Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

She smiled faintly, toying with her sherry glass. For her, even “wallflower” had been too lofty an aspiration. A wallflower might at any moment be chosen, picked out from amongst the other languishing maidens. A wallflower might suddenly be led onto the dance floor, swept into a couple in the midst of other couples. A wallflower was eligible. A wife in potential.

  She was not eligible. She had dreamed of being, at best, a fly on the wall. Allowed to remain in her home, in proximity to others, but on the perimeter. Allowed to take vicarious pleasure in other people’s love, other people’s children.

  Until Alfred had squashed her meager, stupid dream. She could imagine his riposte. Let you remain as a fly on the wall? My dear Ella. Flies are the handmaidens of contagion. One does not harbor flies.

  She gazed toward the head of the table. Mrs. Tenby presided, an attenuated woman, everything about her long and thin. She wore a gown of lemon silk, which gave her too much the appearance of a yellowed bone. She was talking animatedly, waving a long arm, throwing back her head again and again, overcome with laughter. The gesture exposed a considerable length of thin, white throat.

  It would be more charitable to think of her as a swan instead of a bone. Doubtless, swan was the effect she was going for.

  Ella tipped her sherry glass against her mouth to hide a smile that must strike anyone who glanced her way as a little too wide for one so neglected. People tended to be suspicious of those who enjoyed their own company. The last thing she wanted was to stir suspicions. She wanted to fade into shadows between the pools of candlelight and watch without being watched herself.

  But she couldn’t fade away completely. He was looking at her. Isidore Blackwood. She could feel the heat of his gaze the moment he turned his eyes on her. The blood rose to the surface of her skin. He was seated at the other end of the table. She had been trying not to look toward him.

  When he’d walked into the parlor, she’d felt his presence too, even before the announcement sent a flurry of consternation through the guests. She was standing beside Mrs. Trombly, looking down into the velvety nap of the Wilton carpet. The air changed, became charged, like the air before a storm. She turned to the doorway. He’d run a comb through his hair; the wild black locks were swept back from his forehead. The grooming only brought out the angles of his face. He looked even bolder. More predatory. His black evening suit seemed painted on his body so perfect was the fit, so easy were his movements. His blue eyes brushed over her as he lazily surveyed the room.

  Her stomach dropped.

  “Blackwood!” Mr. Tenby, corpulent and ruddy, walked over to him immediately. He was the kind of man whose confidentially lowered voice had the effect of a stage whisper; it whet the audience’s curiosity and was audible to all. “What’s this? Didn’t expect to see you here.” He signaled to his butler. “Another place setting.” The butler did not share Mr. Tenby’s attitude of bemused toleration. The man looked distinctly irritated, almost injured, as he exited the room.

  Mr. Tenby shook his head—a massive object—at Lord Blackwood. “You’ll have to walk into the dining room alone, but I suppose you’ll manage. Tooth’s all better, I take it?”

  Lord Blackwood answered with a smile. A wide, white, flawless smile. “As though the problem never were.”

  Mr. Tenby harrumphed at that. But he seemed pleased at Blackwood’s appearance. Ella noted—and her stomach gave a strange twist as she did—that the ladies assembled in the parlor seemed doubly pleased. Mrs. Hatfield, a statuesque widow with a wide, feline mouth, nearly purred her pleasure to Mrs. Trombly.

  “A rare sighting,” she murmured, her tone leaving no doubt that it was also a pleasant one. “You don’t suppose he comes with a particular purpose?” She cut her eyes at Miss Tenby, who was herself gazing at Lord Blackwood with a wolfish mien.

  Or perhaps, Ella thought, frowning, she was hungry. Blackwood’s unexpected arrival had pushed back the dinner by some minutes.

  Mrs. Trombly glanced at Miss Tenby. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Does a man require a particular purpose to dine out?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Hatfield with a voluptuous smile. “Not when there’s such a wealth of beauty, good sense, and virtue in the company at large. A man should dine out with an open mind.”

  To Ella’s satisfaction, Mrs. Hatfield had ended up quite as far down the table from Lord Blackwood as it was possible to get. She was forced to lavish her “beauty, good sense, and virtue” on her dinner partner, Lord St. Aubyn. Not exactly a hardship.

  The names and titles of the various dinner guests swirled in her head, but she could definitely remember Lord St. Aubyn. The man was a baron. Unmarried. Tall, blond, classically handsome. He had a chiseled face. Lips finely molded. Nose straight and thin. Never broken. His eyes were pale, a green-blue, and peculiarly inquisitive. When Ella had been introduced to him in the parlor, he’d studied her as though he were shortsighted. There was no judgment in his look but rather a clinical detachment. Then he’d smiled. A warm, frank, lovely smile. He was a very attractive specimen.

  Any woman in her right mind would declare him better looking than Lord Blackwood. Lord Blackwood’s countenance too was built along classical lines, but the lines were rough, dark, mobile. Lord St. Aubyn reminded her of a Grecian statue. Lord Blackwood’s expressions could never be captured in marble. There could be no mistake; he was flesh and blood. Powerful. Perishable.

  She moistened her lips with sherry. Why not look at him? They had made a truce, after all. They had walked together. They had laughed together. His tongue had stroked her earlobe.

  That’s why not.

  She did it anyway. She couldn’t help herself.

  He was separated from her by half the table’s length, sitting between Mrs. Trombly and Miss Tenby. Miss Tenby was speaking to him, her head inclined coquettishly. Her head was not so overlarge as her brother’s—its size deemphasized by the row of curls curtaining her forehead—and his ruddy corpulence was in her a rosy plumpness. Her blue gown was very low-cut. She looked soft and appealing. Ella felt a pang. Miss Tenby could flirt and gossip to her heart’s content. They were probably the same age. She felt years older. Lifetimes older.

  Lord Blackwood wasn’t listening to Miss Tenby. She could tell from his posture. His body was angled away from her. He was swirling the wine in his glass, looking down into the ruby liquid. The warm candlelight lent a richness to his bronze skin. Played upon the sensual curve of his lips.

  Then he looked up. His eyes met Ella’s. Her instinct was to glance away. But she did not. She held his gaze. She imagined the whole party disposed around the room on couches, dining in the Roman style, and her lips twitched. Roman women had never contended with crinolines. She smiled, letting him see the laughter in her eyes. Would he too smile, guessing at the reason for her amusement?

  His mouth flattened. His face set into hard lines. Deliberately, he turned his gaze away. He said something, and Miss Tenby laughed, blushing.

  Her smile crumbled. She felt as though her throat had filled with dust.

  “More sherry?” The question came from close at hand.

  “Oh.” She put her sherry glass down hurriedly on the table and nearly upset a salt cellar. “No, thank you.” Only fidgeting.

  She hadn’t expected any courtesy from Mr. Penn. Along with Mr. Huntington, he was her neighbor at the table. He was sitting on her left but had been turned away from her, speaking intently with his wife, since the dinner began.

  Maybe he wasn’t intent on snubbing her, as she had supposed. She tried to revive her smile.

  “I’m quite all right,” she said. “One glass is enough.”

  She heard a thin sniff from across the table. Mrs. Bennington, a strikingly pretty woman, though not so strikingly pretty as her husband, caught her eye. The footman was filling her wine glass with Bordeaux. Not for the first time. Or the second. Mrs. Bennington tilted the glass this way and that, then took a dainty sip.

  “Delicious,” she murmured. “Even better than th
e last.”

  Ella cursed herself. And the lull in conversation that had made her comment audible. She hadn’t meant it to be pointed. She did the only thing she could think of to remedy the situation.

  “That is, I don’t care very much for sherry,” she said to Mr. Penn, brightly, shooting a glance at Mrs. Bennington. “I’ll have a glass of wine, of course, with the roast.”

  The roast was just then being served.

  “Certainly,” said Mr. Penn, politely. Mrs. Bennington’s rosebud lips parted as she laughed a pretty, silvery little laugh. She poked at the meat on her plate with her knife then picked up her wine glass again.

  “I’ll have two glasses of wine instead of the roast,” she said, dimpling at Ella.

  “How frank,” said Mr. Huntington, looking around at them as though he sensed the dinner conversation had found a new center of gravity. “Most women leave that an unspoken policy.”

  “It is a good policy, unspoken or otherwise,” said Mrs. Bennington. “For the figure, at any rate. Mr. Penn will have to tell us if it is as beneficial for the constitution.”

  “Mr. Penn would have us drinking water and eating leaves,” said Mr. Huntington, shuddering as he helped himself to the side of sweetbreads.

  Ella looked quickly at Mr. Penn. There was something on his plate that looked suspiciously like leaves. Green salad, perhaps.

  “Would you?” asked Mrs. Bennington, fixing her light-blue eyes on Mr. Penn, widening them with sham curiosity. “Is that the current wisdom amongst medical men? Leaves and water?”

  Mr. Penn … a doctor? Ella nearly choked on her first sip of Bordeaux. Mr. Penn looked nothing like a doctor. That is, he looked nothing like Mr. Norton. As a thought experiment, she tried to dissociate Mr. Norton from the idea of “doctor,” but it proved almost impossible. Mr. Norton was the exemplar and determining figure of the whole category. He was ancient, easily three times Mr. Penn’s age. His longevity alone seemed a significant testament to his knowledge and ability. Papa had had absolute faith in him. And it wasn’t only Papa. Mr. Norton was widely admired. He was called away to attend to difficult cases up and down the coast, and inland, deep into Devon. Sometimes he went as far as Cornwall. He was a legendary figure. The supreme authority on everything from the common cold to childbirth to … convulsions. His manner was peremptory, even harsh, and he had no tolerance for weakness. Whimpering, weeping, trembling, sneezing, excessive coughing—all of these incurred his wrath. They interfered with his work.

  She supposed it was understandable. Mr. Norton was locked always in combat with Death, and Death could not be defeated. That had to tell on a man. He looked a little like her image of Death, his skull coming close to the thinning skin. When she was a girl, he frightened her. His cold hand felt like a claw when he sat by the bedside and pulled her cheeks from her teeth, articulated her limbs, tapped her chest, probed her abdomen.

  Mr. Penn didn’t have a peremptory bone in his body. He was elegant and thin as a whippet, with curling dark hair and mild, luminous eyes. He had a soft, cultured voice. She couldn’t picture him crouched over a man, bleeding him by cups.

  “I don’t recommend drinking water,” he said as he took a sip of wine. “But leaves won’t do you any harm.”

  “Two glasses of wine and a pile of leaves, you heard the doctor, Daphne.” Mr. Bennington turned from Lady Berners to enter the conversation, laughing. Mr. Bennington made a strong case for the return of the exquisite. He seemed to have stepped out of an earlier era, a time when men wore jewels and powder and lurked in opera boxes waiting for assignations. His oval face was perfectly symmetrical. Ella found herself mesmerized by it; its beauty was uncanny.

  Mrs. Bennington ignored him. She leaned forward, showing even more of her pale décolletage. “Water is harmful, Mr. Penn?”

  Mr. Penn leaned back, as though restoring balance to the table. He glanced to his left, read something on his wife’s face, hesitated, then shrugged.

  “If it’s contaminated,” he said.

  This remark caught the general attention. A hush fell over the table.

  “Lord Berners, you and Lady Berners were recently in Paris?” Mrs. Tenby addressed the earl with a strained smile. “My niece just arrived in Paris.”

  But Lord Berners didn’t give a fig for Mrs. Tenby’s niece. His eyes were alight, and his jowls quivered.

  “Contaminated, you say?” Lord Berners craned his neck to see Mr. Penn.

  Mr. Penn cleared his throat. “I refer, of course, to cholera.”

  A clatter from the head of the table as Mrs. Tenby dropped her cutlery.

  “You really shouldn’t, of course,” declared Mr. Tenby from the foot of the table. His face was bright red with drink.

  “Shocking,” said Mrs. Hatfield with evident relish.

  A dark laugh rang out.

  “Ho, Blackwood,” muttered Mr. Tenby. “Why don’t you tell us about the tombs of caliphs or that coral from the Red Sea the ladies are mad for?”

  Lord Blackwood smiled. Ella had begun to recognize his smiles. This one, dazzling, was entirely sardonic.

  “It’s never the fact, but the fact of the fact being mentioned, that causes surprise in the best society,” he observed, eyes roaming up and down the table. “How dreadfully earnest those people who have it the other way around.”

  “How dreadfully tiresome those people,” replied Lady Berners tartly. “We have no power over facts, Lord Blackwood. But we can choose whether or not we acknowledge them.”

  “It is the great privilege of the aristocrat.” Now Lord Blackwood’s smile looked dangerous, even as he nodded graciously, as though conceding a point. “And why, perhaps, his days are numbered.”

  Lady Berners was a large woman, but nothing about her seemed soft. Her hair was steel-gray, and her back was straight as a spear. She lifted her chin. “I, for one, do find it less shocking that a few people should die diseased in Stepney than that an earl’s son” —here she allowed herself an accusing look at Mr. Penn—“should judge it a meet topic for mixed company at a dinner party on Park Lane. To me, it indicates even more clearly what the world is coming to.”

  Lord Berners cackled, and for a moment Ella had the disconcerting impression that his teeth were floating in his mouth. False uppers. She averted her eyes. She heard Mrs. Trombly’s low voice; the dear woman was trying to draw her little region of the table into a conversation about Victoria Gardens in Bombay. The man on her left side obliged her, and the murmur of their voices broke the tension.

  The footmen were setting out the plates of preserved fruits and nuts and cheeses. Ella looked at the sage cheese, the white skin mottled with green. Mrs. Bennington was eying it too, with revulsion. The whole evening had taken on a distinctly queasy cast. Ella understood why her abstracted, rumpled papa, who’d liked to take his dinner in the library and who always had crumbs on his waistcoat, had never fit in with high society in London. She couldn’t imagine him excelling at the barbed banter that seemed its mainstay. The pursuits of the ton would have struck him as pointless and empty. No wonder he gave it all up so easily.

  Every member of the glittering party suddenly seemed to her desperately unhappy. Gorging themselves on rich foods, swilling wine, laughing brittle laughs, doling out set-downs and blandishments, nursing their private agendas. They were all so keen on presenting brightly glazed versions of themselves. Pretending that the world too was glazed. Everything fixed in its place.

  Except Isidore Blackwood, who pretended nothing.

  And perhaps this Mr. Penn. An earl’s son. With a generous allowance, no doubt. She wondered what had motivated him to choose a profession, and an unlikely one.

  “The thing is we do have power over facts,” said Mr. Penn quietly but clearly. Those involved in speculations about whether Mrs. Trombly’s daughter had exaggerated the dimensions of a stone elephant in her last letter took no notice. But a few heads turned back to Mr. Penn.

  “I believe we’re going to see another epidemic in the
East End, and sooner than later,” said Mr. Penn. “But it can be avoided if we take preventative measures now. For example, if we hold the East London Water Company accountable to the Metropolitan Water Act.”

  “It’s water that causes epidemics?” Mrs. Hatfield’s nose wrinkled. “What a discouraging notion. We can’t avoid water, Mr. Penn.”

  “I can,” declared Mr. Huntington, holding up a glass for Madeira.

  “Indeed,” murmured Mrs. Bennington, following suit.

  “It’s bad water that needs to be dealt with,” said Mr. Penn. “Unfiltered water pumped from the river.”

  “Surely it’s dirty habits that cause disease.” Miss Tenby was looking around for confirmation. “Vice,” she said, meaningfully, but would go no further. She lowered her eyes meekly, as though far too delicate to say any more.

  “She’s right,” agreed Mr. Tenby. “You’re bound to come across all kinds of nasty things if you go looking for patients in places like St. Giles, Penn. They live like swine, all piled on top of each other, men and women alike.”

  “Miasma,” bellowed Lord Berners. “Miasma is the killer. You remember The Great Stink. That’s why we built the sewers.”

  Mrs. Tenby was pouring powdered sugar on her brandied fruit as though sugar were the only antidote to words like “stink” and “sewer.”

  Miss Tenby tittered nervously.

  “Whatever the case,” interjected Lord Blackwood, “we can’t ignore what happens in the rookeries forever.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he had the ability to command attention. All eyes were on him. “Public health will become a more pressing issue when a larger share of the public gets a political voice. And that can only be to the greater good.” Lord Blackwood meant to look at Mr. Penn as he said this, Ella was sure of it, but his eyes met hers.

  She felt herself nodding in agreement, before she froze, blushing. He didn’t care what she thought. But she cared what he thought. She was glad that he considered the suffering of those less fortunate as something more than a vulgar dinner topic. That he supported this dedicated young doctor. It conformed to her assessment of his character. Beneath the brooding exterior, behind the sneer, he was kind. She shouldn’t care, of course. As long as he didn’t interfere with her arrangement with Mrs. Trombly, his character could be of no interest to her.