Distant Choices (43 page)

‘Yes,' he invariably said ten minutes after his arrival and then once or twice more while she hurriedly took her leave of her plants and her stray kittens, arranging for them to be watered and fed until she could come back again. ‘Marie Antoinette. You might call it fun, Oriel, but any woman who
had
to do it would call it drudgery. And she'd be right.'

Yet he did not forbid her to return, as he could have done, nor even to interest herself in news of the girl to whom her true instincts of maternity, her feelings of unconditional love and responsibility, were still directed. Kate.

‘How was your journey, Quentin?' she now said, referring not to his walk from Pooley Bridge but to his recent trip to France, on family business, it seemed, since Kate would deal with no one else, even Oriel's letters, which Francis passed on, returning unopened. All Oriel knew of her, therefore, were the dry details Quentin had given. Dora Merton's fiancé had taken her to Paris and, very quickly, left her there. She had gone next to Germany where, very luckily as it turned out,
someone
– Quentin had not said who, although Oriel believed he had had more than a little to do with it himself – had put her in touch with a branch of her Kessler relations. After that she had ‘travelled', had returned to France, had been ill and recovered, had handed back to him, again unopened, the latest letter Oriel had asked him to deliver.

Now, as they stood quietly by the lakeside, he returned it to her, smiling as, holding it a moment in her hand, she bent down and let it slide gently into the water, an obliging breeze rippling across the surface to take it away.

‘She answers my letters, and even meets me, because I mean nothing to her,' he said, his voice and manner cool without altogether concealing his offer of consolation. ‘I impose no stress on her because she doesn't care …'

‘I don't believe that, Quentin. She must know all you have done for her.'

He smiled. ‘Ah yes. But, you see, she doesn't know why. And since my motives have always been suspect and have usually turned out to have my own best interests at heart … Well – she can allow herself to believe the worst. And I have done nothing more heroic, you know, than arrange for the transfer of another man's money – and not too much of it either – to her account. Is there anything particularly worthy about that?'

Smiling, she ignored the question and asked another.

‘Has she been wise with it?'

‘The money? Of course not.'

‘Is she in debt?'

‘Frequently.'

‘Oh dear …'

‘Quite so. But really, before giving way to alarm, one should bear in mind that debt and disgrace are very much the fashion among some of her new acquaintances.'

‘I dare say.' She was by no means reassured. ‘But people go to prison, don't they, Quentin – surely – for debt?'

‘Oh yes.' He seemed happy to agree. ‘But only people of no account, or not very much. People who have no rich relations. Or none that are willing to buy them out. Which is hardly the case with Kate's present charmed circle of friends. Half of them could be locked up for debt and the other half as revolutionaries, I suppose, if their fathers were not government ministers or bankers or heirs to some title or other …'

‘I see.' The ‘golden youth'of the privileged classes, doing their frantic best to acquire a little tarnish. Was it any stranger than the satisfaction she often found herself in dirtying her own pampered hands with potato peelings or black lead?

‘At least try not to worry,' he said.

‘Will she be staying in France?'

‘Possibly. I believe she is waiting for the new Republic to fall.'

‘And will it?'

‘Very likely. Particularly since one of the leading new republicans is Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte …'

‘Who is – exactly …?'

‘The Emperor Napoleon's nephew. The only one of the Bonapartes to mean anything since Waterloo.'

And, walking back across the field to her garden gate, he lectured her, very precisely, as to Prince Louis Napoleon's attempts to convert the new Republic into a dictatorship, disguised as a monarchy, with himself – of course – at its head. Very much as his famous Uncle Napoleon had done. Some of Kate's friends were pledged to support him, others just as determined to tear up the paving stones of Paris for barricades and resist to the death. While Kate, Oriel may be relieved to know, had merely pledged herself not to miss the fun.

‘Will you stay to luncheon, Quentin? Beef broth and dumplings.'

‘Herb dumplings?'

‘Of course – full of lovage and parsley from my own garden. With an elderflower sorbet to follow.'

‘That sounds almost like witchcraft, Oriel.'

‘Possibly.' Garron had often said the same thing. ‘But it
is
delicious.'

‘I believe you. Sadly I am expected elsewhere. In fact I think I had better set off at once.'

He shook her hand, rather formally, in farewell and went off as calmly as if he had simply stepped across a well-paved street to pass the time of day with her, instead of hazarding his visibly expensive shoes over three uneven lakeside miles, an absolute composure about him which would have been quite chilling had she not been aware of many things in his life which, she now believed, had forced him to adopt that air of distance and authority. His mother – for instance – still repeating, ever more shrilly, that he had ruined her life; his father unloading upon him, with malicious pleasure, the full responsibility of his young brothers and sisters who, for their part, had been brought up to use him in full measure; his sister Constantia forever at his throat to find better employment for her husband, his sister Susannah pestering him as ardently to ensure that her fiancé, the penniless curate, would never be promoted high enough to afford marriage; the sorry situation of Maud who held him entirely to blame for her miserable frustrations; his own, much-talked-of relationship with his handsome housekeeper who had left him recently to be replaced, at once, by another, every bit as handsome.

Walking slowly back into her garden she wondered how much he really cared for Kate, how much more, perhaps, than anyone – certainly Kate herself – had ever realized, her own mood lightening instantly as she remembered that both Elspeth and Morag were going over to Watermillock that afternoon, leaving her blissfully free of them until whatever time their practical, good-natured hostess, Mrs Landon, brought them back again. Late, she hoped. Tomorrow with any luck. But it was not to be, the arrival of their father immediately after luncheon – ten days before she had expected him – putting an end to the visit altogether, obliging her to send her ‘daily woman's'son with a letter of explanation to the Landons of Watermillock and then to fetch Jamie who was out somewhere on the fells helping – or hindering, perhaps – a local farmer to train his sheepdog; to make her usual swift arrangements for her garden and her cats; to pack her bags and the children's bags, as quickly as she could, while Garron, looking tanned and fit as a whole orchestra of fiddles, sat in the sun with his daughters, receiving their welcome and dispensing his presents.

His good-humour set as fair as the weather, it seemed, until something ended it, bringing him to her bedroom – where he had never spent the night, putting up always at the George at Penrith, even the Buck Inn at Howtown – and keeping him there, in the doorway, staring at her as she folded the last of her chemises, with a familiar menace.

‘There was a man here this morning,' he said, speaking a blunt accusation; and laying down her armful of linen, she knew she would be well advised to answer at once.

‘Yes. Quentin Saint-Charles.'

‘Which you forgot to mention.'

‘No, Garron.' And from her past experience of his possessive rages she made her voice tart and steady. ‘You've only been here half an hour, and either you want me to be ready for the four o'clock train or you want me to sit down and have a conversation: When have I had time to tell you who called – who didn't …?'

‘Tell me now,' he said, still hard and wary and, although she never cared to admit it, quite dangerous.

‘Tell you what?'

‘Why he should be in this Godforsaken area, for one thing?'

‘Oh Good Heavens.' That much was easy. ‘He has two sisters at school in Carlisle, so I suppose he has to come up occasionally to settle their bills. And today he had business with Lord Merton who is staying at Lowther Castle. I think Quentin was having lunch there, although he didn't like to admit it. My mother would be speechless if she knew.
She's
never been invited there.'

But even the thought of Evangeline at a loss for words did not divert him.

‘That tells me why he's in the district, not why he came to see you.'

‘He is my cousin, you know – if only by marriage …'

But he shook his head, still sharp and alert, telling her that a man did not walk over six rough miles on a hot summer morning to see a distant cousin.

‘Are you suggesting, Garron, that my behaviour has been in some way …?'

‘Oh for God's sake,' he snapped, ‘just tell me the truth – if you know it when you see it …'

But hearing somewhere behind the threat, the insult, just a whisper of something else which asked not so much for the truth as to be put out of this possessive misery, she said quickly: ‘I gave him a letter for Kate when he went to France. She sent it back and he returned it. That's
all
. What else could there be?' And when the hardness, the razor edge of his tension persisted, she said sharply, ‘Garron, this is all so unnecessary. Don't you know, by now, that I would never have a lover – never!'

‘Why not?'

Because her mother had had at least a dozen that she had been aware of throughout her childhood, and almost certainly had one now, unless his puny, weak-eyed lordship retained only the desire for such things and had lost his capacity for the performance. But nothing, not even this direct physical menace, could ever make her admit it.

‘I gave him a letter for Kate,' she said, gritting her teeth and waiting, knowing, as she had known once or twice before, that unless he believed her now, unless his tension eased, his offended muscles relaxed, he would be more than likely to strike her.

‘So it
was
Quentin Saint-Charles,' he said, speaking quickly. ‘You'll swear to that?'

‘Ask your daughters,' she threw back at him. ‘They saw him. Call them up here now, both together, and ask them?'

Had either of them told him otherwise? She could not believe it. Far more likely no name had been given at all, some joke made, perhaps, about ‘stepmamma's visitor', so that, without listening to more, his mind had leaped – for reasons they both knew of – very likely to Francis Ashington.

‘It
was
Quentin,' she said.

No other name had been spoken. No acknowledgement of any one man who troubled him more than the hundred others who might have designs on his territory, his possession, his woman, had been made. And, as fast and furiously as his temper flared, so now it flickered and was gone.

‘Listen,' he said, tension ebbing out of him with a speed that made him shake his head as if emerging from water. ‘That sounds like Jamie in the garden – doesn't it?'

Picking up her linen and beginning to fold it again, she agreed that it did.

‘Let's get home, then,' he called out.

He had just signed a contract, he told her, that could make him a million or break him, of course, although he didn't believe for a moment, waking or sleeping, that it would. And he was off, before the month end, to sign another. Congratulations were in order, champagne and plenty of it the very moment they got to Lydwick, with whatever took her fancy, the next morning, from that jeweller in Leeds her mother was always mentioning. And anything else, within reason – except this damned little house – that she wanted.

‘Lowther Castle,' she said, adapting, as always, to his humour.

‘Maybe next year.'

Her sins, supposed or otherwise, were not merely forgiven but forgotten, swept so thoroughly away by his return to good humour that he would have been considerably put out had she done other than forget all about them too. He had come home not to be cruel but to be indulged, not to accuse his wife but to cosset her, a blunt, clear-sighted realist who did not expect her to love him or long for him but who thought it only right and proper – considering all the advantages he gave her – that she should behave as if she did.

How refreshing, it suddenly seemed to her, almost how wonderful, that he knew the difference.

She believed she had found the formula by which she could live with a fair measure of content. She knew Garron did not love her in anything approaching the deep, emotional – in his view, no doubt, sloppy and sentimental – manner in which she had been prepared to give love herself; although not to him. A totality of feeling, perhaps even a dangerous excess which now, reaching the mature age of twenty-five, then twenty-six, she thought best to put away with all her other dreams of adolescence. She believed her husband's affection to depend entirely on her own good behaviour, that, in his own blunt terminology, he expected to get exactly what he was paying for, and, in the case of any discrepancy, that it should be more rather than less. But, no matter how unromantic, how downright unflattering his attitude might seem, at least she knew where she stood with it, knew the mark beyond which she must not step, knew not only his rules but exactly what her reward would be if she obeyed them, her punishment if she did not.

He was exacting, of course, demanding in the extreme, the centre of his own, made-to-his-exact-measure universe with herself as his chief satellite, the entire household on Lydwick Green coming to a standstill whenever he entered it, the better to regroup around him, yet, for all that, he was not capricious, his demands remaining the same, the rules he formulated to ensure his pleasures always clearly stated, easy to understand. Her prompt unflagging attention to each and every one ensuring her a beautiful home, a staff of well-trained servants, accounts with the best shops in Hepplefield and Leeds where she might replace her furniture and restock her wardrobe as often as she chose, a surfeit of leisure and luxury with no questions asked about her bills for the simple reason that, in his view, she had earned it.