The Scandal of the Season (34 page)

“A trifle, a trifle,” she murmured. “'Tis but a trifle.”

For a few more minutes, though they felt like an hour, she endured the sound of laughter. At last she saw the room turning back into little groups, embarking upon new stories told in lighthearted merriment. Could it be that they thought so little of what had just transpired? It was the greatest agony of Arabella's life. But they were forgetting her already. Lord Petre himself was talking to Clarissa Williamson again, and he did not meet her eye. Finally she thought that she could trust herself to stand. She got to her feet.

As she left the room, people looked around at her again. They smiled good-naturedly, but to her it seemed malevolent. She smiled faintly in return, the muscle of her lip twitching. For an instant she relaxed her face, but the tears rose in her eyes, and she knew that she must pull up the corners of her mouth again.

At last she was in the gallery. Martha and her friend Margaret Brownlow were beside her. “Are you unwell, Arabella?” Martha asked. Her face, close to Arabella's own, was full of feeling. Arabella reached behind herself for a seat, and Martha took her arm to help her to a low upholstered bench. She sat down on one side of her, and Margaret Brownlow sat on the other.

“There, Miss Fermor!” Margaret said. “He means to make you his wife. There can be no clearer proof. The taking of a lock of hair—'tis a prelude to a far greater step.”

Arabella was grateful to Margaret for understanding so little. But she said, feeling her face tremble as she did so, “He does not mean to make me his wife. Otherwise he would not have let the world know that I am his mistress.”

The girls were shocked, but she hardly cared. She would regret it later, but at this moment she was concerned only that they should remain beside her on the seat. She could not go back into that room.

Martha was, indeed, looking at Arabella in amazement. Until now, she had still not been sure that the rumors Teresa repeated from James Douglass and the girls in town were true. When she had seen them on the river she knew that her cousin must have spent more time alone with Lord Petre than she ought to have done; she had guessed that there had been some inconsequential intimacy, which she knew most women allowed. But the discovery that Arabella had actually been his mistress, when their engagement was not certain, stunned her. She did not censure Arabella for it, but she could not help but think that she had been a fool. Arabella had shown even less common sense than her sister, she reflected.

Even so, she did not feel that much harm could come of Lord Petre's antics today. The matter would be soon forgotten, and it would do no lasting damage to her cousin. Arabella felt his gesture as a cruel rejection, but Martha did not think that others would see it as such. They sat together for about fifteen minutes, Arabella hardly speaking. At last Martha suggested that she accompany her home.

Arabella agreed, but said, with something of her usual spirit, “I must go back into the room again. I cannot have them think that he has destroyed me.”

 

After Arabella walked out, Lady Castlecomber, who was still sitting with Lady Mary Pierrepont, remarked, “Were I Miss Fermor, I should ask for the lock back.”

“Ah—the sad truth about hair!” Lady Mary replied. “A curl that has been cut can never be restored.”

Across the room, Lady Salisbury took Henrietta confidentially by the hand and pulled her down to Arabella's empty sofa.

“If I were Miss Fermor, I should be wild,” she said. “What can the baron be thinking of? Everybody will know now that they are lovers. It is a blemish on her honor.”

Henrietta was hardly listening, looking anxiously instead at the front of her dress. “Take care! You nearly made me spill my tea,” she said. “I might have stained my new brocade.” Then she registered something of Lady Salisbury's last remark. “What did you say of Arabella's honor?”

“It will be blemished forever,” Lady Salisbury pronounced. She paused dramatically. Then in a loud voice she asked,
“Do you know what I have just heard, Henrietta?”

As she had intended, her voice was audible to the entire room. “Lord Petre does not mean to marry Arabella at all,” she exclaimed. “William Dicconson just told me—in confidence, of course—that the rumor about his ward is true.”

Arabella returned to the room just as Lady Salisbury's voice rang out:

“Lord Petre has been engaged these several weeks to Miss Catherine Walmesley.”

Lady Salisbury and Henrietta watched Arabella coolly as she came toward them, very pale. They made no move to accommodate her on their sofa.

“Oh—I did not know you were returned to us, Miss Fermor,” said Lady Salisbury with hauteur.

Arabella opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She stood quite still for several moments, and then tried to walk out of the room again. But as she began to move away she fainted.

Every man in the room rushed toward her, and the women crowded around behind. Henrietta and Lady Salisbury remained seated, watching disdainfully. Lord Petre reached her first. He dropped down onto his knees beside her and snatched her into his arms. The crowd gasped. He lifted her limp form into a chair, and one of the ladies pressed her fan into his hands. He waved it in front of her. Gently, he pushed the hair back from her face, and instinctively reached down to the ribbon of her stays, but checked himself. He glanced up, and saw that William Dicconson was watching him.

One person pressed in to offer snuff, another a glass of wine, then a cup of tea. But Arabella's eyes remained closed.

At last she began to come around, opening her eyes in a weak, fluttering motion. She became aware of a low murmur of whispering around her, and then a crush of people pressing in. She realized that she had fainted, and she gripped the edges of the sofa in alarm. Had she looked undignified when she fell? She wondered how had she been moved to her present position. She blinked her eyes open again, and saw Lord Petre kneeling beside her. She imagined what must have happened: he had lifted her up, insensible, and placed her on the sofa as though he were embracing her. But then Lady Salisbury's words reverberated in her head:
engaged these several weeks to Miss Catherine Walmesley.
She felt as though the shame would choke her. How dare he presume to touch her in such circumstances—how greatly did it exacerbate her humiliation.

She struggled to sit up, recoiling from Lord Petre's attempt to help her. “Please leave me, sir,” she said in a clear voice. “I have no desire to receive your attentions.”

Now Lord Petre looked pale; he tried to appear affronted, as though he had merely been attempting a courtesy. He rose to his feet, glancing around anxiously to see how many people had heard.

Martha knelt down to her cousin instead. “We are ready to take you home,” she whispered. “A boat is waiting at the river.” She took Arabella by the arm and began to lead her from the room.

Teresa, however, made no attempt to follow.

There are people who, no matter how dearly they have longed to witness the humiliation of a rival, will nonetheless wince if the spectacle really should come to pass. Teresa Blount was not among them. Arabella's distress did not move her. In the past, Arabella had seen
her
unhappy and uncertain, too, but such sights had not softened Arabella's temperament, nor disposed her to behave more generously toward her cousin. Teresa did not imagine that, had Arabella not existed, Lord Petre might have married her instead. Neither could she change Arabella's outcome by feeling compassion for her now. Both Arabella and Teresa understood that they belonged to a world that set no particular store by the virtues of fortitude, charity, and humility. Yet neither of them had ever been tempted to forsake it for another.

So, when Martha turned back to her sister and said quietly that they should accompany Arabella home by river, Teresa replied, “No need for both of us to go, is there? I am going to be presented to Her Majesty.”

Martha remonstrated with her by alluding to Arabella's misfortune. But Teresa shook her head fiercely and answered, “
I
do not intend to give up my last day's pleasure because Arabella did not get her own way with Lord Petre. Anybody might have told her that it would turn out thus. Attend to her if you wish, but you will not be thanked for it afterward.”

T
he next day Martha told Alexander what had happened.

“That is quite a tale, Patty,” he said when she came to the end of it. “What I wouldn't give to have seen Miss Fermor's face when the baron snatched away her hair. Nor your sister's when Miss Fermor fainted. What a mighty spectacle it must have been.”

“It was most unfeeling of Teresa not to accompany Cousin Bell home,” said Martha, wanting to make sure that Alexander had noted this part of the story.

“Perhaps not so unfeeling as you think, Patty,” he replied. “Arabella may not have wished Teresa to be there, either. She is not the sort of person who would want her rivals to see her languishing in the Cave of Spleen.”

“The Cave of Spleen?” echoed Martha. “How fanciful your speech is sometimes. Arabella
was
very dejected on the way home, it's true. If I did not know you better, I would begin to think you felt sorry for our cousin Bell.”

“I should be a hypocrite indeed were I to feel sympathy for her now,” Alexander replied. “But one does not wish to see Miss Fermor in her fallen condition—it is so much at odds with the character she shows the rest of the world.”

“I have never known you to defend Arabella before,” said Martha. She looked at Alexander suspiciously. “What can be the reason for this change of heart?”

Alexander looked back at her with a guarded expression. “No, no—no change of heart,” he said. “But there was something flawless about Miss Fermor's poise,” he continued. “She wore her beauty as a knight wears his armor. I had not thought it could be so easily dented.”

Martha laughed at this, feeling more like Teresa in her desire to make fun of him. “Angels, fallen women, knights at arms! Dear me, Alexander,” she said. “What a confusion of ideas this tale has roused in you. You need only add an epic battle to your narrative, and you could take on Homer, Spenser, and Milton in a single morning!”

There was a glint in Alexander's eye, and she wondered if he would reach for pen and paper then and there.

“Mind you give me proper credit,” she added with a teasing look. She was beginning to enjoy the new footing on which they stood. Once again she wondered what it was in Alexander's character that made people want to taunt him. Perhaps it was all ambitious people were the same, she considered. Or all successful people, she corrected herself, reflecting that however gratifying it might be to mock Alexander or Arabella, there was not much pleasure to be gained in poking fun at Teresa's unrealized hopes.

 

Two days later, Martha and Teresa left London to return to Mapledurham. A week after that Alexander departed likewise. His adieu to Jervas was delivered with a mixture of relief and regret, to which Jervas replied in his customary manner.

“I am not suited to melancholy, Pope—I do not like feeling sad. So I shall not say that I will miss you, but rather that I am looking forward to your return.”

Alexander pressed his friend's hand, and thanked him sincerely for all that he had done. “I shall return as soon as I have a poem to sell,” he added.

Jervas said good-bye with a cheerful wave.

 

After the events at Hampton Palace Arabella thought that she would never show her face in public again. It was not merely the fact that Lord Petre had abandoned her that was so shaming—the riskiness of their romance had always been a reminder that she may not attain her end. But if she had imagined their parting, it was as a private affair, engendered by his family's refusal to permit the match. She had pictured it as tearful and anguished on his part, regretful and dignified on hers. Of course, she had believed that he would defy his family's prohibition to marry her anyway.

When she thought about what had happened, she was certain that Lord Petre's family had demanded a public separation, wanting to be sure that the relationship would never be resumed. She wondered what leverage had been used to force him to agree. The motive must have been powerful. She was firmly of the belief that his passions in the past had been compelled by sentimental rather than moral feeling, which was inconsistent with the resolve and cold ruthlessness with which he had just acted. It had been out of character.

As the days passed, her feelings of mortification and betrayal gave way to an unexpected relief. She realized that everybody had known of their affair; if it had been broken off privately she would have become an object of pity, the pathetic dupe of a wealthy, charming nobleman. But as things stood, it was
he
who came off badly—making use of the protection offered by a public setting to perform so dishonorable an act. Had he married Arabella, he would have declared his real nobility, showing that he was rich enough to marry for love and confident enough to marry as magnificent a creature as Arabella Fermor. She hoped that society would view the marriage to Catherine Walmesley as a feeble retreat, a naked attempt to line his family's pockets through marriage to a woman whom nobody cared for.

If Arabella managed her situation well, she might become even more distinguished a prize. She decided to quit London for a season, go instead to Bath, and return to the capital the following year, by which time Lord Petre and Miss Walmesley would have been married long enough to have begun the unglamorous business of breeding.

She was invigorated by these reflections and her decision. But she couldn't help a bitter underlying disappointment that afflicted her private hours. The nature of this regret surprised her; she had told herself that she was pursuing Lord Petre because she wanted to be a baron's wife—and for the adventure of it, which thrilled her. She saw in hindsight that the affair had been exquisite because of more than his rank and fortune; her motivating ambition had been displaced by more complicated emotions. Their regard for each other had been reciprocal. There had been no need for her to indulge in flights of romantic fantasy when they were in fact united by understanding and likeness.

But as soon as she acknowledged her feelings of real attachment to him, she experienced a sudden release. She was amazed. How could it be that by admitting that she had come to love Lord Petre, she had been spared the lashings of remorse and longing that she had expected to overwhelm her? For the first time in her life, the workings of the human heart astounded her. In spite of these discoveries about herself, however, she did remain in one fundamental sense true to her former character. She would never discuss the episode, or her feelings about it, with any of her friends, who wondered at Arabella's unflaggingly cheerful disposition and the resumption of her determined social manner. Since they had no insight into the intricacies of her heart, they concluded that she had recovered so quickly because she was not capable of deep feeling.

She was relieved to leave town with her parents, who decided that their daughter's best chances for success in the next season depended upon her being removed immediately from the present one.

 

Lord Petre's emotions were of a different order. He missed Arabella even more now that their separation was complete, and he reflected how ironic it was that he, most enviable of creatures, should have to suffer the unfairness of losing his one true love. But he decided that he would not seek Arabella out after his marriage to Miss Walmesley, despite his earlier desire to keep her as his mistress. He told himself that it would be up to Arabella to make the first move, and that if she did not, he must submit to his ill fate.

In due course he would hear that Arabella had returned to society more beautiful and triumphant than ever, and the news would intensify his sense of heroic exile—he alone was doomed to unrequited love; Arabella's passion had obviously been superficial in its nature. If they were to be united again, he reasoned, it would be not as god and goddess but as mere mortals, and Lord Petre was rather afraid of the demands that mortality might make of him. As he sensed her drift away, magnificently self-possessed as ever, he vowed that he would always honor her as the great love of his life, even if he should one day find himself in the arms of another mistress.

In the meantime, however, Lord Petre and his family returned to Ingatestone to prepare for the wedding.

 

On the day that he left London, Alexander stopped at John Caryll's house at Ladyholt; he was to be collected there by his father's little carriage the next morning. After breakfast the following day, Caryll invited Alexander to walk in the gardens. As they passed through the well-tended borders, looking out onto the gentle summer prospect of grass and grazing cows, Alexander felt a tide of relief wash over him. He had been pent up in the city for too long. The view also reminded him of his poem
Windsor Forest,
of the verses that awaited his attention when he returned home, and of the very few weeks of summer that now remained. He had meant to send another poem to Tonson by the autumn. As he watched Caryll's slow, wandering step he felt impatience. He was stricken with the thought that he might get no more work done in the country than he had in the town.

At last Caryll began to speak. “I heard recently of a rather sorry affair,” he said. Alexander wondered if his host had brought him outside expressly to discuss it. He turned to him with an interested expression, but said nothing.

“The matter concerns two families who are very dear to me,” Caryll continued. “The Petres and the Fermors. Two of our most ancient lines. Devout, of course.”

Alexander was intrigued; he longed to hear Caryll's account of the events. He did not confess to having heard the tale already, wanting Caryll to tell his version of the story without interruption. Perhaps Caryll knew more about why things had turned out as they did. He was curious.

“The Petres and the Fermors have long been intimate,” Caryll began. “There was once some talk of a match between the eldest Miss Fermor and my ward, the baron. Her fortune is not large, and there are seven younger sisters still to be provided for, but I had always thought it an excellent notion to unite two such ancient houses. But lately a coolness has arisen between them.” Caryll knew that his young friend was looking to write a new poem, and he hoped that he might use Alexander to compose a public record of the events.

He paused, correcting himself. “It is more than coolness; there is anger. The Fermors are angry with the Petres, perhaps implacably so. And upon so trifling a basis! Lord Petre, in a moment of high animal spirits, stole a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair. The jest has been taken too seriously. It has caused an estrangement between the two families, though they have lived long in friendship before.”

“I am grieved to hear it, sir,” said Alexander. “As you observe, it appears a trivial thing to cause such dire offense.” He suspected still that Caryll knew more than he was letting on, and he was about to insist on hearing the details. But he stopped himself.

“Amorous causes too often give rise to mighty contest, I fear,” Caryll said. “But I believe that you may be instrumental in providing a cure, Pope.”

“I, sir? How so?” Alexander dreaded to hear what he would be asked to do.

“I desire you to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again.”

Alexander's heart leapt. It was a brilliant idea!

“A poem upon Miss Fermor's stolen lock,” he answered slowly, not wanting to appear too eager lest Caryll wonder why he liked the idea so much. “The subject is slight,” he added.

“But perhaps you will find that more might be made of it than meets the eye,” Caryll suggested, slyly. Alexander was grateful for this interjection and, once again, decided not to enquire too closely as to its cause. What did it matter if Caryll knew something more about Arabella Fermor's ravished hair? It would be he, not Caryll, who would set the episode in writing.

“I have affection for Miss Fermor and her family,” Caryll continued, “and I should like to see her happy again. Particularly when the offense is founded upon so insignificant an episode.”

“As you justly observe, sir, that is what lends the subject its peculiar charm,” Alexander answered.

As they walked back into the house, he thanked John Caryll for his suggestion, and promised to give the idea thought. But then he felt a pricking of compunction. Caryll lived far from the court and the town, thought Alexander; despite his bravado about traveling to London, he enjoyed a retired life, surrounded by a loving family and old friends. Caryll had probably made this proposal out of affectionate solicitude for people whom he knew to be devout Catholics and respectable landholders. Ought Alexander to let his friend know that there had been a more intimate involvement between the two parties than he realized? How differently might his friend feel if he knew all the details? But he decided against speaking out. He did not want Caryll to change his mind about his writing the poem, as he undoubtedly would if he was apprised of all the facts. He reasoned that Caryll need never learn the truth of the affair.

Caryll watched Alexander carefully. He had thought, for a moment, that Alexander was looking at him awry, almost as though he guessed the secret. But Alexander's face cleared, and Caryll concluded that he did not suspect. He decided against telling Alexander what had really happened. Poets, after all, were not to be trusted with the truth. He knew that Alexander longed for fame—he would be far too tempted to make the story into a scandal—which was exactly what Caryll hoped to avoid. He glanced at Alexander again, benevolently. His fears were needless; Alexander clearly suspected nothing.