The True Darcy Spirit (30 page)

As Cassandra lay in her tiny room that night, her window open to a starry summer sky, and the sounds of the city drifting in from outside, including the melancholy hooting of an owl sitting in a nearby tree, she found it hard to sleep.

It had been a dreadful shock to see Mr. Darcy come into the room. His friend, John Hopkirk, she liked at once; not a tall man, and one who would grow stout with age, he had such a cheerful countenance and such an air of enjoying life and expecting to enjoy his company, that you couldn’t but be charmed by him.

He had sat beside her, quickly discovered that she was an artist, exclaimed with delight, and at once said that she must meet his wife, perhaps she knew her work? No, well as a portraitist she might not, but he’d wager that she would be pleased with her pro-ductions, though in such a very different field. “You women artists must stick together,” he said, “for you are all too rare a breed.”

Cassandra knew that Horatio Darcy’s eyes were on her, although he didn’t seem inclined to speak to her, merely acknowledging her presence with a slight bow. Why had he come? Was he spying on her, had he been set to find her by Mr. Partington, perhaps at her mother’s urging? Why did he look so severe when his eyes rested on her, whereas his face was perfectly good-humoured when he was talking to the others, and a smile and even a laugh could be seen and heard?

She was grateful when Henry Lisser came to sit on her other side, for a horrid moment she had thought that Mr. Darcy was moving in her direction. Could she simply rise and leave? These dinners were informal, people came and went, but it would look odd if she left after she had sat down at the table.

So she stayed, and kept her head and eyes averted from Mr. Darcy’s end of the table, telling herself that it was mere coincidence that had brought him here. She ventured a question about him to Mr. Hopkirk, who replied at once that they had met again after not seeing much of one another for several years, and Mr. Darcy, already a great favourite with Mrs. Hopkirk, often called at their house in Paddington to share a chop and talk about books and such like, “For I am a writer, Mrs. Burgh.”

She at once begged him to tell her what he wrote, and in return, he asked her about her painting, did she come from a family of artists, where had she trained, where had she her studio?

She answered these questions readily and civilly, keeping her voice low in the hope that Mr. Darcy might not hear what she was saying, but she suspected that his attention was on her rather than his immediate companions.

“This Mr. Darcy,” Henry Lisser said in her ear. “I have heard of him. Is he not some connection of yours?”

“He is, but pray do not mention it, and please, on no account give him my direction. He is a lawyer, and acts for Mr. Partington.”

Henry Lisser pursed his lips, and shot Mr. Darcy an appraising glance. “His face gives little away. Do you think he knew you were here, or is he here by mere chance?”

“The latter, I do hope.”

For his part, Horatio Darcy was alarmed to find how pleased he was to see Cassandra, which sentiment was followed by the indignation her presence always aroused in him. She was poised and looked cool and collected. She should not; some confusion at seeing him unexpectedly would have been appropriate, and have reassured him that she was not as controlled as she seemed.

Why did she find the conversation of that man so absorbing? He was the painter, Henry Lisser, the man in the shrubbery, Mr. Partington had told him. Would women find him handsome? They might, there was a Byronic touch to him, although his hair was thick and naturally wavy, Darcy doubted if he pinned it into curls every night as the poet was reputed to do; and to do him justice, he didn’t look the kind of fellow to care overmuch about his appearance. He was wearing a waistcoat under a dark, striped coat; both, to Darcy’s eye, of foreign cut.

He himself wore his habitual black coat with a cherry, damascened waistcoat with buttons that had been a present from Lady Usborne, soon after he had first been welcomed into her bed.

He had an obscure feeling that he would rather not have been wearing those particular buttons, but he dismissed the thought even as it flitted into his mind. Damn it, Cassandra was rising from the table, making her excuses, she was going to slip away.

And a good thing, too. However, it might be useful to have her direction, Mr. Partington might well be in touch again, seeking information.

“You are leaving, Mrs. Burgh, is it not?” he said, getting up as well. “It is surely not safe for you in these streets at this time of night. Perhaps you will allow me to escort you to your home?”

“I shall see Mrs. Burgh to her front door,” said Henry Lisser. “It is on my way. Yes”—raising a hand in farewell—“I am sorry to leave so early, but I have a picture varnishing, which needs another coat, this hot weather makes it all very difficult, since it dries too quickly.”

Cassandra might have kept her direction from Horatio for this evening, but she could not deceive herself as to it remaining long a secret from him; if he wanted to find her direction—and why should he?—then he now knew her present name, he could find out where she was living in a trice.

She comforted herself with the thought that he had no need to find out where she was. It had been an unfortunate encounter, but it
was over, he had, in fact, seen her quite at home in her new life, and the fact that he would disapprove of it, and of the freedom and independence she was earning for herself, was nothing to her.

Wretched man, he should stay in his own sphere of lawyers and clubs and Lady Usborne’s boudoir. That was where he belonged.

Horatio Darcy would have agreed with her, had this point been raised only a little while before, but he was finding, to his astonishment, that the company he kept when with John Hopkirk, and with others of that circle, for his acquaintance among the writers and poets of London was increasing almost daily, was a great deal more agreeable than that of his other life. It would bring him no material benefit, here were no potential clients, no great men of influence, yet he rarely returned home from an evening with any of them feeling that his time had been anything other than well spent.

He didn’t meet Cassandra again; he was not to know that she hadn’t ventured out to the coffee-house again since that evening, telling Henry Lisser frankly that much as she enjoyed herself there, she thought it better not to see Mr. Darcy again.

Horatio was right in his supposition that Lady Usborne would be casting about for a replacement for him, for it suited her to show herself and her friends that she still, at five-and-thirty, had the power to attract a virile young man.

However, she had more on her mind than a cicisbeo, for she was concerned about Lord Usborne. He was fretting about something, and she meant to get to the bottom of it.

They had taken a large, round-fronted house in the best part of Brighton, but it was nothing in size compared to their London house, and so they were thrown together more than they were accustomed to.

She suspected that Lord Usborne did not dislike this, for he breakfasted with her, and even took her out driving and accompanied her to picnics. Very unfashionable, to be sure, although it was becoming, she had noticed, as one ever on the alert to catch the latest fads and whims, much more the thing for husbands and wives to be seen together.

Her good friend Amelia Wannop had noticed it, too, with some dismay. “Lord, five minutes a week is more than I want to spend with Marmaduke, and yet here are married couples billing and cooing together as though they were newly-weds, and had not been together for ten years and more, with children in the nursery! I blame the
Evangelicals, they are breathing a new morality into the air, and it will not benefit women, you may be sure of that.”

“It will pass, these movements do.”

“Don’t you be so sure. Men grow more domestic, and that is the last place left to women to rule as they please. Once a man takes over authority in the home, then women have nothing but duty and obedience and all those dull things to sustain them. I am glad I am not a young woman embarking on marriage, it is a state always full of pitfalls, but they will not have the fun in life that we have had, I tell you that.”

Lady Usborne did not care for this talk of young women. “You sound as though we are in our dotage.”

“Two- or three-and-thirty is not eighteen or nineteen, that is all, however one might wish it otherwise. At least one can face facts.”

It was easier for Amelia to tolerate being in her thirties than it was for Lady Usborne. For she had three children, while the nurseries at Usborne House were empty.

Lady Usborne changed the subject, talking about the reception to be held at the Pavilion that evening, what was Amelia wearing? Her green-and-white crape, or the new gown that she had ordered from Paris?

“There is no point in wearing a new gown on such an occasion, for the world and his wife will be there, and it will be such a crush that you will not be able to see anything but hats and feathers. And it will be stifling hot, with all the windows tight shut, for you know how Prinny is about draughts.”

“It will take more than a draught to carry him off, with his bulk, it would need a whirlwind,” said Lady Usborne.

“I am not so sure. He is not in good health, you know, how can he be when he lives as he does? What a joke it would be if the old king outlives him, and so he never came to the throne at all. And that reminds me, I wanted to ask you, as we are such old friends, and you share everything with me, why is Prinny so displeased with Usborne?”

Lady Usborne was not born yesterday, and though all her nerves
were tingling at this remark, she was far too canny to exchange confidences of this sort with Amelia, who, old friend or no, had fingers in too many political pies to be entirely trustworthy. So she turned it off lightly, saying that Usborne had won rather too many guineas off His Royal Highness at the gaming table, which, as they both knew, was more than likely to put the prince in a pet, and cause him to frown at someone who two days later would once more be admitted to his circle of cronies.

It would suit Lady Usborne well enough if her husband could be persuaded to spend less time in the royal circle. Instinct told her that trouble could be coming in that direction, but any move away from the court would have to be done subtly and in a way not to give offence; the last thing they needed was to incur the wrath of that notably unforgiving man.

No, Lady Usborne had more on her mind than worrying about Horatio. It had been a pleasant interlude, and it was over. More pressing business awaited her, and that evening, home after the reception, and sitting with the sashes thrown up to admit a welcome sea breeze after the heat and smells of the Pavilion, she and Lord Usborne took a companionable glass of wine together, and she began her campaign to wheedle out of him just what he was up to.

Horatio Darcy walked home from the coffee-house that evening, paying little attention to the still beauty of a moonlit night, lost as he was in thought.

His first reaction upon seeing Cassandra had been irritation and annoyance, for he felt that her presence would mar what promised to be an agreeable evening out in the company of Hopkirk and likeminded people.

It was the realisation that she belonged in that company that made him examine his feelings towards her with a new honesty. John Hopkirk had taken to her at once, that was clear, and was keen to introduce her to Louisa. John didn’t care if Cassandra was a Darcy or a Mrs. whatever it was; to him she was an agreeable woman, making her way in the world, in the very same world that he and his wife moved in.

And, more unsettling to Horatio, Cassandra’s beauty caught at his heart. The turn of her neck, those wonderful grey eyes, her thoughtful expression yielding, when she thought he wasn’t looking at her, to a delightful smile, a spurt of laughter. He could tell that she was ill at ease with him there at the table, but even with that restraint, she was, he realised, utterly captivating.

Moreover, he had to admit to a grudging respect for what she was doing. It took courage, huge courage, to stand up to a Partington, to
bear the exclusion from her family, and to set about making her living—in a way that he still disapproved of, but surely one to be preferred to the other possibilities for one possessing her charms. He owed it to her, he decided, to offer friendship, nothing more. She was his kin, after all.

He found out where Cassandra was residing with little difficulty, now that he knew the name she was going under, and a few enquiries brought him the information he was seeking.

He called upon her two days later, and took her entirely by surprise, not waiting for Petifer to announce him, but following his nose—how could she work on such a hot day amid all those oil paints?—so that he arrived unheralded at the top of the house in Soho Square and walked in through the door, which had been left standing open to allow a through breeze.

She was standing before her easel, her smock wrapped round her, a palette held in one hand, and her brush in the other, looking at the canvas with such concentration that she didn’t notice his arrival.

He stepped back, gave a sharp rap on the door, and a little cough.

“What is it, Petifer?” she said, without looking around.

“It is not Petifer. I am sorry if I disturb you.”

She stood frozen, then lowered her hand with the brush and turned slowly round. “You,” she said in disbelief. “What are you doing here?”

“I have come to invite you out for a drive,” he said promptly. “I have no carriage of my own, but I have the use of a friend’s while he is out of town. His horses need exercise, and so I propose a drive out to Richmond, to breathe the air.”

She stared at him as though he were mad.

“Has my stepfather…has Mr. Partington sent you?”

“I have sent my bill to your stepfather; he is no longer a client of mine. I dealt with him in that single matter, he only asked me to act for him because it was a family affair, and that is, I am glad to say, the end of our acquaintance. He is not a man I can like.”

Horatio Darcy couldn’t take his eyes from her face. It was lightly
tanned, no unusual consequence of being out in this weather, and this made her grey eyes even more beautiful. And, which for some reason made his heart constrict, she had a smudge of paint across her cheek.

They looked at one another for a long while, and a slight blush came to her cheeks. Then she lowered her eyes and shook her head. “I am busy, as you see,” gesturing with her brush towards her painting.

“You will work the better for some exercise,” he said.

“That you will, and it will give me a chance to get this room straight, which I haven’t been able to do this se’enight,” said Petifer from the door, where she had been standing, watching the two of them. “You go out for a drive with your cousin, Miss Cassandra. It will be an open carriage, I suppose, sir?” she said to Darcy, giving him an appraising look. “Which, with your being family, makes it all right.”

Horatio offered his arm to Cassandra. “Come, we mustn’t keep the horses waiting.”

Cassandra couldn’t help but feel a lift to her spirits as she climbed into the carriage. It was a phaeton, well sprung, with a spirited team in harness, and it brought back many happy memories of her earlier life, driving to dances and dinners at neighbouring houses, summer expeditions and picnics…At first rather stiff with her companion, and wary—what was he up to?—she found her hostility gradually lessening. Theirs was, after all, an old acquaintance, if a slight one.

They discussed horses, Cassandra rather wistfully admitting that she very much missed her riding: “I was used to ride nearly every day.”

They drove at a steady pace through the streets of London, and then out into the country until they turned through the gates of Richmond Great Park. The carriage drove along a well-kept road between herds of grazing deer clustered beneath the trees for shade, their
dapple flanks speckled further by the sunlight streaming through the branches.

It was the first time Cassandra had been out into the country since coming to London, and she relished the air, the rich colours of the trees, and the pleasant sensation of driving at speed in so well sprung a carriage.

She also enjoyed her company, although she wasn’t going to admit it to herself yet. Horatio talked to her as to an equal; what had happened to the disdain with which he had first made her acquaintance?

By common consent, a number of topics were not raised. Cassandra would talk about horseflesh in general, but not about her own beloved horse now languishing, so she imagined, in the stables at Rosings. They did not talk about her painting, nor about how she had come to live with Miss Griffin. The subject of the Usbornes was also not mentioned, and Horatio was cagey about his law work. It was beginning to bore him, and it would most certainly bore Cassandra.

They had in common family connections, and she was intrigued to learn more about her father’s family than her mother had ever thought fit to tell her; since her marriage to Mr. Partington, she had almost forgotten that she had ever been a Darcy.

And, with her daughter now gone, Cassandra reflected, there would be nothing left to her of that marriage, it would be as though it had never happened. Perhaps, one day, when time had healed old sores, it might be possible for Cassandra to ask if she might have the portrait of her father, painted when he was a young man. It was not a distinguished work of art, but it reminded her of him in a way that the miniature of him, which was hers, never did, it being a stiff picture of a young man in a blue coat who could be almost anyone of his age and class.

“You are very silent,” Horatio said, and she realised with a start that she had been lost in her memories. “Woolgathering,” she said. “What fine, fat sheep, they are Wyntons, are they not?”

“If you say so. As a Kentishwoman, I dare say you know about
sheep. I can tell one from a goat, but that is about all. I grew up amid fields of corn, it is not a part of England renowned for its sheep, where I come from.”

These were, Cassandra felt, when she was delivered back to Soho Square, among the happiest hours she had spent since coming to London. These, and the hours at her easel when her painting was going well. It suddenly occurred to her that she was, despite everything, more fortunate than many of her more respectable sisters, who might share the happiness of an agreeable companion, but would never know the satisfaction that work brought her.

“Nor do most men,” said Miss Griffin, who was in a tart mood that evening. “And it is all very well, when the pen flows, or the brush in your case, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper.”

“Yes, indeed, and that little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.”

Miss Griffin asked to see the sketches she had made at Richmond, for Darcy had stopped the carriage for them to take a stroll and for Cassandra to take out her notebook while the groom saw to the horses. She laughed over a picture of a comical-looking sheep, with a clump of grass hanging from its mouth.

“That bears a strong resemblance to one or two people of my acquaintance,” she said. She admired the little group of mother, nurse, and little boys that Cassandra had caught in a moment of conflict, with the children battling for possession of a ball, and then she came to a sketch that Cassandra had made of Darcy. She had taken his likeness in a few swift lines, but it was the man to the life, and his energy and intelligence and masculinity leapt off the page.

Miss Griffin pursed her lips and made no comment, other than giving Cassandra a thoughtful look as she turned the sheets to show a drawing of the groom, a small, bow-legged man, holding the horses’ heads.

Horatio called again, the following week, and this time drove her out to Box Hill, to admire the famous views. It was not such an enjoyable outing, for there was a tension between them. Cassandra was silent, she found she was once more uncomfortable being with him, and yet, when on parting he said that he was going out of town and would not therefore be able to take her driving again for a while, she felt an unreasonable sense of disappointment.