A Marriage of Convenience (36 page)

Sharp blades of fear reached Clinton through the insulating numbness of shock.

‘I know this is awkward for you.’ He tried to smile at Norton but his lips felt too stiff. ‘As it happens, I’ve a personal and rather pressing reason for not wanting to see him today … Something I promised, which I haven’t had time to do.’

‘Mr Danvers has come here in person.’

‘Tell him you tried to stop me going.’

Norton seemed embarrassed.

‘I really don’t like to, Lord Ardmore.’ He cleared his throat uneasily. ‘The fact is, though I’m sure he meant it in fun … he still hasn’t given me that draft.’

‘I’ll sign a receipt for you to give him.’ Trying to be authoritative, Clinton was horrified by the brittleness of his voice. Norton compressed his lips.

‘I’d like to please you, but I’m placed in a most …’

‘How was I placed with Mendoza?’

‘If I’d had any idea that you intended not to …’

‘Good God, man, I told your clerk I couldn’t meet it.’

Norton hesitated a moment but then moved abruptly to the nearest bell-pull. When a clerk came in answer, he was told to show in Mr Danvers. Without raising his eyes, Norton murmured an apology.

One look at Esmond’s pale tight-drawn features convinced Clinton that he would betray him and had only delayed in order to deliver the
coup
de
grâce
in person. Never could he have expected such a perfect opportunity. Certain he could now do nothing to save himself, Clinton faced his executioner. Esmond nodded to him as if acknowledging a routine courtesy and turned to Norton. Clinton braced himself, but Esmond only asked Norton to excuse them for a few minutes. When the money-lender had left, Esmond said quietly:

‘You’re going to tell me some things now, Clinton.’

‘You’ll repudiate those bills whatever I say.’

‘Not if you’re honest with me.’

‘Go to hell.’

Esmond smiled derisively and nodded to himself as though the response had been exactly what he had expected.

‘I don’t believe you’re stupid enough to prefer ten years in jail to a little loss of face with me.’ Esmond picked up a pair of
silver-handled
glove-stretchers from a table and examined them. ‘
Somebody
came to see me on Sunday evening and told me something rather surprising. Guess what it was.’ Clinton turned his back. Esmond stood snapping the stretchers open and shut. ‘All right, I’ll come back to that when I’ve got your interest.’ He paused. ‘Quite unintentionally this person reminded me of something else … something I hadn’t thought about for months. Perhaps you
remember
mother’s story about the Protestant lady and her footman? The marriage that wasn’t a marriage?’ When Clinton did not react in any way, Esmond said sharply: ‘If you want my help over those signatures, you’d better answer me.’

Clinton shrugged his shoulders.

‘I remember it. Sounded like something she’d made up to amuse us.’

‘But she didn’t make it up, did she?’ Esmond folded his arms and smiled easily. ‘You must know that, Clinton. You see my visitor was sure you married in Ireland.’

‘Make your point,’ murmured Clinton, turning. Apart from the whiteness of his face, he showed no emotion. Esmond put down the glove-stretchers.

‘Have you told Theresa the implications?’

‘Of marrying her in Ireland?’ asked Clinton. His brother nodded.

‘There aren’t any.’

Esmond clapped his hands together as though delighted by Clinton’s reply. ‘I wonder if she’ll agree when you tell her mother’s story. I have to admit it, Clinton … I underestimated you. Not many men would do what you did in cold blood.’

‘What would you say that was?’ asked Clinton stiffening, his pent-up fury obvious now.

‘Deceived her for your own convenience. Don’t look so shocked. Why else would you have married her in Ireland? Unless you thought you might need to get out of it later?’

‘I was stationed there,’ Clinton shouted. ‘If I’d delayed marrying her, I’d have lost her.’

‘You could have come to England. Steamers leave Dublin with tolerable regularity.’ He looked at Clinton with mocking sadness. ‘All you said about treating her honourably … just a bellyfull of cant.’

‘Did I abandon her when you robbed me of my income?’

Esmond backed away as Clinton came at him.

‘You still haven’t told her the truth, have you? And till you do, you’ll go on betraying her every day.’

Clinton stood motionless, staring at the floor.

‘How could I tell her straight after the marriage? Then she was pregnant. Should I have told her the moment she gave me that news? Or when she lost the child and nearly died? After that I had plenty to attend to.’ He met Esmond’s eyes. ‘I looked on it as marriage. Why should I think I betrayed her?’

Esmond looked at him disdainfully.

‘Because you knew the law. Must have known it. Any priest would have told you.’

To Esmond’s surprise, Clinton no longer seemed interested in justifying himself. After a silence, he said with anxiety rather than hostility:

‘Who told you I married her there?’

‘Did you swear her to keep it quiet? Of course you did.’

‘Just tell me, Esmond.’

‘Later.’ Esmond rang the bell and said quietly: ‘I never intended to give you away over those bills. There’d have been a kind of dignity in going to prison for forging them. Love’s last resort.’ He smiled to himself. ‘But I won’t make you a present of the money either; so don’t try running off with it.’

Esmond treated Norton to a roguish grin as he came in.

‘Just a family conference about ways and means.’

‘A happy resolution, I trust?’

‘Entirely.’ Esmond took an envelope from his frockcoat and handed it to Norton with a slight bow. ‘The draft I promised.’

The money lender held out a bulky packet to Clinton.

‘Your money, my lord. Shall I count it?’

Clinton tossed the packet to Esmond.

‘My brother looks after my affairs.’

‘I hope he’s well paid for it,’ returned Norton with elaborate gravity.

‘Pure philanthropy,’ returned Esmond, already on his way to the door.

‘Who told you?’ urged Clinton wildly as they emerged in the street.

Esmond glanced in the direction of his waiting carriage. A footman had already jumped down from behind and was lowering the step.

‘Perhaps I can drive you somewhere?’

‘Anywhere you’re going.’

Ignoring Clinton’s exasperation, Esmond gave instructions to the coachman and climbed in after his brother.

‘Who?’ whispered Clinton.

‘Her father. I don’t suppose you’ve met him?’

‘Damn you. Just tell me what he said.’

‘He turned up a couple of evenings ago. Tried to get me to tell him if you were as poor as Theresa thought.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Told him the truth … more or less. He wanted me to talk about you and Theresa, but I refused. Anyway, when he’d drunk a fair bit of sillery, he asked me point blank whether I thought you’d married her. I said he was out of his mind. Where was his evidence? He wouldn’t say till I poured such scorn on the idea that he lost his temper. He’d seen a marriage certificate. Where? No answer. Who showed it him? Nothing. Could he remember the wording? He told me a place with an Irish name. Priest called Maguire. I forget what else.’ Esmond glanced
sideways
at his brother’s frozen face. ‘It may be worthless legally, but why the hell didn’t you destroy it?’

Clinton stared out in silence at the trees in Golden Square with an expression so distant that Esmond wondered whether he had listened to anything he had said. At last Clinton murmured thickly:

‘Did he say how he got hold of it … anything at all?’

‘Not really. I suppose he must have wormed it out of Theresa. He’s as persistent as they come.’

When he looked at Clinton again, Esmond saw tears on his cheeks. Seconds later, as the carriage slowed down at a corner, Clinton flung open the door and jumped out. Esmond called after him and started in pursuit, but with twenty yards still between them, Clinton hailed a hansom which set off at once.

Though the day had been hot, the elderberries in the dusty hedgerows foretold autumn. On the fells, heather was in flower and the glory of broom and furze was past. Few birds sang in the still countryside. It was early evening before Clinton dismounted at Hathenshaw after travelling all day. The beech trees cast long shadows on the lawn. Past borders mellow with russet and ochre of early crysanthemums, he walked towards the garden door. His first sight of the house moved him not at all, but crossing the soft moss where the lawn ended, the air seemed distended with grief. A feeling that often came to him for no reason he could understand—a warm evening, the smell of leaf smoke, a fox barking at night.

Entering the hall he felt like a ghost returning to a place last seen not weeks but decades ago. A moment later Harris came in behind him, having seen him crossing from the stables to the house. When the servant told him that the bailiff had been back again with another writ, Clinton’s heart seemed to stop. The same tightness in the chest, the same sensation of falling he had known when he realised he had lost all hope with his uncle. For a while every notion of what he had been about to do fell away from him. Harris had moved closer.

‘You musn’t stay long, my lord.’

Clinton touched the man’s arm, moved by his obvious sorrow. Minutes earlier he had imagined going to Theresa’s dressing room, searching for the certificate and handing it to her in silence. Now he merely rang for a maid, asked the girl where her mistress was, and went there at once.

Mother and daughter were making plum and damson jam in the kitchen; their hands and lips stained by the fruit, now simmering in preserving pans on the range. For several seconds Clinton watched Theresa from the corridor. Her hair was charmingly pinned up with a tortoiseshell comb and she wore a maid’s apron over a pale yellow dress. He stood very still; angry, sorrowful, yet wanting to embrace her, held back by the barrier of their time apart and the sapping consciousness of betrayal—his own and hers.

As he went in, Theresa cried out and ran to him with outsretched arms, hesitating as she saw the coldness of his expression. She asked Louise to leave them and said faintly:

‘He wouldn’t help you?’

‘No, he turned me down’. He moved closer, and though his eyes were fixed on her face, they seemed to be looking beyond her. ‘Your father knows.’

His calm impersonal voice was death to her; worse than any anger—as if she had already been condemned, and this opportunity to speak was offered only as formal justice.

‘I didn’t tell him,’ she whispered, trying to contain a rising wave of hysteria.

‘But he knows.’

‘You’d gone to London … the first time. You sent that telegram. I’d never felt so alone, Clinton. I was frightened.’ Ashamed of her pleading tone, she could not help it. She could see that he was relentlessly killing the emotion in himself.

‘I repeatedly asked you to come with me.’

‘I was afraid to be possessive. Then the telegram and Hopkinson. You lied about seeing your trustees. I remembered others … In York, when I saw the letter from your bank you said it was nothing. You refused to admit anything until things had gone too far to remedy. I needed reassurance.’

‘So you asked your father for it?’

‘No, no,’ she cried. ‘I wrote to Maguire. I needed a certificate for the baby’s baptism.’

‘A little early.’

‘I was stupid, I know.’

‘You didn’t trust me. Perhaps that wasn’t so stupid.’ A dart of unhappy fire sprang from the depth of his gold-flecked eyes; his face looked bruised and crumpled. She wanted to throw herself against his shoulder and weep.

‘I didn’t tell him, Clinton. How can you believe that? I don’t know how Louise found out. I think she or a maid opened Maguire’s reply. Louise wrote to father. He came here … I know he won’t tell anyone.’

‘I’m afraid he’s already told Esmond … said you were kind enough to show him the certificate.’

‘I had no choice. He was threatening to make inquiries in Ireland unless I confirmed what Louise had said. For pity’s sake, what could I do?’

‘Never have broken your promise by writing to the priest in the first place.’

‘How was that breaking faith? He knew we were married and
understood the need for secrecy.’ Her eyes were unflinching now. ‘Are you accusing me of putting Louise up to telling her
grandfather
?’

‘So he’d force me to acknowledge you?’ Clinton smiled with
half-closed
eyes. ‘I never thought that for a moment … though perhaps it’s his intention.’ He turned away and walked out into the yard.

‘What will you do?’ she asked, following him.

‘Do?’ he murmured abstractedly, aiming a kick at a bucket. ‘It makes no difference … couldn’t matter less.’ He laughed harshly. ‘To be honest, I rather hoped you had told him; it might have evened the score a bit. You look at me as if you’ve done something wrong …
you
. The irony, my God, the irony.’ She was looking at him with heartbreaking tenderness. He tried to concentrate his mind on what was to come: a few words, and no yielding to the insidious desire to justify or seek forgiveness. He thought: if only it were enough simply to tell her what was done in Ireland; but there was more to say; and though he longed to be done, his thoughts felt slow-footed groping things. She touched his hand, but he pulled it away as if burned. He said rapidly:

‘Nothing’s as it seems. I fancy it’s either … no. We say that man’s true steel, that one a coward … We change so much in and out of love that who can tell what we were and what we’ll become?’ He broke off as a maid came out of the creamery. Clinton took Theresa’s arm and walked with her into the kitchen garden; but there too, they were not alone. Two gardeners were at work planting spring cabbages. They went through the narrow gate into the orchard. Under one of the largest trees was a seat, hemmed about by forked stakes supporting the more heavily laden branches. As they sat down, she asked in a low voice: ‘Why did he refuse you? Why?’

‘I couldn’t meet his terms. It’s over.’

‘Is that all you’ll say?’

‘We can’t change his mind.’ A pigeon flapped overhead towards the house and he gazed after it with restless preoccupied eyes. ‘You recognised me when we met… The young officer with his heart on his sleeve.’

‘I always thought better of you than that. From the day you came to the theatre … from that first day.’

‘I’d rather forget …’ He fell silent, head bowed. At last he said: ‘It all used to be so simple. No regrets, no fears—life a race to be run and damn the hazards. Just keep on headlong, leaving caution to the cowards … to anyone ready to sell liberty to buy wealth and safety …’ The scathing bitterness of his voice shocked her. He drew in breath and said more gently: ‘And I was quite different. Even my
beliefs weren’t like any other man’s … I took every kind of risk, lived from day to day, did enough for a dozen men … spent more than money. Perhaps I spent myself. And nothing, nothing on earth could ever bring me down. Such an old story.’ He dug his nails into a patch of lichen on the arm of the bench. She was about to speak but he turned away. ‘I thought the past powerless to touch me, until one fine day it overtook me and blocked the path ahead.’ He dropped his hands and faced her despairingly. ‘I’ve no faith in the future any more. Even the present’s an outpost I can’t hold. If things had happened sooner—the writs, imprisonment, the loss of hope after hope—I might have had the strength to go on believing in a new life. Now it’s no good. I can’t even pay what I promised to the court. I forged bills in London, might have been imprisoned for years. Perhaps I still will be. In any case I’ll be up before the commissioners before I can raise enough to save myself.’ His voice broke and he covered his face. ‘And all this faith in happiness … nothing but a last throw. An end, not a beginning.’ He dashed the moisture from his cheeks with the back of his hand. ‘Listen to me asking for pity already—Imagine six weeks, six months, and God knows how much of it in custody. I went through it before. I know what I can bear. I’d rather die than see you come to despise me … It’s over, Theresa. Over.’

She was very still and he thought she was crying, but when he looked up, he sensed behind her stricken eyes the concentration of cold anger.

‘How would it help us to part?’

He laid a firm hand on her arm, afraid that when he spoke she would tear herself away before he could finish.

‘The priest had no right to marry us. The law is …

‘The law?’ A scream came up into her throat but went no further. ‘We exchanged vows. Does any law change that? Do you take this woman? Do you take this man? We gave our consent … nothing can wipe that out.’ She broke from his grasp and struck his chest with clenched fists. ‘You said that vows spoken anywhere were binding …’

‘In Ireland the law doesn’t allow a Catholic priest to marry a Protestant and …’

She uttered an hysterical little laugh.

‘The law doesn’t allow murder. Does that bring a corpse to life? A man’s murdered … a man’s married. Facts,’ she cried, ‘facts.’

Paralysed with shame, he saw her face as if it were still not too late; all imagined. A fine summer evening like any other—an apron over a yellow dress, warm sunlight on the tower, wasps buzzing around windfalls. He knew that only the smallest searching for
emotion would make him weep. He longed to say that all he had said had merely been leading to the suggestion of a second marriage in England. A month ago, he would have said just this and meant it, but now the odds had changed, and all his past efforts to deny the inevitable seemed to owe as much to vanity as to honour—a desperate desire to preserve her ideal picture of him, regardless of the ultimate cost to both of them.

In the dappled shade, under the overhanging boughs, her eyes seemed feverishly bright. A thin shaft of sunlight fell on her shoulder and the soft curve of her breasts. The thought of losing her, started a pulse of pain under his skin, throbbing like a bird’s heart; and in all his body a striving for her, against all matters of time and circumstance. And was he her betrayer? Perhaps only a day or two till the bailiff returned. And then?

‘Can’t you see how it would be?’ he asked, tenderness breaking the rough edge of his voice. ‘Every penny you earned swallowed by my debts. While I did what? Drank, sold matches in the street? If all my creditors foreclose at once you know the end of that. How long could we survive that sort of life? In and out of debtors’ jails … resentment killing every other impulse. Would you have me drag you down into that pit with me?’

Her long silence wrung him as her first outburst had not. She sighed and moved slightly; more puzzled than blackly
despairing
.

‘How can I choose? For better for worse, for richer for poorer … I knew what the words meant. Desert me, but I’ll still be your wife.’

‘If the priest denied it to your face …?’

‘I’d believe what I know.’ Her voice was hoarse but absolutely level. Her certainty made everything he had said seem unreal to him. She had rejected the basic premise from which everything should have sprung, leaving him as helpless as a man under a net. She said intently: ‘If I’d made marriage a condition for being with you, I could understand better; but I said it was impossible and in the same breath offered to be your mistress. Everything you did, you chose to do. And now you claim I’ll be to blame for what follows unless I agree to something that isn’t in my power. How can you claim it? How?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether you agree,’ he said flatly.

‘Look at me and tell me you’d go if I begged you to stay.’ A silence; he shook his head. ‘You can’t?’

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘Ask it and I’ll stay.’

‘Then you are asking me to agree.’ She twisted her lips in a parody of a smile, and moved closer, turning his face with her hand. ‘Tell
me,’ she said in a whisper that shook his nerves by its strange tension, its mixture of ruthlessness and suffering. ‘Will the
bridesmaids
carry bouquets of snowdrops? How did you describe it?’ She paused, her eyes searching in his without mercy. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? You’ll go to that girl.’ She paused, waiting for confirmation or denial. He said nothing. She got up with a light shrug. ‘Did I ever tell you, she offered me money in Dublin? I can’t remember what you said to her.’ She shuddered as if suddenly cold, and then started towards the house. And the brief time he held her in view seemed to stretch endlessly, like a spasm of impossible pain. Everything that had been most important and luminous in his life, falling away into the widening gap: love, sorrow and every other desire, until he felt stripped to the bone. He got up and stood hunched and motionless. Without knowing why, he seized a bough of the tree and shook it with all his strength, sending apples raining down around him, unripe and green.

‘Over, over,’ he repeated dully, and the word kept rustling and echoing in the sound of his footsteps through the grass.

In front of the house, he hesitated. There was nothing he could say; nothing else. He wanted to leave and never return. The gardens, the reds tone walls and mullioned windows, the views of the fells across the meadows flooded him with sadness. He walked away briskly in the direction of the stables. Inside, the familiar sweet ammoniac odour in his nostrils soothed him at first. He stood in the shadowy darkness, tears forming slowly. Later he laid his cheek against his favourite stallion’s neck, murmuring the horse’s name, blindly seeking comfort. When his feelings broke, he leant against the rough wall and wept with harsh gasping sobs, until it seemed to him that he had shed all the tears of the rest of his life.

By the time Clinton returned to the house, the first misty stars were visible in the pale sky. He walked slowly, as though any jarring step might hurt him. But already a curious aching hollowness had absorbed his earlier pain. There could only be one moment of admission, one first discovery of betrayal, and, after it, the fact could never wound with the same violence; or so he told himself, as he climbed the stairs.

She was in her dressing room, sitting writing at the small table by the window, her face pale amber in the candlelight. As he entered, her features seemed to tighten, the mouth narrowing, eyes thrown into wider relief. When he sat down, she left the table and walked round him, attentively but seeming at the same time to be contemplating something remote: the way a sculptor might look at a piece of his work done long ago. Had it not been for the baffled simplicity of her gaze, he would have suspected mockery. Passing
behind him, she lightly touched his hair, letting her hand slip down the line of his cheek and come to rest on his shoulder.