Season of Light (15 page)

‘Let me see,’ cried Georgina. ‘Well, I must say I’ve never seen such a wonderful fan. The painting of these figures is as fine as any I’ve seen in pictures here at Morton.’

‘Ah,’ said Madame, ‘but the fan is not to be admired as a painting. A fan’s purpose is to enhance the beauty of its bearer. Displayed by itself, it is a dead thing.’

‘And how appropriate that a fan should carry the picture of a balloon,’ exclaimed Georgina. ‘I’d adore to go up in a balloon. Can you imagine? Did you ever see one, madame?’

‘I did.’

‘Was it like this?’

‘The balloon I saw trailed ribbons of red, white and blue.’

‘The tricolour. So even balloons are in patriotic colours. Is nothing free in France any more?’

‘Madame Warren, the balloon itself is a symbol of freedom, or it purports to be so. Our king did not know what he was seeing when he watched the first balloon fly over Versailles.’

‘What was he seeing?’ whispered Georgina.

‘Why, a breaking of boundaries. You see, this fan was painted before the king was deposed. Here ladies and gentlemen in old-fashioned finery parade along an elegant street. And here we have the red balloon, its basket full of sightseers, floating overhead. In just the same way a balloon once flew over the great palace of Versailles. All that was private was now revealed. All the secrets of the royal household exposed. A king who was thought to have been, until that moment, more a god than a man was shown to require clean linen, stables for his horse and carts to carry away his waste, just like anyone else. How could the king know as he stood watching the balloon that he was looking at a harbinger of such change?’

It was time to begin the lesson. The ballooning fan was folded away and replaced by a much plainer specimen. ‘In London,’ Madame said, flicking it open to reveal a pattern of scrolls and blue flowers, ‘there was once an academy dedicated to the language of the fan. In France, before the Revolution, we ladies used to be taught every nuance, to avoid misunderstandings. For example, if I open the fan and carry it in my left hand, I invite you, Mademoiselle Ardleigh, to come and talk to me.’ She looked Asa full in the eye, fluttered the spread fan and smiled so that Asa had no choice but to move closer. ‘Above all,’ Madame whispered, ‘we want there to be no misunderstandings, especially in affairs of the heart.’

‘I very much doubt,’ Asa murmured, ‘that an English gentleman these days would know the subtleties of the fan.’

‘Even if one does not know its language precisely, one can comprehend the messages of the fan.’ Madame’s free hand dropped on to Asa’s thigh, where it rested lightly, above layers of petticoat. ‘What, for instance, do you suppose a lady might mean when she does this?’ With the open fan Madame covered her left ear, half closing her eyes.

‘Oh, that’s very expressive. I can guess that one,’ Georgina chipped in. ‘You’ve a secret.’

‘That’s exactly what it means. How very clever you are, Madame Warren. And this?’ The fan was dropped on to the sofa beside Asa.

Asa picked it up. ‘You are offering it to me.’

‘I am telling you that we are friends.’ Another smile, sweetly apologetic for the bleak moments in the churchyard. ‘And now, my dear mademoiselle, if you were to close the fan and hold it next to your heart, you would be telling me that you trust me, and that I have won your love.’

‘And what must she do with the fan to attract a lover? That’s what I’m most anxious to hear. Do tell,’ said Georgina.

‘Why, she must close her fan thus, and she must touch it with her other hand, and then he will know that she wants to be near him.’ Playfully Madame tapped Asa’s chin with the tip of the fan. Her eyelids were half closed, her head thrown back, and there was not a vestige of the weeping woman by the church porch. ‘But she must be very careful, because if she holds the fan thus in her left hand, and twirls it round, she will be telling him that she loves not him but another. Thus, as I have said, Madame Warren, you must beware the language of the fan.’

Even Philippa, propped against soft pillows in her opulent bedchamber, could not be entirely protected from the tensions induced by the Warrens’ continued presence at Morton Hall. Asa’s lessons with Madame were constantly interrupted as Georgina rushed about giving needless instructions to the servants and failing to control the restless children. Warren spent his days striding from one room to the next in a sudden fit of purposefulness that led him only to a different window. Sometimes he hung about outside the library, hoping for another audience with Morton or to request the loan of a horse, which he rode – awkwardly – into Guildford from whence he returned red in the face and reeking of alcohol.

Meanwhile the lessons proceeded: deportment, embroidery, French conversation and painting, but not music, as Madame said she could not play well enough to teach Asa anything new, because in her youth, she said, she had concentrated on her art. The lid of the wondrous piano in the music room therefore remained locked, though in the afternoons they danced, following Rameau’s manual, with its diagrams of ladies and gentlemen in stiff-skirted coats and gowns posturing as they performed the minuet or the jig. Madame and Asa reverenced, paraded and twirled, hands clasping and unclasping, Madame’s arm occasionally supporting Asa’s waist as she counted out the steps.

Asa’s feelings veered from irritation at the waste of time spent dancing, to nervous sympathy when she remembered the scene in the graveyard, to reluctant pleasure at learning new skills and being the subject of so much attention. Madame was an excellent teacher, a stickler for detail with hands so fine and features so expressive that she was fascinating to watch. Praise was rare, but if Asa did succeed in performing a complicated sequence of steps she found herself blushing with pleasure.

Though no letter came from France, Caroline Lambert was a regular correspondent. Her main news was that Mrs Dacre, wife of the dead tailor, had been discovered working as a dairymaid some fifteen miles from Ardleigh. Identified by the bundle she kept under her pillow containing the tools of her husband’s trade – scissors, pins, measure and needles – she’d been plucked from her pallet in the barn, bundled into a covered wagon and transported to Chichester Gaol, where she now languished on the charge of theft of her husband’s property.

However
, wrote Caroline,
there are rumours that she will eventually be tried for murder, given that she is supposed to have watched or even assisted her husband in hanging himself and not lifted a finger to save him. When I visited her she refused to speak to me. There is something very disturbing, even sly, about her silence. I said I would write to you, and that you might perhaps visit her, but she made no response at all. Perhaps she will confide in you. She must. You and I know only too well what they do to women who kill their husbands. Perhaps the law is less barbaric than in our youth, but still
…

I think you would agree, Thomasina, that visiting Chichester Gaol is one of the most arduous duties my father ever imposed on us. The sheer hopelessness lowers my spirits – and the dreariness. Today I was more than usually aware of these things because I foresee a time when the prison might become a home from home to me. Father has been warned that he may be arrested because he has refused to dissolve his Abolition Society and is suspected of inciting revolutionary behaviour. Of course, he won’t curtail his activities so I doubt he’ll be at liberty for long. All in all I very much wish you were home, Thomasina
.

Asa had taken this letter outside to the wilderness. Samuel, aged eighteen months, was clasped to her hip while his older brothers picked daffodils for their mama in anticipation of her emergence from confinement the next day. John shouted: ‘Look, a horse. Whose is it? I don’t know him.’ Pounding along the drive was a huge black creature carrying a rider dressed in a coat of forest green.

Shackleford. It must be. Asa seized Edward’s hand and shouted to John: ‘Let’s run.’ Headlong down the slope they raced, plunging into the woods, where they played hide and seek until the boys complained of hunger and cold. Fortunately only Asa had heard the servants shouting in the garden or seen Madame de Rusigneux appear at the top of the bank, swathed in a shawl. After staring into the trees for a few moments Madame had raised her hand and turned away.

By the time Asa and the children went back to the house the visitor had gone and Georgina was in a rage with Asa for missing him. Tomorrow, she exclaimed, there would be no escape. Tomorrow, Shackleford was invited to dinner.

The entire household was assembled in the hall to watch Philippa, decked out in a lavish bronze satin gown and supported by her beaming husband, descend the staircase and shake hands solemnly with her servants, many of whom had been up since dawn chopping, baking and roasting for Mistress’s first dinner and the advent of an important visitor. Both Asa and the fowls slaughtered for the occasion were to be prettied up to impress Shackleford – Asa in a new gown, the fowls in a sauce of prune and redcurrant.

Asa’s dress had been designed by Georgina, sewn by Philippa’s seamstress and modified by Madame de Rusigneux. Never had she worn anything so insubstantial. Madame said that hoops and tight corsets were entirely out of fashion; instead the skirt must be supported by petticoats and adorned only with a deep sash beneath a low-cut, gathered bodice, like her own. The entire ensemble felt to Asa as if it might drift away. Even Madame had a new dress, Georgina’s cast-off, which she’d painstakingly picked apart and resewn in her favoured style. Under scrutiny from Georgina, who praised the quality of her pin-tucks, Madame said that all French ladies were expert at fine sewing, though generally, she added with a wistful smile, they were not required to make seams.

When Shackleford was announced Asa shrank into the shadows of the ivory drawing room. Even from a distance she could tell that he was leaner than she remembered, his golden hair was unpowdered and he was decked out in a midnight-blue coat, intricately knotted cravat and a perfume that flooded Asa with desire – not for Shackleford, but for the afternoon of their first meeting in Paris, in Madame de Genlis’s salon, the gathering of clever, light-hearted people and a hot, appreciative glance from Didier Paulin’s blue eyes.

Georgina rushed towards Asa, the panniers of her striped skirt blowing back like sails. ‘And this is my dear little sister, Thomasina, who of course you remember.’

Asa would not meet his eye but curtsied low, as she had been taught. She then seated herself demurely and, opening her fan, held it perilously close to her left ear: I want to get rid of you. However, her intention to behave with reserve before Shackleford was forgotten when she saw Philippa enthroned in her habitual chair, fully recovered from the birth, and she could not resist jumping up to kiss her. Every movement, she sensed, was noticed by Shackleford. And he in turn was watched avidly by Georgina.

The shame of it, thought Asa, the shame of being on display like one of Morton’s ornamental shepherdesses. The books that Asa had studied with Caroline, her work among the poor, the vigorous walks she had taken on the Downs, above all her precious love affair; all that made up Thomasina was reduced to this muslin-wrapped bag of flesh labelled
Miss Ardleigh, available to the highest bidder
.

At dinner Philippa was restored at last to her place at the far end of the table while Asa sat on Shackleford’s right, opposite Georgina, Madame de Rusigneux and Warren. As he was being served, Shackleford said: ‘I have been hoping to see you again, Miss Ardleigh, for a very long time.’

She wouldn’t look at him.

‘We were in Paris, you and I, at an astonishing moment in its history.’

‘Indeed we were.’

He was such a powerful presence to her; the scent of him, the glow of his hair filled her with anguish because he was so inextricably linked to the confusion of those last weeks in Paris. Did he remember the miniature orange trees in the atrium of the Montmorency or how he’d stood at the street corner and perhaps seen a cloaked figure dash from the hotel? It ought to have been unlikely – in the intervening five years he was said to have travelled the world. And yet, sitting a few inches from him, Asa sensed that he recalled every single thing about her.

She laid down her spoon, according to Madame’s instructions, but did not raise her eyes from the two large buttons on his cuff. ‘I understand that I must offer my condolences, Mr Shackleford.’

‘You mean the deaths of my father and brother? It was indeed a shock.’

‘At least now you will have something to occupy your time.’ Asa resumed eating, angry that she had given Shackleford the dubious satisfaction of knowing that she remembered his indolence.

A side of beef was brought to the table and Morton embarked on a favourite subject: his eponymous estates. ‘This is our own beef, of course. Famed for its succulence up to twenty miles away. Do you keep beef cattle at Compton Wyatt, Shackleford?’

‘I suspect so,’ said Shackleford.

Warren laughed sourly. ‘It must be something to own so much land you don’t even know what type of cattle you have.’

‘Hush, Geoffrey, Mr Shackleford’s only teasing,’ said Georgina, ‘but then, Mr Shackleford, you’ve spent so many years abroad I expect you’re scarcely acquainted with your own home. I’ve heard from my acquaintances in London that Compton Wyatt is one of the most distinguished houses in the West Country. The name itself always contrives to make me think of cascades and mazes and sunken gardens. Am I right?’

‘D’you know, I haven’t noticed a maze. I must have a look the next time I’m there.’

‘Oh, I adore mazes,’ cried Georgina, clasping her hands, ‘you must plant one at once.’

‘Of course, you and I, Shackleford, both chose to leave France before the whirlwind struck,’ said Morton, and there was a reverential hush along the table; acknowledgement that a great concession was being made to the visitor by this mention of the enemy. ‘I expect that you were introduced, as I was, to gentlemen who have since become significant figures in the new government, and whom you would have hoped might have benefited from the insights we offered into our British constitution.’