Gentlemen and Players

by Frances Vernon

  ‘Well, that’s finished,’ said Augusta, and pushed the invitations out of the way. She glanced at her stepdaughter.

  ‘Aunt Augusta, who is that man in the picture? Over the sideboard?’

  ‘That, my dear, is Sir Thomas Fitzwilliam. My great-great-great grandfather.’

  ‘What did he do? Did he do anything exciting?’

  ‘He was very wicked, Sophie. He gamed away two fortunes – his own and his wife’s – he ran away with her, because she was an heiress.’

  ‘I don’t blame her for running away with him,’ said Sophie. ‘He’s very handsome.’

  ‘She had a miserable life.’ Augusta, like Sophie, looked at the portrait. ‘And he was very nearly executed after the Forty-Five.’

  ‘Did he escape from the Tower of London?’

  ‘No, Sophie, nothing romantic. Not like Lord Nithsdale. He was banished instead, and he went to live in France. Died in sordid circumstances, naturally.’

  ‘Were all the Fitzwilliams Jacobites?’

  ‘Only in sympathy, because we are Catholics. Sir Thomas was the only one foolish enough to indulge in rebellion, and he didn’t even succeed in remaining a favourite of the Pretender’s.’

  ‘Being Catholics makes you all so much more interesting,’ sighed Sophie. ‘I mean, the secret chapel you told me about, and the persecutions you suffered –’ she rocked backwards and forwards on her chair legs – ‘and fighting with Bonnie Prince Charlie – all so very romantic. I suppose you’ll be cross with me for saying that.’

  ‘I think you are a foolish child,’ said Augusta.

  ‘I’d like to be a Catholic.’

  ‘I doubt you ever will be,’ said Augusta. ‘I detest converts. Now go away, I have something else to do.’

  Sophie groaned, made her way round the table and out of the room. Although she came downstairs whenever she could to be with the others, she now went up to the schoolroom, where she would be alone. The schoolroom had been improvised from a third-floor back bedroom, which now contained no bed but a big practical table and a globe, and a tree of the kings of England which Sophie knew by heart. Augusta had added a pair of uncomfortable bedroom armchairs with stained covers, and Sophie sat down in one of these.

  She started picking at a scab on her hand. It was painful, but she watched the blood well up with interest before she sucked it away, scratched the wound, and squeezed a little more blood, while she thought about becoming a Catholic. When she announced her intention, Sarah would be puzzled but uninterested, Susan intrigued and slightly shocked, Nicholas possibly outraged. None of them was deeply religious, and all of them had been brought up as Baptists. The girls converted to the Church of England shortly after their mother’s death, because Nonconformity was a tradesman’s faith. Sophie, because she was too young to be told, did not know that her father sometimes called himself an agnostic, but she had heard him profess occasionally a horror of Popery in general.

  Sophie saw herself practising her faith in secret, like the Fitzwilliams of the seventeenth century: lighting candles before an image of the Virgin Mary in her closet, perhaps, invoking saints to protect her from her Protestant family. It was not only that she wished to imitate her stepmother: she liked the idea of a religion with a goddess, and beauty in the churches. She knew that one was never allowed to say so, but confession and absolution meant that one could sin, at least venially, without fear of hell.

  Nicholas would give in, perhaps under a threat from Sophie that she would become a nun. Augusta might detest converts, because they were earnest and enthusiastic, which Sophie never was, but she was not one to miss any compliment paid to herself. Sophie smiled. The scenes would last a few months, but they would blow over and she would stand firm.

  She mounted the table and, with her scratched hands clasped above her head, imitated the pirouette she had seen at the ballet the week before, to which Augusta had taken her. Then she went next door to inquire stealthily after her governess’s headache.

  *

  Sarah might be plain, but her face was flawless, Susan thought as she watched her dancing with Lord Henry Templecombe. Her thick white skin never developed a spot, and although as a child the edges of her little face had been smudged with pale freckles, these had faded when she was in her teens. She never had bags under her black, calm eyes. Her colourless lips were never chapped, she never even seemed to develop blisters from ill-fitting shoes. Her hair, so wild when loose, seemed to be carved out or wood when it was dressed. There was a rose in her hair now, precisely the pink of correctly-coloured cheeks. Susan noticed, when she came a little closer, that Sarah’s cheeks were in fact a trifle flushed, as though they had been rouged, but she knew that Sarah did not know where to buy rouge.

  Her partner was a tall, shapely middle-aged man with very broad shoulders. He had black shiny hair and a black moustache, very fine eyes, the edges of which were slightly creased with age, red lips, a large straight nose, and a face which was slightly ruddy, particularly near the nostrils. When he was young it had been conventional to describe him as the image of Lord Byron. He held his tiny, pale partner with great skill.

  Susan thought he must be a rake. She was surprised to see such a man at this party, which was composed of the very young and their guardians. Apart from Lord Henry, those old people who were not acting as chaperones in this saloon where the young were being entertained with a little dancing, were playing cards in another room. The stakes were perhaps not high enough to attract such a man as Lord Henry.

  Susan had realised only tonight that her sister was in love with this man, and that he was courting her. Watching the pair, she was quite annoyed when a young man came up and took her away from the quiet wall where she had been sitting. As they danced, she reflected that she was rather popular with the young men; but she was still fastidious. To be touched by a man whom she scarcely knew, and did not find attractive, seemed to her unclean. Her serious-minded dislike of dancing was one of her topics of ballroom conversation.

  ‘Do you not think Lord Henry looks like an older Byron?’ said Sarah, when they were back at Bryanston Square.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Susan. She added eagerly: ‘Oh, my poor poor Sarah, you are in love. How very uncomfortable it must be for you.’ She was not being sophisticated.

  CHAPTER 3

  A CHANGE IN THE FAMILY

  Lord Henry Templecombe proposed to Sarah that year, only a few days after Susan first realised that her sister was in love with him. Although Nicholas held to his promise that Sarah could marry whom she liked when she was of age, and was pleased that she had found a lord, he opposed the match, because he had been told that Templecombe was a spendthrift and a libertine. Augusta told him that in London everyone was saying that the little low-born heiress was taking an ageing widower as her husband, because she was on the catch for a title. They also said that, given her plainness and the moderate size of her fortune, it was a monstrously good match for her. Nicholas refused to allow the announcement of the betrothal to appear in the Morning Post until three months before the wedding, so Sarah was nagged and cajoled and exclaimed at for her passion, that winter of 1875.

  *

  Sarah sat in her room at Bryanston Square, gazing at her wedding dress on the day before her wedding: 13 May 1877. The dress lay on her bed, with its gauze wrapper only half lifted, as though Sarah feared some harm would come to it.

  Susan came in and looked. All her life, Sarah had been able to do this: to sit and do nothing whatever for an hour or more at a time, quite still, with her fixed eyes like raisins in her bland face. Susan shook her head at her. ‘I think you chose well,’ she said loudly, and Sarah jumped, as though she had been deep in thought.

  ‘What? I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The dress. Silver grey instead of white – and the waterfall back is becoming to you, although I thought at first you would not be tall enough to carry it off.’

  ‘Thank you. Oh, sit down, Susan, if you wish.’

  A litt
le surprised, Susan did so. Sarah rose, and fetched the veil from her cupboard. It reached down to her knees and was so full that it blew out more than a yard behind her. ‘Did I tell you that it will be held in place with a chaplet of lilies of the valley?’

  ‘Yes, of course you did. Lilies for mourning, Sarah!’ smiled Susan.

  ‘And marry in May and you’ll rue the day. But you see, I am not superstitious.’

  ‘Naturally not. Kitty Mainwaring was married in May, in any case, and only look how happy she is.’

  ‘You are trying to reassure me,’ said Sarah, quickly turning her head away from the dress.

  Susan murmured: ‘Sarah, do you still truly want to do this? I mean, marry him?’

  ‘Of course I do. You don’t understand, you’ve never been in love.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Perhaps you are a little jealous, Susan.’ Now she sounded childish.

  ‘Oh, Sarah, I only hope you’ll be happy,’ said Susan. ‘But you know, I do admire your devotion, because after all, you’ve been engaged two years and you’re still in love. I wouldn’t have thought it, two years ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sarah. ‘Well, it is lovely to be in love. You miss a great deal, Susan, in not having a warm heart.’

  Susan paused. ‘My warm heart, Sarah, is not for the use of men.’ Sarah would not think this pompous, she would be slightly impressed; although if she quite understood, she would not believe it.

  There was some mystery about marriage. It was something very forthright and crude and Augusta must have told Sarah what it was. Susan opened her mouth to ask her, and looked rather foolish, waiting to speak. ‘Well, I think I’d better leave you to get things ready,’ said Susan. ‘What a bustle, to be sure!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah, frowning at her veil, which she was slowly arranging over the satin. Susan left.

  Sarah, seating herself on the chaise longue, put her feet up, raised her knees and hugged them. She would never have adopted such a posture in front of her sister, and would not in front of her husband. Perfect deportment was a habit with her, and casual positions were daring.

  Templecombe saw her two or three times a week, either at parties or when he came to call at Bryanston Square. They were separated, of course, outside the London Season. When he was with her he was always deeply courteous. Augusta and Susan often left them alone together when he called, and then Sarah would serve him refreshments, with a conscious, blushing, wifely gravity which was almost preoccupied. This amused him and she knew it and was rather pleased. On these occasions he had twice kissed her lips, with great gentleness, and he frequently kissed her hand. She liked this very much and she always stared at the hand which held hers, so that she had come to know it very well; although she could rarely call his face precisely to mind, and he remained an image of dark and weathered male beauty. His hand was large and white and bony, unmarked with hairs, and with well-shaped nails which were perhaps an eighth of an inch too long.

  Augusta had not told Sarah the facts of life, because she assumed that, in these drawing-room sessions, Templecombe was initiating Sarah into preliminary lovemaking. She grinned when she thought about it, for Sarah would undoubtedly mumble, ‘No, no.’ Only Augusta knew that Sophie, at fourteen, knew all about it; under her stepmother’s supervision, Sophie had arranged the mating of the spaniel bitch which Augusta had given her two years ago, and even if she had not seen the coupling, she had watched the birth of the litter.

  *

  ‘Only think, this is the last meal at which we shall have Sarah with us – as one of the family properly speaking, that is,’ said Susan at breakfast next morning, in front of her sister.

  ‘I knew someone was going to say that,’ said Sophie, pouring nearly a quarter of a pint of cream onto her thickly sweetened porridge. Susan flushed.

  ‘I won’t brook your impertinence at the breakfast table, my girl, and on your sister’s wedding-day, too,’ said Nicholas, who had bags under his eyes because he had not slept. ‘And look at that cream you’re wasting! Disgusting. There’s some children would be glad of that porridge.’

  ‘But I am glad of it, Father,’ said Sophie with puzzled respect.

  ‘I warn you, Sophie,’ he said, with Augusta’s eye upon him. He opened his newspaper; then thought that he ought not to read the newspaper at table on Sarah’s last day at home. He laid it aside and looked bleakly down at the women.

  Sarah, gazing, said to herself, ‘When you are maried, you can take your breakfast in bed, like any other lady.’ It was one of Augusta’s rules that none of them would lie abed in the mornings. At the thought that tomorrow she would be having her breakfast in bed, Sarah felt her stays crushing her, and she wanted to throw up the slice of dry toast she had slowly consumed.

  Augusta, swathed in a puce dressing-gown, was reading her post. She too felt unwell and was not looking forward to the day’s events. ‘I think I will go to hear Vespers at the convent this evening,’ she said. ‘It ought to be soothing. Sophie, will you come?’

  ‘Oh – yes, Aunt Augusta.’ Sophie had won Augusta’s support months before for her reception into the Catholic church, but her father refused to allow her to convert formally until she was sixteen; and as one who was not yet a Catholic, she was obliged to devote a great deal of time to her new religion.

  For a while there was silence at table, then Nicholas began to make cheerful conversation with his pale-faced eldest daughter.

  ‘We must all go and change,’ said Augusta. ‘We must be at the church in three hours’ time. Come.’ She rose, and the two younger girls followed.

  ‘Now my dear,’ said Nicholas to Sarah a moment later, ‘you’d best go and put on all your finery. You can’t be more than twenty minutes late, you know, it wouldn’t be at all the thing!’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Wedding nerves,’ he smiled at her as she left.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. The door closed, and Nicholas pulled open the Pall Mall Gazette and lit a cigar. He sat staring at the paper, rubbing his head, for a long time. He had risen very early, and was already fully dressed and ready for the ceremony.

  Sarah stood before the mirror, looking like a bride with Susan and Sophie, dressed as maids of honour, inspecting her. Susan was anxiously twitching folds of material this way and that, positioning them, as though Sarah was not going to move thereafter; Sophie was lying on the bed drinking chocolate. She contemplated her own dress, which had been made long in order that she should not look odd in the procession – which, as she was now the tallest of the three, she would have done had she worn a dress which showed her ankles.

  ‘Brigstock,’ said Susan to the maid waiting beside her, ‘is there time to sew up this hem? Just look at it! We really can’t have Miss Sarah tripping over in the aisle.’

  ‘Certainly not, miss. I fear that there is no time and pins, miss, would show.’

  ‘I really think these dressmakers have no idea of the practicalities of life. How on earth is she to carry her bouquet and hold up this skirt – which I dare say is most elegant – at the same time? Without looking very silly?’

  ‘I shan’t look silly,’ said Sarah happily.

  ‘Of course not, dear!’

  ‘What I don’t like about the idea of marriage,’ said Sophie, ‘is having to swear that one will obey the man for ever and ever. I shall never obey any man, I can tell you.’

  Sarah flushed. She had kept a diary of her emotions since she fell in love, and her own phrase describing the vow of obedience was engraved on her mind. She referred to it when she wished to ponder her marriage: ‘the most loving, most sacred, most joyfully made vow of them all.’ She was always a little embarrassed when people mentioned even in the most casual way the subject of husbands and marriage. Now she waited for her sister’s next comment.

  ‘Sarah, are you really going to always obey Lord Henry?’

  ‘One – one is obliged to, Sophie,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ breathed Sophie, i
n imitation of her old nurse.

  ‘Now Miss Sarah, if you are ready, I can attend to your hair,’ said Brigstock.

  ‘You and I will not be needed,’ said Susan to Sophie.

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Sophie wriggled off the bed and went to her own room.

  Susan, who was quite ready, went downstairs. She found Nicholas and Augusta in the morning room.

  ‘How are things progressing?’ smiled Nicholas as Augusta turned crossly towards Susan.

  ‘She is having her hair dressed. She ought to be ready fairly soon.’

  ‘A woman’s soon!’ It was a joke.

  ‘Yes exactly, Father’. Susan sat down rather awkwardly. Although she had interrupted a quarrel, she could hardly leave them to carry on with it now. They were quiet for a while.

  ‘I’ve been telling your stepmother that she ought not to wear that costume. It’s unbecoming, don’t you agree, Susan?’ said Nicholas.

  It was a grape-purple silk, of plain and old-fashioned cut, and with it Augusta wore dangling gold and pearl earrings and a long string of creamy, irregular pearls, knotted on her bosom. Her complexion was not flattered by the colour.

  ‘None of us is becomingly dressed,’ said Augusta. ‘Including you, dear Nicholas. Look at Susan in that insipid blue, and Sophie, too, will look foolish. Gauze sleeves and silk roses!’

  ‘She wouldn’t if she wore a dress suited to her age,’ said Nicholas.