A Dark and Distant Shore (36 page)

‘Shona?’

‘Poor little lamb, she’s so much the odd child out. I hate to say it, but’ – Lucy’s voice dropped – ‘Charlotte does treat her so distantly, and it’s distressing because the unfortunate mite very badly wants to be loved. You’ll see what I mean when we go downstairs.’

When Vilia entered the parlour an hour later, its only occupants were the children, lined up – tallest to smallest – in a row against the wall, measuring themselves and quarrelling amicably the while. Luke, eighteen and no longer a child, had cloudy brown hair and sleepy eyes, and the stringy build of a boy who had grown too quickly. He overtopped fourteen-year-old Georgiana by a foot. Mungo had said once that Georgy should have been Perry Randall’s child, and Grace George Blair’s, and Vilia could see what he had meant. Georgiana had bright, brown impertinent eyes and looked as if she might be something of a handful, whereas Grace’s neat features and compressed rosebud lips suggested that she was a very proper young lady indeed.

Next to Grace were Vilia’s three boys, as neatly stepped as if some architect had measured them out. Theo, eight, Gideon seven, and Drew six – all born in March, all of them slender and fair and self-possessed, although Drew was darker than his brothers and his hazel eyes had more sparkle. His nature, too, was more vivid, more demanding, asking always for the love Vilia hesitated to give, and perfectly sure that all he needed to do was find the right way to ask.

With a deliberate effort of will, Vilia transferred her gaze from Drew to little Shona Randall, the last in the line. Vilia smiled at her, and she smiled shyly back, pretty and brown-haired and unremarkable, and resembling Drew not at all.

Laughing, Vilia said, ‘Hello, children. No tutor, or governess, no Aunt Lucy? I wonder they dare leave you alone!’

They were all a little drunk on fresh air and excitement after watching the king review his troops earlier in the day, and eager to tell her about it. Their voices came tumbling over one another as they competed for her attention. ‘We watched from the Mound, just as you told us, Mama,’ said Theo, his eyes wide and virtuous, and Georgiana chimed in belligerently, ‘
We
saw it from the esplanade,
and
we watched them marching off afterwards, from the hill at the West Bow, just where they’ve demolished the old Weigh-house.’ She stopped. Mrs Lauriston’s beautiful green eyes, which had been surveying her amusedly, had suddenly gone out of focus. Then little Drew rushed across to grasp his mother’s hand possessively. Gazing up at her in admiration, he piped, ‘Oh, Mama! How pretty you look. Prettier than anyone!’ After a long moment, she blinked and then smiled faintly. Ruffling his hair, she said, ‘Thank you, darling. Now, isn’t it time you younger ones were thinking of supper and bed?’

Just then, the door opened to admit Lucy, with Henry Phillpotts and a woman whom Vilia assumed to be the Glenbraddan governess in her wake.

‘Vilia!’
Lucy gasped.

Vilia was aware that she made a striking figure. Indeed, she had designed her gown for the Peers’ ball with precisely that object in mind, for she was unblushingly determined to make an impression on a monarch famous not only for his philandering, but for his taste in architecture and active promotion of a number of highly ambitious building projects. She was a business-woman, and royal favour was valuable in business. It seemed to her that they ought to get on very well together, His Majesty being notoriously short of money, and Lauriston’s new line in architectural cast ironwork being not only as stylish as the ordinary kind, but a good deal cheaper as well. Before she could enrol him as an ally, however, it was necessary to attract his attention, and she thought that might not be easy at a ball attended by the flower of Scotland. She could rely on Glengarry to present her, if necessary – for Glengarry, by sheer force of personality, had made the most profound impression on any number of impressionable people – but there had to be something to lead on from there.

The answer had been obvious once the style of the celebrations had been made public. Vilia knew that every lady at the ball, terrified of being thought provincial, would be gowned in modish tulle or lace or satin, in pink or violet, jonquil or blue, milk chocolate or London smoke, and dripping with pearls or rubies or garnets. So she had looked long and considerably at a portrait of one of her ancestors, painted two hundred years before, and had decided that, as a model, it would do very well.

The final version was cut on the simplest lines, with a low, round neck, the waist at natural level, and the skirt slender and gracefully draped. The sleeves were long, close-fitting, and deeply cuffed, and made of fine, almost transparent muslin to give a touch of evening formality to what might otherwise have been regarded as an insufficiently
grande toilette.
There were no scallops, no slashings, no braids, no rouleaux to spoil the perfect simplicity of the ensemble, which depended entirely for its effect on the fabric, which, of course, was in the Cameron tartan – a bright clear red, with narrow quadruple overchecks of myrtle green, and a fine yellow thread running through at wide intervals; the muslin of the sleeves was of plain scarlet. Vilia’s crowning inspiration had been the wide belt that clasped her waist. Correctly, it should have been of leather, studded with silver ornaments, but she had recently installed a small melting-chamber at the foundry for some experiments with steel, and it had given her a good deal of amusement to set the steel man the problem of producing her an elegant belt. It was constructed of two-inch square panels with cut-out designs based on old Celtic forms, linked together with tiny interlocking rings. The result was light and delicate, and very handsome indeed, and the drop earrings, on a smaller scale, pleased Vilia no less.

Lucy said again, ‘
Vilia!’

‘Do you like it?’ She twirled round gracefully. ‘I really think it is quite successful.’

‘It’s certainly very – er – it’s very...’

‘Thank you, Lucy,’ Vilia said melodiously. ‘I knew you would feel just as you should.’ Then, a little dubiously, she glanced at her reticule, a simple scarlet pouch gathered into a polished steel frame. ‘But do you think... ? I am really not sure about this. I wonder if I shouldn’t, after all, have had it made in the form of a small sporran?’ But the sight of Lucy’s face was too much for her, and she went off into a peal of laughter. ‘Oh, Lucy! When will you learn not to take me so seriously? But admit it – the gown
is
becoming, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, my goodness,
of course
it is. You look superb. But – you don’t think perhaps a little dashing? It’s not that I wish to criticize, dearest, but it’s hardly the kind of quiet good style one expects of a lady of breeding.’

‘I should hope not! I don’t wish to be quiet, I wish to be memorable!’

After five minutes’ conversation with His Majesty, she knew that he would remember her. He had little real power in the world of affairs, although he was quite able to block legislation that offended him, but his influence on taste was considerable. As reel followed strathspey, and country dance followed reel, he remained at her side, delighted to find a pretty woman who could carry on an intelligent and well-informed conversation about things that interested him. When, at last, one of his retinue murmured a reminder in his ear about the others still waiting for the favour of his gracious attention, he smiled at Vilia and drew a plump forefinger conspiratorially down the side of his nose.

‘I – uh – will shortly be having some repairs put in hand at Royal Lodge – at Windsor, you know? I would enjoy knowing that the ironwork had been supplied by such a charming lady. I’ll talk to Wyatt about it.’ He paused, thinking. ‘There’s my little menagerie at Sandpit Gate, too. Nothing dangerous, just a few wapitis and gazelles and chamois. Railings for the animals not beneath you, I hope? Dear little things, they are. Well, I won’t make any promises. You might not think so, but kings aren’t always their own masters, any more than commoners. But we’ll see, we’ll see.’

She curtsied to him, the lovely green eyes sparkling mischievously, and he bowed, his Cumberland corset creaking a little, and moved off. He’d done a good deal for her already, singling her out for attention in full view of most of Scotland’s leading citizens, and Vilia knew – as did His Majesty – that such royal interest would almost certainly bring Lauriston’s a rush of orders. Exultantly, she blessed the gown that had started it all.

The gown had started something else, too, although it was to be years before Vilia discovered it.

Luke Telfer, to his own extreme astonishment, had taken a single look at her when she walked into the parlour of the house in Edinburgh and had fallen head over heels in love.

He recognized, on reflection, that it wasn’t perhaps quite as surprising as it seemed to him at first. Everything during his childhood and adolescence had conspired to make him dislike her. There had been the awkward, unbridgeable gap of eight years’ difference in age. There had been Luke’s own jealousy of the intruder, and what he had always seen as Vilia’s arrogance – her resistance to his mother’s early attempts
at friendship, her dramatization of mourning, her claim to emotional rights over Kinveil. And during her Season, when she had been brilliant, admired, and adult, he had still been a child. After that, he had seen very little of her, except for those few days in October 1814 and again, eighteen months later in Duncan Lauriston’s house, when she had been a wan, spiritless, heavily pregnant widow, dressed once more in the funereal black that so ill became her. The day after that particular encounter, his grandfather had sent him briskly off to London, saying that he had enough to worry about without having Luke under his feet, and in London he had stayed for most of the time since then, even, for the sake of his education, after his parents had taken up residence at Kinveil. His visits to Kinveil had never coincided with Vilia’s, and he had the uneasy feeling that this was by his grandfather’s design. The old man wanted Vilia to himself. In the eyes of someone as possessive as Luke, this had been another sin to set down to Vilia’s account.

But in the six years since they had met, the age gulf had suddenly been bridged. Whereas the difference between twelve and twenty had been great, the difference between eighteen and twenty-six seemed nothing at all. It was, he thought, a matter no longer of years but only of self-assurance. And that was something that could be rectified. His jealousy of her was forgotten almost as if it had never been.

He had just sufficient sense to recognize that he was at a peculiarly susceptible age, but he would have defied any man – he who had seldom considered her more than averagely pretty – to withstand Vilia when she walked into the room on the evening of the Peers’ ball, looking, in her scarlet-sleeved gown, like some mediaeval portrait come dazzlingly to life. She was beautiful, vital, breathtaking, and it was only after ten stupefied minutes that Luke realized, with horror, that for her the gulf was still there and that she still thought of him as one of the children.

Next morning, after a night during which he had slept scarcely at all but dreamed without cease, he set about putting things to rights. By lying in wait on the stairs, he was able to catch her alone. Even in her simple, olive-green carriage dress she was still radiant, and it was obvious that everything had gone well at the ball.

She smiled at him. ‘You’re very dashing, Luke! What height are you now? A good deal taller than when we last met!’ It was precisely what every adult always said to a growing boy.

He treated her to his carefully cultivated, nonchalant grin and, consciously deepening his voice, drawled, ‘Tall enough to hold my own at Oxford.’ Then he allowed his eyelids to droop in a man-of-the-world way, and said, ‘It has been a long time, hasn’t it?’

She twinkled at him, and he hoped her amusement was only at what he hadn’t quite said. ‘And we are both older, and wiser, and more tolerant now? Yes. Perhaps we should start again.’

He was annoyed to feel himself flushing. ‘Why not? Will we see more of you while we are in Edinburgh?’

‘I doubt it. Your mother and I are just leaving for Marchfield House now. I assume you know she is having a sabbatical and staying with me until Monday? But after that... No one ever does me the favour of believing it, but I do go to my office every day like any other hardworked manufacturer, and not even His Majesty offers a sufficiently compelling reason for me to abandon my desk for more than forty-eight hours.’

His heart in his boots, he said, ‘What a pity. But perhaps – might the official opening of the Caledonian Canal qualify as a compelling reason? It’s on the twenty-somethingth of October.’

She laughed. ‘It might, though I don’t expect to be asked. I imagine the Commissioners will invite only landed proprietors to sail on the opening voyage.’

‘My grandfather will be invited, but he says he’s too old to spend two days
voluntarily
being rained on, so he’s sending me instead.’

‘You? Not your father?’

Luke’s shout of laughter had already begun to echo round the stair-well before he realized how juvenile it sounded. Swiftly recovering himself, he said in a very superior tone, ‘My dear Vilia, can you see papa feeling at home among all those local worthies? It wouldn’t be his kind of occasion at all. In fact, he has already made a whole string of engagements in London for the end of October, just to be sure the risk doesn’t arise.’

A little drily, she asked. ‘And you? Can Oxford manage without you?’

‘Who cares? Do come, Vilia. Grandfather has promised we’ll make a real occasion of it!’

But she wouldn’t commit herself. She didn’t know how desperate her need of Kinveil was going to be by then.

Vilia was still glowing with a kind of amused self-satisfaction when she swept Lucy off that afternoon to spend the weekend at Marchfield House, a prospect which Lucy viewed almost with beatitude, although she took good care to conceal it from Magnus and the children. Lucy quite enjoyed children in small numbers and small doses, but a house full of them for a month was too much. Hurriedly, she fished in her reticule for a handkerchief, and found it just in time to trap a small, refined, but unmistakable sneeze.