Reputation

by Lex Croucher

  The location of the Burtons’ house – too close to town to constitute a grand domain, yet too far away to be fashionable – revealed enough about their means (or lack thereof) that Georgiana thought she might be received a little less warmly. She needn’t have worried; the Campbells seemed like the sort her aunt would describe as ‘fine, upstanding people’ – this meaning ‘people who do not openly mock others for the state of their financial affairs’ – and they simply asked politely after the Burtons’ health.

  Standing a little way across the room behind the Campbells, unaware that she was the precise subject currently being discussed, Mrs Burton looked up and saw who Georgiana was conversing with. She gave her niece a small, stiff smile and then urgently muttered something in her husband’s ear, looking concerned.

  Georgiana rather suspected she was recalling Viking funerals.

  ‘Frances, my love – could you speak to Mrs Gadforth and help Miss Ellers find something to complement her dress?’ Lady Campbell was saying quietly, with a hand on Frances’s arm and a quick glance down at the large, blotchy punch stain that Georgiana had quite forgotten in all the excitement.

  ‘Of course!’ said Frances. ‘Goodness, and I was just standing here with you all sad and sodden. Come with me.’

  Georgiana curtseyed and then allowed herself to be whisked from the room, pointing out to Frances as they began to climb the darkened stairs that they were travelling in the exact opposite direction from Mrs Gadforth’s heaving bosom.

  ‘Oh, you are a sweet little thing – nobody will notice,’ said Frances consolingly. ‘And besides, I’m just dying to see the rest of her wardrobe. My money’s on endless gold brocade and some sort of festive hat topped with fruit.’

  The Cognac seemed to be working its magic; Georgiana really felt she ought to protest but somehow ended up willingly following Frances instead, their arms linked once again, as they searched for the dressing room. It was easier said than done in the near-dark, but eventually Frances wrenched open the right door and clapped her hands together in gleeful celebration.

  Georgiana took a seat on Mrs Gadforth’s pink velvet footstool, watching as Frances pulled out more and more outrageous items of clothing from the wardrobe – a shawl of peacock feathers, a mask that seemed to be made of leather, a grey dress so low-cut it could never be expected to contain the human nipple – until they were both beside themselves with helpless laughter. Frances gestured for help unbuttoning the back of her dress, and Georgiana paused uncertainly for a second before assisting her with fumbling fingers, and then watched as Frances explored the wardrobe with renewed purpose.

  ‘Here,’ she said eventually, swiping the flask from Georgiana, who hadn’t remembered taking it in the first place. ‘Try this on.’

  She threw an unidentifiable mass of fabric at Georgiana and then disappeared from the room. Georgiana considered it for a moment – it looked both too large and tastelessly frilly – before pulling it over her head. Left alone, the entire thing suddenly felt beyond ridiculous, but she found herself grinning foolishly into the vanity mirror anyway. Her hair was coming unpinned, and there was a general drunken messiness about her that she had never seen in her reflection before. It didn’t seem to matter very much; it all paled in comparison to how wonderful it felt to have a silly, easy moment of friendship after weeks of loneliness – even if so far that short-lived friendship did seem to entirely revolve around bullying a portly, middle-aged couple.

  ‘Mrs Gadforth, you look simply ravishing,’ Frances said in a comically deep voice as she re-entered the room.

  A fresh shout of laughter burst out of Georgiana when she saw that Frances was doing her best impression of their hostess’s unfortunate husband; she had somehow procured a morning suit and top hat that were far too large for her, and she had to hold them up as she walked or risk becoming suddenly unclothed.

  ‘Oh, Mr Gadforth, you rogue,’ Georgiana replied in a ridiculous falsetto. ‘Eat me like one of your French puddings!’

  Frances cackled with glee as she shuffled towards Georgiana and then collapsed onto the footstool next to her. They kept laughing, somewhat hysterically, as Georgiana helped Frances decorate herself with a wonky moustache drawn in Mrs Gadforth’s kohl liner; once properly moustachioed, Frances took off one of her own rings and pushed it on to Georgiana’s finger in place of a wedding band.

  It was in this state – both sitting astride the footstool professing their deep, matrimonial feelings for each other (‘Mr Gadforth, next to this painting you’re a veritable work of art!’ ‘Oh, thank you, Mrs Gadforth, and might I say I did admire the vaguely pornographic topiaries you’ve commissioned on the back lawn.’) – that Lady Campbell discovered them.

  Georgiana froze in place as soon as the door opened, suddenly so ashamed and horrified that she felt she might combust on the spot. To her surprise, Lady Campbell didn’t look angry; she just looked tired.

  ‘Wash your face and fetch your cloak, Frances,’ she said quietly. ‘Your father says we’re leaving.’ She turned on her heel and exited without another word.

  Georgiana was overcome with mortification, and turned to Frances, expecting to see the same emotion reflected in her expression; on the contrary, Frances simply looked exasperated.

  ‘Right on cue. The slightest hope for some fun, and there she is to throttle the life out of it. She’s a dreadful bore.’

  She stripped down to her slip and began to dress as Georgiana, red in the face, pulled Mrs Gadforth’s frilly gown off over her head and placed it carefully back in the wardrobe. Frances left Mr Gadforth’s suit pooled on the floor, stepping away from it as if it were absolutely nothing to do with her, and then reclaimed her ring.

  ‘Hopefully I’ll see you at the next one, at any rate.’ She saluted Georgiana with a flick of her wrist before turning to leave the room. ‘It’s been a pleasure, Miss Ellers.’

  Suddenly alone again, Georgiana picked up the pile of discarded clothing and started hurriedly putting everything back in its rightful place. She returned Mr Gadforth’s suit and was just rushing downstairs, wondering what exactly Frances had meant by ‘the next one’, when she bumped into the Burtons.

  ‘What on earth have you been doing, Georgiana?’ exclaimed Mrs Burton. ‘Why are you so red? Have you fallen? Are you ill?’

  ‘Not at all, I’m fine,’ said Georgiana, feeling her face with the back of her hand and finding it hot to the touch.

  ‘Well, come along then,’ said Mrs Burton, eyeing her with utmost suspicion. ‘Your uncle ate a funny grape and isn’t feeling at all himself. We’re going home.’

  Chapter Two

  T

  here weren’t a great many rooms in the Burtons’ house, and they weren’t very finely decorated, but they made up for this deficit – in Georgiana’s opinion – by having a well-stocked and cosy library, which faced west and enjoyed the benefits of the last of the evening sun. There was a general shabbiness about the place that Mrs Burton seemed constantly at war with, bubbles in the wallpaper and knocks in the furniture that could not be polished away, and although this extended into the library, Georgiana did not think the room suffered because of it. She made a habit of retiring there after dinner each night, settling into her uncle’s cracked leather armchair for hours of reading, and although Mrs Burton frequently entreated her to join her in the drawing room to do ghastly things like embroider fat little kittens on to cushions, generally she was left alone.

  When she first arrived at the house she had tried to ask her uncle about his collection of the written word, which he now seemed to have eschewed completely in favour of the endless newspapers he resided behind, and had received the rather unsatisfactory reply, ‘Ah, yes. Books.’ Mr Burton had been a lawyer before his early retirement, and Georgiana often wondered if he had used up an entire lifetime’s worth of words during his career, leaving him with very few left for his twilight years.

  She therefore endeavoured to explore the contents of the library alone.

/>   At home she had kept her own carefully curated collection, which paled in comparison to the shelves and shelves inhabiting almost every wall in the rest of the house, and to the study, which housed her father’s personal library. Her father was the master of a rather self-important boarding school, and their small house was situated in its grounds, so if Georgiana ever found her own bookshelves wanting, she had only to provide him with a list and he would return from the school library with a fresh stack for her to peruse. Her parents were great readers themselves, and could often be found of an evening still sitting at the dinner table long after their plates were empty, engaged in rousing debates about literary styles or a particular author’s over-fondness for hyphenation or run-on sentences. Georgiana was not authorised to borrow books without express permission; there had been a particular incident with ink-stained fingerprints on a priceless first edition that had never been quite forgiven, even though she had been four years old at the time.

  It pained Georgiana to think about any of this now: the house, the study, the books. Their home was gone, and her parents were likely arguing about punctuation without her, while enjoying a brisk, coastal, child-free breeze.

  She had decided not long after conversations about moving had begun in earnest that she would certainly not feel sorry for herself, or entertain thoughts of being abandoned, mislaid, or left behind. Her parents had always been enormously practical people, and her mother had been experiencing regular headaches for so long without improvement that a drastic change was the next logical step. Any rational person could understand their reasons for not wanting to take their adult daughter with them as they entered a new phase of their lives. Her father was to take up a new post, and the lodgings provided by this new school could hardly be expected to house both Georgiana and her father’s books.

  Georgiana had cried just once, when they signed the documents that handed the house and her entire life so far over to the new schoolmaster – a man with a smiling wife and three happy, chubby children in tow – and then resolved to never cry again. In the dark recesses of her mind, she imagined prostrating herself at their feet, begging them to take her on and make her their fourth child; she would offer to confine herself to her father’s study and have meals delivered through the door, haunting them like a sorrowful, literary ghost. In reality, she knew she was a child no more, and that she was very lucky indeed that her aunt and uncle had agreed to take her on when her lack of marital prospects so far indicated that she was a very poor investment. She had pulled herself together, her cheeks dry when her parents shook her hand in farewell, experiencing the ever-so-slightly discomforting feeling that something inside her was dying a painful, permanent death.

  Her father had promised to write once they were settled, but they were far away with many affairs to get in order, and Georgiana had heard no news as of yet. Mrs Burton had raised the subject a few times, but had displayed an unusual amount of tact in dropping it when it had not been well received. Georgiana knew that her aunt would be entirely baffled by her sister’s rather hands-off approach to parenting; she had always been treated as an equal at home, an adult in miniature even during childhood, whereas Mrs Burton – new to the office of guardian and having had no children of her own – constantly wanted to bake Georgiana pies, fuss over her hair, and rebuke her soundly for the crimes of ‘staying up too late’ and ‘walking too briskly’.

  Unfortunately the absence of correspondence from her parents was often at the forefront of Georgiana’s mind, as there wasn’t much else to dwell on. Her few friends from home had not written either, likely caught up in summer excursions of their own, or perhaps already forgetting Georgiana now she was not sitting right in front of them at every dinner party and card game. Her parents had often had fellow academics over for evenings of lively scholastic debate, and their children had been Georgiana’s constant companions; they had been quiet, literary types, all cut from similarly sombre cloth. Some of them were blessed with a little conversational wit, but it was mostly wasted on extensive, vicious debates about particular subsections of Roman history, or trying to distract each other into making unforgivable mistakes during long, terse games of chess. On one particularly memorable occasion, a boy had crudely split an infinitive during conversation and they had all talked of nothing else for a week.

  Nevertheless, she had known these people since childhood, and their silence hurt. When Georgiana was not conjuring up elaborate and biblical punishments for them for ignoring her, all she could do for entertainment was to eat an excess of bread, walk the nearby lanes and woods in fair weather, and then upon her return sequester herself in the library with a well-worn copy of Robinson Crusoe or a volume of Mrs Radcliffe’s.

  While her books did provide some comfort and distraction, Georgiana soon found herself reaching a hitherto untouched limit to her joy of the written word; she would cast a book aside after long hours of reading, look around for some other source of entertainment, then sigh and pick it back up again when no livelier company was to be found. The Burtons would not countenance letting her go out on real excursions alone in search of stimulation; their house sat far enough into the outskirts that it was twenty minutes by carriage into the town proper, and they rarely felt the need to go themselves.

  They were content for the most part to sit about the house and garden, watching Georgiana go quite mad.

  A few days after the Gadforths’ party, Georgiana joined her aunt in receiving a visitor in the cluttered, wheat-yellow parlour at the front of the house. Their near neighbour Mrs Clenaghan, who lived in an almost identical house just a few hundred feet down the lane, was elderly, bad-tempered and prone to extended outbursts about not much in particular. She was far from Georgiana’s ideal company, but her blunt demeanour and never-ending mental compendium of local gossip compounded to make her company just about tolerable – even slightly amusing, at times. Most of the unfortunate victims of her stories were friends and acquaintances of the Burtons who did not interest Georgiana, so she entertained herself for a while by running her fingers along the frayed upholstery of the armchair she was sitting in and counting Mrs Clenaghan’s moustache hairs – but they were just taking tea when she heard the name ‘Campbell’, and immediately snapped to attention.

  ‘Their youngest daughter is giving them a world of trouble, I hear. Flighty, unsettled thing. Prone to hysterics. A good boxing about the ears ought to cure her of that, but alas – I’m told the box is going quite out of fashion. Last summer, Mr Grange – you know Mr Grange, he has that goitre and only two pairs of boots – well, he claimed he saw her down at his old mill with some of the dreadful types she hangs around with, and they were’ – here she leaned in, as if afraid of being overheard in the otherwise empty room – ‘half-naked.’

  Mrs Burton looked appalled. Georgiana instantly pictured Frances in a state of disrobe, and blushed to the tips of her ears.

  ‘Yes, well – you may well blush, my dear,’ said Mrs Clenaghan, with an air of great satisfaction. ‘The Campbells are a particularly old, exceedingly important family. Lord Campbell is a military man of excellent stock. He had frequent business in the West Indies, I believe, and on one such trip he returned with Lady Campbell. Well, I don’t mind telling you, it caused quite a stir at the time. People have grown used to her in his circles by now, but his own family would have cut him off, had he not already inherited. It was too much money for one family, in my opinion – I would personally be embarrassed to hold so much wealth. Their house, Longview, is magnificent. In my opinion there are none in the county that better it – and it has been said on occasion that my good opinion is rather hard-won. I never thought much of Lady Campbell, never quite got over the shock of her as others have, but apparently they always hosted the most extravagant parties and dinners. I think parties are rather vulgar, and luckily have never been invited, but in any case – they seem to have stopped throwing quite so many of late. Their elder daughter, Eleanor, was married around five years ago, reported t
o be a perfectly agreeable girl by all accounts. Frances Campbell must be of an age with you, Miss Ellers, perhaps a year or two your senior – it is a shame that she seems so likely to ruin them.’

  ‘A livelier spirit than yours, Mrs Clenaghan, does not necessarily amount to ruination,’ said Georgiana, rather more sharply than she had intended to. Mrs Burton gave her a reproachful look.

  ‘Oh?’ Mrs Clenaghan narrowed her eyes at Georgiana and leaned forward in Mrs Burton’s best armchair, clearly enjoying herself. ‘A friend of yours is she, Miss Ellers?’

  ‘Georgiana and Miss Campbell were acquainted at a party only last week,’ interjected Mrs Burton, flustered. ‘They’re hardly friends – and besides, I’m sure if Georgiana were privy to any manner of impropriety from Miss Campbell, she would have the good sense to cut her off – with good manners, of course, but with great haste.’

  Georgiana thought guiltily of Cognac, and frilly dresses, and Frances’s jaunty eyeliner moustache.

  ‘You’d do best to stay away, Miss Ellers. There are plenty of well-connected ladies about town whose company I’m sure you’d enjoy. Why, I know of a group who meet every Saturday for tea and cards. And they do it,’ Mrs Clenaghan said, raising her populous eyebrows, ‘with their clothes on.’

  Georgiana thought a little nudity might lighten up the sort of card party held by any friends of Mrs Clenaghan, but merely smiled tightly in response.

  The truth of the matter was that she would have swapped all the tea in England for another moment in Frances’s company. Georgiana had already replayed the events of their meeting over and over again in quiet moments; had even started inventing further conversations they might have, future meetings in which Georgiana impressed Frances with her wit and charm, confirming a lifelong friendship and setting in motion the many adventures they would undertake together. Frances would likely open the door to all manner of glamorous parties and enchanting outings, but more importantly, she would be Georgiana’s partner in crime. Her confidante. Her captain.