and if you don’t know what’s due to your sister I do!”
Chapter XXIV
These disruptive plans were never put into execution. Lydia had a plan of her own, which was laid before Jenny, partly in a characteristic letter from Lydia herself, and partly by the Dowager, who paused at Fontley on her way to Membury Place, where she was going to preside over the entry into the world of a second grandchild.
She had given her consent to Lydia’s marriage, but she was still feeling a trifle dazed. Her mind was not elastic, and since she had first made Brough’s acquaintance when he had been an overgrown schoolboy, who frequently came to stay at Fontley, clattering at breakneck speed up and down the stairs, bringing a great deal of mud into the house, and engaging with Adam in a number of exploits which even now she shuddered to remember, she had never looked upon him as anything other than one of Adam’s friends from Harrow. Jenny had supposed that his visits to Bath must have enlightened her, but the Dowager had accepted without question the excuse he had offered. She had thought it very proper in him to have called in Camden Place, and very good-natured to have taken Lydia out for drives, and to have stood up with her in the Assembly Rooms. It had never so much as crossed her mind that he was extremely particular in his attentions. When he and Adam had been schoolboys Lydia had not emerged from the nursery, and if she had thought about it at all the Dowager would have concluded that Brough regarded Lydia merely as his friend’s little sister, to whom it behooved him to be kind.
It had therefore come as a shock to her when Brough had visited her at Nassington House to beg her permission to pay his addresses to Lydia. She told Adam that although the proposed marriage was not what she would have chosen for dear Lydia Brough had expressed himself so beautifully, and with such delicate consideration, that she had allowed herself to be won over.
(
In fact, Lady Nassington had been very nearly right. If the Dowager did not go so far as to visualize her strong-minded daughter as an ageing spinster, it seemed more than likely to her that a girl who could wantonly reject so eligible a suitor as Sir Torquil Tregony would be perfectly capable of falling in love with a penniless soldier, or even of eloping with an adventurer. Regarded in this light, Brough took on the attributes of a God-send. The match was not a brilliant one, as Julia Oversley’s had been; Brough’s fortune did not bear comparison with Sir Torquil Tregony’s; but, on the other hand, Brough was heir to an Earldom, and to the Dowager, who had been obliged to see her lovely elder daughter thrown away on an undistinguished country squire, and her only surviving son married to a female with no pretensions whatsoever to gentility, this circumstance brought more satisfaction than she would ever, in happier days, have believed possible. It was pleasant, too, to reflect that one of her children was contracting an alliance which would meet with the approval of all her friends.
So it was in an unusually mellow frame of mind that she arrived at Fontley. Her first preoccupation was with her grandson, but after she had hung over him adoringly, marvelled at his growth, and discovered that he was even more like his Uncle Stephen than she had previously thought, she was ready to talk about Lydia’s engagement, and to discuss with Adam and Jenny Lydia’s plan for the inevitable party.
Lydia wanted it to be held at Fontley. At first glance this did not seem to be a very feasible scheme, but closer inspection showed that it was really the most sensible one that could have been devised. Lydia had no wish for a large gathering of relations, friends, and mere acquaintances: she would prefer an informal affair, at which only her own and Brough’s immediate relations would be present; and as it was naturally impossible for Charlotte to come up to London, or for Mama to leave Charlotte at such a moment, the obvious place for the party was Fontley. Furthermore, Fontley was much nearer than London to Lord Adversane’s seat, so that as the Adversanes had not come to town this year it would be more convenient for them too. They would have to stay the night, of course, but Lydia hoped Jenny would not object to this. Brough’s sister ought to be invited, but only for civility’s sake: she lived in Cornwall, and certainly would not come; and his brother was with his Regiment, in Belgium. The only other guests Lydia wished to be invited were the Rockhills.
“...
She was explaining to him, at tedious length, the various circumstances which made June 21st the only really suitable date. The most cogent of these was that both Brough and Lydia had engagements in London during the preceding week, and that to postpone the date beyond the 21st would be to run the risk of coinciding with Charlotte’s confinement; and the least that the 21st would be a Wednesday.
“Jenny, are you sure you like this scheme?” Adam asked, when they were alone.
“Yes, that I do!” she replied. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, yes! As long as it won’t put you to a great deal of trouble.”
“It won’t put me to any trouble at all. But if you had rather — ”
“No, there must be a party, of course — or, at any rate, you all think so!”
“Well, it’s natural we should, but if you don’t wish it — ”
“My dear, you are perfectly right, and I do wish it!”
He spoke impatiently, and she said no more, believing that his reluctance sprang from the knowledge that the Rockhills were to be invited. He was not thinking of Julia, although he did not want her to come to Fontley, and had been dismayed when he had heard that she might. He was reluctant because he thought no time could have been more ill-chosen for festivity than the present. He did not say so; his brief sojourn in London had made him realize that between the soldier and the civilian there was a gulf too wide to be bridged. It had been no hardship to cut his visit short. The season was in full swing; the looming struggle across the Channel seemed to be of no more importance to the ton than a threatened, scandal, and was less discussed. To a man who had spent nearly all his adult life in hard campaigning it was incomprehensible that people should care so little that they could go on dancing, flirting, and planning entertainments to eclipse those given by their social rivals when the fate of Europe was in the balance. But England had been at war for twenty-two years, and the English had grown accustomed to this state, accepting it in much the same spirit as they accepted a London fog, or a wet summer. In political circles and in the City a different and more serious point of view might be taken, but amongst the vast majority of the population only such families as had a son or a brother in the Army regarded the renewal of hostilities as anything more than an inevitable and foreseeable bore. Except that Napoleon had not abdicated in March of 1802, it was the Peace of Amiens all over again. It was disagreeable, because taxes would remain high, and one would once more be unable to enjoy foreign travel, but it was not disastrous, because whatever he might do on the Continent Napoleon would not overrun Great Britain. Life would go on, in fact, just as it had for as long as most people could remember.
To Adam, who, until so recently, had had no other real object than to defeat Napoleon’s troops, such apathy was as nauseating as it was extraordinary. It increased his secret longing to be back with his Regiment tenfold; it drove him out of London, thinking that although he could not be where his heart was at least he need not remain amongst people who babbled about picnics and balls, or prosed comfortably and ignorantly in the clubs about the strength of the forces under Wellington’s command.
No veteran of the Peninsula could visualize without an extreme effort of imagination the possibility of the defeat of an Army under that command; but no one with the smallest military understanding could look upon the force now assembled in Belgium with satisfaction. People talked as if it was the same Army that had fought its way from Lisbon to Toulouse, but it was very far from being that Army. The hard core was composed of seasoned Regiments, but its size, so impressive to the uninstructed, had been swelled by raw battalions, and by dubious foreign troops. Adam had heard pompous and well-fed gentlemen lecturing with what appeared to him to be crass
