‘Do you suppose they know?’ Bella said casually.
Elizabeth knew, somehow, what and whom she meant; the upper ten thousand. ‘I don’t think they do,’ she said slowly. ‘No, it was lucky, but somehow I think your disgrace was not discovered. Someone would have been sure to allude to it, I think. The Gilbert girls, no doubt. Both married now – did I say? The younger to a most unattractive clergyman, and glad of it, I dare say.’
‘My disgrace,’ Bella said ironically. Really, what an excellent governess Elizabeth would have made. ‘Dear little disgrace.’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said, lightening a degree. ‘Dear little disgrace.’
‘Elizabeth,’ Bella said. ‘You were making a joke?’
‘A joke?’ Elizabeth said.
‘Your disgrace,’ Bella said. ‘That, I hope, was meant as a joke?’
Elizabeth frowned. ‘I love Henry,’ she said finally. ‘Of course I do. But Bella, please – let me, at least, call things by their proper name. Is there nothing in the world can make you serious?’
For a moment, it occurred to Bella that Elizabeth had never married, and wondered about it; it was deplorable that her sister’s condition was not something she ever considered. But of course Elizabeth could not marry now; whether she had chosen it or not, that was her condition. No man would marry the sister of Bella Garraway; and if he married her, unknowing, then there could be no place in Elizabeth’s life for Bella or Henry. Perhaps scandal had touched her; perhaps she had accepted what must be, through love for her sister. Bella had never considered it. Yes, her disgrace, she thought; and the disgrace had touched Elizabeth, and bruised her hard. She settled back into her seat, and presently the train began to move again.
2.
The house was as it had been, and this was strange. Bella had expected – well, what had she expected? She had not seen it for five years. A ghost of a house, perhaps, shut up and draped against dust. Or newly uncovered, made to shine for her benefit, its chatelaine, the servants lined up on the steps outside to greet her. But it was as it had been; a single unfamiliar maid – what had happened to Emily? – to open the door, and then the dark hall with its heavy ticking clock, the untouched walnut drawing room, and everything just as she remembered it, and somehow different. After all, the house had only been empty for a week; Elizabeth lived here in her solitary bluestocking dignity. She paused, wondering at her own egotism. It was she who had changed, it seemed.
Elizabeth had been hard at work spreading the interesting information of her sister’s return, and, while Bella permitted her cloak and bonnet to be removed by the bobbing maid, she fingered the pile of cards in the silver filigree bowl. A rout – a dinner – another dinner – the notice of a funeral, a man whose name she only dimly remembered. Her name was on all of them, and she went through the pile methodically while the trunks were brought in. They struck her, wildly, as the submissions of tradesmen, begging for her custom. She almost expected to find Burnes’s card there; but how should it be?
‘We dine at home tonight,’ Elizabeth said, ‘and it will be as well to rest tomorrow, too. Very tiring, travelling, and one feels so dirty.’
It was still her father’s house to Bella. She retired to her room, and sat there, not tired at all. Her things were all about her; things she had not thought about for years, and never missed. Her box of precious things, for instance, there on the dressing table, still locked, mementoes of her life before Henry. She felt no urge to open it up, and in any case had no idea where the key could be; only an effort of memory could recall what she had once placed in it so carefully. There was a knock at the door, and the maid entered with the tea. Bella sat with her eyes closed against the room which held some other past; once, perhaps, a girl had sat here, and wondered what would come to her, and what her life would bring. She had never imagined a life like the one she now had; it had surprised her; and there was nothing in it she would wish otherwise.
There was a small sound as the maid quietly set down the tea tray, trying not to disturb her exhausted mistress; the clink of a spoon on china. It was the same noise as – as something – Bella delved, and it was the noise of the workman, knocking at the wheel of the train, four hours before. It sounded again as the maid quietly arranged the things, and a deeper, stranger memory came to her; the sound she had not understood for years, the sound from her father’s study. The teaspoon clinked against the china, and it was as if she were listening again to the regular afternoon tocsin from the next room, as her father drowsily unlocked the opium tantalus and measured out his dose. She had heard the sound every day of her life, but now it brought back one afternoon, as she and Burnes lay there, together, naked, holding each other, as quietly as they could, and listening to the clink of glass on glass, the sound of approaching oblivion.
She opened her eyes; the maid had gone. A false memory. That afternoon, they had been alone in the house. But she could do nothing about it. That was what her mind had decided to recall for her benefit, for her dubious entertainment. Memory, that exhausted repertory actor, going through the exhausted, familiar lines of some tired melodrama. It moved through the now meaningless scenes with a terrible practised proficiency for her benefit alone; and she was in the wings, condemned to watch it over and over, to prompt the leads if they should ever go blank. But they never did; and Bella endured the recurrence, knowing she had no alternative. All memory was distasteful to Bella, even the memory of pleasure. Especially the memory of pleasure. Only Henry was good enough to drive the idle, weary round of memory away; he had taught her, in the end, what love was. Burnes had written three times; long, full, grand letters full of declaration and fine manly feeling. They wearied her, in truth, like a bad novel when there is nothing else to read, but she made an effort and replied in the same vein, hardly considering what she wrote. She knew with complete certainty that he would not return, and, if he did, would not return to her. Henry knew nothing of him, and he knew nothing of Henry.
3.
The doors of the vast ducal house were flung open to the world, and every window blazed with light. The faint strain of an orchestra drifted out in the early-evening air; lilting, silken, rich. The street was unmoving, and blocked with black carriages; the street-boys dodged between them, running towards the gates to get a better look. Tonight, the Duke’s four hundred guests were punctual to the minute, and had arrived at the precise time requested; the promise of Royalty weighed heavily with them. And the two or three hundred carriages converged simultaneously on the same point. The coachmen put their legs up, and tied the reins to the post, munching a bit of bread and cheese contentedly.
For this most important party, the Duke had shown himself. For some years now, he had withdrawn from society to devote himself to what he had always been most interested in, the acquisition of antiquities. Society, on the whole, did not concern itself with this. Lord John, his amusing second son, had taken over the burden of entertaining with pleasure (the Marquess of Porlock, the heir, was a dull dog, too, it was agreed) and the Duke of Dorset was not missed. Tonight, however, the Duke had issued the invitations, and, for the sake of Royalty, was standing in the salon of his house to greet his very prompt guests. Lord John was here, of course, and, as the ballroom filled, he wandered about, greeting friends more casually than his awesome father whom no one knew. In the background the orchestra played; lilies from the ducal hothouses spilled and swooned from the walls, dripping with candlewax; there had been more than anyone knew what to do with. No one danced yet; there was a twitter of excitement in the dazzling room, heavy with the scent of flowers and women, bright with the light of flames and diamonds. Not since the Regent – no, not since the Regent – the room agreed, and the queue of the upmost five hundred of the upper ten thousand, prompt as footmen, built up as the barker called out their names. They advanced, brilliantly smiling, towards the Duke and Duchess, each of them suppressing a catty thought about the Duchess’s ostrich headdress, thick as a shaving brush, secured with brilliants.
‘I don’t see my old friend the Duchesse de Neaud,’ Bella remarked to Lord John. She and Elizabeth had been absolutely on the stroke of the hour, on Elizabeth’s insistence, and, with pleasure, she found herself rewarded with the attentions of an old suitor. For the moment, before the arrival of the Queen, she noted, the room was rather interested in her, whether they remembered or recognized her at all.
‘The Duchesse,’ Lord John said, and then laughed heartily. ‘My dear Miss Garraway, what a very secluded life you have been living, not to hear about the poor woman’s shame.’
‘Shame?’ Bella said composedly. ‘Of all my former acquaintance, she is the last I should have associated with any shame.’
‘A most unfortunate story,’ Lord John said. ‘It emerged, all at once, that she had been sadly deluded in the Duc, who was no duke, but a rich tradesman from Soissons. Forty years in the country, and no one thought he was anything but what he said. I suppose after the Revolution, a great many odd fish turned up here, and were welcomed, but none so odd as that. Patriotic fervour made him a favourite at first, and then a clever marriage, and before you and I were born, Miss Garraway, he was universally accepted as what he said he was. It all came out some two years ago. And she, as you say, so very respectable.’
‘And now?’ Bella said.
‘Who knows?’ Lord John said, giggling. ‘A sad story, looked at in the proper light, and how foolish the Court appears in that proper light. Of course, there was nothing more foolish about the whole affair than the fact that, once in possession of this information, the pair of them found every single one of their former friends strangely forgetful. One day they were so agreeable, and the next no one could recall their names. And yet they were very much the same persons, and who could but admire the old Duc de Neaud for being so very clever? I forget his true name – I knew it once – no, it has gone.’
‘Poor woman,’ Bella said. ‘And did she know of the deception?’
‘No one can guess, and no one seems to know where they are now.’
‘How odd,’ Bella said. ‘What a favourite she was at the Court, without the benefit of her Duke. Could they not, for her sake—’
Lord John gave her a quizzical look. ‘But how could he be received? Well, I expect they live exactly where they did before, but no one calls, and they come to nothing. I have a whim to invite them again, to see what happens when they enter the room. Not when my father is acting the major-domo, however. Ah—’
The orchestra had struck up the national anthem, and the room, by now crowded, drew back into two bodies, either side of a clear passage. The Duke, who had abruptly left the house, now returned with a tiny girl on his arm; a tiny, cross-looking girl in a brilliant red silk gown, flushed and plain. Her face was round as a bun, and as she passed a remark or two, her regal teeth were ugly, little and stubby. As she smiled crossly from side to side, it was as if she were not acknowledging an acquaintance, but ordering the deepest of bows. The room bowed at her command, and the noise was like thunder, muffled by silk and feathers. The Duke and the Queen proceeded slowly up the room, followed by the Duchess and the Prime Minister; her importance could be immediately perceived, the only ugly girl among all these ugly old people. It took ten minutes.
The party began again, and the Queen and the Duke began to dance a stately, ceremonial sort of waltz, like a dancing master demonstrating the correct steps with a favoured pupil. To Bella’s surprise, Lord John did not move away, but asked for the honour of leading her onto the dance floor. She assented, with a sense that this was not meant to happen to her. If she had envisaged her return into society, these three weeks Elizabeth had persuaded her to agree to, it had been with a conviction that society, now, had no role for her; and it came down, in the end, to a doubt whether she was now a woman who danced, or a woman who did not. She was no longer a girl, that was clear, nor was she a new wife who could dance without fear of consequence. If she thought of her place now at all, it was with the abandoned girls, the mothers, at the side of the room, observing and curious. To dance with Lord John was so unexpected an opening to her three brazen weeks that she did not quite know how she could carry herself, and she fell into the steps of the dance with a consciousness that, now the Queen had passed through, the room was observing her. Bella Garraway; so sadly changed; and in the arms of Lord John.
‘I hope you understand the purpose of this evening,’ Lord John said.
‘The Queen, surely, is purpose enough,’ Bella said. ‘I confess, I have never seen her, or only as a cross little princess in the Duchess of Kent’s carriage in the Park. Such an alteration from the old King.’
‘Miss Garraway,’ Lord John said. ‘Miss Garraway, you disappoint me. The Queen is stale, a stale amusement, and will grow staler once she marries. No, the Duke has not invited us here to watch us curtsy; it is to mark his marvellous acquisition. You know the Duke, of course?’ Bella dissented, and she knew Lord John’s father very little. ‘Well, I think few know him well, but I ought to say that this expense and display is, in his mind, all in the service of a magnificent acquisition he has made. So magnificent, indeed, that I doubt he will mention the fact at all, so I promise to take you to inspect it at some point before supper.’
‘You are rather mysterious, Lord John,’ Bella said.
‘I mean to be,’ Lord John said. ‘Ah—’ and he bowed, warmly smiling, in farewell, disappearing like a climbing lark into a white cloud of dancers.
4.
Not since the Regent – not since Waterloo – not since … The old ladies, sitting around the edges of the room, delved back twenty, thirty years in their memories and all agreed that they could not recall so splendid a London Season. No, not since Waterloo; and the Duke of Dorset’s surfacing to pay homage to this marvellous new Queen, after so many decades when her dull or disgraceful old uncles seemed to rule over society, seemed like a magnificent pinnacle of a magnificent Season. The black fans of the dowagers fluttered, and, behind them, the word for the Season was ‘glorious’. No, not since Waterloo.
There was nothing like a faraway military victory to rouse the dowagers of this little London to a fervour of enthusiasm. The news from the East was so thrilling, they named a cotillion after it. The armies of India had roused themselves, and annexed great provinces with surpassing ease. Patriotic fervour made the ballroom glitter, and the most surprising people agreed on the astonishing triumph. Around the room, the name of Kabul was being dropped casually; some pronounced the name with an initial stress, some not; and if they had come to write the name of the city down, few would have agreed whether it began with a K, a C, or even (for even Society may boast a little learning) a Q. No matter; the name was uttered by one shining face after another. In these ballrooms a new reign began; the founding of a new empire, practically; and the eyes of society fell on the ugly little Queen with adoration, as if she had done it all herself.
Stokes’s mind was on expenditure, as, these days, it so often was. His dizzying escalation seemed to have crippled him, so great were its attendant properties. The Dundee Examiner left far behind, the Hatters’ Society long forgotten, his long-foreseen state seemed to require an appropriate method of living, which he was by no means equipped to pursue. The new editor of the thundering paper could not, after all, walk from place to place; he could not with propriety continue to live in Flat Hand Yard with the attendance of a drunk valet called Mullarkey; he could not refrain from the ceaseless burden of entertainment, but it seemed to him that his rapid ascent had conferred honour and obligations without supplying the means to fulfil them, and he felt like a balloonist, gasping at the thin cold air. A carriage; a house in Brook Street; a platoon of servants and an army of new friends he didn’t care for in the slightest, all eating their heads off at his expense; and all so that he could pontificate daily in print and be invited to the house of the Duke of Dorset. Soon, he reflected gloomily, he would have to acquire a wife; the alternative, soon, would be the debtors’ prison.
He slunk into the great salon unannounced. Despite his absolute promptness in departing from Brook Street, the carriage had proceeded no more than two hundred yards before being blocked by the mob of carriages, all similarly queueing for admittance. For ten minutes, they sat immobile, while Stokes weighed up the absurdity of taking the carriage for a journey of eight hundred yards against what had suddenly become the impropriety of arriving by foot. Finally, he flung propriety to the winds, and walked the last stretch, but he was too late; the Queen’s carriage was drawing up ahead of him, and he skulked, kicking his heels. It was some minutes before he could be surreptitiously admitted, lest the Queen’s ears be soiled with the knowledge that there were those who arrived after her.
There was a certain gratification in being the last to arrive, in every sense, and Stokes would have had the doors shut behind him for good. Assiduous as he had always been in his attendance, it was only in the last year or so that he had come to appreciate how incomplete his social ascent had been, and he looked back at the hostesses he had once courted with a real sense of shame at having started in so very degraded a condition. Lady Woodcourt would never be admitted here, or the Gilbert girls; it was now almost incredible to him that he had ever thought of such vulgar hours in terms of ‘society’, and Fanny Woodcourt’s cards, asking him to think of her at seven on Thursday next, were these days returned with a civil regret. To think of Fanny Woodcourt – the idea! No one thought of her, surely, at seven on Thursdays or at any other time. He had been admitted now to Society, and the only thing that could make him happy was the firm knowledge that the gates behind him would be closed, and no one more admitted. All the same, he ruefully admitted, it might well come to the point where he had to sell the Rembrandt to pay for all of this; and if it proved not to be a Rembrandt at all, he did not know what he was to do.
The Mulberry Empire Page 44