Another Regency Romance Ch. 04

Part 4. Amelia's second tale.

It was unusual enough for Mama to interrupt my lessons, that I wondered what news she could have for me that could not wait until luncheon. As I came along the corridor towards the small saloon the door opened and I was surprised to see my abigail, Elizabeth Fisher and her mother come out. Becky was crying and they turned away from me and hurried away. My parents were kind and tolerant people and they had the respect and loyalty of their servants. But accidents happen, and I suspected that Fisher had been caught in some misbehaviour. Never for one moment did I guess that I, not she, was the guilty party.

Mama looked at me so reproachfully that I could feel the tears start in my eyes. She knew! A day or two previously I had seen George sitting reading in the rose arbour. I stole out of the house and went to sit with him. Fisher saw me go and sit very close to him on the rustic seat, and, as so often, pick up his hand and kiss it. We talked for some time, and then she saw me get up, kiss his cheek and walk back to the house.

Mama was looking straight through me, as if I were as transparent as a window-pane. I could not lie to her, and sobbed out the whole story, leaving no detail out. I made her know that I had been the pursuer, not George, and that every wicked step we took was on my initiation. When I was finished, I simply cried myself out, my head in her lap, as she stroked my hair.

"Millie darling, you must never doubt that your father and I love you very much. You have been a very foolish girl, as well as a very wicked one, and I do not doubt that only your brave and loyal Abigail has saved you from total ruin. You would have taken just a few more steps, and then the water would have closed over your head.

You remember poor Arabella Daventry? She, foolish girl, fell in love with a handsome footman, and destroyed her life. She was younger than you when she had to go to stay with an aunt in Ireland for a year. Everyone knows what that means, and she will be lucky to find any sort of a husband, let alone the brilliant match that should have been hers. By the greatest good fortune, you narrowly escaped her fate.

"Mr M'Crimmond is being sent packing. Your father is already making sure of that. I wish he could have brought himself to leave it to me, but he is too honourable a man to shirk his duty. I hope Mr M'Crimmond has the decency to protect you as carefully as you have tried to protect him. I am very angry with you, and your Papa is so disappointed...

"Amelia, you have the misfortune to be of a hot and sanguine temperament, and you can easily fall a prey to uncontrolled passions. For man, to lack restraint and self-control is a misfortune, for women it is a catastrophe.

"You need only think of your poor cousin Caroline, (Lady Caroline Lamb). She called her paramour, Lord Byron, 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know.' She should rather have applied these epithets to herself. Think of poor William (William Lamb, the future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne), he has been so totally humiliated that he could scarce show his face in London. He is a good man, Millie, and I can scarce describe the way she treated him. She even cropped her hair and went about London dressed as a boy to feed Byron's depraved appetites. There must be insanity somewhere in that family!

"Millie, girls gossip, and they harbour dangerously wrong ideas. You may have picked up the idea that, once you have given your husband an heir and a spare, you would be free to take lovers discreetly. Let me tell you. There are a few men who can accept their wife's infidelity with equanimity. Those poor wretches are despised and ridiculed by their peers, and their wives are regarded as outcasts, whatever their rank.

"We will have to brush this under the carpet for all our sakes. Above all, we must protect the reputations of your sisters. But, believe me; you must exercise iron self-discipline. I shall make it my responsibility to choose you a suitable husband who will protect you from the libertine propensities you have shown.

"Now will you swear to obey me in all particulars, or do I have to take stern measures? If I thought it would help, I would have you whipped. But I think there is enough goodness left in you to allow us to put this behind us. I pity your poor father. He has had to see something he treasured shattered to pieces. We must try to mend it as best we can. Now. Do I have your solemn promise?"

I lifted my head from her lap. Raised my tear-stained face and streaming eyes to look at her, and made my most binding promise. If I had ever thought my mother was stiff and unfeeling, harsh or selfish, I saw clearly now. I had hurt her to the depth of her being, and, quite undeservedly, she had given me back some of my self-respect, and talked to me as an equal. I vowed, privately, that I would never betray her trust again.

Relations with my parents were strained for some time. My sisters knew that something was wrong, but asked no questions. What fairy-tales they conjured up to explain the changed circumstances I do not know, and I have not cared to ask. We were caught up with preparations for my London season, and, to make the right impression, I needed a shockingly expensive Court presentation dress, which would only ever be worn once, and a number of ball gowns, together with hats, shoes, ridicules and shawls, all of the finest quality. We went to our London house in Dolphin Square, and, for the first time, my sisters were allowed to come to London and watch the preparations with awed fascination. I had looked forward to my season for half my life, but recent events cast a pall over everything. My father was stiff and solemn with me, and I grieved at having sunk so low in his estimation.

I went through an interminable drudgery of callow young men scuffing my dancing shoes and talking vacuous, meaningless small talk. None of them moved me in the slightest. I would have exchanged the whole charade for a half hour calculating compound interest with Mr. M'Crimmond. At last the day arrived when a young suitor, Sir Robert Astley, approached my parents asking permission to pay his addresses to me. My mother approved, my father complied, and I acquiesced.

Mercifully, he was a polar opposite to Mr M'Crimmond. Stocky where He was tall, black-haired and blue-chinned where He was fair and sandy, lank black locks in place of His crisp waving hair, a Northamptonshire drawl in place of His Scotch burr. He had nothing at all to offend, nothing at all to attract.

Sir Robert Astley. His family were distant connections of Lord Hastings, and, indeed, his uncle was applying for the vacant title to be revived in his favour. My suitor's branch of the family were Calvinistic Methodists, members of the Countess of Huntingdon's connection.

They were serious-minded, solemn faced, and deeply imbued with the dismal, bleak conviction, (with a tough of smugness you may be sure); of those who believe that most of their neighbours are doomed to eternal torment.

I might have thrown myself on my mother's mercy and begged to be put in a convent, were it not for his deep, irrepressible love of horses, and his reputation as a neck-or-nothing follower of the Pytchley hunt. His proud boast that last season he had been out every day that the weather allowed, and in at the death more often than anyone but the Master, made me warm to him a little.

Reader, I married him. I had dreamed dreams of giving myself to my beloved, and, in my girlish innocence I foresaw the pain succeeded by the joy of coupling two bodies whose hearts were already coupled.

For my wedding night, I dressed in my prettiest nightgown I had embroidered as a girl, with red rosebuds, violets, lilies of the valley and all the flowers of love and hope. When Sir Richard entered my bedchamber from his own, he knelt by the bed and prayed aloud to be forgiven for this breach of chastity and guarded from concupiscence and the sins of the flesh. He extinguished the pretty little colsa oil lamp by the bed, and took me.

I felt the rending of my flesh! George's light, hesitant touches of my womanly parts had been a foretaste of heaven, and I had responded with dewy tears of delight. George thrust his member into a dry cavern lined with thorns. In three minutes he was finished, and in one minute more he was gone, with never a word addressed to me from beginning to end. That was my wedding night.

After that introduction to marital harmony, Sir Robert was punctilious in his marital duties. Unless told privily that I was incapacitated, he visited my bed every Saturday evening, and his visit was always prefaced with a prayer. Soon his prayer coupled the cry for forgiveness with a desire to be vouchsafed with the blessing of children. But even God's sense of humour was not so dry as to grant this prayer.

Sir Robert turned his attention to the hunting field and to his stable of glossy, chestnut and bay hunters. Alas for me, his religious principles barred him from those dens of vice, the steeplechases, where wagers were laid and alcohol taken.

Our conversations, never fulsome, became sparser and sparser, like little verbal notes passed from one to the other. We had no mutual hostility or anger; simply nothing in common. And so it was until four years later, when he had a heavy fall that broke his back and his hipbone. He was carried home on a hurdle, and never left his bed again.

Every morning until his death, I went to the stables and checked on the health of his horses, so that I could report on them to him. For a moment or two his eyes lighted up at a good report, or a furrow formed between his brows at a report of the colic, or heat in a joint. He would give me detailed instructions on how these problems should be treated, which his head groom bore with remarkable fortitude.

I sent for Mr Stubbs, the great animal painter, and commissioned painting of his favorite hunter Brutus to be painted in oils, to hang in his bedchamber. As soon as it was dry enough to be handled, and before it was varnished, I took it and propped it on an easel by his bed.

Robert looked me full in the eyes, and thanked me from his heart. For a moment all pretence was stripped away and I saw a sad, sweet man, crippled with shyness; unable to show affection. I had been used to think of myself, self-pityingly, and the victim of my own passions, and of the misplaced solicitude of my parents. But now I saw Robert was a greater victim than I, and my heart broke for him.

"Amelia, my dear, I am not much longer for this world. Every day is a penance for me, and I shall be glad to go to my reward. I trust in God's providence, and doubt not that he had made a place for me.

"When I am gone, you will have a modest competence. My steward will send my horses to Tattershall. My lands are entailed except for the London house, which is outwith the entail. My cousin's estate will buy it from you and you will be free.

"Amelia, go and find your lover. Try to make a life with him. Do not pass up on a chance for happiness."

I could not have been more surprised if he had told me that his cousin would take me as a concubine. How did he know about my folly and my unquenched love? The answer was simple.

I asked your sisters and they told me. I could feel that something was hanging over your head, and I had to know what it was. How different it might have been if I had been frank with you from the beginning. I blame myself for my cursed reticence.

"You have been a good wife to a poor husband, and I am grateful and sorry. Since my accident you have shown me your real self every day with you never-failing kindness and concern. It will not be much longer, my kidneys are failing, and my lower a limbs are dying from the feet upwards. Soon, soon you will be free. Use your freedom well."

These were the last words we ever exchanged. That night he died, and his nurse called me to his bedchamber to say my farewells. By then he was delirious and did not know me.

*****

The attorney was almost apologetic as he explained about the entail, and my reduced circumstances, but I was secretly exulting. I was not to be a wealthy woman, but my marriage portion would be returned to me, and it, together with the proceeds from the London house, would buy me an annuity that would enable me to live comfortably. Tomorrow I travel to Cambridge, where my George is a Fellow. He is expecting me. My old life is over. A new life beckons. The picture of Brutus will go with me when the paint has dried.

A note to readers (if any)

The people with speaking parts in this tale are all fictitious.

Writing this tale, I have fallen into the cadences of the Gothic novel, and I make no apology for this. I wanted to try to suggest that the ways of speaking of people two hundred year ago, are the outward form of different ways of thinking.

To hear how people spoke in a formal setting, the reader will find that court records reveal a lot. Upper class marriages broke up in as dramatic a way as the marriages of today. Women in the Upper classes found themselves on trial for Criminal Conversation, that is, adultery. Their doings were revealed in painfully intimate detail, and their servants were more often their accusers than their co-conspirators. I took several episodes of this tale from trials for Crim Con, and divorce hearings. The most readily available, and one of the most scandalous (I originally wrote scabrous) is the trial before the House of Lords of Queen Caroline, the wife of King George lV.