Bath Tangle

3

It had been the wish of both Fanny and Serena to have removed themselves from the great house as soon possible after the funeral; but in the event several weeks elapsed before they at last found themselves installed at the Dower House. This house, which stood on the fringe of the park, and at no great distance from the little town of Quenbury, was a pretty, old-fashioned building, which had been inhabited until some fifteen months earlier by Serena’s elder, widowed aunt. Upon the death of this lady, it had been lived in by an old servant only, the various schemes for its occupation by this or that distant relative having all of them, from one cause or another, fallen through. It was discovered that some repairs and renovations were needed to make it properly habitable. Serena ordered these to be set in hand immediately, forgetting her altered status at Milverley. Her cousin found her in conference with the estate carpenter in the dismantled drawing-room at the Dower House, and when they rode back to Milverley together startled her by saying: “I am glad you have given your orders to Staines. If I had not been so much occupied yesterday, I should have desired him to come up to see you, and to do whatever you may require of him.”

She felt as though she had received a slap in the face, and gasped, “I beg your pardon!”

He assured her very kindly that there was not the least need of apology, but she was deeply mortified, knowing herself to have erred in a way that was most likely to cause resentment. She tried to make further amends; he said that he perfectly understood; reiterated his wish that she would always look upon Milverley as her home; and left her with a strong desire to hasten the preparations for her departure.

But even had the Dower House been ready for instant occupation, it would scarcely have been possible for her to have left Milverley. The task of assembling all her own and Fanny’s personal belongings proved to be a far more difficult and protracted one than she had anticipated. A thousand unforeseen difficulties arose; and she was constantly being applied to by her cousin for information and advice. She could not but pity him. He was a shy, unassuming man, more painstaking than able, who plainly found the unexpected change in his circumstances overwhelming. That he might succeed his cousin he had never regarded as more than a remote possibility; and since the Earl had shared this view, he had never been granted the opportunity to become familiar with all the details of a great estate. He came to it from a far more modest establishment, where he had been living in quiet content with his wife, and his youthful family, and for many weeks felt crushed by the appalling weight of fortune, lands, and title. In Serena’s presence, he had the uncomfortable sensation of being a nonentity, but he was really very grateful to her, and knew that he would have found himself in a worse case without her, since she could always explain the meaning of the mysteries uttered by such persons as agents and bailiffs. With these he had not learnt to be at ease. He knew himself to be under close observation; they assumed that he had knowledge which he lacked; he was afraid to appear contemptible by confessing ignorance; and relied on Serena to make all plain. She thought he would do better when he had his wife beside him, for it appeared, from the many references to Jane’s capabilities, that hers was the stronger character. But the new Countess was not coming to Milverley until their London house had been disposed of. She seemed to be very busy, and scarcely a day passed without her writing to know whether she should sell some piece of furniture, or send it to Milverley; what he wished her to do about the new barouche; whether she should employ Pickford’s to convey all their heavy cases to Milverley; and a dozen other problems of the same nature.

Serena found that she was obliged to spend several days in London. The preparation of the house in Grosvenor Square for its new owner could not be wholly entrusted to servants. Fanny, whom travel always made unwell, shrank from the journey; so Serena, undertaking to execute all her commissions, set out with no other escort than her maid, and in a hired post-chaise. It was a novel experience, all her previous journeys having been made either in her father’s company, or under the direction of a courier, but she was in no way daunted, finding it rather amusing to be paying her own shot at the posting-house in which she spent the night, contracting for the hire of horses and postilions, and ordering her own dinner. But Lady Theresa, whose guest she was, was shocked beyond measure, dared not guess what her father would have said, ascribed it all to her having cried off from her engagement to Rotherham, and recalled with approval her own girlhood, when she had never done so much as walk in the park at Milverley without having her footman in attendance.

It was painful to visit the house in Grosvenor Square under such altered circumstances, and disagreeable to discover that Lady Spenborough had already inspected it from cellars to attics. Serena was thunderstruck when this news was divulged to her by the housekeeper—she had not believed such conduct to be possible. There could be no denying that her ladyship had every right to go to the house, but there was a want of delicacy about the proceeding which gave a disagreeable impression, hard to shake off. It was excused by the Countess herself, who paid a morning visit at Lady Theresa’s house in Park Street for the express purpose of explaining to Serena the peculiar exigency which had made it necessary for her to go to Grosvenor Square. All was glossed over, in a speech beginning with the words: “I daresay you must have wondered a little...” but although Serena forgave she was unable to forget, and had never been in such sympathy with her aunt as when that lady later described the Countess’s behaviour as encroaching, and such as sank her below reproach. But Lady Theresa was not astonished, for she had never liked Jane. From the outset she had detected beneath the insipid formality of her manners a sort of shabby gentility which had quite given her a disgust of the young woman. She dressed badly, too, had no countenance, and grossly indulged her children.

It was not until November that Fanny and Serena were at last installed at the Dower House. So much preparation and bustle had been attached to the arrival at Milverley of Lady Spenborough and her hopeful family, and so many pin-pricks had had to be endured, that Serena was able to agree wholeheartedly with Fanny, when she exclaimed, as they sat down to their first dinner in their new home; “Oh, how comfortable this is!” Wearied out by all the exertions of the past weeks, she believed that she could be happy in her new surroundings, and looked forward with confidence to the future. The sensation of being uncomfortably cooped-up would pass when she grew more accustomed to living in small rooms; it would be amusing to mingle freely with such neighbours as she had previously received only on Public Days; she was sure she should find plenty to do and to be interested in.

Alas for such sanguine hopes! There were more trials to be endured than she had suspected. She had foreseen that the loss of her father’s companionship would be hard to bear, but not that she would find herself pining for things she would have voted, a year earlier, a great bore. In her world, winters were enlivened by visits: one expected to spend a week at Badminton, another at Woburn; one presided over shooting-parties, rode to hounds, and entertained a succession of guests. All this was at an end: she had never dreamed that she could miss it so intolerably. She recalled the many occasions on which she had inveighed against the necessity of inviting this or that person to stay at Milverley, but it would not do: that was the life to which she had been bred, and she could not easily relinquish it. Nor could she cross the threshold of Milverley without suffering a pang. Its occupation by her cousins seemed scarcely less deplorable than the invasion of Rome by the Goths. She knew herself to be unreasonable, and for a long time never confided even to Fanny the burning resentment that consumed her every time the new owners departed from some trivial but time-honoured custom. “We think”, and “We prefer”, were words too often heard on Jane’s tongue, uttered with a calm complacency which was in itself an offence. As for Hartley, it required a real effort for her to maintain friendly relations with anyone so unworthy to succeed her father. She acknowledged his wish to do right, she was aware of the difficulties that confronted him, but when he confessed himself to be no racing man, and divulged that he meant to dispose of his predecessor’s string, she could not have been more shocked if he had declared himself to have become a follower of Mahomet. She was not mollified by his considering it to be his duty to hunt a little: his horsemanship, judged by her standards, did him little credit.

Fanny saw how much she was chafed, and grieved over it, but could not enter into her sentiments. Her changed circumstances exactly suited Fanny. She had never felt herself at home at Milverley; the Dower House was just what she liked. A dining-room suitable for the entertainment of no more than six persons, a pretty drawing-room, and a cosy breakfast-parlour were infinitely preferable to her than half a dozen huge saloons, leading one out of the other; and the exchange of endless, echoing galleries for two neat halls, one over the other, was to her a gain. To consult with her housekeeper on such questions as how the mutton should be dressed for dinner, or pippins best preserved in jelly; to spend the morning in the stillroom, or in overlooking her linen, was exactly what she liked, and what Serena was no hand at at all. Indeed, Serena knew nothing of such matters. It was natural to her to command; she had reigned over her father’s household to admiration, triumphantly confuting the older ladies who had considered her too young to succeed in such a charge; but her notion of housekeeping was to summon the steward, or the groom of the chambers, and to give him a general direction. Had an ill-chosen dinner ever been sent to table, she would have taken instant steps to ensure that such an accident should not be repeated; but had she been required to compose a menu she would have been as hard put to it to do so as to boil an egg, or make up her own bed. As Fanny had been thankful to leave the reins of government at Milverley in her hands, so was she now content to let Fanny manage all the domestic affairs at the Dower House. She could only marvel that she should enjoy the task, and find so much to interest her in such restricted surroundings. But the more brilliant the parties at Milverley had been the more Fanny had dreaded them. Her disposition was retiring, her understanding not powerful, and her marriage had followed so swiftly on her emergence from the schoolroom that she had come to it with little knowledge of her husband’s world, and none at all of its personalities. Her grace and gentle dignity had supported her through many ordeals, and only she knew what nerve-racking work it had been, during the first months of marriage, to take part in conversations which bristled with elliptical references to events of which she was ignorant, or to persons whom she had never met. To receive a visit from Mrs Aylsham, from the Grange, or to listen to Jane’s anecdotes about her children, suited her very well. Serena could imagine nothing more insipid, and hardly knew how to sit through such sessions without yawning.

The Milverley ladies, though acquainted with most of the neighbouring gentry, had never been intimate with any. The gulf that lay between Milverley and more modest establishments was too great to allow of anything approaching a free exchange of hospitality; and although the 5th Earl had been affable to his neighbours, and Serena meticulous in the observances of civility, it was generally felt that a dinner or an evening party at Milverley called for no reciprocal invitation. On hunting days, if the last point had carried him far from Milverley, it was not unusual for his lordship to take his pot-luck in the house of some hunting acquaintance. As often as not, he would have his daughter with him, the pair of them muddied to the eyebrows; and no guests, it was agreed, could have been less haughty, or easier to entertain. But after being passed from footman to footman on the way up the Grand Stairway at Milverley, traversing several saloons, being received in the Long Drawing-room by the Lady Serena, and sitting down to his lordship’s notion (genially expressed) of “just a neat, plain dinner”, there were few ladies with minds of so lofty an order that they could contemplate without an inward shudder any formal return of such hospitality.

When the stepmother and daughter took up their residence at the Dower House, a good deal of diffidence was felt by the well-bred: and all but pushing persons of no sensibility waited to see what attitude they would assume towards their neighbours before thrusting upon them civilities which might be unwelcome.

“With the result,” said Serena, fully alive to the scruples operating on the minds of the delicate, “that we are left to the mercy of the Ibsleys, and that odious Laleham woman, my dear Fanny! Oh, I must tell you that I came smash up against Mrs Orrell in Quenbury this morning, and taxed her openly with neglect! You know that unaffected way she has! She told me, with such a twinkle, that old Lady Orrell had said to her that she hoped she would not be in a hurry to leave cards on us, for that would be lowering herself to Lady Laleham’s level! You may imagine how I roared!”

“Oh, did you tell her how happy we should be to receive her?”

“To be sure I did! But you would have been shocked, Fanny! We enjoyed a delightful gossip, and made out between us that Lady Laleham’s beginnings must have been wholly vulgar! Don’t eat me! I know how much you affect her society!”

“Now, Serena—! You know very well—! But what is one to do? Sir Walter Laleham’s having been a friend of your dear Papa’s makes it so impossible for us to snub her! I can’t conceive how he came to marry her!”

“Oh, he was all to pieces, and she had a great fortune, or was a great heiress, or some such thing! I pity her daughters: she has them in complete subjection, and, depend upon it, she means them all to contract brilliant marriages! She may succeed with Emily, but I defy her to foist the freckled one on to anything better than a baronet.”

“How can you, Serena?” protested Fanny.

“I’m sure I could not!”

“No, pray be serious! I daresay Anne will be quite as pretty as Emily in a year or two, and I do think Emily quite delightfully pretty, don’t you? Only I do hope she may not be persuaded into doing anything she doesn’t quite like.”

“I’ll tell you what, Fanny: I shouldn’t wonder at it if all this toad-eating is directed to that end! Lady Laleham hopes to jockey you into sponsoring Emily!”

“Oh, no, surely she could not? Besides, there is no need! She seems to know everyone, and to go everywhere!”

“Franked by the Lalehams! Yes, but she’s as shrewd as she can hold together, and knows very well she is only tolerated. She is the kind of person one is obliged to invite to a rout-party, but never to a dinner for one’s friends!”

Fanny admitted the truth of this, but said: “Yet her manners are not at all vulgar, and she doesn’t precisely toad-eat one.”

“Her manners have all the tiresome formality of those who dare not unbend for fear of appearing not quite the thing, and her toad-eating is of the most unendurable order of that ancient art! I swear I prefer the truckler to that ridiculous parade of grandeur! “You and I, dear Lady Spenborough...” “A woman of quality’s laugh, as we know, Lady Serena—” Ugh!”

“Oh, yes, very bad! quite absurd! But I like Emily, do not you? She is such a lively girl, with such natural, confiding manners!”

“Too easily quelled! It is a study to see her guilt-stricken countenance when Mama’s basilisk eyes admonish her! I will allow her to be both natural and beautiful, but if you have discovered more wit in her than may be stowed in your thimble, and leave room to spare, you have remarkable powers, of discernment, my dear!”

“Ah, but you are so clever, Serena!” Fanny said simply.

“I?” exclaimed Serena incredulously.

“Oh, yes! Everyone says so, and indeed it is true!”

“My dear Fanny, what in the world are you at? I have not the smallest pretensions to anything more than common sense!”

“But you have! You have a well-informed mind, and you always know what to say to people. Why, when the Castlereaghs were staying with us last year, I was quite lost in admiration at the way you contrived to talk to him! When I could think of nothing to say but the merest commonplace!”

“Good gracious, what nonsense! That style of thing, I promise you, is nothing but a trick! You forget how long I have been knocking about the world. When you are as old as I am you will be doing the same.”

“Oh, no! I never shall be able to,” Fanny said, shaking her head. “I am quite as stupid as Emily Laleham, and I’m sure you must often be quite provoked by me.”

“Never till this moment!” Serena declared, with a slightly heightened colour, but in a rallying tone. “Good God, if ever I have another suitor I’ll take good care to keep him out of your way! You would make him believe me a blue-stocking, and after that, farewell to my chance of contracting even a respectable marriage!”

That made Fanny laugh, and no more was said. But Serena was shocked to realize how truly she had spoken. Much as she loved the gentle creature, she was sometimes provoked by her simplicity, and often longed for the companionship of someone with wits to match her own.

It was hard, too, to accustom herself to what she thought a dawdling way of living, and harder still to abandon her hunting. That, while she was in deep mourning, she must always have done, but she might, had either Fanny or her cousin shared her passion, have enjoyed some gallops. But Fanny was a very nervous horsewoman, willing to amble with her along the lanes, but cast into an agony of apprehension at the mere suggestion of jumping the smallest obstacle; and Hartley regarded horses as nothing more than a means of getting from one place to another.

She had felt herself obliged to send her hunters to Tattersall’s, retaining only one little spirting thoroughbred mare, which could be stabled at the Dower House. The stables there had not been built to accommodate more than six horses, and although Hartley had politely begged her to consider the Milverley stables as much her own as they had ever been her pride would not allow her to be so much beholden to him. Fanny, knowing what a grief it must be to her, was aghast, but Serena, who could not bear to have a wound touched, or even noticed, said lightly: “Oh, fiddle! What’s the use of keeping hunters one can’t ride? I can’t afford to have them eating their heads off, and I know of no reason why my cousin should!”

Shortly before Christmas, they received a visit from Lord Rotherham. One of his estates, not his principal seat, which was situated in quite another part of the country, but a smaller and more favoured residence, was Claycross Abbey, which lay some ten miles beyond Quenbury. He rode over on a damp, cheerless day, and was ushered into the drawing-room to find Serena alone there, engaged, not very expertly, in knotting a fringe. “Good God, Serena!” he ejaculated, checking on the threshold.

She had never been more glad to see him. Every grudge was forgotten in delight at this visit from one who represented at that moment a lost world. “Rotherham!” she cried, jumping up, and going to him with her hand held out. “Of all the charming surprises!”

“My poor girl, you must be bored!” he said.

She laughed. “Witness my occupation! To tears, I assure you! I was so extravagant as to send to London for a parcel of new books, thinking to be kept well entertained for at least a month. But having been so improvident as to swallow Guy Mannering almost at one gulp—has it come in your way? I like it better, I think, than Waverley—I am left with The Pastor’s Fireside, which seems sadly flat; a History of New England, for which I am not in the correct humour; a most tedious Life of Napoleon, written in verse, if you please! and, of all imaginable things, an Enquiry into Rent! Fanny has failed miserably to teach me to do tambour work that doesn’t shame the pair of us, so, in desperation, I am knotting a fringe. But sit down, and tell me what has been going on in the world all this time!”

“Nothing that I know of. You must have seen that Wellington and Castlereagh carried it against old Blücher. For the rest, the only on-dits which have come in my way are that Sir Hudson Lowe has his eye on a handsome widow, and that the Princess of Wales has now taken to driving about the Italian countryside in a resplendent carriage drawn by cream-coloured ponies. Rehearsing an appearance at Astley’s, no doubt. Tell me how you go on!”

“Oh—tolerably well! What has brought you into Gloucestershire? Do you mean to spend your Christmas at Claycross?”

“Yes: an unwilling sacrifice on the altar of duty. My sister comes tomorrow, bringing with her I know not how many of her offspring; and my cousin Cordelia, labouring, apparently, under the mistaken belief that I must be pining for a sight of my wards, brings the whole pack down upon me on Thursday.”

“Good heavens, what a houseful! I wonder you should not rather invite them to Delford!”

“I invited them nowhere. Augusta informed me that I should be delighted to receive them all, and as for taking Cordelia’s eldest cub into Leicestershire at this season, no, I thank you! I have more regard for my horses, and should certainly prefer Gerard not to break his neck while under my aegis.”

She frowned, and said, with a touch of asperity: “It is a pity you cannot be kinder to that boy!”

“I might be, if his mother were less so,” he responded coolly.

“I think it is not in your nature. You have neither patience nor compunction, Ivo.”

“On your tongue the stricture sits oddly, my dear Serena!”

She flushed. “I hope that at least I have compunction.”

“So do I, but I have not seen it!”

Her eyes flashed, but she choked back a retort, saying, after a moment’s struggle: “I beg your pardon! You remind me—very properly!—that your conduct towards your wards is no concern of mine.”

“Good science, Serena!” he said approvingly. “I am now thrown in the close, and shall make no attempt to come up to time. You are at liberty to censure my conduct towards my wards as much as you please, but why waste these remarks on me? Cordelia will certainly drive over to pay you a visit, and will be delighted to learn your opinion of me: it is identical with her own!”

Fanny entered the room as Serena exclaimed: “Oh, can we never be for ten minutes together without quarrelling?”

“I believe it has been rather longer than that, so we may plume ourselves upon the improvement,” he replied, rising, and shaking hands with Fanny. “How do you do? You have no occasion to look dismayed: I came only to pay my respects, and have already stayed too long. I hope you are well?”

She had never known how to reply to such speeches as this, and coloured hotly, stammering that she was so glad—hoped he would stay to dine—they had not expected—

“Thank you, no! I have no business with Spenborough, and paused here only on my way to Milverley.”

“You need not vent your anger on poor Fanny!” Serena said indignantly.

“I have no compunction!” he flung at her. “My sister spends Christmas at Claycross, Lady Spenborough, and has charged me to discover from you whether you are yet receiving visitors.”

“Oh, yes! We shall be very happy to see Lady Silchester. Pray, assure her—! It is most kind!”

He bowed, and took his leave of them. Fanny gave a sigh of relief, and said: “I am so thankful! Mrs Stowe tells me that the turbot had to be thrown away, and to have been obliged to have set an indifferent dinner before Lord Rotherham would have made me feel ready to sink! How he would have looked! What has put him out of temper?”

“Must you ask? I did, of course!”

“Dearest Serena, indeed you should not!”

“No, I did mean not to quarrel, only I said something severe—Well! It was true enough, but I never thought it would touch him on the raw! I’m sorry for it, but I daresay if we had not quarrelled over that we should have done so over something else.”

“Oh, dear! But perhaps he won’t visit us again!” said Fanny hopefully.