The Westerby Inheritance (7 page)

“I must protest—” began Jane hotly, but Lady Comfrey busied herself over the teapoy and carried on regardless.

“But la! When a man is in his cups he will mate with
anything
. ’Tis said that the Duke of Salford did wed his first cousin, who is at least thirty years older than he, after six bottles of canary and by the time he had sobered and realized what he had done, it was too late. I am told they are quite one of the attractions at Ranelagh, and she does chatter so, quite unbecoming in the old, don’t you see, for I knew her when she was a schoolroom miss, and
that
was not yesterday. Lud, but you are a quiet child!”

“I—”

“Of course, the Bentleys are common. Common as the barber’s chair, and you cannot find anything commoner than that. Or is it ‘more common’? Or does it
matter?
Do have some Shrewsbury cakes. They are exceeding good.”

Lady Comfrey took one herself, and Jane, seizing the opportunity now that her hostess’s mouth was full, fought down her resentment at Lady Comfrey’s remarks on her father and his marriage, and tried to make her speech of thanks for the invitation.

“I am most grateful,” she began, but Lady Comfrey, started to speak again, despite the impediment of cake.

“We shall not go out much, if at all,” said Lady Comfrey, dashing Jane’s hopes of meeting a rich husband then and there. “I had meant to take you about a little, but you are not exactly a beauty and I find the social round fatiguing, or rather I did when I did it. And then we shall be company for each other. You are not pretty, no, but very entertaining.”

Like most selfish elderly people, Lady Comfrey considered any good listener the height of wit and entertainment. “But you may take Wong for walks—Wong is my pug—and you may read to me. I am glad to see your clothes are very well, for that will spare me the expense of furnishing you with a wardrobe.

“Bella said to me that a young thing like you would want to see some of the sights of London, but, ‘La! Bella,’ I said. ‘Why should she crave the sights when she has me?’ ‘Well, my lady, that’s true enough,’ says Bella and gives that terrible horse laugh of hers, although I declare I could not see anything at all funny.”

“Godmother!” cried Jane in a loud voice. “I really must—”

“Of course, you will want to lie down after the rigors of your journey.” Lady Comfrey rang a large brass bell. “I am, or used to be, fatigued even after a drive in the park. Ah, Bella! Show Lady Jane to her room. No, don’t thank me, child. My pleasure, I assure you!”

Jane looked appealingly at Bella, who jerked her head toward the door.

“Didn’t let you speak, I’ll warrant,” said Bella, leading the way up the shallow wooden stairs to the upper floors, where all the musty heat of a London summer seemed to have gathered.

“No,” said Jane. “She—”

“Never has and never will,” said Bella with plump satisfaction. “Talks to herself a lot, you see, so she only hears her own voice. Now, here’s your rooms, my lady, and just ring should you need anything. I’ll need to remind my lady that you’re in the house, for she won’t remember. Anyone would think we was in the Dark Ages instead of 1749, and that’s a fact.”

“It’s 1751,” said Jane, but Bella had already bustled out and could be heard thumping down the staircase.

“This is mad!” thought Jane, sinking down onto a chair. “No one listens to a word I say. And, oh! I was better off at home. I shall be immured here and I shall not meet any gentlemen and I shall become as mad as Lady Comfrey. Oh, what am I to do?”

And, feeling very sorry for herself indeed, Jane cried into her lace handkerchief (courtesy of Mrs. Syms) until she could cry no more.

She felt weak and dizzy when she dried her eyes and, without undressing or taking in much of her surroundings, she walked from the little sitting room into which Bella had ushered her, through to the bedroom, fell headlong on the bed and straight down into a dreamless sleep.

When she awoke, she felt hot and gritty and she had bent her hoop into some strange shape by lying on it. The light was failing, and she realized she must have slept for some hours. Jane quickly undressed and washed as best as she could at a little marble washstand in the corner, which was furnished with two copper cans of tepid water. Then she went to the window and managed to open it after strenuous effort.

She leaned out.

A pale primrose sky was dying over the jumbled rooftops of St. James’s, and lengthening shadows were giving the sooty garden of the square a mysterious beauty. Flambeaux were already flaring and sputtering in their iron brackets on the walls of the house across the square, and even as Jane watched, a smart carriage rolled up, preceded by two magnificent running footmen.

A lady and gentleman alighted. They were powdered and painted and both magnificently dressed in white silk. Jewels blazed from the clothes of both man and woman. The woman stumbled slightly on the step on her high jeweled heels, and her escort put his arm around her waist to support her and smiled lovingly down at her and asked something, and the woman tossed her head and laughed up at him. Both were young and quite handsome.

Even after the door had closed on them, Jane stayed watching, a strange pain at her heart. She had never thought about love entering her own future, that future which held some rich and elderly beau. She experienced her first dawning realization that there might be a kind of love which she had considered as belonging only to daydreams, a love based on affection. Not the lustful love of Hetty and her father, nor the passionate, bosom-heaving love of the novels she had read with Philadelphia, but something tender and delicate. “A consummation devoutly to be wished.” Who had said that? She could not remember—except, vaguely, that the author had not been talking of love but of death.

August dragged its weary length to its dusty and hot end, and people shook their heads over the unnatural behavior of the weather. Another earthquake was prophesied.

Jane wrote a sad letter to Philadelphia to explain that she, Jane, had not asked Lady Comfrey whether Philadelphia could come on a visit, since what would be the point? “I go nowhere,” Jane wrote, “except once round the square with Lady Comfrey’s fat little pug.”

At times Jane thought she might go mad with tedium and heat. Never had she suffered such heat! Bella prattled on of how society had parties on the river on barges under cool silken canopies, or parties in the woods and parties in the parks. It all seemed so near and yet so far! Bella culled her fund of gossip from the other servants in the square, and it was because of this gossip that Jane had acquired a new wardrobe.

Bella had been humiliated to find her servant friends sniggering over Jane’s patched and mended gowns as Jane walked Wong in the square. The gown she had worn on her arrival had been carefully laid away in tissue paper, in the fond hope that one day she might receive just one invitation. So Bella had complained to Lady Comfrey about the state of affairs, and somehow Lady Comfrey had heard her for once, instead of the voices in her own head, and had authorized the purchase of a wardrobe for Jane.

Jane’s heart had beat high with excitement as she envisioned visits to the couturier. But Lady Comfrey’s household did not go to the world; the world came to it. And so it was that Mr. Joubert, that famous couturier, attended to Jane’s needs in the dusty heat of Number Ten, and very soon Lady Jane Lovelace was possessed of one of the finest wardrobes in London, with nowhere to wear it except the sooty confines of the square.

But extreme heat can be as stifling to the emotions as extreme cold, and gradually Jane’s ambitions died within her. She walked Wong, she listened to Lady Comfrey’s onesided conversations, and she read to her.

The last day of August was even more brassy than the rest. The air seemed charged with nervous tension.

Lady Comfrey and her maid, Bella, actually engaged in a heated argument—strange in two women who did not normally listen to each other. Bella had picked up some court gossip. Everyone knew, said Bella, that the old King hated the English and always had done.

Lady Comfrey had accused Bella of treason. His Majesty, George II, was above reproach.

Made stubborn by the heat and important by having laid hold of a genuine piece of high gossip, Bella would not let go. His Majesty, said Bella, had said to Lady Swandon that he had to distribute his favors here in England very differently from the manner in which he bestowed them in Hanover, that there he rewarded people for doing their duty and serving him well, but that here he was obliged to enrich people for being rascals and buy them not to cut his throat. And what did my lady think of
that?

Now King George’s hatred for all things English was well known. He thought everything German was vastly superior and said so, and had been saying so for some considerable time. But Lady Comfrey had taken against Bella and found her overfamiliar, and so she dismissed her as she had dismissed her many times before. And Bella threw her apron over her head and burst into tears, as she had done so many times before.

And Lady Jane Lovelace fled to her room, as she had done so many times before.

And looked out of the window.

There was yet another party in the house across the square. She leaned her now dimpled elbows on the sill and stared hungrily at the silks and jewels and laughter. If it had not been for that house, Jane would have left London after her first week. She had learned it was the home of a certain Mr. Osborne, a member of the untitled aristocracy.

He was much given to holding parties and routs, and so, all unwittingly, he supplied the lonely Jane with a picture of what life could be like if one were not chained to Number Ten by an elderly and eccentric godmother.

Suddenly there was a blinding flash. Jane looked up.

Great black clouds had massed up in the evening sky, and now the storm had broken. Rain came thudding down, drumming on the roof and gurgling in the lead gutters and pouring out from the waterspouts into the square until the whole world seemed to be filled with the sound of water. The servants roused themselves from their summer torpor and began to open windows and let the smell of sweet, wet, cool air through the rooms.

Downstairs, Lady Comfrey forgave Bella and rehired her. Upstairs, Lady Jane Lovelace hung onto the windowsill as if hanging onto the rail of a ship, as the world seemed to heave and plunge under the buffets of the storm.

Jane shivered in the suddenly cool air and turned from the window. All at once, ambition came flooding back with a strength and purpose it had never had before.

“If only I were a man!” thought Jane bitterly. “Someone like Lord Charles Welbourne, the gambler that Bella keeps talking about. If only I were rich, I could
pay
him to gamble for me. It will soon be the start of the Little Season, and the Bentleys will be coming to town. But I have nothing to offer a man like Lord Charles.”

And then, loud and clear, Hetty’s voice sounded in her brain. “We h’an’t got nothing left to sell. Except ourselves.”

She quickly shut out the voice, but it refused to go away. At least, thought Jane, I can ask Bella a little more about this Lord Charles.

She dressed quickly and made her way downstairs. Lady Comfrey was snoring in a corner of the drawing room, and Bella was sitting with her lace cap bent over her workbasket.

Bella looked up at the sound of Jane’s light step. “There now,” she said, biting a thread with strong yellow teeth. “It’s a mercy that terrible weather has broken at last. Why, only the other day I was—”

“Bella!” cried Jane urgently. “Do listen, please. What do you know of Lord Charles Welbourne? Where does he live?”

Fortunately for Jane, Bella was fascinated by the tales she had heard of Lord Charles and so decided to answer her instead of rambling on in her usual way.

“Well, let me see,” began Bella, her sewing lying idle on her lap, and screwing up her plump face in concentration. “They do say he’s Satan himself, although that was when he was wilder—in his youth, you know.”

Jane’s spirits rose. An elderly gentleman! “How old is he?” she demanded urgently.

“Well, now, let me see. About nigh on five and thirty, I should say. Very tall and proud he is, and very handsome in an evil kind of way. ’Tis said when he was but twenty-two, Lady Hampton did kill herself on account of him.”

Jane brushed away this triviality. He was unfortunately not quite old enough. Still, thirty-five
was
middle-aged.

“Is he as lucky at the tables as they say?”

“Lud bless you, Lady Jane, they say there’s none can beat him! You was asking where he lived. In Hessel Street, I believe, quite near here. But you don’t want to have anything to do with the likes of his lordship. He eats virgins for his breakfast.”

“How can I have anything to do with anyone?” asked Jane sadly. “I never go out into the world.”

“Ain’t you happy with her ladyship and your old Bella?” asked the maid.

“Yes, yes, of course,” lied Jane. “But it is so quiet.”

“Well, now, my lady, that’s a good thing in this rumty old world, ain’t it?” said Bella comfortably, picking up her sewing. “There’s noise and strife enough without you bothering your head about it, that’s for sure. Now take some of them young ladies who come up from the country looking for a husband. Why, I ’member when young Miss Johnston, her that was related to the Duke of Belmont, ran off with the second footman ’cause her mama had arranged a marriage for her with old Lord Crummers what had the gout and was given to being twitty on account of it—”

“But Bella,” interposed Jane, “is Lord Welbourne in London just now?”

“—and it wouldn’t ha’ been such a bad marriage, for truth to tell she got the smallpox off of the footman’s third cousin and died of it,” went on Bella, relapsing into her customary habit of conversing with herself.

Jane sighed and looked out of the window. The storm had rolled past, and she could smell the wet, sooty grass of the gardens in the square.

All in that moment, as Bella rambled on with her reminiscenses and the clocks ticked away the seconds and Lady Comfrey snored gently in the corner, a mad idea took hold of Jane’s imagination and would not go away.