A Dark and Distant Shore (67 page)

Next day they went to the Louvre, which had been stripped in 1814 and 1815 of many of its greatest paintings. ‘An outrage!’ Georgiana claimed, as if they had not, in fact, merely been restored to the owners from whom Napoleon had plundered them. Many of the antiquities and the Vatican sculptures had gone, too, but their place had been taken by newly-discovered treasures from Assyria, a fine display of Classical vases and bronzes, and a growing collection of
objets d’art
from the Middle Ages. Even when Georgiana relapsed into silence, there was plenty for two intelligent adults to talk about, even two who were determined, at all costs, to avoid touching on any matter bordering on the personal.

On the second day, they all went riding in the Bois, which had the advantage of ruling out a great deal of conversation. Mr Randall, in any case, only had an hour to spare.

On the third day, they picked their way through the narrow, crooked streets to Notre Dame, and admired the great rose windows, still with their centuries-old stained glass, and the flying buttresses and sculptured portals. They listened to Georgy explain how the long, galleried row of the Kings of Judah had lost their heads – decapitated, she said, by a revolutionary mob who had thought they represented the Kings of France. Then, still smiling politely, they returned to where the carriage was waiting. Perry Randall’s groom was standing beside it with Mr Randall’s horse. Easily, Mr Randall mounted, and with a smile and a wave, left them.

The day after that, Vilia pleaded a headache. Next day, she feared she might be contracting a cold and would be wise to stay indoors. And on the morning that followed, she took the opportunity to say good-bye to Mr Randall. She was about to leave for the country, and would not be returning to Paris. How charming it had been, she said, to renew their acquaintance.

To drive her out of Paris had been his aim. He was pleased to have achieved it so quickly.

Versailles, once the home of so much grandeur, was an empty, abandoned shell, although rumour said that it was soon to be restored. But its neglected saloons and galleries, its overgrown avenues and parterres, its dry fountains, suited Vilia’s mood. She sat on a grassy bank and leaned her tired head against a tree. Her maid and Sorley, a discreet distance away, were squabbling amiably over the remains of the picnic, and the postboys were fast asleep in the shade of the carriage.

The strain had been intolerable. She had nursed her resentment at first, clung to her hatred as if it were a lifeline, and had succeeded in upsetting only herself It had been like hating a cast-iron canopy or a length of railroad track, for he had accepted her chill politeness just as he had accepted Georgiana’s hard-working vivacity – as if he were impervious, as if his own manners and breeding were too much part of him to be flawed by the pettiness or immaturity of others. He had been, and had remained, an eminently civilized companion, and perfectly at ease. There hadn’t been anything ironic in his courtesy, no extra shade of meaning when the satirical gleam came to his eye and the creases round his mouth deepened at something that, in other circumstances, would have amused her, too. There had been no hint of tension in him when he spoke to her, no suggestion of a tremor in his hand when he took her elbow to guide her across the street, nothing to suggest that he remembered they had even met before. Except for that one remark about blonde lace.

It was as if there were an unspoken agreement between them to let the dead past bury its dead. Only, for her it wasn’t dead. She had, indeed, sent him away thirteen years ago, telling him that she didn’t believe his love was either deep or durable; but almost at once, thinking over what he had said – again and again, interminably – she had begun to wonder. And then Mungo had died, and the first sorrow had been absorbed in the second, and then both had been absorbed in a third – the long banishment from Kinveil. Perhaps because that was something it had seemed possible to rectify, she had allowed it to possess her mind to the exclusion of everything else. But no sooner was she back at Kinveil than she began to long for Perry Randall again, and had been desperate enough to persuade herself that Luke might be his substitute. And then Perry had come back, without seeing her, and had betrayed her to Luke.

She told herself, again, that she hated him. But still, she craved an explanation of it all, even though it looked, now, as if he had accepted that ill-judged dismissal, thinking she meant it; which wasn’t surprising. She had relived their last meeting in her mind so many times, and she knew how convincing she had been because of her fear of being hurt again. More, almost, than anything in the world, she wanted to know how and when his feelings for her had changed, not on any general level, but in every tiny, desolate, masochistic detail. She wanted, she supposed, to have everything out with him, to quarrel with him, to justify herself, to prove to him that he had been wrong, yet again, and had failed her, yet again. She wanted to bare her soul, and his.

And she couldn’t. There was no possible way of resurrecting the past with this stranger. This strikingly handsome, authoritative, wholly self-contained stranger. Almost everything he had said had made her realize how little she knew about him. And that was what had made everything quite intolerable in the end. For if he had
really
been a stranger, she would have been in love with him, and he with her.

So she had fled. With Georgiana she had planned an itinerary that would take her, slowly drifting, back to the coast, stopping for a day here or a week there as the fancy took her. Emile had given her introductions to friends who would be happy to welcome her, if she should prefer a civilized house to an hotel or hostelry.

She spent that night not far from Versailles, and set out next day through the valley of the Chevreuse. The sun was warm, the hills were green, and there were pleasant orchards and tree-lined glades. The fields and the farms, the thatched houses and nestling villages, were well tended, well-endowed, peaceful, so that she herself was more composed when they found an inn not far from Dampierre, an elegant jewel of a château with domed corner turrets and a moat of running water, all in a sylvan setting of woods and lakes and trees. ‘The château of Dampierre,’ Emile had said, ‘does not resemble the château of Kinveil in the smallest particular.’ With something that was almost a laugh, she recognized that he had been right. The inn was comfortable and friendly, and she told the
patron
that next day she intended to go on to Rambouillet.

Yet still, that night, she dreamed about him. Half waking, half asleep, she remembered their one brief week together, those days in 1815 when nothing had mattered in the world except him. When all her senses had been focused, like the sun through a burning glass, on what was between them. She had known, in a compartment of her mind, that he was almost distracted with worry. She had known that by every standard of morality her own behaviour was wrong. She had thought of his wife and child and stepchildren, of her own husband and her two little sons – and it had been as if they all existed on another planet. Nothing had mattered except that they should be together again, she and Perry, their bodies, like their spirits, melting together into something above and beyond themselves. The whole infinitely more beautiful than the sum of the parts. Still, sometimes, she was able to take their love out, like a jewel from a velvet pouch, and run her fingers over its smooth, perfect surfaces, and turn it to the light and admire the radiance of it and the lancing fires. She thought about it now, drowsily, and after a while ecstasy took her, and a tearing, resplendent agony.

Slowly, gaspingly, she came back to the present and threw off the feather-stuffed quilt. Gazing blindly out through the thinly curtained window at the dawn she wondered for the first time what would happen if the Perry Randall of 1815 were to reappear before her, older perhaps, but otherwise unchanged; unshadowed by all the betrayals between. Would she still want him? The charming, passionate, unreal lover she herself had created and perpetuated. She didn’t know.

There was a different chaise that day, and the postboys were new; something about a forty-kilometre limit from Paris. She didn’t really pay much attention, because the countryside was soothing and the picnic by the banks of a little stream delightful. Could Mrs McKirdy learn to make bread like this, she wondered, and charcuterie? But it wasn’t easy to get good pork in Edinburgh. As they approached Rambouillet the sun was setting, but Vilia leaned out of the coach hoping to see the fourteenth-century tower of the château, or perhaps Marie-Antoinette’s dairy. It was odd how different latitudes affected the angle of the sun. She would have thought them a little further north than they really were. Anyway, she couldn’t see the château.

She knew nothing about the hotel where she intended to stay that night, except that it was supposed to be good, but she was a little surprised to find it so plain and unassuming. No blaze of lights, no glasses clinking, no sound of talk, no ostlers, and only one other coach in the grassy forecourt. But the postboys seemed to have no doubts, so, with a little grimace, Vilia trod up the broad, shallow stone steps.

There was a man in some kind of livery holding open the front door, and with a nod she passed through. Momentarily dazzled, she was aware that the hall was empty save for one man. The
patron,
no doubt.

And then her sight cleared, and she saw it was Perry Randall. There was a sardonic smile on his lips, but his eyes were unreadable.

He stood aside to allow her to enter one of the ground floor rooms, and she went in without speaking, since it seemed that was what he wanted. It was a welcoming room, charmingly furnished, and the curtains were drawn, the candles lit, and a fire of scented logs burned in the hearth. There was a table laid out with silver, crystal, and porcelain, and an array of covered dishes. A faint, appetizing aroma came from a chafing dish on an ornate burner. As if in a trance, she moved towards the scrolled mirror set in the overmantel and began to remove her bonnet; a few wisps of hair had come loose from her chignon and, automatically, she tucked them in again. Then the door closed, and he was beside her, taking the light, gauzy carriage shawl from her shoulders. Their eyes met in the glass, and she heard the slight catch in his breathing, but he walked over to another door and opened it for her. It was a small retiring room with a gilded dressing stand, basins and ewers, towels, mirrors, and water closet. She was grateful after the journey.

When she returned, he was pouring wine into two slim, tapering glasses. He handed one to her and then, his eyes brilliant, raised his own and said, ‘To you! To us!’ She gazed back at him, her own eyes green and translucent in the candlelight, and then smiled faintly and raised the glass to her lips.

She had no real desire for food, but it was excellent, and she ate some in recognition of all the trouble someone had gone to. They didn’t speak except for the courtesies of the table; there seemed no need.

After a time, she thought of something, and said, ‘Where are we?’

‘At a house called the Chaumière de la Reine, near Montfort-l’Amaury, a few kilometres north of Rambouillet.’

‘You bribed the postboys?’

‘Of course.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Your route? From Savarin. He didn’t even realize he had told me.’

When they had finished, he crossed to the bellpull and two servants came in to clear away, and then to bring a tray of decanters and set up a little folding table with a coffee pot, cups, and sweetmeats on it. Then they were alone again.

She was sitting, half reclining, on a chaise longue by the fire, her eyes fixed on the heart of the flames and a faint, almost imperceptible lift at the corners of her mouth. Perry stood, quietly watching her. He had expected resistance, anger, even a cold fury. Any of them would have been justified. Personal considerations apart, it was hardly good
ton
to abduct a beautiful woman travelling alone in a foreign country, protected only by her servants. But at least, he reflected with a gleam of self-mockery, if one had to go in for abduction it was the easiest way to do it.

He had known better than to show anything of his feelings for her in Paris, for he didn’t delude himself about her probable attitude to his reappearance after all these years. It was necessary for them to be alone, not just for an hour or two and always in danger of interruption, but much longer than that. And in Paris it was impossible. There were too many difficulties, perfectly real ones involving convention, propriety, and possible scandal, and some less real but potent enough to offer refuge if she chose not to face what he wanted her to face. As she might do. She had been forced too young into maturity, burdened too early with other people’s weaknesses, other people’s needs, other people’s demands. Her defences against the world had been thrown up too quickly, so that some were irrational and ill-considered; and because she had never been granted the leisure to take them down again and rebuild more wisely, some were too strong. From remarks Gideon and Shona had made, Perry thought that, over the years, she had come to hold herself aloof from human involvements and was not, perhaps, always as discerning as she might be in her dealings with people. He didn’t know how she felt about him – it was almost the only thing he didn’t know about her but he was certain that, if he still meant anything to her, she would see him as a threat to her cherished self-reliance, just as she had done in 1822.

He was prepared to expend all the patience he possessed on breaking down her barricades. Although she could be cool, detached, sexless, as she had been in Paris, or headstrong and hurtful as when she had sent him away from Marchfield House, he knew that she had a true capacity for love. And that was something that never died, even if love itself did. That was why he was here, why they were both here. He thought she had probably stopped loving the Perry Randall of 1815. But he would make her love the Perry Randall of 1835 as deeply, or more deeply than the weak, irresponsible ghost of twenty years past.