by M C Beaton
Lady Frank moved forward and tugged at Jean’s arm, leading her toward the door. Jean’s white face flushed crimson as she realized what she had done.
Like a field of corn changing color on the wind, back after back turned against her as she moved through the throng. When her slight figure had disappeared into the night, a great burst of sound arose from the ballroom as everyone started talking at once.
It was the biggest piece of scandal to come their way for some time so it accordingly had to be rolled on the tongue, masticated and spat out in various forms of shock and amazement.
Lady Frank tried to say something to the shivering, trembling girl on the road home but was, for once, beyond words.
Henry followed them a few paces behind, burning with curiosity. They did not have to rouse Muggles for the footman had taken the precaution of bringing the house keys with him.
The footman looked hopefully at the two silent women standing in the shadow of the elephant but, since neither seemed about to talk, he asked for permission to retire.
Lady Frank roused herself. “Bring us some brandy to the drawing room first.”
“Brandy, my lady!” Henry raised his eyebrows superciliously. “Perhaps some negus or ratafia?”
“I said brandy. I want brandy. I need brandy,” retorted Lady Frank curtly. “Hop to it.”
In the drawing room, Lady Frank threw her heavy turban across the room where it hung at a rakish angle on the head of one of the many Buddhas and with an “Oof!” of relief, collapsed on the sofa.
When Henry returned with the decanter, she poured two measures with a liberal hand and turned to Jean.
“Want to talk about it?”
Faltering at first, with stumbling incoherent sentences, Jean told the story of Lord Ian’s body.
“I felt so horrified and sick when I got to the ballroom, I think I must have been nearly insane,” said Jean piteously.
“Then he… he… John, I mean… started to dance with me and talk in that cool, languid drawl of his about Lord Ian’s body being eaten by the fishes as if it all didn’t matter and then I felt ill and thought of all the humiliation he had caused me and I just wanted him to be quiet.”
“Well, you certainly succeeded,” said Lady Frank wryly. “But, my dear, you are socially ruined.”
Jean coughed over her brandy and said in a whisper, “What on earth shall I do?”
“Rusticate,” said Frank. “Come back North with me—or better still—why don’t you go back to Scotland and look at your inheritance?
“Better to keep your mind occupied. Colqhoun said something about your uncle having left a house in Edinburgh. Go and visit there for a bit. Take a look around the place. Take the Taylor female with you for company. This scandal will be a seven-day wonder, I assure you. With Prinny in Brighton, there’s bound to be a new one to take its place.”
Secretly Lady Frank thought no such thing. She knew well that the report of Jean’s outburst would race through polite society from Land’s End to John O’ Groats.
Jean meekly bent her head.
“Shall I ever see him again?’”
Lady Frank looked at her sadly. “If you mean Fleetwater—no. And a good thing too, if you ask me. What you need is a pleasant, sensible young man who hasn’t the temper of a Turk or the morals of a tomcat.
“You’re a rich woman remember. You can go to Scotland in easy stages and stay at the best inns and posting houses on the road. See some of the sights. I’ll get Freddie to hire a traveling coach for you and take your gorilla, Hoskins, with you. The roads ain’t safe these days.”
“I wish to leave on the morrow,” said Jean.
“’Course you do. But you ain’t packed and it ain’t fair on Miss Taylor. Just keep indoors out of sight until we get everything arranged.”
The next two days were weary and bitter for Jean. Not one person called. Tired of being cooped up in the house, she at last went for a walk on the Steyne with Miss Taylor. She could have been a ghost for all the notice the fashionable crowd gave her. They simply pretended she wasn’t there.
Even Freddie shied like a startled hare when he met her in the house and fled off muttering that he was busy. He did not even show up at mealtimes, preferring to dine with his friends in the town.
Hoskins, Jean’s bodyguard, had been reinstated, and Jean’s eyes filled with tears as he accepted her apologies with a rough grace, tugged his forelock, and mumbled shyly that he would be “uncommon happy to go to furrin parts if Miss so desired.” To a lot of English like Hoskins, the Union of the Crowns might never have taken place and they still regarded Scotland as a wild country inhabited solely by savage, hairy Highlanders.
Finally, Freddie announced that all was ready and on a bright, holiday morning, Jean and Miss Taylor climbed into the cumbersome traveling coach. Lady Frank hugged Jean fiercely and turned away to hide an uncharacteristic burst of tears.
Hoskins climbed on the roof, the coachman cracked his whip and only Jean’s new maid, Sarah, showed any signs of excitement. It had been unusually hard to find a girl to accompany her as the servant class had proved to be more rigid and snobbish than their masters. Sarah had been the Blackstone’s between stairs maid and eagerly accepted the rise in status to lady’s maid even though it meant leaving the country.
Brighton had never looked so gay or frivolous. Flags cracked and snapped in the breeze above the Pavilion, the bright dresses of the ladies, set off by the morning dress of the gentlemen decorated the walks.
Suddenly, Jean saw the marquess with Lord Freddie, who had not waited to see her off. Both were walking with Lady Sally and Lady Bess, chatting and laughing without a care in the world. As the coach rumbled past, Freddie caught a glimpse of Jean’s white face at the window, half raised his hand in salute and dropped it again.
Jean snapped down the blind and the coach gradually left Brighton behind and made its ponderous way up the Lewes road.
Chapter Eleven
It was well into November before the weary party finally arrived in Edinburgh. They had stopped for several weeks in various places. Jean’s obvious wealth always brought her to the notice of the polite world in each town but it only took a little time for her scandalous reputation to arrive hot on her heels.
They had stayed for some time in Harrogate in Yorkshire, visiting the excellent library and the pump room to try the waters. Jean had loved the placid, sedate town and had seriously considered making her home there until, one dreadful night at a ball in the Assembly Rooms, she had had the humiliation of seeing the familiar wave of gossip running through the room, the curious eyes turned in her direction, and the young man she was dancing with being called abruptly to heel by his mama as if he were a dog.
There was nothing left to do but terminate the lease of her pretty house, pack the trunks and take to the road again.
They arrived in Edinburgh on a lowering windy day with huge, ragged, black clouds tearing across the sky. Jean felt as if she had stepped back into the Middle Ages as the horses pulled up the hill toward the High Street and James Colqhoun’s offices.
At the city’s west end stood an ominous medieval castle crouched on top of a four-hundred-foot pile of black and broken rock. The High Street ran along a ridge from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the castle and turned out to be a narrow canyon running between enormous black tenements, crowded with every sort of human life imaginable. Running off from the High Street was a maze of dark, smelly alleys and courtyards and it was in one of these that they discovered the lawyer’s office. Jean had often heard of Edinburgh described as “the Athens of the North” and had assumed that it was the buildings and the appearance of the city which had earned it this name rather than its intellectual pursuits. It all seemed so incredibly grim and Gothic.
James Colqhoun’s clerk ushered them into the lawyer’s office with great ceremony, trying to resist Hoskins’s efforts to follow his mistress without success.
Jean felt embarrassed by what appeared to he
r to be the dismal squalor of her surroundings. Perhaps Mr. Colqhoun had fallen on hard times?
After the welcomes were over, Jean tentatively suggested this, which amused the lawyer greatly.
“And you a Scotswoman! And not familiar with the capital of your country,” he exclaimed.
“My quarters here are only just beginning to become unfashionable,” he laughed. “Until recently all the aristocracy and gentry lived around the High Street in the Old Town, all crowded together in these tenements you see out of the window. Now, you would maybe get an aristocrat and a tailor sharing the same tenement, and in some cases it’s still the same. We don’t have the same social distinctions here that you have in London.
“But not very long ago, the New Town on the other side of Princes Street was completed and is as fair a place as the West End of London. So most of the rich folk and the aristocracy moved into the New Town and left people like myself high and dry.
“I like it here but business is after all business and I have been seriously thinking of following my clients. Some of the ladies who used to dwell in the tenements around the corner but a few years ago now turn up their noses at my office and demand that I visit them at their homes.
“Ah, well. For all that, it’s still the most overcrowded city in Europe.
“Your uncle’s house, however, is in Charlotte Square in the New Town and a very pretty residence it is too. Your poor Uncle Joseph. I bought it for him on his instructions sent from India and even hired the staff and chose the furnishings. He did so long to retire here after his days in the heat of India. But it was not to be. He died without ever having seen it. Come and I’ll take you there myself.”
When the coach came to a stop in Charlotte Square, the travelers gasped with pleasure and relief. The late Joseph Lindsay’s residence stood in an elegant row of Georgian houses, facing a pretty circular park. The squalor of the Old Town seemed hundreds of years away.
Mr. Colqhoun opened the door and led them into an exquisitely furnished house. Unlike most nabobs, Uncle Joseph had not sent home any Eastern trophies or ornaments to decorate his home and Mr. Colqhoun had avoided the current fad for Etruscan rooms and Egyptian rooms. All was a gem of quiet simplicity in keeping with the Georgian architecture of James Craig, who had designed the whole of the New Town in the last century and had not lived to see its recent completion. On the ground floor, an extensive library had been built onto the back of the house.
“You will find a lot of your uncle’s personal papers here. Perhaps you would care to look through them when you have the time,” said the lawyer.
He was interrupted in his guided tour by a much flustered housekeeper who came in bobbing and curtsying.
“I forgot to tell you, I kept on your uncle’s staff until you came to some decision of what you want to do with the property. This is Mrs. Abernethy.”
“You puir wee thing,” said the housekeeper, beaming a welcome and thrusting Jean unceremoniously into a chair. “Sit yourself down and I’ll bring you a dish of tea. You must be fair forfechit.”
After she had hurried out, James Colqhoun coughed delicately. “In Edinburgh, more than in other parts of Scotland, there is a certain disrespect for rank. James Boswell once warned Rousseau about the shocking familiarity of Scotsmen. I hope it does not trouble you after your sojourn in London.”
Jean shook her head in denial and then, emboldened by the young lawyer’s kindly manner, she hesitantly began to tell him of her terrible social disgrace.
Despite her very obvious distress, Mr. Colqhoun could not refrain from laughing.
“You have come to the one place where Society will not be in the slightest concerned. Education, metaphysics, logic—they are the gods who rule this city. A well-informed mind is an entrée into the highest Society, not the turn of a hem or the setting of a cravat.
“For example, the Reverend Sydney Smith, that famous English wit, has a very funny story that sums it up. He overheard a young lady of his acquaintance at a dance in Edinburgh exclaim during a sudden pause in the music, ‘What you say, my lord, of love is very true in the abstract, but…’ and then the sound of the fiddlers drowned the rest of her words. Metaphysics, my dear Miss Lindsay, metaphysics are what concern fashionable ladies.”
Jean sighed. “I shall fail there as well. I have only been tutored in the accomplishments deemed suitable to a young lady of rank.”
“Then get yourself a tutor,” said Mr. Colqhoun enthusiastically. “Expand the boundaries of your mind and then you will be able to put the petty snobberies of the English court behind you.”
Life did not turn out to be exactly the halcyon state of affairs that the lawyer had predicted. The Edinburgh gentry were, in some respects, trying to ape the modes and manners of London and put a barrier of refinement between themselves and the bawdy squalor of the Old Town. But a surprising number of the town’s Society left cards and, in no time at all, Jean found herself making morning calls, studying with her tutor, attending lectures on philosophy and attending balls at the Old Assembly Rooms around the corner.
For the first time, she began to enjoy being rich and started giving supper parties for her new group of friends. Miss Taylor was inclined to be shocked by the easy-going familiarity of the servants who were apt to join in the conversation at a moment’s notice, but Jean simply found it refreshing, recognizing the underlying affection behind the rough manners which made even one Edinburgh scullery maid worth a room full of Henrys with their supercilious manners.
As Christmas approached, she realized that she had not yet taken a look at her uncle’s papers so, on one particularly vile day when the gales from the North Sea funneled up the Firth of Forth and flung icy squalls of snow on the city, she took herself off to the library and began going through the desk.
There were piles of personal letters and, after some hesitation, she began to look through them, recognizing in some of them, her Uncle Hamish’s crabbed hand.
The first letter was very much in Hamish’s usual hectoring style, so she merely skimmed over it. The second, however, began with a reference to her father, Philip’s marriage.
“She is a sweet and delicate thing and he is nothing but a wastral,” Hamish had written. “I offered Venetia Harrington my hand and my heart. I told her she was throwing herself away on Philip and, I tell you, Joseph, she laughed at me. Were I not a man of God, I would see fit to murder them both, the mocking, feckless, cruel pair.”
Several of the other letters were in the same strain. How happy he must have been when my parents died, thought Jean bitterly. But however wild and mad the letters were, they seemed to exude the very breath of thwarted passion and Jean’s love for the marquess, which had settled down into a small dull ache, reanimated into a sudden, sharp, physical pain so that the sweat stood out on her forehead.
Would she never be free of that pestilent man? She was already being courted by several very suitable young gentlemen and had almost made up her mind to settle for companionship instead of love. Love was a wild, savage, unruly, hurtful beast, tearing at her innards and leaving her no peace of mind. It left her with so little dignity that the ranting letters of a twisted man who had repeatedly tried to murder her could move her to tears.
Snow was beginning to pile up on the window ledges of the library, thick, cold and suffocating. Edinburgh began to seem claustrophobic, the philosophical discourse of her friends, mere intellectual posturing, the assemblies with their wild Scottish reels and hectic gaiety, loud and boorish. Jean longed for the marquess with every fiber of her eighteen-year-old feminine being and was glad of a diversion when Hoskins, who acted as temporary footman, brought in the mail.
She flicked idly through the cards and invitations and found herself looking at a long, heavy letter with the familiar Glenrandall seal.
It was from Lady Bess.
“My dearest friend,” she read. “We are still in London for the Little Season. Mary was married last week at St. George’s, Hanover Square and all
Society was there. We did not send you a card since you are beyond the social pale but as I said to my beloved friend, John—you remember the Marquess of Fleetwater, do you not?—since the poor little thing cannot return to society, it behooves me to send her some little crumbs of gossip to soothe her exile.
“Lord Fleetwater’s engagement to Lady Sally is, of course, imminent. Gentlemen do so love a well-conducted female! It does seem a pity you can never return to London although there are many ladies like you in the demimonde and I could always visit you—in secret, of course. Quite an adventure! My friend, Miss Stokes—do you know her—of the Stokeses of Huntingdon?—had a governess who disappeared and was found to be living under the protection of some Lord! But dear Miss Stokes was so fond of the poor, fallen woman that she used to go to visit her, heavily veiled, in a hack and she told me it was prodigiously exciting to see how these sort of women live.
“So at least you know, my dear Jean, that you still have one friend.
“Your name was mentioned among much laughter at the Courtlands a fortnight ago and I did not hear what was said but Lady Frances threw her glass of wine in the gentleman’s face. It is not amusing? But Lady Frances was a friend of yours, I believe, and always has been a quiz. Chacun á son gôut—every man to his taste—as Miss Taylor was wont to say in teaching us French! Do let me know how you go on, dear friend, and I shall write you all the details of the marquess’s wedding to Lady Sally!”
Jean slowly put down the letter and wiped her fingers on her dress as if they had been soiled. Bess meant to be hurtful and spiteful of course, but she seemed to be very definite about the marquess’s marriage. Jean laid her head down on the desk and wept. Bess was indeed malicious but what had prompted her to go this far?
Had Jean known the true facts of the matter, she would have been a great deal comforted.
The Marquess of Fleetwater had returned to his well-ordered existence and was finding it unaccountably flat. He had firmly put the episode of Jean Lindsay from his mind as being merely an embarrassing passage in his life. He was once again treated with all the delicacy and courtesy due to a man of his rank and fashion. Why did it not then soothe? Why did the simpering of his adoring court of debutantes seem so dull? Why were the clubs, the coffee houses, the gaming tables so stale? Why had visits to a certain charming opera dancer taken on a sordid tone?
