A Dark and Distant Shore (19 page)

But all Vilia said was, ‘Indeed, no! But don’t you think I might be acquitted of that charge, since my family and that of everyone else in the Highlands has been acquainted for at least a dozen generations?’

Not for a moment did Luke think that Vilia had been comparing the length of her own descent with Charlotte’s, but Charlotte was sensitive on the subject. ‘Hardly,’ she replied, the sweetness turning a little sour. ‘Even the oldest and most respected families include rackety young men with whom a gently bred girl would hesitate to associate. You would be well advised, I believe, to dance only with gentlemen to whom you have been introduced by some older lady who is a little more – how shall I put it? – up to snuff.’

Vilia was looking at her meditatively. ‘Only with gentlemen to whom I have been introduced by an older lady?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘How kind of you to warn me, Mrs Randall.’ Luke glanced at her sharply, but her face was perfectly innocent. ‘Out of common courtesy, I must fulfil my engagement for this next reel. After that, I promise I will follow your advice to the letter.’ She turned her head slightly. ‘I see my partner approaching, so perhaps you will excuse me?’

She curtsied gracefully to Charlotte and inclined her head to Perry, then, flicking open her fan, turned towards the striking figure bearing down on her, middle-sized, handsome, high-nosed, and kilted and plaided to within an inch of his life. It was the best-known of all the Highland chiefs – Alistair Ranaldson Macdonell, laird of Glengarry, chief of the Glengarry Highland games, popularizer of the Glengarry bonnet, colonel of the now-disbanded Glengarry Fencibles, evicter of thousands of the Glengarry population, and avaricious thorn in the side of the Caledonian Canal Commissioners. The man Mungo Telfer described as ‘that tup-heided tartan tooralorum’.

With a grunt that might have meant anything, Glengarry looked down his nose at Charlotte, bobbed his head at Perry, and then, beaming widely, led a demure Vilia off towards the floor.

Charlotte’s face was a bright pink. Luke caught a significant glance from his uncle and tactfully removed himself.

The next time he saw Vilia, she was waltzing with Perry. They danced beautifully together.

The time after that, she was in a quadrille with Perry as her partner.

It wasn’t until the third time he saw them together that the glorious truth dawned. Undoubtedly, Vilia had been introduced to Perry, and by an older lady.

Aunt Charlotte, Luke thought gleefully, must be absolutely furious.

Charlotte Randall wasn’t furious, but frightened. There was a tightness at the base of her throat under the expensive cameo collar her father had given her, and a raw feeling behind her eyes as, helplessly jealous, she watched her husband dancing with the Cameron girl. It was a long time since she had seen his face lit by that peculiarly brilliant smile, the smile she didn’t believe any woman capable of resisting.

Under her no-nonsense manner and discreet lilac gown, Charlotte was still as infatuated with the Honourable Peregrine Francis Egerton Randall as she had been when she first set eyes on him in Edinburgh three years before. He had been so different from George, her late, sedate, and not much lamented first husband. Estimable George Blair, square and sturdy in his homespun shooting jacket and serviceable gaiters, with his double Joe Manton always under one arm, and the air of stolid hauteur he affected when she offended against his fuzzy but hard-held code of ethics. She had never succeeded in penetrating its mysteries, although she still found herself clinging to some of its tenets as if they were gospel.

She had been so anxious to marry a ‘real’ gentleman, and George had been available, and prepared, in a superior way, to overlook her non-existent pedigree in favour of her substantial dowry. Not as substantial as it would have been if Mungo Telfer had formed a higher opinion of him, but George had never known that. He thought himself a sound, sensible, plain man, and she had taken him at his own valuation and worked hard to make herself worthy, though with little reward. When he had deigned to comment on the excellence of her housekeeping, he had made her feel like one of the upper servants, and when he had come to her room, as he did but seldom, he had appeared to derive little more pleasure from the performance of his marital duties than she did. After two or three years she had begun to recognize that she was becoming finicky and censorious, and less and less able to find anything to laugh about. More than once, it had occurred to her that, if she were able to make her choice over again, she would make it differently.

And then, miraculously, the opportunity had come and she had grasped it, blind to reason. Rebelling against a widowhood as dull as her marriage had been, she had lost her heart, like some green girl, to Peregrine Randall, a man with nothing to recommend him but looks and charm, which he had in impossible profusion. He was not only the most attractive man she had ever met, but the most attractive man she could ever have imagined.

He had been perfectly frank about his situation. As the penniless third son of an impoverished earl, he had taken to gaming in the hope of improving his situation, and had failed. ‘Dismally!’ he had said, with the smile that turned her knees to water. He had no idea how he was going to extricate himself from his current predicament. Indeed, he suspected that his case was hopeless.

Utterly bewitched, she felt as if she couldn’t live, couldn’t breathe without having him near. Quaking, trying to convince herself that what she was doing was for his sake more than hers, stumbling awkwardly over her words, she offered him an orthodox business relationship – for him, release from his embarrassments; for her, congenial companionship. The awkwardness of the situation was enough to account for her nervousness, which was fortunate, because she thought – with unusual perception – that it might frighten him away if he knew how she felt about him. Afterwards, in the privacy of her room, she had wept tears of mingled gratitude and fear. For the second time, she had bought a husband, but this time less honestly. Glenbraddan, held in trust for her son Edward, was almost all she had; she would have to use what she had saved from the income of it to pay Perry’s debts, although she had implied to him that fulfilling that essential part of the bargain presented no difficulties at all.

Her father had refused to help her out, although she thought afterwards that perhaps she hadn’t really conveyed to him the depth and completeness of her need for Peregrine Randall. Mungo, censuring in his own children, as he so often did, what he would have tolerated in others, took exception to her remarrying without consulting him. He regretted that there would be no decent interval between decision and deed, no time for second thoughts. He disapproved strongly of the difference in age. And, a careful man himself, he was scandalized by Perry’s gaming. Not one penny, he said forcefully, would he put in the way of a young man whose first instinct would be to squander it on cards and horses. Even when he began to revise his opinion of his new son-in-law, on that point he remained adamant. He was generous enough with gifts, but none that could be unobtrusively translated into cash.

Yet despite the disapproval of her family, the resentment of her children, and the feeling that friends, neighbours and tenants were all smiling quietly behind their hands, for more than a year Charlotte had been truly content. Settling back into her familiar household routine, she hadn’t given much thought to how Perry would pass his days. Vaguely, she had always assumed that English gentlemen, as a breed, were accustomed to shoot, fish, ride to hounds, attend to correspondence, and keep abreast of public affairs, and it was her joy to think that by continuing to shoulder all the responsibilities of the estate, as she had learned to do during her widowhood, she was leaving Perry free to lead just such a life, even if riding to hounds had to be omitted from the schedule because of the unsuitability of the landscape.

The grieve managed the land and the tenants. The head shepherd provided meat and milk, fleece, hides and horn. The gamekeepers kept the table supplied with red deer and roe deer, hare, grouse, pheasant, partridge, trout and salmon, pike and char. Charlotte herself was endlessly busy supervising the drying, smoking, salting, pickling, and candying of substantial quantities of food for the store rooms, the making of jams and wines, the spinning, the carding, and weaving, and candle-making that all went to make Glenbraddan almost self-sufficient. Although night after night she went to bed too exhausted to keep her eyes open, she had learned to be proud of the fact that nothing had to be brought in except some groceries, some wheat flour, and a few ankers of French wine and brandy.

There was no need for Perry to stir himself, no need for him even to take a gun out unless he wished. She had been surprised to discover that, though an excellent shot, he derived no pleasure from killing things, except sometimes predators like foxes, wildcats, and hoodie crows. He had suggested that perhaps he might ride round the estate occasionally and talk to the tenants, and although Charlotte had seen no purpose in it she had been touched, and almost tearfully proud when, suspicious though they were of the ‘Sassenach chentleman’, they had all succumbed to his charm.

To her, as to everyone, he was considerate, kind, and unfailingly cheerful. If he hadn’t bargained for the isolation and careful economy of Glenbraddan, so different from the hospitable country houses he knew in the south, he showed no sign of disappointment and never uttered a word of reproach. And yet, gradually, she had begun to feel he was slipping away from her, though not in any way she could identify. She had said nothing, because there was nothing she knew how to say. Inwardly, she fretted, wondering if the fault were hers, and being the kind of person she was, she had become prickly and defensive, taking his most casual comments as criticisms. More and more, she had become conscious of the differences in their age and background. It had come to the stage when even a ‘Good morning’ had become fraught with hidden dangers. She had been trying, these last months, to curb her tongue, to appear a little less busy and harassed, to play the lady rather than the housewife. But it had been an effort, and it showed.

And now, seeing Perry Randall and Vilia Cameron together at the Northern Meeting ball, she knew it had all been in vain.

It was more than six months before the crisis came, six months during which Charlotte had privately succeeded in transforming Vilia, the mischievous but unwitting symbol of her misery, into its wilful cause.

On a torrential day in April, when the hills were lost in thick banks of cloud and the great grey sheets of rain swept in relentless progression from west to east along the glen, she went into her drawing-room and was surprised to find Perry there, gazing idly out of the window.

Mungo Telfer, when he had first seen Glenbraddan House, hadn’t been much impressed. With a scornful glance at the ‘1614’ chiselled on one of the stones in the chimney stack, he had condemned it as too bland and modern. No romance. No memories of Viking raids. No eldritch screeches from the ghosts of Covenanting warriors. And the fact that Bonnie Prince Charlie had spent a week in hiding among the corries further up the glen didn’t alter Mungo’s view. The ’Forty-five was something he was just old enough to remember for himself, and he knew the troubles it had brought to Scotland, then and after. ‘And forbye,’ he had remarked to his daughter in the manner of one who had studied Nature’s design and found it wanting, ‘there isn’t enough water about. Nothing but a douce wee river, when what these hills need is a proper loch or a bit of sea.’ It had been a very dry autumn that year; the douce wee river Braddan was ordinarily nearer a torrent.

Charlotte knew that her father’s real objection to Glenbraddan was that it was too neat and civilized. The original Glenbraddan House had consisted of a fortified tower and a round peaked turret. Then, some time in the eighteenth century, George Blair’s grandfather had added new buildings to extend it into the customary U-shape. The eighteenth century had been an urbane period for building, and Glenbraddan’s floors were all on the same level, and most of its rooms pleasantly proportioned and gracious in size. Except in the original tower and on the top two floors, all the walls were either panelled or plastered.

Charlotte, despite her father, was proud of Glenbraddan, indoors and out. She had made a charming garden, with an old dovecote, and alcoves in the kitchen garden walls to contain beehives. Glenbraddan’s heather honey was excellent; even Mungo admitted that. Never for long, though. The sight of her drawing-room was always enough to set him off again, complaining in the half-jocular tones he reserved for what he considered her sillier pretensions, that he felt like Gulliver in Lilliput threading his way among the spindly tables covered with fragile knick-knacks. Duck-shaped soup tureens, even if they were made of Chinese porcelain, and teapots painted with pictures of half-naked women, even if they came from Meissen or Vincennes, were not what he admired and certainly not what he would have chosen to display in a drawing-room. Sitting down with exaggerated care, he would add, ‘And these chairs are a sight too dainty. Would you not like me to get you something a bit more comfortable?’ But his eyes would be twinkling, and she would know, irritably, that he was teasing her.

It was a pretty room, which always made her feel like the lady she so much wished she had been born. She wasn’t used to finding her husband in it, however, and now she felt the little catch of breath that always afflicted her when she came on him unexpectedly. Biting back an automatic, ‘What are you doing here!’ which she realized just in time would sound ungracious, she said, ‘
What
a dreadful day. It feels as if spring would never come. If only the wind would move round to the east, we might have drier weather.’

‘Yes.’

She had come in only to collect a list, but she hesitated, and after a moment he turned away from the window and began to trace a path towards the fire, hands behind his back and eyes focused on his booted feet as he placed them, with concentrated deliberation, one before the other. It struck her as an oddly boyish trick, and she watched him indulgently, wondering at the same time what was in his mind. He was wearing a dark green cloth coat with brass buttons, and his breeches were of buff leather and his hessians slightly mud-stained
.
In his cravat, she noticed,
was the pin her father had given
him for his twenty-fifth birthday last month, a coiled
serpent in gold, with opal eyes. Its intrinsic value was negligible, but it was an elegant little thing, and he seemed to have taken a fancy to it.