“Yes, I believe she said—” Aunt Gardiner took a folded letter from her reticule and glanced through it. “She said that the man’s name was Lord Henry Carmichael.”
I had been expecting it, of course. But I still felt more sick than ever at having my suspicions confirmed.
“Apparently, this Lord Henry has a less than savoury reputation,” Aunt Gardiner went on. “And Felicity wondered very much that Mrs. Hurst should allow Mary to make such a spectacle of herself with him.”
What is more the wonder is that Mrs. Hurst is not trying to fling Miranda Pettigrew at Lord Henry’s head instead. Mr. Dalton must be wealthy indeed if he rates higher in Mrs. Hurst’s and Miranda’s eyes than the younger son of a duke.
None of which, of course, affects the situation with Mary. All those rules that I used to think were so silly—they are society’s rules, like it or no. And behaving as she apparently has—dancing more than two dances with the same gentleman … and especially dancing anything so near-scandalous as a waltz—is more than halfway towards getting herself branded with the reputation of being ‘fast’.
Not to mention her having gone driving alone with Lord Henry in his private carriage the other day.
I shut my eyes and rubbed my forehead. If anyone had told me three weeks ago that my sister Mary would be in danger of earning a reputation as a forward chit, I should have responded with shrieks of laughter.
“I will speak to Mary, of course,” Aunt Gardiner went on. “But I feel as though I must tread very carefully. I should not wish … that is”—Aunt Gardiner smiled just a little—“this is the first sign Mary has shown of possessing anything like the temperament and interests of a typical young girl. Despite the danger to her reputation, I confess that I do not wish to quash this sudden change in her entirely. Only perhaps”—the smile faded—“to change the direction of her interests. If half of the rumours that Felicity recounted about Lord Henry are true …” Her voice trailed off as she glanced down again at the letter in her lap.
My memory obligingly presented me with an image of Henry Carmichael’s sleekly handsome face leaning towards me, close enough that the warmth of his breath tickled my cheek. I snapped the thought off. “This is so unlike Mary,” I said. “That she should be taken in by a man like that—”
Aunt Gardiner shook her head, though. “No. I confess that I am not especially surprised.” She sighed. “You must have observed for yourself that Mary—for all her learned studies and her wish at all times to appear intelligent and scholarly—has no actual common sense whatever.” Aunt Gardiner smiled a little again. “You, Kitty, have far more real sense and good judgement than Mary.”
If only she knew. Fortunately, though, Susanna interrupted at that moment with another outraged squawk—having lost her teething ring under the bed again—and I was able to bend down and avoid my aunt’s gaze under the cover of retrieving it for her.
Aunt Gardiner went on, “Mary is not actually especially clever. And she has no solid experience whatever in forming judgements of other people’s characters. Besides which, this is the first time that a dashing young man has ever shown the slightest degree of interest in her.”
Which of course invites the question of why Lord Henry should have shown such an interest in Mary. To be sure, he was happy enough to conduct a flirtation with me last year. But we were in Derbyshire, where he was staying with his elderly aunt, and there was very little else for him in the way of amusement. This is London—where he might take his choice from scores of girls who are both handsomer and richer than Mary is. And more accommodating of what Mrs. Hurst would probably coyly term ‘a gentleman’s needs’, as well.
At least I sincerely hope that there are girls more accommodating than Mary. The thought that she may have actually …
This is preposterous; I am sitting here and trying to think of a way to phrase this delicately. In my own private journal!
Very well. To be blunt, the sudden fear that Mary might actually have allowed Lord Henry to persuade her into becoming his mistress struck me cold.
“What is to be done?” I said.
“I had hoped that I might ask you to accompany Mary to some other balls and assemblies—to give her an alternative venue for meeting young men more suitable than Lord Henry. There is to be a charity gala at Vauxhall Gardens on Monday—and I have persuaded your uncle to buy us all tickets. Will you come—and persuade Mary to give up any other plans she may have made and come along?”
I nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“Good.” Aunt Gardiner smiled again. “I will be happy to see you going out and taking some entertainment, as well. I have been worried about you, my dear. You are looking so pale, and you have scarcely left your room these last few days.”
She was—again fortunately—distracted once more by Susanna, who at that moment wriggled out from under Mary’s bed, absolutely covered in the contents of a pot of rouge which Mary appeared to have hidden there. Aunt Gardiner laughed, gave a martyred sigh when she contemplated how much of the rouge had been smeared through Susanna’s hair—then scooped Susanna up and carried her off. Holding her carefully at arm’s length.
Which left me with only my own wholly unpleasant thoughts for company.
Despite what Aunt Gardiner said about my having done nothing wrong, I cannot help feeling that all of this is my fault. If I had not formed my resolution about finding Mary a husband, none of her improper association with Lord Henry would ever have occurred.
To which there is the added fact that I have been more or less hiding in this room for the last two days, ever since I saw Mary and Lord Henry out driving.
I did not want to run the risk of seeing them again. Or being forced to face the truth: that there is in fact far more I can do—or rather must do—in the way of protecting Mary.
Saturday 20 January 1816
I will say for Mary that when she undertakes to do something, she does it thoroughly. Even when that same something involves completely losing her head and abandoning every principle she has previously lived by.
I woke this morning at the crack of dawn to find Mary already up and dressed, tiptoeing about the room in her riding habit. That sight was enough to jolt me from groggy half-awareness to full consciousness. Mary does not own a riding habit. Or at least she has not up until now. This new one was nothing of the clothes I had helped her pick out; she must have picked out the fabrics and ordered it made entirely by herself.
She did not do a bad job with her selection, precisely. Save for a rather incredible amount of gaudy gold braid on the jacket and fringe on the shoulders a la Hussar, the new riding habit was smart enough. The close-fitting coat and skirt were both made of emerald green cloth, and were matched by the hat Mary wore: a tall-crowned affair in the military Shako style, trimmed with curling ostrich plumes.
It was just that the whole effect was so utterly unlike Mary’s usual style of dress that it made me sit up in bed, wondering whether I was having some sort of bizarre dream.
Mary was startled enough to drop the pair of gloves she had been drawing on. “Oh. Good morning, Kitty,” she said. “I did not mean to wake you.”
What she really meant was that she had hoped to sneak out of the room without waking me. However else she may have changed, Mary is still absolutely no good at dissembling. She looked like a small child caught with her fingers in the jam pot: half guiltily conscious, half brazenly defiant.
I pushed the tangled hair out of my eyes and said, “Good morning. Where are you off to so early?”
“Out riding. In the park.”
“I can see that,” I said patiently. “With whom are you going riding?”
I was hoping she would give me a ready, benign answer. I would even have welcomed the news that her engagement was with Miranda Pettigrew.
But Mary, avoiding my eyes, concentrated very hard on buttoning up her gloves as she said, “Oh, just a … a friend.”
Have I mentioned that Mary’s efforts at prevaricatio
n would not deceive a child? Her cheeks had reddened, and her voice had a strained quality—and altogether she might as well have held up a sign reading, I am about to do something of which you will not approve.
I sighed—and tried to pull my sleep-bleary thoughts into order. I should have preferred to at least have had a cup of tea before facing this talk with Mary. Actually, if I am honest, I should have preferred to put off having the talk indefinitely. But since it had to be done, I might as well get it over and done with.
“And does this ‘friend’ happen to bear the name Lord Henry Carmichael?”
Mary jerked, setting the ostrich plumes on her hat bobbing alarmingly, and then lifted her chin and looked at me with a mixture of guilt and defiance. “I did not say that! Why should you suppose that?”
“Because you have apparently spent the last week making a spectacle of yourself all over London with that same Lord Henry!” I drew in my breath and tried to temper my tone. “I am sorry, Mary. I do not mean to speak harshly. I am concerned for you, that is all. Have you not reflected that conducting yourself as you have done these last days—going for rides alone in Lord Henry’s carriage … dancing so many times with him at a public assembly—do you not see that such behaviour exposes you to gossip and scandal of the most unwelcome kind?”
I might as well not have bothered with trying to win Mary over by my kind and reasonable tone. She drew herself up, white dots of temper appearing at the corners of her nostrils, and demanded, “Have you been spying on me, Kitty?”
I let out a breath of exasperation. “No, of course not. But your behaviour—”
“My behaviour contains nothing with which I need reproach myself!” Mary flashed back. “I have held to my own standards of decorum and modesty in every regard. Henry is to me, as Lord Byron so aptly phrases it, ‘the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.’ You may be certain that I am not in the slightest degree concerned about the opinions of narrow-minded and vicious gossips. And if I am not troubled, then I see no reason for you to be, either.”
Only Mary could manage to be both sloppily romantic and insufferably pompous in very nearly the same breath.
I was tempted to quote Mary’s own words back at her—her declaration when Lydia ran away with Mr. Wickham, that a woman’s reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful. But I could not manage it. I did—I do—have a certain degree of sympathy for Mary’s point of view.
It is stupidly, preposterously unfair that a gentleman may keep half a dozen mistresses and visit every house of ill repute in London, and yet remain in the eyes of the world a respectable gentleman still. And let an unmarried lady so much as kiss a man to whom she is not at the very least engaged—or dance more than two dances with him in a row—and she is well on her way to having her reputation ruined forever.
But there was still the matter of Mary’s choice in the object of her affections. I forced back my impatience and began again, trying an alternate line of approach. “Mary, I know— That is, I am sure that Lord Henry must be very charming. But his reputation … he is rumoured to have conducted himself in a manner less than respectable in the past.”
And that is saying quite a bit, that Lord Henry’s conduct has been—even for a gentleman of high station—scandalous enough to earn him a degree of censure in the eyes of London society.
Mary only sniffed, bright spots of temper burning on her cheekbones. “Lord Henry is a gentleman! With a gentleman’s pure heart and noble disposition. I know that he may have been wild in his youth—there are no secrets between us—but all that is behind him. He has thoroughly repented of his past ways and now seeks to conduct himself only in a manner that will prove him worthy of my regard!”
I stared at Mary. Does it say something terrible about my own character that I did not for a moment actually believe Lord Henry Carmichael sincere in his repentance for past sins?
Before I could formulate any sort of response, Mary added, in haughty tones, “And I shall not stay here and listen to another word against him!” and flounced out the door.
Which leaves me forced to fall back on my second plan. The plan I suppose I always knew I would come to in the end.
Monday 22 January 1816
It is past three o’clock in the morning; I know because I have just heard the downstairs clock chime. Mary is curled up in her own bed, peacefully asleep on the other side of the room from me. And I have lighted the candle beside my bed and started writing in this book—because anything is better than lying in the dark and staring up at the canopy above my bed. As I have been for the past seemingly endless hours.
Tonight was the night of our excursion to Vauxhall Gardens. And since I managed—at least slightly—to progress on both the fronts of detaching Mary from Lord Henry and retrieving Jane’s necklace from Mrs. Hurst, the evening ought to be counted a success.
Even if my hands are still shaking almost too much to write. Looking at this page, anyone judging my handwriting would think that it was I instead of Lord Henry Carmichael who had been intoxicated tonight.
But I do not seem to be telling this at all coherently. To begin properly, then:
I had never been to Vauxhall Gardens before and did not know what to expect. But it is a pretty place—the trees are all strung with hundreds of coloured lanterns, and the various paths and walkways are lighted with chains of tiny white lamps that glow like stars. If I were in a more romantic mood, I might say that it looks almost like a fairyland. However, since I am emphatically not in such a mood, I will only write that the effect is very pretty indeed.
In the centre of a grove of trees is the grand Rotunda, ringed by colonnades sheltering the various private supper boxes.
The event tonight was a masquerade ball, intended to raise funds for an East End charity called the Good Christian Military Widow’s Friend—which is an unwieldy name to write out, much less say, but it does have a worthy goal. The purpose of the charity is to support the widows and children of soldiers killed in the war—many of whom have no appreciable source of income with their husbands and fathers gone. Guests could pay to reserve one of the supper boxes, and the resulting moneys would go to the Military Widow’s Friend.
My aunt and uncle had themselves reserved such a box—where I would have been perfectly content to remain the entire evening. But my aunt insisted that we all go to the Rotunda and dance.
Aunt Gardiner had settled baby Susanna for the night before we departed, and she had left Rose with instructions to listen for the baby in case she cried. I know it was hard for her to leave Susanna even so. But I think that my aunt was also rather delighted to have an evening’s entertainment away from home and in such an elegant place as Vauxhall. Aunt Gardiner was dressed for the masquerade in a pink Domino that she must have worn in her youth. And she had managed to persuade my uncle to don the costume of a Crusader knight, which cannot have been easy, despite Uncle Gardiner’s good temper and the fact that he plainly adores her.
At any rate, I did not wish to spoil their evening. Besides which, I could see that Mary was itching to join in the dancing—and the entire purpose of my having come along was so that I might discreetly keep an eye on her. So we all proceeded to the central Rotunda.
The Rotunda was absolutely ablaze with lights. Hundreds of wax candles in the chandeliers over the dance floor showed the guests spinning through dance after dance.
There were costumes of every sort, from gypsies to monks to dashing cavaliers, and from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Egyptian maidens. An orchestra played from a balustraded gallery, and the noise—combined with the sounds of scores of raised voices—was nearly deafening, making it impossible to converse. Almost as soon as we entered, Mary and my aunt and uncle and I were all separated by the crowds, and it was all I could do just to keep Mary in my sight.
I saw my Aunt Gardiner present to Mary a gentleman—I suppose a young man of my aunt’s acquaintance—dressed as Robin Hood,
the upper half of his face hidden by a black satin mask. The young man bowed and extended his hand, apparently asking Mary to dance. Mary accepted, and they moved onto the dance floor. Though I saw that even as she danced down the line of other couples, Mary’s head kept turning, scanning the crowded room as if she were looking for someone.
Several costumed men approached and asked me to dance. And Uncle Gardiner found me, as well, and asked whether I was not enjoying myself, and would I like him to escort me back to our supper box? But I refused all the dance offers—and told my uncle I was quite well, and that he ought to go and dance with my aunt.
“Miss Kitty Bennet! That is you, is it not?” The voice at my side made me turn to find Louisa Hurst standing beside me. Despite her mask, I had no more difficulty in recognising her than apparently she had me. She was dressed in a violently pink and blue shepherdess’s costume that did nothing to flatter her plump form. Her prominent eyes studied me from behind her half-mask and she pursed her lips. “I declare, you are turned into an utter wallflower since first we met in Hertfordshire.” She let out a high, trilling laugh that scraped my ears even above the noise of the crowd. “Miss Kitty Bennet, the belle of the Hertfordshire militia, refusing to dance at a masquerade ball. I declare, I should never have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes.”
John was a captain in the Hertfordshire militia—before he joined the regular army. I clenched my teeth. And then I realised that Mrs. Hurst was wearing Jane’s diamond necklace.
Well, a diamond necklace, at any rate. I could not of course be certain that it was Jane’s. But it was of old-fashioned design, the diamonds worked into a central pendant that had been crafted in the shape of a bow. And it was made with far more delicacy and good taste than anything I should have credited Mrs. Hurst with ordering for herself.
I opened my mouth. And at that moment, I caught sight of Mary slipping out of the Rotunda with a young man dressed in the costume of a Spanish matador. His back was to me, and I saw only the familiar set of his shoulders and the back of a head of fair hair. But I had a sinking feeling that I knew exactly who he must be.
Kitty Bennet's Diary (Pride and Prejudice Chronicles) Page 10
