Jack had to clear his own throat. ‘Uh-hum. Now, we must get you both aid. Shall I go to the road and summon it?’
‘You would not leave us, sir?’ Mrs O’Farrell grabbed Jack’s arm. ‘You could not be so unkind?’
‘I could never be unkind to you,’ Jack said, his words for the aunt, his eyes on the niece, ‘but are you able to walk?’
‘We can, sir. We will.’ Laetitia was gently pulling her aunt to her feet. ‘And if the gentleman would lend an arm?’
The gentleman did. It was slow progress out of the dell and back to the roadway, a little swifter upon it. Jack was happy with the pace, hardly surprised, now the crisis was passed, that his own legs were weakened, too.
With the ruined walls of Bath in sight, Laetitia said, ‘A moment, pray, for us to compose ourselves before we enter?’ There was a wall before a cottage and the elder lady lowered herself onto it.
Jack, who’d spent much of the last minutes gazing on Laetitia’s profile, now found his scrutiny returned. She spoke. ‘May we enquire, sir, the name of our rescuer? And his rank? You are obviously in the Army?’
He was about to declare himself, attempt the formalities that the violence of their introduction had superceded – his connection to their family, his delight in making their acquaintance – when he saw that this last question had directed the green gaze upon his uniform. At first, he sought disgust there, the same he felt when he saw the dreadful, stained and patched hand-me-down he’d reluctantly worn since Quebec. But then he noticed the quality of the look. Not disgust, not at all. Fascination. And the words Red Hugh had spoken earlier that night came suddenly back to him: She will marry for love and the poorer the suitor, the better!
‘My rank? Well, I am a Cornet, miss – with hopes of one day being made up to lieutenant.’
‘I am sure that day will be soon, if courage speeds promotion,’ the older lady smiled.
‘Alas, gold is more likely to. Of which, as you can most certainly tell, I have but little. Or rather none.’ He laughed, gesturing to his ill-fitting apparel.
‘And your name, sir?’ The eyes had risen, from this badge of his poverty, to his own.
‘My name?’ Jack thought, but only for a moment. He had never read any of these ‘romances’ Red Hugh had so disparaged. But he had seen inumerable plays which had similar themes. And playwrights, like novelists, always called their heroes similar things. Something like … ‘Beverley is my name, Miss Fitzpatrick. Cornet Beverley. And your servant.’
‘Debtors have no servants. Rather the reverse. However shall we repay you?’
They smiled at each other. The gaze held and Mrs O’Farrell, perceiving it, suddenly rose. ‘I believe I am rested enough to proceed.’
They passed through the West Gate. ‘Shall I secure you a chair?’ He saw the fear return to the aunt’s face. ‘If I urge them to go slow and ward you all the way to the Circus?’
Surprise replaced the fear. ‘And how do you know where we live, sir?’
Damn! ‘I, um, was standing close when you entered the chair. Heard you give the destination.’ It sounded reasonable. Emboldened, he went on, ‘Didn’t like the look of those fellows who took you off. So I decided to follow.’
‘Thank the Lord you did, sir.’
‘I will. I do.’
A chair was secured and Jack handed the aunt in.
‘I will walk,’ Laetitia said, ‘if you will accompany us, sir.’
‘I shall be delighted.’
‘But will we not take you far from your way, sir?’ Mrs O’Farrell had leaned from the window to enquire.
‘No, no. I am bound for the Circus also.’
‘You are?’ That gaze was again considering the poverty of his clothes.
Damn, again! He really needed to sit down and concoct a proper story. ‘I have … an aunt too, ha-ha. Lives on the Circus. I haven’t visited her yet today.’
‘And you will do so at this hour?’
Jack smiled, at least with his mouth. ‘Insomniac. Insists I drop by to tell her of the play. Though truly, I think she just wants to be certain I eat.’
‘How kind she is.’
To end this examination, Jack tapped the chair with his stick and told the men to go steady. He and Laetitia followed a few paces behind. Picking up their conversation, Jack said, ‘I can think of one repayment for my services, if you still consider it necessary to make one.’
‘Which is?’
‘Let me see you tomorrow?’
‘A small price for such a large obligation.’
‘’Tis all I require – for now.’
Laetitia tipped her head to the side, looked at him with a faint smile. ‘For now?’ When he said nothing further, she added, in a lower tone, ‘My aunt is vigilant. And however much she is obliged to you, she is obliged to our family name the more. She will countenance no cornet attentions.’ She sighed. ‘It appears that I am to be wooed by nothing less than a duke. So they say. But we shall see about that.’
The voice had settled even lower as she spoke her defiance, hovering in that catch he was already half-besotted by. ‘Well, miss, I can only assure you that I am somewhat skilled in subterfuge.’
She smiled back, then looked away. ‘Tomorrow, you say? Well, I shall, as usual, take the waters. And it is a public bath. They will admit anybody.’ She looked up. ‘Perhaps I shall see you there?’
They walked on, Jack’s heart beating nearly as fast as it had at Kingsmead Fields. They were on Gay Street before she spoke again.
‘You must not stare so, Cornet Beverley.’
Jack shook his head. ‘I am helpless to do other, Miss Fitzpatrick.’
They had fallen behind the chair by twenty paces. Jack looked away from Laetitia to see it turn left down Queen’s Parade Place. The Circus was straight on.
He caught up quickly. ‘What do you do, fellow? Your destination is ahead.’
The aunt leaned out of the window. ‘’Twas my orders, Cornet Beverley. The front of our house is being reconstructed. We are forced to use the rear entrance for now.’
The chair was carried up a gravelled path that ran parallel to Gay Street and, Jack presumed, on behind the Circus. Indeed, after five or six rear gates were passed, a tap halted the chairmen.
‘This is ours,’ said Laetitia. The chair was set down and Jack beat one of the men to the door, offering his hand. Mrs O’Farrell stepped out, smiling her thanks. As she reached for a large purse, he resisted the urge to pay. Receiving their fare, the chairmen lurched off. A yawning servant had appeared at the gate, a lantern in his hand. Mrs O’Farrell stepped towards him. ‘There are not words to express our gratitude, dear Cornet. We hope to see you about the town.’
‘Indeed, ma’am, I often visit my aunt on the other side of the Circus here. We are sure to run into each other.’
‘This aunt who lives on the Circus – perhaps you are not from quite so impoverished a family?’
With one eye on Laetitia, he replied, ‘A distant aunt, alas. A Methodist. Does not believe in the Army as a suitable career.’
‘Ah well.’ Mrs O’Farrell moved towards the still yawning servant.
‘Till tomorrow,’ whispered Laetitia. There was a touch on his arm, and she was gone.
Jack stayed staring at the gate for some time, until the servant returned and glared at him, forcing him to move on. He could have finally visited his lodgings, but he knew he would be unable to sleep just yet. Instead he walked into the parkland that backed the buildings, musing on the night and its beauty. From this high elevation, the lights of the town gleamed through the trees below him. To his left, lanterns shone in the windows of what had to be the Circus. No doubt by the light of one of them she was beginning to undress.
‘Laetitia,’ he murmured, running his hands down his chest. His left reached something hard. He pulled out the pistol.
He cocked the piece, raised it into the air and pulled the trigger. Click. No shot, not even the puff of a misfire. The gun had indeed dis
gorged all its powder.
Replacing the gun in the pocket, he smiled. It was just as well that the Irishman had chosen flight over valour. Just as well.
– TEN –
The Pleasures of the Town
It was a scream that woke him, jerking him from pleasant dream to a startled, instant wakefulness, his hand reaching to the bedside table, to the pocket pistol there. He had never returned it to her, keeping it as a first token of love. He was glad of that now, glad that powder was in the pan and the flint renewed. But the room, daylight etching the shutters, presented no target. When the scream came again – a long drawn-out wail ending in a series of barks – Jack shook his head, uncocked the pistol and set it down.
‘Damn’d seagulls!’ he muttered. The birds, so common in Bath despite the city’s distance from the sea, continued their Bedlam cries.
He lay back. Beside the gun was his pocket watch, the time displayed close to eight in the morning. The bird had fulfilled the duty that his servant had not. He was meant to arise at seven, to follow her chair to the town. He would just have to catch up with her at the Pump Rooms.
And what did today hold? he wondered, hands behind his head. Much the same as the ten days that had preceded it since the night of the footpads, no doubt. The social round of Bath.
Hang the place! It was too tame by half for a lad of any spirit. The regular hours stupefied. Balls ended at eleven sharp, taverns closed their doors soon after and Jack had yet to discover the equivalent of a Derry’s Cider House from Covent Garden where the more restless souls could carouse till dawn. He doubted there was one – mere awareness of its existence would have jangled the nerves of the invalids, drawn in their thousands to the town for its healing waters; though they were equally drawn by the peculiar mix of the society. No one was refused a place so long as they could afford the subscriptions to the baths, booksellers and balls, the private walks and assembly rooms; and behaved at them in a dully prescribed manner. The Wapping landlady could make a fourth in a quadrille with a duchess if she wore the correct dress, trod the formal steps and didn’t spit. Indeed, it was the nobility, used to a laxer mode of being, that more often were the ones ejected for some offence. Really, the standards of etiquette would have disgraced no court in Europe. Might have bored the Kings to death but …
Jack was glad his role as Beverley required him to appear poor. The ghastly uniform he resented wearing at least denied him entrance to most events. He was able to be the observer, amused by the pretensions and follies displayed, when he was not focused on the main reason for his observations.
Letty. She’d let him call her that after their fourth meeting – though he was always and simply ‘Beverley’, his invention failing when attempting to find a first name that matched the romance of this second one. He’d taken her hand while Mrs O’Farrell dozed beside her on the garden bench; at their Circus house he’d climbed the wall as soon as he’d heard her snore.
‘Letty.’ He breathed it out, stretched his arms and legs, laughed. Her name, simply uttered, had an effect on him that none had ever had before. Neither the gifted courtesan Fanny nor the lusty Widow Simkin, and not even Clothilde Guen, idol of his youth. She had been his first infatuation and he had wooed her with all a schoolboy’s ardour including poems, sweetmeats, and touches escalating from fingertips to lips. He had loved Clothilde as a boy loves and, as Fanny had observed his first night in Bath, he was now a man. And if that man was known as Beverley or Absolute, did it matter? His love was not a lie, and his goal was honourable. You did not seduce a woman such as Laetitia then depart. You married her. And did not all lovers don masks, selecting aspects of themselves to reveal? Did not all lovers use subterfuge and invention to conquer?
Ten days in Bath and he had turned into Love’s Philosopher! But surely the characteristics of the lover Letty desired were as much a part of him as his black hair; this mask merely allowed him to bring them more quickly to the fore. There could be no dilatoriness, no hints over a hand of whist, no whispers as couples met and parted in the dance. In fact, he’d become convinced that the pretence actually heightened truth. Feelings had to be gauged more swiftly, expressed sooner, then acted upon. Ten days in Bath and they had already reached the point that ten weeks of society could not have gained them. She had got to know the real Jack – yes, by another name but still the man who had fought Frenchmen and privateers, endured slavery, killed a bear, been tattoed. And he had got to know the real Letty, beyond the entrancing green eyes and that voice caught somewhere between velvet and the grindstone. For it was what the voice spoke, what the eyes conveyed that truly entranced. Indeed, her desire to spite her family and fall in love with someone poor was her only sign of silliness, instantly forgiven when set against her virtues. Her wit amused, especially when, in his stalking of her, he observed how she dealt with her suitors. She was cruel only to boorishness and would act for him her merciless put-downs of the Norwich wool merchant or the Harrovian marquis with a skill in mimicry that could have earned her a living upon the stage.
Jack sniffed. He had caught a slight chill – not a relapse of his fever, fortunately – standing in the rain under her window, though she had never appeared. And he still had a mark from a stone on one knee where he’d kneeled too long on the hoggin outside her back door, hoping he’d be noticed. Each pain was worth it, as he got ever closer to his goal. If he could persuade her to an elopement – the ultimate aim of all those novels – he was then certain that the ‘divine poverty’ she intended to be their life together would be swiftly curtailed by its direct experience. A week of squalor, a few weeks of penitence and they could approach her family. His rank, his own person, would win them over. A large fortune would be his – and a wife as beautiful as she was rich. She would eventually forgive him his deception, married bliss would soothe her – along with a little touch of Absolute in the night!
A knocking coincided with his contented sigh. ‘Come,’ he shouted.
The servants’ door, recessed into the wall so as to be almost invisible and not spoil the symmetry of the room, swung in and Fagg entered. In Bath, servants often came with the house and Jack had been happy he needn’t search one out, though the man was next to useless, cross-eyed, monosyllabic and surly with it. He now set down a bowl of chocolate and what was sure to be a stale bun.
‘Breakfast,’ the fellow muttered, moving slowly to open the shutters.
‘Oh, thank you,’ replied Jack, propping himself higher up on the bolster, ‘and at such a fine hour.’
The rebuke was ignored. Light filled the room. It was going to be another glorious day. At the sight, Jack began to whistle, getting louder when he saw the man wince. Fagg was undoubtedly sick from the night before. Jack had learned he could rely on this servant for no late-night cheese toast in the chafing dish. He would be drunk and snoring in his attic by ten.
At the door, Fagg stopped, turned. ‘Forgot,’ he said, and shuffled back. ‘Post.’
Two letters were dropped on the bed. Jack’s whistling ceased. He’d sent letters to London only ten days before. That replies had come so swiftly was amazing. Some Bath fellow called Allen ran the best service in the country, apparently.
Fagg stood looking down at him. ‘News, sir?’ he said, as if the idea was the dullest imaginable.
Jack looked at the envelopes. One was from Mayfair and Absolute House, the other from Hertford, though Jack knew no one there. Turning it over, he saw that the wax seal bore the regimental insignia of the 16th Light Dragoons. ‘I’ll let you know, Fagg.’
‘Oh, good.’ The fellow limped out, forgetting to close the door.
Jack studied the envelopes again. Putting off the news from his regiment, he opened the one from home. The envelope did not bear his mother’s elegant copperplate, however, and he was surprised to discover it was from Nancy, the Absolute housekeeper. He hadn’t known she could write.
‘Dear Jack,’ it read. ‘Lawks we woz glad to here from you tho only me and Timothy woz ere to tost
the news. First they says you woz missin praps dead then alive. You cawzed your mother sum grief sartain.’
Jack looked up, thought. Because of his capture by the Abenaki on the Plains of Abraham in the autumn of 1759, report had been returned that he was probably dead. When he’d shown up alive in the spring, he’d written to his mother then and eventually received a reply. However, she could not yet know that he had missed his ship and sat out another winter in America.
He returned to the page. ‘She’s gawn, joined your father in Germoney where ee fights the war. She was too flestered ere with scummy loyers talking confiscashun and such …’
That would be because of the duel his father had fought on Jack’s behalf, killing Lord Melbury. Both Absolutes had gone to war to avoid the consequences and perhaps win glory enough to mitigate the law’s harshness. Duelling was illegal anyway but Melbury had also been a King’s Minister.
‘… but so far tis only talk. I ave sent your letter on to Hangover. Timothy and I keep the house and awate the safe return of all Absolutes. God bless and keep ye Jack, Your Nance.’
So his parents were still in Hanover. He would have been glad to see them, with so much to tell. But perhaps it was for the best. They would have something to say about his plans no doubt. He hadn’t yet heard of a parent who did not want to interfere in their offspring’s romances. Far better to have it done and introduce them to their rich and beautiful daughter-in-law anon.
He picked up the second letter with reluctance. He’d only written to his regiment because not doing so would be the first step to desertion. The writing was as neat as Nance’s had been wild, the contents confined to three terse sentences: ‘You will report to the regiment’s surgeon immediately. Colonel Burgoyne in command of two troops in attack on Belleisle. Needs replacement officers.’ It was signed by the quartermaster at what had to be the regiment’s new headquarters in Hertford.