A Dark and Distant Shore (46 page)

She knew now what a farce they had been, all those years of trying to cut Kinveil out of her heart. Not only farce, but fiasco. Of her three loves, it alone remained. Since Mungo’s death, when she had learned her last salutary lesson and begun, with care and deliberation, to hold back from the human relationships that brought nothing but hurt in their wake, she had discovered the true extent of her need for Kinveil. She could manage without people, she felt, provided she was not cut off from that mystic corner of the Highland landscape. Her mind, cool and analytical, assessed her feelings and found them absurd. But reason had nothing to do with it. Acknowledging the truth of what her mind told her, she was still, and increasingly, driven by the intuition that she would never again be happy anywhere except at Kinveil.

Her eyes, green as opals in the candlelight, returned to the present. Exasperation still in her voice, she said, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, sit down, Luke!’ and herself sank back into her chair.

She was silent for a moment longer, turning the heavy Kinveil ring absently on her finger, then she said more calmly, ‘I apologize. Why should I read you a lecture, when you didn’t even know poor Wattie?’ There was the hint of a smile on her lips. ‘My temper isn’t altogether reliable these days. I don’t know whether you’ve heard that there is a serious financial crisis on the horizon – too many years of extravagant speculation, and now the banks are beginning to take fright and call in their loans. The foundry won’t be directly affected, but half-built houses are being left unfinished, and Edinburgh is full of unemployed masons and bricklayers, and I am having to give serious thought to the problem of our architectural materials.’

It was, on the whole, a very generous apology, but Luke’s reply made no acknowledgement. ‘Indeed?’ he said, his voice stiff and expressionless. ‘That must be worrying for you.’

There had been a light throb in her head all day, and it was becoming stronger and more insistent. Suddenly, the effort of appeasing him was beyond her, and she didn’t care very much, anyway. He was only a boy, who didn’t know anything, and didn’t want to know. So she smiled again and said, ‘Yes. But let’s talk about something more interesting. Tell me about your plans for the future.’

How had it all flared up? Afterwards, Luke didn’t even know. But she had criticized him, made him feel inadequate, spoken to him as if he were still a child. When he rode away from Marchfield House next day, he knew she was glad to see him go. Still in the grip of a sick resentment, he had no idea when he would see her again, or even whether he wanted to. He tried to convince himself that everything was over between them, but there had never
been
anything between them. And that, perhaps, rankled more than anything.

Luke Telfer stepped out onto his balcony and, leaning his elbows carefully on the crumbling balustrade, looked out over the towers and domes of Venice, ‘Queen of the Adriatic’, now tinted a dusky rose in the light of the setting sun. It still surprised him how pink Italian sunsets were, how insipidly pretty compared with the fiery splendours of nightfall at Kinveil. But tonight, for the first time, it also struck him that the air tasted stale, flat, and unwholesome, and that the eternal lapping of muddy water against steps and buildings and the hulls of gondolas was beginning to prey on his nerves.

The city’s ramshackle grandeur, its atmosphere of long and leisured decadence, had pleased him at first, although the hordes of sightseers had not. So, with the new assurance born of a year of European travel, he had suggested to Henry that they abandon the modest comforts of the Hotel Gran Bretagna in favour of one of the apartments that were to let in the palazzi along the Grand Canal. They had inspected several, and the Palazzo Solari had looked, from the outside, no more inviting than the rest, a damp-stained edifice painted – though not recently – in salmon and white, with a kind of boardwalk balanced over the front stairs so that it was necessary to scramble, rather than step, out of the gondola. Luke and Henry had groped their way through a pitch dark hall in the wake of a voluble gentleman who interrupted his discourse to warn them, first, to beware of the
cane,
and then, a moment later, of the
scimmia.
A dog seemed reasonable enough, but a monkey? Within seconds, something had landed neatly and talkatively on Luke’s shoulder, where it stayed until they reached their objective on the second floor. Then it took off with a flying leap and swarmed up the peacock blue damask curtains to settle, with a chatter of self-satisfaction, in one of the hammock-like swags at the top.

Luke had grinned back at it, and then turned his attention to his surroundings. They were faintly raffish, but also spacious, striking, and very palatial indeed. The saloon in which he stood was all of eighty feet long, and there was scarcely an inch of wall or ceiling that wasn’t covered with paintings or frescoes. Turkish carpets argued vociferously with the patterned marble floor, and the furniture was so extravagantly carved and gilded that it verged on the preposterous. Luke didn’t even have to ask Henry what he thought of it; he knew his tutor’s tastes only too well by now. At seventy-five guineas a month, the apartment wasn’t expensive by Venetian standards, and they moved in next day.

Now, six weeks later, Luke wondered whether he wasn’t becoming
blasé.
He was tired of admiring buildings and pictures, tired of his daily ride near the Lido, tired of the food sent in by the local trattoria, tired of the fashionable little casinos behind the Piazza San Marco where everyone who was sufficiently anyone to be invited was expected to while away the nights with coffee, conversation, and cards before trailing home to bed after dawn.

He tapped his mother’s letter thoughtfully against his teeth. Her bulletins had run like a thread of counterpoint through the major theme of his European travels. He could even remember where and when each one had arrived, crisp and crackling, with its neat superscription and lavender wafer. The first had been waiting for him in Paris in May of last year, when he had returned from an expedition to the châteaux of the Loire.

I so much hope you are yourself again! Your father and I were quite distressed to see you so unhappy during those months after your return from Oxford. Indeed, it seems to us now that we should have suggested the Grand Tour a good deal sooner than we did. But never mind. How I wish I could be with you. So exciting! Our excitements here seem quite pale by comparison. Edward’s marriage to Harriet Morton went off very well, and they are admirably suited. And you may interpret
that
remark in whichever way you choose! She is, I fear, somewhat plain, with hair verging on the mouse and an expression of piety that reminds one dreadfully of all one’s own imperfections. But she has a very methodical nature and likes everything to be just so, which, as you may imagine, has put Edward in such a glow that he is almost human. Your Aunt Charlotte, who has been unwell again, is pleased to have her, since Georgiana is not to be relied on. I cannot imagine who that young lady inherits her disposition from, for she is perfectly giddy – there is no other word for it. Your father says she must be a throwback, but I can’t think to whom. From all I have ever heard, both the Telfer and Blair ancestors were uniformly, and quite tediously, respectable. Gracious – don’t misunderstand me! I don’t for a moment mean that dear Georgy is
not
respectable!

Luke wouldn’t have cared to bet on it. During that morose year at Kinveil, he had tried to lighten his depression by getting up a mild flirtation with dear Georgy, but half-way through the first non-cousinly encounter he had sheered off hurriedly, pointing out to a frustrated Georgy that it was he, not she, whom Edward would be after with a shotgun. She had shrugged. ‘Pooh!’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t marry you anyway. I have no intention of drowsing the rest of my life away at Kinveil. Dear me, no!’

The second letter had come when he was at Cologne in August, just about to set sail on the Rhine. He had been to see the cathedral, and his head was full of flying buttresses and mullions and quatrefoils and cusps. The slender, soaring beauty of the cathedral choir had made him think of Vilia, but his mother’s letter spoke only of Georgiana, with her retroussé nose, dusky curls, and diminutive figure. More like a dissenting chapel, he had thought, pursuing the analogy, and had grinned to think how incensed Georgy would have been if she’d known.

Georgy, it seemed, had fallen passionately in love with a French gentleman who had come to admire the Highlands and stayed to admire Miss Blair. ‘Extraordinarily handsome, in a luxuriant kind of way,’ Luke’s mother wrote, ‘as well as being extremely charming, with that rather baroque French charm.’ Georgy said she would die if she were not allowed to marry him, but Edward was determined to make some inquiries about the gentleman first, in case he turned out not to be a gentleman at all.

By the time the third letter arrived, it was November, and Luke had finished with the Rhine, where he had admired the castles but not the wines, and travelled on to Salzburg by a roundabout route that had allowed him to spend time in Vienna. There, he had ignored the architecture, enjoyed the music, continued to dislike the wine, and eaten his way round every warm, sugar-and-spice-scented
konditorei
in the city. He had also put on weight. He hoped the Alps would take it off again. But although his mother’s letter was full of dutifully maternal laments about his absence at the festive season, he had still felt no longing for home. Florence seemed to him a much more appealing place to spend Christmas. And after Florence, Rome. Disappointingly, Henry’s cassock and cardinal’s hat failed to raise even an eyebrow in the Eternal City, but Luke had no time to dwell on it, since Henry had enrolled them both for an antiquarian course designed to ensure that they saw every church, palace, villa and ruin that was held to be worth seeing – and all within the space of six weeks.

Lucy’s February letter had arrived in the middle of it. Edward’s bride, it appeared, was now in an interesting condition, and Georgiana was to be married to M. Savarin later in the year.

‘Dear Georgy!’ his mother exclaimed charitably.

She is so very happy! But another piece of quite different news. My dear, you won’t believe it, but Glengarry has gone to his ancestors! In the most ludicrous way, and
perfectly
characteristic. He was on his way to Glasgow on the
Stirling Castle
when it was driven aground in a storm near Fort William. Glengarry – of course! – could not wait to be rescued, but jumped impatiently ashore, lost his footing, and was killed on the rocks. It remains only to add that the other passengers were landed without the least difficulty and in perfect safety. I am told the funeral was something quite out of the ordinary. There was a tremendous thunderstorm, which was quite appropriate, you must agree. His blind bard keened over the coffin, having composed a special lament for the occasion – ‘Blessed the corpse that the rain falls on’. What a lot of blessed corpses we must have in this part of the world! His heir seems to have been left nothing but law suits and debts, and talks only of declarators, advocations, issues, answers, and avizandums. No,
don’t
ask me! I have no idea what an avizandum may be!

Luke was sorry about Glengarry, tiresome poseur though he had been, with his passion for ‘old’ customs whose antiquity wasn’t merely doubtful, but certifiably bogus. But he had been likeable in his way. Luke had shrugged and gone back to his ruins.

And now it was April, and he was in Venice, and he was weary of it. And he knew why.

He didn’t need to reread
this
letter, even if there had been light enough. Thoughtfully, from the balcony bowered in climbing greenery and decked with tubs of bay and orange, he watched the tapers start to glimmer under the awnings, and the lanterns of the gondolas turn their wakes to oily flame. Far to his left, a brightly lit barge full of musicians drifted to a halt, its raised sweeps gleaming, before one of the palazzi, and played a serenade before the oars were dipped again and it glided off into the darkness. A nearby gondolier caught the melody and took it up, and was answered by others, further away, whose voices echoed under the bridges, plaintive and soulful.

It was the purest romance, but Luke’s thoughts were on another bridge, not far from Glenbraddan, built from cast iron supplied by a certain foundry near Edinburgh. Because of administrative delays, it had taken almost ten years to complete, but it was to be opened officially at the beginning of October.

And Vilia was to be there. It was the first news he had had of her for more than two years, although he had written to her twice, casual, conversational notes that didn’t seem to need a reply unless one read very carefully between the lines.

‘It will be such a joy to see her again,’ Lucy Telfer had written.

Your father and I agreed that now, if ever, was the time to try and bring about a reconciliation between Vilia and your Aunt Charlotte, so I spoke very seriously to your aunt and the long and the short of it was that she agreed to let bygones be bygones. I think that, even now, she might not have given in if she had been her usual self, but I must tell you that she is suffering from a malady that gives her a great deal of pain, which can only be controlled by opiates. Indeed, I fear she has not many years to live. So sad. I had more trouble with Edward than with his mother, though
really
it is no concern of his! And I had just succeeded in bringing him round when Georgy very nearly ruined everything by exclaiming that Vilia must be invited to the wedding, too, which takes place three weeks before the bridge opening. With the most provoking want of tact, she said she wanted Emile to see that we had ‘at least one truly stylish person among us’.
I
ask you!
Even I was a little offended, though I knew what she meant. Anyway, the important thing is that Vilia is to come to us at Kinveil in the first week of September, and stay until the bridge is opened in October. It will be delightful!