Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

Which wasn’t to ignore the fact that they disagreed rather more than they agreed, their only areas of pure accord being pugilism, a sense of fair play, and an affinity for strong-minded women. Still, he concluded, a friendship could go pretty far on those three.

Mary thought she discerned a hint of ruefulness, a knowledge that their affections could never be so pure as in boyhood. At least they’d never duel again, though-which might be saying the same thing in another way.

“His newspaper isn’t bad, you know, even if it’s far too enamored of its own rhetoric.” Kit stared at the blue velvet ceiling, as though the words he needed were written on it. “Too clever, too… fatuous in its claims for progress and the future, even when it speaks the truth about present injustice.”

“He showed you a few pages?”

“He pressed a few years’ worth of pages upon me; Belcher has packed it up somewhere. I don’t object to it, but there was only one of his scribblers who truly impressed me. A Mr. Elyot, in one of the older issues. Excellent treatment of the Corn Laws. Sober, not afraid to use facts.”

He’s jesting, of course. Richard must have told him that she was Edward Elyot; Elyot was her mother’s family’s name, though he might have forgotten that information. No, she thought, he’s teasing me.

“I shall have to read this Mr. Elyot myself one of these days,” she said, and kissed him to show that she was amused but hardly gulled by his joke.

There wouldn’t be more than kisses, however, today in the bouncing carriage. One could lose one’s taste for an old pleasure. No matter: they’d found some fascinating new ones last night, at an extremely comfortable inn at Matlock.

“I wonder what he’ll do now,” she said. “Mr. Oliver, I mean, now that he’s been exposed. Well, he can’t have any further career as a provocateur…” Her voice had trailed off at the word career.

She began again. “In any event, it’s a good thing that the workingmen of Grefford won’t be embarking on his false crusade. It would have been tonight, you know, around midnight. I should hate to think of Nick and his grandfather, arrested by the militia, tried for sedition…”

She thought she might be in for a little lecture on disorder and the need to contain it. But all he said was, “Of course, it rather leaves them where they’d begun, doesn’t it? With nothing settled-the whole affair come to nothing.

“The odd thing,” he continued, “is that the Home Office might have been able to pull it off, if they’d better coordinated what they told their magistrates, saw the whole thing more strategically.”

“If they’d had you working for them?”

“Yes, in fact. Well, it wouldn’t have been easy…”

“You’ve been thinking how you might have managed it.”

“The idea, you see, was to tell a great many people what they wanted to hear. Those in possession of power are likely to believe that any challenge, any change to how things have always been done, might well be an insurrection. In a certain sense I don’t believe Sidmouth or the Committee of Secrecy was lying. Not by their lights anyway. Workingmen speaking their minds, manufacturers who want representation for their districts-it’s all suspicious and frightening. And if the workingmen don’t know how to organize their own insurrection, if they’re waiting for London to tell them how… well, why not send a London delegate to do the job, even if he represents a rather different London from what they think they’re getting? Get the whole thing done quickly and frighten everyone else into quiescence.”

His voice was quiet. “Spies and informants are excellent at telling people what they want to hear. Pretty soon you’ve manufactured a truth as well as an insurrection. Of course, different people want to hear different truths, so things can get unruly. It’s possible that Oliver told Sidmouth what he wanted to hear; the Home Office might have begun with something a great deal more modest in mind. But if they’d had a detail man like me to help them keep their truths straight…”

To which she had no reply, except to kiss him again, rather clumsily on the cheek. He didn’t speak for a few minutes after that.

“You’re very good, Mary, to tolerate me in this infernal, cynical mood. And of course, to have bullied and badgered me into getting my friend back. Not to speak of putting me in the way of seeing Oliver and Sidmouth exposed. I’m in your debt. Ah yes, and then there was last night… Mary?”

“Yes?”

“We shall have to speak about all this-really talk. Very soon.”

“I expect we shall.” She hoped the words hadn’t come out as doleful as she felt. You’re not in my debt, she wanted to protest. It’s not some kind of commercial, legal agreement we have between us.

She held her tongue instead, in most un-Penley-like fashion. For if (as was seeming increasingly likely) they each held a differing view of what had transpired on this journey-well, then, her view of it must be wrong.

A reunion with a friend. A reconsideration of his political position. And a delicious, scandalous night at an inn.

What more, really, had happened?

And how was it, when she could know so well what he was thinking when they were arguing or making love, that she knew so little of his mind right now?

They’d reached a bend in the road, where it forked between Grefford and Beechwood Knolls.

“Beechwood Knolls,” he called out, in response to Mr. Frayne’s inquiry.

“You’ll want to greet your sister and her family, I expect. The one from Glasgow, I mean.”

“Yes, I know which one you mean. Indeed, it’ll be very agreeable to see them…”

She wondered when this annoying intermittent rain had started falling. Better a whomping big storm than this polite drizzle.

A curricle was parked on the side of the road next to the hedge, just before the turn one took to get to the house at Beechwood Knolls.

“Hold on, Frayne,” Kit called. “What’s that? Do you suppose they need any help? They don’t look like they’ve gone into a ditch.”

“It’s some of our young people, I think,” Mary said, “returning from Colonel Halsey’s.”

Indeed, seated in the curricle were a mournful Fred and a furious Elizabeth.

And as for Lord Ayres and Fannie Grandin?

Mr. Frayne was peering down curiously from the box.

“Come into the coach,” Mary said. “Both of you. Immediately. Mr. Frayne will wait here until we’ve finished speaking.”

Her first fearful surmise proved correct. Fannie and Lord Ayres had run away together just today; Fred and Elizabeth had been parked here for an hour, arguing about who was to blame and how to tell Jessica the news. Of the two young people, Fred seemed the more capable of telling the story clearly.

“He’d bought a flash new phaeton and pair, you see, while we were at the Halseys’. Gave everyone a ride this afternoon, each in turn. Fannie was the last; he said he might as well take her home to Beechwood Knolls, as she thought she might be getting a cold. We followed about an hour later…”

“More like two,” Elizabeth interjected, “by the time you’d made your sweet farewells to Miss Halsey…”

“Make it an hour and a quarter.” Fred shrugged. “We brought Miss Kimball in the backseat…”

Mary glanced out the window, for fear that the old lady was still out there.

“You needn’t worry about her. ” Elizabeth’s lip curled. “She was having such vapors, we imposed upon good Miss Williams to let her stay the night in Grefford. When we discovered that they’d eloped…”