A Dark and Distant Shore (35 page)

Mungo sighed. Such a waste! He was past his eightieth birthday now and thought that probably he’d never see Perry Randall again, which was a pity, as he’d a soft spot for the boy. It was a pity, too, that there was no way to write and tell him he had
two
daughters growing up half a world away. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was better for him not to know.

His Majesty was no fool, and it was clear to Vilia that he had a shrewd idea of what that old harridan, Lady Saltoun, was cackling about. Her ladyship, hearing that he had appeared at his Edinburgh levée in the full glory of a kilt, had remarked that, ‘since his stay will be so short, the more we see of him the better.’ She had been repeating this sally to everyone she met ever since – including, a few moments ago, young Mrs Lauriston, who had heard it before. As also, to judge by the look in the royal eye, had HM King George IV.

The king smiled charmingly at Lady Saltoun and then transferred the smile to Vilia. ‘Mistress Lauriston?’ he said. ‘Our lady ironmaster? I find it hard to believe. There are other ladies present whom I could much more readily envisage in that role.’ His eyes didn’t even flicker.

Vilia dropped into a straight-backed curtsy. Not even when she was having to swallow a giggle at this stout and engaging roué would she bend her neck to a member of the House of Hanover, which had usurped the throne of the Stewarts. ‘Your Majesty is too kind,’ she murmured formally.

He drew her a little aside, and his entourage moved tactfully out of earshot. Everyone knew that he was susceptible to a pretty woman, especially a fair-haired one. His voice, however, was more serious than anything else when he said, ‘How charmingly you look! Perhaps I may ask
you
what I have been meaning to ask my friend Scott. Why do more ladies not wear the tartan? You are the only one, and with all the gentlemen so splendidly clad, it seems a pity.’ He smiled again, disarmingly. ‘You mustn’t think that because I choose to wear civilian clothes this evening, I don’t admire the kilt! But a monarch is supposed to be easily seen in the crowd, and what can he do, when all his subjects are so gaily dressed that they quite take the shine out of him, but go to the other extreme? Though I confess to feeling like a crow in an assemblage of peacocks!’

He was really very appealing. Vilia knew that he relied on charm of personality to compensate for his flaws of character, but the charm was real enough. She twinkled at him. ‘You may be sure, Sire, that most of the gentlemen here tonight are wishing they had been sensible enough to follow your example.’

‘No! Do you mean that?’

‘Of course. I imagine they’re all feeling the draught quite dreadfully.’ It was a slightly daring thing to say, but she didn’t think His Majesty would be offended.

He wasn’t. ‘Since the whole of Edinburgh seems to know that I wore flesh-coloured tights under my kilt last week,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘I am hardly in a position to comment, am I? But I thought these people wore the kilt all the time. Has Scott – Walter Scott, you know – been misleading me?’

Vilia couldn’t very well say that this was precisely what Scott had been doing. With the aid of General David Stewart of Garth, Sir Walter had been largely responsible for designing the ceremonial for this 1822 royal visit to Edinburgh. Not a monarch had been near the place for a hundred and fifty years, and no one had the remotest idea what to do when the newly crowned king announced his intention of remedying the situation. The provost and bailies, in a panic, had gone running to Scott, thinking that he – the still ‘anonymous’ author of those highly successful antiquarian romances, the
Waverley
novels – probably knew more than anyone about the intricacies of Scottish history and tradition. They had been right, in a sense. It was just that Scott’s view of the past was rather highly coloured. When the programme for the visit was made public, there was a great deal of muttering among the Lowland gentry. All those bagpipes and kilts and tartans! The douce folk of Edinburgh and Glasgow, with justice on their side, had pointed out that these were things that belonged to the Highlands, which represented a diminishing and increasingly unimportant section of the nation. But almost at once a strange chemical change had taken place, so that even the unemotional Lowland breast had begun to swell in contemplation of the picturesqueness of it all.

Scott’s house on Castle Street was besieged not only by the bailies, but by Highland chiefs as proud of their bloodline as any Bourbon and a good deal readier to defend it. It had fallen to Scott to mediate in the struggle to decide which of them was to have precedence in the royal escort from Leith to the Canongate. With bated breath, Edinburgh’s citizens waited to discover which wild cateran was to march nearest to the king’s majesty. The chiefs had already agreed that their position vis-à-vis His present Majesty should be based on the positions held by their clans at the battle of Bannockburn five hundred years earlier, when a previous Majesty had been well trounced and sent back to England with his tail between his legs. It wasn’t the most tactful yardstick, perhaps, but none of the protagonists cared for that. The trouble was that there was only clan tradition to say which clan had been where on that fateful day in 1314, and the battle came near to being fought all over again in Castle Street as the chiefs tried to establish their own claims to glory. If it hadn’t been for Scott, no one would have wagered a groat on a peaceful settlement.

It was all very entertaining. So were Garth’s manoeuvres with the Celtic Club, a society of young civilians bent on rehabilitating the kilt, which had been banned for half a century after the ’Forty-five and was no longer much worn, even in the Highlands. Edinburgh’s citizens gaped while the general drilled his plaided platoons in magnificent style, and began to think there might be something to be said for ancient splendours.

The net result was that the tartan weavers of Killin and Stirling and Tillicoultry, accustomed to keeping their looms going on orders from the Highland regiments, had been swamped. It scarcely mattered that the tally sticks recording the traditional setts had, in most cases, been destroyed long ago. Tartans the people of Edinburgh wanted, and tartans – however uncanonical – they were determined to have, and by the mile. Even Scott himself, who had to go back to a great-grandmother to justify his right to wear it, began to appear in the blue, green and black of the Campbells.

The king, blinded all the way from Leith to Holyroodhouse, had come to the understandable conclusion that tartans and kilts were the national dress, and no one had disabused him of the idea. He had always had a weakness for the exotic. He had been deeply disappointed, therefore, to find all the ladies as conventionally clad in lace and satin, plumes and pearls, as if he had still been at home in London. Except for the decorative Mrs Lauriston. He wasn’t to know quite how deliberate that was.

Vilia raised her voice above the strathspey. ‘I imagine Sir Walter wanted you to see Scotland at its most colourful. But, you know, the kilt and the plaid are really outdoor garments. You can adjust them in all kinds of ways, depending on whether you want to keep your shoulders warm, or your head dry, or to protect something you’re carrying. Even so, in my own part of the Highlands the men prefer to wear trews for fishing, and there’s no reason why a city merchant should wear the kilt and plaid at all.’

He took her point. ‘Yes, I see. But the tartan is very attractive. Why don’t the ladies wear it? I haven’t seen more than an occasional sash over gowns that might have been made in London, except for your own. Most striking!’

It had certainly struck Lucy Telfer speechless earlier that evening. Lucy had almost forgotten Vilia’s attitude towards fashion.

Long before anyone had known of the royal visit, Magnus had hired a house in Edinburgh for the whole of August. He and Lucy had been living with Mungo at Kinveil for almost two years, but Luke was going up to Oxford, and Lucy – always delighted for an excuse to leave the Highlands – had persuaded her husband and father-in-law that it was necessary, quite essential, in fact, for the boy to be taken somewhere civilized to do some final cramming, see his tailor, and have a last, mild schoolboy fling. She would have preferred London, of course, but one simply couldn’t be seen in town in August, and besides, the St James’s Square house, now rarely used, had been rented for three years to a French diplomat.

‘Truly providential!’ she exclaimed to Vilia. ‘For if Magnus had not been so beforehand with the world – as one must confess he always is – it would have been quite impossible to find a lodging. I don’t believe there can be a garret in the city that isn’t overflowing with people come to see the king. No, don’t sit down, my dear – stand back and let me look at you. How very provoking you are! You are still as slim as you were when you first came to live with us – how many years ago? – eleven, I suppose. While
I
–
well,
plump
is the only word for it!’

‘Fair of flesh,’ Vilia laughed. ‘And there would be no justice in the world if you didn’t pay
some
penalty for your sweet tooth! But it suits you, so why complain? Indeed, you are looking very well, as if the Highland air agrees with you.’

Lucy’s eyes dilated. ‘Highland air? If only there weren’t so much of it!’

‘At least you can’t say it’s dull. Think how boring it would be if the weather just sat around doing nothing all the time.’

‘But I enjoy being dull. Why do you think I visit so many of my friends in the south, if not to get away from all that energetic blowing and raining and shining and sleeting? My only regret is that we always seem to have been away when you’ve had time to snatch a few days at Kinveil. Such bad luck! But, Vilia, do sit down and talk to me while Sibbald finishes my hair, and tell me all the things you haven’t put in your letters.’

Obediently, Vilia sat down on the edge of a chaise longue and embarked on a highly edited version of her recent career at the foundry, perfectly aware that Lucy had asked out of the generosity of her heart rather than from any real desire to know. Lucy would never understand – just as Vilia herself couldn’t – the strange pull the place had come to exert on her, so that at the same time she could hate it and yet still have a fierce sense of pride in its achievements. It had taken her six years of struggle to establish everything on a sound footing, against odds that, at first, had seemed impossible. Young, ignorant, inexperienced, she had found herself managing a business brutally hard hit by the post-war depression that was sending many other businesses to the wall, and the ironworks had staggered from crisis to crisis from 1816 until just last year, when things had begun gradually to improve. That Lauriston’s had managed to survive was due almost entirely to Vilia’s decision to expand the production of beams, plates, and pipes and other simple castings for bridges and heavy machinery. If the foundry had remained wedded to ‘nice iron bars’, it would have gone under, for competition in that market had become cut-throat. But now Lauriston’s had its own small reputation for accurate casting, quality iron, and reliable delivery, and Vilia knew that most of it had been her doing. She was, justifiably, pleased with herself, even if she felt sometimes as if she had been building the Colossus of Rhodes, single-handed.

Lucy, a smile on her face and appreciative exclamations tripping from her tongue as occasion seemed to require, watched the younger woman covertly in the glass. Unbelievably, it was seven years since they had met, seven years since Vilia had left London in the August after Waterloo and Andrew Lauriston’s death. Lucy had thought, then, how strange it was that she should have driven out of their lives looking as pale, exhausted, and black-clad as when she had driven in. The pretty, frivolous interregnum of the Season, and the brief marriage which had given her a touchingly youthful maturity, were almost as if they had never been.

She was very different now, exquisite, self-contained, and at twenty-six approaching the height of her beauty. Yet, watching the play of expression on the fine features, Lucy felt there was something lacking. Suddenly, she remembered the day at Ascot when they had both put some money on the royal horse – whatever its name was – and it had won, and Vilia had been so excited that it was almost as if she had been lit up inside. She was talking vivaciously now, and smiling, and making her management of the foundry sound really quite amusing, but the spontaneous warmth had gone. Lucy sighed to herself. Vilia wasn’t holding her at arm’s length as she had done during those first months at St James’s Square eleven years ago, but Lucy was still reminded of the curious impression she had had then, as if Vilia were some detached observer from another planet.

‘...and so I coaxed contracts out of Tom Cubitt for some of his houses in Bloomsbury, and from James Burton for St Leonard’s-on-Sea – which he is hoping to transfigure – and your father-in-law invested in the moulds, and we have now begun casting area and balcony rails. The canopies, I fear, are beyond us.’

‘How splendid,’ Lucy said. ‘But how on earth do you find time for anything else? What about the boys?’

‘I see them before I leave in the mornings, and they are old enough now to stay up until I come home in the evening. On Sundays, we have all afternoon together.’ Catching Lucy’s expression, she added, ‘They see as much of me as most children do of their parents – a good deal more than I ever saw of my father! Besides, they enjoy Sorley’s company much more than mine. He is very good with them, and takes charge of them a good deal of the time. I assure you, Lucy, they are doing very well!’

‘Are they downstairs? Then they’ll have met the other children by now.’

‘The other children?’

‘Oh, yes! Charlotte’s girls were so anxious to see His Majesty that I could scarcely do other than bring them, especially as the house is so spacious. Even with you and the boys, there’s still room to spare. But thank heavens Edward decided not to come!
Such
a stuffy boy. Charlotte hasn’t been well, and he felt it his duty to stay with her. Very commendable, of course.’ Lucy’s voice was hollow, and Vilia laughed. ‘Though just between ourselves, I should have thought she would feel better for a rest from him. What could I say, though? He
is
nineteen, and one can hardly order him about like a child. So we have Luke – and Henry Phillpotts, of course – and the three girls, and their governess. Dreadful woman! I can’t imagine why Charlotte employs her. Georgiana and Grace suffer her reasonably well, but poor little Shona – such a sensitive child – is quite miserable.’