“What do you think of this novel, Miss Austen?” she cried as I advanced with words of greeting unspoken on my lips. “It is everywhere praised as a piece of perfection; and tho’ I would hope I am more exacting in my tastes than the common run of humanity, I will own there is much to admire in the heroine — for rather than self-control, the author would champion self-reliance; and thus in Laura every woman must find a salutary model, do not you agree?”
“I regret to say that I have not yet had the pleasure of reading Mrs. Brunton,” I said, “being unable to locate the set of volumes in my last expedition to Lackington’s. But how happy for the author that you find much to admire!”
“The author?” Miss East repeated, as one amazed; “I confess I never think of the author when reading a book — my mind is wholly given over to the conduct of the characters, to the representation of life as one finds it for better or worse portrayed; I am wholly given up to the situations presented. The author never enters my consciousness — except, of course, when I am reading Scott.”
“Indeed! I do not think Sir Walter Scott may be barred from anywoman’s consciousness,” I returned.
“Only consider what perils to mind and virtue Laura must withstand!” Miss East shook her volume with enthusiasm. “First made the object of a rake’s unwelcome attentions — escaping seduction by a hairs-breadth — refusing marriage from that same disreputable (tho’ very dashing) gentleman when he sees the error of his ways — she attempts, as so many of us must, to live upon her own resources — and yet finds not a single lover of art willing to sell her paintings in the entire Metropolis! I am only just come to the part where she must escape the savage horrors of America in a canoe; but the whole is of the deepest moral instruction, I assure you. I should not hesitate to press it upon any young girl of my acquaintance, as a warning against the bitterness of the world.”
I eyed the book somewhat dubiously, and wondered what best to say; but was happily forestalled by a bustle of arrival in the front passage.
“That will be the Count. How tedious the interruption! But we shall talk more of literature later, I hope.”
“The Count?”
“Young Julien. He was supposed to bring his mother — but in the event, she is lying down with a sick headache.” My companion made a moue of distaste. “These elderly women and their disorders! I refuse to countenance Mamma’s continual appeals for attention, on the score of some megrim or another; but naturally she was inclined to sympathise with the Comtesse d’Entraigues, and accepted her refusal — tho’ Watkins had already laid the places — with her usual grace.”
I glanced towards the door, and there he was: slim, elegant, dark-haired, and roguish of eye, with an exquisite air of fashion. He was bowed low over Eliza’s hand, his lips grazing it; then with a swift, laughing look he muttered something in French that caused her to giggle, and rap him with her furled fan.
“Naughty boy! And my poor husband not twelve hours absent from London!” she cried. “Jane — come and say hello to Julien!”
I approached the young Comte with a strange sensation of trepidation. Could this scion of a scheming roué and an opera singer be other than venal in his habits and intercourse? He was present only briefly in the drawing-room at Barnes when we descended upon Surrey a week ago, playing an air upon the pianoforte before quitting the house; Eliza had explained carelessly that a young man of nineteen could not be expected to spend his evenings with a parcel of dowds. I understood Comte Julien had set up his own establishment in the Albany, where any number of single gentlemen take rooms; but how he lived, when his parents’ pockets were entirely to let, must be cause for conjecture.
“Miss Austen,” he said with a bow. “I am honoured to renew the acquaintance of one whom la Comtesse de Feuillide must always speak of with esteem and affection.”
“The pleasure must be mine, monsieur,” I returned. “I hope your mother is not decidedly unwell?”
“A trifling indisposition — the return of an old complaint.”
“And your father, Julien?” Eliza put in with unusual acid. “Does he sit by her bedside, bathing her temples with lavender water?”
The gentleman smiled as tho’ she had offered him a jest, and turned to greet Martha East.
“Is he not a buck of the first stare?” Eliza murmured. “And but nineteen!”
“He bears himself with the possession of a man twice that age.”
“Your Frenchmen usually do. They are not suffered to run about with guns and dogs as our English boys will; their sport is of a deadlier kind, involving swords and hearts, and their apprenticeship is from infancy. I wonder where the old Comte has gone this evening?”
“To sit at the feet of Miss Radcliffe.”
“Let us hope she kicks him, then,” Eliza said, and went off to coze with Mrs. Latouche.
“YOU HAVE QUITE THE LOOK OF YOUR EXCELLENT brother,” Count Julien observed, as the first covers were removed from the table. “He is from home, I collect?”
“Yes — called away to Oxford, on a matter of banking business.”
“And you are not uneasy? Forgive me — but the violence of the neighbourhood of Hans Town — the suicide of the Russian Princess — and your house now unprotected by a man—”
“My brother left his valet in Sloane Street,” I answered evenly, “and the Princess died in Berkeley Square.”
“Indeed. I was forgetting. My family was a little acquainted with the lady, you understand, and all I have heard in recent days is Hans Place.”
“I suppose it is only natural for émigrés to know one another,” I observed.
His smile twisted. “Our very un-Englishness makes us cling to one another? There is some truth in that, tant pis.”
“I am sorry — I did not mean to offend — but her death must have come as a shock to all your family. I believe your mother felt it so.”
“They were not on the best of terms,” he said, fixing his eyes on my countenance, “but I esteemed the lady, and pitied her loneliness. Yes, I felt her death to be a horror. I had seen her alive that very evening.”
“At the Theatre Royal? I had not known you were one of your parents’ party.”
“I sat in the pit, among my acquaintance,” he said simply. “But I do not think I noticed the Princess then. I saw her later in the courtyard of the Albany, where I have my rooms.”
A frisson of interest swept up my spine, but I schooled my voice to indifference. “I wonder what she can have found to take her there?”
He shrugged. “Un amant, n’est-ce pas? It is an abode for single gentlemen, after all; and at such an hour — it was all of two o’clock in the morning. Pauvre enfant. She was an unhappy woman.”
This was the first hint of information I had been certain must elude us — a suggestion of the Princess’s tragic course, in the hours between her first visit to Castlereagh’s house, and her death four hours later.
“She was alone, I collect?”
“Always — that night, and every night, no matter how many persons she gathered about her. La Tscholikova had a genius for solitude; she carried it, like the Russian winter, within her.”
“What very extraordinary behaviour! I wonder whom she might chuse to visit in the Albany? Nothing of a friendship in that quarter was mentioned at the inquest.”
His expression sharpened. “You attended the coroner’s panel?”
“My brother was required to give evidence,” I said primly, “and I merely accompanied him, my sister being indisposed.”
“I see.” He hesitated an instant, as tho’ weighing my words; then said, “Whomever she sought, she did not find him. She would not otherwise have been standing like a lost child in the courtyard.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“I did not. I was already in my rooms, vous comprenez, and observed her from the window. And as I watched, she turned and quitted the courtyard for the street. I assume she had a carriage waiting there — for she was still in evening dress.”