Distant Choices (17 page)

‘And what then, Francis? What
next
? Go on.'

She was excited by the very names of the cities he mentioned. Places of discomfort, some of them, to him, others only half-remembered. The strands of a magic carpet to Kate, a dazzling web to lift her and carry her … Where? Not far, it seemed to him, and not for long.

‘Kashmir,' she breathed, holding the exotic syllables on her tongue. ‘Lahore. Benares.' And then, when he had shifted the location. ‘Samarkand – is it possible? Damascus. Petra. Oh Lord – how glorious. Have you really
seen
all of those –
walked
in them?'

She was thirsty for them, he could feel it in his own throat, parched dry by her simple longing for the name of Samarkand – Baghdad – Babylon.

‘Mecca,' she breathed. ‘The holy city. The Black Stone of the Kaaba.'

He was still thirsty for Mecca himself. He understood. But he would go there – soon – would stand not just on fevered imaginings but on living, doubtless sore and bleeding feet, but
there
, before that fabled black stone with all the other pilgrims, the beggars, the holy ascetics, the fanatics who would murder him by joyful, horrible inches should he be detected as an Infidel.

Yes, he would be on his way before the year was out, just as soon as he had done his duty by Dessborough, whereas she – and with what a deep-felt spasm of sorrow he knew it – would go nowhere, except into the noose of convention which had always awaited her. The uniform destiny of women, eagerly awaited by some, unbearable to others who would have to bear it, just the same.

‘What do you want from life, Kate?' he asked, knowing it would make no difference.

‘Everything.'
The thirst again, scorching her now, reaching out to him. ‘Oh – not to
have
everything – of course not. But to go and take a look at it – to see, and find out, just what it is, and what other people do about it.
You
know.'

He knew.

Tossing back her hair she revealed a face so naked that he lowered his eyes, not thinking it right to look.

‘I often dream,' she said, ‘that someone is holding a pillow to my face.'

Suffocation. Yes. That too he understood in her.

‘Do you see who it is?'

‘Oh yes. Sometimes one person, sometimes another. They usually kill me, too.'

Did she die struggling? Very likely. Although, once again it could make no difference. Certainly not to the dry, questing flame in her which would be snuffed out one way or another. By the man they would find to marry her, he supposed, by the children her nervous body must surely be too frail to bear, by the pillow of ‘Society' which, if all else failed, could be relied on most effectively, he thought, to smother her. Leaving nothing of her but a hollow twig.

Had he not heard something like that about her mother?

‘Tell me,' she said, ‘about Zanzibar –
all
about it. And then – where else have you been? Jerusalem?'

‘I have.'

‘Tell me.'

The afternoon wore on.

‘Oh Lord – is that the bell from Merton church?'

‘It is.'

‘Oh Lord – oh
damnation
. I shall be late for tea now and in as much disgrace for it as if I had stolen the crown jewels. Three o'clock. Four o'clock. All this fuss about time. What does it matter?'

‘It passes,' he said.

Poor Kate, who would bleed and burn and be devoured whole, he supposed, by the monster ‘Society', unless someone forced her to conform to it. And since that could only be done by breaking her hectic, too frail spirit, he did not wish to see it.

Nor had he any real help to give her beyond feeding her imagination with such of his traveller's tales as were fit for her to hear, bearing constantly in mind that, although a rebel, she was also very much a young English lady. Innocent, therefore, and kept in deliberate ignorance of life's realities. Sad and funny. Intriguing, too, at times although he was in no mood to respond to the challenge in her and did not do so. A girl born in the wrong skin, the wrong place, the wrong time, as wrong in every way for his needs and purposes as Oriel was right.

Frail, chaotic Kate. Desperate, thirsty soul. And, for all his experience of the world and its women, he did not realize she had fallen in love with him until she told him so.

The Stangway carriage horses grew accustomed to the uphill journey to Dessborough that summer, Evangeline ordering her coach- man to drive slowly along the narrow, leafy lane approaching the village and then
very slowly indeed
through the village itself – a single, cobbled street, two rows of low, stone cottages, a squat, square-towered church almost black with age and the smoke which had begun to blow over, this last twenty years or so, from Hepplefield – so that the villagers, stout women who came with most obliging curiosity to their cottage doorways, old, quiet men and craggy, quiet young ones, might see the lovely face of Miss Blake, her daughter, and recognize it when she became their squire's lady.

An event, Evangeline reckoned, which would be proposed, announced and irrevocably settled by the summer's end. Thus her reason, two or three mornings a week while the fine weather lasted, for taking her carriage-exercise in the direction of Dessborough, doing no more than obey the urgings of the current Squire Ashington to call upon him and relieve the tedium of a poor bachelor just as often as she was able.

He had issued the invitation with deliberate gallantry, bowing over Evangeline's hand in a manner calculated to please; having learned these charming niceties to perfection at his public school and in his regiment.

‘Do come and see me, Mrs Stangway.'

‘Perhaps – perhaps …'

And as she turned to go, he had taken the game of courtship a stage further by whispering, for
her
ears only, ‘And will you bring your daughter?'

Of course she would. But not every time and never alone, still forcing him to make a deliberate effort to be on his own with Oriel, and then, more often than not, frustrating it. Clearly there was to be no dalliance. If he desired Oriel's company, her mother signified, then he must declare himself honourably, concisely, and as soon as possible. Otherwise the Stangway carriage, every time he walked out of his front door to greet it, would remain – as on this particular July morning – full to the brim with ladies; the discreet and elegant Evangeline herself; Oriel in a flowing ice-blue gown and pale straw hat; Kate in one of the nondescript garments of her Aunt Maud's choosing; Susannah Saint-Charles in a garment cut from the same pattern and showing considerable agitation at the sight of Mr Garron Keith, the railway contractor, who had ridden over, half an hour before, from the site of what was to be the Merton Tunnel, to answer complaints lodged by Squire Ashington of Dessborough and Lord Merton of Merton Abbey against his navvies.

And if Squire Ashington had not cared to invite the contractor indoors but had kept him talking outside on the gravel path, as he would have kept a gamekeeper, it seemed hardly surprising, now that it was no longer just a matter of poached rabbits – although that was quite bad enough – but a whole crop of sorry tales to tell of a nature wilder and far more wicked than anything these quiet regions had hitherto imagined.

Tales of Dessborough girls and Merton girls ‘molested'as they went about their rightful business so that it was no longer safe to walk, even three or four together, in the lanes around the village. Tales of navvywomen swaggering hand on hip along the village street, smoking their foul pipes and shouting their foul language, pushing decent women aside at the pump and the dairy and terrorizing the children. Tales of navvymen invading the ale-house at Merton every night, swearing and fighting and offering money to honest men's wholesome wives and daughters. The truly awful tale of the Dessborough girl who had actually taken those wages of sin and, far from dying of the shame of it, had gone off to the navvy-camp at Merton Ridge to sin again, one presumed, with the man who had despoiled her.

And the girl had been entirely respectable, ‘walking-out' these three years past with a ‘hedger and ditcher'on the Merton estate and with the required amount of household and personal linen hem-stitched and ready in her ‘bottom drawer'. Dessborough and Merton had talked, the past month, of little else. The nearby market town of Lydwick, knowing itself to be the next station on the line, had shuddered. High Grange, its own station at least a year away, had squared its collective shoulders for the attack, Miss Susannah Saint-Charles of High Grange vicarage having taken it upon herself to visit the Dessborough girl's abandoned parents whose hearts, she had formed the opinion, might be in some way mended should it turn out that their daughter had taken up residence not with a seducer but a prospective husband. Might such an outcome be possible? Susannah, little church mouse with the heart of an eagle, had promised to enquire, to beard the lion Mr Keith in his den, if need be, and demand his intervention; or, at least, detain him when next she saw him, just long enough to say a word – whispered perhaps – about his responsibility for the morals and immortal souls of his workingmen.

He was here now.

‘Oh – Mr Keith …' Her mouth opened in silent rehearsal anticipating his impatience although, indeed, he appeared in no great hurry to mount his tall roan horse and gallop away – not, she feared, like a gentleman who rides for pleasure but a man who wishes to get very quickly to his destination. He remained instead, quite calmly, on the broad gravel drive as they got down from the Stangway carriage, Evangeline and Oriel with an identical floating grace, Kate catching her hem on the carriage-step because she could never trouble to look where she was going, Susannah herself very straight of back and clenched of jaw, taking care, above all, to show no hoydenish glimpse of ankle as Kate had just done.

‘Ladies – this
is
a pleasure,' said Francis Ashington, looking at Oriel.

‘So it is,' agreed Garron Keith, looking at Oriel too.

‘Such a lovely day,' murmured Evangeline.

They took a few moments, standing on the carriageway bordered by overgrown beds of geranium and fuchsias and small intensely fragrant roses, to agree with her, each one passing comment on the glorious turn of the weather.

There came a pause, during which it was felt by some of them that Mr Garron Keith might think it time to go away.

‘Mr Keith is here,' said Francis, very lightly, ‘to explain to me that one cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs. Or something to that effect. And is now on his way to tell Lord Merton the same, I rather think …'

‘Oh – Mr Keith …' began Susannah, seizing – or so she hoped – her chance.

‘If Merton wants his railway station,' said Mr Keith, ignoring her, ‘then it takes navvies to build it. And if they go on the randy every pay day and make off with a few of his milkmaids then I reckon it's only to be expected. Considering my lads earn ten times better wages than they'd ever get digging Merton's ditches – and acquire a sight more muscle too …'

‘And so much more skill,' murmured Evangeline, ‘at snaring other people's rabbits.'

Mr Keith looked down at her, smiling but letting it be seen, nevertheless, that he had heard rather more than enough lately about stolen rabbits.

‘The site at Merton Ridge is miles from anywhere,' he said. ‘The men have to eat. I've been to Lydwick and Hepplefield and let it be known the kind of profits to be made from a stall or two up at the camp. But your local merchants seem a bit on the timid side, or maybe just hard of hearing. So far I've convinced a baker and a butcher to drive out twice a week. And, as I'm sure you all know, the men brew their own beer and distil their own gin in the huts. So – until the shopkeepers stir themselves – that's that. Because I'll have no tommy-shop on any site of mine.'

‘
Tommy
shop?' Evangeline's voice hovered between amusement and the suspicion that he had led her to repeat a vulgar word.

‘Yes, Mrs Stangway. Tommy-shop. You won't know what that is, I reckon.'

She smiled at him very sweetly, provoking him for what seemed to her the good and rather pleasant reason of sharpening her wits as a pianist would seize the chance to practise on a particularly grand piano.

‘You may take it, Mr Keith, that your reckoning is quite correct.
Do
enlighten us. You can see we are all agog.'

For a moment he stared at her, insolently in her opinion, and then, evidently deciding not to overstep the mark this time, nodded his head.

‘There are some contractors, Mrs Stangway, who set up their own shop on site …'

‘Are there
really
, Mr Keith?' The yawn in her voice was audible, almost visible. ‘And – do you know – that sounds an excellent, even an obvious idea to me.'

He nodded, curtly, once again. ‘Aye. I dare say. Except that such contractors only pay half their men's wages in cash and the other half in tickets for the tommy-shop. To be spent on mouldy flour and rancid bacon at ten times the price they'd have to pay elsewhere. Which means the tickets won't go far enough and the lads have to use their cash – at the tommy-shop again. Which means nobody has a brass farthing left by Tuesday, more often than not, and so they all have to borrow out of next week's wages. And when the same thing happens the week after, they have to borrow again. So, by the end of a month or two they're working to pay off their debts – to the contractor.'

‘It sounds rather – inefficient – of them, Mr Keith.'

‘It causes trouble, Mrs Stangway. Because a man doesn't need a Cambridge education to know when he's being cheated. The lads soon realize the contractor is paying them with one hand and taking it back with the other.'

‘Indeed. But you, Mr Keith, are evidently more tender-hearted than that.'