Page 4 of The Book of Lost Stories

Pursuits

The air seemed to move about Malvina and she could have sworn that the ghost of a kiss lightly touched her lips.

Her eyes flew open: the monkish figure stepped back from the moonlight that came through the narrow windows, the dark shadow cast by the cowl of his long robe rendering him eerily faceless.

‘Pray, sir, who – who are you?’ she whispered. ‘And what do you mean by me?’

The Travails of Lady Malvina by ORLANDO brOWNE

Alys found Lady Basset lying upon her daybed as usual, her exceedingly plump form enveloped in a dashingly diaphanous pink negligée quite unsuited to her figure, languidly eating sugarplums and reading a letter.

A glass of brandy, with which she dosed herself against all manner of imaginary ills, stood on a little table at her elbow.

She had developed an interestingly delicate constitution as compensation for a life of unrelieved tedium, for Sidlington Hall was isolated and her husband’s interests largely consisted of estate management and hunting.

Although rather snubbed by the wives of the half-dozen neighbours within visiting distance, she was good-natured to a fault and always happy to see her stepson’s friends, even though she found them rather serious young men, disinclined to fun and frolic.

Her husband’s hunting cronies also voted her a very good sort, for she kept an excellent table and always retired immediately after dinner, leaving them to their carousals.

‘Has Marmion arrived, Aunt?’ Alys asked eagerly, as soon as she had greeted her.

Pug, who had sat up and barked at Alys in a token sort of way, settled back down again next to his mistress and began trying to lick powdered sugar off his snub nose with a triangular pink tongue.

‘Yes, it is there on the table, together with some book about the Lake District which I have no recollection of ordering,’ Lady Basset said, without much interest, for while a thrilling tale filled her with such fearful pleasure that she could resist the enveloping vapours of sleep for quite as much as an hour, poetry with no exciting narrative set her yawning in a trice.

She resumed the reading of her letter, for she maintained a voluminous correspondence with an old friend from her days on the stage who lived a life of much greater interest in London, although, in Alys’s opinion, Lady Crayling’s letters only served to make her aunt the more dissatisfied with her lot.

‘Do you know, Alys, that although Eliza is received in several great houses and married a lord, some of the nobility are still too high in the instep to acknowledge her? Titus Hartwood, your maternal grandfather, among them,’ she said now.

‘She writes that the widow of his younger brother – and I dare say there were twenty years between them – has gone to live with him in Albemarle Street, together with her daughter, Arabella. William Hartwood married late, so Lavinia Hartwood must be about my age, and her daughter still in the schoolroom. There is a son, too, who Eliza says is exceedingly handsome, besides being his uncle’s heir, but he resides in bachelor lodgings near St James’s Street. ’

‘Oh?’ Alys said, looking up from the table where she was eagerly examining the new books. ‘How odd it is to have such close relatives about whom I know nothing, excepting only from hearsay.’

‘I believe your grandfather had a partiality for me at one time, for he would haunt the green room when I was there,’ Lady Basset said complacently, ‘but a greater nipcheese in these affairs there never was, and so several of the girls warned me, so I …’

To Alys’s regret, she broke off before she could impart any more interesting insights into her grandfather’s character or, indeed, her own scandalously exciting past.

‘Might I borrow this book about the Lakes, if you do not like it?’ Alys thought that the volume might give her ideas for the background of her novel, which was to be set in the imaginary kingdom of Galbodia at some nebulous time in the mists of antiquity.

‘Yes, do take it …’ Lady Basset agreed, once more returning to her letter. She heaved a great sigh, dislodging a sugarplum from the filmy drapery covering her massive bosom.

‘How lucky Eliza is! She goes to routs and masquerades, drives her own carriage in the park and can go shopping whenever she pleases … and indeed, when Sir Ralph asked me to marry him, I thought my life would be much the same. But no, here I have been stuck in this wilderness ever since.’

Even Alys had heard of some of the doings of the notorious Lady Crayling, since Miss Grimshaw had numerous family in London who, although quite genteelly engaged in professions rather than of the ton , were sufficiently well connected to hear the latest on dits .

She was not in the least surprised that Sir Ralph refused to allow his wife to visit London with him on his infrequent visits to that metropolis.

‘Just listen to this,’ Lady Basset said now, for she often read passages of her letters aloud, entirely forgetting that her audience was a green girl of eighteen. Alys had learned the most scandalous things, for Lady Crayling appeared to have no moral scruples about anything.

Remember what larks we had in the old days, Lydia, when his lordship used to ferry us up the river to his house at Kew, to dance for The Brethren in that heathenish underground temple he had constructed?

We thought we would die of cold, changing into those thin veils in the shell grotto!

Well, you would stare if I told you what goes on when most of the girls leave, except that now I am a Sister of the Order (no Covent Garden nun!) I am constrained to secrecy under threat of the direst punishment should I betray their—

Here she seemed to recollect her audience, for she stopped suddenly and laid the letter aside for later perusal, leaving Alys filled with curiosity to know more about this mysterious Brethren, not to mention the meaning of the phrase ‘Covent Garden nun’.

A mere two pages of Marmion sufficed to put her aunt to sleep, and then Alys could not resist picking up the letter and, with wide eyes, reading more.

She was, however, disappointed to discover that the rest of it was filled with Lady Crayling’s complaints about her husband’s ‘bits of muslin’, addiction to gaming and the prowess of her young lover.

She was just puzzling over the precise nature of ‘Blue Ruin’ and ‘Cribb’s Parlour’ when Lady Basset gave an unladylike snort and muttered something.

Guiltily, Alys laid the letter down again – but really, she needed to know more of the wide world, especially now, when such knowledge could add a new dimension to her work.

Lady Basset and Pug snored on obliviously as Alys utilized her aunt’s papier-maché desk and violet-scented notepaper for the next exciting instalment of Malvina’s adventures:

‘He will never marry me while you live,’ hissed the woman, her beautiful face wild with jealous anger.

‘My birth is too lowly – I cannot give him the advantages he seeks through an alliance with you … or from your death. So, let it be death!’ The curved blade of a great knife flashed angry light from the wall sconce as she flung herself upon the hapless captive, her intention writ clear upon her livid countenance …

*

On leaving her aunt some time later, before she reached the front door, Alys had the good fortune to encounter her cousin, a stolid, worthy and rather pop-eyed young man some few years her senior.

‘James, the very person of all others I wished to see!’ she exclaimed, her luminous large grey eyes lighting up, and immediately she begged him prettily for some paper.

He always had a ready supply, since he had a keen interest in, if little understanding of, modern scientific advances and so maintained a large correspondence on the subject with numerous like-minded acquaintances and learned societies.

At Christmas he had bestowed upon Alys a large and handsome notebook in which to record the various wildflowers of the local countryside, but on whose invitingly blank pages she instead inscribed all the minutia of her daily life.

Now, if James somehow gained the impression that she and Miss Grimshaw were compiling recipes and household hints, he was fortunately too stupid to be surprised at the volume of manuscript required.

However, he was always kindly and generous when asked for such little favours, so in return Alys let him hold forth about his current pet subject of magnetism for quite a half-hour before making her excuses and returning to the Dower House with her booty.

‘Letty,’ she said, ruefully, when she got home, ‘I am afraid I have agreed to let James try a little experiment in magnetism on us tomorrow, when he has set up the apparatus in the small summer house.’

‘Magnetism?’ Letty echoed, looking up from the handkerchief she was hemming.

‘Do not worry. From what I can discover, it will not harm us in any way and may even do us some good.’

‘Well, if you say so. What have you there?’

‘A large quantity of paper and a book about the Lake District, which came to my aunt by mistake.’

‘And did you ask Lady Basset if she knew why any mention of the Rayven family, especially the new heir, rendered Major Weston so irate?’

‘Yes, as I was coming away, for she was asleep most of the time I was there. She thought, from something Sir Ralph once let drop, that Papa and the father of the new Viscount Rayven were in the army together and fast friends, until they fell out. Crooked play was mentioned, so I expect it was gaming: I know Papa was an inveterate gambler, or we would not be living in such reduced circumstances now.’

‘But I believe, Alys, that gambling is a fever in the blood and those in its thrall cannot help themselves.’

‘And I believe it is a great piece of self-indulgence that can lead to nothing but hardship and misery for the families of those concerned,’ Alys declared roundly.

‘Excuse my father’s nature as you will, but you will never succeed in convincing me of the worth of his character, for you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, embroider it as much as you please. ’

*

James had omitted to inform Alys that he had also invited one of his friends to be present at the experiment in magnetism, although since Mr Yatton was cast in the same stolid and commonplace mould as himself, this discovery did not send her into transports of delight.

But Mr Yatton, on being introduced, took an unaccountable fancy to her and paid a morning call at the Dower House next day.

It was unfortunate that Mrs Franby, the wife of the rector, had also condescended to pay one of her rare – and unwelcome – calls at the same time, for she scented a clandestine romance and immediately sent the rector up to tell Major Weston.

‘Papa, the young man came to call from courtesy only, and Miss Grimshaw was present throughout,’ Alys told him when the inevitable rage ensued. ‘Pray, do not fret yourself into one of your fevers over it, for I assure you I found him as staid and uninteresting as my cousin James.’

But, of course, the major, fired by a purely selfish fear that she would leave him, ranted on until he quite wore himself out.

A moment’s sane reflection would have told him that the chance of a serious suitor turning up at the door, prepared to overlook Alys’s penniless state, lack of ladylike accomplishments and lowly situation, was negligible.

It was not even as if she was a great beauty, Alys reflected later, examining her face critically in the mirror.

Her abundant hair was a dark and glossy chestnut and curled without any help, it was true, but her eyes were an unremarkable grey, her mouth too wide and she was quite tall – nearly as tall as her cousin – a grave defect in a woman.

Still, at eighteen most girls had something of beauty about them, she supposed, if only the dewy freshness of youth, and if they were going to get a husband they had better do it before the bloom rubbed off. Unless their papas decreed that their destiny was to flower and fade alone …

Only in poetry and novels did perfect, gentle knights beat a path to the beleaguered maiden’s door.

The Travails of Lady Malvina advanced apace, and Miss Grimshaw, impressed if rather appalled by the worldly and passionate tone of the story, said she did not know where Alys got the half of it, but she was sure it was much better than anything she had read in print.

Alys believed it read well, but resolved to send a sample of her work to Sir Walter Scott, whose The Lay of the Last Minstrel they both so much admired, for his opinion.

‘Although perhaps, being a poet, Sir Walter is not the right person to send such a work to?’ suggested Letty. ‘Might not some genteel lady novelist be more suitable?’

‘But I would value his opinion above all others, and I dare say even if he does not write novels, he reads them.’

So Letty wrote out the first few chapters in her best copperplate on the paper so unwittingly provided by James Basset.

These she enclosed in a package with a covering letter to her nephew, Thomas Grimshaw, an attorney in a good way of business in London, to forward to Sir Walter.

It was quite a circuitous way of doing it, but the only one that would not raise eyebrows in Little Stidding.

No one would be surprised at letters and packages passing to and fro between Letty and her kindly London relatives.

Of course, Major Weston knew nothing of Alys’s writing. He probably assumed that she and Miss Grimshaw spent all their days in the wholesome and healthy pursuits of housewifery, needlework and perhaps a little ladylike rambling about.

And, in fact, Alys did ramble about: she walked for miles and quite often at a furious pace for, full of youth, vigour and a yearning for action of some kind – any kind.

She was so restless that exercise was the only way to calm her disordered spirits.

And now that her novel and its characters had so taken over her mind, she muttered and occasionally even gesticulated as she walked, pouring into the novel all her longings for romance, travel and excitement.

Up on the moors, under the boundless and ever-changing skies, her imagination was free to soar like a hawk, even if in reality she was forever confined to run about a constricted world, like one of her own chickens.