The Stanbroke Girls

by Fiona Hill

  Emilia’s smile returned. “Which is it?”

  “A little of both,” Amy said. “I thought she ought to take some air.”

  “Indeed she ought.”

  “It is really not—” began Isabella.

  But Emilia led her firmly to a long Venetian window, through which the three ladies stepped onto a balcony overlooking a tiny garden.

  “How pleasant the night air feels!” exclaimed Isabella, struck with its cool freshness.

  “Oh for the days of girlhood!” Emilia said comically. “I am sure at your age I should have said the same, but now all I can think of is the chill, and how likely one is to take a cold from the dampness.”

  Amy Lewis began, “I can stay with Bella. Please, go in if you are uncomfortable—”

  “Not for the world,” said the older woman firmly. “Not until you tell me what is in young girls’ hearts these days—though I suppose it cannot be too very different from what was once in mine. Tell me, do the gentlemen look very fine to you?”

  “Oh, very fine,” said Amy indifferently, when Bella did not answer.

  “Oh my, this is weakly spoken! Can it be that they have no charms to move your generation? I must warn my brother. He will need some new tricks!”

  Miss Lewis laughed a little. “I am afraid I do not look too closely at them, as a rule. At least…I mean, I am sure the company here is as splendid as any could be, only—”

  “Oh, Amy thinks only of my—” Isabella stopped just short of the whole secret and amended, “thinks only of one gentleman. If gentleman is the word I want,” she appended scornfully.

  “I gather the fellow in question is not a favourite with you?”

  “Hardly.”

  Amy, much relieved by the comparative quiet of the balcony, found the strength to speak up. “I fear Lady Isabella is in no position to judge fairly. Really I am quite happy with—with my lot.”

  “The fellow in question could not by any chance be Lord Halcot?” Emilia suggested lightly, and was afraid for a moment that both young ladies might fall off the balcony in surprise.

  “How can you know?” demanded Isabella, while Amy gasped. “What a thought!”

  Emilia laughed, inwardly thanking heaven for removing her from the dangerous waters of extreme youth. “When one young lady disparages the idol of her best friend,” she explained, “it is a good bet that idol is related to the first young lady. There is no magic to it. But is Lord Halcot not—does he not return your esteem, my dear?” she asked as delicately as she could.

  “Lord Halcot,” pronounced Isabella, “is an idiot.”

  “I am sure he is fond of me,” said Amy bravely, for she was not even really sure of this.

  “Only he thinks of her as—”

  “As his sister’s friend,” finished Emilia for her. The girls both nodded agreement. “It is a difficult position,” Emilia went on, as if thinking aloud. “I once had a friend who simply adored Marchmont. Naturally he never looked twice at her. Men are so obtuse.” She fell into silence.

  “What happened to your friend?” Lady Isabella finally inquired, for she could not rest till she knew the whole of a story.

  “Oh! She married a duke,” said Emmy. “But you would not care to marry a duke, would you, Miss Lewis? No, it is not in your style at all.”

  Amy agreed, with a sad shake of the head, that a duke would not answer. “I beg you will not exercise your mind upon this—situation,” she said, repeating, “I am quite happy.”

  “Amy could be happy in a dungeon,” alleged her friend.

  “I fancy she could. However, we must see to it she is kept out of dungeons nevertheless,” Emilia said briskly, “and moreover, we may perhaps be able to open Lord High-and-Mighty Halcot’s eyes a little. I shall think on it.”

  “Dear ma’am—” began Miss Lewis.

  But, “Not another word, I pray. We have subjected you to what must have been a very painful scrutiny,” interrupted Emilia. “Now you must forget all about it and see if we can’t salvage some good from all this curiosity. Lady Isabella, if you are feeling quite well now, I think I ought to return to my guests.” With these words Emilia led the way again into the drawing-room where Lady Elizabeth was still playing sweetly upon the pianoforte.

  In a few moments the gentlemen began to return to the assembly, not a few of them quite obviously in improved spirits for having drunk a little port. Miss Partridge, who had been looking a little pale ever since catching sight of Jeffery de Guere, now drew up to her hostess on the arm of her mother to murmur an apologetic farewell. “I hate to leave so early,” she said earnestly, “only—I can’t think why, I feel a little dizzy. Now that Papa is ready, I believe I ought to go home and lie down.”

  Emilia looked into her large brown eyes sympathetically. “Of course, my dear. I am so awfully sorry. I assure you—I mean I hope when you come again there will be nothing to disturb you.” It would have been rude to allude to Jeffery any more directly than this, but Emilia knew the girl understood her. At that moment de Guere himself entered the room. Miss Partridge fairly shrank back to the protection of her mother. Emilia knew without even looking what must have caused this alarm, and she expertly guided the girl and her parent to the door in such a manner as to prevent Jeffery’s coming close to her. She bade the family good night with a surge of bitter anger at her cousin. The look of fright and pain on Lucilla Partridge’s face had been unmistakable. Really, it was a crime to allow such a man to roam loose in the streets.

  Lady Elizabeth still kept her place at the pianoforte; indeed, when she had tried to rise from the instrument a murmur of distress had gone up among the ladies and she had been persuaded to continue. Now that the gentlemen were with them, a few drifted over to listen. Among these few was Lord Marchmont, observed from a little distance (but with no little interest or amusement) by his friend Lord Warrington Weld.

  Elizabeth played very well. Music had indeed been always her greatest pleasure, and she excelled at it naturally. Many otherwise empty and tedious hours at Haddon Abbey had been made pleasant and satisfying for her by her sessions at the keyboard in the music room there, and her musical prowess was considered quite remarkable among the neighbourhood. Nor did Elizabeth limit herself to the ordinary airs and ballads young ladies were expected to play. Not without difficulty (for Haddon Abbey was hardly at a centre of culture) she had procured music by the finest composers of her own age, as well as those of preceding eras. Complexity did not daunt her; her small, graceful hands were also strong and supple; in short, the music she produced was hardly less beautiful than what might be heard in a concert hall or theatre. She was playing, when the gentlemen returned, a sweet, grave sonata by Mozart.

  “Beautiful,” pronounced Lord Marchmont quietly, when she had done. “Quite, and simply, beautiful. I dare say Mrs. Mozart herself did not understand her husband better.” The gentle spell the music had cast over him began to break, and he added (a vision of Charlotte Beaudry in his head), “Though I doubt there was a Mrs. Mozart. If there had been he would not have had time to accomplish all he did.”

  Lady Elizabeth laid her pretty hands in her lap and looked up at his lordship. “There was a Mrs. Mozart,” she informed him. “In fact, I should not be surprised to learn there still is one. She may yet be living, for he died so young.”

  “She may yet be living,” said Marchmont, “but I should be very surprised indeed to learn she is still Mrs. Mozart. No doubt she has found some nice Viennese confectioner, whose masterpieces come a little easier. I am sure it must have been very vexatious for Mrs. Mozart—Mrs. Mozart that was, I mean—to be obliged to listen to that scratchy old harpsichord all day long…and all night too, sometimes, in all probability.”

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “My dear sir, what a very black picture you paint of marriage!”

  “Paint?” he echoed. “It is hardly necessary to paint it: it is visible all round us.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, dea
r ma’am, that one had only to take a look at any married couple in the room to see what a grim institution marriage is.”

  “Institution? You make it sound as if it were a prison.”

  “Here we are again: ‘You make it sound.’ Make it sound, indeed! It has no need to be made to sound anything. It is a prison.”

  Elizabeth was not without her sharp edges, but she had no such cynicism as this, nor had she ever encountered the like before. For a moment she sat silent, nonplussed. A voice broke into this lapse between them, the voice of Sir John Firebrace complaining because the music had stopped. “It is all very well for you, Marchmont,” he said, “for you hear the music of the lady’s speech. But the rest of us are suffering.” Elizabeth smiled at this sally and began to play a little air—but she had hardly managed two measures before she left off again to address the earl. Those who had been clustered round her to hear the music now began to drift away, soon leaving her tête-à-tête with Marchmont.

  “If marriage is so dreadful as all that, my lord,” she asked him finally, “why do you suppose people continue to enter into it?”

  The earl did not hesitate. “Property,” said he.

  “Property?”

  “Property and propriety. The two great pros of marriage.”

  Again she knew not how to answer, but only looked at him.

  “On the con side,” he went on after a moment, “we have conviviality, contentedness, constancy—all of these go on a great deal more easily outside of marriage than within it. But we must satisfy society, oh, indeed we must, and so we invent this appalling ritual.”

  Elizabeth began to feel amused. “Allow me to mention progeny, my lord—and to suggest it is your convenience more than anything else which is disturbed by marriage. But you interest me greatly,” she went on. “Would you be so kind as to let me know exactly who, in your opinion, suffers more in the jaws of this odious machine? Is it the wife or the husband, do you suppose?”

  “Oh, the husband by all means,” he answered at once. “Sometimes I think the wife positively enjoys the business!”

  “Though of course such an idea is ridiculous.”

  “Yes, of course. In my more lucid moments I see that.”

  “Though there is no doubt in your mind it is the husband who fares worse?”

  “Can there by any doubt?”

  She searched the drawing-room briefly, looking for one party in particular. She noticed as she did so her sister deep in conversation with Sir Jeffery de Guere. How different if Marchmont had made this observation, for he would certainly have removed Isabella from so perilous a place! But his back was to them. Lady Elizabeth searched on, presently finding her target. “Look,” she said to the earl in a low tone, indicating by her glance whom she meant. “Look at Mrs. Charles Stickney, if you will. Do you remember her when she was Miss Frane? I do.”

  Lord Marchmont acknowledged that he did, but continued to appear unmoved.

  “Was she not a pretty girl then?”

  “Yes.”

  “A happy girl?”

  “To all appearances.”

  “Full of fond dreams?”

  “We may presume.”

  “And high hopes?”

  “If you like.”

  “How does she seem to you now, my lord?”

  He quizzed her briefly through his glass. “A pleasant-enough woman,” was the verdict. “A trifle worn, perhaps.”

  “Worn indeed,” she murmured. “Now do me the kindness to look at your sister, my lord.”

  “My sister? It is not necessary, I think. I remember her pretty well,” he smiled.

  “Very good. Would you call her a pleasant-appearing woman?”

  “I would do a great deal better than that! I would call her very handsome,” he replied indignantly, placing one foot neatly in the trap. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Indeed I should. And would you characterize your sister as—a trifle worn, I think you said?”

  The earl obligingly lifted his other foot and set it alongside its mate. “Certainly not,” he maintained energetically. “There is not another woman half so fresh as she within five miles of here. Saving yourself, naturally,” he added with lame courtesy.

  “My dear sir, you have proved my point entirely. The great difference between Mrs. Stickney and Lady Emilia is, you will confess, that one is married while the other is not. Had Dorothea Frane shown the sense your sister has, she would not have married either, and instead of calling her ‘pleasant-appearing’ (oh abominable faint praise!) and ‘worn,’ you’d be panting to impress her with your wit and charm, and hoping against hope for a smile from her. Just as,” she continued resolutely when he tried to interrupt her with a protest, “just as my Lord Weld is even now attempting to wrest a smile from Emilia.”

  Lord Marchmont turned in surprise to find that, indeed, Weld was leaning down to whisper to Emilia with, to all appearances, the intent of making her smile. (The reader might imagine he would also, on turning, have seen Isabella and de Guere—but these two had disappeared by now, of which more later.) Marchmont returned his attention to Elizabeth and spoke rather too emphatically, “First of all,” he told her, “if Weld is trying to make Emmy smile, it is only to be agreeable for my sake. She is my sister and he is my friend, and I assure you there is no intrigue there.”

  Elizabeth neither looked nor felt convinced, but she kept silent.

  “Secondly, with all due respect for Mrs. Stickney, I must maintain that she never was Emilia’s match, and that if she had not married she would now be seated in a corner with a cap atop her head, looking rather grey and exchanging last month’s gossip with some elderly matron or other.”

  “Instead of looking practically dead with fatigue,” Elizabeth supplied, “and being squashed to the end of the sofa by Sir John Firebrace, whose back is to her, and who is so absorbed with the perfections of Miss Pye (whatever these elusive items may be) that he does not even realize she is there.”

  This description was too accurate to be denied, but, “Perhaps she has only exchanged one middling fate for another,” said Marchmont in reply. “You have proven nothing, in any case.”

  “Fustian!” cried she. “I have proven everything. And if there were need of more evidence—which there is not—a look at her husband would suffice. Do look at him, I pray you,” she urged. “He is standing by the mantelpiece. Observe the pinkness of his cheeks, his sleek skin, his well-fed belly. Why, I dareswear he’s put on two stone since they were married—but is he loved any the less for that? No. Has he thrice been confined, thrice suffered unspeakably, in the struggle to bring forth an heir? No. No!” she repeated. “All he has had to do is sit back and try not to show his disappointment in his wife too very much—for she has failed to give him a son. She! Failed to give him a son! I ask you, what sort of a failure is that? But if you don’t think she herself is miserable over her inadequacy, I assure you you are very much mistaken. Easier on the wife, you are sure. You have a very interesting idea of logic, dear sir,” she finished rather wildly. To say truth she had had no intention of revealing so much emotion, but there was something smug about his attitude that provoked her intolerably. Now that she had finished, she felt embarrassed by her passionate display, and she sat staring quietly at her hands.

  Lord Marchmont regarded her with a new curiosity. She was very lovely: her cheeks had gone pink with excitement as she spoke, and a few tendrils of her fine blond hair had worked themselves loose from their plaits and coils. He saw her raise her hands unthinkingly to the keyboard, but she merely held them there as if frozen, then dropped them again. The thought of the music she might have made, had been making when he came into the drawing-room, affected him suddenly, and he said, with an oddly tender tremble in his voice, “Will you never marry then, Lady Elizabeth?”

  She looked up as if startled, and her blue eyes met his grey ones with a full, momentarily unguarded glance. For an instant she did not know what to answer, then, “I suppose I must do as my fat
her says in that regard,” she murmured. “It is not an idea on which I exercise my thoughts a great deal.”

  This was not the answer he had expected. He leaned forward so abruptly that she involuntarily withdrew a little. “Will you indeed do as your father says?” he asked gently. “Does it not frighten you to place your future in his hands?”

  She reflected briefly. “My future has been in his hands so often before,” she brought out at last, with a smile, “that I expect I have got accustomed to it. To be frank, it is a little frightening; but then, nothing good is easily gained. And in any case, my alternatives are few.”

  “If your father desired you to marry a man you did not respect, would you do so?” he pursued.

  “I do not believe my father would desire such a thing. No, I am sure he could not entrust me to anyone unworthy of respect.”

  “Granting that, then, suppose he were to desire you to marry a man you could respect but for whom you felt no affection. Would you still serve your father in that case?”

  “I do not think of it as service,” she said a trifle stiffly. “My father loves me, and so do I love him.”

  “But if he gave you to a man you could not love. Would you go?” the earl persisted. His face was only a few inches now from her own, and she felt almost dizzy.

  “If I felt I could not be a good wife to him,” she said slowly, “I imagine I would be obliged to refuse to marry altogether.”

  “You would remain always a spinster rather than marry a man you did not care for?” he clarified, still watching her closely.

  She felt like an animal brought to bay. Striving to hold her own, she gave an emphatic nod.

  “Though it meant you would be alone all your life?”

  “The terrors of solitude are not so great if one enjoys his own company,” she returned.

  “And that no one would love you?” he persisted inexorably, as if she had not spoken.

  “I am already loved.”

  “But that no man would love you,” he insisted.

  “My dear sir, this interrogation has taken a rather eccentric turn,” she finally exclaimed, feeling cowardly for breaking the emotional intensity between them but fearing she might faint if it went on much longer. “In fact, one would have to call it quite exotic. Can it mean anything to you, my lord?” she inquired.