For with all that she had had, she had never had attention, or at least any she had not paid for. No heads ever turned when she entered the room, as they had for jolly Belle. No one ever cried, “We must have Mary to our masquerade, she is such fun!” Rather they remembered that the Duchess of Crewe should be invited. George, while he lived, accepted that she was his wife as he accepted the fact that the title was his from the moment he could toddle. Her children knew that she was Mama, and that she must be visited every day for an hour when Nanny brought them to her. The world knew the Duchess of Crewe, but she was not in demand. For such a large female, she was, withal, seldom noticed.
In the natural way of things, if the duchess had succumbed to a chill in her sixth decade, she would have passed an unexceptional sort of life. The world would have briefly noted her passing and gone on smoothly. But her health was vigorous and two great events changed the course of her life forever when she contemplated her seventh decade.
First, George died, and she noted his absence more than she had ever noted his presence. And secondly, nature at last blessed her with beauty. It was nothing short of miraculous, almost like the transformation of a plain window pane after frost has touched it in the night. For age came to the Duchess of Crewe and brought a great transformation overnight.
It turned her gray-speckled mouse hair to the color of silver. It hollowed her cheeks, turning mere leanness to high imperious cheekbones. At last, her unfortunate nose found a face that it fitted, and, thinned down, it stood high and hawklike, a perfect object for two glittering myopic eyes to peer down over. Her rigid, angular body suited an old woman to perfection: In youth it had been awkward, in her dotage it was imperial. Her height was no longer uncomfortable; it became regal. She had been an unobtrusive woman; she was now an imperial old woman. Nature kept its promise at last.
For the first time, Mary, Duchess of Crewe, excited attention and admiration when she entered a salon. Strangers in the street glanced at her. She was an ornament at the theater. No one ever again forgot her after an introduction. When she appeared, heads turned, and the gentlemen showed her every courtesy. Even the greatest arbiters, the other society matrons, deferred to her. At a great age, the duchess suddenly discovered all the unfair advantages of physical beauty. But equally suddenly, it was not enough.
Much as a born actor after his first taste of applause, the duchess discovered the one ingredient that had been missing in her flavorless life: attention. And as much as she received, it was not enough.
It was only an unsatisfactory brief shower, falling after a long parched life. She wanted more than a taste of it. Now, at a time when many of her contemporaries were content to settle back and watch others live their lives, she wanted to begin hers. She wanted to bask in that rare and lucent light that had always eluded her, the full glare of public attention. But there were impediments.
She was aged, she was female, and she was alone. Her children had all grown, married, and presented her with batches of uninteresting descendants. She could not look to them. She had few friends, and no close ones. And none of them could have given her what she wanted.
She was done with tea parties and tame entertainments. She sought glory. It hardly seemed fair or just that now that she had been presented with a new face and a new aspect, she should languish in obscurity. She felt as a young girl might when her body ripened to a woman's, that there was an attractive stranger within her that she must introduce to the world.
She had heard of the sort of life one could lead if one were wealthy, titled, and attractive. She had heard of, but never seen, the gambling establishments, the fast parties, the masquerades and travel adventures of those select few who cared for nought but pleasure and excitement. And knew that as a duchess she could have entrée to any of them, once. But that there would have to be something special about her to permit her constant presence.
It was a set, she had heard, made up of the cream of the gifted: the poets, the musicians, the authors, the intellectual, the beautiful, and the amusing wealthy eccentrics. She had now presence, beauty of a sort, and wealth. She would have to see to the rest.
Her first companion was a Lady Wiggins, a noble woman who had fallen upon hard times. Together they had traveled to Bath and to Brighton and had received an invitation to a house party at the country seat of a notoriously rakehell lord. All that she had heard was true. She found excitement, gaiety, amusing company, and a sense of privilege. She was accepted, admired, but then, ultimately ignored. For she had no special cachet, no entertaining conversation, no wit, nor even scandalous history.
Her next season, she traveled with Mrs. Coalhouse, a younger woman with pleasant looks and a genteel manner. And although the duchess now cultivated the affectation of taking snuff, and had gone so far as to purchase outrageously expensive antique and imported snuff boxes, this eccentricity was only duly noted and not remarked upon. For in an age where the reigning eccentrics kept upward of a hundred dogs, or traveled without male companions to the Near East, or rode horses into drawing rooms, a handsome elderly female who took snuff was not much noticed. Even her newly emerged forceful personality was not enough.
The following season, in a sort of desperation, she combed carefully through all the applicants for the position of companion. She stopped checking their references and began to note only their physical persons and personalities. For if she could not develop her own startling personality, somewhere in the recesses of her mind she reasoned that she could buy the services of one. Her choice settled on one Miss Violet Peterson, who was nothing like any lady's companion the duchess had ever seen. She was, to the duchess's myopic eye, more like the sort of female who ran the gaming halls and parties she had lately been to.
Violet was youngâstill in her twenties, the duchess thought, although a clearer eye could have said thirties with more certainty. She was buxom, and red haired, and staggeringly attractive. Her dresses were all slightly too extravagant: a bit too low, a bit too colorful, a bit too embellished. But she was bright and alert and cheerful as a songbird. Men's heads swiveled when she flounced into the room. She was, the duchess thought, sometimes a bit too cheeky, but there was no harm in the girl, no harm at all. If it came to that, she was good company, even though it was not company the duchess was after, but the admiration of company.
It was during that first season with Violet, at the country home of a notoriously dissolute duke, that the first whispers about Violet came to the duchess's ears. The whispers grew louder at Brighton, and by the time they got to the scandalous Lady Chester's country retreat, they were a roar. One late evening at the faro table, a noted gossip, a beau of the ton, eyed Violet as she left the room a few moments after their hostess's husband had signaled to her and he leaned over to the duchess. “I say,” he said in a loud stage whisper, “did you know that your companion has spent more time between our host's sheets than her own? And for a price higher than the stakes we're competing for?”
Two high red spots appeared on the duchess's cheekbones. All the others at the table were pointedly looking elsewhere, but all were listening. If her sensibilities were offended, the duchess knew it would be social death in this room to admit to it. She decided to brazen it out, and, in a somewhat confused state of agitation, referred instead to what she felt were Violet's good qualities.
“Let the gel be,” she said in stentorian tones. “She gives good service. Worth every penny she asks.”
The duchess was a raging success after that. She and Violet were welcome to every affair they wanted to attend. If they were not welcome at the sort of parties and houses that the duchess was used to frequent during her long years of social correctness, well, she had put all that behind her now anyway. Attention was paid to the pair of them wherever they went. The duchess, through no overt act of her own, was now considered an amusing, clever, and charming eccentric. She even had the felicity to overhear society's pet bad girl of the season whisper to her cicisbeo, “There goes the Duchess of Crewe. Isn't she delicious? So dignified, so correct, such presence, such wit, to have a common trollop as companion. Plying her trade in the best houses. Oh, it's such a clever comment on society.”
So the duchess turned a deaf ear to propriety, and only cautioned Violet not to get above herself or to involve her employer in any of her doings, and to fulfill her duties as companion before she set off on any “larks” of her own. And Violet, who had been, in her turn, actress, opera dancer, kept woman, and then, only in dire financial trouble and fear of turning to the streets, desperate enough to try for the position of lady's companion, was all too eager to agree.
After another season with Violet in tow, Rose came along. Claiming long friendship with Violet, Rose begged for any position in the duchess's household. The bailiffs were at her door, Lord Lawrence had withdrawn his protection, and she, at thirty-three, was too long in the tooth for any more ingenue roles in the theater. Rose was blond and billowy and friendly, and within months the duchess had two female companions in tow. And her reputation was assured.
Polite society might shun her, her children might plead impotently, but she had a title of her own, and money of her own, and a tenacity of character that only the none too intelligent might claim. It was possible, her children's lawyer said patiently, that they might, after a scandalous, arduous court battle, proclaim her incompetent, but again, it was possible that they might not. The dowager went her way unmolested to all the resorts and masquerades and parties she desired, and she desired them all for all the attention she had starved for all those unawakened years.
And if she heard the whispers about “the duchess's doxies,” as the satirists were quick to dub her companions, she pretended not to hear. The contrast between her rigid aspect and her companions' life-styles tickled those she sought to impress all the more. And if she saw the caricatures in the shop windows of “the dirty duchess,” she was careful not to recognize their subject. Her dignity in the face of such vilification was an exquisite delight to her champions. Yet, all the while, in some recess of her mind, she took it as tribute. There was the distinct possibility that if her children had not been so browbeaten and afraid of scandal, they might have won their case.
And now in this chill winter of 1814, she had narrowly escaped missing another promised treat. For Violet, that wench, had only just sent notice she wasn't coming to Paris as she had netted the Marquis of Wolverton's protection. And Rose, that simple ingrate, had come and prated on about true love and the reformed gambler with whom she was going to settle down.
Even the Duchess of Crewe could not advertise for a trollop. And she had no notion of how to go about acquiring one as companion. One couldn't just pick a girl off the streets. And she could not very easily ask her butler or a footman to frequent a house of ill repute and choose any stray female. And she certainly could not be seen going to one herself. She never chose to think of exactly how her companions earned their extra keep. The whole thought of what transpired at those houses made her ill. So she had cast her net again, asking employment bureaus for a companion and hoping to luck upon, by accident, another woman like Violet, in the same way that she had gotten Violet, through the applicant's own bold deceit.
For three days she had interviewed women of all classes and sizes and condition. To some that she had felt were marginally suitable she had hinted at her purpose and their duties. Those who had understood had left in a huff, or stared at her blankly, apologized, and left. But then this lovely little wench, Catherine, had appeared. As pretty as, or prettier than, the selfish ungrateful Rose and Violet, and not so long in the tooth either, the duchess thought. And she seemed ready for any rig that might be running. The duchess finished off her port and rose to stare out the window. There was a great deal to get done. Travel arrangements to make, dresses to buy, reservations to plan ahead. But her major concern was settled. She had another companion. One who would really make them stare in Paris. And give her employer an international reputation.
After the coach had left them at the hotel, Catherine and Arthur spent the next two hours in a corner of the lobby, in hot debate. She was weary and excited, and would have loved to have been somewhere more private and comfortable. But Arthur was shocked at the idea of discussing anything in their rooms. She might be his sister-in-law, she might have lived in his house for almost four years, but she was a single woman. And he was a man not related by blood. Arthur had very exact notions of propriety.
He refused to postpone their discussion till dinner, for he knew that heated conversation was bad for the digestion. So they sat at a little corner table, beneath a very sick potted palm, and spoke in hushed, but agitated tones.
“She is a duchess, Arthur,” Catherine insisted again, “and very dignified. And if she wants a young companion, I am sure that it is so that she may be cheered up a bit.”
“I still,” he said, as he had said for the past hour, “do not think it a good idea. You do not know her, or her family, or the conditions under which you will be employed.”
“Arthur,” Catherine cried loudly, and then ducked down and flushed for she had not wanted to raise her voice, “you knew all that when I first went to apply for the post. And yet you took me anyhow.”
Arthur flushed a little himself and, because he was by nature not a devious man, admitted, “I just thought that it would help you get the whole mad notion out of your system.”