Chapter Eleven
Letter No. 21
Monday, 18th June
My dear Julia,
I believe I am now privy to the feelings of a general or an admiral, who has spent countless hours frowning over maps and receiving intelligence about the enemy, and planning his battle strategies with the utmost care, only to come to the point, when he must entrust the final execution of his plans to others. However highly he may rate the talents and dedication of those officers carrying out his orders, I suppose he cannot help but suffer from moments of apprehension, when he paces about, wondering if some unforeseen circumstance has sprung up which his plans have not taken into account, leaving his men no choice but to act under their own direction. No doubt your uncle, Major Merrion, would say that a good general should always make arrangements for all possible situations, or that he should entrust his plans only to those subordinates in whose judgment he is supremely confident.
I have no quarrel with your uncle, and in the army perhaps it is different, but in my own situation, flung as I have been into the midst of strangers, I have had little choice in the matter of whom I shall trust. I say nothing against Mrs. Grayson: twice now, I have seen her enter the card-room, escorted by her nephew—whose reluctance, if it existed, was not visible across the room—and since she told me that she has never had any use for cards, there can be no reason for this, other than her determination to seek out Mrs. Barr. Nevertheless, I am uneasy. How can a woman with no opinion of cards hope to win even a few words from Mrs. Smithton, let alone an opportunity to engage in an extended conversation with her companion? What if I have entirely mistaken the situation, and Mrs. Barr, once seated at a table with her hands sprouting various tantalizing combinations, is as engrossed in the fate of her kings and queens as any Jacobite could be? Or—if I am not mistaken in my estimate of her character—what if Mr. Grayson is unable to discern the difference between necessity and preference, and adjudges her a hardened gamester, ready to cast away the family jewels in hopes of a better hand?
You will say, perhaps, that there is nothing to prevent me from walking into the card-room if I wish, and appraising such matters for myself, instead of waiting impatiently for a bulletin—but if you say such a thing you will be quite wrong, for I am as firmly banished from those ‘paste-board temples’ as Miss Barr, with this difference, that while Mrs. Smithton only desires to remain undisturbed, my mother wishes to maintain the fiction, 1) that her insistence that I accompany her to Bath was a wise and excellent decision; 2) that I have made a most favorable impression upon society here, and am spending my days forming friendships with high-ranking persons whose names are neither Parry nor Merrion; and 3) that despite the fact that she is my mother, there is really no connection between herself and that fashionably-dressed but otherwise insignificant young lady with the limp and the astonishing lack of charm. All three of these happy fancies would be effectively shattered were I to droop impatiently about the card-room, like a small ragamuffin holding a gentleman’s horse outside a shop in expectation of a coin, and thus I am forbidden entrance into her sanctum sanctorum.
And if by chance you are wondering why I can gain no intelligence from Miss Barr herself, the sad fact is, that she remains ill and confined to Mrs. Smithton’s house; and though I may send her all the letters I wish, I am not allowed to visit her, as my mother fears a contagion. Today I remembered to place myself in a chair convenient to those approaching the card-room, and was briefly cheered when Mrs. Barr smiled her tired smile when she saw me, and wandered just slightly out of the true path, in order to deliver to me another note. However, it was just Miss Barr being grateful for my ‘excessive kindness’ in taking the trouble to send her a message by her mother, and overwhelmed by the fact that I had later sent a footman to their lodgings with the first two volumes of Evenings at Home. (These I had purchased for her at a book-seller’s last week, after I learned that most of their books had been, of necessity, sold before they left Wiltshire. I thought your father would approve the gift, though no doubt your mother would have suggested one volume, and a packet of lozenges, as more practical.) She wrote many rapturous lines about the comfort she had received from being able to read the ‘dear tales’ once again, but, maddeningly, not one word about anybody named Grayson, with whom her mother might recently have become acquainted.
Such a disappointment after my initial surge of hope was bad enough, but what was worse, is that I believe Miss Barr may have unwittingly enclosed a breath of contagion within her note, for unless I am very much deceived, my throat is even now plotting against me, and I shall wake up tomorrow feeling as if I had swallowed a bowl of sharp-edged rocks for dinner. I have taken care not to breathe too near these pages as I write them, but to be safe, perhaps you ought to read them outside, with a breeze blowing about you—I shall place a warning to this effect above the seal.
But no, I forgot: you hardly ever catch cold. Well, in any event, you must take care that Kitty does not come upon my letter by accident, as she is sure to begin sneezing in an instant.
Yours, filled with a foreshadowing of doom,
Ann