Coronation Summer

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Well done, Darnley,’ exclaimed my father. ‘It was the right thing to do. I’d have done it myself — the sneaking French scoundrel.’

  ‘But I am not aware that the fellow was French, sir,’ replied Mr. Darnley.

  ‘That’s all one,’ said my father. ‘I call ’em Frenchies when they act like Frenchies.’

  ‘And pray, Tom,’ said Emily, ‘what is to tap a canister?’

  ‘Emily, your ignorance is abysmal,’ was Mr. Tom’s reply. ‘To tap a canister is to break a sconce, split a nob, crack the knowledge box, make an incision in the upper apartment, damage the figurehead.’

  All this he reeled off with so droll an air that I could not keep from laughing.

  ‘But how the devil did you get to Epsom?’ asked old Mr. Ingoldsby.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Tom, ‘having seen the pickpocket taken into custody by a policeman and avoided the worthy woman’s thanks, we were just going to try to get into one of the remaining carriages, when a notice was posted up “No more trains to-day”. We dashed out, got a cab, gave the driver double fare to whip up his horse, got my britska out, and as the roads were by now fairly empty we tooled along at a spanking pace, and here we are.’

  My father laughed loudly over this description of a railway journey, and drank confusion to the railways, after which he went to sleep.

  We were amused by a gipsy woman who came begging to tell our fortunes. To Mrs. Seaforth she promised a fine handsome family, which, I may say, without passing the bounds of delicacy, was not difficult to prophesy. To Mr. Seaforth she said he must stick to his breeches, which remark Mr. Seaforth and his wife apparently found highly diverting. Mr. Tom Ingoldsby received the news that he would be a great writer of lils, a piece of gibberish we did not understand, while Emily was told to beware of the letter T. I must say, that considering how Emily was laughing and — can I use the word of my dearest friend? flirting — with Mr. Tom Ingoldsby, calling him Tom at every other word, the gipsy was not making a wild guess.

  On hearing Emily’s fate, Mr. Tom laid his hand on his heart and sang in the true Cockney tone:

  ’Twas going of my rounds in the street I first did meet her,

  I thought she was a hangel, just kim down from the skies,

  upon which Emily, such are the deleterious effects of the juice of the grape when having drunk more than you are used to, slapped his hand. I blushed for her inwardly.

  Then came my turn. The gipsy, scanning my hand attentively, told me that I should have a great sorrow, followed by a great joy, and must beware of a beautiful woman and a handsome man.

  I thought I detected a certain pleasure on Mr. Darnley’s face at these words. He then gave the gipsy a shilling and asked her what she could see.

  ‘You will be on the water,’ said the gipsy, ‘and you will have an aching heart.’

  ‘Come, that’s not enough,’ said Mr. Darnley, ‘give me something better.’

  ‘Another shilling then, pretty gentleman,’ said she, with the true gipsy whine. Then drawing close to him she said in a low voice, which none but he and I could hear,

  ‘All will be well when the Zegri Ladye weeps.’

  Mr. Darnley threw some money to her. I blushed deeply and pretended to be occupied in arranging my dress.

  ‘Here, what’s this?’ asked my father, suddenly waking up. ‘Gipsies? Send ’em to the treadmill.’

  The woman darted a glance of malignant hatred at him.

  ‘I have heard of you, fine gentleman, from our brethren in Norfolk,’ she said. ‘Wait for four weeks and then remember the gipsy’s warning.’

  She glided away among the crowd and my father, after a few curses and shouting for a policeman, forgot his anger.

  ‘It is useless to call the police, sir,’ said Mr. Tom. ‘They are all occupied in chivvying the poor thimble-riggers and three-card men. This is the dullest Derby, begging your pardon, ladies, that I have ever been to. What with all the sharpers and tumblers, and the farmers and country people being swindled and then fighting the swindlers, there used to be plenty of fun. Now there is no freedom — every little pea and thimble man goes in terror of being committed. It is a shame that we may not enjoy ourselves in our own way.’

  ‘Don’t say Darby, Tom, it should be Derby,’ said old Mr. Ingoldsby.

  ‘What will you lay on it, sir?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I’ll lay five guineas, you impudent dog, to teach you not to doubt your elders,’ said Mr. Ingoldsby laughing.

  ‘Done, sir,’ said Mr. Tom, writing the bet down in his book.

  ‘What did I say about Brooks’s?’ cried my father. ‘You Whigs would lay a bet on your mother’s funeral.’

  The rest of the afternoon was without incident. We left the field before the end of the races, to avoid the crowd, Emily accepting a seat in Mr. Tom’s britska, and Mr. Darnley coming with us. Although my father slept most of the way home, Mr. Darnley and I were not able to speak with freedom. The consciousness of the gipsy’s mysterious words about the Zegri Ladye was in both our minds.

  It was not surprising on our return to find that my maid Upton had gone out, without permission, with Mr. Seaforth’s Irish servant, as Mrs. Bellows indignantly informed us, and that the little cockney servant had broken, or so she said, a bottle of port. Mrs. Bellows accused her of having drunk it, my father gave way to temper and swore that one was as badly rooked in London lodgings as in a gambling hell. Shocked by his violence Emily and I went to our room, and when Upton returned I rated her soundly for her impertinent conduct, till she cried and promised not to offend again.

  I will not weary my readers with an account of the exact way in which we spent our days. To a country visitor London is an ever-enthralling spectacle, but to the sated town-dweller the gold appears but pinchbeck. Emily, who knew London better than I, took charge of our sight-seeing, and sometimes together, sometimes with Mrs. Vavasour or Mrs. Seaforth, we saw most of the attractions of the metropolis.

  Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition Bazaar in Baker Street interested me greatly, as we saw there our young Queen and all the Royal family perpetuated in waxen mould. The figures were all lifelike in the extreme, though Mrs. Vavasour, who was with us, assured us that while the figures of strangers appeared to be speaking likenesses, yet any celebrity whom she happened to know was shockingly travestied. The portrait of Madame Tussaud herself struck us very much, and Emily thought she looked horrid.

  The Cosmorama in Regent Street was also highly instructive. Here we saw the Ruins of Palmyra, Algiers, the Mer de Glace, and St. Peter’s at Rome, so vividly depicted that imagination could persuade herself that she was transported to the very regions in question.

  Mrs. Vavasour drove us one day to see the material for the Queen’s Coronation robes. It has been woven by a very respectable person named Edward Howe, in Castle Street, Shoreditch, and is indeed rich and rare. My father, who had accompanied us, gave the man a guinea for ‘beating the Frenchies at their own job’, which the man pocketed gladly enough, though I saw him exchange winks with some of the bystanders. Papa is sometimes more than a daughter can endure. Private annoyance is bad enough, but public mortification is unbearable. However, parents are created to distress us, and let me not forget that Emily too has her trials. Never shall I forget her account of the Sunday when her father, usually all that a parent should be, actually sent her home from the very church door for wearing a bonnet which he considered unbecoming to the daughter of a rector of the Church of England. Poor Emily, who had for the moment indulged in a tender sentiment for a handsome young Evangelical preacher whom she had met while at Miss Twinkleton’s school at Cloisterham, and who was subsequently imprisoned for abducting an heiress, had taken to wearing plain bonnets as a sign of regeneration. She was forced to go home and put on a bonnet with feathers and ribbons, and from that moment she has never again flirted — again that dreadful word! but some train of association always produces it when Emily is in question — with the false and insidious doctrines of t
he Evangelical school.

  It must have been shortly after this visit to Shoreditch that Emily, on receiving a letter from her father one morning at breakfast, burst into loud sobs. My father, who was reading The Times, asked what the devil was the matter that a man couldn’t read his paper in peace. Throwing a reproachful look at him, I went to Emily’s assistance, and after administering sal volatile, she was able to murmur amid sobs the words, ‘Lieutenant Bennett.’

  As the name conveyed nothing to me, I endeavoured to soothe her and satisfy my curiosity.

  ‘What are the Government coming to?’ said my father, throwing the paper angrily down. ‘Here’s a fine affair at Canterbury. Riots, constables killed, a young officer shot. It’s all the Whigs, damned Frenchified scoundrels. Pitt wouldn’t have stood it, nor would the Duke.’

  At the words ‘young officer’, Emily cried so loudly that nature was exhausted, and she had to stop to breathe.

  ‘Now, dearest Emily,’ said I ringing the bell and telling Upton to bring several clean handkerchiefs, ‘confide in me.’

  ‘I once danced with Lieutenant Bennett, when the 45th were stationed at Canterbury,’ said Emily, her voice almost inaudible with emotion, ‘and now he is shot.’

  ‘Let me see the account,’ I cried, seizing The Times and casting my eye over a long article, which I could hardly read for indignation. It appeared that some low demagogue named Thom, but newly released from an asylum for the insane, had preached a kind of crusade in Kent, blasphemously calling himself sometimes Sir William Courtenay, and sometimes the Saviour. Under his order some misguided peasants had attempted a rising. Constables had been sent to stop them, one of whom had been shot and stabbed by Thom. The military had then been called out, the riots having assumed alarming proportions, and this unfortunate Lieutenant Bennett had been shot dead by Thom. The soldiers roused to fury by the fall of their officer, had then very properly bayoneted the villain Thom.

  Having mastered these details, I returned to my task of consoling Emily, and on questioning her found that though she had once danced with the unfortunate officer at a subscription ball at Canterbury, she had no recollection of his appearance or conversation. This sensibility appears to me to be misplaced. I told her so, and we had a sharp quarrel, during which my father left the room, shutting the door violently behind him.

  To calm Emily’s spirits I ordered the carriage, and we drove to Howell and James to look at hats, and then to Waterloo House to buy shawls. Thus the Canterbury Riots were effaced from our memory, though I find that even now there are troubles arising from those lamentable disturbances. However, as it is business connected with them that has called Mr. Darnley to Canterbury and so enabled me to read the Ingoldsby Legends and undertake the writing of these slight memoirs, all may be for the best.

  On the same day I was both gratified and embarrassed to receive from Mr. Darnley a beautifully bound copy of the poems of Miss Landon, in which he had marked the passages he thought most striking. This, he said laughingly, was in payment of his sporting debts, ‘for,’ he added, ‘without my happy association with Miss Harcourt, fortune would not have smiled on me as she did. By the way, Miss Harcourt,’ he added, ‘you may be interested to hear that our friend old Mr. Ingoldsby has won his five guineas. He wrote to the Editor of Bell’s Life and has had the following answer in the Correspondent’s column; “It is Derby, not Darby in pronunciation”. Tom paid up handsomely, but maintains that Darby is correct and that he will stick to it.’

  He then handed a packet to Emily which he said was from Mr. Tom Ingoldsby. Emily opened it and found six pairs of French gloves, and written on a card, ‘Beware the letter T’, at which she had the grace to look quite confused.

  Chapter Six — Literary Lions and Eton Montem

  We were now gratified to receive cards from Mrs. Vavasour for one of her evenings. I feared I would have some difficulty in persuading my father to come with us, as he said he preferred a snug evening at White’s, and had it not been for a lucky accident, Emily and I would have been obliged to go alone. My father had, at his club, come across a book about hunting, by a Mr. Jorrocks I think, though I believe that was not his name. To this book he had taken one of his violent fancies, and quoted from it in season and out of season, mostly, I must admit, out of season, sometimes mortifying me excessively by the very malapropos remarks which must have made people think him a strange kind of country character. Happening to allude to this book in the presence of Mr. Vavasour, my father expressed a desire to meet the author and shake his hand.

  Mr. Vavasour, a kind of shudder running over his expressive features, politely replied:

  ‘If the author can be found, sir, I will engage that my aunt will have him at one of her lionizing evenings, and will have much pleasure in introducing him to you.’

  At this promise my father was delighted, and on the appointed evening was ready full half an hour before the time. On arriving at Mrs. Vavasour’s house in St. James’s Place we were shown into a very elegant saloon, brilliantly lighted. Mrs. Vavasour came forward to meet us, expressing her particular pleasure at seeing my father.

  ‘Our lions have not yet arrived, sir,’ said Mr. DeLacy Vavasour, as he bowed to our party, ‘and my aunt exceedingly regrets that the author of Mr. Jorrocks cannot be found.’

  My father’s answer, which I really do not like to put upon paper, was, ‘Blister my kidneys!’

  ‘Lassy me!’ cried Emily, ‘what will Mrs. Vavasour think, Mr. Harcourt? That is one of your Mr. Jorrocks’s sayings, is it not? Lord, I never could read such a book.

  A slight stir now took place as the name of Lady Almeria Norbourne was announced and our hostess and her nephew went forward to welcome the new-comer. I can even now see her as she entered the room. Of middle height, but exquisitely proportioned, the Lady Almeria had a face of pure oval form. Her high white brow was shaded by hair of rich chestnut, falling in glossy curls upon her alabaster shoulders, and lightly confined by a fillet with a jewelled clasp. Her delicately pencilled eyebrows were arched over large eyes of deepest cerulean blue. Her nose was pure in outline as though chiselled by the hand of Gibson. Her lips, of the deepest vermilion, were full and imperious, and could yet bend to an espiѐgle archness. Her rounded figure was moulded by a dress of pure white silk from the richest looms of Cashmere, while a scarf of finest gauze half hid, half revealed a bust which might have served a Canova as model. She wore no ornaments except a necklace of cameos richly set with diamonds, and her arms were clasped with magnificent bracelets. As she seated herself I had a glimpse of a fine white stocking and elegant black shoes which might have been Titania’s own.

  My heart sank as I looked on her. Jealousy I could not feel for one whom I could not hope to emulate, but how deeply did I wish that I were an earl’s daughter with a fortune. Why I know not, I suddenly felt very angry with Mr. Vavasour, and when he came back to us and inquired after my health, I merely gave him a civil reply and walked away. Mrs. Vavasour then presented me to Lady Almeria, whose conversation was, I will not say vapid, but showed no evidence of deep thought, though her beauty was even more dazzling on a closer inspection than at a distance. I then saw Mr. Darnley enter the room. He approached and seated himself by us, being apparently known to Lady Almeria, for her ladyship roused herself from her state of abstraction and entered into an animated conversation about people, mostly of title, unknown to me. I sat rather silent and low, deeply conscious of how inferior I must appear in Mr. Darnley’s eyes, though he, with real kindness, did his best to draw me into the conversation. At length the talk turned on books, and Lady Almeria inquired of Mr. Darnley whether he had read The Sorrows of Rosalie.

  ‘Indeed, Darnley,’ said her ladyship, arranging her bracelets, ‘you should read it. The verse is quite melting. All about love and poor forsaken women, you know; but then you men are such deceivers. I positively wept over it. You have such feeling you would doat on it.’

  ‘I must certainly follow your advice,’ said Mr. Darnley.
‘Who is the author?’

  But before Lady Almeria could answer, Mrs. Vavasour brought up a gentleman to be presented to her, and Mr. Darnley, rising, offered me his arm to move to another part of the saloon.

  ‘These parties are hardly in my line,’ he said, ‘but hearing from Vavasour, whom I know slightly, that Mr. and Miss Harcourt were to be here, I called upon Mrs. Vavasour and obtained an invitation.’

  The company was not numerous, but highly select, and the conversation was mostly of a literary turn. The subject of Annuals was mentioned, and Mr. Vavasour was very satirical about them.

  ‘The sight of a table covered with tabified Annuals,’ said he, ‘is to me more nauseating than an apothecary’s shop. My aunt cannot altogether resist them, but I have succeeded in making her confine her purchases to the Gems of Beauty and the Keepsake. They are really the only tolerable ones, though that is not saying much.’

  ‘At least, DeLacy,’ said his aunt, ‘even your fastidious taste cannot find fault with the Gems of Beauty. Parris’s admirable designs of the Twelve Passions, each a refined type of feminine beauty, and Lady Blessington’s delightful poems on the same subjects, are a treat for the connoisseur.’

  ‘Come, DeLacy, you must admit that the Keepsake this year is really full of feeling,’ said Lady Almeria. ‘I hardly slept a wink after reading The Vampire Knight and his Cloud Steed, and the story of Sophie of Hanover and Mimi the Faithful Waiting Maid is so historical as well as so melting. But I dare say,’ she added archly, ‘that as an author you are jealous.’

  ‘I do not attempt to compete with our poetesses,’ said Mr. Vavasour. ‘I might even say that it would be impossible. Who, for instance, could emulate the style of your friend Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley?’

  ‘Oh, her Lays of Leisure Hours,’ said Lady Almeria. ‘They are quite superlative. Who could be so insensible as not to feel their merit?’