Eliza let out a genuine gasp. It was well known, of course, that Lady Caroline was a prodigious whip, but it was quite another thing to see it in real life.
“Lady Caroline!” Eliza exclaimed, both in shock and in greeting, as Caroline brought the horses to a prancing stop beside her—her groom jumping down to hold their heads.
“I ordered my phaeton down from Alderley,” Lady Caroline said in explanation, her eyes sparkling. “Hang the expense! Do you like it?”
“It is magnificent,” Eliza said.
“May I take you up for a while?” Lady Caroline said, extending a hand in invitation. “I have just taken Lady Hurley up for a few streets, but I should like to spread their legs properly out of town.”
Eliza hesitated. The high-perch phaeton looked very precarious, the frail body of the carriage hanging directly over the front axle, its bottom a full five feet from the ground. And she was only barely dressed for walking—a sturdy pelisse thrown over her flimsy morning dress in her haste to leave the house. And, further, what would be considered typically eccentric of Lady Caroline in London might well, for Lady Somerset in Bath, be remarked upon as dreadfully unusual.
But . . . With her engagement—her almost engagement—were not the days of watching her behavior so closely behind her?
“I would love to,” she said, feeling reckless, and after bidding her footman return to Camden Place without her, she accepted the groom’s assistance into the carriage.
Eliza had ridden in a high-perch phaeton once before, invited by a gentleman in her first Season—but either her memory had failed her, or that young buck had been a far more sedate driver than Lady Caroline, for this felt like something different entirely. Exhilaration was too small a word for it. The carriage, so unlike its placid cousin, the barouche, offered no protection to its riders at all, and though the day had felt not overly windy while walking, perched above the spokes and driving at what must be ten miles an hour at least, it buffeted directly into her face. By the end of the street, Eliza was breathless. By the time they passed out of Bath and into the fields surrounding the city, she was clutching tightly to her bonnet for fear its ribbon was not strong enough to keep it upon her head and letting out involuntary shouts at every tight turn.
Lady Caroline took them on a wide loop around Bath, and only once they seemed to be on the return journey did she allow the horses to slow sufficiently for proper conversation.
“Oh, I needed this!” Lady Caroline said, shaking her head like one of her horses. “My mind simply does not work without exertion—I have been struggling to write since we arrived.”
“It must be difficult, to write again after such a delay,” Eliza noted, raising her head to the sunshine.
“Oh, there has been no delay,” Lady Caroline said. “I am always writing—it is just publishing that I have avoided these past years. The brouhaha after Kensington was such that I had to retreat from society, for a while.”
“You—retreat?” Eliza said, unable to mask her incredulity. Nothing in Lady Caroline’s deportment—so fearless and glamorous—had given Eliza reason to believe she was bothered by scandal.
Lady Caroline navigated a tricky turn of the junction with an unhurried flick of her wrist.
“You cannot have been in London at the time,” she said. “Our closest friends paid no mind to the outcry, but many hostesses would not receive me. And while it took Caroline Lamb two years to be readmitted to Almack’s after Glenarvon—a far more improprietous text—they were slower to forgive me. But then, standards for Melville and me will always be different than they are for our cousins—as my mother so often warned us.”
“You are related to the Lambs?” Eliza said, though it ought not surprise her, for the aristocracy did have a wretched habit of marrying their own relatives.
“And the Ponsonbys, though more distantly,” Lady Caroline said. “Our family trees are all hopelessly tangled.”
Eliza regarded Lady Caroline out of the corner of her eye.
“The . . . Irish Ponsonbys, too?” she asked tentatively. There had been another article in the newspaper that week about Miss Sarah Ponsonby and her companion Miss Eleanor Butler, dubbed together the “Ladies of Llangollen,” that had made some scandalous intimations.
“If you refer to Miss Sarah Ponsonby, then yes,” Lady Caroline said, seeing through Eliza with ease. “Though I have no gossip for you.”
Eliza flushed pink.
“The sequel to Kensington,” she said in a quick change of subject for she did not want Lady Caroline to think her scurrilous, “you mean to publish it?”
“If I can,” Lady Caroline said.
“And you are not concerned about the consequences?”
“Certainly I am,” Lady Caroline said. “It is why I plan to seek refuge in Paris this summer. Distance should insulate me a little from condemnation.”
“But . . . then why risk it?”
“Because I want to,” Lady Caroline said, as if it were that simple. “It is the work I am proudest of and I’ll be damned if I will be intimidated out of publishing it.”
“You do not think it better to . . . wait,” Eliza said. “Until a more fortuitous time?”
She thought, briefly, of the steadily growing murmurs linking Melville and Lady Paulet.
“I tire of waiting,” Lady Caroline said. “I shall not do it anymore.”
“You are very brave,” Eliza said. “I could not . . .”
“Couldn’t you?” Lady Caroline said. “And what of Melville’s portrait?”
Eliza shook her head.
“It will always remain anonymous,” she said. She was under no qualms that Somerset was likely to find the revelation of her painting Melville’s portrait difficult enough, without it being publicly known. “I did think, however . . . I did wonder . . .”
Eliza looked at the side of Lady Caroline’s face, dithering for a moment, before deciding that while Melville might be blindly supportive, Lady Caroline would surely answer her honestly.
“I did wonder about submitting the portrait to the Summer Exhibition,” she said in a rush. “I saw the work Mr. Berwick is to submit, and I think—well, I do not think mine is all that much worse. But then, why should I do such a thing—even anonymously, it will only invite more inquiry, more spectacle, and for no gain other than vanity.”
“And for what reason do you think Mr. Berwick submits his work?” Lady Caroline asked politely.
“For publicity, I am sure,” Eliza said. “How else will he earn a living?”