Darkwater (18 page)

‘Sandwiches like we eat?’ Nolly asked.

‘Yes, indeed. They have cultivated tastes. But they all need a brush and comb taken to their manes and coats.’

Nolly laughed delightedly. Marcus clamoured, ‘Me, too. Can I come, too.’

‘Naturally. And Cousin Fanny, of course. One day when the sun shines.’

He had a way of making people adore him, Fanny was thinking coldly. Not only children, but adults, like Amelia. Even Aunt Louisa. But the strange conversation they had just had had confirmed her suspicions about him. She knew now what he was about.

He was looking at her to see if she shared the children’s enthusiasm about the proposed picnic.

‘If you are disappointed I am not an heiress, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am afraid no amount of conjecture can achieve that.’ She wanted to go on and say that he would have to be satisfied with Amelia, a compromise that didn’t seem too displeasing to him.

She wasn’t prepared for his frowning anger.

‘I must have been very clumsy to deserve a remark like that. I assure you—’

But at that moment Amelia came bursting in.

‘Mr Marsh, Mamma insists that you stay to dinner. We’re not going to dress. Say that you will.’

He inclined his head. ‘Your mother is very kind.’

‘Then come downstairs.’ She had taken his arm proprietorially. Miss Ferguson’s patient lessons about etiquette and modesty seemed to have escaped from her flighty little head. ‘I think it’s sweet that you should be so interested in my little cousins,’ Fanny heard her saying as they went. ‘But you mustn’t let them monopolise you.’

That was the moment when Fanny decided he was never to have the satisfaction of knowing what he had done to her.

In spite of Amelia’s lofty decree that because Adam was in riding clothes, no one should dress, Fanny took great pains with her appearance that night. She wore her grey taffeta, old to be sure, but she let the neckline fall as low as possible over her shoulders, and she decided, with deliberation, to wear the sapphire pendant Uncle Edgar had given her. Above all, pity was not the emotion she wanted Adam Marsh to feel for her. She brushed her hair into a state of velvet softness and instead of wearing it in ringlets, as was all the rage, she twisted it low on her neck so that her ears and all of her round white forehead were visible.

She went downstairs late, so late that the gong had gone and everyone was just about to go to the dining room. Everyone looked at her. Aunt Louisa was about to scold when Uncle Edgar saw the sapphire and beamed with pleasure.

‘And very well it looks on that pretty neck,’ he whispered conspiratorially, making sure, nevertheless, that his words were quite audible.

‘I had a fancy to wear it,’ Fanny murmured. ‘Somehow I was feeling happy. The children are recovered, and it’s summer, and everything is so beautiful.’

She looked vaguely out of the window, suggesting that her remark about beauty meant the garden, and the trees heavy with mid-summer leaf. But her lingering gaze went round the room.

‘May I sing to you later, Uncle Edgar. It seems a night for singing, I hardly know why.’

‘You may indeed, my dear.’

‘Fanny has a very pleasant voice, Mr Marsh,’ Aunt Louisa said repressively.

‘It’s more likely we may hear a nightingale if we go out-doors,’ said Amelia. ‘Are you an admirer of the nightingale, Mr Marsh?’

So now he was caught between the two of them. Fanny found herself waiting for his answer with more amusement than pain. The pain would come later, when he strolled in the warm dark scented garden with Amelia, as inevitably he would, while she sang to Uncle Edgar, or Lady Arabella, dozing in her chair, or George with his worshipping eyes—or the uncaring moon.

‘Perhaps if the windows were to be opened, we would hear both nightingales.’

‘Bravo, Mr Marsh! Worthy of a diplomat,’ applauded Lady Arabella.

‘Coward, Mr Marsh!’ Fanny murmured.

Adam’s eyes met hers over Amelia’s ringletted golden head. They had a strange intense glitter that shook all her resolutions and left her silent for the rest of the meal.

But later, half way through a song, when the wind from the open window was causing the candle flames to gutter in their own grease, she realised that he and Amelia had disappeared.

‘Don’t stop, my dear,’ said Uncle Edgar. He was a bulky shadowy figure in the winged chair. ‘But perhaps something a little more gay.’

Fanny’s hands came down on the keys in a jagged discord. She saw that the room was empty except for Lady Arabella sunk, as usual, in her gentle after-dinner slumber, and Uncle Edgar. Even George had not stayed. But George didn’t care for music. He could be forgiven. No one else could.

‘Most songs are sad,’ she said.

‘But not all of them are about death. Although, indeed,’ Uncle Edgar was sipping his second glass of port, ‘we must be practical and realise our ultimate destiny. And that reminds me that now you’re almost twenty-one, Fanny, my dear, you must make a will.’

‘A will! But I have nothing to leave to anybody.’

‘It’s more tidy to do so. After all, where would you have been, as indeed where would Olivia and Marcus have been, if your separate father’s hadn’t left instructions about you. True, you haven’t children. Nor have you a fortune. But you do have a little jewellery, my dear, some of it of a certain value. And your aunt and I intend you shall have more. So one day we’ll draw something up. I’m sorry if I sound morbid. Some people think that by signing a will they hear the nails going into their coffin. George made his before he went to the Crimea, and naturally Amelia will also do so later. My own has been made this thirty years, and look at me! No nails in my coffin.’

Fanny was taken aback, more surprised than repelled.

‘What made you think of such a thing just now?’

‘Your song about death. And seeing you wear that sapphire tonight. You will naturally want to choose your own recipient for that.’

It was ironic, macabre, hilarious, even vaguely flattering, since it indicated she wasn’t completely without possessions. She had come down meaning to be so gay and to steal the evenings into her hands, and this was what happened. She and Uncle Edgar had an absorbing conversation about death!

Amelia and Adam came in just as she was laughing with uninhibited mirth.

‘Whatever is the matter now?’ Amelia demanded. She had been flushed and a little sulky all evening, knowing Fanny’s ability to steal a scene. ‘I only took Adam out to insist that he smell the new red rose William is so proud of, and immediately we go you and Papa start having private jokes.’

‘About mortality,’ said Fanny. ‘A very amusing subject. Although I don’t imagine Ching Mei found it so. I hardly—’ She stopped what she was going to say—what had it been going to be? The wind from the open window was making her shiver violently, to the exclusion of all thought. One of the candles on the piano had blown out. The room seemed too dark, the faces all looked at her too intently.

George and Aunt Louisa had also come back, and, about to ask what was going on, the words had died on their lips. It was a strange petrified moment, without rhyme or reason. Did anyone else but herself perceive that all at once Darkwater had turned treacherously into its haunted state?

Someone walked about here who thought too much about death. Was it the name, Ching Mei, that had brought the silence?

A
MELIA’S BALL WAS ONLY
six weeks away, and Hamish Barlow, the attorney from Shanghai, was due to arrive within a month or so. Everyone seemed to be on edge. Uncle Edgar was probably wondering how he was going to explain Ching Mei’s death to Mr Barlow, and Aunt Louisa was constantly fussing about the arrangements for the ball.

Finally, instead of making frequent journeys to Plymouth, Miss Egham, the dressmaker, had been installed in the house, and Amelia divided her time between fittings, riding on the moors with George, or alone (did she have a rendezvous when she went alone?) and wandering about with a moony look on her face.

Adam Marsh kept his word about the children’s picnic, and Amelia, who hitherto had found Marcus and Nolly little but a nuisance, suddenly discovered that she couldn’t resist so delightful an outing, and was sure that there would be room for her in the pony trap, too.

Fanny thought that Adam looked put out when he met them at the crossroads. But if he had, his ill-humour was gone in a flash, and he was welcoming them all with the news that if they followed the uphill road a little farther he had found a perfect spot, out of the wind. Sheltered by an outcrop of rocks they spread their rugs on the turf and prepared to bask in the sunshine. Amelia had brought her parasol, a frivolous affair of purple lace. She said how fortunate Fanny was to have a complexion that was not harmed by the sun, and could even toss aside her wide-brimmed hat. Her own skin was so delicate it would be burned to a cinder without protection, and with her ball so near Mamma was constantly chiding her about her appearance.

‘It’s a terrible thing to be a woman,’ she said, sighing deeply.

‘It certainly seems a pity to have to sit upright under a parasol on a picnic,’ Adam agreed gravely, and then said that he was taking the children to find some moorland ponies. Perhaps Fanny would care to come, since Amelia had her complexion to protect?

Fanny resisted both the invitation and her desire to laugh. She said that she would busy herself unpacking the luncheon basket. She meant to keep Mr Adam Marsh at arm’s length, and anyway Amelia would look so forlorn if she were left, sitting primly under her parasol, playing at being a lady when all the time she wanted to throw dignity to the winds and romp after the children.

‘I think he was laughing at me,’ Amelia declared indignantly.

‘I sometimes thing he is laughing at us all,’ Fanny said.

‘Why? What is ridiculous about us?’

‘Perhaps I used the wrong word. Perhaps, “examining” would be a better one.’

‘He does ask a great many questions,’ Amelia admitted. ‘He says he is interested in human nature. I wonder, Fanny, if he is a dilettante.’ Amelia’s eyes shone. ‘I confess I would find that irresistible.’

‘Getting your heart broken?’ Fanny asked dryly.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t allow that to happen. But he does make all the other men we know seem dreadfully dull. Do you know,’ she finished in a burst of confidence, ‘it is my ambition this summer to make him fall in love with me. If he isn’t already,’ she added dreamily.

‘I think you are a silly little girl,’ Fanny said.

And so she was, sitting there in her too elaborate clothes, the ridiculous parasol outlined against the wild beautiful landscape.

But her silliness could not be entirely dismissed. She was the one with the dowry which was undoubtedly a feature of great attraction. It could compensate for her affectations and her constant chatter and her childish enthusiasms. And she would develop poise. Indeed, she had disturbing moments of it already, when one saw the woman too prematurely. She was irritating and endearing, and Fanny would love her if only she would fall in love with Robert Hadlow, or some other harmless young man.

But now she had to be an enemy, because, innocently, she was exposing Adam’s weakness. Or what one imagined was his weakness…

The children came back, with flushed cheeks and happy laughter.

‘Cousin Fanny, Marcus thought the pony was going to bite him. It took his sleeve, like this!’ Nolly nuzzled at Marcus’s jacket, and he shrieked with laughter.

‘It had big teeth, Cousin Fanny. Mr Marsh said it used them to gnash at its enemies.’

‘There were hundreds of ponies, Cousin Fanny. And Marcus is hungry. Can he have something to eat?’

Whatever this man was, he knew how to make children happy.

‘Let us all sit down and eat,’ said Fanny calmly. ‘Adam—have you a large appetite, too?’

He didn’t fail to notice her use of his first name. He gave her his quiet unsmiling look.

‘I don’t know which looks the more edible, the food or the young ladies.’

Nolly giggled wildly. ‘Pray don’t eat them, Mr Marsh! At least, not Cousin Fanny. She puts us to bed and listens to our prayers.’

‘I would leave her eyes to the last,’ Adam said. ‘Because they are the colour of heaven.’

‘That’s where Mamma and Papa are,’ said Marcus in surprise.

Nolly plucked nervously at Adam’s sleeve.

‘You wouldn’t actually? Would you, Mr Marsh.’

‘I am a maker of bad jokes. I deserve to go without anything to eat at all.’

‘That child would be afraid of a mouse,’ Amelia put in, with some peevishness. She hadn’t cared for the conversation.

‘And so would you, I don’t doubt,’ Adam retorted. ‘Come, Nolly. You be a mouse, and scare Cousin Amelia from under her pretty parasol.’

Amelia shrieked wildly, forgetting to be a lady, as her ruffled and starched petticoats were threatened. And Fanny found herself storing in her memory what Adam had said in his flippant voice.

At the end of the day, as if he were tossing them a trivial piece of information, Adam said that he had arranged with Mr Farquarson to take a year’s lease of Heronshall, and that his Aunt Martha would be arriving to organise the household.

‘If at the end of the year I want to buy, I will do so,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime it’s a place to call home. I have travelled so much I can scarcely remember what it is to have a home.’

Amelia was excited and too unsophisticated not to show her jubilation.

‘But how wonderful! I believe you have done it this year, for me, because it is my coming-out year. Anyway, it pleases me to think so.’

Adam bowed. ‘If it pleases you, Miss Amelia, then it is true, of course.’

‘Your Aunt Martha?’ said Fanny involuntarily. This latest information surely made him a completely honest person.

‘Yes, you must meet her. She’s delighted that I seem to be settling down at last. She has a particular fondness for children, so one day I will send for those two to come to tea.’

‘Surely you will give more than children’s tea parties,’ Amelia said, pouting.

‘To be sure, if Miss Amelia Davenport has time to spare from her numerous social activities.’