A Marriage of Convenience (15 page)

‘Who are these men?’ she asked, shakily.

‘Keep walking,’ was all he said.

No effort was made to stop them reaching the trap, but when they were both seated in the vehicle, Clinton saw that MacMahon and a dozen others stood spread out in a semi-circle some ten yards away. With a shout to Theresa to get behind the dashboard, Clinton brought down his whip and launched the trap at the waiting men. As one jumped forward to seize the bridle, Clinton lashed out with the whip. Theresa screamed as she saw the plaited leather curl round the man’s bare arm, tearing away the skin. She hid her face and a second later heard another sharp crack and a roar of pain. The light carriage was swaying and jolting terrifyingly and she was deafened by angry shouts. A stone struck the tailboard and another crashed against the back of the box, but when she raised her head she could see across the horse’s haunches that the way was clear. A few people scattered, dropping baskets and packages, but Clinton did nothing to slacken the horse’s pace. Dazed with shock and bruised where she had been flung against the dashboard, Theresa was amazed to hear Clinton laughing. When they were clear of the streets, she turned on him furiously.

‘You’re mad. We might have been killed.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ he replied, checking the horse’s pace to a brisk trot. ‘We might have been knocked about a bit if we’d stayed.’

‘You treated them like animals.’

‘You think I should have tried gentle persuasion?’

‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘I do.’

‘The discussion might have been rather one-sided.’

Again he was smiling, more with relief than amusement, but Theresa was in no mood to draw distinctions.

‘What if you’d blinded one of them? Or crushed a man under the wheels?’

He tried to take her hand but she pulled it away. He said softly:

‘The one who knelt down … remember him? He tried to shoot me the day I went to …’

‘Shoot you?’ she stammered. ‘You never as much as …’ She broke off in confusion. ‘He should be arrested.’

‘And tried at the next assizes?’ asked Clinton with a wry smile.
‘On my evidence alone? Imagine my mother’s joy. If most of her tenants weren’t Fenians when the trial started, they would be by the time it finished.’

After a silence she said in a low unhappy voice:

‘He might try again …’

‘Not a chance. I made a mull of things and he lost his head.’

‘And just now?’

‘Drunken bravado. Imagine you’d been humiliated, and suddenly out of the blue comes the man who did it to you. You’re with some friends so you put on a show.’ He sighed and twisted the reins in his hands. ‘I was mad to have agreed to go there. People come twenty miles to a market, and McMahon lives just over the hill … I wasn’t thinking.’

His sudden contrition dismayed her; in all probability his speed of reaction had saved them from a gruesome ordeal, but far from thanking him or showing any relief at their escape, she had made him regret the whole expedition, turning what might have been the bond of a shared adventure into cause for dissension and reproach. A bank of low dark cloud was sweeping in from the west, submerging the whole landscape in shadow. The shrill cry of the redshank overhead and the sound of the wind in the thin-leaved poplars filled her with sadness. She felt that if they were to speak to each other now, it would merely be for something to say: courtesies exchanged between strangers. He would return to his barracks and his men, and she to her old life, with or without Esmond. Perhaps all the time she had been reaching for something beyond her: happiness, that old delusion, forever slipping away into the blue distance. She thought of the flippant anecdotes she had told him before they went to Clonmore. Small wonder if he thought her an empty flirtatious woman. She wished she had told him about her childhood, her marriage, anything but what she had said.

A little later when it started to rain she was surprised that he took the trouble to cover her with a rug. The drops were at first isolated, driven hard by the gusting wind, but soon settling into a downpour of dense slanting rain, that made the road ahead glisten and raised clouds of steam from the panting horse’s back. They drove on another half-mile till Clinton saw some farm buildings and swung the trap into the muddy yard. He jumped down and banged on the door of the cabin intending to ask if they could shelter there till the rain slackened. Getting no answer, he tried the door, which proved to be locked. Leaving the horse under the partial shelter of an oak, he ran with Theresa to the nearest barn. As they entered, some hens ran squawking past them out into the sheeting rain. Inside it was dark and smelled of hay and dung. Theresa could hear
the rain trickling through the thatch; outside it came down with a steady hissing sound, forming large puddles in the yard. She was cold from the tips of her fingers to the pit of her stomach. His silence made her want to scream; it might rain for hours and all that time would she have to endure this silence?

He was leaning against the wall of the barn with his hands on his hips and a lock of wet hair across his forehead, a picture of debonair insouciance, but young, so young, in the pale white light that slanted through the long opening between the barn doors. To a girl of twenty he would seem perfect in his maturity. Looking at him Theresa found it hard to believe that he had lashed out savagely with his whip so short a time before. When she had resigned herself to his absorbed contemplation of the rain, he turned to her sadly:

‘Was it because I laughed? Did that make you angry?’

‘Laughed?’ she asked, not understanding him at all. Amazed by a submissive note in his voice.

‘Laughed when we’d driven through those fools … You thought me brutal … Don’t you ever laugh without knowing why? Hadn’t we got away? And their faces … didn’t you see them? The way one of them crossed himself as if he’d seen the devil.’ Her silence baffled him.

‘In China,’ he said harshly, ‘they tied our hands together with wetted cords which tightened as they dried … stopping the flow of blood; making fingers split and blacken. When they searched me they didn’t take my signet ring. My jailor saw it and wanted it but my fingers were too swollen. He cut off my cords to restore the circulation and rubbed my fingers till he could get the thing off. That’s why I’m here; the rest in that cell got gangrene in their hands. Weeks later I laughed about that.’

‘I was never angry,’ she murmured.

‘Then why treat me like this?’ he shouted. ‘Could I help what happened? If you answer me with clever words and lowered lids … Instead you look at me with amazement. What do you feel, if you feel at all?’ He came towards her and roughly took her hand, forcing open the fingers and placing her palm under his coat against the heart. The fast thumping beat made her feel faint. When he kissed her on the lips, her body seemed to become as flowing and amenable as rain. He tipped back her hat where the brim got in his way, and kissed her again with soft light kisses on her eyelids, cheeks and throat, as though to verify what he had seen with his eyes. Feeling his arms tighten around her shoulders, she let her head tilt back with a shuddering sigh. Her lips resisted a little until his tongue parted them; her mouth imperceptibly moulding itself to his, spreading through her whole body a voluptuous glow of
pleasure—docile at first, but soon sharpening to desire, catching her breath, drawing her fingers to his hair and neck; and all the time their bodies pressing harder together. His hands moved to her breasts and then round her waist, seeking to unlace her bodice, which she did for him, shivering at the cold damp air.

Lying beside him on the damp hay, kissing again while his hands searched under her clothes, she helped him, lifting her skirts, not caring what was torn under them. He had loosened his trousers and she could see his erect member jutting from his flat stomach as he leant across her to place his coat under her head; she touched it with her cold hands as he parted her thighs; his hands were icy too against her skin, but desire made her shiver more than any cold. A frenzied longing swept her: to possess and be possessed. As he entered her she cared only for the wonder of that moment when she felt him moving in her; his face was buried in her neck, yet she seemed to see him standing aloofly against the barn wall, as the first sharp cries of pleasure broke from her.

‘Kiss me, my love. Kiss me,’ she moaned, pulling his face to her, as he thrust for the last time, gripping her hips, and then slipping down on an elbow at her side, breathing hard, pressing her to him. And still it rained, but more softly now, the sky a pale white through the doors, spreading its light in wan rays like a gentle fan.

*

As they drove back to Kilkreen across the wet countryside, torn rags of blue appeared in the pewter sky. The sun shone briefly as they passed a roofless hovel with one of its walls burnt black where the hearth had been. The horse’s hoofs threw up lumps of mud that thudded heavily against the dashboard. Though Clinton’s arm was round her waist, she sensed his apprehension.

‘I expected nothing from you,’ she said gently. ‘Nothing
afterwards
.’ She felt his arm tighten round her.

‘But I want you to. I want that very much,’ he replied without moving his eyes from the road ahead.

‘Want me to?’

‘Want you to know I’ll suffer when I leave here.’

On his face the same brooding unhappiness.

‘Are you ashamed?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘Because if you’d thought me a lady …?’

‘I loved a baronet’s wife. We didn’t hold hands together when we were alone. I’d be ashamed to compromise an unmarried girl. But what’s that to us?’ He studied the handle of his whip. ‘If you leave Esmond because of me, I’ll make what restitution I can.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t want you to feel guilt. That was all. You owe me no obligation.’

‘If you love me, how can you say that?’

‘Esmond loves me; and see how I treat that obligation.’ She looked at him beseechingly. ‘Don’t speak of obligations …
your
duties to
my
love. What about
my
duties?
Your
love?’

‘What should I do to prove it? Esmond can ruin me. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Say it to me … I want no other proof.’

‘I love you,’ he murmured, ‘want you with me; want you …’ Pulling on the reins he stopped the trap and kissed her fiercely, pressing his palms against her cheeks.

‘Dear God,’ she moaned, breathing heavily as they parted. ‘You tell me this and you’re going.’

‘There’s no help for it.’

‘Would they shoot you if you stayed away a few days more? Would your men die of grief?’

‘Do you think I’d stay to see you with him? I couldn’t.’

‘Not one more day?’

‘If there was some woman with me, would you say the same?’

She shook her head and looked down at the rain-flattened grass by the roadside.

‘What can I do?’

‘Love me. Be patient. My regiment moves to Dublin in two months. I’ll take a house there.’

‘Don’t promise anything—not yet.’

She felt that if she let herself go in the least, she would cry.

‘You might change your mind?’ he asked tensely.

‘Me do that? Me? You fool, Lord Ardmore.’ She smiled. ‘Do you know, I’ve only ever called you that?’

When they swung into the stable yard, Corporal Harris came out from the harness room and helped them down from the trap. In his master’s presence he was quiet and unobtrusive. But Theresa blushed crimson when the servant whispered something to Clinton, who, soon afterwards, brushed some wisps of hay from her dress. Walking back to the house she said quietly:

‘Is it one of his regular duties to notice such things?’

The face Clinton turned to her was so anguished, that she could only stammer incoherent words before tears choked her. He drew her to him gently, and held her a little, before they left the shadow of the paddock hedge and walked on in silence across the open lawn.

*

When Theresa had changed out of her wet clothes, she rang for a
maid and told her to bring a tray to her room. Eating the unappetizing cold collation that eventually arrived, she remembered that it was the governess’s afternoon off and that Louise would therefore be spending the rest of the day with her. By the time the child came to her room, it was raining again, and so Theresa suggested playing consequences or forfeits. Louise looked doubtful.

‘There’s no point when you always let me win.’

‘What about riddles? You’re better at them than me.’

‘Only because Miss Lane’s got a book.’

‘Try me.’

Louise sat down heavily and shrugged.

‘How do I get myself through a keyhole?’ Theresa thought for a few seconds and then shook her head. ‘By writing “myself” on a piece of paper and pushing it through. Silly, isn’t it?’

‘I think it’s ingenious.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Louise with a frown, ‘you either know them or you don’t.’ She stared gloomily at the rain-streaked window. ‘I think it’s awful here. I wish we could go home.’

The weight of affection she gave the word made Theresa blench. She had often been acutely concerned about Louise’s attachment to the trappings of their life with Esmond, but never with the distress she now felt. She noticed how closely Louise was watching her.

‘Why did you go out with Lord Ardmore?’

‘Because he asked me to.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘It would have been rather rude to refuse.’

Louise thought about this with narrowed eyes. Her thin face unusually pale and angular in the grey light. She looked up abruptly.

‘Did he tell you the secret?’

‘The secret?’

‘Why Esmond doesn’t like him of course. I know he doesn’t, so don’t pretend.’

‘He didn’t mention Esmond.’

‘But you must think Esmond’s in the wrong.’

‘Why on earth should I?’ asked Theresa, confused by Louise’s insistent tone.

‘Because if you thought he was right, you wouldn’t have gone out this morning.’ Louise’s voice had become increasingly shrill and impatient.

‘But darling,’ murmured Theresa gently, ‘why are you so upset?’ She took Louise’s hand. ‘It can’t possibly affect you.’