Love and Scandal, page 22
It was all very well to hold her head high as she left the Chapter Coffeehouse, but settling her account with them, which she had felt compelled to return to do because of the proprietor’s evil insinuations, had taken what little cash she had left. That she had been overcharged she had no doubt, but what could she say? She would not be so dishonorable as to leave her bill unpaid, no matter what the provocation, and she would not allow Portman to think Jameson would pay it for her.
She would get a draft on her bank account, but that would take some time, a few days at least, and in the meantime she had nowhere to go. She could not go to Henny. Philoxia would take her in, but the memory of their conversation came back to her. Loxy had struggled to raise herself from her stained reputation. Was it fair to place her at risk again, to ask her to shelter a woman the public now thought was a…a whore?
Her next thought had been that as the author of her misfortune, Jameson should loan her his cottage for a few days, at least until her bank draft came through or they concluded their business. She had gone to Jameson’s townhome, but he was not there and was not expected back for a few days, maybe even a week. It was a devastating blow. Where had he gone? Clearly he had never had any intention to settle things with Wilson’s Gazette. Nor did he care enough about her even to be sure she was all right, or he would not have just gone out of town, no matter how urgent the business. Humiliated by the knowing look in the housekeeper’s eyes, she had slunk away from the front door, valise in hand.
What was she going to do? Misery permeated every fiber of her being as the rain increased in intensity. Someone at that wretched inn had stolen her pretty new parasol, her umbrella and her best bonnet.
She stared glumly into the distance, thinking she must move, must find a place to stay, or very soon she would look irretrievably bedraggled, and no respectable innkeeper or landlord would rent her a room. So much depended on appearances in this evil city.
Rain was starting to seep through her sleeves and mat down her hair. She was alone in a city of strangers. She wanted her Aunt Nettie. She wanted to sit in the parlor and drink tea while she read out loud bits of her work to Auntie and Professor Stiltson. She wanted home: long walks near the marshes, the view of the channel on a wild day with the salty breeze tumbling her hair, the quiet country lane she walked when contemplating her plot.
Tears joined the raindrops trailing down her cheek, dripping off her chin. It had been a mistake, coming to London, thinking she could settle her own problems. Men only listened to other men unless there was money to be made from a woman’s talent. Mr. Bellringer had made it quite clear that profit was his sole motivation. She would never go to him for help, even if she were drowning in the Thames and he was offering his hand.
The tears came faster, sliding unnoticed in salty trails alongside freshwater cousins. A sob welled up in her throat, and a second later she had broken down completely. She covered her face, allowing the great, gusty sobs to overtake her. Gone was any faith that kindness existed. It was a hard world, friendless and cruel. Her nose clogged and she searched blindly for a handkerchief in her reticule.
“Excuse me, but can I help you?”
The light clear tones startled Collette as much as a gunshot would have, and she jumped. “What? Who…?”
A woman stood before her on the walkway, protected by a gigantic black umbrella that she held over top of Collette, too, so the rain no longer pattered down on her head. She was a pleasant-faced woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, unremarkable in her pale coloring, light hair parted in the middle and regular features, spoiled only by a nose a little too large for her face. Her clothes seemed almost random, a dark jumble giving no indication of her form.
But her expression, or what Collette could see of it through the blur of tears, was kind, concerned. “May I help you?” the woman repeated, her tone earnest but hesitant. “I almost walked past… I do believe a person’s sufferings are their own private business…but then I could not stand it and came back to at least shelter you. You seem so desolate, and a woman’s suffering will always appeal to my heart. I have had my share of wretchedness, and a kindly hand was always welcome.” She sat on the bench beside Collette, ignoring the wetness and staring earnestly into the Collette’s tear-filled eyes.
“I don’t think anyone can help me,” Collette snuffled, searching through her reticule still for a handkerchief.
The woman presented her with a clean folded handkerchief with the letters G.L. embroidered in the corner. “Why don’t you tell me what is wrong, and let us figure out a cure together?”
Collette looked into the clear, intelligent eyes and read compassion and something else there. This woman would understand her predicament. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did, and was tempted to unburden herself. The final consideration that made her speak was the knowledge that she had nothing to lose, after all. She had no other friend in London she could run to, nowhere to go, and she desperately needed the help of someone who knew the city. It was so very complicated, Collette thought, that she could not tell the stranger everything without the long story of her authorship of Last Days. Yet she was still loath to part with that private bit of her. She just told the woman about the slight to her reputation, Jameson’s lack of help in righting that wrong, and ended with the scene at the Chapter Coffeehouse.
“That scoundrel!” the woman exclaimed. “I know a little of that man. He is hard in many ways. Even I have quivered under his stony gaze.” She said that with a faint smile. “Come, do not worry. I will see that you get your things back. I have been to the Chapter Coffeehouse before and know the owner slightly.”
“That would be some comfort,” Collette said, dabbing at her eyes. “But you could help me most by…oh, by showing me the rail station and loaning me the money for the train fare home, to Kent,” she said in desolation, embarrassed to have asked, and clutched her hands on her lap. “I would pay you back immediately.”
The woman frowned. “Pardon me, my dear, but is that wise?”
“I see nothing else to do!” Collette moaned, wringing the handkerchief in her hands. “I want to eat my auntie’s blackberry jam on scones. I want to sleep in my own bed! I want to walk a country lane and listen to the lark in the hedgerow. I am tired of London and the stench and the rude people and the crowded streets. I am so utterly weary of omnibuses and lorries and carriages and everyone so in a hurry. I want to go home.”
The woman gazed at her with ready sympathy in her eyes. “I know, my dear. There is nothing like the countryside, is there?”
The tears almost started flowing again at the sweet sound of understanding in the woman’s musical voice. She held them back and nodded.
“But before you take such a drastic step—for after all, my dear, once you are home this will continue to plague you, trust me—come home with me and you and I and George will consult.”
“George?” Collette said. “Your husband?”
“No, George is my… George is…” She trailed off with a little shrug. “Do you know, I don’t think we introduced ourselves.”
“Gracious, you’re right! I am Collette Jardiniere.”
She put out her hand, and the other woman took it and gave it a squeeze.
“I am Marian Evans. George is George Lewes, and he is marvelous! Come home with me to East Sheen and we will figure things out.”
Eighteen
Snellcombe, Jameson thought, sitting on the high seat of a hired cart, must be the smallest village ever honored with the title of village. One tiny shop that served as a stage coach office, post office and general merchandise shop comprised the whole of the business section, and it was merely one room above which the proprietor slept. Colin Jenkins’s abode was just a few steps away, by the church, across a dirty, muddy, evil-smelling road. Filthy chickens pecked and clucked at weeds along the path, and when a rider on a slow-moving cob lumbered toward them they scattered in a flurry of feathers and gabbling agitation.
His stomach lurched, whether from the smell of the muck or a kind of anticipatory revulsion, he did not know. He had searched for so long, and now his search was coming to an end. Would he be enlightened or hideously disillusioned? He still was not sure why it was so important to meet the author in person. Perhaps it was because he felt compelled to make obeisance to the man who had done what he could not do.
From a young age books had given him a sort of companionship other boys could not, a companionship of the mind. Within the calf covers of books he had traveled to India and the Americas, sailed with pirates and wanderers, rollicked with Gulliver on his strange travels and Tom Jones on his dubious path to self-knowledge, and even trod Miss Austen’s gentler path to Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park. He would become lost for hours to all sights and sounds other than those enclosed in the covers, only to emerge dazed and fretful after finishing a work he wished would never end.
He had tried writing, but could never be satisfied with his own poor reflection of other writers’ glory. No matter how much he did, he never seemed to improve. He supposed that was what had bothered him so much when he had been tricked into believing Collette the author of Last Days. If a slip of a girl could write a novel like that, what did that make him? It was unthinkable that a spinster from Listerwood-on-Sea should write what was for him the definitive novel of a man’s voyage through life. So, mixed with the anger he felt at having been taken in by Collette was a kind of relief. His judgment about women’s writing ability was sound.
He had met other women who had pretensions to intellect. Marian Evans, now living with that radical George Lewes, was one of them. He shifted on his seat. Marian Evans made him uneasy every time they were in company together. She never flirted, she never deferred to him in an argument and she had a clear, gray gaze that was unsettling in its intensity. Her opinion was invariably well expressed, but since she had taken up with Lewes, he decided she must have been parroting her paramour’s opinions disguised as her own all along. He turned his thoughts away from Miss Evans and back to Collette. When he returned to London he would visit her and call her on her deception. He almost looked forward to the argument, to the way her eyes would sparkle, the anger in her voice—
“Hey, you, gent! You goin’ to see Jenkins or not? I got to get this ’ere rig back to Blackpool afore dark!”
The driver’s voice broke into his contemplation and he realized he was still sitting on the seat in the cart. He jumped down to the dirt road, one foot landing in mud. He needed to collect himself, gather his wits and go up to that door and meet Colin Jenkins. “I shall be back in one hour,” he said to the driver. “Get yourself a pint…if there is any place for such a thing in this village.” He tossed a shilling up to the man.
He crossed the road and took the few steps that led up the walkway to a small stone house snuggled next to the tiny church. He rapped on the door and waited, stamping and scuffing his feet to get rid of the muck from the puddle in the road. He was about to rap again when a gentleman answered, a man in his late fifties.
He wore a black frock coat of old design, a black waistcoat done up to the neck, revealing only a slice of white collar above, and had an enormous white napkin, stained with mustard and covered in crumbs, tucked in to his waistcoat.
“Damn, but I don’t know where the girl is!” he stormed. “Fanny! Fanny!” he roared over his shoulder, then turned back and glared at Jameson. “Well, what do you want? I am just sitting down to my tea, and if it is parish business, it can wait. If it is not parish business, then what are you doing bothering the vicar about it?”
Jameson stared in dismay at the vicar of Snellcombe.
A half hour later, after taking tea with the man, he was still at a loss how to broach the subject that had led him there. He had introduced himself at the door and said he was from London, after which the man enthusiastically pumped his hand, seeming not in any hurry to learn his business. Mr. Colin Jenkins, vicar of Snellcombe, missed London life a great deal, he said. As a lad he had been sent down from Oxford on two occasions, and had stayed at his uncle’s in London.
Were the gardens of Vauxhall still the place to meet a young lady if one wanted a little kiss in the dark, eh? The fellow peppered him with questions. Were the clubs on St. James still the place to be seen? He’d heard of the Crystal Hall and the great exhibition of ’51. Hadn’t been able to get to London; couldn’t afford to go. Was it all it was said to be in the papers? Was the array of goods just as magnificent?
Jameson answered as he drank ale and ate roast beef and pickle sandwiches, but his mind was elsewhere, his thoughts as scattered as the chickens on the road had been. Was this the author, then, this rotund, choleric gentleman of later years? He remembered Collette’s dreamy explanation for the slightly out-of-date feel of the novel. That explanation would fit if this were truly the author of Last Days. His youth was a good twenty-five or thirty years before and his memories of London were dated.
“Do you write, sir? I have been told you are a writer,” he blurted out.
He realized by the look on the other man’s face that the fellow had been in the middle of some remembrance and was put off at being interrupted. His expression changed to one of eagerness though, as Jameson’s question sank into a mind that did not seem to be active in more than consideration of what dinner might consist of, or whether the trout fishing would be good that Saturday.
“I am indeed a writer!”
Jameson had begun to hope that he was mistaken, that this was not the author of Last Days, so little did he like the man. But if he was the author, then there must be something deep within that gave birth to such an eloquent piece of fiction, and he would search for it. Leaning forward, he said, “I am come to thank you, sir, for your remarkable piece of work.” He gazed into the man’s eyes, searching for the depth that must be there.
“Really! Most kind. Which one?”
“Which one?” Jameson’s mind reeled. That Bellringer chap at Rosewood Publishing had assured him Last Days was the first novel by this particular writer. But maybe Jenkins had been published by another publisher. “I was not aware there was more than one work, sir. I would be delighted to read whatever you have written, if I could get a list…”
“I have one here somewhere,” Jenkins said, rising and lumbering to the corner of the small dining room and rustling through a desk piled with papers, fishing lures and the odd wizened apple core. “Where… Ah, yes, here it is.”
He brought a piece of stained and crumpled paper over and handed it to Jameson with a flourish. It was entitled, “The Various Works of the Reverend Colin Jenkins”. Jameson scanned down the list.
The Morality of Sunday Travel
Bread Upon The Water – A Treatise on the Dangers of Wasting Food.
Abolition or Abrogation – A Tract Treating the Question of Whether We Should Interfere in Our American Brothers’ Right to Hold Slaves.
Fly-Fishing For Sinners – A Vicar’s Reflections on Gathering Sinners Into the Fold.
There were more, but all were along the same lines. He looked up from the list. “I do not understand. These all seem to be religious tracts. Why is The Last Days of a Rake not on here?”
“Last days of a what? Who? What are you talkin’ about?”
“The Last Days of a… Oh, of course!” Of course a vicar could not own up to his past as a man about town, nor could he dare publicly acknowledge this kind of writing. But… Jameson paused. If that was so, if he was hiding his authorship of the novel, then why would he put his own name on it?
“Uh, The Last Days of a Rake, sir. Your novel.”
The man’s bushy eyebrows lowered, his cheeks and neck reddened, and he said, “See here, what do you mean by saying I wrote a novel? Heathenish notion to go about writing down what is false from the beginning! Damned lying drivel.”
The awful truth finally penetrated Jameson’s brain. “You are not the Colin Jenkins who wrote The Last Days of a Rake? No, of course you’re not. What was I thinking?” Wearily, Jameson stood and held out his hand to the older man. “My apologies, sir. It seems I have interrupted your day with the mistaken idea that you were a different Colin Jenkins.”
“Ah, there is George now,” Marian said, alert to the footfall on the doorstep. She flew to the door and pulled it open and stepped out to the hall.
Collette shifted uneasily in her chair in a shabby but comfortable sitting room. In the park it had seemed such a good idea to go with Marian Evans. In fact, it had seemed like the answer to a prayer at a moment when she was not able to think clearly for herself. But she had been shocked to the core when she went with her new friend to East Sheen, near Richmond Park, southwest of London, and found that George was Marian’s live-in lover.
What kind of man would seduce a young unmarried female into living with him when he could not free himself of a marriage no longer whole? The man had another family; that much she had learned in their conversation so far. And yet Marian seemed so untouched, so…innocent, almost, despite a vigorous intelligence and sharp, questioning eyes. But when she warned Collette of her living arrangements, there had been a touch of defiance, mixed with a small portion of sadness.
“Do not think this was an easy decision for me,” Marian had said, gazing steadily at Collette as though daring her to disapprove. “Though I espouse radical views on some issues, I do not believe in easily broken bonds, nor had I ever foreseen I would acquiesce to this kind of living arrangement. When you meet George you will understand me better.”
Collette realized her own feelings on the subject were a tumult of confused ideas about the moral code of her upbringing, the teachings of the church and the deepest feelings of her heart and conscience. Had she not just been postulating, about her novel, that true morality was living your life in as honest a way possible, without inflicting any intentional hurt on those one affected? And if so, were not George and Marian living with the utmost morality in admitting their devotion to each other, even in the face of his inability to marry her?
