Stephanie Barron: Jane and the Barque of Frailty

Tuesday, 23 April 1811, cont.

“ARE YOU AT ALL ACQUAINTED WITH THE PRINCESS Tscholikova’s maid?” I asked Manon.

She was arranging my hair for the musical evening with her usual deft grace: a Frenchwoman of exactly my own age, with snapping dark eyes and a firm, thin-lipped mouth. Dressed in a charcoal gown with a starched white collar and cuffs, she is always precise as a pin, and terrifies my sister Cassandra with her swift step and haughty air. Manon and her mother, Madame Bigeon, fled the south of France during the Terror, and have been with Eliza ever since — Madame as nurse to Eliza’s son, Hastings de Feuillide, and after the poor boy’s early death, as general keeper of the household. Manon — whose given name is Marie Madeleine, too difficult a mouthful for daily usage — is in some sort Eliza’s dresser, with the superiority natural to such an upper retainer; she is also Eliza’s most loyal confidante, a soul to be trusted with matters of life and death. Not even a brief marriage to a soldier from Périgord — who gave her his name and a certain dignity before disappearing back to France — could detach her from the Henry Austens.

“You would mean Druschka?” she returned as she bound the bugle band about my forehead, and affixed the stem of a flower just above my left ear. “But of course I am acquainted with her. She is not French, you understand, but speaks our tongue to admiration. I know all the women in London who speak French, me. And most of the men also.”

I studied her inscrutable reflection in the mirror, and understood there was another life entire behind Manon’s picture of perfection: seething with hope and desire, perhaps, or tormented by loss; a human epic replete with character and incident, of which I knew nothing.

“Have you spoken with the maid today?”

“Non et non et non,” she said crisply. “Today I have procured a pair of soles for Mr. Walter and Mr. Egerton to eat, I have swept the back parlour and the front, I have arranged the flowers for the mantelpiece and directed the setting of the glass which is lent by the cabinet-maker, I have dressed Madame Henri and yourself — all this I have done, and it is not yet five o’clock.”

“Naturally,” I murmured.

“You are wondering about the death of the Princess,” Manon surmised. “It piques the interest, no? How such a one — with everything at her command, all the world in her favour — should do herself a violence. It is the artist in you. I perfectly understand.”

“The artist?” I repeated. I had never considered of myself in such exalted terms.

“La romancière,” she explained. “Madame Henri, she has told me of this book you have written. I have a great envy to read it one day soon, when the pages they are printed.”

There are times when the charming Eliza is too much of a rattle. “I had not wished my authorship of the novel to be known,” I faltered. “It is a great secret, Manon—”

“But of course,” she replied. “You should rather ride the horse bareback at Astley’s Amphitheater, non, than be seen to ridicule all your acquaintance so acutely with your pen? I shall say nothing, me. I shall be dumb as a post. But all the same, I comprehend your interest in the dead one et ses affaires. It is in the nature of writers to paint life in all its violence and glory. Naturally you wish to know why it was necessary that the Princess should die.”

The branch of candles on my dressing table sent flickering shadows across Manon’s face, but her eyes were firmly fixed on the task at hand — the taming of the short front curls about my temples — and her countenance was serene, as tho’ she talked only of the weather, and not my soul. It is true, nonetheless, that all my life I have wished to plumb the workings of the human heart — have sought to know the inner yearnings of my fellows through word and observation — and have found a sort of command of nature, in my ability to dispose of my acquaintance with the swift composition of an acid line. Was it mere vulgar curiosity, then, that animated my thoughts on the subject of the maid and her mistress? Was I to be self-condemned as no better than the Comtesse d’Entraigues, with her endless rapacity for gossip?

An image of Evgenia Tscholikova as I had glimpsed her in life — the earnest gaze fixed upon Lord Castlereagh’s box — and the idea of the lady grown rigid in a pool of her own blood on the London street, arose before me as tho’ reflected in the shifting candlelight. An echo of the maid Druschka’s words, guttural with misery, rang in my ears: It’s all lies. All lies.

“What do you know of the Princess?” I enquired.

Manon shrugged. “What everyone must know. She was born to the noblesse — she graced the Tsar’s court at fifteen — she married a man of exalted position whom she knew not at all, and was miserable as a matter of course. She travelled with Prince Tscholikov to Vienna, where he was envoy to the Court; and there she fell in love with a man. Disgrace and ruin followed. She journeyed to Paris, alone and almost without means. Her brother succored her. And so, at the last, she came to this country — her bloom fading, her hopes gone, a woman not above thirty who must establish her credit amidst a sea of foreign faces and tongues. It has happened, vous savez, to others before.”

“I suppose such a history might well end in suicide.”

“Bah,” Manon said briskly. “That is like your Englishness. Always the propriety, out? But I, who have seen the world — I tell you that nothing, not even the shameful letters published without warning in the newspaper — is so terrible as death, mademoiselle.”

I thought of the Terror: of the young girl Manon had once been, of an entire world lost to the guillotine.

“The man in Vienna — was that Lord Castlereagh?”

“Who knows? He is but the most recent in a string of lovers, perhaps. A woman denied all happiness will snatch at anything. But me, I should not snatch at Lord Castlereagh. He is … du glace.”

Ice. I recollected the studied indifference of the former Minister of War: he who had nearly killed a fellow Cabinet member defending his honour; he who could brave the ridicule of the press with insouciance. Ice was required of a man who must send entire regiments to their deaths; had he also sent the Princess to hers?

Manon’s hands stilled, and she smiled into the mirror. “There,” she said. “C’est fini. Does it please you?”

She could not restore lost youth, or conjure me a Beauty; but she had accomplished, all the same, something on the order of a miracle. My dowdy cap was discarded, my locks brushed with pomade until they shone, and my headdress as smart as my means would allow. The band of bugle beads bound about my forehead exactly matched those on the flounce of my dress. I would never be mistaken for an Incomparable — but as a secret scribbler of novels, a Bluestocking of a certain age come upon the Town — I would certainly do.

“Thank you, Manon.”

She curtseyed, once more the modest servant. “I shall call in Hans Place tomorrow,” she said with a sidelong glance, “to pay my respects to the Princess Tscholikova’s household. Who knows what Druschka may tell?”

“Who knows, indeed?” I replied.

OUR DINNER GUESTS ARRIVED AT HALF-PAST FIVE: MR. Henry Egerton, whose principal virtue appears to be that he is the son of a clergyman resident in Durham; and Mr. Henry Walter, a serious young man of philosophic and mathematical stamp, who ought to have quitted London this morning, but stayed to eat sole in my brother’s house. Eliza would wish to have nothing to do with Mr. Walter, as he is the nephew of her cousin Philadelphia — a prudish woman whose disapproval of Henry’s wife is rooted in envy — but the most common family feeling dictated that Mr. Walter being in London, Mr. Walter must be invited to Sloane Street. And so he was placed at Eliza’s right hand, and Mr. Egerton at mine, with the Tilsons to balance the table.