Polonaise (4 page)

‘I'm sure of it.' But when Maria Richards appeared Jenny felt less so. Tall, fair and sylph-like, Mrs. Richards should have had an English cream and roses complexion and been very nearly a beauty, but this morning her skin was blotched and her eyes shadowed from sleeplessness and tears. She acknowledged her husband's introduction of Jenny with something between a sob and a greeting and sat down as far away as she could from the breakfast table where Jenny was still eating kidneys.

‘How you can! The very thought of food makes me feel queasy. My dear mama will be just the same this morning, I know. Missing me. We've never been parted before,' she confided. ‘George says – Where is George?'

‘He said he was going to see to the packing of the carriage. What a kind man your husband is.' Anything to distract her from these damp thoughts of her mother.

‘Oh, yes! The best man in the world!' A blush restored the beauty of her skin and a little, tremulous smile gave life to her face. ‘He's so good to me! He's a Bristol merchant. Came to the Bath Assembly on a visit; saw me; got himself introduced.' Her colour was high now, her eyes sparkled. ‘He says he nearly bankrupted himself courting me, so wasn't it kind of him when he saw what it would mean to me to leave mama – he sold his house in Bristol and bought one in Laura Place. Just a step from mama's apartments. George said mama would be best living her own life. Well, of course, there's no separating mama from pug, and George thinks dogs are for outdoors.
Mama's not over fond of children either.' Now the betraying skin flushed crimson.

‘You have children?' It was a question she had been wanting to ask.

‘No. N … not yet. Mama says two years is nothing. Just as well, she says, for a young thing like me; just a child myself, but I sometimes wonder if George isn't beginning …' She stopped. ‘How I am chattering on. You've told me nothing of yourself. You're a friend of Lord Egremont! And going to visit a princess! It's like a fairy tale.' Her dubious glance took in Jenny's altered riding habit and whole unromantic person.

Jenny laughed. ‘If it's a fairy tale, I'm most certainly not the heroine. But then, I've always thought being a heroine would be remarkably uncomfortable. Just think! If I really was one, I most likely would not have got here at all. The mail coach would have been held up by footpads last night, and I'd have been spirited away, out of the kingdom most likely. Or, if I got here safely, you and your husband would be villains, taking me off to durance vile in a moated castle somewhere on the continent.'

‘Oh, no!' Shocked. ‘I told you, George is the kindest of men.'

‘Bless you! I was only funning. You'd make a much better heroine than me anyway, so beautiful as you are.'

‘You really think so?' She jumped up and crossed the room to study herself in the big glass over the chimney-piece. ‘George does, of course.'

‘What does George do?' Returning to announce that all was ready, her husband was surprised and delighted to find her in so much better spirits and thanked Jenny with a speaking glance.

But the long day's drive took its toll. As soon as they got out of London, George Richards elected to ride beside the carriage, pointing out that this would mean more room for what he called ‘the girls', and give them a chance to get better acquainted.

‘Sacrificing yourself?' asked Jenny drily.

‘Well …' He looked at her for a moment, puzzled, then roared with laughter. ‘You're a cool one. No, you're quite right. I much prefer to ride. I'm glad you're with us, Miss Peverel.'

Settling back in the carriage, Jenny found her companion eyeing her cautiously, as one might a strange foreign creature, possibly dangerous. ‘Do you speak to all gentlemen so?' she asked. ‘Is that perhaps the way they talk at Petworth House?'

‘Bless you, no. I've hardly been there since I was a child. Don't go thinking I'm anything but a poor clergyman's daughter.' But she saw this would not do. Her companion was actually hovering on the verge of jealousy and that was no way to start a long journey together. ‘Forgive me if you think I spoke somewhat freely to Mr. Richards,' she said, meaning it. ‘It's a bad habit of mine. My mother says I'll never get a husband if I don't cure myself of it.'

‘Your mother? How could I forget? You've just parted from your mother, too. And your father and brother.'

‘No,' Jenny told her. ‘My brother Giles was killed on the
Bellerophon
at Aboukir Bay.' She almost kept her voice steady.

‘Oh, I am so sorry.' Maria reached out a hand and caught hers. ‘So very sorry.'

They were quiet for a long time after that, but Jenny was anxiously aware that her companion was not bearing the journey well. Neither of them had come this way before, and she was fascinated by these new views of flat, agricultural England, each village marked by its dominant church. She could not interest her companion in any of this. ‘Forgive me,' said Maria. ‘I don't find myself quite the thing. I'll try to sleep a little.' She had eaten hardly any lunch, and when she only picked at her supper in the bustling Ipswich inn, Jenny began to share Mr. Richards' anxiety. The crossing to Hamburg was a long one, she knew, and her midshipman brother had told her often enough what the North Sea could be like.

‘We must try to get her to eat some breakfast,' she told George Richards, saying goodnight.

But there was no question of breakfast in bed in this crowded post house and Maria gave the loaded tables a sickly glance, then hurried from the room, pursued by her anxious husband. Jenny, quietly finishing an ample meal, was coming to a conclusion. She might be the youngest of her family, but she was also its only available female and had spent a good deal of time in nursing duty at the houses of her older sisters.

Having finished her breakfast she found the Richards stand
ing in the doorway of the inn, considering a fine June morning. ‘I think I should join you in the carriage today,' said George. ‘My poor Maria is not in the best of spirits.'

‘Always so considerate,' said Maria. ‘Dear George.'

Jenny gave her a thoughtful look. ‘I wish I could ride,' she said. ‘Then, perhaps you could manage to sleep a little in the carriage. Those inn bedrooms are so noisy, are they not?' She had slept like a log herself, but it seemed a safe enough assumption.

‘You're right, of course,' said George, disguising his pleasure. ‘Thoughtless of me to suggest joining you on what, I am afraid, is going to be a hot day. You'll be much better on your own, and I know Miss Peverel will take the best of care of you, Maria.'

‘Thank you.' She was blushing again, Jenny noticed, and wondered just what it meant this time.

Once established in the privacy of the carriage, she began a series of casual-seeming questions about Maria's state of health, and soon established, not much to her surprise, that she was pregnant and did not know it. Sparing an angry thought or two for a mother who could have left her child so ignorant, she went a stage further and discovered that the poor girl was wretched because she felt too ill and tired to … Another flaming blush finished the sentence.

Jenny had got hold of her hand in the course of this slow and hesitant conversation, and now patted it soothingly. ‘You poor lamb.' She felt immensely old and experienced. ‘It had really not struck either of you that you might be increasing?'

‘In – Oh!' Maria's hand clasped hers convulsively. ‘You can't mean it! Mama never said … But how would you know?'

‘It sounds very much like it to me, and I'm something of an expert. My mother always sends me to my sisters as soon as there is the least sign – and I have five bouncing nephews and nieces now. In fact,' she could not help a smile at this new thought, ‘I rather wonder what they will say when they realise I won't be there for the next time.' And having thus established her authority, she managed a few even closer questions which brought her companion to tears of embarrassment, but established the facts of the case beyond a doubt. ‘So now we have
to think what is best for you to do.' Her heart had sunk as she recognised the implications of the discovery. ‘Will you wish to go home to your mama? Will your husband be able to abandon his trip to take you?'

‘Oh, no!' Horrified. ‘I know what it means to him. Do we have to tell him? He might make me go back to mama, and she would be in such a taking. She doesn't much like people to be ill, you see.'

‘But you're not ill,' said Jenny robustly. ‘My sisters do feel a bit queasy, like you, for the first few weeks, but after that they go about their affairs just as usual – well, they have to, so busy as they are.'

‘You mean in public?' asked Maria, shocked. ‘In Bath, ladies stay at home … Mama says it's not decent …' She turned suddenly and looked full at Jenny. ‘Please, help me to persuade George that I may come with him. I'd so much rather be with him than with mama. And with you, too. You'll look after me, won't you?'

‘If it's what you want.' She could not help feeling that the girl had made a wise decision. To be cooped up in Bath with a mother who obviously disliked and disapproved of the whole business might easily be disastrous. ‘But you must most certainly talk to your husband.'

‘Oh, but please, Jenny, you'll do that. I couldn't! I may call you Jenny?'

‘Of course you may, but, dear Maria, surely you should be the one to tell your husband?'

‘I can't.' And then, on a totally different note. ‘I wish you would call me Mary. It's the name my father gave me, for his mother. I like it so much better, and so does George, really. He only calls me Maria to please mama. You will tell him for me, won't you, Jenny?'

But a cracked splinter-bar, losing them a precious hour in repairs, so delayed their arrival in Yarmouth that there was no possibility of a quiet word with George Richards before they found themselves breathlessly on board the Hamburg packet. Jenny, exchanging one speaking glance with Maria Mary – could not decide whether she was relieved or appalled.

‘Do you think that's Sandomierz at last?' Glynde reined in his tired horse and pointed ahead to the silhouette of gothic towers against a clear evening sky.

‘It must be,' said Jan. ‘And only a day's ride to Rendomierz from there, praise be! Mother used to talk of doing it by boat down the Vistula, but the state of rack and ruin everything is in in this wretched country, I don't suppose there's a boat fit to travel in. It breaks my heart to see the farms so neglected.'

‘Well, it's an occupied country,' said Glynde. ‘Though how much difference that makes to the peasants, I don't know.'

‘Serfs,' said Jan.

‘Exactly.' Glynde changed the subject. ‘Do you think we can look forward to a few basic comforts tonight? Some edible food, and a bed without bugs? I'm tired of sleeping in the carriage.'

But when they rode across the Vistula and up the dark tunnel through the town's thick, red-brick walls, they found it in an even more advanced state of decayed splendour than Cracow. Carvings on the old houses round the market square and its town hall were crumbling away and many stood empty, with gaping, glassless windows.

‘It must have been a great centre of trade once.' Glynde was looking sadly at what had been a stately Renaissance town hall. ‘Wealthy merchants all round this square, with money enough to build their town hall and market centre. And now, is there even an inn?'

There was, on the lower side of the square that sloped slightly downhill, so that one had the feeling that in the end the whole place might slip gently down into the Vistula below. Any idea of luxury they might have entertained was dissipated when they entered under the once elegant portico of the shabby building. They were greeted with the usual subservient zeal
by the unkempt landlord, but Jan's eager questions were met only with shakes of the head.

‘I shall know the Polish words for “no” and “impossible” before we part, that's one thing certain,' said Glynde, when Jan had conveyed the gist of the landlord's refusals to him. ‘But we can hardly sleep in the carriage here in the town square, do you think? Not with all these beggars about.' Their arrival always drew swarms of these.

‘He's promised clean straw.' Jan had given up apologising.

‘But will we get it? Have you noticed with what overwhelming courtesy they fail to produce anything one asks for? I've never been so civilly neglected in my life.'

Jan laughed. ‘It's a comfort you find it comic too. The landlord promises us a delicious dinner.'

‘And I'll believe that when I taste it.'

It certainly took long enough in the preparing, and Jan had just made an impatient visit to the back of the house to ask how much longer they must wait, when they were surprised by the arrival of the first travellers they had met since leaving Cracow.

‘Good day to you.' The two men who came in from the dusk outside seemed to know the house, shouting casually for the landlord by name: ‘Isaac, some vodka now, quick, we're famished. And for the gentlemen, too. You speak Polish?' the taller of the two men went on.

‘I do.' Jan returned the greeting. ‘But my friend speaks only German, English or French.'

‘Then let us by all means speak French,' he turned to Rendel and greeted him civilly. ‘Since we seem to be doomed to spend a deuced uncomfortable evening together. I hope old Isaac has dealt well by you?'

‘He's promised us fresh straw,' said Glynde.

‘And a
ragoût
, whatever he means by that,' said Jan. ‘In which we hope you gentlemen will join us.'

‘With pleasure.' He strode through the room and out towards the kitchen, shouting again for Isaac and vodka.

‘Knows his way round,' said Glynde in English to Jan.