Distant Choices (63 page)

‘For her? Quentin – the very thing. How clever.'

‘No – no, Kate. Not for her. If her husband wished her to live there, he would say so. He is selling the cottage – surely – to punish her.'

‘Oh Lord – this makes me angry …'

‘Indeed. But if it belonged to you, of course, then you could permit her to stay there as long as she liked. Until – shall we say – she had decided what else to do? At her own leisure …'

‘You mean …?'

‘Yes, Kate. I mean if Francis could be persuaded to use some of the Kessler money to buy the cottage for you. I imagine he would be only too pleased – although you would have to meet him and discuss it with him yourself, of course. And by tomorrow at the latest, I fear, before the cottage is snapped up by somebody else …'

There was a short silence.

‘Quentin Saint-Charles, what a
devil
you are.'

‘I dare say. Will you do it, though?'

She sighed. ‘Of course I will.' And then, jumping to her feet, she gave him a wide, brilliant smile. ‘But just the same, poor Quentin, what are
you
to do?'

Perfectly reading her mind, he smiled back. ‘About what?'

‘About the woman you have been in love with for so long? About Oriel, my dear, who is free of her husband now and might even be persuaded to love you – who knows – in return. She might even come to live with you, one day, and make you so happy – except that such an association would utterly ruin your career. Can you do it, Quentin? Sacrifice ambition for love, I mean?'

He was still smiling, ‘I don't know.'

‘But you do love her, don't you?'

He stood up too, his eyes going to the door through which Oriel had retreated. ‘Oh yes,' he said, ‘with all my heart. Which seems a pity – rather – that my heart, dear Kate, is very far from being the warmest or the gentlest one I know.'

‘Don't hurt her,' whispered Kate.

Leaning forward he brushed his mouth lightly along her forehead. ‘Shall we begin by buying her a lakeside cottage?' he said.

The scandal of Mrs Oriel Keith failed, after all, to titillate Gore Valley drawing-rooms anywhere near as much as her mother, Evangeline Slade-Blake-Stangway had so often done. Perhaps Oriel Keith, although quite beautiful enough to be scandalous, had lacked her mother's delicate skill for arousing envy and a sense of grievance. Perhaps Mrs Keith's husband, the railway contractor, deserved less sympathy, in Gore Valley opinion, than Matthew Stangway who, despite the disdainful turn of his mind had nevertheless been ‘one of them'. While as for Squire Ashington of Dessborough, even if it were true that he and Mrs Keith had been caught in some kind of dalliance, the Valley had always hesitated to pass judgement on ‘gentlemen', the aristocracy being easier to forgive because it always paid so much better to keep on the right side of them, and they were famous, in any case, for living by their own rules and making their own manners.

No. By and large, this was not a first-class scandal, no deaths in suspicious circumstances, no rushing off abroad like Lord Merton who, so far, had shown no inclination to come back again, leaving his wife in her Scottish castle, his daughter Adela in the grip of some Cheltenham religion, only Madcap Dora flitting alone and somewhat disconsolately around their ancient, noble Abbey. A tale of domestic destruction – wrought, of course, by the wicked, wonderful Evangeline – which fired Gore Valley imaginations far more than Mr Garron Keith whose installation of his daughter Morag as housekeeper was considered quite natural, his dismissal of Susannah Saint-Charles, when she called with suggestions of keeping his house herself, being merely vulgar, phrased, as it had been, in rough words Susannah did not understand but which the servants translated for her, discreetly, as ‘Go away'.

She had gone. And although, for a while, she had shown signs of becoming as distracted and, regrettably, as tedious as her mother, she had – by a stroke of luck everyone admitted to be rare in the life of Susannah – found consolation by the arrival in High Grange of a widow of shy disposition but comfortable circumstances with a delicate daughter of fifteen, both of them not only quickly devoted to Susannah but very happy, it seemed, to depend upon her company and the once again flowing fountain of her advice.

The Squire of Dessborough remained in his manor, waiting to become a very rich man on the twenty-fifth birthday of his wife to whom he had presented a cottage on an isolated fell above Lake Ullswater which she, in her turn, had placed at the disposal of Oriel Keith. A matter, it was decided, of one fallen woman helping to raise another, which caused no comment beyond a certain shaking of heads over Squire Ashington's misguided liberality and some slight sympathy for Elspeth Keith, the younger of the contractor's daughters, who, having just become engaged to a young gentleman of Watermillock, could hardly consider the presence of her disgraced stepmother on the other side of the water to be a blessing.

Or certainly the young gentleman's mother, Mrs Landon, had not done so, stepping sharply aside without a word one afternoon in Penrith when, coming out of the apothecary's door, she met Oriel coming in.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Landon,' murmured Oriel.

‘Oh – good afternoon,' came Elspeth's light voice from behind her future mother-in-law's back. ‘Are you well – are you?'

‘Yes. Yes I am. Bless you, Elspeth. Tell Morag the same.'

Driving back in her borrowed dog-cart to Pooley Bridge and then along the path below Swarth Fell, a clear summer sky mellowing to autumn above her, Watermillock felt, not seen, on the other, greener side of the lake, she shed tears quite freely as one could in this solitude, the bare brown fells too high and impervious to be troubled by the small sorrow of a human woman for children not even her own. Therefore, until she reached the Buck Inn on the corner of the lake at Howtown to return the dog-cart and pony, she cried as loudly, in the gilded summer silence, as she pleased, walking back the half mile or so to her cottage, her cats, her flowers, with all her weeping thoroughly done.

She had come here in the early spring, very quietly, having expressed her gratitude warmly but privately to those who had made it possible, accepting their assurances that to help her gave them, each in their separate ways, immeasurable pleasure because she could see it was true; accepting her own need of them at the same deep, surprisingly natural level. They – Kate her sister, Francis her friend, Quentin far more than a friend although she had not yet reached a decision as to how much more that might be – all needed to help her. She needed their help. Whenever help became due to one of them she would feel a corresponding need to give it. So simple had the truths of herself become. So simple, too, the strengths which rose in her, almost unbidden, as she repossessed her quiet acre, the keys returned to her by Quentin who had performed acute acts of espionage to obtain them, he and Kate both making the journey north with her to help with the trunks and boxes, to share her joy, Kate staying for three weeks of settling in, settling down, renewing and exploring; Quentin joining them every Friday to Monday to eat her elderflower fritters, her dandelion and bacon salads, to stroll, champagne glass in hand, every evening through her garden in conversation, laughter, warm and easy understanding, followed by the labrador puppy Francis had sent her from Dessborough, a gift of canine protection for a woman alone, which had considerably offended her cats.

The puppy was waiting for her now as she walked between her quiet lavender hedges and brilliant, golden splashes of marigold leading to her cottage door, startling a pearl grey kitten as he bounded towards her, the rest of the cats, basking beside the valerian flowers, ignoring him, treating him with the faint contempt deserved, in their arrogant, jewelled eyes, by a young dog of frantic, foolish energy, huge paws leading him astray as continually as his vast and incoherent appetite for love, his potential strength and savagery, his burning desire to lay himself, as often as she would let him, at her feet.

An ungainly, impetuous puppy named ‘Glory'by Kate since she thought him unlikely to win it in any other way, who would, quite soon, be a fighting black giant of a dog, staking out his territory, his possessions, his people, and guarding them without even stopping to think whether they wished to be guarded or not.

‘Glory,' she called out, knowing her command to be by no means sharp enough. ‘Do get down – do stop leaping on me – do behave …'

But, wagging a hefty tail in eager circles, hanging his head on one side to tell her he knew she did not mean it, he reared up again as she had expected he would, planting two large, clumsy, muddy paws on her dress, earning her – as she began to scratch his ears and submit to the kisses of his rough, scratchy tongue – the patient contempt of the cats who, although quite fond of her, would not, in her place, have put up with such nonsensical antics for a moment.

‘Poor Glory,' she murmured and, realizing what the elegant black mother cat, a sophisticated adult of at least ten months old, her white and her marmalade sisters, and their lean, tiger-striped brother-lover thought of her dog's far too excited, far –
far
– too sincere emotions, she allowed him to come inside with her, where, totally exhausted by love he threw himself down before the empty summer grate, concealed by a spreading fan of larkspur and clove-carnations, the sound of his panting and snoring filling the room until Oriel at her writing-desk by the window, grew too lulled by it to hear.

Her days – when Kate was not here filling the house and garden with her visit, or Quentin walking up at dawn sometimes from his lodging in Pooley Bridge – were all much the same. Mornings among the plants; fine afternoons out on the fells; wet afternoons – of which, in this region of high peaks and deep, still water, there were a great many – walking only half her usual distance and then rushing back either to her stone-flagged kitchen to concoct her herbal lotions and her pot pourri, or to her desk where, at least twice weekly, she fulfilled her obligations, taken over from Kate, to the editor of the
Hepplefield Gazette
, a gentleman who was as much amused as she was herself by the high tone and precise nature of her advice. Lady Penelope Peel – the adulteress of Ullswater – expressing shock, written in exquisite copperplate, that any young lady should even think herself entitled to walk out so much as two yards alone with any gentleman to whom she was not formally engaged, and even then only with the express permission of her parents; or advising a series of ‘conscientious mammas' – usually with a plate of herb dumplings on her own knee – of the shudder which ran through ‘Good Society'at the merest glimpse of anything so unmannerly as a young lady enjoying her food, suggesting to these much embarrassed mothers the remedy of sending an ample tray upstairs to a ‘greedy girl'ten minutes before a dinner-party so that, coming downstairs replete, she would have no difficulty in passing herself off as the spiritual creature, kept alive on delicacy and fresh air, all gentleman wished to see.

‘To the spiritual, utterly abstemious Lady Penelope', the editor had written on his card accompanying a case of claret, along with a suggestion that, in addition to her readers'letters, she might care to undertake a weekly column of ‘social notes', descriptions of a little ball she had given last Friday evening – or whenever it was one gave balls – and of the trips she made ‘in season'to fashionable flower shows, for instance, or charity bazaars, invitations to expensive boxes at the Opera – London, of course, where ‘Lady Penelope'would be sure to have friends – and to suitable-sounding country houses to do whatever it was one did there, Hepplefield's matrons being very fond of a glimpse of the aristocracy at play. Surely she could whip up some good descriptions of musical soirées, visits to fashionable hat-makers, ‘her ladyship's' daily round of paying and receiving calls, fitting in a dinner party, a theatre, and two or three dances in one evening while she was taking those long walks of hers on the fells? She had replied that she rather thought she could.

‘You can hardly live here alone forever, you know,' Quentin had warned her.

‘I do know, Quentin.'

It had also occurred to her, with a deep, unashamed pleasure, that he might well have an alternative in mind. Yet, until such a moment of decision should arrive, this was a life, nevertheless, suspended in time perhaps but no less vital for that, allowing her the blank repose she needed, the turning-off of her more acute urges to plan, to grieve, to hope too precisely, to examine in too much detail the depth at which she might learn to feel, the direction in which those feelings might go, so that when those busy urges came on again she would be better equipped to consider life – alone or otherwise – elsewhere. For the present, therefore, it was a life. From the editor of the
Hepplefield Gazette
, along with his occasional gifts of wine, she received a parlourmaid's wages which had at least enabled her, so far, to buy the few things she could not grow herself – a stock of coal, for instance, against the winter, candles, oil for her lamps, a little game and salmon from a quiet man, somebody's gamekeeper she supposed, who came very discreetly to her kitchen door – as well as paying a woman to come in twice weekly for the heavy cleaning and the heavy laundry, without any need as yet to touch the contents of her mother's blue velvet bag. Her security, known only to herself and Quentin, lying safely upstairs beneath the cashmere shawls and fur wraps brought across the barrier of her other life, also by Quentin and which, at need, she could sell, along with the satin and lace ball-gowns – cut far too low for the taste of any Lady Penelope – which Garron's money and generosity had bought her.

In the spirit of one who takes laudanum to ease a physical pain she had, by sheer force of will, drugged the part of herself which might have dwelled too closely on that. But now, her elbows on her desk, her chin on her hands, Lady Penelope's letters waiting in their dozens to be answered, she could not avoid the presence of Watermillock, that green and pretty place just across the water, the lights of its few, scattered houses visible from her window, a garden unrolling like a carpet patterned with conifers and pale lilac, pure white, vibrant crimson masses of rhododendrons, to the water's edge, where Elspeth, possibly Morag, might well be standing. Elspeth, she supposed – narrowing her eyes in an effort to see across a distance she knew to be too wide for accurate vision – walking with Tom Landon or with his mother. Morag, she thought, probably alone. Tom, the young fiancé who, only a few months ago, she had thought quite good enough for Elspeth, almost inevitable. An only son with a doting mother and a sizeable if not spectacular inheritance, quite rich enough and quite handsome enough to flatter a girl like Elspeth who – Oriel abruptly realized – would grow not an inch taller in any direction other than the purely physical from the day she married him.