The Misbegotten (51 page)

The Pump Room was so warm that the flecks of sleet on Rachel’s clothes melted at once, and soaked through. She was so distracted that she hardly noticed. The long, elegant room was crowded with people, walking and sitting and sipping at their beakers of hot water. It was the same water that filled the hot baths; steaming, raw from the earth and smelling faintly of eggs. There was a crush of wheeled chairs by the doors, as invalids were brought in for their dose. Rachel paced a circuit of the crowded room until she saw Harriet Sutton with a cup in her hand, talking to a group of middle-aged women. Rachel cut through the throng to reach her side.

‘Ah, Mrs Weekes! How lovely that you could join us. Let me introduce you to our little circle of health-seekers.’ Harriet took her hand, smiling as she introduced her friends. Rachel chafed with impatience as her manners kept her there, curtsying and exchanging pleasantries, until sufficient time had passed that she could draw Harriet to one side. The tiny woman took a sip of her water and grimaced. ‘Do you know, I am quite convinced that drinking this must be truly beneficial, though I’ve never noticed any particular effects, one way or the other, for why else would we be counselled to drink something that tastes so peculiar?’

‘I do not know, Mrs Sutton. I wanted to ask you, if I may, about . . . about the time Mr Alleyn left Brighton for Bathampton. When he received Alice’s letter. You told me that your husband was with him, as he read it?’

‘Yes, he was.’ Harriet’s face turned grave. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Weekes? You seem . . . anxious.’

‘Forgive me.’
There are dark spaces in his memory.
Of all the things Jonathan had said to her, it was these two words that troubled her the most.
Dark spaces.
‘I feel that I am . . . I’m perhaps close to finding out what became of Alice Beckwith. And I need to know . . . I
need
to know whether she is alive or dead.’

‘Alive or dead?’ Harriet breathed. ‘But what is this? What are you suggesting?’

‘I can’t explain here . . . but I will soon, I promise. I—’

‘You can’t mean that Jonathan did her harm?’

‘I know you think him incapable of it, but he has told me himself of the terrible things he saw and did in Spain and Portugal, and that his memories of the return to Brighton and then to Bathampton are . . . unreliable.’
Dark spaces, in which dark things might have happened.
Harriet was looking at her strangely, with something almost like fear, or a warning. ‘Your husband was with him when he got the letter, and when he set off. I wanted to ask . . . was he violent? When he read the letter, did he fly into a rage?’

Harriet looked around uneasily, as if fearing to be overheard.

‘When he read the letter, he wept,’ she said. Rachel shut her eyes for a moment, as relief swept through her. ‘But in a man grief and violence often go hand in hand.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel, softly.
And if he killed her, my sister? If he killed her I won’t ever be able to forgive him.
‘He speaks of trying to make it right. Of atoning.’

‘Listen to me, Mrs Weekes. Jonathan Alleyn is a good man. I live with the proof of it, every day. I’m sorry to make such a statement and not explain myself fully, but there are things that happened at war, with my husband and Mr Alleyn, that I have been sworn never to speak about. He is a good man, and there was nothing in that letter that should have made him attack the girl . . .’

‘You saw the letter?’ Rachel interrupted, confused.

‘Yes, I—’ Her friend broke off, and looked down at her hands. ‘I have it still.’

‘You have the last letter that Alice wrote to Jonathan? How is this?’

‘He dropped it, after he read it. It was left on the floor as he rushed at once to catch the mail coach west. My husband was perplexed as to what could have caused such a reaction. He picked the letter up, meaning to return it to Mr Alleyn when he returned. But Mr Alleyn didn’t re-join the regiment for a good long while, and what with everything that happened with the girl’s elopement, my husband thought it better to . . .’

‘To keep it from him?’

‘He didn’t wish to deepen a wound so fresh and painful. Jonathan Alleyn was ever one to brood and . . . lose himself in thought. My husband thought that if he had the letter to pore over, it might only serve to torment him. I said that if he didn’t mean to return it, he ought to destroy it, but he said that the right time might come to return it to him.’ Harriet frowned guiltily. ‘There was nothing in it to make him violent . . .’ she whispered. ‘Only to make him grieve.’

‘Will you give it to me, to take back to him?’ said Rachel, gravely.
In a man grief and violence often go hand in hand . . . is that what hides in the dark spaces?
The thought made her stomach turn over, and for a second she thought she might be sick. She clamped her teeth together as Harriet nodded unhappily.

They walked back to the Suttons’ apartment, and Harriet fetched the letter from a small drawer in her bureau. She hesitated as she held it out to Rachel, who felt a shiver of anticipation when she saw the small square of folded paper.

‘You do understand, don’t you? Why my husband never returned this note?’ said Harriet. Her eyes were wide in a worried face.

‘His intentions were good. But the time has come to lay the matter to rest,’ said Rachel. Harriet nodded.

‘Stay a while if you want. You must want to read it,’ she said. Rachel looked up guiltily, and Harriet gave her a gently knowing look. ‘I think that you, too, have the best of intentions. And far easier to read it here than out in the cold wind.’ Rachel took the letter, sat down on the very edge of an armchair, and opened it.

When she left the Suttons’ apartment minutes later, Rachel went straight to Duncan Weekes’s rooms, but found them empty. The letter was in her pocket and her hand kept straying to touch the paper through the fabric, to check its safety. Her mind was clamouring as her rapid pace carried her through the city. Sleet fell from a collapsed sky, stinging in her eyes and forming small, wet drifts in the gutters. She felt as though she must hurry, must race to save Alice, though what had been done to her, or what she herself had done, was long past, and couldn’t be changed. Her father-in-law’s name was in the letter, and the suggestion that he knew more than he had ever said, so her path led, inevitably, to the Moor’s Head. Rachel peered in through the window. The rippled glass deformed the faces of the inn’s patrons, but since she saw no sign of her husband she steeled herself and went inside.

The transgression made her feel naked; eyes turned towards her, blatant and speculative. Keeping her face down, Rachel went to the bar where Sadie, whom she recognised from her wedding day, was leaning on her elbows, looking bored.

‘I’m looking for Mr Duncan Weekes,’ she said to the girl.

‘He’s over there.’ Sadie hooked her thumb towards the far corner of the room. ‘But I doubt you’ll get much sense from him. He’s proper swallowed a hare this afternoon.’

‘He’s what?’

‘He’s mauled. He’s
drunk
. Been snoozing at his table these three hours gone,’ said Sadie. Rachel followed her gesture to the back of the inn, where her father-in-law was resting his head on the table, a pewter beaker knocked over beside him and a puddle of spirits creeping close to his scalp. In spite of all the noise, Rachel heard the wet rattling in his chest as she sat down beside him. She shook his arm gently.

‘Mr Weekes? Father? Wake up, please.’ The old man mumbled something and slowly raised his head. His eyes were bloody and exhausted. When he saw her, he did not smile. If anything, his face turned even sadder. ‘How are you, Mr Weekes?’ Rachel asked, pointlessly.

‘I cannot seem to find my feet today,’ he croaked, and Rachel fought not to recoil from the stink of his breath.
That is not debauchery but the taint of decay. He must be seen by a doctor
. With a pang of anxiety she realised that he wasn’t drunk at all, only weakened by illness, and unable to rise.

‘I need to ask you something, sir. I have Alice Beckwith’s last letter to Jonathan Alleyn. She says . . . she says you told her the truth about his family, and about Lord Faukes. She says that you told her what they feared to, and that she was an abomination. Mr Weekes? Are you listening?’

‘They all have his blood,’ Duncan mumbled. His expression was haunted.

‘You mean that . . . Alice was Lord Faukes’s child? Is that what you told her?’

‘Not just his, not just his. Don’t you see? I saw them. I . . .
saw
them.’ Duncan wiped his mouth with a hand that trembled. He shook his head, bewildered. ‘What letter have you, my dear? She wasn’t to send any letters. I heard them say so. Any letter she wrote was to be intercepted, and not sent.’

‘Intercepted by who?’

‘Whoever she handed it to.’ He shrugged, and shook his head again. ‘That poor girl. That poor, poor girl. I should never have told her. It was the grog, my dear; the grog is the very devil.’

‘So her other letters were delivered to Lord Faukes instead? She writes in this one . . .’ Rachel drew the paper from her pocket. ‘She writes that she has sent many letters, and is desperate to hear from him.’

‘All went to Box. They can’t have known of that one you have there, I’m sure of it.’

‘Mr Weekes.’ Rachel gripped both of his hands in hers; stared into his eyes. ‘Please tell me what you told Alice. Tell me what you saw.’

Duncan Weekes picked up his fallen cup and peered into it, with little hope or expectation.

‘I never told my boy. Perhaps that was a kindness, in all this rotten cruelty. He loved her, you see.’

‘Richard? Loved who?’

‘He loved Josephine Alleyn. With all the fire and fury with which a young man falls in love.’ Rachel froze. She thought of the tremor that had run through Richard when he’d introduced her to Jonathan’s mother, and his long, deep bow.
He loves her still
.

‘But . . . she is twenty years his senior!’

‘What matters that? She was beautiful, noble, refined. The most beautiful lady, and he was enslaved by her. He’d have done anything she asked of him. That’s why he was so incensed when we were laid off. He had the blue devils for months after. So I never told him what went on in that house. That was a kindness, was it not?’ Duncan gave her an imploring look but Rachel was too shocked to respond. She waited for what he would say next, and when all that came was silence, she swallowed.

‘I . . . I must hear it, Mr Weekes,’ she said.

Duncan Weekes tried to clear his throat but ended up coughing, and it made him wince.

‘You must by now have heard something of Lord Faukes, from the Alleyns?’ he said.

‘Fine words from them, and . . . a differing account from Starling.’

‘Who is Starling?’

‘A servant in that house,’ said Rachel. Duncan nodded.

‘Aye, she’d have fewer fine words about him, I don’t doubt it. Poor wench.’ He spoke slowly, heavily. ‘The serving girls at Faukes’s house in Box all knew to keep out of his way. From his wife’s lady’s maid, while that lady yet lived, to the lowliest pot-washing scullion. If they were young, and comely, they knew their time would come. And the more comely they were – and the younger they were – the more careful they had to be. But all the care in the world could not protect them at all times, for ever. If the master sent for them, or came down to their quarters, they could not deny him.’ Duncan Weekes swallowed with an effort, and his face wore disgust. ‘Indeed, denying him only seemed to increase his enjoyment of them. Some of them came to accept it, and stayed on. The master was generous with wages, and time off in the year; more generous than other lordly folk about. So the girls weighed it up, and some found that it was worth suffering his occasional assaults. Others had no such fortitude.’

Duncan’s own sister urged him to put in a word with the house steward, and beg a place in the household for the daughter of a cousin of hers. Duncan put her off as long as he could, but his sister was a shrewish woman, with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, and she would not be fobbed off for long. So Duncan tried to quash his misgivings, and spoke to the steward. The girl was taken on as second still-room maid, and the day she arrived Duncan’s heart sank at the sight of her. She was a tiny thing, not more than thirteen, skinny and dark but with enormous green eyes that lit up her face; glassy, empty and afraid.
Oh, why were you not fat and hairy and sour of breath?
Duncan thought. He told the girl, whose name was Dolores – told her twice, three times – to keep herself out of the master’s eye. But Lord Faukes came down to see what new gift had been brought for him, and smiled delightedly when he saw.

Duncan dogged the girl’s steps as much as he could. He had vague ideas about protecting her, at least until she was a little older, but when the time came, of course, he could do nothing at all. Her terrified cries echoed through the lower halls of the house. Duncan could only sit and listen, and drink. So drink he did. So much, that night, that when Dolores stumbled out into the darkness, with bloodied lips and bruises on her neck, and wandered off towards her old home, he couldn’t even get to his feet to follow her. He asked his sister, later, if the girl had made it back to her mother, but received only the hardest glare of her hard eye in answer. Dolores was not seen at the house in Box again.

One girl named Sue, pug-nosed and pugnacious, sussed the lie of the land immediately – she had the clever, calculating look of a girl who knew too much of the world. After Lord Faukes’s first two tumbles with her she called herself his mistress, and sought to elevate herself to the upper serving positions. She went with him willingly, flipping her skirts and flirting like a doxy; calling him
Lord Gundiguts
to the other servants. The cook called her a buttock, but Sue was unrepentant. It availed her not at all, however, since Lord Faukes liked to take, not be given. She was dismissed when her belly began to swell, and Duncan saw her one last time, scowling on the back step with a screaming babe on her hip, as the steward handed over a few coins for the child. There were other bastards as well – born to tavern wenches, servants and farmers’ daughters. People of no import. They were sent away with money, if they were lucky, and still comely; sent away with curses and warnings if they were not. Only one misbegotten child was lavished with all of Lord Faukes’s love and care. Only one.