The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  The arrival of the Duchess of Tintagel in a hackney-cab caused a sensation at Belfield among the servants who witnessed it. When she asked where she would find Mrs. Robinson, she was reminded: “Your Grace, it’s the time when the mistress goes up to see Master Aeneas.” She had forgotten Lizzy’s schedule of motherhood. At the foot of the last flight of stairs to the crenellated turret that housed the day-nursery, she drew her skirts back to make room for a buxom nanny preceding two young nursemaids, one carrying Lizzy’s boy, and the other Mabel’s girl, down to perambulation in fresh air. In the nursery, its Gothic walls papered with bright pictures of kittens and jack-in-the-boxes, Lizzy, Mabel, Virginia, and Conchita were laughing about something, two of them on a sofa and two on small chairs at a small table.

  Seeing Nan’s face, all four fell silent.

  “I have left the Duke.”

  A stunned silence was broken by a shriek: “Nan St. George! Are you crazy? You—you—why, you just wait till I tell—” Virginia stopped, but Nan knew how the sentence would have ended: “—till I tell Mother.”

  Conchita hugged Nan and murmured: “But, darling, you don’t need to leave your husband to be happy.” Mabel cocked her head, puzzled but alert; Lizzy frowned and pursed her lips.

  Virginia recovered from her regression to childhood. Her blue eyes blazing in a face crimson with a fiercer rage than yesterday’s, she lashed out: “How can you do this to us? We all stood up for you against Lady Churt!—And was it true, what she said, after all?”

  Nan shook her head wearily. “No, it wasn’t, Jinny. But I must leave Ushant, and I had to tell all of you.”

  She went down to her room, rang, and, when her maid appeared, asked: “Will you please pack some things I’ll need for two or three days? And then I’m not going to need you, and I think you’ll want to go to Longlands.”

  Mabbit, stiff with injured pride, asked, “Haven’t I satisfied Your Grace?”

  “Oh, yes,” Nan said in eager reassurance, “you have, and I thank you; only from now on I shan’t have a maid. And at Longlands they’ll be glad—”

  Having knocked, Lizzy came quietly in. Nan told Mabbit: “Mrs. Robinson will see that you get to Longlands safely—won’t you, Lizzy?”

  “Certainly, if necessary,” Lizzy said formally, “but, as you may know, Mabbit, my sister, Mrs. Whittaker, needs a personal maid; hers is ill. Could you stay on with her?”

  “Very kind I’m sure, ma’am.” Mabbit looked down her nose. “But I have always been in the service of the Family.”

  “Yes, of course; but if you could bear to help out for just a little while? Mrs. Whittaker would be more than grateful—”

  “Well ...” Grudgingly, Mabbit nodded.

  (“You’ve installed an agent of the Dowager Duchess in our house,” Mr. Robinson protested, when he heard of this arrangement. “She’ll store up everything she sees and hears and report to Longlands.”—“We’ll be able to decide what the Dowager gets,” retorted Lizzy. “Mabbit’s description of Mrs. Whittaker as a model young widow in every way may arouse interest.”)

  When Mabbit had left, Lizzy perched on a chaise-longue, her face softening, and said gently: “Nan, I didn’t say, but I ... I want to help—”

  “Oh, Lizzy!” Surprised—she had not expected Lizzy, who managed life so competently, to feel concern for a woman who’d made so poor a use of greater opportunities—Nan knelt beside the chaise-longue and took Lizzy’s hands in hers. “You’re generous, but—well, Jinny and Conchita are secure, but you and Mr. Robinson... I am already damaging someone’s career, I don’t want to compromise the two of you.”

  Lizzy gripped Nan’s hands while her fine blue eyes searched Nan’s face. “Nan, tell me....” Lizzy hesitated. “Do you really, truly, want to leave the Duke? Have you thought carefully?”

  “Yes.” Nan met Lizzy’s question with equal gravity: “I can’t go on. I’m too unhappy with him. Ushant needs a different sort of wife entirely. He wants to do right, but he thinks he has to be perfect, and so he has this mountain of perfection bearing him down.... Lizzy, he is scared stiff of his mother! Any of you would have been a better wife to him than I. He needs someone”—Nan had a flash of illumination—“someone like Mabel!—who would help him stand up for himself, and please the Dowager at the same time. And Mabel is so rich, maybe the richest woman in the world, it said in the papers! She’d be on equal terms in a way.—Well, almost,” Nan emended with a crooked smile, thinking of the Dowager’s expectations.

  Lizzy embraced Nan to hide a mounting blush.

  “We might as well have taken her into our confidence,” she told her husband when they went up to bed. “She suggested Mabel, herself. I am ashamed.”

  Mr. Robinson, who intended to become a statesman, not a mere politician, had trained himself to see all sides of a situation. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It would be unwise to write Guy Thwarte off. Sir Helmsley’s not what you’d call a good life. That high colour—those wheezing fits—an apoplexy could carry him off any day, and then it’ll be Sir Guy and Lady Thwarte; and with a duchess who wasn’t hostile to Annabel... Let us suppose—” Assuming his parliamentary posture (unconsciously modelled on Napoleon’s well-known attitude), Hector began to tick points off with a finger as he did when presenting a bill in the House: “Let us suppose that the Duke marries Mabel and has a son and then dies... is killed in a shooting accident, say—he’s said to be a careless gun—leaving Mabel as guardian of his heir. Sir Guy and Lady Thwarte return to Honourslove. Mabel’s influence makes them accepted by the county. In time, her son the new Duke marries a daughter of theirs....” Hector halted, belatedly aware of Lizzy’s icy stare.

  “I never knew,” she said tartly, “that you were so imaginative.”

  Nan had told Lizzy that she would take a valise with things for a few days to London, by train. Lizzy could send the rest of her belongings to the left luggage at St. Pancras.

  “But where will you go, in London, Nan? Will you be all right?” Lizzy asked as they waited at the door for the fly to come round from the stables. The others were at tea. Nan had told Lizzy that she would leave quietly; she’d write to Virginia later.

  Unused to deception, Nan answered, “To Miss Testvalley’s family in Denmark Hill” before she remembered that Miss Testvalley had counselled secrecy. “But, please, Lizzy, don’t tell anyone.”

  The fly carried the Duchess to the local station. From St. Pancras she took a cab to the Testavaglia house in Denmark Hill.

  XXXVI.

  When the Duke of Tintagel was informed that the Duchess had left Folyat House by a door into the mews, he said, “Very well,” and told his informant he might go. He dined alone that night without uttering a word.

  The Dowager Duchess had carefully grafted pride of rank and reverence for custom on a nature already cautious, humourless, and self-distrustful, but neither nature nor scientific improvements had rendered her son capable of violence. He could endure; could resist, dig his heels in; he could insist, and (as he had just proved) could even threaten if convinced that his cause was just. But he knew he could not employ physical force. Annabel’s religious duty to produce as many children as he saw fit was also a legal obligation. He could have the police find her, wherever she had gone (to one of her American friends, probably), and hale her back. But, the abhorrent public show aside, if when she was restored to him she remained recalcitrant, was he to break her door down, or order his servants to do so? Impossible. And once he had entered her room? The Duke tried to imagine.... “Perhaps, if I were angry enough,” he thought, “but... how many times?” He must have a son. He must have more than one son. But his mother, conscientious though she was, had produced six girls before he was born.... In trying to keep Annabel at Folyat House—actually shouting to his servants to bar the door—he had gone as far as he could.

  The event itself, the stupefying fact that she had run away from his bouse—and by a mean egress, with his stable-boys as witnesses—and the strain of p
reserving an impassive exterior delayed his full consideration of his scene with Annabel. No sooner had he realized that jealousy might be appropriate than, a self-disciplined man, he had deferred indulgence of the emotion. Only when he had retired to his grand gloomy bedchamber and dismissed his valet did he allow himself to dwell on her saying that she “loved” another man. He had believed what she said about there being no misconduct: that the man didn’t know. Yet it came back to him that she had lied about the five hundred pounds being for a charity. There also came back to him his mother’s face on Boxing Day, when she spoke of Annabel’s indiscretion in the Correggio room, and the day after, when he told her that Annabel was refusing him his rights.

  Now he saw that jealousy was uncalled for. It was a case of theft. Annabel had withheld something that belonged to him. A thief had taken it (or meant to) from her—that is to say, from him. It was not that he had failed as a husband. Annabel’s affections, flighty to begin with, had been alienated by Another.

  The brooding Duke interpreted his misfortunes in the perspective of a very personal Weltanschauung. He viewed the God of the Church of England as a master Clock-maker who had designed an eternal machine which He kept wound up and which needed no repair save when damaged by Nihilists or Republicans. (Or, the Duke now added to the list of trouble-makers, contumacious wives.) Too modest to aspire practically to more than tending to common clocks, in this realm of secret pleasure the Duke had always had his dreams. At Eton he had passionately followed reports of the construction and triumphant public début of Big Ben, and he had gone on to examine foreign achievements. That clock in Munich with its mechanically gesticulating figures of a king and queen and musicians had, almost, tempted him to travel, as the Colosseum and the Alps had not. Without going abroad, he had conceived of an even finer wonder-works: At the first stroke of noon, doors would open on a platform onto which a throng of wooden figures, shining with gilt and the brightest possible red, green, orange, and violet, would step in order. A king and queen would bow to each other, a mitred bishop would raise his crook, a soldier aim a gun, a blacksmith strike an anvil... each figure performing its divinely appointed, divinely timed, role.

  The microcosm of human society which the Duke had an ineluctable obligation to govern fell short of his ideal. The Duchess failed to curtsey to the Duke, or turned up in the slot belonging to the milkmaid... or the key in her back unwound crazily and her springs flew apart.

  It was typical of her that she had gone out into the street bare-headed! How (the Duke asked the world defensively) could he have been expected to know that she wasn’t simply going to her room, when she left her hat in his study?

  But while the Duke did not underrate Annabel’s imperfections, he admitted to himself that he had been inept. He had wanted a young maiden whose foot, under his careful schooling, would grow to fit the glass slipper. It might have been wiser to seek a woman whose feet were full-grown, whose record of performance could be analyzed like that of a race-horse.... But such thoughts, irresistibly as the defective apparatus in the wooden Annabel’s spine, sent him whizzing back to his distaste for marrying a woman who wanted to marry a duke.... He had longed for an Impossible She who would appreciate his position—and not want him because of it.

  Next morning he walked down through St. James’s to his club. His intention was to avoid the unseen glances of his servants—he knew there were glances!—and hear nothing that would remind him of his wife, but he had forgotten that the matter ramified beyond his household. His was a Tory club. Thwarte of Honourslove—whom Annabel had mentioned and not mentioned—had withdrawn from the Lowdon bye-election, citing “personal reasons”; and no fewer than three members, among them the venerable Lord St. Alfont, the Duke’s godfather, alluded to a rumour that Thwarte was about to leave the country. Before the Duke went home, he wrote a letter and rang for a servant to deliver it to Chancery Lane.

  At eleven the next morning, Mr. Cyril Dinsmore of Dinsmore, Fortescue, and Ford conducted the Duke to the heart of a labyrinth of darkish rooms stacked with deed-boxes and trusted that His Grace and the Duchess were well; he regretted not having had the pleasure of seeing Her Grace since the wedding. He blinked three times in rapid succession when the Duke said heavily: “The marriage must end. She has left me. By the door to the mews, in full view of my servants.”

  Mr. Dinsmore, whose wizened mien suggested a diet of ink and parchment, was the grandfather of four young children with whom he played lawn-cricket every week-end when weather allowed. “Poor boy,” he thought, “so that’s why he came here instead of summoning me. But that charming girl!—Poor boy?! You’re a dead stick, sir!”—“An informal separation,” he offered, “not infrequently eventuates in reconciliation.”

  The Duke’s lips stiffened. “Impossible. The marriage must end.”

  “Your Grace envisages divorce? On what grounds? Desertion? Adultery?”

  “She has told me that she is ... attached to someone but that there has been no misconduct. I believe she is truthful. I believe ...” With stronger conviction, the Duke said: “For two years she has refused to ... perpetuate the ducal line.”

  Sighing, Mr. Dinsmore (of such stuff are eminently successful family-solicitors made) quelched sentimental considerations, deftly put questions, and quickly perceived that the answers formed a not-unfamiliar pattern.

  The Duchess had asked for money for a person whom she refused to identify but who she stated, unasked, was not Mr. Guy Thwarte. She stated that she wished to leave the conjugal abode but not because of a man whom she admitted to “loving” but did not name. Mr. Thwarte had abruptly cancelled his political plans and was reportedly leaving England and his family estate.

  Having ascertained these facts, Mr. Dinsmore deliberated for a few moments before he gave an opinion. “Certainly, refusal to perform what a learned jurist has termed”—he coughed—“ ‘the most obvious duty of a wife’ is cause for divorce, as is desertion. If there is adultery, the co-respondent could be jailed and sued for damages. If the parties are taken in flagrante delicto—”

  The Duke’s face puckered. “I prefer,” he said fastidiously, “to avoid the sensational.”

  “Your Grace is too young to remember when the Duchess of Newcastle left the conjugal abode—with a foreigner of lower class, a Mr.... Opdebeck.” Mr. Dinsmore clucked at the uncouth name. “After a hue and cry over the Continent, they were caught, although they were using an alias.... There was sensation for you! And the press, Duke, is far more licentious today.”

  “I only want it over with,” the Duke said bleakly, “as soon and as quietly as possible. I do not want anyone fined or gaoled or, or ... I am not vindictive. I only want—never to see her again.” He turned a proud cold face to his adviser while his fingers moved as if twisting some minute object. “I must be at Longlands for the County Assizes, and I wish to have a plan decided before...”

  Silently supplying “my mother knows,” Mr. Dinsmore proposed: “If so, Your Grace, let us review the possibilities.”

  Since Annabel’s unexpected visit, Miss Jacky March had quivered through gradations of amazement, horror, and, yes, something like exultation! at behaviour so unlike her own. She felt drawn to a compatriot who would demonstrate that one American scorned the greatest marriage in the United Kingdom! (Other than Royal, Miss March corrected herself, scrupulously; but, of course, Royal marriages were inviolable.) She could not jeopardize the network of noble friendships that was her very life; could do little to help, and nothing openly; yet there were tiny practical details which dear Laura, so intellectual, might not have thought of.

  Miss March had heard the Dowager Duchess congratulate herself on having found for her “perfect daughter-in-law” a lady’s-maid who was loyal to the Family. She opened a quaint papier-mâché box, looked through its contents, murmured, “Yes, they would do,” and procured a sheet of note-paper. A conscientious frown crinkled her delicate withering face as she began a letter pointing out to “My dear Laura” tha
t, obviously, Annabel must have a maid who was loyal to her:

  ... Alas, a woman willing to serve a lady in A.’s peculiar situation would probably present a “character” from an actress or worse!! However, I know of two respectable women who might consent to serve A. I attach details. My name should not appear in this connection.

  Some might think my wish to help A. impious; but my dear Father, who was revered by his parishioners in South Braintree, and indeed throughout Eastern Massachusetts , held views on the position of married women which he used to say were “un-orthodox but not un-Christian”! Neither woman has experience in hair-dressing, but that, you will agree, is of small importance in these quite extra-ordinary circumstances!! I rely!! on your not mentioning my name!!! Ever your affect. friend, J.M.

  When Miss Testvalley delivered Corisande and Catharine, fatiguingly rapturous over their experiences as bridesmaids in Norfolk, to Champions, Lady Glenloe was not there. She had left a note explaining that Lady Brightlingsea had implored her to come to Allfriars, as Lord Brightlingsea was seriously ill. Seadown and Lord Richard were coming to see their father, but she needed Lady Glenloe’s company and support.

  Miss Testvalley read the note with acute interest. Her mind flew to poor silly Jacky March, a letter from whom lay beside Lady Glenloe’s, and who must not first learn of the absent-minded peer’s fatal illness by seeing his name among the Deaths in her morning paper. “My dear,” she wrote, “I have sad news which I wish I could give you in person, knowing how grieved you will be to hear....” She was sure, in a P.S., that A. would be grateful for the kind suggestion as to a lady’s-maid communicated by an unknown friend.