The Sleeping Sword (73 page)

The Duke of South Erin died that summer, thus further delaying Gideon's wedding and somehow, when the mourning period was over, the engagement was over too, Miss Madeley-Brown or more likely her mother having got wind of a better offer and feeling she had waited for the Chards long enough.

‘Poor Gideon has been jilted,' Blanche told me, ‘for the Madeley-Brown has got herself a baronet.'

But I had nothing to say about that.

He went abroad soon afterwards, to stay with the Fauconniers in Lyons, the Goldsmiths in Berlin, undoubtedly, Blanche thought, to have another look at the younger Mademoiselle Fauconnier, to cast an appraising eye at a supposedly very promising Goldsmith niece.

‘And he had better be quick about it,' she declared, ‘or he will have Aunt Caroline moving herself into Tarn Edge now that the new duchess has moved her out of South Erin.'

I had nothing to say about that either.

I was busy. I had so much to do. I had my bright new
Star
, my plans—endless plans—to make it brighter, my desk, my decisions, my authority.
My Star
, increasingly mine, as Liam, who had always preferred a battle to a victory, began somehow to keep his distance.

‘There's nothing wrong, Grace,' he told me in answer to my sharp enquiry. ‘Nothing at all. It's just that I'm an odd sort of character, and to tell the truth there are times when I miss the life we had in Gower Street.'

‘You mean this is all too easy now—too civilized?'

‘Is that what I mean? You could be right. You usually are. Yes—I've often thought I'd like to climb a mountain, one hell of a big one, just to prove I could. But the chances are I'd be wondering what the devil to do with myself when I got to the top. I reckon the mountain next-door, or the one next-door to that, might look very good to me.'

But if he preferred to remain Liam Adair of the Gower Street
Star
, I could only respect him for that. And if Monday mornings rarely saw him in the office these days and he took frequent, unexplained trips away, then it suited me just then to be over-burdened, to have more work than I could possibly do and then, by a total concentration of energy and will, to do it, so that I had no time to think of other things.

‘My dear, you are losing weight,' both Anna Stone and Tessa Delaney told me. I had not noticed it and when I did I had no time to care.

‘Dearest, we never see you,' gently complained Aunt Faith. ‘Could you not come to tea on Sunday?'

Of course I could not. Good heavens! Sunday was a working day like any other, the only day when I could really sit down and plan my schedules and the schedules I imposed on others for the week ahead. I would have no time for tea.

I suffered a severe chill that November from which I recovered slowly and, succumbing to the combined pressure of my father, Patrick Stone and Camille, I agreed to spend a week in Scarborough. And, having agreed, instantly regretted it, for Mr. Martin was getting too old, Liam too careless, the rest of them had too little experience and too little sense, and I believed their chances of getting along without me to be very slight. Liam took me to the station, laughed at me, kissed me, saw to the bestowal of my luggage and myself in a compartment where—and I knew how poor a safeguard this could be—another lady was already sitting. I wore a sealskin coat with a grey fur trim, a huge fur muff, a dashing Russian hat. I felt cool and purposeful and pleasant. I looked poised, I thought, and expensive, which, in my case and unlike my travelling companion, did not mark me as the wife of a rich man but as a successful woman. I was my own person, in charge of my own life and responsible for the welfare of others. And on the whole, despite an occasional tightness in my chest, a weakness in my legs—the remains of my influenza—I was pleased with myself.

I received a rapturous welcome from Camille, the usual gruff affection from Nicholas Barforth, who entertained us to a spectacular dinner that evening at the Grand, not quite managing to conceal his surprise, which gave way to wry amusement, when he understood I had not known Gervase would be there.

‘Did I forget to mention it?' Camille murmured. ‘Yes, of course I did. I am a disreputable woman, after all, and one can expect no better of me. But since you are both here, then—well—here you both are. You must simply force yourself, Grace, to enjoy it.'

Force was by no means necessary. Dinner was exceedingly pleasant, Camille vibrant as always with her happiness, Mr. Barforth entertaining us royally but waiting, just the same, to be alone with her, Gervase smiling his quiet assurance at me as if he knew why I required it. And as the evening drew to its close I did require it, for by my own choice, the complexities of my nature and of my past, I had rejected my own chance of tasting Camille's bliss and did not always care to be reminded of it.

‘Nicholas,' she said, ‘it is late—'; the same words, the same spoken caress Mrs. Agbrigg had used to my father and which had threaded themselves so uncomfortably throughout my childhood. But now I understood the joy they offered, the physical harmony I had briefly experienced, and the more complete harmony of the spirit which had always eluded me. And abruptly I was calm and poised no longer, but seemed—among the most substantial glitter of the Grand Hotel—to be falling into a void, a fading away of reality, so that I stood like a wraith, invisible and insubstantial, on the fringes of Camille's humanity, aware of her emotion, her joy, her deep personal fulfilment, the very heat of her body, without being able to touch her; feeling nothing distinctly but a chill air blowing, not around me but through me. And I was horrified.

I managed to walk outside, glad of my expensive fur coat and my dashing Cossack hat to anchor me to the ground, since there seemed nothing heavy enough inside me to withstand the high sea-wind.

‘Home now,' said Camille, since there was nowhere else in the world she wished to go.

‘Grace and I would like to take a walk,' Gervase told her easily. ‘The night is so fine and the stars quite exceptional.'

And once their carriage had gone, I collapsed against him as we stood in the shadow of the hotel and burst into tears, not with the ugly, convulsive sobbing of pain but the fast-flowing, unrestrained weeping that brings relief.

‘Is this for the past, Grace?'

‘I think it must be.'

‘And for our child?'

‘Gervase, I can't speak of that—really, I can't speak of it—'

‘I think you must, for it has been inside you too long. Let it go, love—let it go.'

And until it was over and I had dried my cheeks and adjusted my hat, and we had strolled away hand in hand along the cliff-path, he had nothing more to say.

‘Are you strong enough now, Grace, I wonder?'

‘For what?'

‘My confession?'

‘Lord! I don't think so.'

‘But I am going to make it. Listen to me, darling—if I could have crossed the room to you that day at Galton instead of hovering in the doorway, and knelt at your bedside—as I wanted to do—and held you and cried a little and asked you to forgive me—because I did blame myself—If I could have done those things, you would have forgiven me, that terrible silence would never have fallen between us, and you would still be my wife—'

‘Gervase, you are always telling me what might have been.'

‘I think I am trying to make amends. I am happy, Grace, and I see that you are not. I am
satisfied
—thoroughly satisfied—with the life I lead, because every facet of my nature is involved in it. I feel that I am using myself to capacity, and it is a rather marvellous feeling. Forgive me, Grace, but it strikes me that you are concentrating all your energies on one side of yourself—which is a most interesting and provocative side, a very challenging side, I admit. But there is another side to you which you seem to have put into some kind of cold storage, my darling. And that saddens me.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes, Mrs. Barforth—really. And there is no point, you know, in taking that brisk tone with me, for I am a gentleman of independent means and not in the least inclined to tremble before the proprietor of the
Star
.'

‘I suppose you are telling me I need a lover.'

‘Possibly you do. But what I really wish to say is that if I have hurt you so badly that you are too afraid to risk yourself again, then I must find some way of healing where I have harmed.'

‘You are taking a great deal upon yourself, Gervase.'

‘I would take
you
, altogether, if you would have me.'

I came to an abrupt halt, finding myself somehow face to face with the cliff wall, a sharp salt wind across my back, my answer coming as naturally and easily as my tears.

‘It would not be fair to you, Gervase. If you were in love with me, then perhaps you might be ready to put up with me, but since you are not—'

‘Am I not?'

‘No. You like me, and I like you, probably better than anyone. But it would take a very grand passion to shift you so much as an inch from your way of life—or me from mine—and you are not a man for grand passions, Gervase.'

He smiled and kissed me, very lightly, on the mouth.

‘No, thank God! Venetia was the Barforth for grand passions—and Nicholas, as it turns out. I am entirely a Clevedon in matters of the emotions, with my mother's fondness for friendship and—hopefully—something of her talent for it. She is divinely happy with her good friend Julian, you know. Do I not tempt you?'

‘From time to time—but not to be mistress of Galton.'

He laughed, kissed me again, we laughed together.

‘Very well. I accept your refusal. And at the risk of sounding decidedly unromantic I will even confess that I expected it. But I wanted to ask you so that you would know there was an alternative—that you could if you would—'

‘I am very glad you did ask me, Gervase.'

I was calm again, or calm enough to contemplate our return to Camille's warm and welcoming home, the sight and sound of her joy and the reasons for it, calm enough to endure both her bliss and my own rejection of it—calm enough. And when I came downstairs to breakfast the next morning Gervase had gone.

I stayed the whole week as I had promised, restraining myself from sending more than half a dozen telegrams to Cullingford, marooned in Camille's snug little parlour by the weather which had turned steel grey and intensely cold.

‘Let us sit by the fire and keep warm,' she said. ‘That's the great thing.' But I had not chosen to live safe and warm, and could not be dissuaded from setting off for Cullingford the following Sunday, despite a heavy fall of snow.

It was from the start a terrible journey, the train bitter cold and sluggish, the changes, first at York and then at Leeds, chilling me to the point of numbness, the Cullingford train departing from Leeds an hour late and then proceeding to exhaust and alarm me by its shuddering, unexplained halts among desolate snowfields, freezing rock-hard as night descended, to receive another burden of snow. The sky, which had been overcast and menacing all day, darkened entirely, robbing me of any sense of time or direction, the world and its ills and injustices reduced ere long to my own physical discomfort, my total isolation, since my compartment had emptied a very long time ago and no one since Leeds had been rash enough to get on board this train.

There would, of course, be no one at the station to meet me—supposing I ever reached it—for no one would expect me to travel on such a day, and if my coachman had stirred himself so far, he would by now have gone home again. There would be no other vehicle available, and unless the roads were blocked with drifting snow, which seemed quite likely, I would have to send the station boy with a note to Blenheim Crescent and spend another freezing, tedious hour in the waiting-room until someone came. And if the roads
were
blocked, then—with the resolution of a woman who has chosen to live alone—I would have to grit my teeth, wrap myself a little tighter in my sealskin coat, and walk.

It was a dark and dangerous night when I reached Cullingford, the snow falling in fine, slanting lines, driven by the wind, the stationmaster, who had not really expected the train to arrive, cross and confused, taking charge of my luggage but waving me away towards the yard where, miraculously, through the gloom, I saw a solitary carriage waiting. Liam I thought, for who else would dare risk himself and his horses for me in this storm? And hurrying forward, grateful and glad, I was defenceless when Gideon said curtly, ‘Get in.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Get in. Get in. I've been waiting here since God knows when and I'm frozen to the marrow. Get in. Don't stand and argue.'

Where to? I didn't ask him and there was nothing more he seemed inclined to say, his concentration and his skill being required in full measure to handle the reins, for the snow was very deep, Cullingford's steep cobbled streets very treacherous, and I was always passive, it seemed, whenever he chose to kidnap me, or to rescue me. I closed my eyes and went with him, as I had done when he had marched me around his building site at Black Abbey Meadow, when he had carried me to the Leeds train and then to Tarn Edge; as I would have done in my far away girlhood if he had then understood his need to master me. I went with him, not for long, not too far, but pleasurably, almost slavishly, for this was my very secret, my very precious fantasy, my sole indulgence, and would last no longer this time, I supposed, than the others.

Where to? My own front door, my own servants waiting—was I surprised, or disappointed about that?—and then, as we stood in the hall, his face tight and strangely guarded, he said curtly but somehow without anger—with something in his voice I did not recognize, ‘When you have changed your shoes and whatever else you wish to do, I would appreciate a word.'

There was a good fire in the drawing-room, and seeing him installed before it, a brandy glass in his hand, I flew upstairs and down again, seriously incommoded—there is no use in denying it—by the persistent thumping of my heart, that gave rise to a breathlessness I could not hope to conceal.