Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

I could not suppress a smile. “Unfortunately, I, too, have read rather more of Miss Eliza Bennet than is good for me.”

Miss Jennings’s eyes sharpened. “And what is your opinion, pray? Do you believe the tale to have been written by Mr. Walter Scott, as so many profess to do? No less an authority than Mr. Sheridan, the playwright, assured me it was one of the cleverest things he has ever read — and you know he must be considered a fine judge of words, however embarrassed his circumstances.”

“Perhaps he wrote it himself,” I suggested idly.

“That is just what I think,” Miss Jennings returned warmly. “It has that lively flavour — that rapier wit — we may recall from Mr. Sheridan’s early work. And he should never hesitate to comment on the rapacity of fortune-hunting mammas with daughters on the Marriage Mart, having been yearly witness to their triumphs! Indeed, I am sure the whole is far too clever for any lady of my acquaintance. We have not the brush for so broad a canvas.”

“You are severe upon our sex!” I cried.

“Miss Jennings is severe upon the whole world,” observed an amused voice behind me. “Surrounded as she is by opinions — printed or voiced, wise or illiterate — she has fodder enough for a lifetime’s contempt.”

I turned. And beheld a visage I had not seen in many years: the lovely face of Desdemona, Countess of Swithin — the niece of my late, lamented, and never to be forgotten Lord Harold Trowbridge.

I FIRST MET LADY DESDEMONA NEARLY A DECADE AGO, when she was barely eighteen and at the height of her first Season. The years which intervened between that occasion and this, have greatly altered both our fortunes. She has become the wife of the man she would have fled, when first I knew her; and has grown in consequence as a formidable Whig hostess, presiding over one of London’s most fashionable salons. Allusions to her name, discreetly abbreviated in the accepted mode as D., the C. of S___ , appear from time to time in all the principal papers; she moves (with an occasional hint of scandal — she is a Trowbridge, after all) among the most exalted in the land; her taste in dress is everywhere approved and generally copied; and her dashing perch phaeton with its team of blood chestnuts is a piquant sight in the Park of an afternoon — for she is an accomplished driver, and to be taken up beside the Countess is considered a great mark of favour.

All this I know purely as an interested observer: for Desdemona long since dropped my acquaintance. We met when I lived in Bath, at the behest of her uncle, the Rogue; she was a headstrong and willful young lady then, who learnt at her cost the value of respectability. The circumstances of Lord Harold’s death — my apparent complicity in those events — and his lordship’s bequest to me of a valuable cask of private papers, have alienated the interest and affection of the Trowbridge family. In short, I should not have been surprized had the Countess discovered my identity at a glance, and immediately cut me dead.

Instead, I was saved by the remarkable Miss Jennings.

“Your ladyship will give the world a very poor opinion of me,” she said roundly, “and just when I had hoped to pass myself off with some credit! I was forming a new acquaintance. But Miss Austen will forgive me, I am sure, if I claim the press of business. There is always a crush at Donaldson’s! How may I serve your ladyship?”

“Miss Austen,” the Countess repeated, and studied my visage searchingly. “I should not have believed it possible!”

Am I, then, so wretchedly altered from 1804? It must be inevitable that the countenance of nine-and-twenty is fairer than that of seven-and-thirty; and I shall be eight-and-thirty this December. I am becoming an old woman, tho’ I resist the knowledge.

“Miss Austen, in Brighton , of all places!” Desdemona continued. “No, I should not have believed it possible. I think of you perpetually in Bath, tho’ why I should — It is a habit, I believe, or perhaps a failing in all of us, to fix our friends forever in the life we last knew of them. But how delightful to meet with you again!”

Delightful? She must have forgot the coolness of her parting letter, the implicit reproaches, the suggestion that I had been, perhaps, something disgraceful — her uncle’s mistress, and had learnt to profit by it.

“I shall leave you now,” Miss Jennings said briskly, “in the hope of seeing both of you often within Donaldson’s. Do not forget, dear Countess, Mme. Valmy’s concert this evening!” And she moved off in the direction of my brother — who was absorbed in conversing with a gentleman in buff pantaloons and a blue coat whom I did not recognise, and another I knew at once for Henry’s banking client Lord Moira — Eliza’s inveterate admirer.

“My lady,” I said to Desdemona with tolerable composure, “you are well, I hope?”

“Very well, I thank you.”

“And the Earl?” I could not enquire after her family; that must be taken as an impertinence — a reference to her father, the Duke of Wilborough — who had believed me a potential blackmailer, and very nearly threatened me with a court of Law.

“Oh, Swithin is in his usual roaring health,” she said carelessly. “Nothing ever ails him, you know — he is disgustingly stout, unless one requires him to do what he does not like. But you, Miss Austen! How long has it been since we have met, I wonder?”

“Very nearly ten years.”

“And you have not altered in the slightest,” she said warmly, if untruthfully. “But I observe you are in mourning. May I offer my sympathy? A near relation, I collect?”

A lesser woman might have uttered unforgivable things at such a moment — A paramour, perhaps? You are come into someone else’s ill-gotten gains, I collect ? But she did not condescend to lash me. I do not think I should have been so benevolent, were our positions exchanged.

“My sister, Mrs. Henry Austen,” I said with difficulty.

“The Comtesse de Feuillide?” The shock in her voice was audible as she gave Eliza her French title — how Eliza would have revelled in the notice! “I am sorry to hear it. I recollect her a little from our meeting in Bath — she was the gayest of creatures.”

“Indeed.”

“Well.” Desdemona inclined her head, and held out her hand; for a fleeting instant, there was something of the Gentleman Rogue in her look, a flash of the satiric in her eye. She was as well aware as I, how magnanimous she was being.

I took her hand, and curtseyed.

“Now that we have scraped our disreputable acquaintance,” she told me, “I hope we shall no longer be strangers — in Brighton, at least. It is a town for easy manners, you know. Do you make a long visit?”

“But a fortnight, I believe.”

“And you are lodged …?”

“At the Castle.”

“Excellent! So perfectly to hand!” She reached into her reticule and offered me her card. “Swithin has taken a house for us on the Marine Parade, tho’ he is hardly ever there. I shall hope to find you in my drawing-room one morning, Miss Austen.”

And with that she passed on, to bespeak of Miss Jennings the latest verses of Lord Byron, the name of which she had forgot, but which her friend Lady Oxford assured her were most extraordinary.

SATURDAY, 8 MAY 1813

BRIGHTON, CONT.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK, JANE?” MY BROTHER EXCLAIMED as I perused the fashion plates of La Belle Assemblée , the latest edition of which was in considerable request among the patrons of Donaldson’s. It was clear from the exquisite modes draped on the impossibly tall ladies represented by the artist’s brush that I was fortunate in being obliged to wear black; not even the hundred and forty pounds I have earned from Sense and Sensibility — much less the hundred and ten Mr. Egerton gave for the copyright of P&P — should purchase a wardrobe suitable for Brighton. Spring fashions ran to jonquil crape, Nakara silk — a pearly shade ideally suited to a lady of my colouring, and which I guessed had been exactly the hue the Countess of Swithin was wearing — and apple green. Slippers were beaded and embroidered to match; pelisses of white jaconet, falling just to the knee, were buttoned over gowns; and a profusion of frills graced hemlines this season, which had risen above the ankle to reveal patterned stockings !