by Janet Todd
Yet people had murmured to her about the horror of such carnage. She mused on the immense difference between demanded and inflicted pain. Her arm had hurt as she continued to raise the whip, and the handle, though smooth, had come to chafe her fingers until blood had flowed.
As she came fully to consciousness after a short fitful sleep she realised she had a searing headache. The pain had been so delicious but it had left its legacy and she was anxious. Who had heard? Could anyone know? It had been a stormy morning after the early night of full moon, with great gusts of wind in the lime trees. Would anyone awake have thought the noise, the great thumps, to be tapestries bumping against the wall in the wind? Her rooms were distant from Mrs Manwaring’s and her cousin’s much further down the corridor. Only Frederica was nearby and she slept deeply. She would have no idea of such goings-on and would never put a name to the rhythm. And yet Lady Susan was uneasy.
She and Manwaring did not see each other until late in the afternoon when Manwaring sat awkwardly on a high-backed chair. She felt sure they all knew why and she wanted to laugh aloud. Her fan with its black feathers and carved ivory panels, another present from Lord Gamestone, hid her smile.
Chapter 6
Frederica had upset everyone – but how could she have behaved otherwise? After Mary had danced with Sir James at the ball, she had said something spiteful to Miss Dawlish about Frederica being an artful minx and she had intended Frederica to hear the remark. It was so loud that Miss Dawlish had shushed her. Mary said she’d quite clearly seen Sir James and Frederica walking arm in arm in the garden.
Mrs Manwaring had been kind when she first arrived; now neither she nor her cousin wanted even to notice her beyond the most perfunctory politeness. And all the time Sir James was trying to get her to talk – or rather listen – to him; worse, he touched her or brushed against her whenever he could.
The pursuit – for pursuit she now had to call it – came to a climax near the stables. Since Mr Manwaring was heading there Frederica thought she could venture to creep along out into the meadow beyond without being caught. But, as she walked through the courtyard round which the stables were ranged, she ran straight into Sir James. She couldn’t flee without seeming ridiculous to Mr Manwaring. Sir James seized the moment: his famous counting horse was just being led from his stall with elaborate decorated bridle and throatlash. She must see it.
‘It seems that the beast has as many changes of clothing as a fine lady,’ remarked Mr Manwaring as he walked towards them.
‘Yes, he has,’ replied Sir James excitedly, pointing to other throatlashes, as well as browbands and cavessons which the groom was told to bring out from the stall for display. He then explained the difference between the standing martingale and the tiedown.
‘In Lincolnshire, do guess what I have.’ Manwaring suppressed a response; Frederica was forced to wait. ‘I have the saddle which was worn by Sir Peter Teazle when he won the Derby. Just think of that.’
After his usual braying laugh had subsided, he continued, ‘But you must see my horse count, Miss Vernon, Mr Manwaring.’
The little horse was brought close to them – too close, for its eyes looked a little wild, Frederica thought. They all stood staring.
‘I cannot understand,’ cried Sir James, ‘why the Almighty endowed a horse with such genius, then gave him only four legs to reveal it with. Just one, two, three, four, only that you see. He can only count to four with his four legs. Three, three, I say,’ barked Sir James addressing the horse. After a moment it pawed the ground twice, then waited. Sir James lifted his whip as if to strike, then the horse stamped again.
While the spectators considered the event in their different ways, the horse – it became apparent – was performing further addition of its own. It had now achieved an erection that could not but catch the most innocent eye.
‘Numbers seem to excite him,’ said Manwaring. ‘I fancy that you have taught him to count to five.’
Frederica blushed deeply. Did he mean what she thought he did? It was not a gentlemanly remark.
‘No,’ said Sir James impulsively. ‘Miss Vernon has.’
It was the cleverest thing Manwaring had ever heard him say; Frederica kept her eyes on the ground.
The two men stared in silence at the small horse’s display, Manwaring trying to cover his amusement. Then, suddenly, he grew bored. ‘I will leave you and Miss Vernon to the excitement. Good day.’ He walked off.
‘I wish I was a horse,’ said Sir James. ‘It would make things so much simpler.’
Then, abruptly, he lurched into Frederica and pushed her hard against the stable wall. She felt the discomfort of a browband sticking in her left ear but, before she could experience real fear, Mr Manwaring, having left his gloves on a ledge, returned and coughed. Sir James was easily pushed off.
‘Enough of educated horses,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Miss Vernon should go and read Dr Darwin on vegetable impregnation. More appropriate.’
They were both mocking her. She saw it now. She stifled a sob and fled.
‘Such scenes,’ joked Manwaring to Lady Susan later that day, ‘fancy Sir James trying to mount your daughter. Who’d have thought he had it in him?’
Lady Susan laughed but was not amused.
At last even Sir James felt his departure overdue. Before he left, he sent a message through Barton asking to see Lady Susan in the library.
This was encouraging. She could hear the tinkle of music in the distance – Frederica was practising the piano in the music room. She played poorly, so Lady Susan could recognise the performance. Mary had given up music for the moment and was moping in her room.
She entered the library. Sir James came towards her, wriggling in all his parts.
‘Madam, your ladyship,’ he said. She smiled. She had become used to his pauses in the wrong places whenever he was nervous. ‘You can’t have failed to notice …’ (No, no, thought Lady Susan, nor has anyone else, not even the horse it seems) ‘to notice, that is, how much I am attached to your daughter’s …’ He halted. Lady Susan wondered if she should help him and decided against it. ‘ … person and, um, character, an amiable and modest young lady.’ He remembered his mother’s words. Surely this was the very girl she would have chosen.
Despite her resolve Lady Susan was losing concentration. Half her mind had settled back on Manwaring. If he had been free, if that scrawny pale wife of his were to die … Could she wait? But what would she live on in the meantime?
‘Most generous,’ she interrupted herself, ‘most generous, dear Sir James. The happiness of my daughter is paramount and there is no one I would rather see as my …’ she paused to give him a coquettish look – it could do no harm and might do good – ‘son-in-law than you. But you must know that dear Frederica must be loved for herself. Alas, my husband … you understand me, there can be only the smallest dowry.’
‘No, no,’ cried Sir James and now his words came tumbling out. ‘I have quite enough – that is my income, you know my uncle too, eight thousand a year.’
That much, thought Lady Susan, not bad at all. And the girl would be off my hands.
‘I will speak to her directly.’
He was not prepossessing, but eight thousand pounds must come with some disadvantages. She herself had married a better man for less. The exmarriage would remove the expense of Frederica’s upkeep and advantage herself: Sir James would, she imagined, be generous towards his mother-in-law.
After he had left, Lady Susan sent a footman to fetch Frederica from the music room. Within ten minutes they were together in the library. Manwaring was out, she assumed, and the women of the house keeping their chambers.
‘My dear Frederica. I have had the most pleasant conversation,’ she began. Frederica looked alarmed. ‘I imagine you know what I am going to say and that you have got over the nonsense you expressed when last we conversed on this important subject.’
‘No, Mama, I don’t in the least know what you will say.’ She was tr
embling.
‘What on earth ails you, Frederica? Really! You can’t have been quite unaware of Sir James’s attentions. They have been quite marked lately – they were perhaps not quite decorous. But you know,’ and she smiled in a way that struck terror in her daughter, ‘you have quite enthralled him.’
‘Oh Mama, don’t say so. No, he loved Mary and she loves him, I know she does. She once told me. It can’t be,’ and she patted the air away with both hands.
‘I am not speaking of Miss Manwaring,’ said Lady Susan. ‘I’m sure she would indeed like to have had Sir James, what girl would not? I’m speaking of you. Sir James is quite captivated by your charms. A little encouragement from you and he is yours.’
‘Don’t say it, Mama,’ cried Frederica, her face white and her eyes beginning to brim. ‘Don’t.’
‘There is no occasion to cry I assure you,’ said Lady Susan, keeping her temper with an effort. ‘A proposal from a man with eight thousand pounds a year is not a crying matter.’
‘Mama, he is almost betrothed to Miss Manwaring, to Mary, and besides’ – she was really sobbing now – ‘besides, besides I don’t like him. He is … he is just like a Lincolnshire curlycoat pig.’
Lady Susan suppressed a laugh. Given his pink eyelids and trembling nose, the analogy was not unjust. She waited in silence for a moment, then continued. ‘You were not, I think, keen on the idea of Madam Dacre’s Academy, despite its expense. Surely your own establishment, a nice house in the country, one in town if you ever wanted it, a carriage and’ – she forced herself to add, for the person before her really was just a child – ‘a pony, would be fine alternatives.’
‘No, Mama, I cannot like him, I really cannot.’
Lady Susan paused, then tried a woman-to-woman look before saying, ‘A girl can always learn to like a man if there is enough incentive.’
‘But I never can, Mama. A woman must look up to a husband, he must be her superior. I cannot look up to Sir James, I truly cannot.’
Lady Susan let that one pass. She herself had never looked up to any man – and didn’t find such a posture at all necessary.
‘Frederica, marriage is not a matter of what you may or may not want. It’s something for life and something that in your case had better be undertaken sooner rather than later.’
Her daughter was not listening. She was twisting her damp little handkerchief round and round in her fingers.
There was nothing to be done. If Lady Susan proceeded, she would only make her noisy in grief. ‘Well, well, let’s leave the subject. Think about it, Frederica, when you are calmer. You cannot depend on your face and I cannot keep you indefinitely. Sir James may perhaps be a little boorish but a man can be tamed.’
‘Oh Mama, and … I want to please you. You know I do. But I cannot, I cannot,’ and she dashed from the room, her face streaming with tears.
Lady Susan was slightly dissatisfied with herself. She could handle men better than children.
She wondered at her distaste for Frederica. Even in this conversation she had noticed her daughter’s plump hands, in shape resembling her own. She contemplated her thinner ones where the veins would soon obtrude just a little, faint blue beneath the transparent surface; she found them strangely alluring.
A faint shudder passed over her. She knew her beauty was intact and that it was greater than her daughter’s was or would ever be. And yet there was something about real youth, however manifested, that could not be counterfeited.
Eight thousand pounds a year. The figure struck her forcibly. She’d almost a mind to take him herself. But the image of Manwaring rose before her, and she felt the now accustomed longing. Besides, Sir James was really too ridiculous. He must be Frederica’s. Some months at Madam Dacre’s should do the business. She would speak to that lady and make clear what she expected. Sir James could be dangled for a while.
Next morning it became clear that he had engaged in some unsatisfactory talk either with Mrs Manwaring or with Mary, for the mother wore a long face at the breakfast table. Despite her own sprightly remarks, Lady Susan met with elaborate silence. Miss Dawlish, Mary and Manwaring all breakfasted in their chambers.
Sir James came breezily into the room and began talking about the weather and its effect on horseflesh. Soon even he fell silent. For a while he remained at a loss for words, then informed them that his bags were being packed and his phaeton prepared for departure. His famous horse would follow after him later in the day.
In the hallway, only Miss Dawlish, who felt herself the upholder of standards, represented the family in saying farewell. As Sir James went down the steps, Lady Susan tried to engage her in talk. But Miss Dawlish was not to be drawn. She did, however, manage a weak smile at Lady Susan’s remark about young men and horses.
Sir James mounted his phaeton and took up the reins with complicated feelings. Two female voices mingled in his ears. ‘Oh please, please go away’ had been Frederica’s last words to him when he encountered her shrinking into the banister, while Lady Susan’s farewell – ‘Time, give her time, Sir James, only a proper bashfulness’ – had been so soothing and engaging they enveloped the daughter in their sweetness.
And yet was it sensible to give Miss Frederica ‘time’? Lady Susan had told him how courted she was, how admired through Norfolk. It stood to reason, then, that he ought to make another more forceful attempt. He did not mention this resolve to Lady Susan. She had gently scolded him for his behaviour in the stables – his mother would have been much fiercer.
Yet he remained perplexed. As a result he travelled faster than he should, ignoring the damage done to his delicate springs.
Despite her resolve, Lady Susan soon found she was having too delicious a time with Manwaring to interrupt it for long. She was aware that her lover was becoming careless. He didn’t always allow the proper interval before he followed her to her dressing room, and his eyes swivelled in her direction when they should have remained on his wife and daughter.
Some days after Sir James had gone and six weeks after they had begun their pleasant mutual torture, Manwaring drank more than usual at dinner. He’d been out hunting with the affable vicar, a man who liked carousing, especially at the Langford table. They had already enjoyed some good port together before they came to dinner and Manwaring’s guard was down.
Over dessert Lady Susan caught his eye and enjoyed the sensation of a secret life. Her body responded under the ivory silk shift that lay softly beneath her sober outer garment. On the table, the knives, forks, spoons and crystal glasses glittered in the candlelight.
Then, as she looked away and absent-mindedly fingered some almonds and dried apricots on her plate, she became aware that Manwaring had kept his eyes on her, and had even let a smile that could only denote intimacy play upon his lips. His wife’s fixed gaze rested upon him, as did her cousin’s. The room went very still. Time seemed to have halted.
The conversation had been general, something about the French campaigns in Italy under their new young general Buonaparte, but it ceased now and the room swam in a haze of emotions. No one reached for the porcelain dishes of tiny sweet biscuits; nobody touched the glass decanters. Some seconds of complete and frightening silence ensued.
Then time regrouped and went on. Charlotte Manwaring stifled a sob, jumped up from her chair, pushing it abruptly back on the footman who was about to serve a special syllabub on a frosted green glass plate. It fell to the ground in a snowy mess of sugar and froth. She ran from the room.
Her husband recollected himself at once and swallowed as if coming out of a trance. He started to talk in the belief that he might save the situation. Abruptly he realised it was hopeless and got up to follow his wife. ‘She must be ill,’ he muttered. ‘One of her headaches.’
The rest of the diners sat on not bothering to eat but sipping at their water and wine. Frederica was very pale. Mary looked angry and scornful.
After a few moments, Miss Dawlish glared directly at Lady Susan. Then she too ros
e from her chair. ‘I shall go to my cousin,’ she announced, ‘she was feeling unwell earlier, I think. The unaccustomed sun you know.’
Back in her dressing room Lady Susan mused on the event. It had crossed her mind that there would be a discovery one day. She had even visualised it – a crowd suddenly arriving in the bedchamber as she had the whip raised high in her hand, or at the climax – just after the climax perhaps – the door flung open and an audience in the corridor with torches, noise and flashes of light, Manwaring and she caught as if on a stage in the theatre.
She had dismissed Barton for the night and was looking idly through a book of fashion plates while reclining on her daybed. The door of her dressing room slowly opened. It was Manwaring.
‘You’re mad,’ she hissed.
‘Absolutely so,’ he whispered back, ‘quite mad, madly in love’.
Lady Susan dropped her book and lay back with a smile. Manwaring entered the room fully and came over to her. There was really no resisting him.
As they continued their sport they forgot their surroundings. Lady Susan liked to keep her lover waiting for the blows, while he gave her the kind of sustained pleasure she now discovered she so needed. She relished the feel of her hand on his hard flat belly and tight buttocks.
It was in one of the piquant pauses they both enjoyed that Lady Susan and Manwaring distinctly heard a noise outside in the corridor. Since it was after two in the morning there was no comfortable explanation.
She silently dropped her arm and the whip. Manwaring turned over, ‘Damn, what is it?’
She laid the handle over his mouth and pushed him into stillness. ‘Shsh,’ she whispered.
Words were being spoken outside the door but it was impossible in the room to make them out. Both recognised the tones of Mrs Manwaring and Miss Dawlish.
Then they heard distinctly: ‘Dear cousin, you cannot go in. It would be unseemly. Do come back to bed.’