Jane Austen Mysteries 08 Jane and His Lordship's Legacy by Stephanie Barron Read Free Book Online Page B

the glory of Mr. Hastings himself: a cultivated mind that has mastered both Urdu and Bengali; a commanding knowledge of the historical, geographic, and commercial truths of the Subcontinent; a subtlety of manner and appreciation for the customs of the region that have won him numerous friends, vital to our interest. Should this bill of Pitt's succeed in wresting the Company's power to the side of Government, it will ensure Mr. Hastings's quitting his post--a loss not only for the East India Company, but for the Crown. I must urge you to transcend the petty divisions of party and class. Far more is at stake than a toss of the dice at Brooks's.
    You will be happy to learn that I have succeeded in winning to my side the Princess of Mysore, who proclaims 44 ~ Stephanie Barron
    herself to have abandoned everything for love of me; or love of my pocketbook, as the case may prove. I anticipate a scented paradise in her tent these next three months as she follows me to Madras.
    Do not die of apoplexy, old fellow, before I glimpse the cliffs of Dover again. My exile shall conclude in another year, at which point I intend to cut up my father's peace most dreadfully--
    I reread this letter twice in some puzzlement. I knew Lord Harold to have been an intimate of the late Whig leader, Charles James Fox; yet never had he mentioned a period of em-ployment with Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal. Indeed, I had not understood the Rogue to have lived in India at all. Mr. Hastings, on the other hand, was re-motely connected with my family, as the putative father of my cousin, Eliza de Feuillide; he was a man whose reputation we had been taught to both revere and suspect. And what was the exile to which Lord Harold referred? Had he fallen out with his father at the tender age of four-and-twenty? I could well believe it possible. A duel--an elopement--a significant loss at cards . . .
    or simply the defection of his interest from the Tory party to the Whigs, might have achieved it.
    Another letter, this time from 1788:
    His Majesty's bilious attacks continue apace, with the novel variation of insanity: this morning he cawed like a crow and defecated in his bed, called the Queen a whore and a poxmonger, while Her Majesty cried out and could not be comforted, tho' her Ladies attempted to restrain her. His madness certainly increases, and the moment for the Prince to seize power is nearly ripe . . .

    Jane and His Lordship's Legacy ~ 45
    And this, from a year earlier:
    Mrs. Fitzherbert is brought to bed of a son, and how we shall prevent a revolution when the truth is out, I know not--
    The henhouse was growing hot. I was aware that a consider-able interval had passed, and that my mother would soon be ris-ing. I surveyed the wealth of packets with dismay. There was too much to be read, too much to digest in an ordered fashion, be-ginning with the earliest dates, to achieve much. I should have to devise a more orderly method--and I must secure a place of safety and solitude in which to work.
    I replaced the correspondence and was about to close the chest's heavy lid, when of a sudden I reached for one of the leather-bound copybooks. Perhaps, in his journal, he might once have made mention of me . . .
    Paris
    8 September 1793
    I walked out into the Rue de Sevigne this morning convinced that I should be seized and thrown into the tumbrel myself as a renegade and an Englishman, and caring little for the outcome. If my head were to fall to the blade, what would it matter, in the end? There are corpses piled beneath the trees of the Luxembourg and the stink is unimaginable. What we require is a cleansing fire--a fire that might rage like a storm about the limestone walls of this city and burn its evils to ash, as the souls of the dead in India are sent up in smoke on the holy river of Benares. This is Liberty, then, that Burke was wont to prattle of: The freedom to exact revenge for the inequities of life; to tear down and trample