Distant Choices (22 page)

‘Quentin, you were not – not
fond
of her – surely? Dearest – you are worth a hundred of her – a thousand …'

‘As you say, mamma.'

‘
Quentin
– oh my dear – could I have done otherwise?'

‘No, mamma. You could not.'

‘And you could not possibly have wished – could you? – to marry a wanton?'

But he had wished to marry High Grange Park, the estate, the mines, the status of landed gentleman and the opportunities of professional advancement which accompanied it. She knew that very well. But at any price?

‘Dearest – dearest – to be tied to such a wayward creature … No – no. It would have been too terrible. Too much to pay. Remember her mother.'

‘Quite so, mamma.'

She saw that he did not agree with her. Had she, who loved him most, ruined his life?

‘I am not well, Quentin. For some days now I have felt so – so very poorly …'

‘Then would it not be best, mamma, to go to bed?'

She had obeyed him, and lay shivering for a day or two in the high, always chilly room she shared with her husband, Rupert Saint-Charles, distant cousin of an earl and an admiral, with his honours degree in the classics and his mild enthusiasm for ecclesiastical architecture, who had never been more to her than a
husband
; the best of the none too brilliant selection willing to save her from the disgrace of spinsterhood. Rupert Saint-Charles. She hardly knew him, rarely thought either of him or the children his vague and very brief, although very frequent, contact with her fully-clothed body in the dark kept on so regularly producing. Except Quentin, her first-born son, to whom she had given all the rapture and adoration of her own romantic girlhood, which no knight in shining armour had ever come forward to claim. A store of love which, since she knew it would have embarrassed her husband, had been waiting intact, untouched, for her son. And being of a faithful disposition she had lavished it wholly and exclusively upon him, leaving nothing to spare for the rest. Good children, of course, to be clothed and fed, taught their letters and their manners, but causing her no anxiety for the simple reason she had always been far too busy worrying over Quentin.

He had been the ultimate experience of her life, her true reason for living, and when her ‘nervous indisposition'turned out to be the all too familiar symptom of yet another little brother or sister on the way, it hurt her badly to see him greet the news with a curl of the lip which, in anyone else, she would have called a sneer.

Did he blame her for this too?

‘Is it wise, mamma – at your time of life?'

She had blushed most painfully, not even liking to admit that her one darling child had so much knowledge of such things, much less that he might be capable of putting that knowledge into practice.

‘Dearest – one takes what the Lord sends – surely?'

‘Ah – yes.'

And He would be sending this, her
last
child – please,
please
make it that – at the same time as her daughter Constantia's second. Constantia had been married for two years, Letty for twenty-seven, and since marriage and children were all really made in Heaven then one took what Heaven saw fit to inflict upon one. Of course one did. So had Letty instructed all her daughters, for unless one believed it, then how – she had often wondered – could any woman bring herself to carry on?

‘Yes,' she said bravely, hoping he would tell her it was something to be proud of. ‘I am to be mamma and grandmamma both at once.'

At High Grange it had provided a not unwelcome diversion from the forthcoming wedding.

‘Does one offer congratulations, dear Quentin?' Evangeline had enquired very sweetly, breathing in to accentuate the nineteen supple inches of her own waistline as she often did when Letty was mentioned.

‘Hardly to me, Aunt Evangeline. Possibly to my father.'

‘Oh – my dear boy – I doubt if your father will even notice the addition. Such a scholarly man, so deeply engrossed in designing all those pretty little cathedrals. Such a pity, I often think, that no one actually builds them any more. What a blessing – I know he thinks so – to be able to rely so much on you, Quentin dear, when it comes to finding employment for all your brothers, and suitable young men for your sisters to marry. However are you going to manage it?'

Particularly now, she was really saying, when his best hope of establishing himself and the rest of his family in life was about to walk down the aisle with a man who neither needed nor valued High Grange as much as Quentin.

A bitter pill indeed for him to swallow, although nothing could have exceeded the correctness of his manner as, in his capacity as family lawyer, he explained the necessary financial settlements to Francis who was at pains not to seem too interested, and to Kate who, in her desire to follow her lover barefoot across burning deserts, had no interest at all.

‘Kate – do pay attention.'

‘Yes, Quentin.'

‘Kate – it is important that you should understand.'

‘Quentin – Quentin – I know everything I want to know, and it has nothing to do with deeds of settlement, I do assure you.'

Yet nevertheless, competently, coolly, saying no more and no less than was needful, Quentin performed his duty, as Oriel performed hers on that uneasy wedding morning when, in the lesser finery of a bridesmaid, she followed Kate down the aisle. For, although Evangeline might say what she pleased to Oriel about the plight into which her unwillingness to be seduced had led her, she would give no one else the opportunity for gossip. No. In Evangeline's book – and in Oriel's – one kept one's troubles to oneself. One wept, if one really
had
to, in private. But in the prying public eye one smiled. Appearances were what counted and so, with hemlock in the soul or a knife in the heart or both together,
one kept those appearances up
. One swallowed the hemlock as if it were honey, one ignored the knife and – when no one was looking – one mopped up the blood. Gracefully. One did not make of oneself –
ever
– an object of pity. Which was exactly the same as making oneself ridiculous. And about as shameful as appearing in public in one's chemise.

So believed Evangeline. So had she taught her daughter who, therefore, had consented graciously to act as bridesmaid and even to dress the bride's difficult hair which the maids could never manage. She had done her own hair very simply, a Grecian knot at the nape of her long neck with a red rose in it. Kate's colours, which Oriel herself had shown her how to wear. A splash of crimson flowers against bridal silk, a red rose in Kate's hair too, nestling among the coarse tresses which Oriel's skill had smoothed and burnished to ebony. A pair of ecstatic eyes, black with emotion, glimpsed beneath the lace veil, as sudden and disturbing as feline eyes caught peering by night in a beam of torchlight from a hedgerow.

A bride who moved in a trance towards her destiny. A hastily-put-together little wedding otherwise, providing entertainment, it seemed, for no one but the bride's father, the elegant, sardonic Mr Matthew Stangway, in whose eyes, as he led his daughter to the altar, could be detected a decided glint of amusement.

‘Who giveth this woman …?'

‘I do.' And with the greatest of pleasure, he seemed to be saying, his eyes straying very deliberately to Evangeline, whose only consolation about this sorry ceremony was that all of the Mertons had agreed to attend it.

It had been the most appalling day of Oriel's difficult life. An ordeal which offered her no comfort beyond the bare fact that it would end. It ended. And, for days afterwards, she could not rid herself of the ache in her head, and in her bones, and in her heart. There seemed to be sand beneath her eyelids and a hungry hollow in her stomach which the food she kept on eating – and eating – to avoid sharp questions as to why she had lost her appetite never managed to fill. She was hungry and empty, her nerves raw, her mind heavy and easily distracted from everything but the need to heal herself, harden herself, before the honeymooners should come home again in the Spring.

In October, a month after the wedding, she caught a severe chill, another in December, her coughs and sneezes obliging her to miss the Boxing Day Dance at Merton Abbey, somewhat to the chagrin of Lady Merton's middle-aged and disreputable, but nevertheless bachelor, brother who had glimpsed her out riding one day; and greatly to the annoyance of Evangeline who had not only worked hard to woo the Mertons – unashamedly using the weapon that her husband's daughter was now the wife of one of their cousins – but saw no reason to accept Oriel's judgement that Lady Merton's brother would remain lecherous and unmarried to the end of his days.

‘You could get up – I would have thought, dear child – and make the effort.'

The effort to be Lady Merton's sister-in-law, that is. And then there was always Lord Merton's heir to be considered, a sickly, short-sighted nephew with an unfortunate resemblance, perhaps, to Lord Merton's famous rabbits, which might be readily overlooked, thought Evangeline, when one took into account the many other things in his favour. The Mertons, of course, were expecting him to marry one of their daughters, to keep the estate in the family and give her the title, just as the Stangways had been expecting Kate to marry Quentin. But Adela Merton was very plain, her sister Dora by no means pretty, their cousin Timothy Merton – His Future Lordship – just as capable, one supposed, of losing his head over a clever woman as Francis Ashington had been. Therefore, in Evangeline's opinion, her daughter would be well-advised to rise up from her sick-bed and
try
.

‘Are we not aiming a little higher than we ought, mamma?'

‘Certainly. I would aim for Queen Victoria's Albert if I saw the least chance of him.'

‘Well – I am just a little tired, you know, mamma – at present.'

‘Nonsense. You cannot afford to be tired, my sweet child. None of us can.'

But Oriel's eyes
were
red, her cough persistent, and when with Christmas over, she was still out of sorts and consequently out of looks, it seemed sensible to see what a change of air would do. Not London air, though, which Evangeline, as a result of her masterful charm, her exquisite skill in the social arts, had received an invitation to sample with the Mertons for a few days before their annual winter departure for Monte Carlo.

‘I suppose, my dear, you had better go and see Miss Woodley.'

‘I think so too, mamma.'

For the three most settled years of her childhood, Oriel had attended a school in Carlisle run by a Miss Woodley who, now retired to a cottage by Lake Ullswater, had several times had Oriel to stay with her. Times of personal stress, some of them, like this one, or merely times when the presence of a half-grown, and then full-grown, daughter had been temporarily inconvenient to Evangeline. Pleasant times all of them, cool nights on a mattress stuffed with sweet woodruff and lavender, quiet days in a garden overcrowded with herbs and old-fashioned plants where Miss Woodley, patient nurturer of violets and gilliflowers, firm guardian of hives and nests, healer alike of feline paws and broken wings, asked no questions, issued no invitations to dinner and accepted none, allowing her guests to eat – as she did – when they were hungry, to cry when they were sad, to talk or to be silent – as she did – when they pleased.

‘Yes, mamma. I'll go to Miss Woodley.'

It was an easy enough journey to Lancaster and then by coach to Penrith where Miss Woodley was to meet her, the rose-coloured little town far busier than she had ever seen it before with the impact of the railway workers, the infamous navvies who had come here too, in their wild gangs, to dig and tunnel and blast the railway from Lancaster to Carlisle; upwards of ten thousand men descending with their spades and wheelbarrows on those close-knit, lakeland towns and isolated villages where strangers of any kind were rare and usually not more than two or three in number. Reflective academics mainly who came for the natural beauties of silent hills and silent water, so that the men – and more particularly the women – of the lake country had shuddered, as the earth itself shuddered, beneath the rough-handling of these brawling, beer-swilling invaders. Rootless and reckless every one of them, tearing the ground apart almost bare-handed, it seemed, to make their cuttings and their embankments with little more equipment than pick-axes and muscle and a certain very casual tossing of gunpowder which would take the track – hopefully in triumph – from the treacherous peat bog at Bolton-le-Sands to the mighty summit of Shap Fell, descending gloriously to Penrith and the final eighteen, only-steep-in-places miles into Carlisle.

Certainly the railway workings had changed courtly, harmonious Penrith: not the physical dimensions of the town but the feel of it, which, as Oriel got down from the stage that chilly February day, struck her as somehow off-key, as if she had arrived on the wrong day, perhaps, or not
exactly
in the place she had expected.

Miss Woodley was not there to greet her, either.

But the inn yard of the George was the one she remembered, the same low, red sandstone hostelry where Bonnie Prince Charlie had once spent the night, a hundred years ago, on his way from Scotland to fight the foreign king of England. No mistake, she realized, had been made, the coach rather late of course, the carriage horses and riding horses which had come to meet it striking fretful hooves on the cobbles, their breath visible on the cold air, ostlers and inn-servants shouting at one another as they always did above the din, the steaming coach horses being led off in one direction, their replacements clattering in from another, the livery-stable gigs in a great rush to pick up their passengers and baggage and get away before the coach from Carlisle – also late, she gathered – came in.

It was a scene to which she was well accustomed, except that this time, on this day, there was something more – somehow – about the bustle than the usual urgencies of journey's end. Something sharp-edged and taut – somewhere – which began to worry her, reminding her with growing discomfort that Miss Woodley, so famous for her absent-minded good humour, might not come, with her dog-cart, for an hour yet if something in her garden had caught her eye.