The Misbegotten (40 page)

‘He will not hear of it, Bridget.’ Alice sounded calmer, and resolute.

‘And you must swear to see Jonathan in secret no more. You must separate yourself from him. Swear it, Alice; because sooner or later these things are found out. They always are.’

‘I . . . I—’

‘Swear it to me, Alice, or I will have to report it now. You would leave me no choice. Jonathan Alleyn is not for you, however much you care for him.’

‘Very well, then. I swear it.’ This was spoken in a small, strangled voice.

‘You must talk to Starling. I thought her loyal to you, to both of us.’ Bridget gave a sigh. ‘She has proved otherwise.’ At this, Starling’s limbs awoke. She scrambled up and flew down the stairs, running out of the house as fast as her feet would carry her, because she could not stand to hear what either one of them would say to her.

She roamed along the canal for a long time, then high onto the ridge above the western edge of Bathampton, from where Ralph Allen’s folly looked down – the turreted and crenellated wall of a sham castle, newly built to embellish the view from the gentleman’s town house. Starling stared up at it and wondered at the power some men had, to change the world to suit them better.
When we others must just do as we are bid, and be meek and malleable.
She thought about what Bridget had said of Lord Faukes –
he will have things his way.
She remembered the sudden warning she’d felt, nameless and wordless, deep in her bones, during one of his visits a year or so before.

She’d fetched him a glass of port while he was alone by the fire in the parlour, and he’d taken hold of her wrist to prevent her turning away. Normally she stayed out of his sight as much as she could; she tried to draw as little attention to herself as possible.

‘Wait a while, girl. Starling,’ he said, smiling so that his cheeks turned his eyes into crescents. Starling did as she was bid. She pulled experimentally at her arm but his grip, though gentle, was quite unbreakable. She let her hand hang limply at the end of her wrist. In some hindquarter of her brain, she divorced herself from it completely; if she had to leave the limb behind to free herself, she would do it. She watched him in silence as his thumb moved around to press into the vulnerable underside of her wrist, where the blood was warm and close to the skin. He massaged her in small circles, considering, and the prickling feeling this gave her went straight to that hidden part of her mind that knew to bite, and kick, and run. She balanced her weight evenly on both feet, poised slightly on her toes, ready. She started to shake. ‘Do not fear me, girl. Why should you fear me?’ he said, with a chuckle.
I do not fear you
, Starling realised.
I hate you.
‘How old are you now?’

‘Rising twelve, we think, sir,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Quite the little maid,’ he said cheerfully, and laughed again though his eyes never left her, and it was not mirth that filled them but a kind of hunger. Starling glared at him then, and let everything she was feeling fill her face. Lord Faukes recoiled, though he did not let go her hand. ‘Mind your manners, little vixen. I had a horse once look at me the way you just did. I was forced to beat that mare bloody, so I was.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Starling looked down instead, because she could not keep the hate from showing.

‘That’s better.’ Lord Faukes dropped her wrist and laced his hands across his gut, shifting his weight. The chair creaked. ‘Remember who owns you, girl. Remember to whom you are beholden.’ In that instant Alice came in from the stables with her cheeks glowing and her hair unravelled, and went to embrace the old man with a smile. For a second, Starling wanted to step between them – Alice had no idea how to bite or kick or run. But she could not, since there was no excuse to other than every instinct she possessed, commanding it.

Alice found her eventually, as the sky was turning milky pale and a sliver of moon had risen. Starling had found her way to the lovers’ tree, and was sitting in the shadows on the protruding root, quiet and numb and miserable. She started to cry when she saw Alice approaching, because the shame was intolerable. Alice sat down beside her, all serious and calm. Her pale hair caught the last of the light, but her eyes were in darkness.

‘Don’t cry, Starling. I know why you told Bridget,’ she said. ‘I know why you were angry. You wanted to hurt me some, because I have hurt you, haven’t I, dearest?’ Starling only wept more, messily; snot and tears slid down her chin. Alice’s arm went around her shoulders and squeezed. ‘You are so quick and bright; it’s easy to forget how young you are.’ She sighed softly and fetched out a handkerchief to wipe Starling’s face. ‘You and I have been so close, since you first came to us. It must be impossible for you to understand why I met Jonathan in secret, as well as the times I met him with you, and at the house. It has to do with the kind of love we feel, and my . . . particular situation. Perhaps you understand a little more of that now, after hearing what Bridget had to say earlier on.’ Starling glanced up and saw that her eavesdropping was no secret. She dissolved into fresh tears of misery; for a while Alice let her cry. A weak breeze shifted the willow whips.

‘Now I need to know how close we are, Starling,’ said Alice, after a while. She whispered the words, so that they seemed spoken in part to the darkness and the silent sliding river. Starling gulped and sniffed and tried to read her expression.

‘What do you mean, Alice?’ she said.

‘I have sworn to Bridget that I will detach myself from Jonathan. I had no choice but to swear it. But I shall not do it. I
will
not do it!’ Alice took Starling by the tops of her arms and stared into her eyes. ‘You betrayed me before because you were hurt and angry. But you betrayed me to the one person who had best reason to keep my secret with me. Perhaps it was deliberate, perhaps not, but betraying Jonathan and me to Bridget was really hardly a betrayal at all.’ Starling waited, hardly breathing. She’d never heard Alice sound so serious. ‘I will
not
detach myself from Jonathan, and he will not detach himself from me. It would be utterly impossible. So I will break the vow I just made to Bridget, and break it willingly, and if the time comes that Jonathan and I must flee from our families to be wed, then I will go eagerly, though I should be disgraced for ever. I tell you this now because you will have guessed it, I know. If not at once then sooner or later. So I ask you now, Starling – will you betray us again?’

‘Never!’ Starling gasped.

‘Think before you answer, dearest. It will be harder to keep this secret now. Bridget will be watching . . . she will doubtless make you promise to tell her if I do not keep to my word.’ Alice’s fingers clutched Starling’s shoulders, gently but insistently.

‘I will lie to her too, I don’t care! But you must promise me one thing,’ said Starling, desperately.

‘What is it?’ Alice sounded wary, worried.

‘When you go . . . when you go away with Jonathan, you must take me along with you. You mustn’t leave me!’

‘Starling, dearest . . .’

‘You
must
not leave me! Promise it!’ Alice pulled her closer, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

‘I promise it; and that is a promise I
will
keep.’

They waited until they were both calm, and composed, and resolute, before returning to the farmhouse, and to Bridget’s stern unease. As they went in Alice turned to smile at Starling, and it was that smile that reassured her, and told her she was forgiven and loved. It was that smile that made the ground under her feet turn back to solid rock from shifting sand, and convinced her to ignore that sparkle of instinct that came again, with the shadow of Lord Faukes looming large in her mind; the urge she felt to take hold of Alice’s hand and run, right then, immediately and far away.

Overnight, frost had settled on every stone of the city, every leaf and blade of grass of Barton Fields, where Rachel and Richard met Captain and Mrs Sutton to walk. Mist lay thick over Bath, snaking along the river as though the water had breathed it out. It crept up the lower slopes of the city, so that only the upper crescents rose clear of it; an elegant harbour along a shifting white shore. Cassandra Sutton was swaddled in coat and woollen shawls, with gloves on her hands and leather boots laced high up her legs. She walked ahead and then skipped back to them, to show them whatever she’d found – acorns, or fir cones; once a massive horse chestnut leaf, golden brown and crusted with ice. The exercise made her cheeks pink and her eyes shine, and the child looked as vibrant as the spray of crimson hawthorn berries she next brought to show them.

‘Cassandra, do not run about so, I beg you. You’re a young lady now,’ said Harriet Sutton.

‘But if I run I’ll keep warm,’ the little girl pointed out, and smiled winningly at them as she turned and trotted away once more. Her teeth were a flash of white against the darker colouring of her face.

‘Cassandra!’ Harriet called after her, but her tone was amused, not reproachful.

‘It does children good to run, and fill their chests with fresh air,’ said Rachel.

‘True enough. But Cassandra is coming to that age when I think I ought to instil a touch more decorum in her, perhaps.’

‘Oh, she is but nine years old, is she not? I think she could safely be allowed to run wild for a couple more years.’ Rachel smiled. ‘When I was her age, my father still took me fishing for tadpoles. We would stand for hours in the muddy edges of a stream, dipping for the poor creatures. I think he longed for a boy, to take on such outings! Once Christopher was born, I was allowed to become his daughter, rather than his son. I was about Cassandra’s age when that happened, and I turned out well enough, I suppose.’

‘Indeed you did. You turned out very well indeed.’

Harriet looped her arm through Rachel’s as they walked; Richard was walking further behind, with Captain Sutton.

‘Harriet, may I ask you something?’ said Rachel.

‘Of course.’

‘Does your husband ever talk about his time in the war? The war against the French, I mean?’

‘In truth, very little.’ Harriet Sutton sighed. ‘I do not press him on it, since it seems to me that it pains him to speak of it.’

‘Do you think it . . . troubles him? The things he has seen and done?’

‘My husband is a good and kind man; I’m certain such violence troubles him. But he does his duty to king and country. His duty as a solider.’ Harriet turned her head to look at her husband. ‘The army needs men like my husband, to bring a measure of decency to the grotesquery of the battlefield.’

‘Indeed.’

‘What makes you ask?’

‘Mr Alleyn has lately begun to speak to me of his time in the war. Of the things he saw and did,’ said Rachel.
And they are things that turn my stomach.
‘I can’t imagine how any man could come through the same and remain innocent of heart.’

‘Yes. I have heard of other soldiers who find it impossible to return to their old lives when they come home. They find society meaningless; their days pointless; their wives and families . . . frivolous.’

‘And what becomes of these men?’

‘Gradually, they resettle, and find peace.’ Harriet shrugged. ‘Or they do not, and turn to drink and dissolution, or retreat from the world.’

‘Or retreat into drink and dissolution, all three,’ Rachel murmured. Harriet smiled sadly.

‘What does he tell you?’

‘Such things . . .’ Rachel shook her head. ‘Such things that I begin to understand why his memories torment him so. Why he has lost his faith in humanity.’
And then I read him a tale of adventure and chivalry, and he sleeps, like a child.

For a while they walked in steady silence, watching Cassandra as she darted here and there beneath the naked limbs of a horse chestnut tree, filling her coat pockets with glossy nuts.

‘I am glad,’ Harriet said then. Rachel turned to look down at her diminutive friend, confused. ‘Jonathan Alleyn’s heart is good. I
know
this to be true. And war may change a man’s mind – change his outlook and his behaviour, change the very way he thinks, perhaps. But it cannot change a man’s heart.’

‘But perhaps, if they behave badly enough, it matters not that their heart remains what it always was. Not everything – not every deed – can be forgiven, after all.’

‘Can it not? Is that not what Christianity teaches?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rachel thought of Alice, and the way she had vanished from the world. She thought of the Portuguese girl Jonathan had spoken of, crushed beneath a rock and ravaged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. Harriet squeezed her hand.

‘Don’t give up on him, Mrs Weekes,’ she said softly. ‘Nobody has grown as close to him since he returned from the war as you are now. You are doing him good, I know it. And you are
doing
good, by your time and your . . . willingness to see past the wall he has built around himself.’ Rachel nodded vaguely.

‘I hear such things about him, from . . . others, that I hardly know what to think,’ she said.

‘You can trust my own account, I hope. I
know
him to be good.’

‘But,
how
do you know, Mrs Sutton? How are you so sure?’

‘I . . . I cannot say. Forgive me. Tell me, what does your husband make of your progress?’

‘He makes nothing of it. He knows nothing of it,’ said Rachel. ‘He cares only for the wage I am paid by Mrs Alleyn. He never asks me what I do there, or how I fare.’ Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t keep the unhappiness from her voice, and alongside it was something new; something like contempt. She hoped that Harriet Sutton wouldn’t hear it, but the look her friend gave her was troubled, and she didn’t speak for a good few moments.

‘The first year of marriage is a voyage of discovery,’ Harriet said eventually. ‘And perhaps it is inevitable that not all things we discover will be to our liking.’ She smiled sympathetically, and Rachel looked away. Suddenly, her own distaste for her husband shamed her.

They had reached the end of the track across Barton Fields, and waited for the men by the path that would lead back into the city, and to a coffee house where they could warm themselves. Rachel smiled warmly at Richard to disguise her true feelings. His return smile was thin and uneven, as though he tasted something sour in his mouth, and Rachel’s heart sank even further.