A Dark and Distant Shore (47 page)

The long siesta of the Venetian day was over and the city waking to life again. But, Luke thought, remembering what Socrates had said of Athens, Venice was
melior meretrix quam uxor,
a better mistress than wife; a fine place for a few weeks, but not for a lifetime.

Light sprang up in the chamber behind him as a servant came in, as always at this hour, to bring refreshments and set a taper to the candles. Luke sighed, and turned back into the room. His charming mistress, black-haired, voluptuous, and drowsy, still lay among the disordered sheets of the vast, velvet-hung four-poster, smiling at him invitingly. But he crossed first to the buffet cupboard and poured out two cool glasses of Turin vermouth. Then, clasping her lax fingers round the stem of one of them with his own curled palm, he sat on the bed beside her and teasingly stroked his free hand down the rich, warm contours of her body. Involuntarily, her muscles tightened, but he laughed and stood up. Then, raising his glass, he said with a smile she couldn’t quite interpret, ‘To us. But you will have to find someone else now.’

This was a lover she would be sorry to lose, attractive, amusing, and – for an Englishman – surprisingly expert. She was a little, a very little, in love with him. With sultry, carefully calculated mischief, she stretched out a hand and turned back the skirt of his barbaric silk dressing-gown. Her brows raised in mock disbelief, she murmured, ‘Can it be that I bore you?’

He chuckled. But as he set down his glass preparatory to proving that she didn’t bore him in the least, he said, ‘Never that. It is just that it’s time for me to go home.’

It was several moments before the people round the fire became aware of Luke’s presence. Once, it would have made him nervous to know that, as soon as he stepped forward, a dozen pairs of eyes would swivel his way, but such things no longer troubled him. Instead, he took his time and looked the company over.

Blindfold, he would have known that he was back at Glenbraddan. All houses had their own particular smell, and Glenbraddan’s was compounded of beeswax and peat smoke, good housewifery, and the special sweet-scented candles his aunt made from the bog myrtle that flourished on the moors. Here, in the Painted Chamber, there was an extra tang of woodsmoke. Only logs were burned, to preserve the tempera ceiling that gave the room its name; tucked in between the beams were long, thin panels depicting long, thin prophets and patriarchs, with their attributes. Luke, as a child, had always been deeply worried about Moses, who was illustrated with the burning bush under his feet and several very substantial-looking tablets of the law just above his head, and seemed in perpetual danger of being either toasted or concussed, or both.

The room was cool. Gathered round the hearth at the far end of it were eleven people including Henry Phillpotts, who could change his clothes faster than anyone else of Luke’s acquaintance. Aunt Charlotte was closer to the fire at one side, shockingly thin and haggard, and still in a warm, high-necked day dress, with Luke’s mother beside her, wearing the soft wide-eyed smile that told her son she was putting up bravely with discomforts to which she was not accustomed. Then there was an unfamiliar, nondescript young woman,
plein comme un oeuf
–
clearly Edward’s wife, Harriet – and then young Grace, two years older and two years more earnest than when Luke had seen her last. Directly in front of the fire, though further from it than at least one of the group would have wished, were Edward, who was pontificating about something; Henry, who looked to be asleep; and Magnus Telfer, who was making no attempt to hide his boredom or disguise the fact that he thought it high time someone put a glass in his hand.

But it was the group on the other side of the fire who held Luke’s gaze. Their attention was concentrated on a young man whose waving chestnut hair and extravagantly Gallic gestures proclaimed him to be Emile Savarin, tomorrow’s bridegroom. Standing at his side was another stranger, a slender, dark young man of about twenty, moderately good-looking, with a high forehead, thin-boned nose, and meditative expression. Georgiana was seated, gazing up at them with a smile that only just fell short of roguish in her deceptively candid dark eyes. Her natural curls had been tortured into a style that was unmistakably the latest fashion, puffed out on the temples and raised on the crown into an Apollo knot of three plaited loops, perched like basket handles on an arrangement that reminded Luke irresistibly of a cottage loaf. Her gown was of celestial blue, with outrageously wide sleeves and a bodice tapering from a shoulder line that wouldn’t have disgraced a strong man in a circus down to a waist that measured scarcely a handspan. She was
à la modality
personified.

Luke had to make a deliberate effort to turn his eyes towards the last person in the group, who had already seen him and was watching him with eyebrows slightly raised.

Vilia’s attention had been wandering, and she had caught the movement at the far end of the room as he entered. But it would have been discourteous to interrupt M. Savarin’s display of histrionics, so she waited until he was diverted by a self-conscious witticism from Georgy before she allowed herself to turn. Even from forty feet, she could see that there had been a radical change in Luke Telfer. Somewhere along the highways of Europe he had shed the languor and suppressed nervousness that had always irritated her and replaced them with an air of assurance and controlled vigour. The change showed in his straight shoulders, the poise of his head, and the relaxed and peaceful way his hands hung at his sides. She watched his sleepy brown eyes survey the company and noticed his amusement at Magnus’s patent discontent, and the swiftly suppressed laughter when the full glory of Georgiana’s toilette burst upon him. Then, at last, his gaze met hers and lingered for an arrested moment before he smiled, firmly and vividly, and stepped forward.

She smiled back at him, with the enigmatic smile he had recognized more than once among the sculptures of Mozac and Chartres, and then turned to touch Georgiana lightly on the arm and say, ‘Your cousin is here.’

And then it all deteriorated into an ordinary family occasion, and Luke had to make his bows, and apologize to everyone for being three days late because the carriage spring had broken at Fochabers, and be introduced to tomorrow’s bridegroom. Aunt Charlotte had opened up the formal dining-room for the occasion, a place designed in more spacious times to accommodate some fifty persons without crowding, so that at dinner a good three yards of table separated each cover from the next, which imposed its own strains on the conversation. Aunt Charlotte herself didn’t help. She nagged at Georgiana, made it clear that she thought Luke had been permitted far too much licence on his travels – causing Luke to wonder what she would have said if she had been vouchsafed the full, unexpurgated version – and directed barbed comment after barbed comment at an infinitely patient Vilia. As far as Luke could judge, the only time she drew blood was when she said, ‘I imagine, Mistress Lauriston, that it will not be long before
your
eldest son will be setting off on his Grand Tour?’

Before Vilia could speak, Magnus surged to her rescue. ‘Nonsense, Charlotte! The boy’s no more than a child. Hasn’t even left school yet!’

But Vilia, her eyes suddenly dancing, said, ‘Oh, but he has! He is just preparing to go to university!’ And then, neatly putting Charlotte in her place, turned to Savarin and said, ‘Though I should, perhaps, tell you that in Scotland fourteen is the age for going to university, not seventeen or eighteen, as in England.’

Luke wasn’t impressed by Savarin, who seemed to his jaundiced eye to be playing the caricature Parisian, and was also paying a damned sight too much attention to Vilia, on whom he blandly relied for translations of all the words he didn’t know in French or English. At one point, the fellow remarked, ‘How should I have understood all this so enlightening conversation without you, madame? How comes it that you are so fluent in my language, if I may ask?’

Vilia looked very slightly nettled, as if he had cast a slur on her education and upbringing. ‘My father lived in Paris for most of his early life,’ she said, ‘and spoke to me as often in French as he did in English. As a child, I learned the two languages almost simultaneously.’

Luke had forgotten what a cosmopolitan gentleman Theophilus Cameron had been, and suddenly realized how much it helped to explain about Vilia.

All the way home, by Milan and Geneva and Liège and Rotterdam, he had been haunted by uncertainties. It was almost three years now since he had ridden away from Marchfield House in a haze of resentment, a resentment that had persisted during the misanthropic months at Kinveil that had finally driven his parents to send him off on the Grand Tour, not for the sake of his education, but to give themselves a rest from him. When the excitement of travel had at last begun to shake him out of the sullens, he had been surprised – for he knew he was inclined to harbour grudges – to find that he was forgetting his resentment, but not forgetting Vilia. He had tried. In the climate of European society, it was easy enough for a good-looking young man with plenty of money to find charming and complaisant ladies to divert him. And not professional ladybirds of the kind Luke had known before, but fashionable, experienced young widows and pretty, neglected wives. They had taught him a great deal, and he had enjoyed his lessons prodigiously, but just the promise of seeing Vilia again had been enough to make him cut short a delightful liaison in Venice and set out on the journey home. At Milan, he had dreamed of the glow that would light her eyes when she saw him and knew how much she had missed him. At Geneva, he visualized himself taking her hand masterfully in his and telling her how he felt, and had always felt, about her. But by Liège he was remembering that she had never so much as set foot across the Channel in her whole life. By Rotterdam, he had begun to suspect that when he saw her again he would find her no more than a pretty, provincial woman who couldn’t hold a candle to the glorious creatures he had enjoyed in the most civilized cities in Europe. And by Aberdeen he had succeeded in convincing himself that, in another few days, he would be cured of her for ever.

And he had been quite, quite wrong. He had forgotten what an air she had. Forgotten the length and thickness of her eye-lashes and the way her hair shone like raw silk. Forgotten how exotic her colouring. Forgotten her agile mind. Forgotten, above all, that strangely positive quality that had nothing to do with beauty.

After their first exchange of glances, he had dragged his wandering wits together and recognized that he must prove to her, and at once, that he had at last achieved maturity. Slowly, over the last three years, it had been borne in on him that he must have seemed very gauche to her during his Oxford days, always on edge, always deferring, too preoccupied with the image he was presenting to her to be able to behave naturally. Never in either of their lives, or so he had thought one despondent evening in Maastricht, had she seen him at his best. Now he was a grown man, urbane, amusing, more than capable – or so he had been assured – of holding his own in any company, and it was necessary to let her know it.

The problem was how to go about it. For what remained of that evening, and throughout the next day, Luke was so preoccupied with showing himself in his best light that he noticed very little of what was said, or what was going on, except as it related to himself. Only occasionally was his attention attracted by some remark or other that offered him the opportunity to display his superior taste or knowledge. There was a certain irony in the fact that he made his greatest impression with a nugget or two of information he had gleaned from his grandfather.

The older members of the company had retired to bed, and Georgiana collapsed back into her chair with a sigh of relief. ‘Poof!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why is it that all one’s nearest and dearest are so staid and stuffy?’ Ignoring Grace’s instant protest, she went on, ‘If
only
my stepfather hadn’t had the good taste to run away all those years ago! How I wish you had met him, Emile! The most elegant man, and with such style!’ Impulsively, she turned to Vilia. ‘You knew him, didn’t you, Mrs Lauriston? He
was
charming, wasn’t he? I was still quite young when he left, and perhaps not a very good judge, but it has always seemed to me that he was quite out of the common run.’

There was the briefest of pauses. It seemed to Luke that Vilia was searching her memory, trying to conjure up an image of the man she had met so briefly almost fifteen years ago. Even Luke who had been closer to Perry Randall than anyone else in his whole life – except Henry, which was rather different – found it hard to recall his uncle’s features in any detail. What he remembered, mainly, was the sense of life and warmth and adventure he had generated in a lonely, unhappy, ten-year-old. The withdrawn, defeated man who had sailed for America at the end of 1815 had no more place in his recollection than an insubstantial, irrelevant ghost.

Vilia said, ‘I met him only twice, you know, the second time for no more than a few minutes at Ascot. But yes, I seem to remember that he had a – an unusually attractive way with him. Dark hair, I think?’ She turned to Luke. ‘And about your height? I was told he went to America. Did you ever hear what became of him?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Luke said omnisciently. ‘He went into business. Guns, I believe. Grandfather had one or two letters from him...’

‘What
?
’
Georgy squeaked, round-eyed.

‘...although since he was out in the least civilized parts of the country, mail was dreadfully unreliable. I believe he had a difficult and dangerous time in the early days, but grandfather thought there was hope for him. Very pleased he was, too, because he had a fondness for Uncle Perry.’

‘When was this?’ Vilia asked, with polite interest.

Luke couldn’t remember at first. ‘Oh, in about ’20 or ’21, I suppose.’

‘And he never told anyone!’ Georgy exclaimed. ‘Well, I do think that was unfair of him.’