Reputation

by Lex Croucher

  She and Betty left the library, giggling, and did in fact venture out into the garden. It was small and haphazardly paved, with a few well-pruned borders stocked with flowers and shrubs arranged in unnaturally neat rows, as if to make up for the failings of the paving stones.

  ‘Oh, I do love dog roses, don’t you?’ Betty said happily, taking one in her hand and stroking the petals reverently. ‘I know people say they’re common, and I suppose they aren’t half as pretty as a proper rose – less dignified, I imagine, although I can’t imagine what a flower could do to get itself into somebody’s bad books – incidentally, I wonder who it is that decides which flowers are good and which ones are ugly? What separates the weeds from the prize-winners? I often—’

  ‘Betty,’ Georgiana said wearily, sitting down on the slightly rusted bench at the back of the garden. Her hangover seemed to be making a surprise reappearance.

  ‘My mother loved dog roses,’ Betty said, finally getting to the crux of the matter. ‘She liked dandelions, too, and slow horses, and pigeons – she always said she liked the least-loved things the best, because it always took her by surprise, the unfussy beauty of them. Nobody’s surprised if you like a proper rose – of course you like a rose, who wouldn’t like a rose? You can accidentally like a rose without even meaning to – but to love something like a dog rose is something else entirely – you simply can’t love it by accident.’

  ‘That’s . . . That’s really quite lovely, Betty,’ Georgiana said, confused to find herself genuinely moved.

  ‘Have I told you about the time a pigeon flew down our chimney and died?’ Betty asked brightly, ruining the moment entirely.

  ‘No,’ Georgiana said, and when Betty started to speak again, she added, ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ Betty said, leaning to smell some honeysuckle and then sighing. ‘We didn’t find it for a week, and Mama was dreadfully upset. Do you mind if I pick some?’ She gestured to the honeysuckle.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Georgiana, shrugging. ‘Where is your mother now?’

  ‘My mother and father died when I was ten,’ Betty said, coming to sit next to Georgiana with two freshly picked blooms clutched in her palm. ‘There was a terrible carriage accident. I was in the carriage, too, but I sort of . . . bounced free of it all. You do that, when you’re small, I’m told.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Georgiana said. Betty patted Georgiana’s palm in response, and when she took her hand away, she had left one of the honeysuckle blossoms behind. ‘It must have been terribly hard to lose them.’

  ‘It was,’ said Betty thoughtfully. ‘But then, I have some lovely cousins, and I lived with them for many years. I have an uncle in Scotland who writes me very jolly letters. And I have Grandmama, of course. And her dog. He bites, but he doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘I like dogs,’ said Georgiana, brushing her thumb over a honeysuckle petal.

  ‘Oh! Careful, Miss Ellers. You don’t want to lose the nectar.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘But – you’ve never tasted honeysuckle before? Oh, you must. Just pinch the end off – like this, you see? I always feel as if I am hurting flowers when I pick them – silly, of course, as I don’t imagine they have feelings – yes, very good! And then you pull out the little – well, I don’t know what it’s called, the long part, the leg. See the little droplet? Oh, yes! That’s the nectar. Try it!’

  Georgiana hesitated for a moment before pressing it to her tongue; it was so delightfully, unexpectedly sweet that she laughed, and then held her hand out to Betty to ask for another.

  When Mrs Walters awoke and announced it was time to leave, Mrs Burton actually had to come and find Georgiana and Betty in the garden to deliver the message. Her aunt kept smiling broadly at both of them as they said their goodbyes, as pink-cheeked and proud as if Georgiana had announced she was engaged.

  With the taste of nectar still lingering on her tongue, Georgiana told Betty that she was welcome to come back another time as they bade farewell, and even went so far as to actually mean it.

  The door had barely closed when Mrs Burton threw up her arms in delight and exclaimed, ‘I knew it, Georgiana! I knew you’d make the best of friends, I just knew—’

  ‘Don’t labour the point, Mrs Burton,’ Georgiana said, sighing. ‘You shall put me off her just as I’ve begun to like her.’

  Mrs Burton held up her hands in surrender, but went off into the house humming to herself; she was so pleased with her niece that at dinner that night she kept on giving her extra helpings of pudding, until Georgiana had to push away her bowl and beg her to stop.

  Chapter Fifteen

  T

  o walk into a party with Frances and her friends went a little something like this: they would enter, and the music would pause for just a fraction of a second before starting up again. A hundred small murmurs and whispers would burst into life from all corners of the room. Heads turned; glances were thrown sidelong. Once, a fat little dog-in-arms sensed the subtle shift in mood and immediately urinated all down its owner’s gown. They did not take any of it personally.

  Jeremiah had not come to call since the cottage. Frances didn’t say this, but Georgiana did not have to ask to know it. She was invited to drunken card games in Frances’s solarium, long evenings in the parlour at the Woodleys’, dances at the small and rather crowded assembly rooms, and every other manner of gathering that the town and surrounding hills had to offer – and at not one of them did they see Jeremiah Russell. Frances would be restless every time they entered a parlour or a ballroom, never wanting to stay in one place for more than a quarter of an hour, constantly insisting that there must be far more interesting people in the next room.

  They threw themselves into society with such ferocity that Georgiana got persistent blisters on both feet, and her lips were perpetually stained with the carmine she borrowed from her friends. She would call farewell to them on a Sunday morning at five o’clock after a night of revels, and then give them a pained wave from across St Anne’s Church only a few hours later, while Mrs Burton sniffed disapprovingly at her obviously delicate state. Frances attended services once or twice, craning her neck to look back at the door frequently until the vicar began to speak, and Georgiana knew it was not due to some sudden burst of piety.

  When Christopher was with them Georgiana navigated around him as if he were a venomous snake, always aware of exactly where he was in any room, never allowing herself to be alone with him. Sometimes he was absent – he had a hearty gambling habit, and often disappeared to indulge himself – and she could relax.

  To Georgiana’s eternal relief, Cecily bumped into horsey James again one night at the assembly rooms; he asked her to dance, and then kept asking, and it seemed to drive all talk and thoughts of Mr Hawksley from her mind. Georgiana thought a little unkindly that James’s chief advantage was in being the last man of interest Cecily had encountered – his position in her affections primarily achieved by being the freshest face in her memory.

  Mr Hawksley was never to be found. Georgiana didn’t stop looking for him.

  On one occasion when they didn’t return home from the assembly rooms until seven o’clock the next morning, Georgiana stumbling from Frances’s carriage with only one glove on, Mrs Burton cornered her in the hallway and implied that she was displaying behaviour befitting a stray cat or an industrious prostitute.

  ‘I’ve only been to a late party, Mrs Burton,’ Georgiana replied, aching for her bed. ‘Not signing on at the bawdy-house.’

  ‘One often leads to the other,’ Mrs Burton replied, sounding quite stern.

  Georgiana dutifully stayed at home for most of a week to demonstrate that she had not found gainful employment in the arms of strangers, until Frances grew tired of sending urgent notes and simply showed up to take her out. She sat for tea, smiled winningly and made polite, witty conversation with Mrs Burton for the best part of three hours until her aunt had no choice but to approve, waving them off to h
ave fun.

  Georgiana and Frances waved back with the utmost sincerity until they were well away, and then fell into each other’s arms, laughing hysterically.

  The party they were attending that night was at Cecily’s house. Georgiana had never seen it before; it was farther away from the town than any of the others, and looked exactly the sort of fairytale castle Cecily belonged to, with great turrets and spires and a curving stream that Cecily insisted wasn’t really a moat.

  The golden-haired Dugray brothers were in attendance, with their wives – it seemed to be some sort of birthday party, although whose birthday they were celebrating was somewhat lost in translation – and Georgiana found them to be just as fair and strapping as Frances had described them to be. Lovely as they were, they could not distract her friend from the fact that not one of the grand, well-tapestried rooms contained Mr Russell – and so, unable to find the company she craved within the house, within a few hours Frances had somehow convinced them all up onto the roof.

  It had been a painfully humid August day, the clouds pressing down on them and making everybody miserable, but as they sat looking out over the hills, something magical happened – first, forked lightning in the distance, then a rumble of thunder, making them all cry out with joy and terror. The storm was too far away to be any real threat, and it did not begin to rain, so they sat in awed silence for a while, listening to the booms that reverberated around the valley and pointing every time the sky lit up, as if they were not all watching the same spectacle together. Georgiana had never experienced such a storm – but then, she had never watched one directly after smoking one of Christopher’s mysterious pipes, either.

  ‘It makes me think of a poem,’ Jonathan said, waving his hand at the general landscape.

  ‘Which poem?’ said Frances.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Any of them.’

  ‘Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main, the pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain,’ quoted Georgiana, without thinking.

  Jonathan clapped a hand to her shoulder, thoroughly pleased with her.

  ‘My God, do you just keep all that in your head?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s taking up valuable space,’ Georgiana said, smiling self-consciously. ‘My father used to have me memorise them so I could perform them at the dinner table.’

  ‘Who wrote that one? About the thunder?’

  ‘Er . . . Phillis Wheatley Peters.’

  ‘Which one is she?’

  ‘She was a slave,’ Frances said coolly. Georgiana flinched; she had never heard Frances use that word before, and had gone out of her way not to use anything like it in her presence, as if avoiding the subject made it any less real. ‘She has a particularly good one about her glorious and benevolent masters civilising her – it’s in our library. Father reads it out sometimes, but I’m not sure he quite grasps the irony. Come on, George, don’t hold back – I’m sure you must know it off by heart, too.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Georgiana said quietly.

  ‘Well, well, let’s see what I can remember.’ Frances rotated her wineglass in her hand so that it threatened to spill with every turn. ‘T’was mercy brought me from my pagan land . . . Something about God, and saviours, and how diabolic her skin was. Hard to remember, really, because that’s the part where my mother always starts crying.’

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. The clouds roiled on, the only sign of rain the blurring of the darkening horizon.

  ‘I wonder what makes it do that,’ said Cecily eventually. ‘The sky, I mean.’

  ‘It’s electricity, Ces,’ said Christopher pompously, loosening his cravat.

  He had tried to sit next to Georgiana when they first arranged themselves across the rooftop, and Georgiana had pretended she had something very urgent to say to Frances so that she could shuffle clumsily away from him. He had never acknowledged what had happened at the cottage, and neither had Georgiana, but sometimes when he looked at her she thought she saw a glint of something in his eye – the thought of what he might consider unfinished business.

  ‘Well, what good does it do me to know that?’ Cecily replied, raising an eyebrow at him. ‘You may as well tell me it’s . . . I don’t know . . . physics.’

  ‘Christ, Ces, surely you know what physics is?’

  Frances’s mood so easily tipped over into irritation right now, and apparently Cecily’s lack of basic scientific knowledge was good enough reason to gripe.

  ‘Why should I? It’s hardly relevant,’ Cecily replied, shrugging.

  ‘All right, so you just need a real-world example. A practical lesson.’

  Frances snatched up Cecily’s silky grey reticule from where it had been sitting abandoned beside her, and walked to the edge of the roof. While it wasn’t raining, the wind was a little too strong to be standing so close to what was perhaps a fifty-foot drop.

  ‘You don’t want me to let this slip through my fingers right now because of physics.’

  ‘Give it back, Frances,’ Cecily said, pouting. ‘It’s my best one!’

  ‘Don’t blame me – blame physics! Physics will make it fall. Physics will dash it to the ground and ruin it. Come on, Ces, it’s not difficult.’

  ‘Physics is a cruel mistress,’ Jonathan said with a sigh.

  ‘As is Frances,’ muttered Jane, getting to her feet.

  Georgiana looked sharply up at her; her expression was unreadable.

  Cecily had risen waveringly and gone to fetch back what was hers, but Frances narrowed her eyes and grinned, skipping out of her friend’s reach and dangling the bag over the edge, where it swayed in the wind.

  ‘Do you understand it now?’ she said insistently. ‘Say you understand!’

  Cecily gave a little scream of frustration. ‘Fine, fine, I understand!’ she said. ‘Give it back now.’

  Frances didn’t move, so Cecily leaned forward to snatch the reticule from her hands. Frances opened her fingers and seemed to let it drop, and Cecily grabbed wildly, losing her balance and almost pitching forwards off the edge of the building and to her certain doom.

  Jane was at her side in an instant, pulling her roughly back so that they both fell safely onto the roof with a heavy thud. Frances had not really let go of the bag; she had simply let the main heft of it slip from her hand while holding on to the drawstrings. It was still dangling from her fingers.

  ‘For the love of God, Frances, was that really necessary?’ Jane spat. ‘You could have killed her!’

  ‘Always with the amateur dramatics,’ Frances replied, rolling her eyes. She dropped the bag into Cecily’s lap. ‘Come on. Jonathan? Christopher? I need another drink.’

  She swept away from them all towards the entrance to the stairwell, and Jonathan raised his eyebrows at Georgiana before shrugging and following. Christopher lingered, as if he didn’t want to appear to come when called, but eventually stretched, got to his feet and ambled after them.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said, glowering after them once they had disappeared.

  Georgiana was rather wishing that Frances had called her to heel, too; she had generally avoided speaking directly to Jane since the cottage, and had no wish to do so now. She stood up, hovering awkwardly.

  ‘Are you all right, Ces?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, George – it was just a joke,’ Cecily said charitably, checking her reticule for any signs of its ordeal.

  ‘Oh yes, really funny, if you’d fallen off the roof,’ Jane said, furious. ‘I’d expect to see it satirised in tomorrow’s paper. Local woman plunges to her death to appease bored aristocratic sociopath.’

  Georgiana laughed, and then stopped abruptly.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not funny really,’ she said, fetching Cecily’s wine and bringing it to her.

  She, of course, knew why Frances was so frustrated, but she had been sworn to secrecy. Cecily and Jane understood who Frances was searching for when she pulled them through busy rooms and quiet parlours, but they didn’t f
ully comprehend why she did so with such urgency and in such an ill temper. Not that it excused attempts at rooftop manslaughter, of course.

  ‘Well, cheers then,’ Jane said, ‘to somehow still being alive despite the many times Frances has nearly killed us.’

  They all clinked their glasses solemnly. Jane wasn’t looking directly at Georgiana, but she wasn’t ignoring her, either, or saying anything directly terrible to her – which seemed an improvement.

  ‘How often can one be in mortal danger at house parties and dinners?’ Georgiana asked.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ said Cecily brightly. ‘One time we were at a party in an underwater ballroom’ – Georgiana tilted her head quizzically – ‘Oh, sorry, it’s er . . . It’s like a big glass dome under a lake. Big enough to dance in. Wonderfully atmospheric, if a bit damp. Anyway, Frances and Jonathan had a monster of a fight, really going at each other, and she took this cane he had and tried to smash one of the glass panes. They had to stage an emergency evacuation.’

  ‘That wasn’t even the worst one,’ Jane said. ‘What about that thing at the races?’

  ‘Well, to be fair to her, she didn’t know that would happen—’

  ‘All those poor horses.’

  Georgiana decided she didn’t want to know.

  ‘Of course, our Miss Dugray is very forgiving,’ Jane said, with a significant look at Cecily.

  ‘Oh, not this again,’ she said, sighing sadly and shaking her magnificent blonde ringlets.

  Jane took a very large swig of her drink.

  ‘Ces took a liking to one of the Campbell cousins when we were fifteen and Frances . . . Well, she put a stop to it. She doesn’t like to feel outdone, our Franny, or as if our attentions are divided.’

  ‘I didn’t like him that much,’ Cecily said.

  ‘You were writing to him every night! You couldn’t think about anything else! If that’s what you do when you don’t like someone that much, the next man who does take your fancy will need military protection.’

  Georgiana was silent, taking all of this in. It was a surprise to hear them speaking poorly of Frances. They couldn’t think too badly of her; they were still out with her every night, holding her drinks, following her onto rooftops even if she might threaten to hurl their favourite belongings from them.