The thought of Corfu set me a-thinking on this newfangled Ionian Islands Protectorate. Corfu I was familiar with as the ancient Corcyra, a place very little noticed by the ancients except for its dispute with Corinth and subsequent appeal to Athens that played such a significant part in the events leading up to the Peloponnesian Wars. Of the other six islands, however, I did not even know the names, so little had they featured in the newspapers during the course of the war.
Once my curiosity is aroused, it will give me no rest until it be satisfied, and I set off at once in search of intelligence. At this stage, though unconscionably long abed myself, I was still the only one up and about, apart from the servants, of course, and I soon found my way to the Fitzwilliams’ library. I know very little of the Colonel’s upbringing, but Miss Darcy had grown up at a house provided with a very fine library, and I believe had not neglected her reading while away at school. I was not surprised, therefore, to find her London library very well stocked, and soon found the information I was seeking.
The so-called Heptanesian Republic had been proclaimed as long ago as 1800, when Napoleon ‘liberated’ the islands as part of his destruction of the Most Serene Republic. The French had never allowed them any real degree of liberty, however, and over the course of the last five years of the war they had one by one fallen to British forces in the Mediterranean. Zacynthus, Cephallonia, Ithaca, Cythera and Leucas had all been British for some five years before Corfu and Paxos were added to them at the Congress of Vienna. A constitution granting them a senate and a popular assembly had been approved by His Majesty’s government in 1817, under which the British High Commissioner was given very wide powers. The islanders, so long under the heels of the Venetians and almost at the mercy of the Turks, were now enjoying all the benefits of peace, prosperity and justice that may be supposed to accompany enlightened British rule.
There was one name among this list of obscure islands that could not help but set me thinking. Imagine! Ithaca, the island of Odysseus and Penelope, was now as British as Meryton or Maidenhead, or at least as British as Kilmarnock or Killarney!
What prospects that might open for the student of Classics! What avenues it might open for my research, which was lately at a stand owing to Casaubon’s recalcitrance! What evidence might be lying there of correspondence between the ancient deities of the Homeric age with those of the Celts and the Saxons! What other lost knowledge might be found in those parts by a competent and diligent scholar after centuries of neglect by mercantile Venetians and ignorant Turks! And, now I came to think of it, was not Corfu held to be the Homeric Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians, whose Princess Nausicaa welcomed Odysseus on his last shipwreck?
It could only be a pipe dream, of course, but indulging in it, on the strength of Lydia’s invitation, kept me occupied until there were signs of life from the rest of our party.
Those signs came only too soon for my comfort, and I had barely read a dozen chapters of the first book of any relevance that I chanced upon before I found myself summoned to breakfast, where all the party were waiting on me.
I fear I am no very great hand at what is called conversation at the best of times, my mind being only too easily distracted these days. I am used, moreover to not having to make the same effort at breakfast as common courtesy demands at dinner, and was not best pleased to find myself instantly accosted by both my wife and daughter as to when I proposed to take them to visit their long-missed sister.
I denied ever having made any such proposal, of course, and called the rest of the company to my support, but Fitzwilliam, and even Golightly had evidently learned the lesson of how to preserve a happy marriage, and held their tongues.
When the ladies are united in their recollection of an event or conversation, mere facts are of no consequence, though they may be attested by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York both, the Pope and all the College of Cardinals, and even the Almighty himself. I was thus sore put to maintain my position until Georgiana admitted that to the best of her recollection we were to wait on the arrival of Jane and Lizzie.
In such straits I was happy to compound for suggesting that Georgiana might show her female relatives her favourite milliners and such, while I waited to greet their sisters on their arrival. Even then, nothing would do but that they must have a gentleman to escort them. Fitzwilliam had his duty to attend to, and I, of course, must study the geography of the Ionian Islands and how to get there, in case such knowledge might be needed. Poor Golightly, however, had failed to provide himself with something else that urgently needed his attention, and so must look forward to a day standing around pretending an interest in damasks and muslins. Let no man say that the life of an Anglican churchman is an easy one.
I was all too soon interrupted in my researches, aided beyond measure by the superb comfort of the divan in the library, by the arrival of my two daughters and their husbands.
This time the satisfaction of informing them that they had come too late and observing the barely-suppressed signs of exasperation upon their faces was my perquisite.
Both my daughters took the news as might be expected.
“Poor Lydia!” said Jane. ‘She will be so sorry to have missed us all. She must have been dying to tell us all her news.”
“She must have been dying to flaunt her new status, you mean,” retorted Lizzie, “and she will certainly be regretting that, but no doubt she will soon find substitutes to lord it over. But I admit that I should have liked to see her again, and to have met my nephews and nieces.”
“As for substitutes,” I replied, “I fear your mother is set on providing them, my dears, but we will talk of that later, when you are settled in.”
“Certainly”, replied Lizzie, “but where are we to settle in to? What rooms has Georgiana assigned us? Do you know, Papa?”
“Not I, my love. You know that no-one ever tells me anything. You must consult the housekeeper, I fear. I believe you know Mrs. Briggs already, so there should be no delay. Meanwhile, I will have your bags brought in.”
The ladies bustled off to see to the unpacking, and the gentlemen were left with me in the drawing room.
“It is a pity that we have had to retrace our steps for nothing,” remarked Darcy, “especially as we have been so long from Pemberley. I mean no criticism, however.”
“Come, Darcy,” retorted Bingley, “how can you say that? An unexpected visit to London is always jolly, and you must be glad of the opportunity to see your sister again.”
“I am always glad to see Georgiana,” replied Darcy, “and you, too, Mr. Bennet, but I could wish that we had not been quite so expeditious in sending your man on to Lowick, however. I fear we may have your remaining daughter joining us quite soon along with her husband.”
“Mary will be very welcome, if her husband allows her attendance, but I fear he may not. Casaubon and I are at variance on a fundamental point of scholarship, and all intercourse has quite ceased between us. I shall be very surprised to see her.”
I was very surprised, when, within the hour, ‘Mrs. Casaubon’ was announced.
“Mary!” I cried, “How delightful to see you! We did not expect you…”
“And why should you not, Papa? Is not my sister’s good fortune of as much consequence to me as to the rest of my family?”
“What I meant to say is that we did not expect you so soon. You must have made remarkably good time.”
“Many learned books and chronicles have impressed upon me the value of always being prepared for an emergency. As it happened, John had just had the horses put to to go into Cambridge when the message arrived. It was the work of a moment to pick up the bag that I keep always ready and to accompany him. I came on from there on the Mail, which, as you say, made very good time.”
“And your husband? Is Mr. Casaubon still without?”
“He sends his compliments, of course, but pressure of work requires his presence in Cambridge. You understand, of course. Edward is still young enough not t
o miss his mother for the few days that I expect to be in London. I only hope that I do not catch something dreadful while I am here. The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be. But where are Lydia and Wickham? I must give them my congratulations.”
There is a certain selfish pleasure to be had in disappointing people of their most sanguine expectations; I believe the Germans call it schadenfreude or some such interminable portmanteau word. By now this pleasure was beginning to wear thin, however, and I could not help but admire the way my daughter took the news of her wild goose chase.
“No matter,” she said, with no more than a shrug of her shoulders, “you may take me to the British Museum this afternoon instead, Papa. Mr. Casaubon prates so upon this Rosetta Stone that I should quite like to see it for myself.”
This brought me up with a start. Was I indeed become so old and set in my ways that even Mary was set to outdo me in scholarship now? I had, indeed, heard of this stone, part of Bonaparte’s plunder from Egypt, which was reputed to hold the key to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. What might such a treasure be worth to the scholar of syncretism? Why had I not thought of this before?
It proved a disappointment, however, like so many things in this life. There is the stuff of much scholarship in it, to be sure, but it all remains to be done. The hieroglyphic and cuneiform sections might as well have been Chinese for all I could make of them, while the Greek took some puzzling out, being all of a piece, with no gaps between words, no punctuation of any sort and words straddling lines. Merely translating the Greek portion will be the work of some time, and as for relating it to the Egyptian, that will take a cryptographer, and an inspired one at that. Young Edward Casaubon may reap the advantages of a knowledge of hieroglyphics, but I fear I never shall.
Our visit to the museum was not wasted, however, for we saw the Elgin marbles and came away captivated with their sublime beauty. A man must be senseless as a clod or perverse as a fiend not to be enraptured with them. It was worth all the elbowing through the crowds and squinting through the dim light for that one sight. Two millennia and more have not surpassed them, and who knows what other wonders may yet be mouldering in the hands of the barbarous Turk?
I was still, mentally, on the Acropolis as we made our way back to Marlborough Street, where we found the shopping expedition returned and full of their successes. Proof to all such temptations I declined to turn my mind from marble to muslin, nor yet from triglyphs to taffeta, and left them all a-gabbling while I slipped out to make enquiries of the shipping agents.
Chapter Four:Decisions
At breakfast next day the talk turned, as I was sure it would do, to Lydia, and Mrs. Bennet began to bewail the cruelty of her hard-hearted husband who would not permit her to visit her grandchildren even though they were now distant but a step, I was prepared.
Strangely enough, Mrs Bennet seemed to have resigned herself to her disappointment.
“I know it is not to be, Mr Bennet,” she said in her familiar tone of practised wistfulness, “and I do not complain, for I never complain, as you know, but, oh, it is such a let down, to have come so near to seeing my darling Lydia again, only to have my hopes dashed. And I should so have loved to see my grandchildren before I die, and now I suppose it will never be.”
The sigh with which she accompanied this declaration of resignation, and the delicate way she wiped her eye, would have done credit to Mrs Siddons.
It was Kitty who took her up on this. She has always been in favour of her mother’s schemes, and her new status as a married woman had evidently given her the courage to do more than merely echo them.
“I do not see why we should not take up my sister’s invitation,” she declared. “The war is over, and no end of people are travelling on the continent nowadays. Why should we not join them?”
“Dearest,” she continued, turning to her husband, “why should we not extend our honeymoon? The lodgings we have taken can be cancelled, and I am sure that Corfu would be much more interesting than Brighton. Why, we could do the Grand Tour!”
Golightly could not help shifting uncomfortably in his seat at this unexpected suggestion, but to do him credit, he responded with a willingness very fitting for a newly-wed.
“I have always longed to do the Grand Tour, of course. A gentleman’s education cannot be said to be complete until he has gazed at the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de Milo and seen the sights of Italy. But Corfu can scarcely be said to be part of the Grand Tour.”
“Can it not, my love? I should have sworn I heard someone say it was Venetian, and is not Venice famously a destination on the Grand Tour?”
“It was Venetian, and is now British, but it is at least as far from Venice as Paris is from London.”
“Then if Paris is halfway there, we should be well on our way when we stopped there. And do not people go to Paris every day? And if Corfu is now British we need have no fear of any foreign beastliness when we get there.”
This conversation did not appear to add to Golightly’s comfort, especially when Mary joined in.
“How I should long to go with you, Kitty, my dear! What lectures I should give at the Lowick Ladies’ Literary and Philosophical Society after returning from such a journey!”
“Oh, my sisters are very welcome to join us,” replied Kitty, “only one does not like to make too much of a parade of a honeymoon.”
“Just think, Kitty, what discoveries there must be to be made there! It is the Ancient Hellas itself. I am surprised that our father is not wild to go there too.”
All eyes turned to me. Some were palpable with enthusiasm, all ‘expecting a pleasant answer’. Others were unreadable.
“As to that,” I replied. “I am sure the island has its attractions. It may even be ‘full of sounds that give delight and harm not’, for it is said to be Prospero’s isle, from the Tempest, quite apart from its Homeric associations. But Corfu is not Meryton, nor even Pemberley or Newcastle. One cannot just go there on a whim. There are routes to consider, passages to make enquiries about, all sorts of arrangements to be made. And you are to consider, my dears, that neither your mother nor I are quite as young as we once were.”
At this point Jane surprised me by interjecting –
“Oh, Papa, you are quite recovered from last year’s indisposition, I am sure, and as hale and stout as ever you were. You are quite capable of going to Corfu, or even to Van Diemen’s Land if you wish. And Poor Lydia must be so downcast to have missed seeing her family by such a narrow scrape. I am sure she must miss us quite as much as we miss her.”
“Thank you, my dear,” I replied, “but you will forgive me if I am not quite so resolute in sharing your opinion of my health. But what I am saying is that nothing can be settled on such a subject at once, or even overnight. Such an enterprise needs a deal of planning, and, in any case you are to consider that Lydia and Wickham have probably not arrived there themselves as yet. And we must give them some time to settle in before they can receive guests. It will be weeks before we even know if such a project is feasible. In the meantime, let us all carry on as before. Mr and Mrs Golightly have their honeymoon to continue, and the rest of us have homes to go to, and business of our own to mind there. Let us all do just that, as soon as may be convenient. If Georgiana will be kind enough to put up with our company for a few days more, Mrs Bennet and I will stay on in London while I make enquiries about passages to Corfu. We may all confer again when we have some idea of the practicalities of such a scheme.”
And that, I thought, would be that. Cooler heads would prevail in time and that time had now been gained. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I found myself addressed on the subject later in the day, and not by Mrs Bennet, or even Kitty or Mary, but by Lizzie.
We were alone in the house, everyone else having gone out to see the new paintings at the Egyptian Hall. I declined the opportunity of viewing sensational French depictions of shipwrecked mariners dying
on a raft in the open sea and staid modern English renderings of our Saviour while surrounded by bustling, chattering crowds incapable of telling a mahl stick from a liquorice stick, and settled down to read, or rather to sit by the fire with a book on my lap while slowly permitting my eyes to close. I seem to be doing rather a lot of that sort of thing these days, but if Homer can nod, why may not I?
I was – I will not say I was awakened, for, of course, I was not in any way asleep – but I was aroused from my reverie by the entry of my favourite daughter.
“Do you not go to the exhibition, father?” she enquire. “I should have thought that sort of thing would interest you.”
“I am of an age now when I no longer need pretend interest in things that do not appeal to me,” I replied. “I have seen enough of these modern paintings, and their painters, too, to assure me there are no Raphaels among them. Why, Mrs Morland, the doctor’s wife at Meryton can do as well as most of your Academicians, if not better. You should see the portrait she did of your sister for Golightly when they were betrothed.”
“I did not know that you dined out with country sawbones now, Papa.”
“Oh, young Morland is not your ordinary country sawbones. He is a physician, much caressed by all sorts of learned societies, and his sister is married to a viscount’s brother. Mrs Morland herself was Miss Margaret Dashwood before she married, of the Norland family. The couple are perfectly acceptable, socially, except that they have this whimsical notion of working for their living. He it was who sent me to Buxton, you know.”
“Well, I am glad to see you on good terms with such an eminent medical man, for, you know, father, we are none of us getting any younger, and you were not very well that time you came to us at Pemberley.”
“Oh, I have quite got over that, my dear. I am quite recovered.”
“I rejoice to hear it, but do you really think your state of health will permit you to go gadding about the Mediterranean and digging up who knows what old ruins on the pretext of visiting Lydia?”
Our Neighbours' Sport Beyond the Seas Page 3
