Mr. Darcy's Daughters (31 page)

Alethea was dismissed to the top floor; Camilla had no intention of letting either Fitzwilliam or Mr. Gardiner hear her most unconventional and unladylike views on her sister’s elopement. Did the wretched girl have no principles?

“Surely he must be aware that her family will make every effort to trace her, to bring her back?” Fanny said. “She is not some unprotected miss, and even if her brothers are still in short clothes and her father abroad, there are others who would not let the matter rest.”

“He will surely not linger in Paris,” said Mr. Gardiner, “and he does not need to; he has a country house over there, where he stays several times a year. However, he takes only French servants with him, and no one here seems to know where this house is.”

Camilla’s opinion of Mr. Gardiner was going up by leaps and bounds. He was showing himself to be active and decisive in a way that Fitzwilliam, military man though he might have been, was not. Within minutes of hearing of the possibility of the chaise going to France, he had sent men from his office to London Bridge and out along the first part of the Dover road to glean what news they could of a black chaise and four passing by in the early hours of the morning.

Fitzwilliam was deep in conversation with Mr. Gardiner. “It is better that I should go,” Mr. Gardiner was saying. “I have contacts in many parts of Paris, both commercial and private. I have only a smattering of the language, it is true, but that is easily remedied with the help of a trustworthy interpreter. If Fanny is in agreement, I propose that Camilla should accompany me; she speaks good French, I believe, and one of Georgina’s sisters should be with her when we bring her back to England.”

France! Paris! She could not believe her ears. “I? Go to Paris with you? Oh, sir, do you mean it?”

Fanny was horrified. “Oh, no, it is quite out of the question. It is such a long way, you will be travelling so fast, and then there is the sea journey. It cannot be considered, not for a young and gently nurtured girl.”

Fitzwilliam, Camilla could tell, did not at all take to the notion of her accompanying Mr. Gardiner to Paris. Tracing runaways, bringing unfortunate fallen women to their senses and returning them to the bosom of their reproving family was man’s work.

“I am not so poor-spirited as that, I hope,” Camilla said. “Mr. Gardiner is right, and since Belle cannot possibly go, it has to be myself or Letty.”

They all knew there was no choice. Letty was so full of the inhalations from her flask of smelling salts that Fanny was beginning to fear for her wits; nobody had the least expectation of her rising from her couch of woe to set forth across the Channel to rescue her sister. “Camilla must not go,” she intoned from her sofa, her eyes tightly shut. “For she will very likely fall into worse trouble of her own, she will speak to strangers, she will be abducted, murdered; she will be seduced or entrapped by some Frenchman, I know it.”

Mrs. Gardiner cast her eyes heavenwards and prudently removed the cut-glass vinaigrette from Letitia’s grasp. “Camilla is very well able to look after herself. She will be all the time with Mr. Gardiner; she will be perfectly safe.”

“Camilla might be able to encourage Georgina to see the error of her ways and persuade her to return,” Fanny said, but her voice lacked conviction. Young ladies who ran away with married men at dawn were not likely to respond to encouragement or persuasion to return to a former life.

Camilla could not but agree with her; it was a vain hope. When had Georgina ever taken any notice of any advice she or Letty had to give? She was not going to express such an opinion now, though, not while there was even the slightest prospect of a happy outcome.

For Georgina must be aware of how serious her position was. Ruin was an easy word to use, but a terrible state to have to endure. Though if you were in the habit of living only for the present, and had a child’s carefree certainty that tomorrow would look after itself, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so terrible. And were she to be genuinely attached to Sir Joshua, if there were more than passion involved, and she were actually in love with him, then, to a romantic like Georgina, the world might seem well lost for the sake of love. It would be shocking, to be sure, but comprehensible.

Fitzwilliam was still fuming. “Encourage! Persuade! What language is this? She must be found and brought back, willing or unwilling.”

“No, no, Fitzwilliam, that sort of an approach will never do,” said Mr. Gardiner. “Take my word for it, young ladies cannot be told what to do or made to come here or go there. Your children are still in the nursery; you will understand better what the situation is when Charlotte is of an age to have a mind of her own.”

“No daughter of mine shall ever have a mind of her own, I shall see to that.”

Mrs. Gardiner raised her eyebrows and gave Fanny a look of wonder.

“This is not about Charlotte,” said Fanny. “It is about Georgina.”

“It is indeed,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “and if Camilla is willing to go, I fancy it may answer very well. Mr. Gardiner has experience in these matters, you know; this is not the first runaway he has had to deal with.”

“It is the first in my family,” said Fitzwilliam.

“No, that is not true,” said Fanny. “For do not I recall hearing that your cousin Georgiana, when she was very young, only sixteen or so, nearly eloped with a most unsuitable man? And was only prevented by Darcy discovering in the nick of time what was afoot?”

“She did not run off, not actually run off, with anyone, whatever may have been planned. Like a good girl she confessed all to Darcy, and whatever you may say about him, he took his duties as her brother most seriously. He put a stop to it at once. It was all hushed up, and is quite forgotten by now.”

“Then there was my aunt Lydia, was there not?” Camilla said brightly.

Mrs. Gardiner closed her eyes. “I do not care to remember that time.”

“Well, then, let us take heart from the family history, for if they make a habit of running away, it has, so far, ended happily,” said Fanny. “Georgiana never did elope, and Lydia was married within a few weeks, and preserved her good name. I do not see why something of the same kind cannot be managed for Georgina.”

“Dash it all, Fanny, don’t you understand? How can she marry Sir Joshua? She isn’t a Muslim, you know.”

“No, but perhaps it can all be hushed up. No one will be in the least surprised not to see the girls out and about. Fitzwilliam can tell all his cronies at the club that the twins are indisposed, are keeping within doors. Everyone will assume they are in disgrace; they will not suppose that one of them has gone running off to Paris. As to Mr. Gardiner going abroad, it is the best plan, for he is often away on business, and no one will think anything of it. If Fitzwilliam went, it might arouse comment, with an election so close, but he will be here, just as though nothing had happened.”

You had to admire Fanny and Mrs. Gardiner; no one could be more practical. Once the decision to pursue the runaway to Paris was made, they wasted not a moment in blaming or wringing their hands or going off into fits and faints. There was not much show of morality, either, only a fierce desire to salvage what they could of Georgina’s tarnished reputation, and keep up a united family front.

And an even stronger if unexpressed wish to put everything right before word got to Darcy of what his daughter had done.

Camilla and Mr. Gardiner could not leave that day, for papers had to be obtained—not, in itself, a difficult matter, since Mr. Gardiner had many contacts in government departments, but one that took a little time.

“We are twenty-four hours or so behind them,” said Fitzwilliam with a frown, as they took tea in Aubrey Square that evening.

“It is not so very much,” said Fanny.

More than enough for ravishing and ruination was the unspoken thought of all of them. Camilla was philosophical as to that. They must assume that Sir Joshua would have bedded Georgina by now, and from what she had seen, it was more than likely that he had done so long before any flight from London was proposed. This opinion, however, she kept to herself.

Why the couple had decided on so dramatic a scenario, she could not imagine. Georgina had no doubt slipped a note out to her lover telling of incarceration and soon-to-be exile, and if he were to be leaving London and making a stay in France, it might well suit him to take a pretty young woman with him. It seemed strange to Camilla, but what did she know of Sir Joshua?

Very little, beyond noticing that his evening clothes fitted him uncommonly well, and that, judging by the set of his mouth, he would not be a good person to cross. Not a man for flamboyant gestures, she would have said; nighttime flits did not look to be quite his style. However, the dawn flight would undoubtedly have appealed to her sister’s extravagantly romantic notions of how journeys should begin.

Mr. Gardiner, not at all a romantic, said that the hour had certainly been chosen to catch the tide at Dover.

Everyone was up to see them off, despite the earliness of the hour.

Letitia, dark smudges under her eyes, looked hagged and forlorn, and begged Mr. Gardiner not to fight Sir Joshua.

“Fight him? I should think not indeed. I am hardly of an age to meet my man at dawn. Besides, he is reckoned a capital shot.”

“The Duke of Wellington is no longer young, and he fought a duel a little while ago. Men are for ever fighting one another, especially in France, from what one hears.”

“Men are fools. There is no worse way to settle a dispute, and go hang with your gentleman’s code of honour. All of that should have died out with the old century; there is no place for such fustian goings-on in the modern world.”

Camilla could not help looking at Fitzwilliam, any references to modernity usually being accounted by him as evidence of Whiggery, but on this occasion he restrained himself to a mild snort of disagreement. She did not suppose he actually wanted Mr. Gardiner shot in a duel, however much all that was redolent of Old England. She had no fears on that score; Mr. Gardiner was a man of great good sense who would use his tongue, his wealth and his influence to persuade Sir Joshua to give up his prize.

Reason, not passion, would win the day in France.

France! She still could not believe that in a few hours she would be setting foot on foreign land, travelling across that wicked country, England’s enemy for so many years, a country surely still marked with the blood of the guillotine; and its capital, Paris, full of such revolutionaries as might have survived the revolution itself and the years of the Corsican monster. Although at Mrs. Rowan’s house, she had heard men speak approvingly of Napoleon Bonaparte, of his laws and reforms, of his modern approach to government.

She longed, too, to see French fashions, not in fashion plates in
La Belle Assemblée
and on the few Englishwomen who had the taste and means to wear such clothes, but worn by every fashionable woman. It amused her that Letty, recovering momentarily from her decline, had asked her to obtain one of the enchanting new Leghorn hats they had seen pictures of.

“This is not a shopping expedition,” said Fitzwilliam.

“I dare say there may be a few spare hours in which to visit the shops” was Mr. Gardiner’s more conciliatory response.

The moment the packet drew away from the harbour in Dover, Camilla felt as though all her worries and concerns for her sister, for her own future, for all their futures, had been swept away into the sea.

It was an extraordinary and inexplicable sensation, for nothing had changed, but the lightening of her spirits did much to make the crossing to Calais, the night in a crowded, noisy inn and another day on the road more like an entrancing dream than an ordeal.

They had fair weather for the crossing, with a favourable breeze speeding them on their way. Sackree, who succumbed swiftly to a severe bout of seasickness, stayed below in the cabin Mr. Gardiner had obtained for them, but Camilla had stayed for most of the time on deck, rejoicing in the sounds of the ship and the sea, the crack and flap of the great canvas sails, the hissing of the rigging, the shouts and whistles and stamping feet of the sailors and the rush of foaming water streaming along the boat’s sides.

She spotted a man-of-war on the horizon, a fine sight under a magnificent set of sails, its pennant streaming behind it. Another big ship was, Mr. Gardiner told her after one expert glance, an East India merchantman. They passed a fleet of fishing boats, whose men shouted unintelligible remarks into the spray as the packet sent the little vessels tossing to and fro in its wake. Then the thin line in the distance grew larger, took on shape and definition, became a country, with houses and landmarks visible on the shore.

France.

The language spoken on the quay and at the inn was not quite the French she and her sisters had learned from Mademoiselle Leclair, but after a while her ear became accustomed to the sounds, and she was able to make herself understood and to understand the particulars of the menu, which were sung out to them with great rapidity.

At first Sackree refused to touch the food that was put in front of her.

“It will make you feel much more the thing,” Mr. Gardiner assured her.

“I will begin to wish I had not brought you” was Camilla’s own, tougher inducement to her maid to eat. After a few mouthfuls, Sackree announced she did feel much better for the food, however peculiar it was.

The weather was fine the next day, the sky blue with puffs of cloud, the sun burning through a morning haze as they set off from the inn. Camilla was surprised to see how like northern France was to England as far as landscape went, although the towns and villages they passed through were vastly different, and the road, as Mr. Gardiner observed more than once, was uncommonly ill kept up.

She was fascinated by the clothes of the villagers and the towns-people, by the bustling markets with their extravagant displays of cheese and fruit and vegetables and most of all by a group of nuns hurrying down a street in their wide white hats and dark habits.

“Why, I thought the revolution and Napoleon had quite done away with all the convents and nuns,” she said, forbearing to add that according to Mademoiselle Leclair, every nun in France had been ravished and hacked to pieces several times over.

“They do a great deal of charitable work, visiting the sick and nursing and so forth,” said Mr. Gardiner, fanning his face with his hat. “When we reach Paris, Camilla, we shall put up at the Deux Signes. It is a respectable inn, where they are used to English visitors, and it is in what passes for a quiet street there.”

As their carriage made its slow way through the narrow streets of Paris, Camilla could barely contain her surprise. “It is so dirty,” she cried. “And the smell!”

“You will become accustomed to it,” said Mr. Gardiner. “See how many cafés there are? Now, that is what you will not see in London.”

She tried to believe him with regard to the smell, and indeed, as every few yards brought new sights and sounds, she soon ceased to notice the all-pervasive odour. They drove along one of the boulevards, and she exclaimed at the handsomeness of the houses, each set in its own gardens. “And the trees, only look at the trees bordering the road. They must be a century old at least.”

“Very pretty,” said Mr. Gardiner. “But observe also the cracked and imperfect pavement, and the earthen road.”

She tried to ignore the earthen road, with its dirty gutter in the middle carrying all manner of filth towards the river. They passed into the oldest part of the city, and while the pointed roofs and domes and tiny windows on high buildings might be picturesque, she found the glimpses she had of alleys and dark and narrow streets presented a very squalid appearance.

She was relieved to find that their destination was in a pleasanter area of the city, and, while far removed from the elegance and style of the fashionable part of London, was tolerable enough as to light and air. They rumbled through the porte cochère of the Auberge des Deux Signes and into a large courtyard laid with flagstones. A plump woman with red cheeks and a voluminous apron came hurrying out of a door to greet Mr. Gardiner as an old friend.

The inn was old-fashioned and labyrinthine. Sackree sniffed her disapproval as they were led along winding corridors and up and down flights of stairs.

“What if the inn catches on fire, that’s what I’d like to know? I wouldn’t trust a Frenchie with a candle. And I don’t care to think about what’s going to be in those mattresses; bugs the size of weasels, I shouldn’t be surprised. Damp, too, you may be sure, and rooms not properly aired. I’ve heard about foreign ways, never washing the rooms down, finding yourself sharing the sheets with the Lord knows who.”

“Stop muttering, do,” said Camilla. “It is a delightful place, and since it stretches a long way back from the road, we may be spared the noise of the streets.”

They were, the woman leading them into as handsome and quiet a set of rooms as could be imagined. There was a good-sized private sitting room, with windows opening on to a little balcony. Stepping out on to it, Camilla found that it overlooked a little garden, with a tree in its centre and a tiny rectangle marked out around it with low box hedges.

“Why, it is charming!”

The garden, it transpired, was for their use; a flight of steps led down to it. There were two bedchambers, each with a tiny room off it for a servant. She had to hide a smile as Sackree inspected her quarters with gloomy relish. “Wouldn’t put a dog in here in England. Smells, too.”

“You may sleep on a truckle bed in my chamber.” With no window, the small room was indeed hot and airless, and she did not want Sackree to suffer a sleepless night.

“We shall have a meal brought up here,” said Mr. Gardiner. “You will not wish to eat downstairs in the restaurant; it is no place for a young lady.”

It would be much more interesting in the restaurant, and as a stranger, an English stranger, in the city, no one would know her to approve or disapprove of her presence there. However, it was a hot and sultry evening, and Camilla had a lurking headache, no doubt brought on by being rattled to her bones on the bumpy ride from Calais. It would be better to refresh her toilette and dine in comfort here, before the open window with its slight promise of freshness.

There was a knock on the door, and a chambermaid entered with a jug of hot water. Hard on her heels came a slender man with improbably black hair and a quick, knowing air. He bowed obsequiously to Mr. Gardiner, regarded Camilla with a keen interest as he made an even deeper bow in her direction, and then informed Mr. Gardiner in reasonable-enough English that a gentleman had called enquiring for him.

“Send him up,” Mr. Gardiner said, and the man made a grimace of a smile and bowed himself out of the room.

“That is M. Goujon, the proprietor, come to give us the once-over. He is not used to my being here with a female companion; he is a nosy fellow, but he likes to keep his house respectable. However, it is a comfortable place to stay and they know me, and will look after us well. Paris is not quite the same as London, my dear, and it is best not to enquire too closely into some of their habits and customs, which are very different from ours.”

“Who is this gentleman he is sending up?”

“It will be Perrault, who looks after my affairs in Paris. I sent a messenger on ahead of us to announce our imminent arrival to him, and to request that he make what discreet enquiries he might about Sir Joshua’s whereabouts. He must have been brisk about the business, for I did not look to see him before the morrow.”

Another knock on the door, a loud “Enter” from Mr. Gardiner, and Mr. Wytton walked into the room.