Judith Ivory (2 page)

He bowed, stepping back to bend low and make an elaborate swoop of his arm.
“Mademoiselle.”
He had a knack for turning courtesy into something else.

At the door, he turned toward her again. “I can find you, you know. I fancy you’re not unknown, and you’re hardly difficult to describe.” His eyes glanced down the length of her. “You are breathtakingly lovely, do you know that?” His smile grew suddenly wide as he added, “Yes, you do,” then chuckled. “And I did want to kiss you. I still do. Only not here. Not now.”

Christina let out a little
pah,
a puff of air, of shock, dismay. She stood there without words—mute, flushing by waves and turns, angry, unnerved, flattered, confused. Try as she might, she could think of no retort, no clever last word to fling at him.

The front door clicked softly behind him. His footsteps echoed across the portico, tapped down the steps, then disappeared at a run out onto the soft earth of the front garden. All was quiet. There was only Christina, standing alone in her pretty dress….

She’d been holding her breath. It came out in a huge hiccuping sigh, almost a sob. She looked around her. No one. No one to be any wiser, she told herself. Behind her, she could hear that dinner was over; everyone had moved into the ballroom to dance. Yet the entrance room where she stood felt hollow. The room echoed with a kind of loneliness she had never felt. Something had happened. Her cheeks were glowing with heat. Her hands, clenched in white-knuckled fists, were tingling cold.

And she was not happy. That awful man had ruined it. He had ruined a perfectly good evening by his silliness. She would never forgive him, she thought, never. And tears began to come down her face. Hot, bitter tears that tasted salty as blood.

On the day following her encounter with the earl, roses were delivered to her father’s house in London. A great many roses: It took eight large vases to accommodate them. All morning, Christina looked at them with a strange, confused delight. Though she wasn’t certain she should enjoy the idea, the Earl of Kewischester had indeed found her. He knew not only her name but the whereabouts of her home—and had the nerve to confront her here with a huge, florid display. He’d sent the biggest, fattest, reddest roses she had ever seen in her life.

Just what Christina herself might finally have made of all this, however, became a moot point. It was the reaction of Winchell Bower, King’s Counselor, that achieved a tangible effect.

He came in from court that afternoon and was, at first, delighted. He believed Richard Pinn had sent the flowers. Which made a parlor full of roses “a jolly, fine display.” Then he saw the note.

Respectfully, to Miss Christina Bower. From the Honorable Adrien Hunt, seventh Earl of Kewischester.
The message was engraved. A plate had been cut for her.

At this point, the flowers, the entire gesture became “an ostentatious show of superiority.” The
coup de grâce
came, though, when her father realized the card had been signed, in ink, in the man’s own hand—just the single intial:
A.

“What is this
A
? How well do you know this libertine…this…this dissolute…this…this…? Do you use his given name? Just his initial? How familiar are you? By God, daughter, I can see I have been too free with you.” Winchell Bower was livid. “Where on God’s earth did you meet this man?”

She explained she had only spoken to him briefly at the Baysdens’ party the night before.

“When? I never saw you speak to him. And he sends you roses? So many roses? The next day?” A crescendo was building. “My dear young woman, do you know Pinn’s son is interested in you? A baronet’s son. And there’s been talk of marriage. A marriage which, I must say, would see me content to the last of my days.” He took a breath. “But may I say that the Pinn family, any decent family, would not so much as turn their heads your way if
this
got out!”

This? “I don’t see how—”

But the counselor would allow no defense. “Open your eyes! You’re not a child any longer. An earl, especially
that
earl, is hardly likely to offer marriage. My
God, girl, are you a fool? He doesn’t approach me. He sends you flowers! Many too many red flowers! Then he signs his name like a…like a…well, much too familiarly.” He drew himself up. “If he has laid so much as one finger on you…”

And, thus, there began a kind of revision of fact. For Christina was called upon to give details of the meeting. Over and over. It seemed neighbors, as well as every servant in the house, knew of the extravagant gift. It had taken six of the earl’s men (liveried) and two carriages (crested, of course) to bring the flowers. And the contents of the note, no doubt also through servants, became common knowledge. Circumstances made it necessary for Christina to express her shock and recount—in a slightly tidier, more modest version—the incredible cheek of the man.

Circumstances also made it possible. For, as it turned out, Christina’s version of the evening would be the only one ever heard.

On July 11th, the morning of the flowers, Adrien Hunt crossed the English Channel. From there the earl traveled to the province of Dauphiné in the southeast of France, where, exhausted from two days’ journey by boat then coach, he and his welcoming hosts went to bed. They were all still soundly asleep at midday on July 13th, when the commotion broke out.

Unbeknownst to anyone in the manor house, a group of local farmers had been gathering all night. By noon, feelings were high. United by hunger and a sense of injustice, they rioted. Local manor houses were burned and chopped. Whatever damage could be wreaked with sticks and rocks and farm tools was meted out. Only later would this be recognized as the preamble to the French Revolution—the provincial equivalent of the storming of the Bastille in Paris.

That day France stood on the precipice of enormous social change. A hundred years before, the English had
had their revolution. Their king had lost much of his power to Parliament—and lost his head in the bargain. But France had continued on under the old notion that the French king ruled by Divine Right—that he and the French nobility had, by God’s will, the absolute authority to live better, freer, and without compunction for the lower class. But, since the turn of the century, industrialization had brought forth economic changes that added something new to the mix: a class of citizens who were neither poor nor aristocratic.
La bourgeoisie.
The middle class. The entire notion of three classes rather than two—and the power of the business class—would be built on events and ideas born in this turbulent period of French history.

France was not oblivious at least to the rhetoric of these ideas. French writers—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot—had given words to the new spirit breaking over the world. French treasuries had helped finance, across an ocean, the largest experiment in liberty, equality, and brotherhood: America. The surprise was, however, that these ideas could ignite so violently in France herself.

Three things made this possible. First, a foolish king, Louis XVI, followed a profligate one. Louis XV had taxed heavily. He and his noblemen—exempt from taxes—had grown accustomed to living richly and passing on the bill. His son, Louis XVI, saw both the high taxes and his own dwindling coffers. Yet he refused to make reforms or live more frugally. Eventually, there was simply no money left—either in his treasury or in the poor peasants’ pockets. Then, the final straw, crops failed. No wheat translated, for the poor man, into no food; bread was the mainstay of his diet. The masses, great in number, poor and hungry, had everything to gain and nothing to lose by uniting with the more articulate and savvy middle class.
Voilà.
The organism had a brain and a huge, massive body. A revolution came to life.

And Adrien was there on the morning this violent force—which would shake a continent for ten years—came screaming and wailing into cohesive existence. He, along with his hosts in Dauphiné, were roused from sleep and dragged from their beds. Neighbors—poor men, farmers—were their enemies. With whatever weapons they could carry, these angry, hungry people began their war on the upper class. Then, another stroke of enormous bad luck: In Adrien’s corner of the fracas, the weapon to hand was a scythe.

He sustained what were considered mortal injuries, the curved blade making a neat incision from under his arm, down and across his belly, around to his flank. No man, the doctors said, could ever had been more artfully sliced from one end to the other. The ailing lord was stitched together in France, then carried by litter, very gently, across the channel: brought home to die.

When the news came of the earl’s “accident,” Christina felt a guilty sense of relief. Her small lies were secure. But she felt also, as the days moved on, something else. She
had
lost something. And she had to deal with this tiny bit of grief alone. Her spirits became subdued. She became restless and hardly up to the social commitments expected of her. No one had the first inkling or understanding of it, but she went into a kind of mourning, not specifically for the earl himself, but related to him in a way she could not pinpoint. She went into mourning for herself. For something the earl had represented to her. And for a romance with life she suddenly realized was based too much on her own whim, too little on reality.

May, 1792

Christina Bower Pinn arrived at the country house in a rented carriage. She stepped firmly into the mud of the driveway, wrested her own bags from the rear boot (Was the driver a lout? Or did gossip spread more rapidly than a team of horses could carry her?) and faced the front door. It was, she knew, the front door of a “gentleman friend,” that is to say, a kind of back door to her cousin Evangeline’s happy existence. But Christina was in no position to quibble. Thank God for her Evie’s willingness to help.

Christina pulled the door chain, then had to pull it again.

A preoccupied cook answered, covered at this early hour with the makings of the day’s bread. The housekeeper, she explained, was with the fowler, haggling over a catch of wild birds. There was no one else about, save a lazy gardener, who could never be induced to leave his dirt, not even to let someone in the front door. The master
of the house was, as promised, in London. Yes, they were expecting Christina.

“Faîtes comme chez vous.”
Make herself at home. The cook was French. Directions to her rooms were flung into the air over the woman’s shoulder, along with a mild dusting of flour.
“Vous comprenez?”
The cook didn’t wait for an answer, but rushed on. “You weel be make more comfortable
plus tard. La femme de charge
weel be up
tout de suite.
“

Christina was left alone in a vast entry hall that was purely amazing: It was not only enormous, but contained enough clutter to have furnished—richly—three or four such large rooms. Her host’s entrance room had all the plenty—and organization—of Ali Baba’s cave. Pictures, tapestries, objets d’art. Glass-fronted vitrines filled with a miscellany of tiny figures, vases, dishes. So much furniture was crowded together, Christina could hardly distinguish it all, though she took note of half a dozen chairs upside down, their claw-footed legs in the air where they sat atop their brethren.

A heavy, cloying scent drew her attention to a nearby sideboard. It held enough garden roses, heavy and wilting now, to have denuded every bush in Hampshire—the gardener wasn’t entirely lazy. Their smell made the vast room feel close, oppressive with the call to bees and pollination.

Naturally, Christina’s mind would turn to pollination. She remembered suddenly that Evangeline would be looking a bit pollinated herself when next she saw her. Christina hoped to be able to cope gracefully with the sight.

On this note, she heaved up her first bag and threw herself into continuing on—a phrase that was beginning to annoy her of late for how often her mind resorted to it. She carted up her own belongings as directed. Up the stairs, second landing; her apartments
were on the right—or were they straight ahead? The two words in French were so alike.

Straight ahead
must be correct, for the apartment was wonderfully devoid of all the busyness in the rest of the house. It was stark, in fact. As if longing for someone to move in and occupy it. The apartment’s sitting room and bedchamber pleased Christine immediately and immensely for their spacious simplicity.

And the light in the bedchamber! The windows were not mere windows but French doors that led onto a balcony. With delight, Christina began opening up the tall glass doors, hooking them securely. In temperate weather, as today, why, one could literally let the outside in. Birds sang in an overhanging tree branch. A breeze seemed to blow in sunlight—leafy shadows waved and chattered across the wall. What a lovely place to have landed.

She stepped out onto the balcony to look out over what had to be the best prospect on the whole of the rear estate. A formal garden of arbors and statuary was bordered by a wide path along which sat benches in nooks. At its center a fountain, defunct or at least not in use. An orangery lay beyond the garden. Then, from there, the land went wild—Christina’s favorite brand of landscaping.

The land became a grassy meadow, luminously green in the morning haze and dotted with little black-legged sheep. This meadow ran all the way to a woods at the horizon. The line of distant trees enclosed the property like open arms, giving the land a sense of entirety, an integrity. As if it could hoist a flag and declare its vastness sufficient unto itself.

A woods,
Christina thought. Only royals and a handful of peers had their own private woods for hunting. Did those trees belong to her cousin’s friend? Was all of this his? Where had her cousin sent her?

Christina was suddenly aware of how little she knew about her new circumstance. Evangeline’s note had been brief. It had said the house would be vacant and that it would be entirely all right with its owner if she sent a visitor to it—it seemed Evie had this privilege. Christina knew, or at least suspected, that her cousin was involved with a gentleman here in her own region. She imagined she stood in his house. But Christina didn’t question the offer. She’d embarked knowing its drawbacks. While Evie had written, in a sentence, its advantages: The house was comfortable, less than a night’s ride away, and available on immediate notice.

God bless Evie’s less than conventional attitude. Not everyone came so willingly to the aid of a wife leaving her husband.

Christina took a deep breath and began to unpack.

After a time, the housekeeper appeared. There was no maid to spare; it was hoped Mrs. Pinn would understand.

The housekeeper was a starchier, more dour woman than the cook. And strange. As she spoke she fought an inappropriate smile—not of welcome, but one that glimmered, off and on, at one edge of her tight mouth.

“Shall I help you unpack?” “You’ve found your bath sheet?” “Do you require another lamp?” The woman had a litany of unnecessary questions she asked as she fingered Christina’s possessions.

Christina wished to finish unpacking, to undress, yet she became reluctant to do so. She supposed that her unusual and sudden arrival, with no maid and only a few belongings, amused the woman.

“I hate to keep you,” Christina said at last. “I know you are busy.”

“Not at all. I’m having my tea.”

Indeed. Me. You’re having me for tea.

“Look at that!” the housekeeper said all at once, and pointed out the window. “He’s not from here, you know.” This was meant to explain a great deal.

“Who?”

“The gardener down there.” The housekeeper gestured with emphatic distaste. “if you can call ’im that. All he does is meddle with God’s work. A devil be more his name. Blasphemous. Look. He’s at it now.”

Directly below them, a man in a broad hat had walked into view. He stood at the base of the sweetbrier that climbed the three stories almost into Christina’s room. The plant was still holding some of its spring bloom.

“How lovely,” Christina said.

The gardener brought out a small pair of shears, working so carefully over a stem he looked more surgeon than groundskeeper.

“Ugly,” the housekeeper spoke forcefully. “He makes
orange
roses. And every one of them has been sterile. Every one. It’s pointless.” A sly smile stole across the woman’s face.

With seeming satisfaction, the housekeeper left the room. Christina stood open-mouthed.

Such deliberate malice, from a stranger, left her stunned. But, surely, the housekeeper couldn’t know—

Though, of course, Evangeline did like to talk.

Christina slumped onto the bed. The woman had eyes, she thought. Perhaps it showed. She had never thought of herself in those terms before, but she felt oh so orange now. Didn’t the sun bring out pale orange freckles on her face and arms? Didn’t it streak the bundle of orange hair that weighted her neck? Her eyes—she closed them—were so light a brown as to almost be orange. Well, no, she refused to believe she was ugly. Rejected perhaps. Cast off. But not ugly. Her “orange” features were her strength, her immediate and visual uniqueness. She would carry them as if they
were beautiful, mostly because she still believed they were, but partly because she was perfectly willing to bluff if they were not.

Sterility, though, was another matter. It was not ugly precisely. Just completely out of order: the last thing one expected to question of oneself.

Obstinately, even now, Christina’s mind would not let go of the feeling of being whole, normal—accompanied by a depressing sense of everyone else having got it all wrong. She wasn’t a breeding cow. Why should it matter so much if she couldn’t bear children?

Yet it mattered to Richard. And because it did, she was going to hear another humiliating word applied to her: divorced. She hadn’t been able to stay in the house a moment longer, once Richard told her: A future baronet needed heirs—and a wife who could provide them.

“Honest to goodness, Evie! The Earl of Kewischester! How do you expect me to get my father’s help when he finds out?”

“You don’t need Papa’s help, Christina. You’re a big girl—”

“You’ve stabbed me in the back.”

Evangline laughed. “I’ve given you a shove in the right direction. Besides, where else would you have gone?”

Christina turned from the window. Evangeline Sloane was slender—except for a large, round, pregnant belly—and very pretty, a fact she liked to celebrate as femininely as possible. Today, her brown ringlets jiggled sweetly at the shoulder of a pink voile dress. She had wide, innocent eyes—which she could use shamelessly to convey a rather fetching brand of helplessness, while being about as helpless as a fox.

Christina sighed as she sat back onto the window-sill. She looked at her cousin who sat on the sofa. The
two young women had been having tea and scones in the earl’s small receiving room. “Evangeline,” she said, “don’t mistake me. I appreciate your help so very much. But this is too important. I want—
need
—Papa’s assistance.”

“Indeed, anyone who can handle Winchell Bow—”

“No, no.” Christina frowned. “
Handle
is the wrong word. I’m not trying to manipulate him. I only want for him to understand. You see, I’ve enjoyed a certain amount of independence since my marriage and—”

Evangeline laughed. “Yes, and don’t we all know it. That’s the reason Richard wants shed of you, not this other. He’s afraid of you, Christina. He can’t predict or control you.” With a fresh breath, Evie seemed willing to change the subject. “So who put this other idea into Richard’s head? How could anyone say you’ll never have children?”

“Doctors can, apparently. Three of them.”

“How could they possibly know?”

“Oh, it’s true, Evie.” Christina shook her head. “Two summers ago, I had some pain. It was nothing really. But then I started to bleed. My doctor said I had to stay in bed, but it only got worse. He began to talk about an infection and damage inside.” She heaved a sigh. “Richard was very concerned. I let him call in another doctor, then another. They were unanimous. I was forming scar tissue in my Fallopian tubes.”

“In your what?”

“I’ve heard it often enough; I ought to know how to say it.” Christina looked across the room at her cousin. “What it means, dear, is I can’t conceive. The tubes are too narrow to let an egg pass.”

Evie patted her tummy, pondering, then grinned up slyly. “Perhaps that’s not so bad.” At twenty-eight, she had five children, with a sixth on the way. “So what do you plan?”

Christina mugged a face. “My plan
was
to collect my
thoughts, then write to my father for help. I have no idea what he’ll make of this now.” She bowed her head. “I don’t know, I suppose it’s all right to be barren. I just hate everyone’s gossiping about it before I’ve had a chance to understand what is happening to me first. I want time. Papa could do something for me, I know. He always can.”

“And Richard? You’ve talked to Richard?”

“For hours. He wants a divorce. He is quite set on it.” She made a dry laugh. “Do you know what he had the nerve to tell me? He wants to be able to remarry. He doesn’t want to come off in a bad light. I am not to make ‘a thing’ of this. ‘We must both think of the future.’” She let out a contemptuous breath. “Every time I think of the future, I want to throw up.” She shook her head. “He’s not being very nice.”

“He never has been.”

Christina frowned. “I used to think he was.” But she recanted. “No. I suppose you’re right. He just had all the right appearances.” She sighed. “And, of course, he pleased my father’s sense of upper class. A title.”

“You should have let your father marry him.” Evangeline made a sniff. “And only a baronet at that.” Then she laughed. “Now if you want a title, why not Adrien? Remember the flowers? How your father went on?”

Christina hadn’t thought of
that
for a long time. She groaned. “Please. I’d rather not—”

Evie was off and running. “A full, blooming earl. The Prince of Wales has slept in this very house. In fact, he’s gotten drunk in this room.” Her eyes always danced when she spoke of such things.

Evie reached over a pile of scones and jam for the teapot, edging forward as much as her girth would allow. “There’s so much I could tell you. Adrien looks wonderful. And he’s every bit as naughty as he’s always been.” She laughed. “I think he tells me every wicked deed just to fan his reputation. He flirts with me abominably.
Even like this!” She patted her belly, laughing. “This past winter, even as I was beginning to show, he stopped me in the antechamber of the Haverings’s main dancing room and kissed me full on the mouth.”

Christina was shocked. For almost three years now, she’d been living within the decent boundaries of a responsible marriage. She shook her head at her cousin. “There is talk, you know, Evie. Of you and, I think, this man.”

“Just talk.”

Talk which Christina was, alas, inclined to believe.

Her cousin clicked her tongue. “Christina, don’t be a prig. He’s very charming. You will like him. Honestly.” She tilted her head. “And, of course, I would never be
truly
unfaithful to Charles. It’s just that Adrien makes me feel so—”

“Loose,” Christina finished for her.

Evie laughed, delighted. “No, you ninny.” More laughter. “Well, yes.” She mocked the unsmiling young woman across from her. “It’s a game, Christina. It’s only a game to play. Which Adrien plays quite hard and quite well.” She grew sober: affectionately admonishing. “Sweet coz, I wouldn’t ever really…you know. You
must
know that. Adrien could never take the place of dear Charles. He’s much too—well, full of himself. Adrien comes with all the drawbacks of someone who has had way too much for way too long. Selfish. Self-centered. Shallow, but fun. And he can be perfectly obnoxious when he wants to be. But one puts up with him. Partly because good-looking, rich, well-educated men can be so amusing to have around. And partly because”—she winked—“the Prince of Wales sleeps here occasionally, and it’s a tickle to be so near the blood.” Evie teased with her eyes as she reached forward to drop an enormous mound of clotted cream onto a split scone.