Jennie About to Be (7 page)

“Lady Clarke?” Jennie asked, and both mother and son laughed.

“Dear Lord in heaven, Cecilia was too busy being the queen bee of her own swarm to want to give houseroom to a young widow. No, I went to one of my mother's other sisters, and when my mourning was over, I was introduced to Society as your aunt has introduced you. I met a man who didn't give a snap of his fingers for what Society thought. He was a good father to Nigel, and he gave me another bonny son as well. He has been dead for three years, and I think I shall mourn him the rest of my life.” Her blue eyes glistened, but there was no self-pity about her. “Two men like that in a woman's lifetime, Jennie. Think on it. I've been doubly blessed.”

Nigel lifted his glass to the portrait. He said, “Four times blessed when you count those bonny sons, Mama.”

“Perhaps. I'll know better when you're forty, my dear. Jennie, whatever these sons do—unless the baronet installs a harem at Warrington, which would be absolutely ruinous to the house—is their own affair. By the way, if Nigel hasn't told you yet about his prospects, besides rising in the Army, which I don't count because I don't like seeing my son a soldier, he has an adequate income from his father and stepfather, if he isn't foolish about it. As for Linnmore, Archie married late, Christabel is long in the tooth, and if she produces an heir, I should be dumbfounded, and so will he.
There
.” She poured more wine for herself, sank back in the armchair, and smiled beatifically at Jennie.

“But Nigel—I mean, Captain Gilchrist,” Jennie blurted out, “had never—I mean,
we've
never discussed—the word has never been uttered between us!” She was so hot she wanted to tear open the neck of her habit.

“Nigel's respect for ritual, remember. He must speak to your uncle. You're agitated, aren't you? Your cheeks are flaming. You aren't coolly laughing at this preposterous scene. That means that if the word had never been uttered, it has certainly been
thought
. Let me put it to you this way, and please give me the perfectly candid answer that I expect from Jennie Hawthorne of the honest north. If Nigel asked you tomorrow to run away to Gretna Green, would you go?”

“Dear Mater,” said Nigel, “I'm beginning to think that if
you'd
elope to Gretna Green, my life would be considerably less complicated.”

She ignored him. “Would you, Jennie Hawthorne?”

“Yes,” said Jennie.

Lady Geoffrey waved at Nigel. “There you are, my love. You'd better run along now. Bamber Raleigh is expected, and we're driving out to Richmond Park, not to Gretna Green.”

“A pity,” said Nigel. He leaned over and kissed her. “I know now why certain evil persons threw their mamas into dungeons. It was the only way to stop them talking.”

“Good day, Lady Geoffrey,” Jennie said sedately.

“Don't forget that fantastic hat. . . . You have good color, and that means healthy blood. You're thin but not spindling. I like that. It's the lean horse that wins the race.”

“So it was an inspection after all!”

“My dear, I wouldn't be a human mother if I didn't have some concern for the mother of my grandchildren. I'll be glad to see Nigel settled. London is full of sharks, all female, and Nigel can't resist them any more than they can resist him.”

“Let us leave, Jennie,” said Nigel, “before she produces a clergyman from a secret passage and marries us by force. I shan't see you tonight, Mama. I'll be on duty.”

In the foyer Jennie stopped before a mirror to pin her hat. Nigel whistled “The White Cockade” and slapped his gloves against his thigh; Gertrude helped Jennie, smiling all the while, and Jennie was glad of the quick, capable fingers: her own felt all loose and unstrung.

When the front door closed behind them, Jennie said at once, “Your mother proposed for you!”

“That's the Mater,” he agreed. “Always rushing her fences.”

“But I accepted!” she said. From the roadway the horses and Dickon observed them with unblinking interest. “Nigel—Captain—it was done under duress so it doesn't count. You're quite free.”

“But I don't want to be,” he said imperturbably. “I had already told Mama that you are the girl I intend to marry.”

She said in giddy bewilderment, “Am I dreaming this? What if my uncle forbids it?” Panic.

“He won't. I shall speak to him tonight.”

“I thought you were on duty tonight.”

“That is the duty,” he replied. “Shall we ride now?”

When he escorted her into the foyer at Brunswick Square, Aunt Higham came out from the morning room all smiles, to ask if he would take a glass of wine; instead he asked her very formally if he might meet with Mr. Higham in the evening. She at once strangled her smile and became stately. She was sure that Mr. Higham would be happy to meet with Captain Gilchrist.

Halfway up the stairs, there were the children: Charlotte transfixed, her hand to her breast, a nymph in sprigged dimity; Marjorie and Ann giggling and shoving at each other, not understanding the scene but electrified by it. Derwent's small, pugnacious face was puzzled above the frill of his shirt. Mavis waited by the door to see Nigel out, so immobile she looked like a waxwork, but she could hardly wait to get down to the kitchen with the news.

A
UNT HIGHAM'S
first step in the management of events was to take her niece out for the evening. They went to a soiree where a man read the exciting new poetic drama
Marmion
by Walter Scott, and a lady sang appropriate songs.

It would have all been endurable except that any place without Nigel was a place without sun. George Vinton was there, or rather a something whose cravat seemed to be choking him every time he looked at her; this object was called George Vinton but otherwise had no meaning for her. When they returned to Brunswick Square, she expected to go to bed in suspense and lie awake all night, but Mavis said, “Mr. Higham would like for both you and Miss Hawthorne to come to the library, ma'am.”

“Has Captain Gilchrist been ?”

“Yes, and gone, ma'am.”

Was he smiling when you showed him out?
Jennie burned to ask. She stood in frightened, dry-mouthed silence, twisting the strings of her evening reticule. Mavis turned from taking Aunt Higham's mantle to take hers, and she submitted meekly; usually she didn't want help.

“Be off to bed with you now,” her aunt said to Mavis, who bobbed and was gone.

In the library Uncle Higham stood on the hearth with his back to the fender, his hands clasped behind him under his coattails. He was, for him, effusive, a state which would pass for mild approval in someone else.

“The boy is perfectly sound. Not that he didn't tell me anything I didn't know already, but he told it to me straight, and that's a good sign. His stepfather did well by him, and he's next in line for a considerable property in Scotland. No titles involved, but what is a title compared to solid property? Oh, I believe there's an earldom somewhere, but there are so many people between it and him that it's not worth mentioning.”

However, he had mentioned it, and Aunt Higham must have been torn again between duty to her ward and to her daughter.

“Scottish earldoms,” her husband pontificated, “are worth nothing unless they sit upon coal mines, and this one doesn't. The property in hand belongs to an older brother, and it's unlikely”—he harrumphed hard enough to cause a vibration in his jar of pipes on the mantel behind him—“that there will be a son born. . . . Those Highland landlords are showing signs of intelligence, turning all that empty space over to sheep. There should be something very nice for young Gilchrist in time. Very nice indeed.” Uncle Higham rocked onto his toes and back to his heels. “In the meanwhile he has a promising career in the Army. We'll meet again for the formalities, of course, but I think we can safely assume”— another shattering
harrumph
—“a successful conclusion to the business.” He nodded at Jennie, who was then kissed on each cheek by her aunt and told to go to bed because she needed her strength.

“The wedding will be at Saint George's in Hanover Square, of course,” Aunt Higham said to her husband as Jennie was leaving the room. “I shall commence my lists tonight. I won't be able to shut an eye until I've done
something
.”

All at once weary, Jennie was brushing her hair before the mirror on her toilet stand, observing herself by candlelight with unusual detachment, when Charlotte crept in. “I've been lying awake waiting for you. I saw them when
he
left. They were shaking hands, and Papa called him ‘My boy' and clapped him on the shoulder.” She giggled. “He had to reach up to do it, And I knew it was all right, Papa has consented. Oh, Jennie, aren't you excited? How can you
bear
it?”

“I don't know,” said Jennie. The two girls hugged. Charlotte quivered in her arms, a bundle of fine silver wires.

“You know Mama! She'll have the wedding all planned out by tomorrow morning! May I be your bridesmaid, Jennie?
Please?
Has he kissed you yet? What was it like?”

“Yes, you may be my bridesmaid,” Jennie said. “No, he hasn't kissed me yet.”

“Not even when he proposed?”

But he didn't propose to me, Lottie, love. His mother did
. There were warning signs of a fit of giggles, and she was afraid it would completely take her over if she allowed it. She said solemnly, as if announcing a death, “The park was really too public.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte in disappointment. “I should like to be proposed to in a forest glade or in a garden; at night, with moonlight and a sweet smell of flowers, and a nightingale.”

“Perhaps it will be so for you, my darling,” said Jennie. “Now go to bed before your mother catches you, or Mrs. Coombes.”

“Nanny is snoring,” said Charlotte, “but you're right about Mama. She'll think I'm feverish and dose me again.” They kissed good-night, and she went out like a ghost in her childish white wrapper.

Alone, Jennie sat on the edge of her bed, shivering but not from cold, because a fire burned in her grate. She felt as if she'd been snatched by the great third wave, whipped around, beaten, half-strangled, half-drowned, and then tossed up on a foreign shore: the great Eugenia Hawthorne, who'd sworn to take charge of her own life. The simple ecstasy of seeing Nigel come into a room, of hearing his voice, of being in his arms when they danced, or of riding with him mornings in the park—it was all gone, stolen greedily by their elders. They hadn't had one kiss—even little Lottie was astonished by that—and already their future had been taken out of their hands, as someone would remove a precious object from a baby's fingers.

And if I wanted anyone, she wept, it wasn't a soldier any more than a curate!

The Blues seemed safe enough, as part of the household cavalry, but how could you be sure of anything? She'd heard the talk, some of it from him, of young men pulling all possible strings to be transferred into a fighting regiment. “Keen as mustard, those chaps. All cock-a-hoop to go fight Boney under Wellesley, you know. Dev'lish fine soldier.”

Why hadn't she the courage to ask him then if
he
was keen as mustard and all cock-a-hoop to go?

I'm engaged to a soldier
, she thought,
engaged by his mother and my uncle. And he could be killed fighting Bonaparte, and they'll have made me a widow before I've been married a year. Everything will have been arranged for me, even that
.

She cried herself to sleep. Once she awoke and muttered drunkenly, “I want none of it, not even Nigel.” She fell asleep again, comforted by the knowledge of her gold sovereigns. She would need them when she was cast out for her ingratitude.

But when they had the garden to themselves the next morning, even though she knew the children were staring down from the nursery windows, the simple ecstasy came back; it wasn't soap-bubble fragile after all. They kissed in a dark, shady nook between sooty laurels and the wall. A far cry from Charlotte's moonlit glade with a nightingale, she told him, and they laughed against each other's lips, and kissed again. It was as if she had always known how; the difficulty was in making themselves stop. . . . And perhaps he did not want to go and fight; how could a man want to make love and war both at the same time? If England were attacked, that would be different, but this Wellesley didn't need Nigel to defend Portugal and drive the French out of Spain.

She didn't ask him; she only hoped. In the meantime they were given the leeway allowed an engaged couple, in between his duties and her visits to the dressmaker, milliner, mantua maker, and shoemaker.

“I have so many new clothes already,” Jennie protested to Aunt Higham. “You've already outfitted me completely. I need only a wedding gown.”

“Fiddlesticks. You'll be an officer's wife now, a matron, not a girl. You must be dressed for the position. Has he said where the wedding trip is to be?”

Could there conceivably be something they weren't managing? Rather than admit that the wedding trip hadn't been mentioned to her, she said, “He wants to surprise me.”

Aunt Higham snorted. “There'll be surprises enough without that one.”

She appreciated not having to prepare Jennie for the events of the marriage bed, though she pretended to be shocked when Jennie told her she knew. Then she dropped the pretense. “I dread telling my own girls,” she admitted. “I don't know what Charlotte thinks marriage
is
and where she came from. You and I were lucky to be country lasses.”

Privately Lady Geoffrey gave Jennie some of the jewelry given her by Nigel's father. Officially her gift to the couple was Jennie's portrait, to join the other Gilchrist brides in the gallery at Linnmore House. She wasn't up on the fashions in painters, she said, but Bamber Raleigh knew a friend who was anxious to secure commissions for his godson. Jennie and Nigel were not knowledgeable either, but they looked at the painter's work and liked it, so the portrait was begun.