Jane and the Barque of Frailty jam-9

by Stephanie Barron

  “The pleasure must be mine, monsieur,” I returned. “I hope your mother is not decidedly unwell?”

  “A trifling indisposition — the return of an old complaint.”

  “And your father, Julien?” Eliza put in with unusual acid. “Does he sit by her bedside, bathing her temples with lavender water?”

  The gentleman smiled as tho’ she had offered him a jest, and turned to greet Martha East.

  “Is he not a buck of the first stare?” Eliza murmured. “And but nineteen!”

  “He bears himself with the possession of a man twice that age.”

  “Your Frenchmen usually do. They are not suffered to run about with guns and dogs as our English boys will; their sport is of a deadlier kind, involving swords and hearts, and their apprenticeship is from infancy. I wonder where the old Comte has gone this evening?”

  “To sit at the feet of Miss Radcliffe.”

  “Let us hope she kicks him, then,” Eliza said, and went off to coze with Mrs. Latouche.

  “YOU HAVE QUITE THE LOOK OF YOUR EXCELLENT brother,” Count Julien observed, as the first covers were removed from the table. “He is from home, I collect?”

  “Yes — called away to Oxford, on a matter of banking business.”

  “And you are not uneasy? Forgive me — but the violence of the neighbourhood of Hans Town — the suicide of the Russian Princess — and your house now unprotected by a man—”

  “My brother left his valet in Sloane Street,” I answered evenly, “and the Princess died in Berkeley Square.”

  “Indeed. I was forgetting. My family was a little acquainted with the lady, you understand, and all I have heard in recent days is Hans Place.”

  “I suppose it is only natural for émigrés to know one another,” I observed.

  His smile twisted. “Our very un-Englishness makes us cling to one another? There is some truth in that, tant pis.”

  “I am sorry — I did not mean to offend — but her death must have come as a shock to all your family. I believe your mother felt it so.”

  “They were not on the best of terms,” he said, fixing his eyes on my countenance, “but I esteemed the lady, and pitied her loneliness. Yes, I felt her death to be a horror. I had seen her alive that very evening.”

  “At the Theatre Royal? I had not known you were one of your parents’ party.”

  “I sat in the pit, among my acquaintance,” he said simply. “But I do not think I noticed the Princess then. I saw her later in the courtyard of the Albany, where I have my rooms.”

  A frisson of interest swept up my spine, but I schooled my voice to indifference. “I wonder what she can have found to take her there?”

  He shrugged. “Un amant, n’est-ce pas? It is an abode for single gentlemen, after all; and at such an hour — it was all of two o’clock in the morning. Pauvre enfant. She was an unhappy woman.”

  This was the first hint of information I had been certain must elude us — a suggestion of the Princess’s tragic course, in the hours between her first visit to Castlereagh’s house, and her death four hours later.

  “She was alone, I collect?”

  “Always — that night, and every night, no matter how many persons she gathered about her. La Tscholikova had a genius for solitude; she carried it, like the Russian winter, within her.”

  “What very extraordinary behaviour! I wonder whom she might chuse to visit in the Albany? Nothing of a friendship in that quarter was mentioned at the inquest.”

  His expression sharpened. “You attended the coroner’s panel?”

  “My brother was required to give evidence,” I said primly, “and I merely accompanied him, my sister being indisposed.”

  “I see.” He hesitated an instant, as tho’ weighing my words; then said, “Whomever she sought, she did not find him. She would not otherwise have been standing like a lost child in the courtyard.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “I did not. I was already in my rooms, vous comprenez, and observed her from the window. And as I watched, she turned and quitted the courtyard for the street. I assume she had a carriage waiting there — for she was still in evening dress.”

  It was remarkable how neatly he offered this intelligence, pat as a rehearsed recital, and I must be forgiven for meeting it with as much suspicion as interest. I studied Count Julien’s profile as he bent over his dinner, and noted once more the maturity behind the youthful façade — the look of a young man too well-acquainted with the world.

  “You are an admirable son to devote your evening to a parcel of dowds, Count. What is the meaning of such charity?”

  I had used the phrase deliberately, as reflecting Eliza’s careless remark, but in truth the insipid conversation of several women in their fifties, two spinsters nearly twice his age, and a clutch of gentlemen whose long association with Mrs. Latouche’s husbands recommended them to her society, must have proved unbearably tedious to the boy. I was certain some other interest compelled his attendance; and my evil genius whispered that he was come in the guise of spy — at his mother’s behest. Was it possible that the Comtesse d’Entraigues had learned to fear her oldest friend — Eliza?

  “Dowds!” the Count returned, with an easing of his expression; “you move me to utter a compliment on your beauty, Miss Austen — for certainly no one treated to the vision you present, could proclaim you a dowd!”

  “I hope I am not such a gudgeon as to credit such stuff,” I said calmly. “Do admit that you are bored to desperation — and accept our thanks for enlivening the party. What are the usual pursuits for a gentleman of nineteen? I enquire as the aunt of several young men, who shall be on the Town in a few years.”

  Count Julien allowed me to turn the conversation from the Princess with good grace. “For those of means as well as birth, the possibilities are legion! There are the clubs, where one might play at cards or dice; the wagers on horseflesh; the carriage-driving in the Park; cockfights and mills — these are the prize-fights, you understand — and of course, the pleasures of Society, such as assemblies at Almack’s, or the private parties of the ton.”

  “Decidedly, you mortify your flesh in enduring this evening! I am even more in your debt, sir. Do gentlemen such as yourself patronise the Muslin Company? Or is that reserved for an elder set?”

  If I had expected to jar his complacency — excite his consciousness of his father’s affairs — I was to be disappointed.

  “I spoke of those who possess means,” he reminded me, “not merely birth. The High Flyers scorn those of us whose hearts are ampler than our purses; and if I may be so coarse as to declare it, Miss Austen, your genteel ladies are much the same. I have a title — a certain breeding — but I am heir to a château presently in ruins somewhere in the Auvergne, and the doors of the ton are not always open to me, you understand. When the gift of friendship is offered — as Mrs. Latouche offers it — I should be a fool to do other than honour her. Presently she will beg me to play the pianoforte — that is my gift — and after a little show of modest unwillingness, I shall oblige. It is possible I may have to earn my bread in such a way, with time.”

  “Surely not! Even in England there are any number of expensive young men, whose fortunes are unequal to their births,” I persisted. “Second sons, for instance — or seventh sons. Surely they shift and contrive?”

  “You think me suited to the Church?” said he, with a sardonic lift of the brow. “My father’s cleverness and my mother’s art are my sole inheritances, Miss Austen; neither is given to a pious turn. I had much better marry my fortune — if any schoolroom chit possessed of means will entertain my suit. That is the solution so many of your second sons employ. But which heiress? Perhaps Miss East will have me, if I can but acquire a taste for reading.”

  The cynicism of the speech should have been an effrontery, had it not been uttered with a boy’s painful bitterness; and for an instant, I glimpsed the raw youth full-blown behind the polished manners, and pitied Count Julien. H
e reminded me a little of my Willoughby — born to a station he could not maintain, but for a desperate gaming — the courting of aged relatives — and finally, the sale of his soul in pursuit of an heiress. Society is reckless, in teaching its youth to despise honest labour.

  “If not the Church, then consider the Law,” I suggested. “Or, my dear Count—! You might be endlessly useful as a secretary, particularly among such men as require translations from the French! Consider the realm of politics. Surely with your father’s connexions … I know of an Earl’s son, Charles Malverley, who finds no shame in such a situation. … ”

  Count Julien rose abruptly from his chair, tho’ the second course was hardly begun. “I can well believe that Malverley is insensible to shame,” he said, in a voice tense and low. “He has no feelings to offend. You must forgive me, Miss Austen — I find I cannot support this party after all.”

  He would have quitted the room on these words, but that Mrs. Latouche clapped her hands, and said with obvious delight, “Julien! Do you mean to play? His performance on the pianoforte is most superior, I assure you.” With effort, and an enchanting smile, the impoverished nobleman bowed. “Of course, chère madame,” he said. “You have only to call the tune.”

  IT WAS, WITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST EXQUISITE music I have ever been privileged to hear. His fingers moved with a delicacy and precision that lacked nothing in skill; but the emotions they conjured forth owed everything to passion. I had only to listen once to Count Julien d’Entraigues, to know that in him I had met a young man of complex forces; a man whose obvious charm hid a subtler, more potent self; a man who might be capable of anything.

  I quitted the house on Portman Square not long after his hands had stilled, and the sweetness of the final notes died away in the air. There seemed nothing more to keep us in that over-furnished drawing-room.

  “Beethoven, I think,” Eliza murmured as our hackney pulled up in Sloane Street; and I was still sufficiently bemused — canvassing every detail, every word of my conversation with the Frenchman that evening— that I failed to pay sufficient attention to her words, or even to Eliza herself. I was already mounting the stairs as she paid off the jarvey; I had opened the door — it had been left on the latch — and had stepped into the front passage as the hackney pulled away. It was only as I turned to pull off my gloves and remove my bonnet, that I caught Eliza’s sharp cry.

  Chapter 24

  The Gentleman in His Cups

  Monday, 29 April 1811, cont.

  SHE LAY IN A CRUMPLED HEAP OF FEATHERS AND silk on the flagway, but a yard from the door.

  “Eliza!” I cried in horror. “Manon — Manon, come quickly! Your mistress has swooned!”

  I hastened back across the threshold and knelt over the limp form. Eliza’s arms were flung above her head, and her reticule had slipped from her hand; in the glow of the streetlamp her pallor was dreadful.

  “Good God, what can have happened?” I placed my arm behind her shoulders to support her, and raised her from the stones. She groaned pitiably.

  “Sacre dieu!” Manon muttered beside me. She wore her nightdress and cap; the faint scent of lavender rose from the fresh linen on the chill night air. The maid’s fingers, where they touched my arm, were icy; and I saw that she had not stayed even to don a dressing gown. “Let us take her inside.”

  I grasped Eliza’s torso, and Manon supported her knees; and so we half-carried, half-dragged my sister’s lifeless form inside the house. Madame Bigeon was standing in the front passage, her candle raised, her aged face piteously crumpled.

  “Pauvre madame! She fainted?”

  “I must suppose it to be so — and then struck her head, perhaps, on the flagway. She is certainly insensible.”

  “With that little indisposition, and her delicate constitution — she ought not to have gone out. I told Monsieur Henri how it should be, if he left her — how she would be gay to the point of dissipation, at the very risk of her life—”

  “Lay her on the sopha, Manon, and Madame Bigeon — some hartshorn, please, or feathers we might burn beneath her nose—”

  “Brandy is what she requires,” Madame Bigeon said bluntly, and turned towards the kitchen.

  We settled Eliza on the sopha, and I bent to untie her bonnet strings. Manon threw a log on the drawing-room fire, which had been allowed to go out, and began to work the bellows.

  “Never mind that! Chafe her wrists,” I commanded, and removed the bonnet.

  Eliza groaned more violently than before, and her eyelids fluttered open. Then, with an expression of acute agony, she murmured, “Oh, Lord! My head,” and fell back once more into a swoon.

  “I shall step next door to Mr. Haden’s,” I said hurriedly, and ran for the surgeon.

  “SHE WAS STRUCK A FEARSOME BLOW FROM BEHIND,” I told Mr. Chizzlewit when he called in Sloane Street this morning, in answer to the summons I had penned in the wee hours and despatched at first light in the hands of Henry’s manservant. “The instrument was a cobblestone, Mr. Haden believes — and but for the cushioning effect of her bonnet, the force might well have cracked her skull. We may thank God that my sister lives; and other than a tenderness in the region, a lump the size of a potato, and a good deal of indignation at the way in which she has been served, she suffers no severe effects. Indeed, she will not even allow me to inform my brother of the event — which shows her to remain unaffectedly silly, despite her sufferings.”

  “I am shocked,” he said with unwonted gravity— “indeed, I am grieved. That so lovely a creature as Mrs. Henry should be assaulted with such violence— But is there no one who can describe her assailant?”

  “Sloane Street — all of Hans Town — is a rural vicinity,” I reminded him, “and its denizens are not much in the habit of such dissipation as dining out late on a Sunday night. It must have been all of eleven o’clock when our hackney arrived at the door; and by then, nearly every candle was extinguished. We have not your expensive gas-lighting in these parts; the oil lamps are dim at best; and even I, who was but three yards from her position, heard and saw nothing— until it was too late. Can you have an idea how I blame myself?”

  I broke off, and shielded my eyes with my hand. “Forgive me. I passed an uneasy night.”

  “Not at all,” he murmured. “And the surgeon — Haden? Has he given you cause for concern?”

  “He believes she will recover fully — and when I hear how she orders all of us about, and how thoroughly she enjoys the attention, as she reigns like a queen among her bedclothes, supplied with draughts, and panadas, and surrounded by the latest numbers of the Ladies Monthly Museum and La Belle Assemblée, I should laugh to think she gives me the smallest moment of anxiety![24] If it were not that my brother charged me expressly with taking the utmost care of her in his absence—”

  “She saw nothing, heard nothing, of her attacker?”

  I shook my head. “The wheels of the departing hackney obscured every sound; and in the darkness—”

  “Of course.” Mr. Chizzlewit turned the brim of his curly beaver between his hands; it was a handsome article, as was everything about his neat and elegant form. “But what I must demand is why? Why should anyone chuse to strike down Mrs. Austen? Her reticule was not stolen, I collect?”

  “Nor anything else she carried on her person. The sole object of violence was Eliza herself. And so we must conclude that the attack found its motivation in this dreadful business of the Princess’s murder.” I held the solicitor’s gaze. “For my part, I can think of only one person who has reason to fear my sister — and that is the Comtesse d’Entraigues, who may now believe she divulged too much of a private nature, in her various interviews. Perhaps she has learned somehow of the jewels’ discovery, and restoration to Prince Pirov — perhaps her entire story was a fabrication, intended to obscure a far more malevolent history — I do not know. I may only say that the Comtesse was promised to dine with us last evening, then sent her son as proxy, complaining of a sick headache.”r />
  “—So that she might lurk in wait for your carriage in Sloane Street, and murder her friend?” Sylvester Chizzlewit’s brows soared. “I should call the idea fantastic — were the whole business not already so!”

  I raised my hands in supplication. “One has only to consider of her story as a farrago of lies from beginning to end, to admit that she is ideally positioned to have murdered the Princess — and thus to fear my sister’s knowledge of her affairs. A woman who has killed once, should not hesitate to kill again.”

  “But happily, she failed to do so. I think perhaps I should consult my grandfather — and enquire whether he knows of a likely personage in Barnes, Surrey, who might be set upon the d’Entraigues household. We ought to be informed of their movements — provided the informer acts with discretion.”

  A bell sounded somewhere above — from Eliza’s room, no doubt — and Mr. Chizzlewit said, “I have trespassed too long. I stay only to enquire if there is any way I may serve you, Miss Austen? — Any want of Mrs. Henry’s I might supply?”

  “You are very good! For of course you must apprehend that I called you hither only to presume upon your generosity. I should like the hackney driver questioned, if possible. He may, indeed, have seen something as he drove off that he failed to put to the proper account.”

  “Of course! The jarvey! You engaged him in Portman Square?”

  “There is a stand of such men, waiting on the custom of the inhabitants. It is possible that our driver makes a habit of loitering there—”

  “—and thus might be readily found. I am happy to oblige you — and shall search for him instantly.”

  “Not so swiftly, I hope.” I raised a hand as tho’ to hold him back. “There is one other who might well have observed Eliza’s attacker — tho’ if he should have done so, I am all amazement that he did not come forward.”

  “Indeed? You observed someone in the street — or a neighbour, perhaps, whose lamp was yet lit?”