Love and Freindship and Other Delusions Read online

  It is difficult to describe the scene in which the officials of His Majesty’s government burst into our previously undisturbed sanctuary to lay their rough and uncouth hands upon Augustus. Sophia and I did what we could, by weeping and wailing and wringing our hands in an agony of exquisitely pained emotion. Still, it was to no avail. They dragged him from our presence, his pitiful pleas for liberty and justice unheeded as he begged for mercy from those who had none.

  At last, spent from our frantic exertions on his behalf, Sophia and I both fainted alternately upon a conveniently placed sofa. Edward, meanwhile, exacerbated his nerves by striding up and down the room in an agitated manner, weeping copiously. He was still employed in this happy exercise when Sophia and I awoke simultaneously from our stupor.

  Sophia started up at once, crying, ‘Gone! Gone! My beloved Augustus is parted from me forever!’

  ‘No.’ Edward stopped his incessant pacing, a look of determination upon his countenance. ‘It cannot be! How can I live without my soul?’

  ‘Well, if I can,’ Sophia answered him somewhat pettishly, ‘I’m sure you can too. He’s my husband, after all—not yours.’

  Ignoring this waspish remark, I looked up at Edward over my tear-stained handkerchief.

  ‘What shall we do, my dearest?’ I asked him, confident that he would know just what was to be done.

  ‘I must go to him,’ he said decisively. ‘I will stand by his side in his prison cell and lament over his misfortunes.’

  ‘A fine ambition,’ Sophia agreed. ‘But what about us?’

  ‘You and Laura must remain here and lament with one another, then determine what is best to be done before they turn you out of this house.’

  He would have left us at once, but I flung myself upon him in a frenzy of sobs and sighs.

  ‘Farewell!’ I cried. ‘Edward, my dearest husband, farewell!’

  He tore himself from my arms with some difficulty, and in a moment was gone from my sight. Left alone with my beloved Sophia, we clung together once more, our excessive grief so overwhelming that there was nothing to do but collapse once more upon the sofa.

  It took several days, but when we had recovered our poise to some extent, we began to consider the matter.

  ‘We must apply to Edward’s Aunt Philippa for aid, Laura,’ Sophia said, with sudden inspiration.

  ‘Impossible, my dear Sophia,’ I replied. ‘Philippa has just married a young fortune-hunter who is even now in the process of squandering her last penny.’

  ‘What of your parents, then?’ she suggested.

  Only then did I recall an event so insignificant that it had quite slipped my mind in all the happiness I had known those past months. I refer to the death of my parents almost as soon as I had left the Vale of Uske with my new husband. It seemed they had been in the midst of celebrating the nuptials of their only daughter when a fatal accident had finished them off. When I related this to my friend, she was all amazement.

  ‘What!’ she exclaimed. ‘Both dead at once? What could account for such a double calamity?’

  ‘Too much sherry, I’m told—combined with a steep staircase.’

  ‘Oh, fatal combination!’

  ‘Well, so much for seeking help from them,’ I said philosophically.

  ‘Now you are an orphan.’ Sophia’s voice grew ever more doleful.

  ‘Yes. And the house we lived in was only rented, and my parents had no money saved. In fact, I am destitute.’

  Sophia’s face brightened, though not in response to my last statement. It seemed she had come up with yet another brilliant idea.

  ‘What of your childhood friend, Isabel?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Would she not be eager to help you in this, your hour of need?’

  ‘I do not doubt that she would. But she is recently married herself—though, sadly, she did not elope—and has moved to a distant part of Ireland.’

  Sophia moaned at this, crying, ‘Then we are indeed doomed.’

  ‘I will not despair,’ I said, rallying. ‘We will follow Edward, and join him and Augustus in Newgate Prison.’

  ‘But he has been gone these three days and more. It is too late.’

  I stood up and stretched out my hands to her as she sat upon the sofa.

  ‘It is never too late, my dear Sophia.’

  ‘To Newgate, then!’ She stood with me and we marched out of the room together.

  Chapter Six

  Edward had ridden off on the horse belonging to Augustus. Therefore, as luck would have it, the coach we had stolen from his father was waiting outside for us. We travelled through the night and by daybreak were in London.

  As our carriage moved slowly through the crowded streets of the great city, we stuck our heads out of the window on each side, bellowing loudly to the pedestrians around us.

  ‘Have you seen my Edward?’ I would shriek.

  ‘Have you seen her Edward?’ Sophia would echo.

  Some of the responses we received were most impertinent, I must admit.

  ‘Forget your Edward, my fine lady,’ a red-faced gentleman responded, adding with a suggestive wink, ‘I’ll introduce you to my little friend: he’ll satisfy you, I’m willin’ to bet!’

  A gaudily dressed young woman, her face well painted, looked up at us in surprise.

  ‘Who the ’ell is Edward?’ she demanded.

  ‘He is my husband,’ I explained eagerly. ‘An angel in human form!’

  ‘I’ve seen my share of Edwards, right enough,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Can’t say as any of them answered to that description, though.’

  ‘She’s barmy, she is,’ the red-faced man interjected, which elicited a box on the ear from the young woman.

  We rolled on for mile upon mile, with much the same result. Sophia slumped ever deeper into her seat, the picture of abject despair. I could not help but be affected by this.

  ‘How can we ever find Edward in this teeming metropolis?’ I asked at last.

  ‘Let me try once more, my dearest friend,’ Sophia said in a pitiful attempt to comfort me.

  ‘Very well.’ I knew my voice held no conviction, but what harm could it do?

  Sophia once again stuck her head out of the window and sung out loudly, ‘Have you seen her Edward?’

  Scarcely had she spoken when a young woman standing directly beside the carriage and wearing a large plumed hat, gazed directly up into her face. The look she cast at my friend was so full of malice that the blood froze in my veins.

  ‘Sophia!’ the woman gasped.

  ‘You!’ Sophia responded, quite as aghast.

  ‘Trollop!’ the woman shouted at her.

  ‘Slut!’ Sophia shouted back, quickly withdrawing once more into the carriage and lowering the blind with a snap.

  ‘Who is that lady, Sophia?’ I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

  ‘Nobody,’ Sophia said too quickly. ‘Driver, move on!’

  The driver obeyed her command, and we were soon out of sight and sound of the mysterious female. I observed, however, that Sophia was still visibly shaken. Under the circumstances, it was impossible, of course, for me to refrain from attempting to extract from my friend some details which might elucidate her extraordinary behaviour.

  ‘What is it, dearest Sophia?’ I asked presently. ‘What has so distressed you?’

  ‘I cannot bear it any longer!’ The words burst from her with a rush like the streaming waters of a breached dyke in Holland. ‘I must confess.’

  ‘Confess!’ I could not hide my own anxiety at these words. ‘What can you confess to me, Sophia? I thought you had revealed to me every secret of your heart, every error of your past.’

  Her gaze went in every direction except the one which would bring it into contact with my own. She caught her lip between her milk-white, perfectly even teeth, displaying all the signs of tremendous guilt.

  ‘Not quite all,’ she whispered at length. ‘There is something I have hitherto kept from you.’

  ‘Oh treachery!’ I
cried, drawing back from her in dismay: she in whom I had placed every confidence, whose heart I thought I knew as intimately as my own—to betray me thus!

  ‘I beg you to forgive me, my Laura. It was, after all, many years ago—three at least—when I was a mere girl of fifteen.’

  As it was clear that she was in a state bordering on a nervous collapse, I relented enough to ask her to continue. She hesitated for a moment, no doubt struggling with the enormity of what she was about to disclose.

  ‘The truth is that Augustus is not. . . .’ She drew a deep breath and stopped altogether.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ I demanded impatiently. ‘Augustus is not what?’

  I fully expected her to say that her husband was not a descendant of Henry VIII and the rightful heir to the throne of England, as he had several times claimed. In this expectation I was mistaken. The answer, when it came, was a thousand times more shocking than I could have ever conceived.

  ‘Augustus is not the first man I have loved,’ she cried. ‘Before him there was another!’

  I flinched, drawing away from her in horror as if she had dealt me a stunning blow. That any woman should not marry her First Love was a betrayal of our deepest beliefs. That there could even be a Second Love, and that it should lead to marriage, was a thing most depraved and disgusting in my eyes. I felt physically ill and could not speak for full five seconds.

  ‘It is wicked, I know,’ Sophia continued, her eyes entreating my understanding, though I scarce knew how to give it. ‘But all the girls were mad for Charles Hargrove: including Pamela.’

  ‘Pamela?’ I asked, still reeling from her revelation.

  ‘The young woman we encountered just now.’

  ‘She was your rival for his affections?’

  Sophia nodded reluctantly in agreement.

  ‘I cannot blame her, I suppose.’ She sighed, as the painful memories of her misspent past returned. ‘Charles was absolute perfection. His face shone like the noonday sun, with a positively godlike beauty.’

  ‘Great God!’ I exclaimed. ‘Tell me more.’

  For the first time Sophia summoned the courage to face me directly before pouring out her heart in a tale which was at once pathetic and salutary. Charles had been the most sought-after bachelor in the country, heir to a large fortune. His parties were the liveliest in the neighbourhood, the guests almost always being carried home dead drunk.

  It seemed that Pamela had been so smitten with Charles Hargrove that she vowed she would stop at nothing to win his affections. She determined to accost him at his home, from which she had been barred by Charles and his family. It was some distance from her own humble dwelling, but she made the journey on foot through the woods in the misty chill of autumn.

  ‘I cannot but applaud her bravery and perseverance,’ I said, moved in spite of myself.

  ‘Yes,’ Sophia replied shortly. ‘She had only to make her way from her father’s pigsty to the horse pond near the Hargrove mansion. But there had been poachers in the woods. . . .’

  Sophia’s voice faded away, the knowledge of what was to come pressed so forcefully upon her mind. Nor could I blame her when she concluded her story.

  Wearing a large bonnet tied with a pretty yellow ribbon and trimmed with the best threepenny lace from the village, Pamela set out from her father’s pigsty, cheeks and eyes aglow in the frosty morn. Briskly and cheerfully she navigated her way through the woods, which grew increasingly gloomy and ominous as she proceeded. Lost in a golden fog of love, however, poor Pamela was oblivious to the danger on every side. Not until the sound of a sharp snap and a piercing scream shattered the dewy stillness did anyone know the tragedy that had befallen her.

  ‘Charles had set traps against the poachers,’ Sophia explained, ‘and Pamela stepped blindly into one of them, completely crushing her ankle.’

  ‘Oh, cruel Charles,’ I cried, ‘to wound the hearts and legs of all the fair!’

  Sophia concurred with my assessment.

  ‘I had hoped,’ she added wistfully, ‘that Pamela would have the decency to perish from her wounds, or perhaps cast herself into the river in a fit of despair.’

  ‘That would have been romantic, would it not?’ I agreed, my imagination conjuring up the most agreeable vision of Pamela’s body floating down the stream, her hair splayed out in the water like a billowing cloak about her bloated corpse.

  ‘One might have written a poem about it,’ I rhapsodized. ‘How she flung herself into the river, without hesitation or shiver!’

  ‘Nothing could have been more romantic,’ Sophia responded, quite of the same mind. ‘But Pamela would have none of it. As you saw today, Peg-leg Pamela lives on.’

  I leaned forward, wild with curiosity now.

  ‘And what of Charles? Clearly he did not marry either of you.’

  Sophia gave a loud sniff and turned away again.

  ‘Charles married Lady Shelvedore.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A woman ten years his senior,’ she said, ‘and with ten times his fortune as well.’

  ‘Is he happy, do you think?’ I could not help but ask.

  ‘He is certainly wealthy,’ she pointed out. ‘For some, that is quite enough, I suppose.’

  ‘He was unworthy of your affections,’ I declared, seeing that she was inclined to become melancholy at so much dismal remembrance.

  ‘True.’ But she did not seem mollified at the thought. ‘And I am much better off with my Augustus. Or at least I was, until he was so cruelly taken from me.’

  With these words, she dissolved into a fit of weeping. I attempted to comfort her as well as I could.

  ‘There, there, Sophia,’ I said, my arm about her shoulders. ‘All will be well when we are in prison. You shall be reunited with your Augustus once more.’

  ‘No, no!’ she cried, more agitated and lachrymose than ever. ‘I cannot bear it. The sight of my beloved in such cruel confinement would be too much for my feelings. The mere thought of it brings on a spasm.’

  I did not like the sound of that, I must admit. Spasms are most unattractive and unromantic, in my opinion. But I was quite unable to conceive of a way to prevent them.

  ‘If we are not to go to Newgate,’ I queried, much perplexed, ‘whither shall we go?’

  As I spoke, there was such an immediate and complete change in Sophia’s countenance that I was more astonished than ever.

  ‘I know!’ she announced, her face radiant and exulting.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I have a relative in Scotland who I am certain would not hesitate to receive me if we sought his aid.’

  ‘But have you only just remembered this?’ I demanded.

  ‘This very minute,’ she said, nodding decisively.

  ‘It seems an odd thing to have forgotten so completely.’

  She looked somewhat annoyed by this remark, answering pettishly, ‘You forgot the death of your parents, after all!’

  ‘I do not see why you should be constantly harping on such a trifle,’ I rejoined.

  ‘Shall I direct the coachman to drive us to Scotland?’ she enquired, ignoring this.

  ‘It is much too far to travel in this coach, without a change of horses,’ I pointed out.

  ‘How shall we get there, then?’

  ‘A hot air balloon might be just the thing!’

  We both paused a moment to imagine ourselves drifting through the clouds and wafting gently down to earth like two angels from Heaven!

  ‘Where can we hire such a conveyance?’ Sophia asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I confessed.

  ‘Then why bring it up?’

  ‘It seemed so thoroughly romantic,’ I answered, which she immediately understood and accepted.

  ‘We have left London now,’ she noted, glancing out of the carriage window.

  ‘At the next town, we will get down and travel Post.’

  ‘An excellent plan.’

  Chapter Seven

  After several days, we a
rrived at a village so small that its name quite escapes my memory. Settling ourselves in the commodious parlour, we prepared to await the arrival of the stage, which would not be there until the following morning. In the meantime, Sophia begged a sheet of paper from the landlord and settled down at a convenient table with a freshly sharpened quill to write a letter to her cousin. I stood over her, making comments and suggestions wherever appropriate, until she had finished what I conceive to have been one of the greatest models of the epistolary art ever recorded on paper.

  ‘A most eloquent account of our desolate and melancholy situation,’ I remarked as she folded and sealed this missive.

  ‘If this does not move his heart, it must be made of marble.’

  ‘If it is, your words will crack it.’

  ‘Let us send it off at once, else we shall arrive in Scotland before it does.’

  While she was speaking, I became aware of a great commotion going on in the courtyard outside: the sound of clattering hooves, coach wheels, barking dogs and braying horses. Moving over to the window, I peered through the dusty pane, craning my neck to see what might be going forward.

  ‘What is it, Laura?’ Sophia asked, coming to join me.

  ‘A coroneted coach has just arrived at the inn.’

  From our vantage point, we could perceive an elderly gentleman descend and make his way gingerly towards the inn door.

  ‘Who can it be?’ Sophia wondered aloud.

  ‘I have never seen him before,’ I confessed, trembling with unexpected excitement, ‘but my heart instinctively murmurs to me that he is my grandfather!’

  ‘You have a heart murmur?’ Sophia was somewhat concerned.

  Before I could answer this, we both turned around just as the gentleman entered the room. White-haired and leaning heavily upon a cane, he appeared to be as old as Methuselah. He must, at the very least, have reached his ninetieth year.

  ‘Make way for Lord St Clair!’ a liveried footman announced grandly.

  To this, however, I paid no heed. Rushing over to him at once, I fell on my knees at his feet and declared, ‘Oh my beloved grandpapa! Pray acknowledge me as your own dear granddaughter who has been parted from you these many years.’

  He looked as if he were likely to fall over in a faint. After inspecting me closely, however, he presently said in a weak, raspy voice, ‘Lord bless me! You are indeed my granddaughter.’