Belgravia Read Free

would only embarrass us both.”
    “We’ll see.”
    “I mean it. It’s bad enough that you encourage Sophia.”
    James frowned. “You don’t believe it, but the boy is sincere. I’m sure of it.”
    Anne shook her head impatiently. “You are nothing of the sort. Lord Bellasis may even think he’s sincere, but he’s out of her reach. He is not his own master, and nothing proper can come of it.”
    There was a rattle in the streets, and she went to investigate. The windows of her bedroom overlooked a wide and busy thoroughfare. Below, some soldiers in scarlet uniforms, the sun bouncing off their gold braid, were marching past. How strange, she thought, with evidence of imminent fighting all around, that we should be discussing a ball.
    “I don’t know as much.” James would not give up his fancies easily.
    Anne turned back toward the room. Her husband had assumed an expression like a cornered four-year-old. “Well, I do. And if she comes to any harm through this nonsense, I will hold you personally responsible.”
    “Very well.”
    “As for blackmailing the poor young man into begging his aunt for invitations, it is all so unspeakably humiliating.”
    James had had enough. “You won’t spoil it. I won’t allow you to.”
    “I don’t need to spoil it. It will spoil itself.”
    That was the end. He stormed off to change for dinner, and she rang the bell for Ellis’s return.
    Anne was unhappy with herself. She did not like to quarrel, and yet there was something about the whole episode she felt undermined by. She liked her life. They were rich now, successful, sought after in the trading community of London, and yet James insisted on wrecking things by always wanting more. She must be pushed into an endless series of rooms where they were not liked or appreciated. She would be forced to make conversation with men and women who secretly—or not so secretly—despised them. And all of this when, if James would only allow it, they could have lived in an atmosphere of comfort and respect. But even as she thought these things, she knew she couldn’t stop her husband. No one could. That was the nature of the man.
    So much has been written about the Duchess of Richmond’s ball over the years that it has assumed the splendor and majesty of the coronation pageant of a mediaeval queen. It has figured in every type of fiction, and each visual representation of the evening has been grander than the one that went before. Henry O’Neil’s painting of 1868 has the ball taking place in a vast and crowded palace, lined with huge marble columns, packed with seemingly hundreds of guests weeping in sorrow and terror and looking more glamorous than a chorus line at Drury Lane. Like so many iconic moments of history, the reality was quite different.
    The Richmonds had arrived in Brussels partly as a cost-cutting exercise, to keep living expenses down by spending a few years abroad, and partly as a show of solidarity with their great friend the Duke of Wellington, who had made his headquarters there. Richmond himself, a former soldier, was to be given the task of organizing the defense of Brussels, should the worst happen and the enemy invade. He accepted. He knew the work would be largely administrative, but it was a job that needed to be done, and it would give him the satisfaction of feeling that he was part of the war effort and not simply an idle onlooker. As he knew well enough, there were plenty of those in the city.
    The palaces of Brussels were in limited supply, and most were already spoken for, and so finally they settled on a house formerly occupied by a fashionable coachbuilder. It was on the rue de la Blanchisserie, literally “the street of the laundry,” causing Wellington to christen the Richmonds’ new home the Wash House, a joke the Duchess enjoyed rather less than her husband. What we would call the coachbuilder’s showroom was a large, barnlike structure to the left of the front door, reached through a