By a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  “Then why is he called the Silver Captain if he recovered gold coins?” asked the astute Miss Susanne, not one to readily believe her mother’s tales.

  “Because, my pet, the Royal Navy gave him a share of forty thousand pounds sterling.”

  Quickly doing the math, C.J. multiplied the figure by a factor of fifty to achieve a rough idea of the sum in third-millennium American dollars. Two million. She made the error of whistling in most unladylike amazement and tried to appear as though the sound had been produced by someone else.

  “The late Robert Digby, Henry and Charlotte’s uncle, owned Minterne, in Dorset, which he purchased from the Churchill family in 1768. In his will, he left the estate to his considerably younger brother, the present Lord Digby. Henry is quite devoted to his sister and has no reservations about adding to Lady Charlotte’s dowry portion with some of his own funds.” A beaming Mrs. Fairfax congratulated herself on her awareness of such vitally important matters.

  Lady Dalrymple and her “niece” exchanged concerned glances. C.J. found no words with which to reply, stunned to her very core by Mrs. Fairfax’s revelation. Could it possibly be true—that Lady Oliver was brokering a match between her nephew and her godchild? And assuming there was any truth to the rumors being spread by the Fairfax matron, was Darlington aware of his aunt’s machinations?

  And if his lordship had full knowledge of Lady Oliver’s matchmaking, why had he entered into an understanding with C.J.? They had entered into an understanding, hadn’t they? Their afternoon of lovemaking had been the most passionate, tender, trusting, and truly beautiful experience she had ever had. And not only had he willingly given her a lock of his hair, but he had made her a gift of the locket in which to protect the keepsake—a pendant that had belonged to his own mother. After such an intimate gesture, C.J. had every reason to believe herself secure in the earl’s affections. Surely, she had never been given cause to doubt them. C.J. blinked away tears and turned away from the little party lest her emotions be detected, for in such a case they were sure to become a topic for immediate dissection.

  “I would not be so hasty to share that which you are not entirely sure of, madam,” Lady Dalrymple replied somewhat tensely. She too would feel like a dupe if rumors of an impending betrothal between Lady Charlotte Digby and Lord Darlington were genuine and undistorted.

  Mrs. Fairfax raised herself to her full height of approximately five feet one and gripped each of her daughters by the wrist. She did not like to have her veracity doubted. “We have much to do today and precious little time remaining to dawdle. Come, girls. Your ladyship, it is a great pleasure to see you in such restored health.” She nodded civilly to C.J. “Good day to you, Miss Welles.”

  Miss Fairfax trotted dutifully beside her mother, although C.J. did not fail to miss the touch of the young blonde’s fan to her lips as they passed Captain Keats, who honored his inamorata with a subtle inclination of his head and the trace of a smile. Miss Susanne turned back to regard C.J. with a look of sympathetic concern as her mother towed her away.

  “Heavens, Cassandra!” Lady Dalrymple looked as though she were about to bite off a corner of her silk fan.

  “How could Mrs. Fairfax be telling the truth? Forgive me if I misconstrued,” C.J. began under her breath, conscious of her use of understatement, “but I was under every apprehension that it was Lord Darlington and I who had entered into an understanding.”

  Good God! She had made love with the man, and were word to get out, she would be cast out of society, inasmuch as she was a part of it to begin with. The swift downfall of Lady Rose was a testament to the narrow view taken of such behavior. In any event, the repercussions would severely affect her benefactress. Lady Dalrymple had taken enormous risks with her own reputation by restyling a former lady’s companion—as far as she knew—as a titled relation and member of the aristocracy.

  A familiar presence, sporting a new bonnet of white muslin, came into view. “Bath is getting so very empty that I am not afraid of doing too little.”

  “Ah, Miss Austen.” The countess greeted their visitor with a warm cordiality that showed nothing of the effects of Mrs. Fairfax’s news. “Always a wit.”

  Jane bestowed a kiss on Lady Dalrymple’s cheek. “Every neighborhood should have a great lady,” she advised C.J. with a wink.

  “My aunt so cleverly got the advantage over Mrs. Fairfax just now. Perhaps you saw her departing in haste with her two daughters bringing up the rear like ducklings,” C.J. told Jane.

  Lady Dalrymple crooked a plump finger at Miss Austen, beckoning her closer. “Apart from her usual vociferous display of her own ignorance as regards the education of women, the matron has just boldly imparted a piece of gossip that concerns your cousin, Lord Darlington. I daresay, it was news to my ears.”

  Jane screwed up her face in disgust as she regarded the retreating figure of the vulgar Mrs. Fairfax. “She will never be easy ’til she has exposed herself in some public place,” she remarked dryly, sending C.J. into a fit of much-needed laughter under the circumstances.

  “How remarkably perceptive you are, Miss Austen,” C.J. gasped, swallowing hard to avoid the hiccups.

  “I must say I challenged the veracity of her tale, following which she left, much insulted, in high dudgeon. I hope the foolish woman’s intelligence is false as a mock turtle soup. Oh, my heart,” Lady Dalrymple said, placing her hand upon her bosom. C.J. was concerned that Mrs. Fairfax’s unwelcome news might cause an undue setback in her “aunt’s” condition. She gave her protectress a look of concern, but the countess dismissed her anxiety with a forced smile and a wave of her hand. “Perhaps if we had flattered her ability to acquire such gossip with acuity, rather than doubted her perspicaciousness, she would have departed a happier woman, though I daresay she did not deserve any encomium.”

  “That woman is fool indeed, who while insulted by accusation, can be worked on by compliments,” Miss Austen observed.

  “My legs grow heavy,” Lady Dalrymple announced. “I had promised Cassandra a stroll along Milsom Street this morning, but I fear I am too fatigued to honor it.” C.J. immediately arranged for a chair and saw to it that her “aunt” would be brought home right away.

  Jane allowed that she possessed an hour or two of leisure, although her family had learned from an advertisement in the Bath Chronicle that a suitable house just opposite Sydney Gardens might be available, and she was eager to inspect it. She was quite pleased at the prospect of having such a restful and verdant spot so close to their rooms.

  C.J. pressed her hand into Jane’s. “Your company gives me such pleasure,” she beamed. Then, drawing her friend closer, she whispered, “Please spare me a moment or two of your time. I have something very particular to discuss with you, and it cannot wait.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Miss Austen dispenses advice to our heartsick heroine, and a shopping expedition leads to a nearly fatal disaster.

  THE YOUNG WOMEN locked arms and exited the Pump Room, halting just under the arcade, where the shade afforded them a degree of privacy. “Mrs. Fairfax has quite undone us,” C.J. began, referring to herself and the countess. “I am quite aware that the woman is a rumor mill, yet she seems to be thoroughly convinced of the sincerity of the news that there will soon be an alliance made between your noble cousin and Lady Charlotte Digby.”

  Jane was very quiet. She carefully chose her words. “I have not seen it in the papers. And one may as well be single, if the wedding is not to be in print.”

  “You know as well as I, Miss Austen, that when we last were in company together, in Sydney Gardens, there was an understanding between his lordship and me. You surmised as much. You saw as much.” With a delicate cambric handkerchief she blotted away the tears that had begun their slow trickling journey down her cheeks.

  Miss Austen emitted a commiserating sigh. “Ohhh . . . women fancy admiration means more than it does. And men take care that they should.” Her tone bore a trace of bitterness. Ja
ne gently placed a gloved hand on C.J.’s arm. “It must be terrible for you to hear it talked of. I think the less that is said about such things, the better; the sooner ’tis blown over and forgot.”

  “Forgot? I don’t understand you. Surely you are aware that this transcends the confines of mere admiration.” C.J. changed arguments. “His lordship does not even know Charlotte Digby. How can he possibly love her? I would hazard that he has never spent an unchaperoned moment in the girl’s presence. How can he know her mind? Her likes and dislikes? Her taste in all manner of things?” Her poor square of cambric was by now reduced to a wet rag.

  Jane sighed. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. In many respects, it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.”

  “But you cannot possibly believe that! When you yourself have always believed in marrying for love or not at all. To avoid knowing anything of import about the man you will marry is never to be given the chance to marry him for love.”

  Jane turned white.

  C.J. immediately realized she had said far too much. Not only had she divulged Miss Austen’s deepest personal credo, but she had carelessly disclosed intelligence that the Cassandra Jane Welles of 1801 would have had no cause to know. She flushed a shade of deep crimson.

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Austen. I am somewhat overcome at present,” C.J. sniffled into the hanky. “My remark was entirely unsuitable and inappropriate. It was beyond the bounds of all decency to be so bold as to make my own conjecture upon your opinions of love and matrimony. Of course I would not know your history,” C.J. fibbed, “but I came to the presumption that since you have arrived at a certain age of maturity and remain unwed, you place a higher store on the tenderer sensibilities than the need to enter into an arrangement where there was no love on either side—or at least on your own.”

  Miss Austen’s response was itself a confirmation. “I have no notion of loving people by halves,” she smiled. “And I’ll allow that my attachments are always excessively strong. All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving the longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” Her expression turned momentarily melancholy.

  C.J. wondered about Jane and Tom Lefroy. “I do believe that men have a greater capacity to transfer their affections from one object to another with equal zeal, while we tend to mourn our loss for a lengthier duration,” she replied sourly. The pair of them, she and Jane, had such rotten luck when it came to men. “Darlington cannot be marrying for love, but for money, if he is to marry Charlotte Digby at all,” she added emphatically, realizing that Miss Austen had not exactly confirmed the accuracy of Mrs. Fairfax’s gossip.

  However, Jane issued no denial, and her assessment of her own cousin’s behavior bordered on the pragmatic. The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering himself agreeable, she told Miss Welles, acknowledging her awareness that Delamere was mortgaged to the hilt and that Darlington was under pressure from Lady Oliver to remarry well in order to save the family seat.

  “From what I hear, her portion may be considerably more than ten thousand pounds,” C.J. added glumly. It translated to a sudden windfall, equivalent to nearly half a million twenty-first-century dollars. Her eyes once more welled with hot tears. “Tell me truly, Miss Austen . . . does he love her?” C.J. held her breath.

  “Knowing him as I do, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude,” Jane replied, emphasizing the word affection with an undisguised tone of sarcasm.

  “I am sure he seems practically ancient to the nubile Lady Charlotte. A noble relic,” C.J. responded bitterly. In her own era, the man would have been approaching the prime of life. Still, the earl was certainly in high demand, despite Harriet Fairfax’s dismissal of his age as positively ancient and the fact that many were aware of his financial entanglements with regard to the mismanagement of his estate. Indeed, there had been no dearth of attention in his direction at the ball in the Upper Rooms. Like a bevy of eager stage mothers, more than a handful of matrons—Lady Digby only one among them—had practically shoved their daughters under his aristocratic nose. And Darlington had behaved civilly, cordially, but as far as C.J. could detect, seemed to award none of the young ladies particular favor, behaving as though he had no wish to enter the marriage mart anew, until he met her, C.J. Why, he had said as much. Or was that merely a successful ruse to seduce her?

  So that’s what Lady Oliver had been up to at the Assembly Ball. The old bat was playing Pandarus.

  “To be so bent on marriage—to pursue a man merely for the sake of a situation—is the sort of thing that shocks me,” Jane said, alluding to Lady Charlotte’s exchange of several thousand pounds for the right to be mistress of Delamere.

  “I had not thought so little of Darlington’s character,” C.J. sobbed. “I misjudged your cousin entirely.”

  Miss Austen placed a protective arm about her companion’s shaking shoulder. “There are such things in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to worth, where manners are equal to the heart and understanding,” she said, wiping away C.J.’s tears with her thumb. “But such a person may not come your way, or if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune,” Jane added, taking the liberty under the circumstances to rather uncharacteristically disparage her own relation.

  “Would that his lordship took more after you than his aunt,” C.J. replied ruefully, accepting the loan of Jane’s handkerchief. “The woman is a veritable gorgon. A dragon at the very least.”

  “I am mightily sorry that my cousin has done you such injury. But have you no comforts? No friends?” Jane asked rhetorically. “Is your loss such as leaves no opening for consolation? Much as you suffer now,” she added, taking Miss Welles gently by the shoulders so she could look her companion in the eye, “think of what you would have suffered if the discovery of his character had been delayed to a later period, if your engagement”—Jane selected the word carefully—“had been carried on for months and months, as it might have been, before he chose to put an end to it. Every additional day of unhappy confidence on your side would have made the blow more dreadful.”

  “I find small consolation in that.” C.J. wiped away another wayward tear and offered her companion the return of her linen square, disappointed that the advice she received from the sagely perceptive writer was not what she had hoped to hear. “I am sorry, Miss Austen, for keeping you too long from your appointment at your prospective new lodgings.”

  But Jane refused to leave her friend in such a state and the young women continued to wend their way along Milsom Street.

  “If a man truly loves, then money should be no object. How many love affairs have been terminated because one party or the other has insufficient funds to make a match?” C.J. bemoaned as they paused outside the window of Moore’s Universal Toy Shop.

  “Poverty is a great evil.” Miss Austen was focused on the middle distance and not on her walking companion. Was she thinking of Tom Lefroy? C.J. wondered.

  After purchasing a vegetable wash ball from Moore’s, which the proprietor assured his customers would prevent the hands from chapping, remove freckles, and whiten the skin, and “was of superior quality to any ball yet sold in this kingdom,” the ladies continued their morning progress up Milsom Street.

  Madame Delacroix’s small salon was crowded with patrons. The Miss Fairfaxes and their mother could be seen through the large window, attempting to bargain with her mercer over the price of a subtly striped silk that would have done little for the coloring of either daughter. Upon seeing Miss Welles and Miss Austen, however, Mrs. Fairfax raised her double chin and ushered her brood out of the shop as though she had no wish at present to be within spitting distance of Miss Welles.

  Jane went into raptures and excitedly clutched her friend’s a
rm when they came to the brand-new bow window of Travers’s. She insisted that Miss Welles accompany her inside the emporium while she indulged her passion for bonnets. Confessing under her breath to her companion that she had not the means to afford such extravagances as the outlandish creations on display, she nonetheless spent a good five or ten minutes trying this hat and that, all with a terribly sober expression on her face, as though she wished the proprietor to believe that she was a truly serious customer.

  After finally settling on two particular bonnets and modeling first one, then the other in increasingly rapid succession, she placed a hand inside the crown of each, and holding the elaborate concoctions before her in outstretched arms—the better for Miss Welles to arrive at a proper determination on which was the more suitable of the two—Miss Austen remarked with what C.J. could only describe as absolute deadpan, “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.” At which point both young ladies were overcome with such fits of laughter that they could not contain themselves, much to the chagrin and disapproval of Travers’s elegant clientele.

  The two young women had not been in the milliner’s for very long when the door chime sounded and in walked Mrs. Leigh-Perrot.

  “What a happy surprise!” she exclaimed upon seeing her niece. She greeted her in the Continental fashion, placing a kiss on each of Jane’s cheeks.

  “Aunt, you remember Miss Welles,” Jane said, and C.J. received the same cordial salutation.

  “I must look at the lace,” declared Mrs. Leigh-Perrot as she eyed several different options in the case before her. “I hear Mr. Travers has just gotten a new pattern from Belgium that will be just the thing to spruce up one of my caps. And perhaps there will be a yard or two to spare, to add to an old tea gown.”

  The young women placed their reticules on the counter while they continued to try various bonnets, posing in front of the cheval mirror while they simultaneously wielded a handheld glass to afford the fullest view. Jane then found herself enticed by the different varieties of French perfume atomizers, handblown into exotic shapes that resembled genies’ bottles. “I cannot say when I have more enjoyed a shopping excursion,” Miss Austen remarked, enviously eyeing an ivory satin evening reticule. One day, she hoped, when all of England was reading Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions, she would be able to afford any of the luxuries Mr. Travers so temptingly displayed. If only she could overcome the writer’s block that had plagued her since her family had been compelled to retrench. She had found nothing to recommend Bath until she had made the acquaintance of Miss Welles. Perhaps now she might begin to regain her passion for storytelling.