A Dark and Distant Shore (65 page)

‘At Kinveil? I didn’t know you’d been there.’ It was a silly remark, Gideon thought belatedly, considering he hadn’t even known that Perry Randall had been in the country.

‘What happened?’ the other man asked again.

‘It was an accident. He was caught up in a Clearance episode. We all were, in fact. Edward Blair was evicting some tenants at Grianan, and there was a good deal of stone-throwing, and houses collapsing, and that kind of thing. Luke was hit by a falling rooftree. There was the most appalling fuss about it afterwards.’

‘I imagine there was. When did this happen?’

The date was engraved on Gideon’s memory. ‘May twenty-first.’

Perry had left Kinveil on the seventeenth and reached Marchfield late on the nineteenth. The butler had said Mrs Lauriston would be almost at Kinveil by then. Almost... Almost... And Luke had died two days later. Perry, his stomach churning inside him, could scarcely bear to go on. Was it possible – was it conceivably possible! – that the marriage hadn’t taken place after all? That he had spent six barren years trying, and failing, to resign himself to something that hadn’t even happened? Fighting until a few months ago when, cursing himself for a fool, he had begun to pay court to Miss Sara Fontaine, of Beacon Street, Boston. Nothing had yet been said between them, but he knew that Sara, twenty-two years old but mature for her age, self-assured, impeccably well bred, would be a willing partner in a marriage of convenience. She was plump and brown-haired, and he suspected that the blood which ran in her veins was as cool as it was blue. It would be an excellent match.

Even after twenty years, he hadn’t the right to ask about Vilia, straight out. Into the silence, he said, ‘Tragic for his parents.’

‘Yes. Fortunately or unfortunately, they were in London at the time. It was my mother who took the brunt of it all.’

‘That must have been harrowing for her.’

‘Well, it was, though it could have been worse. I doubt she ever really cared for Luke very much. She’d known him a long time, of course, so it wasn’t easy.’

Clearly, she hadn’t married him.
She hadn’t married him.
And it sounded as if her sons hadn’t even known she’d been thinking of it. What game had Luke been playing with him that evening? What game had Vilia been playing? And
why
?

He almost missed what Gideon was saying. ‘...more upset when his mother died three years later. Cholera. Lucy Telfer had been a very good friend to her.’

Automatically, Perry said, ‘I’m sorry about that. She was a nice woman.’

‘Yes, Magnus was dreadfully cut up about it, though he’s beginning to pull himself together now. Vilia says he ought to marry again, and I’m sure she’s right.’

And that went altogether too far.
That’s one thing you won’t do, my girl! That is one thing you
– will – not – do. Not while there’s breath in my body.

He rose to his feet and stood smiling down at Gideon. ‘Time to be getting back,’ he said.

Most of the light had gone, but Gideon could see the hard line of Perry Randall’s jaw, and the flash of white teeth against the sunbronzed skin, and the glitter as his eyes caught a reflection from the lantern Briggs had just lit on the carriage. He had been kind to Gideon, and extremely tolerant of someone who must have seemed very callow to him. Gideon was grateful to him not only in a positive sense, but because he knew he wasn’t equipped to deal with such a man if he had chosen to be less than cordial. Just at the moment, he looked about as domesticated as a jungle cat. Gideon scrambled to his feet with an alacrity that would have astounded his family and friends. Though perhaps not Vilia, he reflected. If even his strong-minded mama had capitulated to Perry Randall, it wasn’t likely her peace-loving second son was going to do better.

Two days later, armed with a route plan and a walletful of letters of introduction Gideon set off on his travels. ‘Happy hunting!’ said Perry Randall with a grin as he saw him off at Columbia on the canal boat that was to take him to Pittsburgh. ‘You’ll find it’s like going to John o’ Groats by way of Land’s End, but it’s as good a way as any of discovering the mad expedients we’re driven to in this new land of ours!’

Nothing in Gideon’s experience had prepared him for the days and weeks that followed. No one in the Lauriston family was accustomed to idleness, so it was pleasant at first to sit on deck in the sun and watch the country slide by, even if, all too soon, he became aware that it would have been quicker to walk. The nights took even more getting used to. Before he entered the long, narrow cabin with its thirty-nine other occupants, he had thought that his passage on the steamboat had broken him of being over-nice in his sensibilities. But it was an illusion. Since he was slightly built, he was allocated one of the top tier of bunks, the lower ones being reserved for gentlemen whose avoirdupois was greater. He wasn’t reassured by being told that this was to minimize injury in case the supports gave way. For the first time, he learned the absolute truth of the statement that hot air rose. So did smells. From the ripe, overall blend certain high notes emerged, distinct and individual – raw whiskey, tobacco smoke, rancid frying fat, sweaty socks, mattresses matured by years of use. Then someone made the understandable mistake of opening the cabin windows, and to the cacophonous noise of the massed choirs of bullfrogs on the canal banks was added the hazard of massed regiments of mosquitoes in the cabin. Next morning, Gideon noted in his journal, ‘As far as murdering sleep is concerned, Macbeth was the merest tyro compared with the fauna of these parts.’ By the time the canal boat floated over the aqueduct into Pittsburgh, he felt much as the original engineers must have felt when, with relief, they contemplated the results of their labours. Perry Randall had been right about mad expedients, for after the first 172 miles, when the canal meandered along by the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers into the hills at Hollidaysburg, the boat was taken apart, hauled up over the Allegheny summit by steam winch, and then let down to be reassembled at Johnstown for the remaining 150 miles of the journey. Virtuously, Gideon had counted all 174 locks. It added up to a lot of gates. How Drew’s eyes would gleam when he heard!

And so began a strange, months-long interlude in which a few days of talk and smoke and heat and noise alternated, again and again, with weeks of travelling by every means humanity had yet devised, through every kind of countryside – hills and mountains, valleys wooded and bare, rivers quiet and bustling, furiously active new towns set amid great solitudes, where the colours were gaudy and the temperatures high, and the only sign of life was the blue jay, bright and delicate as a flying flower. Gideon learned a good deal about iron, but more about travel and more still about people and the huge, wide continent of America. He even learned to be amused at himself when he caught himself doing what all Americans did, eating his breakfast on the run. No loitering or lounging, no dipping into the newspapers, no pause between mouthfuls of eggs and oysters, steak and peaches, ham and chicken, hot biscuits and corn bread and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. He noted it down, as he noted down everything, so that after a while he had to throw out one of his coats to make space for his journals.

From Pittsburgh to Cleveland, and then to Chicago, raw and busy and bare on the prairie above Lake Michigan, its houses fresh and new in the rough landscape as if they had been tumbled out of some giant’s toybox and set up where they had fallen, stranded among rank grass and tree stumps along half-built streets. Then south again to join the Wabash, and on to the Ohio river, and then the great Mississippi. He left it at Memphis to travel cross-country to Alabama and a new, more violent society where there seemed to be none but the very rich and very poor and there were two sides to every man – silky deference to the ladies and lordly inhumanity to the slaves, a soft drawl in the voice and a sharp knife in the pocket. And after Alabama, on to South Carolina and the mellow, beautiful, blue-blooded city of Charleston.

Gideon had planned to go north from there to Richmond, Virginia, to see the Tredegar Iron Works, and then on to Washington and back to New York. But in Charleston he fell in love.

Long before that, Perry Randall had sailed for England.

Shona was almost speechless with excitement when his letter arrived from Fortune’s Tavern in Edinburgh, and the nurserymaid thought she had taken leave of her senses, walking the floor all afternoon with nine-month-old Jermyn in her arms, cuddling him and whispering to him until, with a faint, bored gurgle, he fell asleep.

Drew was almost as excited as she was when he arrived home and heard about it, and said at once, ‘We must invite him to stay, of course we must!’ No one could have had a more wonderful husband.

Theo remarked thoughtfully, ‘Fortune’s Tavern? Well, he isn’t penniless, at all events.’ Then, after a moment, ‘And Vilia is away. How very annoying.’

‘I don’t see why!’ Drew exclaimed, showing hackle. ‘Shona is perfectly capable of entertaining a house guest, and the man
is
her father!’

‘True,’ Theo replied with one of his most exasperating smiles. ‘True, indeed.’

Perry Randall, when he walked through the front door next day, expected Marchfield House to seem smaller than he remembered it; places from the past always did, and this was no exception. But it was pleasant, and elegant, and handsomely furnished, and had a lived-in feel that his own two houses lacked. For a moment, his eyes rested on the Cameron family portraits, and then he turned back to his daughter.

Slim, brown-haired, and shyly pretty, there was nothing in her to surprise him. She looked like Charlotte, but gentler. Smiling, he held out his arms in a way that didn’t come easily to him, and hugged her. She was laughing and crying, and quite incoherent, and he looked ruefully over her shining head at the two young men standing politely just inside the door. The one with the pleased, proprietary look on his face was presumably Drew, and the other, several degrees fairer and an inch or so taller, must be Theo. It was Theo who returned his glance, and even through the confusion of his own emotions, Perry noted the particular quality of his smile and groaned to himself. He wondered whether Vilia knew.

Where was she
?

Next, he had to meet his grandson, and chuck him under his sleepy chin. Thank God no one suggested he might like to hold him. Then they all went in to dinner, and it was necessary to explain about meeting Gideon, and to relate something of his own recent history, and hear about theirs. Everything was painfully stilted. Perry had almost forgotten how oppressively polite the young were here, in comparison with young Americans. Gideon had been right, he thought, about Shona and Drew. They were admirably suited. How on earth had he and Charlotte managed to produce a daughter so sweet, and loving, and uncritical? She scarcely uttered a sentence that didn’t include the words, ‘Drew says’, and when Drew was talking it was as if he were handing down the gospels from Sinai. She wasn’t very clever, and she had no sense of humour at all, but she was a darling, although the kind of darling, Perry was beginning to feel after an hour or two, who might very easily drive one to distraction. Or was there something mortally wrong with his paternal instincts?

Having met Gideon, Perry would have recognized Theo and Drew anywhere. The resemblance was strong, particularly about the eyes and in their general height and fairness. Theo looked more like his mother than the other two, and Drew least like her. There was a stubborn set to his mouth. Gideon had said he was uncomplicated, and that was probably true. Theo, on the other hand, practical man or not, looked to be a mass of complications, for the people who dealt with him, even if not within himself. Perry wasn’t sure that he cared for Theo, not because of his sexual proclivities – which didn’t bother him – but because there was a hint of intellectual vanity in his smooth charm. It didn’t show much. To Perry, his manner was pleasantly deprecating even when the talk veered round to metals and foundry work, and Shona, with a gentle smile, left the gentlemen to their port with a request that they shouldn’t linger too long. Drew hurried them through it as if their lives depended on it.

Where was Vilia
?

‘My plans are fluid,’ Perry said, ‘but I have business in London, so I will be able to call on Grace and her husband.’

‘Yes,’ Drew said, clearly not very enthusiastic about his sister-in-law. ‘They have two children now. Grace manages them admirably. You won’t be going to Glenbraddan to see your stepson, I take it?’

‘No. Even before my – er – marital troubles, Edward never warmed to me; nor, if the truth be told, did I to him. My fault, perhaps.’

Theo said, ‘Did you know that his sister lives in Paris now? Vilia is on a visit to her at the moment.’

Is she, by God
?
He smiled. ‘Georgy was, I think, seven when I last saw her, an engaging little scamp. Has she calmed down with the years?’

‘Goodness, no!’ Shona said. ‘She’s
so
full of life, and she adores Paris. She has been writing to us forever to come on a visit, and at last we persuaded mama-in-law to go. She has always wanted to, and I feel quite guilty because I know she would have gone sooner if it hadn’t been for me, and wanting to be sure I was settled and happy first. You can’t imagine how kind she has been to me! And she has promised to bring back all the latest frills and furbelows. It’s so exciting!’

Perry had no intention, this time, of rushing off and missing her on the way. Absently, he said, ‘I’m sure it is. Does she make a long stay?’

‘Until the end of September.’

Another seven weeks.
‘Then I may have the pleasure of renewing her acquaintance. I was considering going to France on a matter of patent registration, and I would of course call on Georgy if I did.’
Hell! Not the most intelligent thing to say.
He looked at his daughter, one of the vast legion, he suspected, of under-occupied young ladies who spent most of their time writing letters. ‘Don’t, though, warn your sister to expect me. It’s possible I might be held up in London, and never get to Paris at all.’