A Dark and Distant Shore (62 page)

And on the ladder was the naked body of a man, spreadeagled face down on its black velvet rungs, wrists and ankles manacled to the uprights, and his waist confined by a thin, studded horse harness.

Theo.

There could be no doubt about it. There was a scarlet, eye-slitted hangman’s hood drawn over his head, but Gideon could never have mistaken the lithe, finely muscled body of his brother. It was sheened now with perspiration, golden where the candlelight caught it and shimmered on the stretched, quivering muscles of shoulders and hips, and over the rib cage, whose movement betrayed the quickened breath with which he waited for what was to come.

The big woman stood for a moment, thoughtfully drawing the whip through her fingers, and then, catching the girl’s eye, nodded and stepped back a pace.

Theo screamed. God, but he screamed! Gideon, his hand tight over his mouth, sat and shuddered in the echo of it, and then, his stomach still in his throat, heard Theo – incredibly – begin to laugh. There was a wild, ecstatic, triumphant note in it, and the girl grinned, and the big woman nodded in satisfaction, and raised her powerful arm and brought down the whip.

It went on and on forever, although sometimes there were a few moments when the women allowed Theo to rest. Cool, smiling, superior Theo. Gideon tried to drag his eyes away but couldn’t, until the black-haired girl, with no weapons but lessoned hands and lascivious mouth, began to take over the major role from the red-haired harridan. And then Gideon’s own loins stirred violently, and he threw himself away from the glass and closed his eyes and clapped his hands over his ears, and waited, breath suspended, until some seventh sense told him everything was over.

Shaking, nauseated, his pose of amused detachment in rags and tatters about him, he said to Sam, ‘Perhaps it would be best if I returned to wait in the front hall. I don’t imagine the gentleman would care to know that I had been watching.’

The man ran his tongue over his lips. ‘That’s the reason for the mask, your honour. Most gentlemen don’t care much whether they’re being watched while they’re on Madame’s horse, but it might make for awkwardness if they were to be recognized outside. Very nice class of customer we have, sir, which means that sometimes they’re acquainted.’

‘Quite,’ Gideon said, and gave the fellow a sovereign. He looked as if he enjoyed his work.

It was almost half an hour before Theo appeared, a little flushed. Once or twice before, Gideon had seen him with that cat-at-the-cream look and had wondered what it meant. Never again.

There was a cold, unfriendly glitter in Theo’s eyes. ‘Why, Gideon, dear boy, what a delightful surprise! Were you looking for me?’ Taking his brother hard by the arm, he tossed a coin to the surprised porter. ‘Thank you, Hocking. I’ll see you again. Now then, Gideon...’

All the way back to Clarges Street they talked about Drew; never a mention of Mrs Berkley. Gideon knew there never would be.

Sorley waylaid them the moment they got in.
‘Dia,
but you took your time! For the love of God, go in to her. She will not take anything to eat or drink. She will not lie down or even sit down. She iss chust walking the floor, and there iss nothing I can say or do. Go in, and do whateffer she wants you to, if you love her at aal.’

All their lives they had regarded Sorley as if he were almost a member of the family. He had guided them, and bullied them, and conspired with them, and even spoilt them a little. But they knew his dedication to Vilia was absolute and unquestioning, and that if it came to a choice no one else in the world really mattered to him. He worshipped her. They didn’t know how they knew it, because it didn’t show, but it was as much a fact of their lives as the existence of the foundry. None of them had ever thought of Sorley as a servant. But now, Theo snapped, ‘You’re forgetting your place, Sorley!’ and turned his back on him and stalked away. Gideon, catching the spark in Sorley’s eye, raised his brows in a half-embarrassed, half-derisive way, and followed his brother into the drawing-room.

Vilia was in an even worse state than when he had left her. Some of the pins that held her hair in place had come loose, and a long, silver-gilt coil lay on her shoulder, the fine-stranded threads of it drifting and shimmering in the breeze stirred up by her compulsive pacing back and forth, back and forth. There were tears soaked into her cheeks, and her lips were scarlet where she had bitten them.

She whirled round as they came in. ‘Has Gideon told you?’ Her voice was rough with anguish. ‘You must go, Theo.
You must go
and put a stop to it!’

Gideon could see that his brother had thought he was exaggerating, but not now. Theo’s face changed, and the tight expression disappeared to be replaced with one of the most intense interest. Walking over to Vilia, he took her by the arms and forced her into a chair. ‘She needs a stiff whisky, Gideon,’ he said. ‘And so do I, for that matter. Pour them. Now, mother dear, why such extravagance?’

She took a deep breath and made an obvious effort to speak calmly. ‘Drew is only seventeen, the girl even younger. It is folly for them to marry. If Gideon is right and Drew’s principles wouldn’t allow him to seduce her, then it isn’t too late.
Pray God
it isn’t too late!’ Gideon put a glass in her hand. Her voice ragged, she went on, ‘We can sort everything out somehow, as long as we can stop them. I’m convinced they must be at Marchfield.’

Theo said, ‘They’ll be married by now, you know, otherwise why run away at all? If they’d wanted us at the ceremony, they could have postponed their romantic flight for a few weeks. It’s not as if Edward’s been holding the girl in durance vile. Or has he?’

‘Don’t be frivolous. Drew might have thought we would be opposed to it, unless he presented us with a
fait accompli.’

‘You can hardly call running away from one drearily respectable house to another drearily respectable house – sorry, Mama – much of
a fait accompli.
Anyway, have you ever known Drew do other than thrive on opposition? They’re married by now. They must be.’

Almost beseechingly, Vilia said, ‘However remote the chance that they’re not, we must make the effort. Theo, you can go tonight. You can still catch the Mail and be in Edinburgh in forty-eight hours.’

‘Thank you, Mama,’ Theo replied and then, after a moment’s artificial hesitation, added, ‘But I don’t think I will.’

‘Yes,
Theo. Yes, yes, yes – you will!’

He shook his head. ‘No, I’m tired, and I don’t fancy the journey. If I didn’t get there in time, there wouldn’t be any point in it, and if I did – if I did...’

Gideon watched his brother with a kind of horrified fascination.

‘...perhaps you’ll tell me
how
I could persuade my incorrigible young brother to abandon a course of action that may, I grant you, be ill advised, but is hardly the grand tragedy you seem bent on making of it?’

There was a speculative glint in his eyes, and Gideon knew what he was up to. Drew and Shona’s immaturity wasn’t, by any stretch, enough to account for Vilia’s extreme reaction, and Theo was desperate to know what was.

Vilia also knew what he was up to, but she still went on fighting the inevitable. The unthinkable truth, the impossible revelation of it. ‘You have no need to “persuade” him. You will tell him that he
mustn’t
do it.’

Theo’s slanting brows, so like hers, rose delicately. ‘But he’s of age in legal terms, my dear. He can do as he wishes.’ And then, with exaggerated enlightenment, ‘Oh-h-h-h! Are you thinking of filial duty and family feeling? But I remember you once describing those as – what was it? – the triumph of hope over experience. Have you come to believe in them after all?’

‘Don’t be impertinent.’ She stared into her glass for a moment, and then said flatly, ‘Then I’ll take the travelling carriage and go myself.’

‘You can’t!’ Gideon was shocked. ‘It would be far too exhausting for you!’

‘And besides,’ Theo interrupted smoothly. ‘Chalmers tells me he’s had to call in the wheelwright. There’s something wrong with the axle.’

Gideon looked at him suspiciously, but his face was unreadable.

For an eternity, Vilia went on staring into her glass, while Theo and Gideon stood and watched her.

At last she raised her head and, clearing her throat, said, ‘There is one incontrovertible argument against this marriage. I had hoped you’d never have to be told.’ She looked from Theo to Gideon and then dropped her eyes again and chose her words with meticulous care. ‘I’m afraid that Drew and Shona are – or may be – brother and sister.’

They heard the rain begin again, pattering irresolutely against the windows and sizzling on the gas lantern outside. A carriage rattled down the street towards Piccadilly, and someone thumped impatiently on a front door nearby. A couple of pedestrians went past on unsteady feet, their voices drunkenly quarrelsome. Inside the drawing-room, the coal settled with a gritty sigh among the embers, and one of the candles guttered.

Abruptly, Theo sat down. In other circumstances, Gideon would have laughed at the spasm of pain that crossed his face.

Theo, his eyelids still fluttering with it, breathed, ‘What do you mean?’

He wasn’t shocked. Vilia knew, chillingly, that he was excited. She had borne him when she was just over eighteen, and had even welcomed him. He was a year older now than she had been then, but still very young despite the sophisticated façade and the competitive manner he always assumed with her. Competitive, and possessive, as if the two of them had a special, unique relationship. As indeed they had, for they knew each other better than most mothers and sons, even if in some ways they scarcely knew each other at all. Even through her horror and despair, she had recognized, the moment he walked into the room, that he was bathed in the afterglow of some cataclysmic experience. Sexual experience? She didn’t know and would probably never know. To Theo, like herself, privacy mattered almost more than anything. It was just that, sometimes, she would have been easier in her mind if she had known what he was being private about.

She sighed. ‘I mean precisely what I said. Shona’s father, Perry Randall, may – possibly – have been Drew’s father, too.’ Perry Randall was only a name to them, scarcely even that. Their questions shimmered on the silent air like heat above a flame, and she had no choice but to go on. ‘A few days after your father left for Brussels, I met Mr Randall. We had met casually once or twice before. He was troubled and unhappy and I, perhaps, was over-emotional at the time. I can’t – I won’t – excuse myself for what happened. He came to the house to see your father, but he had gone. Mr Randall was a very attractive man, and I didn’t – resist him as strongly as I should.’ The words were truthful enough, she thought dismally, however false the impression they conveyed. Even now, despite everything that had happened, she couldn’t bear to lay the pale, wild ghost of that long-ago happiness, to exorcize it by reducing it to some crude, inadequate form of words.

Theo said, ‘And Drew was born in March 1816.’

‘Afterwards, Mr Randall went back to his wife, although he stayed only a few weeks and then sailed on an emigrant ship for Nova Scotia. I was told that he later went to America and became a gun salesman. More than that I don’t know. Shona was born in June 1816, some months after he sailed.’ What more did they need to know? What more did anyone need to know?

Gideon went over and took her hand in his, genuine sorrow and sympathy in his face. ‘It must have been dreadful for you. To be seduced, and then not to know afterwards...’

‘Couldn’t you have screamed?’ Theo asked swiftly.

‘Oh, yes. I could have screamed. I could have ruined my reputation, and Mr Randall’s, and Charlotte Randall’s whole life. I could have screamed, but I didn’t.’

‘And you truly don’t know whose son Drew is? I thought women were supposed to know those things.’

‘You thought wrongly.’ A wave of nausea gripped her. ‘And the risk is too great. They must be stopped.’

‘Dear me, yes,’ Theo said, calmly. ‘This does put a different complexion on things. You’d better ring, Gideon. We need our traps packed in a hurry.’

‘You’ll go?’

‘We’ll both go.’

It was a relief, of a sort. She said, almost inaudibly, ‘Don’t tell Drew unless there’s no other way. He’s so proud of his – his father’s heroism.’

‘No, Mama.’ Theo’s smile was ambiguous. ‘You must tell us about him some time, though.’

Theo and Gideon reached Marchfield House after a killing forty-eight hours on the Mail and another two in a hired carriage. Theo was restless, and clearly in some discomfort all the way, and his eyes were feverish by the time they walked into the hall to be met by Drew and Shona, enchantedly happy. They had arrived earlier the same evening.

Proudly, Shona held out her hand with the wedding band on it, made from pale, pure, Scottish-mined gold, she said proudly. Gideon, embracing his new sister, exclaimed over how pretty it was, and Theo, after a moment, followed his example.

It didn’t even occur to Drew to ask them why they had come home on the Mail.

As Gideon swung his hired buggy in through a Gothic ruin of an entrance, complete with broken, ivied walls and fallen blocks of masonry, he hoped he had come to the right place. The light was failing, but to his right he could see, elegantly embowered in trees, something that looked uncommonly like a Greek temple while on the left lay the calm waters of an ornamental lake. He’d been told the house was new, so he hadn’t exactly bargained for a stately home when he had accepted the unknown Tylers’ invitation. He hoped to God he was properly dressed.

Jonathan Marsden, Lauristons’ agent in New York – though not for much longer, if Gideon had any say in the matter – had given him an introduction to Mr Tyler in Baltimore. ‘If you handle him right,’ he’d said, ‘he can fix for you to see over the Government Manufactory of Firearms at Harper’s Ferry.’ It was Gideon’s opinion that, if Marsden had been worth his retainer, he’d have been able to fix it himself without bothering Mr Tyler. Even so, it had been with a thrill of anticipation that he’d set off on the complicated journey to Baltimore – steamboat to Amboy, railroad to the Delaware, and across the river to Philadelphia. Then, after a night at the American Hotel, back on the Delaware again, railroad to the Chesapeake, and finally to Baltimore on another steamboat. He wasn’t convinced that his bath under the hotel pump had freed him from the rich smells of smoking and spitting, the gin slings, brandy, sweat and smuts, that had impregnated him, and his clothes, and his baggage. Steamboat cabins in the New World were frowsty places.