Marry in Haste

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  Camilla, who had been longing to volunteer her services, was equally delighted at his request, and at the kinder tone he used towards Chloe. Besides, she was glad of the chance to accompany him to his rooms and talk to him alone. She had done her best to keep her anxiety about the state of things in Lisbon to herself, considering Chloe too young to be burdened with such worries, but it was an immense relief to be able to ask Lavenham whether he thought an invasion by France, or Spain, or even both, to be imminent. It was an even greater relief to have him pooh-pooh her fears. “Do you think I would have left you and Chloe alone if there had been any chance of it? No, no, there will be much more of the kind of political blackmail of which Bonaparte is such a master before he moves to the attack. I do not expect any trouble before autumn. Ah, that is better,” and he gave himself up, with a sigh of relief, to the soothing pressure of her hands.

  Camilla was waked at first light next morning by a hideous din, which, as she came gradually to complete consciousness, resolved itself into the jangling of all the church bells in the city, mingled with the rolling of drums and the harsh braying of trumpets. The Festival of Corpus Christi had begun. They met early for their breakfast of excellent coffee and coarse, indifferent bread and Camilla was glad to see that Lavenham’s brow was clear and to have him assure her that he had quite slept his headache away. She had given up the effort to persuade the servants to produce an English breakfast for herself and Chloe, but was amused to see ham and eggs appear, as if by magic, for Lavenham. Clearly, she teased him, men were still the lords of creation, at least in Portugal.

  Chloe’s thoughts, of course, were all on the procession this morning, but, warned by Camilla, she managed to refrain from mentioning it until her brother had finished his breakfast. She was rewarded for her patience when he rose from the table Camilla had had set up in the sunshine of the terrace, smiled from one to the other of them, and asked, “And now, how do you ladies wish to celebrate my first day at home?”

  Chloe, who had been wandering restlessly to and fro between the garden and the terrace, ran to him at once. “Oh, Lee, by going to see the procession, please ... It is quite near, I have found out all about it, and it starts from the Church of St. Vincent at our end of the town. We could almost walk there, and everybody says it is something quite out of the ordinary.”

  He turned to Camilla. “What say you, my dear? Shall we gratify this child’s passion for spectacles?”

  Camilla, who would gladly have done anything for him when he called her his dear, agreed at once.

  “Very well, then, we had best start as soon as you ladies can make yourselves ready. Is it not fortunate that my friend Dom Fernando has arranged to make a balcony available to us in the square opposite the church; I fear you would be sadly crushed if we had to watch from the street itself.”

  Chloe reached up to give him a resounding kiss on the cheek. “You monster, Lee, you had planned to go all the time. What a tease you are to be sure. I do not know how Camilla abides you!” And she danced away to fetch her shadiest hat and most becoming scarf.

  Alone with Camilla, Lavenham seized the opportunity to explain to her that Dom Fernando da Casa Molinha, who had arranged for them to have the use of the balcony, was one of the leaders of the British party in Lisbon, and to ask her to try and make sure that Chloe did not, as he put it, “fly off in one of her mad starts” and offend him. Camilla promised to do her best, though she felt slightly daunted when he reminded her that an unmarried Portuguese girl of Chloe’s age and position would be immured almost as completely as a Turk or Moor. She hurried away to fetch her own hat and sunshade and pass on the warning to Chloe, who promised that butter would not melt in her mouth all day.

  Their mule-drawn carriage made its way with difficulty through the crowded streets towards the square in which the church of St. Vincent stood, and they had to leave it some distance off and walk through back streets to the building from which they were to watch the procession. Dom Fernando greeted them in fluent French, and Camilla breathed a secret sigh of relief, having discovered, with surprise, that Chloe knew none. It would be difficult, even for her, to shock their hosts with her few words of Portuguese.

  Looking down, she forgot anxiety in amazement. All round the crowded square, balconies were hung with damask, tapestry, or cloth of gold, and the rich fabrics, gleaming in the sun, made it look more like an Eastern encampment than a European city. Opposite them, the church’s vast flight of steps was lined with Yeomen of the Queen’s Guard, brilliant in their parti-coloured uniforms. When the great doors were flung open at last, and the Patriarch of Lisbon appeared under his canopy, with the church dignitaries in their scarlet vestments and the Prince Regent and his court in all the splendour of full dress, Camilla and Chloe alike were silenced as much by the magnificence of the scene as by the roar of guns and the clangour of all the church bells of Lisbon.

  After some inevitable Portuguese confusion, the procession got under way at last across the square and wound slowly away to disappear down a winding street. Chloe caught Camilla’s hand: “May we not follow it?”

  “I’m afraid not.” But Camilla was distracted by a question from Dom Fernando. She threw together enough French adjectives to satisfy him, and turned to see, with dismay, that Chloe had vanished. Below them, the square was emptying fast as the crowd hurried after the procession. Was that Chloe’s Italian straw bonnet whisking off round the corner? Camilla’s heart plummeted. What should she do? What would Lavenham say? With a half-intelligible apology, she left Dom Fernando and crossed the balcony to where her husband stood talking animatedly in Portuguese.

  “My dear.” She spoke in English. “Chloe—”

  He looked quickly round. “Where is she?”

  No use beating about the bush. “I am very much afraid she is run off to follow the procession. I was talking to Dom Fernando.” She blanched at his frown. “I beg you will forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? What’s that to the purpose? I should have known better than to bring her.”

  “But will you not go after her?”

  “How can I?” He kept his tone casual, but she could sense the anger seething below. “She has played us this trick, and must take the consequences. Because she is a reckless hoyden, am I to leave you here alone? Besides, I have invited Dom Fernando and his friends to come home with us.”

  “But what will you tell them?”

  “About Chloe? That she was overcome by the heat and is gone home already.” It was settled. He turned away to speak to Dom Fernando.

  The rest of the afternoon was slow agony for Camilla. Acting hostess for the first time, offering the wine and sweetmeats Lavenham had ordered, and automatically exchanging polite French nothings, she did her best to hide her gnawing anxiety for Chloe. When their guests left at last, she turned impulsively to her husband. “I’m so worried,” she said. “For Chloe. But did I manage to hide it? Did I do, Lavenham?”

  His smile was reward enough. “You were perfect. My grandmother would have been proud of you.”

  She would much rather he had been proud of her himself, but there were more important things to think about. “And now, will you not go and look for Chloe?”

  His face hardened. “And where, pray, should I begin? Am I to blazon her disgrace by enquiring her out through all the public haunts of Lisbon? Impossible. I am afraid she must pay the penalty of her folly and find her way home as best she can.”

  When Chloe finally appeared, dusty and tired but shockingly cheerful and quite unharmed, Camilla’s heart-felt relief was qualified by dread of what Lavenham would say. He looked his sister up and down from under furrowed brows, then turned to his wife: “You would oblige me by leaving us. What I must say to this termagant is not for your ears.”

  Chloe never told Camilla what he had said, but seemed to avoid him, spending much time wandering in the alleys of their garden and even among the tangled shrubberies of the empty house next door. When Camilla mildly queried the wisdom of t
his, she was up in arms at once. “Oh, pshaw, Camilla, must you play the prude so unmercifully? Were you never young yourself? And anyway, if I wish to be alone sometimes, so, surely must you? I am not quite blind, though I collect you think me so.”

  Camilla was silenced. It was true that she found their trio awkward enough these days. It was not only that her husband and his sister were on such bad terms. She could not help feeling that but for her own impulsive invitation of Chloe she might by now have come to what she thought of as more human terms with her formidable husband. Would he never stop behaving to her with a stranger’s calm courtesy? Walking back now, alone, through the orange and lemon groves of their garden, she tasked herself, for the thousandth time, with folly. Lavenham had promised her a marriage of convenience and had kept his word. But had she ever believed him, or wanted to? Like so many other women before her, she had deluded herself that marriage would change everything, particularly her husband. He hated women, and with cause, but she would change all that. So she had thought, without quite admitting it to herself. Now, she admitted failure. And (she plucked a rotten lemon and threw it, furiously, downhill towards the river) there was worse than that. Lavenham still disliked women, herself included, and she, fool that she was, had fallen in love with him.

  Admitting it made it worse. She hurried back to the house and stopped short at sight of Lavenham himself awaiting her on the verandah.

  “You look flushed.” His cool solicitude was the last straw. “Surely you have not been hurrying in this heat? It is high time we moved to the country. The Prince Regent, Dom John, leaves for his palace of Mafra next week, and Lord Strangford is finding us villas at Sintra. You will be glad, I am sure, of the cool and quiet of the hills. But where is Chloe? I thought her with you.”

  “In the garden.” For the first time Camilla found herself prevaricating with him, but why make trouble by saying she was actually in the garden next door? “I have just left her. She is picking a bunch of jasmine for the house.”

  “Touching and domestic.” His tone held irony. “I wish I might consider her a reformed character, but, if I know her, it is only skin deep. I wish she may not lead you a dance when I am away.”

  “Away?” She seized on the important point.

  “Yes. I must leave you tonight, and do not exactly know when I shall return. Lord Strangford will make our apologies to Dom John. Your presentation will have to be postponed till we have moved to Sintra. Perhaps, by then, Chloe’s conduct will have justified her inclusion in the party. I can only hope so.” He did not sound optimistic.

  Chloe took the news of her brother’s departure, and their consequent return to a life of almost cloistered seclusion, with equanimity. It was a sad comment, Camilla thought, on how relations between brother and sister had worsened since Corpus Christi. As for her, she was glad enough to escape the heavy round of Portuguese hospitality, but missed Lavenham more than she liked. Besides, she was anxious about him. He had avoided telling her where he was going, and she had forborne to press him, but knew, somehow, that it was into danger.

  So when Chloe, the afternoon he left, stretched herself like a luxurious little cat in the sunshine, and said, “Now I call this peace and quietness,” she was surprised at the sharp answer she got.

  Restless and unhappy, Camilla was pleased when Chloe actually suggested that they spend some of their time studying French and Portuguese. They settled down to domesticity, spending long hours on the verandah, sewing and exchanging French and Portuguese verbs. Only, towards evening, Chloe would grow restless, jump up, drop her book, and say she was going for a stroll in the garden. Once or twice, Camilla went too, but it was never a success, and she soon gave up. She remembered well enough what it had been like to be seventeen in Devonshire House, where, however lonely, one was never alone. And when Chloe came back, at dusk, from her solitary rambles, with flushed cheeks and happy step, she congratulated herself on her decision. The child was growing up, finding herself. She must be left to do it her own way.

  It certainly seemed to be working. In her own anxiety for Lavenham, Camilla was sometimes almost irritated by Chloe’s visible, bubbling happiness. She did not walk, she danced; even her voice was a song. Monstrous that this child, with her gift for enjoying life, should have been cooped up for so long, learning little or nothing from a parcel of old women. In her sympathy with Chloe’s past, she was prepared to bear with her present heedlessness. Sometimes she found herself wishing that Chloe was not quite so set on these evening walks of hers. For with the approach of night, the air, intolerably hot all day, began to cool and a fresh little breeze sprang up off the harbour. Now would have been the time to order out the carriage for a drive along the shore. But Lavenham had explained, before he left them alone for the first time, that if they wished to drive out, it must be together, chaperoning each other. He had been equally firm about any chance of their being benighted in the sudden dark. And by the time Chloe came wandering back from the garden, her golden curls in disorder, her arms full of jasmine or myrtle blossom, the first shadows of night would have begun to creep along the terrace and it was too late to think of anything but candles and bed.

  Camilla was brooding about this, one golden afternoon, and wondering whether she was allowing Chloe to overindulge her passion for solitude, when she was disturbed by a servant announcing Dom Fernando and his sister. Surprised and alarmed, for she had thought them already at Mafra with the Court, she hurried to greet them and offer refreshments, waiting impatiently, as they completed the solemn ritual of meeting, for the moment when she could ask the question that had flashed at once to her mind.

  “You have news, perhaps, of my husband?” she said in French.

  “Why, no.” Dom Fernando seemed ill at ease. “That was what I had come to ask you. Can you tell me, perhaps, where I could get in touch with him? The Prince Regent is anxious to speak with him.”

  Camilla, explaining that Lavenham had not told her where he was going, found much to disquiet her about this speech. Dom Fernando was supposed to be a friend of the English, but she knew enough already about the Portuguese Court to be aware that his message from the Prince Regent must be a mere pretext. Why, then, was he so anxious to know where Lavenham was? A creeping feeling along her bones confirmed her earlier certainty that he had gone on a mission of danger, and one, it now seemed, unknown even to his Portuguese friends. But there was no time for anxiety; she was too busy concealing it, laughing with Dom Fernando and showing herself the kind of giddy wife to whom no man in his senses would think of giving precise information.

  “He said he would be back—presently.” She fluttered her eyelashes at Dom Fernando in the best imitation she could manage of Chloe. “Perhaps Lord Strangford would know where he is. I have not seen him this age.”

  “No,” said Dom Fernando. “He is away too.” The words fell coldly on Camilla’s ear and she was relieved when he put down his wine glass and said something in Portuguese to his plump and docile sister. They rose together and took their leave, only, as Dom Fernando kissed Camilla’s hand in parting, he paused for a moment. “Ask him to come to me as soon as he returns. I am,” he paused for a moment, “I am anxious about him.”

  Chloe, returning, late and glowing, from the garden, found her sister-in-law so short-tempered that she retired at once to the dreamy seclusion of her room.

  CHAPTER 6

  The anxious days that followed were made no easier for Camilla by the constant visits she received from Dom Fernando and his family. He brought his sister again, he brought his grandmother, he brought his plump and widowed aunt and his three giggling sisters-in-law. If a day passed without his visiting her, urgent messages would summon her to his house, where, among an indescribable medley of sounds and odours, she was expected to join them in their oily and indigestible meals of fiercely flavoured rice. Dom Fernando’s pretext was the enormous fancy his sister had taken to Camilla, though since, as Lavenham had warned, none of the females of the family spoke either
English or French, it was difficult to see what satisfaction they could get out of her company. An aged, wrinkled priest, part father-confessor, part hanger-on, acted, when Dom Fernando was absent at court, as interpreter on these occasions, translating Camilla’s French formalities into Portuguese and then, laboriously, conveying his mistresses’ trite answers. It would all have been comic enough if Camilla had not been racked with anxiety for her husband, and convinced that all this solicitude on her behalf merely masked Dom Fernando’s curiosity as to Lavenham’s whereabouts. Every day, regularly as clockwork, if with careful casualness, came the question from one or other of the family: Had she heard from milord yet? And every day, equally casual, she replied, with perfect truth, that she had not. It was galling enough thus to have to expose Lavenham’s neglect, and yet she had to admit to herself that if he had expected this kind of inquisition on her, he had been well advised to tell her nothing of where he was going. It would have been hard work, if she had known where he was, not to give something away under this courteous barrage of apparently trivial questions. On the other hand, her anxiety for him was exacerbated by the thought that he did not trust her to keep his secret. He might at least have warned her what to expect.

  Chloe was no help these long, anxious days. Her one idea was to escape visiting the Molinhas, with whose cloistered daughters Dom Fernando had done his best to force her into reluctant friendship. After one session with them in their private apartments, Chloe told Camilla frankly that if she was compelled to go again she would not be answerable for the consequences. “I do not know which is worse, the girls’ giggling or their brother’s laboured attentions.” Camilla found herself reluctantly sympathising with Chloe. So far as she could see, the Molinha girls’ entire occupation was to sit on the floor of their apartments searching each other’s jewelled hair for lice and gossiping about possible husbands, while their brother had so obviously been instructed by their uncle to lose no opportunity of paying court to Chloe that Camilla felt faintly anxious lest, in Lavenham’s absence, Chloe, whose position as a comparatively emancipated young English girl obviously left her open to misapprehension, might not be in some way compromised. So when Chloe pleaded unconvincing headache or unlikely fatigue, or just vanished into the garden when it was time to go to the Molinhas’, Camilla usually took the line of least resistance and went alone. She did however insist on Chloe’s accompanying her when Dom Fernando arranged a party to cross the river and go to a bullfight on the other side. Camilla had done her best to be excused, saying with truth that she thought it of all things what she would like least, but Dom Fernando overruled her, insisting that she must take the opportunity which might easily not recur before the impending general move to Mafra and Sintra. When she hoped to nonplus him by querying the propriety of her attending it in her husband’s absence, he silenced her by telling her the Prince Regent’s wife was a constant spectator. Of course, he admitted, if Chloe had been a Portuguese young lady, it would have been unthinkable that she should have accompanied them. “But your English young ladies have such liberty, have they not? And, since Chloe had gone with them to see the Corpus Christi procession, Camilla could only agree with him, while feeling privately that if she must go she would be glad of Chloe’s support.