Jane and the Barque of Frailty Read Online Free PDF Page A

a lady; and however much we may deplore the manner of her end, I think I am safe in stating that it was not unfitted to her mode of life.”
    I considered of the Princess, lonely and friendless as I had observed her the previous evening, her throat slit and her body cast upon the streets; and thought her death totally at variance with a life of privilege and indulgence. I apprehended that Fanny wished me to draw a moral from violent death, and being surrounded by her tender daughters, did not chuse to pursue the subject. My companion surprised me, however, by continuing the debate with vigour.
    “Her body has been returned to the house,” Fanny said, “and black crape hung from the doorway. There is a coat of arms—quite foreign—suspended above the door, and the knocker removed. I should have thought that the world would shun the remains of one so wretched as to take her own life, but in point of fact a succession of carriages has been coming and going all day, for the leaving of cards and condolences. I am sure there is no one to read them. She lived quite alone, as one would expect of a woman so lost to propriety as to abandon her husband, and desert all her friends.”
    “Not all, it would seem, from the succession of carriages,” I replied.
    “They say there is a brother,” Fanny confided in a lowered tone. “A prince of some kind, tho’ what that may signify among Russians, who can tell? He is said to be travelling even now from Vienna. The husband does not appear. The obsequies must be suspended until the brother arrives; and indeed, what sort of burial shall she receive? She cannot be a member of the Church of England. And then there is the fact of self-murder. Perhaps they will remove the body to Paris, where I understand she lived until lately … ”
    At that moment, a woman I judged to be a maidservant cut across our path, her chin sunk upon her breast and her expression abstracted. She was so near I might have brushed her arm, had I not pulled up short; and she quite ran into little Charlotte, a stout girl of seven, who cried in pain at the trodding of her foot. The maid never deviated, or lifted her head, or acknowledged our presence in any way—and as I gazed at her in consternation, I saw great tears slip unheeded down her cheeks. She moved as one bent upon an unholy errand, or in the grip of a horror so profound that no human voice might penetrate it.
    “Druschka,” Fanny Tilson said in some irritation as she bent to chafe her daughter’s foot. “The Princess’s maid. Perhaps it is shewho reads the condolences. —If, indeed, she is able to read.”
    The woman had crossed Sloane Street and paused before the door of the apothecary, Mr. Haden. It was time, I thought, to fulfill Eliza’s errand.
    1 A charley, as London’s night watchmen were termed, was supposed to make the rounds of his neighborhood every half hour during a set period of work—usually twelve hours at a stretch—and could rest in his wooden booth when not so employed. In point of fact, however, many such watchmen never bothered to make the rounds but drew their minimal pay for huddling in their boxes and periodically announcing the time and weather. They were frequently bribed by prostitutes and petty thieves to ignore minor acts of crime; they were also subject to being overturned in their booths by drunken young gentlemen. At this time there was no regular police force in London.—Editior’s note.
    2 In June 1809, the Portland Cabinet authorized a military campaign to take the Island of Walcheren, in the Dutch river Scheldt, held by Napoleon. The object was to destroy the arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp and Flushing. Some 40,000 troops and 250 vessels were dispatched in a well-publicized raid, conducted with poor intelligence and worse weather. By August, the Cabinet ordered a withdrawal. The Walcheren campaign has gone down in history as a fiasco.— Editor’s note .
    3 This part of the fashionable West End is now