1851: Lavinia deMallard to her sister, Isabella Mallard
Willowmere Cottage, near Clapham
You will scarcely credit the tales now fluttering like startled pigeons through the entire Mallard connexion—from Bombay to Boston, from Madeira to Melbourne—about that infamous Centenary luncheon we so bravely survived last summer. When last I wrote, I told you, in all seriousness, that I estimated the cost of that one-day extravaganza at a cool hundred thousand pounds, which I fancied already a sum to make a Chancellor faint behind his red boxes. It appears that I was a model of moderation. The latest on‑dits declare that the true figure was five times as much—a full half-million lavished on tents, fountains, railways, wines, and the privilege of letting one hundred cousins gorge themselves under stained glass for the space of an afternoon.
And yet—here is the most maddening part—everyone swears the Duke did not, for a single instant, trouble himself about the expense. It was all “put it on the account,” “tell Crake and Pennington to proceed,” “double the order of Champagne,” and “extend the tent by another bay,” as if the whole world were his petty cash box. To hear the gossip, you would think five hundred thousand pounds to him is what five shillings are to us: an inconvenience to count, not a sacrifice to regret. Imagine how wealthy he must be, Isabella! Lands in Sussex, Scotland, Ireland, India, and who knows where else; shares in railways and mines; rents flowing in like the tide; and now, so they say, even a royal annuity and new titles to sweeten his grief over that ridiculous Duck‑Pond office. One begins to suspect that the only thing he cannot afford is a quiet conscience.
But here is the true scandal that has set the family nerves aquiver: all that half‑million, they whisper, is nothing—nothing—to the millions Duchess Alice took with her when she vanished from the stage. You remember how the story went: a tragic fire, a hasty funeral, and the Duke appearing at the Centenary with a “Duchess” who was, in fact, his sister masquerading in lace and emeralds. Now the letters from Bombay, Lisbon, Singapore, and even some dreadful colonial outpost in Rhode Island all repeat the same refrain: Alice did not merely disappear; she departed laden with fortunes—marriage settlements, jewels, securities, perhaps even a finger in the railway schemes. “The Centenary,” writes Cousin Clara from Bombay, “cost him a pebble; Alice carried off the mountain.” How much of this is truth and how much embroidery no one can say, but it delights the world no end to picture even the great Mallards outmanoeuvred in their own drawing room.
You will ask, of course, what the Duke said or did when these rumours began to flap about. Nothing at all, my dear—which is the most suspicious thing. He goes on hunting his ducks, building his little railways, and marrying (or un‑marrying) as suits his inscrutable purposes, while the aunts in the dower houses and the nieces in the colonies cackle like hens in a storm. They repeat, with a relish I confess I share, that he “did not care about the cost” of the Centenary because the sums now at his disposal, after this mysterious rearrangement of conjugal affairs, render such expenditures mere fireworks in a summer sky—brief, brilliant, and utterly without consequence. To be so rich that ruin itself is a form of decoration! It makes my head spin more than the train did.
And now, for the most delicious morsel of all—prepare your smelling salts—I must speak of my little souvenir. Do you recall the necklace I confessed to you, half in shame and half in triumph, that I found strewn in the Saloon as if tossed from an impatient hand? A circlet of crimson stones, glowing like embers in the candlelight, set in filigree gold with clear stones between that I took, very sensibly, to be paste? I told you then I supposed the red stones were garnet or ruby at best, more likely glass, and that my conscience was eased by believing it a trinket, not a treasure. Well, my angel, it appears my conscience must now fidget on a higher perch.
For scarcely a fortnight ago, at a small dinner in town, I found myself seated beside a certain discreet jeweller—recommended, I may say, by a cousin whose husband has run through three fortunes and now lives on the wife’s tiaras. In an idle moment between the fish and the fowl, I mentioned, purely hypothetically you understand, a “family piece” I wished to have valued for insurance. I described the stones as best I could: their shade, their fire, the curious way they caught the light. His eyes narrowed; he asked the most impertinent questions, then declared in a murmur that such characteristics were not those of garnet at all, nor of common ruby, but bore a strong resemblance to what the trade whispers of as a red diamond. A red diamond, Isabella! One of those fabulous rarities of which people say there are but a handful in all Europe, worth—so he hinted delicately—more than the entire contents of many a respectable banking house.
I did not, of course, produce the necklace then and there like a rabbit from a hat; even I have some prudence. But you may imagine how the room swam before my eyes, how the cutlets and custards blurred into nothing as I pictured the thing lying, at that very moment, in my locked workbox at Willowmere, wrapped in a bit of old cambric and sharing space with loose buttons and a length of faded ribbon. I have not yet brought myself to carry it to him, for fear that he will either shout for the police or offer such a sum that I fling myself into ruin by accepting. Still, every time I open that box, the stones burn up at me like guilty coals, and I wonder: did Mallard fling it down in a fit of temper? Did some anonymous hand scatter it from a chest in righteous fury? Or was I simply the luckiest magpie at the Centenary, plucking a gem no one else thought to guard?
So here we are, my love: a half‑million pounds blown on a single day’s theatricals, millions more (so they say) flown away with a vanished Duchess, and your poor Lavinia sitting in a cottage near Clapham with a possible red diamond in her sewing drawer. If this is not the age of wonders, I know not what is. Do not scold me too harshly in your reply; remember that I am but human, and in our family, opportunities do not fall from the skies every day—except, it seems, at the Mallard Centenary.
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