A Dark and Distant Shore (29 page)

It was all pride, Sorley thought, gritting his teeth. Stupid, idiotic, heartbreaking Cameron pride.

‘Aye, you’re a poor thing, aren’t you?’ Duncan Lauriston would sneer, wolfing down a mouthful of stuffed cod’s head whose very smell made Vilia’s stomach turn over. ‘And you were supposed to be a lassie with spirit! I can mind you even having the brass neck to bandy words with me in my own foundry. What’s the matter? Are ye no’ weel?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘I’m all right,’ he would mimic, pursing his lips and tightening his vowels so that it came out like a parody. ‘Then what are ye looking so perjink about? Have I offended your ladyship?’

There was nothing she could say.

‘You’ve months to go yet! So what ails you? D’ye not know that childbearing’s a natural process for women – all you’re fit for, most of you! There’s drabs in my packing shed that’re back at work the very day after they’ve had their brats. Aye, and they’ve been there until the day before, too. And here you are, looking like a drookit lily when you’re only four months gone. Och, you make me sick! It’s time you had something to do, so you can start keeping an eye on the kitchen. And you can tell that McKirdy woman I don’t want to see any more of this kind of rubbish served up at my table!’

She would drag herself upstairs again after such exchanges, shivering in every limb, despairing and terrified. But she didn’t go to bed until Rachelle, her maid, was also ready to lie down on the truckle that was drawn out every night and placed – not for any reason that had ever been put into words – across the doorway just inside Vilia’s bedchamber. Neither of them knew that Sorley spent most of the hours of darkness dozing in an alcove across the hall.

She couldn’t even weep. It was as if her heart had congealed, and she was dully grateful until she had a letter from Lucy Telfer at the end of October that broke the spell. The pain was almost beyond bearing. Embedded in Lucy’s cheerful catalogue of gossip were two sentences that stood out in letters of flame.
‘Magnus had a letter from Kinveil the other day, and
– my dear, you won’t believe it! – but Mr Randall has turned up again after being missing for weeks, no one knows where. Although my papa-in-law does not say, I imagine Charlotte must be vastly relieved; so unflattering to have one’s husband run away like that!’

Sorley, keeping as close an eye on his mistress as he was able, went into her dressing-room next day to find her sitting, still and soulless, with a foot-long kitchen skewer in her hand. He took it from her as gently as he could, and threatened Rachelle with unimaginable tortures if ever she left her mistress alone again.

There was another crisis in January, also precipitated by a letter from Lucy. This time her letter said,
‘and, my dear, such news! Charlotte is in an interesting condition! Very distressing for her, really quite embarrassing, especially as everyone seems to know that Mr Randall has been sent off, utterly in disgrace, on one of those dreadful emigrant ships to Canada. I know it is very wrong of me, but I feel quite sad to know that we will never see him again.’

After that, Vilia sank into a blind, deaf, insentient apathy that not even Sorley could penetrate. For weeks, day and night, he fretted his brain for some solution, and then one evening, when Duncan Lauriston’s venom had passed all bounds, it came to him that there was only one person in the world who might be able to help.

Sorley wrote to Mungo Telfer.

Months before, Mungo had made it his business to find out what he could about Duncan Lauriston, for Vilia had said nothing about him. A hard man, he had been told by acquaintances who had dealt with him, with his own rigid ideas of right and wrong. Accordingly, Mungo sent no message asking if it would be convenient for him to call, and took the precaution of reserving rooms for himself, Luke, and Henry Phillpotts, at the Clarkstoun Inn before he set off, with the other two as protective colouring, to see Vilia.

It was eight o’clock and black dark when they arrived, the carriage lanterns casting a weak glow on grass and gravel as they rolled up to the poorly lit front door.

Mr Lauriston and Mrs Andrew were at dinner, the butler said. Perhaps the gentleman would wish to return at some more convenient hour?

The gentleman eyed him thoughtfully, and after a moment the butler, a shifty-looking fellow, added, ‘Unless, of course, you prefer to wait in the parlour. Mr Lauriston does not care to be disturbed at his meal.’

Mungo said, ‘We’ll wait.’

It was fully half an hour before the master of the house entered with his daughter-in-law trailing listlessly behind. Mungo’s face froze when he saw her. The child was due any day now, but though her body was gross under the black gown, her face and arms were bleached and attenuated, almost transparent. Even her eyes had lost their colour. She smiled at him with a weak, fibreless affection that cut him to the heart, and he sprang forward, ignoring his host, to help her lower herself into a chair.

‘Telfer, is it?’ Duncan Lauriston said in his thick, harsh voice.

Mungo released his crushing grip on Vilia’s hand, and bowed slightly. ‘Mr Lauriston.’

They stood there measuring each other, like terrier and mastiff, Luke thought, and then Mungo said, ‘May I make my grandson known to you, and his tutor, Mr Phillpotts?’

‘Oh, aye?’ Lauriston’s glance was an insult. Taking in Henry’s cassock, he said, ‘Papist, are you?’

Sharply, Mungo said, ‘Mr Phillpotts, as it happens, is not of the Catholic faith, nor have his religious beliefs anything to do with his abilities as a tutor of Latin and Greek.’ Then, regaining command of his temper, he went on, ‘You have no objection to my visit, I hope? I found myself in the district on business, quite unexpectedly, and thought I would take the opportunity to call and assure myself that Mrs Lauriston was in health. But you look peaky, my dear. Quite unlike yourself!’

The other man snorted. ‘Women’s cantrips! Nothing the matter with her that a good dose of will-power wouldn’t cure.’

Mungo, swallowing his anger, said, ‘I have known Mrs Lauriston since she was a child, and she has never been lacking in
that
quality. Have you had medical advice, my dear?’

Vilia opened her mouth hesitantly, but her father-in-law spoke first. ‘It’s not a doctor she needs. Leeches they’re called, and leeches they are. Money-grubbing scum. I’ll not have them set foot over my threshold.’

Mungo’s mind was racing. How, without being dangerously offensive, did one convey to an unsuccessful, miserly, and probably purse-pinched bully that one would pay anything – anything at all – from one’s own purse to prevent harm coming to this girl? ‘Aye, well,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve been a kind of guardian to her for years now, and I don’t think it would do any damage if I were to bring someone to see her. It would set my own mind at rest, and maybe make her feel better, too.’ Then he caught Lauriston’s expression, and his hold over his temper began to slip again.

No one had asked them to sit down. Luke was standing as far away from their host as he could manage, his dilated eyes fixed on him as if he were a man-eating tiger who might at any moment decide he fancied a snack, while Henry had his hands sunk in his sleeves like some monk on the way to vespers, and was breathing audibly through his nose.

‘You’ll not bring a doctor to this house,’ Lauriston said with crude finality.

Mungo stared at him. He had always known instinctively that Vilia was out of sympathy with her father-in-law, but had put it down to youthful ignorance of the world. One didn’t climb the ladder from common labourer to ironmaster without shedding a good many of the gentler attributes on the way. It simply hadn’t occurred to Mungo, who knew all there was to know about the kind of struggle Lauriston must have had, that the man was anything other than a normal human being with an abnormally tough and opportunist streak. But now, observing the brutal reality of him, he saw that he hadn’t understood the half of it. He had met the type before – a mind barren of tolerance, a heart riddled with envy, a soul ignorant of the Christian charity the tongue so loudly professed, and no motivating force other than the desire to possess or to destroy what could not be possessed. A violent man, and a dangerous one. Bitterly, Mungo reproached himself for leaving fastidious, sensitive, over-bred Vilia in such a man’s care. He wondered whether Lauriston knew enough about his, Mungo’s, commercial success to be able to contrast it with his own. It might help to account for the element of personal dislike he sensed in the man.

It seemed to Mungo that the only thing he could do was take Vilia away with him now, but when he looked at her he knew he didn’t dare. The Clarkstoun Inn was no refuge for her, especially when the bairn must already be overdue. And there were the two boys as well, drat it! He’d have to take them when he took Vilia, or Lauriston might well find some legal way of holding onto them. He made up his mind. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning he would find a doctor and bring him here, and the moment the doctor said yes, he’d carry her off to the nearest decent hostelry – the Hawes Inn at South Queensferry, maybe, or the place at Cramond if she were strong enough to travel a few extra miles – and then they could decide what to do next.

It had been a long silence. Mungo didn’t even look at Lauriston as he said, with all the authority of his years and achievement, ‘I’ll be here the morn, lassie, and bring the best man I can find to see you.’ He smiled reassuringly.

Her weak, responding smile was overlaid with a kind of distraction, as if there were something she ought to say, if only she could think of it. She opened her mouth, but again Duncan Lauriston’s thick voice forestalled her.

Surprisingly, he seemed to be giving in. With a curl of his lip, he said, ‘If you must, you must. They say there’s no fool like an old fool, and maybe you don’t mind throwing your money away. But you’ll be wanting to get back to wherever you’re racking up for the night. There’s going to be a heavy frost, and if you leave it any later, your cattle will be skiting around all over the road. Forbye, the woman wants her bed. She’s tired out after her hard day lying on the couch!’

Having carried his point, Mungo thought it would be wise to go, despite a lingering uneasiness. He smiled again at Vilia, sitting there vaguely detached from it all, and said, ‘We’ll have a good talk tomorrow, lassie, never fret.’ Half-embarrassed, because it wasn’t his habit to make a display of affection, he went over and dropped a kiss on her forehead, then, with the still silent Luke and Henry at his back, gave the merest nod to Lauriston and walked out of the house.

When he returned next morning with the doctor, he was told that Mr Lauriston and Mrs Andrew had gone.

Duncan Lauriston didn’t want her dying on his hands, though he thought the possibility remote, but neither was he going to spare her on this day of all days. So he allowed her to stay in the carriage for the first few hours after they reached Edinburgh, and only went to fetch her when, above the clamour of every church bell in the city, he heard the distant cheering take on a more purposeful note. He was a big, powerful man, and despite the press of people had little difficulty shouldering through to the front again, dragging Vilia by one arm while Sorley McClure slithered along, eel-like, on her other side. Duncan Lauriston glanced at him contemptuously, making a great show of protecting her from all the folk who were jumping up and down for a view, knees and elbows going like badly handled puppets. The scourings of every alley and gutter, he thought, and pushed the girl to where he estimated the front row would be when the rabble had been cleared off the roadway.

Here, up at the West Bow, the crowd was particularly thick, for despite the projecting, rickety bulk of the Weigh-house, there was a kind of open space that, earlier on, had drawn people from the crush further down in search of more room. There was none of that now, with the great moment approaching. The great moment when the men of the 42nd Highland Regiment, nine months to the date after the battle of Waterloo, in which they had served so gloriously, were coming home to a vociferous welcome from the massed citizens of Scotland’s capital.

It had seemed for a while as if they would never get here. It was almost three o’clock now, and they should have arrived long since at Edinburgh Castle, the terminus of their ceremonial march. But rumour had reported in the morning that there were so many people, horses, and carriages on the road from Musselburgh that the regiment had been brought almost to a standstill. Much later, it had been said to be passing through Portobello. And now, by the sound of things, it was at the palace of Holyroodhouse and about to enter the mile-long main highway up the Canongate, the High Street, and the Lawnmarket, that would bring it to the West Bow and then, finally, to the esplanade of the Castle, perched high on its rock above the city.

Not a window along the route that wasn’t packed with watchers, not a rooftop that wasn’t creaking under its load. Every dwelling and workshop in the city seemed to have emptied its inhabitants into the Royal Mile. From the elevation of the West Bow and with his own advantage of height, Duncan Lauriston commanded a view right down to the Canongate. The perspective was acute, narrowed not only by distance but by the reducing width of the street, whose sides huddled closer and closer under the jutting upper storeys of houses two hundred years old and more, erratically tiered like some upside-down bride’s-cake. The people were as packed and yet as fluid as grains of sand on a river bed, spreading where space permitted, round the Tolbooth; swirling out and then in again round the market-stall island of the Luckenbooths; funnelling closer and, impossibly, closer where the highway abruptly narrowed just by the house that was said to have been John Knox’s. And from every wynd and close along the route, more and more people were trying to fight their noisy way in. As if, Duncan Lauriston thought savagely, it were some vulgar saturnalia. All should have been still and silent, in reverence for those who had laid down their lives on the field of Waterloo.