Mistress of My Fate (5 page)

To be sure, it all occurred quite suddenly. One moment it seemed our lives were fixed as firmly in stone as the foundations of Melmouth, and then, quite without warning, this pattern of being was entirely overturned. At first, I did not appreciate the grave implications of it, but with hindsight I can say that the entire balance of our household shifted that night. It was as if some supernatural force had intervened and broken the spell that bound Lady Catherine to her mother.

The morning following her outburst, she did not disappear downstairs into Lady Stavourley’s rooms, as was her usual routine. Instead, she moved very gently to the sofa where I sat reading. She approached me in silence, her eyes lowered like those of a supplicant. Carefully, she sat down beside me and smoothed the white muslin of her gown. I remained still, motionless, not knowing how to respond. Then, quite unexpectedly, she laid her head upon my shoulder.

“Hetty,” she breathed, taking my hand in hers. “Dear cousin.”

At first I knew not how to contend with her attention. Although I had passed so many years in hopeful prayer, begging that we should become friends when God or Fortune or whoever looks down upon us saw fit to grant my wish, I was consumed by disbelief. It was with great hesitation that I accepted my cousin’s change of sentiment. Suddenly
she desired my opinion on every subject, and requested my presence as she prepared for any ball or gathering of importance. Now it was my advice she sought rather than Lady Stavourley’s when the friseur worked upon her froth of fashionable curls. No matter what instruction my aunt gave to the hairdresser, her daughter saw fit to contradict it as soon as her mother’s back was turned.

“Do not mind what Mamma says,” she whispered to the giddy, thin-wristed Frenchman. “I shall have the false curls and the rats at either side. Hetty, what think you of this? Is it not
à la mode
?”

“Yes, yes.” I nodded excitedly.

“Come!” She beckoned me with a smile and, taking a pink ribbon from her dressing table, she bid me lean into the looking glass while she wove it through my linen cap.

“There,” she said with a small giggle, “now you are as splendidly attired as I.”

I could hardly fathom how it came to pass, how my once indifferent cousin had become my devoted bosom friend.

At about the time Lady Catherine had made her appearance in society, she requested her own apartments, both at Melmouth and at her father’s townhouse in Berkeley Square. Not wishing to object to any of their daughter’s desires, Lord and Lady Stavourley provided her with a tidy set of rooms in both places. I was at first abandoned in the attic nursery, until Lady Catherine demanded otherwise.

“Papa has agreed to it and we shall be together!” she squealed. And so at Melmouth, the small closet room opposite what was to be our shared drawing room was allocated to me. Although it was but an intimate space, the luxury of sleeping in a bed of my own and enjoying the use of an oak clothes press, a compact dressing table and an escritoire was almost more than I could believe. I had never dared dream of such an honour: to be granted a place in my cousin’s very rooms. It was if, after so many years of darkness, the sun had quite suddenly burst forth.

As you might imagine, this new arrangement led to a good deal
of girlish conspiring. Lady Catherine was at liberty to lock the doors behind us as we gossiped and mused. She was not much one for embroidery, nor did she enjoy painting, drawing or any of the diversions in which I indulged. I soon learned that she found my choice of reading “desperately, desperately dull.” She loathed Virgil and Homer and the tales of the ancient world that had occupied me in my loneliness. She had no mind for serious study, for works of moral advice, or for the long, melancholy verses of Donne or Milton.

“I far prefer novels,” she announced one afternoon, flouncing into a chair. “Have you never read
The Castle of Otranto
, Hetty?”

“I cannot say I have,” I apologized.

“Mamma read it to me and it frightened me vastly.” She smiled broadly. “Oh, we must read it together, Hetty! We simply must!”

With that, she jumped to her feet and took hold of my arm. We fairly ran through the corridors of Melmouth to the library, laughing and singing as we went.

And so the seeds of what would become our greatest shared joy were sown. In the privacy of our rooms, we would shutter the windows and draw the drapery, so that even in the brightness of day no light seeped through. We lit our candles and sat very close upon a sofa or a bed and began our dramatic readings of what we came to call “dark tales.”

By the cast of the candle we would work ourselves up into a terror. My cousin read in a breathy, suspenseful tone of apparitions, disembodied limbs and giant swords. We shivered and screamed and laughed, acting out the various scenes, until, utterly consumed with fear, I would dash to the window to throw open the shutters.

“No!” my cousin would shout, pulling me back. And then, with a mischievous giggle, she would extinguish all the candles until I cried out in alarm.

I cannot say why, but I do believe she enjoyed this sport, for there was more than a hint of cruelty in her trickery, especially the occasion when I awoke to find her standing at the foot of my bed, her face covered
in white powder, the cast of the full moon illuminating her nightdress. My goodness, how I howled with terror, while she could scarcely breathe for laughing!

The Castle of Otranto
was followed by every ghostly, Gothic book to be found. Together we devoured
The Old English Baron
,
The Recess
,
Hamlet
,
Macbeth
, even
Ossian
. Mind you, this was in the days before Mrs. Radcliffe wrote her novels. I cannot bear think how my cousin would have horrified me with
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.

Our mutual indulgence in these gloomy delights somehow served to draw us into an even closer union, so that soon Lady Catherine was sharing all her most intimate thoughts with me. The grand events, which I was not permitted to attend, would be recounted to me in minute detail, often in the earliest hours of the morning.

“Hetty, Hetty… Henrietta!” She would shake me awake, and then slide beneath the bed coverings as she launched upon her stories of the Marquess of Worcester, who would not let her dance with anyone else, of Lady Bessborough’s petticoat with a fashionable new furbelow, or how she drank two glasses of rum punch without her mother noticing.

Then, of course, there were the letters. As any well-bred young lady is taught, it is appropriate and expected that she show her correspondence from gentlemen to her mamma, but my cousin was now well beyond the domain of my aunt. Instead, she read her letters aloud to me, squealing and squawking with delight.

“ ‘My daaah-liiing angel,’ ” she purred, mocking the heartfelt devotions of Sir Philip Digby, “ ‘I shall die if I fail to spy you on your constitutional tomorrow. Love will cause my heart to explode with the frustrated fury of Vesuvius…’

“Well, I should like to bear witness to such a spectacle as that!” she cried. “What a blockhead he is, Hetty.”

It all meant very little to her.

In Lady Catherine’s mind, this endless round of assemblies, gatherings, routs and public promenades served no purpose other than to
amuse her. The young men who pursued her—Sir Charles Coote, Sir Philip Digby and Mr. John Wentworth—came and went. She accepted their offers to dance, their billets-doux and their gifts of kid gloves, but refused their professions of love. After a time, even I began to sense that this attitude of careless abandon could not endure. One day, there would come an abrupt and unpleasant end to the levity. Of this, I was certain.

My cousin’s behaviour caused my aunt no end of grief. The despair was graven upon her features, held in her drooping eyes and downturned mouth. She did not have it within her to pull in Lady Catherine’s reins and act the tyrant. She was weak, and now her daughter ruled her, just as she had been warned would happen so many years earlier. Daily, she fretted and wept, her frail constitution growing ever more fragile. “I know not what to do, I know not what to do…” she could be heard wailing from behind the doors of her apartments, the now lonely rooms that had once been the scene of her daughter’s sprightly antics. The sound of her distress was so charged with unhappiness that it caused my heart to jolt. These were not merely the moans of one who had lost all authority over her charge, but the plaintive cries of a soul who mourned the loss of love. A cold shiver shook me. Had I not prayed for this, to be the recipient of my cousin’s affection? Had my violent wishing not caused this to come true? Had my years of imagining and hoping not played some role in transferring my cousin’s devotion from her mother to me? I had achieved my aim, but never had I considered that it might come at a cost.

Lady Catherine never appreciated her mother’s sufferings, which had begun on the evening she jilted Lady Stavourley in favour of me, and carried on for the better part of two years, until the early spring of 1789. By then, so many words had been whispered about the fecklessness of the mother and the character of the daughter as to call for drastic measures. At the age of eighteen, it was time my cousin married.

My uncle, being a generous and enlightened soul, had always
expressed a wish that his daughter enter into a union of her own choosing. Of course, Lord Stavourley also desired her choice to be a suitable one and accordingly had settled an adequate but not immoderate portion of £15,000 upon her to ensure that men of title, rather than fortune hunters stepped forward. However, as Lady Catherine seemed to have no intention of ever making a choice, the Earl and Countess decided that the time had arrived for them to choose for her.

With the assistance of the Duchess of Devonshire, who enjoyed nothing better than making matches, my aunt conspired to introduce her daughter to the young Duke of Bedford. After a great toing and froing of letters, this meeting came about at Devonshire House during a musical party, where Lady Catherine simpered and flicked her fan while Bedford gazed at her longingly. She recounted the entire scene to me later that evening.

“He was a good deal anxious of me at first, and stammered and made excuses,” she explained, “but then I paid him so many compliments as to make him positively fall in love with me!” she announced. “La, but he is so ugly. He has a fat, brutish face.”

Brutish face or no, the Duke was not bashful about his intentions and on the following day he began a campaign of courtship. First came the gifts: the patch box and the fan, and eventually a goldfinch. The latter was returned. My cousin was not fond of birds. Then came the letters: first tepid in tone, referring to her as “dearest Lady Catherine,” and then “the mistress of my heart” when he was more certain of himself. My cousin roared with laughter at his missives, reading them to me with a sneer before dropping them into the fire. She had tired of Bedford by then and refused to respond, but the poor lovesick swain was too far gone to see it. At Ranelagh Gardens she turned her back on him, and then at the Pantheon attempted to ignore him altogether.

After all my aunt had endured, she could hardly bear to witness yet another scene of her daughter’s ill-mannered indifference. Upon their return that evening, she fell into a fit of inconsolable sobbing.

“What makes you think you have the right to refuse the attentions of a gentleman like the Duke of Bedford?” she cried.

Her daughter bit her cheek and looked away shamefacedly.

“Oh Mamma,” she peeped, “I mean no harm. It is just a lark…”

“The Duke of Bedford!” Lady Stavourley cried, her face now glowing red with distress. “No, no, Catherine, it is too much to bear! It is too much.” She gasped for breath and pressed her handkerchief to her face. “All the Quality believe you to be a coquette, and now this. They will talk of nothing else. Child, do you know what a marriage to the Duke of Bedford would mean for this family, for your father’s ambitions? Stavourley and Bedford united in marriage—why, you as a pair would trump the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire for your influence! But no, you think nothing of this. You would dismiss him as if he were some ballad singer wishing to serenade you!”

My cousin stood in silence, observing her mother’s tear-drenched cheeks with as much pity as an executioner.

“Pray then, Mamma, what would you have me do?”

Lady Stavourley raised her eyes, her face a picture of disbelief.

“Oh, you silly, silly girl.” She shook her head ruefully.

At that moment, my cousin knew precisely what her mother wished her to do. Her tightly pursed lips began to tremble.

“No, I will not!” she cried defiantly. “I will never marry him, Mamma.” Then she too began to sob. “How could you force my hand, my own dear Mamma and Papa? I do not love him! He is beastly ugly! Oh, what cruelty is this! What horror! I shall be a slave; you would put me in shackles!” She shrieked and fled from the room, like the heroine of one of our Gothic novels.

Oh, my dear friends, I am afraid things became very bitter after this. It was as if the ice of winter, which had all but disappeared from the streets, had retreated indoors and chilled our home. While my cousin took to her bed and wept for a day or so, my aunt suffered greatly. This turn of events proved more than her frayed nerves could withstand.
The following morning she succumbed to “a plague of infernal headaches” and “a weakness of the lungs and limbs.” She confined herself to her bedchamber and lay all day with the shutters and drapery pulled across her windows. After a pint of blood was removed from her arm, her physician gently suggested to my uncle that he might consider removing her to Bath for a spell, as ladies with her sort of complaint benefited greatly by a change of air.

My uncle understood precisely his meaning.

And so this was how we came to Bath in April 1789. Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, there was no fiendish design at work, no devious plan involved. Not one among us could have guessed what would transpire there, or how that innocent sojourn was destined to alter all of our lives entirely.