Lady of Fortune (20 page)

It doesn't happen often; and it is not a coincidence in the accepted sense. Sometimes the revelation is puzzling and meaningless. Sometimes its meaning only becomes clear years and years later, when it is too late for anyone to do anything about it. Sometimes it is misunderstood, and causes accidents, or fatalities, or utter despair.

Effie's moment came on Saturday, when she accompanied Dougal and Prudence down the river from Albert Embankment to Greenwich. It was an extremely cold day, even for early February, and snowflakes were tumbling through the air like ash from a distant funeral pyre. Effie wore a dark sealskin coat, and a dark fur hat, and had buried her hands in an ermine muffler. Prudence wore a long elegant coat of black merino wool, lined with astrakhan. Dougal's nose was red, and he kept sneezing and blowing his nose on his pocket handkerchief. It was damper in London than in Edinburgh, and he had caught a slight cold.

The river-boat
Arogi
, charmingly christened after the massacre of 700 Abyssinians by British forces in 1868, bore them steadily through the snow past Tower Bridge, and the London docks, a dark and leafless forest of masts and rigging. The warehouses of London were the biggest in the world, and could store nearly a quarter of a million tons of tea, spices, rubber, coffee, rum, and rope. Even on a cold day like today, the fragrance of cloves and allspice blew across the river in the north-west wind like a nostalgic conjuration of the Far East.

Effie made a particular effort to be friendly to Prudence, and when they went down to the Arogi's saloon, to drink hot lemon tea, and watch the brown waters of the Thames swilling past the windows, she engaged Prudence in conversation about dresses, and hats, and theatres. But Prudence,
in return, was nothing more than courteous to Effie, and noticeably withdrawn. For most of the journey she held Dougal's hand and said almost nothing.

As they docked at Greenwich, however, and walked down the boarded gangway, she said, ‘I love days like this. Gloomy and forbidding! You could think that the whole world is about to come to an end!'

‘Aye,' said Dougal, helping her step down on to the quay. There are days in Edinburgh like this.'

‘And Lichfield, too,' said Prudence. ‘We used to have a house that overlooked the Ladies of the Vale, the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral. I can remember looking out of my window and seeing the snow whirling down all around them.'

‘Dougal said you came from Dorset,' said Effie. ‘The Dorset Cuttings, I believe he told me.'

Prudence brushed snow from her coat. ‘Yes, quite right,' she said, sharply. ‘That was before we moved.'

Effie glanced at Dougal as they walked across the white-dusted cobbles of the quay. Dougal gave her a puffy-eyed look that seemed to mean, well, does it really matter where she was brought up?

They climbed together up the steep green slope of Greenwich Park, until they could see northwards across the misty curve of the Thames towards the Isle of Dogs, and Millwall; and westward to Rotherhithe and the Surrey Commercial Docks. Below them, dim and elegant in the snow, were the buildings of Greenwich Hospital, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and the Queen's House, built by Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark, the consort of James I.

They toured the Royal Observatory on the top of the hill, peering at the clocks and the chronometers and the barometers and then they stood one after the other on the brass strip which marks the zero meridian of longitude. The snow began to fall more heavily still, silent and soft, and Dougal suggested that they should return to the quayside, and take tea while they waited for the boat to take them back to Albert Embankment. Strangely, a boy was flying a kite in the snow, and it dipped and twisted in the wind.

Dougal and Prudence went on ahead, down the pathway which led to the old Hospital buildings. Effie, ten or eleven paces behind, noticed how closely they held each other, and how their cold breath, as they talked, was intermingled in
clouds of vapour, as if their actual words were twining around each other, and caressing each other, before they faded affectionately away.

She stopped to pat a red cocker spaniel, which was sitting beside the path panting. Dougal and Prudence didn't notice that she wasn't keeping up, and strolled on together, down the criss-cross paths, until they were well out of earshot.

‘Well, boy,' said Effie, to the spaniel. ‘Well, boy, you're a towzie boy, then. Who's your mistress?'

A voice, quite nearby, said thinly. ‘He has no mistress, I regret. Only a master.'

From between the grey trunks of the elms appeared a crooked man in a wheelchair. He was probably quite young, no more than twenty or twenty-two, but his hair was thinning over the large white dome of his forehead, and there were circles under his eyes as blue as cloudberries, and when Effie looked down at his thin knees, blanketed in grey, and his skeletal hands, she knew she was looking at a man who has little time to live, and most of that in pain. He wore no hat, and no gloves, and from under his blanket there peeped only thin kid slippers, in black.

‘He's been running in the mud,' Effie said, tugging at the dog's ears. ‘Look how gumlie he's got.'

The young man in the wheelchair came closer. From two or three feet away, Effie could hear the cold air whining in and out of his lungs. He raised that great pale lantern of a head up to look at her, and he smiled. ‘You're Scottish,' he said. ‘A Scots girl. Well, that's excellent. We used to have a Scottish gamekeeper once, when I was very young.'

‘I'm Effie Watson,' said Effie. ‘I only came down to London for the first time two weeks ago, so all of this is very new to me.'

‘It's a wonderful city, London,' said the young man. ‘It's a hard one, though, and harder for me. I'm having treatment at St Bartholomew's Hospital, for whatever it is that makes me so ill.'

‘You don't know what it is?'

‘Some hereditary pox, I expect,' the young man smiled. He reached under his blanket and took out a small clay pipe, the kind that working-men usually smoked, and laid it on his lap. Then he produced a leather pouch of tobacco.

‘Would you like me to fill your pipe for you?' asked Effie.
She didn't really know why she had offered. But Dougal and Prudence were now right down at the bottom of the slope, scarcely visible in the snow, and Effie had the feeling that if she performed one act of kindness for this poor crippled creature in his wheelchair, she might somehow be going some way to justifying her ambition and her desire for wealth. The spaniel came closer to his master, and watched him with attentive eyes. The young man touched him on the head, and said quietly, ‘Hush, Pepys. Hush,' although the dog had uttered nothing but a low mewling noise in his throat.

‘Do you live near here?' asked Effie, pressing tobacco into the brown bowl of the young man's pipe.

‘I have relatives here,' the young man told her. ‘I used to live in Gloucestershire, but of course there is nobody in Gloucestershire who can deal with my daily pain. They give me baths, you know. Hot baths of brine. Sometimes, at the end of my treatment, I feel like a salted herring.'

Effie turned up the collar of her coat. Over Stepney and the West India Docks, the sky had grown so dark that Effie could almost imagine Wagnerian Valkyries riding through the snowclouds, their hoofs threshing amongst the spires and fishbones of the tea-clippers' masts, and drumming over the silver tract of the Thames.

She handed back the young man's pipe, and said, ‘I hope that burns properly. I'm not really used to tobacco.'

He cupped the bowl of the pipe between his hands, and applied a match to it. In a minute or two, it began to burn, and he sucked, with a high whine, and sucked again, at last the smoke began to drift through the trees, and Pepys the spaniel settled down at his master's wheels.

‘You don't mind the weather?' asked Effie.

The young man shook his head, his pipe clenched between his teeth. ‘I think it's a treat! Look at the way the snow's falling! Mind you, I shall probably be scolded when I get back, for getting myself wet. “You'll catch a chill!” they'll tell me. “You'll die of double pneumonia!” Well, perhaps I shall. I shan't mind.'

‘You
ought
to mind,' said Effie.

‘Ought I? What do I have to stay alive for, except to wheel myself from Greenwich Park to Maze Hill, and sometimes across to the pond on Blackheath. Even Pepys wouldn't miss me, would you, old fellow?'

Effie looked quickly down the hill, and saw that Dougal and Prudence had stopped, and were waiting for her.

‘I must go,' she told the young man. ‘Perhaps I can come here again, and talk to you some more.'

The young man smiled. ‘You won't be back,' he said. ‘In any case, I'd prefer it if you didn't try to seek me out.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘Because … I'm not what I should be.'

Effie brushed snow from her lapels. ‘What should you be? What can you be, except for yourself?'

The young man said, ‘I should be active, vigorous, and manly. I should be running my own estates. Well, they're not my estates any more. I had to sell them to pay for my medical treatment, and for a voyage to Australia and back. They thought the climate might cure me, but of course it had no effect, except to give me rashes. And I cannot begin to describe the voyage to you. I was very seasick, I'm ashamed to say.'

Effie held out her hand. ‘Well,' she said, ‘if this has to be goodbye, then goodbye.'

The young man didn't attempt to take her hand, but gave her a jaunty nautical salute. ‘Goodbye, Miss Effie Watson.'

Effie paused, on the grey path. ‘And to whom shall I say goodbye?' she asked.

The young man turned his large head towards the north, and narrowed his eyes against the wind. ‘It's not important to you, is it?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘In that case, you may say goodbye to David, Lord Rethesdale. The sixth Lord Rethesdale, and unquestionably the last.'

Effie said, ‘Are you teasing me?'

The young man turned abruptly in his wheelchair, his thin fingers controlling the spoked wheels with the terrible clutching dexterity that must have been acquired through months of pain. ‘I can't afford to tease
anybody
,' he said. ‘Particularly anybody who shows me kindness.'

‘Are you really Lord Rethesdale?'

There was a very long silence, and then the young man said, ‘Yes. I am. Of course, you don't have to believe me. I can't force you to believe me!'

Effie looked down the hill again, towards Dougal and Prudence.
Dougal was waving now, and crying out, ‘Come on, will you, Effie! We're freezit! Come on, or we'll miss the boat!'

Effie said to Lord Rethesdale, ‘You lost your lands, you say? Sold them all, to pay for doctors?'

‘Yes. Well, they were mostly mortgaged already.'

She came back to his wheelchair, bent forward, and kissed his forehead. ‘I wish you all the best of fortune,' she said, ‘and I may yet be backlin, if you're patient.'

She left him then, and hurried down the path to rejoin Dougal and Prudence. Dougal looked cold and cross. ‘Who was that wheel-chaired gangrel you were talking to?' he demanded.

Effie took his arm. ‘Nobody. Just a poor thigger asking for pennies.'

Prudence said, ‘It's terribly cold. You might have hurried. I don't know why we had to come to Greenwich, of all places. It's the end of the very earth.'

Dougal put his arm around her, and squeezed her close. ‘Effie can make friends with anyone she meets,' he grinned. ‘It's just something the family had to get used to.'

‘As long as I don't have to get used to it,' said Prudence, sharply.

The trip back upriver to the Albert Embankment at Vauxhall was like a voyage through the blackest reaches of a pillowmaker's nightmare; all darkness and white feathers. When at last they docked, Prudence told Dougal to call a cab for Effie, and a separate cab for themselves. ‘You must see me home,' she said. Her hair had come unpinned, and her nose was pink, and her eyes were streaming with tears from the cold. ‘I don't care if I never see Greenwich again,' she said. ‘Or the river. Or your sister Effie. Or anything.'

The last thing that Effie heard as her cab clattered away from the embankment was Dougal saying, ‘I'm sorry, Prudence. I'm truly sorry. What else can I say?'

When she returned to Eaton Square, she found that Henry Baeklander had called again, and left her a box of crystallised gooseberries. There was a card propped against the box of sweets, which said simply, ‘I sail on Wednesday.'

She asked Jerome for a light supper of soup and biscuits, which she took in her room. Then she called for Logan to draw a hot bath for her, and she sat for almost twenty minutes soaking herself, and listening to the distant reverberating echoes of the house which reached her through the high white walls of the tub.

She was already in her white broderie anglaise nightdress, sitting up in bed reading The
Illustrated London News
, when there was a knock at her door. It was Dougal, tired and damp-haired, a handkerchief balled-up in his fist. He sat down on the basketwork chair in the corner of the room, and fruitlessly wiped at his nose.

‘I've never had a brash as bad as this. I feel downright ramfeezled.'

‘You should ask Jerome to make you some hot lemon and honey, with cloves.'

‘Och; I can't abide such things.'

‘Then take some Laxative Bromo Quinine. Or ginger tonic.'

‘I think I'd rather die.'

There was a long silence between them. At last, Effie threw her magazine down on the floor, and said, ‘You're really in love with her, aren't you?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘How can there be any
suppose
about it? You've been following her around all day as if she's the shepherdess and you're a poor wee tip. She's got you hap-shackled, Dougal, and you don't see how sharp she's being to you. She treats you so contemptuously! If anybody's the sheep, it's her, that gimmer! But you won't see it, will you?'