Distant Choices (42 page)

Kate's disappearance had not affected, nor even much interested Susannah. Nor had Maud, still painfully adapting to her new life of thankless drudgery at the vicarage, felt more than a self-righteous moment of ‘I told you so'where Kate's behaviour was concerned. But Evangeline had seized upon it in all its aspects of shame and glory and wrung the last drop out of every one, making it clear to Matthew that unless he now took sensible legal steps – long overdue in any case – to ensure her own future, she would set about poisoning his by making every revelation about Kate and her mother as loudly and publicly as she could.

There was nothing to be done about the estate of High Grange, of course, which on Matthew's death – ‘and you are not a
young
man any more, my darling' – would pass, through Kate, to Francis. So too would the Kessler money on the very day Kate became twenty-five, a husband – as the law stood – retaining his right to take possession of all his wife's property and future inheritances whether she lived with him or not. Making it essential, therefore, in Evangeline's view – ‘Since I am younger than you, dearest, and women who have avoided turning themselves into brood animals like Letty tend to live longer in any case' – that a house be purchased, furnished, and made over to her entirely, possibly in Lydwick, so that ‘dear Matthew'might have the comfort of knowing her to be secure when he passed away.

Quentin, she supposed, would know how to manage the legal formalities to ensure that Francis – who seemed to be getting everything else – could not snatch her new little house from her, Quentin being very clever at such things, having already tracked Kate down, it seemed, and – although Evangeline was not prepared to say how she knew this – arranged for Francis to make her an allowance. Or talked him into it, for devious reasons of his own, perhaps. Unless, of course, Francis – by sending his mad wife those few unnecessary pounds every month or so – wished to ease his conscience about the Kessler fortune he would be getting in five years from now.

Yes. Five years. And before that day dawned Evangeline – she kept on declaring – must have a house of her own, all right and tight, although, of course, she would not dream of living in it until Matthew had been carried out of High Grange in his coffin and Francis had put the whole estate in dust-covers until Celestine should be old enough to possess it.

It became an obsession with her.

‘Who knows how things may turn out?' she told Oriel, over and over. ‘It makes no difference whether Kate lives or dies or who she decides to live with, for that matter. Her husband still gets the Kessler money, the estate, the coal – everything. And with no strings attached, no obligation to give any of us –
me
, in fact – a penny. Good Heavens – I used to feel sorry for him but he is really coming out of this very nicely. No wonder he is making her a small allowance. A token of gratitude to her, I expect, for going off and leaving him in peace, so that when he does come into her inheritance he can actually enjoy it.'

‘I imagine, mamma,' Oriel murmured, ‘that the small allowance is as much as he can manage.'

‘Indeed.' Evangeline was not at all moved to sympathize. ‘We all know
that
will change. She was twenty, wasn't she, when she ran off? And she gets the Kessler money at twenty-five. He hasn't long to wait. And, in the meantime, every penny piece he gives her is an affront to the Mertons.'

‘I don't think they know about it, mamma, unless …'

She did not like to add ‘unless you have told them'although Evangeline, of course, readily understood.

‘Oh no,' she said, ‘no, no. I would not dream of adding to their burdens by even hinting at it. Francis is their cousin, after all, and they would be bound to see it as the blackest disloyalty. No, poor things. They have had more than enough to bear.'

A situation of which Evangeline had taken full advantage, realizing at once that with Dora still frail and fretful, with Adela now living apart from her husband, with Lady Merton still waiting in a state of panic for the revolution, and Lord Merton at the end of his never particularly resourceful wits, a great deal of sympathy and practical understanding was surely needed. A golden opportunity, in fact, which Evangeline seized so thoroughly that although each one of the Mertons still thought of her – or
thought
they did so – as the ‘pushy'wife of a gentleman of only middling fortune and local importance, it was Evangeline in whom Adela Merton confided her wish to be separated from her husband and all the anxieties it had created; Evangeline who persuaded Dora to dance and ride again and look about her for another fiancé; Evangeline who skilfully fed Lady Merton's terrors so that her ladyship soon felt uncomfortable about going either to her castle in Scotland or her mansion in London unless Evangeline went with her.

There were those, of course, who believed Lord Merton to be Evangeline's lover. Maud, for instance, and the housekeeper at Merton Abbey, the entire household staff in the Scottish castle where gossip was hard to come by, a parlourmaid or two in London and in Monte Carlo where she had already spent a triumphant, exceedingly well-dressed summer.

Matthew Stangway had no comment to make about it whatsoever, just as he had never made any comment about the disappearance of Kate, although Oriel was at all times very quick – very nearly cutting as a knife – to defend her mother, and had even spoken sharply to Maud, around whom one usually trod warily, about certain comments of hers when Evangeline had gone alone with Lord Merton to the opening, by no less a pillar of virtue than Queen Victoria, of the Great Exhibition at the miraculous Crystal Palace specially erected to house it in Hyde Park.

Oriel had visited Hyde Park herself a few weeks later, travelling to London by train with Morag and Elspeth and Jamie in a reserved compartment from which, at every station, she had had an excellent view of the working people who, ten years ago, would have been lucky to get ten miles beyond the places in which they had been born, coming now, every day, in their tens of thousands, to see the wonders of the industrial world on display for them, from May to October, at the Crystal Palace.

Just how many people could have got here by stage-coach, Garron Keith, railway builder, wanted to know as he escorted his wife and children beneath that mighty crystal dome, over a hundred feet high. Certainly not the 68,000 a day they were packing in now. Certainly not these northern millworkers and those farm hands from Dorset and Suffolk, taking advantage of the cheap excursion rates on the trains some of them had never even seen before. And which now, moreover, they might well be thinking far more wonderful than the Exhibition itself, all these mechanical inventions for doing one thing or another and the raw materials with which to do it, all these silks from Bombay and worsted cloth from Hepplefield and Bradford, these Bowie knives from Sheffield for use – one supposed – in the far west of America, all these French tapestries and rugs, these Indian pearls and Spanish lace mantillas. Even the Koh-i-Noor diamond itself. Although, in the civil engineering section, both Garron and Jamie were more than a little taken by the model of Liverpool docks complete with more than a thousand rigged ships.

Jamie, deciding then and there to be a civil engineer, set himself to count them and had to be lured away by the offers of fresh strawberry ices at the audacious price of one shilling a glass which, as Jamie demolished his fourth, Elspeth and Morag their second, caused Garron to remark that the confectioner who had paid £5,500 for the exclusive right to sell refreshments must already be considering it money well spent.

Not – as Oriel knew very well – he would have grudged them a dozen ices apiece and would, she thought, have been only too pleased to buy that model of Liverpool for Jamie, had it been for sale, as well as any pearl or diamond to which she had taken a fancy, right up to the Koh-i-Noor itself.

‘Now there's a diamond,' he'd said, impressed mainly by what it represented and the thought of what
he
could do with assets such as that; and laughing, shaking her head, she had answered, as if they had been standing at a shop-counter, ‘No – no. Not today. I'm more in the mood this morning for something to match my eyes.'

They had spent a pleasantly tiring week of sight-seeing, shopping, expensive meals, excursions on the river to stop, at likely looking places, for more expensive food and wine and general merrymaking, after which Garron had gone off to inspect his various sites up and down the country and she had made the journey to Ullswater and that one precious site of her own.

She had not expected to see Quentin here. But then, one did not
expect
so subtle and self-contained a man. One accepted, rather, that he would come when it seemed right to him and that every visit of his would have a definite purpose. Yet, since the purpose would only be declared at what he judged to be the right moment, Oriel spent a few moments of her own offering him cool drinks, enquiring about his journey, taking him out into the garden again to show him the pale, perhaps sinister valerian flowers, the cats dancing, languorous and bemused, around them, and the two daughters of Garron Keith who had no interest, just then, either in feline ballet or the odd obsessions of their stepmother for herbs and spices. Not too much interest either, perhaps, for one another.

‘Good morning, Mr Saint-Charles. Isn't it a lovely morning?' Elspeth, at least, could always be relied on to make herself pleasant if only because, having few ideas in her head just then beyond the fine, fair hair which grew upon it, the blue of her own eyes, the ‘peaches and cream'of her complexion which had started to win her admiring glances whenever she went to Penrith, she liked to know what impression she was creating.

A poor one, it seemed, on Quentin who, with no time to spare for flirtatious young ladies of fourteen, merely and very coolly replied, ‘Good morning, Miss Elspeth. Yes – very fine.'

Nor was he any more affable to Morag who, although far less flirtatious and certainly more intelligent than her sister, knew enough – too much, thought Oriel – about Quentin's disagreements with
his
sister, Susannah, to make her rather stiff with him.

‘Good morning, Miss Keith.'

And the manner in which she replied ‘Good morning' plainly conveyed her own absolute support for Susannah, her own pained surprise that, having objected to his sister's engagement to the curate Mr Field three years ago when she had wanted to be engaged, he would not help her to break it now when she did not.

‘I do believe that young lady dislikes me,' he said as they moved on to the garden's edge and then, across a narrow, steeply sloping field to the very margin of the lake.

‘Oh – at fifteen I suppose we are all prone to foolish dislikes. And even sillier “likes”, I'm afraid. She is not fond of me at the moment, either.'

‘Does that worry you?'

‘Well – I shall be glad when it comes to an end – if it ever does. But she would have resented any woman Garron had married, wouldn't she? I can't blame her for that. And I suppose there is nothing even personal in it.'

That was the way she chose to look at it, in any case, the compromise for which she had settled. And, apart from Morag's need to criticize, there had been few dramas or upheavals, Oriel seeing to it, in the main, that no matter how carefully Morag looked for trouble, there was rarely very much for her to find. She felt no more emotion for these children, or only rarely, than she supposed they felt for her, yet, nevertheless, she had built a home around them so much in accord with their needs and natures that not even her exacting husband had found cause to complain. The boy Jamie was being brought up to be a man and showing great enthusiasm for it, the girls to be ladies who, once married to the wealthy husbands Garron had in mind for them, would disappoint no one in the arts she had carefully, and even with good-humour, taught them, the flower arrangements and fine embroidery, the copperplate handwriting and painting in water-colours or on china, how to play a few romantic pieces on the drawing-room piano and pronounce a few selected lines of Shakespeare or Keats or Wordsworth by heart, how to get the best out of servants, how, above all, to prove, by one's own luxurious lack of any useful occupation, the ability of one's husband to pay lesser females to do the work.

It was what Garron wanted for his daughters and she had set herself to achieve it, finding a willing pupil in pretty, flirtatious, happily ‘luxurious' Elspeth who would be snapped up, Oriel estimated, in a year or two and who, the moment she became mistress of her own house, her own carriage, her own pin-money and calling-cards, her own account with her own dressmaker, her
own
easy life would promptly forget about any other. While Morag, perhaps, might learn more, resist more, might even be worth more –
would
, for certain, have been worthier, deeper, so much better had Susannah not interfered with her – but, in the end, helped along by the dowry her father could give her, would probably marry a man of his choosing and become what he saw as a good wife.

And, in the meantime, before those gilded wedding-bells started ringing, they learned their lessons, took what Oriel offered,
made use of her
as their father, perhaps without realizing it, had implied they should, accompanying her, eagerly in the case of Elspeth, at least willingly on Morag's part, to Hepplefield and Leeds and London, or to her lakeside cottage where, even in that isolated spot, they had soon made ‘useful'acquaintances, spending a great deal of time with the daughters of a solicitor in Penrith or with a large, interestingly well-to-do family on the other side of the lake at Watermillock who were forever giving parties or dashing off to look at waterfalls or Roman ruins or stone circles, allowing Oriel – more often than she thought Garron realized – the luxury of being alone.

‘Playing Marie Antoinette again, are we?' Garron usually enquired when he appeared, heavily sarcastic and always somewhat out of the blue, to take her home, frowning as he stooped to enter her low doorway, looking around him, never with much enjoyment, at the herbs hanging in bunches from the kitchen rafters, and at the kitchen itself, the well-scoured stone floor, the well-used wooden table at which the very kind of chopping and peeling and scraping of raw fruit and vegetables his first wife would have done a great deal to avoid seemed always to be going on, the inevitable basket of kittens by the hearth, the insultingly small, old-fashioned cooking-range, black-leaded to perfection by a ‘daily woman'from Howtown who probably despised it as much as he did. As much as his first, over-worked, over-fertile wife would have done.