Flirtation & Folly

by Elizabeth Rasche

  “French, harp, piano,” Aunt Harriet said with a decisive nod. “Very well.”

  Aunt Harriet returned to her stiff, forward-facing attitude, and Marianne schooled her face to attentiveness as the service began. The vicar was of middle years, with a sonorous voice that carried well despite the innumerable shiftings, whispers, and creakings within the church. His black hair was cut a little too long, forcing him to shove it back from his face again and again in a way that monumented his patience and wore out that of his flock. The sermon was like those Marianne had heard a thousand times before from her father: stern in its tenets, but vague in its practical application.

  As her attention drifted, she found herself analysing the array of bonnets that dotted the audience like pale berries in a bush. Marianne had gone to a milliner’s with her aunt the day before, and although delighted with her choices, she already felt tempted to obtain more. The desire clashed shamefully with the sermon on prudent governance. Even while the vicar’s intent expression emerged and re-emerged from his dark locks and his strong tones declared the importance of guiding the weak, Marianne’s mind wandered again and again to the charming nods of tiny feathers caught in a draft atop their bonnets, and the smooth similarity of colour on a gentlewoman’s dress and hat.

  If I wore clothes like that, everyone would notice me. The expanses of pastels stretching through the crowd looked like a rainbow in their muted colours, and Marianne could imagine a perfect rose-pink enfolding her where she sat, joining her to the rainbow. Then again, if she wanted to stand out, perhaps things were best as they were. She had chosen brighter colours at the warehouses of fabric, and she had instructed the dressmaker to combine unusual tints in her gowns. Originality. Creativity. That was what would truly prove Marianne worthy of admiration and applause, not simply copying the dresses she saw around her. Satisfied with herself, Marianne settled back into her pew and attempted to fix her attention to the sermon.

  The sermon had already ended, however, and Marianne only had the chance to work out her penitence in the closing prayers. When the congregation finally filed out into the curling, wayward mists of the street, Marianne spotted a young man deftly moving through the crowd. He distributed greetings and gracious nods to others as he passed, but his smiling face always reoriented towards Aunt Harriet. When he finally sidestepped the last churchgoer and arrived at Aunt Harriet’s side, he bowed.

  “Captain Pulteney.” Aunt Harriet dipped a brief curtsey, and Marianne hurried to do the same. “You have not yet made the acquaintance of my niece.”

  “I remember you said she was coming for a visit,” Captain Pulteney said, glancing over Marianne. His figure was gentlemanly: legs encased in fawn breeches, a trim waistcoat hugging his middle, and a bottle-green cut-away coat visible beneath his greatcoat. His blond hair was cut short, with the slightest of curls underneath the confines of his beaver hat. Marianne wished she looked half as polished and fit for London.

  Aunt Harriet made introductions, and Marianne felt a gallop in her heartbeat as she dipped a curtsey again. The heroines in novels never fell in love at first sight—it was unladylike, and Marianne was too attached to her vision of conquering London to be conquered herself in so offhand a fashion. But she had to admit, as she gazed into Captain Pulteney’s light-hearted blue eyes, that the temptation to fall suddenly in love was more powerful than she had imagined.

  Captain Pulteney offered his arm to Aunt Harriet, but Marianne managed to stroll beside him despite the occasional press of passers-by.

  “You should have heard the paeans celebrating your upcoming arrival,” he said to Marianne as they walked. “Your Aunt Harriet professes to be a stodgy Spartan matron, only praising those who drag the spoils of war before her, but I think she was more excited to have a peaceful niece come to visit than any ten Spartan women with victorious sons.”

  “What nonsense,” Aunt Harriet said, but she did not sound displeased. “I doubt I said ten words about it.”

  “And as for your aunt Mrs Cartwright, with whom I also have the honour of being acquainted, she has arranged her medicinal bottles in the manner most advantageous for a young lady of fainting susceptibilities. That is her way of cultivating your comfort. It would be grave indeed if you disappointed her by remaining in perfect health.” He let out a gusty sigh. “Alas, your features bode ill for her. You look the very pink of health and good cheer.”

  Marianne blushed. Here was the moment for wit and intellect, but she struggled to think of anything to say. No one had ever complimented her looks in so personal a manner. Why would they, when Belinda was near? But Belinda is not here. The thought sent a shiver of anticipation through her, and she forced herself to respond. “I fear whatever paeans you heard were meant for my sister, not for me.”

  It was a hard truth, but Marianne felt the sacrifice of saying it was only fair. Perhaps it was her penance for ignoring the sermon—or for feeling unsteady and dazzled by the light in Captain Pulteney’s pale eyes. “She had intended to stay with my aunt, but was needed elsewhere.”

  “She got a better invitation,” Aunt Harriet said.

  Captain Pulteney shifted his attention to her. “Now who speaks nonsense?” he said, tapping his walking stick to make a swift rap on the sidewalk. It echoed in the fog, as if mischievous fairies carried and dropped the sound without any firm purpose. “This errant niece does not know the full value of London, if she passes by the house of Adams for some other home. Miss Adams, I beg you will not punish this poor niece for her sister’s foolishness. And perhaps this other niece will come by someday. The prodigal will return.” He smiled, and Aunt Harriet allowed herself a smile back.

  “I daresay she will visit. You know I do not care a thing about it. I will do my duty by Marianne, now that she’s here. But I do not care if I never see another niece after this again.” She brushed the snow that had collected on her sleeve in a gentle cascade off her arm.

  “The Spartan matron again.” Captain Pulteney sighed, but smiled to show that he was only teasing.

  Marianne took her opportunity to edge into the conversation. “Captain Pulteney, you must be honoured for serving our country. Did you fight in Spain? Or Portugal?”

  Captain Pulteney laughed. “I know better than to bore ladies with tales of dusty soldiers and battle. It only sounds exciting when you know nothing about it.” He rapped his walking stick again on the sidewalk: one quick, firm rap, this time only slightly muddled by the fog. Marianne had the notion that he was proud of the way he handled it. Now that she thought of it, his movements were elegant in every respect, just as fine as the clothes he wore. He seemed to exude a grace foreign to Marianne, but recognisable as elite in London society. She wondered how much a captain in a regiment earned. She had heard that many of the men serving in the regulars were actually wealthy and titled. A man like that would be worth pursuing.

  “I would not be bored in the least, I assure you,” Marianne said.

  “My role in the war is of no consequence,” he said, but his smile seemed to hint at a hidden meaning. “What is of far greater interest to me is Mrs Cartwright’s party this week. Will you be there, Miss Mowbrey?” Now his smile turned to entreaty.

  Marianne flushed. “I will be there.”

  With that settled, he turned back to Aunt Harriet and broached other topics. They chatted pleasantly until they arrived at Aunt Harriet’s stone house. Although Aunt Harriet invited him in, he pleaded other engagements, and Marianne had to watch him stroll away, the mist churning around him as if he were a young god walking into a cloud. Her heart squeezed as his figure blurred and disappeared.

  He might be suitable. With a proper income, of course. And only after she had set London afire with her wit, originality, and beauty—well, her soon-to-be beauty. Captain Pulteney clearly had the fashion and intelligence to make a fine husband.

  Marianne could only hope he had not already stolen her heart.

  As intriguing as Captain Pulteney was, he subsided into only on
e of the many concerns that preoccupied Marianne on the chilly Thursday afternoon she spent in her bedroom later that week. Despite having several days to become accustomed to it, Marianne still felt like the bedroom her aunt had assigned her was more like a stage than anything else—a room of display, fitted up with elegance but too self-conscious for everyday use. The fire in the grate would have been forbidden at home as an unnecessary luxury, and even though its heat tickled Marianne’s legs, she had the odd sensation that it was all make-believe, something too lovely for her real life. The walnut bedstead with fringed bed hangings in olive green and oyster white looked too fine for anyone to actually sleep in.

  Worst of all was the dressing table topped by a swinging mirror. No one looked into it but Marianne. At home, the mirror would have flung back image after image of every sister: Harriet, Belinda, Little Matty, Belinda, Clementina…Belinda again. In London, the mirror only showed one face—Marianne’s—but in a variety she had never confronted before. There was the cool, composed face that woke to thin January sunlight. There was the flushed, quick-blinking face that appeared after a shopping trip with her aunt. And there was the languorous, dreamy face that settled on her palm and gazed in after re-reading a favourite novel. It made Marianne feel like an actress with too many roles to count.

  “You can scarce imagine what my friend says about Lady Angela,” Jenny said. The maid’s fingers wound up Marianne’s hair with a dexterity surprising in a housemaid. Each skill one might expect in a lady’s maid, Jenny took special care to display. She insisted she had already been taught all she needed to know to fulfil the role by a friendly maid in Lady Angela’s household, and Marianne had to admit she found nothing wanting in her. Not that she had ever had a lady’s maid before, but Jenny played the role as Marianne’s novels would have prescribed.

  That included the chatter and gossip servants seemed fated to provide in such stories. In the novels, heroines always kept their servants at a cool distance and solemnly refused to listen to their gossip, and yet the servants always blurted out exactly the pivotal information needed to twist the plot. Marianne struggled to take the high-handed approach with Jenny, and failed. The gossip was just too new, too engrossing. Wrumpton had no lively figures. There was no Prince Regent wooing mistresses, no wild parties of young men in gaming hells, no crim. cons. to dissect and discuss. Jenny claimed to know everything that occurred this side of London; even if half her ‘everything’ was false, it was all fascinating. Marianne could not bring herself to hush her chatter—and worse, she sometimes joined it.

  “She looks prim as you please, Lady Angela does, and she is, too, as far as scolding people goes. But my friend says Lady Angela reads the most scandalous novels. Things that ought not even be in print.”

  “What sort of novels?” Marianne could not help but ask. She tried to pretend she was not that interested by flipping through the pages of her sketchbook with one hand. Her fingers moved through the idle pictures she had made in her scant free moments in Wrumpton. A portrait of her sister Harriet, complete with strawberry tart stains and mussed hair—too realistic for her mother’s taste. An egg-shaped puddle she had spotted in the main thoroughfare of Wrumpton—that one had taken a great deal of dexterity to sketch. She could still vividly remember the curses of wagon-drivers as they tried to manoeuvre around her. A broken stile, a gaggle of geese, the rectory’s barn. All of them were unsuitable subjects for a proper lady, but they had entranced her pencils.

  “French novels, about love and intrigue and that sort of thing, I suppose. Suitors dying of love for their mistresses.” Jenny giggled and tugged more of Marianne’s hair into place. “Imagine a suitor dying for Lady Angela!ˮ

  “You forget—I do not know her yet.” The books did not sound so bad to Marianne.

  “Perhaps you’ll meet her tonight at your aunt’s house. Your other aunt’s, I mean. You’ll meet ever so many people in your visits, Miss Mowbrey.” Jenny’s voice dropped, and Marianne found herself listening more intently. “There will be so many beaux after you, Miss Mowbrey. I daresay they will all think you a catch!ˮ

  “That is ridiculous.” She wished she could keep her face from blushing. “I am not pretty, and my father could not offer much money to settle me.”

  “Oh, you’re ever so pretty,” Jenny said. If Marianne had not glanced into the mirror at just the right moment, she would have missed the sly look passing over the maid’s face. “And your aunt might give something to settle you. She’s rich as rich can be, you know.”

  “You ought not to speak lightly about my aunt,” Marianne said reprovingly. It was an effort to take an authoritarian tone with Jenny, but she would do it for Aunt Harriet’s sake.

  “Of course, Miss Mowbrey. Just as you say. I only meant that you will have your pick of gentlemen. And when you choose one, you will have a whole household to contend with, won’t you?” Slowly the strands wound up into a pretty, uplifted braid in the back and dangling curls in the front. Marianne had to admit Jenny knew what she was doing. Her hair had never looked so deftly coiffured.

  “I suppose I shall.” Remembering her dignity, she added, “If I ever choose to marry, that is.” It was hard to pretend that she cared nothing about it when it was the only way to ensure she remained happily in London forever. Aunt Harriet had had enough money to turn up her nose at marriage, but Marianne did not.

  “It’s awful hard, beginning in a new house with a flock of servants about you that you don’t know. I’ve heard ever so many tales of ladies who found their new husband’s servants didn’t suit them, and yet they couldn’t rightly dismiss them all straight away, could they?”

  “That might be awkward,” Marianne said.

  “It’s so important to have someone on your side,” Jenny said. “Now, a lady’s maid is always permitted to accompany her mistress to a new household. It’s expected.” Marianne hid her smile as Jenny continued. “You might not know, Miss Mowbrey, being so new to London, but a lady’s maid has quite an influence. She could put in a word with the other servants and tell you who is telling tales and what the master is doing. I’ve all the skills a lady’s maid needs, Miss Mowbrey, and heaven strike me if I’m not loyal to you.”

  “You have not known me very long,” Marianne said, running a finger along the smooth walnut of the dressing table alongside her sketchbook. One day she would be used to luxurious surroundings, if she married well. “Less than a week, I think.” As amusing as Jenny’s professions of skill and constancy were, Marianne found herself pleased with her ambition. Jenny did not want to be stuck as a housemaid forever. Like Marianne, she wanted to shine. In her own way.

  “Oh, but I can tell what ladies are special. You’re special, Miss Mowbrey. I knew as soon as I saw you. And I knew you’d understand even a humble servant like myself.” Jenny’s fingers began to move more quickly now that the basic coiffure was done. She slid a jewelled comb into Marianne’s hair so that it stuck out like a star adorning a goddess. “Why, what a picture, Miss Mowbrey!ˮ she blurted.

  Marianne looked down. The sketchbook was open to her sketch of a beetle climbing over a leaf. The beetle was shiny and dark with jagged-looking legs. It had been scaling the far side of one of the garden plants when Marianne spotted it. The way it seemed ready to cast itself into the abyss below it had struck her, and she had rushed off to grab her sketchbook.

  “What an ugly thing,” Jenny said.

  “I thought it was rather nice, in its own way,” Marianne said.

  Jenny hurried to remedy what she perceived as the insult. “Oh, I don’t mean your drawing, Miss Mowbrey. I mean the beetle is ugly. You’ve a nice way with a pencil. I’m sure a gentleman will like that, although you had better leave off drawing beetles and dirty children.” She must have meant one of the other sketches as well, one of the poorer tenant-farmer’s children playing in the dust of a ploughed field. Marianne had thought it picturesque, but no one at home had agreed with her. She supposed no one in London would, either.

&nb
sp; “Never mind that. I hardly suppose gentlemen will look at my book unless I want them to.” She could not explain that drawing was one of the few pursuits she could use to forget her dreams of grandeur and homage. It was both a solace and an embarrassment, something to turn to when she was feeling sick of tending cross little sisters. “And you are right, I do understand not wanting to be a housemaid forever.”

  “I’m right better than a housemaid. And you ought to call me by a proper lady’s maid name, Miss Mowbrey. Jenny is a housemaid name. You ought to call me Evans, if I’m to be your lady’s maid. Or Jeannette.”

  “Jeannette?”

  “French servants get paid more, Miss Mowbrey,” Jenny said in a bald tone.

  “Can you speak French?”

  “Not so much as yet,” the maid replied cautiously, stepping back from Marianne’s chair to allow her to stand up. “But my friend at Lady Angela’s is teaching me a few phrases, and of course I needn’t speak much to other servants if I am a lady’s maid.”

  “Not even George?” Marianne had finally learned the name of the footman who had accompanied her partway to London, mainly because Jenny and he had an ever-shifting relationship of friendship and warfare.

  Impatience clouded Jenny’s tone. “Of course I don’t mean I could pass for French here, at your aunt’s. But if you call me Jeannette, I can practise; and by the time you are established, I will have everything ready. No one at your husband’s house need know I’m not French.” She suddenly grinned. “There won’t be any George there to cause trouble.”

  “I suppose not…Jeannette.” Marianne could not help smiling back.

  Aunt Cartwright’s house was the unkempt little brother to Aunt Harriet’s establishment. While Aunt Harriet’s white steps gleamed with splendour before a fashionable street of London, Aunt Cartwright’s grey stone steps were mottled with slush in front of a street that was respectable but lacked distinction. The distance between the two places was small—an easy walking distance—but the social distance was the difference between the elegantly rich and the industriously well-to-do.