Jane and the Canterbury Tale

“I am sure that John Plumptre is an excellent young man,” Fanny began as I stirred up the fire. She was curled on the sopha before the blaze, her slippers discarded and her feet tucked under her. It is so much the fashion for young ladies to go about half-naked, that she is in a perpetual state of gooseflesh; and as I glanced at her, she shivered. If the idea occurred that a corpse in the house was the source of her discomfort, rather than the chill weather, I did not voice it, but threw another log upon the fire and drew the curtains against the swift autumn dark.

“An excellent young man,” I echoed, “and not unattractive, with his expressive dark eyes and sober look. However—”

“However, when a gentleman of one’s acquaintance will read one a lecture on the impropriety of the waltz, despite having solicited one’s hand for the very same dance in the course of the evening —”

“Oh, dear. You refused him, I collect?”

“I was already engaged to waltz with Mr. Thane.” Fanny’s chin rose. “Had Mr. Plumptre been rather more beforehand with the world—”

“Or simply with you—”

“Exactly. But to suggest that I disgraced myself, Aunt—merely because I showed a relative stranger the same sort of disinterested favour I might have bestowed upon John Plumptre, had he solicited my hand prior to Mr. Thane, instead of standing about in that stupid way, conversing with his companions, as tho’ all one intended at a ball was to talk—”

“Mr. Thane, I suspect, is the real difficulty, and not merely for John Plumptre.”

Fanny threw me a look brimful of laughter. “It is excessively diverting, is it not, how Mr. Thane has ruffled all the male plumage? Even Jupiter, I swear, was thrown off his stride by the Corinthian’s air and address.”

“Jupiter does not stride,” I scolded. “He swings into orbit, far above the scene, and suspends all animation until required to answer for himself.”

“ ‘Pon my soul,’ ” Fanny growled in a creditable imitation of Mr. Finch-Hatton’s utterance. “ ‘Ought to be horsewhipped. My opinion, course.’ ”

“Confess, Fanny—you should be bored to tears with an excess of Finch-Hatton’s society!”

“Naturally”—she sighed—“but I shall never say nay to standing up with him in a ballroom. There is every possibility he will be an earl one day, you know. Besides, he holds so much weight with the other gentlemen that any lady Jupiter deigns to solicit for a dance is in request the entire evening thereafter.”

“Whereas Mr. Plumptre—”

“—Achieves the reverse. He is excessively worthy, I am sure,” Fanny persisted in a voice of loathing, “and no doubt brilliant in his understanding—but so tedious in his opinions, Aunt! He is like an old woman, tho’ he cannot be more than one-and-twenty! To condescend to scold me on my conduct at the Chilham ball—and to say that the waltz is an activity unbecoming in a lady, one no true Christian should countenance, when I am perfectly aware he was longing to dance with me all the while—”

“And so, being denied that pleasure, he must regard you as a Work of Satan—set down to tempt him from the path of virtue. It is his youth, I think, that betrays him,” I said thoughtfully.

Tho’ I would not declare as much to Fanny in her present attitude, I do admire John Plumptre, as one whose mind and character are unimpeachably elevated—and I have guessed a little at the ardent nature of his feelings for my niece. Poor man! That a quiet, unassuming fellow with a strong intellect and noble feelings, who possesses neither moist palms, a gangling frame, nor an unfortunate wetness about the mouth, as so many youths appear to do, should nonetheless be supplanted by his more dashing acquaintance—is the way of the world, I am afraid. Plumptre has every advantage behind him, and if his chief fault is to utter platitudes in moments of pique, a few Seasons should cure him of the evil. “Both Wildman and Finch-Hatton are several years Mr. Plumptre’s senior, are they not?”

“They must be full five-and-twenty, I believe, and the closer friends of the trio,” Fanny replied. “Plumptre is rather like our George, you know—always desperate to be included among the older boys, and affecting a greater maturity so as not to be caught out.”

Our George was but seventeen years of age; he is a stripling beside the Wildmans and Plumptres of the world. “George must have been awed, indeed, to be among this morning’s shooting-party—and shall probably suffer nightmares on the strength of it. I cannot think a corpse has come in his way before this.”

Careless words—and it did not require Fanny’s stricken look, or choked silence, to remind me that all my brother’s children had been forced to endure the sight of their mother, turned to lifeless clay at the tragic age of five-and-thirty, not many years since. Before I could beg forgiveness, however, Fanny rushed into speech.

“If the fact of Mr. Fiske’s death disturbed Mr. Plumptre, he hardly betrayed it. If I must charge him with a fault, Aunt, it is that he lacks all sensibility. When confronted with murder, does he blench, and fall back? No! He must draw himself up, and assume the airs of a magistrate—and pronounce the decided opinion that one Julian Thane shall be found guilty of violence.”

I stared at Fanny, aghast. “Plumptre never said such damning words in the presence of James Wildman! Mr. Thane is Wildman’s cousin, after all.”

“Ye-es,” Fanny agreed doubtfully, “but I do not believe James likes Thane very well, for all that. He said that Julian was a smoky fellow, for all he had excellent ton, and that he wouldn’t answer for his temper when the claret was in him.”

I sank down on the sopha beside her. “Do not regard it, Fanny. Those young gentlemen will say a good deal they ought not, when thrown together with little to do, and a fresh corpse laid out in the scullery. Only conceive how unsettling for all of them, believing that one of their guns had despatched Curzon Fiske.”

“Yes, but the knowledge—which I fear my brother Edward conveyed to them—that Mr. Fiske was in fact killed by a single lead ball, has relieved their minds so much, that they are ready to indict the first stranger who comes to hand.” There was a fretful edge to Fanny’s tone. I must credit her delicate sense of Justice—or Julian Thane’s dexterity in the waltz.

“It seems,” she continued with a diffidence not wholly natural, “that Mr. Thane has been out some once or twice.”

A lady who has been out is considered on the Marriage Mart, and a virginal member of Society intent upon changing her status as swiftly as may be. A gentleman who has been out, however, is quite otherwise: for he is one who has met a rival at twenty paces on a duelling ground, with seconds to the rear and a swift carriage standing ready to convey him to the Continent, should he prove so unlucky as to kill his opponent.

“How very dashing, to be sure,” I murmured. “And does Mr. Thane keep his duelling pistols by him, when he comes into Kent?”

“He certainly did not display them in the ballroom!” Fanny flashed with asperity.

Chapter Ten A Dish Best Served Cold

“Watch your tongue, when a king is across the table.”

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Summoner’s Tale”

Friday, 22 October 1813

It was a subdued party that sat down to dinner last evening; and I might have passed over the interlude