A London Season

by Anthea Bell

  “I wish,” said Sir Edmund, surprisingly, “that I knew how I might be of use to you. I don’t like to leave London when I can see you are in some kind of worry. Doubtless to be laid at Persephone’s door! Whoever her husband may eventually be, he is going to have his hands full with that girl and her music! However, now that I have arranged to see the lawyer in Cheltenham, I suppose I must be off tomorrow morning. By the by, is there anything in that house you would care for, as a keepsake? I swept you away in such haste that I fancy you brought very little with you, except that splendid box of treasures for the children.”

  She was touched again by his thoughtfulness, and said, “Well, there was a picture—a pretty little landscape which hung at the top of the stairs, and I used to be very fond of it. It is a sunlit scene, with water and a bridge, and seemed so different from ... yes, I own I should like to have that. If it is not of any great value, that is,” she added hastily.

  “Of course you shall have it, whatever its value,” said Sir Edmund briskly. “The main thing is that it is of value to you! And after I have finished my business in Cheltenham, I’ll continue to Bath, as we agreed, and call on the good ladies who keep that seminary, to find out the direction of Persephone’s music master. The more I think of it, the more likely it seems to me that he may be able to throw some light on this love affair of hers that troubles you—so pluck up your spirits, Cousin Elinor, and don’t let the wretched girl fret you! Come along! I am now going to persuade you on to the floor, and I shall hope to be allowed to take you in to supper later.”

  In happier circumstances, this would have crowned her pleasure in what, as everyone agreed, was proving a highly successful evening’s entertainment. About midnight, Isabella Yoxford remarked with satisfaction to her brother and her cousin that it would be wonderful if Persephone’s ball did not quite shine down the coming-out parties for any other of the Season’s debutantes! But Elinor’s evening was marred by the fact that Grenville Royden was spending quite as much time in Persephone’s company as was proper, and perhaps a little more. She would have told herself firmly that this merely showed Persephone regarded him no more seriously than her cousin Charley, but for his murmured remark as he passed her late in the evening: “Wondering what progress I am making with your charge, my dear? Try if you can get her to confide in you!”

  This almost overset her again, but she was a little comforted by the firm pressure of Sir Edmund’s hand when he said good night, assuring her that he would spend no longer than necessary away from London, and adjuring her not to worry too much about Persephone, or take her duties too seriously. As the last of the guests departed in the pale light of dawn, and the family, yawning, retired to their beds, Elinor thought hopefully, All may be well. Who was it who had said that? A character in one of Shakespeare’s plays, she fancied, and now she came to think of it, she had a lurking feeling that the personage who had expressed this opinion came to a particularly nasty end very shortly afterwards. But she must not—she would not—fall into the dismals. And with that brave determination to cheer her, as well as the memory of the extraordinarily flattering attention that Sir Edmund had paid her throughout the evening (only of course she must not think too much of that), Elinor fell into a deep, exhausted sleep, though still with a lingering worry as to just what might be Grenville Royden’s intentions.

  No such troubles clouded the daydreams of his sister Charlotte, who was far too excited to be able to sleep but lay comfortably in bed in the Steads’ house, going over the kind things Lord Conington had said to her again and again, and able to dismiss her brother’s cutting remarks entirely from her very well contented mind.

  11

  Unimpeded on this occasion by the necessity of providing transport for a young lady and a quantity of baggage, Sir Edmund was able to travel down to Cheltenham and Bath in an easier and more agreeable manner than on his. last visit, driving himself in his own phaeton, and accompanied only by John Digby. “A tamer landscape than some we’ve seen, John,” he observed, as they emerged from the environs of London and took the road westward. “D’you regret the Alps and Pyrenees and the Rhine? Or come to that, the girls of Paris and the gaieties of Berlin?”

  “Not I, sir!” replied John Digby, with a broad grin. “Time I settled down, I reckon, and yesterday—why, sir, I got Peg to name the day at last!”

  “You did? Excellent! I wish you both very happy, and I’m sure you will be.” For Sir Edmund had, over quite a long period, been the recipient of John’s confidences concerning his courtship of Peggy, the under-nursemaid at Yoxford House. Peggy was ready enough to marry him but not, as she stoutly averred, to go jauntering off to them nasty foreign parts. From the start, Sir Edmund had assured John Digby that he would not stand in the couple’s way, and if John left his own service, there would certainly be a good position waiting for him at Yoxford House, but since his man would not hear of that, the courtship had been a protracted one. As might have been expected, however, Sir Edmund’s decision to come home to England for good had brought it to a happy conclusion. His congratulations to John Digby now were cordial and sincerely felt.

  As they trotted briskly along in the smart black and primrose phaeton, driving between lush green banks, beneath branches laden with foliage and heavy white hawthorn blossom, and past the tall grasses waving by the roadside, Sir Edmund wondered for a moment why he felt a certain envy of his servant. For a moment, but no longer. He was tolerably well aware of what had been happening to him over the last few weeks, although it was only last night that he had consciously realized it. No doubt about it, he had fallen in love, a thing he had never thought to do again! There was something missing on this journey, compared with the last time he had travelled the road between Cheltenham and London. It was certainly not young Persephone’s sulks, nor even the bright chatter with which he had heard her enlivening the way once she regained her temper, but the quieter presence of Elinor Radley. Her shining chestnut hair and grey eyes, he found, had taken the place in his mind of dead Catherine’s lovely image, which, instead of evoking that keen sense of loss he had known so long, was faded to a smiling memory—just as he acknowledged Catherine herself would have wished.

  There had been women in his life after his wife’s death, but these affairs had been of fleeting duration, and the kind of liaison likely to occur in diplomatic circles in the capitals of Europe, where a man might find himself suddenly posted hundreds of miles from his inamorata. It did not do to engage one’s affections too deeply. Nor had any of Sir Edmund’s mistresses, when separated from him, been witty and intelligent enough to sustain a relationship over a distance and a long period of time by means of interesting letters, as Princess Lieven had done with her correspondence to her lover Metternich. He would certainly never, on finding himself fifty miles from one of these ladies, have felt an urge to turn his horses and drive straight back to her, in order to propose that he and she emulated John Digby and his Peggy!

  The notion of marriage to Miss Radley presented itself in ever more attractive colours as he drove along. He wished, however, that he could think she felt for him in the same way. She had given no indication of regarding him as anything but a friend and a cousin. The mildest of personal compliments last night, he remembered, had caused her to shrink with apparent distaste. But then, she was certainly anxious about something just now. That’s not it, she had said, of the trouble the ball had given her. Was she really just concerned for Persephone’s whims and fancies? Perhaps so: Miss Radley certainly took her duties very seriously. As for himself, he realized that he cared very little about his ward’s presumed amorous problems—it was his own, as he ruefully told himself, that were in the forefront of his mind. What he did care for was to see that expression of haunted, wary anxiety banished from Elinor’s fine eyes. Well, let him but get his business at Cheltenham over, discover (he hoped) tidings in Bath to make her easy in her mind, and then, like John Digby, he meant to apply himself seriously to the pleasant task of courtship!r />
  Cousin Sophronia’s gloomily righteous shade seemed to him to be still brooding over the house in Royal Crescent, and though there was no need for a fire in the drawing room this fine May day, Sir Edmund missed the warmth he had felt about the place on his previous visit, and which he had fancied even at the time emanated from Elinor herself. Mrs. Howell, discursive as ever, and her amiably silent husband, were on the point of moving out to their own little cottage. Sir Edmund easily found the small landscape painting Elinor had mentioned, still hanging on the landing, and saw at once why she liked it. It was from the brush of John Crome, and showed a wide, clear sky and a graceful bridge spanning a stream; it must, he imagined, have seemed a vista of freedom to a girl cooped up in the suffocating atmosphere of Lady Emberley’s household.

  He was putting up at the Plough again, and having left John Digby there with the phaeton, he next called upon Mr. Stanfield, to read and sign the various documents the attorney set before him. Their business completed, Mr. Stanfield produced a decanter of excellent sherry, and begged Sir Edmund to do him the honour of taking a glass with him. He then inquired after Miss Radley. “I have been very glad, I will confess,” said he, perceptibly relaxing his punctiliously legal manner, “to know that she is with those who, given a broad interpretation of the term, may be called her family! I will not conceal from you, for indeed I know we agree upon that subject, that I consider Lady Emberley did very ill in omitting the name of Miss Radley from her will! That is a good girl, Sir Edmund, a very good girl!” he added, with unwonted warmth. “Several times Lady Emberley assured me that she would be making adequate provision for her companion, and it is a thousand pities that she never did!”

  Sir Edmund was not going to enlighten the lawyer as to the manner in which Lady Emberley considered she had made adequate provision, but allowed himself to say, “If she was not going to do so, it was certainly improper in her to single out any other person for a bequest. We do indeed agree on the subject of Miss Radley, and I’ve tried to set matters right, but I couldn’t prevail upon her to accept anything but the salary of companion to my young ward.” “I suspected, of course, that that would be the case—and you could hardly compel Miss Radley to accept what she would regard as charity! You will allow, sir, that her sentiments do her credit.”

  Sir Edmund was very ready indeed to allow this, and found, somewhat to his surprise, that he would be happy, in the manner of the most callow young lover, to sit and talk of his beloved at length to Mr. Stanfield, for the mere pleasure of pronouncing her name. But the lawyer had turned to that other bequest.

  “As for Mr. Spalding, sir, you need not be surprised, precisely, at the legacy to him. The fact is, Lady Emberley much deplored the laxity of tone prevalent in the society of this town, and, Mr. Spalding entering fully into her own sentiments on the matter, she regarded him as—er—an instrument for good.” The attorney’s tone was perfectly neutral, but he gave a small, dry cough.

  “Good God!” exclaimed Sir Edmund, amused. “Is Cheltenham such a shocking haunt of vice?”

  “Hm! Well, so Lady Emberley held, for there are persons residing here of whom, she found, she could not at all approve.”

  “And the good Mr. Spalding is supposed to rid the place of them? I wonder just how!”

  “I have,” said Mr. Stanfield, with a wintry smile, “occasionally permitted myself to wonder the same thing! I fancy that he would, for instance, encounter some difficulty in dislodging Colonel Fitzhardinge from Berkeley Castle!” For as Mr. Stanfield remembered only too clearly, for the circumstance of being obliged to listen to his late client’s lengthy diatribes, that gentlemen had been prominent among those of whom Lady Emberley found she could not at all approve. The Colonel and other members of his family had always supposed that he would succeed to his father’s title, but on the death of the fifth Earl Berkeley it transpired that his parents had not in fact been legally married at the time of his birth, and the House of Lords ruled that his youngest brother Thomas was the Earl’s heir. Thomas, however, refusing to accept his rights, left his elder brother to reside in the Castle and vowed that he himself would never marry, thus avoiding the possibility of any bar to the Colonel’s enjoyment of his inheritance. There were those who considered this a touching instance of fraternal affection, but such were not Lady Emberley’s sentiments. She thought it very wrong of the altruistic Thomas, and still less did she approve of the Colonel himself: not only stigmatized as illegitimate, but bold-faced enough to continue living at the Castle and cutting a notable figure in Cheltenham society, just as he had done before the shocking revelations about his birth! He had led the Berkeley Hunt through the streets of the town one day, had appeared in amateur theatricals on the stage of the Theatre Royal, had encouraged the sport of horse-racing, with all its attendant evils, and was no enemy to the holding of the fair! It was all very depraved, to Lady Emberley’s way of thinking, and showed only too well the spirit now abroad in Cheltenham. Things had been very different when she first came to live in Royal Crescent as a widow, twenty years before! Mr. Spalding was very sure she was right, and she rejoiced to find him of the same mind with her.

  But notwithstanding Lady Emberley’s disapproval, and whatever reforming powers her legacy and its beneficiary might prove to wield, Cheltenham was still a tolerably lively place, and a pleasant one on a warm May evening. After partaking of an excellent dinner at the Plough, Sir Edmund went for a stroll, viewing (from outside) the Assembly Rooms opened by the Duke of Wellington some eight years earlier, and the Montpellier and Sherbourne Pump Rooms. He was not yet tired, so he next betook himself to the handsome Promenade, and was walking along it, lost in thoughts of what he would say to Miss Radley once back in London, when he was brought down to earth by a gentleman who was hailing him in a loud voice.

  “Sir Edmund! Sir Edmund! I am very happy to see you! It is Sir Edmund, is it not?”

  Sir Edmund admitted that it was. It took him a moment to identify the stout, imposing personage who had greeted him with such cordiality, but he soon placed the man: he was face to face with the recipient of the legacy which he still deplored, as he rather fancied Mr. Stanfield did too.

  “Mr. Spalding,” said he, politely. “How do you do?”

  “Well, very well, sir, thank you! Thank you, I am very well!” the clergyman assured him. “Allow me to invite you to enter one of the Pump Rooms with me, and try a glass of our excellent Cheltenham water!”

  This Sir Edmund declined, having drunk more glasses of unpalatable spa water upon the Continent than he cared to remember, but as he had enjoyed a very tolerable claret with his dinner, he instead courteously begged Mr. Spalding to repair to the Plough with him and crack another bottle of it. Mr. Spalding fell in with this proposal, though regaling his companion on the way with a convoluted excuse for doing so, to the effect that while he did not in general partake of spirituous liquors—a practice which had, moreover, been abhorrent to that late, generous patroness of St Mary’s, Sir Edmund’s much lamented cousin Lady Emberley—he supposed that on the Continent, where everyone knew the water was not fit to drink, Sir Edmund must, like many another English gentleman, have fallen into the habit of taking wine freely.

  Sir Edmund listened patiently to all this, and noticed that once the claret was set on the table in his private parlour, Mr. Spalding seemed far from unwilling to take it pretty freely himself. Smiling inwardly, he stored up this circumstance in his memory to be related to Miss Radley in due course. He then bore for some time with his companion’s prosy and highly repetitive conversation, privately wishing that automatic politeness had not compelled him to offer hospitality; a little of Mr. Spalding went a long way. After a while, the clergyman asked, “And how, pray, is Miss Radley? I hope she goes on well in London?”

  Sir Edmund hoped so, too. The anxiety in her face last night at Persephone’s ball had been near the forefront of his mind all day, and the farther he went from London, the more impatient he had become to return to her. He was
not a vain man, but he could not see Mr. Spalding as a serious rival for Miss Radley’s affections, and in any case he had heard her turn down that gentleman’s offer of marriage very comprehensively. However, the memory of the infelicitous terms in which Mr. Spalding had couched that offer (or rather, supposition) did not endear him to Sir Edmund, who contented himself with saying, “Yes, I think so.”

  “To be sure! So good of Lady Yoxford to take her in! Elinor must feel obliged in her indeed! Such graciousness—such condescension!”

  He was about to expand further on the virtues he assumed (without ever having met her) in the amiable but indolent Isabella, but this was a little too much for Sir Edmund, who interrupted him, saying, “No, no, it is quite the other way round. My sister is the person who is obliged to Miss Radley! She is a great favourite with the children, and made all the arrangements for my ward’s coming-out ball, which took place last night, incidentally, and was most successful.”

  “I am glad to hear it.” Mr. Spalding nodded his approval. “It cannot be denied that Elinor has a gift for managing a household. I do not despair, you know, of her managing mine some day. Oh, no, I by no means despair! Indeed, I quite look forward to it!” The meaning smile which he bestowed upon Sir Edmund struck that gentleman as remarkably fatuous, but Mr. Spalding was inexorably proceeding. “I am sure she has not forgotten her old friends in Cheltenham. Miss Dunn, an excellent woman and one of my parishioners, was asking me only the other day whether I thought Miss Radley would be returning. A consummation, in the words of the poet, devoutly to be wished! Of course, she cannot have much acquaintance in London.”