Shadow of a Lady

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “Charles,” she said again. “I’m here. Holding your hand. Trenche lied to you. I don’t know what he said, but I know he lied.”

  “Trenche.” He thrashed about on the narrow bed. “I wish I’d killed him.” And then, suddenly, in an entirely different tone. “Lied?”

  “Yes. He’s always been my enemy. He’d say anything.” Anything but the truth. If only she knew what he had said.

  “Lies?” Some part of his mind seemed to be working on it. “All lies?”

  What should she say? She took a hard breath. “Yes.”

  “Lies.” Now it was a statement. His breathing, which had been rattling in an alarming way, steadied. “Helen,” he said.

  “Yes.” She bit off an endearment, and then wished it spoken.

  “Stay with me. I’m . . . not . . . well. In the morning, we’ll talk.”

  “Yes, in the morning. But, now, for my sake, drink this.” She put one firm arm behind him and raised him on his pillows so he could swallow.

  “Ouch.” It was an extraordinarily reassuring, normal sound. “Nasty.” But he swallowed the black liquid dutifully.

  “That’s better.” She settled him back on the bed. “Now sleep.”

  “ ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,’ ” he said, and slept.

  So, in the end, awkwardly, still holding his hand, half sitting, half lying by the bed, did she. Waking suddenly into complete consciousness, she heard him talking again, the same half-comprehensible mutterings as before. Bending near, she heard her own name, and Trenche’s, and then “No! I won’t believe it. Trenche. And her mother dying. ‘It killed her mother.’ That’s what he said. Waking to find them . . . Oh . . .” It was a long groan. And then, clearly, “ ‘Heaven stops the nose at it.’ ”

  Othello. She knew now what Trenche had told him, and, ice cold with anger, knew it for even worse than she had expected. Trenche had claimed to have been her lover on board the Trojan, before her mother died. Charles had not been there. How was he to know how physically impossible it would have been. Surely, used as he was to life on board ship, he might have guessed, but when was jealousy ever rational? And, clearly, Trenche had embroidered his story with some horrible description of a scene when her mother had surprised them. Hard to imagine how he made that convincing, but then she remembered the cot Forbes had had made for her mother on the after-deck. By some stretching of the circumstances there, it was just, unspeakably, possible.

  And what could she do about it? The answer was: nothing. Charles’s mind was poisoned against her and, if Angelina was right, that very poison was helping to retard his recovery. And she could not even allow herself the comfort of blaming him for believing the worst of her. After the news of what must have seemed her extraordinary marriage, he would have been in a mood to believe anything.

  He was muttering again. “Lies?” It was a question. “All lies?”

  So he had taken in something of what she had said last night. Was this a chance for her? She leaned forward and took his hand. “Yes, Charles, all lies. You should have known Trenche would lie to you.”

  Very faintly, his hand pressed hers. “Should have known,” he muttered, his head moving restlessly. “Trenche . . . lies . . . Should have killed him.” And with that apparently settled, he turned his head into the pillow and fell into what seemed like a real sleep. He still had her hand, and she sat there, not daring to move, until Angelina came.

  “Ah,” said the old woman, putting a hand on Charles’s brow. “That feels better. And just as well, signora. There’s the devil to pay in the house.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ricky,” said Angelina. “We should have acted sooner. That Price must have put him up to it, of course.”

  “To what?” She was on her feet, ready to go to her child’s defence. “Tell me quick, Angelina.”

  “He got into Mrs. Forbes’s dressing room,” said Angelina. “While she was asleep. He’s played hob with her things. She’s fit to be tied. Poor little thing, he fell asleep there after he’d done. She found him. You’d best go, signora.”

  “Yes.” One last, quick look at Charles, and she was outside, running swiftly up the stairs to the suite of apartments where she had installed Charlotte. Opening the door, she found Charlotte in hysterics and Ricky in floods of tears. Rose, between them, looked as if she could not decide which to imitate. The room was a shambles. Ricky had found the rouge and pearl powder with which Helen had suspected Charlotte of experimenting, had apparently begun by smearing them on his own hands and face, and then tried to clean himself up with the muslin gown that had been left hanging over a chair.

  But even worse than this, he seemed to have pulled out all the drawers of the dressing table, spilling their contents on the floor. Now his face was white under the smears of rouge, and a scarlet mark across one cheek must mean that Charlotte or Rose had hit him. At sight of his mother, he drew in a long, sobbing breath. “No sweets,” he said, as if it explained everything. “I couldn’t find any.”

  “Little devil.” Charlotte’s hysterics had also stopped at sight of Helen. “He must be whipped for this.”

  “No,” said Helen. “Charlotte, I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but he’s only a baby.” Impossible to tell Charlotte of her suspicion—her certainty that Price was behind this. Ricky would never have thought of the possibility of sweetmeats in Charlotte’s drawers by himself. Price must have put the idea into his head; had probably even brought him to the door of the room and even—it had a very heavy catch—opened it for him. But to say so would be to precipitate the very crisis she most wished to avoid. “Ricky.” She made her voice stern. “You must tell the lady how very very sorry you are, and then you must go to your room. You’ve been a bad, bad boy.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “Nasty lady. She smacked me. Won’t say I’m sorry.” He began to cry again, and Helen longed to take him in her arms and comfort him. After all, this was entirely her fault.

  “I told you he was a devil,” said Charlotte. “Whip-ping’s too good for him. Just look at all my lovely things.”

  “I’ll get you some more.” Helen moved forward to examine the extent of the damage, but Charlotte was before her.

  “Leave my things alone!” she said. “Rose, start packing. I know when I’m not wanted. Now I’m glad John insisted on getting me a passage on the Dido. I’ll stay in the Hotel Britannia until she’s ready to sail.”

  “Oh, Charlotte,” pleaded Helen. “Please . . .” But at last she had understood what Price had intended. He wanted Charlotte out of the house, and she did not like to think why.

  Luckily, John Forbes, paying a very early call, largely, Helen suspected, for news of Charles Scroope, made short work of Charlotte’s plan of moving to a hotel. “No such thing,” he said firmly. “It would be an insult to Lady Merritt, for one thing, and, besides,” he hit on a clincher, “what would your mother say if she found I had let you stay with only your maid at a common hotel?”

  “I wouldn’t go to a hotel,” said Rose, and settled it.

  Chapter 20

  HELEN was glad to leave John Forbes soothing his tearful wife and take Ricky up to his room, where she left him in charge of Lucia, the girl from Torre del Greco, with strict instructions that he was to stay there all day. “Unless you’ll say you’re sorry,” she said severely to the sobbing Ricky.

  “Not to her,” said the child. “I’ll tell him.” He looked up at his mother. “I am sorry.”

  It rent her heart. “I’m sure you are, my poppet.” She bent to hug him. “I’ll bring Captain Forbes. It will be easier among men.”

  “Yes.” She felt him relax at last in her arms, and realised with a fresh pang how far she had let him slip from her. Hurrying downstairs, she found John Forbes just emerging from Charlotte’s rooms, and explained Ricky’s proposition.

  “Yes of course,” he said briskly. “Man to man, eh? Charlotte,” he turned back in the doorway: “Young Ricky apologises to me
, and then it’s all to be forgotten.”

  “Oh very well,” she said sulkily. “I might have known you’d be against me, too.”

  Up in Ricky’s room, John Forbes held out a hand. “Well, young man, I believe you’ve something to say to me?”

  “Yes, sir.” The child looked up at him. “Please . . . I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the boy.” Forbes took the small hand and shook it. “Tell me,” his voice was conversational, “who put you up to it?”

  “No,” said Helen, as the child’s face crumpled into tears.

  “Oh?” He looked at her. Then, “Very well.” He swung the child onto his shoulder. “All forgotten,” he said. “When you’re a man, will you come to sea with me?”

  “Yes, please,” said the boy. “And we’ll have no women.”

  Forbes and Helen exchanged glances. “So it was Price,” he said softly, safe outside the room.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And you do nothing?”

  “Believe me, I cannot.”

  He looked around. “I want to talk to you.”

  “The sickroom,” she said. And then, suddenly radiant: “Captain Forbes, he’s better.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it.”

  In the sickroom, Charles’s more natural colour and breathing confirmed her words. Angelina reported that he had actually taken a few spoonfuls of the chicken broth that had been brewed fresh every day on Helen’s orders. “It’s the turn at last.”

  “And thank God for that,” said John Forbes as she left the room. “You must have wondered, Lady Merritt, why I chose to call so early.”

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I was so grateful . . .”

  “It all hangs together.” As once before, he moved over to make sure that the door was securely shut. “Someone is trying to make trouble for you. Price?”

  “I think so. But you mean there’s more than Ricky?”

  “Much, much more,” he said soberly. “I was so late last night, I decided to stay in town. At the Britannia. A good thing I did. I heard the talk there.”

  “Talk?”

  “About you and your witch, and how you’re killing a British officer between you. And how you’re bad luck for Naples. Don’t ask me how they work it out,” he anticipated her question impatiently, “because it don’t make sense. But they’ve convinced themselves. Or someone’s convinced them. Which is more to the point.”

  “Price?” Now it was her turn to ask it.

  “I don’t know. I doubt if he’d appear in it directly. Not down there. From the way they talked, I’d think they were a parcel of Jacobins.”

  “But—”

  “You think it’s the French he’s spying for?”

  “I’m almost sure of it.”

  “But still he’d not be seen in it. He’s very great with your husband, is he not, Lady Merritt?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “So of course he’d not be seen in it. And your husband’s away?”

  “Yes.” It had been a relief when she learned Lord Merritt had gone straight from Lady Hamilton’s party to his shooting box at Caserta, though she had been puzzled that Price had not gone too.

  “Just so. You’d have been on your own here tonight, with Charlotte at the hotel—oh, that was predictable enough, if I’d not taken a hand. And when they came, the servants would have ran for it.”

  “They?”

  “The mob of lazzaroni that’s been worked up against you. By the time they had finished with you, and Angelina, and the house, no one would ever have known whether you had really been killing or curing my friend here.”

  “You mean?” She had imagined horrors, but nothing so bad as this.

  “I do. Tonight was the night. They wanted Charlotte out, of course, the people behind it—because everyone knows what vengeance would be taken for a captain’s wife. If she stays, I think you are that much the safer.”

  “But you can’t risk her.”

  “I don’t intend to. There will be a guard of Cormorants here tonight, and anyone who comes to make trouble will find more than he bargained for. But, in fact, I don’t think anyone will come. This kind of mob-stirring can work both ways. I am going back to the Hotel Britannia now, to mention, in public, how well my friend Scroope is doing in your house. Thank God, it’s true.”

  “Thank God.”

  She spent as much of that endless day as she possibly could between Ricky’s room and the sickroom, thus at least sparing herself Charlotte’s continued grumbling. The first thing she had done after Forbes left was to sit down and write a note to Lady Hamilton with the good news of Charles’s improvement. It was the best way she knew to get it into public circulation. It brought her an enthusiastic reply, which also, to her relief, absolved her from the duty of calling at the Palazzo Sessa. Lady Hamilton was very busy indeed, she reported, interpreting for the Admiral. “My duty to him and to my adorable Queen must come first.”

  No doubt the attack on Rome was being discussed, but Helen had more immediate anxieties, and it was with a sigh of heartfelt relief that she heard Captain Forbes announced at last. “All’s right and tight,” he assured her. “My men are on duty outside, and I’ve come to spend the night, if I may.”

  “Oh, thank you. I’ve not told Charlotte.” And then, hurriedly, “In her condition . . .”

  “Quite so. And unnecessary anyway. I truly believe, Lady Merritt, that the danger has passed. There are a whole set of new rumours in town today, and I think you and our friend Scroope have been forgotten. An extraordinary people, this . . . And dangerous. I wish you did not have to stay here. But how is Scroope?”

  “Still mending, I’m delighted to say. But Angelina thinks it will be a slow business.”

  The night Helen had dreaded passed without event, and, in the morning, thanking John Forbes warmly, she found herself wondering what would really have happened if he had asked her to many him, back on the Trojan. She had spoken part of the truth when she told him that she would have refused him, but later, when her moment of crisis came, she knew well that it was to him that she would have turned, rather than to Lord Merritt. And, she was sure, he would not have failed her.

  All past, all over, and best forgotten. But, for his sake, she worked extra hard all day to make things right again with Charlotte, taking her out on an extensive shopping round to replace the things Ricky had spoiled. What a mercy it was to have her own money, even if it was only pin money, compared with her actual inheritance. But these, too, were thoughts best put out of one’s mind.

  Charlotte sailed for England a few days later, with Rose in somewhat reluctant attendance, and Helen was surprised to find herself missing them. But then, Angelina had ordered her out of the sickroom. “Your presence troubles him now,” she said. “I don’t understand it, but you’d best stay away. The maids can help me. It’s more suitable anyway.”

  It was perfectly true, but it made Helen miserable just the same. She had not realised what peace there was in sitting beside Charles’s bed, until she was banished from it. Public affairs provided an exciting distraction. Her calls at the Palazzo Sessa had kept her up to date in the long discussions between Nelson, the Queen, and her minister, Acton. The Queen and Acton had hoped for outright support from her son-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, but all they got was advice, and an Austrian general called Mack, who arrived with much pomp and circumstance in the middle of October.

  Nelson thought highly of him at first, and a march on Rome was soon a settled thing. In action, Nelson insisted, lay Ferdinand’s only chance of safety. His choice was simply, “To die with sword in hand, or to remain quiet and be kicked out of his kingdom.” A holy crusade was preached from the pulpits, the lazzaroni took fire at the idea of restoring the exiled Pope to his see, but, characteristically, the Neapolitan Court felt that no move could be made before the Princess Royal had had her expected baby. In the meantime, the whole Court moved to San Germano, where the army was encamped, and Queen Mari
a Carolina put on a blue riding-habit with gold fleurs-de-lis at the neck, and a plumed general’s hat, and reviewed her troops. Her husband, enjoying the camp life, nevertheless had one of his surprisingly shrewd comments when it was suggested that his soldiers should change their blue and yellow uniforms for red ones, like those of their allies, the British. “Dress them in red, dress them in yellow,” said King Ferdinand. “They’ll run away just the same.”

  And Nelson, returning in a bad temper from blockading Malta, soon revised his original good opinion of Mack. “General Mack,” he said, “cannot move without five carriages! I have formed my opinion. I heartily pray I may be mistaken.” But events were to prove him right. When Helen accompanied him and the Hamiltons to watch Mack manoeuvring his troops, it was to see the scene degenerate into total confusion, with the “enemy” masters of the field. But everyone shrugged it off. The Princess Royal had a daughter, and the army marched at last, on November the twenty-second, in the pouring rain.

  Helen was not there to see them go. A messenger from Angelina had summoned her home to the Palazzo Trevi. Charles Scroope’s leg and his general health were mending steadily, if slowly, but his first action on recovering full consciousness and realising where he was had been to demand that he be sent back to the hospital at once.

  “I can’t stay here.” His voice was harsh as he greeted Helen. “It’s impossible. Even you must see that.”

  “You might thank the signora.” Angelina had understood tone, if not words. “You’d be dead if you’d stayed in that hospital.”

  “And you’re not strong enough for it now,” said Helen. “Please, Captain Scroope, be reasonable. My husband and I owe you a debt beyond repaying. You must let us do what we can. It was Lord Merritt’s idea,” she added, with more tact than truth.

  “Oh.” He took this in. “Where is Lord Merritt? I would like to thank him.”

  “Off shooting,” she made it casual. “He saw no need to stay, now you are so much better.”

  “I see.” He was still pitifully weak, and the short conversation had exhausted him. “Well, then, for a few days more.” He managed the ghost of a smile. “And my deepest thanks, Lady Merritt.”