A Dark and Distant Shore (17 page)

It was clear that he hadn’t the slightest interest in whether she understood or not. She had only asked to see the foundry out of politeness, which she now recognized to have been misplaced. It hadn’t softened his mood at all, but had given him the opportunity to add a touch of sadism to the contempt with which he ordinarily treated her. He had no time for women, and especially no time for his son’s wife.

‘What do you mean, the answer is no?’ She could scarcely make herself heard amid the clamour. ‘No, what?’

He was bending over the pigs, seemingly oblivious to the heat. A big, muscular man, with a harsh, impervious face. His skin was pitted with the scars of smallpox, and his complexion had the purplish-red tinge that spoke of heart disease, but his eyes were like Andrew’s, green with amber flecks, set wide and straight under heavy brows. He was just over fifty, and his brown hair was beginning to turn grey although it was still plentiful. He was wearing what she took to be his working coat and clumsy knee boots, as if to suggest, not very subtly, that her visit was an unwelcome interruption of the working day. Outside the foundry, he was usually well enough dressed, if not precisely modish.

He didn’t trouble to turn his head but, ignoring the furnace keepers busy around them, as if they were so many pieces of furniture, he said, ‘I mean I’ll not have him idling his time away in London like all those dandies and perverts and fornicators you’re so fond of.’

She gasped. It was such an extraordinary remark that, in other circumstances, she might have laughed. But one of the furnace keepers, a brawny fellow, half naked, whose open shirt revealed a mat of moist, black, curling hair, dashed a huge hand over his eyes to brush away the sweat, and gazed at her over his master’s head with an almost animal speculation. Another, younger and fairer, slid her a sideways glance, his mouth half open over broken teeth and a jeer twisting the corners of his lips. She looked round. All the men were staring at her as if they had never seen a woman before. Abruptly, she was grateful for the thick veil she had thrown over her satin straw bonnet. Duncan Lauriston’s housekeeper had warned her to wear something to protect her from the dirt and soot and ashes, and since it had been wet and cold when Vilia left Marchfield House earlier in the afternoon, the veil and heavy grey travelling pelisse had seemed a practical solution. The housekeeper hadn’t mentioned the heat.

Vilia could feel the perspiration starting on her forehead under the smothering gauze. ‘That’s not true!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’re not even acquainted with such people!’

As if it had broken some spell, all the men returned to their labours, pushing the molten iron down the feeding channels, smoothing and levelling what was already in the pigs. Duncan Lauriston rose to his feet. ‘Fine!’ he said. ‘Then you’ll not miss them when you come to live at Marchfield with me. There’s room enough.’ He strode off to the door facing the one by which they had entered.

Vilia took a moment to pick up her skirts and devoted more care than she would otherwise have done to circumventing the obstacles strewn about the vibrating floor of the furnace shed. Her mind refused to recognize what her father-in-law had said. As a prospect, it was unthinkable.

He was in the store yard outside. He pointed. ‘Low-sulphur coal for coke making. Some of it comes from Rothes, some of it from Sheriffhall in Midlothian. Owned by his gracious lordship, the Duke of Buccleuch. Friend of yours, no doubt.’

She said nothing. She had never met anyone who loathed rank and distinction as he did. Good breeding to him was synonymous with luxury and privilege, which he condemned with an Old Testament virulence that smelled strongly of envy. Vilia supposed that her own birth and breeding were largely accountable for the fact that she had failed so badly with him, for although she had disliked him on sight she had tried to overcome it, and had been as charming and pleasant as she knew how. But even on the day of her wedding she had heard him say to Andrew, without troubling to lower his voice, ‘Highty-tighty! You’ll have trouble with that one, you mark my words!’ And during this last week, when at Andrew’s insistence she had brought the baby to visit him, she had come to suspect that he not only disapproved of her but hated her. It was a dreadful feeling. She had never been aware of anyone hating her before, except, in a very juvenile way, a small boy called Luke Telfer.

Duncan Lauriston pointed again at other heaps piled about the yard. ‘Iron ores. Red one’s haematite, very rich. Yellow-brown one’s ordinary grade, very hard. The violet-grey stuff comes from Dunbar, on the sea coast the other side of Edinburgh.’

The noise was fractionally less, here. She cleared her throat and said, ‘Live with
you
?’

‘You’ll not be able to afford to live anywhere else if my son leaves the army. If you’d brought him a dowry, that might be a different story.’

So that rankled? He must have hoped that Andrew would marry money.

‘But you thought
he
had enough blunt to pay for your high living and fancy gowns. Well...’

It suddenly seemed very important to say, ‘I pay for my gowns from the small income my father left me!’

But he gave no sign of having heard. ‘I tell you now, if he gets out of the army he’ll not have a penny except what I give him. And I’ll give him
nothing
’
–
he put a venomous emphasis on the word – ‘unless he comes to live here and learn about the business.’

He was stumping ahead again in his clumsy boots, and Vilia ran to keep up. ‘I gave in when he was so desperate to join the army, and he was doing me credit. I looked to see him a colonel at least, before he was finished. But it doesn’t suit you, does it? I know your kind.’ As he disappeared through another doorway, his words were snatched away by hammer thuds and the roaring and reverberation of the furnaces inside. But, incredulously, she thought she heard him say ‘...vain and sinful.’

Her legs were trembling, and she had no idea how to deal with him. Andrew had said, ‘Go and stay with my father, and I’ll write to him so that my letter arrives when you are there. He hates the thought of money being wasted, but
you
can turn him up sweet, my darling!’ How blind was it possible to be?

She straightened her shoulders and followed him. Here, the furnace doors were open and there were men before them, guarding their eyes with one hand while, with a long tool in the other, they raked and stirred and spread in the very heart of the fire. ‘Puddlers,’ said Duncan Lauriston briefly. ‘The pig iron’s melted and puddled – that means raked – to make it fit for forging. The hammers are beating the melted stuff into blooms – lumps – and then it’s squeezed into bars by these rollers here.’

He turned to her before she had time to recoil, so that his spectacles were only inches from her face. She understood the purpose of them now. ‘Are you not interested?’ he said.

‘What? Yes, of course. It’s just that it’s difficult to take it all in at once, especially with the noise and the heat.’ The hammers were clanging through her head and the furnaces blazing in her face. She could scarcely remember what it was like to be quiet and cool. Unbidden, a vision of Kinveil in the snow came to her mind.

‘Aye, you like your comfort. Well, you’d best recognize that the money that keeps you isn’t comfortably made. You never think of that when you go flittering off to parties and balls, night after night, leaving the bairn to some gin-sodden wet nurse! Well, you’ll find things a bit different at Marchfield. We don’t go in for dissipation, and Andrew’ll be a sight too weary to squire you about, anyway. You’ll just have to stay at home and look after the boy.’

He never called the baby by his name, which was Theophilus – Theo for short – after her father. It had had to be that, or Duncan, and Duncan she couldn’t have borne.

‘And you can comfort yourself,’ he added with a sneering smile, ‘with the thought that you’ve only yourself to blame. I’ve no doubt it’s you wants my son out of the army...’

Vilia found her voice and the strength to make herself heard. ‘Stop!
Please
stop! It’s not I who want him out of the army. The French wars are over now, and Napoleon is in Elba, and Wellington has turned diplomat. The army will soon be on peacetime strength, and Andrew believes the prospects for advancement will be very few indeed. It’s
he
who sees no purpose in going on. It’s
he
who wants to resign his commission!’ But there was only disbelief in Duncan Lauriston’s face.

He turned away. They were off on their travels again. Somewhere in an unrelated corner of her mind she was grateful she had decided to wear comfortable shoes.

He said, ‘I’ll believe you. Thousands wouldn’t. But I’ll not believe you had no hand at all in his decision.’

She could have wept. Not once, during the sixteen months of their married life, had Andrew ever asked her opinion about anything. Not once – when he had been there to forestall her – had he allowed her to make a decision, even on her own behalf. He didn’t want her worrying her beautiful head. She had come to the conclusion that it was the only way he knew of expressing his love, except in bed.

She said again, ‘No. The decision was his own.’

Her father-in-law threw open a heavy door, its padlock hanging loose. ‘The workshop.’

It was a haven of quiet, full of cast-iron stoves and grates and kitchen ranges, kettles and pots, spades and hoes, hinges and bolts. There was no machinery working, and the place was empty of people. She remained just inside the door.

‘Times are bad,’ he said. It wasn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact. ‘We’ll do no more casting until we’ve sold this stuff. We’re under-capitalized, always have been. Skilled labour, high costs, dear transport, it all adds up. Welsh iron’s cheaper, you see, and we weren’t like Carron at Falkirk, with big war orders.’ He took his spectacles off, and his eyes gleamed inimically in the reflected glow from the furnaces across the yard. ‘We’ve no reserves, but we’ve no partners either. It’s all mine – and Andrew’s, and the boy’s. D’you understand me!’

‘I think so.’

‘If he sells out of the army he won’t even get the full price for his commission. The Horse Guards’ll keep some back for the reserve fund,
if
they agree to him selling out at all. He’s supposed to have twenty years’ service before they’ll even consider it.’

Vilia said, ‘He thinks that, with the war over, they may be more flexible.’

‘Aye, maybe. But maybe, with the war over, no one will want to buy his commission. He might not even get back what I paid to make him an ensign in the first place. And, by God, I could have done with that money these last years! No!’ His voice was blunt and final. ‘I’ve had enough of all this. Even if I could spare it, I wouldn’t increase his allowance. I won’t even maintain it. The Bible has things to say about wasting one’s substance on sin and loose living, so you can reap your whirlwind, my girl! You’ll come to Marchfield and learn to be a good wife to my son and a mother to his bairns.’

His bairns. Theo, who was seven months old, and whom, after the first shock, she had wanted and welcomed, because she thought a child might transform her match with Andrew into a real marriage. And the second child, already on the way. The first pregnancy had given her a respite from her husband’s passion during his all too frequent visits home; Wellington had been using him as some kind of courier for dispatches to London, and he had been back and forth across the Channel like a homing pigeon. But this time he had said, ‘The fellows tell me I don’t have to stop. It’s just a question of’ – and he had turned a fiery red – ‘of not doing
everything.
’
More than ever she had felt like a whore, and when he had left for France three weeks ago the relief had been so intense it was almost an anguish.

She looked at the hateful man towering over her, and suddenly she was furiously angry. She didn’t realize how many generations of well-bred ice were in her voice when she said, ‘Mr Lauriston! You do neither yourself nor your son any credit by speaking to me in this way. I am aware that you disapprove of me, but I must tell you that I married Andrew in perfect good faith, and that I have conducted myself with perfect propriety ever since. I would not dream of doing otherwise. Only blind prejudice could make you speak to me as you have.’ She had thrown up her veil, and her eyes were glittering.

There was a disastrous silence. Duncan Lauriston’s face was frozen, but his amber-flecked eyes seemed to grow and grow, intent and greedy. He moved a step nearer, but her back was to the door jamb and she couldn’t retreat. Her heart was pounding like one of the hammers in the foundry furnace. A breeze from outside sent a hot, fetid smell into her nostrils.

Then his hands clamped down on her shoulders, and he said viciously, ‘Blind prejudice, is it?’ She could see every pore and vein and scar on his face, hideously magnified, and his lips, which must once have been as well-shaped as Andrew’s, were moist and slightly parted. He was breathing heavily. ‘Don’t you dare take that tone with me, you bitch. You Jezebel! As God is my witness, I’ll make you pay for it!’

The world was spinning round her head, and she knew suddenly that she was deathly afraid of him in a way she had never dreamed of when she had said carelessly to Lucy, on her wedding day, that he frightened her. She knew that she was very near to fainting, but every nerve in her body screamed at her not to. With a tremendous effort of will, she brought her reeling senses under control, and even managed to cast disdainful eyes down on his bruising hands.

For an eternity, they stood there immobile, and then Duncan Lauriston dropped his hands and moved back a step or two. He said nothing at first, but simply went on staring at her so that, although superficially she had won, she had no sense of victory or even of relief. Then, ‘It’s all settled, is it?’ he asked flatly.

‘That is for Andrew to decide.’ Her voice sounded almost normal.

‘How long will it take to make the arrangements?’ He turned away and began studying a hinge he had taken from one of the shelves, looking at it as if he had detected a flaw in the moulding.