Distant Choices (36 page)

None of this dimmed her glow. He came to her in the middle of the night straight from Merton Ridge, wet and filthy, foul-tempered and often still foul-mouthed with the vocabulary of the site. She brought him hot water herself to spare the sensibilities of the servants, washed his hair and scrubbed his back like any miner's wife in his home village, gave him food and sex in lavish, often double helpings and sent him off to his work again before going to wake and feed and entertain his children.

‘You're a good woman, Oriel.'

She smiled and nodded, knowing he meant ‘strong', strength being more to his liking any day than virtue.

‘And you'll be telling me I'm a good man, I reckon?'

She nodded again. ‘
And
modest.'

Good too, she freely admitted, according to the estimation of the world he lived in; and, increasingly, in her own. A man of iron nerve and muscle, capable of gigantic labour, hearty and demanding in all his appetites, open-handed, unsentimental. A hard man, blinkered by his own forceful needs and ambitions, seeing first and foremost what he wanted himself and making sure he got it, giving to others what he believed they ought to have, or the things he had wanted himself at their age, or in their situation.

He had given her a gold chain set with diamonds for Christmas and diamond earrings of which he fully appreciated the value, and her quiet, lakeland acre which had little value for him but was beyond price to her. She was grateful, hopeful. Had it not been for the hovering phantom she knew to be Kate, never far from the edge of her vision, she may even have been happy. And, even as things were, she was often very much amused.

In the middle of February – Kate still locked away, so far as she knew, in the custody of the Mertons – she went up to Penrith to lay claim to her inheritance, travelling for the first time with her husband and children all together, and, when she and Garron had separately assessed what the cottage required to make it habitable – very little in her opinion, a great deal in his – returning home to deep snow and the still, clear magic of a midwinter night. The town of Lydwick was made of cut crystal, their own house silver with moonlight, the garden a pure carpet of snow, its surface unblemished until Jamie, with a wild whoop of glee, plunged knee high, then breast high, across it.

‘That's far enough,' called Oriel, entirely without conviction.

‘Silly boy,' murmured Elspeth, the pretty one, the vain one, who had been complaining all day about the cold and the mud on her shoes, her face slightly bemused now as
something
– she really didn't know what – drew her into the snowdrift after her brother.

‘She's younger than she thought,' said Garron, ducking the first snowball his son hurled at him, receiving the second full in his chest, and then, suddenly bareheaded as Elspeth's haphazard handful struck his hat, wading in among them, firing missiles of his own, hard and accurate ones it seemed, playing even this game, gleefully perhaps, but nevertheless to win.

‘Father …' said Morag reprovingly, picking up his hat. Oriel took it away from her. ‘He may need your help, Morag. Look – it's two to one.'

‘Oh …' The snowballs were flying now, thick and fast.

‘Come on, Morag,' shouted Garron. ‘Where's my girl …?'

Shaking herself, as if released from a spring, she bounded away. ‘I'm here – watch out – Jamie, you
beast
– take
that
one – from me …'

Such fun. Standing on the path, her ankles tingling in the snow. tasting the crisp air, her eyes full of sharp little winter stars and a few stray tears, Oriel knew a moment of equal joy and sorrow that would, in a moment more she thought, blend into a wholly acceptable compromise. Not the life she would have chosen. Nor the man she would have chosen either. But a life, nevertheless. A man who valued her, who often made her laugh, who was, in fact, even handsome. Children who needed many things she could give. Perhaps a child of her own one day.

And it was as the thought of children released the thought of Kate – who had been destroyed, it seemed, by the strange wounds of getting the man she loved and bearing his child – that she heard horses, and running footsteps; an excitement which, at this hour, surely meant disaster, something too urgent, too fatal to be left until morning. An accident? Or worse?

Kate. Had her self-torment led to self-destruction, to the ending of a life she no longer knew how to live? Kate? Oriel knew she could not bear it.

And there Kate was, although it took even Oriel a moment to recognize the woman in the dark red ball-gown and black velvet cloak who was suddenly
there
in the snow, splashing it about like sea-foam in the faces of the two men who accompanied her, the third man – Quentin Saint-Charles – striding along the path to Oriel, telling her succinctly and at once everything she wished to know.

‘Yes, it
is
Kate, Oriel. I do apologize. She arrived at Merton Abbey a few hours ago, I don't quite know from where, and insisted on driving over to see you. No, Francis is not with her. I believe he is still in Scotland, with the child. Those two are Merton cousins who have taken rather more than a drop too much, as I expect your husband will realize, and are both in love with Kate. Or so they were telling her on the way over. You will see that she is looking much better.'

But Oriel was too stunned even to reply as she watched poor, broken Kate skimming the snow like a wild bird, a crown of dark red feathers doubling her height, her black cloak thrown back like giant wings revealing bare shoulders, a red dress which clung to her waist and bared somewhat more than half her breast, the skirt moulded by the snow against a body which seemed to ripple and quiver with her own delight in the power she had suddenly acquired over these men – any men – who desired her, who could see and taste and smell in her a glorious unleashing if what
they
, at least, understood as sensuality.

‘What fun,' she kept on calling out, still skimming the snow. ‘What an absolute lark.'

Look at me
, she was really saying – Oriel heard it loud and clear –
Look at me. Here I am. Kate who was dead and is alive again, although perhaps she still doesn't know what for. Come and teach me, if you can. Kate, who has left her husband and child in Scotland, and drives out in the middle of the night with rich young men who say they love her. And why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't she? Better, at any rate, than hiding unwashed and terrified in her bed.

‘I suppose when one is sufficiently desperate one will be likely to try anything. Perhaps one is fortunate, Oriel, never to feel
quite
that degree of desperation.' It was Quentin who had spoken, and then Garron, appearing suddenly at her other side, and murmuring what she understood to be his version of the same judgement in her ear.

‘You'll do no good fretting over that one, bonny lass, because there'll be no helping her. She'll cause a stir while her flame goes on burning, I don't doubt it. But once it burns down then – well, I've seen it before and there'll be no lighting it again. I'm sorry, lass, believe me – I'm sorry for
her
– but there it is. All it amounts to, by the way she's carrying on right now, is a matter of time.'

A matter of time? Garron Keith was not the only one to think so throughout that hectic winter and the very nearly frenzied spring and summer to follow, nor the only pair of eyes to watch with speculation as Kate – who had been in turn the nuisance, the rebel, embarrassing in her passion, limp in her despair – acquired the surface dazzle and allure of a diamond; with a fire beneath it at which there seemed no lack, at any time, of men both young and old, waiting to be burned.

Biding their time. Which would not be long in coming, according to an increasingly bitter Aunt Maud, for whom it could not come soon enough; to Evangeline who, as part of her game with Matthew, was more than ready to hasten it along; to Lady Merton who, as a woman of fashion, had become very virtuous since the accession of the prude Victoria; and to Lady Merton's younger daughter, affectionately known from childhood as ‘Madcap Dora', who apart from cherishing a certain fondness for her Cousin Francis, did not care to see her own reputation for wildness and waywardness suddenly eclipsed by his wife.

Not that Kate was beautiful, of course. No amount of diamond sparkle could achieve that, as Dora Merton well knew, her own attraction depending entirely on such things as her recklessness on horseback, her unpredictable ‘fits and starts', her enthusiasm for organizing elaborate games of ‘hide and seek' at which couples who wished to be alone were never found, and the simple fact – much talked of in Merton circles – that one really never knew what that Madcap Dora might get up to next.

And the suspicion that she was beginning to look little more than eccentric beside the flame and dazzle of this new Kate did not please her at all.

At Dora's birthday dance that February Kate wore a scarlet satin dress which, towards the end of the evening, ‘fell off'her shoulders, a mishap serious enough to send any other woman scuttling for cover but of which Kate seemed so oblivious that one felt bound to conclude she had done it on purpose. Thin shoulders, too, with nothing that ought to have been enticing about them, nothing that
ought
to have caused so many gentlemen – Timothy Merton, Adela Merton's new husband, and the young aristocrat with whom Dora herself was contemplating marriage prominently among them – to have behaved so foolishly.

‘Bees round a honeypot,' Dora had muttered contemptuously, wondering how it was that the honey – from such a source – should not be sour.

‘The girl has turned out quite wanton. Who would have thought it?' murmured Evangeline, highly delighted. Although Matthew Stangway, for whom all honey had lost its sweetness, merely nodded his head.

‘So it would seem.'

‘You have another daughter, Matthew.
My
daughter.'

He smiled, perfectly reading her mind. ‘Ah yes. But I have a granddaughter too, my darling – an entirely legitimate and, one supposes, wholly innocent Miss Celestine Ashington. Whatever happens to Kate I am in honour bound, surely, to provide for my grandchild? In fact, with regard to certain, and I fear exceedingly substantial portions of family property, I would have no choice.'

Miss Celestine Ashington. An heiress for High Grange, then, as well as Dessborough, six months and then rapidly approaching twelve months old, a pretty, sturdy child, a black-eyed, amber-skinned Ashington in appearance, who could hardly be aware that the highly-scented, highly elated creature who occasionally, never more than briefly, flew across her path was no scarlet and ebony bird of paradise, no flash of jewelled lightning, no vivid and quite possibly dangerous whirlwind, but her mother.

‘Wanton,' repeated Evangeline at every opportunity, adding, for Matthew's ears only, ‘A legacy, one supposes, my darling, from the Kesslers.' Since Eva Kessler, as he must surely remember, had taken strangely to motherhood too.

‘A quite natural rising of high spirits,' Quentin Saint-Charles kept on repeating with Oriel's full agreement. ‘Spirits, which, having sunk so low after the birth of her child, have really nowhere else to go now – wouldn't you think? – but up?'

Neither Evangeline, nor Madcap Dora Merton, nor little Celestine's nanny who, like Dora, was slightly in love with Francis, seemed inclined to agree.

‘And I am not aware,' persisted Quentin, ‘of any one name which has been linked in any truly damaging circumstances with hers. That she flirts and fascinates, yes – perhaps surprisingly – so she does. Yet if she has allowed anyone to compromise her to an extent that her husband might feel
really
threatened, then I – as her family lawyer – have not heard of it. Have any of you?'

‘No,' said Oriel, firmly and loudly. ‘Absolutely not. Thank you, Quentin, for bringing the matter up.'

But Kate, after all – as Evangeline was quick to imply – had managed to get herself well and truly compromised once before, when it had suited her. And now, despite Oriel's and Quentin's assertions that it was no more than an attack of ‘high spirits', just a perfectly harmless excess of dancing and flirting, letting her ball-gowns slide off her shoulders and her riding-habits show far too much ankle, giggling in corners with Adela Merton's new husband and Dora Merton's new fiancé, getting lost in the old ruins at Merton Abbey with no less a person than Lady Merton's bachelor brother, the wicked, worldly, yet so very wealthy baronet Evangeline had once dreamed of for Oriel –! Very well. Oriel out of loyalty, and Quentin for reasons no one could fathom, might talk of these ‘high spirits'as much as they pleased, but to Evangline and Madcap Dora, as well as to Lady Merton's worldly-wise brother, and those two hopeful young gentlemen, Adela Merton's husband and Dora's not totally beloved fiancé, it remained a much more realistic matter of time. And time only.

‘She may be your friend and maybe something more,' Garron Keith told his wife on the eve of his departure to inspect his sites abroad, ‘and I'm not saying I don't feel sorry for her and understand something of what drives her. But she's no fit companion, the way she is right now, for any wife of mine, I'm telling you. I don't want you gadding about with her while I'm away. I'm sorry, but that's that. You can be sure I'll know about it if you do.'

Susannah, she supposed, would tell him. Or Morag. Yet his ship could not have reached Calais before the crisis, which had been on the simmer for some time at Susannah's own home of High Grange Vicarage, blew up into proportions which brought Susannah to Lydwick, not to take note of Oriel's behaviour, but in tears.

‘It is Quentin. He will not come home, you see. And mother is falling ill with missing him …'

So much so, in fact, that Letty's entire household, which had never been particularly stable or efficient, had fallen into a chaos which her reverend husband, as he closed his study door on it. had termed absolute; the housemaids unsupervised and therefore doing as they pleased, which had never been much in any case; the younger boys playing truant from the excellent school their brother Quentin had found for them; Letty herself huddled blank-eyed in her parlour-chair all day long. A disaster for which Quentin, from his handsome rooms in Hepplefield, showed no proper sense of responsibility. No more, that is, than to continue the payment of school fees for those brothers still in need of them, the maintenance of another at Cambridge and of the brightest of his sisters at an establishment for young ladies in Carlisle, which, as he informed his reverend father rather coldly, appeared quite enough to him.