by M. C. Beaton
Euphemia gave her charming, rippling laugh and glanced sideways at Jane, and then frowned. For there was no hurt look on Jane’s face.
Jane was lost in a dream.
For by simply going to London, she might see him again.
The fact that he might be married after eight long years never crossed her mind.
She had first seen Beau Tregarthan in the summer of 1800 when she was ten years old and had dreamed of him ever since.
The normally sleepy village of Upper Patchett had been alive with gossip about the great prize fight that was to be held on the downs. Sir Bartholomew Anstey was putting his man, Jack Death, into the ring against an unknown contender, promised and sponsored by Beau Tregarthan. The odds were running ten to one in Jack Death’s favour, although many would have loved to see the most savage bruiser of the English boxing scene get his comeuppance. He had beaten his last opponent to death. But very few wanted to stake money on an unknown.
Bored with endless lessons given by a governess who was strict towards herself and dotingly lenient towards Euphemia, Jane longed for adventure. Finally, on the day of the prize fight, she slipped from the house with one of her father’s old beaver hats down about her ears and a muffler up to her eyes. She wore one of her father’s old coats, which trailed on the ground at her heels. She hoped anyone seeing her would take her for some village boy.
She reached the outer edge of the crowd that had gathered that hot August day on the downs. For several minutes, she stared despairingly at the row of masculine backs blocking her view. Then retreating up the slope of the downs, she saw a small tree and, hampered by her heavy coat, she managed to climb it with difficulty.
The ring was in the middle of a hollow, the slope of the downs all about forming a natural amphitheatre. In the very middle stood the Master of the Ring, Gentleman Jackson. Jane fished out her father’s telescope from one capacious pocket and put it in her eye. Jackson was a splendid figure in a scarlet coat worked with gold at the button-holes, a white stock, a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee breeches, white silk stockings, and paste buckles. He had a hard, high-boned face and piercing eyes, in all a magnificent figure with those splendid “balustrade” calves that had helped him to be the finest runner and jumper in England as well as the most formidable pugilist.
Around the edge of the ring stood the beaters-off in their high white hats. Their job was to wield their whips and stop any spectator setting foot in the ring.
A cheer went up as a white hat with scarlet ribbons sailed into the ring. Jack Death had arrived, and, amid a roar from the crowd, he followed his hat into the ring. His chest was bare, and he wore a pair of white calico drawers, white silk stockings, and running shoes. Round his waist was a scarlet sash, and dainty scarlet ribbons fluttered at his knees. He was broad-chested and swarthy. There was something almost ape-like about his long slingy arms and his thrusting jaw.
Two men below the tree in which Jane crouched were becoming anxious that the fight might not take place. “Lord Tregarthan’s man has not arrived and there’s only five minutes to go,” said one. The crowd craned their necks this way and that. Soon, there was only a minute left.
Then a jaunty black beaver hat sailed into the ring. The cheer that followed its appearance was so loud, so exuberant, that Jane clung onto the branch on which she was lying, afraid it might throw her off her perch like some great wave.
“Who’s his man?” asked the man below her.
“’Fore George,” cried his companion, “it’s Tregarthan himself.”
Jane peered down her telescope and then held her breath. The cheers of the crowd had become mixed with laughter. A London exquisite had strolled into the ring. Beau Tregarthan himself. He drew off his gloves and tossed them to a stocky man, who was fussing about him. Gentleman Jackson appeared to be remonstrating with Lord Tregarthan, but the beau just smiled and stripped off his coat, his waistcoat, and his shirt. Then he turned and faced his opponent.
The laughter died and there was a murmur of admiration. Jane screwed the telescope so hard into her eye that she carried a red mark around it for all of the next day.
The beau stood in the middle of the ring, stripped to the waist. His skin was white and fine. When he moved, the light of the sun caught the beautiful liquid rippling of his muscles.
“Strips well,” murmured the man below Jane. “How stand the odds?”
“Seven to one now,” grunted his companion.
The beau waved to the crowd. His hair gleamed guinea-gold. He had a high-nosed handsome profile. A great silence fell on the crowd as Gentleman Jackson held up his hands. His stentorian voice carried far over the downs in the still air. There was not even a breath of wind.
“Gentlemen!” cried Jackson. “Sir Bartholomew Anstey’s nominee is Jack Death, fighting at thirteen-eight, and Lord Tregarthan’s nominee is … Lord Tregarthan, fighting at eleven stone-three. No person can be allowed at the inner ropes save the referee and time-keeper. All ready?”
“Too light,” complained the voice below. “Shan’t bet on Tregarthan. Too light. Corinthian though he is, Jack Death’ll kill him.”
“No! He cannot!” squeaked Jane in alarm. She lost her grip and fell out of the tree at the feet of the two men below.
Her hat tumbled from her head.
One of the men turned out to be Mr. Wright, the village blacksmith.
“Miss Jane!” he exclaimed. “Off along home with you.”
“Don’t tell my mother,” gasped Jane. “Oh, please, Mr. Wright.”
“Reckon I won’t,” said the blacksmith who had no love for the cheese-paring Mrs. Hart. “But I will, mark you, if you don’t get out o’ here sharpish.”
Suddenly horrified at what would happen to her should anyone else spot her and tell her mother, Jane crammed her hat down on her eyes and ran all the way home. Although she managed to enter the house unobserved, she received a stern dressing-down from her governess for having missed her lessons in the schoolroom. But Jane escaped the birch beating she usually received for any misdemeanour by bursting into overwrought tears.
Alarmed, and sure she had some dangerous infection, the governess rushed to tell Mrs. Hart—for she had never known Jane cry before. Jane was promptly put to bed. The doctor, hurriedly summoned, diagnosed brain fever caused by an excess of lessons, for he had once made advances to the governess and had had them rejected. His prescription was that Jane should spend six weeks away from her books.
Normally this would have delighted Jane, but all that day she tossed and turned, imagining the beautiful Lord Tregarthan being beaten to a pulp. When the maid came in with Jane’s bedtime glass of hot milk, Jane could bear the suspense no longer. Struggling up against the pillows, she asked as casually as she could. “What was the outcome of the prize fight?”
“Young ladies should not know about such things,” said the maid repressively, placing the glass of milk by the bedside and heading for the door.
“Oh, Martha,” pleaded Jane.
Martha suddenly grinned and came and sat on the bed. “Well, Miss Jane, you never did! ’Tis said Lord Tregarthan himself went into the ring against Jack Death and he floored him in the fifteenth round. Jack Death was bleeding so hard about the face he could not see and my lord did not even have a mark on him. Seems my lord’s man was bedded with the fever the night before so my lord decided to fight himself. How they cheered him!”
Jane burst into tears of relief.
“Quiet,” hissed Martha, looking anxiously at the door. “You’ll get me into trouble. You should never have asked me.”
She waited anxiously until Jane gulped and smiled and said, “I shall do very well now, Martha.”
During that night, Jane decided to marry Beau Tregarthan.
As she grew older and plainer, she knew she could never hope to attract the attentions of such a god. But if she hoped and hoped and waited and waited and prayed very hard, perhaps the fates might allow her one glimpse of him—just one m
ore time.
Chapter
Three
There’s no use in being young without being beautiful, and no use in being beautiful without being young.
—La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
The arrival of Joseph Palmer at Number 67 Clarges Street was most unexpected. Neither Rainbird nor any of the other servants had expected him to venture out in such weather.
The snow had fallen steadily for days and then had frozen hard, squeaking beneath the Londoners’ feet as they scurried through the cold. A biting north-easter had blown the fog away. Blocks of ice churned about the steely waters of the Thames.
MacGregor fortunately had espied the stocky figure of the agent in Bolton Row and had rushed to warn the others of his impending arrival. The blazing kitchen fire was doused with a bucket of water and the back door was opened to chill the servants’ hall and kitchen. Palmer knew they had not any money for coal and would immediately demand to know where they had found it.
Lizzie, almost completely recovered, had been moved out of the upstairs bedroom, but still Alice and Jenny flew upstairs to make sure there was not the slightest trace of her recent occupation.
The wind had abruptly died and a pale disk of a sun was moving down the sky as Jonas Palmer stood on the step and scraped the mud and snow from his boots on the iron scraper set into the wall of the house. He performed a brisk tattoo on the brass knocker and then fidgeted impatiently on the step while the pattering of hastening feet crossed and recrossed the hall inside.
At last Rainbird opened the door. He did not look in the least surprised to see Palmer, and the agent crossly guessed that they had been forewarned of his arrival. Palmer stumped past the butler and went into the front parlour on the ground floor. A dim white light shone through the frost flowers on the window, and the room was as cold as the grave.
“The windows will soon be cracking with frost if you don’t fire the house properly,” said Palmer sourly. He was a heavy-set man who looked like a farmer with his great coarse red face. There were tufts of grey hair sprouting from each nostril and adorning his cheeks.
“You did not give us any money for fuel, and sea coal is dear,” pointed out Rainbird.
Palmer stared at the floor.
“Should any tenant come to inspect the premises first,” pursued Rainbird, “they might not wish to take such a cold house.”
“Had a hard winter, heh?” grinned Palmer.
“Like everyone else.”
“We’ll see about getting you coal, for the house has been let.”
Rainbird’s face remained impassive.
“It’s a member of the gentry,” said Palmer. “A Captain Hart, his wife and two daughters. But there’s a problem of sleeping space.”
“There is enough,” said Rainbird. There was a bedroom at the back of the dining room on the first floor and two bedrooms on the second.
“Mrs. Hart is bringing a fancy French lady’s maid and wishes her to have a room separate from the common servants.”
“Then it can’t be done,” said Rainbird, surprised, “unless the daughters share a room and give the other on the second floor to the maid. I gather Mr. and Mrs. Hart will wish to take the large bedroom next to the dining room.”
“Seems the daughters must have a room apiece,” said the agent. “So Mrs. Middleton will have to give up her parlour.”
Mrs. Middleton, the housekeeper, had a small cosy parlour on a half-landing on the kitchen stairs. It was her pride and joy, but Rainbird knew that not one of them was in a position to protest. They all desperately needed a tenant for the Season.
“And the Harts’ is the only offer?” he asked.
“The only one that I’m taking,” said the agent. “They’re paying in advance.”
Mrs. Hart had been advised to do this by Lady Doyle in case the house should prove to be £800 instead of £80. “Pay in advance,” Lady Doyle had urged, “and get the lease letters so that if they have made a mistake, they cannot go back on it.”
“Very well,” said Rainbird. “I shall tell Mrs. Middleton to prepare the parlour for the French maid.”
“And none of your womanising tricks with the maid,” said Palmer.
“I do not go in for womanising.”
“Ho, no? You what was dismissed from Lord Trumpington’s household for bedding his wife?”
“The only crime there was that I was found out,” said Rainbird stiffly.
He had been a young footman at the time and had been well and truly seduced by Lady Trumpington, but her husband had cried rape and Rainbird was glad to escape with only the punishment of a bad reference. Still, the scandal clung to him wherever he went.
“’Tis monstrous cold. Is there no tea?” asked Palmer.
“Alice will be along directly,” said Rainbird, ringing the bell. He was torn between elation at the idea of having a tenant and worry over Mrs. Middleton’s distress when she found out she had to give up her parlour.
Because Palmer surmised they had been warned of his coming, he did not inspect the premises—which was just as well because the servants’ hall and the kitchen were both still suspiciously warm.
Rainbird was glad to see him go after an hour of instructions. He had not liked the way Palmer’s pig-like eyes had rested on Alice’s bosom as the maid had bent over to deposit the tea tray on a low table.
To Rainbird’s relief, Mrs. Middleton stoically agreed to transform her parlour into a bedchamber for the lady’s maid. It was not the giving up of her sanctum that disturbed her, she said, but that the Harts should have employed a French maid. What was the world coming to when English servants were not considered good enough? This foreigner would probably murder them all in their beds in the way that Napoleon’s troops were murdering British men abroad. The French were savages. Everyone knew that!
But Rainbird, wise in the ways of the ton, pointed out that society still interlarded their conversation with bad French, slavishly copied French fashion, hired French chefs, and generally went on as if there were not a war raging across the Channel.
The new tenants were to arrive at the beginning of March and stay until the end of June. Surely a family who could indulge in the frivolity of a French maid would be open-handed and generous.
In the late afternoon, Lizzie asked permission to go out. The previous tenant, Miss Fiona, now the missing Countess of Harrington, had once urged Lizzie to eat raw vegetables and to take as much fresh air as possible, and Lizzie, pleased that her disfiguring spots had gone, still followed her advice.
Her wrist had healed, although she would carry the scar to the end of her days. As she walked towards the Green Park, her thoughts turned as they usually did to Joseph, the footman. Little did Lizzie know that the vain footman longed to be able to take his precious handkerchief back but could not steal it because Lizzie kept it under her gown, next to her heart. Lizzie wondered what the French maid would be like. What if Joseph fell in love with her?
The sun was setting and the trees in the park cast their long black shadows across the snow. Lizzie stood silently, thinking of Joseph, as the sun turned to red as it sank lower. The snow burned crimson, one glorious blazing sheet of rubies, and then slowly changed to grey with bluish tinges in the hollows.
Lizzie had come to Clarges Street from the orphanage. Her parents had died just after she was born and the servants in Clarges Street had become her adopted family.
She shivered as a sudden wind rattled the skeletal branches of the winter trees. As she turned about to head home, she saw a bundle lying near the edge of the reservoir. In the hope that someone might have dropped some firewood, she went closer—and then drew in a sharp breath of anguish. A mother and child lay half-buried in the snow. The child was about three years old, its dead face turned to the darkening sky.
Frozen to death!
She swayed as she remembered the death of Clara, daughter of the second tenants of Number 67. She, too, had been found dead on the edge of the reservoir. Lizzie stumbled away
towards the cottage at the gates of the park where two elderly ladies kept the herd of cows that supplied fresh milk to Mayfair. She banged on the door. A tall old lady dressed in the style of Louis XV—high lace cap and gown of brocaded silk—opened the door.
“Please, mum,” gabbled Lizzie, “there’s a woman and child by the reservoir, and, oh, mum, they’s dead … starved and froze.”
“Indeed,” said the lady. “So inconsiderate. I will tell the rangers. You may go. Wait! Do you know who I am?”
Lizzie bobbed a curtsy. “No, mum.”
“I,” said the lady, drawing herself up and looking down her long thin nose at Lizzie, “am Mrs. Searle.”
Lizzie looked blank.
“I am George Brummell’s aunt.”
Even little Lizzie knew of George Brummell, that famous leader of fashion and close intimate of the Prince of Wales.
“Yes, you may stare,” went on Mrs. Searle. “I started him on his career. He was visiting me after he had just left Eton when the Prince of Wales called on me with the Marquess of Salisbury. The Prince was attracted by George’s nice manners. He said, ‘As I find you intend to be a soldier I will give you a commission in my own regiment.’”
All at once, remembering the face of the dead child, Lizzie burst into tears.
“Yes, you may well cry,” said Mrs. Searle. “I see you have guessed the tragedy of it. That wicked boy never came near me after I had set his feet on the road to success.”
Lizzie stumbled away, still crying.
Although the other servants tried to comfort her, they were slightly irritated by what they considered Lizzie’s excessive sensibility. Certainly bodies in Mayfair were not so thick on the ground as they were in the less salubrious areas, but with dead bodies lying frozen all over London, and with dead bodies dangling from the gibbets, they privately thought Lizzie over-nice in her feelings, unsuitably so for a scullery maid.
