Jane expressed the hope that despite her early tribulations, Miss Welles would grow to enjoy Bath and furthered the wish with the desire that they should become fast friends. She enumerated the pleasures which they might savor together: the social whirl of the Pump Room, the Assembly Dances, the shopping—for Jane admitted she could not pass a milliner’s without stepping inside—and of course the delights of the theatrical season. C.J. could scarcely believe her good fortune.
“Speaking as you had been, Percy, of Shakespeare, Mrs. Siddons is to play Lady Macbeth this month,” Lady Dalrymple interjected swiftly. “Right here in town.”
Without thinking, C.J. jumped in. “I hear her performance is quite . . . modern . . . so they say.”
“It is quite the object, Miss Welles. She does the most extraordinary thing in the sleepwalking scene.” Darlington rose to his feet and crossed over to the doors. “She enters from a grand staircase with a lighted candle,” he began, offering his own dramatic interpretation of Siddons’s somnambulance. “Then . . . she puts her candle down! And she wrings her hands, thusly,” he demonstrated, “as though to wash Duncan’s blood away!”
“Simplicity, indeed, is beyond the reach of almost every actress by profession,” Miss Austen interjected, whereupon C.J. allowed that she should like to trod the boards and perhaps assay Lady Macbeth herself one day. This elicited a horrified gasp from Lady Oliver, and Lady Dalrymple began to wonder if Miss Welles was not somehow related indeed. Jane studied her teacup thoughtfully. “I have no wish to be distinguished, and I have every reason to hope I never shall. Thank heaven I cannot be forced into genius and eloquence.” C.J. bit her lip, for she knew that Miss Austen’s secret passion for “scribbling” would one day place her in the pantheon of English novelists.
Darlington addressed the countess. “Lady Dalrymple, with your kind permission, I should like to escort Miss Welles to the theatre to witness Mrs. Siddons’s extraordinary performance for herself.”
Jane laughed merrily. “See! Shakespeare gets one acquainted without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is intimate with him by instinct.”
Lady Dalrymple was about to offer her consent to the proposed excursion, when she was briskly interrupted by Lady Oliver. “Highly inappropriate, Percy. Highly inappropriate. To bring a young lady to the theatre unchaperoned.”
“Then perhaps Cousin Jane will accompany Miss Welles,” Darlington offered.
Jane nodded her head. “I should be only too glad. I am an indifferent card player and I much prefer the theatre to a dreaded evening of whist.”
“The theatre,” Lady Oliver continued dismissively, addressing her nephew directly. “As if the theatre had not brought you enough ruin in your lifetime. And to the family of Miss Welles too. Euphoria, is it not true that your niece is too embarrassed to be known by her proper name, and to use the title which she should be accorded, because of her father’s theatrical connections?”
Miss Austen fixed her gaze on Lady Oliver, then regarded C.J. with tremendous sympathy. “There is someone in most families privileged by superior abilities of spirits to say anything.”
Lady Dalrymple and C.J. exchanged a look. “To be sure, Augusta. Of course, Percy, Macbeth is notorious for being an accursed play. All that pagan mumbo jumbo. Although I am rather fond of the tragedy myself—”
The countess received a sharp reproof from her steely contemporary. “Highly inappropriate, Euphoria. For my nev-you to escort Miss Welles to the theatre, regardless of the performance. I will not allow it.”
Is he not a grown man? C.J. wondered. Why does he not rebuke the old bat?
“Ah, well.” Darlington accepted his defeat with equanimity. “The theatre is sure to be crowded and warm, and there are scores of people who enjoy perfectly fulfilled lives without ever deriving the pleasure of watching Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. Are you fond of dancing, then, Miss Welles?”
Jane smiled slyly at C.J. and whispered over her teacup. “I have often observed that resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our eyes. And fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward.”
“Oh yes, I love dancing,” C.J. responded enthusiastically—and perhaps a bit too energetically. She had to keep reminding herself that, as Shakespeare said, a low voice is “an excellent thing in woman.” Lady Oliver looked up from her tea and narrowed her slate-gray eyes.
The earl leaned toward C.J., the better to speak more intimately to her. “Then when I see you at the Assembly Rooms, I hope you will save a dance for me.”
“To be fond of dancing is a certain step towards falling in love,” Jane added with a wink at her cousin.
“Percy?” his aunt quizzed sharply. “What are you discussing with Miss Welles?”
“Miss Welles has promised to honor me with a dance at the Upper Rooms on Thursday, Aunt Augusta.”
Aunt Augusta wasted no time in indicating her immediate disapproval of the revised proposition. “Percy,” she sneered, “you will not be seen in public with someone dressed like a scullery on Sundays.”
“Nonsense, Aunt Augusta,” her nephew deftly countered. “I am sure that Miss Welles possesses everything she requires. No doubt she did not wish to call attention to her wealth when traveling, and deliberately dressed in a humble and appropriately modest gown.”
If only that were true. Then it struck C.J. that the gentleman sitting opposite her—an earl—did not care two figs what she wore, or so it seemed. How refreshing! Not only that, after a full afternoon’s discourse he still evinced no recognition of having seen her before. C.J. smiled to herself, immensely relieved.
Lady Oliver placed her teacup on the ebony tray and rose to her feet. “Come, Percy. I must stop at Travers’s to inspect a new bonnet before we reach home, and the hour grows late.” She bestowed a kiss on Lady Dalrymple’s cheek and donned her dove-gray gloves before offering her hand to C.J. “It
