Distant Choices (47 page)

For a whining hysteric like Letty? Letty who dared to be alive when Evangeline was dead? Letty and Maud. And Lady Merton, to whom life seemed nothing but a burden. These miserable, worthless, ugly women, all alive, all strong enough to moan and complain and issue their own petty decrees for their own comfort, while Evangeline lay upstairs on that soiled mattress.

She heard, as if disembodied, the growl, rising louder and louder, in her throat, saw her hands clench into fists and start raining blows first on one another then on the red flock wallpaper of the housekeeper's room, striking hard and haphazard until she could actually feel the pain and, with it, the start of tears, drowning – as he may have known they would – her need for violence.

Had he reminded her of Letty in order to bring this about? She thought so. And now, standing quite still, he allowed her to weep unhindered by any sign of pity, waiting, as a man might wait for a woman to do her hair, until the first storm was over.

There came a discreet knocking on the door, a prudent voice calling, ‘Mr Saint-Charles, the doctor is here.'

‘Thank you, Mrs Mountjoy.' He sounded as cool and noncommittal as if she had merely announced the arrival of the postman with the morning's mail. ‘Please show him upstairs. I will be there very shortly.'

There was a moment of careful silence.

‘Oriel, will you stay here now for a while?' Evidently he had judged her strong enough. ‘There are things to be done, certain people to be informed, which need not concern you. I will send a maid to help you dress.'

‘Thank you.'

‘And then, when the road is clear enough, I will take you home.'

She thanked him for that too, sat down in the armchair by the fire, the cashmere shawl still around her, her feet on a stool as he directed, and closed her eyes, not on tears but simply to free him from the concern she knew he felt for her, so that he might go and take what care remained of Evangeline.

But then … ‘Oh, Quentin,' and her voice was very steady, ‘one thing I must tell you. My mother is wearing a diamond ring – quite a large one.'

‘Yes.'
His
voice was crisp. ‘So I noticed.'

‘Should anyone suggest removing it, would you please ask them not to. It was her wish that it should be buried with her. She told me.'

Wages, she thought grimly.
Wages
, of which her daughter would not have her deprived. A pittance, no more, and little enough to give, when one remembered that she had died for it.

Once again Quentin seemed to read her mind.

‘Oriel – I must tell you …'

‘Tell me, then.'

‘I know exactly what occurred. Just as I know – of course exactly what Lord Merton expects me to do about it.'

Briefly, crisply, she nodded.

‘I am sure you will do it very well, Quentin.'

She did not intend to criticize, simply to acknowledge the way he made a good part of his living, as she had always acknowledged Evangeline's methods, and Garron's, and her own. And there were others, beside the Mertons, to be considered.

‘You are going to hush it up.'

But, shrugging slightly, he shook his head. ‘If I can. But this is a large house, you see, full of the kind of people his lordship tends not to notice …'

‘Servants.'

‘Yes, indeed. And since his lordship is not popular, one can expect them to talk rather loudly, should they find anything to talk about …'

‘You mean if any of them happened to be about when Lord Merton was murdering my mother?'

She had spoken the words clearly, each one a separate, sharp-headed icicle aimed not wildly but with skill, and, smiling at her rather gently she thought, he said, ‘Do you know, I would have expected Kate to say something like that. Although she, of course, would have marched straight into Lady Merton's bedroom and shouted it through the bed-curtains.'

She found it possible to smile, as Evangeline, at every crisis, every disaster, every defeat in her life, had always done. ‘Yes. Kate would. Whereas I don't suppose I shall say it to anyone but you.'

‘I suppose not.'

He bowed, completely impassive, and left her, a maid appearing soon afterwards with her clothes and hairbrushes, jugs of hot water and the kind of plain, household soap she – and Evangeline – had never used even in childhood, so that when Quentin returned with her cloak to tell her the road was open as far as Lydwick she was not only dressed but rested, having slept for two full hours in the armchair.

A bad mistake, the waking memory of Evangeline striking her a body blow which, as the pain coursed through her, translated into the plain, inner cry of
Mother, please don't leave me
. For whatever else Evangeline may have done, it had never been that.

‘Put on your cloak,' Quentin said and when she stared at him, for just a moment, quite blankly, her eyes saying
Cloak? What cloak? I want my mother
, he took the garment and wrapped it around her with distant but careful hands.

‘Come now. There is no reason for you to stay here. Uncle Matthew has arrived and you may not care to see him just yet. Later this afternoon, I thought.'

But Adela Merton was waiting for her in the hall, a woman who, feeling herself much sinned against, was growing ever more zealous as to the punishment of sinners. Or, if they themselves, for any reason, were not to hand, then at least their offspring upon whom, with the full permission of the Bible, their sins might be transferred.

‘Mrs Keith is just leaving,' said Quentin, placing himself quietly between them, but Adela, to whom he was only the family solicitor, stridently brushed him aside.

‘Indeed – Mrs Keith
is
leaving. I expect you know, Mrs Keith, that this sorry business has caused my mother an enormous amount of distress?'

‘Indeed?' said Oriel, speaking, moving, smiling – and very graciously – as Evangeline. ‘I cannot suppose it has caused
my
mother much pleasure, either.'

And, still as Evangeline, as an act of love, a fitting memorial, she swept across the wide hall and
out
, away, her skirts swaying, her cloak sweeping royally behind her as Evangeline's used to do, her head tilted – for as long as she could endure it – at Evangeline's provocative, quizzical, always elegant angle.

Quentin gave her his arm across the snow and helped her into his carriage, nothing in his face or manner to indicate that he was doing anything other than escorting a lady home after an evening spent, more or less pleasantly, with friends.

‘Bravo,' he said. ‘Except, of course, that Evangeline would not have left all her secret rainy-day money behind.'

She had forgotten it entirely. Not that it mattered. Not that she wanted a penny. Except that it had been Evangeline's final, anguished effort, her gift of love as she most deeply understood it, to the daughter she had always feared to be not quite hard enough, not ruthless enough; thus obliging her to be hard and ruthless for two.

‘No,' she said, her voice throbbing with affection. ‘My mother would not have forgotten her money.'

He smiled. ‘I must confess that neither would I. You may think money easier to give than some other things you value. But for those of us who need it so acutely we could not do without it. then – well, yes, Oriel, I think you ought to receive it gladly.'

And raising her hand very briefly to his lips he then placed into it, slowly and carefully, a small but bulging blue velvet bag.

‘Banknotes,' he said quietly, as if in the habit of making such remarks to her every day of the week. ‘Lighter than gold, of course, although less reliable. Your mother will have exchanged them, quite regularly I think, for new ones. A sensible precaution. Should you find the least difficulty in doing so I will, of course, be only too glad … If, that is, you feel able to trust me?'

Closing her eyes very quickly now, she wondered why he thought it necessary to ask.

The Merton servants were extremely quick to gossip, a certain footman on his clandestine way to visit a certain parlourmaid having not only glimpsed his lordship and what he had at first assumed to be his drunken lady-love in the upper passage but had followed them – an easy enough matter on that poorly lit third floor – very nearly to their destination, thus being in a position not only to know in how rough a manner the poor lady had been dragged there but to overhear the shriek with which her daughter had accused Lord Merton of murder.

Those had been Mrs Keith's exact words, declared the footman with relish. ‘You have murdered my mother', and although no one in the servants'hall doubted the official verdict of heart-failure it was generally held by all that had his lordship left the poor lady in peace to get on with her attack in his bed then she may – who knew? – have survived it. So they said from the start in the servants' hall. So, by the afternoon of the same day, were they saying in Merton Village, then Dessborough, then Lydwick and High Grange, and the better areas – growing fewer in number – of Hepplefield itself.

Not, of course, that the blame directed at his lordship in any way excused Mrs Evangeline Stangway's presence in his bed to begin with. By no means. Which rather made it the most wickedly diverting scandal to have struck the Gore Valley for years.

The Merton servants, contrary to their master's expectations, had known from the start, of course, about his relations with Evangeline. So, very likely, thought Oriel, had Lady Merton and her daughters who, although perfectly happy to ignore it so long as it was never mentioned and Evangeline never forgot her ‘place' as a social inferior among them, took violent exception to the first whisper of scandal. Lady Merton going off post-haste to lock herself in her Scottish castle the moment the word ‘murder'was mentioned; her daughter Adela, who thought adultery rather worse than murder since her own husband had started committing it, going herself to join a friend of a religious persuasion in Cheltenham; his lordship himself bolting, perhaps wisely, to Monte Carlo, his panic containing elements of bewilderment and distress which – although he did not openly admit it – had even touched the heart of his astute lawyer, Mr Quentin Saint-Charles.

Only Dora Merton rode over to Lydwick Green, badly startling Oriel who, seeing her striding across the lawn in riding-boots and habit with a crop in her hand thought for a terrible moment that she had come to whip her. Madcap Dora, capable of anything, who had almost died by fire rather than admit her fear of it, an excitable young girl no longer but a thin, nervous woman approaching thirty, still unwed, unloved, although she had tried ‘love'in many and various of its guises; and ‘jealousy'too, both of Kate and Oriel, but who now held out an abrupt hand which squeezed hard and said, ‘Look here – I'm sorry. This must be damnably difficult for you. No – no. I won't come in. Just wanted you to know that when all's said and done, one couldn't in all honesty blame you.
I
can't, at any rate.'

Although Dora's mother, and her sister Adela, of course, seemed ready to blame anyone who did not bear the name of Merton, having stated clearly before their separate departures that although a certain sympathy was due to their neighbour, Mr Matthew Stangway, one would do well to bear in mind, where Mrs Oriel Keith was concerned, that old piece of wisdom which stated, quite clearly
Like mother like daughter
.

An attitude which, even in the few days before the funeral, had spread to Lydwick, a town of strict manners which was owned, in the main, by Lord Merton's cousin, thus causing considerable anxiety to Morag and Elspeth, young ladies now every bit as polished and proper as their father had intended, who thought it a black injustice that their reputations, and consequently their ‘chances'should suffer for the follies of the mother of their father's second wife. They had not even liked Evangeline, and with fair reason since she had never treated them with anything warmer than indifference and had known far too well, in their early, uncertain days, how to make them feel awkward and overdressed, how to raise pained eyebrows at what she had called the ‘regional quality'of their speech, and wrinkle her nose as if still detecting the odour of Scottish herring upon them.

And although they showed more sympathy for Oriel, to start with, than she had expected – having once lost a mother of their own – it dried up, rather, when their invitations around Lydwick began to be cancelled and it transpired that even their friends the Landons from Watermillock by Ullswater, had heard of Evangeline's scandalous end from certain local grandees who were acquainted with the Mertons.

‘We shall never be able to show our faces there again,' wailed Elspeth who, these three years past, had been falling in love with the eldest Landon boy for a week or two every summer, gaining nothing in the way of consolation from Oriel but a sharply spoken ‘If your face is worth looking at there's no need to hide it': which sounded, to both Elspeth and Morag, like something Evangeline herself might have said.

Nor would Oriel make any kind of public denial of her supposed accusation of Lord Merton, an easy enough matter, since her word would naturally carry more weight than that of a night-prowling footman, her silence encouraging the rumours which, as Letty and Maud and Susannah pointed out to her, it was her duty – for Matthew's sake – to stifle.

‘I have no debts to pay to anyone,' she said coldly, knowing full well that Matthew Stangway's difficult position had brought nothing but satisfaction to his sister Maud who, the moment she heard of it, had packed up and left the vicarage, installing herself with some personal triumph in her own, old room at High Grange, letting it be known to one and all that she was needed, once again, to look after Matthew. As he had always needed her, of course; except that this time there would be no unwanted child to worry him, as Kate had done, no predatory, scheming mistress – like Evangeline – hovering on the fringes, waiting her chance to break in. Only Matthew and herself, or so it would be, as soon as the short ‘lying-in-state'should be over.