The Autumn Rose

by Fiona Hill

  He is trying to cow me into obedient awe as well, but I do not frighten so easily. Besides, I have perceived who really holds the power, and that is Seabury.

  Miss Meredith, I may add, is rather pretty, except that she is pale. She is visibly Seabury’s cousin, and has the same dark curls and emphatic features. Her eyes are brown, however. I suppose I may as well own, while I am at it, that Lady Susan Manning is a very well-looking woman too, and hardly shows her age (the devil prompts me to add), either in appearance or in behaviour. She is blond and light-complected, and except that she squints continually she is quite attractive.

  I may truthfully mention, my dear Angel, that I have seen no one here at all pretty enough to rival you. You have a freshness no London toast can aspire to, so do not start thinking of yourself as a poor country mouse. All this talk of looks leads me to my first interview yesterday with Lady Beatrice. We visited her yesterday after mass (dreadfully tedious!), “we” being all of Rucke House save the impious Romby. Lady Beatrice herself must be near sixty-five; she is grey-haired, fat and frank. Like her brother, she is immoderate in her pleasures, free in her language, and really quite coarse (can such a stricture come from me?) in her notions and expressions. These are qualities of the last century, of course, and I daresay her ladyship and Romby consider themselves simply too old to change. Perhaps, I may even speculate, they would not if they could. Lady Beatrice is a widow since 1807, when her husband, the Marquis of Bree, died of the scarlet fever. The pair had no children, and so the marchioness has had nothing but her own pleasure to consult these past ten years, a habit she seems to have taken to heart. Though her fortune is but little more than adequate to her style of life, there is some considerable curiosity as to how she will eventually dispose of it. Seabury is the obvious choice, but she does not appear to admire him altogether; and Miss Meredith being the next most reasonable prospect, it will be interesting to see how she chuses.

  What morbid considerations! Lady Beatrice continues quite alive for the moment, so let me concern myself with that. When she saw me it was all she could do to keep from sending me back to Berkshire straightway: apparently, my dear, I am no beauty by London standards. Where I am lean I ought to be plump; where angular, round; my back is too long, my cheek-bones too high…In short, everything is wrong with me, and nothing right. “You will be quite difficult; quite difficult, I am afraid,” is how Lady Beatrice expressed it, waddling slowly round me and clucking with disapproval.

  “I shall try to please,” said I politely.

  “You will need to do more than try. You will need to change.”

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am, but what exigence is this which requires my alteration?”

  “The exigence of finding you a husband,” said she, surprised. “I hope you had no other aims in mind, for this by itself will be hard enough.”

  “If it is all the same to you, I will spare you that difficulty,” I replied. “I do not want a husband.”

  “That is very good; that will do for a start.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This business of not wanting a husband. It is an old trick—but it works more often than not, for all that. Yes, start with that line, and about mid-season—oh, by June at the latest—we will bruit it about that you have changed your mind. Or no, that Lord Such-and-Such has prevailed upon you to change your mind. Yes, that is very good.” She paced around me as she laid out this scheme, for all the world like a general round his aide-de-camp. “Do you sing?” she snapped at me of a sudden.

  “No. Not well, I mean. Though frequently I do sing.”

  “Never mind. Dance?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Lessons,” was her decision. “Seabury, find her a dancing-master,” she called over her shoulder—for you must understand that this evaluation of my prospects was going forward in a room full of people. She returned to the examination of my person. “Green eyes, thin cheeks, thick hair—it is thick, is it not?”

  “Not too thick,” I said, but she ignored me.

  “High colour—that’s something—and good large eyes; thin neck, long teeth, long hands…What happened to you in your youth, gal? You look as if you had been stretched on the rack. And speaking of youth,” she continued, before I had answered, “how old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Shh!” hissed she, furiously. She glanced round to see if Lady Susan or her mother had been listening. Apparently satisfied they had not, she went on in a whisper, “Say you are twenty-one. That is bad enough.”

  This made me laugh, and Lady Beatrice grew friendlier. “I like you, my girl,” she said, “and scrawny as you are, I shall help you find a husband. But you must promise me that when you and that husband have a daughter, if I have the astonishment to be still alive at her sixteenth birthday, you will not send her to me to make her come-out. It was I who brought out Lady Lillian, you know, for her own mother was a bumbler and a fool; and that was enough bringing-out for me. I only agreed to help you as a favour to your brother; I was always partial to Humphrey.”

  “So am I,” said I, feeling a bit lonely.

  “That speaks well for you; I wish I could think of something that spoke well for Miss Amy,” she added in a murmur, “but I suppose at least she has her looks. You…” Her voice trailed off as she eyed me despondently.

  “It is not so terrible as all that,” I protested. “I have had offers in Berkshire, after all, so I cannot be so very plain.” You see I had already bowed to her presumption that I wished to marry; at the moment it seemed as if it would occasion some amusing episodes, if nothing else.

  “Country offers are a different thing. No, I am afraid what we must do,” Lady Beatrice informed me, “is invent a character for you—develop a style which, though perhaps not the fashion, is particularly yours. For a start, let us dress you only in—what is your best colour?” she interrupted herself to ask.

  “Yellow.”

  “Yellow! It cannot be yellow. What a very vulgar, tawdry hue. Think of another; what do you say to rose, a very dusky, muted rose?”

  “Rose is pleasant,” said I meekly.

  Then rose it must be. Seabury, send Lady Caroline here tomorrow, and I will have my dressmaker come at the same hour. Send her at four o’clock. No, not my dressmaker,” she went on to herself. “Someone more modish. Lady Susan, who sews your—no, never mind. Never mind,” she muttered twice, while Lady Susan looked questioningly in her direction. “I will find you a clever dressmaker, trust me,” she whispered confidingly to me. “And do try to think of some acceptable eccentricities for yourself. You must begin to cultivate them at once, or no one will ever believe you.”

  I have given you this dialogue at some length in hopes it would divert you, and also because Seabury has very kindly offered to frank my letters—

  Lady Caroline Wythe paused mid-sentence, her head tilted in a listening attitude. Had she heard a crash? Unlikely—but yes, and it was followed by a shout, then an unmistakable wail in the entry-way. Within instants her ears informed her unequivocally that positive pandemonium reigned below. Shrieks, halloas, keening—Lady Caro dropped her pen (it formed a perfectly enormous ink blot over her open, evenly drawn characters) and rushed out to the landing of the oaken stairway. From this vantage point she surveyed a sorry scene: Romby (bent with age though he was) poking his cane and shouting at Miss Amy Meredith, who stood amid a pool of porcelain shards, yelping and howling by turns.

  “By God I will see you hanged for this!” thundered the old tartar. “You will finish in the workhouse, that you will, you vicious little thief!”

  “Help!” shrilled Miss Amy, most pitifully. “Help me! Henry, Henry, he will kill me! Oh, someone! Oh, you fiend!” she added, dodging a thrust of the earl’s ivory stick.

  “Kill you? I will do worse than kill you, you wild young hoyden. Steal my vase, would you?”

  “Heaven defend me!” squealed the pious Amy. “Why will you insist upon that, sir? I never stole you
r vase—”

  “Because I caught you,” he broke in, snarling. “I caught you—and you hurled it to the ground for spite, and smashed it.”

  “You startled me! It dropped,” Amy contradicted.

  “Dropped, did it? Startled? And what were you doing, pray, that you jumped when I came in? Only the guilty jump like that, my girl.”

  “But you stuck your cane in my back—you know you did!”

  “And why should I do that?”

  “And why should I steal your vase?” countered Amy, with a semblance of spirit soon belied by a renewed outbreak of tears and whimpers.

  “Wretch! She-ape!” bellowed his lordship.

  “Hartshorn! Sal-volatile!” pleaded Amy, looking indeed as if she might faint if these restoratives were not quickly applied.

  “My dear sir,” Lady Caro at last interrupted, still on the balcony above them. “My dear Amy! I must implore you both to put a period to this spectacle as soon as possible. It is well to be generous with one’s servants, certainly, but to provide such an entertainment as this is doing it a bit brown, my friends;” and she indicated, with a nod of her head, the doorway leading to the kitchens, where half a dozen persons had assembled to view the interesting scuffle.

  “Damn them,” muttered Romby succinctly.

  “Oh Lady Caroline, pray, pray do help me,” begged Amy, adding in a loud whisper, “his lordship has gone mad again.”

  Lady Caro descended, sent one curious servant to fetch Mrs. Henry, another after a bottle of hartshorn, and directed a third to sweep up the fragments of the disputed vase. Lord Romby eyed her distrustfully through all of this but seemed unwilling to quit the scene, even when the officious Mrs. Henry (whom he particularly detested) appeared.

  “Can you not keep your charge in hand?” he demanded of her, hobbling after the ladies as they assisted Amy to a couch in the nearest drawing-room. “I found her attempting to make off with one of my China vases, and now she has dashed it to the ground and destroyed it.”

  Miss Meredith moaned faintly.

  “Merciful Heavens, listen to the man!” said Mrs. Henry, appealing to Caroline. “As if my poor angel could ever conceive of such a thing!”

  Miss Windle, having finally heard of the commotion (she had been hopelessly lost in Mrs. Radcliffe’s An Italian Romance) now flew through the drawing-room doors clutching a handful of feathers. “Here is help,” she cried; “here am I. You, footman, fetch a glass of wine for the young lady.”

  “Wine?” Mrs. Henry repeated hollowly, looking up at Windle from where she knelt by the afflicted Miss Meredith.

  “Yes indeed, wine,” Windle insisted, proceeding to the fireplace, where a small flame burned steadily. Here she lit a candle, and over the candle singed the feathers she carried.

  “Miss Meredith is in no need of your feathers, nor your wine either. In fact, she is so little in the habit of drinking wine, I should not be the least bit surprised if the draught you suggest to revive her killed her instead.”

  “What have you administered?” Windle inquired suspiciously, looking at the bottle Mrs. Henry held to the girl’s nose. “Not sal-volatile, I hope?”

  “Hartshorn,” said Henry, with dignity, “and we will be most appreciative if you will stop burning those horrid feathers.”

  “There is nothing like burnt feathers to revive a young lady,” Miss Windle said tightly.

  “Save hartshorn, you mean,” said Henry.

  “Spirit of hartshorn or salt of hartshorn?” asked Windle, unwilling to give an inch. Lady Caroline turned their bickering to good advantage by leaving the room while they were so distracted; she took Lord Romby (though he resisted) along with her.

  “My dear sir,” she said to the old gentleman, when they were closeted safely in the Gilt Saloon, “this is really coming it a bit strong, I think.”

  Romby ignored this charge and took up the offensive himself. “I shall thank you not to meddle in my affairs, young lady,” he said. “I do not like you, and I tell you so to your head.”

  “You do not know me,” Caroline objected.

  “I have no need to.”

  “Anyway, it is ridiculous to say you do not like me. Everybody likes me; I am universally liked.”

  “Gammon.”

  “It is not gammon at all. Even Lady Lillian likes me, after a fashion.”

  “Now I know you are talking gibberish, for I may remind you that Lady Lillian is my daughter, and I know she never in her life liked anyone above half. Except your brother,” he appended grudgingly.

  “And me.”

  “Rant.”

  “It is not.”

  “Fustian.”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Absolutely,” said his lordship, rounding on her. “And even if she does like you, that is no reason why I may not.”

  “Then you are a silly dotard who does not know a friend when he sees one,” said she.

  The Earl of Romby was a tall, stooping, grey old man, but at this he leaped from his chair with all the spryness of a boy. “You will not tell me who is a dotard, miss,” said he vehemently, waving a crooked finger in the neighbourhood of her nose. “I shall know who my friends are when you are mouldering in your grave.”

  “The devil a bit you will.”

  “Devil a bit, is it?” he echoed. “Who taught you such words?”

  “Humphrey,” Caroline said calmly.

  “Oh, Inlowe was it? A fine piece of language for a lord to teach his sister,” Romby growled, but Caro could see he rather admired than deplored her mannish speech. “On that head, I may say I never did think it said much for your brother that he took such a fancy to Lillian. What a creature it is! Seabury is bad enough, but if I had to live with her I swear I should cut my throat.”

  “I suppose it is a mystery to you where she learned to be so hard,” Lady Caroline observed coolly.

  “Oh, you are a fine chit, my lady! Already all of twenty, I should guess, and judging your elders like the Lord on Domesday.”

  Caroline smiled sweetly. “Dreadful, am I not?”

  “Worse.” Romby, who had been stalking about the room, chose this moment to settle into a high-backed plush-covered chair. When he sat, his rounded shoulders fell forward even more, and since his neck sketched more a horizontal than a vertical line, he looked very like a weary vulture. Surveying him, Caro could see how handsome he must once have been; but time had dealt harshly with him and those traits which were formerly proud and fine were now sunken and painfully withered. His colour, as she watched, subsided from the heights to which anger had raised it, leaving behind an ashen complexion. He looked, once more, frail and old. Caroline thought he had tired of opposing her, but after a moment he said, “How should you like to go home again, and leave me in peace?”

  “That I shall do,” answered she, “in time. But do I truly disturb your peace so terribly much?”

  “My dear ma’am,” he said heavily, “before the arrival of your crony Miss Meredith—followed with such lamentable haste by your own coming—Rucke House was the home of two bachelors, pure and simple. There was none of the nonsense you see here now, no abigails running hither and yon, no bells ringing every quarter of an hour, no dressing for dinner—no dressing at all, on some days!—and most important, no niffy-naffy, mealy-mouthed, middle-aged ape leaders. Life was pleasant then! I could wake at eleven, growl at my valet till one, sip chocolate till two, rise at three, badger Seabury for money till five, dine—”

  “Ah, but you see,” Lady Caroline interrupted, “here is just the sort of thing I mean, my lord. I have no opinion at all of Seabury’s pinching your pennies for you; it is most shocking! How can you have allowed such a monstrous situation to have developed in the first place?”

  She had uttered magic words, it appeared, for now Romby answered freely, his blue eyes (the same almost as his son’s) flashing as he warmed to his subject. “How indeed? How indeed? Ha! I shall tell you how indeed. Trickery! Villainy! Magistrates,” he spat
out with disgust. “Arbiters of justice plotted with my son, suggested, phrased, made legal this abomination of a budget. They schemed with him, advised him—barristers, solicitors, counsellors—rogues, rogues every blasted one of them! My note of hand is not worth the paper it is written on—all London knows that. And how they did it, since you inquire, was by encouraging me to consume, one night, four bottles of claret, then waking me at six the next morning to put my name to some papers. I might as well have signed my own death warrant, as it now appears. But the worst of it—all this is not the worst of it, dear ma’am,” he noted, glaring at her, “the most unbearable of all is that Seabury has gone to my club, to Brooks’s Club, to the very place where I waited while his mother gave birth to him—to Brooks’s, I say, where wagers were once laid on his turning out a boy or a girl—and had me barred from the gaming-tables. Now that is a doleful tale if ever I heard one, and I have heard two or three.” Romby rapped his ivory stick against the parqueted floor as if to punctuate this conclusion.

  Lady Caroline had listened to him with profound interest; she sat in reflective silence for a few instants, then declared, “This is even more horrid than I thought.”

  The earl harrumphed loudly to signify his approval of her new estimation of his difficulties. He was surprised at finding her so sympathetic, but not too surprised to be pleased as well. “I omit a complete account of my humiliations,” he murmured, “and trust your imagination to sketch in the details.”

  “They are very easily guessed,” said Caro, with growing indignance. “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth indeed; a good deal sharper. What an odious course of action! It passes all bounds, truly. I hope you will believe me your friend, sir, for I cannot hear such an history as this unmoved. Such prodigious meanness! Surely there must be some weapon to combat it. Seabury is the greatest beast in nature, to rob his father of both pleasure and power, and in full view of society as well! To be sure, his bearing is not that of a tolerant man; indeed, I fancy there is cruelty in the lines about his mouth…And yet, to serve you so ill—” But Lord Romby, who sat facing the doorway, had begun looking past her so pointedly that she finally broke off her own sentence to see what had caught his attention there. She whirled round, her next words on her lips—but there they froze, for Lady Caroline found herself face to face with the greatest beast in nature.