Sir Reginald put the letter down and removed his spectacles.
“I must go—”
“No—I’ll write—”
“If this is happening now, there’s no time.”
Sir Reginald bolted up to prepare for the journey.
Reginald DeCourcy was stunned to receive his father’s summons to meet him at Hurst & Wilford. What could explain such strangeness? Sir Reginald’s aversion to travel was well-known; he preferred to remain on his own land always. Also surprising was the call to meet at Hurst & Wilford, rather than Churchill directly. Reginald had seen enough that autumn to suspect his sister’s meddling. So, he rode to the inn partly resenting his sister’s interference, imagining remonstrating with her for it, but partly oppressed by awareness of his own unfulfilled filial obligations.
Arriving at the inn, Reginald found his father nearly alone in the main room, standing with his back to the fire warming himself.
“Father! How extraordinary for you to be here…”
Sir Reginald made no reply.
“You are in good health, I trust. How is Mother?”
Sir Reginald continued silently by the fire.
“What brings you here?”
With a sort of grunt Sir Reginald motioned for Reginald to sit and then did so himself, flipping up his tail coat as he settled on the chair.
“I won’t dissemble and say I have business in this district,” he began. “What I’ve come about is far more important.”
“What could be of such importance?”
Unaccustomed to interrogation, Sir Reginald had no inclination to encourage the habit by replying.
“I know that young men don’t admit inquiry into affairs of the heart but—as the sole son of an ancient family—you must know your conduct is most interesting to us. In the matter of marriage especially, everything’s at stake—your happiness, ours, the credit of our family name, its very survival—”
“But Father—”
“Hear me out: I know you would not deliberately form an engagement without informing us, but I cannot help fear that you’ll fall into an obligation which everyone near you must oppose.”
“What do you mean, Sir?”
“Perhaps the attention Lady Susan now pays you arises only from vanity—or from the wish of gaining the admiration of a man whom she must imagine to be prejudiced against her. It is more likely, however, that she aims at something farther. I understand that Lady Susan might naturally seek an alliance advantageous to herself, but her age alone should—”
“Father, you astonish me!”
“What surprises you?”
“Imputing such ambitions to Lady Susan: She would never think of such a thing! Even her enemies grant her excellent understanding. My sole interest has been to enjoy the lively conversation of a superior lady; but Catherine’s prejudice is so great—”
“Prejudice? Lady Susan’s neglect of her late husband, her extravagance and dissipation, her encouragement of other men, were so notorious—”
“Stop, Sir! These are vile calumnies. I could explain each but will not so dignify them. I know you spend little time in Society—”
“None.”
“Should you have frequented it more you’d know the astonishing degree of vile, hateful jealousy in our country—”
“Do not deprecate our country, Sir!… I don’t wish to work on your fears but on your sense and affection. I can’t prevent your inheriting the family estate, and my ability to distress you during my life would be a species of revenge to which I should hardly stoop—”
“Father, this is unnecessary—”
“No, let me continue. A permanent connection between you and Lady Susan Vernon would destroy every comfort of our lives: It would be the death of the honest pride with which we’ve always considered you—we’d blush to see you, to hear of you, to think of you.”
“Father, with the utmost humility let me say that what you imagine is… impossible.”
Reginald returned from the interview agitated and outraged by his sister’s tale-bearing. She had needlessly poisoned the elder DeCourcys’ peace of mind and tranquillity; such is the bitter fruit which malicious gossips sow.
Reginald had resolved to remonstrate with Catherine upon his return but, in the eventuality, had little chance to do so. The arrival of a letter that morning put the house in an uproar. “But what of Frederica?” The reader might at this point well ask; the beginning of an answer is close to hand. Among that morning’s letters was one from Frederica’s school. Lady Susan assumed it to be another dunning notice for the school’s hardly moral fees, but Miss Summers had written about another matter.
“No!” Lady Susan suddenly exclaimed.
Catherine, engaged in her needlework, looked up with concern.
“I can’t believe it!” Susan said. “It… defies comprehension!”
“What?” Reginald asked.
“Frederica has run away!… Run away from school!”
“How terrible! Where to?”
“They don’t know.”
“She’s lost?”
“No—they detected her plan early enough to intercept her. But what folly! Where could she have thought of going?”
“Surely, here,” Reginald ventured.
“No, this is the last place she’d come; I mean, rather—”
“But,” Catherine interposed, “she must miss you terribly—”
“Certainly. I just don’t think Churchill would be her object. Her sole acquaintances are the Clarkes in Staffordshire—but the danger of such a journey!”
She resumed reading.
“This is outrageous! Miss Summers requires that Frederica be removed from school! No! This will not stand!… Perhaps Miss Summers is under the impression that, as a widow without fortune, I may be bullied. She’s evidently forgotten: Frederica is a Vernon!”
Susan looked to them.
“Charles must set this right: Confronted with his imposing worth, even the mistress of a school must be persuaded to act rightly!”
For Lady Susan any London trip, even one on such an urgent basis, also meant seeing her intimate confidante Mrs. Alicia Johnson (whom I have mentioned earlier). The amity of these two ladies was a monument to that particular capacity for friendship enjoyed by women of sensibility.
(Regrettably, their candid and humourous conversations would provide fuel for their later vilification at the hand of the spinster authoress. Perhaps we all have a spinster authoress in our lives, even if just that inner demon who mocks and denigrates all we do.)
Lady Susan’s sympathy for Alicia was great. First, Alicia Johnson was an American. Her family was on the losing side of that bloody skirmish, the American War of Independence, which at its essence was a matter of larceny, grand and petty, rather than of the sonorous Defence of Rights usually claimed. Crown property, colonial revenue, and finally an entire country were to be purloined by an odious clique of disloyal Whig adventurers. At school we dismissed the Empire’s loss of its American colonies with a familiar formulation, “good riddance of bad rubbish,” but for those who lost homes, fortunes, and homeland the defeat remained an open wound.
Alicia Johnson descended from the Connecticut branch of the prominent De Lancey family who had chosen loyalty to King, Country, and the great British Constitution.* Their links across the Atlantic had been and remained strong: Alicia’s uncle, James De Lancey (later Chief Justice and Lieutenant Governor of the Province of New-York), and her cousin, James, had both studied at Eton and Corpus Christi, Cambridge, then read law at Lincoln’s Inn. For the De Lanceys the destruction of the great equestrian statue** of King George at Bowling Green in New-York, pulled down by a vicious mob in 1776, came as a frightful shock. With the war’s catastrophic denouement at Yorktown five years later—only after, it should be noted, the royal navies of Bourbon France and Spain altered the balance in the rebels’ favour—many of the loyalists, who came disproportionately from the colonies’ best families, chose exile.
The destinations would be the West Indies, Halifax, or elsewhere in the province of Canada, but for the De Lanceys a return to London was the natural course.
Though her cousins had many English connections, Alicia De Lancey, then seventeen years old, had few on which to rely. Arriving in London during the great wave of emigration, she found her cousins’ English circle grown less than welcoming. Only her father’s business partner, Mr. Johnson, a gentleman with extensive interests in the Connecticut, took a certain interest, a certain interest which led to certain intentions. Older than Alicia and lacking her vivacity and wit, he had still been able to make himself sufficiently charming to persuade her to be his wife. However, over the years, their union had not been fruitful and, what was most unfair, Mr. Johnson appeared to blame his wife for the deficiency. In truth it is impossible in such cases to ascribe responsibility, but Mr. Johnson did so anyway. He was of a “judging” disposition which was consonant with his vocation for he was also a judge—and woe to the miscreants who came his way!
The spinster authoress seized particularly on the purported letters between the two ladies, which had been entirely in jest and joke, to injure their reputations. But the true story is all to Lady Susan’s credit. Her only objective had been to raise the depressed spirits of her friend—trapped in an oppressive domestic arrangement—by treating the events of their lives in comical terms. The two friends understood this confidential language; their declarations, while in that mode, bore no resemblance to their true sentiments! But how delighted some authors are to misrepresent and readers to believe them.
Lady Susan had first learned of her banishment from the Johnsons’ Edward Street house in October when she had stopped there on her way from Langford to Churchill. Mrs. Johnson had broached the subject immediately:
“You didn’t receive my letter?”
“Letter?”
“Mr. Johnson forbids my seeing you.”
“That’s preposterous!” Susan laughed. “By what means ‘forbids’?”
“He threatens the severest punishment imaginable—sending me back to Connecticut.”
“To be tarred-and-feathered?” Susan jested, still not quite crediting this edict.
“The dangers I’d prefer not to ascertain; Mr. Johnson claims to have important business at Hartford and threatens to settle there if our connection is not entirely severed.”
“But for what possible reason or pretext?”
The pretext, it turned out, was some absurd tittle-tattle regarding Lady Susan’s stay at Langford. Such had come to Mr. Johnson’s attention and he had reacted with this Draconic prohibition. So, a judge treats uncorroborated hearsay!
But by November the friends had decided that the ban must only relate to meeting within the Edward Street house itself.
A return to town, however exasperating the original impetus (in this case Frederica’s flight), was always a tonic to Lady Susan’s spirits. Barred from home she instead met her friend at the stately Adams Arcade, there recounting Frederica’s recent misadventure with her usual good humour which, in my view, is the mark of an excellent disposition.
“I had no notion of Frederica’s being so contrary!” she concluded. “She seemed all Vernon milkiness—but it confirms the rightness of my plan: Did Sir James call?”
“Several times.”
“Excellent!”
“I followed your instructions, scolding him roundly for making love to Maria Manwaring—he protested that it had only been in joke! We both laughed heartily at her disappointment and, in short, were very agreeable. You are right: He’s wonderfully silly.”
Despite this phrasing I cannot imagine that either lady considered Sir James in any way “silly.” I understand this to have been an affectionate term the two friends used, between themselves, for a man whom they enormously liked and respected, as indicated by their use also of the adverb “wonderfully.” The spinster authoress clearly sought to use the word in another way, to deprecate Sir James. To feel themselves “higher” there are persons who make a virtual vocation of putting others “lower”—and this was true of the spinster authoress for whom even His Highness the Prince Regent was a figure to be mocked and deprecated. The affectionate epithet represented the sort of facetious language the two friends delighted in using with each other. I think we have all had such conversations; we would never want them set down, even in private manuscript.
“Perhaps one day I will see Frederica’s escapade as having advanced my plan,” Susan said. “But we can’t let Sir James forget with whom he’s in love—a man so rich and silly will not remain single long.” (Again, the word is used here as a term of affection I am quite certain.)
“Sir James is so far from having forgotten the Vernons I’m sure he would marry either of you at the drop of a hat!”
“Thank you, my dear!” Alicia’s acknowledgement of her continuing power pleased her.
Across the arcade’s interior courtyard, or arcade-yard, a gentleman noticed the ladies and began to cross towards them, with his footman following.
“I must now return to Churchill,” Lady Susan sighed. “But should Miss Summers refuse to take Frederica back I will need your help in finding another school. Under no circumstance will I have her at Churchill!”
“Very wise, my dear.”
“What do you mean?”
“The nearness of their ages: hers and Reginald’s.”
The implication of this observation greatly irritated Susan; such fugitive, ill-conceived remarks often cloud relations between friends.
“How unkind.”
“Forgive me!”
“Forgiven!” Lady Susan exclaimed, her sunny mood returned. “‘The Fallacy of Youth!’ Isn’t it rather clear we, Women of Decision, hold the trumps!”
They both laughed, again united.
“Lady Susan? Lady Susan Vernon?”
The intruding voice was that of the gentleman who had crossed towards them.
“How dare you address me, Sir!”
The gentleman was taken aback.
“But…” he stammered, “Lady Susan—”
“Begone, Sir! Or I will arrange to have you whipped!”
The man turned on his heel and walked away, his footman scrambling to follow.
“Outrageous!” Alicia said. “You had never seen him before?”
“Oh, no, I know him well—I would never speak to a stranger that way.”
Such was Lady Susan’s delightful spirit, full of surprises, which her friends so savoured. Her actions, ostensibly puzzling, were nearly always justified. Perhaps, in this instance, this particular gentleman had no bad history or intention; it might seem harsh treatment for no worse infraction than greeting a distinguished lady in a public place. But if not he, surely others like him, at some point, had offended against their sex, perhaps often—so in general terms the rebuke was well justified.
“The Grand Affair of Education”
In Lady Susan’s and Charles Vernon’s first meeting with Miss Summers, that lady continued the pretence that her concern was Frederica’s conduct rather than payment for her school’s excessive fees. When Charles insisted on settling whatever fees were owed, Miss Summers refused, pending a decision on Frederica’s continuance at the school—Lady Susan, however, was able to see through this tactic also.
Later, when Lady Susan mentioned her fatigued state to Charles, he reacted swiftly, urging her to return to Churchill; he would remain in town to pursue a more favourable outcome. Would Frederica be allowed to remain at school? Susan vibrated with concern for her daughter’s future. Should Frederica not be allowed to remain at Miss Summers’, where might she go? The ignominy of being “sent home” to Churchill must be avoided at all costs!
The next day, returned to Churchill, Lady Susan unburdened herself of these concerns as she walked with Reginald.
“You cannot know the emotion a mother feels when her child is—or could have been—in danger. We cannot regard our children coolly: Nature won’t perm
it it. You perhaps see Frederica’s actions as the dangerous egotism of a wilful child; I cannot.”
“But you believe she’s safe?”
“Physically—yes. But I’m frightened by what this reveals of an erratic nature. One loves one’s child dearly, however selfishly she might behave. Can you comprehend that?”
“Yes—but I cannot help seeing in her behaviour a terrible irresponsibility which rather outrages me. Whilst I know that, as a mother, you must see everything she does with maternal softness—”
“Yes: I would never represent my daughter as worse than her actions show her to be.”
Catherine Vernon was passing through the ground floor rooms with a letter for Lady Susan when she saw her and Reginald entering from the garden, Susan looking uncharacteristically fragile.
“Take a seat, rest,” Reginald said as he helped Susan to the nearest sofa.
“Forgive me,” Susan said. Always polite and considerate, Lady Susan felt constrained to apologize even for her faintness, which the heedless conduct of children has ever caused mothers.
“Susan, the afternoon coach brought this note,” Catherine said, handing it to her. “Perhaps Charles has succeeded with Miss Summers.”
Susan, her fingers quite trembling, broke the note’s wax seal and read its first lines.
“It’s as I feared… Miss Summers refuses to keep Frederica—she says she must think of her school’s reputation—”
“Preposterous!” Reginald exclaimed. “I have never heard of her school!”
Not long thereafter the sound of horses and carriage echoed from the Churchill forecourt.
“Could that be them?” Reginald asked.
“What, Frederica? Here? Already?”
Lady Susan rose to see Charles and Frederica coming from the front hall in their traveling attire.
“Hullo, hullo. Well, here we are,” Charles Vernon announced pertinently.
“Is this Frederica?” Catherine asked.
“Yes,” Charles said. “Allow me to introduce our niece—charming girl—Miss Frederica Vernon.”
Love & Friendship Page 3