The Autumn Rose

by Fiona Hill

  Her companion knew perfectly well she was concealing something, but found himself unable to think of words to express the conviction that would yet not constitute an insult themselves. “In any case,” he returned after a pause, “this piece of doggerel is an insult, and I shall respond to it as such.”

  “You will not—” she exclaimed at once, her alarm finally banishing her tears; then checked herself abruptly. “I hope you will do me the favour of ignoring it, my lord, as I intend to do.”

  “Ignore it? Dear Lady Caroline, I am afraid you do not know me very well. However, the matter need concern you no longer,” he concluded, for if it came to a duel between himself and Mockabee he had no desire to embroil Caroline in it any more than was necessary.

  Her ladyship entirely divined his meaning, and was apprehensive. “Lord Seabury,” she said carefully, “the thought of your…taking any action whatever in defence of me, I find extremely…repellent. Lord Mockabee is a vicious and unprincipled man.” She thought, as she said this, of how probable it was that the baron would take advantage of a challenge from Seabury to wound or even to try to kill him. He had probably done as much before, to persons who had irritated him less. Had not Lord Embrey once appeared in society with a badly injured leg? He blamed it on a fall from his horse, but all London rumoured it to have been the result of a meeting with his wife’s impudent lover. The injury to his leg had been so severe as to have prevented him from repeating the challenge since then, though the liaison had continued just as openly and strongly. Indeed, Lady Caroline had thought of mentioning this to Amy that evening at the Opera when she had pointed out Mockabee and sought to dissuade Miss Meredith from pursuing him; but intuition told her such a scandalous on-dit would merely have made the baron that much more intriguing to the foolish chit. Neither did she mention it now, to Seabury, though it was much on her mind; instead she merely continued, “He will soon enough be brought down by his own behaviour; there is no point to your sullying your hands by dealing with him more than need be.”

  Seabury could not guess her motive, but the idea that Caroline did not desire him to champion her came through with oppressive clarity. The extreme boldness she herself frequently displayed prevented his supposing that she could possibly be frightened for him. Rather her words suggested a certain fastidiousness at the thought of his acting as her representative, an unwillingness to link her name in that fashion with his. It did not influence his decision, but it certainly caused him a great deal of pain to be rebuffed in this special way. Conscious of an aching he could not examine just then, he suppressed it and turned the topic from Caro and Mockabee to Amy and Mockabee. “I am no longer fool enough to suppose,” he said, not addressing himself otherwise to Caroline’s last remark, “that Amy would accept me were I to offer for her. Indeed, I am amazed I should ever have been persuaded of it. That alternative barred, then, I begin to wonder again if she ought not to be returned to her aunt Meredith for a time, so that her—ah, passion for Mockabee may subside. Do you suppose she will go? How does the idea strike you now? I rely upon your perspicacity to enlighten me.”

  Pleased at being consulted in this manner, and delighted to leave the other topic behind, Caroline could not help but smile. However, she said dubiously, “At the height of the season? I am sure Amy is devoted to her aunt, but I do not believe I have ever heard her say so. Certainly she does not appear to pine for home…I rather doubt, I must own, if she will go voluntarily.”

  “Setting that aside for a moment, do you think it a useful course of action?” His handsome, expressive features, strong and pronounced as they were, nevertheless showed much faith in her, and much uncertainty of his own judgement. Caroline, returning his dark glance, thought she saw something almost of timidity in his eyes.

  “At first I did not,” she said, “but now I do think it wise. Mockabee has proved quite intractable, and Amy is not less so. Perhaps you ought to ask her if she will go home for a fortnight, no longer. Once she is there, she may chuse to extend her visit. I even—this is a bit devious—but I even think we might do well to enlist the support of her aunt. Could she not pretend to be invalidish, and require the presence of her niece? Is she a woman who could do such a thing?”

  Seabury laughed outright. “No, alas, she is not. Agatha Meredith is the kindest, roundest, dearest creature in the world, but she is also the silliest. She could no more maintain a pretense than the man in the moon. Hers is a weak character too, I fear; all the Merediths are weak of character, unfortunately. I suppose you have seen enough of Amy to guess that by now.”

  “It does not astonish me,” she conceded.

  “If you will permit, I shall summon Amy immediately, and propose to her this temporary retirement into Kent—that is where her aunt resides, you know. I hope—I pray you will remain with me during the interview,” he added gravely. “I have never seen anyone quell Amy as you did this morning; I am sure I could not. Will you help me just this little bit more?” His handsome eyes trained on her, he awaited her response.

  “I shall be delighted,” she said simply. This softening trend in the viscount she found most intriguing, not to say disquieting. The stiff, cold gentleman whose acquaintance she remembered to have made on first arriving in London—the man who bore so close a resemblance to the disagreeable Lady Lillian—where had he gone? Her misadventures with the baron and Lord Romby had done more than cause her to rescind her initial harsh opinion of Seabury: they had made her admire him. How well he had dealt with the folly and malice around him! In a sudden rush of confidence, she informed him, while they waited for Miss Meredith, in what high esteem she had learned to regard him. “As for your consulting my judgement, I am as amazed as pleased to be so applied to by you,” she continued, speaking now not only with candour but also with deliberate precision. It was a happy union; Lord Seabury was aware of a delicious sensation when she added, “Except for my brother, I know no gentleman with qualities to equal yours—or even to approach them.”

  Amy Meredith’s graceless entrance into the saloon prevented his lordship from replying. “I am wanted, I understand,” she remarked sullenly, looking at neither of them so much as at the floor. “I suppose it is a matter of some significance, or I should not be called from my bed.”

  “My dear Amy,” her cousin said very gently, taking her arm and leading her to a comfortable settee, “I have a proposal for you which I hope you will like.”

  Amy looked up at him mutinously.

  “I wish you will return to your aunt Meredith for a fortnight,” he went on mildly. “Your—your indisposition this morning convinces me that London is unhealthy for you. You are vapourish, and I am concerned for your happiness.”

  “Do not be, I beg,” said she, with heavy sarcasm. “If my friend Lady Caroline would but leave me in peace I should do very well, thank you.”

  He hesitated a moment, then said quietly, “It pains me that you should feel such things.”

  “I suppose you desire me to take her tenderly to my bosom?” she inquired, eyeing Caro warily.

  “A simple polite tolerance would content me,” said he.

  “She does not tolerate me.”

  “On the contrary; I am sure Lady Caroline is very fond of you.”

  “She loathes me,” said Amy. “And I do her.”

  “Please be so kind as to apologize,” Seabury directed abruptly, with a sudden return of that inflexibility which had for so long been his refuge in times of strain.

  “I shall not! It is true,” Amy cried, quite glaring at Caroline.

  “If I may be allowed to speak?” Caro said slowly. “It occurs to me that it is no more than honest to admit to Miss Meredith that I am not, as indeed she charges, overly fond of her. I take no great pleasure in her society; no more does she in mine. This does not alter the fact, however, that I bear no ill-will towards her whatever, or that all my behaviour to her is dictated by her best interests. Let us dispense with the formality, therefore, of pretending to love one another,
Miss Meredith, and see if we do not breathe more easily.”

  “You see, she hates me,” muttered the stubborn young lady.

  “I beg you will attend me,” said Caroline, with surprising patience. “I do not hate you, nor do I love you. It is my opinion that you frequently act contrary to your own interests, and certainly, quite wilfully, contrary to those of your cousin and his family. This is not behaviour calculated to endear you to anybody. I should like, for your sake and that of your family, to see your conduct improve. As for you hating me, you are entirely at liberty to do so. It does not disturb me in the least.”

  Amy was silent for a moment. “She persuaded you to send me away, did she not my lord?”

  “Not at all. It was my thought entirely.”

  “Well I will not go,” Amy declared, flinging a defiant glance at Caroline.

  “You are asked to go, and go you shall,” said that lady energetically. “I shall not stand by while you bully your cousin, merely because he is too good and too gentlemanly to exercise his power. You must behave as his ward while he acts as your guardian. You will do as he says, and you will do it cheerfully. You may return to your chamber if you like,” she concluded, seating herself and taking a large album into her lap to signify that the interview was at an end.

  Amy stood, still looking dangerously rebellious. “When?” was all she asked.

  “In a week. Monday, perhaps,” said Caro, looking to Seabury for corroboration.

  “Monday,” he repeated, nodding.

  Amy turned and trudged towards the door.

  “I am very glad you have decided to cooperate,” Caroline told her. “Your aunt Meredith will doubtless be delighted to see you, too.”

  Amy said nothing. She should have liked to say that she would see Caroline at the devil first, but this was too shocking a retort even for her. Her initial instinct, on arriving again at her bed-chamber, was to throw herself on the bed and repeat this morning’s tantrum, only with fresh ruffles and flourishes. Her next instinct was unhappier still, and of course it was the one she followed. She flew for her desk, scribbled out a note, sealed and directed it. Next, she handed it surreptitiously to a footman, along with the promise of a coin if he were swift, and told him to wait for an answer. Three hours later the footman returned, bearing the eagerly awaited reply. After that no complaint was heard from Miss Meredith on the subject of her visit to Kent.

  While this clandestine exchange was going forward, Lady Caroline was faced with yet another vexation: Miss Windle had discovered a new case of mischief in her work-box. “I daresay there is some perfectly simple explanation,” said the poor lady, tears standing in her eyes and choking her voice, “and that it is nothing to do with Satanic intervention or any such thing, but I assure you I cannot divine it if there is! It looks like Lucifer himself to me; how else is one to understand it?”

  Caroline offering neither a solution nor a glass of wine, Miss Windle boldly requested the latter as a consolation. Caro bespoke it of a servant while Windle expanded her lament.

  “This time it was not the handkerchief,” she sniffed, “for I keep that locked up—can you imagine, locking up a handkerchief?—but a cap I was working for your niece, little Delphina. How sweet she might have looked in it! Fancy a lavender ground with green and yellow stitches—oh, and a little red—representing a lettuce patch! With little brown bits for earth, and a blue sky…my heart fairly breaks when I think of it,” she ended on a sob, accepting the comforting claret Caro now proffered. It sounded to Caroline as if the cap were much better off in tatters, but to say as much was unthinkable, and so she merely murmured what solace her conscience would allow.

  “Delphina adores to run about bare-headed of course,” said she, “so perhaps it is all the same to her. I am certain she would love to receive a reticule, however; though I doubt Lady Lillian deems her sufficiently grown up to carry one.”

  “Ah, little Delphina!” said Windle, relaxing into a pensive mode, as she frequently did over claret. “How much a mother is blessed, who has children!”

  Caroline silently wondered what sort of mother, blessed or unblessed, has no children. Miss Windle, however, was already giving voice to further reflections.

  “I have often observed, that a primary joy of the married state is the introduction into the household of children. What pleasure, what interest is taken in the little ones! What pride does the proud father experience! What love the loving mother! Oh dear, there is the last drop of claret,” she said, swallowing. “Might I trouble you for another glass?”

  Caroline poured again from the decanter. They sat in the snug parlour situated between their bed-chambers. Caro kept her work-basket there, so it was not much trouble for her to take out her filagree and keep herself occupied with it while she listened to her chaperone’s verbal meanderings. She even took some amusement in them.

  “I never married, as I think you know,” Windle resumed rather loudly, “but I might have, I might have. Yes, I say to you without fear of its going farther, I might have married twice, had I desired it. My papa two times informed me of the tender emotions harboured in the breast of a young man in our village—emotions, I may say, gathered like little boats in the cove of my admirer’s bosom, and bobbing there like tiny buoys on the ripples of the sea—yes, twice did my dear papa inform me gravely of this fine young person’s love for me (I do not shrink from calling it love, as you see; I name it freely) and twice did I refuse him. Why, you will inquire; why did I refuse him? Was I an icy maiden, my frost-bitten ears deaf to his bootless pleas? Was I a stone, over which the warm flood of his sentiments ran as over a rock? Was I pitiless, merciless, cruel in the face of that love, so heated by the fires of his passion, so sharp with the keenness of his desire, so deep with the depths of his profundities?” Miss Windle paused to take a long swig of her claret “Yes! Yes, I was! I tell you baldly and truthfully—yes! I was utterly without compassion for him of any sort. I may even say—yes, I do say—that I did not like him. Not a bit. A slobbering hulk, with his shoulders hanging over his sinking chest like bushes over a cliff, and soiled linen round his red neck, that smelt of garlic, and a great purple nose like a turnip. Why, you ask? Why!” she demanded, draining the second glass and rising to pour a third for herself. “Because…I despised the brute! A monster! The blacksmith’s son, that is who he was, and my father would have thrown me to the dog and a dowry besides—would gladly have tossed me away to live in a smithy and stitch eternally at a lot of garlicky collars—” Miss Windle stopped talking as abruptly as if someone had smashed her over the head with a club. “Oh dear! I hope…I do hope, my dear Lady Caroline, I have not been saying what I think I have in fact been saying. Have I?”

  “Have you what?” Caro asked.

  “Been saying what I think I have been saying. Oh my, I hope not!”

  Charitably, Caro assured her she had not.

  “Thank Heaven,” breathed the good lady. “I expect I have been talking about Lord Romby then, have I? It was Lord Romby I meant to speak of all along.”

  Caroline hesitated. “Yes, rather, though you have not said much just yet. What exactly was it you wished to mention?”

  “Oh my, only what a fine man he is!” said the other, as if this were self-evident. “You do think he is a fine man, do not you?”

  She debated within herself. “Certainly he is not a bad man,” she said finally, “though he cannot be said to be without vices.”

  “Who among us can?” inquired Windle dolefully; then, “What are they, my dear?”

  “Romby’s vices? Why, intemperance, and wrath, and prodigality, and an addiction to games of chance; and then he is blasphemous, and refuses to go to church,” Caroline answered, surprised to be able to hit upon so many so easily. Really, his lordship was not a very fine old man at all!

  “Oh, that,” Windle replied after a moment, as if Caroline had made note of some tiny flaw. She made a large gesture with a pale hand as if to sweep the objections away, and pointed ou
t generously that she herself drank a glass of claret or two on occasion.

  “Yes, but my dear ma’am,” Caroline answered, putting down her filagree the better to fix Miss Windle with her gaze, “that is quite a different matter. I am sure you have never taken an oath in your life stronger than ‘Angels defend us.’ I know for a fact you have seen the priest every Sunday for the last five years. You are patient, and resigned, and frugal, and if you ever play at anything deeper than Speculation, you make an excellent secret of it. Lord Romby, by comparison, is practically a devil.”

  Miss Windle, who on this particular occasion had drunk a glass of claret or four already, promptly and spiritedly denied this accusation. “Lady Caroline, I think you are the best young lady in the world—I often have said so to Mrs. Henry, if you do not believe me—and compared to that disaster of a Miss Meredith, you are a seraph. However! To say that Lord Romby, a good, long-suffering, sweet, though much maligned old gentleman (and he is not all that old, by the bye) is ‘practically a devil’ shows a singular lapse of judgement, an hideous and most disappointing want of insight and charity, which is excessively painful to me—as your chaperone and relative no matter how distant—to be obliged to mention. I ascribe it—no no, let me proceed,” she insisted, as Caro attempted to interrupt, “—I ascribe it to youth, to the lack of ripeness of your soul which, like a green cherry on a tree, hangs awkwardly from the yet springy bough of your meagre experience. When the sap,” she continued, ever gaining in volubility, “when the sap that shoots madly through your childish veins, like arrows shooting wildly through a verdant wood, shall cease to boil and froth as the foam on a brewing posset; when the sap shall subside, I say, you will see things in a different light. Different, did I say? Nay, better. Truer. Brighter. A brighter light, dear young miss, beams on us in maturity, than ever shines on any golden-headed child—not, you know, that you are golden-headed, or ever were—and shows us where to walk, and how to walk, with a precision, and clarity, a cloudlessness of vision such as you can never fancy. Mr. Wordsworth notwithstanding!” she shouted triumphantly, adding a second resounding, “Mr. Wordsworth NOT withstanding!”