‘Very well then, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. When the minuets are over, I’ll come to you, and if you have any dances still free, I’ll take them, but if anyone else asks you afterwards, I’ll step down. How would that be?’
‘Oh, very well,’ Jemima said, dissatisfied, without quite knowing why. Her mind jumped to her new dress again. ‘Do you think Papa will let me wear the Countess’s diamonds?’
Dining downstairs was exciting enough, with its new dishes, and so much more choice, although having to make conversation was uncomfortable, particularly as she was seated between an elderly lady who was deaf and a fat alderman who wanted to talk about the scandal of young men bathing naked in the River Ouse beside the New Walk, which made it difficult for Jemima not to laugh. After dinner everyone went to sit in the drawing room while the family gave her her birthday presents. Robert gave her a book of his own sermons; Edmund was away, but Augusta gave her a pair of tortoise-shell combs, which Jemima thought very kind. Uncle George gave her a pair of lavender gloves for riding, and kissed her cheek, whereupon he became more scarlet in the face than ever and retired hastily to his fireside seat.
Everyone’s presents were typical of them, Jemima found herself thinking. Her mother’s present was a needle-case with the comment that she didn’t suppose Jemima would get much use from it: Allen, who had little money but was skilled at working in wood, had made her a beautiful cedar-wood box in which to keep her handkerchiefs. Finally her father took her hand and said:
‘Come to the window, chick, and you’ll see my present to you.’
Jemima went with him, intrigued, noticing her mother’s sour expression as she did so. It must be something her mother disapproved of, she thought. Her father flung open the casement and stepped aside, and Jemima leaned across the windowseat and looked out. On the opposite bank of the moat stood a groom holding the halter of a beautiful black colt. He had one white sock before, and a white star on his brow the shape of a dew-drop; the sound of the window had caught his attention, and he was looking towards it with his ears pricked, and when Jemima leaned out and cried, ‘Oh he’s lovely!’ he whickered as if in reply.
She turned round and hugged her father. ‘Oh, Papa, thank you! He is perfect.’
‘He’s called Jewel, and he’s four years old, just the right age for you to mould him your own way,’ Jemmy said, pleased with her pleasure. ‘It was time you had a horse of your own. If you’re old enough for grown-up dresses, you’re old enough for a proper horse. I picked him out for you myself last year, and I’ve been schooling him, though I had to leave it to Allen to ride him – I’m much too heavy – so if he’s any bad habits, you can blame your uncle.’
‘I’m sure he hasn’t, he looks perfect,’ Jemima said. ‘Does he—’
Here Lady Mary intervened. ‘That’s enough, Jemima. It is quite unsuitable to talk about horses in the drawing room. Remember we have guests. Mr Morland, will the tea be here soon, do you think?’
Jemima subsided, hurt, and Jemmy obeyed the hint by going to the door and calling for tea. It was brought at once, and after tea Jemima went upstairs to he down before the excitements of the evening began with dressing in her new dress.
While Rachel dressed her for the ball, Mary was aware of feeling more miserable than at any time since the first terrible days of her marriage. Rachel did her best to cheer her mistress by admiring her dress – of her favourite harebell shade, no Lady Dudley now to make her wear pink – but it did no good. After a moment Lady Mary interrupted her.
‘Thank you, Rachel, but you may save your breath. What pleasure can I have in a ball for my grown-up daughter? I am nearly forty years old; I am lame and cannot dance; and I certainly have no lover amongst the invited guests.’
Rachel was silent, blushing at the unexpected frankness, but Mary was beyond caring if she shocked her maid. Her sons were dead, and as if that were not enough, here was her daughter preparing to usurp everything she had ever had, her place as Mistress of Morland Place, and the regard of her husband which she had always wanted. She remembered so clearly the time when Jemmy had given her a horse, how afraid she had been, how Davey had taught her secretly to ride. Jemmy would not do as much for her now; she doubted if he even remembered giving her Leppard.
Tonight at the ball her daughter would become a woman. Her daughter who had crippled her, so that she would not be able to dance tonight; her daughter who, in growing up, was making Mary old. And her husband would dance with Lady Strathord, with the Princess, as he still insisted on calling her. When the Princess was a child, Jemmy had loved her more than he loved his own sons. And now, now that the Princess was a child no longer? She stared down at her blue dress, and hated it, and hated herself. Her restless, pained mind turned here and there, seeking relief, and fixed once more on her daughter, and her mouth turned down bitterly.
‘Rachel,’ she said, ‘send word to Miss Jemima that I want to see her when she is dressed. I want to see how well she looks.’
‘You look wonderful, Miss,’ Jane Chort said, standing back to admire her handiwork. Jemima stood like a statue, hardly daring to breathe, looking at her upper half in the mirror, and longing, as she had done at Lyme, to see the rest. She could not claim to be comfortable: everything she had on seemed to be hurting her in one place or another. Her stockings of fine silk had to be gartered very tightly to keep them up, and the garters were biting into her lower thigh. Over her chemise, around her waist, the tapes of her pannier-hoops were gripping her tightly. Her corsets were stiffened with both whalebone and wire, to give her upper body the fashionable, smooth cone-shape, and to make her neckline convex. Her new, budding breasts were forced in and up into the neckline in a way that they, at least, found most unnatural, and the sachet of scented herbs that was tucked down between them was scratching her. Her shoes were pointed and high-heeled, and hurt her feet, and her head felt as though it was stuffed with nails, where the multitude of hairpins was holding her tête de mouton coiffure in place.
But all that was as nothing beside the pride and excitement of being dressed in her first ballgown. It was of satin, of a heavenly lilac colour, with the petticoat and robings a shade darker. The stomacher was frilled with silver lace, and petticoat was trimmed with layers of stiff silver ribbon, and there were silver rosettes on the shoes. Her hair was curled all over, and the bunch of ringlets behind was held with artificial flowers and silver and purple ribbons. And, best of all, she was wearing the Countess’s diamond collar, which made her hold her head up in a way that all the deportment lessons she had had all her life had tried and failed to achieve.
‘You’re an absolute picture, miss. Now here’s your gloves – you’d better go along to your mother’s room. Be careful of your heels, and walk slowly, remember, and mind how you go through the door with your panniers. Have a good time, and remember all I’ve told you and be a credit to me.’
Jemima could only nod, carefully, for to have kissed Jane would have involved manoeuvres she was not sure she could manage as yet. As Jane held the door open for her, she walked slowly and carefully out and towards her mother’s room.
Mary stared at her daughter bitterly. At a stroke, she thought, they had changed the child into a woman, and cast Mary herself back a generation. Jemima’s cheeks were so bright she might have painted them, though Mary knew from experience it was the tightness of her bodice that was causing it. But her eyes were bright too, the curling hair was glossy, and her figure in the new stays was womanly. She was not pretty, but she was no longer, as she had been all her childhood, plain. She was – striking. Why are you alive, she thought, and my sons dead?
‘I suppose you look well enough,’ she said at last, ‘though purple ribbons will put everyone in mind of funerals.’
Jemima’s excitement was enough to make her unguarded. ‘I can’t think how I shall manage to dance, in these corsets, and these shoes,’ she exclaimed breathlessly.
Lady Mary made a dismissive movement of her hand and said harshly
. ‘No doubt you’ll fall down and make a spectacle of yourself, but that’s no more than to be expected. You always were clumsy. Leave me now.’
She saw Jemima’s eyes brighten with tears and her lips tremble as she made her curtsey and left, and knew that just for a moment at least she had quenched her pleasure in the evening. It was very small consolation.
‘You look very nice, chick,’ her father said, and she had to make do with that, telling herself that a father would never notice how a daughter looked, not in any detail at least. He had already decided whom she should dance with for every dance until supper, and told her so, which rather took the excitement from the first part of the ball, but as the guests arrived she discovered that she was getting quite enough interested glances, the young women admiring her dress, and the young men admiring her, to satisfy her unpractised vanity. One good consequence of her father’s policy was that when young men came to ask if they could dance with her, and she said she was engaged right up to supper, it made them very eager to secure her after supper, thinking that she must be immensely sought-after. She was to open the ball, of course, dancing the first minuet with Nicholas French, the most eligible bachelor in York, but as he was twenty-two and very haughty, Jemima rather knew it to be an honour than felt any pleasure in it.
As soon as she and Master French had taken their places, her father led out Lady Strathord to stand beside them. There was a sprinkling of applause, and Jemima saw heads leaning together behind fluttering fans as the onlookers whispered comments upon the handsome couple. Lady Strathord looked magnificent, dressed all in white, white lace over white satin. Her stomacher and petticoat were sewn all over with pearls, her magnificent copper-gold hair was dressed high with pearls and white feathers, and at her throat she wore a necklace of crystal spars. All eyes were upon her and Jemmy, handsome in emerald green velvet and white silk breeches, and for a moment a resentment raised its head in Jemima. It’s my birthday ball, and I am opening it: they should be looking at me. But it was only momentary, soon banished by simple admiration for the couple who looked so out-of-the-common they were more like a King and Queen than ordinary people. Then the music began, and Jemima had to concentrate on the proper sequence of the complicated steps.
‘How pretty the child looks,’ Marie-Louise said to Jemmy during their third dance together. It was gratifying to her that he should so openly prefer her to anyone else in the room, even though she knew some people would excuse it on the grounds that Jemmy could not dance with his wife, and was therefore taking his nearest female relative as a substitute. Marie-Louise’s eyes were drawn, as they were every time she looked at Jemima, to the diamond collar. It was absurd that a thirteen-year-old child should be wearing such a fortune of diamonds when her own more appropriate throat was encircled by common crystal. Her only consolation was that Jemmy felt so too.
‘You would look so much better in the diamonds than Jemima,’ he said apologetically, ‘but they were given to her, after all, and she so wanted to wear them to her first ball that I hadn’t the heart to refuse.’
Marie-Louise felt she could afford to sound generous. ‘She had better get used to jewels, I suppose. One day she will be very rich.’
Jemmy raised an eyebrow. ‘One day! By one day, you mean when I am dead. How lightly you shrug off my death, Princess! You are quite heartless.’
‘Great beauty is always heartless,’ Marie-Louise said gravely. ‘Besides, how should I not be heartless, when I gave my heart to you more years ago than I can remember?’
Allen caught up with Jemima as she came out of the supper-room after supper, and drew her hand through his arm in a friendly way.
‘Are you having an agreeable time?’ he asked. Jemima was hurt.
‘You did not come to me as you promised, to ask for a dance.’
‘I did not think it worthwhile. Your father told me he had arranged all your partners for you.’ Allen said reasonably.
‘Will you dance with me now?’ she asked eagerly. ‘I have saved the two first after supper for you.’
He smiled. ‘Why, that was kind of you. But I’m afraid I have engaged to dance with Lady Strathord.’ He saw her crestfallen face. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you a partner for the two first with no trouble at all. Everyone wants to dance with you.’
Jemima swallowed her disappointment. ‘Will you dance with me later on?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘I would be honoured, if you have a dance free.’
‘The two third? I have the two third free,’ she said at once, and he bowed his acceptance.
‘Enchanted,’ he said. ‘And – why, this looks to me very like a young man come to ask your hand. Are you sure, Jemima, you want to waste a dance on an old man?’
Jemima made no reply, except to give him a reproachful look as she turned away to receive the approaching young man.
The Princess put in two extra steps at every half-turn, and Allen was partly amused, partly admiring.
‘You are very gay tonight,’ he said.
‘Should I not be gay at a ball?’ she said, smiling at Jemmy as he passed her going down the set.
‘Indeed you should, when every eye is upon you. You are out of place here, you know – the assembly is too dull for your extraordinary beauty.’
She bent her golden gaze on him curiously. ‘You never used to say such gallant things to me. When we were children together, you used to shower me with such cold and critical looks, that I could only be glad you never gave them tongue.’
‘Time wreaks many changes,’ he said. ‘You were a very unpleasant and arrogant little girl – though even then I was in love with you.’
She laughed, making the crystal spars tinkle with the movement of her throat. ‘I am a very arrogant and unpleasant young woman,’ she said. ‘Are you still in love with me?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘As you know very well. So tell me why you are so especially gay tonight? There is something about you – an excitement, as if you were planning some mischief.’
‘Not mischief,’ she said, becoming confidential. ‘I have had news from my uncle Maurice, who keeps very poor company these days – a renegade slavetrader by name of Antoine Walsh, and a drunken, unfrocked priest by the name of Father O’Sullievan. The new Lady Chelmsford is not pleased with the acquaintance: they have made her sell her jewels, that she worked so hard to wear.’
Allen looked bemused. ‘I suppose all this means something.’
‘It means that my brother has been over-long in Paris, and has grown tired of waiting for the King of France to give his sanction. He has determined to move, to go alone to Scotland if necessary, and I, I applaud him, with all my heart.’
‘Scotland? Your brother?’ Allen felt dim stirrings of understanding and apprehension, as if at the approaching of a storm.
‘My brother the Prince of Wales,’ she said superbly, lifting her head high as if she wore a crown. Allen had no words, and she said, ‘Come, you must know the story of my birth – the servants tell you everything.’
‘I—’ He shook his head, realizing that it was far too late to begin denials. ‘I didn’t think you knew.’
‘My grandmother told me. All through my childhood she told me about my father and grandfather and the Cause and what I must do when the time came. And now the time is coming. When my father has his throne again, I shall be a Princess of England.’
Allen looked at her with enormous sadness, at such delusion, at the head filled with romantic dreams that reality would prove so hollow. Was this how the Countess had thought fit to prepare Marie-Louise for life? It made him both sad and angry, and also afraid for her.
‘What is it you plan to do?’ he asked. She looked at him shrewdly, her head a little tilted, as if wondering how far she could trust him. When she spoke, it was not an answer.
‘You should be glad too, Allen Macallan,’ she said. ‘When the King has his throne again, you may have your estate returned to you. You will be a gentleman of means. Depend upon
it. I shall speak to my father on your behalf, I shall do everything I can for you. And if you fight for him, as duty says you should, he may reward you with a tide.’ And she smiled, as if to say that things between them would be very different if he had an estate and a title.
‘But what is it you plan to do?’ he asked again. The dance was coming to an end, and he pressed her hand urgently to hurry her answer.
‘I have to dance with Jemmy now,’ she said. ‘Come to me after the next dance, and we will talk.’
She met Jemmy by the screen that closed off the kitchen passage, and said, ‘I have danced enough for now. Let us take the air somewhere. Can we slip out without being seen?’
‘You should not go outside if you are heated,’ Jemmy said, but she ignored him, looking round.
‘The herb garden – we can get to it through the pantry, if I remember rightly, and it will surely be private at this time of night.’
She slipped round the screen, and with a shrug and a backward glance, Jemmy followed her. In the herb garden the air was warm and scented; having trapped the heat all day, the stones of the walls were giving it back into the still night. Marie-Louise stretched her arms wide and walked forward.
‘Oh to be outside, to be in the fresh air, unconfined.’ She turned to Jemmy almost reproachfully. ‘You don’t know what it is like to be a woman, to be always shut indoors, never allowed to do the things you want, to have always to be careful of the night air, of the rough ground, of the thorn hedge—’
Jemmy laughed aloud. ‘I do not recognize this picture you are drawing. There never was a woman more unconfined than you! Why, I don’t suppose you spend two hours of a day indoors, unless the weather is foul – and as for fearing the thorn hedge or the rough ground, even your grooms are afraid to follow you when you are hunting!’
Marie-Louise came up close to him and pretended fierceness.
‘Don’t you dare to laugh at me, or I’ll—’
Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty) Page 25