“Very well, Mamma. If we must consider Desdemona’s heart, I can see no alternative but to adventure Bristol on the morrow. There are only two inns I can conceive of Swithin gracing; and at one of these, he will be remembered. And now I must away, or Miss Conyngham will play without my admiration. Miss Austen? May I set you down in Seymour Street?”

“You may, my lord, with my deepest thanks.”

I made my adieux, and was very soon established in Lord Harold’s curricle.

“YOU ARE RATHER QUIET THIS EVENING, MISS AUSTEN. I hope my niece has not overtaxed your fund of strength.”

“Hardly — though I am, perhaps, a little oppressed in spirits.”

A swift glance, as swiftly averted. “I very much regret the impertinence of the newspaper, Jane.”

The gentleness of his tone, and his adoption of my Christian name, very nearly brought tears to my eyes — but I drew a shaky breath and attempted to affect a carelessness I could not feel.

“Oh, as to that — do not trouble to consider of it further. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? It shall be forgot, and Green Park Buildings returned to its usual obscurity.”

“Your complaisance does you credit. I must hope that Maria Conyngham possesses not half so much — or I shall be sadly thwarted in my efforts to provoke her this evening.”

“Provocation is all very well — but I would counsel, my lord, that you undertake it only with the most zealous care for your person. There is a danger in travelling alone. My chair was waylaid by footpads as I attempted a return from the Lower Rooms last evening.”

“Footpads! I had not an idea of it!” Lord Harold turned to me in astonishment. “They were after your purse?”

“—Though there was little enough within. I recognised one of the men, however, as he held a knife to my throat — and informed the constable of his name and direction. He was a certain Smythe, of the Theatre Royal. I had remarked him Thursday when we ventured to the wings, as a man quite subject to Hugh Conyngham’s direction. And though his beard and headgear obscured his face, I could hardly have been mistaken — for Smythe possesses one blue, and one brown eye; and thus must be instantly known, even in darkness.”

I spoke with tolerable composure, but Lord Harold’s distress was sudden and extreme.

“He held a knife to your throat!”

“Do not concern yourself, I beg. He very soon ran off, when I summoned breath enough to scream. But I should be interested to learn whether the constable succeeded in seizing him. You might find it out at the theatre this evening.”

“And you believe this villain was despatched by one of the company?” Lord Harold enquired in the grimmest accent.

“I am utterly convinced of it — by Hugh Conyngham himself, perhaps. Our conversation in the Lower Rooms last night must somehow have excited that gentleman’s anxiety; and from a fear, perhaps, of the letters’ exposure — or a fear of my intimacy with yourself — he determined that I should be silenced.”

“But you cannot have betrayed our suspicions so completely, Jane! And yet you think the man Smythe intended your death?”

“I detected no gentleness in his look — only the coldest light of determination.”

Lord Harold snapped the reins over the back of his team, though the horses already moved smartly enough. “When I think that I might have prevented it! Had I never urged you to deceive Conyngham, while I searched the manager’s office, you should not have been exposed to this danger.”

“You must not reproach yourself, my lord. I am no slip of a girl to require excessive protection; what I have done, was done of my own free will. I impart the particulars only so that you may be on your guard. For if you persist in baiting Maria Conyngham, you surely risk the gravest injury. Have a care, Lord Harold — and trust no one’s appearance of benevolence.”

“You could not have bestowed your warning on a less likely object,” he replied with mirth. “It is many years, indeed, since I have trusted the appearance of anything like disinterested good.”

We achieved the stoop of Green Park Buildings, and he jumped down to hand me to the street.

“Jane, Jane,” he said with a sigh, “I regret your misfortune extremely.”

“Not another word, my lord. I would not forfeit the thrill of this chase for a thousand footpads. And there is Lord Kinsfell to be thought of — is he to rot in gaol for the preservation of a man like Smythe? Never!”

Lord Harold surveyed me with a judicious air. “It is as much as I would expect of you, my dear. Having risked your life thus far, may I enquire whether you would accompany me to Bristol on the morrow? I should value your penetration extremely.”

“Sunday travel? I should never hear the end of it, among the Austens,” I mused with a smile.[62] “But I think I shall attend you, all the same. Tomorrow is my birthday, Lord Harold, and I shall regard the journey as in tribute to my natal day! But you must allow me an hour first for the observance of morning service. I might pray to be forgiven my family’s poor opinion.”

“Capital!” he cried. “Expect my carriage at eleven o’clock. We shall be returned in time for dinner.”

Chapter 13

A Confidential Nuncheon

Sunday,

16 December 1804

A QUIET SUNDAY SERVICE AT THE QUEEN’S CHAPEL, FOLLOWED by a short turn in the muddy Crescent — and so the morning of my twenty-ninth birthday passed as many a Sabbath, while resident in Bath.[63] Though quite out of charity with all my beloved family, I was nonetheless treated to some small remembrances of the day — an embroidered needle-case from dear Cassandra, offered with an anxious look; from my father, a handsome set of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, bound in vellum and tooled in gold; and from my mother, who learned somehow of the slyness of the Bath Chronicle, a lecture on the foolishness of impropriety in one so nearly beyond the marriageable age. Did I suffer my reputation to sink, no respectable gentleman would ever solicit my hand, and how my dear mother was expected to keep me once Reverend Austen was cold in his grave, she could not begin to think. She then exclaimed at length upon the subject of Lord Harold, and went so far as to solicit my father’s authority, and beg that he should abhor the acquaintance — but the Reverend George, however uneasy in his own mind, refused to censure my activity so much. I was, he declared, a woman of some maturity, and must exert my own judgement in these and all matters; I should not have my father to look to, in a very few years more; and if the principles with which I had been raised, did not serve as friends in the present case, he could do nothing further with me.

I reminded my mother that our beloved Madam Lefroy had declined the wedded state until her twenty-ninth year, and had yet attained a highly respectable, if modest, condition, in the acceptance of her clergyman — but it would not do.

“For,” the good lady darkly pronounced, “Madam Lefroy’s excellent fortune is of no account, for there were many more eligible young men a quarter-century ago, before Buonaparte forced the country into regimentals. Cassandra I cannot reproach for tarrying in the single state, though she is several years your senior, for she would have got poor Tom Fowle if she could. But there — it was not to be. Let her misfortune be a lesson, my dear, and do not place your affections among such men as are likely to die of little trifling fevers.”[64]