Black Rabbit Hall (25 page)

‘Ah, that’s its charm. It’s quite perfect on you. No wonder you’re attracting such attention from all these bad-mannered brutes. You’re quite the belle of the ball,
darling.’ She raises one eyebrow, glances over at Caroline. ‘I’m surprised Caroline didn’t make you wear sackcloth quite frankly.’

‘She’s barely acknowledged me. I don’t think she’s even noticed I’m here.’

‘She’s noticed you, my darling. Be assured of that.’

‘I can’t bear her, Grandma,’ I say, feeling it fiercely. ‘I just can’t.’

At that moment Caroline looks at us, perhaps sensing we’re discussing her, and her gaze hardens.

Grandma waves cheerfully, speaks to me from the side of her mouth. ‘I suspect the new Mrs Alton is one of those women who needs to feel well liked before she becomes likeable, my dear Amber. It is down to us to ignite such a process, however testing.’

‘Well, I can’t. And I don’t think Daddy loves her either.’

‘In situations such as this, my darling, we must all find ways of getting on with one another, even if that means dampening our own judgement for the greater good.’ She lifts her glass to her lips, mutters beneath its rim, ‘Good gracious, I fear Caroline intends to honour us with her company. If you want to scoot, I suggest you do it right now and pretend you haven’t noticed her intentions.’

I slide along the wall, dash out of the room, and find Barney and Kitty in the hall, fists full of sugared almonds. I have to push the exhausted pair up the stairs, hands on their bottoms. On the landing I look down at the boiling sea of people below and vow not to return until every last one of them has left.

In the nursery Kitty starts to sob because she’s ripped her bridesmaid’s dress and Peggy’s cap makes her look not
like Peggy. Barney confesses he drank half a glass of champagne and feels a bit peculiar and could I please carry him into bed? I make him drink three glasses of water and settle them both to sleep.

As I swish his curtains shut, the sound of fevered clapping rises from the drive, then the rattle of tins on gravel as a car zooms away. Well, she’s gone at least. And tomorrow the guests will also be gone and the house will be ours again, I think, trying to lift my spirits. I must tell Toby the same thing. I must find him, check he’s okay.

Toby is not in his bedroom. The window is gaping open and there is a black puddle in the middle of the floor – the moon gleaming in its centre like a glass eye – where the rain has been lashing in. I lean right out of the window to check he’s not scrambling down the ivy. He’s been known to do this to avoid company.

‘Amber?’

I cannot move. My stomach flips.

‘Everything okay?’

Slowly, I turn to face Lucian. The room suddenly feels impossibly small and charged, full of things we cannot say, our mutual embarrassment electric. I don’t know where to look either.

‘I’m … trying to find Toby,’ I stutter. My mouth is dry, my heart beating so fast now that I’m sure he must be able to see it pumping beneath the silk of my dress. ‘He’s gone.’

‘I can’t blame him if he’s bolted.’ Lucian walks across the room, shuts the window. He has taken off his tails and I can see the blades of his shoulders beneath his shirt. ‘My mother’s set are boring when sober and beastly after a drink, I’m afraid.’

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

He laughs then, and some kind of understanding sparks between us. Music drifts up from downstairs, the rise and fall of voices. It feels another world away, the distance between it and us completely unbridgeable. His hand reaches to flip away his floppy fringe but it isn’t there because it’s all slicked back, making his handsome face seem more open and strangely vulnerable. ‘May I help you look for Toby?’

For some reason it feels like he’s asking something else, so I nod, feeling that he could ask me anything and I would only ever be able to say yes.

He holds open Toby’s door. ‘After you.’

The petticoats under the skirt of my dress rustle against his leg like sheets. I feel that tug deep inside. The same desperate tug I’d felt when he kissed me at the bottom of the drive. How can I feel this about a stepbrother? How is it right?

It may not be right. But it is. And this, I tell myself firmly, is how it will stay, a bud, never a full flower.

‘Up?’ he asks, stealing a glance at me.

I blush and nod, rather than suggesting we start outside, where Toby is most likely to be: I no longer care what Toby is doing.

On the topmost landing, I wipe away a circle of condensation from the window, then peer out into the night.

‘See anything?’ he asks.

‘Not much.’ The rain has stopped. The party is moving outside again, a flurry of hurricane lamps darting like fireflies on the lawns. But it is far too dark to see anything beyond the edge of the woods, black and dripping,
where Toby, no doubt, is curled in his tree house – he has slept there twice this week already – to return at dawn to doze on the end of my bed like a dog, damp, muddy, with twigs in his hair and, when he wakes, strange lights in his eyes.

Lucian slides back the heavy lock and pushes the window up. There’s a metallic smell of rain on leading. ‘Can you hear something?’ he asks.

‘Voices in the garden, I think. Sound sort of bounces along the roof. Things get distorted up here.’

‘Really? That’s the roof?’ He pushes his head eagerly through the open window into the night. ‘Possible to get out there?’

‘Kind of,’ I say hesitantly. I’ve never much liked this bit of the roof. Daddy goes up there sometimes to try to fix things, check chimneys for nests, but Momma banned us from going anywhere near it. She was always terrified of Barney finding his way out there and falling off.

‘Oh, come on. I’ve never been on the roof of any house before.’ He offers a hand to pull me up after him, smiles. ‘I promise not to jump if you won’t.’

I take his hand, our palms sparking as they touch.

The dim landing light spills across the lead only a few feet, but far enough for us to see the short, chunky battlements. We step towards them gingerly. The wind sucks my dress to my legs. The sky is bright now, stitched with stars. And I feel alive, more alive than I’ve ever felt, like I’m going to burst out of my own skin.

Lucian’s leg is about ten inches away from mine.

‘I did my best to talk Ma out of the marriage,’ he says quietly.

I steal a glance through my whirling, night-tangled hair. We are standing closer now, although I wasn’t aware of either of us moving. The awkwardness between us in Toby’s room has become something else.

‘She’s never been particularly interested in my opinion unfortunately.’

I feel a little sorry for him. Momma always made me feel that my opinions mattered.

‘You don’t get to choose your parents, do you?’

‘No. No, you don’t.’ I’m struck with my own sheer luck in getting my mother out of all the millions of potential mothers in the world. I lost her. But I’d
had
her too. This has never occurred to me before.

‘Ma wants me to rule the world, all that nonsense.’

‘Daddy hoped Toby might rule the world once. I’m not sure he dares hope now.’

‘Ah, Toby, Lord of Misrule,’ says Lucian, not unkindly, making it sound like a compliment.

‘What about your father?’ I ask, emboldened by the furry lateness of the hour, the strangeness of being up on the roof on such a charged night. Up here, it seems, we can ask each other anything, anything we want, but the moment we descend back into the house, all the old rules will apply and we’ll be back to talking about the weather and asking the other if they would be so kind as to pass the bramble jelly and pretending to be brother and sister. Also, I sense that Lucian quite likes blunt questioning.

‘Father? He was a good man.’ He is silent for a moment and when he speaks there is a crackle in his voice. ‘I still miss him. It’s been years. Stupid, isn’t it?’

I shake my head, afraid that if I speak my voice will
crack, too, or, worse, I’ll cry. And I absolutely hate it when people cry on my behalf, as if what happened to me happened to them when it didn’t.

‘He was seventy-three,’ he says, as if trying to remind himself. ‘So he had a fair innings.’ He is silent for a moment. ‘I’m aware that your mother didn’t.’

‘Forty is pretty old.’

‘Just not old enough.’

‘No. But she was happy, really happy. Whenever I think of my mother she’s smiling. She had a gap between her teeth. You could stick a match end in it.’ Talking about her doesn’t feel stretchy or awkward as it normally does. Oddly, she comes alive again in the retelling to Lucian. ‘I’m not sure if it’s better to die happy, or worse because more is lost.’

He considers this. ‘I think it makes it better.’

‘She was beautiful too,’ I say, unable to keep the pride from my voice.

‘I know. I’ve seen her portrait in the hall.’

I start to grin at the craziness of the night. I can feel the ridge of his shoe against my pump.

‘You look just like her,’ he whispers, in a voice so soft I can’t be quite certain he’s said it.

We stand there, buffeted by wind and feelings, bats dancing figures of eight around the battlements.

The band starts a new song. The wind carries some notes up high, swallows others. Inside my body, things are happening too, a strange kind of music all its own.

‘Look, I’m sorry about the kiss. If I’d known that they’d marry …’ His words trail off in a fug of embarrassment. ‘But we mustn’t let it … ruin this … our friendship.’

A loud bang, like a gunshot, splitting the sky. I jump,
clench my teeth. Another. Louder. I hear it in every cell of my body. Feel it. See it. Blood splattered across the stable floor. Brains. A shattered skull in a black velvet box. I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling sick and faint, that terrible night rushing up.

‘Amber, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ I mutter, trying desperately hard not to make a scene, braced against the next shot, which comes loud, louder. I see the fingers bouncing from the jolt of the gun. Squeeze my eyes tighter shut.

‘It’s nothing to be frightened of. Fireworks. Really. Trust me. Look.’

So I do trust him and I do look.

Skipping ropes of fairy lights twist in the sky, over and over, before dissolving into a stream of silver. Bang. Bang. Bang. I flinch each time but Lucian’s arm is around my shoulders and this makes it bearable. I press closer, my body remembering the fit of him, the smell of him, and all these sensations make the dreadful wrongness, the reasons, the rules for me not loving him completely irrelevant. There is no one I’d rather be with here on the roof. No one with whom I feel so myself. In hushed voices, our warm mouths close to each other’s ears, we marvel at the bats, that a man might soon step on to that white pimpled moon, that we are on a roof high above the world. After a while the fireworks become quieter, less like gunfire than applause, clapping from high in the gods, and the space closes between us completely – that last inch – and we kiss and kiss as if we might get inside one another’s skin and the sky shatters gold through the gaps between my eyelashes. His mouth drops to my neck. Whispering my name over and over.

‘Amber! Amber!’ Toby’s eyes are glassy and pink. His hand wobbles my shoulder roughly. ‘Wake up!’

I groan, pull my blanket up to my chin. ‘What is it?’

‘Has something happened with Lucian? Give me the word and I’ll thump the living daylights out of him.’

‘What? What are you talking about? Go away. I’m asleep.’

‘You’re not hurt? Nothing’s happened?’

‘For God’s sake, Toby!’

He sinks down in my velvet bedroom chair, face in his hands, one knee juddering urgently, like he needs the loo.

I feel his eyes on me as I roll on to my side and face the wallpaper, heart scudding. I think, He knows, deep down, in the animal bit that doesn’t need to be told stuff.

‘Sorry. I … I couldn’t sleep, you see. I got it into my head that something had happened. That you needed protecting.’

‘Go back to sleep.’

Secrets are thrilling but deceit is horrible. It’s been ten days since the wedding. I want more than anything to be able to be honest with Toby. But I can’t think how this is possible. I can’t really think at all. I feel less like a human being than an iridescent bubble flying across a summer sky. Less a sister. Less a child. Less of everything I was and yet somehow more myself than ever.

In Daddy’s and Caroline’s honeymoon absence, Black Rabbit Hall has become epic, ungoverned, ours. Peggy is too exhausted to object to anything much, leaving Annie to keep a lazy eye on Kitty and Barney, the rest of us to swim and amble, picnic on pasties, strawberries and broad beans eaten raw from the pod, while Lucian and I shoot secret smiles, wondering when we can next be alone. Usually we don’t have to wait long: Toby has been hammering new ‘cells’ – higher floors – with sole-tingling drops, to his tree house, the ambition of his plans ever more fevered in the summer heat.

He was in the tree the night of the wedding, of course.

Toby’s bedroom was empty at dawn. I’d left Lucian not long before but couldn’t sleep a wink, so I’d walked into the woods to find Toby, cool dawn singing through my fingers, passing a pair of satin knickers stuck on a hydrangea bush and a fat man beached on the lawn, champagne bottle still in his hand. It seemed to take forever to get to the tree house, and I was glad of that, as if time, like water, could wash away any incriminating traces of the kisses. Finally, I spotted Toby’s dirty bare foot through the trees, dangling in mid-air, his straggly red hair poking through the gap in the planks, like a giant bird in a nest. I was about to call out to him and bring him back to the house. But I lost my nerve – fearing he’d see my swollen lips and guess – and crept away soundlessly on the carpet of fallen beech nuts, leaving him to sleep peacefully among the knives and guns and stolen beer. As I retreated, I vowed that I would never kiss Lucian again. The risks were far too high.

A few hours later Lucian and I were kissing again, more urgently, knowing it to be wrong but quite unable to stop.

We kiss whenever we can now. On the cliff ledge. In the tall fluffy grasses at the back of the field, hidden by the stamping cows’ hoofs. Beneath the surface of the river, slippy limbs entwined. And in the wardrobe, our favourite place, where we whisper furtively about everything that matters – music, books, why it’s impossible not to giggle at funerals – and lick the salt off each other’s swimmer’s skin, peeling ourselves back, discovering each other inch by inch.

We did it there.

The first time the fierce burn of pain made me cry out. But now, after further fumbling and practice, I let out different cries, strange sounds that I have to stifle in the furs, the sounds of my body melting and opening, revelatory as a strange new planet. I know that it’s against the rules – although no one but Annabel, Matilda’s sister, has ever fully explained what ‘it’ is – but as far as I’m concerned, the rules broke the day Momma fell off her horse. Besides, I don’t feel dirty or used, any of those things that girls are meant to feel. I feel … worshipped. Adored. Connected to the world again, no longer floating numbly in the cold black place beneath it. And, despite the danger of being caught, safe for the first time in months.

We are careful. Lucian always pulls out of me, just in time. And I’ve been bathing twice a day so that Toby won’t smell it on me, the sweat, the sweetness, the betrayal. If Toby is in the room, I try not to look in Lucian’s direction, and sit as far away from him as possible, or the urge for us to touch – a soft tap of the knee, a brush of the foot – is irresistible.

Yet I find myself thoughtlessly saying his name under
my breath. And it still feels as if Lucian is spread inside me like a colour. Which leads to the problem. The bigger problem, much harder to hide.

It is this: I am stupidly, shockingly happy. More than anything else, I worry that this will be the thing that gives me away. There is so much to be unhappy about – Daddy duped by Caroline, Momma’s bones picked clean in the soil, the stupidity of loving
anyone
if you don’t have to, when people die so easily – and yet … It’s like watching the knife cut, seeing the blood and not feeling a thing.