Reputation

by Lex Croucher

  Jeremiah sighed and rubbed his temple.

  ‘What is it that you want? I thought we understood one another,’ Frances continued, clearly attempting to sound perfectly in control of her feelings, but with a shake in her voice that even she could not disguise.

  After what felt like an age, Jeremiah finally spoke.

  ‘Please don’t make this more than it is, Frances,’ he said.

  Georgiana took a sharp intake of breath. Frances seemed to have done the exact same thing.

  ‘More than . . . ? We were both there, Jeremiah. Did I dream it? We were in that damned cottage, and you said . . . You said you couldn’t wait, you couldn’t wait until we were married. What could have been more than that? How could I – how could it mean anything less than it did?’

  Jeremiah looked sightly uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry if you feel I have wronged you, Frances. But . . . come on. Every time I turned around, there you were. Sitting as close to me as you possibly could, drinking from my glass, practically climbing on top of me at every opportunity. I think we both knew where it was leading. That night – that was just the . . . the natural conclusion.’

  ‘The natural conclusion?’ Frances hissed, and Georgiana could practically see the rage radiating from her. ‘The natural conclusion when one talks of marriage – when one makes promises – the natural conclusion is a wedding, Jeremiah.’

  ‘You’re drunk, Frances. You’re out of your mind – and you always are. You think I want you to spend time with my parents? Are you mad? Oh yes, Father, please meet my fiancée, she’s been at the laudanum, and the opium, and Christ knows what else—’

  ‘Coming from you? Where do I get half of it, Jeremiah—’

  ‘Yes, but we drink, we smoke – we do it to have fun. We know when to stop. We’re not all quite as desperate to escape reality as you are, Frances. You’re completely out of control. I know what you did to Annabelle, I know you hunted her down and found her father – what right had you to do that? If you really want to get married, if you want a good match, you need to settle down and stop behaving like a spurned child. At this rate I can’t blame your father—’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Frances, and her voice cut clear through the night. It seemed to leave a ringing silence in its wake.

  ‘Well, there you are. Just proving my point. My father certainly warned me this would happen – told me to set my sights on a nice, traditional girl—’

  ‘I am a nice girl,’ Frances said, but all the fight seemed to have gone out of her.

  ‘Oh, come on, Frances. You’re not nice, and you know it. God – there’s no talking to you when you’re like this.’ Jeremiah shook his head, getting to his feet. ‘I really am sorry, Franny. It just wasn’t . . . It just wasn’t like that, for me.’

  There was a shout from close by, and Georgiana jumped. Two of Jeremiah’s friends came swaggering through the bushes, crying out to him in greeting. Georgiana bit her lip, her eyes on Frances. She was shaking, but standing her ground. Incredibly, she was not crying.

  ‘Jeremiah,’ she said softly. ‘Please.’

  ‘Oh, please, Jeremiah,’ parroted one of his friends in a cruel falsetto.

  Georgiana expected Jeremiah at the very least to reprimand him – to apologise, to do anything other than let Frances stand there in total humiliation while they smirked at her – but he didn’t. He laughed. He laughed, and then he got languidly to his feet and walked away.

  He didn’t look back.

  Frances collapsed onto the bench he had vacated as if she had been shot.

  Casting aside the awkwardness of her sudden appearance, Georgiana rushed to her side and reached for her arm.

  ‘Frances, are you all right? I saw him leave, I heard him—’

  She was cut off by Frances’s expression; instead of despairing, she looked outraged, as if Georgiana had said something to offend her.

  ‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ she said coolly, and Georgiana froze with one hand hovering ridiculously over Frances’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, come on, Frances, you don’t—’

  ‘No.’ Frances got to her feet with both arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold. ‘I don’t need your help.’

  Georgiana gaped at her. ‘Why are you angry with me?’

  ‘Oh, don’t pretend you’re so innocent,’ Frances spat. One of her ivory gloves had a large red wine stain on it, and Georgiana found herself watching it as Frances raised her arm to point at her. ‘You like to pretend you’re so good all the time, such a great friend, but when there’s the slightest risk that I might embarrass you in front of some second-rate man you like, suddenly I’m not your friend at all.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Georgiana said, feeling herself growing hot, ‘Wait. That isn’t – that’s not what happened, Frances. You were terrible to Thomas. He was just trying to help, and you were—’

  ‘I was terrible?’ Frances said, still trying to keep her voice level, but wavering with the effort. ‘I came to you because I needed . . . God, I thought you understood! I thought you were different. I waited for you the next day, Georgiana. You said you’d come, and I believed you. And then when you didn’t call, you didn’t write – I didn’t understand why.’

  ‘I just told you why – I was waiting for an apology, Frances, I was waiting for—’

  ‘No,’ Frances said, shaking her head with a grim smile, as if nothing Georgiana could say now would change her mind. ‘That wasn’t it, was it? Because when I saw you at Cecily’s, I knew. You don’t want to be my friend. You want to feel important. You want to come to nice parties and drink the best wine and have people point at you and say – look, there’s Georgiana Ellers, isn’t she something? You wanted my friends, my position, my influence. Well, I hope it’s everything you wanted, George. I hope it makes you very, very happy.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Georgiana said, hearing how pathetic her rebuttal sounded. ‘That’s not—’

  ‘Oh, thank Christ, here you are.’ Jonathan was suddenly there, stumbling through the trees, and a few seconds later he was followed by Jane and Cecily. If he sensed the tension, he decided to ignore it. ‘I thought maybe the French had nabbed you. Come on, stop lurking about in the garden – let’s go and find the party.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances, her eyes fixed on Georgiana. ‘Let’s.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Jonathan said half an hour later, looking up from the straight gin he had been pouring himself, his glass precariously balanced on the edge of one of Lord Haverton’s ornamental fountains. He nodded very slightly across the ballroom. ‘Natural disaster incoming.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Jane said immediately, rolling her eyes. ‘Just . . . don’t look at her, and maybe she won’t see us.’

  Frances, who had been unnervingly silent since the scene in the garden, snorted into her drink.

  It was too late. Betty Walters, red in the face and adorned with a few drooping flowers in her hair, was approaching with purpose.

  ‘Georgiana?’ she said. ‘Miss – Miss Ellers?’

  Georgiana winced, exchanging a pained look with Jonathan before she rearranged her features into a more neutral expression and turned to look at Betty.

  ‘Can I help you, Betty?’ It came out a little less warmly than she had intended, gin sharpening her tongue, and Georgiana heard Jonathan choke on a laugh behind her.

  ‘Well, it’s just – we had arranged to meet,’ Betty said, going even more red.

  Georgiana felt something drop in the pit of her stomach. She had forgotten. She had forgotten entirely.

  ‘We had said we would meet, you know, outside the front of the party, and I thought – well, I arrived at nine as we had agreed and I waited – I thought perhaps you had been waylaid or you had forgotten something and had to go back for it, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else in case you pulled up and I had vanished – so I waited, you see, I waited for an hour or – perhaps it was two hours – but eventually I thought maybe you weren’t coming, so I came in to see if I had somehow
missed you, and I met some very interesting people but none of them were you. I thought you might have come in at the wrong entrance, or be waiting for me elsewhere, or—’

  ‘Betty,’ Georgiana said, attempting to abate the flow, knowing that Betty was due an apology but feeling incapable of doing so sincerely while she could hear Jane laughing openly at her shoulder. To her horror, Betty looked precariously close to tears.

  ‘I just thought – we agreed to come in together, you said so in your letter, and so I thought it must have been some kind of mistake – it is a mistake, isn’t it? Because I thought we had such a pleasant time when I came to tea, we had such fun—’

  There was an unpleasant feeling rising in Georgiana’s throat. The more Betty spoke, the more hot and embarrassed she became. She could feel the eyes of her friends burning into the back of her head, feel them jostling and laughing and likely losing all respect for her by the second. The gin she had poured generously down her throat to cope with the awkwardness of standing next to Frances, as if nothing were wrong between them, seemed to be poisoning her from the inside out.

  Incredibly, Betty was still going.

  ‘—I was going to have you over to our house, Grandmama told me to invite you, she said it’s only polite when we came to you, and that if you are to be my special companion—’

  ‘Betty,’ Georgiana said, with enough force that Betty finally did come to a pause. ‘Don’t you ever grow tired of listening to yourself talk?’

  Betty looked, for a moment, as if she were trying very hard to find some charitable reading of this sentence that might mean she had not been insulted; when she failed, her entire face seemed to crumple inwards on itself.

  ‘I thought – I thought we were friends,’ she said quietly.

  Georgiana’s mouth felt very dry; she raised a hand slightly, as if she might be about to reach for Betty and apologise, but she found herself unable to move it any farther.

  Betty took one last look around at the faces behind Georgiana and then tearfully fled.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Jonathan when Georgiana turned back towards him, not sounding the least bit sorry. ‘I think you’ve broken her poor heart, George.’

  ‘God, something about her puts all my teeth on edge,’ said Jane.

  Frances laughed humourlessly – but Cecily was frowning.

  ‘Oh, I feel sorry for her,’ she said, shaking her head slowly. ‘She can’t help being so ridiculous. And it is a party, after all. Nobody should be crying at a party.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Jonathan. ‘One of the main purposes of a ball is for people to cry on the outskirts of it.’

  Cecily still looked rather disappointed.

  ‘I think we should go and make a peace offering,’ Frances said suddenly. Georgiana shot a confused glance at her, but she seemed sincere. ‘In the spirit of the party.’

  ‘Oh, please do,’ Cecily said. ‘Otherwise the image of that sad little face will rather ruin my evening.’

  ‘We should take her a drink,’ Frances said; she raised her own glass of gin.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Georgiana said quickly, taking it from her with dubious co-ordination. ‘I’m the one who upset her. I’ll take it.’

  ‘You are a dear,’ Cecily said, patting her on the shoulder as she went.

  The room was far too loud, too bright, too hot; Georgiana must have bumped into upwards of twenty people as she crossed it, but this seemed inconsequential, as if all strangers had become part of the furniture and required no acknowledgement or apology when nudged or tripped over. She paused and shook her head slowly in an attempt to clear it, and only succeeded in loosening more of her hair, which was dropping from its pins at an alarming rate. She distantly wondered what the sheet formerly known as her dress now resembled; if it was covering all of her vital organs, it would quite frankly be a miracle.

  She discovered Miss Walters outside, sitting on a bench, looking excruciatingly heartbroken as she gazed forlornly into a rose bush.

  ‘There you are,’ Georgiana said, and Betty turned her pink, tear-brimmed eyes to Georgiana. ‘Betty, listen, I’ve had far, far too much gin to give you the proper grovelling sort of speech you really deserve, but just . . . Here – please, have a drink. From me. Well, from all of us, really.’

  It was a poor attempt at an apology, but Betty was easily mollified, and took the glass from her.

  ‘I’m sure – I’m sure you didn’t mean to be so cruel,’ she said in a tremulous voice.

  Georgiana felt guilt roil in her gut. She knew she didn’t deserve so benign a judgement, but she shouldn’t have expected anything else from Betty; she was unable to be anything other than too kind and forgiving.

  ‘And, well – I don’t drink beyond a few fingers of wine, ordinarily – Grandmama says that’s quite enough to lubricate one of an evening. But when in Rome, I suppose . . .’ She took a sip of gin, wrinkling up her face in disgust as soon as it hit her tongue. ‘This is – oh, this is quite horrible!’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? You get used to it,’ said Georgiana, wondering if she herself had perhaps become a little too used to it.

  Betty bravely endured a large gulp and then put down the glass, sniffing and wiping her damp eyes with her gloved hands.

  ‘You forgot to meet me, didn’t you? It’s all right, you can tell me, it’s not the first time it’s happened to me – I did wonder, when you weren’t there, because of course the mind does go straight to the disappointments of the past, and one always lives in horror of repeats—’

  She stood up, clearly attempting to rally, but then her expression became quite strange.

  ‘Betty?’ Georgiana asked nervously, watching as Betty seemed to sway on her feet and then sat abruptly back down again on the bench. She had gone very pale, and suddenly clapped both hands over her mouth as if she might be in danger of imminently vomiting. Georgiana moved away instinctively.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I feel – I feel very odd,’ Betty said, eyes wide.

  ‘Oh. Are you – er . . . Are you ill?’

  ‘I’m not – I’m not certain.’ She tried to get to her feet once more, but had to hold on to the bench to achieve something resembling an upright position. ‘Oh, Miss Ellers, I’ve come over so queer – I think I may be dying!’

  Georgiana was too unsteady on her own feet to be of much use, but she stood and held out a supportive arm anyway. The sudden shift of weight when Betty tried to take it proved too much for her in her current state, however, and she lost her balance, sending Miss Walters tumbling quite spectacularly to the ground. Some guests nearby exclaimed at the disturbance, a few making to come to their aid.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Betty. I’m so sorry—’

  They were interrupted by a sudden burst of laughter, and Georgiana looked up to see Frances watching them, her eyes narrowed.

  ‘Not much of a drinker, are you, Miss Walters?’ she said.

  Georgiana looked from her friend to the half-drunk glass of gin beside them; Frances had something small and dark clutched in her hand, and with an unpleasant lurch of her stomach, Georgiana recognised the horrible, potent bottle of Christopher’s finest.

  ‘What have you done?’ said Georgiana in consternation as Betty struggled to get to her feet, ‘She’s not well, I really think we ought to—’

  ‘Miss Walters?’

  Georgiana froze. She knew that voice.

  She turned to see Thomas was standing behind her, two glasses of champagne in hand, frowning at the scene in front of him.

  Georgiana could not have devised a worse situation for him to walk into if she had tried.

  More people were beginning to gather around, to see what was the matter; Betty was swaying, almost swooning on her feet, and seeing this, Thomas put down the champagne and rushed to steady her before she fell again.

  ‘Are you all right? Do you need a doctor? What happened?’

  He looked from Betty to Georgiana in concern, clearly baffled by Georgiana’s lack of
action.

  ‘Oh, Mr Hawksley,’ Betty gasped, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘There was something in – in my drink – I thought she was really sorry, I thought she wanted to make amends, but instead she – she’s p-poisoned me.’

  ‘Who’s poisoned you?’ Thomas said insistently, his arm around her shoulder.

  Georgiana felt sick to her stomach as Betty raised a shaking hand and pointed directly at her. She put up her own hands, pathetically trying to indicate her innocence.

  ‘Georgiana?’ he said, his tone disbelieving.

  ‘Oh, it was only a very small poisoning,’ Frances said dismissively. ‘We all know it would take more than that to bring you down, Betty.’

  Georgiana looked at Frances in horror as she so casually damned her; Frances just laughed. Thomas was gazing at Georgiana with utmost shock and revulsion, as if she had disappointed him even beyond his lowest expectations.

  ‘She told me she would meet me, so I wouldn’t have to come in alone, and then she left me there – she just left me standing all by myself, it was horrid.’ Betty sobbed into Thomas’s shoulder. ‘And then when I found her she was so rude to me, and I thought – I thought she was my friend.’

  Georgiana tried to interject, attempted to say something in her defence, but only managed a spluttered ‘No!’ before she was being bustled out of the way by guests coming to help, offering Betty their carriages and drivers. Two of them took her from Thomas and put a shoulder each under her arms to bear her away to safety; only once she was being carried over the threshold of the house with a small crowd in tow, her sobs still audible as she went, did Thomas turn back to look at Georgiana.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked her, his tone flat.

  Frances snorted.

  ‘Leave us, Frances,’ Georgiana muttered, and Frances pressed a hand to her chest in mock affront.

  ‘I’d rather stay and watch the show, if you don’t mind.’