Lady Susan Plays the Game (45 page)

The city greeted them well. A rich Englishman and his beautiful wife were welcome additions to a dwindling expatriate population. The couple were seen sometimes together in fashionable salons, and more often apart.

Venice had time on its hands. It had been a power with a great navy but had sunk in its own and everyone else's estimation. ‘
Niente a fare
' was the mood. It was best to leave others fighting the mad French and have a fiesta while it could.

Given the closeness of these Frenchmen, it was perhaps unwise to be English, but for the time being the little expatriate community continued as unprepared as the city itself. In any case Lady Susan had no wish to return home where she would probably become – perhaps she already was – a grandmama.

The floating town was as brilliant as anyone could wish. The damp of the cold winter was kept at bay by making summer indoors at night with colourful luminous fabrics and roundels of candles. For the moment Lady Susan was content with a city which, having closed its ridotto in more virtuous times, was privately devoted to basset, piquet, and the quick casino. She played with relish at the tables of merchants who, to her amusement, regarded themselves as noble.

Sir James had not much liked English strong ale but he took to the local Veneto wine and drank more than he used to in the company of some other Englishmen trapped overseas by the war and as interested in equipages as himself – although he could now only talk wistfully of carriages he once possessed. Lady Susan regarded his extra drinking as a harmless vice customary with young men and, besides, they inhabited separate apartments.

So all was as well as it could be. And yet Lady Susan was a little bored – palazzi, canals, Italians, art and artists, even these particular gambling tables – had a sameness about them, a lack of variety and real excitement.

One night, in the small hours when everything was most hectic and the candles made obscure and flickering shadows in the Contessa Zorzi's apartment, she caught sight of a silhouette she had last seen against the window in Lady Harry's drawing room in Mayfair. She was startled. Surely he could not have come so far across a war-torn continent for a mere debt. Surely not for lust. She herself might have crossed England, perhaps even the Low Countries for a night with Manwaring but, especially now that the memory of him had begun to fade, she would not have added France to the list. And
she
would have known what she travelled for.

He was near enough for her to see him. In the flickering light and gloom Sir Philip looked more gentlemanly than in London, almost handsome. Lady Susan rose and caught his eye, then walked into the shadows towards him.

Janet Todd
is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.

Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen
and editor of
Jane Austen in Context
and the
Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice
. Among her critical works are
Women's Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800
and the
Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen
. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils.
Lady Susan Plays the Game
is her first foray into fiction.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal
Women's Writing
. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 2013 Janet Todd

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eISBN: 9781448213450

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