A Civil Contract (33 page)

‘
Adam!
’ she gasped.

He burst out laughing. ‘Never did I know a fish that would rise to the fly more readily than you, Jenny! Or see anything more ludicrous than your change of countenance! – No, you goose, I gave him my blessing, and some sage advice.
He
was bent on posting off immediately to Bath – for whatever may be your opinion, my dear, he and I are agreed that Mama’s consent as well as mine must be obtained. But I know Mama a great deal better than Brough does, and I’m persuaded nothing could be more fatal than for him to present himself to her hard on the heels of the baffled Conquest. Mama must be given time to recover from her disappointment. So we have decided that nothing shall be disclosed to her until next month, when she means to spend a night with my aunt, before coming down to be with Charlotte. According to my aunt, she will by then have resigned herself to the melancholy prospect of seeing Lydia dwindle into a withered spinster, and so may be thankful to entertain Brough’s proposal.’

‘Your aunt knows then, and likes it? But it is very hard that Brough shouldn’t be able to speak to Lydia yet!’

‘My dear Jenny, he spoke to her before ever I arrived in town!’ Adam said, amused.

‘Oh, I’m glad! And she?’

‘Well, she told me that she was
rapturously
happy, and I’d no difficulty in believing her.’

‘I wish I might see her! Well, at all events, that settles it!’

‘Settles what?’

‘We must open Lynton House,’ said Jenny decidedly.

‘Good God, why?’

‘For the party. And don’t say
what
party, because you know very well there’s always a party held in honour of an engagement, and that’s one thing Lady Nassington shall
not
do!’

‘But –’

‘And don’t say
but
either!’ interrupted Jenny, getting up to carry her sleeping son back to the nursery. ‘The instant I know that your mama has given her consent, I’ll set about hiring servants. Though I think I’ll take Dunster and Mrs Dawes with me, as well as Scholes, because they’ve got to know my ways, and you may depend upon it they’d be glad to go. And it’s not a bit of use arguing, my lord, for my mind’s made up, and if you don’t know what’s due to your sister I do!’

These disruptive plans were never put into execution. Lydia had a plan of her own, which was laid before Jenny, partly in a characteristic letter from Lydia herself, and partly by the Dowager, who paused at Fontley on her way to Membury Place, where she was going to preside over the entry into the world of a second grandchild.

She had given her consent to Lydia’s marriage, but she was still feeling a trifle dazed. Her mind was not elastic, and since she had first made Brough’s acquaintance when he had been an overgrown schoolboy, who frequently came to stay at Fontley, clattering at breakneck speed up and down the stairs, bringing a great deal of mud into the house, and engaging with Adam in a number of exploits which even now she shuddered to remember, she had never looked upon him as anything other than one of Adam’s friends from Harrow. Jenny had supposed that his visits to Bath must have enlightened her; but the Dowager had accepted without question the excuse he had offered. She had thought it very proper in him to have called in Camden Place, and very good-natured to have taken Lydia out for drives, and to have stood up with her in the Assembly Rooms. It had never so much as crossed her mind that he was extremely particular in his attentions. When he and Adam had been schoolboys Lydia had not emerged from the nursery, and if she had thought about it at all the Dowager would have concluded that Brough regarded Lydia merely as his friend’s little sister, to whom it behoved him to be kind.

It had therefore come as a shock to her when Brough had visited her at Nassington House to beg her permission to pay his addresses to Lydia. She told Adam that although the proposed marriage was not what she would have chosen for dear Lydia Brough had expressed himself so beautifully, and with such delicate consideration, that she had allowed herself to be won over.

(
Brough doing the thing in style
, thought Adam appreciatively.)

In fact, Lady Nassington had been very nearly right. If the Dowager did not go so far as to visualize her strong-minded daughter as an ageing spinster, it seemed more than likely to her that a girl who could wantonly reject so eligible a suitor as Sir Torquil Tregony would be perfectly capable of falling in love with a penniless soldier, or even of eloping with an adventurer. Regarded in this light, Brough took on the attributes of a God-send. The match was not a brilliant one, as Julia Oversley’s had been; Brough’s fortune did not bear comparison with Sir Torquil Tregony’s; but, on the other hand, Brough was heir to an Earldom, and to the Dowager, who had been obliged to see her lovely elder daughter thrown away on an undistinguished country squire, and her only surviving son married to a female with no pretensions whatsoever to gentility, this circumstance brought more satisfaction than she would ever, in happier days, have believed possible. It was pleasant, too, to reflect that
one
of her children was contracting an alliance which would meet with the approval of all her friends.

So it was in an unusually mellow frame of mind that she arrived at Fontley. Her first preoccupation was with her grand-son, but after she had hung over him adoringly, marvelled at his growth, and discovered that he was even more like his Uncle Stephen than she had previously thought, she was ready to talk about Lydia’s engagement, and to discuss with Adam and Jenny Lydia’s plan for the inevitable party.

Lydia wanted it to be held at Fontley. At first glance this did not seem to be a very feasible scheme, but closer inspection showed that it was really the most sensible one that could have been devised. Lydia had no wish for a large gathering of relations, friends, and mere acquaintances: she would prefer an informal affair, at which only her own and Brough’s immediate relations would be present; and as it was naturally impossible for Charlotte to come up to London, or for Mama to leave Charlotte at such a moment, the obvious place for the party was Fontley. Furthermore, Fontley was much nearer than London to Lord Adversane’s seat, so that as the Adversanes had not come to town this year it would be more convenient for them too. They would have to stay the night, of course, but Lydia hoped Jenny would not object to this. Brough’s sister ought to be invited, but only for civility’s sake: she lived in Cornwall, and certainly would not come; and his brother was with his Regiment, in Belgium. The only other guests Lydia wished to be invited were the Rockhills.

‘
…at least, I don’t precisely wish it
,’ she wrote, in a private letter to Jenny, ‘
but I know Brough does, tho’ he does not press it. The thing is that he is much attached to Rockhill, who has always been particularly kind to him, which makes it awkward and slighting not to invite him. I daresay they will refuse, on account of the distance from town, but for my part I do not think it signifies if they do not, because when Adam accompanied my aunt and me to the Bickertons’ party they were present, and Julia in high bloom, but Adam did not appear at all conscious, but was perfectly composed, and greeted her in the most natural way…
’

Bless the child, did she expect him to betray himself at a rout-party?
Jenny thought, wryly smiling, as she put the letter up, and turned her attention to what the Dowager was saying to Adam.

She was explaining to him, at tedious length, the various circumstances which made June 21st the only really suitable date. The most cogent of these was that both Brough and Lydia had engagements in London during the preceding week, and that to postpone the date beyond the 21st would be to run the risk of coinciding with Charlotte’s confinement; and the least that the 21st would be a Wednesday.

‘Jenny, are you sure you like this scheme?’ Adam asked, when they were alone.

‘Yes, that I do!’ she replied. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes! As long as it won’t put you to a great deal of trouble.’

‘It won’t put me to any trouble at all. But if you had rather –’

‘No, there must be a party, of course – or, at any rate, you all think so!’

‘Well, it’s natural we should, but if you don’t wish it –’

‘My dear, you are perfectly right, and I do wish it!’

He spoke impatiently, and she said no more, believing that his reluctance sprang from the knowledge that the Rockhills were to be invited. He was not thinking of Julia, although he did not want her to come to Fontley, and had been dismayed when he had heard that she might. He was reluctant because he thought no time could have been more ill-chosen for festivity than the present. He did not say so; his brief sojourn in London had made him realize that between the soldier and the civilian there was a gulf too wide to be bridged. It had been no hardship to cut his visit short. The season was in full swing; the looming struggle across the Channel seemed to be of no more importance to the ton than a threatened scandal, and was less discussed. To a man who had spent nearly all his adult life in hard campaigning it was incomprehensible that people should care so little that they could go on dancing, flirting, and planning entertainments to eclipse those given by their social rivals when the fate of Europe was in the balance. But England had been at war for twenty-two years, and the English had grown accustomed to this state, accepting it in much the same spirit as they accepted a London fog, or a wet summer. In political circles and in the City a different and more serious point of view might be taken, but amongst the vast majority of the population only such families as had a son or a brother in the Army regarded the renewal of hostilities as anything more than an inevitable and foreseeable bore. Except that Napoleon had not abdicated in March of 1802, it was the Peace of Amiens all over again. It was disagreeable, because taxes would remain high, and one would once more be unable to enjoy foreign travel; but it was not disastrous, because whatever he might do on the Continent Napoleon would not overrun Great Britain. Life would go on, in fact, just as it had for as long as most people could remember.

To Adam, who, until so recently, had had no other real object than to defeat Napoleon’s troops, such apathy was as nauseating as it was extraordinary. It increased his secret longing to be back with his Regiment tenfold; it drove him out of London, thinking that although he could not be where his heart was at least he need not remain amongst people who babbled about picnics and balls, or prosed comfortably and ignorantly in the clubs about the strength of the forces under Wellington’s command.

No veteran of the Peninsula could visualize without an extreme effort of imagination the possibility of the defeat of an Army under that command; but no one with the smallest military understanding could look upon the force now assembled in Belgium with satisfaction. People talked as if it was the same Army that had fought its way from Lisbon to Toulouse, but it was very far from being that Army. The hard core was composed of seasoned Regiments, but its size, so impressive to the uninstructed, had been swelled by raw battalions, and by dubious foreign troops. Adam had heard pompous and well-fed gentlemen lecturing with what appeared to him to be crass stupidity any who could be persuaded to listen on the strategy and the tactics the Duke would employ in the campaign. To hear them prating about the Dutch-Belgian Army was more than Adam could stomach. They seemed to believe that the Dutch-Belgians would be as valuable as the Portuguese Caçadores, whom Marshal Beresford had trained: they were more likely to be as unreliable as the Spaniards, he thought, remembering how often those volatile, damnably-officered troops had proved a dangerous embarrassment during the war in the Peninsula. He kept his tongue between his teeth, because to spread despondency was a military crime. Heaven knew, too, that there were too many croakers already, shaking their gloomy heads, saying that they had always foreseen how it would be, that it was folly to think Napoleon could ever be beaten. The most woodheaded optimist was preferable to these gentry; so, even, were the fashionables, preoccupied with their balls, their scandals, the newest style of tying a neckcloth, the chances of some pugilist in a forthcoming match. It was unreasonable to be so much irritated by the pleasure-seekers: there was nothing for them to do, after all, but to occupy themselves with their usual pursuits. It was even unreasonable to look with bitter contempt upon the rabid Whigs, who had been declaring for years that Wellington’s victories had been grossly exaggerated, that he was nothing but a Sepoy General, and who were now so thankful to know that he was in command: Adam knew that he ought rather to rejoice in their conversion. He could not; and the only thing to do was to remove himself from their vicinity. He would never, perhaps, feel himself a civilian, but he was one, and had as little to do in the present military crisis as the most frivolous member of the ton. So he had gone home to Fontley, where there was so much to do that his inward fret was sensibly allayed. He still wished that he were with his Regiment, but if the work into which he had thrown himself was not military it was at least of enormous importance – whatever might be Mr Chawleigh’s opinion of it.

Having agreed to the proposed betrothal party, he thought no more about it. Jenny never bored him with her housewifely schemes, so it was only when he saw his mother that the party was brought to his mind; and since Membury was ten miles distant from Fontley his meetings with the Dowager were infrequent. Nor did Jenny vex him by talking arrant nonsense about the military situation. Lambert did so, and Charlotte, too, acting as Lambert’s echo, but he met the Rydes as seldom as he met his mother; and, in any event, Lambert (thanks to Jenny) had become a mere bobbing-block.

Jenny rarely talked about the war at all, but when she did mention it she showed, he thought, a great deal of good sense. It did not occur to him that Jenny, like Charlotte, was her husband’s echo.

Out of hearing of all the rumours that flew about London, he regained cheerfulness and confidence. One or two of his old friends wrote from Belgium now and then: the news was growing better. Some of the Peninsular Regiments which had been recalled from America had arrived, and in capital trim; the dauntingly heterogeneous Army had been welded into a workmanlike whole (trust old Hookey!); Blücher’s Prussians were present in force, and were credibly reported to be well-disciplined soldiers. The Allied Army, in fact, was now ready to receive Napoleon at any date convenient to him. ‘
We are all anxious to discover what costume he means to wear for the occasion,
’ wrote one of Adam’s correspondents, in sardonic allusion to the postponed ceremony at the Champ de Mars, at which the Emperor, as far as could be gathered from the accounts published in the newspapers, had appeared in the vaguely historical raiment suitable for a Covent Garden masquerade.

Meanwhile, Jenny went quietly about the preparations for her first house-party, enthusiastically assisted by Mrs Dawes, who perceived in this small beginning the promise of a return to Fontley’s former state.

It came as no surprise to Jenny that the Rockhills accepted the invitation. She thought that for some reason beyond the grasp of her own simplicity Julia could not keep away from Fontley and Adam; and she had no reason to suppose that Rockhill would put any bar in her way. So far as she understood Rockhill, he believed that Julia’s love for Adam was a romantic fancy merely, which thrived on imagination, and would dwindle in the face of reality. Jenny hoped he might be right, but resented the strain which this peculiar cure imposed on Adam.

However, it could have been worse. She had felt herself obliged to invite them to come to Fontley on the day before her dinner-party, since it would take them some nine hours or more to reach it, but Julia wrote, very prettily, to decline this: she was bringing her next sister, Susan, to join the nursery-party at Beckenhurst, to be cosseted back to health by old Nurse, after an attack of influenza which had left her with an obstinate cough; and she and Rockhill would spend the night there, driving on to Fontley on the following day.

Brough brought Lydia down on the 17th, a Saturday. There was no need to ask Lydia if she was happy: she was radiant. Mrs Dawes, much moved, said: ‘Oh, my lady, it quite brings the tears to one’s eyes, the way they look at each other, Miss Lydia and his lordship!’