A Disconcerting Surprise for Sir William and Lady Lawford

A Vignette suggested by a Passage in Bernard Cornwell’s ‘Sharpe’s Storm’ (2025), by “A Lady” Based on Characters created by Bernard Cornwell






November 1813

Mayfair, London, England


Sharpe returned to us from England (1) in the New Year of 1810 inexplicably besotted with Simmerson’s niece! whose image it turned out he had been carrying in a silver locket which, he said, he had retrieved from the body of her brother, Christian Gibbons, on the field of Talavera some six months earlier. The story had been given out that Gibbons had died a hero’s death; however, Sharpe explained to me later that Gibbons had in fact been a caitiff given to vile habits and villainous conduct unbefitting any man, let alone one of His Majesty’s officers, as had also been his toady, Lieutenant John Berry, and that therefore the traditional soldiers’ justice had been meted out to both of them - to Berry during the night under cover of a classic example of a chaotic action in the dark upon the hill called the Medellin, and to Gibbons on the ordered field of battle the following day. This attachment of Richard’s to Miss Gibbons I found entirely baffling save in one respect – she was niece to a Baronet, who, although he occupied only the lowliest rung upon the aristocratic ladder, was, notwithstanding, a symbol of the entrenched ruling hierarchy of entitled power which Sharpe had always hated – a perverse attraction, I considered it (and believe me when I write that I know a great deal about the power of perverse attraction). I can only suppose that it was a form of revenge upon that class, and no wonder, therefore, that she, no doubt aware of his scorn for what she represented to his prejudiced way of thinking, deserted him so early in their marriage for the handsome, charming, morally bankrupt and utterly worthless Lord John Rossendale, younger brother to that Bertram Rossendale, a stolid and dependable sort, and who had served as my groomsman on my wedding-day in the January of the Year ‘6 (I do not think that I should have got through the day without him at my side). Bertram had at some point in the intervening six years unfortunately died: therefore upon his wastrel cadet, the mercurial Johnny, had devolved the title, the lands and the money – the latter two attributes of which he had quickly set about losing through gambling and loose living. This was, I had later supposed, why he had felt a need to set his larcenous hands upon Sharpe’s fortune (2) shortly after he had laid his adulterous eyes upon Sharpe’s wife (then Sharpe’s fiancée); which thing he first did, it was later discovered, the very night of the Prince Regent’s reception at Carlton House when Sharpe’s friends (amongst which I had still dared to include myself, recent events notwithstanding (3)). I had been back in civilian life for eighteen months by then, and we had been celebrating the confounding of the criminal scheme of Simmerson and Lord Fenner: the crimping scandal which had been unfolding on the island known as Foulness – Foulness by name and a fitting location for the commission of deeds of Foulness, one might say! in Essex – whence it had turned out that the men of the Second Battalion of the South Essex had been spirited away when they had gone missing from the barracks at Chelmsford – as if snatched by the Pharisees! (4). Foulness was hardly any distance at all down-river from London and almost within sight of the authorities at Horse Guards! Well, I exaggerate – one cannot see Foulness from London even on a clear day, as it lies around the angle created by the south-eastern corner of Essex at the estuary - a little to the north, where the Thames widens and empties into the German Ocean (5) - but it is not far – and I therefore suspected that the collusion had gone well beyond Simmerson and Fenner and their immediate circle. I recall that Sharpe missed Jane at a point in the evening and it later turned out that John Rossendale (he was an aide-de-camp of the Prince of Wales, hence his presence, and his familiarity with Carlton House) had persuaded her to accompany him to a room which had been lately tricked out as a kind of orangery or conservatory, as the fashionable were beginning to call the greenhouses they were installing in their homes (rooms for plants! inside their very houses! I daresay if Mama had still been alive she would have insisted upon having one grafted onto Cannock Hall like an egregious glass carbuncle in order to impress her neighbours in the countryside around, but I felt sure that Henry would be far too sensible to allow such a peculiar innovation, (6) and in any case he preferred his geological specimens, which required no close fond attention and were impervious to sudden changes in humidity and temperature. Rossendale had merely (Jane had explained later) wished to show her a banema plant, from Guinea, Prinny’s latest botanical acquisition, possession of which the tiresome fool had been boasting at tedious length earlier in the evening (if the reader has ever seen the somewhat obscenely suggestive yellow-skinned fruits that grow upon the banema plant he will no doubt be as sceptical of Rossendale’s motives as I am afraid that I was upon hearing this). I had already had my doubts regarding the suitability of Jane Gibbons as a wife for Sharpe. These were substantial, given her sordid family background. I do not refer to her father’s having been in trade. I cannot fathom why prejudice against trade in the class of society to which I belong persists so, given that it is the source of our nation’s wealth - and do not the great majority of the aristocracy of England have at least some degree of interest in the production of West Indian sugar and tobacco? No, it was not that. Rather, I found objectionable Miss Gibbons’s connexion with the nefandous Sir Henry Simmerson, a feeling which had begun to grow upon me from that hour. However, not wishing to take the shine off Sharpe’s Essex triumph, achieved that very day, I held my tongue – and I maintained my silence, even following a very odd incident which took place in November that year, of which I shall now set down an account.

I was up in London. One day, when there was no business requiring my attention in the Chamber of the Commons, the 9th of November, a Tuesday, I think, I was squiring Jessica upon one of her shopping expeditions in New-Bond-street. We had a fancy to do that from time to time. It was a pleasant, cordial way for us to be together in public, engaged in what at least looked like a conventional activity for a husband and wife, and as I was still capable of holding a few light parcels it made me feel more contented in myself if I could be seen to be making myself at least of some use to Jessica, for whom I did have fond feelings, in spite of all. (I like to think that she enjoyed my company on such occasions, but the dear girl has been dead these nine years now, and I cannot ask her. Robert Ovalton did not mind my usurping from time to time what had become his customary role on these occasions during my absence in the Peninsula, for we had, although somewhat against the odds, successfully maintained our old friendship from our school-days, notwithstanding that he had now been Jessica’s lover for many years.) In any case I quite enjoyed the pastime of looking into the windows of the shops – particularly those of the drapers and the haberdashers and the purveyors of pretty ornaments, which were well-stocked with attractive goods, notwithstanding the twenty years of near-continuous war with France and French-dominated Europe which England had now endured. Naturally I pretended an austere manly indifference to such things, although I do not think that Jessica was taken in by my counterfeit sang froid. Anyway, upon that occasion, she had been wanting to buy a particularly fine muslin frock and a pretty new sash and matching ribbons for our daughter Eloisa, who was now seven years old and sensible enough to know not to tear the gown nor to smear grease upon her finery, to wear at the coming family Christmas celebrations down at Cannock, and we had been proceeding along the pavement, chattering inanely but happily of baubles and furbelows and pleasing trifles, as one tends to do when one is shopping for fripperies with one’s wife, when suddenly Jessica halted, squeezed my elbow to alert me to the fact that was about to make an announcement, as was her habit (she used to say that I could sometimes be maddeningly inattentive, so she always took care to signal to me when she was about to utter), turned to me and said,
“Look, William – is not that Jane Sharpe?” (indicating a lady who was just then stepping back into the street through the door of a jeweller’s establishment on the other side of the thoroughfare).
“Jane Sharpe? My dear, it cannot be – Mrs Sharpe is currently secure in Saint-Jean-de-Luz with the other officers’ wives who travel with Lord Wellington’s army - you may depend upon it! At least, that had been the plan, according to Major Sharpe on the last occasion upon which we spoke, at the end of August.” But -
“Look again, William!” Jessica persisted. I obliged her. Lord! I thought then, Jessica is not mistaken! Jane Sharpe! in London! when she should be in France? And visiting one of London’s premier purveyors of very expensive trinkets? And unescorted? What does this portend?
“That lady is very like, I confess,” I said - cautiously however, already uncomfortably aware of where this conversation might be leading.
“It is Jane, I am certain of it, William!” Jessica exclaimed impatiently. “I recognise the bonnet! I helped her to pick it out – she could not decide between several - and to choose the trim! And that Rifles-green velvet Spencer with the black frogging – she had it made on purpose to compliment Major Sharpe’s new dress uniform, I recollect! It was to be part of her wedding outfit! But what business could she possibly have in the establishment of Messires Wells and Lambe? Major Sharpe is not at all a wealthy man, you told me.”
“As far as I am aware he is not - although there have been rumours, since what happened after the battle at Vitoria in June - “
“It was I who took her with me into that shop in the dying days of August, when she was our guest, after she had quitted her uncle’s protection so precipitately and Major Sharpe had asked her to marry him! It was where I had bought that silver-gilt clasp to keep your sleeve secure, collect. I thought I should show her the place, for she had admired the clasp so, on account of its brilliant-cut rubies which had caught the light of the candles, and scintillated so prettily that night when we sat down to that intimate supper with them, in celebration of their engagement! William, that is Jane Sharpe, or else I am Mary Anne Clarke!” (7)
“Jessica! Hush!” I said to that, scandalized, in case she had been overheard by passers-by.
I had looked again, hoping after all that we had both been mistaken. But with a heavy sensation at my heart I saw that the lady in question was indeed Jane, Mrs Richard Sharpe. Seeing her in profile, that pert nose and the way she had had of carrying her head, as if she were in sooth the Lady Jane, daughter of a peer and not merely the daughter of a saddler, however worthy and decent a man he might have been, made that abundantly plain.
“There is a gentleman with her!” Jessica had said then, almost squealing with excitement and faux-horror, and standing now upon her tip-toes (how women do love to garner grist to fill their burlap-sacks of gossip!). “Do not stare!” (I of course interpreted that to mean, “Look! Look!”, and so I did.) “He is just now effecting egress from the shop! He has turned back at the door – a retainer is speaking with him – papers are exchanging – I daresay the receipt was left behind – now I see him plainly – he is an officer of the Life Guards, if I am not mistook!”
My already-burdened heart sank entirely at this. One often reads in novels of characters who claim that something has occurred which has caused their hearts to sink, but mine really did at that moment - full fathom five, because I knew at once what was coming.
“William, could it be that young man, the one who was at the Prince’s reception that evening in August – which we attended after all the excitement, that very entertaining day in Hyde Park when everyone was at first terrified that Major Sharpe had meant to assassinate the Prince and his entourage, but then the crowd cheered him and his men to the welkin once they had understood his true intent?”
Reluctantly, my soul full of direst foreboding, I glanced across the street a third time and studied the face and figure of the officer, who had now taken Jane Sharpe’s arm in his as they had begun to walk away from the premises of Mr Wells and Mr Lambe. The pair had struck up an intimate conversation, smiling, heads close together. There had been an air of conspiracy about their exchanges, I thought, which boded no good at all.
“It is indeed Captain Rossendale,” I said, now filled with deepest unease. “Jessica, he – “
“Oh, look, Jane has noticed us at last!” Jessica said then, happily. I looked. Jane had certainly noticed us. Her smiles, her laughter, her animated expression, had vanished. She looked, it seemed to me, vastly displeased to see us. Her face had fallen. A frown disfigured her smooth young brow. Her mouth had set into a hard line. The expression which now occupied her fair face had not become her. Something, I knew, must be wrong. As for Rossendale, he had looked at once alarmed, annoyed and, it had seemed to me, suddenly - guilty.
“Let us cross the street and speak with them!” said Jessica, blithely, apparently oblivious to all of this. I did not know why she had failed to see what was so clear to me, manifested as it had been in their altered demeanour, unless it had had to do with how I had grown up, forever vigilant for signs that things had been about to become unpleasant between myself and my brother Charles as his mood had changed suddenly for the worse - for happily Jessica had never known what it was like to have to live every day in brittle fear, at the whim and pleasure of a domestic tyrant who held one’s well-being in the palm of his hand and did not scruple how often he reminded one of that fact.
“Jessica, my dear,” I protested, alarmed myself now - for I really did have a most unsettling feeling about this business - “I do not – “
Jessica, however, never one to have her enthusiasm arbitrarily curtailed, had already half-started into the traffic, meaning to cross the street.
“Jessica, have a care!” I cried, as a curricle, driven at great speed and teetering upon its left wheel until its giddy driver, a young gentleman who looked no older than one-and-twenty (and also, I thought, somewhat the worse for drink), regained control of it, just then appearing from around the corner at the junction of New-Bond-street with Bruton-street, came bowling towards her. I dropped the packages which I had been carrying (thankfully they had not contained anything breakable; the contents had been embroidery silks, I think - ribbons, lace, silk flowers - trim for ladies’ gowns and bonnets, things of that sort, for Jessica had been planning to prepare small Christmas gifts for her mother Lady Hayles and her sister Mrs Slingsby, and Henry’s wife Arabella and their daughters Anne, Charlotte and Catherine (8)), not caring that some lurking rogue might have rushed forward and snatched them up - and made to run after her to pull her from harm’s way, my solitary arm now disencumbered, fingers primed to seize hold of her pelisse and drag her back to the pavement, and to safety - but she was already retreating.
“How odd!” Jessica said, puzzled, stepping back onto the pathway and returning to my side. “Jane has turned away her face! My young friend, so fond of me but three months past, now seems not to wish to acknowledge my existence!”
I too wondered why the wife of army-rank only Major Sharpe did not wish to know Jessica, Lady Lawford, wife of the Honourable Member for Knowlton in the County of Dorset and a junior minister in Lord Liverpool’s administration, and sister-in-law to a Peer of the Realm, who had shewn her such attentive kindness when she had been our guest in my family’s house in Upper-Brook-street in those dying days of summer – apparently penniless, a fugitive from her uncle’s circle (all the while as Simmerson had been breathing out threats and declaring that he would go to law against us for Jane’s kidnap and wrongful imprisonment, and what have you – nothing had come of that, however – he had not dared) and otherwise friendless in London.

Just then I saw Rossendale say something, turn about-face, and hurry Jane away as fast as he could. It was no good. They had gone. I stooped to retrieve the packages before they could be stolen by some rogue, my heart now wretched for Richard.
“They have just this moment turned down Conduit-street,” Jessica said, as I straightened. I watched the pair for a moment or so as they quickened their pace once more before they disappeared entirely from view, vanishing into the crowds of Christmas shoppers. Before they had quite gone I saw Lord John place his hand upon the small of Jane’s back, as if to hasten her; the intimacy of the gesture, exactly like that of a lover, almost made me gasp with incredulity. O God, I thought. Poor Richard!(9)

Perhaps I should have spoken out before Richard married her. Four Grand Passions in one year – Teresa (and Richard’s tragic loss of her) - the Marquesa – and Countess Camoynes only that very month of August, when as it had turned out he had at pretty much the same time been romancing Miss Gibbons (for whom my cynical secret name throughout the period before the wedding, I confess, had been Miss Givings)! I certainly ought to have made further enquiries regarding young Rossendale’s circumstances. However, I did not speak, and neither did I take my disquiet at the idea of Jane and Rossendale any further after this, not wishing to intervene in the affairs of my newly-wedded friend. I kept my counsel and tried hard to persuade myself that there must be an innocent explanation for Jane’s behaviour, which became less difficult once I had heard that she had returned to her husband in France. Fool that I was, I even invented a reassuring story for myself that Jane, inspired by Jessica’s gift to me, had gone to that jeweller’s emporium to choose a belated wedding-present for her husband and had asked Lord John to accompany her to provide a gentleman’s opinion upon what a man like Richard might appreciate as a gift. Disaster, in due course, befell; but one cannot undo what is done, and I do not see that I should bear disproportionate blame for what was to happen the following year.

Notes

1 Sharpe had been in England recruiting for the South Essex. (See Sharpe’s Gold.) Ed.

2 A stolen fortune, it must be said, appropriated in the aftermath of the battle at Vitoria. Army officers, unlike their Naval counterparts, have small hope of prize money, so no reasonable person would have grudged Sharpe his cartouche or haversack of looted gold and diamonds, no matter how much Wellington might have huffed and puffed about the ransacking of the French baggage wagons. In particular, Wellington had wanted to capture the pay-chests, said to contain the equivalent of five million in gold, in order to fund our own war effort.

3 I do not think that I ever quite succeeded in bringing Sharpe to a full understanding of why I had acted in the way in which I did regarding the Simmerson-Fenner affair. He, with his ineradicably simple ideas of right and wrong (which, although befitting the understanding of the common soldier which he had once been, were hardly adequate to inform the processes of thought of one who had been raised to the estate of an officer) had, perhaps quite reasonably, I suppose, to his way of thinking, expected me, his former commanding officer, to take his part; and once upon I time I do believe I should have done so; for in our India days I was certainly the most naïve subaltern who had ever wondered precisely what he was supposed to do with his sword should the enemy come at him shrieking like a demon and with his shining tulwar whirling in his thrawn brown hand above his gorgeously-bejewelled turban, threatening immediate and bitter death! But I was a soldier no longer, naïve or otherwise. In the months since I had left Spain I had by who knows what subtle degrees metamorphosed into what is likely that most ambivalent equivocating self-preserving prestidigitating salamander of a creature known to mankind - a politician. Sharpe had wanted me to help expose Secretary of State at War Lord Fenner’s malfeasance and was astonished and offended when he learned that I was not disposed to oblige him, and that it was my opinion that a more subtle approach should be adopted. However, I knew the affair had to be resolved without a scandal if we were not to risk the fall of Lord Liverpool’s government, which would have been disastrous for those of us who saw the necessity of our continuing to prosecute the war against Bonaparte (the Opposition wished to end our involvement, because they were croaking Whigs and therefore short-sighted isolationist fools), and hence, disastrous for the whole of Europe, and indeed, the world (and if I am honest, it would indeed have been a great and most likely mortal blow to my nascent political career also). I had to work very hard indeed in the aftermath, and also to treat a young person for whom I had recently come to care a great deal rather badly, to restore our friendship to something like it had been before all that had happened. This falling-out had been at least as great as our quarrel at the time of Busacco occasioned by Richard’s insubordination and also by his rudeness to a brother-officer (Cornelius Slingsby, admittedly - the fool had come as close as it had been possible to get to losing my Light Company, and Richard’s anger, scorn and rudeness had been more than justified, but even so I could not let it pass), and that had only finally been healed during the winter of 1810-1811 when Wellington’s Army had been at its leisure in Lisbon, safe behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, and Richard and I had finally found the time and the room in which to make up our differences and regain the trust and the affection which we had formerly held for one another before the vexed matter of Slingsby had come between us. I should confess that it was I who initiated this renewal of intimacy: when it had become clear that Richard had been feeling very keenly the absence of his lover Comandante Teresa Moreno, who had remained in the north of Spain, harassing and murdering Frenchmen and Afrancesados wherever she could find them, I told him that he was more than welcome to spend time with his friends (meaning primarily myself, obviously) instead, although we were but a poor substitute. He took me at my word. That was, at least for me, an idyllic winter.

Perhaps this is an appropriate place to record my thoughts regarding Sir Henry Simmerson’s entanglement in all of this. Simmerson had, from his own resources, raised and equipped the South Essex – a thing which was not unusual in those days, and a mightily expensive business such an undertaking was, too - and he had been its first commanding officer – again, following normal practice; from that command he had been unceremoniously removed at Talavera by myself, on Wellesley’s order, at the very height of the battle - because of his own egregious actions, it is true; but I can only assume that the slight had festered with him, and that he had come to imagine himself due some compensation; hence his involvement with Fenner’s extremely lucrative crimping scheme.

4 Or Farishers. East Anglian term for the Fairies, more specific to Norfolk, but might have occurred in North Essex amongst barge-men who plied up and down the coast between the Thames and the Wash. Ed.

5 The former British name for the North Sea. It was changed at the time of the First World War. (Ed.)

6 Henry was. He did, however, commission the building of a rockery at Cannock. There was nothing unusual in that at that time, of course. The unique feature of Henry’s rockery, however, was that it consisted solely and exclusively of rocks. People who saw it remarked upon the fact that there was not an Alpine plant to be seen anywhere upon it. Following Henry’s death it was eventually dismantled and wheeled away in barrows by a relay of gardeners. For many years its component rocks languished behind the stable block half-hidden in nettles, then when Henry’s great-great-grandson took it into his head to build a tennis-court in 1923 it was used as hard-core. Ed.

7 Mary Anne Clarke was the mistress of Frederick, Duke of York, second son of King George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British Arny. In 1809 there was a great scandal when it was discovered that she had been illegally arranging for the sale of promotions and preferments amongst Army officers. Frederick had to stand down as C-i-C for a while until the affair had blown over. Ed.

8 The daughters of Henry Lawford, Earl of Winchester, were styled Lady. If they had been sons they would have had the honorific ‘The Honourable’ placed before their Christian names, as had William and his brothers when they had been growing up when the then Earl’s heir, the Viscount Petersfield, had been their father. (This is the convention for the children of Earls and Viscounts.) Lawford did not use these in his private memoir however, for it would have been far too formal for a work which he had evidently been composing for his own benefit and perhaps for that of his closer friends and relatives, never imagining that it would be seen by a wider audience. Ed.

9 I later heard that Jane had told Richard a cock-and-bull story to account for her absence when he had returned unexpectedly to St-Jean-de-Luz in November 1813 in the course of his duty and found her gone from the lodgings she had shared with a Mrs Susan Lassiter, wife of a senior officer. Mrs Lassiter had told him that Jane had told her that she was returning to England aboard a ship called the Pelican to attend upon her sick mother. Sharpe of course knew perfectly well that Jane’s mother had been dead for years. It later transpired that a Spanish noblewoman who had become entangled with a French cavalry officer and abandoned by him in France was to be returned to Spain aboard a vessel called the Pelican. Jane had clearly wished it to be supposed that she had been sent to chaperone the noblewoman (a girl, in fact, called Donna Alyssa) which was arrant nonsense, as she was entirely unsuited to such a task; Wellington, recognising this, would far more likely have given the task to a brace of sensible stout grey-haired middle-aged colonel’s wives, and not to a flighty piece like Jane Sharpe who was not five-and-twenty years old and who always, notoriously, had her neck (Lawford means her breasts – a common euphemism then - Ed) exposed beyond the limits of what could be considered decent. She would have been a ship-board disaster. The clear truth of the matter was that Jane had been nowhere near either the Pelican or Donna Alyssa, but had quite obviously skipped home briefly aboard another vessel during her husband’s absence in the field to keep a tryst with Johnny Rossendale, as her appearance in the dining-cabin of the Pucelle flaunting a necklace of fine diamonds, which (Richard later discovered) its presentation case declared to be from the emporium of Wells & Lambe of New-Bond-street, reliably indicated was the truth of the matter. Sharpe told me later that he thought that the lie about the sick mother had been because the Donna Alyssa mission was supposed to have been a secret, so he had excused Jane for that untruth, until another six months had passed and he could no longer go on believing in her fabrications. <

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