I seized her hand. “Like Mrs. Fitzherbert, who carved the Prince’s feathers in the lintel of her door in Richmond Hill.[61] The tiger! Of course!”
“A gift to a lady, and not his own.”
“The Maria Portal named with his dying breath! Why did we not perceive it before?”
“And so it was Miss Conyngham who killed Portal, and fled through the anteroom passageway, and lost the tiger unbeknownst to herself,” Lady Desdemona whispered breathlessly. “Oh, my dearest Miss Austen — we must away to my uncle.”
We threw some coin on Molland’s counter, called hastily for chairs, and were gone.
DINNER WAS EXCESSIVELY GRAND, AND I FELT MY WANT OF evening dress acutely; but the Dowager kindly assured me that a trifling affair of two courses, comprising some twenty dishes, should never incommode so dear a friend as myself. Lord Harold presided at one end of the long table, his mother at the other, with myself and Lady Desdemona ranged in between; Miss Wren’s earlier presentiment of ill-health having been realised with a most tiresome cold in the head, she kept to her rooms and requested a little warm gruel on a tray, and a hot mustard bath for her feet.
Her Grace was suffered to offer an apology, at presenting so excessively stupid a table for my amusement. Before Lord Kinsfell’s misfortune, they had been wont to see some thirty guests in Laura Place at dinner; but a festive mood was wisely deemed unsuitable at such a time, and the Dowager had desisted in entertainment.
Lord Harold had greeted me with a bow, and a countenance devoid of expression; no mention was made of the offending item in that morning’s Chronicle; and I blessed the elegance of manner that allowed the preservation of my composure. The Gentleman Rogue is too accustomed to impertinence from a public quarter, to dignify it with outrage; whereas among the Austens, such notice is so unusual as to be met with dismay on every side.
Her Grace enquired anxiously after Lord Kinsfell, and Lady Desdemona was able to give a tolerable report of his spirits; but before the servants, some four of which remained in an attitude of readiness behind our respective chairs, she was loath to mention the interesting intelligence our visit to the gaol had elicited. In thus longing for the relative privacy of the drawing-room, we were encouraged to make short work of the sole, the pheasant, and the venison. But an hour and a half of steady application to the Dowager’s table, in fact, was required before I was released to the comforts of tea and feminine society.
When Lord Harold had done at last with the duty of his solitary Port, and appeared in the drawing-room reeking of tobacco, Lady Desdemona fairly leapt to his side. In a breathless accent, she related the whole of our morning’s endeavours.
Her uncle listened, and looked grave. “My errand in Orchard Street gains in urgency. I had intended the Theatre Royal this evening — both the Conynghams are to play — and now I believe I must hasten there without delay. It is unfortunate that Mr. Elliot bore the interesting pin away with him to London; for I might have made an addition to my attire, and displayed the tiger on the collar of my coat. It should never have excited too great a notice in general; but in one quarter, at least, it might have moved the guilty to betrayal.”
“But you do agree, Uncle, that it is possible Swithin had nothing to do with Mr. Portal’s end?” Lady Desdemona persisted.
He gazed at her an instant before replying. “I hesitate to declare Swithin innocent of anything, my dear, until our excellent Mr. Elliot has returned from London.”
“We need not await the magistrate’s intelligence on one point, at least,” I broke in, with an anxious look for Lady Desdemona. “For Lord Swithin’s sisters acknowledged only this morning that the Earl had business so near to Bath as Bristol the very morning after Mr. Portal’s murder. Certainly it was from Bristol that his lordship sent for the Fortescue ladies, before journeying to Bath himself on Wednesday. They joined him here on Thursday, I believe.”
“Did they, indeed? This is news of the first water.” Lord Harold considered my words a moment, then wheeled to confront his niece. “Would it comfort you, Mona, to know that Swithin was in the clear?”
“It would,” she replied, with downcast eyes.
“Though in all probability Miss Conyngham wore his device — in the most public admission of his patronage? You persist in valuing a man of so dissipated a character?”
His voice had grown quite stern, and Lady Desdemona quailed; but it was the Dowager who replied.
“Leave her be, Harry,” she said with a wave, “you need not fear she is abandoned to the reprobate. She merely hopes he is not entirely so past recall, as to have murdered Mr. Portal. There is nothing very singular in this.”
“Very well, Mamma. If we must consider Desdemona’s heart, I can see no alternative but to adventure Bristol on the morrow. There are only two inns I can conceive of Swithin gracing; and at one of these, he will be remembered. And now I must away, or Miss Conyngham will play without my admiration. Miss Austen? May I set you down in Seymour Street?”
“You may, my lord, with my deepest thanks.”
I made my adieux, and was very soon established in Lord Harold’s curricle.
“YOU ARE RATHER QUIET THIS EVENING, MISS AUSTEN. I hope my niece has not overtaxed your fund of strength.”
“Hardly — though I am, perhaps, a little oppressed in spirits.”
A swift glance, as swiftly averted. “I very much regret the impertinence of the newspaper, Jane.”
The gentleness of his tone, and his adoption of my Christian name, very nearly brought tears to my eyes — but I drew a shaky breath and attempted to affect a carelessness I could not feel.
“Oh, as to that — do not trouble to consider of it further. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? It shall be forgot, and Green Park Buildings returned to its usual obscurity.”
“Your complaisance does you credit. I must hope that Maria Conyngham possesses not half so much — or I shall be sadly thwarted in my efforts to provoke her this evening.”
“Provocation is all very well — but I would counsel, my lord, that you undertake it only with the most zealous care for your person. There is a danger in travelling alone. My chair was waylaid by footpads as I attempted a return from the Lower Rooms last evening.”
“Footpads! I had not an idea of it!” Lord Harold turned to me in astonishment. “They were after your purse?”
“—Though there was little enough within. I recognised one of the men, however, as he held a knife to my throat — and informed the constable of his name and direction. He was a certain Smythe, of the Theatre Royal. I had remarked him Thursday when we ventured to the wings, as a man quite subject to Hugh Conyngham’s direction. And though his beard and headgear obscured his face, I could hardly have been mistaken — for Smythe possesses one blue, and one brown eye; and thus must be instantly known, even in darkness.”
I spoke with tolerable composure, but Lord Harold’s distress was sudden and extreme.
“He held a knife to your throat!”
“Do not concern yourself, I beg. He very soon ran off, when I summoned breath enough to scream. But I should be interested to learn whether the constable succeeded in seizing him. You might find it out at the theatre this evening.”
“And you believe this villain was despatched by one of the company?” Lord Harold enquired in the grimmest accent.
“I am utterly convinced of it — by Hugh Conyngham himself, perhaps. Our conversation in the Lower Rooms last night must somehow have excited that gentleman’s anxiety; and from a fear, perhaps, of the letters’ exposure — or a fear of my intimacy with yourself — he determined that I should be silenced.”
“But you cannot have betrayed our suspicions so completely, Jane! And yet you think the man Smythe intended your death?”
“I detected no gentleness in his look — only the coldest light of determination.”
Lord Harold snapped the reins over the back of his team, though the horses already moved s
martly enough. “When I think that I might have prevented it! Had I never urged you to deceive Conyngham, while I searched the manager’s office, you should not have been exposed to this danger.”
“You must not reproach yourself, my lord. I am no slip of a girl to require excessive protection; what I have done, was done of my own free will. I impart the particulars only so that you may be on your guard. For if you persist in baiting Maria Conyngham, you surely risk the gravest injury. Have a care, Lord Harold — and trust no one’s appearance of benevolence.”
“You could not have bestowed your warning on a less likely object,” he replied with mirth. “It is many years, indeed, since I have trusted the appearance of anything like disinterested good.”
We achieved the stoop of Green Park Buildings, and he jumped down to hand me to the street.
“Jane, Jane,” he said with a sigh, “I regret your misfortune extremely.”
“Not another word, my lord. I would not forfeit the thrill of this chase for a thousand footpads. And there is Lord Kinsfell to be thought of — is he to rot in gaol for the preservation of a man like Smythe? Never!”
Lord Harold surveyed me with a judicious air. “It is as much as I would expect of you, my dear. Having risked your life thus far, may I enquire whether you would accompany me to Bristol on the morrow? I should value your penetration extremely.”
“Sunday travel? I should never hear the end of it, among the Austens,” I mused with a smile.[62] “But I think I shall attend you, all the same. Tomorrow is my birthday, Lord Harold, and I shall regard the journey as in tribute to my natal day! But you must allow me an hour first for the observance of morning service. I might pray to be forgiven my family’s poor opinion.”
“Capital!” he cried. “Expect my carriage at eleven o’clock. We shall be returned in time for dinner.”
Chapter 13
A Confidential Nuncheon
Sunday,
16 December 1804
A QUIET SUNDAY SERVICE AT THE QUEEN’S CHAPEL, FOLLOWED by a short turn in the muddy Crescent — and so the morning of my twenty-ninth birthday passed as many a Sabbath, while resident in Bath.[63] Though quite out of charity with all my beloved family, I was nonetheless treated to some small remembrances of the day — an embroidered needle-case from dear Cassandra, offered with an anxious look; from my father, a handsome set of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, bound in vellum and tooled in gold; and from my mother, who learned somehow of the slyness of the Bath Chronicle, a lecture on the foolishness of impropriety in one so nearly beyond the marriageable age. Did I suffer my reputation to sink, no respectable gentleman would ever solicit my hand, and how my dear mother was expected to keep me once Reverend Austen was cold in his grave, she could not begin to think. She then exclaimed at length upon the subject of Lord Harold, and went so far as to solicit my father’s authority, and beg that he should abhor the acquaintance — but the Reverend George, however uneasy in his own mind, refused to censure my activity so much. I was, he declared, a woman of some maturity, and must exert my own judgement in these and all matters; I should not have my father to look to, in a very few years more; and if the principles with which I had been raised, did not serve as friends in the present case, he could do nothing further with me.
I reminded my mother that our beloved Madam Lefroy had declined the wedded state until her twenty-ninth year, and had yet attained a highly respectable, if modest, condition, in the acceptance of her clergyman — but it would not do.
“For,” the good lady darkly pronounced, “Madam Lefroy’s excellent fortune is of no account, for there were many more eligible young men a quarter-century ago, before Buonaparte forced the country into regimentals. Cassandra I cannot reproach for tarrying in the single state, though she is several years your senior, for she would have got poor Tom Fowle if she could. But there — it was not to be. Let her misfortune be a lesson, my dear, and do not place your affections among such men as are likely to die of little trifling fevers.”[64]
We were joined at breakfast by Henry and Eliza, who took notice of the day by pressing upon me a ravishing headdress of apricot silk and feathers, purchased no doubt in Edgars Buildings, and quite admirably suited to my fashionable new gown.
Promptly at eleven the housemaid announced Lord Harold; he bid good morning to all the world, won an interesting sparkle from Eliza’s fine eyes, presented me with a posy, and voiced the hope that I might be granted many happy returns of the day. This little ceremony of deception being well-received, and the weather continuing to hold fine, his lordship did not scruple to suggest a country drive; and to the astonishment and dismay of all my family, I readily acceded to the whole, and hurried into my warmest pelisse. The Gentleman Rogue assured my father I should be much improved from the healthfulness of the airing, and that I should be returned unharmed before nightfall; and so we drove off, with an agreeable sensation of liberty on my part, and a distinct uneasiness behind.
“I expect to be arrived in Bristol by one o’clock at the latest, barring a mishap to the wheels,” Lord Harold observed as we trotted up Charles Street towards Monmouth, and the turning for the Bristol Road. “I shall regale you in the interval with an account of last evening’s adventures at the Theatre Royal.”
“Miss Conyngham was in evidence?”
“She was, though her brother Hugh was not. Indisposed, according to the program notes — perhaps the result of your too-lively dancing, Jane.”
“You do not think, that having failed in his efforts to silence me, he has summarily fled the city?”
“His sister assures me that he has not — but in her word I place the barest confidence. Upon quitting the Theatre Royal, however, I undertook to seek his lodgings — and was told that the gentleman was within, but was to see no one, under the strictest injunctions from his doctor. And so I had not the least glimpse of the fellow, and cannot say whether he was there or no.”
“That is very bad.”
“Less bad, perhaps, than it at first appears. Mr. Conyngham is unlikely to desert his sister. Of Mr. Smythe, however, I cannot say so much.”
I drew the collar of my pelisse close about my throat, at the sensation of a sudden chill. “But you have some intelligence of Smythe?”
Lord Harold nodded. “I happened to enquire of an errand-boy in the wings, and for the price of a few pence was told that the constables had rousted the villain from bed in the small hours of yesterday morning. Being warned by his landlady, however, Smythe jumped from a back window, and made off through the alleyways unpursued.”
“He jumped from a window, you say? And was it a first-floor window?”
“You think of Her Grace’s anteroom! The same suspicion has animated us both. I eagerly enquired of the boy, and was told with the greatest pride and satisfaction that his hero Smythe disdained any distance under twenty feet. He is a tumbler by rearing, and was wont as a child to roam about the countryside with a band of performers known for their physical feats.”
“But this is excellent news!” I cried. “Did we find the guise of Pierrot discarded in his lodgings, we might free Lord Kinsfell today!”
“I had expected you to feel some trepidation in the knowledge that the man was at liberty. Are you so careless of security, Jane?”
I lifted a gloved hand to shade my eyes from the brilliance of the morning sun. The countryside beyond the city’s environs was blighted by the advance of winter — a brownish heap of rolling Somerset hills, dotted at random with the occasional beast; but my spirits would not be oppressed even by fallow fields. “I cannot rejoice in his escape,” I admitted, “but must trust to Providence. Mr. Smythe is unlikely to adventure so perilous a town as Bath for some time to come. I will not indulge in excessive anxiety.”
“All the same—” Lord Harold began.
“I shall promise you never to venture out-of-doors without the company of another,” I said. “Now tell me of Miss Conyngham.”
“She refused to see me, of course, and
so I was reduced to storming her dressing-room. I thought it wise to inform her that Mr. Elliot was hardly as satisfied with the case against my nephew as had once been believed, and that the magistrate was even now embarked upon the errand of tracing a curious bauble discarded in the cunning passage, that might well prove to be the property of the murderer. I was deliberately vague; but Miss Conyngham was observed to pale, and stagger a little for support — and she agreed at last to the space of a conversation.”
“And? Did she confess the whole?”
“Jane, Jane — would you have a woman go blindly to the scaffold? Naturally she did not. She intends to divine first how much I know. That I suspect a good deal — that I have perhaps learnt something to her detriment, from my researches or my nephew or both — she is completely aware. But she is confident I have not the conclusive proof; and so she intends to fence with me for as long as she is able.
“We sat down; and I found occasion to comment upon the Earl of Swithin’s interesting attentions to my niece — our belief that he intended to renew his offer for Mona’s hand — a few reflections on the disappointment of Mr. Portal’s death in that quarter — Mona ready to be consoled by the attentions of another — even Colonel Easton much in attendance — and Miss Conyngham’s visage was observed to darken. I then made my adieux, and left her to consider the intelligence conveyed; and I hope very soon to see my stratagems bear fruit.”
“You are an incorrigible beast,” I calmly replied, “but as the lady seems deserving of no very great solicitude, I cannot abuse you as thoroughly as I might. Did she betray anxiety? Guilt? The desperation of an abandoned character?”
“None whatsoever. A suggestion of grief, at Portal’s passing — but we must believe that to be the grossest falsehood. It is a pity,” Lord Harold reflected, “that such a degree of dramatic talent should be employed in so unfortunate a manner.”
“You regard her as beyond salvation, then? As being devoid of every proper feeling?”
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