A Little Folly (11 page)

In the subsequent rearrangement of the party, Louisa found herself walking with Kate Tresilian; and in her paleness of cheek and muted utterance were to be read all the disappointment that in another young woman might have proclaimed itself to the skies. If the strength of Mr Tresilian’s feeling for Sophie was still inscrutable, no such doubt attached to Kate’s, on the prospect of Valentine’s going away.

Kate, however, tried to speak composedly on the event that was giving her pain. ‘You will be gone a good while, I dare say.’

‘Our cousins are kind enough to invite us for as long as we wish to stay. But, of course, we shall not remain in town for ever.’

Kate smiled faintly; and looked as if it would seem so, for her.

‘I was asking your brother whether he might not contemplate an excursion to London at some time,’ Louisa said tentatively. ‘He was not much inclined to it – though I fancy
your
inclination would weigh much more heavily with him.’

‘I should like to see London,’ Kate said, with a little shake of her head, ‘but – I know this is absurd – I misdoubt whether I would be homesick, if I stayed long; and of course one cannot see it all in a few days.’ Her eyes on Valentine and Lady Harriet, she added: ‘And we know no one there. Your cousins, I dare say, have a good deal of acquaintance in society.’

‘I dare say. But for my part I do not mean to be impressed by society, unless it truly is impressive. And I doubt we shall reach so very high, after all: no royal levees, or anything like that.’

‘But you never know,’ Kate said, brightening in spite of herself, ‘you might even see the Prince Regent.’

‘Well, we might see a part of him: of course one could not see him all in a few days.’

This occasioned in Kate one of her quiet, helpless fits of laughter; and when she had squeezed and cajoled herself back to sobriety, she said curiously: ‘I wonder how much, exactly, you have to eat to become so prodigiously fat? And if you indulge an appetite so much, does it not sicken? It is a strange pleasure, indeed, that must be pursued until it becomes a positive pain to you.’

Strange, certainly: but as they took their leave, and Kate gave Valentine her hand with brief, white, sad confusion, and watched him turn eagerly to hand Lady Harriet into the carriage, Louisa thought it was not so very strange: or so very uncommon.

She sat up late that evening, talking with Valentine, whose spirits were unquenchable; and of his interview with Mr Tresilian, he said only with a pitying smile: ‘I did not tell him so, of course, but really Tresilian is turning quite the old woman. I almost felt I should promise him to wear a flannel waistcoat, and sew my purse into my pocket.’ After he had gone to bed Louisa extinguished the candles, then sat on for a while, reflecting that this was the very room where she and Valentine had made their decision about the fire-screen, and about the enterprise of living. Of the many changes since that day, passing swiftly through her mind, it was the internal that struck her with most force. ‘And all changes for the better,’ she said aloud; but the sound of her own voice, in the silent blackness, afflicted her peculiarly, and she hurried to bed.

T
ravelling post to London was, as Valentine pronounced, the only way. It was many years since either the Pennacombe coach or coachman had ventured further than Exeter; and going by post-chaise was, besides, swift, dashing and comfortable – everything indeed to arouse Sir Clement’s mistrust.

The degree of comfort was, Louisa found, somewhat overstated. The heroines of novels were always whirling along in post-chaises, but the whirling never seemed to include such bumping, joggling, lurching and bone-aching; nor was there complete relief to be found in the two nights they spent at inns – establishments that, though reputable, seemed to have become thoroughly infused with old gravy, from the rafters to the bed-sheets. The enforced confinement with companions that such long travel required was also, she found, a great test of tolerance; though after three days on the road, she hoped she was no worse affected to them than in finding a good deal of the town tattle exchanged by Sophie and Lady Harriet rather vacuous, and in considering that Tom’s habit of genial smiling might easily have been restricted to four or five hours a day, without any risk to his general amiability.

Under such circumstances, the wonder of her arrival in London was tempered with relief at their having got there at all: the great straggle of suburbs, where everything was either falling down or being new-built, the river with its teeming of craft, the dome and spires of the City heaving up through the smoke, all received from her a weary hastiness of admiration that must wait its time for proper expression. After a fierce battle with an army of hackneys, they drew up at last before the Spedding house in Hill Street, in all its substantial gentility.

‘Going away is delightful – but still there is nothing like coming home,’ cried Sophie. ‘Now, Harriet, I will not hear any more of it. You simply must dine with us, and rest yourself a little, before you even think of returning to Jermyn Street. Now I insist: and if you refuse, I shall become fierce. I am terrible when I am fierce, you know.’

‘No. It is only postponing it,’ Lady Harriet said, with a grey smile.

‘Let me add my own entreaties,’ put in Valentine. ‘After such a long, fagging journey, Lady Harriet, going home alone to an empty house is the very worst thing for your health and spirits.’

‘You must not suppose me so fragile, Mr Carnell,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘indeed you must not. Besides, you are a family party: you and Miss Carnell have your aunt to meet. I have played the cuckoo in the nest long enough.’

She would not be moved; and with a brief nod at Sophie’s assertion that they would see each other again soon, she drove away in the first of the chaises, while the small luggage was being brought down from the other. This, indeed, was all Louisa would have thought to bring; but Valentine had insisted that people who did things in style always had a great deal of luggage, and so there were several trunks being sent on by the public coach – which, containing as they did some of his best shirts and waistcoats, he had then been anxious about all the way, and continually imagining being tipped into ditches, or despatched to Lisbon by short-sighted postmasters.

The Spedding house was richly fitted out: nothing was wanting either in comfort or elegance; and their aunt, Mrs Spedding, who received them in a drawing-room full of lustrous reflections, was as welcoming and hospitable as Tom and Sophie had promised.

‘It is a very great pleasure to see you at last, my dears,’ she said, taking their hands, and searching their faces with a wondering smile. ‘Dear me, yes, there’s my poor sister, to the life! It’s such a pity we have been so long unacquainted – but there’s an end of that. You must consider this absolutely your home, you know, as long as you are in town. I am very fond of company, and there is after all no company like family. Bless me, we shall have a thoroughly pleasant time of it.’

To the novelty of cousins was now added that of an aunt: though it was soon clear that the august quality that that word bestowed was not much sought by Mrs Spedding, who wished rather to look young. She was a pink, rounded, daintily smiling woman, with eyes very open, perhaps so that they should not wrinkle, and a little light hair artfully made much of: fashionably dressed in a high-necked gown, with many tinkling bracelets: serenely easy in her manner, full of civil enquiries, happy responses and ready agreement. Sophie and Tom treated her with great fondness and indulgence, reassuring themselves that she had not suffered a moment’s loneliness without them, commiserating her small ailments, loading her with presents they had bought at Lyme, and generally according her every sort of attention, compatible with not really taking any notice of her.

‘Well, you tell me you had a safe journey, my dears, and so I believe you; but I am always a little anxious about these things, ever since the time you got lost in Scotland.’

‘Dear Mama,’ laughed Tom, ‘that was Wales: and we did not get lost – one of the carriage-horses lost a shoe; quite different, you know.’

‘Is that how it was? How very surprising: I had Scotland quite fixed in my mind. But of course you must be right, my dear – and it is still very disagreeable when a horse loses a shoe. One must wait about for an age. I know I had to wait a good half-hour at Vauxhall once; and I always suspect damp at Vauxhall. How do you like Vauxhall, Louisa?’

‘I’m afraid I have never been there, ma’am: I have never been in London since we came here as little children.’

‘To be sure – exactly what Sophie wrote me. Well, here is your opportunity, my dear, to try all the diversions of the town. For my part I live pretty quietly, but these children of mine are the most sociable of creatures. I dare say they will be taking you everywhere.’

‘Exactly our plan, Mama,’ said Sophie. ‘It is our determination that not a single day or night shall pass without its engagements, as long as our cousins are with us.’

Fatigued as Louisa was, there was more just then to oppress than to excite in Sophie’s promise of their entertainment; but after being shown to her room, and enjoying the comforts of hot water, a change of clothes, and a luxurious stretch of her limbs on the ample bed, her spirits were almost restored; and an excellent dinner completed the revival. Even the sounds of London, the continual undertone of carriage-wheels and rapping doors and street-criers, began to act not on her nerves but her imagination, and to speak a promise.

A comfortable couple of days of settling in succeeded: – enough to reveal to Louisa whence came the assurance of address, the confidence of belonging in the world, that characterised her cousins. The ease and liberty prevailing in the Spedding house could hardly have presented a bolder contrast with her own experience of home. Mrs Spedding was the mildest of châtelaines; and her untroubled references to her late husband, and the portrait of him in the hall, which appeared to show a smiling man melting apologetically into his cravat, suggested that his own temper had been no more exacting.

Not that Mrs Spedding was spoiled or selfish; but generally she presented the appearance of a woman who had never suffered any greater inconvenience than was occasioned by the bringing of two children into the world. There was that, indeed, about Mrs Spedding’s pretty smile, which suggested that her cheerfulness was private and interior, and not much altered by seeing you, or hearing what you had to say: – but this was to quibble. She made Louisa and Valentine very welcome: listened devouringly to anything they had to tell, and promptly got it entirely wrong in retailing it to someone else; and gave every indication that if either of them were to fall under the wheels of a carriage tomorrow, she would find it thoroughly regrettable.

‘You know, I feel as if I have lived here all my life,’ Valentine remarked to Louisa, a few mornings after their arrival, as he stood at the breakfast-room window looking down at Hill Street. ‘Pennacombe seems very far away!’

In fact Louisa had just been wondering whether the housekeeper was being kind to her cat, and whether Jane Colley had heeded her instruction to call in the surgeon to look at her gammy knee, and not go to that old woman in the village who brewed noxious nostrums out of snails. – Valentine, however, was plainly not so encumbered by recollection. He was all eager receptiveness: was already speaking familiarly of the Strand and the Monument, of hackney-stands and link-boys, even with a note of true London world-weariness; and last night had been talking with Tom of the advantages of a town residence every winter, with a ready agreement that a neighbourhood east of Soho Square was not to be considered. He had only one dissatisfaction – they had seen nothing of Lady Harriet since their arrival; though Sophie assured him that her friend had not deserted them, and that she must have a thousand things to attend to in Jermyn Street.

Not the least of these, Louisa surmised, was the reopening of the faro-bank by which she supported herself: though there might also be, for all she knew, negotiations with her estranged husband to be dealt with. Certainly there must perforce be an end to the holiday-time, the retreat from the world, which Lady Harriet had enjoyed in Devonshire; and Louisa found herself several times on the brink of hinting at this to Valentine. But on second thoughts she trusted the general fascination to displace the particular. Lady Harriet had appeared at Pennacombe as a brilliant fragment of the greater world: that world now lay all about him, in its vastness and variety. Her significance must surely be crowded out by a host of other impressions. There was more safety, Louisa felt, in being universally dazzled than in following a single light down a doubtful and unpropitious path.

For her own part, Louisa was very soon thrust into the bustle of a town season. Sophie, of course, was voraciously social; and Mrs Spedding, in spite of her avowal of living quietly, scarcely less so. Her especial addiction was shopping, for which she made a daily expedition; and once Louisa politely accepted an invitation to accompany her. – Once was enough. Louisa could find only so much interest in looking over hats, ribbons, fans, scent-bottles and gewgaws, and was heartily glad when Mrs Spedding had done. Her aunt’s appetite for buying never diminished, however; and on every subsequent occasion, she returned to Hill Street with something new and prodigiously pretty that she could not live without; and which would make an appearance once, in her costume or on her work-table, before being entirely forgotten.

Paying morning calls was another rite that Louisa found less than stimulating, though its complexities greatly exercised Sophie, who was deep in the matter of who had called on them and when, who had left cards, who had departed from town, who had arrived, who was expected. – The culmination of all this activity was often nothing more than half an hour spent sitting in a cold drawing-room on a hard chair, exchanging commonplace enquiries with people who seemed to Louisa quite as bored as she felt, before rising, expressing delight in the visit, and going on to the next, where the only expectation of novelty was that the hard chairs might be differently distributed.

Much more to Louisa’s taste, indeed, were the galleries, concert-rooms and theatres, and here her cousins were invaluable guides and arbiters. May, and the end of the season, it might be; but as Mr Tresilian had said, there was to be no tailing-off into summer this year. – Preparations were afoot for a great round of celebrations: foreign dignitaries and even crowned heads were to descend on London to mark Europe’s final crushing of Bonaparte; and even Sophie admitted she had never known town so lively. It was the theatre, above all, that convinced Louisa she had never properly lived until now. Even to step into the lobby at Drury Lane was an excitement; though Sophie delicately cautioned her, indicating the concourse of gauzy females, that this was not a place to linger.

‘Because they do rather tend to use this as a place of resort,’ she said; and then, at Louisa’s enquiring look: ‘Demi-reps, my dear. Cyprians. Votaries of Venus. The muslin sisterhood.’

‘Oh,’ said Louisa, in an impressed tone. ‘I thought they were just prostitutes.’

As for the performance, she could have dispensed with the patriotic prologues, but
The Merchant of Venice
, with Mr Kean as Shylock, was another matter. She was so incensed by the gentlemen who came in yawning at the last act, and talking loudly to their friends, that she could have turned Shylock herself, and divested them of a pound of flesh each without compunction.

For some time afterwards she remained wrapped in the high-coloured world that had been presented on the stage; and, on returning to reality, found everything about herself drearily everyday. Even a dose of tragedy, she thought, would be a fair price to pay in order to feel life that intensely. No such exaltation of emotion intruded at Hill Street, of course: still, there came some ripples to its untroubled surface. Among the many calling-cards that adorned the hall table, that of Mr Pearce Lynley one day appeared.

‘Ah, yes, one of our Devonshire acquaintance,’ Tom informed his mother. ‘Has the neighbouring estate to Pennacombe. Capital fellow. Never known a better, taken all in all. His place is called whatsname, no, Valentine, don’t tell me. Begins with a – what’s the letter? – jolly old B.’

‘Hythe Place,’ supplied Valentine, smiling. ‘Mr Lynley is indeed our neighbour at Pennacombe, Mrs Spedding, and was a friend of my father’s. He came up to town, I believe, shortly before we did.’

‘Well, it is a thoroughly pleasant attention in Mr Lynley,’ Mrs Spedding said, ‘and I shall be very glad to have his acquaintance. It would bring me a little closer to Pennacombe, indeed, and to my poor sister.’

Louisa was silent, though she felt the eyes of both Valentine and Sophie turned to her. The card was only a card – the name only a name: still, they released a flood of unhappy feeling, which she was at some pains to disguise; but at last she forced herself to recollect that Pearce Lynley was nothing if not punctilious, and that the leaving of a card at an address of his acquaintance in London he would consider an imperative form, even if he had to dodge through a second Great Fire to do it. – This duty once performed, there was nothing more, she thought, to be apprehended. He seemed to have viewed the Speddings as, at least, tainted by their association with Lady Harriet Eversholt, and would surely not expose himself to the potential corruption of a house where she was welcome.