Season of Light (19 page)

They had walked half a mile beside the choppy waves before Asa had told the full story of her father’s relations with the tailor’s wife. Once convinced of the squire’s culpability, Caroline’s eyes shone with their habitual determination to right an injustice. ‘Your father must marry her.’

‘He never would. He’s deeply conventional at heart and would never marry anyone so lowly, even if he loved her.’

‘Then she must at least be given bail and he must protect her.’

‘We have no money. If it were a matter of a few pounds I would sell clothes or even mother’s ring. But Mrs Dacre will need a lawyer. The bail will be tens if not hundreds of pounds. And a cottage must be rented for her, fuel provided and some kind of allowance.’

‘Your sisters?’

‘The Warrens are worse off than we are. I’ve thought of asking John Morton but I suspect he would refuse outright. In the first place, he would hate the scandal. In the second I doubt he would regard Mrs Dacre as being worthy of his charity.’

‘Then what will you do?’

‘As you say, I must extract her from prison somehow. A lawyer, I’m sure, would do the trick. Dear heavens, perhaps my sisters are right and my only hope is to marry Shackleford.’

They were retracing their steps towards the town. Their skirts flapped as they were rushed forward by the wind. ‘You really think he might make an offer?’ said Caroline.

‘Madame de Rusigneux thinks he is in love with me. He has invited us all to Compton Wyatt. It seems there is to be no escape unless, perhaps, through a miracle. But seriously, Caroline, you know I would never even consider him.’

The silence that followed was very strange. Caroline’s pace slowed and she took Asa’s arm. ‘When I look into the future I am afraid. Father didn’t tell you how ill he was after the latest visit from the magistrate. I found him in his chair, unable to move his right arm or foot. For days he lay in his bed and could not eat. He’s still not fully recovered, though he hides it very well. We are behind with the rent. Sometimes I think that marriage, so long as the husband was relatively kind and did not make excessive demands, wouldn’t be the worst fate in the world.’

‘Caroline, what are you saying? You are surely not encouraging me to accept Shackleford?’

‘It’s true, I’ve changed … I don’t believe you should throw away your chances of marriage for the sake of an ideal or a fantasy, Thomasina. Neither of us should. We have to be practical. Look at the pair of us. We have nothing.’

‘Are you telling me I should even give up the idea of France? That’s not a fantasy. How can you say so when you are the one who has encouraged me to keep faith? Why would I give up now? Why are you being like this?’

‘I am like this, as you say, because I have glimpsed the future and see that it is bleak.’

They returned to the cottage to find Mr Lambert asleep, his head lolling so that he looked far older than his years. Full of sorrow, Asa hugged Caroline and kissed her a tender farewell. During her heavy-hearted ride back to Ardleigh the sky darkened and the vegetation in the lanes whispered as if brushed by invisible footfall. After dismounting at the church she watched her groom lead the horses up the side of the manor along the familiar cobbled track.

On the village green earth scorched by the pyre was covered with fresh growth, grazed by a couple of ill-tempered goats; there was the spot where Madame de Rusigneux had been standing, beyond the smoke, the bedlam-like charivari stilled by the steady gaze of a new French companion. Here was the rickety gate to Key Cottage, which wouldn’t close, the overgrown front garden and the door against which the tailor had huddled while the village boys pranced and yelled and beat their drums. Key Cottage had possessed a lock but never a key.

Inside was the stench of decay. The cottage had remained more or less untouched since Mrs Dacre’s arrest because the villagers were too superstitious to venture inside. The windows were draped with abandoned cobwebs and soot had dropped down the chimney, accumulating in soft piles on the hearth. Rainwater had seeped through the rafters and collected in slimy pools on the floor. In the other, smaller room was the bed where the pair must have lain night after night listening to the owls in the manor-house woods. A stocking, probably the tailor’s, and a few rags, too worthless even for Mrs Dacre to have included in her bundle, were heaped in a corner.

The back door was jammed open. Outside, the yard was even smaller than Asa remembered, with the overhanging beech branch moving gently in the wind. Nettles and bindweed had colonised last year’s vegetable patch.

Although the beech was full of new leaf, hanging from the branch was the rope that Mr Dacre had looped about his neck in February; left there, in the hurry of the moment, by the blacksmith, who’d cut the tailor down. And of course it would never have occurred to Squire Ardleigh to have the cottage cleared of such a gruesome memento. The fabric swayed back and forth; four pieces of cloth, pale cambric, black twill, green and yellow spotted cotton, and a thick, light brown wool that looked very familiar. The previous autumn Mrs Dean had prised the squire’s favourite waistcoat from his back and instructed the tailor to make him a new one, exactly the same minus the patches, frays and wine stains. The noose was a testimony to the tailor’s skill – the even knots, the accurately cut strips of fabric, the precisely measured distance that was required for a man to hang himself.

That evening, after Madame had gone upstairs, Asa unlocked her cache of letters from Didier and took them into the garden. A slant of late sunlight still fell on the far side of the orchard.

Mignonelette
,

It is a month since I wrote and you would be right to reproach me for that. But then, if I know Thomasina, she will have read the papers and she will know why I have been such a poor correspondent. With every breath in my body I opposed the reinstatement of the king. How can we trust him since he tried to run away and throw himself on to the mercy of our enemies? Fifty unarmed people are now dead for daring to stand in the street and protest about this same weak and wretched monarch and his government. I grieve. We are not sufficiently bold, that is the trouble. Everything is still in place, the priests, the king, all the old inequalities. We have not even outlawed slavery, which is so glaringly, incontestably wrong
.

We must start afresh. Haven’t I been saying that all along? It is impossible to cobble together a new France from the rags of the old
.

Perhaps this letter will be intercepted and read. I do not care. I want something to happen. I think of you in your quiet little English house, so close to the sea which divides us, and I grow calmer. I am striving for your sake – to be able to live with you, my girl, in a world where we can work shoulder to shoulder for the good of our children
.

Sometimes you seem so far away I cannot see you any more. And then I remember those clear eyes, that purity, that courage. And I know that truly only one future matters to me
.

Compton Wyatt, guilty as sin.

Compton Wyatt; a white, many-windowed mansion completed thirty years earlier by the late Mr Thomas Shackleford, plantation owner, shipping merchant, glass maker and wine trader, high in the valley of a tributary of the Frome between Bath and Bristol, on the site of a twelfth-century castle and later a medieval manor house, all gone save for a ruined chapel which now formed a feature of the circular walk in the gardens.

Two days’ drive from Ardleigh in the squire’s ill-sprung carriage brought Asa, the Warrens and Madame de Rusigneux, not to mention the coachman and his lad, and a mound of luggage, to a lane bordered on one side by an eight-foot wall then, half a mile or so later, to a pair of gates fit for a palace, with a single-storeyed lodge on either side and, beyond, an avenue of young oaks.

Georgina, who had been hanging out of the window for the last hour, cried: ‘There’s a lake. I told you there would be. And good God, look at the size of the house, how many rooms would you say – forty, fifty? Oh, and there’s a temple on that hillock. Good heavens, I don’t believe it; the entire household has come out to welcome us. They must have been waiting for hours.’

And indeed, when the carriage door was flung open, there was Mr Shackleford wearing a sober black coat over yet another dashing waistcoat, this time embroidered with daisies in silver thread, his face filled with pleasure, ready to assist first Georgina then Asa. The rest of the household was ranked on the shallow steps, all in deep mourning: first Shackleford’s mother, a plump, sharp-eyed woman; next her daughter-in-law, The Honourable Mrs Susan Shackleford, unsmiling wife of Shackleford’s deceased elder brother; and finally a companion, a third or fourth cousin of Mrs Shackleford called Mrs Foster, whose bottom lip worked incessantly against the upper as if to keep her teeth in place. Beyond were rows of footmen and maids poised to leap forward and relieve the carriage of the Warrens’ three trunks, Madame’s portmanteau and Asa’s small travelling chest.

‘We
are
honoured,’ whispered Georgina. ‘Heavens above, Asa, you do realise this is all for you? You might as well be married already.’

Mrs Shackleford the elder placed her white hand on Georgina’s arm and led her inside. When Georgina gushed over the sightless bust of a Roman emperor, Mrs Shackleford responded coldly that it was believed to be Caesar, first-century, and her manicured fingers raised themselves half an inch from the lace of Georgina’s sleeve to mark her displeasure at her visitor’s overenthusiasm. Meanwhile (The Honourable) Mrs Shackleford junior, in the nasal drawl appropriate to a viscount’s daughter, enquired after Asa’s journey and then fell silent. Behind the ladies, Warren and Shackleford embarked on a discussion about fishing in the Frome.

Compton Wyatt smelt like no other house. Vases of hothouse lilies adorned alcoves and side tables, sunshine baked the fragrance of polish from shining floors; when the windows were open the scent of cut grass and roses blew in from the garden and the logs burning in the fireplace – even on a mild May afternoon – were of aromatic pine and applewood.

But it was more the absence of bad smells which made the air so pure. The kitchens, in a separate wing, were closed off behind swing doors, and the house, fed as it was from springs high up in the valley, had water closets more efficient even than those at Morton, a couple of marble buffets between the dining room and drawing room in which one might rinse one’s hands or fill a glass with ice-cold water, and a bathhouse in the garden.

Later that afternoon they were given a tour by a languid Mrs Shackleford the younger, who had been chosen for a wife, whispered Georgina, because of her father’s title rather than her looks. It was said that her family, having got rid of her to the elder Shackleford boy, didn’t want her back now she was a widow. Asa at once paid sympathetic attention to the poor woman, whose extreme thinness reminded her of Caroline, though not her pursed lips or evasive eyes. This after all might be Asa’s fate – an eternity spent at Compton Wyatt showing visitors its many remarkable features.

They obediently stretched their necks to admire the cupola above the immense polished oak staircases with mirror-image flights of steps and wrought-iron balusters as fine as lace; were paraded from one room to the next until they had completed an entire circuit of the ground floor, gallery, music room, library, drawing room, withdrawing room, dining room, morning room and back to the entrance hall; then toured their various bedchambers, each decorated in the theme of a different country to reflect the late Mr Shackleford’s obsession with travel. Asa’s room, the second grandest, contained an immense bed draped in Indian figured silk, and wallpaper flocked with exotic flowers. From the window she could gaze upon a perfect landscape; under a blue and white sky were sunlit hills upon which sheep grazed and in the foreground a white rotunda was perched on a mound, while a couple of swans drifted across the lake chaperoning three cygnets.

Dinner, taken at six in a room half the size of Ardleigh in its entirety, consisted of twenty dishes. Georgina filled the gaps in conversation by expressing her awe at every inanimate object from salt spoon to chandelier, while Mrs Shackleford senior dedicated herself to an examination of Asa, whom she had placed to her right. At intervals her beringed hand seized Asa by the wrist as she inclined her bewigged head on its bejewelled neck and spoke confidingly, to show the others that they were engaged in talk of the most private nature. Her eyes, like chocolate-coloured marbles, fixed relentlessly on Asa’s face. ‘The name Ardleigh is in the Domesday Book, I gather.’

‘Yes.’

‘And who was your mother?’

‘The daughter of a Chichester squire named Dinsford.’

The hand was withdrawn and Mrs Shackleford again took up her knife. ‘I’ve heard the name Dinsford and believe that the family is one of the most prominent in Kent. You must miss your mother very much, my dear.’

‘I never knew her.’

‘Do you know, I might have guessed? A girl who has never known her mother always has a certain air about her.’

‘Although I would dearly love to have met her, my sisters more than filled her place.’

‘Certainly they seem to have done very well by you. That’s a beautiful gown, my dear. Its simplicity suits you. I wish I could keep up with modern fashion but of course I am an old lady, and in mourning.’ Her eyes watered and for a moment she looked forlorn amid her array of priceless porcelain and silver. The hand shot out again. ‘Who makes your gowns?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know, madam. Georgina brought this one from town.’

‘Ah yes, and you have another sister married to a John Morton. Morton Hall is a very modern house, my son tells me. What do you think of our Compton Wyatt in comparison to your sister’s house?’

‘I’m afraid I’m a poor judge. When I am at Morton I have three nephews to consider, and it’s the opportunities those little boys find to tumble down the stairs or slip on the hall floor that concern me.’ The old lady looked so disappointed that Asa added: ‘But of course there is no comparison. Morton Hall is a quarter the size of Compton Wyatt, and being so new, not nearly as well established.’