Painting The Darkness (47 page)

II

Plon-Plon had risen late and bathed lengthily. Recent weeks had seen so many of his plans go awry that he was in no haste to stir abroad, in case yet further misfortunes should crash about his head. He sat, gloomily wrapped in a vast velvet dressing-gown, empurpled by invading sunlight, confounded by an unkind destiny and confronted by an English travesty of
petit déjeuner
. At length, he lit a cigar, sipped some coffee and pondered what malevolent working of fate had brought him from the brink of preeminence to an ill-aired suite of the Buckingham Palace Hotel.

It had all been Gambetta’s fault. If the driving force of French Republican government had not contrived to die so unexpectedly on the last day of 1882, Plon-Plon would not have judged the early weeks of 1883 such a propitious time to reassert his leadership of the Bonapartist movement by publishing a revolutionary manifesto in the pages of
Figaro
. The objective of outflanking his upstart son and the loathsome pack of Royalist pretenders had been achieved, but only at the expense of a month’s imprisonment on a preposterous charge of ‘endangering the State’. Then, within three days of being acquitted and released, he had been banished from his homeland by decree of the Senate. So it was that he now found himself where he least wanted to be: in London, within walking distance of the court where the case of
Norton versus Davenall
would be tried in seven weeks’ time.

Suddenly, there was a commotion in the outer room. Plon-Plon looked up from his brackish English coffee and
scowled
. An over-zealous chambermaid, perhaps. But no: there were male voices, raised in argument. One was his secretary’s, the other … not wholly unfamiliar.

The door was flung open and Sir Hugo Davenall strode in, brushing off Brunet’s attempts to stop him. ‘Good morning … Count!’

‘
Mon Dieu!
Hugo, what do you mean by—?’

‘Call your lap-dog off!’

Plon-Plon restrained himself, for fear of aggravating a grumbling headache. ‘
Un de mes amis, Brunet. Je lui parlerai
.’

The secretary recovered himself and withdrew.

‘Hugo! To what do I owe the pleasure?’ In truth, he felt no pleasure; nor, it seemed, did his guest. Hugo looked thinner than when they had last met and somewhat wilder of eye. He was unshaven and perceptibly unsteady on his feet. Had it not been for the cigar-smoke, Plon-Plon suspected he would have been able to detect alcohol in the late-morning air. ‘I am not travelling under an alias,
mon ami
. Why did you address me as “Count”?’

Hugo shrugged his overcoat off his shoulders and pitched it over a chair, then leaned against the chair-back, swaying slightly, the muscles of his jaw and forehead working convulsively.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘I’ve just come from our new solicitors, Plon-Plon. They’re the very best. The most expensive.’

‘They are equipped with a bar?’

‘All right. I stopped off somewhere. God knows, I needed to.’

‘Your solicitor is no longer your cousin Richard?’

‘He ran out on us. Didn’t you know?’

‘I may have read of it. A sad business.’

‘Of course you damn well read of it!’ Hugo’s words came in a rush of bitterness. ‘You’ve been hiding over there in Paris these past four months,
reading
of my misfortunes. I could hardly believe it when I saw in the paper this morning that you were back. But it’s only because you had no
choice
, isn’t it? It’s only because you had nowhere else to go’

Plon-Plon bridled. Why should he be interrogated by this impetuous young man? ‘I was not in hiding, Hugo! I never hide!’

‘Call it what you please: it amounts to the same thing. You were there, hatching your damnable political schemes, while I was left here to face Norton alone.’

‘Come, come—’

‘Didn’t you ever spare a thought for me? Didn’t you ever think you should try to help me?’

‘
L’imposteur
Norton gave me an uncomfortable half-hour last October. Why would I expose myself to him again?’

‘For my sake, of course.’

Plon-Plon sighed: this was becoming painful. He rose from the table, walked across to Hugo and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I am sorry for you,
mon jeune ami
, but I am too old for sacrificial gestures. You should know me well enough to realize that.’ At such close quarters, he could see the reproachful cast to Hugo’s expression and was genuinely puzzled by it. It suggested a naïvety he had never associated with him.

‘My mother’s told me the truth. There’s no point trying to bluff your way out of it.’

‘Out of what?’

‘I could hardly believe it at first. You, my father’s oldest friend …’

‘What are you trying to say?’

Hugo’s knuckles blanched as his grip on the chair-back tightened. ‘That I am the son of Sir Gervase Davenall in law only, of course. I’d suspected it long enough, God knows, but I never thought … never guessed …’

‘What?’

Hugo looked into Plon-Plon’s eyes with undisguised hostility. ‘You have the damnable nerve to ask? I can’t believe you don’t know. You must know. My father was probably still in the Crimea when you bedded my mother; still fighting for his country … when I was conceived.’

Plon-Plon stepped back amazed. Among his many conquests, Catherine Davenall had never figured. Nor had he wanted her to. Hugo’s accusation was absurd. Yet all he could find to say was: ‘This is not true.’

‘Are you calling my mother a liar?’

‘Did she tell you this fairy story?’

‘She admitted you were my natural father.’

‘
Incroyable
. Then, yes,
mon ami
. I am calling your mother a liar. When am I alleged to have cuckolded your father?’

‘You know well enough. The summer of 1855.’

‘Impossible. The Emperor entrusted me with the organization of the International Exhibition that year. I was busy in Paris throughout the summer.’

‘You could have found time to visit Cleave Court. For that matter, my mother could have visited Paris.’

‘All things are possible, but I think I can prove I did not meet your mother at all during 1855. In other words, I can prove I did not seduce her. I can prove she is a liar.’

All the strength seemed to drain from Hugo. He pulled the chair back, slumped down on to it and put a hand to his forehead. ‘Damn,’ he muttered. ‘Damn it all.’

‘I am sorry, but she has misled you.’

‘For God’s sake, why should she?’

Plon-Plon shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows? Perhaps to protect the true culprit. The strategies of women would elude the finest general.’

Abruptly, Hugo rose to his feet, his face crimson from a mixture of embarrassment at having revealed so much and resentment at having been deceived so completely. ‘By heaven, they’ll elude me no longer! I’ll have the truth out of her if it’s the last thing I do.’ He grabbed his coat and swept to the door.

‘Hugo—’

But it was too late. He was gone, leaving Plon-Plon to stare down into an insipid cupful of English coffee and think of Catherine Davenall. It was true: they had not met during 1855, nor had they wanted to. Their meeting at Constantinople in late November 1854 had left them
with
a powerful dislike of each other’s company. It had been a meeting, indeed, that neither of them was likely to forget – or forgive.

Plon-Plon returned to Constantinople that afternoon in a mood of ill-humoured savagery. The humiliation he had suffered at Scutari still squirmed within him, and he was determined to make somebody pay for it. It could have been anybody – his aide-de-camp, an emissary from the Sultan, an inquisitive journalist – but it was not. Fate decreed, instead, that Catherine Davenall should come calling before he had yet changed out of his blood-stained uniform.

‘Prince! What
has
happened to you?’

Catherine was still then the young and winsome creature Gervase had married. She had not yet become the stern inflexible woman of her middle age. But neither her charm nor her vivacity could quench the blinding anger which Plon-Plon felt. ‘
Un accident, madame
. What do you want with me?’

Pulling up halfway across the room at sight of his thunderous expression, she said: ‘Why so gruff? I hoped you might have news of Gervase.’

At another time, Plon-Plon would have recalled Gervase visiting him after the battle of Inkerman and asking him, when he heard that the Prince was about to quit the Crimea, to look up Catherine in Constantinople, to where he had sent her some weeks previously on account of the danger from cholera. He would have recalled his friend’s jovial confidences about the advantages of his wife’s absence and would have respected them, would have smiled at Catherine and assured her that all was well with her brave and faithful husband. But not now. Not when this dark and boiling fury was upon him. ‘I have no news of Gervase, madame, that his wife should hear.’

‘What can you mean?’

‘I advise you to go home to England. Leave your husband to his … consolations.’

Catherine frowned. ‘Are you quite well, Prince? You seem out of sorts. It was reported that you had been ill, of course, but—’

‘But you did not believe it!’ Plon-Plon crossed to the french windows that gave on to the balcony and flung them open to the stagnant late-afternoon air. ‘Smell that, madame: the perfume of the Orient. It is the only thing you should believe about the Turks:
l’ordure
.’

‘All I meant was that I understood you had recovered.’

‘Do you know where I have been today? Scutari. I went to visit your famous Mademoiselle Nightingale. But I did not see her. Instead, I encountered a friend of yours.’

‘Of mine? Who was it?’

He swung round from the windows to face her, smiling triumphantly as he did so. ‘Vivien Strang.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘She insulted me before a mob of journalists. She threw a basin of bloody water in my face. She shamed me – on your husband’s account.’

Catherine sank into a chair. Her face had lost its colour, her mouth its firmness. ‘I do not understand. What is she doing here?’

Plon-Plon had always disliked Catherine for her haughty sanctimonious ways. Now hatred was added to that dislike, a hatred of all the effortlessly disapproving English gentlewomen who had ever come his way, a hatred which convinced him that this one must be made to suffer. ‘She is one of the nightingales, madame. She is nursing. Nursing a grievance, you might say.’

‘A grievance against Gervase? Why?’

‘She lost her position as your governess because of him.’

‘No. It had nothing to do with him. She stayed out all one night and refused to say where she had been. Naturally, my father—’

‘She was with Gervase!’

‘If she says that, she’s lying.’ Catherine’s gloved hands had tightened into tiny fists of determined disbelief.

‘
She
does not say it, madame. I say it, because I know it to be a fact. Gervase lured her to the maze at Cleave Court that night and raped her.’

‘No!’

‘He had been obsessed with her for months. That night, the obsession ended.’

‘It cannot be.’

‘There is more. She had his child, madame.’

Catherine rose to her feet. ‘I won’t listen to such nonsense. Either she is lying – or you are.’

‘She refused to tell you what had happened because she knew she would not be believed. You never liked her, I think. You were glad of the excuse to have her dismissed.’

‘None of this is true.’

‘Ask Gervase. See if he denies it. Ask Mademoiselle Strang. She is at Scutari now: you could confront her easily enough. You will not, I know. You will not, because you know I speak the truth. You must have realized your husband’s taste for … variety. That is why he sent you here. So that he could be free to … indulge himself.’

Catherine had heard enough. She turned and hurried to the door.

‘So there’s news of Gervase for you to take away, madame: news of the woman he preferred to you, news of the bastard she bore him!’

The door slammed shut. He was alone. The rage began to drain from him, leaving a dragging emptiness in its place. He went out on to the balcony and watched Catherine’s carriage drive away. The sun was beginning to set now, casting its sickly glow on the minarets and mosque-domes of the city. There was a rush of plover-flight across the roof behind him as the muezzins took up their ritual cry. On the Asian shore, beyond the Bosporus, the Barrack Hospital loomed vast and strangely anodyne in the pink declining light. Below him, in a narrow alleyway, a Greek was whipping a thin and overladen donkey. Suddenly, the stench of friendship betrayed
filled
Plon-Plon’s nostrils. He turned and retreated into the room.

‘Brunet!’ Plon-Plon called when he had finished dressing. ‘We shall be leaving London.’

‘When,
mon grand seigneur
?’

‘Immediately.’

‘But … to go where?’

Plon-Plon frowned. Where to go indeed? He could neither remain in London nor return to Paris. Turin contained his wife and, which was worse, her family. None of the alternatives appealed, but to one of them he would have to go. ‘Anywhere, Brunet,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Anywhere.’

III

A transitory warmth had come upon Salisbury as the day advanced and now, as Constance and Emily passed through the Harnham Gate, they were struck by how spring-like the close contrived to seem, with tightly wrapped shoots of daffodils sprouting from the grass, doves cooing beyond the walls of the Bishop’s Palace and the pale sunlight drawing a golden hue from the cathedral stone.

‘It has been like this ever since you arrived,’ said Emily, as they walked along, savouring the gentleness of the day.

‘Too good to last, you think?’ said Constance. ‘This whole winter has seemed like that to me, Emily: a taste of pleasures which may not endure.’

‘Why should they not?’

‘Because, for the moment, I am looked upon charitably by the arbiters of cathedral opinion. Should I follow the prompting of my heart, however, they will not be so understanding.’

‘Should you marry James, you mean?’