A Little Folly (16 page)

He was gone, moving swiftly and softly for so large a man; leaving Valentine mute and white, and Louisa confronting a terrible suspicion – a suspicion that, she realised, she had had before her all the time, like an ominous crack in the ceiling that the eye convinces itself is a cobweb.

‘To think it should be
him
who came to our rescue!’ Sophie cried, as Valentine stirred at last, and went to fetch a hackney. ‘Thank heaven you were with me, my dear: for if it had been me
toute seule,
he would have been very happy to see me quite trampled into the ground. Oh, yes: because Harriet has to do with me, and will have nothing to do with him; and he suspects everyone around her as increasing her enmity, and dividing him further from her. Well, now you have seen him for yourself, what do you think? Is he not monstrous?’

‘I don’t know,’ Louisa said distractedly. ‘He did do us a service.’

‘Lord, what a thing to happen! The deserted husband, indeed! I can hardly wait to tell Harriet.’

For Sophie, characteristically, the encounter was merely to be seized on for its novelty and excitement. Louisa’s own feelings were much more complicated. Monstrous – that was exactly what Colonel Eversholt was not: he was no monster or bogey, he was very real, and he was the lawful husband of Lady Harriet. She began to see the matter of the Eversholts’ marriage from a new point of view: it was their affair only, and not to be meddled with, or taken up either as a noble cause or an enjoyable sensation.

But above all this stood her dreadful apprehension about Valentine. That is where he goes at night, she thought: he goes to Lady Harriet’s house; and the colonel is aware of it. For the moment she could not allow the thought to develop further. It was sufficiently alarming, as the summation of all the chivalrous admiration Valentine had shown since Lady Harriet’s first coming to Pennacombe. If he was simply infatuated, there was enough to trouble and disturb. Impropriety was not the point: having met Colonel Eversholt, and added the truculent impression he made on her to his dark reputation, she feared that Valentine was stepping from imprudence into danger.

But how was she to say anything of this to her brother? Loyalty – doubt – embarrassment – above all, adopting the censorious voice of their father: all impeded her. In the hackney home, observing Valentine’s silence, and his still pale but quite composed, even proud expression, she ventured at last: ‘It was awkward, being beholden to such a thoroughly rude man.’

Valentine gave a faint smile. ‘Rude?’ He shook his head. ‘He is everything one supposed. It is almost satisfying.’

‘Of course,’ she went on, in a resolutely reasonable tone, ‘one can never know the true facts of such a case.’ But Valentine only smiled faintly again, and seemed gently to withdraw from her to a great distance.

She and her cousins were engaged the next day to go with the Tresilians to the Haymarket theatre; and several times before the curtain went up Louisa glanced at Mr Tresilian seated in the box beside her, with an urge to tell him of yesterday’s encounter – without quite knowing what she expected him to say, or perhaps with an apprehensiveness about what he
would
say. Once the performance began, however, there was an end of all trouble: the piece was
Othello
, and for three hours she was lost to everything but the stirring compulsion of the tragedy. When the curtain fell, she found that she had seized and held Mr Tresilian’s arm through the stupendous last dying moments of the jealous husband; and coming to herself, was quite prepared for him to be satirical. But no: his face revealed that he had been as rapt as she.

‘Powerful – powerful stuff indeed,’ he said, mopping his brow. ‘I confess I did not expect it to come up to the Indian Jugglers as an entertainment; but really, I have been most agreeably surprised. Well, agreeable is not the word. There are no words.’

‘“One that loved not wisely, but too well.” That is very fine, is it not? I must say there is nothing in Byron to equal it. Only look at that woman in feathers, yawning her head off! How stupid people are.’

‘I fear she has only come to be looked at, and finds the play a great nuisance, distracting people’s attention.’

There was a great deal of movement in the theatre: – some were leaving now that the main piece was over, others, more fashionable, coming after a good dinner to take in the after-piece and the jigs. Louisa was surprised to see, in a box on the opposite side, Valentine among them. – Surprise was quickly succeeded by astonishment. A woman was with him: a woman who put back her veil to reveal the face of Lady Harriet Eversholt.

A glance was sufficient to reveal that Mr Tresilian had seen them too. ‘Hullo,’ he murmured. ‘Your brother has conquered his aversion to the theatre, it seems.’

‘I think – I think they must be with a larger party,’ Louisa said.

‘Ah, yes, I see them,’ Mr Tresilian said grimly, his eyes fixed on the box, where Valentine and Lady Harriet were talking with lowered heads. ‘Mr and Mrs Invisible, and all the young Invisibles. Charming family.’

Louisa was struck with a confusion of emotions; painful was the feeling of having her worst suspicions realised; but loyalty to Valentine, and the instinctive desire to defend him, were still pre-eminent. Luckily Kate was attending to Sophie, who was expressing her despair at the behaviour of the young man in the next box, and condemning him as the most infamous flirt, in between trying to catch his eye.

‘Very public,’ Mr Tresilian went on, shaking his head, ‘and hence very provocative.’

‘And that is exactly the point,’ Louisa said eagerly. ‘Valentine has this gallantry: he hates the mean-minded proprieties that would make an outcast of Lady Harriet, when she has done nothing wrong. He is all for openness and liberality. This is his way of proclaiming it.’ At the same time she uttered an inward blessing that she had not told Mr Tresilian about the meeting with Colonel Eversholt after all.

‘A very well-dressed outcast,’ Mr Tresilian said. ‘But I dare say you are right. Well, I am engaged to spend an evening at his club this week. You will not consider me mean-minded and proper, I hope, if I just mention to him that how this
appears
may be very different from how he conceives it. And there is not only his reputation to consider.’

‘Very well: but as for me, I could never find anything to reproach in Valentine’s conduct, Mr Tresilian – please have no uneasiness on that score.’

He was silent; and though she tried to turn her attention to the after-piece, she could not be easy. Her eyes kept returning to that box, and to Valentine and Lady Harriet so conspicuously together in it; and she was more relieved than sorry when they left early, Kate pleading a headache. Kate Tresilian was nothing if not observant, and Louisa suspected she had witnessed the spectacle too. If it were so, she longed to be able to mitigate the pain of it; but however she considered it, that lay out of her power. For it was out of Louisa’s power even to quieten her own misgivings, or to suppress a suspicion that the curtain had gone up on quite a new act in their enterprise of living, and one that might take a turn more ominous than entertaining.

W
hen Mr Tresilian had undertaken to speak to Valentine about the matter of Lady Harriet, loyalty had made her respond breezily: but inside, she seized thankfully on the one thing that seemed likely to quell her anxiety. The name of Mr Tresilian had long been synonymous in Louisa’s mind with trust. When he said he would do a thing, he always did it, quietly and efficiently: she remembered an occasion at Pennacombe in her youth, when Valentine had lost a riding-crop, inlaid and engraved with silver, and was terrified to tell his father, whose gift it had been on his breeching. Mr Tresilian had said he would right the matter, against all Valentine’s frantic assertions that it was impossible; and soon a perfect replica appeared, procured from Exeter, where Mr Tresilian had directed the craftsman in reproducing every detail; and he had guarded against the dangers of a parcel, which Sir Clement would have insisted be opened before his eyes, by carrying it in his coat-sleeve when he called, and discreetly placing it on the hall table.

Now Mr Tresilian had said he would consult with Valentine just as discreetly: he of all people could manage such a ticklish matter, and she did not doubt him. Or, at least, she chose not to doubt him; for her enjoyment of London was still so great that she was inclined to turn her mind away from anything that imperilled it; rather as the small cloud in the sky, on a day which our plans demand must be fair, is not to be regarded and will surely blow away.

An invitation for the Spedding household to dine with the Lynleys at Brook Street arrived, and quickened that enjoyment. – It was not something Louisa had ever expected to feel in such a prospect; but there had been a change. Her meeting with Francis Lynley had left a deep impression on her: she could not say whether she liked him, for her feeling lay at the bottom of a good deal of curiosity and perplexity, which was further entangled by her thorny relation with his brother; but she was very ready to see him again, and to compare the reality of that angular challenging face to the one that had been appearing repeatedly before her mind’s eye.

Before the dinner engagement, Mr Tresilian spent his promised evening at Valentine’s club; and calling at Hill Street the next morning, gave Louisa a brief account.

‘I never knew fashionable dissipation could be so dull. There is a deal of fuss about sitting in the bow-window and being seen, which I could not understand; and it seems very modish to yawn continually.
There
, you may believe, I managed very well. But I found something that made up for all of this: the most delightful discovery. I have made the acquaintance of The Top. Do you know him, or it?’

‘I have had the pleasure.’

‘Is he not entrancing? I could study him for hours. It is not just the stupidity – it is the thoroughness with which it is kept up. To remember all that slang, and not deviate into normal language here and there: to
never
say anything remotely interesting or thoughtful, even by accidental lapse – this requires a special kind of talent. I can only look on in fascination. I think the high point of the evening was when he called me a “ninnyhammer” – but, no, comparisons are odious.’ He shook his head in dreaming wonder; then with an altered expression added: ‘As for Valentine, and what we spoke of, I am going carefully. He is a Carnell. It is no good telling him to take his hand out of the fire: he must be brought to believe that taking his hand out of the fire has been his settled intention all along.’

She ignored his hit against the Carnells: she was comforted by a picture of Valentine’s evening entertainments so innocent of danger, and by Mr Tresilian’s assurance that he would undertake another such expedition. She even allowed herself to wonder whether simply having Mr Tresilian’s eye on him had brought Valentine to a sense of what was prudent, and made him withdraw from Lady Harriet’s society. And, besides, the notion of
herself
as such a blind and wilful being, with all her long habits of caution and self-watchfulness, was so absurd that only someone of Mr Tresilian’s whimsical temper could have fancied it.

Pearce Lynley, unsurprisingly, had taken a very good house in Brook Street; and, perhaps more surprisingly, had laid on a very good dinner, though there were only two other guests besides the Spedding party. Mr Lynley seemed bent on being agreeable, and was as nearly so as his inflexible manner would allow: it occurred to Louisa that this might have been a consequence of his being the host, and in his own household; and she even came close to the dizzying thought that his habitual stiffness when out in company might have been the result of awkwardness, or actual shyness. But she could not avoid the conclusion, drawing on what his brother had told her at their last meeting, that she herself was the reason for this: that even Mr Lynley’s last angry words to her had revealed a feeling far removed from indifference; and it appeared an absolute confirmation of this that Mary Bowen joined them at dinner with her charge, instead of taking the usual solitary governess’s tray in an upstairs room. There could, Louisa thought, be no other reason for this relaxation of strictness, and allowance of humanity, than to impress her, who had condemned his treatment of governesses so roundly; though Mr Lynley seemed to find the gesture alone sufficient, and studiously ignored Miss Bowen for most of the evening, even appearing to colour and hesitate whenever he was forced to speak to her, as if made uncomfortable by the evidence of his own unaccustomed benevolence.

All this was intriguing: but Louisa’s first object was the resumption of her acquaintance with Francis Lynley. Whether his inclinations ran in the same direction, she was not at first sure: he appeared in lively spirits, and was universally civil, even listening to a long anecdote of Tom’s, full of people he had never heard of, with nothing more ironical than a slight twist of his eyebrow. But when it was time to go in to dinner, Lieutenant Lynley was prompt to secure the place by her side; and once there to announce: ‘There: now I am easy. I have done my duty, put on a respectable imitation of a normal human creature – and now, with you, I can be as black and savage as I like.’

‘I am flattered – or I
think
I am, at any rate. Are you feeling black and savage about anything in particular? Or is it a general disaffection?’

‘Oh, name anything you like. These crowned and ribboned boobies parading about the town – have you seen them? Tell me frankly what you thought.’

‘Well, it was only from a distance; but I thought the King of Prussia looked exactly as a King of Prussia would – as if he lives in cold rooms full of busts. The Tsar, I thought, looked rather sad.’

‘Ah!’ he said, crookedly smiling. ‘Absolute autocrat of a vast country – any amount of serfs to lash when he takes the fancy – and yet he is not happy. This must say something about us, though I hardly know what. Oh, I don’t mind them, though it will be a great relief when they scuttle back to their palaces, and we can go back to hating all foreigners equally. No, the cause of my disaffection, like most, is purely selfish. Pearce and I have been disagreeing splendidly. He is anxious for me to take up some position in the world, and I am anxious lest I find myself doing anything of the kind.’

‘Surely there must be something. You are free now of soldiering, which you have told me you did not like; and not to like something implies a preferred alternative.’

‘Does it now? I wish I could be so sure. I have a dreadful fear that if I were manacled in a damp dungeon – add some poisonous toads to it, if you like – and a fairy were to appear, and effect my magical release, I should still be a little stumped as to
where
exactly she should whisk me.’

‘This is discontent indeed: – such, I would venture, as can only be expressed by someone who is reasonably content after all. The truly miserable are silent.’

‘Miss Carnell, you are rather terrifying: I mean, in your good sense. You remind me of a Portuguese doctor I knew when I was in the Peninsula – the only medical man I ever came across who was not a humbug. An officer of my regiment had been very sick with fever, and though the worst was past, nothing the army surgeons could do would restore his health. The Portuguese – round, fat, genial fellow, whiff of garlic, waxed moustache – took a good look at him, told him not to worry, and prescribed at least one bottle of Madeira a day and general good living. It worked admirably.’

‘I am glad I remind you of someone so pleasant – though I can only hope the garlic and the moustache are not the chief triggers of association.’

‘This will not do – you are cheering me up, and laughter spoils the indulgence of a black mood most abominably. I shall be frank: I
would
like some sort of position. If there was one that involved, say, taking up a comfortable post at Charing Cross or the Strand, and simply watching everything that passed, and perhaps making a note of anything particularly interesting – sad – piquant – absurd – why, then I should consider myself perfectly and happily placed. But the positions Pearce means are those in which something is required of you; and that’s where I turn to a man of jelly.’

At the other end of the table, a certain conscious look about Mr Lynley suggested he heard his name mentioned; but whether from pride, or in his new accommodating spirit, he did not glance their way.

‘Surely,’ Louisa said, ‘you do not doubt you have abilities.’

‘It’s a curious thing: I would like nothing better than to show them – only I fear they would not pass muster with Pearce. That’s why it is easier to stick to being a good-for-nothing fellow. He expects that: we know where we are. But if I
were
to try to be something more, I might disappoint him – and that is above all what I cannot contemplate. Absurd for a great fellow of four-and-twenty – but with Pearce I never feel that: I am forever a boy, looking up at him. And I
did
look up, you know, most adoringly.’

‘It is not absurd at all. The influences of our childhood and youth cannot be underestimated, I believe: those are the experiences that shape us, far beyond their immediate power.’

‘Do you mean there is no escaping them?’

‘I think we must make the conscious decision to do so.’

‘You speak feelingly. – I never knew your father, beyond our exchanging greetings here and there – or, rather, he barked at me, and I squeaked in return. But I understood he was something of a Tartar. Pearce was always full of his praises, but I read between the lines of those. So, Miss Carnell, have you escaped? An impertinent question, I know, but they are the only interesting ones.’

‘I consider I am my own woman, now,’ she said carefully. ‘I think that can be said with no disrespect to anyone.’

‘It should be said without fear or favour – it should be proclaimed. But you dismay me with this talk of decisions. It suggests effort, which I am always unwilling to make.’

‘Well, what of your scheme of making a rich marriage? That will not be achieved without some application.’

‘True,’ he said, pushing away his plate with his most saturnine look. ‘And there lies my obstacle. The whole business of love-making disgusts me. All its language and gesture is so miserably outworn: so tritely dramatic. I wish I could talk to my mythical bride as I do to you. Oh, you do not bridle, or look for compliments, or suppose there is something tremendous and apocalyptic about a man and a woman enjoying each other’s society. And there, at the risk of sounding intolerably self-pitying, Pearce has the better of me again. I think he will find his golden dolly first. He appears very much taken with Miss Astbury, you know. He has called at Portman Square several times, and the other day was actually seen driving with her in the park – suitably chaperoned, of course: that aunt of hers who looks as though she has been kept in a trunk, or ought to be.’

‘Mrs Murrow,’ Louisa said, suppressing a smile. ‘You are very unkind.’

‘Oh, I can do a good deal worse than that. Now, as far as one can tell beneath Miss Astbury’s excessively icy surface, she views him with a certain degree of favour likewise. But it is curious – I am not sure his heart is entirely in it.’

If this were a tribute to her continued power over Pearce Lynley, she was not sure how she felt about it – yet it was undeniably interesting. ‘Well, I do not suppose his heart needs to be, in such a match. After all, your own project of marrying well surely does not require it.’

‘Ah, I fear you have taken me too much at my word. I estimate that roughly half the things I say I do not mean – though I would be hard pressed myself to tell which half is which. No: if it were a love-match, it would be a very different matter.’ For a moment he looked serious: then he shrugged with his little irritable laugh. ‘Or so I conjecture. It is one of those fruitless but intriguing speculations, like the distance between the stars, or the annual number of lies told in Parliament.’

He was not an easy dinner companion – but one whose society very much absorbed her: the time passed too quickly, and she regretted having to leave the table to the gentlemen, and retire to the comparative insipidity of the drawing-room. There was, however, the chance to speak to Mary Bowen: Louisa had bought a volume of Wordsworth, and was getting on pretty well with it, though she was not convinced that a flower could produce
quite
such transcendent effects on the soul, no matter how hard you looked at it. But Miss Bowen seemed not in spirits: she said she was glad Louisa was enjoying the book, and fell silent.

‘Miss Lynley, I think, is in very good looks, and her address is particularly pleasing now,’ Louisa went on, meaning a sincere compliment to Miss Bowen’s tutelage; for Georgiana was conversing with Mrs Spedding in quite a normal fashion, and had not stamped her foot once.

‘Oh – yes: one hopes so,’ Miss Bowen said, coming out of abstraction. ‘She is at a difficult age.’

‘To be sure. Still, there must be a satisfaction …’ Louisa faltered: Miss Bowen’s look was so bleak.

‘Satisfaction, did you say?’ The surprising eyes flashed upon her, then turned away. ‘I know nothing of that.’