Stephanie Barron: Jane and the Barque of Frailty

BY THE MORNING I HAD ENTIRELY FORGOT RUSSIAN princesses and French countesses, their affairs of the heart or their implacable hatreds — for it was Tuesday, the twenty-third of April, and thus the very date determined by Eliza nearly two weeks before, for an evening of musical entertainment, the professional performers to include a player upon the harp, one upon the pianoforte, and a succession of glees, to be sung by Miss Davis and her accompanists. The evening was intended as a sort of tribute to Mr.

Henry Egerton — no relation to the publisher of my book, but the son of one of Henry and Eliza’s friends — and Henry Walter, a young gentleman who is a cousin in some degree to all of us. I like to refer to the party as “the evening of the three Henrys,” and have served my hostess best by staying out of the way. There is a great deal to be done — the final orders to the cook, the shifting of a quantity of furniture from the passage and drawing-rooms, the disposition of chimney lights — but at ten o’clock in the morning Eliza and I paused to draw breath, and to drink a cup of tea. Eliza has suffered the slight indisposition of a cold, resulting no doubt from the necessity of quitting the coach briefly on our journey into Surrey Sunday evening — it being a chilly night, and the horses jibbing at some rough paving on the hill prior to the descent into the village, and all of us forced to stand about in the cold air while the coachman went to the leaders’ heads and led them over the broken ground. Eliza’s nose is streaming, and she will not be in looks this evening for her party — a vexation she is happily able to disregard, in all the bustle of preparing for her guests.

“Here is Henry,” she said impatiently as my brother stepped into the breakfast room, the morning paper under his arm, “come to eat up all the toast! I dare swear you smelled the bread baking halfway down Sloane Street, and hurried your feet to be in time.”

I held out my plate, but Henry was not attending to Eliza’s teazing words. His face was very white, and his countenance unwontedly sober.

“What is it?” his wife demanded with sudden perspicacity. “You look entirely overset, my dearest. Surely it is not — not one of the family?”

Henry shook his head, and set the newspaper on the table. “Nothing so near, thank God. But terrible, for all that. I suppose it is because we saw her only last evening. I cannot get over how alive she was, at the Theatre Royal … ”

As one, Eliza and I bent over the Morning Post. And read, in implacable print, the news: the Princess Tscholikova was dead — her throat slit and her body thrown carelessly on the marble steps of Lord Castlereagh’s house.

Tuesday, 23 April 1811

“HOW VERY DREADFUL,” ELIZA BREATHED. SHE SET down her plate of toast and pressed her hand to her heart. “And to think she lodged but a few steps from our door! How thankful I am that she was not killed at home!”

“ Was it murder, Henry?” I enquired.

“The editors would intimate suicide. The Princess is believed to have done herself a violence after being refused admittance to his lordship’s household.”

“But at what hour?” I reached for my brother’s Post. “Only consider — she cannot have importuned Castlereagh on the very steps of his home, even at the close of Mrs. Siddons’s play, and not been remarked by all the world! London does not go to bed so early as one o’clock!”

“Neither would she have sought an interview with his lordship at dawn, Jane.” Henry frowned. “Yet her body was found by a charley in Berkeley Square at a few minutes past five o’clock in the morning.” [2] A charley, as London’s night watchmen were termed, was supposed to make the rounds of his neighborhood every half hour during a set period of work — usually twelve hours at a stretch — and could rest in his wooden booth when not so employed. In point of fact, however, many such watchmen never bothered to make the rounds but drew their minimal pay for huddling in their boxes and periodically announcing the time and weather. They were frequently bribed by prostitutes and petty thieves to ignore minor acts of crime; they were also subject to being overturned in their booths by drunken young gentlemen. At this time there was no regular police force in London. — Editor’s note.

“She might have lain there some time, I suppose. Does a London watchman make regular rounds?”

Eliza sniffed. “Never if he may avoid it. The charleys, as you will observe, are elderly louts. I cannot recollect ever meeting with one in the lawful conduct of his duties — even when we resided in Upper Berkeley Street, which you must know, Jane, is most select. We must account it the merest mischance that the Grosvenor Square man stumbled upon the body at all.”

The Post had furnished its readers with a small line drawing of the Princess, in full evening dress, her looks ghastly and her torn throat dark with inky blood. The editors were amply recompensed for their part in the poor creature’s ruin; her violent end should sell numerous copies.

“And was this revenge?” I mused. “Her character destroyed by the publication of her correspondence, did the Princess think to shatter Lord Castlereagh’s peace? Prick his conscience? Shame his wife? Or was she simply mad with grief?”

“All Russians are mad,” Eliza observed.

“She did not appear to be out of her senses last evening, however. Recollect her earnest gaze! Princess Tscholikova greatly desired to be private with his lordship — but could have no opportunity. It must be impossible to command Castlereagh’s notice in so publick a venue as the Theatre Royal. Did she seek him, then, on his very doorstep? And to what purpose?”

“It cannot look well, her having been found at his lordship’s,” Eliza said doubtfully. “If the world fails to credit the notion of suicide, Lord Castlereagh must be suspect.”

“Fiddlestick,” I retorted. “Why should a gentleman of high estate — heir to an earldom, and known to be powerful among government circles — chuse to discard the body of his mistress in his own entryway? It will not do, Eliza, and you know it. Throw the lady into the Thames, by all means, but do not leave her lying about for the charley to find. Besides, Lord Castlereagh has no need of murder. He is the sort of man so complaisant in his own regard, as to consider the denial of his society as punishment enough.”

“What is this?” Henry cried. “Is Jane to ridicule a Tory minister? And she such a staunch opponent of the Regent and his Whiggish friends!”

“I cannot admire Lord Castlereagh,” I admitted, “Tory tho’ he is; and he has not been in government these many years, for which we are taught to be thankful. The little fact of his having a mistress is as nothing to his want of brilliance in oratory; and you well know, Henry, that his conduct of the Walcheren campaign was everywhere deplored. [3] In June 1809, the Portland Cabinet authorized a military campaign to take the Island of Walcheren, in the Dutch river Scheldt, held by Napoleon. The object was to destroy the arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp and Flushing. Some 40,000 troops and 250 vessels were dispatched in a well-publicized raid, conducted with poor intelligence and worse weather. By August, the Cabinet ordered a withdrawal. The Walcheren campaign has gone down in history as a fiasco. — Editor’s note . The Great World did not mourn when he resigned the post of Minister of War.”

“—Because he afforded the Great World such sport, in throwing over his political career!” my brother countered. “Consider, Jane, his treatment of Mr. Canning! Surely the violence he showed on that occasion is a great deal more to the present point, than all your talk of oratory?”