The Fraud

 
 
 

 
The Fraud

 

 
BARBARA EWING

 
 
Hachette Digital

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ACTRESSES
A DANGEROUS VINE
THE TRESPASS
ROSETTA
THE MESMERIST

 
 
 

 
The Fraud

 

 
BARBARA EWING

 
 
Hachette Digital

 
Published by Hachette Digital 2009

 
Copyright © Barbara Ewing 2009

 

 
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

 

 
All rights reserved.

 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

 
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

 
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

 

eISBN : 978 0 7481 1492 4

 

 
This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

 

 
Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
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An Hachette Livre UK Company

For Henry and Matthew

I have perused with interest the Histories of Mr William Hogarth, Mr Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, those famous Portraitists of the Eighteenth Century. It is my belief that another History should be told also, and I present it here.

 

The Author

Unfortunately that summer was cold in Wiltshire. There was a blizzard in June, and the Church blamed Sin.

 

The new bride, entering the huge old country house with her father (her groom already gone ahead of her and pouring himself a large glass of rum), was complaining in a not unquiet voice.

‘Pray, Father, where are the Jewels and the fine China Plates? And why is it so dark? And look! The curtains are so faded and so old! Am I to live here now?’

‘Ssshh, girl.’

‘And I am so cold, and they have great slobbering dogs everywhere about the place! And his Mother looks as if she has swallowed a Pin-Cushion. Alas for me, you promised me there would be Jewels, Father, but I cannot see even one Pearl!’

‘Sssh, girl.’

‘You promised me, Father! I shan’t stay, I swear I shall not! This is not what you promised me if I married him!’

Her father, the local Squire, carried his portly stomach before him like a pudding and shussshed his foolish daughter. ‘You are now inside a Stately Mansion as of right, Miss! You will be called “Lady Betty” by the servants and treated with all manner of civilities. It is an
Honour
. We are accepting an
Honour
.’ And he and his over-ventilating wife urged the newly-conjoined bride forward. Portraits of older generations looked down in disapproval from dark walls: the disapproval had perhaps a slightly raffish air (or it may have been the peeling paint) and the big room grew colder and darker as the wedding day wore on and the bride looked in vain for jewels. A maiden aunt in a dark gown and a white cap, who was so self-effacing as to be almost invisible, finally closed the last shutters as the grey light faded. The candle-lit room was full of shadows now; the groom was greatly inebriated, as was his father, so their shadows weaved and stumbled; but the Squire beamed, infatuated by his own importance (he had managed a respectable dowry). He was
particularly
infatuated by his own importance today because of his triumph: this day his family was finally conjoined - he had hardly dared hope - with the Wiltshire Marshalls.

The Wiltshire Marshalls were an old, once slightly noble, foolish family of languishing landowners who had tried to inject new money into their ranks by being so utterly vulgar as to buy some of the first plantations in the West Indies. But there was something inherently reckless and wild about the Wiltshire Marshalls which seemed to pass down the generations: some darkness: something in their inheritance that was unable to stop the decline. Attractive,
louche
, beautiful dark eyes, irresponsible: their new money, like their old money, was frittered and gambled away.

Therefore the Wiltshire Marshalls had - reluctantly - supervised this day the marriage of their youngest, feckless, dark-eyed son Marmaduke to the local Squire’s fair daughter, hoping that the young lady might at least bring new energy, new blood, to a fading family - not to mention a large purse of dowry-money to stave off immediate disaster.

The Squire’s family departed - minus a daughter - still beaming.

Late in the night one of the maids finally, wearily, walking about the great, draughty house with a candle snuffer, put out the lights; her own shadow walked with her, fading as the candles were extinguished one by one. In the ancient baronial hall bones lay strewn, and dogs and humans snored. Upon one chair the maid passed the bridegroom, sprawled asleep with rum spilt upon his trousers. The groom’s father had stumbled over a chamberpot so that the room stank more than usual. From the nuptial bedroom weeping emerged.

It was not an auspicious beginning to the marriage.

 

The Wiltshire Marshalls hoped that the pretty fair-haired bride would be economical with Marmaduke’s small and fast-vanishing fortune. Unfortunately this young lady, Betty (who was to become the mother of Philip and Grace Marshall, whose history we are beginning) had only one attribute of note: she was extremely, eloquently, pretty. She was furious when she found she was not to be addressed as Lady Betty (or indeed anything regal at all: her father had been wrong) and she was not in the least interested in the domestic concerns of country life. Betty harboured Social Ambition: the innocuous old maiden aunt (who had been named so hopefully forty years ago, Joy) could supervise; Betty herself refused to dirty her hands in the household, tossed her pretty head. Betty yearned for cities and social niceties, but did not understand that Bath and its spas, not Bristol and its trading ships, was beginning to attract the gentry. Weak, good-looking, lazy Marmaduke had never thought of moving anywhere at all, he was quite happy misspending his time over gambling and imported rum. He played cards for money and the rest of the time indulged his one artistic hobby: he liked to draw or paint the high-stepping, beautiful horses that had been bred in his family’s diminishing fields.

‘
Painting?
’ scoffed pretty, scornful Betty. ‘What use is
painting
to raise us high in Society?’ She kept nagging her husband that they must live in Bristol where this High Society, she was sure, reigned. Pretty and sulky and manipulative, Betty insisted on Bristol as the price for other favours.

So Marmaduke and his growing family (five pregnancies in four years, only two still-births: this was considered a good record) moved to a Bristol house in fashionable Queen’s Square (unfortunately the less fashionable end). The house was ill-ventilated and narrow and high, hardly big enough for a gentleman and his children, not to mention servants and the maiden aunt and family heirlooms and the new mahogany furniture that Betty insisted upon. There was a tiny formal garden at the rear, containing one over-elaborate statue of a dubious Grecian goddess, to remind them of the nobler environment from whence the once illustrious Wiltshire Marshalls had come. The neighbours, they soon found, were all vulgar tradesmen. Marmaduke continued his gambling. Betty, to comfort herself, acquired a white poodle and called it Beloved, and consumed much Madeira wine.

Children
would
keep being born, dead or alive: altogether five of the children lived, of whom Philip Marshall - a personage of whom we shall be hearing a great deal more - was the eldest. He was named after his paternal grandfather in the hope of largesse: alas none was forthcoming. He acquired two pretty, sulky sisters, Juno and Venus (named when Betty was briefly enamoured of Greek goddesses like the one in the garden) and later, two younger brothers, Ezekiel and Tobias (named when Betty was going through a brief religious phase).

To be the oldest of five children in a languishing family of extremely faded nobility was not an easy inheritance: always Philip Marshall had to look for the main chance. From a very early age he found that he had the kind of smile that made people look twice, notice him:
what a pretty boy
they said. He had learned to be charming before he knew the meaning of the word; by the time he was five he knew the meaning of the word and he was an expert in charm: roguish and cherubic simultaneously with dark hair and black smiling eyes: in short, Philip was delectably beautiful. He was the only child in the family to receive some sort of education: soon education was low in the priorities of this particular family.

Time passed, wealth diminished further. Over and over pleas were made to the Wiltshire Marshalls for financial assistance. In one spectacular row which used up more energy than the Wiltshire Marshalls had displayed for years, Marmaduke was cut off for ever from what remained of the family fortune and the almost invisible Aunt Joy understood she would never see the rolling Wiltshire hills again. She became a pale, grey ghost as she endeavoured to keep the Bristol household running, unnoticed by everyone unless something was needed:
Aunt Joy!
little children called imperiously then,
Aunt Joy!
Very occasionally, thwarted, the eldest child, Philip, he of the beautiful face and the dark eyes and the hint of education, erupted suddenly into terrible spectacular rages and screamed at Aunt Joy. Otherwise he continued to be immensely charming but had, as he grew older, no other obvious skills that could save the family.

Bristol was a filthy, flourishing port; trade and finance ruled everywhere: credit was easily obtained as coal and guns and cotton and nails were shipped out, sugar and silks and spices and rum were shipped in, and not too much attention paid to the other element of trade that gave the Bristolians their wealth: slaves. In the streets people hurried by:
money, money, money
: there for the making if you knew how. Stories abounded of fortunes made on foreign shores, of new continents and new wealth, of jewels and cruelty and sugar: Bristol became richer and richer as goods from across the seas poured in and occasionally black men in chains were auctioned on the docks. Naughty children were rebuked with threats of black Mohammetmen who would cut their throats and drain their blood. Occasionally a black man appeared in the town in footman’s clothes and was stared at: bought at an auction on the docks, or brought back as a servant from the sugar plantations in Jamaica perhaps, or from the coast of Africa; nothing caused so much mirth and the pointing of fingers as a black man in a powdered white wig.

Betty (less pretty now) lived in Bristol almost entirely on credit and Madeira wine. But credit does not last for ever, even when you come from finer stock. Marmaduke placed larger and more dangerous bets. Betty bemoaned her fate upon the
chaise longue
with her poodle, Beloved, in her arms. She and Juno and Venus spoke more and more desperately of ‘Nobility’ and ‘Marriage’ and ‘Fortune’. In the meantime the two wild, uneducated younger boys, Tobias and Ezekiel, having little else to entertain them, viciously stoned to death a piglet belonging to one of their tradesmen neighbours; they laughed and squealed (imitating the expiring small animal).