Distant Choices (45 page)

About Dora Merton and ‘nanny'to whom Francis remained Sir Lancelot incarnate, about his tenants to whom he was a distant but responsible squire, about his neighbours with whom he shot and hunted and chatted freely – as she did – without really saying much at all, even about the ladies of fashion who, coming season by season as guests to Merton Abbey, were quick to offer him brief, extremely fashionable consolation which – as she knew from Evangeline – he did not always turn aside. And now here she was inviting him to conspire with her, just as fashionably, about the replacement of a vicar so that his fiancée might avoid becoming a bride and remain a missionary.

He smiled at her again, and then, his eyes amused, smiled at his housekeeper who had positioned herself in the parlour window to keep watch as they strolled through the sleeping, January garden, at ‘nanny'mounting
her
guard from the nursery window above, while Miss Elspeth Keith, who rarely noticed anything but herself, sat fur-wrapped and a hundred miles away on the garden swing, apparently unaware of her position, in that house, that garden, as her stepmother's chaperon.

‘Ought this clerical Chinese cousin of mine to have a name, do you think?'

‘It will make no difference,' Evangeline told her a few days later. ‘Susannah has already put us on trial, my love, and found us both quite guilty. Of trying to get her married, that is, when
she
is trying so hard to have all the advantages of marriage with none of the obligations. And, my goodness – one look at her Mr Field is enough to tell me that obligations there would certainly be. Timid as a rabbit, the poor little man, and just as fertile – one ought not to doubt it. Susannah would be overrun. Just like her mother. Such a crime we tried to commit – you and I – by
almost
securing him the income on which to do it. And since she cannot punish us, she will never forgive.'

‘Thank you, mamma.'

And it was, therefore, with more than usual reluctance that she gave in to her mother's request to accompany her, that evening, to Merton Abbey.

‘For Heaven's sake, Oriel, why not? Your husband is abroad – very much as usual. And please restrain yourself from moaning to me about his children. You have a housekeeper and a governess as well as a houseful of other servants, all eating their heads off, no doubt, who can take care of them. A position in society is what you ought to be thinking of, Oriel – as I do.'

‘Yes, mamma.'

Yet, if Oriel did not like the social position Evangeline was carving for herself it was her place, she believed, not to criticize but to defend, and hotly sometimes, having retaliated sharply even to Garron's comments about the number of banquets, balls, theatres, race-meetings, shooting-parties, polo-matches, coaching meets, regattas, both in England and abroad to which Lord Merton – his wife's ‘nerves'making her unavailable – had, this last year or two, escorted Evangeline.

‘My mother's husband does not complain,' she had informed her own husband, quite coldly.

‘So I've noticed. He watches and smiles, which strikes me – being a simple man – as an odd way for any woman's husband to behave. In your place I'd ask your mother – in your own obscure fashion, of course – what she thinks she's doing.'

Evangeline, when most discreetly asked, had been in no doubt. ‘I'm feathering my nest,' she had said, very cool and bright. ‘What else? And, good Heavens, Oriel, since husbands have this tendency – as all the world knows – to pass on and leave us widows, you ought to do the same. I have no intention, I do assure you, of finding myself with nothing but my memories to live on when Matthew goes, and Kate's husband arrives the day after to turn me out of High Grange. Be sensible, Oriel. Your husband is older than you, and what position will you have here when he burns himself out with over-work, or over-indulgence – or both, more likely? Just bear in mind, my love, that his coffin will not have passed over the threshold before that boy of his rushes in to claim the house and the business, with his sisters a step behind him to make sure of the rest. What of you? Nothing, dearest – do think about it – except what his will allows you. And unless you push him now,
hard
, while you can, it may not be much. The widow's mite, Oriel. And I have no intention –
ever
– of living on that.'

She had herself pushed Matthew,
very hard
, already into buying her one of the new houses shooting up everywhere, these days, around Lydwick which, although still apparently unfurnished was, in fact, an Aladdin's Cave of sofas, rugs, lacquer cabinets, inlaid tables, crystal and china, all quietly removed from High Grange and kept under covers. The nest, already duly feathered, for her widowhood. While, as for her association with the Mertons, just why – she asked Oriel with even a touch of indignation – did it follow that if Matthew had reached the end of his ambitions she had done the same?

She had not. Her life, by her own efforts alone, was growing rich and full. She had – at last – the very things she had always desired, friends who were not only rich – since Garron Keith was that – but in high places. Friends, moreover, who were acquainted with those even higher than themselves, with Queen Victoria, for instance, and her Prince Albert, although no one much cared for
him
, since, after fourteen years of wedded bliss he still had not learned to dress or shake hands or ride his horse quite like an Englishman.

‘He is German, mamma.'

‘So he is.' So too was the Queen's mother, the Duchess of Kent, from whom she may have inherited her strict sense – by no means English either, in Lord Merton's view – of morality. which still disinclined her to welcome, at her court, a gentleman of Lord Merton's lineage for the odd reasons that his elder daughter had separated from her husband, his younger daughter had more than earned the nickname of ‘Madcap', his wife had long since taken to dosing her ‘nerves'with brandy, while the gentleman himself – and was it any wonder? – had found consolation in the
friendship
, no more, of an intelligent woman.

‘He never seems very intelligent himself, mamma,' Oriel said tartly, setting off most unwillingly that January evening to spend a few hours in his company.

‘Dearest.' Evangeline was mildly amused. ‘Never mind his intelligence. He is
devoted
. What more could one possibly need?'

‘To be perfectly frank, mamma,' and Oriel was rarely that, ‘I wonder why you need to bother with any of the Mertons at all.'

‘My dear, what a question.' Evangeline's voice, reaching her daughter from the darkened corner of the Stangway carriage, trilled with laughter. ‘For exactly the same reason as I have
bothered
with all the other Mertons we have come across on our travels, you and I. Such as those – for instance – who happen to call themselves “Stangway”. Whereas – surely you see that, my darling – they are just Mertons, all together.'

‘I dare say.' In fact, yes, she took her mother's meaning perfectly well. Yet – thinking with her mother's mind – she wondered, having got the Stangways very much where she wanted them, if it could be worth the trouble, if – at Evangeline's age – it was even wise to embark on this elaborate, and surely very tiring, conquest of the Mertons?

‘Mother – what are you really after?'

‘My own darling.' And once again Evangeline trilled and sparkled with laughter. ‘Who knows? Lady Merton might be carried off one day, by one of her so very many nervous spasms. And if it just so happens that I am a widow by then, living in my pretty little house in Lydwick Park with all my glass and china and my lacquer cabinets … Well, his daughters would not like him to make me into the new Lady Merton, of course. I hardly blame them. But young ladies cannot always have just what they want.'

‘Mother, that wife of his will live forever.'

‘I dare say. I dare say.' She did not sound particularly dismayed about it. ‘But you can't be
sure
of that, Oriel. Matthew will probably live forever too, but that has not stopped me from getting my own house and furniture together, just in case. One has to keep as many doors half-open as one possibly can. And – as it happens – I am fond of Matthew.'

‘Are you?'

‘Oriel. I have known him – well – for over thirty years. And – yes – shall I tell you something shocking?'

‘Perhaps not.'

‘But I will. And you must allow me to indulge myself, since I couldn't possibly say this to anyone else but you. The truth is I would love to be Lady Merton. I would be marvellous at it too – Lord yes, a definite cut above magnificent. No doubt of that. But if I ever managed it, if I actually got the title and the money and the family jewels, and the villa in Monte Carlo all to myself … Well, the first thing I should want to do about it, the thing that would please me absolutely the most, would be running to Matthew and telling him just how I'd done it – just how much it was worth – just how I was going to keep the best of it, the jewels and the social position and the house in London for instance, away from those silly girls of his even when his even sillier old lordship was dead. And since my poor darling Matthew would have to be dead himself before I could start it … You see? How shocking.'

‘Yes, mamma. I see.'

They made the rest of the short journey to Merton Abbey in silence, Lord Merton himself coming to meet them in his vast but never very well lit hall, a weak-eyed, weak-chinned, fussy little man who owed the fact that no one noticed him at all – thought Oriel – with anything sharper than mild irritation or warmer than pity, to his power and property, his ownership of enough land and the houses and shops, the villages and market towns standing upon it, to enable him to appoint, as his fancy dictated, the vicars of several village churches and, even in these new days of electoral reform, at least one member of the House of Commons.

‘I don't hold with that,' often declared Garron Keith who would have exploited such privileges to the full had
he
been born with them. Nor would Lord Merton have entertained, even to a light family supper, the wife of a self-made railwayman had she not been the daughter of his Muse, his Inspiration, his Evangeline, who, the moment she entered his presence, transformed him, by her unfailing magic, into a glorious male creature, as hard-muscled and virile as the common railwayman himself, yet with all the pure authority of noble birth.

Therefore he needed the presence of Evangeline, basking in it, frisking in it, in the opinion of Evangeline's daughter, like a foolish puppy, performing tricks for her applause which were rarely either pretty or comical, and sulking,
very
comically this time, whenever anyone else dared to claim her attention. His wife, for instance, whose nerves required a great deal of Evangeline's sympathetic conversation; his daughter Adela who, although still refusing to live with her husband, seemed consumed by her jealousy of the woman now doing so; his daughter Madcap Dora, still drifting from one romantic attachment to the next and needing Evangeline to explain why none of them was really suitable.

‘My one remaining pleasure in life,' Oriel had often heard Matthew Stangway tell her mother, ‘is watching you at work – Evangeline my love. For wages, of course. One merely hopes they will be adequate.'

The only other member of the party that night was Quentin Saint-Charles, appearing after supper on a matter of business – something to do with the allowance paid to Adela's husband, it seemed, which Adela was resisting – and then, to Oriel's great relief, joining the ladies in the vast, tapestry-hung chamber which Lady Merton used as a family parlour.

The room itself was always cold, the chairs always too far apart, the conversation – when Lady Merton and Adela were present – always stilted, Dora curling up, her feet on a priceless sofa, and nodding off to sleep while her father, strutting up and down before Evangeline, explained the likelihood of British intervention in the war just starting between Turkey and Russia, now that the Russians had shown their hand by sailing out of Sebastopol right into the Black Sea harbour of Sinope and sinking the Turkish fleet at anchor there. A bad business. Particularly since one had known all along that the Russians were just making excuses about wanting to protect the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem and Nazareth. Convenient excuses, at that, when one remembered that Jerusalem and Nazareth and the rest of Palestine as well were all in the shaky possession of the Turkish Empire. Poor Turkey. About to fall to pieces and shed its ancient, so very
sizeable
empire to the four winds, according to the Tsar of Russia who seemed determined – if it did – to grab a chunk of it for himself. Couldn't be allowed, of course.

‘Of course not,' murmured Evangeline.

No, by God. Absolutely not. If the Turkish Empire – in the interests of fair play – needed propping up, then England, with some help, it seemed, from this new Napoleon's France, would just have to get along to the Crimea and do it. Not that anybody expected it to take long. Quite a picnic, they had been saying the other day at his club. A fine sight which not a few of his friends were already thinking it a pity to miss. So much so that there was already talk of going out there, to this Crimea wherever it was, with a good pair of field glasses and a decent hamper of claret and cold game, on purpose to observe the Russians get their beating.

‘How about it, then, my dear, dear Mrs Stangway? Shall we organize a little trip of our own out there? How about it – Dora, Adela –? Why not? A glimpse of decent men in honourable action can only do you both a power of good?' And so excited, so demanding of attention did he become that no one, in that huge, chilly apartment, noticed the snow until, with seasonal, entirely silent rapidity, it had covered the hard snow already on the ground, drifted to a depth far beyond the safe performance of any horse-drawn carriage, and effectively cut off Merton Abbey, by no means for the first time, from its village.