“Don’t you think he would have wanted you to be happy?” Fanny offered.
“I shall be happy. I am not asking for his permission,” said Madame Duchesne with a wry little smile. “But I owe him this much. A moment for a fond farewell. He was the love of my girlhood.” She kissed the miniature lightly, and then began to wrap it in a piece of silk.
“You know, Fanny,” she said. “I was only fourteen when my parents arranged my betrothal to Jean-Phillipe. Who knows what our lives would have been together? One can never know what might have happened.” Looking up at Fanny, she added, “and neither will you, I suppose. You might have defied your uncle and been happy with Mr. Gibson.”
“The circumstances are very different,” said Fanny impulsively. “You had no choice about what happened to you and your poor fiancée. But I had to make a choice, and I did. And at least I know that Susan is very happy, and how could I have been happy myself, knowing I had destroyed my sister’s happiness?”
“What is this? Why do you speak of your sister?”
Fanny shook her head. “I didn’t speak of it, for fear Susan would feel herself under a debt of gratitude to me. I told you and Mrs. Butters that my uncle had spoken out against the match, and yes, I had my own doubts, but as well, Mr. Miller, that is to say, my sister’s father-in-law, well, he—"
Just then, Mrs. Butters called up from the bottom of the stairs.
“Madame! We shall leave for London without you!”
“Coming, Madame Butters!” Madame Duchesne snatched Fanny by the hand. “You might have confided this to me, Fanny! I thought we were friends!”
“Promise me,” said Fanny, “that you will tell no-one. For no-one needs to know. Please.”
Madame Duchesne didn’t answer, but hurried down the stairs, followed by Fanny. She put the conversation aside to say an affectionate farewell to Mrs. Butters.
“Dear madam—I cannot help but feel you ought to put off this journey,” Fanny murmured in her ear. “Indeed, I fear you are not well.”
“Then I shall go now, and hurry back,” Mrs. Butters replied.
Captain Duchesne solicitously handed the old widow up into her carriage, then his wife, then he took his own seat and the horses pulled away.
* * * * * * *
Mr. Miller had assumed as a matter of course, that Mrs. Price would devote all of her time to her daughter Susan during and after her lying-in. The old baker doted upon his daughter-in-law, and he was surprised when her own mother did not appear.
He did not visit Mrs. Price very frequently, because she had taken up the habit of enquiring if he might find some employment for her poor son Sam. This plea laid him under the inconvenient and awkward necessity of declining, and when pushed, to bluntly explain he would only hire a one-armed man to work in his bakery if he could find no more two-armed men in Portsmouth. Mrs. Price had persevered, he had as steadily refused.
The arrival of the little stranger at least furnished a different topic of conversation, so that Mr. Miller felt he might hazard a brief visit to wish her joy.
He knocked at the door and waited for some time before a trollopy-looking servant opened the door and escorted him to the little parlour.
“That is not Eliza, I think,” he remarked as he took his seat, after the servant had gone through the swinging-door.
“Eliza!” Mrs. Price exclaimed. “Eliza was gone last winter. And another after her. No-one, my dear Mr. Miller, has been so much plagued about their servants as I have! When my dear husband was alive, we kept an upper and lower servant you know, but now I find I can only have a stout girl of all work, and nothing will answer.”
“It is a very great pity for you, ma’am. But you have something more cheerful to think on—your new grand-son.”
Mrs. Price expressed her pleasure and satisfaction, in answer to his congratulations, and added that, out of consideration for Susan, she would put off her visit until the child was a little older, “when Susan is sufficiently recovered to entertain visitors.”
“I see,” said Mr. Miller, though he really did not. “Still, it is excellent news that Susan and the baby are both very well.”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Price complacently. “Susan is in very good hands with your family, Mr. Miller. It is a blessing to me at my time of life, to see her so well provided for. If only I could say that for all of my children! It has been such a struggle, you know, getting them all out into the world!”
She appeared to be veering toward a renewal of her pleas for her unfortunate son Sam but then, to Mr. Miller’s relief, some association of ideas prompted a different thought: “You know, Mr. Miller, I have been reviving my idea of going back to Northamptonshire.”
“Indeed ma’am. I think I have heard you mention the idea once or twice before. Is there some change—is your daughter gone to Northamptonshire?”
“No, Betsey is here with me, of course.”
“I meant to enquire,” said Mr. Miller, “after Miss Price.”
“Oh, you mean Fanny! No, she is still in Bristol.”
“I think she has not married?”
“No... no. She is... let me think...” Mrs. Price set down her knitting, the better to recollect. “William is thirty this year, so Fanny must be six-and-twenty. I have given over expecting it, now.”
Mr. Miller found that this was not such a comfortable topic for him, either.
Chapter 15: Italy, Summer 1818
Mary had resolved never to speak to Percy Bysshe Shelley again, but she was still in possession of his trunk filled with his books and notebooks. She
