by Sophie Gee
When at last they drew up outside Jervas’s town house, Jervas’s butler rushed to help Alexander down, and he was pleased at the prospect of the good fire and excellent dinner waiting inside. He suspected indeed that part of his host Charles Jervas’s delight in having guests was that it gave him an excuse always to be having another little something to eat and drink.
“Good afternoon, Hill,” Alexander said, putting a piece of silver into the servant’s hand as he took his arm. Caryll drove away immediately, and Alexander allowed Hill to help him into the hallway.
“Welcome back to town, sir,” Hill said. “Mighty chilly today.”
What a civilized place Charles Jervas’s house was, Alexander thought as he walked inside: elegantly furnished, with a robust masculine taste; excellent paintings in the hall and the reception rooms; a good cook and fine servants; and a light studio at the top of the house where Jervas painted. It was exactly what a gentleman’s establishment should be. As Charles walked down the handsome staircase to greet him, Alexander felt a smart of envy. Jervas was wearing a housecoat with velvet slippers and no wig, and he extended his hand to his friend with the kind of easy, unconscious confidence that was born of good breeding and a happy life.
“My dear Pope!” he exclaimed. “How was your journey? I’ve been marching about the house all morning, warming it until it feels like the Indies, imagining that you would scarcely be alive when you arrived.”
“My health was never better, Jervas,” Alexander replied, untruthfully. He felt that Jervas had a tendency to lay the hostly performance on a bit thick. He and his friends conducted themselves with a seductive charm, which had the simultaneous effect of making their guests understand how very much less charming they were themselves.
“Come, you were a dead man not two weeks ago,” Jervas insisted.
Alexander was about to reply scornfully that Jervas was exaggerating, but he checked himself. His host spoke with such a pleasant manner, and yet with the polish of a person unmistakably from town. It made Alexander determined to prove his own sophistication. “In that case, my dear Jervas, I must be the Messiah,” he said. “For I am perfectly resurrected in body and spirit.”
“I cannot believe you, Pope—but I will indulge you,” Charles conceded at last, with a smile of goodwill toward his friend.
Alexander removed the silk cushion against which Charles had propped him on his little chaise.
“You keep a mighty fire, Jervas,” he said.
“Well, why not?” his friend replied, settling his own cushion more comfortably. “I am not bred for country pleasures. My idea of life is to have as much to do with English men, and as little to do with English weather, as the present age can afford. A fine table, capital wine, first-rate plays, and the best conversation: that is all I have to ask. Rusticity is the worst of affectations. If one can spend the week in silk stockings and dancing shoes, eating asparagus, who would ever wish for the foot of mud and frost that cakes our country in misery—or think of the wretched sods who tramp about in it?”
“Sitting as a guest in your house, Jervas, I should say that you have more sense than any man alive,” Alexander answered.
Jervas noted Alexander’s studied manner with a smile, realizing that his young friend must have been told that elegant phrasing was the fashion in London conversation. He decided not to tease Alexander about it, guessing that he would soon learn to modify his speech. “You flatter me, and you know it,” Jervas said instead. “But you must admit, Pope, that modern luxury deserves its good reputation. I have, for example, recently acquired a tap. I now have running water inside the house, guaranteed except in the worst of frosts! What say you to that?”
“I say that your habits of luxury will be checked by the expense of a houseguest who will never leave,” Alexander replied with a smile.
“Come, you must have a glass of my wine,” Jervas was saying. “I had my man bring it up especially for your arrival. Your being here has given me a chance to open it, but I will not drink alone.”
Without waiting for his footman, Jervas picked two glasses up from the sideboard in one hand, and splashed the burgundy into each. The wine folded against the side of the crystal, catching the light from the fire as it was poured. Jervas handed one of the glasses to Alexander, and raised his own.
“To the pleasures of the season,” he said, and they drank together.
Their dinner consisted of a fish, plenty of good beef, and an excellent cheese. Alexander asked Jervas if he would show him his paintings in the studio after they had dined.
The servants were preparing to take away the plates, and Jervas was rising to lead Alexander to the top of the house, when they heard a visitor in the hallway. Jervas rushed forward at the prospect of offering his services as a host once again.
“Douglass!” he called to the handsome gentleman who now entered his dining room. “What are you about? What excuse can you give for arriving too late for dinner and too early for tea?”
“A very simple one, Jervas,” the friend replied. “I dined in Westminster at noon, and I am to take tea in Piccadilly. But I could not pass by your house without visiting.”
Jervas turned toward Alexander, who had also risen from his seat at the table. “Allow me to present my young friend Alexander Pope, just arrived from Binfield,” said Jervas. “Douglass is lately returned from abroad,” he added.
Douglass looked startled at the sight of Alexander, but said quickly, “Binfield! You came by the Windsor road, I imagine.”
Alexander nodded.
“Pope,” Douglass repeated. “A good Romish name, sir.”
Alexander’s heart sank at the remark—the very first person he met in London had raised the matter of his religion. And yet something about Douglass’s tone of voice made Alexander look at him more closely. Was it possible that this man could have another reason for asking about his name?
As though he sensed Alexander’s curiosity, Douglass spoke again. “I come to issue an invitation to Tuesday evening’s masquerade at the Spring Garden,” he said with a smile. “I need not tell you, Jervas, what these nights are generally like, and I leave it up to Mr. Pope to envision a gathering at which every man and woman imagines that they are disguised beyond the possibility of recognition.”
Jervas laughed, and said that he was longing to attend.
Alexander murmured that he would do his utmost to construct the spectacle.
“He need hardly imagine it, Douglass, for he is soon to see it for himself,” cried Jervas, covering over Alexander’s diffidence. “But come! I am about to show Mr. Pope my new paintings. Will you come upstairs, too?”
Douglass said that he would, and threw his gloves down onto a chair in the hall, where his greatcoat was already lying. As they walked up the stairs, Douglass turned to Alexander. “How did you find the road today?” he asked. “Very wet, I daresay, at this time of year.”
“On the contrary,” said Alexander, looking at him closely again. “It was dry, and not at all crowded. The hard frost has kept the roads in excellent repair, and the sportsmen in the country.”
Jervas interrupted with delight, oblivious of Alexander’s wary tone. “Speak not to Douglass of hard frosts and sportsmen!” he said. “I do not believe this man has left town for the country since we were at school. Frosts and thaws are of no account to him, as I do not think he has chased after a deer or shot at a bird in his life.”
“Charles is quite right,” said Douglass, glancing into a room where a large looking glass was hanging just inside the door. Alexander watched as he made an adjustment to his cuffs. Then, as though he could not help a small gesture of arrogance, he lifted a hand to his neck and smoothed his collar. Seeing it, Alexander drew in his breath sharply, and the men’s eyes met in the glass of the mirror. At first Douglass’s expression was blank, but, as Alexander stared at him, a shadow of comprehension crossed his features. He recovered quickly.
“Nothing would induce me to leave town at this ti
me of year,” Douglass said. “I cannot bear the damp of an English country house. In my mind’s eye the road to London is always wet in the winter, and since that is the only eye with which I shall ever see it, wet it remains.”
With this they reached the door of the studio, and the sight of Jervas’s pictures distracted Alexander from his fledgling thoughts about Douglass.
The room was just as he had remembered: a delightful miscellany of drawings and pictures brought back from the Continent, half-finished canvases, a pair of busts from Rome, and a figure that he had found in Greece. There was a considerably larger number of paintings by Jervas himself than there had been on his last visit, all of them of grand-looking people whom Alexander took to be Jervas’s patrons. His friend must be doing well.
“These are not likenesses, Jervas!” Alexander exclaimed. “No woman made of flesh and blood resembles these divine creatures. Your patrons must be paying you very handsomely indeed!”
But Douglass cut in across him. “Here is a picture of my Lord Petre, and very like. Do you know that family much, Jervas?”
Alexander looked at the picture that Douglass had pointed out, and saw that it was indeed the boy who had paid a visit to Caryll several years earlier. But he was now unmistakably a man, with no lingering disparity between the freshness of his face and the commanding court dress that he wore for the portrait. It was a good painting. The expression on Lord Petre’s face was what made it memorable, thought Alexander—detached from the setting in which Jervas had placed him—seemingly scornful of the rich brocade fabric that he wore. He looked out from the canvas with an assured, ironic gaze that Alexander couldn’t help but admire.
Jervas answered Douglass’s question. “I met His Lordship at St. James’s, and he has bought a few paintings from me,” he said. “But I do not find that workaday artists, however mighty their patrons might be, are much taken into the confidence of the first families in the land. Everything is very merry when I meet my Lord Petre, and he flatters me a good deal and charms me into believing that I am the cleverest artist in the world. But I cannot pretend to know the first thing about the man’s private character. The Petre family has done well, of course. They have stayed papists, and kept their titles and their land. Few families can boast as much.”
“They have kept all their property, have they?” Douglass asked sharply. “Lord Petre must have inherited a vast fortune.”
“I believe that he has,” Jervas replied. “And yet he is unattached—uncommonly selfish of him. Not a woman in London will spare the rest of us a glance until Lord Petre has been claimed.”
So Petre was not married. But everybody was in love with him. Alexander frowned, thinking of Teresa.
Douglass announced that he was late for his appointment in Piccadilly, and Alexander stayed in the studio while Jervas went downstairs with his friend.
He stared abstractedly at the portrait. Mr. Douglass’s discomfort upon meeting had not, Alexander thought, been occasioned by his crippled frame but by his mention of traveling down by the Windsor Road. At first, when they were in the dining room, he thought little of it. But as soon as he saw Douglass raise his hand to his collar, he began to doubt. When they entered the studio, Alexander had glanced back down the staircase to where Douglass’s surtout was thrown down on a chair. A fur collar lay there, curled like a living thing under the folds of fabric.
But what to make of it? Douglass had told them quite plainly where he had been that morning, and had made it clear that he had not even the most perfunctory notion of what a country road would be like on a freezing January day. Alexander would seem like a madman if he were to tell Jervas that he thought he had seen him from the coach. And seen him doing what? Talking to another man. What business was it of Alexander’s if a person he did not know should lie about where he had been?
Jervas returned to the room, full of enthusiasm for the ball on Tuesday night.
“I never enjoyed myself so much in my life as at the last masquerade,” he said, throwing himself into an easy chair and gesturing to Alexander to do the same. “Music, dancing, wine—and women such as you have never seen,” he chattered, waving an arm around at his paintings. “Ladies are a good deal more willing when they are disguised,” he said with a smile.
“Tell me about these glorious creatures you keep gathered about you,” Alexander said, abandoning his thoughts of Douglass, and stepping up to one of the finished canvases. It was of a young woman, perhaps nineteen or twenty, and very pretty. But it was not the girl’s beauty that made the portrait so striking. It was the freshness and vitality with which she carried herself, looking out at the world with brilliant eyes and a playful lift to her mouth.
“That is the Lady Mary Pierrepont,” Jervas replied. “Daughter to the Earl of Kingston.” A Protestant and a noblewoman, thought Alexander.
“She is to inherit a fortune,” Jervas continued, “but people say that she runs very wild. She has too much spirit for her father, to be sure—he cannot get her to meet the men he wants her to marry.” He shrugged, and added, “So he ordered the painting to show it to her suitors!”
Alexander smiled. He walked over to a picture on the easel that was finished but for some work on a draped plinth and pillar against which a young woman was, rather improbably, standing. She was exceptionally beautiful; so beautiful that it was impossible not to stand and stare.
“Now she is one of the most ravishing girls I have ever painted,” said Jervas, staring at the picture, too. “The popular press has named her as one of London’s ‘Reigning Beauties’ for the last two years. Her name is Arabella Fermor.”
“Oh!” said Alexander, stepping back and looking at him. “So that is the celebrated Miss Fermor. She is cousin to the Blount sisters who live at Mapledurham. They have mentioned Miss Fermor often, but I am astonished to see that her beauty has not been too warmly described.”
“It seldom is,” said Jervas, “when the description is given by a lady.”
CHAPTER THREE
“A Youth more glitt’ring than a Birth-night Beau”
Arabella Fermor was looking at herself in the glass, considering on which side of her cheek the morning’s beauty patch should be placed. She stepped back so that Betty, her maid, could tighten the robings on her stays. Arabella’s lapdog, Shock, got up from his basket, gave himself a rousing shake, and trotted around to the other side of her bed. When Betty had made the last adjustment to her gown, Arabella picked the dog up and carried him down the stairs, leaving the room in disarray behind her. A footman gave Arabella her hooded mantle in the hall, and she wordlessly handed him Shock in return. Immediately he passed the animal off to another servant, and went to help Miss Fermor into the carriage.
Arabella, known to her friends as Bell, was blessed with an almost perfect face and figure—and had been told as much from the earliest age. But in spite of this, Arabella had not allowed her loveliness to be the ruin of her character. She had long known that she was very pretty, but that knowledge had not distorted her powers of perception or understanding, with the result that at the age of twenty-two she combined beauty and cleverness in almost equal parts.
She was well educated, having been provided as a child with a governess, and afterward with some expensive years at a convent school in Paris. And yet it was not formal education that made Arabella remarkable. She was distinguished rather by her capacity for observation and judgment, and for these she relied not on books and learning but upon life itself. Here again Arabella had been lucky. Her parents had taken up residence in a town house in the smart London parish of St. James’s, and granted their eldest daughter as much access to life (at least as it was lived in this small corner of the world) as she ever could have wished for. Arabella had good manners, excellent conversation, and highly developed powers of social observation. She was, therefore, uniquely positioned to put her talents to the use for which they had been cultivated: the acquisition of a rich husband.
Arabella was in London when
she received the letter from her cousin Teresa announcing that she and Martha were coming to town. Teresa and Arabella had been in Paris at the same time, and Teresa had greatly admired her cousin’s worldliness and sophistication. Back in England, they had continued to meet periodically, tied by bonds of family and religion, but they had never been intimate friends. Teresa spent almost all of her time with her sister, Martha; Arabella was several years older than her own sisters, and saw very little of them. Neither did Arabella spend much time in her parents’ company, busy as they were with social preoccupations of their own. She enjoyed being self-reliant, pursuing her life in London largely independently of her family and childhood friends. It had long been her intention to make a glittering match, to become the envy of the close-knit Catholic circles that she had always found so stultifying. But after two seasons in town she had met no one to inspire the kind of passion that she yearned to feel, and she had found herself withdrawing from romantic intimacies that she knew most girls would have been delighted to entertain. She had met rich men; she had met handsome men. But she had not fallen in love.
When Teresa’s letter arrived Arabella at first thought little of it, but as the days passed she found herself looking forward to her cousin’s arrival much more eagerly. In spite of her many diversions, in spite of her enviable independence, she had grown bored. Arabella did not imagine that Teresa herself would provide the variety and change that she sought, but it did occur to her that, in showing her cousin the town, she might encounter new scenes to refresh her world-weary gaze.
So it came about that on a Friday morning, when the Blount sisters had been in town for a few days, Arabella had dressed early and was stepping into her carriage, preparing to collect Teresa for a trip to the shops at the Royal Exchange.
The coach drew up outside the town house in King Street where the Blounts were staying, and after a minute or two Teresa came out of the house.
