A Dark and Distant Shore (27 page)

‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I find that spirits don’t agree with me these days.’

Mungo bustled in at last, small, sturdy and wary. ‘Oh, aye,’ he said. ‘You’re back, are you?’ His eyes took in the ill-pressed dark blue coat, the dull, mud-caked boots, and the elegantly tied but far from snowy neck-cloth. Though at least the laddie hadn’t pawned the cravat pin Mungo had given him, which was something.

Braced for he didn’t know what, Perry was completely taken aback by this matter-of-fact reception. He knew precisely what he intended to say to his father-in-law when they settled down to talk seriously – if he were allowed to say anything at all – but the preliminaries were suddenly beyond him. Involuntarily, his hands came away from his sides to display the palms, open and defeated, to Mungo’s gaze. After a moment, he said inadequately, ‘I... Yes, I suppose so.’

Mungo compressed his lips and muttered a non-committal, ‘Aye, mphmmm.’ He could see the laddie had had a bad time, and he was torn between pity and exasperation, and the desire that was afflicting him more and more with the passing years, not to be bothered with other folks’ troubles. He supposed he would have to do his best to sort things out between the boy and Charlotte, and how he was going to manage it he didn’t know, because Charlotte was behaving like the worst kind of hysterical female over the business. It would be too much to hope that they’d succeed in sorting things out for themselves. Then a thought came to him, and he realized with grim amusement that they were going to have to try.

He said, ‘You’re not fit to be seen. I’ll send Jeannie Grant up with something for you to eat, for I jalouse you’ll be hungry. But I’ve no time to talk now. I’ve got a houseful of guests for the shooting, and I must get back to them.’ Deliberately bracing, he went on, ‘You’ll know Charlotte’s here? Well, unless you want to sleep in the byre, you’ll have to share her bed. There’s not another room in the place.’ He couldn’t put a finger on the change in Perry’s expression, but it irritated him. ‘D’ye not want to see your wife after all these months? Aye, well, then. Ye’ll do as you’re bid, and I’ll have a word to say to you in the morning. It’s the Yellow Room on the second floor.’ He turned and walked out.

Charlotte was in full control of herself when she walked into the Yellow Room, without knocking, just before midnight. Her maid didn’t appear, and Charlotte showed no sign of emotion whatever – no excitement, no relief, certainly no pleasure. Her eyes were cold and waiting, and her mouth turned down at the corners. Unconsciously echoing her father, she said, ‘You’re back, then?’ and at once disappeared behind the screen to change into her night attire, as if he had been away for no more than a day or two, on an errand she didn’t approve of.

After the civilized supper that had simultaneously revived and sickened him, he had discovered that the Yellow Room had no dressing-room attached, and that there wasn’t even a truckle bed hidden under the four-poster. There was no retreat, nothing he could say or do without provoking a confrontation for which he was not prepared. He had no choice but to lie down on the side of the high bed she so ostentatiously left for him.

Like a pair of tomb figures they lay, silent and immobile. Then, somewhere in the middle of the night, he drifted out of a half sleep to the knowledge that she was weeping, inside herself but not quite soundlessly. He remained as still as he could, but she soon sensed that he was awake, and it was enough. Clumsily she turned towards him and laid a shaking hand on his chest. His chest; how like her, he thought bleakly, to choose the least responsive, least intimate part of him she could reach. He didn’t move at first, but then the dam broke and words and tears came tumbling out in an unintelligible flood. Her distress was painful, brutal, and only someone who actively hated her could have ignored it. At last, he realized that what she was saying, over and over again, was, ‘I’ve missed you so much, my darling. Hold me,
please
hold me. I’ve missed you so much. Please,
please
!’

And because he felt drained, and guilty, and haplessly sorry for her, and because he didn’t know what else to do, he turned and comforted her.

Chrissie Fraser pressed Perry’s coat and breeches in the morning, and laundered his neck-cloth, while Mungo’s valet removed his boots with deep distaste and returned them cleaned, polished, and newly soled and heeled by the orraman, old George Macleod.

At eleven, Perry went down to confront Mungo in his study. He hesitated for a moment before the wide iron-bound door and waited for his heart to stop thudding. It was like those long-ago days when, as a boy, he had prepared himself to face his father’s wrath over some juvenile misdemeanour. Then he knocked and heard the brisk, homely voice bid him enter. The day, unlike yesterday, was bright and sunny, but it was dim indoors, even though Mungo’s own sanctum was neither slate-floored nor stone-walled, but cheerfully carpeted, and panelled in light pine. To comfort his ageing bones, he said.

From where Perry stood in the doorway, the old man’s face was no more than a mask etched in with shadows. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said without much conviction.

‘Morning, laddie.’ Mungo’s voice held a hint of some expression that might almost have been amusement. ‘Shut the door and sit ye down.’

A disembodied hand waved towards the chair on the far side of the desk, a massive piece of furniture veneered in zebra wood, of which Mungo, though no one else, was inordinately fond. Perry closed the door, and a wisp of breeze fluttered the papers on the desk. The slap of Mungo’s hand on them ricocheted from striped desktop to door, to walls, to window embrasures, and then to ceiling, before it died, suffocated, in the hand-knotted Axminster on the floor.

Mungo grinned, and it was infectious, but by the time Perry had seated himself the grin had gone. There was a brief silence, the suspended silence of indoors in the Highlands. A lapwing shrieked in the distance, and there was a gentle plash of water against the rocks. One of the servants said something, laughing, under the window, and then her voice was abruptly stilled. Everyone, Perry thought, must know that Himself was engaged on bringing his erring son-in-law to book.

‘Aye, well,’ Mungo said, clearing his throat. ‘You’d better tell me about it, hadn’t you?’

It was some time before Perry reached the end of his careful narrative, and afterwards Mungo sat chewing his lip for a while. He’d never believed all Charlotte’s nonsense about Perry and Vilia. Even if they’d been attracted at that dratted ball, they certainly hadn’t met again in the six months or so before Perry had left Glenbraddan for London. It was then the boy had told Charlotte about the Funds, and Mungo didn’t think Perry was a liar, even if, like most folk, he could sometimes be sparing with the truth. No, the sad tale of the Funds, and the gambling, and the forced sale just when a few more hours would have seen everything right, sounded to Mungo like the real thing. He knew a good deal about stocks, and Perry hadn’t put a foot wrong in the telling. There was no reason to doubt him.

Not that lack of doubt was the same as approval. Unhelpfully, Mungo said, ‘And what now?’ He assumed the laddie was going to ask him to settle his debts. There was no other solution. And he supposed he’d have to, otherwise as soon as the news got around that Mr Randall was back in the district that jeely-piece of a sheriff-substitute would be down on them, with his limp, sugary smile and smirking apologies for putting a member of such a distinguished landowner’s family under lock and key. Mungo wondered absently whether the boy had made his peace with Charlotte last night, and felt momentarily guilty at having forced them to face up to things without decent warning. He said again, ‘What now? You want me to settle your debts, I suppose?’ It was a lot of money, he reflected irritably.

Perry’s eyes were on his fingers, steepled before him. ‘That’s for you to decide,’ he said slowly. ‘I have been God’s own fool, and I deserve nothing from you, certainly nothing as generous as that. In fact, I wasn’t going to ask it of you.’

Mungo’s brows drew together. ‘Well,
someone’s
going to have to settle them! You’ve not struck gold in the Cluanie hills, I take it? And you’re not thinking of setting up for life in the Canongate!’

‘No,’ Perry said.

The thick old eyebrows bristled at him thoughtfully. ‘Well, then?’

‘America.’

‘Running away?’

‘There wouldn’t be anything new about that, would there? I’ve run away from responsibility all my life.’

Mungo didn’t contradict him. His lips folded, he said, ‘Are you trying to tell me that, this time, you’re running
to
something?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What, for example?’

‘To having to stand on my own feet.’

Although it wasn’t altogether intentional, there was nothing he could have said that would have pleased Mungo more. He liked his son-in-law, and thought he had been ruined by his upbringing. Maybe there was some gumption in him after all. America might be the making of him, if it wasn’t the final breaking.

Without realizing it, he was staring at Perry with the shrewd, calculating expression that, years ago, had reduced his competitors to blancmange. Perry could almost see the thoughts ticking over in his head. ‘You’d let the debts go hang?’

Perry sighed. ‘They should be paid, of course. Debts of honour, and all that. But I’ve done a lot of thinking in these last weeks, and I can’t see that gambling debts are a matter of great importance. Moral rights and wrongs hardly come into it. The gambler who loses is merely paying for his foolishness, and the one who wins is making profit out of the fact that his luck isn’t as bad as the other man’s. I’d like to pay them, yes. But if I can’t, I can’t, and that’s all there is to it.’

The argument seemed to Mungo a little specious, but he let it go for the moment. ‘Ye’ll not take Charlotte with you?’

‘No.’ Perry’s voice was flat and final. ‘The kind of life led by a penniless immigrant is no life for her.’

‘What’s she to do, then?’

‘She’ll be better off without me, once she becomes used to the idea.’ It wasn’t easy to explain without hurting the old fellow, and Perry phrased his reply with care. ‘You know – as I do – that people have the ability to change themselves, and their outlook on life, only so much, and no more. We’ve both tried, and failed. I should never have asked Charlotte to marry me, especially since I knew that she cared for me more than was wise, however she tried to hide it. The fault was entirely mine, and you can’t possibly blame me more than I blame myself.’

Mungo’s face was unreadable.

Perry went on, ‘She has tried and I have tried. Genuinely. But it can never work. We’re too different. All we ever do is bring each other unhappiness.’ He was talking in fits and starts, as if he were reasoning things out as he went along. ‘I won’t pretend I’m being wholly disinterested. I’m not. My own life matters to me. But if I thought that, by staying, there was any possibility of making Charlotte happy, I would stay. These months of isolation have taught me something about myself, though. I realize now that, if I did stay, I’d lose all the qualities – this may sound foolish, or vain, I don’t know! – that attracted Charlotte to me in the first place. Do you know what I mean?’

Mungo knew very well. The humour, charm, and vitality that were the essence of the man. He pursed his lips again and said nothing.

‘Anyway, that’s how I see it. And there’s something else. If I go now, all the fault will be seen to be mine. Everyone will say good riddance to a bad lot, and Charlotte will be accorded universal sympathy.’ He smiled wryly.

‘Does she have nothing to say in this?’ Mungo’s paternal instincts were not strong, and he was having a struggle to remember whose side he was supposed to be on. He wondered how Chattie would have dealt with the situation, sensible, comfortable, practical Chattie, who had died almost twenty years ago and whom he still thought of – more often than he would have expected – with a sense of loss. They had never been what the books called ‘in love’, which would have been foreign to their natures. But there had always been a kind of conspiratorial relationship between them, as if they were the only two adults in a juvenile world. He’d had the same feeling with Vilia Cameron, which, considering her age, was just ridiculous.

He had missed Perry’s reply. ‘What?’ he said.

‘No, Charlotte has nothing to say to it.’

‘You mean she can argue the pair of you blue in the face, but it won’t make a pennyworth of difference? In other words,
your
mind is made up.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me get something clear. You don’t want me to settle your debts. You won’t stay. You want to go to America. And you’re not even prepared to talk to Charlotte. Then why are we being honoured with your company?’

‘I came to say good-bye. I thought I owed you that much at least. And though I don’t ask you to settle my debts, I would like to beg something from you.’

‘Money?’

‘Money. Not £10,000. Just £10 or perhaps a little more.’

‘Your fare on the emigrant ship to Nova Scotia?’

Perry smiled. ‘What else? If you have any hesitations, I won’t ask it of you. As it happens, I still have a little money of my own.’ The familiar, irresistible grin broke through the strain on his face. ‘I have, to be precise, £6.11s.5d. It may not sound much to Mr Telfer of Kinveil, but to Mr Randall of Nowhere it sounds a good deal. Somehow, perhaps, I can raise the extra few pounds I need.’

‘Havers, laddie!’ Mungo exclaimed, his face scarlet. ‘I’ll let you have what you need, and a wee bit more forbye. There’s one condition, though. Ye’ll stay here as long as the shooting party lasts – another week or so – and see if you and Charlotte can’t patch up your differences after all. If you can, well and good. If you can’t...’ Uncharacteristically, he shrugged. ‘Away ye go, now. You’re respectable enough to meet my guests, and I’ll thank ye to help me with the entertaining of them. I only invited them so as to take Charlotte’s mind off her troubles, which means they’re as much your responsibility as mine!’