“You! Behindhand! As though anyone could think it,” Lizzy returned, with that pale green gleam in her eye that suggested an inner amusement “I believe that everything at Eastwell is in the first rank of taste — would not you agree, Jane?”
“Entirely,” I murmured. Knowing my opinion of the place all too well, Lizzy was cruelly impertinent; but I endured the test to perfection, and betrayed nothing in my countenance.
“Pray tell me,” Neddie persisted, “what improvements do you presently undertake about that remarkable place? Not that it could be said to require improvement, but I know your artistic spirit too well. It will never rest while the least suggestion of beauty remains at bay.”
Well put, I silently commended my brother. He had got the notion in one. At bay would beauty forever remain, however desperately the Finch-Hattons pursued it.
“The interior of the house is quite nearly complete,” Lady Elizabeth confided, unbending a litde, “but for the trifling matter of some painted Chinese papers that are intended for the drawing-room, and are shockingly delayed en route. And then there is the matter of the dining-parlour's draperies — I could never be sanguine regarding the shade of pomegranate silk; it seemed to me to border on the tawdry.”
“That is often the way with pomegranate,” Neddie remarked, with a compelling command of countenance. “One may meet it anywhere — and not always in the best company.”
“Exactly! I believe I shall change it out for green,” Lady Elizabeth said complacently. “But it must await Mr. Finch-Hatton's present passion, which quite consumes our energies.”
Lizzy's brow furrowed slightly in an effort to discern which, of the numerous Finch-Hatton projects, Lady Elizabeth intended. “The construction of the foyer's free-floating dome?”
“The dome!” Finch-Hatton himself cried out, as if in pain. “No, no, my dear lady — the dome is quite complete, the most marvellous thing you shall ever observe! St. Peter's is nothing to it! Although it might be accused of wanting in frescoes — but I shall attend to that presently, when the necessary Florentines may be shipped with safe-passage.”
“Florentines,” Neddie murmured. “Of course.”
“What I would speak of, my dear Mrs. Austen,” said Lady Elizabeth with her first suggestion of animation, “is Mr. Finch-Hatton's design of the park. It is to be entirely new-laid — approach, prospect, shrubberies, and all!”
“The park?” I could not but be surprised. “But I thought it had been done in your father's time, by Mr. Capability Brown.”
“Not Brown himself,” Finch-Hatton supplied carelessly, “but one of his journeymen. And as for Brown, well—”
“Oh, do not vex me with the name of Brown!” cried Lady Elizabeth. “When I consider how much of the Picturesque that man destroyed, with his sweeps of turf, and his little clumps of trees, and his ha-has built up like a moat about the house, I could weep with vexation!”[30]
Lizzy and I exchanged a speaking look. Neither of us could ignore Lady Elizabeth's recourse to the Picturesque. It had become the chief phrase of Mr. Humphrey Repton's acolytes — those who would dot the landscape with scenes both romantic and wild. Eastwell Park, I surmised, would swiftly be turned into a wilderness, with haunted grottoes and abandoned cottages just ripe for a wandering hermit; a lake would be constructed, with an earth-work island, raised expressly for the purpose of displaying a Gothic ruin — all of it quite modern, of course. How it would all appear, with the Roman fantasy of a house as backdrop, I could hardly imagine.
“And so you aspire to the Picturesque,” Neddie offered, in a dangerous spirit of encouragement.
“How often have I observed to Mr. Austen,” my sister Lizzy said provokingly, “that the little copse on our hill is too insipid for words! — That the walled garden lacked all enchantment! That the path of the Stour might be swelled to something greater — an ornamental pond, perhaps, for the siting of a Chinese pagoda! I even appealed to his desire for coarse-fishing — but to no avail!”
“Perhaps not a pagoda” Mr. Finch-Hatton countered doubtfully, “but a smallish ruin, now—”
“And that avenue,” Lady Elizabeth added sadly. “Bentley, as I believe you call it—”
“Bentigh,” Neddie corrected gently. “It was planted in the first Mr. Knight's time.”
“So I assumed,” she rejoined placidly. “I am sure it is shockingly old-fashioned.”
“I believe the lime trees are over fifty years old,” Neddie agreed. His lips were a trifle too compressed, as though the humourous had given way to the insulting. “Nasty, unnatural sorts of things, limes — don't you agree, Jane?”
“My dear,” cried Lady Elizabeth, “I truly believe that the Austens might benefit from an introduction to Mr. Sothey! Is it not the very thing? Would it not be a service in the calling of Art?”
“Of course,” her husband replied. “You must have Sothey, Austen — he is quite the genius of our little place, as the saying goes, ha! ha! I should not order a spade to be shifted, without I consulted Sothey.”[31]
“He is your chief gardener?” Neddie idly enquired.
” Gardener! Good God, no!” Finch-Hatton cried.
His daughter, the inscrutable Louisa, echoed a shocked and irreverent, “Julian, a gardener? Lord!”
“Mr. Sothey is the second son of the Earl of Matlock,” Lady Elizabeth assured us. “His mother and I were quite the best of friends, before poor Honoria died. I have made it a little cause, you know, to look out for Julian— to further his interest, and so on, where a word or two might help. Particularly since the Earl went all to pieces in that shocking way, a few years ago …”
She left the matter hanging. I had never heard of the Earl of Madock, much less his shocking ruin; but Lizzy nodded shrewdly.
“It is a pity, is it not, that those who most lack success at the tables, are the very ones who game to their ruin?”
“And his heir is just like him!” Lady Elizabeth cried, as hot on the scent as a foxhound. “The Honourable Cecil Sothey has fled to Switzerland these two years or more, and how he lives no one can say!”
“But the younger son takes an interest in … landscape?” I ventured.
“Exactly so! Julian was always of an artistic disposition — a painter in oils, and put to study with the finest masters of Europe, before Buonaparte quite destroyed the Grand Tour, and the Earl's circumstances brought an end to all education. But dear Julian's taste is entirely beyond dispute, is it not, my love?”
Mr. Finch-Hatton had withdrawn his pocket-watch once more, and was studying it intendy.
“Mamma, “Miss Louisa cried in a warning tone, “if you do not leave off chattering, we shall be late for dinner at Eastwell. And then what will Julian say?”
“He is presently a guest at Eastwell Park?” I enquired.
“At last!” Louisa exclaimed. “Julian has been all the summer promising to come, and never setting foot through the door! I declare I was quite distracted with disappointment. But there it is! One lady's misfortune is another's good luck. No one will want Julian at The Larches, I daresay, now that Mrs. Grey—”
“Louisa!” her mother interjected sternly. “It does not do to talk of such things. I am sure Mr. Austen is already sick to death of that odious woman. I quite pity you, Mr. Austen. To be let in for such a tiresome business, and in such heat!”
There was a fractional pause. Then my brother enquired negligently — as tho' merely from politeness — “Mr. Sothey was a guest at The Larches?”
30
Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1715–1783), the supreme interpreter of the natural style in landscape gardening, transformed the English countryside in the eighteenth century. He abolished rigidly geometrical park designs, such as the formal terracing and allees of the French style then predominating, and achieved a free-flowing, bucolic terrain dotted with copses that has come to epitomize the late Georgian landscape.
A ha-ha was an elaborate livestock guard, separating the area of free-ranging parkland from die more formal garden space. It was formed of either a sunken ditch or a raised wall. Maria Bertram, in Austen's
31
It was Alexander Pope (1688–1744) who remarked that nothing could be achieved in landscape design without respect for the “genius of the place” — the governing spirit of a particular landscape. He referred to an idea first stated by Horace, that every place possessed a resident