The Scandal of the Season (9 page)

“Readers in the present day are not concerned with visions of childhood,” Tonson answered briskly. “They live in a world in which everything is new. Let them go forward, Pope. Another poet, in another age, will take them back to what they were. Just be sure that you don't give your new verses to that scoundrel Lintot to publish.” He laughed a little at this, and at last Tonson brought forth the book that he had been keeping out of sight.

“
An Essay on Criticism.
Printed for W. Lewis in Russell Street, Covent Garden,” he read from the title page. “Is this yours, sir? The writer is anonymous, though the style I take to be your own.”

His own book! Not just a poem in a miscellany. Alexander wanted to reach out for it eagerly, but he was stricken with embarrassment for not having told Tonson, realizing now that the pleasantry about Lintot had indeed been meant as a reproof.

“Not even I have seen the thing in print yet,” he mumbled.

Tonson did not smile. “Indeed, the pages are still warm from the press,” he replied. “My man Mr. Watt printed it for your publisher friend Lewis, so he showed it to me. Ours is a small world.” Tonson paused again, still stern. “I have read the poem through, sir, and I think it extremely fine.”

Alexander smiled. “Oh, Mr. Tonson, I value that opinion highly indeed,” he said.

“Not without its faults, you understand me.”

“I believe that I do understand you, yes,” Alexander replied, gaining confidence from Tonson's words of encouragement.

“Faults that can be corrected in the second edition,” Tonson added with a twinkle in his old eye.

Alexander bowed modestly. “But I dare not hope that a treatise of this nature, which only one gentleman in threescore can understand, will be reprinted,” he said, hoping that Tonson would correct him.

And Tonson, for once, obliged. “I think it very likely that it will run to a second edition,” he said, “for it is bound to create a stir in Grub Street. I fancy that when Mr. Dennis, for one, discovers that you have slighted the school of criticism he regards as his own, he will not rest until he has made one of his usual replies.” Mr. Dennis was a famous critic in town, well known for his attacks on writers whom he did not like.

“Mr. Dennis's style of reply is one that cannot properly be answered but by a wooden weapon,” said Alexander. “I might have sent him a present from Windsor Forest of one of the best and toughest, in English oak.”

Tonson laughed, though Alexander could tell that he tried to look severe.

“Pope, I see that you have a taste for trouble. Mr. Dennis does not care for the fact that you are young and brilliant, when he is old and beaten about like me.”

Alexander was unable to suppress a laugh as he replied. “If Mr. Dennis's rage proceeds only from his zeal to discourage young and inexperienced writers from scribbling, he should frighten us with his verse, not his prose.”

Tonson smiled at him, and then replied in a stern voice, “You must learn not to laugh so loud at your own jokes, Mr. Pope.”

“I laugh loudly only because I am so determined that I shall laugh last,” Alexander answered as he stood to leave.

Tonson considered checking Alexander for this final piece of impudence, but shrugged instead. The young man was certain to get into a great deal of strife as he went on in his career. And Tonson had made his fortune by knowing that in the world of Grub Street, this was half the battle won.

A
rabella was so used to meeting men who admired her that she did not at first realize how much she herself was affected by the encounter with Lord Petre. She told herself that there was nothing in his attentions that she had not seen before, but then days passed, and she did not hear from him. Other men would have written by now: gallant, supplicating notes begging her indulgence. They would have sought her out, and fixed on her a pleading stare to confess to their feelings of helplessness. With Lord Petre, it was apparent that there was to be no pleading stare.

She tried to put their meeting out of her head. It had happened by chance; she must pretend that it had not happened at all. But before she could forget it she acknowledged that it had been the most enjoyable encounter she had experienced. Never before had she met a man's gaze and seen in it the look of an equal. She thought of the confidence with which he had delivered the parting remark about visiting her chamber. There was nothing of the courtier in his character; he did not fawn. If he were to desire something of her, she was certain that he would never beg for it.

She shrank from acknowledging the place he now occupied in her thoughts. To think of him was thrilling, but it also made her afraid. For all her proud talk, Arabella understood well that the situation in which she found herself was fraught with uncertainty. Like Teresa and Martha, she was a Roman Catholic. Against that, she was beautiful and she was rich—but she knew she was not rich enough for her wealth or beauty to surmount every obstacle that lay before her. For two years she had been considered the prize most worth the winning in London, but now Arabella could think only of how greatly she longed to be won by Lord Petre. The longing threatened to overwhelm her, and she knew that she must resist it. She could not allow herself to be overcome by passion—least of all for a man who, she suspected, was governed by complex, contradictory emotions of his own.

On the Tuesday night of the masquerade ball, she sat at her window looking out to the street below. It had been dark for many hours, and the lamps that had lighted up the pavements and shopfronts earlier in the evening were now burning lower. By the time she left, they would almost have guttered. Outside the front door of their house, James prepared the carriage for her, and an underfootman handed him the fur blanket that the family took out in the coach on winter nights. Her window gave a little rattle in the wind, reminding her that she must have Betty fit it more tightly in the jamb. It was getting late, and she turned back to her room to ring the bell.

As she did so, she caught a glimpse of her face reflected in the clear light of the dressing mirror. The glance was unselfconscious, and she looked back at herself with a start, surprised by her beauty, as though for a moment it were not her own face upon which she gazed. But she became conscious again, and began to take note of those personal arrangements that made her appear so charming. She was wearing only a smock, having lately removed her gown from the day. The pins in her hair, which had been snipping uncomfortably at her scalp, had been pulled out, and her lightly disarranged curls fell down naturally upon her shoulders. Her only adornment, aside from the pearls that hung from her ears, was a single beauty patch on her cheek.

She was thinking that this was exactly the attitude in which she would like Lord Petre to see her, when Betty walked into the room carrying Arabella's costume for the evening. She was to be dressed as a swan. A gray gown had been made for the occasion, embroidered with a thousand feathers of luminous white, and a headdress fashioned into a hood of down, smooth as a swan's neck, with a little turret of gray feathers behind the crown. Her mask, in the Venetian style, was lacquered in jet black and egg-yolk yellow to suggest a swan's beak.

When she had chosen the costume she had wanted to seem imperious, magnificent. But something in her had changed, and now she looked at the dress uncertainly. It was too artful a disguise for her mood this evening. She would appear cold and proud in such unsullied plumage; too pristine for heady pleasure. What she wanted was a costume that might capture the same nice confusion, the disarray that had taken her by such delightful surprise when she caught a glimpse of her face in the glass.

Arabella did not permit herself to be entirely honest about the change of attire. At first she reflected that the ballroom would be too warm for feathers, and that she would not be able to dance. She also reasoned that she did not wish to so outshine her cousins Teresa and Martha, for whom it was the first ball of the season. At last she decided that the costume would be too lavish for a public masque, and it would be better to save the dress until she could make a greater show at a private ball. But the consideration that Lord Petre would surely be there, and that in a different costume she would be more likely to catch his eye was one that Arabella did not articulate to herself. She could not admit the concession.

She sat down to her toilette table, which was still scattered with the girlish clutter of her morning's labors. Little perfume jars with silver tops; an inlaid box lined richly in silk. Jewels and trinkets from India and the Far East, which glistened in reflected candlelight. In front of her mirror was a nosegay of the earliest spring flowers, bought that morning at Covent Garden and delivered to the house by an admirer. There were cases of hairpins, a new box of powder, and a fur tippet, thrown down upon the table as she rushed in before teatime. But when she looked at herself again she saw, in place of unstudied beauty, a glimmer of uncertainty. It came as a shock, and she pulled herself up. She was determined that the world must not see Miss Fermor insecure.

She turned to Betty and said, “I have decided to wear the costume that was made for Lady Seaforth's ball earlier in the season. I shall go as the goddess Diana—with a hunting bow to carry upon my arm. My father keeps one in the stables. We shall put up my hair so that it looks rustic; let us have some clean straw sent up to weave through my plaits.”

Betty, who had spent three hours that morning steaming the down upon the swan outfit into a state of perfect smoothness, was somewhat put out by the change of plan.

“But you got the swan made just for tonight!” she protested. “Your mother will be wild with you. There'll be trouble in this house for weeks.”

“I can hardly explain it even to myself, Betty,” Arabella replied haughtily, refusing her servant's gaze. “But the swan is not for tonight. I will wear it to another ball later in the season, and my mother will be perfectly easy with the change. I shall tell her myself.” Her mother would not care, she knew. She took almost no interest in her daughter's arrangements.

“I daresay you're hoping to see some gentleman at this ball, madam, whom you fancy will like you better as a goddess,” Betty said.

Arabella did not reply.

Her maid laughed, and pulled roughly at Arabella's locks until she protested, “Pray brush more gently, Betty. I shall have no hair at all if you go on as you are!”

 

On the Charing Cross Road, at ten o'clock that evening, the way was impassable for the jam of coaches, chairs, and cabs that crowded the cobbles outside the assembly rooms. Arabella had invited Teresa and Martha to ride with her in the carriage, thinking that it would be best to arrive in a party of people. It was a novelty for Teresa and Martha to be out at night without their mother or aunt to chaperone them; Arabella, long accustomed to being without her parents, thought nothing of it. They were attended on horseback by a distant cousin of Arabella's, Sir George Brown, a rotund, blustering individual, whose person was coated this evening, as on all public occasions, in a fine pellicle of snuff.

“Thank heavens I am not a swan, or my feathers would become ruffled by the crowd,” Arabella said as she stepped upon the cobbles.

“Deuced feathery bird, the swan,” Sir George observed with a tap upon the lid of his snuffbox. Arabella ignored him.

But Martha turned to Sir George with a kind smile and said, “Oh yes! Swans have such a lot of—of feathers.”

Teresa looked about, overcome for a moment by the splendor of the scene. “Look at the dancing bear, getting down from his coach-and-six!” she exclaimed.

“Sir Paul Methuen, beyond a doubt!” Arabella supplied quickly.

A group of cinder wenches and pastry cooks ran by, laughing loudly, on their way to meet a monk and a friar.

“Will you not catch a chill dressed as a shepherdess, Miss Fermor?” Sir George asked.

“I am not a shepherdess,” Arabella replied. “I am Diana, goddess of the hunt. See my bow.”

The girls stood in a tight little group. Teresa and Martha looked instinctively to Arabella for guidance, though Teresa tried to appear unconcerned by glancing around at the other arriving guests, as if expecting at any moment to see somebody she knew.

After a short pause, Arabella pointed toward the entrance of the assembly rooms. “Is not that fellow over there your friend Mr. Pope, Teresa? He is wearing a ruff.”

Teresa and Martha looked up together. Alexander stood with his masquerade ticket in one hand, talking to Jervas, who was dressed as a Roman senator. Martha began walking toward them.

Seeing that Teresa did not follow her, she turned back, and said, “How unlike himself he looks! I wonder who he is supposed to be?” When Teresa made no answer, Martha added, “I shall ask him myself!”

But Teresa said, “Better not to approach him, Patty. I do not think it is done to recognize one's friends at these affairs.”

Martha guessed that the prospect of an evening with Arabella made her sister anxious, but she had no intention of slighting Alexander for the sake of Teresa's vanity. “But we have hardly seen Alexander for three weeks, except to borrow his little broadsword,” she said.

As Martha rushed forward, Arabella looked at Teresa, expecting her to follow. But Teresa remained where she was. “You are right about Mr. Pope, after all, Bell,” she said. “He looks uncommonly silly. Thank heavens we shall be masked, so I need not acknowledge him.”

Arabella gave her a sharp look by way of reply, but they walked toward the staircase arm in arm.

Alexander broke into a smile as soon as he saw Martha, and stretched out both of his hands across the crowd.

“Patty!” he exclaimed. “Your costume—it is delightful. You must put your mask on, however. I am not supposed to know you.”

“Which character does your costume represent, Alexander?” she asked.

“I am astonished that you do not recognize my disguise,” he answered with a cheerful air. “I am the celebrated poet Alexander Pope, arrived in London without a masquerade costume. The ruff is borrowed from Jervas. An excellent touch, do you not think?”

Martha noticed that his eyes left her face as he spoke. He pulled himself up straight and adjusted his coat, and she guessed that he had seen Teresa.

At that moment Jervas came up behind him. “You must make that joke as often as you can now, Pope, for if your poems ever do become celebrated, you will have to think of something new to jest about.” Alexander was about to reply when he saw that Jervas was looking at Martha.

“I lament that we are supposed to be incognito,” Jervas said, “for I cannot ask you to introduce me to your friend here. This is the prettiest young lord I have beheld, and I long to make his acquaintance. I should warn him that there will be a Roman senator at this gathering, intending to flirt unabashedly.”

To Alexander's surprise, Martha blushed, looking shyly at them both.

“I believe that I shall have wit and virtue to defend myself against any such attack,” she replied with a little smile. “But if those should fail, I shall resort to my sword, which was lent to me by a very dear friend.” She began to tie on her mask.

Alexander put his hand on Jervas's shoulder and turned him toward the doorway. As he passed into the room behind his friend, Alexander glanced back to look at Martha again. But she had disappeared in the crowd.

While Martha was speaking to Alexander, Arabella was carrying on an exchange of a different kind. Near where she was standing, a man dashed up the steps pulling on the headdress of an Ottoman prince. Arabella recognized him instantly as Lord Petre and though she had been in the act of putting on her own mask, she held off for a little longer. She watched as Lord Petre greeted a friend, then turned back to survey the crowd. As he did so, Arabella was sure that he caught sight of her. He did not meet her eye, and she did not acknowledge him, but, satisfied that he knew her costume, she covered her face. A moment later Lord Petre did the same, and disappeared into the swell of revelers.

After the men had gone in, Martha returned to Arabella and her sister. “How strange that so many women have come to the ball alone,” she observed. “Look at that elegant woman dressed like a Spaniard, and yet without a partner.”

Teresa had not noticed—she, too, had been preoccupied by the sight of Lord Petre. The Ottoman headdress made him look even more distinguished than did his ordinary suit and waistcoat. She had seen him looking into the crowd, and she believed that he had tried to catch her eye. He
had
been impressed to meet Miss Blount of Mapledurham—she had thought as much. She turned to Martha with an assured expression.

“That is probably a woman of the town, Patty, come in the hope of procuring a mate,” she explained. “And in any case, it is accepted for women to arrive at the masquerade alone. Once inside, friends separate, and must give themselves up to the conversation of anybody who addresses them. That is the fun of it. There are rooms to which parties may retire if they wish, and show their faces by consent.”