A Dark and Distant Shore (26 page)

‘Than in making love,’ he said, and took her in his arms.

‘Not scandalized,’ he resumed, a few breathless minutes later. ‘Only sad that we have to meet in this clandestine fashion.’

‘Clandestine? What a stuffy word!’ She was laughing and defensive, like an over-excited child. ‘Especially when I have been so clever. My darling, there isn’t a soul in the house but us! Apart from Sorley, of course, and the second maid. And I wouldn’t care to guess how
they
will choose to occupy their afternoon!’

Aware that his mouth was open, he closed it again. ‘Dear God, Vilia! I hope you don’t make that kind of remark to anyone but me!’

But his eyes were smiling, and she fluttered her eyelashes at him. ‘Of course not. I am, in general, a very model of respectability. Quite mealy-mouthed, in fact. But what matters, my dearest, is that we can be together and private for hours.
Hours!
The Blackwoods always go to her father’s on Sunday and spend the night there. The first maid and the nurserymaid sleep out, too; I have no idea where, and I don’t ask as long as they’re back by six on Monday morning. And my crowning stroke of genius was to grant Nurse’s dearest wish and allow her to take the babies to visit her sister in Kensington. I’ve told Sorley that I don’t wish to be disturbed before nine, as I have serious things to think about. But I did say that a certain Mr Randall might, just possibly
might,
call in at about that time, and that I might, just possibly
might,
invite him to join me at supper. Was I not born to be a conspirator?’

She raised her hands, and with the most delicate concentration began to remove the pin from his cravat. An elegant thing, she noticed, a coiled gold serpent with opal eyes.

His voice husky, he said, ‘I won’t pass judgement about that. But born to be a witch, and a wanton, and my only love...’

They supped at nine, half-formally, in the dining-room. Sorley, who was acknowledged by Mrs Blackwood to have the lightest hand with an omelette she had ever encountered, stayed only to clear away his chef d’oeuvre and lay out the cold cuts, the salads, and the cheese, and then they were alone again.

They were still at the table when the knocker sounded. It was followed by a low-voiced conversation and then Sorley entered again, bearing the butler’s silver tray and on it, somewhat creased and grimy, a letter. ‘From the major, madam,’ he said. ‘I thought you would be wanting to haff it at once. The messenger would not wait, but I asked him if there wass any news and he said there wass none.’

‘Thank you.’ She weighed the letter in her hand until Sorley had left the room, and then, with a flicker of some expression Perry could not identify, picked up a knife and slid it under the seal.

He sat, gently twirling the stem of his wineglass, and tried not to watch the play of feeling on her face as she read it. It didn’t take very long. Afterwards, she passed it to him. ‘I think you should read this.’

He didn’t want to, but he took it. The handwriting was large, and lacking in character, but very clear. Only the fact that Andrew had crossed his lines so as to keep what he wanted to say within the limits of a single sheet made it difficult, here and there, to decipher.

It had been written in instalments, the first of them from Ghent on June eleventh, exactly a week ago.

‘My dearest wife,’ it began.

After a somewhat tiresome journey, with a very rough crossing to Flanders and an unconscionable time disembarking the baggage and horses, I have made good time here by way of Bruges, a pretty place that I think you would admire, although I found it too irregular and picturesque for my taste. Approaching Ghent, I was strongly reminded of Oxford, which will make you think me very insular! The city itself is full of bustle and confusion, and the narrow and winding streets are crammed with French royalist officers hung about with more orders and medals than one would think had ever been minted, as well as some newly formed Belgian infantry – a skimble-skamble lot who, it must be hoped, will make up in numbers for what they lack in belligerency. I leave almost at once for Ninove. The Duke, it seems, waits only for the Austrians and Russians to arrive on the French frontier before commencing operations.

The second instalment had been written at Brussels on the fifteenth, and Perry’s stomach lurched with apprehension as he read it.

I must be quick. Boney has moved with all his old unexpectedness, and today broke the Prussian line at Charleroi. The news is just in that Blücher is falling back, and the Duke has put all of us in Brussels under arms. I do not know where we will be tomorrow, but I put my trust in God.

He had to turn the sheet sideways to read the third and last instalment. It was headed from Quatre-Bras on the sixteenth, Friday. Two days ago.

Today we were engaged, and held our ground only with the greatest difficulty and heavy losses. My Highlanders were badly mauled, but I, though tired and tattered, sustained scarcely a scratch. The Prussians were worsted again at a place called Ligny. I do not know what the Duke has in mind, but I think we must fall back to match the Prussian withdrawal. There is a place called Mont St-Jean, a kind of ridge where the Brussels road passes through a wood, with a village called Waterloo close by. I must stop now, for there is a messenger going to Brussels, and I hope this letter may be sent on to you. I do not know how long it will take to reach you, but pray for me, my dearest wife. You are always in my thoughts – Your loving husband, A.L.

Perry couldn’t at first bear to look up from the almost illegible scrawl of the last two lines, which had put his own fears into a new and painful perspective. He knew almost nothing about Andrew Lauriston, not even how Vilia felt about him. He and Andrew, he had suddenly realized, must be very nearly the same age, and in a way he envied the other man, who had at least done something with his life.

Vilia’s face was drawn, and he recognized that, whatever she felt for Andrew, he was still her husband, that she had lived with him for two years, and slept with him, and borne him two sons. Just as Charlotte was still his wife. He had no idea at all how he would feel if he heard, suddenly, that Charlotte was in danger. With a raw ache in his heart, he said, ‘It doesn’t sound good.’

‘No.’

‘Do you fear for him?’

She cast him a puzzled, almost angry glance. ‘Of course.’

‘Because you care for him?’

She sighed, and ran one forefinger round the rim of her glass. ‘In a way. Is it possible not to care – even a little – about someone you know so well?’ After a moment, her eyes, green and intent, came up to his. ‘Don’t mistake me. To compare what I feel, or ever felt, for him with what I feel for you – there
is
no comparison. I belong to you. Before you came, I belonged only to myself, never to him. But I still have to say, yes, I care what happens to him. We had a hideous, awful quarrel the night before he left, and the fault was mine, though I blamed him for it, and hated him for it. He said things my pride couldn’t accept. But he was so righteous, so inflexible! He thinks he owns me.’ She grimaced a little. ‘Strange, isn’t it? I said a moment ago that I belonged to you, and I do. But that doesn’t make
you
think you own me, does it?’

He shook his head, wordlessly.

After a moment, she stretched out her hand to him. ‘It doesn’t sound hopeful, does it? But we must win, surely!’

He didn’t know which ‘we’ or which battle she meant. His eyes on the slim fingers, with the narrow wedding band and the single pearl that guarded it, he said slowly, ‘I’d already heard that Blücher had fallen back after Charleroi, although the rumour was said to be unfounded. But it didn’t stop the panic in the City. Sell, sell, sell. Tomorrow, they’ll hear of these affairs at Quatre-Bras and Ligny, and then the fat will be properly in the fire. I don’t know what to think.’ He sighed. Nothing settled, nothing solved, nothing clear except his passion for her. The smile didn’t reach his eyes, when he said again, ‘I don’t know what to think.’

She didn’t hear from him at all next day, but a note was delivered by hand on Tuesday afternoon.

My very dearest – I have gone. I hope you will forget me, but pray that you will not.

When I returned to my lodgings on Sunday evening, I was met with an ultimatum from one of my creditors demanding settlement within twenty-four hours. I went to see him, but he wouldn’t listen and pretended to believe that I had promised to settle more than a week ago. So I have had to sell, after all, to silence him, and have told my man of business to settle with as many others of my creditors as he can.

This means that everything is over. Ashes to ashes... There is, I suppose, a kind of melancholy justice in the fact that the gentleman who chose to press me is a close friend of my disapproving brother-in-law, Magnus Telfer. Malice, revenge? I don’t know. I only know that I deserve it, but that you don’t.

Don’t think too harshly of me, my very dearest. I have to leave within a few minutes. I don’t know where I shall go, or what I shall do, but my heart is in your keeping. I love you always – Perry.

That same evening, there was wild cheering in Piccadilly as the whole of London turned out, singing, dancing, shouting, to escort the arriving postchaise that bore the three captured Eagle standards, symbols of Wellington’s great and glorious victory over Napoleon at a place called Waterloo, on Sunday, June eighteenth.

A few days later, Vilia was officially informed that Major Andrew Lauriston of the 42nd Highland Regiment had died on the afternoon of Sunday, June eighteenth, from wounds sustained during the victorious engagement at Waterloo. And a few weeks after that, she realized, without a shadow of doubt, that she was pregnant again.

It was late, and Perry Randall was tired and hungry as he spurred his borrowed horse along the last wet, winding miles to Kinveil. The many-caped greatcoat over his shoulders, relic of better days, was heavy with rain. It smelt sour, too, for it had been bedding and blanket as well as coat to him during these last months in the gaunt, grimy Edinburgh tenement that had housed – it sometimes seemed to him – almost as many humans as vermin. He hoped he had succeeded in ridding himself of fleas and lice on the journey, but couldn’t be sure, although he had bathed compulsively in every icy river and loch along the way.

They had told him at Glenbraddan, with soft, careful, politeness and no trace of curiosity, that Mistress Randall and the children had gone to spend a few days with Mr Telfer at Kinveil, and his code of honour, battered and bruised though it might be, had forbidden him to make free of his wife’s house without her knowledge. So he had ridden on like an automaton, without pausing for rest or refreshment.

It came as a shock, when he approached the castle causeway, to see the glow of many candles behind the slit windows of the Great Hall, and to hear, over the water, the sound of fiddles and many voices raised in conversation. He hesitated for a moment, and might even have turned back except that there was nowhere else he could go. Nowhere except to Kirsty Macintyre, warm, open-hearted, uncritical Kirsty, with her comforting arms and cheerful ways. He closed his weary mind to the thought of her.

The youngest Fraser boy came running from the stables as he dismounted at the end of the causeway, and Perry said, with an obstinate attempt at normality, ‘It looks as if you’re busy tonight!’

A beam of pleasure came to the lad’s rain-spangled face. ‘Aye, Mr Randall, sir! There iss dozens of people, so there iss. I will neffer haff seen so many!’ He ducked his head a little, and then looked up, slantwise and shyly polite. ‘Welcome back, sir. Wass you wanting me to bed the mare down for the night?’ As Perry hesitated, the boy shifted his gaze self-consciously to the horse, and was surprised into an exclamation. ‘Och! It iss Archie Lamont’s old Knock-kneed Jenny, so it iss!’

Perry laughed for the first time in months. ‘Is that her name? How very appropriate!’ Somehow, the decision had been made. ‘Yes, bed her down, please – Ian, is it?’ Then he turned and set his foot on the shallow stone bridge over the water.

The butler, who was also Ian’s eldest brother, greeted him with stately calm, his large, pallid face showing no trace of any expression other than a trusted servant’s proper pleasure at welcoming back a member of the family who had been absent too long. Neither the heavy eyelids nor the wide nostrils so much as quivered as he accepted the malodorous greatcoat, the sodden beaver, and stained gloves. He said, ‘Himself hass house guests for the shooting, sir, and some other ladies and chentlemen who iss staying only for tonight. Wass you wishing to choin them in the Great Hall? If you wass to prefer, I can inform Himself privately that you are here.’

To the best of Perry’s knowledge, Robert Fraser had never in his life been further south than Fort William, but no London butler could have handled the situation with greater aplomb. He smiled faintly, ‘Thank you, Robert. I’ll wait in the dungeon.’ It seemed apt that Mungo should have chosen to turn the old torture chamber into an anteroom.

Within a few minutes, Robert was back with a tray. ‘Himself will be down as soon as he can manage, sir. May I pour you a dram while you are waiting?’

All his senses craved the comfort of whisky. He couldn’t have survived in Edinburgh without it, cheap, rough, and plentiful. For twelve long weeks he had never been quite sober. It was whisky that had cushioned him against the noise, and the sweating heat, and the smells, and his fellow lodgers – people, rats, fleas and lice. It was whisky that had helped him swallow the endless thin porridge, the oatcakes and palate-scraping cheese, and the pickled herring, too long in brine but cheap now that the new season’s catch was on sale to anyone with the extra pennies to pay for it. Whisky that had helped him to forget all the things he needed to forget if he were to keep his sanity. In a whisky daze, he had arrived at certain conclusions and known what he must do, and had at last left the house in the Canongate during the Sunday truce, with just enough money left to see him home – if ‘home’ was what it was. Somehow the release from prison-sanctuary had given him back enough will-power to make at least one resolution and stick to it.