A London Season

by Anthea Bell

  The handsome instrument she had chosen, made by the firm of Clementi, Collard and Collard, was delivered to Upper Brook Street that same day and installed in the Yellow Parlour, a pleasant apartment which was to be given over entirely to Persephone and Miss Radley as music room and private sitting room. She had followed up this purchase by the acquisition of a great deal of sheet music and several books of songs, lingering with greedy pleasure over the wealth of such material on offer, and eagerly scanning the bills posted up in the shop which advertised the forthcoming attractions of various Concerts and Musical Recitals.

  A music master was also quickly found. The Yoxfords gave a small dinner party a couple of days after Persephone’s arrival in London—“Just the Barleighs and Mellises and the Derwents who are all very dear friends of mine,” Isabella explained. Persephone did not look as if she thought the prospect of meeting these people was particularly enticing, but brightened a little when told that Miss Kitty Derwent, who would be with her parents, was very musical. And Miss Kitty, called upon to entertain the company after dinner, could certainly play prettily, although when Persephone duly took her place at the piano and began to execute a Haydn sonata, her performance was so very superior in every way that Elinor wondered, a little uneasily, how Kitty and her mother would like it.

  But Kitty, a friendly soul, was open in her admiration, and exclaimed, “Oh, how beautiful! I only wish I could play like that—but then, one must practise for so many hours, and after a while that becomes such a bore, doesn’t it?”

  Persephone looked at the other girl with as much wonder as if she had been a freak on show at a fairground, but to Elinor’s relief said only that she always liked to play. Elinor herself hastened to ask the name of Miss Derwent’s music master. He was, it seemed, most particular in the pupils he would agree to take, but Mrs. Derwent (graciously) had no doubt that once he had heard dear Miss Grafton, he would not demur at adding her to their number.

  Such indeed was the case: the rather pernickety elderly musician, who unenthusiastically presented himself in Upper Brook Street to hear yet another well-born young woman show off her mediocre accomplishments, came away frankly astonished by his good fortune, and more than ready, in addition, to furnish Lady Yoxford with the name of an acquaintance of his who gave voice lessons. This acquaintance, an Italian of excitable disposition who had been a notable singer himself in his prime, was heard by Beale the butler muttering in his native tongue as he left the Yellow Parlour after his second visit to Miss Grafton. Stopping short as he reached the front door, he appeared, though still speaking Italian, to be expecting some comment from the butler.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” inquired Beale.

  “A thousand pities—I say, a thousand pities, no?” translated Signor Pascali, apparently addressing himself rather than Beale, after all. “Yes, a thousand pities! Che voce! With such a voice, to be born to rank! E un disastro!” And with this he hurried out, falling into indistinct but plainly ferocious Italian once again.

  Alfred, the new footman, goggling after him, so far forgot himself as to ask, “What maggot ‘ad ‘e got in ‘is ‘ead, then, Mr. Beale? Lor’! Was it Miss Grafton ‘e meant?”

  “Foreigners, as is well known, are apt to be Peculiar in their conduct,” pronounced Beale austerely. “But that, young Alfred, is no reason for you to overstep the line and pass remarks about the Family!”

  “No, Mr. Beale,” agreed Alfred, meekly accepting rebuke.

  Persephone seemed very well pleased with both her musical mentors, so that, Elinor considered, was all very comfortably settled. She had been a little afraid at first that her charge might become mulish when required to tear herself from the piano to spend time in the choosing and fitting of new gowns, but luckily Persephone was not quite so single-minded as to despise pretty things. And no girl could have failed to be enchanted by the lavish display of gauzes, muslins, cambrics, silks and organdies and aerophanes laid before her. Mademoiselle Hortense, the dressmaker patronized by Lady Yoxford, was delighted by the prospect of dressing Miss Grafton, who, she saw at a glance, would do the greatest credit to her own skill in cutting and the industry of her busy seamstresses’ fingers. Persephone and Elinor spent many a happy hour poring over fashion plates with Lady Yoxford and the dressmaker, choosing the patterns and fabrics for morning and evening gowns, carriage dresses, walking dresses, pelisses, redingotes. Miss Downing of New Bond Street, to whose millinery establishment Isabella directed her cousins, was enthusiastic too: the higher-crowned hats and broader-brimmed bonnets now coming into the mode would set off Miss Grafton’s delicately rosy cheeks and soft dark curls to perfection. And then there were visits to warehouses which seemed to both Elinor and Persephone a riot of colour and luxury, and where they purchased ribbons, laces and trimmings, gloves and handkerchiefs, stockings, tuckers, fichus, reticules and fans—there was apparently no end to the things a young lady of fashion and fortune needed in her first Season!

  Without knowing just how it had come about, Elinor too found herself the possessor of a number of new garments. Her objections had been overborne when she protested that she must, indeed she must pay for them herself, out of what seemed to her the amazingly lavish sum upon which Sir Edmund had insisted as her salary. She fancied that his sister must share some of his talent for diplomacy, since without actually saying so, Isabella conveyed the general impression that it was a mere matter of course for Elinor to be provided with a new wardrobe, implying that Sir Edmund would find it tiresome if she mentioned the matter to him, and moreover that it would be quite improper for her to go about town in the outmoded dresses she had brought from Cheltenham.

  There was a good deal of truth in this: she did need new gowns, and could not disgrace her cousins by wearing dowdy old-fashioned ones in the kind of circles where they moved. Though more than a little bewildered to find herself the owner of so much finery, she came to the sensible conclusion that there was nothing she could do but accept it with a good grace, and enjoy the wearing of it.

  She had been quite surprised to learn that, in early April, the Season was not yet in full swing, since it seemed to her that she and Persephone had attended a staggering number of parties during their first two weeks in London. They had already crossed the sacred threshold of Almack’s, that decorous but most exclusive club, to whose balls admission could be obtained only by vouchers from one of the Lady Patronesses. But as Sir Edmund had promised, there had been no difficulty here. Isabella Yoxford’s cousins were sure of admission, and Emily Cowper herself, calling in Upper Brook Street, professed to be charmed by Sir Edmund’s ward.

  Once again, Elinor felt a little nervous when Lady Cowper asked if Persephone would not play something, saying she had heard from Sir Edmund of his young cousin’s musical gifts. But Persephone’s conduct was admirable. She executed a short piece on the instrument in the Grey Saloon beautifully but not showily, and accepted the visitor’s praise with composure (if not with the blushing protests that some might have thought becoming in so young a girl). Lady Cowper only wished her own Minny could play the pianoforte half so well! She happily sponsored Persephone and her companion on their first visit to Almack’s, where Miss Grafton wore a very pretty gown of white organdy with an overdress of pink gauze embroidered with knots and flowers, while Elinor could scarcely believe her own elegance in an evening dress of apple-green silk trimmed with velvet ribbons, its full sleeves stiffened with book-muslin. With an impish thrill of excitement, she allowed a quite wickedly improper thought to cross her mind: If only Samuel Spalding could see me now! Then she sternly put such notions from her mind. She was here only to take care of Persephone—though it was certainly gratifying to feel she looked so little like a chaperon that several gentlemen had asked her to dance. Of course she had refused them all, since chaperons did not dance, but all the same it was very pleasant! Her own private regret was that Sir Edmund was not present: he had gone up to Westmorland a few days after their arrival in London, and so did not make
up one of the party. But of course, it was for just such reasons that she had been engaged, and it would be ridiculous to repine at it!

  She knew that she did fulfil a useful purpose, for it was very soon apparent that, as the Miss Maddens had foreseen, Persephone’s beauty allied to her fortune had all the attractive powers of a magnet on the young gentlemen who came thronging round her. But it might have surprised the sisters to see that Persephone, who to their certain knowledge had already dabbled extensively in the game of breaking hearts, seemed indifferent to the members of her little court. Elinor thought that, while pleasant in her manner to them all, she favoured none above the rest: not even young Viscount Conington, heir to the wealthy Earl of Wintringham and a great catch on the Marriage Mart, who had quickly become most particular in his attentions. One of Persephone’s charms was that, though she could not help being aware of her own looks and their devastating effect on susceptible young men, she seemed to set little store by them herself, although she did display what could be justified as a very proper pride in her musical talents. This, of course, served to attach her suitors further, especially those like Conington who were so eligible as to be generally pursued rather than pursuing.

  Any alarm still lingering in Lady Yoxford’s breast concerning her young cousin’s behaviour in London was thus soon stilled; since that Unfortunate Business of the tutor, she thought, Persephone had learnt conduct. Plainly she no longer thought it good fun to break hearts. Elinor fancied that the energy she might, at sixteen, have put into that occupation now went into her music instead.

  “I own myself very pleasantly surprised in Persephone,” Isabella confided to Miss Radley. “I believe she will make a very good match! To own the truth, Elinor, I’d as lief not have her for my daughter-in-law, because I don’t think she would make Charley comfortable, and besides his being still very young, he has no need to marry a fortune, although ... where was I? Oh yes—I was a little afraid she might throw out lures for Charley, but I don’t think he feels for her in that way, do you?”

  “Not in the least,” Elinor was very ready to agree, since it was obvious that young Mr. Hargrave and his cousin were still upon the cheerful terms of childhood. “I think they regard one another quite as brother and sister. And when Charley can be induced to attend an assembly or ball with us, I have noticed that he will make himself useful to Persephone in a kind but not an amorous way. Taking her into supper, or dancing with her when she doesn’t wish to show favour to some other young man, I mean. It is an admirable arrangement: sensible of her, and very good-natured of him.”

  “Yes. I don’t believe she feels any partiality for anyone as yet—though of course, the Wintringham connection would be most eligible, and one cannot but be gratified by Conington’s attentions to her. Not that there is the least necessity for Persephone to be rushing into an engagement at the beginning of her first Season. Especially now I have you to take all the troublesome part of her come-out off my hands!” added Isabella, with engagingly frank self-interest. “Still, it would be a very good marriage. You know, for the first time I begin to understand how mothers of growing daughters must feel, which is something I have never known in just that way before, on acccount of all the boys coming before Maria.”

  And resting her cheek on her hand in a pretty pose, she fell to musing, well in advance, upon those scions of the aristocracy now bowling their hoops in the Park or throwing tantrums in the nursery, who might one day make eligible husbands for her treasured only daughter.

  “I dare say,” she observed idly after a while, “that I should know more about little girls if only Catherine’s baby had lived, because she would be ten by now, and of course I should have seen a great deal of her.”

  “Catherine?” asked Elinor, quite at sea.

  “Edmund’s wife, my dear—didn’t you know he had been married once?”

  “No, indeed.”

  “Poor Catherine! She was quite lovely, and died in childbed of a baby girl who died too.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” exclaimed Elinor, with ready sympathy. “How sad for you all!”

  “Yes, for Catherine was the sweetest creature, just like a sister to me, and it’s my belief that Edmund has never truly recovered from her loss. He has not shown the least sign of wishing to marry again, as you might think he would, knowing that the baronetcy must come to him some day, and unless he has a son, of course, the line dies out with him. However, he does not seem to care for that, for I have never, in all this time, seen him pay serious attentions to any lady of the first respectability, although naturally he has had—well, intimate friends of the female sex!”

  “Naturally,” echoed Elinor, surprising herself in a rather shocking sense of envy of those intimate friends, if by that term the delicately spoken Isabella meant what Elinor thought she did. Really, this will never do, she told herself, I may not be a lady of the first respectability, but I ought at least to make a push to behave like one!

  “But there!” said Isabella, recalling her thoughts to the present. “I should dearly have liked to have a niece, but it is Persephone I must be thinking of now, and I will say this: I shall be very well pleased if, in the end, she does make a match of it with Conington.”

  “He is certainly a most agreeable young man,” Elinor agreed. “But to be honest, I do not think she likes him above the rest.”

  “Perhaps it is just that she does not seem to?” suggested Lady Yoxford optimistically. “Which is a very good thing, for nothing gives a gentleman such a disgust of a girl as for her to be seen dangling after him. Yes, I have hopes that something may come of it.”

  Indeed, all things considered, the advent of Persephone had turned out much better than Lady Yoxford had expected, and if there were anything at all disquieting in Miss Grafton’s lack of interest in the gentlemen who surrounded her, it troubled no one but Elinor. She did wonder uneasily, from time to time, if the memory of the young man who had gone walking in Wales were really dying the natural death she had anticipated and hoped for.

  And her doubts were strengthened when Charley brought a Cambridge friend of his to Yoxford House. Lord Conington was already there in the Grey Saloon, calling upon the ladies of the family. Elinor was coming to like him a great deal; he was a tall, well set up young man with easy and engaging manners, and if he could win Persephone’s heart she felt, with Isabella, that he would make her an excellent husband. He was talking to her now in one of the window embrasures, while Mr. Hargrave introduced his friend to his mother and Miss Radley. The friend’s surname was Smith, but his parents had plainly thought to compensate their son for its commonplace nature by christening him Zachary. “Call him Zack—everybody does so!” Charley counselled his mother. “Said he wanted to come here. Don’t know why.”

  Mr. Smith seemed so painfully shy as to be incapable of speaking for himself, apart from muttering a confused but civil greeting to Lady Yoxford, but his reason for wishing to come to Upper Brook Street was plain for anyone to see. Elinor recollected meeting him at a rout two nights before. He had been conspicuous there both for his inarticulacy and his negligently romantic attire, had spent most of the evening staring spellbound at Miss Grafton and seemed ready to resume this occupation now. Elinor charitably beckoned Persephone over to meet Mr. Smith, but as he was still unable to bring out a word, Conington was soon able to reclaim her attention without incivility.

  “Zack’s a poet,” offered Charley. Elinor supposed that accounted for the young man’s careless dress and the drooping lock of hair over his brow. It was to be hoped that he had more facility of expression on paper than in person!

  “Mind, I don’t understand a word of his stuff myself—but Ellingham does: he’s up at Trinity with us and as clever as can be, and he says it’s not a patch on Byron’s verses!”

  Goaded into speech at last by this slighting comparison with the late, famous poet, Mr. Smith glowered at his friend and said loftily, though with a pronounced stammer, that he did not as yet aspire to genius
of that high order. Having found his tongue, and discovering that Miss Radley was both friendly and unalarming, he allowed her to draw him into conversation, and disclosed that he was engaged upon a major work on a very new subject, which would be quite out of the common way.

  “It’s—it’s an Ode on the W-wonders of Steam,” he confided, and went on to impart to Elinor a number of interesting facts concerning such modern marvels as Trevithick’s steam engines, and the very recently opened Stockton and Darlington mineral railway, engineered by Mr. George Stephenson, which Mr. Smith fancied had never yet featured in literature. Such was his enthusiasm for his subject matter that Miss Radley ventured to wonder whether he might not do well to direct it towards the Wonders of Steam themselves, rather than celebrating them in verse (for the few lines of his poem which he recited to her were not especially felicitous). But it appeared that although such mechanisms did interest him a great deal, steam power was not the kind of thing one could study at Cambridge. “H-however, m-my Ode will show the world a thing or t-two, Miss Radley!” said the poet earnestly. “B-believe me, it w-will astonish you!”

  “Never fear, old chap, we’ll believe you.” Charley assured him, not very kindly. He could not have looked very closely at his friend earlier that day, for he now scrutinized Mr. Smith’s neckcloth and said, with some irritation, “Dash it all, Zack, you ask me to make you known to my people, and you ain’t even wearing a proper cravat!”