The Misbegotten (20 page)

Movement in the courtyard below caught her eye, and she looked down to see the red-haired servant crossing from the coal cellar to the kitchen door.

‘You there!’ Rachel shouted down to her. The girl froze and glanced over her shoulder, looking as guilty as sin. When she saw Rachel, her eyes widened in surprise.

‘What are
you
—’ she began to say, then closed her mouth and moved to go inside again.

‘Wait!’ Rachel called. She leaned over the railings to get a better look at the girl, and was surer than ever that she’d been the one at the Moor’s Head on her wedding day. ‘I must thank you,’ she said. At this the girl turned again.

‘Thank me, madam?’ she said.

‘Yes. It was you who . . . persuaded Mr Alleyn to unhand me, when I first met him last week. Wasn’t it?’ The servant looked uneasy, and hesitated before she replied.

‘Aye, madam.’

‘Were you watching us, then? And listening?’ said Rachel, to which there was no reply. ‘No matter. I am glad you were. I am glad you were there. And thank you for helping me.’

‘Very good, madam,’ the girl said curtly. She turned to go again.

‘Wait – didn’t I see you at the Moor’s Head? A few weeks ago, on the day I was wed. Didn’t you serve us wine that day?’ The serving girl turned again, and looked so angry that Rachel knew she was right.

‘You must be mistaken, Mrs Weekes,’ she said grimly. Rachel didn’t press her further; she was already sure she was right, though she couldn’t say why it bothered her so much to know.

‘Will you tell me your name?’ Again, the servant seemed to seek a way not to answer before conceding to.

‘Starling,’ she said. ‘I must get on, madam. There’s much work to be done.’

‘Well. You have my thanks, Starling,’ Rachel called as the girl vanished through the door.
Mrs Weekes, she called me. So she knows exactly who I am, too.

She found Richard in the cellars at Abbeygate Street. With the onset of autumn, he had taken to lighting a little brazier in the middle of the room to keep the casks and bottles at an even temperature. The room smelled faintly of cinders and smoke, amidst the wood must and wine smells of the stock. It was a strangely restful place, only ever softly lit. Richard was drawing off white wine from a barrel into a bucket. The smell of it was sharp and vinegary, and he wrinkled his nose. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and in the wan light his hair shone softly, and the skin on the backs of his broad hands was smooth and tanned. Rachel watched him for a while, soothed by his methodical movements as he worked, and the mild, diffuse expression on his face. In that moment, she could see what it was about him that she was trying to love. She took a long, slow breath, and sought to fan this tiny flame.

‘How now, Mr Weekes?’ she greeted him. Richard looked up with a smile.

‘My dear. Is aught amiss?’

‘No. I only wanted to tell you about my latest visit to Lansdown Crescent.’

‘Oh yes?’ To the denuded barrel of wine he added a bucketful of fresh milk, then a handful of salt and one of dried rice. Then he began to stir the mixture with a long pole. Rachel watched, fascinated.

‘What are you doing to that wine?’

‘It’s foul.’ Richard grimaced. ‘This whole batch from Spain tastes like horse piss. This treatment will improve it no end, given a few days to work.’

‘Won’t the milk turn sour? And spoil it further?’ she asked, Richard shook his head.

‘It will settle out. You’ll see. Now, tell me of your visit.’

The sounds of sloshing and the gentle clonk of the pole against the barrel filled the cellar. Rachel seated herself on the corner of one of the racks, and drew a pattern in the sawdust with the toe of her shoe.

‘Mr Jonathan Alleyn came downstairs to talk to his mother and me, on this occasion,’ she said.

‘In truth? That is good, good. So he is not so very unwell?’

‘Perhaps not. Or, perhaps not all of the time. He does limp badly, however.’ She did not say that he had seemed like a dead man still standing, from the pallor of his skin and the unhealthy sheen upon it; and the way his eyes shone like glass, and the bones of his face and hands stood proud beneath the skin. She did not say that the sight of him had made her recoil.

‘And what did he say this time?’

‘He apologised for . . . his ill-behaviour last time. He said he had been suffering a great deal that day from the pains in his head, and that it hadn’t been the best time for me to visit.’ At that point he’d glanced quite coldly at his mother, and there’d been anger in his eyes that was older and deeper than this polite reprimand. When he’d looked again at Rachel his face had shown . . . something. Something she hadn’t expected, and wasn’t sure of. A slight awkwardness, almost sheepishness. He’d said he had little recollection of what they’d spoken of that day, but that he had a knock on his head he couldn’t account for, and remembered her running from the room in haste. At this he’d grimaced, one corner of his mouth pulling to the side in displeasure.

‘And what else? Did Mrs Alleyn say aught of note?’ Richard asked, still stirring the barrel. The air had ripened with the odd, unhappy smell of wine and milk combined.

‘How long must you stir that brew?’ Rachel asked.

‘Half an hour or more, to be sure all has been taken up. Go on, tell me of Mrs Alleyn.’

‘She was obviously delighted that her son had come downstairs and was willing to meet and take tea with us.’ A brittle kind of delighted, which was poised at all times to revert to nerves, to remonstration, to apology. ‘We spoke of our interests, and I told them of my love of poetry and reading . . . Mr Alleyn agreed that reading could be a greatly soothing balm to a troubled mind. He also declared an interest in philosophy, and expressed regret that he is unable to read a great deal any more.’

‘Oh? Why can’t he?’

‘It’s too great a strain on his eyes, he says, and brings on the pains in his head. He finds that he can’t concentrate to read more than a page of printed text.’ She paused in her recounting of the conversation, just as the three of them had paused, and Rachel had seen an idea, a tremulous hope, come upon Mrs Alleyn.
Perhaps
. . . she had begun to say, and Rachel had known at once what she would suggest.
Perhaps you might come and read to my son, Mrs Weekes? From time to time? You have a pleasing voice, and a clear diction
. . . Rachel had swallowed, but with them both watching her, the mother alight with hope and the son bewildering, unreadable, her instinctive refusal had died on her lips. For a moment she’d wondered at this, at being welcomed so readily into the circle of so great a family. She, the wife of a wine trader. But then, with a blink, Mrs Alleyn had added:
You will be compensated for your time, of course, Mrs Weekes.
An employee then – governess to a grown man; companion to an invalid. Rachel had felt slighted, even somewhat hurt, to be reminded so bluntly that she was not their equal, and was not expected to give her time freely, out of friendship. ‘I have been asked to return and read to him. As a . . . regular habit. Mrs Alleyn has offered to remunerate me for my time. I thought . . . I thought that perhaps it would be more seemly to refuse.’

‘To refuse her request?’

‘To refuse the payment, Mr Weekes. One does not rise in society by being in the employ of those higher than oneself, after all,’ she said. ‘Better to be unpaid, and therefore charitable. Better to be there as a . . . friend and acquaintance, rather than as an employee.’

For a while there was quiet but for the clonking and sloshing of the barrel.

‘I can see the sense of what you say, Rachel,’ Richard said at last. ‘But . . . that you alone should be invited there, and not the both of us together, on more than one occasion, tells me that this is how we are viewed already. That this is what Mrs Alleyn had in mind for you all along – that you could be employed in service to her son. For if it was merely to be sociable, why was I not invited back with you?’ Rachel made no reply. She hadn’t guessed that Richard would see their position so clearly. He was ever ready to climb, it had seemed, rather than to admit that the Alleyns were too high to reach. ‘And, in truth . . . an extra income would be most welcome,’ he added.

‘Indeed? But I thought your business was . . .’

‘My business increases, but so do our . . . outgoing costs.’

‘Which costs, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel asked, carefully. Richard had the good grace to look away, and frown uncomfortably.

‘The extra housekeeping we have taken on. The extra . . . food, your new clothes, and . . . sundries,’ he muttered, not meeting her eye.
The money you lose to drink and the gaming tables
, Rachel thought, and an angry blush coloured her face, that she alone should be blamed for their want of funds.

‘Well then, I suppose I shall have to accept. I have no wish to become a financial burden to you, husband.’ She stood, smoothing the back of her skirt and turning to go upstairs.

‘Rachel,’ Richard called. She turned, expecting an apology, or some words of thanks. ‘Be sure to let me know, when you discover it, how much she intends to pay you.’

Rachel filled the kettle from the pump then went up to the kitchen and set it on the stove with quick, angry hands. It was perfectly reasonable that the wife of a working man should be paid to provide some service to a wealthy family, and yet, in truth, she had thought to leave employment behind her and devote herself to being a wife, nothing more and nothing less. It was not truly Richard she was angry with, more herself – that she had been foolish enough to think herself invited as an equal, albeit the lesser of equals. And she was afraid. The thought of being alone with Jonathan Alleyn, of perhaps being in his rooms again, made her pulse speed up and her thoughts scatter. The memory of his hands around her neck, and the unbreakable strength of them, was too fresh. She was not sure she could do it, in spite of his calmer demeanour this time. And when they looked at her, both of them, they saw her echo; they saw in her the memory of another.
Is it reading they want, or is it Alice’s face?
Under Jonathan’s gaze she’d felt unsure of what to do with her expression, or her voice. It felt as though anything she said would sound like a lie; like she had something she ought to hide, when she did not. Nothing felt natural any more, not even breathing. The air simply sat in a lump at the top of her chest, and made her feel dumb.
He loved Alice Beckwith, who had this face. He can tell me of her.
It was that, more than anything, which urged her to return to him.

Rachel brewed a pot of tea, then went to the window and looked out over the city. To the north, on the hill, she could see Lansdown Crescent. She could see the curved bay front of the Alleyns’ house. She could see, just, the exact windows of Jonathan’s room. In reverse, it would be impossible to pick out the Abbeygate Street house – the jumble of buildings was too confusing. How well this reflected their lives, also, she thought: the Alleyns grand but set apart, easily recognisable and yet isolated too; then she and Richard, part of the commingled soup of humanity pooling in the river valley, in the heart of the city. She wondered if a man could really mourn a betrayal for so long – for twelve long years. She wondered if losing Alice could truly be all that ailed Jonathan Alleyn.

Unbidden, the red-haired serving girl with the name of a bird came into her mind.
Mrs Weekes, she called me. She knows who I am, and it
was
her at the inn, at our wedding feast
. Rachel tried to work out what nagged her memory about that, and then realised it – the girl had been as struck by her appearance as Mrs Alleyn and her son had.
She saw Alice too, when she looked at me. She knew this Alice well.
Rachel wondered how she might talk to the servant, about this girl who’d worn the same face as her, and had disgraced herself for love; because the shadow in her mind had been ever more alive since she first heard of Alice. That distant voice, that echo, grew ever louder, and begged her attention, until Rachel sometimes caught its movement as a flicker in the corner of her eye. As with mirrors, she didn’t dare turn to look because she knew it would vanish, and she so longed to have it near. To have her near.
Could it be?

January 11th, 1809, Corunna, Spain

My Dearest Alice
,

I scarcely know how to write to you, my love. In truth, I can scarcely write to you, the cold has injured my hands and made it near impossible. We have reached the coast at last, we are at Corunna, but there are no ships. The ships were supposed to await us here but there is nothing but the wide ocean horizon – how unimaginably vast it seems, after so long a time spent watching my own feet marching. The French are close behind us. We face the prospect of having to fight them here, when we have been starving for weeks, and frozen half to death. My heart is so heavy, my love, only thoughts of you keep it beating. Suleiman is dead. Bravest, most valiant and noble creature. Oh, how it grieves me! I cannot bear to relate to you the manner of his death – suffice to say it is a bitter injustice, a most terrible injustice, when he made it through the mountains with us, all the way, as so many others fell or gave up. He was steadfast, the most courageous creature I have ever known, and a truer friend I never had, other than you, dear Alice.

I know I am cowardly to despair. We have reached the coast, after all, when it seemed for some weeks that we would not. The men are in grievous poor shape. They are thin, and exhausted, and much beset by frostbite and illness. We have lost thousands on the march through the mountains. I have seen . . . oh, but I should not write of what I have seen, because I would not wish to pain you. But I have seen things, and done things, which will haunt me ever after. I have done things, my dearest. Things I can never tell you. There is such a stain of shame upon my heart, I fear you will perceive it and love me no longer. And then I would die, Alice. I would die. A shadow of dread looms over me, and it is the sure knowledge that I am worthy of you no longer. But I will not speak of it, and can only hope you will forgive me. Yours is the sweetest and best soul I ever knew. Can you forgive me a weaker one? A corrupted one? The Spanish call us ‘Caracho’. It means something foul. It is a curse word. It is a name we deserve. I await the means to send you this letter. I long to see you, or to have a few words from you.