Flint and Roses (83 page)

And I was not to blame—although perhaps Blaize did not immediately agree—when my butler, either from a surfeit of curiosity or an attack of nerves, blundered, showing Nicholas directly into the drawing-room and allowing Georgiana no time to escape.

She shot to her feet, alert and desperate, her breath catching on a low moan, but Nicholas merely glanced at her, her attitude of defence telling him all he needed to know, and turned instead to Blaize.

‘I understood you were looking for me.'

‘Yes. I expect you know why.'

‘I expect I do.'

And already the conflict was between the two of them, as it had always been, the Barforth males who could submit to no authority but their own, who had fought each other since their nursery days for anything and nothing, and who were closing in now, on the battleground of my drawing-room carpet, to put an end to it. And I started to shiver again.

‘You took your time.' Nicholas said. ‘If you'd come to me sooner I reckon we could have spared the ladies.'

‘I didn't know about it sooner.'

‘You mean she didn't tell you?'

‘She didn't tell me.'

‘Didn't she, by God!' he said, his mouth twisting into a smile that was deliberately sardonic and unkind. ‘Now that
does
surprise me, and it's a pity. But never mind. I didn't want this to happen so publicly, but there's no help for it.'

And sliding a hand inside his coat he took out a familiar brown envelope and set it down with a brisk slap on the table.

‘That's my new offer for your share of the mills, Blaize. I've had to slightly reduce the down-payment, I'm afraid, since times are getting so hard. But I'll tell you what I'm ready to do. I'll throw in the Abbey to make up the difference. How does that suit you? Otherwise, of course, the estate goes under the hammer.'

I heard a strangled sound beside me which must have been Georgiana, and then, for a dreadful moment, could hear nothing but my own pulse-beat, my own protest, for I had suspected, it could be something like this and had wanted, most acutely, to be wrong. Hate and punishment would have been a beginning. Reconciliation a possibility. But, as always—and I
should
have known—it was hard cash, ambition, the limits he had chosen for himself, the limits within which he felt powerful and safe, and which he had no desire to cross. ‘Personal relationships don't suit me,' he had once told me and I had not believed him. But he had wanted it to be true, had forced it to be true, and I believed him now.

‘You clever bastard,' Blaize said, sitting down, I think, because his legs in that moment of shocked revelation failed to support him, looking for the first time older than Nicholas, his frame leaner, more brittle, too light in substance to combat the bold, tough-fibred bulk of the younger, far more ruthless man.

‘Yes—you clever bastard. You used Oldroyd's whore to get Nethercoats, and Galton to get me.' And, as his words ended, heralding a deep silence as chilling and insidious as sudden drifts of snow, I continued to shiver. If Blaize accepted this offer, if whatever it was he felt for Georgiana proved strong enough for him to make his sacrifice, then I knew our marriage would be over. Yet if he refused it, and harm came to her as a result, then we could have no real future together either. Guilt, I thought, or solitude. Which is it to be?

I saw Blaize only from my eye-corner, Nicholas not at all, Georgiana standing chalk-white, arrow-straight, her hands clenched, the taut concentration of her face telling me she was well aware of the sacrifice which had been demanded, the implications of its acceptance. And already, for me, it was over. This morning I had been aware of a few vague sorrows. This fine, early evening I knew I had been my own sorrow, my own disaster. All I wanted now was to go back to the evening Blaize had given me my cameo swan, to relive that homecoming and the next, to make sure there would be another; and I could see no real chance of it.

‘I reckon you can give me your answer straightaway,' Nicholas said, obviously in no doubt of it, and as I made a half turn, intending to leave the room—since I could not doubt it either—Georgiana suddenly lifted her head, her cheeks flooded with colour, and, crossing to Blaize's side, looked directly at Nicholas and said. ‘It won't be necessary for him to give an answer at all.'

He began, I think, to tell her to be silent, but she made a gesture of quiet command that I had seen before, a gesture the squires of Galton, perhaps, had made from time immemorial, so that now it was bred into their heirs. And, although she was young and slender and very certainly a woman, it could have been her grandfather standing there, or his grandfather, a line of upright, honourable men whose code it was to sacrifice themselves at need for the good of others, rather than allow others to be sacrificed: a line of men—and women—who could be narrow and overbearing, but could also be very true and very strong.

‘Please don't say anything, Blaize. There is absolutely no need. For, even if you could be persuaded to agree to this monstrous coercion, I would not allow it.'

‘Georgiana,' he said, ‘You shouldn't—'; but she silenced him too, with that same movement of calm authority, a woman I had not seen before, who had been badly hurt, assuredly, but who seemed able to meet and to overcome this new pain as bravely as the madcap girl in her could gallop home from the hunt with a broken bone or pick herself up bruised and laughing from a stony ditch.

And the whole room was completely full of her.

‘Oh Nicholas, how very like you,' she said. ‘I have been sitting here all day trying to decide just why you hated me so much, whether you wanted me dead so that you could marry again, or merely wished to drive me insane so that I might be locked up out of your way, or whether, perhaps, there could still be a spark of a quite different insanity left between us—such romantic notions. I thought you were doing it all for passion, when really—oh, my goodness!—I see now it couldn't possibly be that. It's just a matter of business, isn't it? What else? And really, Nicky, it won't do you know. Don't you think we've embarrassed your brother, and poor Faith, long enough—and to no good purpose? I think we should leave them in peace.'

‘Be careful,' he said. ‘Be very careful, Georgiana—'; but, although the threat was there, the anger of a man who had forgotten how to be thwarted, it was less than I had supposed, an indication that even he was aware of the change in her, the sudden deepening of her nature, a moment of growth and self-knowledge leading her to a threshold it should be our privilege to watch her cross.

‘You must think very poorly of me, Nicky, if you imagine I would lay claim even to my rightful inheritance at such a price.'

‘I'd think you a fool if you didn't,' he told her, recovering from his initial shock with the speed of a seasoned campaigner, his body alert now with the stalking caution of a predator circling her defences, certain of breaching them, since he no longer believed in the existence of a woman—or a man—who could not be bought or bullied or otherwise persuaded.

‘Georgiana,' Blaize said, with quiet pleading. ‘Indeed, you must be careful. This is no game.'

‘Oh—I think it is. What else can one call it? Nicky wants your share of the mills. He has the money to buy, but no weapon to make you sell. But then my grandfather dies, and, gambling on his belief that I cannot live without the Abbey and that you will not allow me to be destroyed, he decides to use me as that weapon. A very simple game—and very effective—except that I will not be so used. Good heavens, Nicky! you have not the slightest chance of success. I have only to say I do not want the Abbey and all your cards fall down.'

‘Then say it, Georgiana,' he told her, menacing her quietly, almost casually, since he still believed her to be incapable of any such thing. ‘Say it, and mean it.'

‘I—'

‘Yes, Georgiana?'

‘I don't want the Abbey—not on your terms.'

He swung away from her, his back briefly turned, and when I saw his face again he was actually smiling.

‘Ah yes—I see you qualify your statement. You don't want the Abbey on my terms—which doesn't convince me that you're ready to give it up.'

‘I believe I am.'

‘I doubt it. What you really believe is that I won't go through with the sale. And, if that's the hope you're clinging to, then you couldn't be more mistaken. I'll do it, Georgiana. Ask Blaize.'

‘He'll do it,' Blaize said, still strangely brittle, very pale.

‘Ask Faith.'

‘He'll do it,' I answered, my mouth stiff and awkward to manage. ‘He'll really do it, Georgiana.'

‘I know,' she told me almost kindly. ‘He'd have to, I realize that, to save his pride and ease his temper. I know—strangers walking in the cloister, riding in the stream—I'll say it for you, Nicky, to save you the trouble of taunting me. I know.' She made a small gesture with her hands, pushing some unseen object away and smiled, shakily, but with resolution.

‘Nicky, I would like to make you understand. This morning I believed no price could be too high. I was wrong. The Clevedon land nourishes the Clevedons—you've heard me say that often enough, too often I suppose—but only if we deserve it. No, no—I'm not talking fairy-tales. If I accepted your quite shameful terms, then the crops wouldn't fail and the cows wouldn't abort, I know that very well. But if I lost my self-esteem I could hardly consider myself a Clevedon and I'd have no right to the Abbey then. I'd be the stranger in my own cloister and I would prefer not to be there at all. There's no need to take the Abbey away from me, Nicky. I'll give it to you freely, even if the law says it's not mine to give—for it seems to me that, in this case, the law is showing very little common sense.'

She paused, her hands clasping themselves jerkily together, the great strain in her face sharpening every feature to a heart-rending clarity, her eyes a darker green than I remembered, her eyebrows a deep copper, a dusting of freckles across her resolute, patrician nose, a beading of sweat above her lip, the merest suggestion of tears blinked fiercely away whenever she felt them threaten. And she had not yet done.

‘Yes, Nicky—I'll give it away, and let me tell you what it is I'm giving—since you see everything in terms of what it could fetch in the market-place. I don't understand such things, but I can tell you what my gift is worth to me. Every happy day of my life is in that house. My father and my grandfather are in the churchyard, and my brother, who was not a good man—but I loved him. To you it is a heap of stone. To me every stone has a voice. But it doesn't matter. Take it all, Nicky, and sell it, because if it has become an instrument of harm—a weapon—then I can't wish to keep it. My grandfather would not have kept it himself on those terms. My son, if he grows to be the man I am hoping for, would not wish to receive it from me at such a cost to others.'

He said, ‘How noble. Perhaps you'd care to visit your tenants tomorrow and explain why they're to be dispossessed.' And I could have slapped him, hurt him.

‘You can't turn them off—surely?'

‘Some of them, yes, I can. The choice is yours.'

‘Then do it, Nicky.'

Once again he turned away, allowing the silence to fall, Blaize and myself remaining on the edge of it, Georgiana standing with her hands neatly folded now, her head high, waiting with at least a surface calm for the next blow.

‘What now, Nicky?'

‘Just this. Don't stand in my way, Georgiana. You'll surely regret it.'

And this conventional threat surprised me, caused me to glance at him keenly, half afraid of seeing defeat in his face, although I wanted him to be defeated. But there was not even a spark of anger in him now, nothing so warm nor so weak as that, nor even any great coldness. Calculation, certainly, and shrewdness, a perfect readiness to manipulate his wife's finest feelings as if they had been figures on a balance sheet, not from greed or jealousy or any kind of passion, but for the sake of the manipulation itself. And for a moment Georgiana allowed him to look at her in silence, her body relaxing now beyond calm to a strange and moving serenity.

‘I believe you are right,' she told him. ‘I will regret it. But not for the reasons you suppose. I have been so afraid of you sometimes, Nicky, and now, quite suddenly, I can see no cause. What can you really do to me? The law allows you full control of my body and my spirit, we all know that—but I have already told you that the law, in these matters, is sadly lacking in sense. All I need to do is refuse—and go on refusing. And if that is a very alarming step to take, at least the first time—and it
is
very alarming—I would get used to it. Eventually I would be bound to prevail. The Abbey is the only real cord you had to bind me, and now it's gone I do believe I'm free. How very astonishing, but really, Nicky, what else can you take away from me?'

‘I wonder,' he said smoothly, almost as if this unexpected resistance, this stretching of his ingenuity, was giving him enjoyment. ‘Let's see. There are the children—'

But even this—which I anticipated with dread—did not dismay her.

‘Yes, indeed. The children. In law you are their guardian and I am nothing—I realize that—just the brood mare that gave them birth. And who ever heard a brood mare complain of ill usage when one takes her foals away? Yes, Nicky, the law allows you to treat me in just that fashion, for I have made enquiries as to my exact rights, and have been correctly informed that I have no rights at all. But, for all that, I am not sure you can do it. My children are no longer babies who can be locked away in a nursery with a nanny to bar the door. You could keep me out of Tarn Edge, but you can hardly keep Gervase and Venetia in—not all the time. And your mother would not help you to do it in any case. If they love me and want to be with me, then they will come to me, whatever I have done, wherever I may be. It may not be in accordance with the law, but it accords well with reality. I am not afraid of it.'