The Misbegotten (46 page)

She was at his door and breathing hard, and then inside without knocking. At the sound, Jonathan came from his bedchamber with his shirt untucked and rumpled, his hair a mess in front of his eyes.

‘Starling? What’s happened?’ he said, tilting his head at her; his tone so normal, so understated that Starling took a step backwards. Time and reality skidded around her.
Here is the man I hate. Does he not know that I hate him?
‘Are you well? You’re so pale.’

‘Am I well?’ She reeled slightly, putting out her hands for balance. ‘This is all wrong,’ she murmured, dizzily. Past his bedraggled figure, on the cluttered desk, was a knife. A pewter blade, dull in the low light; a blunt instrument for the breaking of seals and the splitting of figs. Blunt, then, but still lethal, if used with enough force. Starling stared at it as Jonathan watched her, bewildered. Three steps were all that were needed, she calculated. Three quick steps, a turn and a strike, and whatever truths he knew would bleed out of him and drip through the fancy plasterwork of the ceiling below. She rolled onto the balls of her feet, balancing herself.

‘Starling,’ said Jonathan, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He sighed. ‘You remind me of her sometimes. Did you know that? Just in your . . . gestures. Your facial expressions. Just sometimes.’ Starling blinked, and lost sight of the knife behind a haze of tears. She shook her head vehemently.

‘I wish you had died instead of her!’ she said. Jonathan didn’t flinch.

‘So do I,’ he said.

The proper thing to do would be to stay indoors until the cut and swelling on her lip had fully healed, but Rachel found she cared less and less for what was proper. One side of her chin was greenish grey with bruising, and the cut had knit into a stiff black line. As he dressed, Richard kept his eyes turned away from her, and wore his guilty scowl.

‘You will not go to the Alleyns looking like that,’ he said, pulling on his boots.

‘I have an appointment. I will keep it.’

‘But, your face . . .’

‘What of it?’

‘You should send a message and say you’re unwell,’ he suggested, as sulky as a child. Rachel felt a whole new emotion just then, one she had never known before – an exhausting blend of fear and contempt.

‘But I am quite well, Mr Weekes. And I’m sure my appearance will cause no particular outrage in that house,’ she said stiffly. Richard didn’t see fit to argue further; he went down to the shop without another word and Rachel was left to wonder if that was how things would be between them, for the rest of their lives.
Anger, violence, disappointment. For both of us, it seems.

By the time Rachel had climbed to Lansdown Crescent the sun had turned the milky sky a blinding white, and behind that a touch of blue was beginning to glow. Frost furred all of Bath’s window glass; the air was entirely still. November was promising to be cold and sharp. Jonathan rose from behind his desk when Dorcas showed Rachel into his rooms; he smiled, but it melted from his face when he saw her.

‘What happened here?’ he said seriously.

‘A small mishap, nothing more.’

‘He beats you?’

‘This was the first time, and my fault, in part. I quarrelled with him.’

‘The first time is rarely the last. What was the quarrel about?’

‘I—’ Rachel broke off, unsure if it would sound petty and sentimental to him. ‘It was a trifling thing, to be sure. I had a silver box that belonged to my mother. And inside it I kept a lock of her hair, pinned to the lining. The box is . . . sold.’ It still made her sad, and somehow more alone.

‘Sold by your husband, without your knowledge?’

‘Yes. A childish thing to mourn, I know. But mourn it I do.’

‘Perhaps, but to have a piece of the child you were can be a precious thing,’ said Jonathan, softly. ‘I can scarce remember what it was to be a child. Who I was then, before all of this . . .’

‘Perhaps it does no good to. The temptation is always there to imagine what that child would make of me now. Of the life I have chosen for myself.’

‘Nobody can know the outcome of things, before they are begun. You should not blame yourself,’ Jonathan said quietly. Rachel turned to gaze out of the window, where the sky was now brilliantly blue. The rooms around her seemed stifling in comparison.

‘Come. Let’s go out for a walk. I can’t bear to stay cooped up inside today.’

‘I don’t go out.’ Jonathan shook his head with a frown.

‘I know, and it’s high time you did. Come. The fresh air and exertion will do us both good.’

‘I don’t care to be seen. My leg, and all the tattlers . . . And I can’t abide crowds,’ he said. Rachel thought for a moment.

‘How about sheep? Can you abide sheep? I daresay they will have nothing much to say about you, or your leg. Come. I insist.’

Dorcas and the butler, Falmouth, watched in undisguised amazement as Jonathan came downstairs and asked for his coat and hat. They watched in more amazement as he left the house, squinting in the sunshine, with Rachel on his arm.

‘They will run and tell my mother I am cured,’ he said drily. He kept his arm, and Rachel’s hand on it, clamped tightly to his ribs, and Rachel felt the tension running through him.

‘It is only a walk,’ she said carefully. ‘Quite a commonplace thing.’ Jonathan kept his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, ignoring the glances they got from passers-by – gentlefolk and dallying servants both.

‘People are staring,’ he muttered. ‘Damn their eyes!’ His weak leg twisted and buckled slightly as he walked, giving him a jolting, uneven stride.

‘Let them stare. They’re most likely looking at my lip and wondering if I kicked you in the leg to retaliate,’ said Rachel. Jonathan laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard it, and straight away she loved the sound, and the way it bounced along. In the sunlight his skin was terribly pale, but the shadows under his eyes and cheeks looked less severe. She could see the grey running through his dark hair more clearly, yet at the same time he seemed younger, as uncertain as a youth.

They reached the far end of the crescent and passed through a gate onto the high common. The grass was ankle-length and tussocky, drenched in dew and frost-melt, glittering in the sunshine. They walked for twenty minutes or more, climbing steadily, until the city was behind and below them, and the only sounds were the occasional bleats of sheep and piping of birds. The uneven ground was hard work for Jonathan, and he had been so long without exercise that he was panting by the time they stopped and turned to look back. The dew had soaked their feet and the hems of their clothes. Rachel’s toes were damp and numb, but she didn’t mind it at all. The blood was thumping through her veins; she felt warm, and well. They stood side by side to catch their breath, and squinted down at the tangled streets of the city, where the last shreds of mist lingered like ghosts.

‘This is as far as I have been from my rooms in nine years or more, I think,’ said Jonathan.

‘No wonder you’ve been so unhappy,’ said Rachel. Jonathan looked down at her, but said nothing. ‘I prefer to look the other way – away from the city. To look at the far horizon. Somehow it always makes problems seem smaller,’ said Rachel. Jonathan turned obediently to the west, where the River Avon shone like a discarded silver ribbon, winding through fields and trees still clad in the remnants of their autumn colours.

‘I came to Bath with my mother because I didn’t know where else to go, or what else to do. I didn’t care, because I wanted to die,’ Jonathan murmured. ‘Now it seems I will never leave.’

‘Of course you could leave, if you wanted to.’

‘And go where, and do what?’

‘Wherever you choose; whatever you choose. Take a wife, begin a family. You have that freedom; you have that choice. Don’t you see? You can do that. You need not stay trapped here, as I must.’
If I persuade him well enough he will do it, and I will see him no more.
The thought jolted her heart.
Better that, though, than him continuing in torment.

‘The rules are harsher for women than men.’ Jonathan narrowed his eyes against the light, and they were unreadable. ‘But you could still leave him, if you were strong enough to do so.’

‘And go where? And do what?’ She smiled, sadly. ‘I would be a pauper, reduced to beggary, or whoredom. I would have no employment, no society. No. I have no choice but to remain by my husband’s side.’ Whatever lightness of mood she had felt suddenly vanished, and she took a deep breath.

‘Then I will remain as well,’ he said. ‘Who else would sit and read tales of adventure and derring-do to me, a mad cripple?’ He smiled, and Rachel smiled back at him.

‘You are not mad, or crippled,’ she said.

‘Then what am I?’ he asked.

Wounded. Haunted. A killer. The person I most yearn to see.

‘You are a good man, war wounded and much troubled by the past.’

‘And you are the soul of tact and diplomacy,’ said Jonathan. ‘Do you think I can’t see the other thoughts that whisper to you behind your eyes?’

‘What do they whisper?’ she asked.
He sees me?
In response Jonathan only smiled again, took her hand and raised it to his lips, pressing a kiss into her chilly skin. Rachel felt the touch of his mouth right down to her bones, like a burn or a bruise, but sweeter. For a moment she couldn’t remember how to breathe.
Because a week or so past he might have killed me, and now he kisses me?
she wondered.
No
, said the echo,
only because he kisses you.
She suddenly thought how Starling would react to his gesture, and felt a little sick. As if he sensed this, Jonathan dropped her hand at once. He looked at her for one second more, his expression shifting, ambiguous, then he turned to the horizon again.

‘May I ask you something delicate, Mr Alleyn?’ Rachel said weakly.

‘I think you have earned the right to.’

‘What makes you so angry with your mother? I mean, long years living together under . . . difficult circumstances may well breed discord, I know, but it seems to me that there is more to it than that. That you blame her for something,’ said Rachel. Jonathan folded his arms, shielding himself. He did not break off his stare into the west.

‘Yes, I do blame her. She is the reason . . . I think. I mean, I can’t know because I know she lies, and does not tell the whole truth even when she deigns to tell me some of it. But she is the reason Alice wrote to me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Alice’s last letter to me. She wrote to me, a letter that reached me in Brighton.’

I know
. Rachel managed only in the last instant not to say this out loud.

‘She said . . . she said we had to part. That we could never be together, or marry. That it would be an
abomination.
That was the word she used. Abomination. To describe our love, that had been as strong and blameless as the sun since we were just children. She said . . . things between us could never be as they had been before. We should not meet again.’

Bridget was right
, Rachel knew in that moment.
Why else do rich and powerful men sponsor nameless young children?
And if Alice had been Lord Faukes’s child, she would have been Jonathan’s aunt.
Oh, poor girl, if she found that out.
Rachel swallowed, she shut her eyes for a second, and Abigail flickered in the far corner of her mind, ever fainter. Rachel reached for her.
Josephine could have been wrong. Perhaps Lord Faukes only adopted her. Found her, and adopted her
, she thought desperately.

‘And there was more . . . I know there was! If only I could
remember
. . .’

‘You do not have the letter still?’

‘I can hardly remember that day. I had just got back to Brighton . . . I was injured, exhausted, half mad, half starved. I can barely remember my journey back to Bathampton at all. It’s like some strange, dark dream. And when I came to myself I didn’t have the letter in my possession. I must have dropped it, or cast it away. But –
abomination.
I remember that word; I did not dream it.’ He shook his head. ‘It was the retreat back to Corunna, you see . . . from the moment we marched into Spain, it was near impossible to write, and when I did write there was nobody to take the letters. She had no word from me for weeks and weeks, so she went to Box to see if they had news,’ said Jonathan, shaking his head slowly. ‘Oh,
Alice!
Why did you do that? If only she hadn’t. She must have thought that they would welcome her – she must have thought that they’d find common ground, in their love and fear for me. She wasn’t to know that my mother – and my grandfather – had rules she couldn’t hope to know about.’

‘So your mother told her something to make her flee?’
How much has he guessed?

‘Yes. When I arrived back to find her gone, they spun me the yarn that she had run away with another, and forsaken me. Mother told me she’d left a note, to my grandfather, to explain and apologise. They said she was a disgrace, a pariah, and I was to forget her.’

‘But you didn’t believe them.’

‘When my mother lies, I can tell. She has lied all her life, and though I can’t discover the truth, still I
know
she lies.’ His voice had turned hard and angry.

Rachel thought hard, searching for sense in the conflicting tangle of all that she had heard said.

‘But you said to me, some time ago, that you’d found a note from Alice’s . . . new companion. A note for her, to arrange an assignation.’

‘Yes, I . . .’ He broke off, and frowned. ‘I’m
sure
I did. But it was . . . I was not myself in those days. I have forgotten much . . . there are stretches of time I can’t account for. Dark spaces. They are one of the things I brought back from Spain with me. Dark spaces.’ He shook his head again, and Rachel felt a chill go through her.
The first time I came to read to him, he said those words to me – dark spaces. When he could not remember throttling me.
She thought of the brain in its heavy jar, teetering above her head, and the blank, blind look in his eyes. ‘But the note has gone, if I did find it. It has gone. Perhaps I destroyed it. Perhaps I . . . never saw it. A nightmare, it might have been. Brought on by the lies my mother and my grandfather told.’