A Dark and Distant Shore (72 page)

It was Vilia who had set him thinking, at the beginning of last year. He had escorted her to a party and made some genial remark about what a pleasure it was to have a pretty woman on his arm again. And she had laughed up at him – she really was a very pretty woman! – and said, ‘You should marry again, Magnus. You know how well it suits you to be looked after, and Lucy always said you made an admirable husband.’

‘Did she?’ He had been a little touched.

Considering it afterwards, it had struck him that Vilia herself would do very well in the role of second Mrs Telfer. They had known each other for years, and he thought he ought to marry someone decently mature. He couldn’t face breaking in some blushing debutante who had no idea how to run one household, far less three and would probably wear him out by being coy in the bedroom. Especially as there had been one or two occasions lately when he’d needed a bit of help; regrettable, but only to be expected when one reached the age of fifty-two. No, he didn’t want a debutante. There was the point, too, that Vilia had been very close to Lucy and knew exactly what Lucy had done to make him comfortable. By and large, he thought she would do him credit as a wife. Her fair fragility set off his own stalwart looks rather well. They would make a distinguished pair, and she was sufficiently good-looking not to make him look elderly – always a problem, he’d noticed, when a wife aged more quickly than her husband. He couldn’t stand seeing well set up fellows of his own age dancing attendance on stout, grey-haired matrons. And Vilia had three sons, so she must know what that side of life was about. It had occurred to him, too, that she might take some of his business problems off his shoulders; he couldn’t leave everything to Henry Phillpotts. It would do him a world of good to be relieved of worry, and she would probably enjoy managing things, especially Kinveil, which was always a headache. Yes, he had thought, it was a real possibility. But he wasn’t going to rush things. He’d sound her out next time she was in London.

He had understood he would see her on her way back from Paris last September, but she had gone straight home to Marchfield – something to do with urgent business at the foundry that only she was equipped to deal with. He had no doubt she would deal with it very effectively. The nagging little voice in his head grew louder. As a wife, might she not be too efficient for comfort? Magnus couldn’t stand people being brisk with him. And perhaps she wouldn’t let him have his own way as readily as Lucy had done. Lucy had known that, because of the very fact of his being a man, his judgement must necessarily be superior to hers, but Vilia might not see things in quite the same way. But he still went on feeling that she could be the best wife for him until it occurred to him to work out what age she was. When she had come to live at St James’s Square in November 1811, she had been not quite sixteen, which meant that on the ninth of December last she must have been – good God! – forty. Not too old to produce a son and heir, but too dashed near it!

Then, by the greatest good fortune, Magnus had met Julia Osmond, who was twenty-seven and rather like Lucy, not in appearance but in temperament. She couldn’t hold a candle to Vilia for looks, but she was calm and placid and had been running her father’s house for some years now. Magnus decided she would know just how to make him comfortable, and had wasted very little time in asking her to do so. They were to be married in September.

He looked at Vilia’s letter again. ‘...tired and unwell... would benefit greatly from spending a few weeks at Kinveil. You said once that you would open it up for me whenever I wished... have always felt it too much to ask of you... but now my need is great...’

He couldn’t leave it to Henry Phillpotts, he supposed. And he had to break the news to her some time, so it might as well be now.

‘July the third 1836.’ he wrote. ‘My dear Vilia – I am greatly distressed to hear of your indisposition. It appears to me that you have asked too much of yourself for too many years. The female constitution was not, after all, designed for the rigours that a man may face without flinching. However, I am sure that a period of rest and repose will suffice to restore you.’ That part was easy enough, but several rewritings were entailed before he was satisfied with what came next. The final, fair copy that Vilia received three weeks after Drew and Shona’s second child was born, went on,

Unfortunately, having already decided to open up Kinveil again, I have thrown in an army of workmen to make good the ravages of the last few years. In consequence, it is not fit to receive you. The workmen will not be finished until September, a date I have set for a purpose – a happy one for me. Remembering your advice that I should marry again, I know you will rejoice with me that Miss Julia Osmond, of Crawley Hall in Wiltshire, has consented to be my wife. Since Miss Osmond is very attached to the country, I anticipate that we will spend the better part of each year at Kinveil.

I hope you may find yourself sufficiently recovered by September to be present at the ceremony in Wiltshire. If not, we will be delighted to welcome you at Kinveil when we are settled in, possibly in the summer of next year. I am sure you will become as attached to Miss Osmond as you were to my dear, lamented Lucy, God rest her soul.

Please accept my sincere wishes for your early recovery, and convey also my regards to my niece Shona and her husband. Yours &c – Magnus Telfer.

It was almost six months before Vilia’s recovery began.

One day in January 1837 when, sunk in the apathy that had possessed her for she didn’t know how long, she was lying listlessly in bed, she heard a howl from Elinor’s four-week-old Lizzie and an instant, echoing screech from six-month-old Lavinia. The sounds came from just outside her door, and she knew that the babies’ nannies, shushing vigorously, were taking them out for the afternoon walk that all nannies insisted on, torrent, gale, blizzard notwithstanding. This afternoon there was a combination of all three. Vilia couldn’t even be grateful that she herself was lying on a warm, soft bed, with candles to repel the gloom, and a pile of new novels beside her that she couldn’t summon the interest to open. All she cared about was being left alone in her cocoon, dead to feeling.

Even so, she was hazily pleased that Lavinia was such a healthy child, and quite unflawed. Funny, gurgling, and far more positive than her brother Jermyn. More like Drew than Shona, she thought. And more like the man who had fathered both of them. Even that didn’t mean much any more, so that she was able to think about it – just. She couldn’t think about
him,
yet, and when she tried to, her mind always slid away on to some other track, or no track at all.

Shona had told her that there was soon going to be a baby in the house on Beacon Street in Boston, and Vilia had managed to say how exciting it would be for Shona to have a new half-brother or sister. She had been distantly proud of herself, as if she had achieved something rather splendid, even if her mind had recoiled from defining what the something splendid was. The news hadn’t been unexpected, of course. Considered coolly, it had been as inevitable as the news Grace had just passed on from London, that the new Mrs Magnus Telfer was also in the family way. ‘Already!’ Grace had exclaimed with uncharacteristic malice.

The world, suddenly, seemed full of babies, and all of them – with the sole exception of little Lizzie – associated in Vilia’s mind with her own pain. With the incestuous alliance between Drew and Shona. With
his
second – third – desertion, worse almost than the first. With her own final severing from Kinveil. Vilia had no doubt that Julia Telfer’s child would be a boy; a boy to inherit.

And yet... And yet...

She turned on her side, her eyes blind to the pretty room with its washed greens and silvers, its graceful furniture, its flowered hangings. She hoped those silly women would have enough sense to bring the girls back in again. And yet... All of it, she supposed, meant that there was nothing more the world could do to hurt her; no longer any blow left for Fate to deal.

Laboriously, she considered it. She considered it all afternoon, and again in the evening, after the boys had paid their duty visit before going down to dinner. The past, with its agonies, was past. There was nothing the future could possibly do to her.

She slept that night for four whole hours without waking.

It was a week, still, before she was strong enough to rise from her bed, and almost two months before she ventured downstairs for dinner. She wanted to be sure that she didn’t quiver like a frightened mare when Shona fussed over her, or Elinor mentioned Charleston, or Theo put Drew in his place with some clever, cutting remark.

By April, she was strong enough to write to Magnus and say that she would so much like to make the acquaintance of his dearest Julia, and hoped it would be convenient if she came on a visit at the end of May. Theo insisted on escorting her, although she told him Sorley could look after her perfectly well.

Dearest Julia died early in the morning after they arrived, giving birth to a seven-month child. There had been no warning, and the midwife wasn’t due for a month or the fashionable London doctor for six weeks. Even the man from Fort Augustus couldn’t be found in time.

Magnus hurried across the causeway to greet them in the soft, moist air of early evening. Foliage and grass were tropically lush, and the range of greens almost oppressive. There was no wind, and the rain had lifted a little so that all the insect life of the countryside had emerged from hiding. The midges were swarming – vicious, hungry little bloodsuckers, the plague of overcast days and still water, landing and biting before one even knew they were there. Magnus, sweating with fear, wore them like a nimbus round his head.

‘Can you do something?’ he gasped. ‘Can you do something for her? She’s dying, I know she is, and there’s no one to help but the servants! You’ve had three children, you must know what to do. Help her, Vilia. Help her!’

There was nothing she
could
do. The girl who lay on the bed, uselessly swathed in towels and napkins and wadded sheets, her fair hair still braided but her cheeks waxen and her eyes ringed with purple, had been too frightened and too ignorant to let the village women do what might have saved her. ‘It wass the wrong way round, Mistress Vilia,’ Morag Bain murmured to her. ‘And she would not be letting uss turn it because the pain wass too great. She wass screaming and fighting, she wass, aal the time. It iss a miracle the baby iss aal right, but there iss no way that we can stop the bleeding. Poor soul. Poor soul.’

When, at last, Julia Telfer lay straight, still and lifeless under a fresh white sheet, and the child Juliana had been lulled to sleep at Morag Bain’s breast, Vilia went out to stand on the sea wall. After a while, Theo, who had been filling Magnus up with whisky, came silently to join her. It should have been dawn, but the sky had turned black as pitch and so lowering that it seemed near enough to touch. Minute by minute, the world closed in around the two quiet figures on the parapet until they could see nothing beyond a dozen yards. And then the rain came, sudden and violent as if it had been emptied out of some cosmic bucket, pouring down the castle walls in great, thick, moiré ripples, like molten lead, until the courtyard was awash and Vilia and Theo as drenched as two corpses from the deep. The lightning followed, wild, brilliant, ragged flashes of it, ripping the sky to north, and west, and then to south, illuminating the five great peaks at the end of the loch with an unearthly glare, flickering so that it seemed almost as if the mountains themselves had begun to move. The thunder rolled and reverberated unceasingly, echoing over water and hills like the ultimate meeting of the upper and the nether millstones.

When it began to die away at last, with Kinveil, miraculously, still standing solid and four-square as it had stood for more than five long centuries, Theo, far from sober, murmured, ‘Cheap symbolism, Vilia dear! Come indoors and dry yourself. Remember you have been ill.’

A year almost to the day after Julia died, Magnus Telfer came to Vilia and asked her to marry him.

He had recovered well from his third loss in eight years, although there was more grey in his hair, and the well-furnished face was marked with lines that had not been there before. She was a little surprised at the simplicity, and the honesty, of his declaration.

‘I have never been a passionate or demonstrative man,’ he said, ‘and I cannot change now. What I feel for you is warmth, and fondness, and the greatest admiration. Gratitude, too, for the way you tried to help Julia last year. Perhaps you may think that none of this is enough. But there is Kinveil as well, and I know what it means to you. If you consented to marry me, you would have to give up the foundry, but the boys must be able to manage that by now. Will you take me, and my little Juliana, and Kinveil, instead?’

Although in most ways she was well again, there remained a numbness of heart and feeling that she thought, now, might never leave her. She didn’t want them to, because they gave her the kind of armour she had been trying to create for herself ever since Mungo died. She had even lost interest in the foundry, which demanded too much of her. Besides, it was right that the boys should be left to fight their own battles without her interference.

Looking at Magnus, with the unfamiliarly open, almost anxious smile round his eyes, she realized that, although two or three years ago she had schemed to bring a marriage with him about, it would have stood, then, only a moderate chance of success. Alive and alert, she would have been bound to try to do things, and probably to manage him as well, and they would have ended by irritating each other beyond bearing. But now, when he knew he needed her, and when she had no more tears to shed, she thought they might do better. Indeed, she thought they might do quite well.

The wedding took place at Kinveil in July, and there was a special gaiety about it, spilling over from the coronation, a fortnight earlier, of the new young queen, Victoria, with all its promise of a brighter future and glittering new horizons.