Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Barque of Frailty

“Perfectly, ma’am. But I cannot hope to offer you a reasonable price without an interval of reflection. I should be cheating you else.”

“Could you put a round figure to the whole, Mr. Rundell?” Eliza asked.

He pursed his lips. “The settings are decidedly out of mode, Countess — none but a dowd would be seen to wear them now without they was reset — and the price of gold has sadly fallen in recent weeks—”

“Tush.” I made as if to rise from my chair. “You were mistaken, Eliza, in your opinion of Mr. Rundell. I think perhaps I should have followed my own inclination, and consulted Mr. Phillips in Bond Street.”

“Not so hasty, if you please,” he said, lifting one hand. “The settings are old and the price of gold is fallen sadly—”

“—At the height of war, Mr. Rundell? That is not what we hear from my brother the banker. The price of gold has, if anything, risen—”

“But it is undoubtedly true,” he continued as tho’ I had not spoken, “that the gems themselves are of the finest, and should fetch a pretty penny. If you will trust me with the lot for a matter of two days, I will undertake to state my very best price. You won’t get as good from Phillips in Bond Street nor Gray in Sackville Street neither. They’re warm men, but they haven’t Rundell’s means.” [7] To be “warm” in Jane’s day was to be wealthy. According to Charles Greville, a contemporary of Austen’s, Rundell was so rich he was able to lend money to his bankers during the financial panic that followed Waterloo. When he died at the age of eighty, Greville notes, Rundell left the largest fortune then registered under a will at Doctors Commons — some million and a half pounds. — Editor’s note .

“Very well,” I answered, with just the faintest suggestion of unwillingness. “Write out a receipt for these items, if you please, and I shall return in two days’ time.”

“Done.” Mr. Rundell scrawled his name on a square of hot-pressed paper and handed it to me with a flourish.

Eliza was so relieved to have the business concluded, that it was quite an hour before I could tear her from the contemplation of the amethyst bracelets strewn about the shop’s casements.

Wednesday, 24 April 1811, cont.

OUR ERRAND HAPPILY CONCLUDED AND THE weather holding fine, we ordered our hackney carriage to Gunter’s establishment, and regaled ourselves with pastries and tea, followed by a thorough debauch among the volumes of Lackington’s book shop — a vast room lined with shelves and clerks poised on the steps of ladders necessary to reach them, a vision so replete with the printed word that I stood as one stunned, incapable of voicing a request for full seven minutes. Mary Brunton’s Self-Controul then offered as the ardent object of my writer’s soul — it being the only novel talked of in London this April — but in vain; among all that wealth of books, not a copy of Brunton was to be had. Eliza quitted Lackington’s with a volume in the French, and I with some poems of Cowper and a dissatisfied heart. Of what use is it to reside for a time in the very centre of the world, surrounded by every possible whim or comfort, if one cannot obtain Self-Controul?

Having spent all our money, we made a virtue of necessity, and extolled the benefits of exercise in walking the remainder of the way to Hans Town.

“Only think, Jane,” Eliza observed as we bent our steps towards Hyde Park, “what it shall be to find your book in Lackington’s window! I am sure I shall faint!”

“It could never be deemed worthy of such prominence,” I said despairingly. “It shall be thrust with the other lamentable publications beneath the counter, there to languish unread — or abused by every rational critic as the most vulgar and silly effusion yet offered by an ill-educated ape-leader. What can I have been thinking, Eliza, to throw Henry’s money after such folly? — When there are already so many books in the world!”

“But none can boast a creature half so entertaining as Willoughby, I assure you, nor half so … so improving … as Elinor. Jane—” She stopped short, shading her eyes with one hand. “Is not that the old Count I espy before us? In animated conversation with the ladies in that very dashing perch-phaeton? I wonder if he is forever speaking to them in French!”

I should judge it to be nearly three o’clock in the afternoon — a fashionable hour to promenade in the Park, whether by foot, horse, or carriage; and the parade was thronged with parties of young ladies in open carriages, Corinthians astride their showy hacks, and sedately strolling misses in the company of chaperones. There was also, I may add, a quantity of those persons commonly known as the Muslin Company: showy hacks of a different kind of animal, also intended for a gentleman’s pleasure. My mother should have called them Bold Pieces, and abhorred their display of charms; but the present age held such women in something like admiration, as might be divined from the euphemisms commonly applied to them: High Flyers, Fair Cyprians, Birds of Paradise, Snug Armfuls, Barques of Frailty, Demi-reps. These were not the common women of the streets, but mistresses of the highest order, who lived under the protection of a variety of swains to whom they offered a fidelity commensurate with the quantity of gold laid out to secure it. The dashing perch-phaeton Eliza had espied was certainly commanded by one of these: a golden-haired, ringleted creature of perhaps seventeen, who tooled the ribbons of a very fine pair of matched greys. The phaeton was of a sort usually driven by a gentleman rather than a lady; and this daring, coupled with the extraordinary cut of the girl’s habit, must draw the attention of every male eye.

“It does not do to stare, of course,” Eliza observed reprovingly, “when a gentleman of one’s acquaintance is in conversation with such a person; one ought to affect an interest in the opposite side of the parade. But do you think it possible, Jane, that we see before us poor Anne’s rival? The agent of all her fears? The girl is very lovely, I daresay — but barely out of the schoolroom!”

I did not immediately discern Comte Emmanuel-Louis d’Entraigues, who was supported by an ebony walking cane, his grey hair surmounted by a showy beaver. But an instant’s study revealed the elegant scholar of Barnes, Surrey: a man in his middle fifties, well-dressed but with something foreign in the cut of his coat; a figure once elegant and strong but now tending to corpulence; a Gallic beak of a nose and a pair of lips that might be judged either sensual or cruel. The hands alone were still very fine: untouched by labour or traffick with the world, accustomed to the handling of leather-bound volumes and objets d’art — such as the girl who now dimpled down at him, a confection of innocent beauty and knowing vice.

I studied the creature’s complexion of rose and cream, straight line of a nose, and wide sapphire eyes; there was breeding as well as beauty there, if one chose to find it, yet the girl would never be taken for other than an adventuress. Her carriage dress was too formed to her body, and the décolleté plunged as deep as a ball gown’s. A dark blue hussar’s cap was set at a raking angle over her brow, and guinea-gold curls clustered at the nape of her white neck. There was something familiar in her looks, tho’ she was entirely a stranger to me … and then I had it: in figure and countenance, she might have been Anne de St.-Huberti’s younger self.

“I cannot put a name to that little Bird of Paradise,” Eliza whispered, “but her companion is none other than Harriette Wilson, the most accomplished Cyprian in London. You will recollect the box at the Opera House — the Ponsonbys and Mr. Canning … ”