A Dark and Distant Shore (22 page)

In a small, detached corner of her mind she remembered that she hadn’t told the Telfers Andrew was leaving tomorrow, which made it easier. But nothing in the whole wide world would have stopped her from finding an excuse for seeing Perry Randall again. She said, ‘I’m sure he would be happy to be of help. But you mustn’t delay more than a day or two, for he expects to be ordered to Brussels very soon now.’

There was a surge of movement among the spectators, and he was caught in the current making for the nearest gap in the rail. Just before he was swallowed up by the crowd, he called back, laughing, to Lucy, ‘Pray give my compliments to young Luke, Mrs Telfer!’

‘Really, Vilia!’ Magnus began, and then stopped. One didn’t, after all, broadcast one’s sister’s misfortunes to all and sundry, not even to someone as close to the family as Vilia. She would find out soon enough, he thought gloomily; Lucy would tell her if no one else did. But it was all damnably unfortunate. He felt a renewed surge of irritation. He couldn’t conceive what the girl was about, inviting that fellow to her house. ‘I don’t imagine Lauriston will thank you for wishing that ramshackle fellow on him!’ he resumed, a touch sourly. ‘You should have sent him about his business. No bread-and-butter of yours if he’s worried about his shares!’

Vilia was searching in her reticule, her face invisible. ‘Lucy, do
you
have the betting vouchers? Oh, no. I have mine here after all.’ Her expression when she raised her head again was perfectly innocent, though she could scarcely believe that Magnus couldn’t hear the anthems resounding in her heart. ‘I’m sure you are right, Magnus. But how could I be so uncivil to your sister’s husband? His request was perfectly unexceptionable!’

Lucy came to her aid. ‘Of course it was, Magnus. At home, one always has the servants to turn people away, but it is not so easy to do it oneself. Besides, Vilia, if he does call and you would prefer not to receive him, you have only to tell your butler to say you are not at home!’

Vilia laughed, as if she hadn’t quite enough breath to laugh with, and then said quizzically, ‘Such genius, Lucy! I should
never
have thought of that!’

Magnus, outmanoeuvred, abandoned the subject. ‘Well, well!’ he said with unaccustomed vigour. ‘That’s the Gold Cup over. We’ve seen what we came for. No point in staying longer, do you think, and if we leave now we’ll miss the rush.’

As the smart barouche picked its careful way through the throng, its occupants caught one more glimpse of Perry Randall, standing by the entrance to a tent marked ‘EO’.

‘EO?’ Lucy asked.

Her husband, directing a glassy stare in the opposite direction, said, ‘A kind of roulette. Gambling – what else! Just as one would expect. It’s all of a piece, all of a piece!’

When the carriage deposited Vilia at Half Moon Street soon after seven o’clock, Blackwood, the butler, informed her that the major had not yet returned. He was still not back when, having visited the nursery, washed, and changed, she descended to the little parlour by the dining-room. At nine o’clock, she emerged from her dreams long enough to decide that it was unfair to ask Mrs Blackwood, the housekeeper, to put supper back again, and sat down to dine in solitary state and with no consciousness at all of what she was eating. Then she went back to the parlour and picked up a book.

It was eleven before she heard the bustle that meant Andrew had come in, and another ten minutes before Sorley appeared with a tray of decanters and glasses. ‘The major iss gone to tidy himself, Mistress,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘He says will I tell you he will be choining you in a few moments.’ She looked at him blankly. Andrew always came straight to her the moment he entered the front door, however tired or dusty he was. Sorley sighed and shook his head a little. ‘Aye,’ he said, and then turned like a good footman and left.

She recognized the warning, but didn’t take it very seriously until Andrew walked into the room soon after. Then, the sympathetic smile died on her lips at the sight of him, clean, controlled, and hostile. In her own elation, she had almost forgotten how resentful he had been that morning, and it seemed the day had done nothing to soften his mood. Indeed, his ‘Good evening’, spoken in the tone he might have used to some distant acquaintance, was like a douche of ice water.

He poured himself a glass of brandy and then crossed to the table that held the latest periodicals. ‘I hope you had a pleasant day?’ he said.

Through all the hours of that same, interminable day, while he had been receiving his final orders at the Horse Guards, making arrangements for the journey, instructing his servant as to what should be packed, he had been unable to banish Vilia’s disloyalty from his mind. Always before, when he had been disturbed by her contempt for convention, her levity, her occasional dismissiveness, he had succumbed to the first glimmer of her smile. He knew it was weak of him. He knew his father was right when he wrote, as he frequently did, that ‘the girl’ needed to be ridden on a tight rein. But he loved her too much. And that, perhaps, was why it was different this time, why her carelessness, her selfishness – for he saw it as nothing less – had hurt him so. Tomorrow, he might be leaving to go to his death, for if it came to a battle between Wellington and Boney, he, Andrew, would be in the thick of it. Yet she had gone gaily off to Ascot as if it were all a matter of no consequence. For the first time, he had found himself wondering whether she loved him at all. But she
must
love him. She was his wife.

‘Very pleasant, thank you. The Telfers sent you their kindness, and were sorry you couldn’t join us.’

‘Were they?’ Unseeing, he flipped over the pages of the
St James’s Chronicle.
‘Didn’t they think it strange that you should have chosen to go with them to the races, instead of staying here in case I needed you?’

She sighed heavily. ‘Oh, Andrew! Surely you can’t still be brooding about that? Be honest – did you or didn’t you go out immediately after I did this morning? And did you or didn’t you come back after I did this evening?’

‘I did.’

‘Very well, then. Where is your grievance? Was there anything
at all
I could have done if I had stayed at home all day?’

His hands clammy and shaking a little, he turned to face her. ‘There might have been. And I might, for all you know to the contrary, have stayed away so long because I knew you wouldn’t be here if I hurried back.’ Seeing her lips curl in amused scepticism, his pose of cool displeasure began to slip. His voice was raw as he said, ‘After all, it will be weeks, perhaps months, before we see each other again. It
might
be never.’

She tilted her head a little and, with the tolerant half-smile she bestowed on the children when they misbehaved, said, ‘Andrew! Such dramatics! You have gone off on military duty, how many times – half a dozen? – since we have been married, and have always come back safe. The Lauriston luck, my dear. Why should it be different this time? I regard you as quite indestructible.’

He had a sudden vision of the battles he had been in, and the skirmishes. Of men he knew, stretched on the blood-muddied ground with arms or legs torn off, or their guts spilling out, or their faces shot away. Of himself, possessed by frenzy and fear, urging his Highlanders on to mad charges and madder assaults, while the air was livid with cries and screams and the thunder of artillery and the clash of arms and the whinnying of horses, and, close and private, quite separate from all the other sounds, the hoarse, laboured breathing of the men at his shoulder, and the rattle in his own throat as he tried to summon the voice to yell, ‘Forward!’ And again – and again – ‘Forward!’ He was always dully surprised at the end of the day to find himself relatively whole, and counted his escapes with the nervous care of a cat keeping tally of its nine lives. In the moment’s lull before the beginning of each new engagement, he would stand preparing his mind for the end that, this time, must inevitably come – praying to be spared, not the end itself, but the agony that went before. Praying to the harsh, righteous, punishing God of the Old Testament whom he had learned to fear even before he was old enough to walk. The God of his father, Duncan Lauriston, and very like him.

It didn’t occur to Andrew that, desperate for his wife to believe she had married a fine, upstanding fellow who didn’t know what it was to be afraid, he had never told her what war was like, or how he felt about it. Neither did it occur to him, who thought only cowards knew the meaning of fear, that Vilia might suspect it was only fools who didn’t.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he burst out. ‘No one is indestructible! And the battle we’re facing now will be the bloodiest any of us has ever fought!’

‘But the Allies will win, surely?’

It wasn’t the point at issue, and she knew it as well as he did, but he answered just the same. ‘Perhaps. Probably. Although it will be the first time Wellington has ever taken the field against Boney in person. Neither of them can afford to lose. They’ll be bound to go on fighting until there’s not a man left to fight or stand. And the Duke always throws the Highland regiments in where the fighting is hottest!’

A little, a very little of his dread found its way through to her. Since they had been married, she had never once thought about what he had been going
to,
when he left her. Her sense of release had always been so great that, after the agonized heart-searching that had followed his first departure, she had tried deliberately not to think about him at all when he was out of her sight. But now, when it was much too late, when today’s encounter at Ascot had turned the whole focus of her being on one man alone, a quirk of insight told her something about her husband she had never known before. It was as if, looking over the abyss today had dug between them, she could see him more clearly.

He was wearing civilian clothes this evening, but tomorrow he would ride off, splendid in his blue-faced scarlet coat, with the famous red-and-white plumes of the 42nd’s grenadiers waving in his hat, and enough gold coins, special passes, and authorizations to ensure that he would be accorded priority over all other travellers. He might be afraid of the battle that lay ahead, but he wasn’t going to be late for it. She rose and took a step towards him. ‘My dear, I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t realized... Forgive me? I must have seemed very thoughtless.’

But his resentment was not to be so easily assuaged. Indeed, it was fanned by her tacit admission that he had been in the right. Fanned, too, by the knowledge that he had given himself away. ‘Thoughtless?’ he repeated. ‘More than that. I asked you not to go, but you went. It shouldn’t even have been necessary for me to ask. My father is right...’

Her face stiffened and she moved away.

‘My father is right when he says you have no idea how a wife should behave. Two years of marriage, a household to run, two sons – and none of it has changed you. You think you can go on just as
you
see fit. But marriage isn’t like that!’ Angrily, he struggled to put it all into words. ‘There are some things that are morally right, and some things that are morally wrong. Things one simply doesn’t question! It’s
my
moral duty to provide for you and the children, and
your
moral duty to – to do as a wife should, without even being asked. It’s like the army. I know my orders. It would never occur to me to disobey them.’

Her tone lightly ironic, she said, ‘And do you propose to court-martial me for disobeying mine!’

Looking back afterwards, she was to realize that they were both being ridden by their private devils that night, she by her passion for freedom, he by his Calvinist upbringing. They were like two people trying to communicate the most complex thoughts and instincts without knowing each other’s language.

She had never seen him really angry before. His neck muscles hardened into ropes, and a vivid red flush sprang to his cheekbones. ‘Take care what you say, Vilia! Until now I have let you have your head, but it doesn’t mean that my patience is inexhaustible. I had hoped that, as you grew older, you would lose this unbecoming habit of levity...’

‘Not levity,’ she flashed, as angry as he. ‘Vivacity, I believe, was the word you used when you were so anxious for me to marry you!’

‘Be silent!’ He spoke in the bark he would have employed towards an erring subaltern, and his voice, as he went on, was loud and hectoring. ‘It’s time you realized that
I
am the master in this house. When I return, things will be done differently, I assure you! Come what may, we...’

His head snapped round. ‘Yes!’ he rapped. ‘What is it?’

Sorley McClure stood in the doorway, his freckled face wooden, his arms hanging straight at his sides. ‘It iss midnight, sir,’ he said. ‘Do I haff your permission to lock up, or will you be going out again?’

‘Lock up. But see the doors are opened promptly in the morning. I will be leaving at five.’

‘Yess, sir. Goodnight, madam. Goodnight, sir.’

Sorley closed the door behind him. Subtly, the pressure had eased. Vilia said, without expression, ‘You should go upstairs, or you will have no sleep.’

Andrew’s high colour had gone, and his voice had relaxed a little. ‘We shouldn’t be coming to cuffs like this on my last night. I won’t say anything more than this – if I survive these next weeks, I
will
sell out of the army, come what may, and we will go and live with my father. When we see more of each other, we may learn to understand each other better than we do now.’ He hesitated. ‘But I mean what I say about being master in my own house. You pushed me too far today, Vilia, and I have no intention of letting it happen again. However,’ his tongue flickered over his lips, ‘let us cry quits for the moment, and forget about it.’ He moved towards her.

She was standing by the far window, and couldn’t retreat any further. She couldn’t mistake the look on his face, the indefinable slackening of the muscles, and the breathless laxity about his mouth. His hands felt warm and clammy on her bare arms, and his words came out in a rush. ‘You go on up, and I’ll come to you soon.’