Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

“How very provoking! I did not think you could be so cruel to children of your own invention.” He leaned towards me, his face alight. “What is it about novels that engages your interest — nay, that commands your powers?”

Torn between the duty of turning his scrutiny with an arch remark — and the desire to unburden myself to one who might actually comprehend — I gave way, as is generally the case, to Desire.

“All of life, my lord, is found among the workings of three or four families in a country village. You may laugh if you dare” — for his sardonic mouth had turned up at the corners — “but what I say is true. In the hopes and sacred dreams of a young girl on the verge of womanhood, one may see as much of courage and destiny as in the most valorous deeds of the Ancients, with far better scope for conversation.”

“All of Fate, encompassed in a Susan! I do not like your ambitions so circumscribed, my dear. You had better call her Clorasinda, or some other name of four syllables, and exchange this respectable watering-hole for London, where the full panoply of human folly is on daily parade.”

“I cannot bear the thrust and noise of a town; and besides — people themselves alter so much, with the passage of time, that there is infinite material for a patient observer. In the relations between men and women alone, one might detect endless subtlety and variation.”

“Just so. I wonder, Jane, when I shall meet myself in your prose?”

“Never, my lord. You should defy my attempts at subjugation.”

He drew down his brows at this. “At last you have said what may be understood. It is a delicious power, is it not, to subject the unwitting to the lash of your pen? This is what truly beguiles you, Jane. You have found your weapon in words. You set out your creatures as examples of the human type — you anatomise them with a few deft strokes — and there is the character of Man exposed: in all its weakness, foible, arrogance, and careless cruelty.”

“And its goodness,” I amended. “I may laugh at what is absurd, but I hope I may never meet true worth with derision.”

“I cannot regard the world with the indulgence and affection you do,” he returned. “My greatest fault is a propensity to despise my fellows, when I do not condemn them.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested hesitantly, “that is because a man is more often taught to exploit another’s weakness — to use what is vulnerable for his own ends — than to respect what is admirable and good?”

He glanced at me swiftly. “Tell me, Jane — have I ever attempted to exert that kind of power over you ?”

“No, my lord.”

“—Though I may often have been tempted?”

I knew, then, that I had played at cat’s paw with a lion. Lord Harold apprehended my vulnerability — my brutal weakness: how I longed to be at his side at any hour, the merest observer of an intellect and a decision so acute as to leave me breathless — how I longed for his regard, and strove to merit it. How I led a parched existence in his absence — though that absence might endure for years — aware that true life occurred wherever he might be. The knowledge of all Lord Harold understood fell upon me there, in the intimacy of his closed carriage; and I gasped, as though I wanted for air.

“Do not look so alarmed, Jane,” he said briskly.

“We were speaking, I think, of novels. You ought to demand the return of your Susan from Messrs. Crosby and Co.; they seem disinclined to publish, and the sacrifice of so much talent upon the altar of male stupidity is not to be borne. Once you have succeeded in retrieving the copyright, you must entrust the manuscript to me.”

I swallowed hard on my emotions. “You are very good, my lord.”

“I am a scoundrel,” he rejoined gently, “but as we both apprehend that much, there is nothing more to be said.”

In the interval of a day, the yard’s mud had dried somewhat, though the smell of pitch and timber was just as strong as I had found it the previous morning. I understood the cause once Lord Harold handed me down from the carriage: Mr. Dixon’s men had cleared a space at the centre of the yard, and piled the remains of the seventy-four near the sea wall. Vast charred timbers of elm and oak rose into the sky like a devil’s scaffold, and flames licked at the base. The ship was become a pyre, with all Mr. Dixon’s hopes freighted upon it.

“The Lascar?” Lord Harold shouted.

The cloud of smoke was heavy enough that I could distinguish none of the men who tended the bonfire. My eyes smarted and my nose burned. I shook my head helplessly. Lord Harold, perceiving my streaming looks, motioned me back to the carriage. The coachman and Orlando both were at the horses’ bridles, for the great beasts had no love of fire.

“Take Miss Austen to Porter’s Mead,” his lordship cried to his coachman above the crackle of burning wood. “I shall join you there in a quarter of an hour.”

Amble handed me within, and I collapsed on the elegant cushions in a paroxysm of coughing. We were under way in an instant, the horses wheeling towards the sea. I found, when I recovered myself, that Orlando was seated opposite, and that in his hand he extended a clean linen handkerchief marked with a great scrolling monogram: H.L.J. Lord Harold’s own.

In his other hand was a silver flask.

“May I suggest a drop of brandy, ma’am, to clear your throat? I need not attest to the quality.”

I took both the linen and the flask without a murmur. In managing women, the valet, it seemed, was as adept as his master. “Orlando, how did you happen to join Lord Harold’s service?”

“Out of gratitude,” he said gently. “His lordship saved my life.”

“And are you able to describe the circumstances?”

An expression of pain — or was it hatred? — flickered across his countenance. But he neither hesitated nor demurred. “I was sentenced by the French governors of Oporto to hang, ma’am, on a charge of thievery. His lordship. . persuaded. . the men who held me in keeping to let me go. You will forgive me if I say no more.”

“You need not. I have an idea of the scene. Are you Portuguese, Orlando? For you betray not the slightest hint of accent in your speech; from your manners, I might believe you born to luxury in an Earl’s household.”

“I never knew my mother,” he replied, “but was named in the Italian at her insistence, before she died. My father was English, an army infantryman. He was carried off by a fever when I was but sixteen. From that moment to this, I have made to shift for myself. I wandered the world for some years, until I was so fortunate as to earn his lordship’s notice.”

“You have no other family?”

He smiled faintly. “None of which I am aware.”

“And you are how old?”

“Seven-and-twenty, ma’am.”

“What did the French believe you stole, Orlando, during your sojourn in Oporto?”

“Bread.” His gaze remained steady. “We had been subject to blockade, you understand, some months. Food was exceedingly scarce. I was hungry; the French plundered what little we had, and kept their stores under guard in a warehouse. It had once been a shed for aging sherry. I noticed an aperture for drains — I am a slight fellow, and adept at worming my way into every sort of hole.”

“Lord Harold must find such talents useful,” I observed under my breath, and returned the flask to Orlando’s keeping.

“The Lascar is a capital fellow,” his lordship declared as he joined me on the Mead some twenty minutes later.

I had quitted the carriage and commenced walking the length of the meadow, out of a desire for exercise and a compulsion to feel the wind on my face; Lord Harold came up with me quickly, covering the ground in long, easy strides that must always appear graceful.