Chapter Eleven
Our heroine’s first Assembly Ball, whereat her English country dance experience proves a godsend in that she starts off on the right foot, but with the wrong arm, leading to a highly embarrassing faux pas; and her rosy view of the aristocracy is cruelly shattered.
C.J. FELT AS THOUGH she had stepped inside a pistachio-colored confection when she and Lady Dalrymple entered the grand hall of the Assembly Rooms.
In a modern postcard, the straight-backed walnut chairs that ringed the empty ballroom’s perimeter stood like so many silent sentinels, waiting to be used by the phantom dancers who graced the well-polished wooden floor with quadrilles and polkas, the occasional mazurka, and eventually—though not formally until 1812—the waltz. One was left to imagine how the room might have appeared in its heyday. Now that C.J. was getting an eyewitness account of its glories, she had expected to find a crush of people, owing to their fashionably late arrival; but only five or six couples were dancing a longways set, their small number dwarfed by the majesty of the room itself.
Lady Dalrymple did little to conceal her disappointment. “There is a paucity of revelers because it is so late in the season,” she informed her young protégée, sotto voce. “A pity you did not arrive in Bath sooner.”
Taking in the scene, C.J. noticed several young ladies gowned nearly identically in filmy white muslin, escorted by their doting mothers dressed in deeper tones. The chairs, by their very lack of comfort, were conducive to dancing, and fortunately, several of the tunes were recognizable to her ear. Still, to watch some of the couples executing intricate maneuvers nevertheless generated flutters of anxiety that should the inevitable invitation to make one of a set arise, she would risk exposing herself as an impostor.
The strident voice of Mrs. Fairfax could be heard well above the music, thus Lady Dalrymple had no trouble reconnoitering with her acquaintance in one corner of the room. The parvenue, eager to dispose of her two marriageable daughters before the season’s end—and with time rapidly running out—raised her quizzing glass to one eye and surveyed the eligibles across the room.
“What think you of the way Mr. Essex dances?” she said, scrutinizing a young pup in a leaf-green coat and formfitting white breeches energetically executing a hay in the middle of the floor.
Her good husband found it difficult to maintain his pretense of ignoring her when he felt such an adamant tug on the cuff of his sleeve.
“He bounces too much,” Mr. Fairfax replied laconically.
Mrs. Fairfax returned the quizzing glass to her right eye and squinted. “Upon re-examination, I quite agree with you, my dear Mr. Fairfax. Yes, you are invariably such an excellent judge of character. Too much exuberance on the dance floor undoubtedly connotes a juvenile temperament.”
“And Lord knows, our daughters are silly enough without encouraging their suitors to share their frivolity,” her husband drawled.
Two young ladies approached the older couple with glasses of negus, the sugar-sweetened, mulled, and watered-down wine customarily offered at such gatherings.
“Quite a dear you are, Harriet.” Mrs. Fairfax patted the hand of a very pretty girl, her face framed with golden curls. She took a sip of the negus and handed it to her husband. “Mr. Fairfax, do taste this and tell me whether they have used port or sherry this evening. I can never discern. Lady Dalrymple, I believe you have met my eldest daughter, Harriet; and this,” she added, indicating the strawberry blonde hovering near her opposite shoulder, “is my younger, Susanne.” The young women curtsied to the countess, and turned to gaze upon the newcomer in their midst.
“Ah yes. The poor relation,” Mrs. Fairfax announced a bit too loudly and with an entire lack of tact. “Girls, allow me to name you Lady Euphoria Dalrymple’s niece . . . Miss Cassandra Jane Welles.”
The young ladies curtsied daintily and acknowledged the poor relation’s presence in a tandem of soprano voices. “Miss Welles.”
“Miss Fairfax, Miss Susanne. It is a pleasure to meet you.” C.J. wondered if in this light her own gown was as nearly transparent as those of the Miss Fairfaxes. Even at twenty-first-century parties, where young women clearly in the marriage market displayed deep cleavage and long legs, one still didn’t wear diaphanous attire and pretend it was a hallmark of modesty. C.J. surveyed the room once again. Good heavens! A ballroom filled with virgins (surely she was the only one in white who did not qualify), whose garments left nothing to the imagination. She ventured that a gentleman could place a wager on the calculation of a lady’s weight, just by eyeing her in her white muslin.
“Aunt Euphoria, allow me to fetch you some punch,” C.J. offered, hoping to avoid being within earshot when Mrs. Fairfax gossiped behind her fan to her two daughters, tut-tutting over poor Miss Welles’s misfortunes.
She wended her way across the gleaming parquet floor and out into the Tea Room, where enormous silver epergnes dripped with fruit: plump, fresh grapes in three different colors, plums, figs, and fragrant Seville oranges. With two kinds of cold punch, lemonade, and the warm negus in huge urns filled near to overflowing, the table, groaning under its weight, resembled refreshments at a bacchanalia.
The display was just shy of perfection, however; and C.J., not wishing to call attention to the problem, and not having an inkling whom to hail for assistance in any event, thought it would be best to tackle the issue alone. Just as she had steeled her nerves to do the deed, an exceptionally elderly couple, nearly blind and ambulating only by the grace of God and sturdy walking sticks, approached the punch table. The couple probably would have noticed nothing, were they to swallow the offending object, but C.J. could not content herself to stand idly by.
“Stay back!” she warned. The urgency of her tone and the volume of her voice instantly drew a curious crowd. At least she had the presence of mind not to ruin a brand-new, buttery-soft kid glove. While keeping her spectators at bay, C.J. struggled to tug the skin-tight, elbow-length glove down the length of her arm. Having succeeded, she plunged her right arm—all the way up to the elbow joint—into the punch bowl, jumping back so as to avoid splashing herself and ruining her new gown. But the object of her consternation, a common housefly, was not as easily trapped as she had initially thought. Its wings were not beating as though the mite were drowning, so C.J. assumed that the poor bugger had drunk himself to death and she was merely to play the role of undertaker. The shadows in the liquid danced and her target bobbed up and down upon the waves created by the intrusion of her arm as she struggled to capture the cadaver.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Fairfax was furiously semaphoring her husband to locate a chair, so that Lady Dalrymple could make herself comfortable, when a flurry of movement at the entranceway caught her eye. “Harriet, Susanne, stand up straight. Lady Oliver and her nephew have arrived. Make yourselves presentable for the Earl of Darlington.” She seated herself with an exaggerated show of gentility and lowered the quizzing glass to her lap.
But the earl was not advancing toward Mrs. Fairfax and her party. His steps took him in an altogether different direction. “I would dare to kiss your hand in greeting, Miss Welles, but it seems to be . . . occupied at present.”
“Gotcha! Good heavens!” C.J. jumped when she heard the voice behind her. Her arm flew out of the deep punch bowl, and the assembly ducked for cover. “I apologize, your lordship. My very first ball, and I seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, necessarily. The wrong arm, perhaps,” he added, appraising her bare appendage and clutched fist. “What have you got there?”
C.J. inclined her head, indicating that he should come closer. “There was a fly in the punch!” she whispered. “And I thought it best to surreptitiously remove it on my own, rather than call the majordomo, or whomever I must alert in such circumstances. Alas, I ended up with an audience.” She opened her fist and looked curiously at the wet black spot nestled in her palm. “That’s funny. It has no wings.”
“That is because it is not an English fly.”
“What the devil do you find so amusing, your lordship?”
“It is a French fly. A mouche. And in Italian, should you be curious to know, the word for fly is mosca.”
C.J. blanched. What a fool she had just made of herself! “Thank you for the education in romance languages, sir. All that for a mouche?” C.J. said, scarcely able to disguise her mortification.
“Come, Miss Welles. Let us take a turn about the room and see if we can spot the real perpetrator of this heinous hoax. We shall put the first man or woman with a glaring red pockmark to the rack to see if they confess.” Smiling, he glanced down at her bare limb.
“’Twas nothing more than a patch, then.” C.J. shivered and sighed and searched about for a linen towel with which to dry her arm. She would have to wash it before attempting to replace her glove, and without her glove, she would not be permitted on the dance floor. “Please excuse me, sir,” she said, and found a liveried servant, who arranged to have a basin of water and a clean cloth brought posthaste.
Her impromptu toilette completed, C.J. sought out the rest of her party. She tried to ignore the cutting glances of the well-accoutered assemblage but was unable to stop her ears from the insidious buzz circulating around the room apropos of her hoydenish behavior.
“Countrified manners,” sneered a handsome woman in a jeweled headdress, glinting over her peacock-feather fan. “But then what can one expect from a poor relation.”
“I daresay my horses are better schooled,” guffawed a yellow-toothed, odiferous elderly gentleman. He removed his gold-rimmed spectacles to dab a rheumy eye with the edge of his ruffled cuff.
Myriad comments of a similar nature filled C.J.’s ears, and she tried to hold her head high despite the sting she felt from the ton’s assault, but before she reached Lady Dalrymple at the perimeter of the ballroom, there was a collective gasp from all and sundry.
Could her gaffe have been of such epic magnitude?
When C.J. realized that this particular communal intake of breath was not directed at her, and that all of the patrons had turned toward the door, she, too, paused to regard the cause for such commotion.
A young woman, attired from head to toe in lemon yellow, had just made her entrance on the arm of a dapper escort. They had eyes only for each other and feigned obliviousness to the effect they had produced amid the gathering throng.
Just as the couple had located a pair of chairs, and the gentleman had seated his lady and was about to make for the negus table, Mr. King, the Master of Ceremonies, approached them and announced in stentorian tones, “You are not welcome here, your lordship, your ladyship.”
The murmurs began anew.
“She is carrying his child,” remarked a sweet-faced blonde. “And her, barely out of mourning for her father.”
“I hear,” smirked a dandy so coated with cosmetics that he resembled a china doll, “that it was at the earl’s funeral that the deed was done . . . while the guests were partaking of the mourning meal. The funeral meats were cold, but our young Lord Featherstone’s was smoking. Just past the hedgerows, I hear it happened—on the old earl’s own property. He was always so fond of his rose garden.”
“And now it seems that his Rose’s bush has been well pruned,” his older companion snickered.
“Nay, not so much pruned as pricked,” the dandy laughed.
“It seems Featherstone could not wait for the banns,” whispered a haughty matron who pointed a gloved finger at Lady Rose’s ever so slightly rounded belly.
“You are to leave the room at once and are not welcome at future public assemblies,” Mr. King proclaimed, audible to all.
There was no opportunity to protest and no court in which one would be entertained. Lord Featherstone offered his hand to Lady Rose.
The collective reaction of the ton could not have been more powerful had it been choreographed. As the loving couple exited the room, depriving their detractors of the satisfaction of watching them depart at a hasty pace, it seemed that almost every aristocrat, regardless of age or gender, made a great show of turning his or her respective back on the pair. The silence during this exhibition was deafening. Once the illicit lovers had departed the Upper Rooms and were enveloped by the night air, the cats indoors resumed their merriment.
Shocked by this display, C.J. made her way over to her “aunt” and seated herself beside her. Lady Dalrymple read the young woman’s expression and patted her hand sympathetically. “I do not condone the behavior you have just witnessed, nor do I agree with it, but my dear, that is the way of the upper crust. We are expected to set an example for those considered to be in the inferior classes, and when decorum is so flagrantly violated—paraded even—well, you see the degree to which it is tolerated.”
“Is that what it means to be ‘cut’?” C.J. asked.
“It is indeed,” replied the countess. “To endure the censure of one’s peers in such a fashion has quite effectively and publicly rendered Lord Featherstone and Lady Rose societal outcasts. Their presence will not be tolerated at public gatherings such as these, and any hostess who would presume to entertain them in her home or on her estate risks similar censure herself for the very act of defying this unwritten decree.”
“But what if Lord Featherstone were to marry Lady Rose?”
“No doubt he will, my child. Any fool can see that they are very much in love. It doesn’t signify, however. The indiscretion has been committed and no matter what pains are taken to rectify the situation, the act of censure remains the same.”
“How dreadful. And ridiculous. I noticed that Lord Darlington did not turn his back, nor did many of those seated around the perimeter of the room.”
“Percy has always been his own man, and for that reason, I have always doted on him. Now,” the countess explained, gesturing with her fan, “the others you remarked upon are not of the same strata as the ton. They have no call to cut their betters, whatever their behavior. Their circles rarely intersect with ours, except at public assemblies such as these.”
“I cannot imagine wanting to be in the same room as those who would so universally condemn my actions.”
Lady Dalrymple squeezed C.J.’s hand. “Ahhh . . . but a life of ostracism can become a very lonely one. It will be interesting to see whether or not Lord Featherstone and Lady Rose can endure such an existence without inciting rancor between themselves.”
Mrs. Fairfax, who had been struggling to overhear the conversation between C.J. and the countess, admitted defeat and broached a subject of her own. Aiming her closed fan at Lord Darlington, she said, “The earl is one of the most eligible bachelors this season, your ladyship. Perhaps he will suit one of my girls. It will take their minds off of His Majesty’s officers.”
“But, Mama,” Susanne lamented, “he is a widower and over thirty-five years old. Thirty-seven or even thirty-eight, some say. That is nearly more than twice Harriet’s age, and assuredly more than twice my own.”
“Imagine being married to a man twice one’s age,” interjected Harriet. “If I were twenty, he would be forty. And by the time I reached that age, he would be eighty!” C.J. had to remind herself that she was dwelling in an age where it was popularly held that female children had no need to learn mathematics. “Besides,” Harriet continued, “I hope that Captain Keats will be here this evening. He looks so splendid in his uniform,” she confided to C.J.
“Captain Keats is a poor officer with nothing of substance to recommend him,” her mother said dismissively.
The pretty blonde sighed petulantly over her mother’s ignorance. “He has a medal for valor, Mama, which is more than any man of our acquaintance can boast.”
As if on cue, a tall young gentleman, resplendent in his scarlet coat with its gold braid and shiny silver buttons, and decorated with an item that Mrs. Fairfax was quick to discredit as a mere tin trinket, approached their party.
Harriet blushed. “Captain Keats! We were just discussing your merits. Do join us for a glass of punch.”
“I should be only too happy to oblige,” the dashing captain replied, as he stood beside the infatuated Miss Fairfax. “I could not help overhearing as I approached, mum, your daughter’s mention of my medal for distinctive service.”
Mr. Fairfax presented Captain Keats to Lady Dalrymple and her “niece,” and the officer explained to the little group the history of his decoration. “I was one of Sir Ralph Abercromby’s expedition to Egypt this past March, you see, and each of us was granted the distinction of the Sphinx. If you inspect the order more closely, you will see that it is inscribed with the word Egypt.”
Miss Fairfax was only too happy to oblige. “Oh, bless me! Goodness if it does. Egypt,” she mused. “That must be terribly far away.”
“Indeed it is, Miss Fairfax. And a rather more arid climate than we are used to in England.”
Quickly losing interest in a discussion of North African weather, C.J. scanned the room, noticing the earl and Miss Austen in the company of Lady Oliver and an older couple. Darlington was glancing in her direction as they sought chairs, none of which appeared to suit his esteemed aunt.
After a few moments, the earl approached their party, greeting each of them warmly. He allowed that he remembered the Miss Fairfaxes, yet there was not a hint in his manner of anything beyond cordial recollection. Mrs. Fairfax would have to wage an aggressively persistent campaign on behalf of her nubile offspring if she wished the earl to entertain even the slightest inclination toward espousing either of her daughters.
Darlington surreptitiously leaned forward to speak to C.J. “I should like a word in your ear, Miss Welles, if you can spare me a moment this evening.”
“You have piqued my curiosity, your lordship.”
“I should be quite honored if you would join me in a set.” He inclined his head toward the center of the room. “As you are no doubt aware, propriety prohibits me from engaging your company more than twice this evening—and my aunt’s wishes are rather adamant in my halving that number—which will not afford me nearly as much opportunity as I should like to enjoy your delightful company. Perhaps the supper dance would be best, and then we may talk more freely afterward.”
C.J. was learning something else about the inhabitants of this society. Nearly everyone here danced around his or her intentions, cloaking them in nuance, riddle, and understatement. Would she ever become used to it? “I should be honored, your lordship,” she replied, and dropped a respectful curtsy.
“My cousin would like to say good evening to you, Miss Welles, if you will allow me to separate you briefly from your companions.” Darlington nodded to the Fairfaxes and to Lady Dalrymple and begged their indulgence while he spirited away Miss Welles to greet his cousin, his arm lightly guiding C.J. by the elbow as they crossed the room to address the other party.
“Miss Jane’s cousin’s first husband and my late wife were brother and sister—if you can follow that rather knotty family tree,” the earl informed C.J., who did not recall hearing about Darlington’s first marriage from his own lips. She supposed that among the ton everyone knew one another’s business regardless of whether or not the source of the intelligence was firsthand.
They reached the opposite side of the ballroom, and his lordship made the introductions all around. “Miss Jane Austen, with whom you are of course acquainted, Miss Welles. And Miss Jane’s uncle and aunt, with whom she is staying in the Paragon, Mr. and Mrs. Leigh-Perrot.”
C.J. offered them shallow curtsies and tried to express her pleasure in the opportunity to make their acquaintance. She felt woefully inarticulate and socially inept.
“This is Miss Welles’s first season,” prompted the earl, surprised at her unusual muteness.
Fortunately, C.J. was rescued by the articulate Miss Austen. “It is a pity you were not here earlier in the year.” Jane surveyed the room, and shook her head. “The crowd is shockingly and inhumanly thin for this place, though there are people enough, I suppose, to make five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies.”
“Yes, Jane never tires of poking fun at poor little Basingstoke’s countrified remoteness,” Mrs. Leigh-Perrot agreed, then excused herself and her husband to join another couple in one of the few country dances requiring a square.
Darlington held out a chair for C.J. “You would not think it to know her, for her manner is always so gentle, but my cousin has an exceptionally wicked predilection for gossip,” he commented. “You were treated to a taste of that at tea the other day, Miss Welles. Cousin Jane, do share with our companion what you were just telling me.”
Miss Austen slid her chair closer to C.J.’s and spoke in a confidential tone. “I have a very good eye for adulteresses,” she whispered, glancing toward the opposite end of the room at a highly rouged woman wearing a handsome striped silk turban with a large topaz at the center, from which an enormous egret feather sprouted. “Though I have been repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the she, I fixed upon the right one from the first.” Jane looked pleased with herself.
“You have great powers of perception, Miss Austen, to be able to detect the slightest foible of character at fifty paces,” C.J. murmured to her new acquaintance.
The young women shared a laugh, and Jane, sensing a kindred spirit, took hold of C.J.’s hand. “I do believe we shall become great friends,” she pronounced with assuredness.