“I am greatly obliged to your lordship, but, my circumstances are such that, I can no longer—we must leave the past in the past.”
“The past? I was not aware that we had parted. My dear, can you not continue to be my very good companion when you are in London? I do miss you extremely.”
“As I will miss you, my Lord, but, I do beseech you, allow me to go my own way now, and let us part as friends, and perhaps—perhaps one day, we may meet again.”
“I have many friends,” Lord Elsham responded testily, “and don’t require any more. If you are going to keep company with your partner over there, I suppose I must wish you well, but I see no occasion for you to withdraw from me in this fashion. Can you not find time for someone who admires you as I do? One who did so much to introduce you into the highest rungs of Society?”
Miss Crawford’s face still wore a smile, as she looked about the room, as though she and the Earl were discussing the weather. She tried to find Edmund in the crowd.
“I hope we may part as good friends, my Lord,” she repeated. “You have been very generous to me, I own. But you know as well as I, that reputation is a bubble and I must guard mine very carefully at this time.” She stressed ‘at this time,’ in the hopes of placating him—she knew not if she would ever allow the Earl such liberties as he had taken in the past, but she did not wish to antagonize so powerful a man.
“With the greatest regret, then, my dear Miss Crawford,” the Earl kissed her hand affectionately, and he kept his hand possessively around her slender waist until Mary was able to locate her partner again. Edmund Bertram had to be satisfied with her explanation that the Earl was a particular friend of her uncle, and had known her since she was a child, etc., and Edmund tried to persuade himself that the look he had seen the Earl give Miss Crawford was an avuncular one. Nay, it is but an uncle, he told himself.
* * * * * *
“I declare, can it be? Yes, it is! ‘Tis the divine Miss Julia!” Mr. Yates exclaimed cheerfully as he claimed a place next to her at the supper table. Her dancing partner looked up from his dish of white soup in irritation that someone was flirting with his partner, saw that it was Yates, and returned his attention to his meal.
“Mr. Yates, how good it is to see another friendly face amidst this sea of strangers,” Julia returned his salute.
“And how fortunate are we that you have come to London to enchant us all with your beauty,” Yates enthused. “A blooming country rose fresh from Northamptonshire. I have told my friends Sneyd and Anderson about you, do y’know. They declare that there never was a female possessed of a good sense of humour, who could tolerably understand their wit, and I told them, ‘no, no, no, you have not met the divine Miss Julia, she is a girl who loves to laugh.’”
“I think all young ladies claim to prefer a gentleman with a ready wit,” Julia offered, “but wit can be so dangerous, Mr. Yates. It aims its barbs in all directions.”
“Fear not, Miss Julia, I will be your shield and protector for so long as you are in London. Stay by my side.”
“So long as you do not shield Miss Bertram from Cupid’s darts, Yates,” put in her partner. “You and your particular friends must not engross her.”
The two men fell to joking about arrows and quivers and targets and butts and soon Julia, while affecting to laugh, found she did not understand them at all.
While Julia Bertram collected admirers, her sister was at pains to keep only Henry Crawford by her side, wherever they appeared together.
Her time in London had both entertained and sobered Julia, for she had realized that, while in Northamptonshire she was reckoned, along with her sister, to be foremost beauty in the county, she was one of many beauties in London. As for accomplishments, education and wit, she again acknowledged that she had many rivals in Town. This revelation, together with her disappointment over Henry Crawford, had humbled her vanity not a little, and she was the better for it.
It was not at all unusual for Henry Crawford, when attending a reception or a ball, to be surrounded by two or more jealous females who aimed venomous looks at one another, and in the ordinary course of events he not only accepted such attentions as his due, he took amusement in the havoc he created in the breasts of the young ladies in his circle. He watched as sisters turned into enemies, best friends turned into implacable rivals, and it had only served as food for his vanity.
But Maria Bertram, with her superior, though as yet, unpublished, claims to his affections, was of a different order. When in public with him, she would not suffer him to address or even smile at any other lady under the age of five-and thirty, she fixed a glare that Medusa might have envied on any young woman who approached him, and as for dancing with anyone but herself and his own sister, he had first to seek her permission, confirm that the young lady was the daughter of an old family friend, and, as anyone could see, so far inferior to Maria in point of beauty that it
