by Edith Layton
Susannah’s Da was a man born for his time. He’d taken his profits in fish and cleverly put them into less ephemeral products: mines, mills, trading companies, and ships. But not one of the gently bred young women, and few of the commoner sort either, could ever forget that the richest young woman in school might have remained firmly in her place in front of her father’s fish barrow if he hadn’t had the audacity to step out from behind it.
She became a superior student. Books had the power to inspire her, but any hurt they might inflict was a distant, entirely intellectual sort of pain, and they made good companions for an increasingly dreamy girl whose best friends were made of ink and paper. Which was not to say that she shunned the other students. No, she was by nature a gregarious girl. But her living friends were never as close to her as her fictional ones were. Except for Lady Alice, that once, for that long, and then never again.
Lady Alice was exactly Susannah’s age. They met at the academy in their first years there, but each was too busy mourning her distant family, and too weary each day from lying awake stifling her sobs every night to pay much attention to each other then. But in time they did. It was only natural, they had so much in common. They both were motherless but home-loving children who enjoyed literature and music and hated the Honorable Miss Mary and their green vegetables and their French mistress, Madame Corday, with an equal passion. Lady Alice was a pretty child with brown ringlets and a merry, open countenance, and when Susannah’s Da saw them together one day when he visited the school: two lovely children, one fair, one dark, with their arms around each other’s waists, it could be said, just as he was that pleased to always say after, that his heart near broke it was so full from the beautiful sight of it, and as he didn’t say, from the pride of it. For he saw the fishmonger’s daughter and the duke’s own daughter, arm in arm, coming down the stair as though they were equals set on coming on through life together.
It was a friendship that supported both. It helped Lady Alice to bear the fact that she was exiled from her home because of her rakeshame father’s depraved entertainments there, and later on, it helped Susannah through the enormous pain of her own father’s death. But Lady Alice didn’t shed a tear when her papa finally met his end at the hand of a rival for some wench’s bed. She only clapped her hands together when she was at last alone with her friend, and said, eyes glowing with sudden joy she’d concealed in all propriety from everyone but her friend of friends, “Only think, Susannah, now I can go home! But, my dearest, don’t frown, for of course, you shall come visit me too. But oh, Sukey, I am free!”
It had been hard for them to separate, they were fifteen and had shared everything for five years of that short span. It was only Lady Alice’s promise to have her friend visit during the next summer vacation that kept Susannah’s heart high all that long, lonely winter. A dreamer by nature, now a dreamer by reason of necessity, she passed the winter by envisioning the delights of the coming summer: seeing her friend again, and at last meeting her friend’s idol, her brother. Susannah knew all about brothers, and took a great deal of what she’d been told about the new duke, newly returned home himself, with a tablespoon of salt. But when he came to the school with his sister to collect Susannah for the promised visit in her sixteenth summer, it was hard for her to fault one wonderful thing she’d been told about him.
He was slender and brown-haired, and if not particularly handsome, with his even features and ready smile, his charm and politeness made up for any lack in his appearance. Best of all, he was all of three-and-twenty, and so was a perfect, safe object of idolatry for Susannah, since he was of an age when he considered all his sister’s friends to be infants. In a year he’d seek a wife from their ranks, but in that summer they were still all children to him. And so he spared no effort to be charming to Susannah, for he liked children and she was a particularly lovely one, and his sister’s favorite.
It began thrillingly. Their home was a stately one, filled with the sort of inherited treasures that even Susannah’s father had never been able to buy, and it was staffed with a dizzying number of servants who all seemed to have been handed down in the family for ages as well. Lady Alice’s aged aunt was a benevolent chaperon, but the house belonged to the new duke and his sister now and they were clearly determined to bring it back to the calm state of grace it had enjoyed before their father’s misbehavior had routed them. Though she’d always been cosseted, Susannah’s life took on the even tone of privileged leisure that she’d only read and heard about before. She felt as though she were living in an enchanted world where noble, graceful people did even the smallest things with wit and elegance. Every day there were new diversions, as Alice and her brother took their guest on picnics and improvised water parties and led her on riding tours through the neighborhood. The first nights were filled with laughter as Susannah caught Alice up on all the gossip at school, and her friend, in turn, told her all about the neighbors and their peculiarities.
But then, even with their games of cards, and singing and performances at the pianoforte, time, especially on subsequent nights, began to hang heavy. For once the gossip dried up, Susannah realized, there were no exchanges with other people to feed them more. And after those first nights, the young duke, using a young gentleman’s prerogative, slipped off into the night to his own diversions.
Each night, then, after those first weeks, the girls went to bed earlier and retired alone, with nothing like the forbidden, deliciously wild giggling sessions that had kept them up half the night, stifling their laughter under their coverlets, at school. Very soon, Susannah thought with disquiet one warm moonlit night as she sat in her room alone, they would be going to bed with the sun, and rising with it, like farmers, not best friends. Yet, she recalled, Alice’s letters had been full of local dances, routs, and supper parties. It was then that Susannah began to entertain the most serious doubts about her welcome. She resolved to ask about it first thing in the morning. But she never had to.
For she rose early, before Alice’s maid could awaken her, and she slipped into her clothes and went downstairs. She’d worried about how to ask her friend so as to present the matter lightly and avoid the risk of saying anything insulting. She was rehearsing how to put it as she entered the morning room where Lady Alice and her brother were taking coffee after their earlier morning ride and conference. Then she heard them, and so had her answer before she ever had the chance to frame her question.
“Well, Allie, my sweet,” the young duke was saying in his usual light, casual tones, “I’ve racked my brain but I can’t think of another place we can safely take her. So if she’s truly your friend, I believe the sacrifice of a few weeks of your entertainment is only right. Your beaux must wait, your other friends will understand. She’s lovely as a sprite and as clever as you claimed, but there’s absolutely no way we can foist our beautiful mermaid on polite society, love, not without disgracing ourselves, and that’s all there is to it.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t persist in calling her that,” she heard Alice sigh.
“But, love,” the young duke answered, laughing in his gentle, charming fashion, “what else would you call a fishmonger’s beautiful daughter?”
Susannah squirmed even now, remembering, even though she sat alone in a parlor of a wayside inn, five years after and a hundred miles away from that place and that one summer’s morning moment. But it was a moment that remained evergreen, and appeared whole and clear in her most unsettled dreams, and would, she believed, always.
But on that morning they were all mutually aghast and embarrassed when the young duke spied movement in the corner of his eye and turned in time to see Susannah flee. Being a gentleman, he of course sought her out that very day and apologized handsomely, and being trained to be sensitive to his inferiors, he felt badly about it for a week. But by then she was gone from his home. For being very well-bred herself, she’d accepted his apologies and then given hers to Lady Alice just as nicely when she left two days later, plea
ding her own brothers’ sudden desire to see her home for the summer, after all.
As both girls were extremely polite, having been trained to it in the same classroom, they could never discuss it again, and so after a few stilted letters passed between them, the friendship ended gently, deflating rather than exploding, full of sighs but with no harsh words on either side. Because, Susannah had thought then, as she thought now, what was there to say, after all? She was a fishmonger’s daughter, and true gentlemen and ladies of the ton were made of older, if not finer, stuff than that.
But she’d been educated as a lady even if she was never to be accepted as one. And when school was done and she came home to live with Charlie and his wife (her other brother living on the Continent, managing their growing businesses’ interests there), she found that her education had ruined her for the suitors Charlie brought around. She doubted any of them would have pleased her, but in any case, she scarcely had the opportunity to find out. Although they were impressed by her looks, most of those earnest, rising men of business were dismayed at the amount of her knowledge and the extent of her social graces, fearing she was too far above them, since, having just risen so high, they were not anxious to be brought or thought low in their own homes or bedrooms. Or else they were just the opposite sort, and so, and far worse in her eyes, they were clearly desirous of acquiring her as they would any other souvenir they’d picked up on their travels to the top, and for the same reasons of purely proud show.
The gentlemen she’d dreamed of, and read about, and had been trained to meet and consort with, were not available to her. Unless, of course, they were like those few who’d sought her out even in her obscurity, the sort she’d learned of and scorned even in school: those who were gentlemen born, but out of funds, and so out of desperation willing to sell their names, even to a fishmonger’s daughter, in order to live like gentlemen again.
There was no one for her, because she didn’t know quite what she was anymore. She had a great deal of knowledge but couldn’t be of help with the family business, since all her schooling had to do with things a lady ought to know, such as poetry and art, and she hadn’t a grain of skill with math or matters of finance. She’d been told she was beautiful, but if she was, of what use was it? She couldn’t be a suitable helpmeet for a man of business, nor could she do more than attract a gentleman’s interest. Unable to be a wife, unwilling to be a mistress, there was little else she could think to do except grow old enough to set up her own household.
Ironically, and lately she’d thought it often, she believed she’d become very like the mermaid she’d been named years before. She was, she knew, in some ways just such a hybrid creature, not fitted for one way of life or another. Whatever she was, she was clearly not wholly suitable for the usual sort of life, however she might dream of love, of happiness. That was why she’d refused her brother’s latest offer of London for a season with some genteel relative he swore he’d unearthed. That was why she’d been on her way to Tunbridge Wells to live out a few more years in seclusion, until that eventual day when her brothers deemed her old enough to let alone, and let live alone.
Yet tonight she’d had a glimpse of something else. Perhaps because she was still very young, she had not buried hope quite so deep as she’d thought.
She sat back in her chair now, entirely passive, waiting for her brother’s return, and she thought of the beautiful young coachman again. If he were truly a gentleman, then he was certainly an unusual one, quite as unusual in his way as she was in hers. For if she were a commoner with the style of a lady, then he was a nobleman taking on the ways of a commoner. But he was more admirable, she thought with sudden painful honesty, for he didn’t shrink from the world’s opinion as she’d done, as she was now shamed but able to admit she’d done. She took courage from his courage, for she’d overheard his whole encounter with the other young gentlemen, and it was obvious he was willing to work at the most menial chores for his living, though he reaped scorn from his fellows for it.
And so, she thought, picking up that one strand of information she’d gotten and spinning out an entire story from it as daydreamers do, as she always did, surely if such a gentleman wanted a wife, if he hadn’t a wife—and he hadn’t the look of a married man—he wouldn’t think of either money or class in his search. And just like the prince he resembled from all the fairy tales she’d loved, he’d seek out the one lady who suited him, who fitted him as well as her lost slipper fitted her, and he’d love her, whether she were truly a born lady or not.
It was true that this was a great deal to imagine from a very few facts and one small encounter. But she had the time and the imagination and the need to embroider upon it. It was also true that their eyes had met for only a moment, but they had met, and she’d never forget it, so it was not too much to believe that he might remember her if they ever met again. And now she had hopes that they might. Her brother might have been right, she thought: this night might have been a godsend after all. For if nothing else, at least she had hopes again, and if they had any foundation, they were a class above dreams.
She hoped her brother would go about his business discreetly and not embarrass her by betraying her interest. For she decided that she might just go to London after all. It might be that she’d given up too soon on too much. Once, before reality had frightened her away from life, she’d hoped for a great many things. Now it seemed, incredibly enough, as she sat and stared into the firelight and allowed herself to see a certain bright face instead of the flames leaping there, that it might just possibly turn out just the way it did in all her favorite stories, in all her dreams, in all her best, most secret hopes.
3
“Now, this,” Warwick Jones said with satisfaction as he strolled into the room, “is much more like it. More like a home than any parlor I’ve ever seen in an inn, at least,” he mused as he seated himself at a planked wooden table and lifted a tankard, twin to the one his seated companion already held to his lips, and raised it to his own. “It makes me quite nostalgic for… I’m not quite sure what”—he frowned—“for I’m positive my mama would never have given house room to that pair of chipped china spaniels, much less placed them on the mantel to enchant her guests. Ah well… Good God, Julian, what is this concoction?” he asked as he gagged on it, and then, grimacing, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and demanded, “Have you taken to drinking perfume? I’ll swear this is heated bay rum, someone’s put a hot poker in a cup of scent. You’re supposed to dab it on your cheeks and put it behind your ears, man, to delight the ladies from without, not swill it to destroy yourself from within. You can’t be that far down on your luck, Blue Ruin’s only a penny a glass, and though it’ll make you blind, I believe you’d survive it better than a swallow of this.”
He put down his tankard and gazed at his friend, looking very affronted. But the coachman, who had taken off his jacket and high boots, sat relaxed in his shirtsleeves and vest, and only stretched out his legs to the fire to dry the last damp from his pantaloons.
“It’s a Jamaican punch our landlord’s made in my honor,” he replied, unfazed, “and I like it. That’s spice and citrus and cinnamon in it, Warwick, but you know it, since as I remember, you’re something of an epicurean. And this is his private parlor, and I’m honored, if you’re not, that he’s lent it to us, because he hasn’t a private mousehole left in the Swan tonight, and I told him I wanted some time alone with you. I could hardly ask you to throw your ladies out into the cold.”
“You could have asked,” the slender gentleman said, laughing. “Oh Lord, Julian,” he sighed, “I’m not at all sure I wouldn’t have obliged you, too. It’s fairly awful having to face what seemed so entrancing face-to-face the night before, the evening after. I should have been thinking back on my little impetuous encounter with the young woman with fond remembrance tonight, instead of actually attempting to converse with her. Which was, by the by, perhaps the only thing I didn’t attempt with her last night when we firs
t met. My only excuse is that I’d just passed a dreary week at an aged uncle’s bedside. I was spoiling for some merrier sport, I suppose, and went directly to an acquaintance’s country home near to my own, by invitation. I won’t bother to mention his name, it makes no matter, it turned out the sport there was too merry for me.
“I don’t know if I’m too young or too old for orgies,” he said on a shrug, “but they don’t suit me, so I took off in the night, bound for London, and decided to stop over at the Ship in Brighton. There I met the baron and his young companion, and before I could close my wallet, the other young female showed up. This morning, out of courtesy, I offered them all a ride home with me. By rights, and as a reward for my charity, I ought to have been in London now, with the baron sleeping in his own house, the two young lovelies sleeping with whomever they choose for the night, and I in my own little bed, happily alone at last, sleeping or not. My, whatever has happened to me, Julian?” he asked on a sad smile.
“You didn’t used to talk about your young ladies,” his friend said from the echoing depths of his tankard, so that only the edges of his grin could be seen above the rim.
