Joan Wolf (15 page)

Julianne felt quite clearheaded and determined in the bright morning sun. She did not love Lord Rutherford, that she admitted to herself quite coolly. But she was fond of him and once she was married to him and had had his children, that fondness would grow and strengthen. She would never feel for him what she felt for John Champernoun, she admitted that also. But what she felt for John was dangerous and untrustworthy. She could be content with William. She would build a family with him, would be a good wife to him. His wishes would be her wishes, his ways her ways, his home her home. He loved her and she was grateful to him for that. She would always be able to rely on him. They would have a good marriage.

Julianne was helped considerably in her campaign to stay out of John’s way by a message that came to him at Minton in the early afternoon. His aunt, Lady Avanley, had arrived at Lansdowne unexpectedly. John was forced to thank the Mintons for their hospitality and leave for his own home in order to entertain his aunt. Upon his departure both Julianne and Lord Rutherford heaved sighs of relief.

The next few days passed with unexceptional regularity. The play was going well. The preparations for the water party that Lady Minton was giving for the benefit of her tenants and the local tradesmen were going well. Lady Minton’s program called for the play to be given on Friday evening for the enjoyment of their neighbors and such friends as were staying at Minton. The following day, Saturday, would be the dinner and ball in honor of Julianne and William. And the day after that, Sunday, would be the water party.

As Friday drew nearer, George drove his cast with increasing concentration. The scenery had been painted, the costumes were ready, and the actors all knew their lines, but he insisted on rehearsals. Most of the cast did not mind at all; they enjoyed the excitement of it. Julianne did not like it, but she went along with the rest of the party and showed herself agreeable to whatever George suggested.

A week before, Lord Rutherford would never have questioned her behavior, but now he found himself wondering. He wondered what it was she was really thinking behind that impenetrable patience of hers. He wondered why, if she was really as happy as she appeared, there were two faint half circles of strain under her eyes. He was developing the uncomfortable conviction that he did not know Julianne at all.

No one else appeared to notice anything amiss with either Lord Rutherford or his fiancée. Lord Denham was felt to be a loss to their party, but Lady Minton announced that he and his aunt would be returning for the play and the succeeding festivities. She had said this at tea one afternoon, and William looked quickly at Julianne to gauge her reaction. But he could read nothing in her profile, nothing in the hands so prettily and steadily stirring her tea. In a minute she had turned to him with a smile and a new topic of conversation.

As it turned out, they saw John Champernoun before the play on Friday. He rode over Thursday morning and invited Lord and Lady Minton along with whoever else wished to come to Lansdowne for the afternoon—to meet his aunt and see the house and grounds.  Lord Minton was interested in seeing the estate and in talking to John about improvements; he had found his former neighbor’s impecunious state very distressing. As he rather assumed he would be of the same mind, Lord Rutherford found that he was expected to go as well. And Julianne was included as a matter of course.

So it was on a lovely August afternoon that Lord and Lady Minton with their son and future daughter-in-law as well as the dowager duchess drove over to visit the ancient home of the Champernoun family, Lansdowne.

Chapter Nineteen

Some fowls there be that have so perfect sight,

Again the sun their eyes for to defend

—Sir Thomas Wyatt

Lansdowne was a castle with a moat. Unlike so many of the great houses of the English nobility, it had not been renovated in the eighteenth century. The “new” wing dated from the time of Charles II, when the Champernouns, who had been faithfully Royalist, had known a brief moment of prosperity. It was perhaps more beautiful for being so relatively untouched, although the interior was not notably comfortable.

The grounds, however, were beautiful. Whatever money the previous earl had been able to put his hands on he had put into the part of the estate that showed. There were miles upon miles of lovely walks, which wandered in and out of magnificent old trees, informal gardens, a rose garden, a sunken garden, and a lake. The furniture in the house might be faded and sparse, the wall hangings crumbling, the rugs in decay, but the grounds belonging to the house had been kept up. John informed Lord Minton that he could not say the same thing about the farms, a fact of which Lord Minton was already well aware.

Lady Avanley took Lady Minton, Julianne, and the dowager duchess in charge while Lord Minton and William went off for a while with their host. Julianne found herself liking John’s aunt very much. She was brisk and efficient and after short tour of the gardens she took the two older women back into the house for tea. Julianne was given permission to wander about by herself for a little, which she was very happy to do. After her life in Africa she had never thought she would desire to be alone again, but she was finding the constant crowd of people at Minton to be rather trying. On a few occasions she had managed to slip off by herself, but that was not as easy to do as one might have imagined. One had to do it on the quiet; one could not simply announce that one was going for a walk alone. It appeared that English people thought there was something disgraceful about a young girl who desired solitude. Girls in England apparently traveled only in packs.

Julianne enjoyed her solitary walk very much. The old trees and walks, the lovely gardens—all exemplified to her mind the best of England. She was so absorbed in her surroundings that the pricks of uneasiness that had been disturbing her serenity of late quite faded. She sat down on the turf steps that led down to a beautiful rose garden and feasted her eyes. There was no one to disturb her,  no one with whom she must make polite conversation. She folded her arms around her knees. She was happy.

An hour later John had returned to the house with his two male guests, and still there was no sign of Julianne. The dowager duchess was very perturbed, as were the Mintons. John said easily, “If I know Julianne, she is out communing with the flora and fauna. She’ll come back when the trance is broken.” He wanted to serve the light meal that had been prepared for his guests, but Lord Rutherford refused to eat. He would go look for his fiancée, he announced.

As he walked purposefully off through the garden. Lady Avanley said to John in a low voice, “You don’t seem very concerned. After all, she is alone.”

There was a distinctly saturnine look on his face. “I know. Poor girl, she gets precious few opportunities.”

Half an hour later Julianne and Lord Rutherford returned. She was full of apologies for losing track of time. “But what were you doing, Julianne?” her grandmother asked crossly. “You have made Lady Avanley put back her meal and worried all of us half to death.”

“I was looking at the gardens,” Julianne said simply. “There was no reason for everyone to be worried. And you should not have waited for me to eat.”

“Not
everyone
was worried,” put in Lord Rutherford evenly. “Lord Denham desired us to eat, but of course I could not think of such a thing.”

Julianne’s reaction was not what he had hoped for.

“Good heavens, William, what on earth could have happened to me?” She looked distinctly annoyed. “You should have done as Lord Denham suggested and eaten.”

William’s lips tightened. For the first time since he had known him, John saw the young man angry. “There are all sorts of unsavory characters hanging about since the end of the war,” he snapped. “Demobilized soldiers and sailors who have nothing to do but get into mischief.”

“Are they the same ‘poor wretches’ you and your radical friends are so anxious to assist?” she asked with deadly sweetness.

“Well, we are glad to see you safely returned, Miss Wells,” put in Lady Avanley briskly and tactfully. “And I can assure you. Lord Rutherford, that there are no unsavory characters wandering about the Lansdowne gardens. Now, if we might go into the dining room?”

As he walked past her to take in the dowager duchess, John, murmured for Julianne’s ear alone, “I pity the poor unsavory character who runs into you.”

She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

Lord Rutherford was extremely annoyed with his fiancée. He did not like her penchant for wandering off alone. And to look at the gardens! They were simply gardens, not unlike the gardens at Minton. He did not understand her.

She tried to explain. “It is simply that I love nature, William. It comes from spending so many years in Africa, I suppose. Among humans there was so much ugliness, with the slave trade and all, I mean, and nature provided an escape. It’s— it’s like my religion, you understand.”

“No, I do not understand.” He was sounding very annoyed now. “I can perfectly understand your appreciating the beauties of nature; that is something every civilized person must do. What I cannot understand is how you could disappear for two and a half hours and not realize that we would be worried about you. Two and a half hours! To look at a garden! By yourself!”

He could not understand and, given his background, it was not reasonable to expect that he should. Lord Rutherford was a member of the Whig aristocracy, perhaps the most relentlessly social society ever seen in England. Whigs liked politics, which for them consisted for the most part of personalities. They gave balls, went to clubs, played cards, got up private theatricals. They had love affairs. They admired what was elegant and magnificent and easy to understand.

 Julianne was not easy to understand. When William spoke of it being “civilized” to enjoy the beauty of a garden, he did not mean the all-absorbing transcendence that she apparently felt. He meant “enjoy”—to look at it and see that it was pretty, and that was all. He was, to the very core of his being, a ‘civilized’ man. From childhood he had been accustomed to move in a complex society, and the social arts were to him the essence of what civilization was all about. It was most certainly not civilized to spend two and a half solitary hours staring at a garden when you were a guest in someone else’s home and they were holding up dinner for you.

If he was blowing this incident all out of proportion, undoubtedly it was because it served as an excuse for him to voice the apprehensions he had been having all week about certain aspects of his fiancée’s character.

Julianne was perturbed by his reaction. She did not expect him to share her feelings, but she did expect him to make an effort to understand. The thought crossed her mind, and not for the first time, that though William was indeed very nice he was also utterly unimaginative.

They arrived back at Minton to be surrounded by a bustle of activity: The showing for the servants of
She
Stoops to
Conquer
was to be given in the evening. Julianne tried valiantly to join in the general enthusiasm, but in her heart she was beginning to feel like some wild, caught creature in a vast and beautiful cage.

The performance for the servants went very well and the following day several more people arrived from London. The great house of Minton was bursting at the seams. Julianne escaped with Lord Minton into the gardens for a part of the afternoon, but his company did not provide its usual delight for her. He had not changed; he was still the same good-humored, charming, intelligent man he had always been. It was just that as she looked into his quiet eyes she seemed to see beyond the deep security that had previously always been there for her; glimmering in their gray depths now was the faint reflection of a cage.

She returned to the house to find that John had sent her a copy of a poem. It was by William Wordsworth and was called “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”  She went to her room and without even taking her hat off sat down to read it.

There were tears in her eyes when she finished. To think that someone could feel like this and could find such magnificent words to express those feelings. To find someone who
knew.
Her eyes went back to certain passages:

... that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us

     on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the

     power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

“That is what it is like,” Julianne breathed, staring in wonder at the paper in her hand.

... Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty

     world

Of eye and ear,—both what they half

     create,

And what perceive; well pleased to

     recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor or my purest thoughts, the

     nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and

     soul

Of all my moral being.

It was what she had tried to explain to William yesterday when she had said that nature was her religion, and he had not understood.

The man who had sent her this poem understood. It seemed incredible, but it was true: Of the two men—one civilized, educated, cultured; the other an adventurer, a mercenary—it was the latter who was the man of sensitivity and imagination. Under the circumstances it was not a comfortable realization. But it was a realization she could no longer avoid.