Sir William

by David Stacton

  The trouble was Emily. Seduction is an art. The ability is given at birth. We can polish the skill, but we cannot polish what we do not have. And though it was essential to appear the seducer and to chuckle about the little lady tucked away somewhere, and possible to do the tucking, given one had the deposit money, the actual process of performing the rite had left Greville weary and wary to the point where he sometimes wondered if other gentlemen of his acquaintance did not also exaggerate their trophies the better to conceal their wounds. However, go home he must, and so home at last he went, though with his mask on. He was kindly but above these things. That was his mask.

  He hoped Emily was comfortable and had recovered from her untimely experience. He had no doubt but that Emily was tired this evening and would require rest. In short, what the devil was he to do with her?

  On the second day, Emily and Mrs. Cadogan refrained from discussing what had not happened the first night, which was also what did not happen on the second; on the third evening, Greville was out; on the fourth morning Emily had hysterics; and on the fourth evening Mrs. Cadogan, though gingerly, took the matter into her own hands.

  “Em’ly is here only to do your bidding. You have but to say, and she will do what you wish. Em’ly has retired only to await you, sir.”

  “Has no one ever told you the word is in three syllables?” demanded Greville, irritated both with himself and her.

  “What word is that, sir?”

  “Em’ly,” snapped Greville.

  “How else would I address her? She is my daughter.”

  “Then we must change the name,” said Greville firmly. “I shall think about it and advise you.” When she had gone, he sat glumly to the contemplation of his port, alone, for he could not very well show her off to his male acquaintance until he had something to show.

  Today is Thursday, he said to himself. I shall approach her on Friday and every Friday thereafter. That will be suitable; and he began to devise lists of names. The Fair Teamaker of Edgware Row was the epithet he had chosen, but what the devil was he to call her?

  Port is a heavy drink. Three bottles of it are even heavier. It was all he could do to stumble up to bed.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who had been hoping for developments, and philosophically blew her candle out. “What is to become of us?”

  Emily was asleep and vastly enjoying herself. She infinitely preferred to sleep alone, though such luxuries are seldom possible, short of widowhood. Men are so messy.

  Summoned from sleep in some dark part of the night, she felt a body in the bed beside her. It was a smooth, hairless, slim body, adolescent in quality, and breathing liquorous fumes. It was an apologetic body, she decided, as well it might be for disturbing her, so she was not alarmed.

  “Feel no fear,” said the body. “It is only Greville.”

  Which was true enough. “Oh, dear, dear Greville,” she said, and stroked his hair which, since he did not shave for a wig but had it cut to a stubble, was no more alarming to touch than it would have been to rub a hedgehog the right way.

  To her surprise, though naturally revolted (men are beasts), she was not displeased. The sensation was localized, transitory and brief. He did not derange her hair. He did not make ugly noises. There was the added advantage that she could not see him. It could not be denied that the sensation, so long as one was careful not to become aroused, was conducive to repose; and when he was adequately relieved he had the good taste to go away and not to clutter up the bed.

  “Very well then,” he said, in Ms own room. “From now on it will be Thursdays.”

  “Very well then,” said Emily, in her own bed. “Really, all things considered, it is not so bad, and later on I suppose he will taper off—most men do.”

  “Very well then, at least it has led to something, and I suppose in the morning we will find out what,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and went to sleep again.

  “Damn,” said the parlormaid, awakened in her bed by sheer frustration. “It is a suitable employment, but what young man would come this far out of town to see me?” She was an authentic member of the lower orders and would not last long.

  It is a rum household, thought the cook, in the midst of slumber. “But that no doubt is because they are members of the gentry, or as near as makes no difference. Tomorrow they shall have overcooked turbot for lunch, with a shriveled lemon, curdled hollandaise sauce and some dead parsley for garniture, and that will take care of them.” For she took pride in her work and worried incessantly.

  *

  In the morning, Greville came downstairs, descriptions of illicit rapture completed in his head, and halfway down, paused, for Mrs. Cadogan was in the hall, looking up at him.

  “I have decided to call her Emma Hart,” he said. “Emma is a fashionable name, and as for Hart, it is a pun, for not only does she seem to have one, but she is like a young doe.”

  He then entered the dining room where he ate two eggs, three grilled kidneys, half a sausage and some kedgeree to keep his strength up; after which he sauntered to town, not only a virile, but a proven man.

  Mrs. Cadogan bounced upstairs as fast as short legs could take her.

  “You have given satisfaction,” she said, bursting in on Emily, who was about to commence “The Jolly Miller” on the spinet, in order to express herself.

  “I have made my sacrifice,” said Emily.

  “He has given you a new name.”

  “He has given me what?” Emily’s mind had toyed for the moment with jewelry.

  “He wishes you to be called Emma—Emma Hart,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

  It was not a diamond, but it would do. “I must say I like the sound of it,” said Emma, new born, trying it a few times and even playing it on the not quite harpsichord (E, A, A), back and forth, into a little jig. She was in good spirits. He had given her her adolescence back again, quite untarnished, except on Thursdays. She had had no idea these things could be so sedately done.

  It was the beginning, not of a passion, which she would have viewed with repugnance—being at bottom a stout English girl—but of affection, which she felt far more. There was something endearing about him after all; he was the runt of an imaginary litter.

  “But dear me,” she said, “isn’t he stingy?”

  *

  “The color is back in her cheeks. I have rescued her from the mire. She is like a rose after rain, a briar rose,” said Greville.

  “And she loves you for it, of course?”

  “Passionately,” said Greville, determining that Emma should never sleep with any man whose reticence he could not trust, which meant with no man. “She is like a Greek goddess.”

  “Which one?” asked Towneley.

  They were in his atelier. Lest for a moment anyone might believe that Towneley did anything except be Towneley, it must be added that by atelier he meant the room in which he kept his sculpture, not the room in which he did it. Lady Di Beauclerc might so far forget herself as to deign to draw a little, but Towneley never forgot himself. Being well-bred, he admired only. What he admired most was mostly Roman sculpture, for he liked a sure thing, and usually a copy of a sure thing at that, which is what the Romans had admired. However, as did the Romans, he called it Greek.

  “A Hebe,” said Greville, catching sight of one.

  “Come now,” said Towneley, “if that is the case, you may as well have a Ganymede instead. But I do not think that is quite your taste. An Athene perhaps?”

  “She is untutored.”

  “A Thetis? Perhaps she has had naval connections?”

  She had. Greville blushed.

  Towneley was satisfied. He had rather thought so. “Of course we will come to see her. What does your uncle have to say, by the way?”

  Greville had several uncles, but Sir William was always the one referred to. For he was more than famous: he was also a connoisseur, and had already sent back from Naples more Etruscan vases than any other living Englishman.

  “Not only is he
the power behind the throne,” Towneley had once said, in his not unkindly—but if we wish to be witty we cannot have qualms—way, “he is also the chair the nephew sits in.” It was true enough. Greville cut a fine figure, what with that idyllic face, but without his uncle he would scarcely have been competent to cut ice.

  This kind of bickering, since it was the only kind he knew, seemed to Greville both warm and congenial. It was the great world of little gossip, and he knew no other. Indeed it was easier to gossip about the great than actually to endure them, for any show of vigor, except in the matter of bric-a-brac and chitchat, would have been detected at once and despised. In this world one exerted oneself only to inherit money or to conceal the fact that one had not. Since Greville did both, he qualified; his position was secure. But as one must provide the occasion for gossip as well as the gossip itself, he had come to ask his cronies to Edgware Row.

  So Emma, who did not, in the presence of her mother, find the absence of other women distressing, but was bored, soon had a host of distinguished gentlemen, all pink, all plump and all benign, to entertain her. There was Towneley himself, the first epicene man she had met, though apt to pinch in the dark to prove his manhood; there was Mr. Hayley, almost as dull as his verse, but just as distinguished and far nicer. And there was Lord Bristol, the Bishop of Derry, rosy cheeked as a law lord and just as spiritual; a lovably wicked old man (he was fifty-two) who told her God must have been in a romantic mood the day He created her. He had pudgy hands and a wholesome laugh, and she liked him best.

  Each one, as he left, said to the others: “Now how do you suppose he managed that?” Greville was pleased and proud of her. She had conducted herself well. But must she conduct herself in that voice?

  “It is her native Doric,” explained the Bishop of Derry. “Her wood-note wild.” To Emma he said, “My dear child, speak more softly, enunciate, and if you cannot put the ‘h’s’ back where they belong, do not be impatient on that account to shove them in where they most certainly don’t. Never grow excited; and practice aspirating into a candle flame each night—that will soon take care of everything.”

  “Asp, eat, oat, Ute,” said Emma, obediently. “Heat, heart, hot, hut.” And soon she had it in the proper order, unless she did get excited, and with the exception of “a.”

  “Hate, hat, hard, Harold,” prompted the Bishop amiably. “And then there is the problem of such things as honor. Their derivation is usually French, and that is why we do not pronounce them properly. They are not quite a part of the English tongue, you see.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Emma, and for a wonder she did. “It is one of your jokes.”

  “It is one of God’s jokes,” he corrected her. “But we do the best we can.”

  “What are Utes?”

  “American Indians,” said the Bishop. “Have you never read your Voltaire? A pity. He is one of the few pleasures of which the Cloth is capable. Because it is naughty, you know. I shall send you a copy, for while you are at it, you may just as well learn French.”

  “There seems a great deal to learn.”

  “Not as much as you might think. Consider Charles.”

  Emma was shocked. “Greville is truly learned,” she said, and meant it. It was no more than he said himself.

  “I know. It is a great waste. However, you must not mind my little ironies.”

  “I don’t,” said Emma, who didn’t.

  The Bishop of Derry went away, sighing for true, as opposed to technical, innocence, and wondered how Greville did manage it.

  *

  He managed it, among other things, by rigging thimbles and saving string, and all those other stratagems to which those who would have the world think well of them are put. The house was to be run on £100 a year. He insisted on it. He also insisted Emma keep accounts, writing down such sums as apples, 2½ pence; mangle, 5 pence; coach, a shilling; and poorman, ½ pence. For five poormen, you could buy more apples. For five coaches, muslin by the yard. So she wore muslin by the yard. It was not merely economy. It was discipline. For dress, charity and entertainment, she had £30 pin money per annum. The housemaid was paid £8, and the cook £9. Therefore the cook did very little cooking, but did sometimes dust; and when she was not dusting, Mrs. Cadogan did most of the cooking. She was an excellent cook. It was an excellent arrangement.

  His sherry, port and portraits he paid for himself, as also the rent of the house. That was his contribution, and as for entertainment, it need not prove too dear, for in the absence of any other, they had him.

  Mrs. Cadogan, who had no allowance, did not happen to find Greville that amusing, but since Emma did, it could not be helped. Greville, who dressed, if not in the height, at least in the hand-me-downs and foothills of fashion, had an arrangement with his tailor. But what did he do with the other three hundred pounds a year he surely had? It was a mystery. He neither gilded the cage nor left it open. He neither forbade a trip to town, nor provided a carriage. So they could not find out. In the evenings, sometimes, if there were candles enough, he read them La Nouvelle Héloise. His French was like the rest of him: he did not stumble, he never lost his place, but he had no lilt. It was in truth a bore.

  But Emma found La Nouvelle Héloise affecting.

  “To think a simple love could live so simply,” she said.

  “My dear, that’s why,” said Mrs. Cadogan, gathered up her darning (cotton and needles: 9 pence), and went to bed.

  *

  Greville now came spontaneously every Tuesday, as well as according to his system, on Thursdays. Emma did not mind. She was meek and submissive and grateful and still young enough to believe that everything went on forever, instead of grinding, as it did sometimes, to a halt. What was to be done? Not that Mrs. Cadogan longed for livelier scenes; she had had quite enough of those in her younger days, thank you, but since she happened to be a very good plain cook indeed, she did hanker after a slightly larger allowance and a nip or two on the bottle in the afternoons. Unfortunately Greville marked his bottles.

  Then, to relieve the tedium, came the visit to Ranelagh. Either somebody had suggested the idea to him, or else it was to be their Annual Outing. They were eating, at the time the visit was proposed, one of Greville’s celebrated imaginary meals.

  The phrase was the Bishop of Derry’s. “Go dine at his house; yes do, but come on to dine with me afterward,” he said. “Or better still, take along a Sandwich in your greatcoat pocket, lest you feel faint on your way back. Greville is the best creature in the world. Or the second best. But he serves imaginary meals. You are asked to dine. You are told the menu in advance. It is an excellent menu. The wine is superb. The dining room is elegantly appointed. The service is everything that service should be. You are even allowed to discuss the meal, a thing allowed in no other English household, for though we worship at the throne of Gastronomy, we do so ashamed, alone, and after fasting. However, to what I was saying: his meals are famous. His dishes are fine. His cutlery is impeccable. But there is no food. None whatever. A solitary pea upon a plate, an inch of flounder drowned in a sea of sauce, a scruple of savory imposed upon a merely ideal lozenge of toast. The man is not only mad, but thin.”

  He was quite right: there was none. Only the knowledge that there was a carrot pudding steaming in the basement, and loads of lovely jam, sustained Emma and Mrs. Cadogan through these singularly absent feasts.

  “To Ranelagh,” said Emma.

  Greville sat there, the image of foppish benevolence.

  “And would you like that, my child?”

  “Oh yes, I should like that very much.”

  “Then there is no difficulty,” said Greville. “We will go tonight, after the smoked salmon and the cottage pudding.”

  The salmon would be sliced thin, to look like horn windows at sunset. As for the pudding, it was remarkable how such a man could live so long on starch, though true that he dined out frequently and sometimes brought the menu home to show it to them.

  To Ranelagh they we
nt. Of London’s pleasure gardens—there were once as many as five—it was the most famous and the most sedate. That is why he had chosen it. There are a limited number of places to which a kept woman of the demimonde may go. And he did not, for reasons of jealousy, wish her to go anywhere that the demimonde itself went. That left Ranelagh.

  The building had been refurbished last year. It was a rotunda of vast dimensions, supported by a central column. Music was played there while you walked around and around. When you were tired of walking around and around, there were the gardens, which were the sacred precincts of the fribble and the fop, for the shrubbery had grown to a sufficient height to permit of privacy in diversion, so that sometimes a startled shriek was allowed to mingle with the mellifluous cadences of Performed Song.

  “On Thames’s fair bank a gentle youth

  For Lucy sighed with matchless truth

  Ev’n when he sighed in rhyme.

  The lov’ly maid his flame return’d

  And would with equal warmth have burn’d

  But that she had not time….”

  Emma hummed, and God knew how she had learned it, but then women are as sensitive to the latest airs as savages are to tribal drums, and seem to learn just as much in the same way, even at a distance.

  An outing demands a new dress. There was one. The two women had managed to smuggle one or two Repositories of Fashion and Mode into the sitting room upstairs, paid for out of the apple money. The result was not an entirely new dress, but an old white one, fitted with a transparent pelisse of scrounged tulle, dyed smoky in the basement, surreptitiously, with lampblack. With a blue sash, a transformed bonnet, some blue morocco pumps filched from the embers of Sir Harry’s wrath, and a muff to keep her hands warm—for it was summer—the outfit did well enough. So well that Greville wanted to ask where it had come from, but thought better of doing so, lest he be told. So instead he did an unusual thing: he smiled.

  Emma smiled back. She was still too trustful. Since she was unconscious of her beauty as yet, she believed that people liked her for herself rather than merely for her appearance, and she felt very much herself this evening.