Lady Susan Plays the Game

by Janet Todd

  Charles Vernon, who well understood his wife’s feelings, was glad to end the conversation. His clinching point had been the letters. But he had a niggling suspicion that the hand was a touch too masculine for a lady. There was often a difference between the sexes in the script they wrote, slight but definite. Men showed a boldness in the upright letters, a greater swirl in the dangling ones, and shorter dashes. This hand put him in mind of an old friend with whom he used to go hunting before his marriage. He told himself that surely this could not be: the writer must be Mrs Manwaring. None the less a suspicion remained, one that it was better not to share with his wife.

  In the absence of Manwaring, Lady Susan found her mind turning to cards again. Some days after her arrival the local rector took tea at Churchill. It was towards evening and there was talk of his making up a rubber with the Vernons and Lady Susan. Mr Vernon liked the idea. It would give him an opportunity to look more openly at his lovely sister-in-law. He was not filled with desire at the sight of her, but he was aware that he liked looking at her white and slender hands, the fluid fingers with which she had fiddled one day with the broken filigree of Arabella’s toy. He’d heard something of her gambling debts – he supposed it was true for it was hard to understand quite what had happened to Frederick otherwise – and he fancied that she would hold playing cards with elegance.

  But it was not to be and it remained unclear whether Lady Susan or her brother-in-law was most disappointed. Before the table could be set out – a good one Lady Susan observed, old and dark brown and decorated with laburnum parquetry, over which the green baize would be stretched – Mrs Vernon had started a word game for herself, her husband, the rector and Lady Susan; the children, who were usually in their beds long before this time, were encouraged to attend and interrupt. To be pleasing and to halt the chaotic game, Lady Susan exploited a pause to make an acrostic of Arabella’s name. It began: ‘A girl with a naughty habit/ Ran to the wood one day …’, but then Freddie clamoured for similar attention, and Mrs Vernon’s word game petered out.

  There followed charades, with the children lisping out silly answers and Arabella showing off by dancing all the time. Catherine Vernon was by now heated with maternal enthusiasm and Lady Susan saw the chance of a rubber receding still further.

  Usually she would have despised such a paltry card game but it would have been a welcome escape from all this domestic cosiness. If this is what families did when together in the country, she could hardly be blamed for quitting Norfolk as often and as quickly as she’d done.

  That night she prepared for bed in a bleak mood. Barton had an eye on the upper footman, who, she was sure, had given her a knowing wink, and was not as displeased with their new place as her mistress, but the languor was contagious and she undid and fastened and brushed and wiped with less vigour than usual. Barton’s ministrations were soothing and Lady Susan yawned. I shall die of boredom, she groaned inwardly.

  Barton picked up the unspoken words but didn’t respond. The faraway look in her mistress’s eyes convinced her that Lady Susan, beyond experiencing some comfort from her attention, had almost no sense that another person was even in the room. It would be something to be a lady, she thought, something indeed.

  Lady Susan glanced at the greenish painted ceiling. It looked better in candlelight than by day, less crudely executed, less garish. By the flickering light Flora, with her truncated limbs and overblown flowers, seemed more carefully displayed; at the same she emerged from the darkness as an almost oppressive presence, her smile now a leer as she bent towards Lady Susan with her monstrous blooms trailing behind her. In the darkness that shrouded much of the ceiling, she could not distinguish whether or not Flora was simply offering her flowers with their twiny stems or whether she was caught in them, suspended forever in this quiet room, deprived of the bustle and noise of real growth.

  Involuntarily Frederica came into her mind with her pictures of nettles and twigs. What a strange interest for a girl; it was as if she aimed to disoblige her mother in everything.

  Lady Susan turned her eyes from the ceiling. She didn’t care much for painting and certainly not of the second rate. She preferred the mobile arts – music, dancing, theatre – where living people interpreted the absent or dead. If she were not careful, she might feel oppressed by this plump static figure looming over her. She hoped she had more control over her mind than to let that happen. It was as well her distant sight was flawed.

  In bed and the curtains drawn against painting, room, house and family Lady Susan yawned again. Yet she knew she wouldn’t sleep naturally. The combination of desire for Manwaring and horror at the boredom and self-denial that lay ahead agitated her. It was hopeless to try.

  Barton had foreseen this, as she usually did. As she reached through the curtains for the glass and bottle on the night table, which she expected to be there, Lady Susan wondered if perhaps she had recourse to laudanum more than she was quite aware and that her maid actually placed the bottle beside her bed most nights. She had not used it a great deal at the Manwarings, she was sure, but then that was another country altogether. On this occasion she knew it was all that lay between her and sleeplessness and a response to the dark winter morning of something that would be close to what she had experienced just once in London. She was not prone to bleak moods – in part because, when they occasionally threatened, she briskly headed them off: there was always some way in which she could wager against the world.

  The Sydenham’s laudanum was of high grade and very soothing. Lady Susan took her dose and fell at last into a dream-filled sleep.

  At the other end of the house, Mrs Vernon sat at her dressing table while Bonnet prepared her night attire. She was too heated by the evening to relax at once. She still felt aggrieved at having the notorious Lady Susan in her house, the woman she’d hated so roundly for all her years of marriage. And yet, now that she was actually here and seemed to have been so for longer than the week or two that had passed, Catherine Vernon felt not that she liked her at all – that could never be – but that there was an added warmth abroad, a quickening of all their pulses. It was a little disturbing. Lady Susan would of course never in any way be a friend, and yet Catherine Vernon had to admit she no longer instinctively – and publicly – shrunk from her affectionate touch.

  She thought of Reginald who would soon be here. He’d been born eight years after her and from then onwards she’d had to join her parents in admiring him. It had been easy. They’d been loving of course – no one could fault their care for their daughter – and yet the attention, the almost adoration sometimes, had been for Reginald – so handsome, so clever, so endearing, so masculine. She rather thought she herself the better horsewoman but it had been Reginald who’d been praised, even when, in her view, he took risks both with his horse and himself.

  Reginald would of course inherit the de Courcy estate, her home as well as his when they were children; she had nothing to grumble about here for her own dowry had been substantial and had established her dear Charles in the world as a man of importance. Then Reginald would carry on the name, with his children inheriting, while her mother, who would surely outlive her father since he was so irascible and became so dangerously red in the face when anything irked him, would stay with her son and whatever wife he happened to choose. And so it would go on when they too had a wonderful boy. She sighed, but then her mind moved contentedly to little Freddie, whose toy horse still lay on its side near her dressing table.

  Mrs Vernon moved into the chamber she shared with her spouse. She felt herself becoming drowsy as soon as she climbed in to the high bed; the nature of things was slipping from her mind. All she retained was the pleasure that seeing Reginald would bring, mingled with a little fear that he would despise her for having the ‘ancient coquette’ – as he termed Lady Susan – within her house.

  Soon the only grown-up person awake in the house was Nanny, who had been the under-nursemaid at Vernon Castle when Charles and his siblings had
been children; now she had Charles’s own brood in her charge. She was mopping up Arabella, who’d been sick in her bed after jumping around till all hours and eating too many bonbons.

  Chapter 10

  The days at Madam Dacre’s passed mournfully but the acute misery of the first week did subside. And in one area Frederica found new comfort.

  After Anna Leigh had scorned her books of poetry and botany, Frederica had valued them the more highly and continued to pore over them. But she’d been intrigued as to what her bedfellow kept in her locker to read – because to her surprise she found that Anna did read. She often did so in the dormitory when they weren’t supposed to be there, after the maid had tidied the beds.

  So Frederica took her first step in what she was beginning to see as grown-up behaviour. She stole into the bedroom one quiet evening after dinner and looked in Anna’s cupboard. There she found books in three volumes in haphazard order, all in board covers, with the stamp of a local circulating library. Inside was the name of the bookseller William Lane.

  Tentatively she took up a volume and turned over the pages. It was Caroline; or, the Diversities of Fortune, a romance by a Miss Hughes. She began reading. The story told of villainous baronets and virtuous girls, golden happiness in the country and fearful plots in the town. Frederica was entranced; she couldn’t stop. She became so engrossed that she didn’t notice Eustacia Clarke coming into the room.

  ‘You’ve got Anna’s book,’ the girl said accusingly.

  ‘Yes, but I only b-b-borrowed it,’ stammered Frederica putting it away. ‘I am going to t-t-tell her.’

  ‘Don’t hide it on my account, miss,’ said Eustacia and flounced out again.

  Despite intending to, Frederica didn’t tell Anna Leigh and by the end of the week she’d read all three volumes of Caroline; or, the Diversities of Fortune and two more of The Victim of Fancy, a Novel by the author of The Conquests of the Heart, all that were at that moment in Anna’s cupboard. She was careful to put them back exactly in the disordered order in which she’d found them. Each day she meant to mention what she was doing but the days went by and she found no opportunity. When one afternoon Isabella Kelly’s The Ruins of Avondale Priory replaced Caroline; or, the Diversities of Fortune, she read that too.

  Frederica had come across so few novels before this time that the volumes had a most extraordinary impact. Was what they described real? Was love really like this, so engrossing? It seemed so. It was at once comforting and disturbing – like putting one’s head through a curtain into another world, and seeing the old view but more vivid and clear. Always she had to read on.

  One night, instead of owning up explicitly, Frederica decided to allude to one of the novels while Anna and herself both undressed for bed.

  ‘Oh you’ve read it, have you?’ exclaimed Anna. ‘Goodness! I wonder where you got it. I love the beautiful Miss Morven, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ said Frederica eagerly.

  Anna looked at her narrowly; she never understood the other girl’s tone, but Frederica spoke so little she gave you no chance to practise.

  ‘Well, she deserves to get her reward, you know. She’s the most accomplished.’

  ‘The most persecuted,’ said Frederica.

  ‘Well, of course,’ replied Anna Leigh with a chuckle. ‘They’re all persecuted. Everyone’s envious of them. People are always envious of the young and beautiful.’ She herself was young and suspected she might be beautiful. The clerk at number 22 thought so since he always raised his eyes to the window when she was sitting by it with her work.

  ‘Still,’ Anna Leigh went on, ‘I think Miss Morven could have done more for herself. It’s all very well fainting but she didn’t need to do it really; she could just have pretended so he’d hold her. He’d have leant over her anyway and nearly kissed her. I’d know what to do,’ she added with a laugh.

  Frederica didn’t reply. Soon Anna Leigh gave up the talk. It felt too one-sided.

  One day Madam Dacre informed Frederica that she was to be fetched on Thursday by Mrs Johnson of Edward Street. Frederica had seen her mother’s friend only once and found her overbearing. But now, in the grey winter days of the school, the visit was welcome.

  Mr Johnson was staying out of town for a few days with another elderly parliamentarian or else his wife could hardly have introduced a daughter of the hated Lady Susan into their house. But, left alone, she was not unhappy to have a duty to perform, especially one that included trips to the shops. She wanted to see what was on offer in the new emporia in Oxford Street and would like a companion: she was planning to order a gown from her dressmaker and needed to be sure that the mode she had chosen was the latest. She knew the places that could be trusted to have the patterns direct from Paris. Their present fashions were too revealing for London but they might be duplicated more decorously. A young person must enjoy shopping and Alicia Johnson liked the idea of being seen chaperoning one down Bond Street.

  The carriage with Mrs Johnson seated within arrived at the school on the agreed hour and Frederica was taken the short distance from Wigmore Street to the Johnsons’ house. It was grander than any establishment she had seen in London, with a wide chequered hall, high windows and pier glasses; liveried servants met them and ushered them in to a spacious drawing room.

  Frederica ought, she knew, to admire everything smile prettily and murmur the kind of things she heard her mother say on these occasions – how delightful, how simply exquisite, what a wonderful colour, and so on – but she could never bring her mouth to utter such phrases. It was not that she feared telling a lie; rather, she didn’t know how the words would emerge from her mouth. It was also true that she found the house too lavish – she knew her father would not have liked it.

  Alicia Johnson had prepared for the girl to be leaden or sullen – she’d had plenty of warnings from Lady Susan – yet she at once felt deflated by the lack of response. Her mother had blamed Frederica’s backwardness on a country upbringing; Mrs Johnson recollected her own childhood in Suffolk and doubted it. But then she had little experience with young girls: she supposed they got more timid as they approached womanhood. And as she looked at Frederica’s rounded figure she saw she was very much a woman. Such fall into bashfulness hadn’t happened to herself and her friend but she’d read somewhere about the difficulties girls now had changing into adults, or perhaps it was boys into men – someone had even thought up a name for the confused state. It was the kind of thing her husband would have mentioned but Alicia had long ago given up listening attentively to him.

  ‘Send me a report on her,’ Lady Susan had demanded in her latest letter. ‘You, dear friend, are the best person to judge whether she has made progress at all. Has she got a sense of how to carry herself in society? I don’t expect miracles but some improvement ought to show by now. Find out if she has any idea what is expected of her. She seems timid but she’s as obstinate as a mule.’

  Alicia decided to avoid mention of the Manwarings but thought she might venture a comment on Sir James and the counting horse, which her husband had heard about at Tattersalls. It did nothing to ease the talk, for Frederica looked as though she’d jump through the window if any more was said, but at least she had shown some emotion. It was best, Alicia decided, to go on an outing.

  So they took the carriage to Oxford Street and alighted at one end. They strolled along looking through the glass windows at the satin slippers and bonnets on display; then they entered shops to feel the materials, the shimmering silks and chintzes, and see the muslins hanging luxuriously in front of the fine high windows like folds in a woman’s dress. As evening darkened they walked underneath the shining lamps staring at the brightly lit jewellery behind the glass windows, the smart buckles, ornamental buttons, the shammy gloves, ribbons, fans and artificial flowers.

  Mrs Johnson registered the girl’s lack of interest but found her less surly than she’d feared when in Edward Street. Frederica answered politely when directly addressed – s
he even once came alive before some Indian shawls and asked how they were made and from what part of India they came. So Alicia Johnson had no problem going happily about her own business of choosing and comparing and feeling and appraising. In the first trinket shop she’d been prepared to lay out something for Frederica if she’d admired anything in particular, but nothing had been required.

  ‘I expect you want all the pretty things you see,’ she’d said smiling as they entered one brightly illumined shop. Lord Godring was present, buying a trinket for his mistress, she presumed. He and others looked on indulgently waiting to hear what the young girl would say. ‘I know I did at your age.’

  But Frederica had replied, ‘Not all, no. The necklace would be lovely for little Lydia. She’s a small friend I had in Someyton.’ And with that her face became so mournful that the other shoppers looked away.

  Yet, by the time they returned to the house, Mrs Johnson was not dissatisfied with the day or her visitor. Despite what Lady Susan had told her, Frederica seemed good-natured enough, although lacking much talk. In her favour was the fondness for Chubb. She was not eloquent about his points, the ears that had been so much admired by his breeder, and the little white socks above his dainty feet, but she’d looked so lovingly on him and handled him so gently that Alicia Johnson was almost won over. She’d stroked him for a full ten minutes, drawing her fingers through his soft coat.

  Mrs Johnson had invited one or two old friends including Sir Dell to come in for a dish of tea later. She might then see how the girl performed in a group and could report back to Lady Susan. It would also allow her to broach the subject of marriage in an oblique way. Alicia was not sure of her own ability in this style but one of her guests could be guaranteed to raise the subject when chatting to a young girl.

  It happened that Sir Dell sat next to Frederica on the striped sofa and, without being primed, acted as Mrs Johnson required – although, she had to admit as she listened from the other side of the tea table, it was rather crudely done.