A Little Folly Read online

  ‘It will be odd at first, but I do not much mind it,’ Georgiana said, ‘for I like Miss Bowen a good deal, as I might not like a stranger marrying into the family.’

  ‘Lord. When you take the rational and sensible view, then there is no hope for any of us,’ Lieutenant Lynley said mordantly. ‘Well, here are the Transparencies: not quite as silly as one could wish, but they will do.’

  The great mural-size paintings, lit from behind, were certainly colourful in every sense: Lord Nelson seemed to have taken his famous vanity to the extreme of wearing rouge; but what Louisa chiefly wondered at, as she passed along the scenes, was how it had ever taken so long to win the war – for the French seemed always to be on the ground being bayoneted, an operation the British seemed to find so easy that they winked and smoked clay-pipes while they were doing it. Lieutenant Lynley laughed at them, but half-heartedly; and was soon recurring to the theme of his brother’s engagement.

  ‘Really he is a marvel: one can only admire. I am trying to imagine the trouble, the brouhaha, the wailing and gnashing of teeth if I were to announce I was going to marry the governess – but no, imagination fails, it is beyond all scope. Yet how Pearce carries it off! How he bears all before him! Believe me, I was entirely sincere in my congratulations, if only for that.’

  ‘Does it really displease you, then?’ Louisa asked. ‘You do not like Miss Bowen?’

  ‘Oh, she is well enough. She scares me: but, then, I always expected that a bride chosen by Pearce would scare me. As you well know, from our first meeting,’ he said, with a fleeting smile. ‘But the fagging thing is, I must find myself a new berth somewhere, at some time soon. Not that I am unwelcome, no, no: Pearce has explicitly said that I must always consider their home my own. Which is handsome: he can be handsome. And I am being the opposite – ugly, ungracious, call it what you will – when I say, to you at least, that I cannot bear the thought of sharing in that sober felicity. One or other of them, I fear, will always be correcting me: if not my conduct, then my grammar.’

  ‘Well – it looks as if you will have to seek that rich wife after all,’ Louisa said, with a little laugh, which was the very opposite of her feeling. ‘I wonder what, exactly, her fortune would have to amount to, to make her eligible as a candidate?’

  ‘You should know me better now than to take me at my liverish word,’ he said, almost scowling. ‘I think there can be nothing worse than being locked in a loveless marriage.’

  ‘But love in a cottage, they say, fares ill.’

  ‘They say a great many things. What do you think?’

  ‘I – I do not pretend to be indifferent to the comforts of life,’ she said, suppressing a shiver that was quite at odds with the stuffy heat, ‘but if one did lack them – or lose them – I believe compensations, great compensations, are still possible.’

  ‘Oh, everything is possible. As my sainted brother has just proved. Forgive me, I am good for nothing today. Shall we go? Georgiana, you too must be heartily sick of me, and I mean to take you for ices at Grillon’s to make it up to you, or so you won’t complain of me when we get home.’

  Louisa was sorry, but not sorry: he was not in his best spirits, and her own were hardly lively. Only as he was handing her into Mrs Spedding’s carriage did he speak again.

  ‘By the by, the talk is that your brother does not consort with Faro’s Daughter any more. The fearsome colonel warned him off, one supposes.’

  For a moment she could not answer: the subject weighed upon her heart with all its terrible oppression; and though she could not break confidence, she longed to be able to speak of it a little to him – to relieve the burden for a moment.

  ‘Well, as you remarked before,’ she said, ‘it is one of those tattling things that is talked of and forgotten. Though if it were not—’

  ‘Like Pearce Lynley and his governess bride,’ he said gloomily, ‘except there is no forgetting that: for some of us, it will go on and on. What a thousand pities it is that Pearce did not succeed in marrying you!’

  Disconcerted, Louisa asked: ‘Why would that have been better?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know,’ he said, in his most inconsequential manner; and chuckled. ‘Not that I am wishing you on him – God forbid.’

  ‘If he had,’ she said, searching his face, ‘he might have repented of his choice.’

  ‘How so? Would you have led him a merry dance?’

  She hesitated. ‘You spoke of Valentine and the – the rumours attaching to him. Such associations, you know, would surely not have been gratifying to your brother. Though of course you do not mind them.’

  ‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘But once married to Pearce, be assured, you would have been eternally safe from reproach: the dazzle of his righteous armour would have banished all scandal and trouble; great heavens, you would have been safe!’ And laughing, half turning, he waved her languidly off.

  Safe: from the awkward dissatisfaction of their meeting, and through the troubled commotion of her mind, this word rang like a deep bell. She sat numbly staring for some moments: then, when the carriage began to move, called out to the driver. ‘No – not home yet, please. I want to – I want to go and see the Law Courts.’

  ‘The which, miss?’

  ‘Where the great cases are tried.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be nothing in session there just now, miss. Not the right time.’

  ‘It doesn’t signify – I just want to see them.’

  He shrugged, supposing her, perhaps, being a little countrified about the sights, and set off. It was a long, slow business, with a great snarl of wheeled traffic at Charing Cross, and another hard by Whitehall, where a brewer’s dray had come to grief; but Louisa’s mind was so occupied with a kind of purposeful act of imagining that she scarcely noticed. At last she raised her head to see vast, venerable roofs darkening the summer sky: on one side Westminster Abbey, with the Parliament-house ahead: darkest and most solemn of all, the building to which the driver pointed with his whip.

  ‘Westminster Hall, miss,’ he said, mopping his brow. ‘Like I said, there’s nothing doing just now. I fancy some cases come on at the Guildhall too – but I doubt you’ll want to fag all the way over there besides,’ he added hopefully.

  No, this would do very well: here was sufficient dingy loftiness, and gloomy grandeur, to impress her mind: she could picture the arched and echoing interior, could even summon the musty smell of dreadful authority. In Devonshire the petty sessions and assizes had seemed commonplace bucolic affairs, like market-days, and her father used to grumble about the amount of drinking and idle gathering they engendered. Here, all was different: there appeared something terribly appropriate in the way this ancient bastion of the law stood flanked by the greatest edifices of government and religion. Here was power that there was no evading: here no allowances would be made, and the voice that spoke of good intentions and the heart’s innocence must be rendered a pitiful whisper.

  ‘Now, when the sessions are on, that’s different,’ the driver said, seeming to find disappointment in her frozen silence. ‘We’d be carriages wheel to wheel then. Why, there’s no show like it.’

  She nodded: she had already pictured the spectacle – the crowded galleries, the gleaming rail of the witness-box, the silks and wigs; and she had placed Valentine and herself in the midst of it.

  ‘Thank you for bringing me,’ she said. ‘Let us go home now.’

  The vision was confronted; and she quailed at it sufficiently to make redundant the other sight she had readied herself to go and see – the debtor’s prison. But her task now was to balance it against the other vision that she had been entertaining ever since Francis Lynley’s parting words. The image of safety: experimentally and treacherously, she had allowed herself to picture her life now if, by some means, she had forestalled Mary Bowen, and brought herself to accept Pearce Lynley.

  Mrs Lynley, mistress of Hythe Place, wife to one of the most respectable landowners in the kingdom, would be beyond the rea
ch of trouble: her fortunes would be so solidly established that even if her brother should involve himself in scandal and ruin she could remain serenely untouched, if she chose. And there would not be voices lacking to say she should so choose: everything rational and sensible pointed to it.

  The picture did not attract for more than a moment: swiftly its feeble glow was extinguished by the strength of her true feeling, her loyalty to Valentine, her complete belief that nothing could excuse such a cold, worldly match; still, she was disgusted with herself for the indulgence of that moment, and was glad that it was gone. Yes, even the shadow of Westminster Hall was a healthier place in which to move. But the resonance of that word safe was not quite ended. She thought there could be beauty in it, not mere prudence – if it encompassed warmth and truth of affection, the union of minds and hearts. There – there was something to be reached for; and hastily wiping her itching eyes as the carriage brought her back to Hill Street and to Valentine, she was grateful to have been given a glimpse of it, even if it seemed unlikely to be realised in the doubtful future that awaited them.

  Chapter XX

  At Hill Street Louisa found no news; and it was with renewed heaviness of heart that she realised some child-like part of her had been hoping for it – that she might somehow find Valentine and Mr Tresilian turning to her with lifted brows, inviting her smiling to a seat, and explaining that some accommodation – she hardly knew what – had been reached. Instead there was Valentine mute and pale, hands in pockets, dully shaking his head at her look; and the Speddings still full of the comfortable novelty of Mr Lynley’s surprising engagement.

  In the course of the long evening she found herself reviewing her own clandestine attempts at a solution to their predicament – and reviewing them, for the first time, with misgivings. Both Lady Harriet and Colonel Eversholt, in their different ways, had lent an ear to her persuasions, and so she had convinced herself that they might do good, or at least no harm; but now a dubious voice spoke up, and demanded to know how she could be sure that what she had done was not mere dangerous meddling. There was, after all, so much that was unknown to her in their situation: with Colonel Eversholt she had only a very limited acquaintance; and it occurred to her on looking back that Lady Harriet, despite her having been a guest at Pennacombe, had never stepped across that threshold which makes a person truly known; and that even in their last interview she had felt herself somehow at one remove from Lady Harriet’s thoughts and feelings, as if they were being expressed on a stage. If further evidence were needed, that she was not wholly easy with her own intervention, it surely lay in the fact that she had kept it secret – not so much from Valentine, who was too tenderly involved to judge it dispassionately, but from Mr Tresilian.

  The suspicion thus roused that she might not have helped their situation, and even that she might have made it worse, was a bleak one with which to end the evening: the image of Mr Tresilian frowning over it completed the gloom with which she retired to bed, and which she had little expectation could be lifted by the coming of the brightest morning.

  Bright it was: but it was with the lowest spirits, which she saw reflected in Valentine’s hollow looks, that Louisa came down to breakfast. – Yet it was not, at least, to be a blank day. There was news. Just after breakfast the maid brought in the post; and Valentine’s face as he saw the handwriting on the cover of the letter was enough to reveal to Louisa who it was from. Muttering an excuse to Mrs Spedding he started upstairs, and as soon as she decently could Louisa, struggling to conceal her agitation, followed him.

  She found him sitting in his room, blinking like a man just woken abruptly from sleep, the letter on the floor before him.

  ‘Look,’ was all he could say.

  Louisa took up the letter: at first the trembling in her hand made it dance before her eyes.

  To Valentine Carnell, Esq.

  Sir,

  I tender you this communication, in the earnest hope and expectation that it will be the last I am ever required to make. After scrupulous consideration, and weighing the demands of honour against the claims of clemency and forbearance, both imperative upon the conduct of a gentleman, I have come to a decision regarding the recourse to a suit at law, namely that of criminal conversation, to which I alluded in my last, as the only hope of redressing the injury to my reputation inflicted by your apparent intimacy with my wife. My decision, founded on the grounds mentioned above, is not to proceed with the suit. – This is not to be interpreted as any vindication of your conduct: but so excessive is the publicity attaching to all parties in such a suit in these times that a gentleman can hardly contemplate it with equanimity; and taken all in all, I prefer to rest, sir, upon the private satisfaction of your assurance that all intercourse with Lady Harriet has ended, and that this estrangement will remain complete and lasting. This is the final word I expect to pen, on a subject extremely distressing to the feelings, and which I shall be very happy to consider for ever closed.

  I remain yours &c

  HENRY EVERSHOLT.

  Louisa’s first reaction was that it could not be: that such a longed-for turn of events, such a liberation from the oppression of doom under which they had been living, must be the result of a mistake – of wishful thinking, of a dream; and she had to re-read the letter several times before she could be convinced of the blissful truth. Only then could she shout her delight and embrace Valentine, who held her stiffly, as if he still doubted that he was awake.

  ‘I have not misread it, Louisa – have I? He is giving the crim-con suit over?’

  ‘That is what he says. There it is, in writing. Oh! Valentine, is it not beyond anything? I am so happy for you – such relief – I feel my legs are going to give way, or else begin dancing. Oh – keep that letter safe. We must send to Mr Tresilian – he will want it filed with the lawyer, or something. He will be delighted too – who could not be? Who would ever have supposed that Colonel Eversholt could bestow such happiness?’

  Valentine’s smile was unsteady. ‘What can have made him change, do you suppose?’

  She had her ideas about that; but they were to be saved for her own private satisfaction. ‘I hardly know. Perhaps his friends have warned him against it, doubting its success. Probably he has been doing as you have – taking legal advice; and there he may well have heard unpromising things, especially about the costs he may be liable to. Perhaps he has simply seen sense. For my part I don’t much care – as long as you are safe.’

  She hugged him again. He still seemed half stunned; but he agreed that Mr Tresilian, who had laboured so hard on their behalf, should be told the glad news at once. They took a hackney to Lombard Street, and sent up a note for him to come out to them, mindful of preserving secrecy from Kate and Miss Rose; but he came hurrying out to tell them the ladies were gone shopping, and to invite them in.

  ‘You say good news,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Am I wrong to hope—?’

  ‘No, you are not wrong,’ Louisa said, and checked herself in the strong, unforeseen impulse to embrace him too: that would never do.

  In his parlour Mr Tresilian read the letter attentively, while Louisa could hardly keep still, and Valentine gazed mutely out of the window, as if seeing the world for the first time.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Tresilian said at last, blowing out a great breath. ‘Thank heaven. Something has made him see sense.’

  ‘Exactly what I said,’ cried Louisa. ‘The costs, perhaps, the risk – even the damage to his own reputation.’

  ‘Certainly I do not think it is his better nature,’ Mr Tresilian said. ‘As you say, prudence may at last have been the motive.’ His eye fell on Valentine. ‘Mind, there is nothing to prevent him threatening such an action again: it would make him look a fool, but he could do it – if these conditions are not met.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Valentine said, his voice muffled by the glass, ‘those conditions.’

  ‘Which, of course, are conditions your own good sense has already recommended to you,’ Mr T
resilian went on. ‘We have known from the beginning that that must be the case.’

  ‘To be sure.’ Valentine turned. ‘It is a victory – and, like most victories, has a little hollow taste about it. No, no,’ he added quickly, at Mr Tresilian’s look, ‘I am thankful, most heartily thankful, believe me. I am sensible that I have been saved from a dreadful prospect – all the more dreadful in that I did nothing wrong to deserve it.’

  Mr Tresilian’s face remained thoughtful; but after a moment he shrugged and went to the decanter, saying lightly: ‘Well, I dare say none of us gets what we deserve, for good or ill. I shall not prate of learning lessons: let us instead simply celebrate your delivery. It is rather early, but we can pretend the sun is over the yard-arm.’

  ‘Now I know you are happy,’ Louisa said, joining him, ‘because you are using nautical expressions.’

  ‘Oh, stow it and drink your grog,’ he said, handing her a glass.

  ‘Truly, though – I understand your caution, but – there is nothing to fear now, is there?’

  Mr Tresilian raised his glass gently to hers, with one of his rare, bright smiles. ‘There is nothing to fear.’

  In such an elevation of spirits as now seized her, nothing could come amiss. After Mr Tresilian had talked of informing their lawyer of the news, and Valentine, drinking deep, had said little, Kate and Miss Rose returned. Louisa had never been so glad to see Kate’s gentle face: Miss Rose, she thought, was a well-meaning woman in her way; and she looked over and admired their purchases with an enthusiasm that set Kate glancing a little anxiously at the decanter.

  On their return to Hill Street, she remained exultant; but she took some time before nuncheon to be alone, and indulge in a little prayer of thankfulness. – Whether after all it was her own persuasions, joined perhaps with those she had implored Lady Harriet to make, which had operated on Colonel Eversholt to this most felicitous result, she could not tell; and she would not tempt Fate by any crowing satisfaction. Other influences there must have been, including those she had suggested to Valentine and Mr Tresilian; but she had noted that phrase in the letter – your apparent intimacy – with its suggestion of an interpretation of Valentine’s conduct that could only have come from her; and so, just perhaps, hers had been the grain that tipped the balance. To joy and relief was added the warm hope that she had not failed her brother; and that she was much more equipped to deal with the great world than anyone, from her father to Mr Lynley, had ever given her the credit of believing.