His eyelids flickered. “A visit of condolence,” he said. “The heaviest I have ever been called upon to pay. You will have heard, naturally, of the Duchess’s death.”

“The Duchess of Devonshire?”

Lord Harold dropped his gaze to the pair of gloves he clutched tightly in his hands; and it was then that I troubled myself to notice that he was arrayed entirely in black. It had often been a habit of his — a kind of elegance of attire — but on the present occasion was accompanied by a total lack of adornment. He was plunged into the deepest mourning. Was this, then, the source of his trouble?

The passing of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, so recently as March, had been the sensation of the Season. Not only was she the most powerful hostess of the great Whig families, a lady who had presided over a veritable court to rival King George’s, but she had been the most fashionable figure of the past age, almost a queen in her own right. It was Georgiana and her circle at Devonshire House that Richard Brinsley Sheridan burlesqued in A School for Scandal, and it was Georgiana, not Queen Charlotte, whom the public followed in blind adoration. Her blond curls, her sweetness of temper, and her youth — she was a Duchess at seventeen — had recommended her to the multitude; and no gown was adopted, no style or habit worn, that Georgiana did not set. More than this, however, had been her ambition. Her intellect ranged beyond the frivolities of Fashion. Some two decades ago, in the Westminster election of 1784, she had discarded the reserve so usually associated with great ladies of her station and fortune, and had condescended to campaign on behalf of the Whigs’ political light, the Genius of the Rabble, the Monster of Richmond, Charles James Fox. It had been rumoured in broadsheets that the two were lovers; Her Grace had been everywhere reviled, for buying votes on the hustings in return for kisses; but Fox prevailed in his parliamentary contest, and went on to sustain a brilliant career. With the death of the Tory leader, William Pitt, this past January, Fox at last bid fair to win the post of Prime Minister for which he had apprenticed all his life — and he owed his ascendancy in no small part to the Duchess of Devonshire.

When a liver ailment at last would claim her, huge crowds stood vigil with flaming torches before the gates of Devonshire House in London. The Prince of Wales paid a death-bed call. And the newspapers squandered oceans of ink for ensuing weeks, in eulogizing her fame.

I had known, of course, of Georgiana’s death — much as I had known of Marie Antoinette’s, and with as little personal sensibility. Although my brother Henry and his little wife, Eliza, the Comtesse de Feuillide, may have attended her routs at Devonshire House, the Austens were not in general a Whiggish family. My mother regarded the great ducal families, and their determination to control their King, as a select form of heathenry — one that possessed more wealth and influence than any heathen ought. Georgiana was as remote from my world as might be the moon.

But she had not been remote from Lord Harold’s. He was, after all, the son of a duke.

“You were intimately acquainted, sir?”

“From our infancy,” he replied. “I am Devonshire’s junior, of course — he is eight years older than his late wife — but with Georgiana I was always of an age.”

“My deepest sympathy, my lord.”

He shrugged slightly, as though from embarrassment at his own emotion. “The best-natured and best-bred woman in England is gone, Jane. There is nothing more to be said.”

“Hear, hear,” murmured Sir James. I glanced at him, and found an unwonted gravity in his looks. It was to be expected, I suppose, that a baronet and a native of the country would be acquainted with the Cavendish family — he must often have been invited to dine at Chatsworth when the Duke was in residence.

“Do you make a long stay in the neighbourhood?” I enquired.

Lord Harold seemed to rouse himself from a brown study. “Unhappily, not so long as I could wish. Parliament is at present recessed, but when it sits again we shall have much to do, if Fox is to prevail. Napoleon’s victories in Austria have satisfied the Emperor’s appetite, for a time; but more of Europe, and its armies, and its resources, are in thrall to the Monster, and he has never been a man to let fall a weapon when he might rather use it. Worse is yet to come, and we must be prepared to meet the Empire with force on both land and sea. I am come to Chatsworth, Miss Austen, to consult with His Grace the Duke — for no one may move the Whigs as Devonshire, if only he will give himself the trouble.”

I smiled faintly at Lord Harold. “You would do well to guard your tongue, my lord. You speak to a respectable Tory, who must declare with Pitt that the map of Europe had better be rolled up again, for we shall not be wanting it this decade or more. I will not listen to the schemes and stratagems of a Whig! And I rather wonder whether His Grace is in any condition to hear you? Is not the Duke at present prostrate with grief?”

Lord Harold exchanged a look with Sir James, and both men were silent a moment. “His Grace must feel his wife’s passing, to be sure. But his consolation in life has always been the friendship of Lady Elizabeth Foster; and she is presently his guest at Chatsworth.”

“I see,” I said, although I saw nothing but that Lord Harold would dissemble, and that he moved in deeper waters than I had previously understood. A change of conversation appeared advisable. “Pray tell me, my lord, how does your family?”

“Very well, thank you. My nephew Lord Kinsfell is very lately married.”

“I wish him joy! And your delightful niece? Is the Countess of Swithin in health and beauty?”

“Desdemona is blooming,” he replied, with more of lightness than I had yet seen; “indeed, she is increasing. We expect the child to put in its appearance at Christmas.”

“How delightful!” I cried, and marvelled inwardly at the effect of time. I had first made the acquaintance of Lady Desdemona Trowbridge some two years before, in Bath, when she was a girl of eighteen and all unmarried. Now she was a lady of fashion — a formidable hostess in Town — a Countess in her own right, and soon to be a mother. Life for Lady Swithin had only grown more dazzling, while life for Jane Austen had contracted yet further. I had survived the passage of my thirtieth birthday, the loss of my father and a very dear friend; I was soon to give up my abode of three years, and venture forth into the unknown. I possessed even less inclination for marriage, and fewer prospects of achieving that state; I must live upon the princely sum of fifty pounds per annum — the probable cost of one of Lady Desdemona’s gowns — and did I dwell too long upon the impoverishment of my circumstances, I should grow unutterably depressed.

“It was precisely this that drew me to your side today, Miss Austen,” Lord Harold was saying. “My niece is come with me to Chatsworth, to condole with Lady Harriot Cavendish, who is of an age with Mona and a friend from her earliest years. The Countess learned of your presence in Derbyshire only last evening, from Sir James” — this, with a glance for the Justice — “and could not know of it, without desiring to renew the acquaintance. My niece would have waited upon you this morning, indeed, but that Sir James assured us you were to appear as witness at the Inquest; and so it was settled that I should seek you out and bring you back to Chatsworth when all was concluded. Lady Swithin is wild to meet with you again — I say no more than she would herself,” he added with a smile, “for those were her very words.”

Chatsworth! Second only to Blenheim as the most venerable and exalted estate in the land! That I should be invited, the acquaintance of one of its intimates — that I should walk into its grand foyer, not as a member of the touring public, but as a guest desired and welcomed! I might stroll through its extensive grounds, arm-in-arm with a Countess, and admire the fabled fountains and the Spanish oaks scattered about the lawns — I might take tea at a table set out on the grass, or sample fruit from a hothouse tree. I might fancy myself an equal with such a man as Lord Harold, and turn to find his gaze upon me. I, Jane Austen, an intimate of Chatsworth — and of the heathen Whigs it harboured!