A Marriage of Convenience (11 page)

‘We can try, my lord.’

‘Hear that, Esmond?’ laughed Clinton. ‘The man’s a tiger.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find his funeral most amusing.’ Esmond paused, his pale features and clenched hands bizarrely at odds with his quiet ironic voice. ‘Maybe you recall the gallant nobleman who told his tenants they wouldn’t intimidate him by killing his agent.’

Clinton pushed back his chair, parodying outrage.

‘Do I detect a slight on my honour? Actually I’m going to strike the blow; then Wright can go in and take prisoners. Break the
ringleaders
and the rest will pay up on the nail.’

Esmond nodded with taunting gravity.

‘Shoot them, you mean?’

Clinton looked at him reproachfully.

‘You always underestimate my brutality.’

A slight shiver passed through Theresa as she watched the two men face each other in silence. Nothing about their manner was as it seemed—Esmond’s elder brother’s calm superiority being as much a mask as Clinton’s insulting gaiety. Lady Ardmore too, for all her outward composure, was no more able than they to break the shadowy threads that bound them to their past. For what was this argument about land and rents? Theresa asked herself, but a thin pretext for renewing a deeper conflict, dormant at times but never extinguished or resolved.

Then suddenly the menace she had felt so palpably seemed absurd and fanciful. Clinton was pouring more wine in her glass, his expression so warm and candid that she could not help smiling back. When he began asking Wright more mundane questions about methods of getting payment, she believed that if there had been a crisis, it had passed. Wright was silent a moment and then said in reply to a question about bailiffs:

‘I did offer a premium of fifty pounds to any man who’d bring in the worst of the lot. Nobody was prepared to earn it. The man’s said he’ll kill anyone who tries to arrest him. He carries a loaded horse-pistol with him everywhere. I’ve seen the handle sticking out of his coat.’

‘How long till we could get the constabulary to evict?’

‘Under an ordinary notice to quit?’ Wright pursed his lips. ‘At least a year at present.’

Clinton sipped his claret reflectively.

‘And lose another thousand in the meantime … I think not.’ He touched Wright on the arm. ‘You reckon this one’s responsible for the rest not paying?’

‘Most of them anyway.’

Clinton nodded.

‘Excellent. I’d better talk to him. Draw me a map of where he lives. If I have to ask questions on the way, someone’s sure to warn him.’

The casualness of Clinton’s voice took Wright by surprise and it was a moment before he seemed to realise what had been said.

‘He lives up by Rathkenny. McMahon’s his name.’ The agent’s voice shook a little. ‘Hadn’t I better come with you, Lord Ardmore?’

‘He’d recognise you. I don’t want a fight.’

‘What do you want?’ shouted Esmond, past caring how he sounded.

Lady Ardmore got up from her chair, face flushed and lips trembling.

‘There isn’t enough trouble for him in Carrickfeeney, so he comes here to make more. He won’t be the one who has to crouch behind iron shutters at night. That’ll be my pleasure when he’s gone.’

‘You can’t feel safe with your tenants wandering about with guns under their coats.’ Clinton met her eyes calmly. ‘What would you do if he came here and demanded every gun in the place? It happens, you know, when landlords allow their rights to be trampled on.’

‘Rights?’ cried Esmond, making Theresa start. ‘Spare us your cant about upholding the law. You want more money out of the estate and you’ll risk her life to get it.’

Scarcely having heard Esmond raise his voice before, the fixed gleam in his narrowing pupils and the sneering edge he gave his words, chilled Theresa. Clinton stood up slowly.

‘I do need money, Esmond. But I’ll risk no life but my own.’

‘Has it crossed your mind that you may have to kill this man in self-defence?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Then just consider the consequences.’

Clinton smiled blandly.

‘I’ve no intention of taking a loaded weapon.’ He walked to the door and looked back. ‘Come along, Mr Wright. That map of yours.’

The agent rose at once and followed Clinton out.

As soon as they had gone, Lady Ardmore sank into her chair and slumped forward with her head in her hands. Her widow’s cap had
slipped down over her forehead and she was trembling, whether with grief or anger Theresa could not tell. She herself felt dazed and slightly sick. She watched Esmond rise and lay a hand on his mother’s shoulder, their bond of close sympathy repelling her. The old woman looked up at him pathetically.

‘You swore you’d prevent this.’

Esmond sighed heavily.

‘I didn’t know he’d take blackmail so far.’

‘Blackmail?’ echoed Theresa, in amazement.

Esmond said slowly, as if to a child:

‘I refused to lend him money. This is his reply—Give me what I want or I’ll make our mother’s life such misery you’ll be forced to give in to me.’

‘But it wasn’t a threat,’ she stammered. ‘He’s going, Esmond.’

‘Not a threat?’ he groaned, jerking back his head in exasperation. ‘Let’s call it a taste of what he may do later … replace Wright, serve writs by the dozen, start evicting. That’s what he’s telling us.’

‘Why couldn’t you talk to him reasonably?’

‘You think he was reasonable to me?’

‘You patronised him, so he went further than he intended. I’m sure he never meant to …’

‘You know nothing about him,’ snapped Lady Ardmore. ‘Some men need to risk their necks, the way others need strong drink at breakfast.’

The woman’s derision shocked Theresa less than her lack of all concern.

‘Aren’t either of you worried about him?’ she whispered. Lady Ardmore glanced at Esmond before turning back to Theresa.

‘My dear,’ she said silkily, ‘you really shouldn’t insult Lord Ardmore until you know him better. I can assure you he’ll be more than a match for any wretched one-horse grazier. It’s the ruffian’s numerous companions I feel less sanguine about.’

‘If the man’s such a poor fool, why won’t anyone go near him for any money?’ Theresa replied hotly. Esmond raised a propitiating hand.

‘Of course if he was utterly contemptible, you wouldn’t catch Clinton demeaning himself. He enjoys a challenge.’

Theresa murmured urgently: ‘Ride part of the way with him, Esmond. Be there to fetch help if he doesn’t come back.’

‘If he wanted my help he’d ask for it. I’m not going to try to steal his thunder.’

‘Is bravery so laughable?’ she asked, wounded by his scoffing tone.

‘It’s evidently made a better impression on you,’ he replied with a bitter smile on his lips.

‘All I wanted was to be left in peace … that was all,’ moaned Lady Ardmore.

‘Shall I help you to your room, mother?’

Without speaking Lady Ardmore rose and held out her arm for Esmond to take.

A little later a maid came into the dining room to clear the table, but seeing Theresa still seated, she went away. Theresa stared aimlessly at the decanter in front of her; shafts of light from the window made the dark red wine glow and sparkle, its colour refracted and intensified by the many-faceted glass. Without
thinking
, she reached forward and poured herself some more wine, but her hand shook and she spilled some drops on the cloth; like blood, she thought; dark stains on a white shirt. She heard Clinton’s laughter on the croquet lawn and shuddered. Her forehead was hot and she was gripped by a hateful feeling of suspense as if a tightly wound spring were about to uncoil with sudden violence.

How could it have been unnatural for her to show fear and apprehension? Used only to Esmond’s intuitive understanding, the memory of his grim-faced hostility struck her with the chill impact of revelation. Never, until seeing him goading Clinton, had she thought him joyless and bitter; as if his brother’s youthful animation drained him. Now too, Theresa thought she knew why she hated his complicity with his mother—their bond seeming to owe as much to shared antipathy to Clinton as to love for each other. And through every exchange between them, Theresa had felt the helplessness of absolute exclusion. A family’s hatred, no less than its love, had the power to create an inexorably closed world.

Through the small thick panes of glass, Theresa saw the sombre outline of the surrounding hills and imagined the rooks flying high above the house in never-ending circles. With a sudden throb of panic, she wondered how she would endure more days at Kilkreen. Seconds later Clinton came in, and with his presence everything that had seemed ominous and dark in the silent air seemed to leave it.

‘I wanted a word with Esmond before I went.’

‘He’s with your mother.’

‘A most devoted son, Miss Simmonds,’ he replied, smiling at her brooding face. As he moved to the door, she called after him with a vehemence that surprised her:

‘Why are you going?’

‘Questions like that and I won’t know whether to start with my right foot or my left.’ He looked at her kindly, and flicked at his riding boots with his whip. ‘Don’t we all do what we want, and dress it up with words like duty?’

‘You must be frightened.’ she murmured after a brief silence.

‘Too little imagination. Hasn’t Esmond told you?’

She did not smile, but said quietly: ‘He may refuse to pay anything; he may not be able to….’

The anxiety in her voice drew from him a tenderness of
expression
she had never seen before.

‘I only want to persuade the man not to harass tenants who would otherwise pay their rent. Nothing very alarming in that.’

The gentle reassurance of his tone contrasted so strangely with the masculine jut of his jaw and the almost arrogantly authoritative way he held himself that she was bemused by a sudden sense of his accessibility; a feeling that for the first time there was no barrier between them and that if she chose to talk more to him he would reply without the constraint and tension she had become used to. And yet how unconsciously proud he seemed of his healthy young blood and the vitality that surrounded him like an aura. Illness, death and old age only happened to ordinary people, but, like a god in a cloud, he was invulnerable. His serene confidence both
exasperated
and touched her. Suddenly he laughed, and she wondered why until then she had never noticed how irresistible his laughter was.

‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of my aunt’s remark after a performance of King Lear. “What a tiresomely disagreeable family those Lears must have been”.’ He smiled. ‘You musn’t take us so seriously, Miss Simmonds. It’s not good. It’s my worst fault, so I ought to know.’

Then, with a slight inclination of the head, he turned and was gone. Unspoken sentences raced through her mind and dispersed like swirling smoke, leaving only a confused sense of loss. For several seconds she could not remember a word he had said. The same tension, she had felt earlier, returned with greater force. For an instant she saw Clinton with hallucinating clearness: the cut of his nostrils, the curve of his cheeks, still glowing after his morning in the open air, the golden hairs on the back of his hands, a slight scar above his left eye—details she had observed unaware and was now astonished to possess. A treacherous tide of emotion bewildered and scared her. She thought of bullets lodging in his body and felt a spasm of giddiness. With a shock she realised that Esmond had come in.

‘I didn’t think you’d be still here.’

‘Did he find you?’

Esmond nodded and sat down next to her.

‘Did you manage to dissuade him?’

The lines deepened at the corners of his mouth and his pale eyes mocked her.

‘Would you like to see me turn water into wine …?’

He ran a hand wearily through his greying hair and stared vacantly at the table.

‘Please, Theresa,’ he murmured, reaching out blindly to her, ‘don’t judge me too harshly by today. Perhaps you think I envy him … maybe I do. If I was his age we might understand each other better … if he’d struggled as I have … if, if.’ He looked at her more like his old self, rueful, ironic. ‘A man like Clinton really doesn’t have to be brave; he simply couldn’t conceive of this Irishman or anyone else standing against him. I don’t pretend it’s just youth or arrogance …’ His face relaxed and the furrowed frown left it. ‘Anyway you’ll be glad to hear I found him in the gun-room loading a revolver. It’s not untypical, believe me.’ He noticed her lips curving upwards and looked away. ‘Is that funny, my love?’

‘I suppose it must be since I want to laugh.’

But instead of laughter coming, her throat felt tight and choked, and when Esmond asked her what was wrong, she could not look at him or answer.

*

Clinton rode through the beech woods bordering the domain park, over ground thick with fallen leaves, and on into rougher country where the bracken was russet and golden. Ahead of him a pheasant darted away in a jerky undignified rush. From a misty sky the sun was shining now with a fainter warmth. He was nervous about the coming encounter, but the feeling did not displease him; just a gentle flutter under the diaphragm and no parched mouth and shaking hands. Elation mingled with the faster beating of his heart.

Since his arrival at the house, late the previous evening, Clinton had deliberately checked his natural desire to press Esmond about the sale price which Markenfield now seemed likely to realise as a result of his preliminary negotiations with the mortgagees. And to remove any possible temptation, Clinton had absented himself for the entire morning. But now that he had given Esmond so clear an indication of what he might do to raise funds if the estimated price were to prove low, Clinton felt confident that Esmond would return to London considerably more eager to bargain hard before reaching a final agreement. Clinton would have prefered to
safeguard
his interests in a less dramatic fashion, but, since Esmond in all their past dealings had only done his best for him when given a clear incentive, Clinton had made up his mind to provide one.

Trotting his horse along a rutted lane between hedges bright with rose hips, he savoured the gratifying and entirely unlooked for effect
his behaviour had seemed to have on Miss Simmonds. It was extraordinary how even the most experienced and canny women were often swayed by male recklessness into an almost maternal solicitude. To pass the time, and take his mind off McMahon, Clinton allowed himself to wonder what he might do were she to give him any more positive signs of being attracted. She was an intriguing woman certainly, and unnervingly forthright. It was his clear recollection of this quality which made the possibility
unexpectedly
disquieting. With a measure of regret, painful enough to surprise him, he reluctantly accepted that anything short of active discouragement would be unthinkable.