An Accomplished Woman

Also by
Jude Morgan and available from Headline Review

The
King’s Touch

Passion

Indiscretion

Symphony

Copyright
© 2007 Jude Morgan

The
right of Jude Morgan to be identified as the Author of

the Work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First
published in 2007 by

HEADLINE
REVIEW

An
imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7553 0768 5

Trade
paperback ISBN 978 0 7553 3903 7

Not enough naked flesh,
Lydia concluded, and too many horses.

‘Oh! I do beg your
pardon.’

The pain of having your
foot trodden on is always surprisingly intense. Luckily the young woman who had
accidentally backed into Lydia, and who now turned in startled apology, was a
slip of a thing. Still, Lydia’s smile was really an adapted grimace.

‘Not — not at all.’

The young woman — girl,
in truth — blinked her large, pale, distracted eyes.

Lydia had a moment of
peculiar recognition. ‘Do I . . .?’ she began; but the moment flitted away
along with the girl. No, she didn’t know her. A mistake.

Lydia tried to return
her attention to the paintings. But here was the dissatisfaction.

Oh, there was some fine
work: she had locked eyes with some spirited portraits, and stood long in
undecided fascination before a turbulent new landscape of Mr Turner’s. But
really no Royal Academy Exhibition was complete, she felt, without the proper
portion of decorous and classical nudity. Actaeon, say, peeping through fronds
at a rumpy dimply Diana; Orpheus, disconsolately strumming whilst wearing
nothing but sandals and a curiously adhesive towel round his loins. That was
what was wanted, and it was sadly lacking this year.

Instead (surely she had
seen that girl somewhere before?) they had overdone the horses.

These were mandatory
too, and Lydia would have been disappointed if she had entered the
exhibition-room at Somerset House to find there were
no
long-necked,
impossibly smooth quadrupeds standing sideways on billiard-table pastures. But
this was excessive. There was even, she saw now, a cow. She drew the line at cows.

Yet an old gentleman
paused before it and, pouting with admiration, pronounced: ‘Magnificent.
Magnificent animal, hey, my dear?’

‘I must remember to
order a chine of beef before next Saturday,’ replied his wife, perhaps from
association of ideas.

Next to the cow, a
grandly framed general was winning the smoky battle behind him by pointing
disdainfully at a map. ‘Can’t be one of ours,’ growled a young man in naval
blue and braid. The lady on his arm fanned herself with the catalogue and gave
a distressed laugh, as if something were starting. A shadow touched Lydia’s
mood. She suddenly wished for fresh air, began the tortuous wending and shuffle
through the crowd towards the doors. As for that girl . . .

The mystery lay in the
certainty that she
didn’t
know her — because Lydia’s memory for faces
was depressingly retentive. During this two-month stay in London she had
endured countless introductions. A dull evening could be like a parade-ground
inspection: Miss This, Mr That: carry on, at ease. But the bobbing faces always
remained with her. There was nothing she could do about it. She would remember
the old gentleman admiring the cow, with his look of owlish complacency, and
the old lady’s nutcracker jaws.

But the known, unknown
girl . . . Something persisted mildly, like the throb in Lydia’s toes.
Difficult, though, to think in here, with the crush and the noise, top-boots
scrunching and gowns crackling and swishing and the endless
London-season-company babbling, thrown back by the domed ceiling as a churchy
rumble.

It was something about
those eyes, something almost painful about their unshaded blue largeness — and
suddenly, there they were again. A momentary parting in the crowd revealed the
girl sitting alone, a full-length sketch of melancholy, on one of the low
benches. A shaft of light from the glass dome struck a gleam from those eyes —
a wet gleam.

Compassion completed
what curiosity had begun.

‘I do beg your pardon if
I intrude,’ Lydia said, sitting down beside her, ‘but may I ask if you are
quite well?’

Clutching her
handkerchief like a weapon, the girl turned on Lydia a boiling, swimming stare,
and a violent silence.

‘Or — whether there is
anything I can do?’ Lydia went limply on, already concluding that she had
intruded terribly. The question now was how to apologise and go. How did
rejected Samaritans walk away? With smooth unconcern? That suggested you didn’t
much care in the first place. Or stalk off faintly offended?

Lydia had just decided
on a sort of regretful glide when the girl abruptly responded.

‘I
am not at all well, thank you, that is if feeling wretched, absolutely
miserable and wretched beyond anything and everything is not being well, which
I cannot help but think it is.’ She unfolded the handkerchief and cracked it
out like a whip. ‘And there isn’t, thank you, anything you can do. Unless you
can bring my brother back to me.’

‘Oh. Oh, I am indeed
sorry. How very . . . Was it a recent loss?’

The girl shrugged. ‘Half
an hour. Perhaps more — perhaps even an hour — I can’t tell, there’s no clock
in this horrid place that I can see, and don’t you think there ought to be?
It’s not as if there is an insufficiency of
pictures.’

Lydia rearranged her
skirts, and herself. ‘Ah. Your brother was here, and now he is not.’ I sound
like a French grammar-book, she thought.

‘I only came because he
said he wanted to see the exhibition, which as soon as he walked in he plainly
didn’t — but then he is in such a shocking state of spirits lately that one
hardly knows what he’s saying or what he means, and neither does he . . . My
great fear is what he may do, or what he’s already done.’

‘My dear Miss — I’m
sorry, I don’t know your name, and I don’t
think
we have met, unless —
but please, you alarm me, tell me what you mean—’

‘James has slipped out
and gone somewhere to drown his sorrows.’ The girl confronted Lydia with a face
of pale, tragic finality ‘Oh, yes. I know it. I was looking at a picture of a
ship, or it might have been a mountain, and he pressed my arm and said he was
going out to get some air and — it is prodigious hot in here, though, is it
not? Why, do you suppose? Is it because of the paintings, something like
keeping butter except the other way around?’

‘I dare say.’ Lydia
glared away a hovering young buck, strenuously pantalooned and about to simper
at them. ‘And so your brother left you — and he was your only companion here?’

Lip-biting, the girl
nodded. ‘I see how it will be. He’ll drink brandy, or something else he simply hasn’t
the head for, and then he’ll forget about me, and I shall have to go home alone
in a chair or something.’

‘Well. I cannot help but
think this remiss of him, though I don’t know the circumstances — that is,
these sorrows you spoke of—’

‘Oh, I don’t blame him
for anything. I blame
her!
The girl could do a lot with a handkerchief:
now it was having its neck slowly wrung. ‘That woman — that
jilt.
James,
you know, has always possessed the most amiable, the steadiest of tempers. He
would never have left me like this before. But he has been so abominably
treated by this — I don’t know what to call her — that he is quite overset.
Oh!’ She leaped up from the bench and sat down again all in one movement. ‘Oh,
I thought for a moment that was him. But it’s someone quite different, except
for the coat.’

‘Have you far to go
home? I might accompany you if —’

‘Oh, I don’t care about
that!’
Thegirl’s face loomed with fierce confidentiality. ‘I’ve tried to tell him,
you know, that she simply isn’t worth it. More than that — he has had a lucky
escape. I said to him, “The next unfortunate to be ensnared by your precious
Miss Templeton may be caught fast. A blessing she has revealed herself now and
not later.” One wants to be kind, of course, but one must put the sensible view.’

‘Oh, certainly. There
was, then, I collect, nothing like an engagement between your brother and this
— you said a Miss Templeton?’

‘That is her name, and I
am heartily sick of hearing it. We have had nothing but Miss Templeton this
past fortnight. Oh, not that I ever saw the creature, but she was all James
would talk of. No, there was no undertaking, but I feel sure James had it in
mind to ask . . . Well, never mind. He is too susceptible, that is his trouble
— too impulsive. But it is her loss, make no doubt of it. James is
seven-and-twenty, and
she
is all of thirty, it seems. Thirty, if you
please! Really, at such an age she is lucky to receive any such attention,
never mind playing the coquette over it. Nor is there any great fortune or
connections in the case — simply a respectable family in Lincolnshire. One
would suppose them very ready to get her off their hands—’

‘A moment. I believe — I
do believe I know the lady you refer to. Lincolnshire is my country. Is not the
Templeton place south of Grantham, off the Great North Road?’

‘I think that’s what
James said. Mind, when she has played him so false, she may have lied about
that too—’

‘No, no. I am convinced
that is the very place — and that I know your Miss Templeton.’

‘Do you? Then you’ll
surely agree that she is the most . . . Dear me. I hope not a near friend?
Forgive me if . . .’

Lydia shook her head and
patted the girl’s hand. ‘Oh, no. I
know
her pretty well — let us say no
more than that.’

The girl nodded
solemnly, leaning closer. ‘Then perhaps you can tell me — is she generally
known as a jilt? I only ask for the sake of information, and so I can reassure
James he is not the first. Though for myself I find it hard to credit as she
sounds from his account like the most monstrous bluestocking. Horribly clever
and bookish and superior about her accomplishments—’

‘This assuredly
is
the
same Miss Templeton. You have described her exactly. In our part of
Lincolnshire she is well known for it, and I have even heard it remarked that —
well, the
mot
is rather cruel, but they say she has Latin in her veins
instead of blood.’

‘Latin in her . . .!
What delicious funning! I must tell James — only, you know, to reassure him.’

‘Of course: and I may
add that your brother has indeed had a fortunate escape. Miss Templeton has a
name as a proud, ill-natured woman, disdainful of society and civility, and —
to speak candidly — quite the dowd besides.’

‘Exactly as I thought!
Though no doubt,’ the girl added reluctantly, ‘she must have
some
superficial
attractions, to have made such a conquest of James—’

‘Superficial, as you
say; and she knows well how to dissemble, I suspect, when she takes it in her
head to torment a man. I am afraid your Miss Templeton is that species of woman
— cold to the male sex, yet still seeking to demonstrate their power over them:
lifting them up for the pleasure of seeing them fall.’