A Dark and Distant Shore (6 page)

When his mother returned a few minutes later, bearing the pretty silk shawl she had bought for Vilia, she found the two of them still sitting where she had left them. Luke had stayed, rigid with anger and apprehension, because he felt obscurely that he ought to; Vilia because there was nowhere else she could go. She didn’t even know yet where her room was.

‘I really am dreadfully afraid,’ Lucy Telfer said guilelessly, ‘that Luke is going out of his way to be objectionable to poor Vilia.’

Magnus, who had been succeeding tolerably well in ignoring the atmosphere in the house for the last three months, kept his eyes firmly fixed on the
Morning Chronicle.
Recognizing, however, that a reply was expected of him, he murmured, ‘Not very good at it, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Oh, but he is, very good indeed. He seems to have a real, natural talent for it.’ If Lucy had not been the sweetest and mildest of women, she might have added, ‘I can’t imagine who he gets it from.’ Magnus, though in general a model of politeness, could take a very arbitrary tone when roused. Thoughtfully, she went on, ‘I believe he regards it almost as a kind of game. Once he discovered he could break down that rather trying reserve of hers – my dear, if only she would snap, or even sulk, everything would be so much easier! – he couldn’t resist going on. I don’t think he wants to provoke another storm, but I do think he may be experimenting to see how far he can go, short of it. It’s a new experience for him, you see, having someone of his own age group to quarrel with. Not that she quarrels back, of course. But he
will
harp on the fact that Kinveil is going to be his one day...’

Magnus looked up at that, and his wife smiled mischievously. ‘Not for years and years and years, of course! But one can almost see her holding her tongue, and because she is so good, he is becoming quite intractable. Frustration, of course. I’ve told him he is being very unkind – quite cruel, in fact – but it makes no difference.’

His momentary interest dying, Magnus dropped his eyes to the newspaper again. ‘Jealous,’ he said briefly. ‘Doesn’t like having to share his parents with a stranger.’

It was something Lucy had recognized within a week of Vilia’s arrival, and she was pleased that Magnus had reached the same conclusion, even if it had taken a good deal of prompting. ‘How clever of you! I’m sure you’re right,’ she exclaimed. ‘But what’s to be done?’

‘He’ll grow out of it.’

Lucy sighed. ‘Do you think so?’

Magnus turned a page. ‘All this,’ he said, straightening the fold noisily, ‘must be tiring you dreadfully. I wish I could relieve you of some of the burden.’

His wife, perfectly capable of distinguishing between a statement of goodwill and a declaration of intent, smiled at him gratefully. ‘It’s not a burden, my love. How could it be? Though I confess I
should
like a rest from it all. And do you know, I think the time may have come to find a tutor for Luke, so that he would feel there is someone on whom he can rely for undivided attention.’

‘A tutor? Well, we’re agreed he shouldn’t go to school, certainly.’

‘Indeed, no. Such nasty, rough places.’

‘Yes.’ Magnus still remembered his years at Eton, and he’d been told that Harrow was just as bad. ‘I’ll make inquiries. But I don’t see how we can arrange to have a rest from the pair of them. We
could
leave them here, I suppose, when we go to Ramsgate in the summer.’

He sounded doubtful, and Lucy gave his doubts a few moments to solidify before she said, delicately, ‘I have been thinking. You know how much Luke enjoyed his visit to Kinveil? And Vilia loves it very much. I wondered whether we might not send them there. I’m sure it would go far towards restoring Vilia’s spirits.’

Magnus, though not in general a very quick thinker, always displayed a creditable turn of speed when it came to finding reasons for saying no to any idea he hadn’t thought of himself. ‘I don’t agree. It might well restore her spirits, but it is not her home now, and she must be encouraged to forget it. She is a charming girl, but she’s not one of the family.’

‘If you say so, my love,’ his wife replied equably. ‘I merely wondered whether visiting it again, now that she knows something of the world, might not serve to show it to her in a different light. You yourself have told me that it has little to offer an educated person who is acquainted with the richness and variety of life in London.’

Magnus shifted his ground adroitly. ‘You may be right, my dear, but I am afraid she cannot go this year, and neither can Luke. They can’t travel without a responsible escort, you know, and I don’t intend to pay my usual visit to father this summer.’

‘Not going to Kinveil? Not at all?’ Lucy exclaimed, surprised. And then she realized why. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Charlotte?’

Three years earlier, George Blair had stolidly ignored a chest cold and it had turned to pneumonia. ‘Typical,’ Magnus had said. He had never cared much for George. Everyone had assumed that the widowed Charlotte would stay at Glenbraddan with five-year-old Edward and baby Georgiana, and dwindle into a solitary middle age. But in September last year she had gone off on a visit to Edinburgh, met the Honourable Peregrine Francis Egerton Randall – who had been passing through en route for a shooting party in Perthshire – and married him, without so much as a by-your-leave, three months later.

Lucy knew that a letter had come from her father-in-law at Kinveil this morning, but not what was in it. Now it transpired that he had been making some inquiries, and had discovered that Mr Randall had been cast off by his family for being wild, irresponsible, and fatally addicted to gaming.

‘Just as we suspected,’ Magnus said heavily. ‘Earl’s son though he may be, he’s a scoundrel of the worst sort. It was obvious, of course, as soon as we knew that he was ten years younger than Charlotte. One didn’t have to look far to discover why he should have married her.’

Lucy sighed. ‘How distressing! I always thought it a pity for Charlotte to be tied to such a tedious man as George Blair, but one wouldn’t have wished her to go to the other extreme.’ She looked on the bright side. ‘Perhaps he isn’t as bad as he is painted. After all, if he’s only twenty-one, he can’t really have had time to sink very far into depravity, can he? He may turn out to be quite charming in spite of everything.’

‘One assumes he must be attractive, or Charlotte wouldn’t have made such a cake of herself. Indeed, I suppose most rakes must have some such quality to recommend them or they wouldn’t succeed in the role. But that has nothing to do with it. I am only grateful that my father has made sure the fellow won’t have the opportunity to squander any Telfer money. He’s giving Lottie an allowance, but no marriage settlement. Her dowry when she married George was swallowed up by Glenbraddan, and that’s in trust for Edward, of course, but the steward seems to be making the place pay well enough – better than George ever did, by all accounts. If I’d been father, I wouldn’t even have given Lottie the allowance. However, even with it, Mr Randall will find his wings clipped. More fool he,’ Magnus said with satisfaction, ‘not to discuss the dowry before he committed himself. But it’s all of a piece! Anyway, I’m so angry about the whole thing that I don’t think I could be civil. I don’t want to meet the fellow, and if I go to the Highlands I can’t avoid it. So I shan’t go. And if I don’t go,’ he pointed out conclusively, ‘the children can’t.’

‘No,’ Lucy said thoughtfully. ‘They can’t, can they?’

During the next few days, even Luke noticed his mama’s abstraction. Blaming it on Vilia, he became even surlier than usual. Vilia ignored him. On that first day he had caught her at a very low ebb indeed, deeply depressed by her own situation, physically and mentally exhausted from supervising the disposal of her father’s possessions, and quaking with nerves at the prospect of having to come to terms with new guardians and a new life. More than anything else in the world she had wanted to fly to the sanctuary of Kinveil – the Kinveil of her childhood, not of the here-and-now – and the last thing she had been prepared for was an attack on the weakest point of her defences by a spoilt, smug, ignorant little boy. Afterwards, she knew where the attack was coming from and was armed. Not once in the three months since she had come to live in St James’s Square had she done more than find release in a swift flash of temper, and even that had happened only rarely. She had been quick to see that Luke’s malice would lose its savour if she didn’t respond, although she hadn’t expected it to take so long. He was quite the most self-absorbed child she had ever encountered, and tiresomely possessive – about his mother, his father, his grandfather, Kinveil, even the chair he liked to sit in and the books he chose to read.

Even so, obnoxious small boys could be ignored. It was harder to ignore the gentle, solicitous Lucy, with her relentless kindness and sweet, unchanging smile. It had not taken Vilia long to decide that Lucy’s delicate health was a myth, and setting her down as a fraud and a hypocrite had made it easier to reject her interference and her weak-willed anxiety that everyone should be happy and content. The trouble was that Lucy remained blind to her guest’s determination to keep her distance. Nothing short of downright rudeness, Vilia thought despairingly, seemed likely to have any effect, and to be rude would have conflicted with all Vilia’s instincts, as well as the tenets according to which she had been reared.

A state of war existed between them, but it was a ludicrously polite war. ‘Indeed, my dear,’ Lucy would say. ‘There can be no question of putting off your blacks for several months yet, but I do think we might find something less oppressive. Not even the highest stickler could expect black bombazine of you.’

Vilia liked black bombazine. It suited her sense of the dramatic. If one was forced to mourn for someone for whom one hadn’t cared very much, why not do it in style?

Lucy said, ‘I saw a charming black cambric the other day, embroidered with silk dots. It would be perfect for you, made ankle-length rather than down to the ground, and half-high, to the base of the neck rather than up to the chin. Pray be persuaded, my dear! You will see how delightfully you look.’

Vilia did not wish to look delightfully. It was too soon after her father’s death, she conveyed, for her to concern herself with such frivolities as fashion.

Regretfully, Lucy abandoned the subject of dress and turned her attention to Vilia’s hair. ‘That heavy knot is too old for you,’ she murmured, shaking her own silken head. ‘You could clasp your hair high on the crown, perhaps, and let it fall from there? When you make your come-out, of course, you will wear it in a Grecian coil on top, with one or two tiny wisps to soften the line. No, no. I don’t mean those dreadful corkscrew twists. You must keep the pure, sculptured line. You have such beautiful bone structure, it will look lovely.’

No one had ever told Vilia she had beautiful bone structure before. Momentarily diverted, she peered at herself in the glass.

But when she tried clasping her hair on the crown, she reported that she thought the result commonplace.

Days afterwards, however, she discovered that Lucy was not as easily defeated as she had thought. Vilia’s very own maid, brushing her hair one morning, stopped in mid-brush, the silver-gilt mane trailing gracefully from her fingers. ‘How becoming it looks, just so!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wonder if we could persuade it to stay like that?’ It took a moment for Vilia to spot the stratagem. When she did, she began to wonder if perhaps she had underestimated Lucy.

Now and then, somewhat to her annoyance, Vilia found her sense of humour tickled. Lucy was terrified that Vilia might be mistaken for a blue-stocking.
Fatal
when she came on the marriage mart! People might excuse her for not playing on the pianoforte or the harp, provided she was seen to appreciate other ladies’ music. And many women of the highest rank were clumsy with their needles. It was a blessing that she could draw so elegantly, and a mark of high civilization that her French should be flawless. But Lucy had been horrified to discover that Vilia had a naturally mathematical turn of mind. Also, she was quite unacceptably well read, and in the most recondite subjects! One couldn’t, after all, go around explaining to
everyone
that there had been no children’s books in the library of the house where she had been brought up. With the greatest seriousness, Lucy told Vilia that she must never let it be known that she had a firm grasp of such things as ancient Christian heresies and the use of triglyphs in Greek architecture.

The conversation at St James’s Square became more frivolous every day as Lucy tried to instil into Vilia the principles of social small talk, and it was only by exercising the sternest self control that Vilia maintained her equanimity. It was a very real relief when, in February, Lucy abandoned her gentle persecution and relapsed into an absent-minded daze. Quite against her will, Vilia was intrigued.

She was still more intrigued when Luke’s new tutor arrived and Lucy promptly reverted to normal.

The tutor’s name was Henry Phillpotts, and how anyone as wildly unsuitable as he had found his way into the Telfers’ favour Vilia could not at first imagine. Possibly the fact of his having been recommended by the Duke of Argyll had helped to outweigh his many and obvious imperfections.

Vilia, wiser in the ways of the Highland aristocracy than her hosts, suspected that the Duke of Argyll had never set eyes on Henry, or Henry on the Duke. All Scots peers had dependants, and some felt compelled to do what they could even for distant connections of their stewards, or third cousins twice removed of their most junior footmen. The Duke of Argyll, hearing that a London neighbour was in need of a tutor for his son, might well have recommended someone like Henry, especially if the neighbour was only a nodding acquaintance and couldn’t hold it against him.

When he came to St James’s Square, Henry Phillpotts had been ordained for a year but had not found a parish. Nothing, he implied, would have persuaded him to accept a living from some fox-hunting squire in Leicestershire or some clothwitted manufacturer in Leeds. Oxford or London he would have considered – or even Cambridge – but how could a fine mind expand in the mud of the Shires or the weaving sheds of Leeds?