The Covert Captain, page 9
She sat up, drawing Harriet near. “It is very like looking in a glass, to me. Something you see without remarking it—something you know because it is so in yourself.”
“If you should be wrong?”
“One is only wrong once, generally.” Eleanor softened it with half a smile.
“And you saw—that—in me?”
“I saw you, and thought I would risk the rest.”
“Do you think I could do that?”
Eleanor paused in tying her maharatta, and gave a strange look to Harriet by the glass.
“Not tie your cravats. Go as a man, I meant.”
“I knew.” Eleanor put her head on one side. “What for? You’ve no need to draw pay, or court women—I guess—and I mislike to think you might go for a sailor.”
“To see what it might be like,” replied Harriet, and more firmly when Fleming recoiled, “Not for sport. To know what it must feel like, to be—you.”
Eleanor finished her knot before she spoke. “It is not a good idea, Harry.”
“I only—”
“You do not mean to go guising for sport, I know. But it is harder than it looks, dearest, and I could not bear it if—”
“If I made a cake of myself in public?”
“If you should end in the pillory!”
Harriet moved where she might comfort Eleanor by touch, though she shuddered herself. “I was not making light, dearest.”
Eleanor shrugged. “Somewhere up here be rigs I wore when I was younger. They are out of the style, but they might do you for a masque.”
“I have no wish whatever to masquerade a boy! It is your life, and so mine, and I would understand!” Harriet stamped her foot.
Eleanor might have smiled, behind her hand. “Stow that, for a start.”
Half an hour later, she sat upon the tea-table to get the best point of view, hopping down now and again to twist, or tug, or cuff at Harriet’s clothes. “Stand, really stand,” she ordered. “Take up the room! You are an Englishman! If your back does not hurt, and your heels, and your shoulders, you’ve failed. Point your chin at the chimney-piece!”
“You mean to give me no quarter at this,” said Harriet, hopping out of reach in the unfamiliar boots.
“None,” Eleanor agreed, seizing Harriet’s shoulders and hauling her back before the glass. “God Jesus, talk so I might hear you. Men are heard, Harry, always!”
Harriet, in a young man’s bottle-green cutaway and fawn waistcoat and a well-braced pair of Eleanor’s breeches, slumped somewhat. “You are right,” she said. “I am quite a loss.”
“God, no, fetching rather…though the upper storey is a problem.”
Harriet crossed her arms upon her chest. “Why do you shout so at me, then?”
“I’m not shouting, dearest. Only speaking you as I might Sherry, or any lad who knew me by Christian name.”
“I think I am addled in the mind,” Harriet said. “May I not sit?”
“Don’t know,” answered Eleanor. “Not my business telling a gentleman what he may do.”
Harriet dropped straight down onto the floor. A waistcoat-button flew. “The upper storey, indeed!”
“Malign it not too much.”
“But what am I to do?”
Eleanor crouched beside her, tracing her knuckle down Harriet’s nose. “Go on, if you like; or give over. I am your servant, madam, even though you go off hare-brained.”
Harriet bit Eleanor’s lip. “Hare-brained! What if I should want to dress like this always?”
“Then we must to Paris, and a tailor,” said Eleanor, closing another kiss, but utterly grave. “It could be done, if you wished. Hellish, though—hellish morning and night. It is not what I should want for you, dearest.”
“You manage.”
“I have not your…graces,” blushed Eleanor.
“I own I find nothing lacking in yours. I should like to go on, please,” said Harriet, tilting up her chin.
Eleanor sat with her boots planted square, elbows on knees, chin on wrists. She might not have heard a thing.
“I’ll go on.” Harriet jumped to hear her voice ring off the walls, the furniture, her own frame. She was hot, and sore, and the short words were pitched with temper.
“As you like, lad,” said Eleanor, and lent her a hand up.
All the binding linen Eleanor had to spare was stiff with newness, and she drew it with no little strength, though she was quick from long practice and gentler with Harriet than herself. Harriet clasped her hands in her hair, studied the ceiling, and only at the last let any noise past her teeth.
“Ow!”
“Arms down,” said Eleanor, and stroked Harriet’s back as if to make amends. “I did tell you…”
“I can’t breathe,” said Harriet, nothing like a boy, as Eleanor helped her on with shirt, waistcoat, and cutaway all again. “Nora, how can you breathe?”
“Much shouting,” she answered, “and much singing. Say something.”
“Say what?”
“Say ‘God save the King.’”
Harriet echoed it, plucking all the while at her waistcoat front.
“No! Upon my word. He is the King. He is mad as Nero Augustus, and he will have you taken from your sweetheart, and stuffed into a troop-ship, and order you must face the foe and die! You very much wish him saved, and that well away from you!”
“God save the King,” said Harriet, bolder, and felt it where Eleanor’s hand lay upon her stomach.
“If you come over faint, fold in half, touch your boots, and say ‘God save the King.’” Eleanor tweaked at Harriet’s binding. “Don’t ask me. I learnt it second-hand. If you feel queer in the street, set your back to a wall and look foxed. No one pays any mind.”
“In the street!”
“You don’t imagine I should hide so comely a boy in my rooms?”
“I am no wise ready to put to the test,” Harriet whispered.
“You look passing better in your brother’s hat than does your brother.” Eleanor set a brown velvet coachman over Harriet’s curls. To what Harriet had spoken, she said nothing. “You want a set of side-whiskers, but it’s as well. I can’t abide to be tickled.”
Eleanor stood away, leaving Harriet in the center of the chamber. Harriet could not see a boy in the glass, however she stood and lifted her chin. She swung her arms and rocked in her boots, and then tried to stand as Eleanor did, at rest; she looked, to herself, a badly-strung puppet.
“Remember you are an Englishman,” said Eleanor. “A gentleman! I mean to take you no unsafe place, but if you remember that, you will buy yourself less trouble. And—remember I am with you.”
“And armed to the teeth,” Harriet remarked, with a stab at keeping her voice low. “Where do you mean to take us?”
“Oh, Bevis Marks,” said Eleanor.
“To Aldgate—among the Jews!” She forced her hand away from her mouth. It was not a gesture Eleanor would make.
“Nowhere a man might fear to go.”
Chapter 12
The shop was signed only by a gilt ball, hanging on a fanciful wroughtwork curlicue over the street. Its windows were small and diamond-paned, and candles burned in them as though it was not broad day.
“Splendid, a day for business.” Eleanor quickened her step. “It’s luck; I can never remember when their Sunday might be.”
Harriet, loping in unfamiliar boots, was a stride behind now Eleanor did not match pace with a lady. She came under the jeweler’s awning all blown, wiping perspiration from forehead and hatband, and could not quite manage to make her waistcoat lie smooth. She had made no acquaintance with Jews, but their shopfronts and their shop’s-bells were the same; she flattened back against Eleanor, a bit, lest the interior show something outlandish or untoward, but under the sign of the golden ball was a jeweler’s like any in Mayfair.
“Come down, Elie, it is Lady Linley’s granddaughter the captain!” There was a woman behind the counter, running a cloth over the dustless glass of locked jewel-cases. She was smaller than Harriet, and rounder, but her voice was not timid.
“They know, then!” Harriet meant it for a whisper.
“Mendelssohn was my grandmother’s man for her jewels,” Eleanor answered. “I have known the father and the son—Mr. Mendelssohn present—since my hair was in plaits. When Grandmamma—when I no longer came here in her company, it did not sit well to start a lie.”
“We had an eye upon the casualty lists, Captain, after Bonaparte was sent down, and were most grateful you had been sustained—but I declare we have not seen you since!”
“My regiment was held to keep the peace at Paris,” said Eleanor. “I am only arrived in Town September past.”
“I suppose you may be excused, then. Eliezer, faster is better!”
Harriet was unused to being invisible to men—women—of trade; she felt gaudy and small in her bottle-green coat. The jeweler’s wife came from behind the counter, to greet Fleming French-fashion, and held her bare hand out for Harriet’s kiss.
“Miri Mendelssohn,” she said. “You are a friend of the forgetful Captain Fleming…?”
Eleanor coughed. “Harry—Lady Harriet—let me make you known to Mrs. Mendelssohn. Mrs. Mendelssohn, the Lady Harriet Sherbourne.”
Mrs. Mendelssohn exclaimed, and drew her hand back before Harriet could grasp it. “Captain, why did you not say you were on real business? I will fetch him down at once!”
“All the business is mine, I am afraid, small as it is.” Eleanor smiled. “I am content to wait him, if my lady—?”
Harriet had turned to con over one of the glass-topped cases. She looked up from the pendants and stickpins and nodded. “It will give me time to say which of these suits you,” she said. “You had nothing from me at New Year’s.”
“I am not one for frippery, Harry…”
“These are beautiful things—some quite old,” answered Harriet. “The old ones are not frippery. And your neckcloth needs something; you have no pin I know of, and you forever tie the same.”
“I did not know you made a study.” Eleanor was beginning to go pink. She was extricated, before Mrs. Mendelssohn could open the case for Harriet, by loud creaks of the swaying staircase as someone came below.
He had hair red as an Irishman’s, and eyes hazel-green behind a gold pince-nez, and a flattened round cap like a tonsure upon his head. He bore the look, as Sherbourne, of a man who had crossed the Rubicon of thirty-five and settled to better filling out his waistcoat. He grinned when he saw Eleanor, and bowed with flourishing wrist.
“You are aging well, Madam Captain.”
“Bless all such lies, Mr. Mendelssohn; I will give you the same.”
On rising from his courtesy, the jeweler had noticed Harriet; now he took her measure frankly, from her boots to the crown of her coachman's hat, until Eleanor cleared her throat.
“Eli, I should like to see the Linley pieces, please.”
“Another horse, is it?”
“No, I thank you, Malabar does well.”
“You must need a pair for Town driving, there’s the way of it!”
“Upon my word, I am not come into fortune,” Eleanor laughed. “Only—a happy chance. I thought to give Lady Harriet her choice among what’s left.”
Mr. Mendelssohn’s eyebrows rose, but he spoke no question. He bowed again, and with his wife, disappeared. He returned alone, in a moment, carrying a box ostentatiously locked, with a gilt-figured key.
“Madam Captain,” he said, and set the box down for Fleming to open it.
He unrolled a piece of clean velvet, showing upon it a chatelaine of filigree gold, a brooch set with cracked coral and milky-green jade, and four or five pendants with stones. There was a signet, too, its cuts softened by age at the edges, but the gold still bright; Eleanor tossed it aside like a pebble.
“I would like to see that one, please.” Harriet closed her hand upon the signet.
“It is a man’s ring, lady, and I could not bring it to proportion without damage to the intaglio.”
Harriet examined its design, a plain shield of arms bearing a thistle bloom, but more carefully she looked to Eleanor’s face.
“I will have nothing, if you do not have this.”
“I don’t—”
“You do want it, very much, or you should not have put it from you like that—and it belongs to you, besides!”
“Belonged to my grandfather Linley,” she said. “And I am not of consequence enough to require a seal.”
“You are—or you will be, when we have wed.”
“Harry—”
“I don’t think you had better cross her, Captain,” the jeweler said. “I will take your lady’s measure while you come to grips. And I will do the work gratis upon that ring, if it ease you!”
“Mendelssohn, don’t gloat. It looks as though you’ve come over bilious.”
The jeweler came round the counters again. He divested Harriet of her gloves and felt her finger-joints, and measured them with a thread that seemed quite ordinary. He passed a tape round Harriet’s neck, but made note of the result by no means Harriet could see; he made no comment upon her mode of dress. He bent to her, instead, as if to learn the thickness of her cravat, and so spoke into her ear.
“I would you did not sport with the captain upon marriage. She is too good to be so used.”
“You dare!” He was a tradesman and a Jew; she need not give him more, and yet she flinched when he did.
“I beg your pardon, madam; it is all very well for you to play a game of flats, but my friend could lose her commission—I daresay her life. I but attempt to dissuade you continuing so for amusement.”
“I have accepted Captain Fleming’s addresses,” Harriet replied, more loudly than she intended. Fleming started up from her elbow-loll on the frame of one of the cases.
“All’s well, Harry?”
“Quite well,” she said, and smiled.
“My lady Harriet was sketching me your acquaintance,” said Mr. Mendelssohn. “As you are appalling with the pen, and never graced us to know you courted.”
“I have done courting,” Eleanor corrected. “Now, by grace, I must only keep her, and she seems willing.”
“Nora!”
“Do you mean to make her known to Mrs. Hannaford?” Mr. Mendelssohn was gathering up the Linley jewels, arranging and tying their velvet bundle, and carried the cask away again perhaps without notice of Eleanor’s silence.
“Mrs. Hannaford? I never heard of such a person. What did the Jew mean?”
Eleanor tilted her head to Harriet. “He has a Chri—a given and a surname, when last I saw his mark.”
“Mr. Mendelssohn, then,” said Harriet.
“He was having sport of me, but certainly I might do so. Not in those clothes, I think,” she added, “I fear you would be mistaken for the dessert.”
There were two well-dressed men at a game of cards, and another in the corner with a note-book and pen. “It is always so quiet, at the Season,” said Mrs. Hannaford. “A score more will come, at perhaps ten o’clock, when the Runners make their presence known in the park.”
Eleanor had gone to greet the young gentleman with the ink-blotted cuffs; Harriet, alone, shrank down between the door and Mrs. Hannaford’s panniered hip. Nora might have been gone half a minute, but it felt an hour.
“Let me make you known to Mary and Grace, who have been called to Lords these twenty years by other names, and Olivia St. Clair, who writes for Ackerman’s.” Mrs. Hannaford nudged Harriet upon the room as though she were a wallflower at a country dance. “This is—upon my word, what will we call her? This lady is Captain Nathaniel Fleming’s intended.”
“Your intended! Captain, you do not play for halves!”
“Comes of her failure to die in pieces at Waterloo.”
Eleanor shrugged. “I fell in love. She said she would have me.”
Harriet had not colored so fiercely since her coming out. “Nora,” she whispered, and would have addressed those assembled, but she had no idea what to say.
“Hold hard a moment, madam, I know you! Your father was—”
“My father was no man of consequence,” Harriet cut the gentleman.
“Oh, now! Have you given our Fleming the lie? Step softly, Captain, this is an earl’s daughter!”
Eleanor, easy as breathing, had her sabre half unsheathed. “Have a care how you speak the lady, Mary. Unlike yourself, I’ve something in my hanger.”
“Mother! Mother, she has drawn arms upon me!”
“Captain,” Mrs. Hannaford called from the top of the room. “Stop menacing the girls. Sit you to the pianoforte, and stay out of trouble.”
Eleanor looked reluctant to give up Harriet’s side.
Harriet astonished herself and let go Nora’s arm, with a kiss. “Do. You have not played since…” All her sudden courage was lamed by memory. “Since Sherry’s party.”
Eleanor bowed toward Mrs. Hannaford, but her smile was for Harriet, and real. “What will you have, dearest?”
“Oh, Captain, will you not give us Rambling Soldier?” The man Eleanor had called Grace, resplendent in a frock-coat of peony pink, spoke out before Harriet could.
“I will give it to you in exchange for The Butterfly,” Eleanor replied. “I have scarcely danced with my intended, and I want something rather nicer than cotillions.”
“And how,” drawled Grace, “am I to strip the willow with your wife if I am fiddling?”
“Life goes hard.” Eleanor fixed her countenance very grave.
“Oh, Lord! I am a martyr to a decent singing-voice. I’ll take your price. When you are not in Town, we must all listen to St. Clair’s poetry.”
“Suck my prick,” cried she in answer, and did not lay down her pen.
When every candle had been twice replenished, there was a rough supper, and oceans of punch and claret; the dancing stopped awhile, but someone ever kept up the music. Past midnight, past dancing, Harriet found herself lodged on a settee between St. Clair and Mary, who declared his dancing-pumps unsoled.
St. Clair leant, whisky-breathed, to shake Harriet’s hand as one gentleman might another’s. “Forgive me, I was too deep in my cups before to wish you happy.”
