A Dark and Distant Shore (102 page)

‘Please, Theo. I would rather not.’

The muscles of his jaw tightened a little, but the glitter in his eyes didn’t fade. Instead, it became more pronounced. ‘Why not?’

She blurted out the only commonplace excuse she could think of. ‘It’s the wrong time of the month.’

At that, his slanting brows rose and his smile deepened. ‘Really? How very odd. My memory for
that
is usually infallible.’ He stood for the briefest of moments surveying her, his lower lip delicately gripped between his teeth, and then, before she realized what he was about, took three swift steps across to the bed, tore the coverlet from her fingers, grasped the neck of her night-robe in two iron hands and ripped it, in a single movement, from throat to hem.

Even as she cried out in protest and shock, he threw the gown open and scanned the length of her body.

After a moment he murmured reproachfully, ‘Really, my pet. You should have pleaded a headache, and then I might have believed you and gone away.’

‘Theo, no! Please don’t. I don’t want...’

But already he was stripping off the magnificent robe, and she closed her eyes against the still elegant figure, pale-skinned and smoothly muscled, and frighteningly aroused. ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘
Please,
no.’

Poised by the side of the bed, he said pleasantly, ‘Yes, I had the feeling you knew. Lavinia, I presume?
Dear
Lavinia. But never mind. You understand now why...’ He ran his hands lasciviously, not over her body but his own. ‘You understand now why we mustn’t waste it, must we?’

Always before, he had taken the trouble to be careful with her, but tonight she could sense the fury in him. No one, in all her life, had treated her roughly, not even in small things. Even in Lucknow, there had been a kind of impartiality in the way the Fates had scattered misery and suffering on everyone. But this violent, burning invasion of her flesh was hers alone, and that made it worse. She would have doubled up, writhing, under the hard, deliberate torment of it, if all his weight had not been upon her. She cried out on a high, gasping note, and he grinned down at her, as if hurting her gave him pleasure. Through the haze in her mind, she realized that it probably did, and that if only she could stay limp and silent she would deprive him of it, and then perhaps it would be over sooner. But the driving agony was too much for her and she screamed out again and again, ‘Stop! Oh, stop! You’re hurting me!
Stop!
’

‘Oh, no – my – pet!’ He spoke through his teeth, biting the words off to the cruel relentless rhythm that was tearing her apart. ‘You – know – how – much – Magnus – wants – another – heir.’ Then he laughed, deep in his throat. ‘Luke the Third.’

The sheer brutality of it, she realized long afterwards, achieved precisely what he wanted to achieve. A wild rage surged through her and she began to fight him, tooth and claw, throwing her slight body from side to side, tearing her head away from his, jerking her legs and knees viciously between the iron thighs that knelt astride her, ripping with sharp, manicured nails at his back and chest and the face that, laughing triumphantly, he succeeded in always twisting beyond her reach.

And all the time until, exhausted and heartbroken, she could fight no more, she could hear his excited voice gasping, ‘Excellent! Splendid! Keep it up, my dear! Superb!’ The more she fought, the more he laughed, and the more powerful and pitiless his assault became. In the end, when her head fell back on the pillow and all her rage was drained from her, she looked up into the face angled above hers and found that it was wearing the most beautiful smile she had ever seen on it.

Breathing hard, ecstatically, he whispered, ‘Don’t stop! Persevere! Persevere, my pet. Please try! Go on. For
me
!’

It was her turn to laugh, and she did so, weakly and hysterically, her body jerking convulsively as he forced himself through the last urgent strokes until his body arched, and became rigid, and he gave a single, strident groan – and then they were free of each other.

When he spoke, a few moments later, his voice was his own again, cool and ironic. ‘An improvement, without doubt. Ordinarily, my pet, you are a little docile for me, but that was a definite improvement. Almost thou persuadeth me!’ He rose, and belting the magnificent dressing-gown about him, went on solicitously, ‘You must get some rest now. I’m sure you are tired.’

He spoke only once more before he left, turning to look back from the door at where she lay, just as he had left her, in the wreck of the pretty bed. Softly, smilingly, he said, ‘It was really quite exhilarating. We must do it more often.’

She lay for a long time before she was able to drag herself up and make her painful, stumbling way towards the door, to turn the key in the lock. She didn’t know whether she would ever have the courage to unlock it again.

Magnus was ready to die, and claimed in weak and querulous tones that he wanted to die, but to part with anything that belonged to him – even, or especially, his life – was to violate the principles that had guided him for almost eighty years. He had taken to his bed, for no good reason but with an air of finality, at the end of 1861. The only difference being bedridden had made to his way of life was that it saved him the trouble of getting dressed every day.

Twice in the two years since then, he had summoned the family to his death-bed, but on the first occasion Juliana had been suffering from a bout of the fever that had attacked her at intervals ever since her return from India, and had been unable to travel. And the second time, six months ago, Shona had been prostrate after losing Drew. He had gone home from the foundry one evening, tired and tense as always, and had fallen asleep in his chair. He hadn’t woken again. For him an easy way to go, but for Shona a shock that had almost killed her, too.

Vilia herself had been more upset than she would have expected. Drew had always been the most irritating of her sons, and as soon as falling in love with Shona had given him someone else to centre his emotions on, he had grown right away from her. For more than half his life, it had hurt Vilia terribly to look at Drew and be reminded of the joy and pain that had given him birth. But now the dead past had buried its dead. All else that remained to her of that past had been extinguished on a June night in 1851 when, racked by nervous nausea after Shona’s dinner party, she had brought herself to recognize that the distant, courteous man Perry Randall had become regarded her with as little interest as she had pretended to regard him. She had been almost sick before the evening began, with her long-suppressed need for him, and then they had met as if they were the merest acquaintances. And if the spark no longer lived in him, her pride forbade that it should survive in her. She hadn’t known how much warmth that tiny, lingering spark had generated in her heart, until at last she had snuffed it out. She had heard from Shona the other day that Perry’s wife was ill, and not expected to live, but it woke no interest in her. She was far more interested in what kind of profits young Benson Randall was making out of the Civil War.

She would be sixty-eight next month, but her mind was as sharp as ever, even if her body was less reliable than it had been. Her hair was pure white now, which she didn’t mind, but her once flawless skin was marked with innumerable tiny lines, which she minded very much. Even so, the only thing that made her feel her age was the funerals of so many people who were younger than she was. There had been Drew, of course; and Peter Barber, who had died at fifty-three; and Edward Blair’s saintly wife Harriet, just a few weeks after Drew. She had been fifty-seven. Vilia supposed that Sara Randall couldn’t be much more than fifty.

It seemed unjust that Magnus, who had never done a hand’s turn in his life, should be allowed to potter on until he was almost eighty. Fat, over-fed, over-lubricated, bone idle, he should have succumbed to his weaknesses years ago. But, Vilia thought sardonically, this time he might really go, when he had the audience he craved; most of the family was due to arrive in the next few days. Trust Magnus to be as stubborn and crotchety about dying as he had been about living. Well, he kept saying, as he had been saying off and on for five years now, they would all find out soon enough what he had ultimately decided to do about Kinveil.

It was his secret, to be clasped to his bosom with childish glee, but Vilia had a shrewd idea of the dispositions. In fact, if Ian and Isa Barber, after five girls in a row, hadn’t at last succeeded in producing a son a few months ago, she would have been moderately satisfied. As far as she could tell, Magnus had, typically, wriggled out of making a final decision by leaving Kinveil to Vilia herself for her lifetime, though probably with a whole law book of provisos. When she died – which she didn’t intend to do for another thirty years at least – he wanted it to go to a son of Juliana and Theo, or, failing such, to Ian Barber or his male heirs. If by any chance Vilia outlived them, Jermyn’s male heirs were next in line; not Jermyn himself, whom Magnus had never forgiven for blowing the roof off the Kitchen Block all those years ago. Jermyn had only one child so far, a daughter Drusilla, but there was another on the way. If the worst came to the worst, the only other possible legatee now that Guy Savarin was dead was young Peregrine James, that infuriating young man who, despite his strong physical resemblance to Perry Randall, seemed to Vilia to be more of a Cameron than any of them.

Voicing her thoughts to Sorley, striding along behind her by the side of the loch, she said, ‘Who does Peregrine James remind you of?’

He took a moment to answer, because he didn’t think she meant the formidable gentleman who had wafted in and out of her life like some fallen angel, giving her love for an hour and pain for an aeon. ‘Och, he reminds me of Himself, for sure. He iss chust like the old laird, chust like your father.’

‘He is, isn’t he?’ Just like the cool, self-centred, cosmopolitan gentleman who, by selling Kinveil to Mungo Telfer, had shaped the whole pattern of his daughter’s life. It was more than fifty years since he had died, but Vilia still had not forgiven him.

‘If only it weren’t for the Barbers,’ she murmured. Ian himself, and the baby John Stuart, christened after John Stuart Mill, the philosopher. Such commonplace names. Vilia had already decided that she, at least, would call the child Jay. If it weren’t for the Barbers, there would be Cameron blood in the veins of all the potential heirs to Kinveil. It was a thought that, increasingly, had come to obsess her.

There should have been no doubt. What, she wondered, had gone wrong between Theo and Juliana, that five years of marriage hadn’t even produced the beginning of a pregnancy? Theo was in excellent physical condition, and Vilia had warned him to make sure that Juliana wasn’t taking precautions; one never could tell, and she had been tiresomely introverted since her return from India. Sometimes Vilia wished that Gideon had been sensible enough to escort the girl home instead of vanishing back into the Indian heartland and, afterwards, to China. He might have made a better husband for her. No one had ever expressed any doubts about
his
virility, and he had already fathered one child. As always when she thought of Lizzie, Vilia’s mind sheered off again.

It was too late now, in any case, though why Gideon should have chosen to marry another American, Vilia failed to understand. Miss Amy Stevenson wasn’t a day under thirty, and to judge from the inscrutable Chinese portrait Gideon had sent home, no beauty, either. She was the daughter of a Boston family that had been in the China trade for many years, first at Canton and then at Shanghai, and although Gideon had been typically uncommunicative, it seemed he had been instrumental in saving her from some dreadful fate or other when the Taiping rebels had menaced the outskirts of Shanghai early last year. It hardly seemed a good enough reason for marrying her, but Vilia supposed it could have been worse; she could have been, not a merchant’s daughter, but a missionary’s. And there were quite enough sanctimonious people in the family already.

Kinveil was still full of family six weeks later, for Magnus, even yet, was taking an unconscionable time a-dying.

Glancing round the dinner table, Theo inquired suavely, ‘Is it possible that anyone has any real idea
why
we are all here, like a gathering of vultures? I can’t recall, offhand, any other instance of the prey insisting on the presence of the scavengers.’

It was hardly in the best of taste, but only Shona and Jermyn’s wife, Bella, showed any inclination to cavil. Even the saintly Ian’s patience was wearing thin. ‘While I would not resort quite to such terms, I confess to thinking that it was somewhat ill-judged of Great-uncle Magnus to invite us, especially in words which no person of reasonable sensitivity could decently refuse.’

‘Quite!’ responded Theo fulsomely, earning a reproving glance from his mother. ‘I do so agree. I found that part about wishing to see me once more before he dies excessively touching. Who would have thought that Magnus, of all people, would be anxious to have all his family around him in his final hours! Well,
almost
all.’ He turned towards Gaby Savarin, amber-haired, liquid-eyed, and in maturity even more seductive than she had been at twenty-two. ‘We have all had too much delicacy to ask, Gaby dear. Your respected parents? And your even more respected husband?’

She smiled limpidly at him. ‘
Ma mère
enjoys indifferent health, and it is
necessaire
that my father remains with her. My husband, M. le comte, was desolated to have engagements that it was not possible for him to break.’

‘Alas! But so vairy interrr-resting that Magnus invited them!’

Gaby said nothing, although her gaze on him was heavy as sour cream. It dawned on Juliana for the first time that Gaby, indolent though she was, disliked Theo very much.

His decadent hazel eyes turned towards Vilia. ‘Should I ask? Dear Mama, tell us. Was Lavinia invited?’

Vilia said, ‘No. And I think that will do, Theo.’