by Joan Aiken
The series of winter concerts had ended: spring, rainy, tardy and reluctant, was beginning to creep through the streets and gardens of Bath. I had resumed my habit of taking Pug for an evening stroll in the Green Park. There was a small iron gate leading to an inner garden, which, I suppose, had once belonged to a private house. Here I used to ramble with Pug (now becoming aged and asthmatic) because the early flowers in this sheltered spot, crocuses and snowdrops, made a poignant reminder of the gardens at Kinn Hall where, between deep banks, the little brook dropped from level to level, and there would often be spring flowers in January, or even December. I wondered, walking here, how Triz and Lady Hariot were faring, whether they were still in Portugal. It was long since I had heard from them. The French had reached Oporto now, and were all over Spain; Napoleon had set his brother Joseph on the throne in Madrid. Perhaps my friends were safe enough in Lisbon; British troops were there, still. And now there was talk of Sir Arthur Wellesley being sent out to the Peninsula to do battle against the French forces under the command of Soult and Ney. Colonel Brandon, I knew, had served under Wellesley in India; perhaps (if healed of his wound) he too might have decided to rejoin his old commander, if Sir Arthur should take command there? But, in that case, what would Mrs Brandon do? Would she accompany her husband? Or return to England?
All these speculations were sad and fruitless. I had heard nothing from Mrs Ferrars as to the Colonel’s whereabouts. My only news of the war came from Mrs Jebb, who, on her regular excursions to the Pump Room, devoted at least half an hour each morning to careful perusal of the newspapers; she had been bitterly disapproving of Sir John Moore’s retreat to Coruña. ‘Trust a man to make such a botch-up of the business! If a female had been in command there would have been no such retreat. We would soon have sent that Soult about his business, and Bonaparte also!’ (Boney-party, she pronounced him.)
‘You should be at the Horseguards, ma’am,’ I said, teasing her, and she seriously replied, ‘You are right, child. Wars – and utterly stupid, costly wars, at that – will continue, no question, until government lies in the hands of females. And that will not be in my lifetime, nor in yours, neither.’
Quitting the little garden, in the February dusk, I caught a finger of my glove in the rusty latch of the gate and stood trying to disentangle it without breaking any of the silk and worsted threads. In this I was much hampered by Pug, who wheezed and twitched impatiently at his lead.
‘Allow me to assist you, madam,’ said a courteous voice over my shoulder, and a large male hand appeared, which skilfully detached the twisted strands from the rough latch. ‘Quiet, sir!’ the voice admonished Pug. ‘Can you not see your mistress is in difficulties?’
Startled and subdued, Pug desisted from his pulling.
‘I am very much obliged to you, sir,’ I said, glad that my left, or better hand had been the object of his solicitude. The right one, holding on to Pug’s leash, I tucked well under my mantle.
‘There can be no obligation in the case. I have been longing for such a chance to introduce myself ever since I heard you sing. Miss FitzWilliam, is it not? I am Harry ffinch-ffrench. I know all about you, Miss FitzWilliam, because I have a cousin, Maria Glanville, at Mrs Haslam’s school. And she tells me many wonderful things about you, Miss FitzWilliam, including the fact that you are a great devotee of poetry – which I am too! I cannot tell you how eagerly I have longed for an opportunity to discuss with you all my favourite authors and their works!’
His voice was extremely agreeable, warm and cajoling.
Oh, me! How readily we may be deluded, if the delusion should chime with some pet vagary of our own! Harry ffinch-ffrench could not have hit upon a subject more attractive to my taste; and in no time, recrossing the Green Park, we were deep in discussion of Mr Scott and Lord Byron, of whether it was permissible to compare their work, and whether Scotland was as suitable a location for tales of chivalry and drama as the more romantic Italian or Turkish mountains and valleys.
I ventured to inquire whether he had come across the works of my friends Mr Bill and Mr Sam. He expressed surprise at my being acquainted with them, said he himself had not read them, but understood their verses were crude peasant stuff and imbued with dangerous revolutionary notions, to boot. At which I laughed very heartily and urged him to acquaint himself at once with the works in question, before he revealed such an ignorant misconception to any other interlocutor.
My new acquaintance seemed quite startled at this, and turned to peer at me inquiringly in the dusk. His looks, I could see, fully lived up to Miss Artingstall’s panegyrics; and – what did more to recommend him to my favour – he bore a certain resemblance to dear Mr Sam, in that he had large deep-set eyes and glossy black locks which were swept back in picturesque disorder. (He was in truth somewhat handsomer than Mr Sam, who had thick lips and a habit of letting his jaw hang open when excited; but no qualities could ever excel those of my dear Mr Sam, or not in my estimation.) Still, as I say, the resemblance, superficial though it might be, recommended this new acquaintance to my goodwill. Also I was happy to encounter someone, and a member of the male sex, at that, with whom I might discuss matters that were of interest to me. I had spent so many hours, days, weeks and months, uncountable periods of time, it seemed to me, during the past few years, listening to trivial conversation on supremely uninteresting topics.—At least in Byblow Bottom when we talked, it was on subjects relevant to our life: somebody’s wife had died, somebody’s pig had escaped, somebody’s roof had collapsed. Means of dealing with the situation were canvassed. But here in Bath, conversation was, it seemed, an end in itself. Materials for it were collected like kindling wood, but then used in an artificial and prodigal manner, merely to generate a flame. But to what end? Simply to make a sound, to fill a silence, to pass a period of time. Time which, it seemed to me, could in a thousand ways have been more profitably spent. Mrs Jebb’s aged friends, the girls at the school, the teachers there, made themselves acquainted with books, attended dramatic performances, not because they cared about the book or the play in question, but simply in order to be supplied with topics for chat.
‘You must converse, young ladies!’ Miss Orrincourt admonished her charges over and over. ‘The gentlemen – your husbands, fathers, suitors – always require to be entertained. Always. When they are not hunting, shooting, governing, making laws or fighting wars – then it is your task to provide them with entertainment. So you must at all times have a fund of conversational topics ready to divert your company.’
Be hanged to that, I had often thought, remembering Lady Hariot and her unique knowledge, wit, intelligence, all lavished and wasted on the Squire; I shall look for a man who can interest me. And if I do not find him, like the lady in the ballad, I will go to my grave unwed.
Which is more than likely to happen in any case.
But now here, for a wonder, seemed to be a man who was prepared to interest me. Who walked beside me talking of Crabbe and Cowper and Sir Charles Grandison. As we parted at the park entrance, he suddenly drew out from the breast of his jacket a paper and handed it to me. He said beseechingly, ‘I have long, as I told you, Miss FitzWilliam, been seeking an opportunity to meet you and I have not come unprovided. This paper – somewhat warm and creased as you may see – has accompanied me for several weeks through the streets of Bath in the hopes of such a lucky encounter.’
How many weeks? I wondered in parenthesis. For he had told me that he was a student at the university of Cambridge and I had wondered no little at his apparent liberty to leave his studies so freely in order to flit away and disport himself in Bath.
‘I have been so eager for your eyes to rest upon these lines, Miss FitzWilliam! And I shall do my utmost to procure an early opportunity of hearing your comments.—Do you often walk here at this hour?’
I replied cautiously that I did now and then but that my time was not at my own disposal, etc., etc., and he bowed, wit
h much grace, sweeping his hat from those artlessly disordered locks – would have pressed my hand – only it was still holding the paper he had given me – and then vanished into the dusk.
The light being by now insufficient for me to be able to read what was written on the paper, I had to suppress my natural curiosity until I was back in my bedroom in New King Street.
There, I am obliged to confess, I felt a certain disappointment.
I long to be
My lady dear
The drop that sparkles
In your ear
I’d share your pillow
All night through
I’d hear each gentle
Breath you drew
If not the jewel
Then I’d be
The glass wherein
Your face you see
Ah! joy! for then
You’d smile at me!
I could not help regarding this verse and the various others that accompanied it as sad trivial stuff, surely unworthy of my new friend’s intelligence – and decidedly inferior to my expectations. It seemed curious that one who could talk with warmth and admiration of Cowper or Scott should produce such indifferent work himself.—Not only that but it seemed to me that I had come across something very similar elsewhere. Also I felt – and here I must confess a touch of impatience entered my critical attitude – that, if the lines were supposed to be addressed to me personally, it was unobservant of Lord Harry not to have noticed that, unlike most of the young lady boarders at Mrs Haslam’s, I wore no earrings. (Mrs Jebb had a pair of silver-and-jet buttons which she had sometimes appeared almost on the point of offering to lend me; but the point had never quite been reached and I had no great expectation that it ever would.)
Still, I told myself, there was a world of difference between an intelligent appreciation of literary works and the ability to create such works; there had been many shrewd critics of poetic style who could no more compose verses themselves than they could fly to the moon. And if Lord Harry showed a generous appreciation of other talent, then that was as much as could reasonably be required of him, and he would rapidly learn to know his own limitations. Was I to be the one to disillusion him as to his lack of genius? I hoped not. The harsh world would enlighten him soon enough.
These thoughts, and others of a similar nature, ran through my mind that evening as I sang some operatic airs by Mademoiselle Duvan from her Suite de les Génies for Mrs Jebb and her friends, and played on the harp a set of variations by Handel. The hours seemed to pass rather more smoothly and speedily than usual on such evenings, and when I retired to bed it was to hear again, in echo, that warm and engaging voice: ‘I know a great deal about you, Miss FitzWilliam,’ he had said, and I wondered what else Maria Glanville had told him about me. Nothing very flattering, I could be sure; she was a hen-witted girl, unable to distinguish one note from another, who fell into a paralysis of fright when asked the simplest musical question. She had probably told her cousin that I was a dragon. It would be amusing to disabuse him . . . So thinking, I fell asleep.
***
I need not retrace here in day-to-day detail the progress of my acquaintance with Lord Harry ffinch-ffrench. Suffice it to say that, isolated and somewhat off my guard as I was at that time, I found myself looking forward to our next encounter with unaffected eagerness and made my way to the Green Park as often as daily circumstances permitted. Or as the weather permitted: that was an unusually rainy spring.
– He was not always there. And now the evenings were beginning to lengthen, and more people came to stroll and enjoy the favours of the season, our chances of a private encounter grew fewer and fewer, unless I took my promenade at a late hour, which suited neither Pug nor Mrs Jebb.
I found myself reluctant to tell Mrs Jebb about my new acquaintance.—It was not precisely that our encounters were clandestine; but I knew by instinct how much Miss Orrincourt would disapprove if one of her instructresses should be regularly meeting a gentleman, however innocuous the circumstances, however respectable his intentions and antecedents; and although Lord Harry appeared the pinnacle of respectability – and eligibility – the gulf between our stations sufficed, in itself, to cast a shadow of doubt and discredit over our acquaintance. I tried not to devote too much thought to this aspect of our friendship, I must confess; that we were friends and liked to talk about books, was, at that time, sufficient for me. If he asked questions about my background I returned evasive answers; I never suggested that he come and present himself at Mrs Jebb’s house, for I felt sure that she would not wish to receive him; and he himself never suggested a meeting anywhere else.
– Just occasionally I seemed to hear Fanny Huskisson’s voice at my ear: ‘A rare cheapskate he be, dearie, if you ask me! Not to offer you so much as a cup of chocolate at a pastrycook’s or an apple from a costermonger! Why, I’d think it a shame to be acquainted with such a skinflint, and he the son of a dook with all his millions at command.’
But then Fanny Huskisson, a thoroughly vulgar girl, had no notion of any such thing as the interplay of two intelligences.
Learning that Lord Harry had passed his schooldays at Eton I did consider, at one time, asking if he had ever encountered Hoby, but on second thoughts refrained. That might lead to revelations. Next time I wrote to Hoby – now entered at King’s College, Cambridge – I would ask him if he knew Lord Harry. His opinion might be of interest.
I wondered sometimes what had become of the rest of the Bath Beaux, Lord Harry’s friends. Once I alluded to them in a casual manner; where were they now? I asked. Oh, he said vaguely, he had seen them the other day; they had all been to a race-meeting together. They were shocking, inveterate gamblers, his friends, he told me, laughing; if there were no steeplechases to bet on, they would wager on the colour of the first dog to come out of the market, or the number of swans along the bank by the Parade Gardens. ‘Ned Weatherspill and Gus Link once staked five hundred apiece on the number of hairs in the blacksmith’s beard at Corsham,’ he said, laughing even more heartily.
‘But – good God – how would they ever discover which of them was right?’
‘Ned paid the fellow to have his beard shaved off.’
‘He was willing to do such a thing?’
‘No; not at all willing; but they made him drunk and it was done. And Ned won his bet. They obliged the barber to count the hairs three times over.’
I pondered over this story, which somewhat shocked me. Not that it exceeded in outrageousness various pranks perpetrated by Hoby and the others back at Byblow Bottom; but I had assumed that these gently reared young sons of lords would have higher standards.
‘But now the other fellows have all gone back to Cambridge – and I ought to return there, too,’ he added in a somewhat languishing tone. ‘But I have fallen into shocking bad habits here of sinful self-indulgence. Can you guess what keeps me lingering and procrastinating?’
He threw me a slanting look from his large dark eyes and repeated, ‘Can you guess! Are you not going to ask me what I mean?’
I felt suddenly ill-at-ease. An exquisitely fair evening after a week of rain had tempted us beyond our usual limits, and we had persuaded the protesting Pug up Beechen Cliff, which, because of its noble hanging woods, always reminded me of the walk I had taken along the coast to St Lucy’s of Godsend with my two dear friends. By myself, I could not have come as far as this; for it was not considered a suitable walk for a young lady on her own. And few of the girls at Mrs Haslam’s cared to ramble so far, even in each other’s company.
‘Lord Harry,’ I said hesitantly, to break the silence which all of a sudden seemed to envelop us like a cocoon, ‘there is something I have been wishful to say – no, not at all wishful, but it needs to be said –’
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, laying his hand upon my arm. I was much struck by the warmth of that hand, and by the fact that it q
uivered violently. ‘Ah, surely,’ he went on, ‘by this time we need not be quite so formal? ‘Lord Harry’! Can you not venture to call me Hal, as my friends do? And may I not – pray – address you as Eliza?’
I glanced about us. We were now in a little clearing of the beech wood, where a seat had been erected, commanding a majestic panorama of the city of Bath, roofs and spires and the winding river far below us.
He led me to the bench and invited me with a gesture to sit on it, then sat down himself, facing me, with an arm hooked over the back rail.
I felt both nervous and resolute. For the last few meetings I had been evading him, practising with an adroitness of which I had hardly known myself capable Miss Orrincourt’s art of leading the conversation away from a risky area into a more innocuous region. But now I felt our intimacy had reached a point where the truth could be postponed no longer.
‘Very well then – Hal.’
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed in a throbbing tone. ‘How exquisite – how truly interesting that word sounds upon your lips! Hal! It has a grace – a resonance – hitherto undreamed-of! I shall for ever like the name better – from this day on – now that I have heard it from your charming voice –’
‘Well – I hope so. Perhaps you may not think that when you hear what I have to say. For, my dear Hal, I am obliged to tell you that – sadly – I do not believe your gifts lie in the realm of poetry. Your true genius, perhaps, may be situated elsewhere – as critic, perhaps essayist – philosopher – man of letters –’
He was staring at me intently, his mouth somewhat open – like Mr Sam’s, I thought – his eyes dark with urgency. There were numerous beads of sweat upon his forehead, though the evening was not warm, and he had all of a sudden grown so pale, so very pale, that I felt – I must confess – considerable compunction for being obliged to dash his poetic hopes.
