A Dark and Distant Shore (21 page)

Discreetly, Vilia held her tongue. For once, Magnus was probably right. And indeed, by the time they reached Windsor they had been reduced to a snail’s pace and Magnus was scarlet in the face. Not all the beauty of the countryside served to divert his mind, though it was rural England at its most perfect. The trees were in full leaf, the elder bushes in scented bloom, and many of the houses were clothed in china roses, clambering twenty feet to the eaves and bursting on the senses in a cascade of blush-pink fragrance. But all that concerned Magnus was whether they would arrive in time, and whether his groom – sent off before dawn with the somewhat antiquated town carriage – had managed to find, and keep, a place beside the rails. It was the greatest relief to discover that the groom had, in fact, succeeded in keeping a place, although backing the town carriage out of it so that the barouche could move in – for Magnus had no intention of allowing himself to be seen either by the plebs or by the royal party, if they should happen to be looking, in anything else – presented several unforeseen problems, notably in the form of other spectators, who showed a reprehensible tendency to edge into the vacant space as soon as the town carriage began to edge out. For the first time that she could remember, Vilia saw Magnus on his mettle, and had to admit that he was impressive.

Even so, he deeply resented having to exert himself, and when it transpired that the royal party consisted only of the Duke of York and a princess or two, he took it as a personal insult. The Regent, it seemed, had returned to London on Tuesday to be on hand for when war broke out again with Napoleon. ‘As if it mattered a penny piece whether he’s here or there,’ Magnus fumed. Although by no means a party man, he had Whiggish tendencies. ‘I should think the last thing they need at the Horse Guards is to have Prinny poking his nose in!’ Lucy’s mild remonstrance – for she had felt a childish
tendre
for the Prince Regent in his salad days – failed to move him.

Not until the luncheon interval after the first race, when he was able to assure himself that the claret had not been too badly shaken up by the journey, did he begin to recover his equanimity, so that the ladies were free to look about them. The crowd was considerable, lines of carriages four or five deep edging the inside of the track for almost a mile. Strung along the outside was a motley assortment of wooden shelters, with the Royal Stand near the winning post and, just across from the Telfer carriage, the much larger betting stand erected some years earlier by an enterprising builder called Slingsby. Everywhere else was a vast concourse of tents and booths, selling all kinds of refreshments or offering the usual fairground entertainment. There were jugglers and ballad singers and glee singers, ladies who danced on stilts, a man who could balance a coach wheel on his chin, thimblerig men who fleeced the yokels by taking bets on which thimble hid the pea, and confidence men of all descriptions.

Vilia revelled in it. The life, the noise, the colour, the sheer stimulus of seeing so many people enjoying themselves, acted on her like a tonic. She felt as if she had been released from prison, for although Andrew had been prepared to attend all kinds of social gatherings when he had been trying to fix his interest with her, she had discovered that, his conquest made, he preferred to stay at home. Despite his apparent ease, it seemed that
ton
parties reminded him of his origins, and made him ceaselessly aware that this was a world to which he did not belong. He wouldn’t have cared for Ascot, either, Vilia thought, for the vulgar and vociferous throng would have reminded him of his origins in a different but no more acceptable way. She, who had learned in her childhood to be equally at home in cottage and castle, found his prickliness hard to sympathize with.

When, for the dozenth time, she felt Lucy’s soft fingers grasp her arm, she wondered with amusement what in the world could still be left to intrigue her. Lucy, protected all her life from contact with the common herd, had been gazing on the scene with saucer-eyed fascination, applying to Magnus or Vilia at frequent intervals to have this or that explained to her. But on this occasion her grip was vice-like, and her face full of suppressed alarm. Meaningfully, she drew Vilia with her as she leaned across to Magnus, who was occupying the seat facing them, and it was patent that she wanted help in diverting his attention from something she was anxious he shouldn’t see. With a strong effort of will, Vilia restrained herself from looking round.

‘Magnus, my dear,’ Lucy said brightly. ‘Vilia and I would so much like to be daring, and place a small wager. What do you think?’

‘Ummm.’

‘I don’t see – do you? – that it could be considered improper, provided the horse was a
respectable
horse, of course!’

Vilia giggled, and Lucy cast her a reproachful glance.

Magnus said, ‘In the Gold Cup, you mean?’

‘Do I? Oh, yes. I would think so, wouldn’t you?’

‘Which horse?’

‘
Which
horse? I’ve no idea! What about – does the royal family have a favourite?’

If she went on like this, Vilia thought, Lucy’s race would be run. Coming to the rescue, she said, ‘The Duke of York has entered Aladdin. He’s a five-year-old, and he should do well over two-and-a-half miles. I am prepared to stake a whole sovereign on him!’

Lucy gazed at her admiringly. ‘Are you, Vilia? Oh, I’m sure you are right. What do you think, Magnus? Is it a nice horse?’

‘Good-looking enough,’ he replied, unerringly diagnosing what his wife meant by ‘nice’. He shrugged. ‘He wasn’t even placed in the Derby in ’13, mind you.’

‘Oh, dear. Is that bad? But it – I mean, he – might be better now. It – he – must have had a lot of practice since then.’

Just in time, Vilia suppressed another giggle.

Magnus said resignedly, ‘Very well. But you won’t make much even if he wins. He’s five-to-two on.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Means if you put five shillings on and he wins, you only get seven shillings back.’

Lucy was undaunted. ‘Then that’s all right, surely? There can’t be anything improper in winning only a
little
money!’

Vilia glanced unobtrusively over her shoulder, but could see nothing to account for Lucy’s lapse into twittering idiocy. Turning back, she began to fish in her reticule. ‘Will you send your groom?’ she asked Magnus.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Then here is my sovereign.’

‘And you will,’ Lucy added anxiously, ‘give Williams a sovereign to wager for me, too? Pray tell him now, my dear. I should so much dislike it if he were not able to – what’s the expression? – lay the bet in time.’

Grumbling, though quite good-naturedly, Magnus descended from the barouche and strolled off to find his groom, while Lucy, hand to heart, subsided weakly into her seat and gasped, ‘My goodness, what a relief!’ She was looking very pink.

‘What in the world was
that
all about?’ Vilia demanded. ‘I am dying of curiosity!’

Lucy’s reply swept the amusement from her fair, elegant face. ‘Peregrine Randall! Charlotte’s husband! I saw him walking up the course with another gentleman. Thank heavens he didn’t see us. My dear, I haven’t had the opportunity to tell you, but he has left Charlotte. Actually left her!’

‘Left her?’

Lucy was too busy fanning herself to notice Vilia’s sudden pallor. ‘He wanted to come to London. Something to do with his gambling, Charlotte says. And she told him that if he gave way to his baser instincts – for he was really a dreadful gamester before they were married, though she thought she had quite cured him! – she would cast him off, and refuse to have him back. But he paid no attention. My dear, he simply walked out the next morning, without so much as a by-your-leave. Well, not walked out precisely, for he had to take a horse, of course. And he did,’ she added fairly, ‘arrange for it to be sent back to Glenbraddan afterwards, so he can’t have been lost to
all
sense of propriety.’

‘When was this?’

‘Oh, several weeks ago. In April, some time. But Charlotte wrote to us only the other day. I have been wondering why she took so long, and strictly between ourselves I believe she may have hoped he would go back to her, and that Magnus would never find out. Then we had another letter from my papa-in-law this morning, saying that he thinks Charlotte may have been in some degree at fault. Magnus is furious. I have never seen him so angry.’ She paused. ‘Pleased, too, in the most lowering way. He has written to Charlotte to say he always knew how it would be, and that she had brought it all on her own head. He was quite severe with her, and of course it is perfectly true that he considered the marriage doomed from the start, and disliked Mr Randall quite amazingly. But I fear that his letter wasn’t such as to endear him to Charlotte. So tiresome to have people remind one that something is quite one’s own fault!’

‘He hasn’t come to call on you, I take it? Mr Randall, I mean.’

‘Gracious, no!’ Lucy sounded faintly regretful. ‘Of course, I
have
only met him once, but I thought him a charming young man. I imagine he must be quite embarrassed, and far too well-bred to embarrass
us
by calling on us.’

‘Yes.’ Vilia’s voice was as drained of colour as her face. Since October the previous year, she had succeeded in banishing Perry Randall from her waking thoughts, but not from her dreams. The laughing grey eyes and long, humorous mouth sprang alive, so often, behind her closed lids, and the tall, limber body brushed against hers as it had done when they danced together on that sweet-sour evening at the Northern Meeting ball. Once or twice she had woken in the dark, to feel her own body melting in a way she had never known before, in a sensation that was half anguish and wholly delight. She had lain waiting, her breathing shallow, her stomach muscles taut and trembling, her legs limp as the stalks in a wilting daisy chain, and her mind adrift on some powerful and mysterious current. But the excitement had died, unfulfilled, because the man sleeping beside her was Andrew Lauriston, the husband to whom she had given her vows and borne two sons.

By the time the second race had been run, she had recovered her countenance. Then it was time for the course to be cleared of the spectators who flocked onto it the minute the horses had passed the post – sometimes before – so that the great event of the day could take place, the race for the ‘Gold Cup of 100 guineas value’ for three-year-olds and over, mares and entire horses only, to start at the Cup Post and race once round the course.

Lucy was ridiculously pleased when the Duke of York’s Aladdin, carrying 124 pounds of purple-clad jockey, reached the winning post nicely ahead of the field. With a cry of delight, she threw her arms round Vilia, exclaiming in a carrying tone, ‘Oh,
Vilia!
Hurrah! How
clever
of you to know that it would win!’

Vilia, smiling faintly, withdrew her gaze from the winning post and, with a shock that drove the breath from her lungs, found herself looking full into the arresting grey eyes of Perry Randall.

Afterwards, she realized that he had probably been pushed off the course with the other promenaders at the beginning of the race, into the space between the carriages and the rails, and that he must have heard Lucy’s voice even through the commotion. But at the time, it seemed like a miracle. Their eyes locked, and she knew then that she had inhabited
his
dreams, too. A wild, glorious happiness flooded through her veins.

Then there came an explosive, ‘Good God!’ from Magnus, and it was too late to do anything but let events take their course. Courteously, Perry fought his way through the press of people who separated them, until he was standing beside the carriage making his bow to an appalled Lucy and her fair, self-possessed companion.

Magnus, as much put out by the fellow’s effrontery in approaching them as by his presence at the races at all, spluttered a forbidding ‘Good day’, and then retreated into thin-lipped silence, but Lucy was made of sterner stuff.

‘How delightful, Mr Randall,’ she said. ‘I hope you are well? Was it not splendid that the Duke’s horse should win? Mrs Lauriston and I... Oh, you
do
know Mrs Lauriston? But of course you do! We were quite daring – it being a royal horse, you understand? – and I believe we will find ourselves richer now. Though I am not sure by how much. We staked only a sovereign, you know. I do hope you backed it – him – too?’

Perry smiled into the soft, anxious brown eyes. ‘Not my kind of odds, Mrs Telfer! I favour nothing less than twenty-to-one against.’

It was hardly the wisest thing to say under the circumstances, but Vilia knew he had spoken without thinking. Lucy’s expression was a study, and Magnus ostentatiously turned his head away and allowed his eyes to survey the course as if he wished to be counted out of this conversation. If Vilia could have thought of something to ease the tension, she might have spoken. But she had lost all power of thought and speech, and knew only an overwhelming need for the man who lit up every corner of her soul.

After a moment, he raised his high-crowned beaver and brushed the dark hair back from his forehead. Then, and it seemed to her almost against his will, he turned towards her. His smile was as engaging as ever, but there were lines of strain at the corners of his eyes, and a new sharpness to the creases that bracketed his mouth. In these last months he had known what it was to be unhappy, and she wondered whether he could sense the rush of tenderness that possessed her as she recognized the signs.

It felt like an eternity, but it was no more than a second or two before he said, ‘I trust Major Lauriston is in health?’

She nodded, her eyes in the sunshine as green and translucent as young leaves against the sky. With an effort, he went on, ‘I thought I might call on him, unless you have any objection? It would help me greatly to know at first hand something of the situation in Belgium. I have some shares which give me concern.’ He faltered a little under the clear, consuming gaze of her eyes – a wood-nymph’s eyes, he thought suddenly – and then rallied again. ‘My military acquaintances seem all to have vanished in the direction of Ghent and points south, but I heard the other day that the major was still in town.’ Her eyes clung to his, draining him of sense and sanity.