Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

‘When do you leave town, ma’am?’ Bella asked.

‘Yes, indeed – Tuesday next, I believe – thank you Miss Garraway – or so I believe, quite, entirely, happily dependent on the wishes of others—’

‘I hope M. le Duc is well?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘Thank you, yes, quite well, quite mad with uncertainty, constantly requiring his trunks to be unpacked for some favourite jewel, naturally, though happy, as I say, to be – I expect, Miss Garraway, you have read this – most entertaining, most instructive—’

This , naturally, was Burnes’s book, which the Duchesse seized with both hands from a pile on the bookseller’s table. Bella had the presence of mind not to blush, and, though Miss Gilbert was smirking to a painful extent, she could assure herself that the Duchesse probably meant nothing by it. Elizabeth had wandered off, thankfully, affecting to be engaged by some other book.

‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Bella said collectedly. ‘Mr Burnes and I, you know, are quite friends.’

That did the trick, and Miss Gilbert went off to squeeze Elizabeth for gossip.

‘Most timely, his book, I must say,’ the Duchesse went on, apparently not much caring whether Bella was friends with Burnes or not. ‘Lord Palmerston – at the opera, you know – only last Wednesday – no, Thursday – most concerned, most intrigued. You see my dear, as Burnes says very truly, nature abhors a vacuum – abhors – and where we refuse to step in, others may. You mark my words—’ and a black, glittering and sombre eye now engaged Bella’s own, ‘— others may. Thank heaven for Burnes – excellent, splendid, most timely warning, Palmerston was saying so to me—’ again that tactful drop in volume, to impress Bella that it was only the significance of what the Duchesse was saying that led her to invoke Lord Palmerston, and not a desire to display her glittering connections to a crowded bookseller’s shop, ‘—he and I were talking about it – Malibran, in The Sleepwalkerine , most enchanting, ringing top notes, last Thursday – no, Wednesday – and we agreed, he and I—’ now speaking again at normal levels, ‘—that we must go to the rescue of these poor people. Helpless, quite helpless, in need, if anyone is, of our assistance – and, as I was saying—’ sotto voce , ‘—to him: if we do not, others may. The Russian Bear, my dear, the ravening hungry Russian Bear. Thank heaven for Burnes.’

The Duchesse, now finished, fixed Bella again with her gaze, and then, astonishingly, gave a great ursine growl. Bella jumped back, having no response whatever to make to this; she could hardly growl back, as if she were in the nursery with this small brown wrinkled duchess – a mental picture of the Duchesse in her infant frocks, clutching a rusk, shrunken but entirely the same, and growling, shot across Bella’s mind. Nor, in all conscience, could she respond in any way to what the Duchesse had said; she understood nothing of what she was referring to.

Elizabeth returned, and Bella felt able to escape. As they left, the Duchesse, still deep in her own thoughts, cried, ‘A word to the wise, my dear—’ and then, as Bella nodded her goodbyes, she made her astonishing bear’s growl once more. The surprising fact was that no one else in the bookseller’s shop – not even Elizabeth – seemed remotely troubled or interested by the remarkable performance. Bella stepped into the pillbox carriage waiting for them with a persistent and worrying sense that it was she, and not the extravagant old woman, who had made a spectacle of herself.

She felt able to plead fatigue, and John took them back to Hanover Square, their errands almost complete. Elizabeth, inexhaustible, let Bella off at Hanover Square before asking John to take her on, wanting to make her farewells to a friend in Green Street.

It was three in the afternoon, and Burnes had been waiting, ‘no more than five minutes, I assure you’.

‘How did you know I – we should return soon?’

Burnes smiled. ‘I did not. I had set a limit on my patient waiting.’

‘And how long was that, Burnes?’ Bella said, long ago having passed to this intimate, military form of address. She began to unpick her bonnet as they sat down. ‘I would like to know what value you place on my company, and the length of time you would wait for my return seems as accurate a measure as any. For some truly important person – let us say for the Governor General, the King, or my sister’s friend Goethe—’

‘I believe Herr Goethe is dead, Bella.’

‘No matter – for these, let us say they would merit a whole afternoon’s waiting, hat in hand, jumping to your feet every time the maid enters to feed the fire. On the other hand, let us say, for our friend Stokes—’

‘I was truly asking myself whom you were planning to alight on, but Mr Stokes is a very fair choice.’

‘Thank you. For Mr Stokes, I do not suppose you would wait at all; a mere drop of the card in the bowl, and off you would fly like an afrit riding the West Wind. Am I correct?’

‘Quite so.’

‘And yet you waited for me – how long I do not know – and you would, I believe, have waited a minute or two longer. How long the limit you had privately determined is for me to establish, and that, I presume, will inform me what value you place on the conversation of a silly little girl. I wonder with what ingenuity I can discover the true facts of the case.’

‘No ingenuity is required,’ Burnes said, laughing at Bella, scratching her head like a regular urchin. ‘I will tell you – I had decided to wait for fifteen minutes. In any case, I knew you had gone to your bookseller’s two hours before, since Emily was so kind as to tell me, and I knew a bookseller could not detain you much longer than that.’

‘Very well,’ Bella said. ‘Fifteen minutes. Now I call that a very valuable contribution to knowledge, though, like the higher mathematics, I hardly know as yet what use I shall put it to.’

‘I dread your uses , Bella,’ Burnes said, helping himself to tea and, greedily, to sugar. ‘But how long would you wait for me?’

Bella was silenced, and Burnes, too, in a moment stopped laughing. There was no answer to that; in them both was the unspoken knowledge that the ‘six weeks’, so lightly spoken, so long ago, had shrunk now to one week, that then, he was gone, that after, there was nothing that either could see. In Burnes’s pained anxious face was some knowledge that he had not been fair to Bella, and it would have been better not to have come at all; in Bella’s face was nothing but a forgiveness for anything Burnes might do, be doing, have done. Bella’s forgiveness had no tense, had no aspect, and Burnes dropped his eyes from hers, from her sad, her shining eyes.

‘In the interests of coquetry,’ Bella said, collecting herself, ‘no woman would ever wait for a man as long as he would wait for her. If I were a flirt, five minutes; if I were a woman of normal self-regard …’

But she saw in Burnes’s face that he had no heart any longer for their normal banter, that their conversation, like the afternoon, like their lives, had turned in an unexpected direction, and now there was no retrieving it.

‘Perhaps ten minutes?’ she said, and faltered, her eyes, now, big and swimming and full of ache. She looked at her lap.

‘Bella,’ Burnes said again. ‘How long would you wait for me?’

She could not think, and she hardly trusted her voice to speak.

‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. He could not look at her, perhaps in shame, and he drew back a little in his chair.

‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘must be your brother.’