Shadow of a Lady

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “They might at least do something for the child.” Captain Telfair returned again and again to this, and Helen was increasingly aware that he looked on it as somehow her fault. The only one of her great-aunts she had ever met was Aunt Helen, her godmother, who had visited them once, had given her the gold crucifix and chain, quarrelled violently with her father, changed her will, and died. Mention of Helen Stott brought Captain Telfair close to apoplexy, so she was never mentioned. Helen sometimes thought that even her own name irritated her father.

  Her childhood, from the age of nine, when he came home, apparently for good, was even less happy than it had been when alone with her frail mother and irascible grandfather. But she was older now, and had learned a new way of escape. Her father, who thought education wasted on a girl, had dismissed the idea of a governess, and Helen might well have grown up in a state of ignorance worthy of a Rousseau heroine, if the vicar’s sister had not intervened. Meeting Helen and her mother in the street one day, this lady had paused to ask when Helen was to start her schooling, had learned the dismal state of the case, and had dismissed Mrs. Telfair’s explanation that she herself intended to undertake her daughter’s education with the scorn it deserved.

  “Nonsense, my dear,” said Miss Tillingdon. “Daughters never learn from their mothers. And, besides, what, pray, have you to teach her? Oh—accomplishments, I grant you them. You shall teach her satin-stitch and sketching, so she may waste silk and spoil paper, but send her to me, I beg you, in the mornings, and I will teach her to read. It will be an entertainment for me. I worked for a while with my friend Miss Wollstonecraft at her school in Newington Green. It was the happiest time of my life.”

  And, as she grew up, Helen’s mornings, at least, were happy. Miss Tillingdon was not a methodical teacher, but she was an instinctive one. They studied what she chose and studied it from the heart. Her brother, the bachelor vicar of Up Harting, gave them the run of the very considerable library he no longer used, retiring, himself, to the “den” where he kept the collection of other people’s sermons from which he took his Sunday pick.

  So Helen learned to read in quite a new sense, and was soon carrying off volumes from the vicarage library for afternoon consumption. She also learned a useful lesson when her father caught her with Tom Jones and, predictably, exploded. She was too old by then to whip, but he made both her and her mother’s lives a misery to them for several weeks. What girl reared on such improper stuff would ever make a good marriage? And marry, of course, Helen must, preferably as soon as possible, and someone with parliamentary or naval influence, or both.

  “Though how he expects me to,” said sixteen-year-old Helen to her friend Miss Tillingdon, “when he knows I meet no one, I cannot begin to imagine.”

  “Marriage,” said Miss Tillingdon, “is a very doubtful blessing. At least for a woman.”

  Helen could not help laughing. “There would be few marriages, dear Miss Tillingdon, if all the women refused.”

  “Just so. My friend Miss Wollstonecraft writes me that she is engaged in composing a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in answer to Mr. Burke. She believes that marriage is an outmoded superstition, and has even persuaded her sister to abandon her brute of a husband.”

  “I shall never marry,” said Helen.

  “Then we had best work hard at your education, my dear. Miss Wollstonecraft is most fortunately able to support herself by her pen, but hers is a most unusual case. I, as you see, have found myself compelled to keep house— for a brother.”

  “Yes.” Helen had a practical turn of mind. “But I have no brothers.”

  “You have something better,” said Miss Tillingdon. “You have an income of your own.”

  “What?” said Helen.

  “I thought you had not been told. From things your mother has said, I think it possible that even your parents do not know, surprising though it seems. So perhaps the less said about it, the better. But I do think you should know. Your great-aunt, Helen Stott—Helen Glendale that was—left you her fortune. I do not know the exact figure, but it should provide an income sufficient to keep you in comfort. It is in trust, I think, until you come of age. Naturally, if you marry, it will become your husband’s.”

  “Yes,” said Helen. “I shall certainly never marry. Dear Miss Tillingdon, thank you for telling me.”

  Chapter 2

  WHILE Helen and Miss Tillingdon worked their way simultaneously through the works of Rousseau and those of Richardson, the political scene darkened and Captain Telfair’s hopes rose. Revolution broke out in France and he made the valet he could not afford refurbish his uniforms. “You never can tell,” he said, “when I may need them.”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Mrs. Telfair. The years that had rested him had wasted her. There were no more quarrels now, because she agreed with everything he said. Domestic duties exhausted her, and after old Mr. Telfair had made a particularly disagreeable scene over the way his house was run—or not run—Helen had quietly taken over the housekeeping. It meant that she could no longer go to the vicarage in the mornings, but she went in the afternoons instead, and she and Miss Tillingdon continued their happy, random process of education, but as companions rather than pupil and teacher. They were studying Italian together, since Helen was rather more fluent than her preceptress in French. She thought, sometimes, how surprised her father would be to know how much she knew, but took every precaution against his finding out. Her first action, after that disastrous episode over Tom Jones, had been to embroider an elegant book-cover in her best satin stitch, and now everything she read looked like the Bible. Nor had she ever betrayed, by look or hint, that she knew herself an heiress, and no one had told her. In fact she was convinced by now that Miss Tillingdon had been right. Her parents quite certainly knew nothing of her expectations. It was very odd, and she only hoped Miss Tillingdon knew what she was talking about. Pressed as to the source of her information, she had subsided into tears and incoherence, and Helen, appalled at this sign of weakness in the only person in the world that she admired, abandoned the painful subject.

  When she was seventeen, the year after the Bastille fell, and her grandfather died, the invitation Helen’s father had stopped even grumbling about actually arrived. It was from the youngest of Mrs. Telfair’s aunts, who had married late in life and was now bringing out her own youngest daughter. She wrote to suggest that Helen come and stay with them and “do” the London season with her Charlotte. Reading between the lines of the letter, Helen decided that Charlotte must be a problem of some kind, and that she herself was to be made use of. But it was a chance to get away from home, and as such, not to be resisted. Her only qualm, as she confided to Miss Tillingdon, was that she knew herself to be going on false pretences. “Nothing could induce me to marry,” she said. “And here is poor Mamma spending all this money on rigging me out to catch a husband.”

  “Never mind,” said Miss Tillingdon comfortably. “They can afford it now old Mr. Telfair’s dead, and you need the clothes.”

  Arriving in St. James’s Square, Helen was interested to find herself treated as a pauper. Apparently the facts of Great-Aunt Helen’s will were not known even to her immediate family, and she wondered, with some respect for her dead relative, how she had contrived this. She was immensely grateful to her. As a pauper, the chances of attracting the kind of marriage offer for which her parents hoped were slight enough. She knew she was handsome, in a rather formidable, dark-haired way, but her wide reading of novels had taught her that when it came to marriage, good looks were seldom enough. Anyway, she did not mean to marry. If Miss Tillingdon’s information about her inheritance proved false, she would have to teach, or even write for money, like her heroine, Mary Wollstonecraft.

  Charlotte was away when Helen arrived, staying with one of her married sisters, and Mrs. Standish’s few references to her youngest daughter confirmed Helen’s suspicions that Charlotte was a problem. It was all too obvious that her mother disliked her, and Helen, work
ing hard with her aunt’s sewing woman to refurbish her wardrobe out of her married cousins’ cast-offs, resisted the temptation to ask the mildest of leading questions about Miss Charlotte. Her father, too, was out of town, hunting with the Belvoir, so they were a quiet household for the first week of Helen’s stay, but when he brought her back on a wet February Monday, everything changed. The house came alive; servants ran about; doors banged, invitations began to pour in. And in the middle of all the excitement was Charlotte, pretty as a picture, tiny, golden-haired, and unable to speak to her mother without a stammer so pronounced as to be agonising.

  Aunt Standish had calculated well, Helen thought, when she invited her to join Charlotte for the . She could only wonder what kind of enquiries had been made, and how. Her looks were the perfect foil for Charlotte’s and she understood why her aunt had felt she could afford to be generous in outfitting her. And—had her aunt known this too?—conversation came easily to her. She could not remember when she had outgrown her dread of her father and grandfather, but outgrown it she had, and if she was not afraid of them, she feared nobody. At that first, dreadful family dinner, when Charlotte, asked by her mother for a report on her sister, who was breeding, had got as far as “She m . . . m . . .” and then stammered to an anguished, tear-laden halt, Helen had plunged in with a knowledgeable question to Mr. Standish about hunting conditions in the shires. He was not a sensible man, but he could talk about hunting, and did, for the rest of the meal.

  It set the pattern for the whole extraordinary season. Charlotte looked ravishing, and stammered. Helen looked handsome, and talked. In fact, after two younger sons had asked for her hand and been ruthlessly refused without reference to either uncle or father, she talked a great deal. It had been Miss Tillingdon’s advice. “Make them think you a bluestocking,” she had said, “and you will be quite safe.”

  In the main, it worked admirably. Just occasionally, it worked rather better than she had intended, as when one of the younger sons was actually inspired to invite her and Charlotte to visit the winter exhibition of the Royal Academy at Somerset House with him. It was, Aunt Standish said, an unusual invitation, but she could see no harm in it, so long, resignedly, as she herself went too. Since Charlotte stammered much worse when her mother was present, this made the excursion to Somerset House less agreeable than it would otherwise have been to Helen, who had to act, all the time, as a protective screen between Charlotte and the others. Young Mr. Scroope had brought an equally young friend, Mr. Fysshe, to balance their numbers, and Helen hoped, for a while, that the party might separate, leaving Charlotte alone with Mr. Fysshe, who was so timid himself as to be almost beyond stammering at. But Mrs. Standish knew her duty and did it. They all drifted round the handsome galleries together, and Helen was between Mr. Scroope and Mr. Fysshe when she gave a gasp. “Who in the world is that?” It was years since she had thought about her angel, but there she was in a gold frame, unmistakable, even dressed as a bacchante.

  Mr. Scroope went red, Mr. Fysshe went redder. “It’s a picture by Mr. Romney,” said Mr. Scroope, recovering.

  “But of whom?” Helen was aware of her aunt in the background, apparently making faces at her, but refused to notice. “I’m sure I met her once.”

  “Impossible,” said Charles Scroope.

  “An imaginary subject?” suggested Mr. Fysshe hopefully.

  “No.” When she knew more, Helen was to respect Mr. Scroope for his answer. “I believe the young lady was a favourite model of Mr. Romney’s.”

  “Was?” Still Helen would not notice her aunt’s forbidding face.

  “Oh, she’s still alive,” said Mr. Scroope. “Very much so.” His colour was high. “She is in Naples now, staying with our ambassador there, Sir William Hamilton.”

  “It is time,” said Mrs. Standish, awfully, “for us to go home.”

  She sat portentously silent in the carriage, and Helen thought the two young men had showed extreme good sense in abandoning the doomed expedition so promptly. Doomed, indeed, it seemed to be. One of the horses cast a shoe in the Strand, and the coachman, who feared his master even more than his mistress, refused to budge until it had been replaced at the nearest smithy. The three ladies, meanwhile, sat in painful silence, Helen busy wondering how she could find out more about the fate of her angel. She had not even, she realised with regret, learned her name, remembering her only as Emmy.

  Her resolution was more easily fulfilled than she had expected. Reaching the Standish house, Mrs. Standish dismissed Charlotte to her room and led Helen into her own little downstairs parlour, used mainly for the castigation of servants.

  “Now, miss.” She did not sit down, but stood by the fireplace, drawing off her gloves. “You will be so good as to tell me what you meant by that disgraceful scene.”

  “Scene?” Helen, who found the house intolerably hot, dropped her pelisse onto a chair. “I do not seem quite to understand you, Aunt.”

  “No? You really expect me to believe that it was all sheer ignorance and innocence? From my Charlotte, poor creature, I might be prepared to credit it, but from you, with your learned airs and graces, I rather think not. ‘I’m sure I met her once.’ ” She quoted Helen’s own words furiously back at her. “The notorious Mrs. Hart. ‘Mrs!’ Well she has as much right, I imagine, to that as to the ‘Hart.’ And you must needs lay claim to knowing her. It will be all over town tomorrow. It’s too good a story to waste. Mr. Fysshe has not sense enough to see it, but Mr. Scroope . . . and Charlotte there, too. Inevitably involved. I wish to God I had left you in the mud where you belong.”

  “Thank you.” Now Helen was angry too. “I’ll go home tomorrow.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind. It would merely confirm the scandal.”

  “I wish . . .” Helen reached for patience. “I wish, Aunt, that you would explain to me just what this scandal is.” She saw Mrs. Standish nearing explosion point again, and threw up a hand. “But first, please let me tell you all I know about the matter. Once, years ago, when I was a little girl, I got into the garden of Uppark.”

  “Oh my God!” Mrs. Standish interrupted her. “It’s too much, I shall swoon; I feel it coming.”

  “Here.” Helen took her arm and guided her to the sofa. “Sal volatile, Aunt? Or would you prefer a drop of your cherry cordial?”

  Limp on the sofa, Mrs. Standish fanned herself weakly. “The cordial, child. Not the small glass, the other one. You had best have some yourself.” It was the smallest possible olive branch, but Helen accepted it as such, merely wishing, as she filled the two glasses, that her aunt kept brandy or port in her theoretically secret cupboard, as well as the oversweet cordial.

  Sipping greedily, Mrs. Standish gazed over the glass at Helen with large, curious eyes. “Uppark. When you were a child. What did you see?”

  “Nothing much.” The older woman’s eagerness was disgusting. “Sir Harry was having a party. The fiddlers were there from the village. That’s when I saw this Mrs. Hart—if that’s her name. They called her Emmy. She danced for them; on the table. It was beautiful.” She would never admit to having thought Emmy Hart an angel.

  “Danced on the table.” Mrs. Standish leaned forward, spilling a little of the precious cordial. “Not. . . Helen . . . Not . . .” She stopped, for once at a loss for words.

  “Not what, Aunt?”

  “Was she dressed?” asked Mrs. Standish, simply.

  “Of course she was.” Helen was beginning to understand the kind of orgy Mrs. Standish was imagining. “I thought it the most beautiful dress I had ever seen. She was so lovely. And kind.” But she would not tell Mrs. Standish how she had fallen out of the bushes and been discovered.

  “Kind!” Mrs. Standish picked up the word. “Too kind by a half, poor girl.” She emptied her glass and held it imperiously out for more. “That’s why Sir Harry turned her oil. Increasing, of course, and not by him.”

  “Oh.” Helen remembered the day she had last seen her angel, waiting for the coach in Pe
tersfield. “Turned off” had been the phrase old Mr. Masters had used, and Emmy herself had admitted to being “in trouble.” The phrase had a meaning for Helen now that it had not had then, and she remembered Emmy’s strange laughter, and the desperate way those strong teeth had bitten the crucifix, and was glad that she had given it. But this was something else not to tell Mrs. Standish. “What happened to her then?” she asked instead, handing back the filled glass and making a pretence at sipping from her own.

  “That was the extraordinary thing.” Mrs. Standish had forgotten that she was not talking to a woman of her own age. “She turned up a while later, demure as you please, pretty as a picture, in keeping with Mr. Greville at Paddington Green. That’s when Romney painted her. You couldn’t go to a gallery without her languishing at you from some canvas of his or other. As a muse, a Venus . . . oh, a whole range of most unsuitable subjects. But faithful to Mr. Greville.” She conceded it grudgingly. “I even heard that Mr. Romney had to get in a professional model to do the . . .” she coughed. “The limbs.”

  “What happened about the baby?” Remembering that wan face, with the dark-circled eyes, Helen was sure this part, at least, of the extraordinary story must be true.

  “Nobody knows. Well, Greville’s a very sharp young man.” Mrs. Standish laughed harshly. “So sharp he may cut himself yet, people say.” She looked up sharply at Helen. “This is a most extraordinary conversation.” The syllables blurred a little.

  “Yes.” Helen did not attempt to deny it. “But, don’t you see, Aunt, I need to know just what has happened; how bad things really are.” She managed to suppress a laugh. “I do see, now, that I put the cat among the pigeons, back there when I said I’d met Mr. Greville’s Mrs. Hart. We must put our heads together, you and I, and see how we can best make a recovery, for Charlotte’s sake. Mr. Scroope seemed to know a great deal about Mrs. Hart,” she went on thoughtfully.