The Westerby Inheritance

by M C Beaton

  “I think you are a fine woman, Hetty,” she said, hugging her stepmother harder, gun and all. “I think I had better learn to use a gun too. Come, you shall teach me how to use a gun, and I shall teach you how to embroider, and that way we shall begin to share our skills.”

  “You mean it?” Hetty turned a shining face on her, her mercurial spirits as elated as they had been depressed a bare moment ago.

  “Yes, I mean it,” said Jane earnestly. And, putting her arm around her tall stepmother’s waist, she led her toward home.

  But Hetty would not train Jane to use a rifle. Jane was too small and would be in danger of rendering herself deaf or dislocating her shoulder, at the very least. Hetty produced a fine pair of pistols and said she would teach Jane to use a pistol instead. “It’s about the only things apart from his sword that your pa h’an’t pawned,” she explained.

  Throughout the following long, hot days, Hetty taught Jane how to aim and fire until she declared in delight that Jane’s skill had surpassed that of her teacher.

  Although she was desperately uninterested in acquiring any skill with the needle, Hetty patiently tried to learn, enjoying this new closeness with her stepdaughter.

  And then the letter from Lady Comfrey arrived. It was bald and to the point. Jane was invited to London, on the understanding that, if she did not “suit,” she would be returned to the country forthwith.

  All Jane’s ambitions came flooding back. Feverishly, she began to darn and mend what clothes she had. Lady Comfrey was to send a carriage for her in a bare two days’ time.

  Betty and Sally, her stepsisters, were frankly envious and begged her to send them sugarplums from “Lunnon.”

  The Marquess was too drunk to understand or care.

  Hetty felt as if a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. It was different for Sally and Betty. They came from the same coarse mold as herself and were better prepared to cope with the rougher side of life. But she had hated to see the dainty Jane suffer. Now she, Hetty, could be happy.

  With this thought, she pushed her husband’s head aside—it was lying on the kitchen table—and poured herself a tankard of Lisbon to celebrate, and glugged it down noisily.

  Her eyes, peering over the rim of the tankard, met those of Jane just before Jane quickly dropped her own. But not before Hetty had seen that old familiar look of disgust and contempt.

  Hetty gave a heavy sigh. She felt she had lost Jane forever. Jane would meet all the fine lords and ladies in London and would compare their grand manners with those of her common stepmother. She was suddenly impatient for Jane’s leavetaking.

  Despite Jane’s fears to the contrary, Lady Comfrey’s carriage arrived at the appointed time, complete with wigged coachman, two footmen on the back strap, and two burly outriders. Jane’s very small trunk was strapped to the roof, and she turned to say good-bye to Hetty and her stepsisters. The Marquess was sleeping off his latest bout and hardly seemed to be aware that his daughter was leaving.

  Hetty gave Jane a warm hug, her eyes filling with tears. Little Betty began to cry, because she was a soft-hearted creature and fond of her stepsister. Sally tossed her dark mane of hair, so like her mother’s, and begged Jane not to forget and send sugarplums. The Syms family had arrived in full force, Mrs. Syms unbending slightly since Jane was going to an aristocratic address.

  Jane felt guilty at feeling so cheerful. With the boundless optimism of youth, she considered the matter of restoring her father’s estates as having been almost achieved. In London, all would be elegance and good taste.

  The combined efforts of the Syms and Westerby households had managed to turn out Lady Jane Lovelace in full fashion. Her gown had a flowered silk bodice and cream-colored skirts trimmed with lace. Light blue shoulder knots, an amber necklace, brown Swedish gloves, a flowered silk belt of green and gray and yellow with a bow at the side, and a brown straw hat with flowers of green and yellow completed her ensemble. Jane felt very strange and new in all her finery. She wore her hair unpowdered, and—wonder of wonders!—Hetty had managed to find her a long walking cane decorated with gay ribbons. Carefully managing the enormous hoop of her gown, Jane was assisted into the coach.

  “I shall see you soon,” whispered Philadelphia. “You must ask Lady Comfrey to invite me too!”

  The coachman cracked his whip. “God go with you,” cried Mr. Syms, waving his hat.

  Hetty stood silent, one hand on the shoulder of each of her daughters. Large tears were running unchecked down her brown face.

  “Don’t cry!” called Jane. But she did not want to lean out of the coach window for fear of demeaning herself in the eyes of the servants, and so her last remark went unheard.

  Already father and stepfamily were fading and fading and growing smaller and smaller in Jane’s mind, until, as the carriage swung out onto the London road, they had disappeared altogether. London took up the whole of her horizon.

  It was only a few hours’ drive to London, so Jane had a peaceful respite in which to dream of that glittering capital of elegance and wit, of spires and fine buildings, drawing rooms and parks.

  The reality was like nothing she had ever imagined.

  Nothing had prepared her for the noise.

  In the first place, shopkeepers had apprentices outside their shops, bawling lustily, “Rally up, ladies! Buy! Buy! Buy!” Add to that the people who had skills to sell, bawling out offers to mend chairs, grind knives, solder pots, buy rags or kitchen stuff, rabbit skins or rusty swords, exchange old clothes or wigs, mend old china, cut wires—this excruciating, rasping operation was done in the open—or copper casks.

  Then there were the sellers of things to eat and drink—saloop, barley broth, rice, milk, frumenty. Shrewsbury cakes, eggs, lily-white vinegar, hot peascods, rabbits, pullets, gingerbread, oysters, honey, cherry ripe, Chaney oranges, hot codlins, pippins, fruit of all kinds, fish, taffity tarts, fresh water, tripe, tansy, greens, mustard, salt, gray pease, watercresses, shrimps, rosemary, lavender, milk, and elder buds. Or things for domestic use—lace, ribbons, almanacks, ink, small coal, sealing wax, wood to cleave, earthenware, spigots, combs, buckles, leghorns, pewter pots, brooms in exchange for old shoes, things of horn, Holland socks, woollen socks and wrappers, brimstone matches, flint and steel, shoelaces, scissors, and straps—the thousand and one things not sold in shops but peddled on the streets, each salesman trying to outcry the other.

  Then there was the bear-ward with his animal and his drum and his dogs, the sweep shouting from the housetop, the ballad singer bawling in the road, the tumbler and the dancing girl adding to the cacophony with fife and drum.

  There were the wagons that went ponderously grinding over the rough stones on the road; the carts rumbled, the brewers’ sledges growled, the chariot carrying Jane through all this melee rattled abominably, and the drivers in the streets quarreled and cursed and fought.

  A trumpeter was calling the rabble to see a six-legged calf; a fresh-faced country youth was screaming in the filth of the kennel where he had been thrown by a bully with a two-yard-long sword who had told him, “Turn out there, you country putt!”

  The pedestrians on the pavements were in constant danger of being flattened by burly and aged chairmen who carried their sedans at a fantastic rate, or blinded by barbers who blew powder onto wigs outside their shops with great energy and strength of lung.

  Jane huddled in the corner of the carriage, deafened by the tremendous roar from the streets; frightened by wild, staring faces outside the carriage window; frightened by the shifting, moving, howling, ever-changing rabble. She did not look out of the carriage window again until she realized that the noises of the street had abruptly died away. The carriage was swinging round into Huggets Square.

  She stiffly alighted, with the help of the footmen, and followed them up the shallow steps, not quite knowing how to handle her beribboned cane, which was as long as Jane was short. A massive butler with the dignity of an archdeacon opened the door and ushered Jan
e into the almost tangible silence of Number Ten. “I will h’ascertain whether my lady is at ’ome,” he intoned, showing Jane into the morning room and closing the door behind her.

  Jane looked about her curiously. The room was sparsely, if elegantly furnished, with delicate little chairs and a handsome writing desk in one corner. A round satinwood table in the center of the room was laid for tea, with a teapoy—a tea chest on a small tripod table—standing at attention, its four lacquered canisters and mixing bowls gleaming with blues and reds and golds.

  The door opened, and Lady Comfrey entered. Both ladies surveyed each other, each trying to hide her disappointment. Jane had secretly been hoping for a substitute mother, Lady Comfrey for a beauty.

  Jane saw what seemed, to her young eyes, a very old lady who was painted and patched and powdered like a grotesque. Lady Comfrey’s youthful, striped satin gown had a low decolletage which cried out for a fichu, since it revealed rather too much of her scrawny bosom. Her eyes were very dark, almost black, and seemed to be the only thing about her that were alive.

  Lady Comfrey saw a very small girl, little more than a child, with a pinched, elfin face and oddly slanting brows.

  “Well,” said Lady Comfrey, deciding to make the best of things, “I am sure you would like a dish of Bohea after your journey. Pray be seated and tell me how your papa goes on.”

  “He—” began Jane.

  “It is a pity he gambled away his estates,” said Lady Comfrey, who was not in the way of holding conversations with anyone other than herself. “It is always the ones who are unlucky at cards who are the most taken with the pastime, although it has come to my ears that there is a certain Lord Charles Welbourne who is accounted a demon with the cards. ’Tis said he has sold his soul to Satan. Would you consider that at all the case?”

  “I—”

  “Neither do I. And so I told Bella. Bella is my maid, and a monstrous fund of gossip. I know it is not at all the thing to chat to one’s servants, but then there is no one else precisely. Such a pity about your father’s marriage. The final straw! Vulgar, common, ranting woman.”

  “I must protest—” began Jane hotly, but Lady Comfrey busied herself over the teapoy and carried on regardless.

  “But la! When a man is in his cups he will mate with anything. ’Tis said that the Duke of Salford did wed his first cousin, who is at least thirty years older than he, after six bottles of canary and by the time he had sobered and realized what he had done, it was too late. I am told they are quite one of the attractions at Ranelagh, and she does chatter so, quite unbecoming in the old, don’t you see, for I knew her when she was a schoolroom miss, and that was not yesterday. Lud, but you are a quiet child!”

  “I—”

  “Of course, the Bentleys are common. Common as the barber’s chair, and you cannot find anything commoner than that. Or is it ‘more common’? Or does it matter? Do have some Shrewsbury cakes. They are exceeding good.”

  Lady Comfrey took one herself, and Jane, seizing the opportunity now that her hostess’s mouth was full, fought down her resentment at Lady Comfrey’s remarks on her father and his marriage, and tried to make her speech of thanks for the invitation.

  “I am most grateful,” she began, but Lady Comfrey, started to speak again, despite the impediment of cake.

  “We shall not go out much, if at all,” said Lady Comfrey, dashing Jane’s hopes of meeting a rich husband then and there. “I had meant to take you about a little, but you are not exactly a beauty and I find the social round fatiguing, or rather I did when I did it. And then we shall be company for each other. You are not pretty, no, but very entertaining.”

  Like most selfish elderly people, Lady Comfrey considered any good listener the height of wit and entertainment. “But you may take Wong for walks—Wong is my pug—and you may read to me. I am glad to see your clothes are very well, for that will spare me the expense of furnishing you with a wardrobe.

  “Bella said to me that a young thing like you would want to see some of the sights of London, but, ‘La! Bella,’ I said. ‘Why should she crave the sights when she has me?’ ‘Well, my lady, that’s true enough,’ says Bella and gives that terrible horse laugh of hers, although I declare I could not see anything at all funny.”

  “Godmother!” cried Jane in a loud voice. “I really must—”

  “Of course, you will want to lie down after the rigors of your journey.” Lady Comfrey rang a large brass bell. “I am, or used to be, fatigued even after a drive in the park. Ah, Bella! Show Lady Jane to her room. No, don’t thank me, child. My pleasure, I assure you!”

  Jane looked appealingly at Bella, who jerked her head toward the door.

  “Didn’t let you speak, I’ll warrant,” said Bella, leading the way up the shallow wooden stairs to the upper floors, where all the musty heat of a London summer seemed to have gathered.

  “No,” said Jane. “She—”

  “Never has and never will,” said Bella with plump satisfaction. “Talks to herself a lot, you see, so she only hears her own voice. Now, here’s your rooms, my lady, and just ring should you need anything. I’ll need to remind my lady that you’re in the house, for she won’t remember. Anyone would think we was in the Dark Ages instead of 1749, and that’s a fact.”

  “It’s 1751,” said Jane, but Bella had already bustled out and could be heard thumping down the staircase.

  “This is mad!” thought Jane, sinking down onto a chair. “No one listens to a word I say. And, oh! I was better off at home. I shall be immured here and I shall not meet any gentlemen and I shall become as mad as Lady Comfrey. Oh, what am I to do?”

  And, feeling very sorry for herself indeed, Jane cried into her lace handkerchief (courtesy of Mrs. Syms) until she could cry no more.

  She felt weak and dizzy when she dried her eyes and, without undressing or taking in much of her surroundings, she walked from the little sitting room into which Bella had ushered her, through to the bedroom, fell headlong on the bed and straight down into a dreamless sleep.

  When she awoke, she felt hot and gritty and she had bent her hoop into some strange shape by lying on it. The light was failing, and she realized she must have slept for some hours. Jane quickly undressed and washed as best as she could at a little marble washstand in the corner, which was furnished with two copper cans of tepid water. Then she went to the window and managed to open it after strenuous effort.

  She leaned out.

  A pale primrose sky was dying over the jumbled rooftops of St. James’s, and lengthening shadows were giving the sooty garden of the square a mysterious beauty. Flambeaux were already flaring and sputtering in their iron brackets on the walls of the house across the square, and even as Jane watched, a smart carriage rolled up, preceded by two magnificent running footmen.

  A lady and gentleman alighted. They were powdered and painted and both magnificently dressed in white silk. Jewels blazed from the clothes of both man and woman. The woman stumbled slightly on the step on her high jeweled heels, and her escort put his arm around her waist to support her and smiled lovingly down at her and asked something, and the woman tossed her head and laughed up at him. Both were young and quite handsome.

  Even after the door had closed on them, Jane stayed watching, a strange pain at her heart. She had never thought about love entering her own future, that future which held some rich and elderly beau. She experienced her first dawning realization that there might be a kind of love which she had considered as belonging only to daydreams, a love based on affection. Not the lustful love of Hetty and her father, nor the passionate, bosom-heaving love of the novels she had read with Philadelphia, but something tender and delicate. “A consummation devoutly to be wished.” Who had said that? She could not remember—except, vaguely, that the author had not been talking of love but of death.

  Chapter Five

  August dragged its weary length to its dusty and hot end, and people shook their heads over the unnatural behavior of the weather. Anoth
er earthquake was prophesied.

  Jane wrote a sad letter to Philadelphia to explain that she, Jane, had not asked Lady Comfrey whether Philadelphia could come on a visit, since what would be the point? “I go nowhere,” Jane wrote, “except once round the square with Lady Comfrey’s fat little pug.”

  At times Jane thought she might go mad with tedium and heat. Never had she suffered such heat! Bella prattled on of how society had parties on the river on barges under cool silken canopies, or parties in the woods and parties in the parks. It all seemed so near and yet so far! Bella culled her fund of gossip from the other servants in the square, and it was because of this gossip that Jane had acquired a new wardrobe.

  Bella had been humiliated to find her servant friends sniggering over Jane’s patched and mended gowns as Jane walked Wong in the square. The gown she had worn on her arrival had been carefully laid away in tissue paper, in the fond hope that one day she might receive just one invitation. So Bella had complained to Lady Comfrey about the state of affairs, and somehow Lady Comfrey had heard her for once, instead of the voices in her own head, and had authorized the purchase of a wardrobe for Jane.

  Jane’s heart had beat high with excitement as she envisioned visits to the couturier. But Lady Comfrey’s household did not go to the world; the world came to it. And so it was that Mr. Joubert, that famous couturier, attended to Jane’s needs in the dusty heat of Number Ten, and very soon Lady Jane Lovelace was possessed of one of the finest wardrobes in London, with nowhere to wear it except the sooty confines of the square.

  But extreme heat can be as stifling to the emotions as extreme cold, and gradually Jane’s ambitions died within her. She walked Wong, she listened to Lady Comfrey’s onesided conversations, and she read to her.

  The last day of August was even more brassy than the rest. The air seemed charged with nervous tension.