“But you cannot possibly believe that! When you yourself have always believed in marrying for love or not at all. To avoid knowing anything of import about the man you will marry is never to be given the chance to marry him for love.”
Jane turned white.
C.J. immediately realized she had said far too much. Not only had she divulged Miss Austen’s deepest personal credo, but she had carelessly disclosed intelligence that the Cassandra Jane Welles of 1801 would have had no cause to know. She flushed a shade of deep crimson.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Austen. I am somewhat overcome at present,” C.J. sniffled into the hanky. “My remark was entirely unsuitable and inappropriate. It was beyond the bounds of all decency to be so bold as to make my own conjecture upon your opinions of love and matrimony. Of course I would not know your history,” C.J. fibbed, “but I came to the presumption that since you have arrived at a certain age of maturity and remain unwed, you place a higher store on the tenderer sensibilities than the need to enter into an arrangement where there was no love on either side—or at least on your own.”
Miss Austen’s response was itself a confirmation. “I have no notion of loving people by halves,” she smiled. “And I’ll allow that my attachments are always excessively strong. All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving the longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” Her expression turned momentarily melancholy.
C.J. wondered about Jane and Tom Lefroy. “I do believe that men have a greater capacity to transfer their affections from one object to another with equal zeal, while we tend to mourn our loss for a lengthier duration,” she replied sourly. The pair of them, she and Jane, had such rotten luck when it came to men. “Darlington cannot be marrying for love, but for money, if he is to marry Charlotte Digby at all,” she added emphatically, realizing that Miss Austen had not exactly confirmed the accuracy of Mrs. Fairfax’s gossip.
However, Jane issued no denial, and her assessment of her own cousin’s behavior bordered on the pragmatic. The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering himself agreeable, she told Miss Welles, acknowledging her awareness that Delamere was mortgaged to the hilt and that Darlington was under pressure from Lady Oliver to remarry well in order to save the family seat.
“From what I hear, her portion may be considerably more than ten thousand pounds,” C.J. added glumly. It translated to a sudden windfall, equivalent to nearly half a million twenty-first-century dollars. Her eyes once more welled with hot tears. “Tell me truly, Miss Austen . . . does he love her?” C.J. held her breath.
“Knowing him as I do, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude,” Jane replied, emphasizing the word affection with an undisguised tone of sarcasm.
“I am sure he seems practically ancient to the nubile Lady Charlotte. A noble relic,” C.J. responded bitterly. In her own era, the man would have been approaching the prime of life. Still, the earl was certainly in high demand, despite Harriet Fairfax’s dismissal of his age as positively ancient and the fact that many were aware of his financial entanglements with regard to the mismanagement of his estate. Indeed, there had been no dearth of attention in his direction at the ball in the Upper Rooms. Like a bevy of eager stage mothers, more than a handful of matrons—Lady Digby only one among them—had practically shoved their daughters under his aristocratic nose. And Darlington had behaved civilly, cordially, but as far as C.J. could detect, seemed to award none of the young ladies particular favor, behaving as though he had no wish to enter the marriage mart anew, until he met her, C.J. Why, he had said as much. Or was that merely a successful ruse to seduce her?
So that’s what Lady Oliver had been up to at the Assembly Ball. The old bat was playing Pandarus.
“To be so bent on marriage—to pursue a man merely for the sake of a situation—is the sort of thing that shocks me,” Jane said, alluding to Lady Charlotte’s exchange of several thousand pounds for the right to be mistress of Delamere.
“I had not thought so little of Darlington’s character,” C.J. sobbed. “I misjudged your cousin entirely.”
Miss Austen placed a protective arm about her companion’s shaking shoulder. “There are such things in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to worth, where manners are equal to the heart and understanding,” she said, wiping away C.J.’s tears with her thumb. “But such a person may not come your way, or if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune,” Jane added, taking the liberty under the circumstances to rather uncharacteristically disparage her own relation.
“Would that his lordship took more after you than his aunt,” C.J. replied ruefully, accepting the loan of Jane’s handkerchief. “The woman is a veritable gorgon. A dragon at the very least.”
“I am mightily sorry that my cousin has done you such injury. But have you no comforts? No friends?” Jane asked rhetorically. “Is your loss such as leaves no opening for consolation? Much as you suffer now,” she added, taking Miss Welles gently by the shoulders so she could look her companion in the eye, “think of what you would have suffered if the discovery of his character had been delayed to a later period, if your engagement”—Jane selected the word carefully—“had been carried on for months and months, as it might have been, before he chose to put an end to it. Every additional day of unhappy confidence on your side would have made the blow more dreadful.”
“I find small consolation in that.”
