I am tired, and my dear sweet Maria, my good-natured common-law wife who will inherit all that I do not leave to Antonia, waits to hold my hand, to mop my brow, and whisper lies to me about getting well. All these tasks you should have performed for me, Madam, had you been a true and devoted wife, and a half-decent human being, all of which you are not.
I leave you, and pray that we never meet again in any life, this one or the next.
James Strathsay
THREE
Mlle Moran, Hanover Square, Westminster, England, to M’sieur le Duc d’Roxton, Hotel Roxton, Rue St. Honoré, Paris, France.
Hanover Square, Westminster, England
October, 1745
Je espère que cette lettre vous trouve bien, Monseigneur!
I wanted to let you know as soon as possible that Ellicott and I have arrived safely in London, and without incident. Oh, that is not strictly true! There was an incident, but not while we were traveling.
Indeed, the entire journey from Paris was very well planned and executed, and not one mishap did we have. Ellicott was most solicitous in ensuring that every stage, every mile, every convenience of travel was pleasant and uneventful. Of course, I know I have you to thank for this ease of travel. Your large traveling carriage, pulled by six swift horses and escorted by a contingent of outriders, was stared at all along the way. Peasants in the fields looked up and watched as we trundled by in this black and gold painted magnificent conveyance; as did the people going about their daily lives in the villages we passed through. And wherever we stopped for refreshment, we attracted quite a crowd. Ellicott was quick to supervise the unpacking of the nécessaire de voyage so that our inn fare was served up on porcelain plates, crystal tumblers, and silver cutlery. I do not think I have ever eaten such plain food using such exquisite utensils. Then again, I do not remember eating at all. Though Gabrielle she tells me I did eat and drink, but food was of no consequence to me.
The crossing from Calais to Portsmouth was smooth, again thanks to your sloop, which took us across the Channel without any trouble, and there, waiting for us at the docks, was your English carriage with your English driver and footmen, ready to take us on to London.
I will not bore you with my feelings, or how much I miss you, or ask you again why you were so cold to me in the library that you were an entirely different being to the one you were in your private apartments. I wish you had had the good manners to at least wave me off, instead of departing immediately for l’Majesty’s hunt. I have thought about your hateful words and your abrupt departure for many hours and my confusion still remains. Now I find I have made myself ill with thinking, and I do not want to think about it at all, and so I won’t.
As to the incident that happened upon our arrival in London…
Oh! But first let me tell you my initial impression of London. This place it is so very noisy. Much more so than Paris. I think that is because adding to the cacophony of carriages, criers, beasts of burden being taken to market, and the usual hurly-burly, here there are a great deal of building works happening throughout the city, or as Ellicott corrected me, Westminster, which is apparently another city entirely. Oh, and before I forget, I was most surprised to hear Ellicott speak in English. Like you when you speak the English tongue, he sounds a very different person. But whereas your English voice it is cold and uncompromising, when Ellicott speaks it he sounds friendly. So much so that I have decided to call him Martin. He tells me in a most pleasant way that I cannot do so without your permission. But as it is his name it is for him to decide to allow me or not, and so I told him.
Martin is too loyal a creature to go against you, and I do not wish to distress him, so I will continue to call him Ellicott in public, but in private I will call him Martin. The name suits him.
But again I digress from the incident I wished to tell you about. You may have guessed it concerns my grandmother. Parbleu, but I was very nervous about meeting her! I did not know what to expect, but what I did not expect was to meet a woman who looks much younger than her years, who has the most astonishing head of red hair and, most surprising of all, to find she and I are very alike in countenance and form. Incroyable! Yes! Even I see that we resemble one another. I was very pleased by this discovery, but she was not. She looked me up and down with a frown and said to her friend Lady Paget in English that she was not at all sure she liked what she saw—which was I! Can you believe a grandmother would say that to her only grandchild upon first meeting? I do not think she realized then that I understand the English tongue almost as well as my own French, and thus her criticism of me. Lady Paget she told my grandmother in no uncertain terms that such a comment was ill-mannered, and that to criticize my appearance was to criticize her own. My grandmother was offended by this and not happy to be rebuked, and like a spoiled child she pouted and flounced to the window to hide her embarrassment. She then tried to make amends by giving me a light kiss to each cheek and patting my hand in a perfunctory manner I did not like in the least.
Monseigneur, I have never met a more vain creature! She cannot pass a looking glass without peering into it! And her manner of dress is quite alarming in that her sizeable breasts almost fall out of her low-cut bodice, so that whenever a man walks into a room he cannot but stare at such magnificence spilling forth for his admiration. If she were not my grandmother I would take her for a harlot. But I think it is more vanity than venery.
So this incident of which I have still to tell you about occurred when one of her male admirers came to visit and we were sitting down to tea and biscuits. Do you drink tea, M’sieur le Duc? I do not like it at all! It tastes as I suspect dishwater must. In fact there is no taste and yet here it is drunk in the best salons. Lady Paget she tells me English people cannot get enough of tea, and that it is so highly prized that the black leaves are kept locked away in silver canisters that require a key to open. Can you believe it? If I live to be a hundred, I do not think I will become accustomed to drinking this insipid beverage from China.
So again this incident. I am sorry for delaying the telling, but I have so much to tell you that it is all dripping off the nib of my quill in no particular order because I do not want to forget one thing about my first few days here in London.
Sitting down to tea and biscuits with my grandmother and Lady Paget, we were interrupted by a gentleman wearing the most absurd pair of breeches I have ever seen. And that is saying a great deal, given some of the ensembles worn about the halls of Versailles! This gentleman’s name is Percy Harcourt and he is Vallentine’s cousin, though they look nothing alike. Monseigneur, you must believe me when I tell you he was wearing spotted breeches! Yes! Spots! Black spots. The material itself was a velvet and woven in such a way as to appear like the skin of a leopard. A leopard I tell you! And with these spotted breeches he wore bright yellow stockings and black shoes. His frockcoat was yellow with black lacings, so that the ensemble, when taken as a whole, reminded me of a mythical creature—half man and half beast! I could not stop staring at him! Harcourt thought it was because his attire impressed me. He even confided that such breeches are all the rage in Naples. I did not know what to say. But I did not need to say anything because he ran on at the mouth so much that I thought he had forgotten to breathe and would soon pass out from lack of air!
Of course he stared at me, too, as if I had two heads, and then at my grandmother and back again to me, so I think he was unaware of my rudeness. I did my best to control my giggles, hiding my smile behind my fluttering fan.
But I do not think my grandmother was so much upset by M’sieur Harcourt’s extraordinary attire as she was by his lack of attentiveness to her. He spent most of his time over his dish of tea engaging me in conversation, which, to be truthful, I found tedious. Not only because he would insist in conversing with me in French (his French it is very bad indeed) but that he punctuated almost every sentence with “Extraordinary!” and “Upon my word!” and “I am beyond speechless!” which of course he was not because he
kept on talking.
In the end, my grandmother was so exasperated with him that she pushed aside her dish and saucer with some violence so that it slid across the lacquered tray and off the edge of the table and smashed on the floor. To which my grandmother jumped up off the sofa and blurted out “See what you have made me do!”. But not at M’sieur Harcourt, but at me! Why?
I was so shocked, as was everyone else in the room, that I excused myself with a headache, which I never get, and retired to my apartment, just to have a moment’s peace, and so she could regain her composure. Lady Paget scratched on my door to see if I was all right, but I told Gabrielle to tell her I was already asleep. A lie. But I truly did not want any company at that moment.
After all that I had been through, and the anticipation of meeting my grandmother, then to finally meet her, such was my disappointment in her that I wondered if I had followed the right course in coming to her. Perhaps I would have been better off staying with Maria and returning with her to Venice. But it is early days yet, and so I am inclined to allow my grandmother to recover her shock and discomfort at having me to stay.
The one good thing to come out of all this is that I am far away from the Comte de Salvan and D’Ambert’s petulance. Tomorrow I am to meet my Uncle Theophilus, and I pray that he is not like grandmother at all. I will let you know the outcome of that meeting in another letter. This one I will now conclude, as Martin has promised to take it with him upon his return to Paris in two days’ time. I will miss his company. How you are managing without him, he and I both agree cannot be at all well. Please do not tell him that I said so. He would be mortified. He is a most discreet and loyal servant and devoted to you.
I hope you will do me the favor of a reply to this letter, so that I may know you are well. Please give my love to Madame, and to Vallentine. I will write to them under a separate cover, and hopefully before Martin’s departure, so he can deliver those letters, too.
Love,
Antonia
FOUR
Estée, Madame de Montbrail, Hotel Roxton, Rue St. Honoré, Paris, to Mme de Chavigny, Hôtel de Créquy-Gravier, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Hotel Roxton, Rue St. Honoré,
November, 1745
Dear Tante Victoire, I trust you are now able to walk about on your foot better than the last time I visited you, using the walking stick I sent. As it has a pretty pink porcelain handle and is of the finest burled walnut, I hope you will see it as an accoutrement and not as a necessary aid to illness or age. I am told that such walking sticks are becoming all the rage in the most fashionable salons, where the young ladies are just as likely to carry one as they are a fan, so you too must use it, to be seen to be up with the times!
Is Francois well? And Hubert? How are your little birds in this colder weather? Did you move their cages closer to the windows in the conservatory so they have warmth during the day? I know you were worried about a gutter high up on the turret which was dripping water right into the conservatory, and onto the Turkey rug underneath the cages. I hope that is no longer a worry for you.
Before I forget to mention it, I have enclosed the medicine I spoke to you about, the powder from London. It is called James’s Powders, and there are all sorts of claims as to its abilities, from curing gout to the common cold. Lord Vallentine he recommended it and had some shipped over. Everyone in London, it seems, uses these powders. His lordship swears by it for the easing of headaches, and he is confident it will help ease the pain you continue to have in your poor foot. Why even Roxton agrees that these powders could be of use to you. So please, Tante, please put your silly ideas about the English aside this one time and take the powders for at least a week, as instructed on the packet. You cannot complain about the English unless you at least try their remedies, and then if they do not work, by all means complain.
Tante, I am worried about Roxton. My brother he does not say so, and he has never been demonstrative with his feelings or his thoughts, but I know he is not himself. Vallentine he agrees with me. It is the little things I detect that he thinks I do not see. His great abstraction. He spends most nights walking the chestnut grove with his hounds. I know this because the servants are up and lighting the flambeaux for him to walk about as if he is in daylight! The amount of wax he uses is staggering. But as it is a mere pebble of expense to him, why should I worry? It is not the expense of it, but this incessant walking about at night, out in the cold, and sometimes for over an hour.
If you can believe it, he now avoids the library, his favorite place in the house! Yes, it is true, I tell you. When he does go there, Vallentine says he does not sit in his favorite chair, but takes the one opposite, as if his favorite chair it is somehow already occupied! It is most strange and alarming. And he has taken to sitting in the drawing room with his book. This is most disconcerting to us, who have never had his company when he has his nose in a book! Vallentine tried to rally him by suggesting they play at backgammon, but Roxton he declined, making some lame excuse about wanting an early night to bed! You must believe me! It is all true. I almost fell off my chair to hear this excuse. I am sure you are as shocked by this as I am. My brother in bed before midnight? Unbelievable!
I truly fear for not only his health, but also for his sanity. I thought him ill and wanted to call the physician, but Vallentine he said a physician cannot cure what is wrong with my brother. To my great sorrow and alarm I believe he is right. There is only one cure, and it presses on my heart to think I was the one who was so against the match. That perhaps if I had approved, or tried harder to dissuade our cousin Salvan to give up his ridiculous notion of wanting to wed Antonia to his son, there might have been some hope of another outcome.
I am missing Antonia’s presence just as much as my brother, I fear, for the rooms of this big house are now no longer filled with her laughter, her chatter, and her great teasing of Vallentine, which made us all laugh, even my betrothed. There was a lightness about the place, of it always being spring, when in fact it was autumn all along, and yet, we who were in her company never thought so. It is now as bleak and as cold as the bleakest of winter days, inside and out.
Why is it that it takes separation and sadness to lift the blindfold and see what we should have seen all along? I am not only talking about her presence, but that before she came amongst us we were existing day to day, but we were certainly not living. It is true. And none more so than for my brother, whose very English and phlegmatic attitude to life had never bothered me in the past. Yet now I see it bothers him, too, for he is no longer indifferent to life, no longer unconcerned and bored by it. Antonia opened his eyes to other possibilities, and now, tragically, he can no longer close those eyes and pretend not to see the world as she does. But without her here amongst us, to keep our spirits lifted, to tease and cajole us, it has caused my brother to sink deep into a vat of moroseness, and, oh, Tante, he is drowning!
I tell you what I have told no one but my priest at the confessional. I cannot wait to be married to Vallentine and be on our way to the Italian states for our honeymoon, if for no other reason than to escape my brother’s depressing orbit. To spend more time than is necessary in his company is to soak up his great sadness, and that I can no longer suffer. It is selfish of me, but I cannot help it, and Lucian he agrees with me.
Why oh why did I not insist Antonia remain with us until the marriage ceremony it was over with? Then at least the time it would have been happy, and I would not have the pressing feeling of guilt mixed with anger, at Salvan for putting us all through this torment, and at my brother for falling in love with this girl—of all the females who have crossed his path! Why must it be one who is betrothed to another? Why must she also be in love with my brother? It is unfair on them, but it is also unfair on Lucian and me when I want everyone to be happy for us!
Please pray for us, and for my soul, for surely such selfish self-absorption has blackened it in His eyes, and that, too, is my fault!
Roxton sends his love, as does m
y darling betrothed.
Your loving niece,
Estée
FIVE
Mlle Moran, Hanover Square, Westminster, England, to M’sieur le Duc d’Roxton, Hotel Roxton, Rue St. Honoré, Paris, France.
Hanover Square, Westminster, England
January, 1746
Joyeux Noël et bonne année, Monseigneur!
The Twelfth Night celebrations they have just ended, but I could not sleep, so decided to write and tell you all about them.
You, I am very sure, know all about the silliness of this season in England, though I am certain you did not partake of it, but sat back and observed it all through your glass with that look, half-incredulous half-disdainful, which annoys others no end, but which makes me giggle! For I know inside you are shaking with laughter to see what people they will lend themselves to with the excuse that everyone they are silly upon such occasions, and never more so than on Twelfth Night!
I am determined one day Vallentine he will play at Bullet Pudding with me. Do you know this particular Yuletide game? Perhaps you played it as a boy? No! Even then I think you would have abstained but enjoyed watching others make fools of themselves. I do not doubt that Vallentine he was one of your hapless victims. But I know there is no malice in you, and that Vallentine he would have enjoyed the game for its own sake.
Eternally Yours: Roxton Letters Volume 1 Page 2