Lady of Fortune (36 page)

‘David Campbell said that your father had suffocated; or, rather,
choked
,' he said, tearing at his bread-roll. ‘He also intimated to me that this choking could have been – and when I say could have been, I mean prbably
was
– inflicted on him by an outside party. There were bruises consistent with a struggle, and there were contusions inside the trachea which indicated that some material had been thrust down his windpipe to prevent him from breathing. Paper, perhaps, or cotton.'

Robert sat back in his chair. In the yellowish light from the stained-glass windows, he looked rather like a mandarin, placid and inscrutable.

‘Did David have any more opinions?' he asked. ‘Such as who might have perpetrated such an infamous and unlikely act?'

Mr Long laid down his knife and fork. ‘This is all extremely embarrassing, you know. I've known your father and you, your whole family, for so many years. But, the fact is that David Campbell has presented me with quite reasonable evidence that, well; your mother may have been the culprit.'

‘My
mother?
Is he mad?'

Mr Long shrugged, and helped himself to some more whisky. ‘He's not mad, Robert, no. The evidence is quite sound. In fact – and I have to be honest with you here – in normal circumstances I'd try for a conviction. Your mother
often visited Dr Campbell and poured out her heart about how much she hated your father, and how she would like to see him dead; and when you add her private medical record to the evidence that Dr Campbell found on the scene … the throat injuries, the scratches around his face which were caused most likely by a woman's hand … well, you can see my dilemma.'

Robert steadily ate his bread-roll, and then lifted up a forkfull of salmon. He looked Mr Long directly in the face. He smiled. He said, ‘I think you're taking this much more seriously than you need to.'

‘Well,' said Mr Long, ‘it depends what guarantees you can give me.'

‘I can guarantee your loan, if that's what you want.'

‘Robert, I need more than that, and you know it.'

Robert chewed his salmon, and then busily wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘I've been prepared for this, Charles. I'll make you an offer. But, I won't repeat it, and if you turn it down now you can forget about your cattle and you can forget about any ideas you might have for seeking co-operation from Watson's Bank in the future, financial or political. I acknowledge that I have to make a concession, and I'm making it. But don't push me any further.'

The Procurator-Fiscal said nothing, but raised his head with as much impotent dignity as he could muster. A man at the bar broke out into uproarious laughter.

Robert said, ‘I'll send my mother away to a nursing-home, in Dunkeld. She'll stay there for ten years, at least; well cared-for, but isolated. We can say publicly that my father's death caused her a breakdown, from which she has to convalesce. I'll guarantee your personal loans for the cattle, and make a further £25,000 available to you if you require it. I will give you no trouble, and require nothing further of you.'

Mr Long unhappily rubbed at his neck. ‘You'll have to give me time to consider it.'

‘There is no time,' said Robert. ‘I'm about to embark on several new financial schemes, and I need to know now. There must be no breath of scandal connected with Watson's Bank, and particularly not with me, personally or with my parents.'

Mr Long took out his pocket-handkerchief, and blew his
nose. That was a fine place they buried your father,' he said, ‘A wonderful view of the Paps of Jura from there.'

‘I doubt if my father cares about that,' said Robert. ‘But I certainly care about tomorrow's hearing.'

‘I don't care for threats,' said Mr Long. ‘You're threatening me, Robert, and I don't care for it. You're on dangerous ground.'

Robert raised his hand to attract the attention of the waiter. ‘Bring me some more brown bread,' he said, tersely. Then, to Mr Long, ‘I think you've forgotten that you're talking to a Watson. In fact, I'm sure you must have done, to speak so tentlessly. Do you remember perhaps the arrangement you made last year with Mr Buchanan, over the matter of the property fraud he was said to have perpetrated at Leith? Surely you do! Especially since your auld mother is now staying rent-free in that fine house in Water's Close. How could you forget?'

Mr Long sniffed, and cleared phlegm from his throat. He looked extremely miserable. At length, he said, ‘You'll really send your mother off to Dunkeld?'

Robert nodded.

‘Well, then, I suppose we can say that we're satisfied that your father's demise was natural. After all, paper down his windpipe, that's rather far-fetched, wouldn't you say? I must speak to David about it.'

‘I already have,' said Robert.

There was a cold moment of silence. Mr Long paused with his whisky glass raised to his lips, his eyes as watery as the fresh-opened oysters which the waiters whisked past him on pewter trays.

‘What did you say to him?' asked the Procurator-Fiscal.

‘Och, not much,' said Robert, artlessly. ‘But Dr Campbell agreed with me that he was near to retirement age, and that he might be better off with his sister in St Cyrus, breeding those Cairn terriers of his, rather than carrying on his medical practice in Edinburgh.'

Mr Long sipped his whisky carefully, and then set down the glass.

‘I see that you've inherited all of your father's capabilities,' he said, throatily.

Robert leaned back in his chair, beaming, and fished out his gold pocket-watch on the end of its chain. ‘I'm going to
have to leave you now, Charles,' he said. ‘Business calls! You don't mind if I ask you to pay for the lunch?'

The Procurator-Fiscal shook his head. ‘I don't mind. The lunch is the smallest price I have to pay; and you know it.'

Robert and Prudence were married in the first week of April at St Giles', the High Kirk of Edinburgh, in a ceremony that became famous as The Black Wedding. In respect for the memory of Thomas Watson, Prudence cancelled her white silk gown, and wore instead a gown of jet-black, with an overlay of black Nottingham lace, sewn with jets, and for a headdress and veil, she wore a black mantilla. Even the bridesmaids were dressed in black, and Robert himself wore a black coat and the sombre hunting tartan of the Malcolms. Outside the kirk, on the cobbled forecourt, an honour guard of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders beat a long, fast drum-roll, which led the correspondent from The
Scotsman
to remark that ‘I felt as if I were witness to some event far more momentous than a wedding; that furious
rub-a-dub rub-a-dub rub-a-dub
of drums made me think of frightening and dramatic times in history, like Flodden, and Culloden, and the ‘45. It was only when the bride and groom had been driven away in a majestic black Albion motor-car that I came to my senses again, and realised that I was back in modern times, at a nuptial ceremony that had been characterised principally by the humanity and the understandable grief of its participants.'

The newly weds were to spend a short three-week honeymoon in the Highlands, mostly at the extraordinary turreted castle of Graigievar, not far from Balmoral. Prudence wore a going-away dress of eggshell blue, with blue hat to match, and a finely-tailored blue wool coat by Madame Cheruit, of Paris. Effie, who had dressed for the wedding breakfast in a white Doucet gown with a pale yellow over-dress, went up to the Cerulean Room just before they were about to leave to wish Prudence well. She found Prudence sitting on her bed, staring at the blue pattern on the carpet, white-faced and
tired in the sharp April sunlight which filled the room.

She said, gently, ‘Prudence?'

Prudence gave her a brief smile, and then looked away again.

‘Prudence?' Effie asked her. ‘Are you all right?'

Prudence said, with an unintentional catch in her voice, ‘Of course. Why shouldn't I be?'

Effie sat down beside her. ‘Oh, Prudence, you know that I'll always do my best to look after you.'

‘I know that,' nodded Prudence. ‘It's just that your best may not be good enough.'

‘I don't understand,' said Effie.

A single tear slid down Prudence's right cheek, a sticky diamond. ‘I don't expect you to. I just want you to be there. Will you always be there? You must. I don't have anybody else.'

Effie held Prudence close, and kissed her cheek. ‘Prudence, you know that I'll always be here. You know I shall. I promise.'

‘Oh, you can't promise that,' said Prudence. ‘You have your own life to lead. I'm sorry. No, really, I'm sorry. Don't listen to me when I'm like this. I'm just upset. The wedding, and everything; I think it's all been too much for me.'

She wiped her eyes, and attempted to look happy. But there was Effie, so young and so pretty and so bright, without any of the bitterness of knowing that her son was being cared for by strangers, fed by bottles, and wheeled in a strange perambulator along the seafront at St Andrews, under the shadow of St Rules, cooed over by old ladies and doodled by whiskery old men, waking up every morning in his crib with the sunshine blurred by those eastern sea-mists the people of the north call ‘hoars', without his mother, without any of those tiny warm whispered confidences that only a mother can tell her child, hush, now, or the fairies will come and steal you away for ever.

And another bitterness that Effie couldn't share with her was what had happened after the wedding ceremony, after Robert had brought her home to 14 Charlotte Square, and carried her laughing over the threshold. Once upstairs in the bedroom, the laughter had suddenly died, and when Prudence had twirled around, singing, she had suddenly realised how quiet the room was, because Robert had turned the
key in the door, and now stood facing her, his hands on his hips, his eyes bulging a little, uglier and more walrus-like than he had ever looked before, and certainly not the calm affectionate Robert who had taken her hand only half an hour ago in the Kirk, and slid the gold wedding-band on her finger, and kissed her, and promised her all of his worldly wealth. She had said, ‘Robert?' while downstairs a fiddler had started to play
Bonnie Peggy Alison
.

I'll kiss thee yet, yet,

An' I'll kiss thee o'er again;

An' I'll kiss thee yet, yet,

My bonnie Peggy Alison!'

Robert had stripped off his black coat in three forceful tugs, and thrown it across the bed. Prudence, in black, had taken off her black mantilla, obediently, but also defensively. ‘Robert?' she had repeated, more quietly, because she had realised by then that he wouldn't answer her.

He had taken two steps forward, and clutched her left wrist, still gloved as it was in black silk, clutched it so tightly that she was shocked, and unable to move, and too frightened and puzzled to struggle. ‘You're my wife now,' he had said, staring at her. ‘You're my property. You know that, don't you? You belong to me, whatever.'

In a clumsy rush, he had pushed her towards the bed. She had tried violently but vainly, to twist away from him, and so he had swung her around, still gripping her wrist, and thrust her up against the bedroom wall. A small etching of the birks at Aberfeldy had been knocked awry, and a small blue vase had been tumbled off the bedside table and rolled across the carpet.

Neither of them spoke now. The struggle had become too intense for words. Robert had snatched Prudence's other arm, and pinned her up against the cornflower-patterned wallpaper with both her hands raised above her head. He had kissed her, and bitten at her neck, and breathed whisky and biscuits into her mouth. She had bitten back at him, making his lips bleed, but in response he had beaten her upraised wrists against the wall, again and again, with relentless steadiness, and bruised them.

Then, Robert had altered his grip so that he had imprisoned both of her wrists with one hand. With his free right hand, and his knees, he had gathered up the voluminous
skirts of her black wedding-gown, and her five embroidered petticoats, until he had bared her garters and her stockings and her cream-coloured silk drawers. Prudence had gasped, and struggled, but Robert was both heavy and strong, as well as being invested with the same implacable certainty as his father that he would always get what he wanted. He pulled her drawers aside, harshly cutting into her flesh and tearing the lace, and even though her eyes were closed she felt how close he was, felt him breathing against her cheek. He lifted his own skirts, his Malcolm tartan, and exposed his rearing crimson penis, and his dark furry balls; and in the reflecting glass of one of the pictures on the opposite wall, when she at last opened her eyes, Prudence could see his big white rounded buttocks, with their black shaggy cleft.

Grunting, he had forced himself up against her dry, closed vulva. ‘You're mine now, you understand me?' he had told her.

She had said nothing, her neck backwards, panted in fear and hopelessness.

‘Do you understand me, you belong to me?'

‘No,' she had whispered; and when she had said no, he had burst up between her lips, and thrust the whole length of himself deep inside her.

He had released her wrists, then, but taken her with such force and greed that she had been frightened that he was going to kill her. With his philabegs raised up, he had forced himself between her bare white thighs, smoothered himself in her petticoats and her mourning gown, like a man wading recklessly and madly into the darkest and foamiest of lochs. He had pushed and pushed and pushed until Prudence had no longer known whether she was ashamed or aroused; until she had twisted her fingertips into the black curls of hair in the cleft of his bottom, and tugged at them wildly, to hurt him, to stop him, to urge him on. He had shouted at her,
‘Another, you bitch, another!'
, blared it out like one of the clan war-cries at Culloden.