Chapter 10
Half a mile away, Greville crossed Berkeley Square at an impatient pace. The wind was in an unusual quarter, and so this evening Mayfair reeked of the same effluvia as the slums to the east: chimney-smoke and the rich green stink of London’s many rivers. Greville heard the crowd that had gathered outside his family’s seat in London before he actually saw it: a mellifluous babble of feminine voices carried on the breeze. Having cut across the garden in the middle of the square, Greville let himself out of the wrought iron gate, stepping back onto the wide, well-swept street: at least thirty assorted young women clad in a variety of inexpensive muslins had gathered on the walkway outside Crauford House. Most of them were accompanied by maidservants: respectable if not fashionable.
‘Oh, for the love of God,’ Greville said, quietly, walking up to the front steps; the little crowd scattered at his approach.
As he passed, a girl with wax cherries fastened to her bonnet whispered to her companion. ‘Is that him? Doesn’t he look ferocious and so brooding?’
Greville didn’t wait to hear the reply, and thank God the front door opened before the knocker had even struck. Crauford’s footman was almost as tall as Greville himself, redolent of carbolic soap, his well-scrubbed brown face expressionless as a hen’s egg. Greville didn’t miss the exact sward-green shade of his eyes, though, or the faint crater left by some form of pox on the side of his nose. Nor did Greville miss the swift head-to-toe appraisal that he himself received; one could hardly blame the man. As a footman, he was trained to spot interlopers from a mile off; he exuded ambition and doubtless had half an eye on Crauford’s butler’s job. Greville knew very well that he couldn’t have looked much more disreputable if he’d tried.
The interlude lasted no more than a moment, with Greville aware of the hum of voices drifting downstairs from his mother’s salon. ‘I’m here to see Lady Crauford. The Dowager Lady Crauford.’
The footman didn’t smile, of course, stepping back to allow Greville into the house. ‘I regret to say her ladyship is not at home, but do come this way, my lord.’
Greville stepped into the hall, instantly surrounded by the familiar and half-forgotten: a sun-bleached Turkey rug, peonies bursting from a blue-and-white Delftware vase, dark oil paintings in heavily gilded frames.
‘I see you’ve studied this lot,’ he said, with a terse nod at the family portraits lining the stairwell, which included his own. ‘What’s your name, and what is happening outside?’
‘My name is Somers, your honour. And yes, your lordship’s likeness is very exact, if I may be permitted to say so. If I might also say, your lordship is the image of the Dowager Marchioness of Crauford: a strikingly clear resemblance, my lord, so that I should have immediately comprehended you are one of the family. The females have come to see Lord Byron, my lord. They are quite impossible to dissuade from their object; the more we cleared them away, the more they returned. It is, if I may be permitted to remark, quite an extraordinary thing to observe in respectably bred women.’ Somers swept up the stairs with such grace of movement that he seemed almost to be propelled by wheels up a ramp imperceptible to the human eye. ‘I perceive that your honour has only very recently arrived from Spain. Might I arrange hot water? Your baggage?’
‘You can see to it all apart from the hot water, thank you.’ Greville had no intention of remaining in his brother’s house long enough to put up with the consequences of offending the Craufords with his travel-stained state.
‘And your manservant, sir?’ Somers said, stepping smoothly onto the landing. ‘Will I have Mistress Houghton arrange for his accommodation?’
‘Thank you, no. I’m not staying here, and my batman is dead.’ Greville was now only half listening to the hum of voices drifting down the corridor from the salon. He’d already written to Jackson’s people; the letter would likely reach the sleepy Northamptonshire village tomorrow. There was no justice when a man could survive Badajoz and succumb to a rotting wound a few days later.
‘Very good, sir.’ Somers dispensed a benevolent smile at a maidservant hurrying along the corridor bearing a pile of folded, bloodstained linen, her face grey and immobile with shock. Somers didn’t so much as flinch.
‘Where did you serve?’ Greville asked.
‘I was last in at Walcheren, sir.’
‘An unpleasant business. I take it you were invalided out?’
‘Indeed, sir. I was fortunate enough to recover from the Walcheren fever, but sadly my lungs are not what they were. I retired from the military life and returned to service, your honour.’
By this time, Greville and Somers had arrived at the double doors. Crauford must have been practising economies again, for there were no footmen stationed outside the salon and it was left to Somers to toss his name into the hubbub as though it were a grenade.
‘Lieutenant Colonel Lord Greville d’Eresby Nightingale.’
The shocked silence was palpable; the room heaved with massed humanity reeking of pomade, sweat, and coal-smoke from the grate. Even after years in Spain, it was all so jarringly humdrum, despite the crowd and the chattering excitement. Greville’s brother the Marquess of Crauford stood hemmed into a corner by a gathering of earnest-looking women, looking much like a peevish shadow of their father, and also much like a man who regretted not being at his club. His wife, Marianne, who had engineered all this, was ensconced on a chaise longue beneath the window in bile-yellow dupion silk, her expression of triumph fading into one of dismay at the sight of Greville, who didn’t really blame her for returning his dislike, all things considered.
‘Why, Greville! What a wonderful surprise!’ Marianne was still as fragile and insincere as ever, with those blonde curls swept up like a seventeen-year-old debutante’s.
Hard pushed to spit out the niceties, Greville bowed in the direction of his brother and sister-in-law and went to the sofa where his half-sister Kitty held court.
‘Oh, do go away, darlings – I need to talk to my disgracefully rude brother.’ Kitty, Lady Alasdair watched her audience scatter with an air of tolerant boredom and Greville kissed her outstretched hand. Ten years Greville’s senior, Kitty was married to a kindly but distant Scottish laird who shared her passion for word-games of fiendish complexity. He was an offshoot of the more famous Fraser family; she was a child of her father’s first marriage in the last years of the old century. Kitty’s mother had been the daughter of a Mughal noblewoman and the fourth son of an English viscount. Brought to England as a six-year-old when her widowed father unexpectedly succeeded to the title, Kitty herself was slender and immaculate in white muslin, with long-lashed dark eyes and her heavy black hair swept up into a crown of braids. She gave Greville a single, appraising look, as well as her hand to kiss, and then instantly sliced through all his defences.
‘Heavens, Greville, someone is in trouble – what has happened to you?’
‘Nothing at all.’ Greville smiled at her, releasing her hand; she was the first person in London he’d actually been glad to see.
‘You liar,’ Kitty said, unmoved. ‘But who am I to force confidences?’
‘I know you’d never do so. What the devil are you playing at, though, Kit, going along with this idiotic charade? It’s not like you to court fashion. Where’s my mother?’
‘Mama? She’s been out exchanging shots across the bows with Annis Fane.’ Kitty dealt him a wry smile: her fond relationship with his mother had always flown in the faces of those who secretly hoped the elder Lady Crauford might make her stepdaughter’s life a misery. ‘And as if all this Byron nonsense is anything to do with me. Come on, Greville, do you suppose me to have altered that much?’
‘You haven’t altered at all,’ Greville said, truthfully, smiling at her and unable to help himself. ‘Although I fully expect your offspring not to know me.’
Kitty rolled her eyes. ‘Not with Johnny’s obsession – he’s been counting down the days until his father can be persuaded to buy him a commission and he’s been in alt ever since we found out you were coming home. Anyway, our dear sister-in-law is being insufferable about Byron, as you can imagine. It’s pretty unbearable to see Marianne have the satisfaction of snaring him for an evening when most people would sell their own dead grandmother to the resurrection men just to have him in the house. But look at the man, isn’t it fascinating? He was such an awkward boy, too, but you’d never believe it now, would you?’
Greville stretched out his long legs, crossing one ankle over the other. The morning room was crowded, the air thick with the scent of overheated bodies and stale breath; their brother’s wife had deliberately selected this smaller, more intimate chamber over the drawing room which would have easily swallowed the seventy or so members of the haut ton. Even so, a young man stood alone by one of the long book-cases, absorbed in examining the spines, dark hair curling over his pale forehead.
‘No one will talk to him, is that your point?’ Greville accepted a glass of champagne from a footman he didn’t recognise.
‘Marianne’s fatal error.’ Kitty spoke with a wicked light in her eyes that didn’t disguise a thread of tension in her voice. ‘They’re all too fashionable. As if Brummell and Princess Esterházy would lower themselves to public hero-worship like those extraordinary girls outside. I haven’t seen anything like it since you were first on the town, and even so it’s far more intensive than the attention you and Cressida got—’ She broke off at the expression on his face, with a small, brisk shake of her head. ‘Oh, don’t. What would you prefer, that we never mentioned you and Cressida in the same breath? It was the rest of us who had to live with the aftermath of your opera dancer and her duke, and I don’t see why I should protect your feelings now.’
‘I’ll try to maintain a better command of my features, I promise.’
‘You should. I always have to. Anyway, Byron is far more interesting than you, and he’s scorching across the haut ton like a comet. They’re all fascinated by him, and they’ve obviously all read Childe Harold – or pretended to – but everyone here is far too self-conscious to lower themselves to actually speak to the poor boy. You knew him, though, didn’t you?’ Kitty’s gaze was just as penetrating as it had ever been; she’d always been difficult to lie to. Either she really knew nothing of Lascelles’ concerns about Byron and Jamie, or had chosen to play those cards close to her chest.
‘Byron was far more a friend of Arthur Lascelles – they were in the same circle at Cambridge.’ Greville wondered idly if the traumatised maidservant had made it to the laundry room with her pile of bloodied clothing, and if his sister was even aware of the melodrama unfolding elsewhere in the house.
‘Hmm.’ Kitty picked up a madeleine from one of the absurdly small gilded china plates that had belonged to their paternal grandmother, never taking her eyes off Greville as she demolished it down to the last bite. He waited until she’d dabbed at her mouth with a damask napkin. ‘Look at Crauford: poor thing. He’s obviously wishing the whole crowd of us to the devil. I don’t know why he and Marianne insist on parties when neither of them really enjoy the experience. They’d both rather be at Summercourt annoying Phelps in the garden. Although, to be honest, Jamie hasn’t been helping.’
‘Oh?’ Greville said, as discouraging as possible.
‘He’s got into Radical politics. You may guess how that was received.’ Kitty glanced at their brother. Crauford stood in the corner still, eyeing Byron as if he were an unexploded grenade, unique in his ability to make a jacket tailored by Schulz look as if it had been run over by a coach and horses.
‘Kitty, Jamie’s been spouting the Rights of Man over the breakfast table since he was about fourteen. Maybe one day the force of his conviction will induce him to actually do something other than just talking about it, like actually study for his bar examinations.’
‘Obviously, but the prime minister’s just been killed. You must have heard the rumours, that it was all part of a Radical plot,’ Kitty said; she looked genuinely worried. ‘Jamie took Chas to see Thomas Spence and Robert Wedderburn give a talk somewhere in Limehouse. Crauford was furious: Jamie might as well have indoctrinated Chas into Satanism. You won’t have heard,’ Kitty went on with a particular inflection in her voice he recognised only too well from his childhood, ‘but Chas is a little out of sorts. He won’t be at the Vennings’ drum later, poor thing, which is such a pity.’
‘Out of sorts?’ Greville said. Their scapegrace younger brother had always been predictable if nothing else. ‘Stale drunk, more like.’
Then Kitty mouthed at him: He’s been shot.
Greville closed his eyes, very briefly. Christ. ‘Perhaps I’ll look in on him.’
‘I would if I were you.’ Kitty spoke with a creditable assumption of carelessness. She gave him a flinty smile. ‘I bet you wish you were still in Spain, don’t you?’
Greville left her on the chaise longue, in awe of his sister’s nerve as well as her ability to speak without drawing breath. Kitty was right: if she absented herself, the younger Lady Crauford’s guests would comment.
Greville had barely reached the bookshelves before he had to pass Byron, who was still examining a shelf of calf-bound Greek philosophy with a glass of champagne in one hand, as if the sweating throng of people were nothing more than smoke from a badly laid fire. He looked up as Greville approached, all tempered aggression and well-cut plain dark jacket and breeches. Byron lifted his gaze to meet Greville’s own and raised his glass in a silent salute, as if they were the only two men of flesh and blood in the room. Even as a boy, he’d possessed the rare gift of bestowing the whole of his attention on a single person, making it all too easy to believe that you were the only one in the world for him. Greville returned the salute but couldn’t ignore a cold sensation of unease. What was it Kitty had said of George Gordon, Lord Byron? He scorches across the haut ton like a comet. When all was said and done, what was a comet but a star that left destruction where it fell?