Wilkinson intervened. ‘Lady Anne’s daughter, madame. But you’ll not find her in the ’54 register, ’twas last summer.’
‘Well, well.… And here is the Ladyday quarter, Anton—search through and see if a Very Particular friend of your own is not here, my dear, as I’ve told you.…’ She shoved the great book over towards him.
Wilkinson, however, thrust both books aside. ‘Useless, probably. Ladies and gentlemen of the quality seldom put their true names—as we’ve found to our sorrow, madame, since the blame falls to us; and especially those with Very Particular friends who may come later in search of them.’ He eyed them shrewdly. Friends of Lady Anne Paulett might well be emissaries also of the Duchess of Argyle whose outcry against the Fleet marriages had given them all an infinity of trouble. ‘Come, ladies—your minds should be upon your own marriages, a solemn moment in your lives: and in the lives of those who must now lose you to these fortunate gentlemen.’ He cast an anxious eye to the door where his partner yet dallied, and meanwhile encircled the waists of the ladies and gave them each a valedictory squeeze. Tom Jean’s inamorata was, only too obviously, in no condition of health to be squeezed and she gave a shrill scream and relapsed into her inevitable giggles; Sapphire, shuddering, submitted to the endearment, releasing herself, however, with a dexterous twist and falling in feigned half-drunkenness into Anton’s arms. Oh, God! she thought—if my mother could see me now; if my poor father could see me, whose hope for me ran so high that he would sacrifice us all—to this! In such a place as this, on such a work as this! And all for a moment of despair when all that was needed had been but a little patience, a little faith, to end in bliss. And she thought of the difficulties still to come, of the long, lonely path of sorrow that she, for love, had chosen to tread. We will go to Italy, she thought: Christine will come with me, we will go to Italy, there at least there will be smiling faces and blue skies, and my lovely Venice will open her arms to her weary exile and take me to her heart again. And perhaps, even yet, she thought, concealment might be possible: perhaps even yet, it might not be too late.…
Parson Grierson came in, bowed, without further ado began rapidly reading out the marriage service, the two couples standing, one grim and silent now, one restless and sniggering before the covered table. In the act of scratching an initial in the book, she put her hand to her breast. ‘Help! Help! I am faint.’ Her companions moved round her, crowding out the two chaplains from view of the books and she edged the earlier volume towards Prince Anton. ‘Water—a glass of water!…’ As he stood, dismayed, looking down at the book, she hissed: ‘Take out the page.’
‘I can’t,’ he said stupidly. ‘There’s a clasp. The book’s locked.’
Wilkinson shoved his way back in among them: he had collected his fee and now wanted them only to begone—every moment they delayed was danger of discovery to him. The lady would be best in fresh air.
‘No, no,’ moaned Sapphire, doubled up again over the table. ‘A doctor—I pray you go, sir, and fetch me a doctor.’
‘There is no doctor here, madame; save only,’ he said, grinning, ‘a doctor in orders. You had best get back to your coach and go yourselves in search of one.’ And he took her by the arm and hauled her bodily up from the table. Anton and Tom Jeans sprang forward in genuine horror. ‘Unhand her, sir! Lay your hands off her ladyship!’ But he urged her forward, his partner taking the other arm, forcing her, violently resisting, towards the door. ‘It is time to begone, sir, we risk transportation if you are found here, and the women in wedding guise. Get back to your coach and attend to your lady there.’ She struggled against them, casting imploring glances at Anton, hissing: ‘The book! Get the whole book!’ but he was blind to all but the insult of their hands upon her and Tom Jeans only said, foolishly, ‘The book?’ and might have given all away had she persisted. Almost weeping, she was forced out and into the coach, the two men still fighting off the rough grip of her assailants. ‘If ladies will come in such condition to be married,’ said Grierson, guffawing, ‘they must do their fainting in private: we are interested only in marriage-beds, not sick-beds; in laying-with rather than laying-in.’ He gave the woman a shove and she scrambled after them, no longer giggling, concealing her great pregnant belly from his insults as well she might with the skimpy folds of dress and veil and cheap velvet mantle: for the third time that evening, the coach jolted into action, the two jeering faces at the window were left behind. Sapphire sank back into the corner in utter despair. ‘This night has been doomed to disaster from the outset; and now we have failed. We had better go home.’ She said to Tom Jeans: ‘Where do you wish this—lady—taken?’
‘Let the lady speak for herself,’ said the woman pertly. She leaned out of the window and screeched up to the coachman: ‘To Berkeley Square!’
‘I regret,’ said Sapphire, ‘I do not entertain ladies at Berkeley Square.’
‘You will entertain me,’ said the woman. ‘You forget, madame, I am now Mrs. Jeans.’
‘You are no more Mrs. Jeans than—than I am a princess of Brunswick. This ceremony was a farce; from last Ladyday, all such marriages have been illegal.’
‘Then why was your ladyship there?’ she said reasonably.
‘I was there to obtain a—a trophy: did not Mr. Jeans tell you? ’Twas a jest. (What in God’s name will she spread about, if we tell her less than the truth?’ she said angrily to Anton.) ‘All the world knows of the Treasure Seekers’ Circle, ’twas a sort of—game: we went to secure a trophy.’
‘And where is the trophy now, then?’ said the woman.
‘We have failed,’ said Sapphire, bitterly. ‘We did not get it.’
‘You take it very hard,’ she said, curiously: she leaned round to peer through her veil at her ladyship, across Anton’s broad shoulders. ‘Do you say then you will not entertain me, my lady?’
‘I regret: I entertain gentlemen only, madame. Let the coach drop me at my front door and conduct you on to wherever you wish to be delivered.…’
But when they stopped at the house it was the other’s turn to be taken faint and call for help, for water, for a doctor.… And she, indeed, seemed in a condition that might just possibly make it a genuine emergency. ‘Better take her in,’ said Sapphire at last, wearily. She watched the two men mount the steps with her. It is a hoax after all, she thought: she walks as well as I do—she meant to gain entrance. She left them and climbed up wretchedly to her room and let her maid take her cloak; and sat for a little while, not troubling to remove the paint from her face or repair the tumbling of her dress, and rose at last and went down to the drawing-room. She had been absent only a short time but Tom Jeans met her at the door with a face of anxiety. ‘My—my wife! On the sofa here—given birth.’
They all stood back watching her as she flew over to the sofa where, under a coverlet, the woman lay groaning. Oh, heaven! she thought, this drab delivered of a child here, in this way, none present but men—all grinning like apes, and—and He may arrive any moment.… She stood over the woman bewildered. ‘Do you say a child has been born?’
Tom Jeans at her side, also grinning. ‘A splendid child: felicitate me, madame! A little brown in the complexion, perhaps, a little leathery of hide for one so young.…’ And with a swift movement he stripped back the coverlet. ‘If your ladyship cares to see …?’
White veil, half hiding painted, simpering face; tumbled, tawdry dress: a pair of large feet squeezed into white satin shoes sticking up in the air: and clasped to the stomach by a pair of large white hands—a square book of brown leather.
She caught it up, ripped through the pages: January—February—March—April—May.… She looked no further. March, 1754.
And a burst of laughter, and that wretch Cecil Prout, oddly masculine in feminine attire who ordinarily looked so feminine in man’s dress—sitting doubled up on the sofa in an hysteria of giggling, the white veil pulled at last aside.
‘I will thank you for ever,’ she said to him, and though her mouth l
aughed, her eyes were not laughing. She had ordered a fire lit, to the astonishment of the servants for it was August and the night stifling: and now she went over with the book in her hands to the fireplace and stood there. ‘With your permission, gentlemen: this book holds secrets which are no business of ours. Prince Anton will be content, no doubt, to hold as his prize the story of its acquiring.’ Without further ado she took it, riffled through its pages, looked earnestly for a moment at one page—and threw the whole book in the fire. ‘This is the happiest hour of my life,’ she said.
The happiest hour of her life: standing there in her draggled finery, a glass of red wine thrust into her hand, with her painted face and her dress half pulled off her body by the filthy hands of two rascally renegades: with her rabble of tipsy profligates about her and God knew what secret burning to merciful ash in the grate at her feet: and a servant standing whey-faced in the doorway—‘If you please, your ladyship—my lord is here.’
‘At eleven o’clock on the night of August the first, madame, did Lord Weyburn seek an interview with you?’
‘First dismissing all the servants to bed,’ said Sapphire. ‘Yes.’
‘Did his lordship accuse you of wanton behaviour with gentlemen now in court?’
‘He did, yes.’
‘And ask the reason for what seemed like a determination on your part to disgrace his name?’
‘To what end are these questions, Sir Henry?’
‘Did you, Lady Weyburn, request his lordship’s permission to return to your home in Italy?’
‘I did.’
‘And he taxed you with thus behaving so that he might wish to be rid of you, might pack you back home to Venice “where your heart had always been”?’
‘In marrying an Englishman, Sir Henry, I exiled myself from Venice: would I have done so—?’
‘Would you have done so had he not been rich, madame, and able, blackmailed by you with dissolute behaviour, to pension you off in wealth to “where your heart was”?…’
She had borne many insults in that court—deserved or not: but at this she flushed up for the first time, she brought the ivory fan down upon the table before her with a crack that rang through the gaping, eager silence of the crowd. ‘My lord!—will you permit this to be said, will you hear me called a—a whore, that would sell herself for a competence abroad? What need had I for your money? I had a home, I had a loving father and mother, I—I couched there like a bird in its nest, safe from all harm, till this woman, this bird of ill-omen, this eagle, beaked and taloned, swooped down and carried me forth to know suffering for the first time and cruelty and callous indifference, to lose my young innocence and all my joy for ever.… And will you let any man dare to say that I came in greed and infamy to sell myself for gold? Will anyone dare to say it of that girl who came, so ignorant and afraid, into your world?’ She was silent, eyes bright, head held high: waiting. Nobody spoke. ‘It is you who are disgraced,’ she said, looking round at them, and her face took on the old careless, scornful smile again. ‘It is you—not I.’
‘I asked you, madame, if that was your purpose in defiling my name by your conduct. You denied it; but afterwards you said you would protest no longer; that “perhaps that was the reason after all”!’
The fire had gone. She said carelessly: ‘Oh—did I say that? Very well then. Have it as you will.’
‘But it was not true, was it?—after all.’
She shrugged. ‘You say first it was true, now you say not.’
‘You acknowledged then that it was the reason—so as to disguise another, the true reason. We … I …’ He stood trembling for a moment, not able to control his voice. ‘We came to—an agreement; I—invited you to remain in England to become, in truth, my wife.’ Over the suddenly whipped-up storm of sensation in the court, his voice rose high. ‘You consented—upon one condition, madame, did you not?—that you return to Italy for a certain time.’
The storm had died away to silence as swiftly as it arose: all ears listened for the answer, all eyes stared, fascinated at the two pale, proud faces, deep blue eyes flashing defiance, cold grey eyes, relentless, meeting them. ‘This was the first of August. Your marriage to Prince Anton of Brunswick is said to have taken place at the end of March. You had had four months in which to conceive a child: and you asked me for six months—alone—in Italy. Your child, in fact, was born there in the following spring.’
She said steadily: ‘My child and yours.’
‘My marriage with you remains unconsummated: you had no child by me.’
‘Our marriage was consummated on that night of August the first. The boy is your heir.’
‘I deny it,’ he said: as steadily as she.
‘You lie, my lord.’ She rested her finger-tips on the table before her, their nails whitened by the pressure upon them to control their trembling. ‘Do you deny that upon that occasion you took me in your arms?’
He gave her a small, cold bow. ‘I do not deny it. I have told the court that we came to an agreement: a reconciliation, if you will. But—the question of your visit to Italy arose. Even then—I was unsuspecting, I might yet that night have made you my wife. You will tell the court, my lady, what locket I found in your bosom; we may leave them to judge whether, having found it, I turned with love to you.’
‘With love! Ah, no! A man does not love a bawd, sir, that he tumbles into bed in some brothel of the town; and nor did you love me. But …’ She laughed out on a high, crude, tearing note that made them wince who heard it. ‘But—tumble me you did, my lord, bawd that I was to you and wearing Prince Anton’s locket in my breast where, in tearing aside my dress in your lust, you found it.’ And she laughed again as at a memoried picture, vile and unlovely. ‘The servants a-bed, and by your orders, and I in your chamber in the dress I wore at our bridal.… I remember your words, sir: they were the last, I think, coherently spoken, I ever heard from you: “Since every other man in London appears to have known you,” you said, “why, so will I.”’
And the fruit of that bridal bed, she said, looking round upon them, deliberately shameless, shaming them by the very scorn of her own violent pandering to their hunger for her shamelessness, was Nicholas. ‘Who I say again, and will say despite what this trumped-up court of yours may find to the contrary, is Lord Weyburn’s heir.’
Verdict of the jury, sniggering behind large, red hands: that with all this consummying and not consummying, you couldn’t make head nor tail of it; but the quality did seem to be up to some rare old tricks all right, and if they’d bin in ’is lordship’s shoes, they’d’ve consummied the marriage quick enough, I’ll warrant you.…
Verdict of the court—if not of the jury—at the end of the second day of Lady Weyburn’s trial: that she married Prince Anton of Brunswick, secretly, on March 25th, that being the last day of legal marriages at Savoy chapel: two months, that is to say, before her mock marriage to Lord Weyburn at Starrbelow. That on August 1st, she and Anton conspired to remove all traces of the marriage from the register. That that night, knowing herself with child, she endeavoured to seduce Lord Weyburn to an act which might father the child on him; and that she failed. Verdict of the court: that the brat might be legitimately Anton’s by a marriage which now, thanks to their action in destroying the register, could never be proved: but was not Lord Weyburn’s heir.
THIRTEEN
The third day. For the prosecution—sick with grief, grim, resolute, deadly with the blind purpose of an honest man bent upon a just revenge: the Earl of Frome. For the defence: only the accused. And the charge—murder.
She stood in her place at the head of the great, glowing table: her dress today was of a stiff, creamy silk, she wore no glittering jewels but a circlet of seed-pearls exquisitely wrought in a pattern of lilies close about her lovely throat: her fan was of mother-of-pearl. ‘My lord Duke, my lords, ladies and gentlemen—I do not answer to this charge.’
‘The charge, my lady, is that, to preserve your secret, which she, only,
could disclose, you administered laudanum to the Countess of Frome and so brought about her death—’
‘I understand the charge very well, my lord Duke: and I have said and I now repeat that I shall not answer—I shall not condescend to answer—to so monstrous an accusation.’ She sat down quietly and slowly, serenely, like some white swan preening its feathers before its progress down the ruffled waters of the muddy stream, arranged the creamy folds of her skirt, composed her white hands in her lap, opened out with a flick the white wing of the iridescent-gleaming fan. The Earl of Frome stumbled to his feet.
‘My lord Duke, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen of the jury.… I wish to make it clear from the first that my wife, the Countess of Frome, was not in the habit of taking laudanum. Most of us take laudanum now and again for sleeplessness or pain; I do myself and in a closet adjacent to her room was a small phial, a sufficient dose to which she might have resorted if she had found herself in need of it. But that she would resort to it of her own accord is unlikely in the extreme; she was strongly prejudiced against it, I have never known her to use it; and, as it transpires, the phial in the closet remains untouched. I make this point to prove, my lord, ladies and gentlemen, that if my wife were offered a dose of laudanum, were persuaded while in a state of over-emotion to do what in other circumstances she would never do, and accept it—she would be ignorant of the proper dose. Lady Weyburn, on the other hand, though she also seldom resorted to it, as I understand, did now and again use laudanum, did understand laudanum; kept always a large phial of laudanum in a locked box.
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