Free Jane and the Canterbury Tale by Stephanie Barron

was no longer acknowledged by most of his old friends in Kent. There were genial clubmen abiding in Town—rakes, for the most part, or Pinks of the Ton, Slap Up to the Echo, who continued to regard Mr. Fiske as a Knowing One, and the best of good fellows—but respectablemammas, with daughters to push off on the Marriage Mart, shepherded their charges in the opposite direction when Curzon Fiske hove into view. For the pockets of Mr. Fiske were entirely to let, and he was well-known to be hanging out for a rich wife.
    By six-and-thirty, he had been forced to sell his patrimony in Kent—the comfortable manor at Chartham—and send his aging mother and unmarried sisters into lodgings in a dismal quarter of Bath. By seven-and-thirty, he had been refused by no less than nine young ladies of unimpeachable virtue and moderate wealth. At eight-and-thirty, he espied Adelaide Thane moving through the figures of the quadrille at Almack’s on the arm of his old friend, George Moore, whose first wife had lately died—and was lost.
    She was, at the time, but seventeen years old. She betrayed already, however, the regal bearing and dark beauty that would ripen, in time, to the depth of elegance I had admired so completely last evening. Fiske stared at her as she went down the dance, and determined to wrest her attentions from Moore.
    Miss Thane was no heiress. Her father had been a gamester, well-known to Fiske from numerous encounters across the punting tables. She was exactly the sort of woman he ought
not
to pursue, much less marry—and so of course Fiske was compelled to achieve both. In wooing Adelaide Thane, he pitted himself against one of his oldest friends; George Moore was frank in admitting his object was to gain the lady’s hand, and the rivalry added spice to Fiske’s conquest. He set himself to be all that was charming; devoted himself to Miss Thane and her mother—who was wise enough to recognise a wastrel when she met one, having lived her life in a gamester’s pocket—and succeeded in encouraging that wary female to ride tyrant over her daughter, threatening the young lady with incarceration in her bedchamber andbread-and-water for a week, if Adelaide chose to encourage such an ineligible
parti
.
    Naturally, when Fiske was forced to flee London for relief from his creditors, the impressionable Miss Thane was ready to throw her future into his hands, and elope to Paris. The triumph was achieved one windy midnight, with a headlong flight to Dover and a perilous crossing prolonged by foul weather for some twenty hours, the prospective bride prostrate with seasickness for the duration.
    “How long ago was this?” I interjected.
    “The year Six, I believe,” Fanny replied, “for it was
then
that Mr. Moore took Aunt Harriot as his wife.”
    “—Seeking consolation in the arms of propriety and baronet’s blood, having been worsted in the fight for Beauty.”
    “I should not describe Aunt Harriot as
ill-favoured
, exactly,” Fanny said doubtfully, “tho’ it is certain she cannot shine when compared to Adelaide Fiske, and she possesses only a moderate understanding. Dear Mamma was still with us in the year Six—and tho’ I was
not
in request as a bridesmaid, I recollect taking some enjoyment in Aunt Harriot’s wedding. The only peculiar aspect of the ceremony was that the parish clerk at Wrotham, where Aunt was married, held Mr. Moore in such profound dislike that he ensured the funeral hymn was sung instead of the usual Nuptial Psalm.”
    “Dear, dear. But to return to Curzon Fiske, and his harum-scarum bride—”
    “Miss Thane would, as I have said, been seventeen at the time of her elopement to the Continent. I do not know how the couple contrived to live, tho’ it is
rumoured
that Mr. Fiske set up a gaming establishment in one of the lesser towns—Lyons, perhaps, or Liège—I am forever confusing the two—and that his beautiful young wife condescended to
deal faro
at one of the