Indeed, I am determined not to be denied, for I truly long to be made known to your dear little children, in whose hearts I shall be very eager to secure an interest, and to be introduced at last to my sister.
Your most obliged and affectionate sister,
Susan Vernon
Lady Vernon showed this letter to Frederica before it was sent to post.
Frederica confessed herself astonished and doubtful. “If, when the grief of my father’s passing was immediately before him, my uncle would not admit of any duty to us, he will not be any more obliging after so many weeks have passed. And why to Churchill? My uncle is so often in town that he cannot avoid you if you settle there.”
“Nobody is so easily avoided anywhere as in town. But in his family home, in the presence of his wife and children, your uncle will be forced to appear hospitable and obliging, which may kindle something like a sense of duty. If I had any hope of legal redress, I would not put myself in his way—even for my own welfare, I would not do it, as I might sell the Portland Place house and live very comfortably. But if, as Mr. Manwaring attests, your father expressed how much he meant to settle on you, I must make some attempt to call him to account.”
“I do not wish, for my sake, that you expose yourself to the duplicity of my uncle. I will not forget how he came to us at Churchill Manor while my father was in frail health, preying upon family feeling in a very underhanded manner, and to a most mercenary end! How the brother of a man as kindhearted and generous as my father can be so selfish and wicked! To have the same mother and father and yet to turn out so unlike! I pity my aunt and cousins—to have such a vile man for their husband and father!”
“You may be as liberal as you like with your pity,” replied Lady Vernon. “I will reserve mine for us.”
“But what of the Manwarings? They talk of you returning to them after I go to London. Maria says that they quite depend upon it.”
“I think that Mr. Manwaring does, but I cannot think that Eliza is feeling as charitable as she did when the invitation to Langford was first given. Eliza was willing to tolerate me as an object of pity, but a woman can never be charitable for long when she believes—however wrongly!—that she has a rival for any man’s attentions, even if that man is only her husband.”
chapter nineteen
Sir James Martin, having exhausted his appeals to bring his cousins to Ealing Park, departed from Langford on the following day. His absence was but briefly felt; four gentlemen, eager for gaiety and diversion, came to fill his place, so that there was no time to lament the absence of one. Indeed, they began to be sorry that Lady Vernon had not followed her cousin to town, for she seemed resolved upon making herself so charming that, when she announced her decision to leave them some weeks before her proposed departure, nobody was sorry save for Manwaring and his sister. Manwaring’s defense of her was in proportion to what he supposed her fortune to be, and Maria would not join in the censure of one whose conduct she had never observed to be improper and whose daughter had become her closest friend. The other ladies, however, began to resent that Lady Vernon managed to be more elegant in bombazine and crepe than they could manage in velvet and silk, and the gentlemen pronounced her “monstrous pretty”—too pretty for a widow—and they would not want their own wives to be so gay after they were cold in the ground. “I daresay everything I ever heard about her is quite true!” declared Charles Smith, a lively, forward young man who had come to Langford with a friend. “She is too much the coquette for my taste,” he determined, though Lady Vernon had said little more to him than a polite “Good morning” when she came down to breakfast and an equally civil “Good evening, sir” when she retired at night. “And her daughter, entirely the reverse!” he continued. “So dull and bookish—so entirely without style or elegance!”
Lady Hamilton approved these speeches and declared that Mr.
Smith was a very sensible young man and not one to be fooled by appearances. She would not scruple to set down all of Lady Vernon’s coquetry and impropriety in her letters to Lady deCourcy and to her niece at Churchill Manor—indeed, every letter posted from Langford had something of Lady Vernon in it.
Mrs. Manwaring to Mrs. Johnson
Langford, Somerset
My dear friend,
You were mistaken, my dear Alicia, in supposing that Lady Vernon and her daughter would be with us for the rest of the winter. Had I not been so overcome with pity for her situation, I would never have had her come to Langford. Though she was so recent a widow, I was not without apprehension, and she had not been here very long before she began to invite the attentions of every gentleman present, not excluding those of my own husband! Upon Sir James Martin, she bestowed what notice was necessary to detach him from Maria, and now it appears that, though Sir Frederick has been gone for scarcely three months, Sir James has every intention of making his proposals for Miss Vernon. I have learned from Maria that Miss Vernon is not at all inclined toward the match, which, if that is true, must make her the greatest simpleton on earth! I have no doubt, however, that her mother will be rewarded for her exertions as wicked people so often are, and that the scheme of placing her in the care of Miss Summers’s Academy on Wigmore Street is only done to give the girl a bit of polish before entering into the engagement.
We are in a sad state, but that will soon be relieved as Lady Vernon leaves us at the beginning of December. It is said that she will not open her house in town but only install Miss Vernon in school and then go down to Churchill Manor. I cannot think that she would go to them unless there were truly no place in England open to her—to Churchill she is to go, however, until something better comes into view, and so she may plague Mrs. Charles Vernon and flirt with her husband—who was once Lady Vernon’s beau. What an abhorrent thing for Mrs. Vernon to have to receive her!
Adieu. I beg you, my dear Alicia, to give my warmest regards to Mr. Johnson and tell him that I do not at all resent his throwing me off upon my marriage, which—considering the conduct of my husband—showed a greater affection for me than I gave credit. If I had been one degree less contemptibly weak, I should never have married him, for you know that I was applied to by more than one title above baronet—yet I was foolish and romantic and would not be satisfied by riches alone. If Lady Vernon were not to leave us very soon, I might find myself so desperate as to appeal to Mr. Johnson—but I will not impose upon your domestic tranquillity just yet. I will know better how things stand after we are relieved of Lady Vernon’s presence.
Yours, etc.,
Eliza Manwaring
Lady Vernon, accompanied by her daughter and Miss Lucy Hamilton, quit Langford in the first week of December. Mrs. Manwaring was so overcome with joy at seeing them go that she was almost restored to cordiality. Manwaring, on the other hand, was so despondent that Lady Vernon might have felt sorry for him had she not believed that the Christmas season would bring him many more visitors who had pretty wives and sisters, and that he would not want for somebody to flirt with. Miss Manwaring was genuinely unhappy at the loss of a pleasant companion, but the promise of a steady correspondence and the prospect of being in London within a few months herself reconciled her to the loss of Miss Vernon’s company.