Distant Choices (12 page)

He was married then. She was infinitely relieved about it.

‘I lost my wife,' he said crisply, ‘some years back.'

‘I am so sorry.' It was the plain truth. Very sorry indeed if it meant – as it surely did – that he was on the look-out for a replacement, someone, she judged, who could be considered a step up that slippery social ladder yet whose chances in the marriage-stakes had been sufficiently damaged in some way to make her accept a far from socially advantageous husband like himself. Plain girls without dowries, like Susannah. Or pretty girls with questionable backgrounds, like herself.

‘Susannah,' she murmured, ‘how sad for Mr Keith to be bringing up his children alone.'

‘I expect,' said Susannah who, as a vicar's daughter, was on easy terms with self-sacrifice, ‘that they are a comfort to him.'

‘Not that I've noticed,' declared Mr Keith quite cheerfully, his eyes, lingering on Oriel's bare shoulders, indicating that the comforts of fatherhood were not the ones he most appreciated.

‘Are they sons?' she said just a shade tartly, feeling sure they would be. Big, unruly boys with grazed knuckles and a scattering of cuts and bruises, as he would have been himself. Insolent, lounging, staring boys, little braggarts full of wild schemes and coarse language, created exactly to their father's image.

‘One boy. Two girls,' he told her. ‘You'll be fond of children, Miss Blake. Aren't all women?'

‘Oh – some more than others, I think. Susannah – I know – adores all children. Whereas I have had so little to do with them …'

He looked straight at her, she thought, with the same warm appreciation, the same insolent delight as he had bestowed on the roast lamb.

‘That ought to be remedied, Miss Blake.' The appearance of a dish of quails and plovers made an answer happily unnecessary, enabling her to turn to Mr de Hay with a far more dazzling smile than she would otherwise have felt him to be entitled.

‘Do try the quail, Mr de Hay. It is a very special recipe …'

Mr Keith had eaten every morsel which had been placed before him and drunk every drop. Mr de Hay, most correctly had left a little of every dish on his plate and enough wine to ‘show'in every glass. Susannah, again correctly, had picked like a nervous sparrow. Kate, directly opposite, had eaten almost nothing at all, staring, her eyes out of focus, into hostile space, drugged by boredom, in pain with it, her face vacant and strange and showing, never more plainly, its Kessler heritage.

Catching her eyes Oriel smiled at her, conveying encouragement, the clasp of an understanding hand.
Never mind, little sister. One ordeal is like another, in that they all come to an end sooner or later. Don't worry, Kate. And don't stare like that, as if nothing, anywhere you look, seems quite real to you. Don't play into their hands. Don't wilt before Quentin. Fascinate him. Let him see you as Young Nefertiti, as you saw yourself upstairs in your mirror. Fascinate them all and take your pick. You can if you try.

‘You must sample the chocolate pudding, Mr de Hay – Mr Keith –' she said. ‘We are rather pleased with it.'

‘A
soupçon
merely,' murmured Mr de Hay. Mr Keith firmly declared ‘I will.'

The sweets were taken away and Evangeline, with a graceful, half-reluctant movement, rose to her feet, signifying the withdrawal of the ladies so that the gentlemen might smoke and drink their port and brandy and pass, as last, to those serious topics considered unsuitable for ladies. Business and politics, Oriel supposed, certainly in the case of Quentin. Stories of a coarse nature, perhaps, from gentlemen of such differing social status as Lord Merton and Mr Keith. A supercilious silence from Matthew Stangway.

Her father? She could not think of him as such. ‘Kate,' she called out as they left the room.
Certainly
her sister. But Kate had fled instantly upstairs to avoid the fuss of greeting new arrivals, those who had not been thought interesting or important enough to attend Evangeline's dinner, and those who had not thought her dinner grand enough for them. Another batch of Quentin's brothers and sisters, whose names Evangeline made a point of never quite remembering, a few local squires and merchants from Hepplefield who made a show of remembering
her
just a shade too well. And then – the prize of the evening – Lord Merton's two daughters who, despite their exceedingly superior manner, their die-away airs and graces and the reputation which had followed them up from London, of being rather ‘fast', could easily have been mistaken for any of the Misses Saint-Charles, accompanied by a young man who lit an immediate spark of animation, of recognition almost, in Evangeline.

‘Our cousin – Francis Ashington,' said Dora Merton, speaking very nearly through a yawn. ‘And terribly famous, don't you know. Been all over India dressed as a native. And all over Syria and Arabia too, pretending to be an Arab. The Royal Geographical Society think the world of him. Lectures for them, you know – and has articles in all the magazines. You will have heard of him, I expect – Mrs – er – Stangway?'

Evangeline had not. Yet somewhere, it seemed to her, she had
seen
him. No doubt Oriel would remember.

‘Mr Ashington, how do you do? This is Miss Blake – my daughter.'

For a moment Oriel recognized him too and then the resemblance – as resemblance it could only have been – faded, or eluded her, leaving her a clear view of a man who was, quite simply, the most handsome she had ever seen. Not – and she
did
realize this – that he was really any more beautiful in face or figure than the other men who, from time to time, had briefly attracted her. It was just that none of
them
had moved her like this. None of them had seemed so wonderful to her and at the same time so familiar that she might well have known him intimately and happily at some other level of experience, somewhere else. Or had simply dreamed him into her reality.

She knew that her throat had gone dry, her stomach tight with anticipation. She knew herself to be at a threshold in her life, face to face with a vital door.

‘Mr Ashington …'

‘Miss Blake.'

He was very dark, a man who could easily have passed for an Indian, she supposed, his skin tanned not to leather like Mr Keith's but to smooth amber, his eyes almond shaped and deep set and very nearly black in colour, an air of something essentially exotic about him while, at the same time, he was unmistakably an English gentleman. Immensely civilized. Courteous and restrained. Beautiful.

Oriel Blake, behind her fine, pale shell, was mesmerized.

‘Ah – there you are.' Lord Merton, in need of Evangeline to convince him all over again of his new-found wit and extra inches, had soon grown restless, declining a second glass of port, stubbing out his cigar and declaring his intention of joining the ladies, thus obliging the rest of the smoking-party to do the same.

‘There you are, Mrs Stangway – and that young dog of a nephew of mine with you. Very decent of you, Francis, to bring Dora and Adela. You'll have met him before, I reckon – my cousin Celestine Ashington's boy? Beautiful woman – something like yourself, Mrs Stangway – although dead and gone now, of course, more's the pity, like all the Ashingtons. Except this young scoundrel. Quite the hero, don't you know – soldiering and adventuring all over India and the Lord knows where else. Lost in the desert – nearly died of thirst. Twenty bouts of fever – or was it twenty-one? Reported dead in all the papers. My wife, who was very fond of his mother, shedding tears. And then he turns up again, looking like a scarecrow, with nothing in his head but going off again to some Holy City or other, where they'll kill a white man as soon as look at him. Told him straight, Mrs Stangway – or my wife did – to come home first and find himself a wife. There's been an Ashington at Dessborough Manor as long as we've been at Merton. And if he's the last, then it's his plain duty, before he disappears into the wilds again, to get himself an heir. Introduce him to your daughter, Mrs Stangway. I'd give him either one of mine except that Dessborough's only a small property, not grand enough by half to suit them. Or their mother.' Lord Merton, despite his refusal of that last glass of port, was quite drunk, a matter of which his daughters, who thought him ridiculous in any case, took only moderate notice.

‘Really, papa,' reproved his elder daughter Adela who was almost engaged to be married to another cousin, the one who would eventually inherit her father's title, Lord Merton having no sons.

‘Do hush, papa,' said Dora, his younger, who, since she could not be Lady Merton had made up her mind to be a duchess.

The ladies, who had been called upstairs to the attention of Evangeline's maids, returned – all except Kate. The gentlemen returned too, filling the room with the clatter of coffee cups and the anticipation of champagne. Card tables were arranged in the book-room. Violins began to play in the stone-flagged hall.

‘Francis …?' Dora Merton beckoned to her cousin who, although not rich enough to marry, was exactly the kind of man with whom – while waiting to be a duchess – she thought it would be most exhilarating to fall in love.

But he was looking at Oriel, and did not see her.

Quentin Saint-Charles approached with cool affability, expecting an introduction and wishing to know where Kate was hiding.

Oriel, her mind full of Francis Ashington, did not know.

Mr Garron Keith, the railway contractor stood for a while, his bulk filling the doorway, watching her until she looked at him with what she did not realize to be mute appeal.
Please go away. Don't intrude and spoil this – well – whatever one can call it. Please don't break this spell for me. There may never be another.

‘Oriel, what ought I to do?' asked Susannah Saint-Charles very pink and flustered. ‘There is Mr Keith over there looking like thunder – because of all the things I said at dinner, I suppose, about his poor navvies. Ought I to go over and apologize?'

‘Yes,' said Oriel. ‘Please.'

But by the time Susannah, wearing her most resolute expression, reached the doorway, Mr Keith had gone.

They went together to the hall to listen to the violins although her senses were too enraptured by the simple presence of this man to take in a note of music. Nor did she taste the champagne beyond a prickling sensation on her tongue which did little to ease her parched throat.

She was not part of the company. She was with Francis Ashington. Amazed and enchanted. Still shaken. Yet managing nevertheless, to perform, as smoothly as she always did, the basic acts of smiling at him, answering his questions, asking him the requisite details of his life in India, his journeys, his home at Dessborough, his family, whether or not he was glad to be in England again.

‘I find it strange,' he told her. ‘The colours seem wrong.' And when she did not understand him, he drew her aside, so as not to disturb the musicians, and explained himself to her.

‘I was taken out to India as a child and grew up with Indian colours – hot pink and flaming scarlet and a wonderful, smouldering orange all around me – and all together, more often than not. So now, sadly perhaps, it is all these muted English colours which seem foreign to me. And, to be honest with you, I don't think my ears are quite tuned, as yet, to these violins. Perhaps they would sound better if we went up to the Long Gallery? I may find them sweeter, at a distance.'

Smiling, moving very slowly, she went with him, knowing herself to be in a blaze of excitement as vivid as any of those Oriental pinks and scarlets, no matter how much she might look like a placid English swan, not a feather unruffled. It did not even occur to her to wonder how he knew the way to the portrait gallery.

‘I ought to tell you,' he said, ‘that I used to come here, sometimes, in childhood.'

‘Before India?'

‘Ah, no. There was nothing
before
India. I was sent back to England to school, of course …'

‘Of course.'

‘And since my father was a cousin of some sort – although rather distant, I think – of Mr Stangway's …'

She caught her breath. So that was it, the hint of something in him which had seemed familiar. The candle-flame of a resemblance which, the moment he spoke to her, had been snuffed out. The dark, aquiline, faintly sardonic looks of the Stangways, seen here in their portraits and in Matthew Stangway. Her father. But with a warmth, an excitement in life's adventure, a joy in living that was not in Matthew.

‘I see,' she said.

‘What do you see?' He smiled at her. ‘I know what I see, Oriel. May I call you that – since we are, to some extent, related?'

She nodded, still mesmerized, the forward movement of her long neck so slow that it could have been a lovely, lingering bow of submission.

‘Francis …?'

‘Yes, Oriel. What a golden name. You are the girl we all dream of in India. Do you know that? You look like an April day.'

‘An English April?'

‘Of course. There
is
no April, worth speaking of, anywhere else.'

The gallery was empty, lit only by the candles from the hall below, the air heavy and a little dusty, very still, his lean, alert body standing a correct six inches away from her yet touching her, nevertheless, like a breath. Silence spreading between them and around them like gently lapping water, closing them in together until – harshly – it was broken.

‘Francis Ashington – is that you?'

And Oriel could have clapped her hands over her ears to shut out the ugly sound of that stridently intruding voice, those trespassing footsteps shattering her quiet dream.

Dora Merton, she supposed.

But it was Kate – her own Kate – who emerged suddenly from the shadows in a vivid swirl of scarlet and white, her strange, up-tilted eyes aglitter, her overstrung body vibrating with an urgent rhythm that caught the breath and held the eye.