Distant Choices (27 page)

Yet a number of events suddenly occurred to alter her strategy, not least among them the extraction from Matthew of a substantial dowry for Oriel which, whether the bridegroom wanted it or not, was a vital matter of pride to Evangeline.

Not that she felt in any way disposed to thank him for it. ‘She
is
your daughter, Matthew, after all. And if you are determined to throw her away I suppose you might as well do it in style.'

‘My love,' he looked dangerously innocent. ‘The man is making a fortune. It occurs to me that, really, instead of creating all this fuss, we would do better to snap him up. For if he goes on at this rate – who knows? – even the Mertons, who are often short of ready money, might find him a useful proposition. Young Dora Merton is often in debt, one hears, and never quite likes to tell her father – particularly whenever he happens to have been gambling himself. So is it beyond the bounds of her imagination, do you think, to sell her noble self to somebody like our Mr Keith, who might not be dazzled by nobility but will know – one feels quite certain – just what it is worth? The opening of just about every door he might wish to enter, right up to a seat in Parliament, should he have the fancy. Especially since the Merton cousin, young Timothy, who is going to marry Adela, has no talent in that direction. You
have
heard, I take it, about the Merton engagement?'

Yes. She had heard, in a letter from Monte Carlo, how Lord Merton's nephew and legal heir to the title had announced his engagement to the elder and therefore correct Merton daughter, Adela, thus ensuring that the estate and title would remain in the family but dashing all hopes of it for Oriel. She had also heard, in the same chatty letter, of the unfortunate entanglement into which Lady Merton's brother had fallen with a fairly well-known actress, a mature and scheming woman who, having managed to move into his Kent manor, would ‘give him the devil's own job' as Lord Merton put it, to get her out again.

Certainly not in time for a Spring wedding before Mr and Mrs Ashington came home again.

Yet it was the stricken appearance of Susannah Saint-Charles – so badly, so comically enamoured of Mr Garron Keith herself – which showed Evangeline how best to change course. Only a matter of weeks ago she had warned Letty to keep a sharp eye on the plain and so awkwardly passionate Susannah, describing the object of her attentions as both dangerous and impossible. What better way, now, of saving face than by pretending it had all been part of her ploy to snatch him up for Oriel?

‘The man is so obscenely rich,' she purred to a hostile assembly of Maud and Letty, ‘that really – after a while – one rather loses sight of the few odd little things one may not have quite liked about him to begin with. One's eyes are dazzled, I suppose, by such a mountain of gold … And such a powerful nature – so tempestuous – I rather fear he has swept Oriel off her feet.'

It was done.

‘And it will be so delightful,' she murmured, ‘to have my daughter established so close to me in Lydwick. A pleasant town, I have always thought. So much more – well – the sort of place to which one is accustomed than Hepplefield.'

Thus giving Letty an extra scratch of the claws since Quentin, on the excuse that he found the daily journey between the vicarage and his offices in Hepplefield too long, but – as Letty believed correctly – because he could not tolerate the disruption of another baby in his parental home, had moved into ‘rooms'in Hepplefield's premier thoroughfare of Bishop Blaize Street, to be looked after by a landlady who, although competent and clean, was not his mother. A handsome woman too, one heard, with a calmness of manner one might even describe as dignified; thus making a pleasant change – Evangeline had been heard to murmur – from Letty.

‘Yes. I am so pleased my daughter and her future husband have decided to settle in Lydwick.'

It was a much smaller town than Hepplefield, untroubled by the industrial expansion which, with the touch of its demon wand, had doubled Hepplefield's population, and then trebled it, overnight. New factories were springing up in Hepplefield, they said, like toadstools, each one surrounded by rings of lesser toadstools that were the cottages to house its workers, the ginshops and pawn-shops for their convenience, so that the same industrialists who had sown and harvested the ugly crop were now eagerly awaiting the coming of the railway in order to escape it, having realized at once that, although a man with a horse and a carriage is obliged to live within a mile or two of his factory gates, no such limits are imposed upon a man in a train.

But Lydwick, on its snug bend of the River Gore where the water ran too slow and shallow to turn a mill-wheel or power a steam-engine, had escaped industrial splendours and squalors alike, remaining the country town it had always been, a few quiet streets of bow-windowed shops selling good quality leather boots and saddles, choice tobaccos and rare, scented teas from China to suit the tastes of the neighbouring ‘gentry'; a wine merchant to satisfy the palates of the discerning; a book-binder to cater to those who believed ‘intellect' to be still in fashion; a portrait painter who found much employment in producing the ‘likeness'in oils of a daughter on her wedding day, a son in uniform, a father taking up his appointment as a magistrate, a wife with a new-born heir.

Gentle, slow-moving Lydwick, therefore, surrounded not by the coarse, bare moorland of Hepplefield but by fresh, green meadows and wide-armed groves of chestnut trees, the peaceful refuge of well-to-do widows, retired academics, gentlemen's families of small distinction but ample private means, and of Mr Garron Keith whose lavish appointment of the house he had lately purchased on Lydwick Green was, at once, the focus of many, not altogether admiring eyes.

Two houses faced each other across the ‘Green', the small, grey vicarage hidden by overgrown hedges which no vicar had ever thought to trim, and the ‘new house', the first to be built in Lydwick for fifty years and more, begun and then abandoned by a Leeds manufacturer who had left Mr Keith to finish off the elaborate façade, the stone fruit and flowers and vine-leaves clustering above the front door which Lydwick, accustomed to the simple, elegant lines of the previous century had thought too overdone, too modern, too much in keeping with the overblown sentimentality of Queen Victoria and her prim and proper Albert.

The shopkeepers of Lydwick, having made their money in the days of the poor morals but excellent taste of the Prince Regent and his bucks and rakes and dandies, did not altogether approve of the good husband, good father, too-good-to-be-true Prince Albert, finding his virtues of small encouragement to the luxury and sporting trades. Nor did they approve of Mr Keith either, finding
him
, at a glance, too common; although the young person who was to be his wife was someone with whom they could feel perfectly comfortable. A lady. No one in Lydwick could fail to recognize the breed, nor disagree with the general opinion that it would be a pleasure, as soon as Miss Blake became installed as Mrs Keith in the ostentatious, high-ceilinged, over-ornamental splendours of the ‘new house', to take tea with her.

She would have a very fine drawing-room, after all, with a Grecian-columned marble fireplace, a ceiling across which plaster Cupids flew in pairs between garlands of plaster flowers picked out in gold, and with long windows opening to a terrace and a prospect of velvet lawns, clipped box-hedges, and a sufficiency of nymphs and more Cupids – stone ones this time – for a miniature Versailles.

Oriel had chosen nothing in the house herself, nor had she expected to do so, accepting it as a ready-made part of Garron Keith as she accepted his children, to whom she was presented, just a few days before the wedding, as ‘your new mother'. It was not a phrase she relished. Yet it was another accepted formula, the ‘right thing to say'on these occasions which, considering the rate at which ‘real mothers' faded and died, were by no means uncommon. And although it sounded a decidedly false note in her ears, she did not think she would care to be addressed either as ‘Mrs Keith'or ‘stepmamma'.

The children were a surprise to her.

‘They'll need some polishing,' the man she still hesitated to call ‘Garron'had warned her. ‘Their mother's family are mainly fisherfolk from the far north of Scotland, and that's where they've been for most of their lives. I've had them with me whenever I could. But it's not in
me
to polish them. I know I can depend on your mother's agreement to that. And maybe whenever I chose a governess I picked the pleasant ones who could put up with the travelling life, instead of the old dragons who might have taught the bairns their manners. So you'll have your work to do.'

But it was neither their roughness nor the awkwardness of their posture which took her aback. She had simply not expected them to be so blonde. A girl of ten and one of eleven, with hair as silver-pale as her own, and a boy with the same deep tan as his nut-brown father but with hair the strong, rich gold of honey. Elspeth, the younger girl, tongue-tied and ready to be tearful with shyness, her wide blue eyes awestruck as they fastened on the flowing lines of Oriel's cream silk gown, the elegance of the brown velvet roses at the waist which had scattered their rosebuds, in the same brown velvet, all around the hem. Jamie, the honey-gold boy, sturdy and shrewd, with no living memories of his real mother to trouble him. And Morag, the eldest, named for the woman who had died, tall and reed-slender, her eyes pale enough to be called grey, their glance passing over and through her fashionable, expensive, high-bred ‘new mother'with unmixed hostility.

‘She's the eldest and the strongest,' Garron said when they had made their curtseys, given their stilted answers to Oriel's very correct questions and then gone outside, on their father's orders, to play. ‘They've had a roving life. Here and there with me. Back to Scotland whenever I was away somewhere that wouldn't suit them – which was a lot of the time – to be looked after by this aunt, or that aunt – rarely the same one. So I reckon Morag has looked after the other two. In her own mind maybe she thinks she's their mother, which can't be good for her. Nor for them, either. From now on I can see to the boy. But I want those girls to grow up looking like you, and sounding like you. You'll know how to handle it.'

‘Yes, Garron.'

She would do her best. For Morag, whose pale hostile eyes seemed, from that day on, to follow her everywhere; for Evangeline, still sharp and critical and so deeply disappointed; for Kate towards whom her feelings, in spite of everything, remained both warm and responsible; for Susannah Saint-Charles whose excessive weeping at the wedding was quickly explained away by Quentin – who else? – as being due to the miscarriage, the night before, from which his other sister, Constantia, had almost lost her life. No happy omen for a wedding, although Oriel herself had passed into a state beyond anxiety, wishing, quite simply, to get on and lead the life she had agreed to lead, to do the things she had promised to do, to look after her home and her husband to the best of her abilities in Lydwick or anywhere else he might require her to follow him.

To keep her word.

Money had been spent on the wedding ceremony, both Evangeline and Garron Keith having required, absolutely, that it should. The bridal dress of white satin, cut to resemble an arum lily and stitched, here and there, with seed pearls, announced its own value, while the diamond on the long, pale hand of the bride, the diamonds in her ears, the triple strand of pearls at her throat were sufficient explanation, in themselves, as to why the marriage was taking place. The church was full of flowers which, being still in the month of March, had obviously been procured at great expense, the wedding-breakfast at High Grange Park being costly too in terms of game pies and galantines and champagne, although rather restrained, due – it was said – to Constantia's sad ‘accident', to Letty's nervous collapse on hearing of it which seemed likely to bring on a similar ‘accident'of her own, to the fact that the Mertons were still in Monte Carlo, and that the bridegroom himself was impatient to get away. Not on honeymoon but on business in North Wales, to put in a tender against serious competition for a proposed railway which, at this vital stage of estimating costs and completion, absolutely required his personal attention.

‘I have to get it right first time,' he explained to Oriel. ‘If I go on the safe side and ask too much I won't get the job. If I ask too little then I'll bankrupt myself getting it done. So
I
have to go myself, not send one of my agents, to work out how many men I'll need and what they'll cost me, how many cubic yards of earth they can move in a shift depending on what sort of earth it is; how many bricks they can lay in an hour when it comes to lining tunnels and building stations and how much I have to pay locally for bricks. So if it works out wrong then I've only got myself to blame. And then, when I've got the figures right and can see my profit I've got to go along to my bank and raise the capital. They won't listen to anybody but me.'

Nor could he take her with him, much of his journey being by coach on narrow mountain roads, some of it on horseback, all of it in rough company to which he would not expose any wife of his. Any wife? She had been wondering, lately, about that other wife, Morag the fisherman's daughter from the Western Isles. A tall, fair woman – like herself – she supposed, if those tall, fair children were anything to go by. Yet, although she might allow herself to wonder, she did not visualize the possibility of asking him whether or not he had loved her. Indeed, it might be better – far more comfortable – never to know.

‘I'll make it up to you,' he said. ‘I'll take you to France. I have some business there about the Paris to Rouen line. Maybe in September – which gives you time to get the house in order.'

And so she spent her wedding night in her husband's new house at Lydwick, his children sleeping in the nursery wing on the floor above her, in charge of the governess he had chosen for her placid disposition but who, already, had found no favour with Oriel. It would be among her first tasks tomorrow, when he had gone to Wales, to tackle the woman about her haphazard teaching of deportment and pronunciation, the piano lessons not yet begun, the water-colours and the needlework samplers barely started, giving her the option to change either her methods or her situation. And then, when that sharp little interview should be over, there would be one or two matters to clarify with cook, congratulations to be offered to the butler, a man she felt certain of winning to her side, a personal maid for herself to be looked for and a good, exceptionally patient tutor for the still very nearly illiterate Jamie.