“I’ll ask Eskott to take me to Lady Wethercotte’s rout party this evening.”
“That you won’t, my girl,” her aunt said swiftly and firmly. “You may count yourself lucky if he
speaks
to you in future, let alone takes you to routs and balls.”
“I apologized twice—once orally, and once in writing. Eskott is not one to hold a grudge, Auntie. We quarrel more often than not, but he always comes back.”
“Not this time. Don’t ask him, Madeline. Don’t lay yourself open to further humiliation. Listen to me this time. I was right about Aldred, and I am right about Eskott. We old ladies
do
know something.”
“Eskott always forgives me. He scolds like a harpy first, then forgets my offenses.”
“He was beyond scolding, if you will recall. When you accuse him of lacking honor, you afflict his pride, his self-respect. I would think less of him myself if he truckles down to you on this point. But he shan’t. It was done in a public way too, to aggravate the situation. However he might have reacted had you done it in private, between the two of you, his pride will not let him come back now. That is the way men are.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Madeline answered, but in a disinterested voice.
She was not at all convinced she should not write to Eskott. It was apathy more than conviction that stayed her hand. If Eskott called, she would ask him to take her. If he did not come, she would stay home. He didn’t come.
Her father dined at home that evening, a thoroughly unpleasant meal, the subject throughout which was the evidence piling up that their cousin was nothing else but an opportunist. All the while he had been working for Fordwich, he had been in touch with the lower elements of the Whig party, it seemed. Now that his reversion to it was out in the open, Fordwich had been subjected to a dozen sly, taunting barbs. “You were too slow in finding the lad a position” and “You can’t win them all” was the nature of their comments, for even the Whigs were too polite to say what they really thought: that Fordwich was an old fool, and Madeline had lost her beau to a lady whose uncle was influential in the opposition party.
“Does there seem any likelihood it was Aldred who rifled those letters? That is what I want to know,” Lady Margaret said.
“They’ll never admit it, but I am satisfied that it is the case. He was seen in private talk with Reed in his chambers yesterday. When Reed came out, the story began propagating. That’s the explanation certainly, but as he is to join their ranks as a member, they will hardly blacken his character so early in the game. Give him a year, and he’ll do it very capably for himself.”
“You underestimate him. It won’t take that long,” his daughter said grimly.
“Eskott was looking daggers at me across the House all morning. I writhe with shame to face the man. At least we shall be spared his calls at our house in future. Never could understand why he continued coming after Maddie turned him off.”
“Maybe it’s me he comes to see,” Lady Margaret said lightly, for she deemed it high time for some levity to enter the house. “The Old Lady of St. James’s Square.” She looked a quick peek to her brother to see if this appelation struck him as significant. As it did not, she assumed this part of Madeline’s disgrace had not been broadly circulated through town.
“Heh heh, setting up in competition to Lady Hertford, are you, Meg?” Fordwich joked. “They may run her down as much as they like. She is a levelheaded woman.”
“Does that mean she has talked Prinney into accepting Sidmouth without turning you out of government, Papa?”
“It looks very much like it. Very much like it indeed,” he said with satisfaction.
“Good. I am happy to hear it,” Madeline said with a wan smile that was not far removed from tears. But they were not really tears of sorrow. Her heart was not broken at all. She was angry and frustrated and ashamed. She was thoroughly chastened, but she was not heartbroken.
Chapter Sixteen
The prince regent accepted Lord Sidmouth’s appointment and the Tories were once again securely in the seats of power. There was no further talk of unseating them. The Whigs railed against his perfidy in the House, in the press, and in private, but to no effect. It was back to business as usual. On St. James’s Street, too, some semblance of normalcy returned. The major excitement there was the arrival of a card announcing the nuptials of Henry Aldred and Agnes Dannaher.
“I can scarcely credit the gall of this!” Madeline declared throwing it into the blazing grate before Margaret had a chance to see it.
“He hitched his wagon to the wrong horse,” Margaret said. “Had he known the prince meant to stick by the old boys, he would no doubt have married you instead of this Agnes person. I was sitting by Taffy Barker’s mother at a musical party last evening, and she tells me the girl is plain in appearance, which will please you.”
“Plain and
young,
I suppose?”
“Nearly eighteen. Which reminds me, Maddie, we must have a do for your birthday. It is coming up pretty soon. Twenty-six years old, is it?”
“I have every intention of turning twenty-four, and I don’t want you telling anyone otherwise.”
“Gracious, you’d think you were nudging seventy, like me. Twenty-six ain’t so very old.”
“It is
ancient.
I ought by rights to be wearing caps, to proclaim my state to the world. Not that I mean to do it!”
“Bah, you’re just in low spirits over Henry. You’ll get yourself a nice new protégé in the spring, and things will look brighter. You’ll see.”
“I have abandoned the idea of protégés.”
“You must do something with your time. Something more than mere socializing, I mean. If you don’t mean to marry and raise a family, all the things that go with it, you will want an exciting hobby.”
“Yes,” Madeline answered with a little sigh, but in her heart she had no desire to dispense with marriage and raising a family—everything that was natural and attractive to a woman. It had never been her intention to forgo them entirely, only to put them off a little, till the right man came along. She thought increasingly these days that the right man
had
come, but come at the wrong time. When first he asked her, she was too young, not ready for marriage. And on his second proposal, she had been insane, or in love, with Henry. She knew how unlikely it was he would ever ask her again.
She missed Eskott, his frequent visits and easy conversation, his help in arranging the trivia of her daily life, the errands, the opinions and advice. She felt she no longer even understood politics, when she got only one side of the affair being discussed.
Eskott had rounded her thinking, shown her that what Papa and his friends spouted as morality was often expediency. It was dull having no arguments, but only unchallenged statements and opinions when a party gathered in the saloon. She missed doing things for him too. When his maternal aunts visited him in March, it was Lady Susan who was seen to show them the exhibits. On another relative’s visit, it was not Madeline’s tickets for Drury Lane that were borrowed, but Lord Moira’s.
She longed to hear his version of the St. Patrick’s Day dinner held at the Freemasons’ Tavern, when the prince was hissed. Sheridan, she knew, had stood up to defend the prince, but he too had been hissed, and was probably drunk. Eskott would have made an amusing tale of it for her.
Papa said only that it was a “shocking disgrace,” but she felt it had been roisterously funny, and resented not knowing the truth. Lord Forbes, a Whig aide-de-camp of the prince, had tendered his resignation, and it had been refused. She felt there was some lively gossip in that, too, for Lady Margaret had heard somewhere that Forbes had removed the prince’s buttons from his coat, and the lively Whigs would have some amusing anecdotes to relate.
But not to her. In her set, it was another “shocking disgrace,” and no more. It became clearer to her every day that the lively, interesting, and quite possibly even the more dedicated and public-spirited men did not belong to her father’s party.
As if to emphasize it, half the party fell ill with assorted maladies in the last hard spell of winter—old men, whose every sniffle was serious, lest it should carry them off. Her father was amongst them. He was in bed a week, too ill even to be taken home to Highgate, away from city worries. He recovered once more, but he walked at a slower gait, his shoulders more stooped. The next time, he might not recover at all.
As winter waned and spring approached, with the new season looming close on the horizon, Madeline felt her spirits lift, as if stirred to life by the warmer sun, the longer days, the traditional season of rebirth and renewal. She decided she would lay siege to Eskott, to see if she could not beguile him back into being friends with her. The idea was precipitated by her Aunt Margaret’s return to Highgate, leaving a large hole in her circle of intimates. At least she had patched up
that
relationship.
On the day of her aunt’s departure, she sat down and penned a playful note to Eskott, asking in saucy terms if he was not through punishing her yet. She said she had a set of books that were two months overdue, waiting for him to take them back to the library; her tickets to Drury Lane gathered dust; and she had not been to admire a cathedral since the bishop’s last visit. She hoped he would reply in person, and feared he would not acknowledge her letter at all. A card was returned the next afternoon, insultingly late and crushingly terse. He was very busy, and prayed she would excuse his negligence in not calling. He trusted she was well, and signed it with a formal “Eskott.”
She read it twice, then tore it up, placed it in the flames, and watched it burn. She felt as though a giant hand were squeezing her heart, causing an ache in her chest. It was all over then. She was so miserable she hardly felt like going out to parties. If Eskott was in attendance, as he often was, he failed to see her, or at most nodded his head in mute greeting, his eyes black, accusing, scornful.
At the first large ball of the new season, he chanced to stand directly behind her waiting to be announced. She felt it her golden opportunity to reinstate herself in his good graces, but as often as she turned her head to look over her shoulder, he discovered some other corner of the room to draw his interest. In a fit of pique, she jostled his elbow and said, “Excuse me, would you, by any chance, be Lord Eskott?”
“Good evening, Lady Madeline,” he said, without a smile or any display of pleasure. The words fell from his lips like snowflakes—softly, gently, as cold as ice. Then he turned his back to her and began a conversation with the party behind him. Her face pink with shame, she turned to her escort to laugh and talk loudly, and pretend she had not noticed his rude behavior.
The awful subject of Henry Aldred occasionally arose at home. “Aldred has taken his seat in the House,” her father told her one evening over dinner. “I hear he has set up in a vulgar mansion in Whitehall, near Taylor’s place. They entertain a good deal, folks say. If we receive cards, we will not attend, Madeline.”
“That advice was hardly necessary, Papa.” No cards were received. A friend pointed Mrs. Aldred out to Madeline. She was a dumpy girl, extravagantly outfitted with too many feathers on her bonnet. She looked like exactly what she was—a provincial come to town determined to show the ton she could outdo them. She was young, not pretty, but very satisfied with herself, their ages notwithstanding. But how should she complain?
She
had chosen Henry over dear Eskott.
Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
was officially launched that March, causing such a stir that Madeline finally got around to reading the advance copy Eskott had thoughtfully supplied her, and she, in her usual dilatory fashion, had not returned. She would have liked a closer acquaintance with the man who said so well what she felt:
What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from life’s page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
But Byron, being an interesting young aristocrat, was a confirmed Whig, so she only had the pleasure of nodding to him at social events.
Her twenty-sixth birthday was an ordeal. She had a party, to please her father, but there was not a guest at the table under fifty. Her father’s cohorts and their wives. She did not wish to announce her exact years to her own friends. As the ladies sat around the saloon waiting for the gentlemen to join them after port. Lady Tilsit began outlining a scheme to raise money for orphans.
“We matrons must get together and do something,” she said, without even making any little joking reference to the hostess being included in the group in an honorary capacity only. She was assigned the role of a matron, which was as well as saying she was a confirmed spinster.
She could not accept it. She made one last try for some love and romance in her life by carrying on for a few weeks in April with a handsome captain who had returned from the Peninsula covered in medals and ribbons. She tried her hardest to fall in love with him. He was tall and handsome, he was a hero, he was even conversable, interesting for the stories he related of the war in foreign lands, but in the end he was not Eskott, and she could not love him. Captain Townsend was dropped gently but firmly.
She made the arrangements for their annual ball without one bit of pleasure. Doubt as to whether she should send Eskott a card preoccupied her as much as deciding what food to serve and what decorations to use combined. The reason for her indecision was that she had not received cards to his, usually held early in May. She had not actually heard anyone else say they had invitations yet either, and if it were only that he was not having his ball, she would certainly ask him to hers. On the other hand, if he did have a ball and pointedly excluded her name from his list, that was a different matter. She had made enough advances to him. She had no desire to grovel. If only she could chance to meet him somewhere, talk to him, explain...