Distant Choices (38 page)

He had not expected to care for her. Had the choice been his he may not have done so, recognizing too well the implications of lifelong commitment. There had been no choice. Arshad and Celestine. Two deep, lasting loves in his life. None in Kate's. And it was for this reason – guilt, he supposed – that he had shown patience, and demanded it of others, throughout those nightmare weeks of her depression when, uncombed, unwashed, she had tried to reject life and had ended only by rejecting her child; and himself.

He knew she feared her baby. He even knew the fear to be involved with feelings of her own inadequacy and her tortured relationship with her own mother whose memory, even now, caused her to shudder. Yet, since the child had to be fed and protected, he knew of nothing to do but take it away from her to the care of the wet-nurse who disgusted him and the nanny whose starch, somewhat to his regret, had melted so soon away, leaving Kate – since no one else knew how to heal her – to heal herself.

He had taken her to Merton Abbey that first Christmas because it appeared to make no difference to her where she went, and he had been desperate to escape the gloom of Dessborough. For three days she had remained in her room, still silent, still fixing her blank gaze on the wall, and although, on the fourth morning, he had gone down on his knees at her bedside – in another fit of guilt, he supposed – and vowed, like a man administering medicine, although he prayed she would never know it, that he loved and needed her, he nevertheless suspected that it had been Lady Merton's desire to keep her upstairs, safely hidden from such fastidious souls as herself who could not bear the sight of suffering, which had eventually persuaded Kate to sit up and call out, none too pleasantly, for combs and mirrors and hot water.

A new Kate, of course. Another desperate experiment, perhaps, as doomed as all the others, to failure. And just as his guilt had inspired his patience in her sickness so too did it become the source of his tolerance, his willingness to turn what many considered to be a blind eye, when she was sick no more. Or, at least, when her symptoms had changed drastically enough to make it seem a different disease.

She had asked him for freedom. And although this new life of hers, this constant carnival, this hungry lapping up of anything that passed for pleasure, was neither freedom as he understood it nor the pure, precious liberty she had once craved for, it was the best he could give her. It was all he could give her.

He gave it.

‘Dora thinks I am making you miserable, Francis.'

‘No, Kate, I'm not miserable.'

‘Are you not? Nor jealous either?'

‘Do I have any true cause for jealousy?'

‘No – as it happens – none whatsoever.'

He may have been the only one to believe her, except Oriel perhaps and that cold, clever man Quentin Saint-Charles, yet believe her he did, for, in her sudden emergence as an exciting woman, a desirable woman, it was power not promiscuity, it seemed to him, that Kate had really discovered. The power – at last – to win notice, admiration, attention, whenever she needed it. And her need of such things he acknowledged to be very great indeed. Power to attract and to subdue, power to tempt and then the even more delicious power to disappoint, power above all to still her lifelong hunger for affection by arousing, all around her and completely, often cruelly at random, its substitute; lust. The power to make people care for her now, at the very moment when her own ability for caring seemed to have gone off-key, astray, sadly missing.

So that when she wandered off into the woods with Lady Merton's disreputable brother or the newly-married Timothy Merton, taking good care that everyone should see them go, neither the young bridegroom nor the old roué looked particularly triumphant on their return. Kate's being the only eyes to sparkle,
her
smile the only one with anything in it approaching mischief or satisfaction.

Wanton? So she appeared to be, but only in promises made so very openly that no man could aspire to win her unless he was ready to do it practically in the public eye. ‘Follow me.' She could speak the words with her body, leaning across a dinner table with her face and bare shoulders in full lamplight, or with the challenge of her smile, the provocative raising of an eyebrow across a ballroom floor, directed always at a man who was dancing with another woman. Very often these men left their partners and came to her. Too often, bringing her their hopeful lusts, their adolescent dreams, their ageing fantasies, the enmity of the women they had – at her glance – abandoned. She had acquired the power not only to make men desire her but to make them suffer.

‘Come now, Timothy, let us have no more nonsense. For one thing, you are married to Adela. So trot along and make love to her. I expect she likes it.'

This, spoken in the great, fan-vaulted cloister of Merton Abbey, her voice echoing with such force and arrogance that Adela Merton, a few yards away, saw no alternative but to stride over to Kate and slap her hard across the face.

‘Tut – tut,' said Kate. ‘Such a fuss.' Over a totally unremarkable, ten-a-penny young man like Timothy? No doubt that was her meaning, although she made no explanation to Francis as he drove her home, other than to say, ‘I expect I ought to be sorry.'

‘I expect so.'

‘Why didn't
you
hit me?'

‘I saw no reason.'

‘There was none – not really. Only in his mind – which I suppose is what hurt Adela. He will be unfaithful to her eventually. Probably just as soon as he can. Although not with me. You do know that?'

He knew. How could he, of all men, doubt her word when he – of all men – had experienced the terror which, quite independently of anything in her mind, had seized her limbs, causing them to shake and quiver and her skin to crawl with the force of a silent scream the first time he had tried to make love to her, a full four months after the birth of Celestine? Tried and failed utterly, defeated by her body's blind fear that he might make her pregnant again. And even when he had explained, carefully, skilfully, the methods to ensure that he did not, and she had understood them, she had trembled so violently at his touch that he had merely caressed her, almost companionably, for a while and turned away.

‘In time …' she said, ‘just a little time …'

‘Of course. As much as you need.'

But time had gone by.

‘Francis – listen to me. I know I'm useless – useless and strange and a burden … Everyone says so. So if you should need some other woman – a mistress, I mean – then I don't think I ought to complain about it …'

‘I would prefer to have you, Kate.' The right answer, although untrue of course, since thoughts of a mistress had already occurred to him and been rejected only because of the complications. And because, in some odd way, he knew it would hurt Kate. He had had mistresses before in any case. Now he had a daughter and a wife who seemed to him every bit as newborn and fragile and horrendously breakable as her child.

‘Would you really prefer me?' she said, honestly frowning. ‘I don't know why. I wouldn't want to live with me, in your place. I'd want to murder me, I think, like Adela does – and Dora. I suppose you've heard that Dora's new fiancé was seen at my bedroom door, last Wednesday – when I stayed overnight at the Abbey?'

‘Oh yes. Someone told me.'

‘And you replied “Ah well – so long as it was only at the door, we need hardly worry,” or something similar …?'

‘I believe I did.'

He also believed that she had invited Dora's new fiancé – who bore a remarkable resemblance to her last one – up to her room in order to be found there, giggling and gossiping in her doorway, a champagne glass in hand, well after midnight. While he – her husband – as all the Mertons must have reminded each other over breakfast the next morning – had been busy at Dessborough with the care of her home and her child.

‘Kate, my love,' Evangeline, also a guest that night at the Abbey, had told her, ‘I believe you are a force for destruction. Which is something I hardly suspected, even when you used to amuse yourself by leaving scissors around for me to sit on when I first became your stepmamma.'

Was it true, wondered the Gore Valley? Was she really malicious, callous, hateful, wanton, as the Mertons said?

‘Of course I am,' she told the ever-growing, ever-changing band of men who were not, or at least not physically, her lovers; even though some of them, quite a few of them in fact, were apt to boast of more favours than they had ever received. And when they obediently chorused ‘No, Kate. We won't have that. You're splendid. Glorious', she laughed at them, tossed her head in its tall, shiny hat, thrashed her boots with her riding-whip and reduced them to a quick, and altogether predictable, ecstasy.

‘Poor things – my lovers,' she would sometimes say to Francis, or to Oriel. ‘It doesn't really matter what I do to them, does it, since they're not even real – poor things. Not real at all. Do you know that?'

Possibly Francis – and Oriel – and Quentin Saint-Charles did. Although it all seemed real enough to Adela Merton – married, of course, for her title and her money – who, when her husband finally succumbed to the temptation of a woman she had thought of as her friend, blamed Kate most bitterly as being the one who had first given him the inclination. Real enough to Dora Merton whose new fiancé soon went the way of the one before him, and the one before that; and to Lady Merton who, although refusing to admit even the possibility of sin in her own family, rather thought it should be punishable by hanging or flogging or banishment to a penal colony – for life, of course – in others. Real enough too to Evangeline who issued regular bulletins on Kate's behaviour or lack of it, after every visit to Merton Abbey where she had succeeded in becoming a regular guest; and to Maud who had need, these days, of any scrap of consolation to come in her increasingly weary direction.

Malicious, promiscuous Kate, defended only by Oriel who had evidently been brought up – said Dora Merton – to find an excuse for everything; by Quentin Saint-Charles who had most likely thought up some way of making money for himself out of it; and by Francis who – supposed Dora – was putting such a brave face on it for the sake of his child. That delightful little creature, that adorable, black-eyed little angel whose first birthday party her own malicious, promiscuous mother had not attended.

Yet even the Merton, who so hated her, could not bear to keep away from her for long, needing her constantly under their eyes to see for themselves the mischief she was up to, the better – it seemed – to defend themselves against it. And the better, of course, to let her know how much she was detested.

Another Christmas passed, bringing a New Year in which the whole world the Mertons recognized as civilized seemed, all of a sudden, to be exploding around them so violently that Lady Merton took to her bed and, following the collapse – yet again – of the French monarchy, thought it highly likely she would stay there. Not that the Orleans family meant very much to the Mertons who had preferred the Bourbon Kings of France – any one of them – to this Orleanist
Citizen
King Louis Philippe. Although it still shocked them badly to hear the news, that February, of this new revolution, which had sent him scuttling for safety through the Tuileries Gardens calling out to the mob, as he went, that he was abdicating. A precaution considered quite necessary by Lord Merton when one remembered that other French Louis, not too long ago, who, through not abdicating in time, had gone to the guillotine, thus losing both his crown and his head.

Yet, although Lord Merton did not really like the man, it seemed quite natural to him that the exiled Louis Philippe should take refuge in England with Queen Victoria who, having set aside a spare palace at Claremont for his accommodation, could not really be held to blame when, as a result of lead being found in the drinking water, his French Majesty was obliged to move out, with his Queen and various royal duchesses, and take up residence – temporary one hoped – at the Star and Garter at nearby Richmond.

It could not happen
here
, of course, insisted Lord Merton, meaning revolution, it seemed, rather than lead-poisoning which, of course, could happen anywhere. The English throne could never fall, although even Lord Merton felt obliged to admit that they had started to topple just about everywhere else. What was the world coming to?

‘Long live the Revolution,' murmured Kate, with the clear intention of hoping to shock the Mertons who, at that particular moment, were not aware that in their own city of London, men called Chartists – and many thousands of them, at that – were celebrating the overthrow of Louis Philippe and professing themselves quite ready, unless she granted them their civil liberties, to do the same to Victoria. As men – it abruptly seemed at the start of that unfortunate New Year – were doing all over Europe, the citizens of Milan suddenly rising in ferment against their Austrian garrison, the Sicilians clashing at Palermo with their Neapolitan rulers, Vienna ridding itself of Prince Metternich, barricades erected and bullets flying in Berlin, violence rearing its ugly head in the streets of Rome, the Irish rushing into the fray to parade their banners, beneath English noses, proclaiming ‘Ireland for the Irish', the Prussians finding themselves so unpopular after the massacre they had wrought in Berlin that Queen Victoria was obliged to withdraw her invitation to their ruling Prince William to come over and be godfather to Princess Louise, her new baby daughter.

A whole storm of assorted trouble, powerful enough to keep frail, fastidious spirits like Lady Merton in her bed from which she trusted the peasants of Hepplefield, should they also heed the call to rebellion, would not care to drag her, but which fired other, younger spirits with a disturbing restlessness. The world, very evidently, was changing. France was to be a Republic again. The peoples of Europe were rising as one, it seemed, to claim their liberty. And there were those, like Kate and Dora Merton's newest fiancé – rather different from the others – who wished them well of it.