A Dark and Distant Shore (69 page)

His voice when he spoke was crisp and business-like, the kind of voice she used herself at the boardroom table.
‘My
son. Married to
my
daughter.’

She remembered walking the floor at Clarges Street, her mind paralysed at the thought of Drew marrying his half-sister, but the horror of that seemed pale compared to the unequivocal
‘my
son...
my
daughter.’

She could hear voices coming from the direction of the stables, and there was a jingle of harness. The clip-clip-clip of shears floated up from the gardens. The birds were singing their hearts out, and a female chaffinch landed with a faint scrabble on one of the window bars and pecked at the glass, puzzled to find a barrier in the clear air.

Inside the room, there was no sound at all. It was if they had both stopped breathing.

Into the reverberant silence, he said, ‘How could you let it happen?’

If she had not been who she was, she would have gone on her knees to him and cried, ‘Forgive me! I was upset at the time. I didn’t think. It never occurred to me that they would meet. I had almost forgotten Shona’s existence; anonymous, retiring little Shona. And when I knew, I tried desperately to stop it.’ But she had never been accountable to anyone for her actions. If he had said, ‘How did it happen?’ it might have been different. But, too shocked to choose his words, even for her, he had said, ‘How could
you let it
happen?’

She was lying where he had left her, the pillows no whiter than her face. She felt cold in every nerve and pore. If he had loved her at all, he must have known that she had done everything in her power to stop it. But he didn’t know. So she was still, in spite of everything, alone, as she had been for so much of her life. No haven, after all. No haven but the grave.

‘How could you let it happen?’ he said again. ‘Surely you could have stopped it.’

The effort of speech was almost beyond her, the voice she forced out past locked throat muscles flat and colourless. ‘Drew went to Kinveil alone. I was in London. When I heard about it, it was too late.’

After a time, he turned, but his face was still invisible, lost in the silhouette of dark head and strong shoulders and smoothly-muscled thighs. Then he moved towards the bed and sat down in the chair beside it, leaning forward, with his crossed forearms resting light and relaxed on his knees. She had never seen such an expression in any man’s eyes.

Patiently, he said, ‘I don’t understand. Ever since he was born you must have recognized the danger.’

‘No.’ Her voice scraped a little.

‘Why not? Because you cut it out of your mind, as you cut out everything you don’t want to know about?’

‘That’s not true.’
And if it is, why not
?
Why shouldn’t I
?
How could I go on living if I couldn’t stop myself from thinking
?

‘Then why didn’t you take steps to prevent something like this from happening?’

‘How could I?
How could I
?
’

‘You could have told the boy when he was a child, when he would have accepted it without much thought.’

Even through the grief that was not only for herself, but for him, she gave something that was almost a laugh. ‘Oh, yes! “By the way, darling, the hero of Waterloo whom you so idolize wasn’t, as it happens, your father...” Oh, yes, I could have told him!’

‘Don’t be juvenile. It would have been difficult, no more.’ He paused, and then resumed, ‘You were afraid of losing his love and trust. I see that. But then you should have made sure the children never met.’

‘I did! They saw each other only once, when they were six years old. We had nothing to do with Glenbraddan. No contact. Charlotte hated me. But how could I put a guard on them when they were growing up? I did my best. Until they disobeyed me, the year Luke died, the boys had never been to Glenbraddan, and not even, since they were babies, to Kinveil.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Luke.’

His voice was still perfectly reasonable, but her head began spinning. What next? What next?

‘You were prepared to marry him for the sake of Kinveil. You wanted Kinveil so badly you were prepared to run any risk for it.’ With all the humour and vitality gone, and in his eyes nothing but anguish, he looked his age. ‘I understand that you might feel that way. But there are some risks nothing can justify. If anything had come of that, it would have been impossible to keep the children apart.’ He was frowning a little. ‘You do see that, don’t you? You should have considered the risks.’

For the space of a heartbeat, she remembered the long, lonely journey through the arches of the years, with no respite from her burdens, and no hope of peace except one.

And then,
‘Should I
?
’
she flared, and springing out of bed snatched at her night-robe, voice and hands shaking uncontrollably as she struggled to fasten it. ‘You don’t understand anything at all. How dare you hand down judgements from on high! How dare you speak as if it were all my fault! Yes, Drew
is
your child. Why should you start caring after all these years? You loved me and left me – isn’t that what they say in the ballads? You loved Charlotte and left her, too! How many other children have you begotten on wives and mistresses I know nothing of? How many other girls should I have kept Drew away from, in case they were his sisters, too? How...’

His hard hand on her shoulder whirled her round, and with the other he dealt her a blow on the cheek that sent her reeling into the corner between the
garderobe
and the wall.

She gasped, and after a moment began to weep, her sobs rising on a hysterical crescendo that was dreadful to listen to, her arms clasped around herself not as protection against him, but against her own heartbreak.

He wouldn’t spare her. He stood scarcely a yard away, desolation in his eyes and an exhausted anger in his voice. ‘You don’t know what love is, do you. It’s more than passion, more than the – the felicitous matching of two personalities, more even than slaving to provide for those who need and depend on you. It’s being able to understand them completely, to know them through and through and
still
love them. As I do you. It’s foreseeing what might hurt them, and doing everything to prevent it, even if means sacrificing yourself in the process. It’s bringing your intelligence to bear on everything that affects them. And many other things, too. You have to love, or at least feel for the human race, if your love, for individuals is to be worth anything.’

She tried to protest, through her tears, but he stopped her. ‘No, let me finish. Don’t tell me how you’ve worked, how you’ve made a success at the foundry. I know you have, and I know how hard it must have been for you. But don’t deceive yourself, Vilia. I have no doubt you think you have done it all for the boys, but you haven’t. You wanted success for yourself, as much as for them. More, perhaps. And you want Kinveil entirely for yourself. I’ve never quite known why you have such an obsession about the place, but even if you marry Magnus tomorrow, he will never bequeath it to the boys.’ He paused for a moment, and then went on heavily, ‘Did you think you and he might have children? It’s still possible.’

Stunned, disbelieving, cornered not only by his body but by the mind that seemed to know everything about her, she could only stare at him. After a long, long time, answering her unspoken question, he said,
‘I know you.’

Then he turned away and began to don the riding dress his manservant had laid out the night before. She watched him, motionless, as he pulled on his boots and then stood up to transfer coins and notes and keys from the dressing chest to the pockets of his coat.

‘You’re very stupid, sometimes,’ he said, as he stood before the glass fixing the pin in his cravat, the gold pin in the form of a serpent with opal eyes that she remembered Mungo had given him. ‘You didn’t recognize what a fool of a romantic our son was. Do you know that Gideon hates the foundry, that all he wants to do is travel and write? Do you know that Theo... Do you know that his sexual inclinations are – unorthodox? And very illegal. There’s quite a recent Act of Parliament that says, “Every person convicted of the abominable Crime of Buggery committed either with Mankind or with any Animal, shall suffer death as a Felon”. I checked it when I was in London. You don’t know what buggery is, my dear, do you? It’s what the Bible calls sodomy. And Theo is heading that way, even if he hasn’t got there yet. If you love him, remember that.’

He came to stand before her again. ‘I’ve told you about Theo because I love you. If you know now, it may save you a greater hurt later.’

The pain still raw in his eyes, he took her chin lightly between his fingers and raised her face so that he could kiss her. Marble lips to marble lips. ‘We both need to be alone, to think. I’m going riding. Good-bye, my dear.’

When he returned many hours later, she was gone. He had expected it. Nor could he bring himself to follow her.

Gideon ducked as a pot of butter launched itself past his head with the velocity of a cannonball, and made a snatch at a cut of corned beef that looked about to leap off the table and bolt through the door of one of the staterooms. An apple dumpling skidded along the board, dead in line for his lap. He repelled it. All he wanted was a small egg, lightly scrambled, that would sit still in front of him and allow itself to be eaten.

Abruptly, he realized that he didn’t even want that, and, rising to his feet, made his apologies to the captain and took himself up on deck.

The fresh air helped, although it was still blowing a gale and the sound of timbers creaking and wind whistling through the rigging reminded him of the Norse legends Vilia had given him to read as a child, legends of the storm god Wotan, and the Wild Hunt and the Raging Host. They were all abroad this morning, running free over the wide ocean with its great, grey foam-topped waves and mountainous billows, huge and black, bursting into spray with a roar like all the furnaces of hell rolled into one.

After a while, feeling less squeamish, he went below to the cabin where Elinor lay, her skin green-white against the damp mahogany of her hair. ‘Oh, Gideon,’ she moaned. ‘I want to die.’ Her soft Charleston drawl slurred the word ‘die’, dragging it out until it seemed as if it would never end. As he had done every morning for the last ten storm-tossed days, he took her hand in a sustaining grip and said, ‘Not much longer, my darling. We should sight Liverpool soon.’ And he thought again, as he had thought every day, ‘We should have waited. Madness to face the Atlantic in March. The foundry can’t need me as urgently as this!’

At the beginning of February, less than a week before he and his new bride had been due to set off from Charleston on a round of honeymoon visits a letter arrived from Theo. It was dated December tenth.

Gideon, dear boy – We were all, of course, charmed to hear that the beautiful Miss Langley has consented to make you the happiest man in the world. Drew, while prepared to dispute the title with you, begs me to convey his felicitations, as well as a great many reflections on the joys of matrimony. I do not propose to clutter the page with them, as it should place no great strain on your imagination to work them out for yourself.

Greatly though it pains me, however, I must ask you not to prolong your lotus-eating any more than necessary. The sad truth is that we need you here. Indeed, I cannot answer for what will happen to the administration of the foundry without you. I am much too busy to concern myself with it. Drew is not equipped, and Vilia, at the moment, is more of a hindrance than a help. Impossible to credit, perhaps, but there it is! She returned from Paris at the end of September in a high state of nerves, and although she has not granted us the favour of an explanation, I have my own suspicions. I merely
mention
the fact that our American friend, visiting Marchfield in August, expressed his intention of going on to Paris and calling on his stepdaughter, Georgiana Blair. Intrigued? And rightly so. Anyway, Vilia has scarcely smiled since her return, and jumps out of her elegant skin if anyone so much as sneezes. Mistakes at the foundry are multiplying. I cannot feel that it is good for business to send a gross of Mr Bramah’s unpickable locks – without keys, I may add – to a customer who has ordered a single furnace-bottom.

Vilia excuses herself – and at least she
does
excuse herself – by saying she has not been sleeping well. But she refuses to resort to laudanum. I thought, a week or two ago, that she was beginning to improve, but alas! It was a false dawn. I fear that her relapse may have had something to do with dear Shona’s ecstatic discovery that she is increasing again, and if that is so, then we can expect no real improvement until the brat makes its entry into the world in June or July. Hence the present
cri de coeur.

One more thing. With a sad want of foresight, and remembering your remarks about Marsden’s deficiencies, Drew and I proposed to Mr Randall when he was here that he might care to represent Lauriston Brothers in America. Just possibly, he may now view the proposal with less favour. If you are sailing from New York, I do think it would be wise to see him and sort the matter out. I won’t disguise the fact that I will be interested – really,
most
interested – to hear what happens. Don’t, I beg of you, let the agreement fall through if you can help it!

Pray apologize to your bride for Vilia’s not having written to her. So fortunate that ladies always seem to understand other ladies’ indispositions!

We will see you as soon as you can contrive, won’t we, dear boy? – Yours, Theo.

To Gideon – lotus-eating, as his brother had so accurately surmised – it had all brought back that incredible day at Clarges Street just over two years ago, the day he would never really forget if he lived to be a hundred. Did he want to go home to it all? he wondered, as he ran up the stairs of the house on the Battery to break it to Elinor. She had been disappointed, for, like all Southern girls, she had looked forward to showing her husband off to every last relative and connection she possessed, but she had overcome it almost at once, and smiled at him, and exclaimed, ‘No, of course I don’t mind, Gideon honey. We must go if your family needs you!’