Distant Choices (2 page)

Evangeline.

The same woman. And not much altered, either, by these twenty years which, one supposed, could not all have been kind to her. The same long, slender figure, the same porcelain-pale skin and silver-pale hair as her daughter, coiled most becomingly, as she had always coiled it, on a neck that still had the drooping, swaying grace of a willow. The same pale blue eyes with a sparkle of laughter and a chip of ice set deep in each one, the same voice, light and playful as Springtime, and every bit as lethal – when she chose – as a well-aimed knife-thrust. And she had often chosen to be deadly.

Among those privileged upper few hundred of the Gore Valley no woman had ever liked Miss Evangeline Slade, while of the men whose heads she had turned in the old days few had had a good word to say for her once the spell had faded. A lovely woman, none could deny it. But tricky. Inclined to be scornful when caught off guard. And not always quite so clever as she ought to have been about concealing, from the heights of her own good-breeding and aristocratic, albeit penniless connections, how thoroughly she had despised the very men she had been trying so hard to marry. Most of them now present in the congregation, local giants of trade and commerce with their sensible wives, twenty years older and richer and all of them quite wise enough – in view of Matthew Stangway's exalted position in the community – to accept his bride exactly as he chose to present her. The respectably widowed Mrs Blake – no matter what anyone
really
thought about it – who, on this crisp, cold morning in perhaps the fiftieth year of her age, was to become Mrs Stangway of High Grange Park, a noble house with a noble fortune attached to it, coming from mines and quarries and the dowry of the lady, now deceased, who had been Mrs Stangway before her.

‘
Charming
woman,' murmured the congregation, rising to its feet as she entered the church, a smile on every face and rather more than a good idea in every shrewd, suspicious heart that when she had bolted so suddenly from the Valley all those years ago it had not been to accept the convenient proposal of one Captain Blake, but to hide herself away in secret to bear Matthew Stangway's child.

Charming
woman. Schemer. Fortune-hunter. Calculating adulteress. Her calculation being that, in view of his wife's indifferent health and his own sense of duty, she would manage to coax him or inveigle him or shame him into marriage without too much trouble – one day.

How shocking. How terribly cold-hearted. How very like Evangeline Slade to wait twenty years, with the sleek patience of a pedigree cat, for another woman to die.

Yet now that she had succeeded, now that Matthew Stangway
had
deigned to make an honest woman of her – and a very rich one – how could one openly condemn her without foregoing the pleasure of observing, at very close quarters, all the heartless and wicked and highly entertaining things one felt absolutely certain she now meant to do? How could one decline to call on her, or send one's butler to the door with a curt ‘Not at home'when she herself came to call, without giving up the poignant thrill of hearing, at first hand, how the Stangway daughter, or Matthew Stangway's two sisters, might be getting on with her?

Badly. One knew it would be badly. Therefore one had expressed oneself delighted to attend the wedding and whatever came after it at High Grange Park, knowing, in any case, how little one's opinions counted with Matthew Stangway, a man who had long ago ceased to consider anyone's convenience but his own.

A handsome man, of course, he had always been that, of a dark, distinguished bearing and cold, somewhat empty eyes who, since he grew rich enough to afford his whims and fancies, had indulged himself to the full. Fine wines, thoroughbred hunters, a London gunsmith and a London tailor, a diamond in his cambric shirt-frill, fur rugs in his carriage, women, as and when they took his fancy, no matter what his thin, eccentric, quite recently deceased wife had had to say about it. Never much, one felt. Nor – it was generally believed – would he have listened if she had.

Would this new wife – this old mistress – fare any better? Or was Matthew Stangway about to turn foolish now, in his middle-age, with love?

There came a mighty flaring of the organ, bringing the bride, as lovely as ever and probably just as treacherous in the dovegrey velvet with the swansdown muff and hem she had thought appropriate to her station, the triumph in her light eyes shadowed by a hat of grey gauze and feathers, pearls in her ears, a cluster of them pinned to the fall of white lace at her neck, her wide skirts flowing like water from a supple waist any woman half her age might envy.

Glorious Evangeline, savouring her victory like vintage claret.

Yet, as he turned to watch her progress down the aisle towards him his mind was so far removed from passion that he could not even retain its memory. He had desired her once, of course, when they had first met in those youthful, greedy years of his poverty, when he had owned nothing but the decaying shell of his ancestral home, his pride, his fastidious determination to live as a gentleman, his arrogance and his temper and the enormity of his desire for Evangeline Slade, as poor and proud and well-born as himself and just as urgently, as
ruthlessly
, in need of a ‘good marriage'. Two high-bred fortune-hunters from the same stable, equally disdainful of the quarry they were hunting.

‘I am a Sussex Slade,' was the first thing she had said to him.

‘I am a Yorkshire Stangway.'

Two ancient families growing even poorer, every year – every generation – more hard-pressed to support themselves in the state befitting their rank as ‘landed gentlemen'; until Matthew's father and Evangeline's father had had nothing to bequeath their son and daughter but the same piece of advice. To go out and find money, wherever it could be had, through marriage.

How ironic that they had found each other.

She – a girl whose grandfather had been on easy terms with the Duke of Wellington – had taken a post as secretary-companion to a banker's widow in the Gore Valley town of Hepplefield eight miles away – in those days – from Matthew's still rural village of High Grange. And they had been drawn together instantly by many things, not least their shared contempt for Hepplefield's shopkeepers, merchants, industrialists, for anything which could be bought and sold since the things
they
valued could only be inherited. For anything and everything tainted by the vulgar hand of trade, although they were both ready to grasp that hand, of course, and squeeze it as dry as Hepplefield's choking, mercantile dust.

In those self-conscious, middle-class drawing-rooms where all the furniture had been brand-new and visibly expensive, all the women wearing their virtues and their pretensions as rigidly as they wore their whalebone stays, Evengeline's had been the only voice he had recognized. A woman of his own kind.
His
woman. And, for a while, nothing else had mattered. Yes – the roof at High Grange Park might be letting in the rain, the home farm in need of extensive repair, his two sisters even more in need of husbands which only a dowry apiece could buy. But how could he sell his name and status to a girl of the alien newly-rich and lose Evangeline? He could not. For a while. Until he had fully acknowledged the flaw in his own nature which would have made him hate her, when passion cooled, if he had found himself trapped with her beneath that leaking roof, his coat and all his aspirations threadbare.

He had therefore shrugged his shoulders, hardened his mouth which had been quite hard enough to begin with, and married the thin, dry, slant-eyed, vaguely foreign daughter of Josef Kessler, wool merchant of Hepplefield and Bradford, thus ridding himself of the need to worry about frayed cuffs and collars or broken roof-tiles ever again. A marriage of convenience. A bad joke, it had seemed to him, on the day not long after when coal had been discovered beneath his land, making him a rich man in his own right.

Coal. That most ‘gentlemanly' source of riches, requiring no sordid commercial practices on his part, no greater personal involvement than the appointing of a pit-manager, as one appointed a gamekeeper to look after one's grouse-shoot and hand-rear one's pheasant. An excellent fellow, as it turned out, who had managed to situate his slag-heaps and his pit-wheels well away from the manor and village of High Grange, throwing up an unkempt sprawl of workers'cottages on what, in Matthew's boyhood, had been Low Grange Wood and Low Grange Meadow. A hell-hole now, he supposed – if one cared to look at it closely, as he certainly did not – which meant no more to him than a source of revenue.

Of considerable wealth, in fact.

Although too late, of course. And not only for him and Evangeline, but for his sister Letty who had made only a very mediocre marriage, and for his sister Maud who, somehow or other, had never married at all, having grown too dignified, perhaps, or simply too old for passion. Which had been far from the case with Eva, his thin, dry Kessler wife, the heiress of Hepplefield wool barons who, despite the careful repressions of her education, had loved him, for a while, with a fire and a ferocity he had found astonishing.

Not welcome, either.

Poor Eva. Fierce and possessive and burned almost to a cinder by her own entirely unexpected sensuality, until he – embarrassed by a desire he could not reciprocate – had felt obliged to reprimand her for it, pointing out to her in cool, precise language, the unladylike nature of her excess. Making it very clear to her that this frenzy of hers had no part to play in their contract.

He had hurt her, of course. But he had seen no help for it. And she had paid him back by growing thinner and dryer and every day more peculiar, withdrawing from all the social and domestic concerns proper to womanhood, so that in the end all that had mattered to her had been her paint brushes and easels and those garish caricatures she had called her ‘Art'.

Ghastly daubs, which he hoped his sister Maud still had kept safely under lock and key in the attic – all as excessive, as positively embarrassing as Eva's own younger self. Paintings, each one of enormous size, throbbing colour, which still haunted him – although he would never of course admit it – as an accurate record of those tarnished,
offended
years of avoiding Eva's passions and somehow stifling his own as he had watched Evangeline offering herself to anyone who could free her from her own trap of poverty, as Eva Kessler had rescued him from his. Clever Evangeline. The belle of every ball. The bridesmaid who outshone every bride. High priestess of elegance and wit and fashion who, every season, attracted a new worshipper to her shrine. And – every season – lost him. Not to some rival goddess of greater fascinations but to one tame and tedious schoolroom chit after the other whose father – like Eva's– could endow his child with the powerful charm of money.

Desperate Evangeline.

Yet Matthew Stangway, a gentleman by now of worth and distinction and acquisitive habits, had continued to want her. After ten years of living first with Eva's awkward hungers, then her enmity, finally her blank-eyed indifference, he had felt entitled to have her. And in the vulnerable thirtieth year of her age, when her last possible fiancé had deserted her for the heiress to a Gore Valley spinning mill, she had finally surrendered to him.

His woman at last. And what a year – or perhaps only half a year – of exultant, savagely indulged passion that had been. What an explosion of sensuality on his part at least; an acceptance, rather, on hers, of his carnal nature which, if she could not share it – and he had quickly realized she could not – she could most decidedly arouse, excite, taunt and tease and enrage: And did so. Could lead him, with her purring smile, to every frenzied physical extremity until, not in the least to her chagrin or surprise, she had conceived what she had intended to be his son.

The only child he would ever be likely to have, too, by the thin, overstrung look of Eva. His heir, therefore, this son of Evangeline's. Already, in her mind and his, she had set the wheels of legal adoption in motion; while even a daughter would have to be lavishly provided for.

So Evangeline had told him.

‘Matthew, my darling, I fear I have rather become your lifetime responsibility now. I – and my little encumbrance. Have I not? What luck you are so well able to afford us.'

Once again, too late. Had she kept him waiting too long so that the reality of her had failed to match his expectations? Or was it simply that his heart had grown too cold, too fastidious, ever to be fully satisfied? Or had always been so? Very likely.

He had sent her to France to have her child in traditional, furtive luxuriousness. After which, when she had reminded him artfully, expensively, of her claims on his attention, he had established her in a series of country cottages or city apartments as they took her fancy, visited her as and when she took his, grown accustomed to her and been unfaithful to her as he had always been with Eva.

And even the child had been a disappointment. Not the son he had been promised but a girl who could offer him nothing in the way of interest or companionship. And when, two years later, Eva had finally produced a child herself, that had been a girl too, meaning – as every man of substance knew – responsibility without pleasure, substantial cash payments in the form of dowries leaving the family for the benefit of other men.

Daughters. Would anyone choose to have them? And he had paid little attention to either. None at all, in fact, to Miss Oriel Blake, beyond establishing her in her false identity and paying handsomely – Evangeline had seen to that – for her upkeep both at home and at all those select schools for ‘young ladies'to which her mother had kept on sending her.

A polite stranger to him, Miss Oriel Blake, addressing him as ‘Mr Stangway'whenever he had been obliged to spend a restrained half-hour in her company.

‘Are you quite well, Miss Blake?'