A Dark and Distant Shore (95 page)

By the time he arrived in London, gaunt as a scarecrow and scarcely recognizable, there was no longer any sign that a crisis had been reached between Vilia and Juliana.

Juliana, blaming herself for not having given Lizzie support when she needed it, had turned on Vilia and laid it all at her door.

‘My dear Juliana,’ Vilia had said with exactitude. ‘An accidental overdose of laudanum is something for which no one can be blamed except poor Lizzie.’

‘Poor Lizzie!
Poor Lizzie!
If you hadn’t patronized her with your “poor Lizzie” all these years, she’d still be alive now! You made her feel silly, and stupid, and unloved. She would never have run away with Guy if she had thought there was any other choice. You never gave her any softness or comfort, and she needed them so badly. She was like me, in a way; she needed someone to hold on to. The kind of help Lavinia and I could give her was no use, because she knew we were as young and ineffectual as she was.’

‘Juliana,
really!’
Vilia interrupted, her voice taut. ‘Lizzie was a sweet but stupid girl, who died by an unfortunate accident. I am aware that you must be upset –
as I am
–
but I would be obliged if you would control your tongue. I thought, at least, that I had managed to instil some idea of self-discipline into you in these last seventeen years!’

‘Oh, yes!’ Juliana exclaimed hysterically.
‘Oh yes!
You’ve been very firm with me. You were so firm with Lizzie, too, that she came to think you hated her. If it hadn’t been for that... But she thought she would be happy with Guy, happy for the first time in her life. And then you said no! You didn’t show her even the tiniest hint of sympathy when she fell in love, though it was the most wonderful and the most – the most
difficult
thing that had ever happened to her. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you at all! I don’t think you know what love
is
!’

When Juliana at last rushed from the room, leaving her stepmother in a state of ice-cold fury, she had said more than she would ever have dreamed herself capable of saying. There was only one thing she had held back.

The note Lizzie had written her on the day before she died had been scrawled, and blotted with tears, but its message had been unmistakable. Life, in the end, had become too much for her.

I don’t understand anything any more, and I feel as if my head is going to burst, and even Guy thinks I am stupid. I know it will be like this for as long as I live, and I can’t bear it. I feel so alone, so
alone.
There is only one thing I can do, isn’t there, Juley? I know you meant well when you came to see me, but it isn’t enough. There is only one thing I can do, and even if I
am
stupid, I am still capable of
that.
Please tell my papa I am sorry. If only he had been here. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Good-bye, dear Juley.

Juliana had told no one about the note, because she thought only Gideon had the right to know that his daughter hadn’t died by accident; only he who could decide what, if anything, to do about it. But when she saw him, she found that showing him the note was quite beyond her power. He had suffered enough. And besides, she couldn’t see what good it would do.

A year after Lizzie’s death, Dr Richard Henry Curtis of the Bengal Medical Service approached Magnus with some trepidation and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Juliana had warned him that her father would say no, because he always said no on principle.

But his prospective father-in-law’s glassy stare discomposed Richard more than a little. Not being able to read Magnus’s mind, he couldn’t tell that the old man was suffering from an attack of
déjà vu,
remembering St James’s Square forty years ago and another army fellow asking permission to take another young woman off his hands. Vilia Cameron. By God, he wished someone would come and ask him again now!

He exhaled gustily through his lips. ‘No, no. Couldn’t consider it,’ he said. ‘What, take my little girl away from the only home she’s ever known to a nasty, dangerous country on the other side of the world? The graveyard of the British, they call it! No. Definitely no.’

‘But I
am
a doctor, Mr Telfer, and I’ve had five years in India already. So I know what I’m talking about. She’ll be perfectly safe with me, I assure you.’

Magnus ignored him. ‘Anyway, strange people and places have always frightened her. Nervous little thing, you know. In fact, I don’t know what’s got into her. D’you tell me she
wants
to marry you? Why should she? Why should she want to go gallivanting off to goodness knows where with you?’

Richard gulped. ‘Well, sir, we are very much attached to each other, and she says that, if she has me, she will be perfectly comfortable even in a strange land.’

‘Humph!’

No more than Richard was Magnus aware of his daughter’s increasingly desperate need to get away from Kinveil, and as far away as humanly possible. The first few months after Lizzie died had been predictably awful. Juliana’s Season had had to be abandoned, which she didn’t regret, and Gideon had returned with herself and Vilia and, for a brief space, Theo, to the Highlands. Theo had been particularly kind and sympathetic to her, but he hadn’t been able to stay long and hadn’t been back since, because railway speculation was running riot in America and Lauriston Brothers’ was very much under pressure. Vilia had been curt with him for some reason. Gideon hadn’t stayed as long as he might, either. The peace and inactivity of Kinveil seemed to fret him rather than soothe him. It was as if he had locked Lizzie’s death up inside himself, for he spoke of nothing but the war in the Crimea and of no one but Miss Nightingale. When a news item appeared in
The Times
saying that she was dangerously ill, he had announced at last, ‘I must go back.’

‘Because of Miss Nightingale?’ Vilia’s eyebrows had gone up. ‘But why? There is certainly nothing whatever that you can do.’

‘No. I just know that I have to go. Anyway, Fanshawe has been very forbearing, and little though one might think it, here, the world beyond Kinveil continues to turn.’

Juliana had known she would miss Lizzie, but she hadn’t known how much. Nor had she realized how inevitably she would be thrown into her stepmother’s company. And that was worse than anything, because Vilia, deeply and it seemed irrevocably angered by Juliana’s outburst after Lizzie’s death, treated her now with a distant, elaborate politeness that was more hurtful than Juliana would have believed possible. She felt completely isolated, and only now began to understand fully what Lizzie had meant when she had talked of being alone.

She didn’t know how to escape. And then Jermyn, blandly ignoring Magnus’s dislike of him, had come up on a visit, bringing with him a young man, home on leave from India, whom he had met through some old university friends. Richard Curtis was almost twenty-nine, but he had pleasant good looks and a charming, boyish enthusiasm that had the almost instantaneous effect of lifting the clouds. She liked him very much and thought she might come to love him. And she had always wanted to visit India, ever since the Great Exhibition.

So, when Dr Curtis, captivated by her piquant little face and obvious pleasure in his company, had gone down romantically on one knee and begged her to be his wife, she had said yes. If Papa would permit it.

In the end, it was Vilia who persuaded Papa to agree by being dubious, and hesitant, and voicing a great many arguments for Magnus to shoot down. Juliana, expecting Vilia to be on her side – not because she had any sympathy for young lovers, but because Juliana assumed she would be as glad to see her go as she herself would be to leave – had gone to Vilia first. Her response had been tolerant. ‘It’s serious, is it? But an army doctor? With no money and no prospects, unless he has ambitions to become Surgeon-General, or whatever it is?’

Juliana, nettled, exclaimed, ‘If he marries me, we will have Kinveil!’

There was quite a long silence, then Vilia said, ‘That’s true.’

Juliana didn’t like her tone. ‘We might not, of course, if we were forced to run away together, in the old family tradition. But I don’t think even that would cause Papa to cut me off. Do you?’

‘Probably not. In any case, I think a complete change of scene would do you good, and India has the merit of being exotic.’ Her lips curled satirically. ‘And think of all those Cashmir shawls I couldn’t drag you away from at the Great Exhibition! But I don’t imagine India is all shawls and rajas. I hope you will remember your upbringing. The poor need your respect and consideration far more than the rich. Don’t forget it.’

Richard, who had joined them, exclaimed, ‘Forgive me, Mrs Telfer – er – Cameron but there will be no question of Juliana having any contact with the natives, except for the princes and officials, of course. The bazaars are never free from epidemics of one kind or another, and the British don’t have the inbred resistance to them that the natives do.’

‘Afraid of a few germs, Richard? And you a doctor!’ Vilia said mockingly. ‘How fortunate that Juliana has always been so healthy. I don’t remember her ever catching anything, even a cold.’

Richard looked as if he were about to embark on a lecture, so Juliana said hurriedly, ‘Oh, well! Since we will have at least twenty servants – because Richard says they are very firm about not encroaching on one another’s duties – I expect I will learn quite as much as I want to about the lower classes without going near the bazaars!’

It hadn’t been the happiest choice of phrase, she recognized, seeing Vilia’s frown. Her father was always talking about ‘the lower classes’, and it never failed to irritate Vilia, who didn’t believe in ‘classes’.

The wedding took place in May at Kinveil, though Edinburgh would have been more convenient. But Magnus was over seventy and found travelling too much for him, so Juliana had to begin organizing her trousseau without recourse to shops or warehouses. Shona and Lavinia sent materials up by the bale for all the things Juliana had been told she would need. She hadn’t believed the first list she was sent by a lady who had resided in India for fifteen years, but others confirmed it – and there were a great many others. Indeed, it seemed as if half the gentlewomen in the Highlands were, or had been, married to husbands who had seen service in the East India Company.

‘Two dozen cotton chemises, six flannel vests, six lightweight petticoats, and ten flannel ones!’ she exclaimed to Vilia.

‘And Mrs Lyon says that two of the flannel ones must be red,’ Vilia replied drily. ‘Jenny Meneriskay can make them for you.’

‘Four crinoline petticoats, four pairs of corsets with washable covers, two dozen pairs of cotton drawers, three dozen pairs of gloves. And three dozen pairs of stockings with double-woven heels, because Indian dust is as bad as sandpaper, and no lacy-patterned ones because they give the mosquitoes an opening.’

‘Well, we know all about
that
,
don’t we! It sounds as if mosquitoes belong to the same persuasion as midges. What else?’

Juliana looked at the list doubtfully. ‘Soap, knives and forks, Eno’s fruit salts, lace for antimacassars, a piano. A
piano
?
’

‘How fortunate that you’re not musical!’ Vilia said cordially. ‘You can cross that off.’

Juliana sighed. ‘And gowns, hats, boots, shoes, not to mention furniture for the cabin on the ship, if we don’t want to spend sixteen weeks sleeping on the floor. How will I ever be ready in time!’

But at least it took her mind off the wedding itself, and what came after. Juliana was sufficiently a child of the countryside to understand Vilia’s somewhat cryptic references to the Kinveil bull and his harem, and to believe that a young wife’s marital duties might not be pleasurable at first. But it was all right after all. Richard was wonderfully gentle with her, and almost as nervous as she. Perhaps he ought to explain to her what was going to happen, he said. Being a doctor made it
quite
all right for him to talk about it. Did she think that would be a good idea? He looked pink, and harassed, and just a little pompous, so that Juliana couldn’t help but giggle. And then he laughed too, and after the first few nights, once she was used to it, she began quite to enjoy it.

By the time they embarked on the
Southampton
at the end of July, she was already wondering whether she might be carrying a child. It was a natural sequel to marriage, but hard to believe that it could be happening to her, Juliana Curtis, who had very little experience of life and none at all of babies. She wished now that her father, as much to annoy Vilia as anything else, hadn’t flatly forbidden her ever to set foot in any of the houses on Kinveil, which always seemed to be full of babies. ‘You never know what you might catch.’ Thank goodness she had Richard, who was a doctor and would look after her.

She turned to Gideon, who had come to see them off. The war in the Crimea over, he was home again, thinner and more serious, with a good many silver hairs scattered among the fair, and sidewhiskers that were almost white against his weathered skin. But his smile was still full of charm.

He said, ‘I’ve brought you a small parting gift.’

She had to open it there and then. It was a beautiful diary, a big, fat one bound in sapphire-blue leather, with her new name in gold on the cover. ‘
Gideon!
’
she gasped.

‘You have to fill it, remember. And with the kind of things you won’t be ashamed for other people to read. Think of your duty to the family chronicle. I depend on you!’

‘Heavens! I haven’t kept a diary since I was twelve, and that most certainly wasn’t fit for other people to read. Full of adolescent yearnings and deep thoughts.’ She laughed, remembering. She had been frantically in love with the gamekeeper’s son at the time. ‘I’ll do my best, and Richard will help me. Good-bye, Gideon dear. You will write to me, won’t you?’

‘I already have the timetable for the overland mail.’ He patted his pocket. ‘And I’ll expect you to answer, dear Mrs Curtis.’ She blushed enchantingly, and looked at her husband. Gideon hoped to God she was going to be all right. She was so young still, and so very vulnerable.