A Song Twice Over (26 page)

Not that she was in quite so much awe of the Larks since Sir Felix had failed to marry Gemma. For – while Sir Felix had nothing much wrong with him except a wild look in his eye sometimes and a tendency to go off in fits of what Gemma had called ‘unstable' laughter – she had heard certain tales of moral laxity about his brothers and uncles and even one or two of his sisters, which had done nothing for her peace of mind. And she was bound to confess that the Larks had always made her nervous, that she had always dreaded her visits to their crumbling, chaotic, downright shabby ancestral home, with dogs leaping out at one from every chair and all those things they kept on shooting – pheasant, partridge, grouse, poor little scrawny things – hanging up to rot simply everywhere.

Quite ghastly.

No indeed, one never knew quite what to expect from the gentry. She had resigned herself to that. Yet they were here today in gratifying numbers, a double row of Larks looking very bronzed and weathered from striding over those ancestral acres, which men like her husband and Lizzie Braithwaite's husband could never possess; and their cousin, Colonel Covington-Pym, Master of Foxhounds, with his rather glorious, highly intimidating wife, a tall, red-haired woman who could be seen in Frizingley sometimes wearing a black riding-habit so tight that she must have been stitched into it – Linnet said – and mounted on a colossus of a horse very nearly the same colour as her hair.

Amabel had spoken to Mrs Covington-Pym only once and had been completely unable to follow the lady's conver sation. But the Colonel and John-William were both Justices of the Peace, often serving on the same Bench together, and although she had so far shirked inviting them to dine – the prospect of being alone with the Colonel's lady frankly terrifying her – she was delighted to see them here today, feeling that their presence lent great distinction. And perhaps with Linnet at her side she might pluck up courage, one of these days, to pay them a call.

She smiled once again, and very warmly, at the back of Tristan's pale gold head and then at his truly Grecian profile as he turned to look up the aisle hoping – she supposed – to catch a glimpse of his bride. Was Gemma late? Amabel, who never knew even approximately what time it was, looked puzzled for a moment, waiting for someone to tell her. But John-William – who
always
knew to the very minute – was engaged in the happy task of bringing his daughter to church to be married. Linnet, who wore such a pretty little diamond watch pinned to her bosom, ought to be in the carriage ahead of them with such of the Dallam cousins and Amabel's sisters' children who had claimed the right to be bridesmaids.

Surely nothing had gone wrong? The morning was cold and very frosty. Had a horse slipped on those treacherous Frizingley cobbles – something she always dreaded – and broken a leg? Had a horse bolted? Something she dreaded even more. Oh dear. Oh – Good Heavens. One lived surrounded by dangers. She could feel them, quite acutely sometimes, pressing in on her, always from the outside. She could feel them now – dangers everywhere – gathering all around the churchyard wall, biding their time until a door should open, just a crack, and let them in. John-William. Would someone please send for him?

There was a flaring of organ music and he came, filling the aisle in his progress, a square, brown man with his square, brown daughter beside him, looking very small in her white satin covered by that additional weight of lace frills and bows and lover's-knots of satin ribbon. A beautiful dress. Was Gemma simply not tall enough for it? Was her waist just a shade too stiff for so massive a skirt? Biting her lip Amabel reproached herself thoroughly and sincerely for not having forced her to wear those whalebone stays all night when she had been growing up.

Yet the orange blossom sat prettily on Gemma's head, her hair looking soft and glossy against it. Her back was very straight, the line of her little nose and chin just glimpsed beneath her veil looking pensive and sweet, as a bride should. Not studious at all.
Not
plain.

Lovely. Gemma's mother gave a sigh of deep satisfaction and love.

And then, walking behind her at a rather greater distance than might have been thought usual, came Linnet Gage in a dress that fell from her tiny waist as gracefully and naturally as a waterfall, each diaphanous tulle frill overlapping the other with perfect simplicity, her face as delicate and beautiful as rare porcelain, her blue eyes clouded by a dream of remote but tantalizing sweetness, which also touched the corners of her lips, raising them very slightly in a smile of which every man present must have wished to know the secret. She wore her hair low on the nape of her neck, its weight giving fragility to the long, slender throat, the chignon itself gleaming like spun silver.

She looked exquisite, breakable, so desirable that not a few lustier members of the congregation, whose minds should have been on holier things, found themselves in a sudden, quite ferocious state somewhere between arousal and bewitchment, which could bring any man to his knees.

She looked almost angelic, untouchable. Yet with a frail woman's tenderness that could surely be touched by the man clever enough to find the way.

She moved slowly, so slowly indeed that for a moment she was alone in the centre of the aisle, a swan gliding on still water – abandoned there, waiting to be rescued – creating such emotion in several manly breasts that not everyone noticed that the bride and groom had already reached the altar, waiting the approach of their chief bridesmaid before they could be joined together.

Gemma, in this her last moment of being Miss Dallam, did not notice the stir Linnet was creating and would not have minded if she had. She knew that the fussy, frilly bridal gown did not suit her but had accepted it, as she had accepted so much else in her life, for her mother's sake. In everything concerning the trappings of the ceremony this was Amabel's day, not hers, and she willingly made a gift of it to her mother in sincere, if perhaps slightly exasperated affection. Amabel, looking so delightful in her blue taffeta, who had made up her daughter's love-story as she went along, with not the faintest suspicion in her heart that Gemma was marrying for convenience. And were she now to inform her of it, Gemma knew that her mother, once the shock had abated and the smelling-bottle put away, would only murmur ‘My darling, I know you will grow to love him.'

Gemma did not think so. Smiling at her father, who probably did not think so either if he would permit himself to be honest about it, she placidly allowed him to give her hand to Tristan who looked down at her very intently, his face noble and moved and marvellously beautiful in the jewelled light from the stained glass window. A perfect bridegroom. Was that even a tear in his eye? She believed so. And, oddly enough, there was a tightness in her own throat as they exchanged their promises of loving and cherishing and, in her case, of obedience.

She smiled at him and then, once again, at her father from whose authority these vows released her. ‘Dear father, thank you so much,' her smile said – for he had loved and cherished her most tenderly, claiming her obedience as his right, his due. She had given it with affection, but would have been forced – by custom, by law, and by John-William's iron will – to give it anyway. Now, with her smile, she withdrew it. Now her duty was to her husband, who must guide her and guard her and speak out for her on all occasions. And she had no doubt that Tristan would listen when she explained to him what it was she wished him to say on her behalf, or in which direction she wished him to urge her to go. As her father would never do.

‘I pronounce you man and wife.' The organ flared again, the young husband bending to kiss his wife lightly on the corner of her mouth. She belonged to him. So said the Church. So said the State. But, to all practical intents and purposes, particularly in matters of finance, Tristan himself had merely joined the favoured band who belonged to John-William Dallam. Or so John-William Dallam's lawyers had made clear to him when he had signed the marriage-contract a week ago, telling him what his allowance was to be, what it was meant to cover, by how much he could overdraw, to whom he would be answerable if his affairs fell into disarray, making it all sound more like an application for employment than a romance.

Not that he had minded in the least, for if he had a daughter as rich as Gemma and a fellow like Tristan Gage were to come along he'd take all the necessary steps himself to see that she could never be cheated. But there was no need to worry in his case. He wasn't greedy and there was more than enough for everyone to have their share. Enough to satisfy a dozen fellows like him. And Gemma was surely the most agreeable girl a man could wish for. A good sort and no mistake. Sometimes he could hardly believe his luck. And if she wasn't very pretty … ! And she wasn't. Well – perhaps white was simply not her colour. He had no intention of getting himself into a stew about that. A man couldn't have everything. One had to add a dash of realism and a great big dollop of gratitude to a situation like this. And anyway, he didn't suppose for a moment that there could be another girl in the world as lovely as Linnet.

As they all squeezed into the vestry he told her so. ‘What a witch you are, my darling.' An opinion endorsed by not a few others who whispered among themselves – some of them when Amabel was not listening, others when she very obviously was – that Linnet Gage had stolen the show. Ben Braithwaite, lusty, thirty years old, his own master and master of a sizeable fortune since his father died two years ago, certainly thought so. Uriah Colclough, who had seen an angel just like her once when he had been fasting on some religious occasion, thought so too. And when the bridal party came out into the church porch and stood blinking and smiling in the winter daylight, Sir Felix Lark, his wild eyes excessively unstable, was instantly at Linnet's elbow, topping the suave invitations of Mr Adolphus Moon to meet his artistic friends with offers to mount her for the Far Flatley hunt.

Even Captain Goldsborough, looking rather dangerous and disreputable the ladies were all saying – fascinating in fact – in a long, dark driving-cape with a black fur lining, had a word or two to whisper in Linnet's ear, although he did rather more whispering, Gemma noticed, to the Amazonian Mrs Covington-Pym of whom her mother was so terribly afraid. What a strange man. What a strange wedding-gift he had given her too, when he came up to the manor the other afternoon, making her feel like a tenant in her own home; which, of course, had once been his.

Yes. A very odd present. A large sculpture, primitive in nature and in texture, African she thought, although she had not cared to ask him, fearing he might expand rather more than she had bargained for on the origins of what she suspected to be a goddess of fertility. And a most disturbing one at that; too disturbing by a long chalk to display on one's sideboard to embarrass one's guests.

A strange man indeed, disdaining now to join the wedding party escorting her and her bridegroom to their carriage but going off on his own down one of the narrow churchyard pathways, towards the dressmaker Miss Adeane.

What could he want with her? Now
that
, Gemma decided was a foolish question. Miss Adeane was beautiful. And a girl who looked like that must be forever finding herself pursued by men. Men of the predatory kind, that is, like Captain Goldsborough. And Ben Braithwaite too she rather suspected. Not Tristan though, who might like to flirt a little and might not run too fast should he be himself pursued but who was certainly no beast of prey. And she had no doubt that Miss Adeane could take care of herself.

Smiling at her brand-new husband she slid her hand into his, taking him somewhat by surprise although he responded instantly and correctly by giving her short, brown fingers a squeeze and then, realizing he could do rather better, raising them to his lips. Thus presenting a most romantic picture as they were driven smartly away to their wedding-breakfast amid a flurry of good wishes and a merry ringing of bells.

Cara had attended the Dallam wedding mainly to annoy Miss Ernestine Baker and, having thoroughly annoyed her, had suddenly lost heart and walked off among the gravestones to contemplate what she was coming to recognize as the end of another rainbow. Another vision almost but never quite within her grasp. Another crock of gold that had turned out to be precious metal all right; but for somebody else. And winter coming on.

She had tried. Never harder. And when the satin had been recovered and she had found – after a painful, dry-mouthed fortnight of dosing herself with cheap gin and jumping down the cellar steps whenever Odette was not looking – that she was, miraculously, not pregnant, she had believed her luck to be on the turn.

But the Dallam trousseau had brought her no further orders but the brown satin dress which, since it had not been worn yet in Frizingley or anywhere else, had given no one the opportunity to enquire the name of its maker. And could she hold on until someone did? She was beginning to doubt it. She had the money Mrs Dallam had paid her for the petticoats and chemises. Riches: until she had given Luke the money she owed him, paid a month's rent in advance, redeemed a few things from the pawnshop, bought extra coal for the cold weather, taken Liam to a doctor because something had to be done about his cough; looked down the bleak distance of the weeks ahead with no work promised. Nothing for certain but the dark weather and the bitter cold. January and February when even rich women like Mrs Dallam and the new Mrs Gage would not be thinking overmuch of new clothes. Nothing much to hope for, in fact, until Easter-bonnet time. And how could she last until then? Particularly now that Ned O'Mara had turned against her, watching her like a hawk so that her source of pies and tarts and bones for her dog had come to an end. Poor Ned, cruel with his jealousy, who had already made it clear to her that as soon as Captain Goldsborough went away again – as he surely would – to see to his interests in Antigua and Martinique, then she would have to give Ned exactly what he wanted. Or go. So she would go. And since Ned would also be empowered to put up her rent and see to it that she was refused employment at the Beehive or the Dog and Gun, just where she would go had become a constant, gnawing ache never leaving the back of her mind.