A Little Folly

by Jude Morgan

  ‘I must ask Valentine to take me on one of his town jaunts,’ Mr Tresilian remarked to Louisa, thoughtfully. ‘There must be a powerful attraction in them: they cannot all be dressing up, jawing, and lounging. Mr Spedding, perhaps you will secure my admittance.’

  ‘Certainly, my dear sir, nothing easier: would like nothing better. But I must caution you, Valentine goes the pace – Lord, he goes it! Frankly, I flag, and want my slippers by midnight. But he will always go on somewhere.’

  ‘I wonder where,’ Mr Tresilian said mildly; and Louisa found herself avoiding his eye. His words – a powerful attraction – had stirred in her an uneasiness she did not wish to acknowledge.

  There came the morning when the Tresilians were engaged, in moving to their new lodgings, and Tom with an unbreakable appointment at his tailor’s; so it was Valentine who accompanied Louisa and Sophie to see the Allied Sovereigns riding in Kensington Gardens. The crowd along the avenue to the Serpentine was greater than any they had yet seen – greater, noisier and, under the hot midsummer sun, more feverish. As well as the Tsar and the Prussian King, General Blücher was part of the mounted procession, and he was the next best thing to Wellington himself: there was a yell and a surge to get near him; and suddenly being part of the crowd was not exhilarating, but disturbing. Louisa felt herself carried along in the press, with her toes just drumming on the ground: she kept her arm firmly looped in Sophie’s, but Valentine was borne away from them by a cross-current in the throng, and his head bobbed out of sight. There were screams, and even the horses of the bodyguard began to rear and plunge: Louisa saw a woman stumble and fall: the sensation of stifling powerlessness was dreadful. Dragging Sophie with her, she managed to fight her way to a break in the crowd near the trees, and burst free; and at that moment a tall, broad-chested gentleman in a military coat appeared before them.

  ‘Miss Spedding,’ he said, his glance just grazing over Louisa. ‘Are you hurt? Your companion?’

  ‘No – no, I thank you, Colonel Eversholt,’ Sophie said, recovering after her first start. ‘Only a little draggled. A shocking squeeze, is it not?’

  ‘Shocking, dangerous and ill-planned. There is a great deal of rabble here beside the better sort. – Here they come again. Pray get behind me, or you will be swept up.’

  The wild surging of people was so powerful and unpredictable, however, that at last Louisa and Sophie had to shrink against the trunk of a tree, whilst Colonel Eversholt stood with his arms braced back to protect them. The situation was too novel and alarming for Louisa to take much note of the introduction to a man of whom she had heard so much; but as the press of people began to disperse, she found a moment to take his measure. There was nothing in his impressive figure to suggest a man of five-and-forty; his large, strong-boned face was handsome too – but an uneasy face, furrowed and bleak, with a complexion that spoke of wine and long nights.

  ‘You will pardon the proximity,’ he said, as he stepped away. ‘A necessary measure. You are unaccompanied?’

  ‘No, no – my cousin is with us, but we became separated,’ Sophie said. ‘I hope he is not hurt. – Oh, wait, I see him – good heavens, he was carried almost to the gates. Thank you again, Colonel, for your assistance.’

  Colonel Eversholt’s unrestful gaze turned to Louisa. ‘I do not have the honour.’

  ‘Gracious, of course – this is Miss Carnell,’ said Sophie, who appeared uncharacteristically nervous in his presence. ‘My cousin – my very dear cousin – from Devonshire. Louisa, my dear, Colonel Eversholt. Who is the husband of Lady Harriet – whom of course you know.’

  ‘Carnell?’ The colonel repeated the name with a certain bright, hard interest: then bowed. ‘Your servant, Miss Carnell. So, you are acquainted with my wife? The acquaintance was formed, perhaps, in Devonshire?’ He had a peculiarly gentle, painstaking, almost tender way of speaking, suggestive of a man picking his way across hot coals. ‘I am aware she spent the spring in the country.’

  ‘Yes: Lady Harriet was our guest for a short time,’ said Louisa, aware, with the acutest discomfort, that Valentine was making his way towards them.

  ‘Then accept my thanks for your hospitality. I must do this, as it were, at one remove, but still I hope I know how to value polite attentions to my wife. I know, of course, she is returned to town, and have seen her; but such is my peculiar position, Miss Spedding, that I must ask you, her particular friend, how she does.’

  ‘Oh, as to that, I saw her – it would be on Tuesday, or perhaps Wednesday, in Bond Street – at any rate, yes, I think she is well, Colonel Eversholt, quite well.’

  ‘You think? Miss Spedding, I had expected more: I am only the deserted husband, but you are the favoured friend, who must be admitted to a far greater knowledge of her affairs than I.’ He smiled a dull, seething smile. ‘I press you unfairly, perhaps. For all I know, you too may be excluded from her intimacy: I hope not, for your sake. It is a very unpleasant thing, when it happens. One is made to feel quite the villain of the piece.’ He turned as Valentine called out to them. ‘You spoke of a cousin?’

  ‘Yes – Mr Valentine Carnell of Pennacombe,’ Sophie said. ‘Louisa’s brother, you know.’

  ‘Ah, brother,’ said Colonel Eversholt, softly. – Valentine was now before them, apologising for losing them, anxious for their safety, but his flow of words stopped as Sophie introduced their rescuer.

  ‘You are Colonel Eversholt,’ Valentine said, turning pale to his lips.

  ‘I am, sir.’ The colonel surveyed, or inspected, Valentine, with one cool sweep of his pale eyes. ‘You speak as if it were a matter of surprise to you. Yet I do not think we have ever had anything to do with one another – have we?’

  ‘No,’ Valentine said, recovering himself a little. ‘But I have the honour of her ladyship’s acquaintance.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ Colonel Eversholt said dismissively, turning away from him. ‘Miss Spedding, Miss Carnell – I shall not be needed now, though I would advise you to go home as soon as you may. The crowd may gather again. If you should see my wife, Miss Spedding, pray give her my compliments.’ To Valentine he tendered a short bow. ‘I am glad I was able to be of some assistance, even though it was not my place to do so. You should take care of your own, Mr Carnell, and not go a-wandering: that is my advice to you.’

  He was gone, moving swiftly and softly for so large a man; leaving Valentine mute and white, and Louisa confronting a terrible suspicion – a suspicion that, she realised, she had had before her all the time, like an ominous crack in the ceiling that the eye convinces itself is a cobweb.

  ‘To think it should be him who came to our rescue!’ Sophie cried, as Valentine stirred at last, and went to fetch a hackney. ‘Thank heaven you were with me, my dear: for if it had been me toute seule, he would have been very happy to see me quite trampled into the ground. Oh, yes: because Harriet has to do with me, and will have nothing to do with him; and he suspects everyone around her as increasing her enmity, and dividing him further from her. Well, now you have seen him for yourself, what do you think? Is he not monstrous?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Louisa said distractedly. ‘He did do us a service.’

  ‘Lord, what a thing to happen! The deserted husband, indeed! I can hardly wait to tell Harriet.’

  For Sophie, characteristically, the encounter was merely to be seized on for its novelty and excitement. Louisa’s own feelings were much more complicated. Monstrous – that was exactly what Colonel Eversholt was not: he was no monster or bogey, he was very real, and he was the lawful husband of Lady Harriet. She began to see the matter of the Eversholts’ marriage from a new point of view: it was their affair only, and not to be meddled with, or taken up either as a noble cause or an enjoyable sensation.

  But above all this stood her dreadful apprehension about Valentine. That is where he goes at night, she thought: he goes to Lady Harriet’s house; and the colonel is aware of it. For the moment she could not allow the thought to develop further. It was suffici
ently alarming, as the summation of all the chivalrous admiration Valentine had shown since Lady Harriet’s first coming to Pennacombe. If he was simply infatuated, there was enough to trouble and disturb. Impropriety was not the point: having met Colonel Eversholt, and added the truculent impression he made on her to his dark reputation, she feared that Valentine was stepping from imprudence into danger.

  But how was she to say anything of this to her brother? Loyalty – doubt – embarrassment – above all, adopting the censorious voice of their father: all impeded her. In the hackney home, observing Valentine’s silence, and his still pale but quite composed, even proud expression, she ventured at last: ‘It was awkward, being beholden to such a thoroughly rude man.’

  Valentine gave a faint smile. ‘Rude?’ He shook his head. ‘He is everything one supposed. It is almost satisfying.’

  ‘Of course,’ she went on, in a resolutely reasonable tone, ‘one can never know the true facts of such a case.’ But Valentine only smiled faintly again, and seemed gently to withdraw from her to a great distance.

  She and her cousins were engaged the next day to go with the Tresilians to the Haymarket theatre; and several times before the curtain went up Louisa glanced at Mr Tresilian seated in the box beside her, with an urge to tell him of yesterday’s encounter – without quite knowing what she expected him to say, or perhaps with an apprehensiveness about what he would say. Once the performance began, however, there was an end of all trouble: the piece was Othello, and for three hours she was lost to everything but the stirring compulsion of the tragedy. When the curtain fell, she found that she had seized and held Mr Tresilian’s arm through the stupendous last dying moments of the jealous husband; and coming to herself, was quite prepared for him to be satirical. But no: his face revealed that he had been as rapt as she.

  ‘Powerful – powerful stuff indeed,’ he said, mopping his brow. ‘I confess I did not expect it to come up to the Indian Jugglers as an entertainment; but really, I have been most agreeably surprised. Well, agreeable is not the word. There are no words.’

  ‘“One that loved not wisely, but too well.” That is very fine, is it not? I must say there is nothing in Byron to equal it. Only look at that woman in feathers, yawning her head off! How stupid people are.’

  ‘I fear she has only come to be looked at, and finds the play a great nuisance, distracting people’s attention.’

  There was a great deal of movement in the theatre: – some were leaving now that the main piece was over, others, more fashionable, coming after a good dinner to take in the after-piece and the jigs. Louisa was surprised to see, in a box on the opposite side, Valentine among them. – Surprise was quickly succeeded by astonishment. A woman was with him: a woman who put back her veil to reveal the face of Lady Harriet Eversholt.

  A glance was sufficient to reveal that Mr Tresilian had seen them too. ‘Hullo,’ he murmured. ‘Your brother has conquered his aversion to the theatre, it seems.’

  ‘I think – I think they must be with a larger party,’ Louisa said.

  ‘Ah, yes, I see them,’ Mr Tresilian said grimly, his eyes fixed on the box, where Valentine and Lady Harriet were talking with lowered heads. ‘Mr and Mrs Invisible, and all the young Invisibles. Charming family.’

  Louisa was struck with a confusion of emotions; painful was the feeling of having her worst suspicions realised; but loyalty to Valentine, and the instinctive desire to defend him, were still pre-eminent. Luckily Kate was attending to Sophie, who was expressing her despair at the behaviour of the young man in the next box, and condemning him as the most infamous flirt, in between trying to catch his eye.

  ‘Very public,’ Mr Tresilian went on, shaking his head, ‘and hence very provocative.’

  ‘And that is exactly the point,’ Louisa said eagerly. ‘Valentine has this gallantry: he hates the mean-minded proprieties that would make an outcast of Lady Harriet, when she has done nothing wrong. He is all for openness and liberality. This is his way of proclaiming it.’ At the same time she uttered an inward blessing that she had not told Mr Tresilian about the meeting with Colonel Eversholt after all.

  ‘A very well-dressed outcast,’ Mr Tresilian said. ‘But I dare say you are right. Well, I am engaged to spend an evening at his club this week. You will not consider me mean-minded and proper, I hope, if I just mention to him that how this appears may be very different from how he conceives it. And there is not only his reputation to consider.’

  ‘Very well: but as for me, I could never find anything to reproach in Valentine’s conduct, Mr Tresilian – please have no uneasiness on that score.’

  He was silent; and though she tried to turn her attention to the after-piece, she could not be easy. Her eyes kept returning to that box, and to Valentine and Lady Harriet so conspicuously together in it; and she was more relieved than sorry when they left early, Kate pleading a headache. Kate Tresilian was nothing if not observant, and Louisa suspected she had witnessed the spectacle too. If it were so, she longed to be able to mitigate the pain of it; but however she considered it, that lay out of her power. For it was out of Louisa’s power even to quieten her own misgivings, or to suppress a suspicion that the curtain had gone up on quite a new act in their enterprise of living, and one that might take a turn more ominous than entertaining.

  Chapter XIV

  When Mr Tresilian had undertaken to speak to Valentine about the matter of Lady Harriet, loyalty had made her respond breezily: but inside, she seized thankfully on the one thing that seemed likely to quell her anxiety. The name of Mr Tresilian had long been synonymous in Louisa’s mind with trust. When he said he would do a thing, he always did it, quietly and efficiently: she remembered an occasion at Pennacombe in her youth, when Valentine had lost a riding-crop, inlaid and engraved with silver, and was terrified to tell his father, whose gift it had been on his breeching. Mr Tresilian had said he would right the matter, against all Valentine’s frantic assertions that it was impossible; and soon a perfect replica appeared, procured from Exeter, where Mr Tresilian had directed the craftsman in reproducing every detail; and he had guarded against the dangers of a parcel, which Sir Clement would have insisted be opened before his eyes, by carrying it in his coat-sleeve when he called, and discreetly placing it on the hall table.

  Now Mr Tresilian had said he would consult with Valentine just as discreetly: he of all people could manage such a ticklish matter, and she did not doubt him. Or, at least, she chose not to doubt him; for her enjoyment of London was still so great that she was inclined to turn her mind away from anything that imperilled it; rather as the small cloud in the sky, on a day which our plans demand must be fair, is not to be regarded and will surely blow away.

  An invitation for the Spedding household to dine with the Lynleys at Brook Street arrived, and quickened that enjoyment. – It was not something Louisa had ever expected to feel in such a prospect; but there had been a change. Her meeting with Francis Lynley had left a deep impression on her: she could not say whether she liked him, for her feeling lay at the bottom of a good deal of curiosity and perplexity, which was further entangled by her thorny relation with his brother; but she was very ready to see him again, and to compare the reality of that angular challenging face to the one that had been appearing repeatedly before her mind’s eye.

  Before the dinner engagement, Mr Tresilian spent his promised evening at Valentine’s club; and calling at Hill Street the next morning, gave Louisa a brief account.

  ‘I never knew fashionable dissipation could be so dull. There is a deal of fuss about sitting in the bow-window and being seen, which I could not understand; and it seems very modish to yawn continually. There, you may believe, I managed very well. But I found something that made up for all of this: the most delightful discovery. I have made the acquaintance of The Top. Do you know him, or it?’

  ‘I have had the pleasure.’

  ‘Is he not entrancing? I could study him for hours. It is not just the stupidity – it is the thoroughness wi
th which it is kept up. To remember all that slang, and not deviate into normal language here and there: to never say anything remotely interesting or thoughtful, even by accidental lapse – this requires a special kind of talent. I can only look on in fascination. I think the high point of the evening was when he called me a “ninnyhammer” – but, no, comparisons are odious.’ He shook his head in dreaming wonder; then with an altered expression added: ‘As for Valentine, and what we spoke of, I am going carefully. He is a Carnell. It is no good telling him to take his hand out of the fire: he must be brought to believe that taking his hand out of the fire has been his settled intention all along.’

  She ignored his hit against the Carnells: she was comforted by a picture of Valentine’s evening entertainments so innocent of danger, and by Mr Tresilian’s assurance that he would undertake another such expedition. She even allowed herself to wonder whether simply having Mr Tresilian’s eye on him had brought Valentine to a sense of what was prudent, and made him withdraw from Lady Harriet’s society. And, besides, the notion of herself as such a blind and wilful being, with all her long habits of caution and self-watchfulness, was so absurd that only someone of Mr Tresilian’s whimsical temper could have fancied it.

  Pearce Lynley, unsurprisingly, had taken a very good house in Brook Street; and, perhaps more surprisingly, had laid on a very good dinner, though there were only two other guests besides the Spedding party. Mr Lynley seemed bent on being agreeable, and was as nearly so as his inflexible manner would allow: it occurred to Louisa that this might have been a consequence of his being the host, and in his own household; and she even came close to the dizzying thought that his habitual stiffness when out in company might have been the result of awkwardness, or actual shyness. But she could not avoid the conclusion, drawing on what his brother had told her at their last meeting, that she herself was the reason for this: that even Mr Lynley’s last angry words to her had revealed a feeling far removed from indifference; and it appeared an absolute confirmation of this that Mary Bowen joined them at dinner with her charge, instead of taking the usual solitary governess’s tray in an upstairs room. There could, Louisa thought, be no other reason for this relaxation of strictness, and allowance of humanity, than to impress her, who had condemned his treatment of governesses so roundly; though Mr Lynley seemed to find the gesture alone sufficient, and studiously ignored Miss Bowen for most of the evening, even appearing to colour and hesitate whenever he was forced to speak to her, as if made uncomfortable by the evidence of his own unaccustomed benevolence.