Darcy & Elizabeth (20 page)

Wickham's Waterloo

Countess Césarine Thierry was an extraordinary woman. Yet, had she only her looks to promote herself, she would have been pronounced quite unexceptional. It was the second look (which, invariably, they all took) that stole every man's breath.

Her hair was an unusual reddish-gold, but although her figure was voluptuous, it was not uniquely so. Her face was lovely—white powder emphasizing her ivory complexion—yet her expression was girlish. Her allure lay in her air. She had a kittenish quality that, when coupled with an earthy little moue of a sulk, made bored men laugh and silly men mute. The story circling about that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Russian prince (and whispers that the flare of her nostrils suggested an unrivalled libido) had elevated her from the shady outskirts and onto the heady heights of Paris's demimonde. That she leapt from milliner's helper to courtesan was not the true astonishment. Nor did that wonder lie in the fact that she arrived in Paris not from St. Petersburg at all. Her exquisite accent belied an English birth.

It was in a little village bordering Donkey's Fen in Cambridgeshire that little Frances was born to Henry and Clotilde Gapp. Having given birth after losing all hope of ever doing so, Mrs. Gapp was nervous of having a toddler about her house, what with boiling pots and china cups. Therefore, it fell to her husband to see to little Frances. Henry Gapp was happy to do so, for he doted on his only child. He had once been a scholarship student for several terms at Cambridge before reduced circumstances denied him his education. Still, he came away very nearly proficient in Greek and Latin and took a situation in the village as schoolmaster. He did what he could to support his family by also serving as tutor to rusticated undergraduates desperate to return to university. Although they subsisted upon the fringes of gentility, Mr. Gapp was a good husband and loving father.

Fanny was a pretty little girl and bright enough to learn well at her father's knee. Mr. Gapp kept her near whilst he tutored, for he was disposed to believe that his daughter being thrown into the company of gentlemen of education would improve her chances for a good match. Yet, when one particular young gentleman took notice of the blossoming Fanny, favouring her with those compliments and gifts that were wildly rich only in sentiment, Mr. Gapp was duly suspicious. The young man seemed earnest and eventually his openness and pleasing address won over Mr. Gapp's reservations. Even had he not such an expression of goodness on his countenance, his finely tailored coat and faultless boots were ample proof that he was, indeed, a gentleman. Mr. Gapp chose not to stand in the way of true love.

It was with profound displeasure that Mr. Gapp learnt that his daughter's honour had been wilfully surrendered not to a gentleman at all, but a cad (he was naïve enough to suppose that the two could not be one and the same). Believing a match was at hand, Mr. Gapp, blinded by the possibility of a marriage that was much in his daughter's favour, had not fulfilled the office of watchful father. Hence, he found himself in the precise position of countless outraged fathers before him. Coughing in the dust left by the fleet feet of a well-seasoned absconder, he looked upon the swelling belly of a newly impregnated daughter.

With hat in hand and trust in his fellow man in tatters, off went Mr. Gapp to the Cambridge provost, to see to it that the culprit was found and made to do right by poor Fanny.

“He's a student here, he is,” said Mr. Gapp, demanding retribution. “I have his name. It's Darcy. Mr. Darcy is his name. If he can't be made to marry my daughter, his family can pay. I know they can. They're people of property. I demand satisfaction!”

Righteous indignation had coloured Mr. Gapp's face a frightening shade of red, the intensity of which was not mitigated when he was told that there was but one Mr. Darcy and he had graduated in the previous term.

“I regret to inform you, sir,” said the provost, “it would have been impossible for him to be guilty of the heinous act brought here before us. Mr. Darcy is now, and has since Michaelmas, been observing the ruins of Rome and Greece.”

This was not the first (nor would it be the last) incident of this nature attributed to a Cambridge undergraduate. Hence, the provost was in no manner astonished at the possibility that one of their students might be guilty of dishonourable conduct. More often than not, the accusation was credible and the culprit was brought either to justice or the altar. Upon this occasion, that was not to be.

“But…but…” stuttered poor Mr. Gapp. “He gave his family name as Darcy, his Christian name, Fitzwilliam. I am not mistaken. He sat in my parlour…”

The provost shook his head sympathetically, but with finality, “It is of no use, sir. I fear you and your daughter have been duped.”

Mr. Gapp was inclined to think of a more fitting verb, but chose not to employ it.

The provost, however, had good reason to believe that he knew the identity of Fanny Gapp's defiler, for the proctors were often in pursuit in the gambling dens and public houses surrounding the college a certain undergraduate. Although he professed to be meant for the church, his attendance had been highlighted by plucked exams, gatings, and rustications. All these offences led to his eventual expulsion. Had he not been under the particular protection of the most eminent family in Derbyshire, he would have been sent down upon his first malfeasance. Until Mr. Gapp's visit, his recent doings had been unknown to the provost. But as that was only a guess and George Wickham was long gone from their institution, he thought it pointless to bring up his name.

However, in the absence of anyone else to blame, Mr. Gapp chose to blame Fanny. Hence, he banished his cherished daughter to a convent in Boulogne to live out her term, praying earnestly for her redemption and eventual return.

When the nuns took Fanny's newborn from her arms, they shushed her tears, telling her that her daughter would have a convent upbringing.

“Your baby will not suffer from your disgrace,” the mother superior told her.

As Fanny lay recuperating on the narrow cot in her barren little room, she stared up at a bronze crucifix over her head. It was the single adornment on the wall and, other than her dispiritingly hollow belly, all she had to ponder. She had always blamed her father's interference for her lover's desertion—even when told that she was seduced under another man's name. Like the star-crossed girl she was, she tenaciously held on to the hope that she, her daughter, and her lover would one day be united. She held on to that hope until one day she did not.

In the dark days that surrounded what could only be called a revelation, it was not redemption that excited Fanny's esteem. Nor was it the thought of returning to little Donkey's Fen as a fallen women. Through the agency of that lost lover, she had acquired a taste for wine and the delights of the boudoir. Moreover, in living in enforced poverty in a French convent, she began to believe that she liked money above all else and soon did not scruple how she came to have it.

Whilst still at home, she had spent long hours dreaming of London and eloping there with her lover. Unfortunately, once dispatched to Boulogne, a sizeable body of water lay between her and escape to London. The fare for a channel crossing was quite beyond her means, in that she had none whatsoever. However, the governing principle of Fanny's nature was nothing if not autonomy and her spirit was quite indomitable. Hence, she took a look at the lay of the situation and made a judicious decision. Early one morn (and bearing a determinedly innocent expression) she set out on the pretext of herding a bit of livestock to market. Allowing neither muddy road nor stricken conscience to impede her, she walked the way from thence and on to Paris in her bare feet, prodding a trio of geese before her with a stick.

Consequently, hers was not the typical tale of violation and ill-use that drove many a young woman from the countryside into the arms of disgrace as a
fille de joie
, but it certainly was a fair approximation. Fanny had come there with the full knowledge that Paris was where a girl without means could support herself, if not with scrupulosity, at least with style. (It remained unquestioned whether it was actually cruelty that ultimately compromised Frances Gapp, or ambition.) The sale of the geese bought her a pair of slippers, surreptitious diligence of netting purses and feathering hats in her sparse convent room accoutred her to win a position as a milliner's helper. Hovering about the pretty shop, she was soon espied by the husband of a customer who had quickly tired of the office of holder of the purse. When it was evident that she had procured her first protector, she cast out her past compleatly by eschewing the name (however prophetic) of Fanny Gapp. She assumed a
nom de guerre
more fitting the courtesan she meant to become—evermore she was known as Césarine Thierry.

She left Fanny Gapp and all her girlish longing behind her—save one paradoxical desire. As had Fanny, Césarine hoped to see her truant lover just once more. When she gave it any thought, she shook her head at her own capriciousness. It was a compleat whimsy, she knew—perhaps attributable to the propensity for always recollecting to whom one had surrendered one's virtue. Either that or an obsessive desire for retribution. In the end, she decided to forgo that vengeance. Rather, it was a life lesson that she would fully embrace. For how could she be angry at a man for loving himself more than her?

She would never again allow a man have sway over her heart.

***

One unfamiliar with the tenets of courtesan society might have believed all disappointment and vexation past. But inherent to success in a realm such as this was a rude predicament. Existing in this exclusive circle demanded not one, but a succession of lovers, each one surpassing the last in wealth. A courtesan who had reached the apogee of her calling was not judged only on the price her time could command, but discretion in the choice of lovers that she could exercise. In attracting those lovers, a display of ostentatious finery was essential—one must feign wealth if one wanted to obtain it.

To look the part was only half the struggle. These potential protectors were lured by way of grand soirées beholding vaunted guests. Moreover, one must have elaborate rooms with a fashionable address in which to hold them. The grander the soirées, the more vaunted the guests, the more lucrative the potential quarry, the more money she acquired. And the more money she made, the more her expenses grew. It fell to her to spend rather than save, for the conventions of the age demanded an extravagant peacock to dress a lover's arm, not a scarlet woman secreted away in a garret. It was an altogether voracious lifestyle, devouring men and their fortunes with rapidity.

So rapacious were these denizens, respectable mothers feared that these
lionnes
—these queens of beasts—would devour their guileless sons. This dread generated an equally lucrative avenue of revenue for a courtesan—that of gentle, but tenacious, extortion. Baroness, countess, and duchess alike would pay handsomely for a courtesan to leave their son's heart and his bank account in peace. (Visiting any
putain
held the substantial threat of a disease that offered not only madness and early death, but the sloughing off of one's virile member—if that was not a deterrent to amour for young men, maternal exhortations were all but useless.) Rumours abounded about lovers Césarine Thierry had jilted and aristocrats she had ruined. Occasionally these rumours were spread and slightly embellished by Césarine herself (for one must present oneself as a temptress if one is to tempt). If her reputation was wicked enough, the mothers of endangered sons were quite happy to be extorted.

Despite such embroidery, Césarine was undeniably gifted in the art of beguiling these young pigeons—er, lords. She took great care to procure them fresh from the nest, with only delicate pinfeathers of sagacity clinging to their flesh—ready for the plucking. She lavished them with exotic pleasure until, compleatly picked clean, they fell to earth in a bewildered heap. Ignoring their heartbroken pleas, she quickly turned to her next prey.

Although Césarine told her lovers variously that she had aspired to become an actress, a singer, or, upon occasion (most fancifully), a nun; truth be told, she had none of these ambitions. She aspired only to be rich. One of her earliest protectors was Count Francesco de Nuncio, a landed gentleman of Portugal who caught her eye by dangling an exceedingly enticing jewelled necklace into her cleavage. The count had neither a nervous mother nor a nose for duplicity, hence Césarine convinced him to accept her hand in marriage. As she was no more inclined to sleep with him than he was to settle her ever-mounting gambling debts, their alliance deteriorated with undue rapidity. Other than a new taste for exquisite jewels, her lone acquisition from this union was the title that she would carry the rest of her days and a determination to allow no one to learn that Count de Nuncio's title was as fictitious as her Russian birth.

Vivacious and restless, yet undeniably mercenary, La Comptesse Césarine de Thierry, as she called herself thereafter, settled into a life cushioned by considerable pelf, spending her afternoons dispatching
billets-doux
to her lovers and her evenings in her box at the theatre surveying the crowd for her next armigerous conquest. In her evening soirées, she plumped her guest list with poets, painters, and princes and compleatly disregarded the anarchy that was taking place on the very street on which she resided. She feigned great disregard of it all, but it was a hard-fought battle to appear so insouciant when one of her dearest friends was literally dragged from the bed of her lover and with him to La Force prison. (She had heard that Juliette had escaped the guillotine through bizarre circumstances, but the story was so unlikely and was not told with enough certainty for her to hold it compleatly credible.) She most certainly did
not
want to lose her head, but returning to England was not a temptation. She no longer considered herself one of that race. Yet that someone she knew had stood in a tumbrel was far too close a connection for her to do otherwise than reinforce her dedication to her own amusement.