Painting The Darkness (20 page)

Unprecedented or not, there was Mr William, the least formidable of the Trenchards and the least respected, seated at his desk reading a letter from the post, his office door open.

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Parfitt.

Trenchard looked up. ‘Oh. It’s you.’ He was haggard
and
unshaven, Parfitt noticed, his hair awry. He had not so much as fitted a collar to his shirt. As Parfitt stepped into the room, he was met by an odour of stale pipe-smoke and … yes, alcohol, quite definitely. ‘What time is it?’

‘A little after seven.’

Trenchard blinked, as if his eyes were sore, and reached forward to extinguish the lamp still burning on his desk. ‘Do you always arrive this early?’

‘Habitually, sir, yes.’ Parfitt’s eyes darted round the room. A smeared tumbler stood on the mantelpiece. Trenchard’s jacket and overcoat were draped over a chair-back. Was it possible he had been there all night?

Trenchard coughed and rose from his chair. ‘Well, I’ll have to leave you to it, I’m afraid.’ He picked up his jacket, shrugged it on and moved unsteadily to a mirror hanging on the opposite wall.

‘Going out again, sir?’

From his jacket pocket, Trenchard had pulled a collar and tie. He squinted into the mirror and began to fasten them about his neck. ‘Yes, Parfitt. Straight away.’

Parfitt shifted his gaze to the abandoned desk-top. There were tumbler-shaped rings on the blotter, flakes of tobacco amongst the scattered papers. And there was the letter Trenchard had been reading, restored now to its envelope. Parfitt could just make out the postmark: Bath, 13 October.

‘So you’ll have to excuse me.’ Trenchard leaned past him, plucked the letter off the desk and moved to the door. ‘Needs must …’

‘When the devil drives,’ Parfitt muttered to himself as he listened to Trenchard’s footsteps descending the stairs. Well, Mrs Parfitt had always said that one would go to the bad. And she was seldom wrong.

II

Brotherton & Baverstock,

Commissioners for Oaths,

Albany Chambers,

Cheap Street,

BATH,

Somerset.

13th October 1882

Dear Davenall,

Excuse my addressing this letter to your home. I did not wish to run the risk of its lying unread at your office over the weekend.

Lady Davenall persists in maintaining that 20th September 1846 is a date of no significance. I know from Miss Pursglove, however, that Lady Davenall’s governess at that time, a Scottish spinster named Strang, was dismissed in September 1846 following an unspecified incident at the Cleave Court maze. I also know, from the same source, that Prince Napoleon attended a ball at Cleave Court in September 1846, probably on the 19th. Lady Davenall, however, has instructed me to leave the Strang question entirely alone, which I am, therefore, bound to do.

Lady Davenall has also instructed me to tell Sir Hugo – which I trust I may leave you to do on my behalf – that Mr Norton’s claim is to be uncompromisingly resisted. She would oppose any monetary inducements being offered to him to withdraw. I might add that she has heard of none through me.

You will appreciate that I now enjoy little scope for movement in this matter. I should be obliged if you would let me know how and when Warburton intends to proceed.

I remain,

Yours truly,

A
RTHUR
E. B
AVERSTOCK

The cab drew to a halt, and Richard Davenall slid Baverstock’s letter back into his pocket: here they were at The Limes. He climbed out and paid the man off, then took a lungful of St John’s Wood air – somehow sweeter than ever frowsty Highgate – and marched up the drive. There was a spring in his step and a tilt to his hat, as if, from all the unpromising circumstances crowding around his head, he had drawn some unreasonable inspiration.

The front door was open. A trunk stood in the hall. At the foot of the stairs, a small girl, dressed in a travelling cape, her hair tied in pig-tails, sat on the bottom step, staring intently ahead and clutching a bonnet in her lap. Richard recognized her from his previous visit.

‘Hello,’ he said, stepping in. ‘It’s Patience, isn’t it?’ She did not reply. ‘Going somewhere?’

The little girl’s eyes clamped themselves on him, as only a little girl’s can, but still she said nothing.

‘Is your father in?’ With the diffidence of a confirmed bachelor, he stooped to her level. ‘Your daddy – do you know where he is?’

At last, she spoke, slowly, as if the words had been rehearsed. ‘Daddy … isn’t … coming.’

Richard frowned. What could she mean? Suddenly, the stairs before him vibrated with the descent of a flustered female figure. ‘No time to sit there mooning, Patience!’ she cried. ‘We must be up and doing!’ Richard looked up. It was the child’s nanny, all calm efficiency last time, transformed now into an embodiment of bustling frenzy. ‘Come along,’ she said, plucking Patience from her seat. ‘We’ll soon be ready to go.’ The pair vanished together into an adjoining room, Patience gazing back at him solemnly as they went.

Richard rose slowly and looked about him. At the end of the hall, in an open doorway, stood Constance, watching him with some of her daughter’s solemnity. How long she had been there he could not tell.

‘Good morning,’ he said lamely.

‘Hello, Richard,’ she replied. ‘Looking for William?’

‘Yes.’

‘He isn’t here. Won’t you come in?’ She retreated into the room, and he followed. ‘Please close the door.’ He did so. ‘I was just writing you a letter.’

‘Really?’

‘I thought you should know my course of action – and my reasons for it.’ She took the letter, as yet unfolded, from the bureau and handed it to him. His gaze rested, despite himself, on the splintered wood showing above one sagging broken drawer of the bureau. ‘Here you are.’

He carried the letter to the window and began to read. It did not take long.

‘Well?’ she said, when he had clearly finished.

He looked at her, the light from the window falling full on her face, and noticed, for the first time, how superficial her composure was. There was some tumult within her, some moving passion at which the letter only hinted. ‘If you choose to live with your father rather than with your husband, Constance, it is no business of mine.’

‘Yet the reason is.’

‘Where is William?’

‘At Orchard Street. He decided to spare us both this parting.’

‘I’ve been there this morning. They told me he’d left. That’s why I came here.’

‘Oh?’ Her lack of reaction shocked him. It was as if she was no longer interested in Trenchard’s movements; as if, already, the ties of an earlier, unconsecrated union were stronger than any legal marriage.

‘Do you intend to declare openly your support for Norton’s claim?’

‘I shall await the outcome of the hearing.’

‘And then?’

Her gaze, which had hitherto drifted, gossamer-like, about the room, now fixed itself upon him. There was his answer, clear to see in the candour of her expression. ‘Your refusal to accept James baffles me,’ she said at last. ‘William is jealous, Hugo avaricious. And Lady Davenall
has
always been a mystery to me. But you, Richard – how can
you
maintain the pretence?’

‘The evidence is—’

She silenced him with one upraised hand. ‘I ask you as his cousin and his friend – not as his solicitor.’

Something in her commanded him to be honest. ‘Because I can’t be sure who he really is. He knows enough to persuade anyone – I don’t deny that. Yet, sometimes, he seems to know too much. More of James in some things, less in others. As if—’

‘Yes?’

‘As if he is the man James might have been – but wasn’t.’

‘He is James. I no longer doubt it.’

They were standing, side by side, before the window and the view it presented of the garden. All this hedge-trimmed order, all this inner domestic calm, was about to be ended – for the sake of … what? A falling leaf floated by, close against the glass, moved by the invisible breezes of the season; moved, as they were, by forces unseen yet irresistible.

‘His story, which you all tried to keep from me, I had from his own lips.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It seared my heart.’

Richard, too, spoke in an undertone. ‘As if he holds within him all the false steps and treacherous turns we’ve taken. As if he’s all our pasts demanding satisfaction, our consciences, which we can no longer stifle.’

A moment of silence followed. Then she seemed to hear what he had said. ‘What?’

He turned and smiled at her. ‘Nothing. I see you are not to be dissuaded. As Catherine is to you, so are you to me.’

‘A mystery? But I have—’

‘You have her will, her strength. Now, today, for the first time, I see the resemblance.’ His gaze drifted back to the window and passed, to a different day, through the refracting surface of his memory.

For those eight months that served as the meagre season of passion in Richard Davenall’s life, his cousin’s wife, Catherine, was a person he had never known before and would never know again. Whatever had so struck at her complacent serenity in the Crimea, whatever Prince Napoleon had disclosed to her in a fit of rage in Constantinople, had ushered in the brief flowering of her true self. For Catherine, as he and she alone knew, was neither the pliant wallflower of her youth nor the forbidding recluse of her middle age. There was another, secret Catherine, who returned to Cleave Court in December 1854 and honoured Richard with her company during the months that followed.

She was twenty-five years old, at the peak of her physical beauty, suddenly restless and resentful at all she had been denied between a domineering father and a domineering husband. What had sparked this mood of convulsive emotion she never revealed, and Richard never asked. As a young and diffident man of twenty-two, ostensibly dedicated to learning the ways of estate management and earning the approbation of his demanding father, he ought to have resisted the slightest suggestion of something more than the respect he owed her. But he did not. Instead, he fanned the flame of a dangerous sensation.

The spring of 1855 set in early, as if Cleave Court were in Italy rather than in Somerset. April was a succession of numbingly perfect days, during which Richard found himself accompanying Catherine on endless walks and drives and languid excursions. As if bewitched, like Richard, by the eerie paradise the weather had made of his home, Sir Lemuel offered the two only encouragement, seeming to draw some sap of youth from their heedless ways. There was no work, no duty, no threatened end to their idyll. Gervase was far away and forgotten by those who claimed to love him. The world was compounded of Catherine’s smile, and bouncing hair, and running feet on warm grass. And the world’s end was not ordained.

The first time he kissed her, he held back, hesitating before the prospect of what he might be about to do. They were in the woods behind Cleave Court, in a realm of green-pillared sunlight set aside for their pleasure. Her hair hung loose to her shoulders, her eyes gleamed. He ached to touch the pale flesh beneath her dress – and she seemed to want him to.

‘You are married,’ he said haltingly.

‘My husband has forfeited his right to me.’

‘But have I won it?’

She did not answer. Instead, she drew him to her.

Half an hour after leaving The Limes, Richard Davenall was sitting, his shoulders hunched, on a rough backless bench towards the summit of Primrose Hill. Further down the slope, a child played with a hoop whilst her mother read a book. Everywhere, the leaves were falling. He could hear them, if he listened hard enough, fluttering about him where he sat.

Constance would be on her way by now, daring to act where he would have faltered. He could not have explained to her the secret dread that clutched him even if he had wanted to. His compunction, his instinct, his lifelong training, so nearly forbade him to recall it even to his own mind. He had to shut his eyes to prevent the memory causing him to shudder at the shame it inspired.

They had spent the day on the downs and had returned to Cleave Court late in the afternoon. It was the last week of June 1855, its golden endless days wrapping their world in tempting warmth. Sir Lemuel had gone to see his bootmaker in Bath and taken little James with him – or so they supposed. In fact, after their departure, the little chap had complained of feeling sick: a touch of sunstroke, Nanny Pursglove surmised. He had been put to bed, and Sir Lemuel had gone alone.

The house seemed strangely empty, the servants all below stairs or out on errands, the upper quarters silent
but
for sultry breezes sighing through open windows and stirring the heavy sunshades. It seemed reserved for them – and they for each other.

In Catherine’s room, the half-drawn curtains billowed in the soft currents of air. Patches of invading sunlight spread across the carpet and reached the two figures on the bed, warming their flesh where it fell upon it, catching her smile as she took his hand and guided him, heightening the delirium of his abandonment: he was hers, body and soul, and she had seemed to be his.

Then she froze beneath him. Her eyes opened wide. On her face there was a look of such horror as, even now, he could not erase.

She cried out. ‘James!’

All he glimpsed, as he twisted his head in the direction of her gaze, was a small scampering figure fleeing through the open door. It slammed behind him like a rifle shot. James had seen them – but not soon enough. She was his for one more moment – and then was lost for ever.

Richard slipped Baverstock’s letter from his pocket and read it again. There were more secrets, it seemed, than he had supposed. Something linked September 1846 and June 1855 and the present. And there was only one way to find out what. He would have to see her again, would have to face that stare, that pitiless accusing stare, and wrest from her the truth. He would have to speak to Catherine of all that had lain so long silent between them. He rose from the bench and walked quickly down the hill.

III

Dr Fiveash’s consulting-room looked out on to a sloping chestnut-fringed lawn. Beyond, weak sun lit the pale stone of the city-swathed slopes. This very room, Fiveash said, turning back from the view, was where he had told James Davenall the true nature of his illness
.