Chapter Eight
These fellowships are pretty things,
We live indeed like petty kings:
But who can bear to waste his whole age
Amid the dullness of a college,
Debarr’d the common joys of life,
And that prime bliss—a loving wife!
—Thomas Warton, “The Progress of Discontent” (1746)
Well, surely this was unprecedented. To be married at ten in the morning, and to have driven one’s bride away by two?
Benjamin Ellsworth sat at the desk purchased by Lord Dere.
It was an elegant mahogany piece, opening from the library case and fitted with cunning slots and drawers.
Nor had there been need to burrow in his trunk for pen, ink or writing paper, not when he found all he required within those same drawers.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would say he had fallen on his feet. If he must crawl into some strange woman’s bed in a London inn and be forced to wed her, why not make it the bed of a baron’s cousin?
Indeed, his wife’s connection to the baron changed everything.
Imagine if he had stumbled into a barmaid’s chamber at the Bolt in Tun!
There had always been stories in Oxford of those dons who disgraced themselves with their scouts or bedmakers, fathering a child or two before discovery.
The more honorable of them then offered marriage, while the less honorable fobbed off their former lovers with maintenance payments or, more creatively, a contrived marriage to someone more befitting the lady’s rank.
That is, such things happened, and those who escaped such consequences shook their heads at the foolishness of those who did not.
If fate had delivered him to a barmaid’s bed, Benjamin Ellsworth would have slunk back to Oxford, pursued by his scandal, and joined the first category of fools, dutifully marrying the barmaid.
He could not have done otherwise because, truth be told, his own mother’s history would not have allowed him to send any unfortunate girl packing with no more than a few stray shillings.
Jeanne Ellsworth had once been a servant in a household where such advantages were taken of the women, and she never forgot her narrow escape.
But when Benjamin returned to Oxford with marriage to a baron’s cousin hanging over him…
! That had been quite a different matter.
He had been congratulated. Clapped on the back.
Asked where more such cousins could be found.
Even Warden Gauntlett of New College, a strict and fussy man, merely chided him perfunctorily before agreeing to extend his fellowship one year past the wedding.
What a world.
Was he the only one who did not think he had miraculously snatched victory from the jaws of defeat?
Well, you are the only one besides your parents who knows anything of Miss Verity Allen.
The loss of her ought to be the clear cause of his discontent, for “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,” etc.
etc. And yet, Benjamin knew it was not the loss of Miss Allen which lay behind his bad humor.
That is, he had not been mourning Miss Allen and calling it “pride.” No—his pride had genuinely been offended.
Shutting his eyes, he let his head hang down. What a perfect ass he had made of himself! “I don’t want free rent!” “I don’t want free furniture!” “I don’t want to be the baron’s kept man!” “I wish we lived in two stifling rooms which I paid for myself!”
He saw again his new wife’s astonishment, confusion and hurt.
If she could be believed, Lord Dere was in the habit of these…
fits of magnanimity, done not to gain control over others or to burden them with obligation, but simply because it made him happy.
Whoever heard of such a thing? Of such a person?
What a world, indeed.
And because of his own—tantrum—Miss Allen had come into it.
Miss Allen, whom Benjamin had never wanted his wife to know about.
Not out of any desire for secrecy but because what would be the purpose?
He had given Miss Allen up, though she had not been his to give up in the first place.
That he was able to think of her now without being overpowered both relieved and surprised him.
Well, Miss Allen had always been a distant and forlorn hope at the best of times, so surrendering the hope of winning her was rather like surrendering the hope of being made, in ten years’ time, prime minister.
Though prime minister is not altogether out of the question, he thought satirically, now that I have a baron’s backing.
He tapped the pen on the desk absently.
Yes, he’d been an unmannerly beggar and stumbled at the threshold with his new bride, so that they began married life as, if not enemies, certainly not as friends.
He would try again when she came home—if she came home.
Might she even now be crying on the bosom of her nearest family member (probably the sister at Keele’s) and vowing not to return? The picture made him wince.
One difficulty at a time, if you please.
Glancing at Lord Dere’s Dutch clock, he sighed and opened Lord Dere’s ink bottle.
First there was the letter to write to his parents.
Benjamin had put it off, feeling as his brother Austin did that it would only make matters worse, but it could not be delayed any longer.
Mercifully, the start of Hilary Term at Oxford coincided with the start of term at Winchester College, where his father taught.
With any luck, by the time he saw them again, they would have reconciled themselves to this unexpected turn of events, and by that same time, he and—Mrs. Ellsworth—would be friendly enough to please their concerned families.
The letter required several drafts, but there was plenty of Lord Dere’s paper. Now if only the baron had seen fit to provide a servant who might send the letter for him, so that he need not run the Chop-and-Pork gauntlet…
“Perhaps I’d like to be a kept man after all,” Benjamin told Lord Dere’s clock.
When it only ticked pleasantly at him, he frowned and drew his watch from his pocket.
Yes, it really was four o’clock, and Mrs. Ellsworth had not returned.
Which meant their dinner would be brought up any moment, and he would have to make some excuse for her absence.
Suppose she never returned? Could she be that touchy?
But then—footsteps!
Benjamin threw himself onto the sofa, affecting nonchalance. No, no—why would he be sitting there, staring into vacancy? He sprang up again. He would ask Rundell to put the letter in. He wouldn’t cower here, as if afraid of what the Chop faction might think.
The door opened just as he strode into the passage, but it was not Rundell with a tray. It was his wife, bonnet in hand.
“—You came back,” said Benjamin idiotically.
“I did,” agreed Maria, equally idiotically. Perhaps it was her encounter with the young men in the street, but again she felt conscious of her caplessness and put a hand to her bare hair.
“I thought you were the dinner,” he muttered. “That is, Rundell with the dinner.”
As she was clearly neither, this remark did not lead anywhere useful, but Maria managed a smiling grimace as she unfastened her cloak.
“Allow me to take that.”
Though the second-floor passage was brighter than its ground-floor equivalent, it was just as narrow, and her awkwardness in wriggling from the article, coupled with his awkwardness in receiving it, resulted in limbs jostling together and his letter dropping to the floor.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Do excuse me.”
Coloring as if he had touched something more intimate than her elbow, he turned to hang her cloak next to his greatcoat.
“Mr. and Mrs. Charles Ellsworth,” read Maria, having retrieved the letter and finding it easier to look at its direction than at him.
“Yes. My parents.”
She held it out to him, murmuring, “I—know so little about your family. That is, apart from what you said that very first morning at the Bolt in Tun.” Her blush deepened.
Had she just told a lie? For of course Mrs. Markham Dere had supplied the baron with a list of questions to ask the New College warden when he met with him.
Dr. Gauntlett’s answers confirmed what Mr. Ellsworth had told them, but still—
He gave an uneasy chuckle. “Heh. I—remember so little of what I might have said—then—but I hope I didn’t invent anything in my delirium.”
In the pause after he spoke another tread was heard below.
“It’s the dinner!” he hissed, taking a step toward the dining room, just as Maria breathed, “Rundell!” and started for the parlor.
The two of them collided, breast to breast, but Benjamin being both taller and heavier, Maria rebounded into the wall, where contact with her head knocked her bonnet from its hook.
Yelping in surprise and pain, Maria felt tears spring to her eyes just in time for the maid to enter.
“Dinner, if you please.”
Without a rattle of crock or cutlery the stocky young woman took in the whole scene: Benjamin dismayed, Maria clutching her head and wincing, the bonnet on the floor.
“Yes. Er—thank you.” Benjamin indicated the dining room (as if Rundell might have forgotten its location) and then, feeling like a humbug, added to Maria, “Are you all right—my dear?”
That elicited a bark of a cough from Rundell as she turned away, and neither Ellsworth could avoid hearing her grumbled “A straw for your ‘my dear’! Whole neighborhood could’ve heard you earlier, wrangling wi’ all your might and main.
And now to be lifting a hand to—!” (Furious tongue clicking.) “Missus won’t like such brawling under her roof, no, not for a moment. ”
Benjamin’s lips parted. “Lifting a hand to—”! “Brawling”? Was she actually accusing him of beating his wife? He was on the point of denying this outrageous charge, but then he thought it would only add “brangling with the serving maid” to the day’s list of sins.