A Dark and Distant Shore (51 page)

It had been good advice, and at the foundry she had always followed it. She supposed it was an index of her current state of mind that, only now, did it occur to her to apply it on a personal level. If she could induce Luke, by whatever means, to ask her to marry him, that would be enough for the time being. She wouldn’t have to say yes, or no, straight away. And it would give her time to come to terms with her conscience.

For what remained of the journey back to Kinveil, she devoted her mind to the problem of how to handle him.

It was one o’clock in the morning when at last she tumbled into bed and deep into sleep, exhausted by two wakeful nights and the seemingly interminable day. The ladies had retired at eleven, leaving the men comfortably ensconced in the Long Gallery with their whisky and brandy and the evident intention of staying up for hours more, but Vilia had thought it wise to remain fully dressed for as long as there seemed any danger of Luke coming to her room. There were no locks on Kinveil doors, and never had been. So she had sat, pretending to read, until her eyes began to close of their own accord. Then she had looked at the time, and thought that he wouldn’t come now.

She didn’t hear his footsteps on the stairs, or the lifting of the latch. She didn’t feel him turn back the coverlet with extravagant care, or loosen the ties that held her nightshift together, and open it, and smooth its satin folds aside so that she lay exposed to him, naked and silver-pale in the fitful light of the moon. She didn’t sense him, flushed and elated, steadying himself against the carved bedpost while he raked her with his eyes. He ached for her, with an ache all the more consuming for the brevity of their union on the hill. A dozen times he had relived those swift, importunate moments, thinking – God! how Silvana would have laughed to see the elegant, leisured Signor Luke, with his unequalled skill at prolonging the act of love, behave like some frantic beginner, some uninstructed schoolboy. Yet there had been beauty in it, and an overmastering relief.

Relief on more counts than one. He knew, now, that Vilia must always have been chaste except during her marriage. In the six years since he had fallen in love with her, he had scourged himself with the belief that it was impossible for such a woman, so beautiful, so unprotected, to have preserved her virtue. Sick with jealousy, he had peopled her life with a legion of lovers. Yet during those fifteen climactic minutes on the hill when, from love and weakness, she had given in to his passion, not by a word or a sigh, a movement or a caress, had she shown herself aware of the arts of seduction that, if she had known other men, she must have learned. It had been strange to him to realize that, for all her worldly success, for all her undoubted maturity, she was still so innocent. Strange, and touching.

Now, after the long evening of boredom and frustration, he was very drunk indeed. And as he gazed at her, lying asleep, every last shred of caution and sobriety vanished in his desire for her. He raised a hand and began to strip his cravat away from his throat. It was night, and they were alone, and he would teach her all the exquisite enchantments of flesh on flesh. Teach her to need him as he needed her. But just in case she said no, he would have to be firm with her at first. She wasn’t, he reminded himself fuzzily, an incognita. She had to be taught.

She fought him all the way while he raped her, and although none of her struggles had any effect, she didn’t give up, not for a moment. She thought, afterwards, that if she had had a weapon she might well have killed him.

When it was all over, he fell asleep on top of her and it took her a long time to drag her maltreated body free, bones and sinews as unstable as quicksilver, and wrap herself in the illusory protection of a robe. But she managed it at last, and subsided into a chair, drained of everything but shame and disgust.

It was hours before he came back to awareness, his senses spinning. He wasn’t even sure where he was until he saw her shadowed face in the first grey-gold gleam of the dawn light. And then he remembered what had happened. There was nothing he could say that men hadn’t been saying since time began.

Slowly he pulled himself upright and sank his head in his hands. There was a small, vicious hammer beating just behind his right temple, and the lining of his mouth felt as if it had been dredged up out of a neglected laundry basket. After a while, he said thickly, ‘Will you ever forgive me? No refinements. No finesse. Just simple, brutal need.’

He forced himself to look up, and saw a shiver run over the face that had been still as an icon. Then, as if the words had been forced out of her, she said, ‘Like Andrew. That was what hurt. As if I were no more than a mechanical toy, without mind or feeling, something to be used.’ The tears began pouring down her pale cheeks, as she went on, ‘I thought, the other day on the hill, that what was between us was something different, but it isn’t, is it? I’m only a vehicle for you to vent your desire on. Whatever I am, whatever I’ve made of my life, there’s still one thing I share with the cheapest drab in Edinburgh. Love without joy, love without tenderness. Nothing but degradation and child-bearing.’

Tears came to his own eyes, at that, and he stumbled to his feet and went to her, where she sat. He half-expected her to recoil, but she didn’t, as if her misery were too deep, so he sank on the rug before her and took her hands in his, tightly. His voice shaking, he said, ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. It shouldn’t be like that.’

But it was as if she hadn’t heard him. Turning her face away, she whispered, not to him but to herself, ‘The fault is mine, all mine. What have I done?’

He knew she didn’t mean it. Even through the thick, cloying fog in his head, he knew she didn’t mean it. At any moment, what he thought of as her natural, womanly shame would give way to the revulsion that she must feel at the sight of him. And then would come the rejection he deserved, which he feared more than the wrath of God.

‘What have I done?’ she whispered again. And then, despairingly, ‘What if I should have a child?’

It was an aspect of the matter that hadn’t occurred to him, either tonight, or on the hill. There had been nothing in his mind but desire. What, after all, did sordid realities have to do with a grand passion such as theirs? And then the solution came to him, suddenly, blindingly. He knew he would never stop wanting her. He thought he would die if she refused to let him touch her ever again. Somehow, he had never considered marriage, even in these last days, perhaps because he had always thought of her as independent and unattainable, and feared instinctively that if he asked he would be refused. And that would be the end of everything. But now...The blackmail sprang readily to his tongue, as if it had been lying there waiting for its moment.

He poured some water from the carafe on the bedside table and gave it to her, although his own throat almost cried aloud for it. ‘Drink it,’ he said gently, ‘and let me hear no more of such nonsense. What you have done – what
I
have done – is beyond recall. But there is an answer to it, and only one. You must marry me.’

She looked up at him, her face colourless and drawn.

‘I mean it. Don’t think of Andrew. Don’t think of what I forced on you tonight. That wasn’t love.’ He took the glass from her, and knelt at her feet again to clasp her hands in his. His lips touched to the fine, transparent skin on the inside of her wrist, he murmured, ‘We
do
have something different,’ and then, almost pleadingly, ‘It
was
beautiful the other day on the hill. It can be even more beautiful again, I promise you. Marry me, Vilia! I love you so much.’ He didn’t dare to raise his eyes.

The silence seemed to stretch into eternity. She gazed down at his dark head and her mind, very slowly, began to function again. It had all come about as neatly as if she had planned it, but she hadn’t. Or she didn’t think she had. Her distress had been agonizingly real, and there had been space for nothing else at all in her mind. Unless that second self, the other Vilia who had taken a hand in her life once before, on a day she tried never to think of in August 1822, was hovering in the air again, calculating and contriving, putting into her mouth the magical words that, this time, would achieve the one thing above all that she wanted to achieve.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice grating. ‘I don’t know.’

Nothing he could say or do, no argument he could advance, was sufficient to persuade her to give him an answer then, or to prolong her stay at Kinveil until she had made up her mind.

‘How can I change my plans?’ she said. ‘What would your parents think?’

‘Does it matter? Why won’t you say yes? Why won’t you marry me at once – now – today? This isn’t England, with its banns and licences! All we need to do is clasp hands before witnesses and declare ourselves man and wife! Then I will have the right to be with you always.’

He was still, she thought, as spoilt as when he had been a child, always expecting his wishes to be paramount. ‘But I don’t know! I must have time to think.’

He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she didn’t respond, and after a moment he let her go again. Then an idea came to him, and he exclaimed, ‘I know! It’s just that I can’t bear to be separated from you. Why don’t you,’ his voice was wheedling, ‘why don’t you say yes – provisionally! – and then we can tell my parents, and they’ll understand why I have to come to Edinburgh with you! Please! Why not, my darling, why not?’

She could think of several reasons, including three sons who were living reminders that she was eight years older than he, and the brisk efficiency that the foundry always brought out in her and that had made him so nervous during his Oxford years. Patiently reasonable, she said, ‘Calm down, my dear. We mustn’t rush into marriage just because of what’s happened between us. I don’t want you to marry me because you feel you have to! You – we – must take the most careful thought, separately and privately, without any pressure from outside or from each other. Apart, there’s a chance that we may be able to consider the future rationally. Together...’

His hands were on her shoulders, and his lips in the hollow of her throat, and in another moment she knew they would begin to slide downwards to where the neck of her robe had slipped open. She twisted away from him, firmly but not unkindly, saying, ‘Together, we’re beyond reason. But marriage is so much more than the physical. At New Year I’ll come back, and then we can decide.’ She hoped she was doing the wise thing. She prayed that nothing would go wrong.

Neither of them knew, when she drove away just after noon, that they would not see each other again for seven long, weary months.

Luke’s birthday was on May sixteenth, and this year was his twenty-fifth. After a wet morning, the weather was showing signs of clearing, but he still sat at his desk in the panelled, carpeted study that had once been his grandfather’s. The room had changed little since Mungo’s day, although Luke had bought an elegant satinwood secretaire to replace the zebra-wood monstrosity the old man had been so fond of. It had been a mistake. Designed by the younger Mr Chippendale, it was full of drawers, shelves, and pigeonholes of, one might have thought, every conceivable shape and size, but none of Luke’s notes, letters or diaries fitted comfortably into any of them, so that he was hemmed in by piles of papers on all sides, some of them spilling over onto the floor. Mr Chippendale had had the doubtful distinction, at one stage in his life, of being declared bankrupt. Serve him right, Luke thought.

He threw down his pen and rose to set a taper to the fire and light one of the thin brown cigarillos he had lately begun to affect. His mother would have wrinkled her nose in disgust, but his mother had been in London since December.

The last two months of 1828 had been months of family crisis. Scarcely a week after the opening of the bridge, Charlotte Randall’s illness had entered a final, acute phase, and Magnus and Lucy had spent most of November at Glenbraddan, watching her die. Luke, for the first time in his life, had felt genuinely sorry for his father, who had been fond of her in his way. And then, no more than a few days after the funeral, it had been discovered that Edward and Harriet’s infant son wasn’t just naturally placid, as everyone had thought, but suffering from what the doctor called a palsy of the brain. No way of telling how badly, yet, he had said, but no known cure. The only thing to do was wait and see. Harriet had clung to Lucy, and Edward, prey to a hopeless misery, had turned to Magnus, as if to the father he had never really known.

Luke had made up his mind to be extra considerate to his parents when at last they escaped from Glenbraddan, their stock of family feeling exhausted. But his good intentions had suffered a nasty setback when his mother said, ‘My nerves are in tatters, and I see no possibility of mending them here. We will be much better equipped to give Edward and Harriet the support they need later on, if we take the opportunity to recruit our strength properly. In London, I should think.’

‘An admirable suggestion, my love,’ Magnus said. ‘We both need a change.’

Hopelessly trying to salvage something from the ruin of his plans, Luke said, ‘Why not wait until after the New Year? What about the guests you’ve invited to the house party?’

Lucy shuddered. ‘House party? Heaven preserve us! No, we will have to put everyone off. I know it’s short notice, but they’ll understand.’ It was clear that she was indifferent to whether they understood or not.

Vilia couldn’t, and wouldn’t, come to a house where there was no hostess to receive her, and Luke couldn’t take the time to travel to Edinburgh when he had been left in undisputed charge of Kinveil for the first time in his life. Or so Vilia told him. There was no urgency, it seemed, of the kind they had feared. She would come, she promised, as soon after Magnus and Lucy’s return as she reasonably could. And now it was May, and Luke’s parents were due back in two weeks, and he had written to Vilia, and lied to her, and told her they would be home for his birthday and that his mother looked forward to seeing Vilia almost at once.