Dangerous to Know

by Christina Boyd (ed)

He excused himself from his friends and made his way toward her, though he had been planning to wait until just before the last set to claim a dance. (It would not do to appear too eager, after all.) Just as he was close enough to hear her, she laughed—a musical, joyful laugh. And though he was not jealous—how could Sir Walter Elliot be jealous of an ugly vicar—he supposed it must have been something like jealousy. There was no other explanation for his odd behavior: he ducked behind the nearest potted plant so that he might spy on their conversation.

  “Come now, Miss Stevenson,” said the vicar, the crooked smile on his lips doing nothing to improve his appearance. “You may laugh at me all you like, and yet you cannot deny the truth of my claim: satire like Swift’s A Modest Proposal has a good deal more power than my meager sermons to bring attention to the plight of the poor.”

  There was that laugh again—pure, melodic, and, as far as Sir Walter could tell, wholly unwarranted. After all, what had the man said that was so amusing to her? And who was this Swift person, anyway?

  “I most certainly hope you do not advocate the eating of infants in your homilies!” she responded, her laughter giving way to a smile that made Sir Walter forget her nonsensical reference to consuming children. She offered this vicar not that hesitant, embarrassed smile she so often used with him, but a wide, unchecked expression of happiness that took his breath away.

  The vicar seemed similarly affected. He stared at her for several long (far too long) moments. Then, clearing his throat: “Ah, yes, rather, no, that is, my sermons stay quite clear of satire—and cannibalism.”

  Again, she laughed, and again, Sir Walter wondered why. He had at least deduced that they spoke of some piece of writing (what kind of man discussed books at a ball?), but as his reading material never veered from the Baronetage, the newspapers, and (though only a few of his household staff were allowed in on the secret) fashion magazines, Sir Walter had little to say on Swift himself.

  Could it be that Miss Stevenson was something of a bluestocking? This new view of her gave him pause. He was not against female education, so far as it went, but talking of satire and cannibalism—he could only hope she was merely humoring this fellow. Her laugh, however, suggested some hidden predilection for intellectual conversation, which he despised in both ladies and gentlemen alike. To know the major authors of the day—well, there might be some use for that in drawing room discussions but leave the intricacies of such things to the scholars, that was his view of the matter.

  Had they continued on about such ridiculous topics, Sir Walter might very well have turned away, made his excuses, and left the assembly. Indeed, he might have given up Miss Stevenson altogether; he had no use for a bluestocking!

  Instead, the vicar began another line of conversation, one of much greater interest to Sir Walter.

  “The dancers appear quite enthusiastic tonight,” said the vicar, clearing his throat. “I was wondering, Miss Stevenson…” He cleared his throat, again and again, so that Sir Walter was tempted to give the man a lozenge or a glass of water. “If I might be…be so bold…as to…”

  Sir Walter needed no deep understanding of literature to predict the stammered words that would follow. And though he had, only moments earlier, considered giving her up completely, he knew in that moment that he could not possibly abandon her. It was for her sake, as much as his—for how could he allow such a delicate flower as Miss Stevenson to be plucked by such unworthy (and ugly) hands? So what if she possessed an unhealthy interest in intellectual matters? He had no doubt he could cure her of such eccentricities, given time.

  With a great sweep of his arm, Sir Walter pushed aside the branches of his hiding place and stepped into the fray. “My dear Miss Stevenson! I have been searching for you everywhere.”

  Gasping, Miss Stevenson spun to face him, while the vicar said, “Yes, even in the potted plants.”

  “Excuse me?” Sir Walter turned to the vicar with a curt bow. “I do not believe we have been introduced.”

  “Oh, yes, Sir Walter, this is…” Miss Stevenson paused, as if she could not possibly think of another’s name while looking into Sir Walter’s eyes. “This is Mr. Grant. Mr. Grant, may I introduce Sir…Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall?”

  As she spoke his name, Miss Stevenson’s cheeks again took on that rose-hue flush he loved (yes, loved!) Her eyes lingered on him, and the tip of her tongue (as rosy as her cheeks) darted across her lips. Oh, she might find this vicar amusing, but there was no denying her attraction to him.

  “Mr. Grant attended Oxford with my brother,” continued Miss Stevenson, “and is now vicar at Monkford, which he tells me is not very far from Kellynch Hall.”

  Ah, so they had been discussing Kellynch before his arrival! No doubt Miss Stevenson had asked about it, hoping to learn as much as she could. Sir Walter nearly laughed. Had he truly been afraid?

  He offered Mr. Grant a smile, a sign of his goodwill. (Never let it be said that Sir Walter possessed anything but a sportsmanlike attitude toward those he bested.)

  “Yes, I know of Monkford. I have passed by the parsonage many a time on my way to Taunton. It looks a snug little place. Good for a bachelor, I dare say, though I hope Governor Strafford improved the roof before scampering off to India.” In an aside to Miss Stevenson—he leaned in close enough to hear the quickening of her breath—he added, “I heard the last vicar had to use an umbrella—indoors, my dear!—to keep himself dry in the spring.”

  Her smile was tremulous; her response, a breathy, “Oh my!”

  “You need not be anxious on my account,” said Grant, his frown turning the suggestion of a double chin into a terrible, ugly reality. “Governor Strafford is a most generous landlord and is continually providing for various improvements. If you must be concerned for the plight of others, Sir Walter—a noble trait, I am sure—then I might remind you of Mr. Terry.”

  Terry? The name sounded familiar, but it took several seconds for him to connect it to the petition that his new agent, Mr. Shepherd, had shown him. Apparently, this Terry fellow, a tradesman from the vicinity of Monkford, believed himself misused because Sir Walter had provided a reduced payment for a damaged piece of furniture. Terry had claimed it had been Sir Walter’s men who had dented the back of the sideboard when moving it into the dining room And, who can see the back of a sideboard anyhow, eh?—but Sir Walter doubted very much that his servants were responsible (they knew too well how much he despised dents of any kind). Had he been cruel, he would have refused payment altogether. As it was, he gave what he supposed a very generous amount.

  How this vicar knew of this matter was less important to him than the fact that he would dare to raise it in polite society—in front of a lady, no less.

  “Who is Mr. Terry?” asked Miss Stevenson, glancing anxiously between the two men.

  Her voice trembled so sweetly that Sir Walter reined in every impulse to give this impudent vicar a set down. (Besides, it would hardly do to have his business discussed in such a public setting.)

  “Come, Miss Stevenson,” said Sir Walter, taking her by the arm, “I beg you to dance the next set with me. Your beauty makes it impossible for me to think of anything else.”

  When she made as if to turn toward Mr. Grant, Sir Walter brought her gloved hand to his lips. “May there soon be a time when we dance all our sets together,” he whispered against her fingers.

  He watched her eyelids flutter and knew she would think no more of the vicar that night.

  His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own. Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable; whose judgment and conduct, if they might be pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot, had never required indulgence afterwards. —Persuasion, Chapter I.

  GLOUCESTER, JULY 1784

  The morning was clear and fine, just as it ought to be for the wedding of Sir Walter Elliot. Though the church a
t South Park did not quite meet Kellynch’s standards—the parson here had done little to keep his chickens, who were roaming the churchyard, from recognizing their proper place in the glebe—it was a pretty, little building, worn stone half covered in ivy. Set against the cloudless, blue sky, even this squat, gray edifice appeared attractive.

  “You have a singular talent,” Miss Stevenson had said to him just the other day, “for making any room you enter lovelier than it was the moment before you arrived.”

  This praise—rather forward, but then he could not deny the truth of it—had been whispered just after he had kissed her in one of the back stairwells of South Park. He would never before have considered himself the kind of man who kissed anyone in back stairwells (let his friends have their dalliances with maids in out-of-the-way places; Sir Walter Elliot could not believe any passion so strong that it must be fulfilled amidst grime and dust.) And yet, there he had been, descending the stairs just as Miss Stevenson had been ascending, her hair decorated with a delicate pink rose from the garden. There had been nothing for him to do but kiss her. She had smelled so delicious, and besides, South Park’s housekeeper maintained a very tidy, grime-free stairwell.

  What an odd experience, this season of courtship! He had secured Miss Stevenson’s hand soon after that assembly in Bath and had planned to spend the spring and early summer enjoying his last days of bachelorhood by attending all the usual fetes Bath and London offered before the ton scattered to the country. Instead, he had found himself seeking out Miss Stevenson, as if he still needed to woo her. When her father invited him to stay at South Park until the wedding, he had accepted with alacrity.

  Why he had acted thus, he could not precisely say. It would have been more proper, he supposed, to have kept some distance, to remind the family that, as a baronet, he had many obligations and many more important friends to visit. Yet he assured himself that there was some sense to his choice; Bath and London were really not to be borne in June—sweat, all that sweat!—and Kellynch was undergoing refurbishments to prepare for its new mistress.

  If he were to be wholly truthful with himself, he must own that he rather enjoyed spending time with the Stevensons. This realization had shocked him, for the Stevensons were not nearly so polished or fashionable as his other friends, a fact he lamented whenever he was seen with them in Bath. The elder Mr. Stevenson was one of those hearty, country gentleman who liked to make sport of his own rough edges, and the younger Mr. Stevenson, Elizabeth’s brother, was more bookish than refined. Yet they were tolerable, he supposed, and provided a good laugh when there was no better company to be found.

  Miss Stevenson, on the other hand—she captured his attention no matter who else was present. Something had changed about her since their first meeting, for then she had been attractive in only that common way—her truly fine complexion being the exception to this ordinary prettiness. Yet in the weeks and months of their acquaintance, he seemed to have inspired a blossoming in her; she had become radiant, beautiful. This even his friends seemed to have noticed during their last days in Bath, when they congratulated him on his engagement. “She has more bloom than I first thought,” Viscount Dalrymple had conceded.

  “You must think me incurably silly, blushing so often when I am with you,” she said on that same afternoon he had stolen a kiss on the back stairs.

  “Not at all, my dear,” he replied, stroking her cheek with the express purpose of bringing about the blush she pretended to regret. (Surely, she could not truly regret that which made her more beautiful.) “Your complexion is one of the finest in all of England, even when you blush.”

  To his surprise, she pulled back at this compliment. “My complexion may not always be so fine. We will grow old together.”

  “Old?” He tried to laugh, but oh, the image she had put before him! Why would she ruin their intimacy with such dreadful, heavy thoughts?

  “That will not be for many years,” he said, in a calmer tone than he felt, “and besides, there are very good creams my valet can recommend. In the meantime, you must not frown so. What, will you not smile for me? Then I can think of only one way to convince you…” And he bent down and kissed her until her lips relaxed and the frown lines disappeared.

  “But I must have you understand,” she insisted afterward, her cheek against his shoulder so that he could see only the top of her head. Her hair powder really was a dull shade; there must be some concoction his valet could recommend to her maid.

  “Though you are the handsomest man of my acquaintance,” she continued, “it is your generosity and kindness I admire most, Sir Walter.”

  This was a new experience, being praised for his generosity and kindness. True, he performed the usual acts of charity, but he did no more than was expected of him. When in the presence of Miss Stevenson, however, he found himself performing the most extraordinary (and unintentional) acts of chivalry. This behavior had begun quite accidentally at one of the first card parties they had both attended as an engaged couple. Sir Walter had been paired with an old Stevenson relative who, it transpired only after he sat down, had the most noxious breath and a grand total of two teeth in her mouth. One might have hoped such a condition would have inspired silence in the woman, yet she seemed more garrulous than most. Sitting across from her, he found himself directly in the current of both her breath and her nonsensical conversation. Leaning back did little to ameliorate the situation, but he discovered that, if he leaned forward and yet to the side, angling himself just so, he could avoid the stream of her breath while also appearing to listen most attentively to whatever it was she was saying (two teeth being too few for comprehensible speech).

  “You cannot know,” Miss Stevenson said to him later, “how happy it made me to see you giving my aunt such courteous attention! So many people neglect her for reasons she can hardly help.”

  And a fortnight later, when he and Miss Stevenson had been riding together across some of the prettier acreage of South Park, they had come across a small group of urchins, likely tenants’ sons, who had decided to transform their master’s trout stream into their private swimming place. They were only discovered because one of their number was howling quite piteously, having cut his foot on a rock. Sir Walter would have upbraided him and the others most severely, except that Miss Stevenson had already dismounted her horse and raced over to the boys; she had slid off her horse in a most unladylike way, not even waiting for the groom to help her, but then at least her haste had given him a quick glimpse of one finely shaped leg.

  Rather than scold, Miss Stevenson had comforted the boy. When Sir Walter had seen how she had hugged that towheaded rascal, he had been struck by the notion that she would make a fine (if somewhat indulgent) mother. If he did not examine the scene before him too closely—if he ignored the rough, homespun clothing and the dirt-smeared face of the boy in her arms—he could picture her instead with his son. This vision so inspired him that he also dismounted his horse and handed the boy (who was not so badly injured as his howling had suggested) a shilling before telling him and his comrades to scamper.

  “Dear Sir Walter!” she had exclaimed when they were alone—well, the groom stood several feet behind him, but then he hardly counted. She smiled at him with such fondness that he might have given away yet another shilling if the boys had not already run off. Then she had offered her hand, and he had kissed those long, delicate fingers. Charity, it seemed, rewarded the giver as well as recipient.

  Though Sir Walter had planned to return to Kellynch briefly before the wedding, he just could not seem to make himself leave the warmth of Miss Stevenson’s admiration. (That her esteem was based largely on the appearance of goodness, rather than the reality of it, troubled him not, for he had always subscribed to the philosophy that appearance was reality.) He dashed off a few letters of business to his steward and solicitor, and then set out to enjoy the fortnight before his wedding. He bounded about South Park in such a way that no one in residence, from the master of the ho
use to the lowliest of scullery maids, could doubt his affection for his bride.

  No one, that is, except Mr. Grant.

  “You neither know nor appreciate Miss Stevenson’s true worth,” the vicar had been impudent enough to say one evening when he and Sir Walter had found themselves together in South Park’s library (which Sir Walter had entered only because he believed Miss Stevenson to have been there).

  Yes, somehow that ugly vicar had found a way of imposing on the hospitality of the Stevensons for an entire ten days. He claimed to be out of house and home while the parsonage at Monkford underwent repairs, a story Sir Walter found most dubious. It seemed more likely that Grant was a leech who lived on the luxuries of his more prosperous friends. Was not the man’s exceptional girth proof of this?

  True, Sir Walter himself had been in residence for nearly six weeks, during which the Stevensons had thrown a ball each fortnight and dinner parties at least three nights of the week. But, then he was to be family, whereas this Mr. Grant—who was he, but an old schoolfellow of the young Mr. Stevenson?

  “They are like brothers,” Miss Stevenson explained when he had complained to her of the vicar’s presence.

  “And yet,” returned Sir Walter, “they never will be brothers, not as your brother and I shall be when we are married.”

  Her brow furrowed, causing him to reach up to smooth the wrinkles from her otherwise perfect forehead.

  “Oh, Walter,” she had murmured, leaning forward to kiss him before he could remind her that Sir Walter would have been more correct. “I beg you not to dislike Mr. Grant. He is a true friend.”

  “In your eyes, perhaps, this man may be but a friend, but to deny his deeper, baser interest in you, my dear Miss Stevenson…well, you are too naive to recognize his feelings for what they are.”

  She appeared startled by this idea that Grant might want her—just as startled as she had been all those months ago when Sir Walter had expressed his own admiration. It was as if, in her lovely eyes, he and this vicar were on equal terms—both just as unlikely to be attracted to the likes of her. Could it be that her adoration of him came not from his good looks, rank, or even his vaunted generosity and kindness—but rather from the mere fact that he was the first man to express an interest in her?