Eliza’s Daughter (14 page)

You'd smile at me!

I could not help regarding this verse and the various others that accompanied it as sad trivial stuff, surely unworthy of my new friend's intelligence – and decidedly inferior to my expectations. It seemed curious that one who could talk with warmth and admiration of Cowper or Scott should produce such indifferent work himself.—Not only that but it seemed to me that I had come across something very similar elsewhere. Also I felt – and here I must confess a touch of impatience entered my critical attitude – that, if the lines were supposed to be addressed to me personally, it was unobservant of Lord Harry not to have noticed that, unlike most of the young lady boarders at Mrs Haslam's, I wore no earrings. (Mrs Jebb had a pair of silver-and-jet buttons which she had sometimes appeared almost on the point of offering to lend me; but the point had never quite been reached and I had no great expectation that it ever would.)

Still, I told myself, there was a world of difference between an intelligent appreciation of literary works and the ability to create such works; there had been many shrewd critics of poetic style who could no more compose verses themselves than they could fly to the moon. And if Lord Harry showed a generous appreciation of other talent, then that was as much as could reasonably be required of him, and he would rapidly learn to know his own limitations. Was I to be the one to disillusion him as to his lack of genius? I hoped not. The harsh world would enlighten him soon enough.

These thoughts, and others of a similar nature, ran through my mind that evening as I sang some operatic airs by Mademoiselle Duvan from her
Suite de les Génies
for Mrs Jebb and her friends, and played on the harp a set of variations by Handel. The hours seemed to pass rather more smoothly and speedily than usual on such evenings, and when I retired to bed it was to hear again, in echo, that warm and engaging voice: ‘I know a great deal about you, Miss FitzWilliam,' he had said, and I wondered what else Maria Glanville had told him about me. Nothing very flattering, I could be sure; she was a hen-witted girl, unable to distinguish one note from another, who fell into a paralysis of fright when asked the simplest musical question. She had probably told her cousin that I was a dragon. It would be amusing to disabuse him . . . So thinking, I fell asleep.

***

I need not retrace here in day-to-day detail the progress of my acquaintance with Lord Harry ffinch-ffrench. Suffice it to say that, isolated and somewhat off my guard as I was at that time, I found myself looking forward to our next encounter with unaffected eagerness and made my way to the Green Park as often as daily circumstances permitted. Or as the weather permitted: that was an unusually rainy spring.

– He was not always there. And now the evenings were beginning to lengthen, and more people came to stroll and enjoy the favours of the season, our chances of a private encounter grew fewer and fewer, unless I took my promenade at a late hour, which suited neither Pug nor Mrs Jebb.

I found myself reluctant to tell Mrs Jebb about my new acquaintance.—It was not precisely that our encounters were clandestine; but I knew by instinct how much Miss Orrincourt would disapprove if one of her instructresses should be regularly meeting a gentleman, however innocuous the circumstances, however respectable his intentions and antecedents; and although Lord Harry appeared the pinnacle of respectability – and eligibility – the gulf between our stations sufficed, in itself, to cast a shadow of doubt and discredit over our acquaintance. I tried not to devote too much thought to this aspect of our friendship, I must confess; that we
were
friends and liked to talk about books, was, at that time, sufficient for me. If he asked questions about my background I returned evasive answers; I never suggested that he come and present himself at Mrs Jebb's house, for I felt sure that she would not wish to receive him; and he himself never suggested a meeting anywhere else.

– Just occasionally I seemed to hear Fanny Huskisson's voice at my ear: ‘A rare cheapskate he be, dearie, if you ask me! Not to offer you so much as a cup of chocolate at a pastrycook's or an apple from a costermonger! Why, I'd think it a shame to be acquainted with such a skinflint, and he the son of a dook with all his millions at command.'

But then Fanny Huskisson, a thoroughly vulgar girl, had no notion of any such thing as the interplay of two intelligences.

Learning that Lord Harry had passed his schooldays at Eton I did consider, at one time, asking if he had ever encountered Hoby, but on second thoughts refrained. That might lead to revelations. Next time I wrote to Hoby – now entered at King's College, Cambridge – I would ask him if he knew Lord Harry. His opinion might be of interest.

I wondered sometimes what had become of the rest of the Bath Beaux, Lord Harry's friends. Once I alluded to them in a casual manner; where were they now? I asked. Oh, he said vaguely, he had seen them the other day; they had all been to a race-meeting together. They were shocking, inveterate gamblers, his friends, he told me, laughing; if there were no steeplechases to bet on, they would wager on the colour of the first dog to come out of the market, or the number of swans along the bank by the Parade Gardens. ‘Ned Weatherspill and Gus Link once staked five hundred apiece on the number of hairs in the blacksmith's beard at Corsham,' he said, laughing even more heartily.

‘But – good God – how would they ever discover which of them was right?'

‘Ned paid the fellow to have his beard shaved off.'

‘He was willing to
do
such a thing?'

‘No; not at all willing; but they made him drunk and it was done. And Ned won his bet. They obliged the barber to count the hairs three times over.'

I pondered over this story, which somewhat shocked me. Not that it exceeded in outrageousness various pranks perpetrated by Hoby and the others back at Byblow Bottom; but I had assumed that these gently reared young sons of lords would have higher standards.

‘But now the other fellows have all gone back to Cambridge – and I ought to return there, too,' he added in a somewhat languishing tone. ‘But I have fallen into shocking bad habits here of sinful self-indulgence. Can you guess what keeps me lingering and procrastinating?'

He threw me a slanting look from his large dark eyes and repeated, ‘Can you guess! Are you not going to ask me what I mean?'

I felt suddenly ill-at-ease. An exquisitely fair evening after a week of rain had tempted us beyond our usual limits, and we had persuaded the protesting Pug up Beechen Cliff, which, because of its noble hanging woods, always reminded me of the walk I had taken along the coast to St Lucy's of Godsend with my two dear friends. By myself, I could not have come as far as this; for it was not considered a suitable walk for a young lady on her own. And few of the girls at Mrs Haslam's cared to ramble so far, even in each other's company.

‘Lord Harry,' I said hesitantly, to break the silence which all of a sudden seemed to envelop us like a cocoon, ‘there is something I have been wishful to say – no, not at all wishful, but it needs to be said –'

‘Ah!' he exclaimed, laying his hand upon my arm. I was much struck by the warmth of that hand, and by the fact that it quivered violently. ‘Ah, surely,' he went on, ‘by this time we need not be quite so formal? ‘Lord Harry'! Can you not venture to call me Hal, as my friends do? And may I not – pray – address you as
Eliza
?'

I glanced about us. We were now in a little clearing of the beech wood, where a seat had been erected, commanding a majestic panorama of the city of Bath, roofs and spires and the winding river far below us.

He led me to the bench and invited me with a gesture to sit on it, then sat down himself, facing me, with an arm hooked over the back rail.

I felt both nervous and resolute. For the last few meetings I had been evading him, practising with an adroitness of which I had hardly known myself capable Miss Orrincourt's art of leading the conversation away from a risky area into a more innocuous region. But now I felt our intimacy had reached a point where the truth could be postponed no longer.

‘Very well then – Hal.'

‘Ah!' he exclaimed in a throbbing tone. ‘How exquisite – how truly interesting that word sounds upon your lips! Hal! It has a grace – a resonance – hitherto undreamed-of! I shall for ever like the name better – from this day on – now that I have heard it from your charming voice –'

‘Well – I hope so. Perhaps you may not think that when you hear what I have to say. For, my dear Hal, I am obliged to tell you that – sadly – I do not believe your gifts lie in the realm of poetry. Your true genius, perhaps, may be situated elsewhere – as critic, perhaps essayist – philosopher – man of letters –'

He was staring at me intently, his mouth somewhat open – like Mr Sam's, I thought – his eyes dark with urgency. There were numerous beads of sweat upon his forehead, though the evening was not warm, and he had all of a sudden grown so pale, so very pale, that I felt – I must confess – considerable compunction for being obliged to dash his poetic hopes.

But then he stammered out: ‘
Eliza –
there is something else also that – that I have to say – dammit, this is hard for me – I have never been in such a devilish predicament before –'

His face was working strangely, as if he were in a fever; he seemed to be in a curious medley of fright, frantic excitation, regret and embarrassment.

But the fear predominated.

Fear of what?

Of me?

My senses are very alert. It has always been so. Whether these faculties were inborn, or developed from early habit in Byblow Bottom – where such vigilance was daily required for survival – I know not; but eyes and ears, even my sense of smell, were acute as those of a fox or hare. Now, three such messages assailed me simultaneously: I heard a crack in the bushes, and what sounded like a stifled chuckle; I saw Pug turn his head sharply, and observed a telltale twitch in Lord Harry's hessian pantaloons; even more strongly, I smelt the sweat on him, of fear, of shame, of bodily excitement.

I sprang to my feet, snatching up Pug.

Lord Harry, too, jumped up, and now his physical state was even more apparent.

‘Don't – my dear creature – oh, pray don't go!' he gasped, and made a clumsy grab at me, snatching my shawl from my shoulders. I dealt him what, in Byblow, would have been rated a mild buffet on his ear and, abandoning the shawl, darted off into the underground. Instinct prompted me to avoid the track, and the quarter from which the sounds had come; I made uphill for a shadowy grove of young bushes and stopping there, crouched low, stifling Pug, and remained very still.

Now I heard sounds in plenty, shouts, footsteps and curses.

‘God dammit, where has the bitch fled to?'

‘I thought Hal had her all to rights –'

‘Deuce take the jade! She's gone to ground –'

‘Hollo, hollo, sweet one? Where are you hiding?'

Lord Harry's friends, the Bath Beaux – as I readily guessed – were crashing and stumbling about, searching for me and blaming their comrade for mismanaging the tête-à-tête.

‘Devil fly away with you, Hal, why were you so slow with the wench – why not broach-to directly? What need for all that argy-bargy? A pox on you! Now here we are up non-plus creek –'

Hal defended himself.

‘I had to talk her round! I was doing capitally until you –'

‘Talk her round? Begad, you talked to such purpose that the vixen smelt a rat and has given us the go-by –'

‘Oh stap me, look here, there's a cursed bramble round my leg which has torn my stocking –'

‘Mistress! Mistress Fitz! Where are you hid, my charmer?'

‘Come out, sweetheart, and let us see you!'

‘Tally-ho, tally-ho!'

There was a strong odour of liquor. Several times one or another of them nearly stumbled over me. Luckily they were fairly fuddled with drink, it seemed. Grumbling and blaming Hal, they finally gave up the search and doubtless concluding that I must have made for the city they themselves proceeded quarrelsomely in that direction.

‘I talked poetics to her, did I not?' Harry ffinch-ffrench was declaring in peevish, injured accents as they tramped in single file along the path, still thrashing hopefully at the brambles with their canes. ‘I led her on finely. I talked poetry for days on end, until I could barely order dinner but it came out in rhyme – and now all my application and hard labour is wasted because you stupid dunderheads could not lie doggo in the bushes for ten minutes at a stretch – '

I heard their trampling and cursing fade into the distance. Some allusions to ‘the stake money at the White Hart' were the last words to come back to me.

When the voices had quite died away, I returned to the bench hoping to reclaim my shawl. But they had taken it with them.

***

So, cold, angry, dishevelled and heartsore, I took my own way back to New King Street, carrying Pug, who made his displeasure very plain by snoring at me in a gloomy and censorious manner.

But his gloom and censure were nothing to what I encountered on my arrival.

By now it was late.

‘We were about to notify the watch!' Mrs Jebb told me, stroking and pacifying Pug. I noticed a strong odour of brandy in the parlour. Even stronger than in the woods. ‘Poor old fellow, then! Did he get taken for a long disagreeable cold walk in the dark? And where is your shawl, Miss? And what – pray – have you been up to?'

The shawl was a Norwich one she had given me; old, worn and darned, but still handsome.

‘Ma'am, I have had a misadventure. There's no getting away from the fact. I'll tell you the whole story.'

I did so.

Pullett, who had come in to bring me a hot drink, remained to listen with starting eyes.