Dark Angel (26 page)

Jane hesitates, then closes the music in front of her. She lifts her hands to the keyboard and begins to play from memory. This time, a piece of music she loves, one she respects, for this music has no pat answers and its cadence does not reassure. Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,”
not
a piece for a drawing-room gathering.

Free, free, free. It is a difficult piece. As she approaches its close, she becomes aware that someone is standing behind her. A man. While the music lasts, she is convinced that it is Acland.

But it is not Acland. It is Boy. He waits until she has finished; he claps politely.

“I wonder,” he says as Jane closes the piano, “would you like some fresh air? I thought we might go into the conservatory.”

Jane rises and goes with him. She knows what will happen in the conservatory; she knows she does not want to think of it. Instead, she keeps the music in her mind, and the comet, and an image of Acland pointing, not to the comet now but to a path, a route, a different course she might take.

Camellias brush her arm; Boy kneels (he actually kneels); he places one hand in a tentative gesture in the region of his heart.

“Miss Conyngham … Jane …” he begins.

Jane fixes on the comet, on a halo of hair, on an absolute silence that, for her, echoed and reechoed, like guns.

“… your hand in marriage.”

Boy stops. Jane waits. There is a long silence. Then the daring of a few minutes ago deserts her, as she feared it would. Long lean years of spinsterhood—is that what she wants? And that is what lies in wait for her, after all. More christenings to attend—and all for other women’s children. What of the future when her father dies and her aunt dies and she is left all alone with her fortune?

Spinsterhood. Or Boy, who is almost certainly her last chance. Turning toward Boy, she accepts (though she insists, in the next breath, that there must be a long engagement). She is prepared to wait, she would prefer to wait, until he is twenty-one.

Boy’s face falls. Then his eyes brighten. He stands up. His knees make a cracking sound. Jane would like to laugh, it is all so absurd, but instead (pitying them both), she holds out her hand to him, and smiles.

It is a night for proposals, possibly a night for love. While Boy and Jane become engaged, other promises and assignations are taking place.

In the drawing room Freddie flirts with a young girl called Antoinette, vaguely connected to his aunt Maud by marriage, and even more vaguely chaperoned. Antoinette (fourteen but precocious) flirts back. Freddie swaggers.

On the far side of the crowded room, his aunt Maud (wearing her famous sapphires) discovers she has much in common with the financier Sir Montague Stern. As they discuss opera, Maud eyes his waistcoat (loud and luxurious; it fascinates her). She tries to remember what she knows of this man whose name is a byword in London circles. A man who has risen fast, and a man of great influence certainly, rumored to have the Prime Minister’s ear; Jewish, of course, though that fact is discussed only behind his back, usually by those who owe him money. What is his real name?

Not Stern, she is sure of that, and there are stories she has heard about him which she recalls vaguely as sinister, though the details escape her. A man some few years her junior, she estimates; around forty, though it is difficult to be certain, and he could be younger. A powerful man; a saturnine man; both amusing and unshakably urbane. It occurs to Maud that she has never been to bed with a Jew, and just as she is thinking this, she finds she has accepted an invitation to the Stern box at Covent Garden.

“Delightful,” Maud murmurs, and casts her eyes around the room. “And your wife? Shall she join us? Is she here tonight?”

“I have no wife,” Sir Montague replies, and something in the measured way in which he says this causes Maud’s heart to quicken.

He waits a beat, exactly the correct beat, then inclines his head. “And your husband, the Prince?”

“In Monte,” Maud says, her manner firm. They smile at each other. It is at once clear to them both that the Prince is disposed of; he need never be mentioned again.

Sir Montague takes her arm; he steers her through the press of people toward a servant with a silver tray and champagne. They pass the elderly earl, who acknowledges Sir Montague in a formal way; a politician, who greets him with more warmth; Eddie Shawcross, who is perhaps slightly drunk, weaving his way toward Gwen.

“Such a very unpleasant man,” Stern says; he glances in Shawcross’s direction and gently steers Maud to one side. The comment, coming in mid-anecdote, surprises Maud, for she had not expected Sir Montague to be frank.

“Gwen likes him,” she answers, and at once regrets both the remark and the manner in which she made it—certainly indiscreet. Maud, who likes Gwen, who has no illusions as to how unpleasant it would be to be married to Denton, who finds it touching that Gwen should bother to be so private about her affair, now hesitates.

“That is,” she adds awkwardly, “Gwen is interested in art, you understand. In books. And my brother Denton—”

“But of course,” Sir Montague says in even tones, and at once changes the subject.

Maud is reassured—as perhaps she was intended to be. All her instincts tell her this man will not gossip; her indiscretion is safe with him. Yet she also has the impression that this piece of information, inadvertently given, will not be forgotten. Just for a second, as her eyes meet his, she senses a man whose mind is banked with secrets, with snatches of information—possibly useless, possibly useful—all of which are stored away against some future contingency.

A banker; a bank; stored power—is it this that gives Sir Montague that air of containment? Maud is not sure, but some power she can sense, and it is erotic; her pulse quickens again.

A small silence between them; Maud looks into Sir Montague’s eyes, which are dark, heavy-lidded. She looks away.

“In which room do you sleep tonight?” Sir Montague asks, and because he asks in this way, without preamble, without subterfuge, when only a few hours have passed since they were first introduced, Maud answers him at once.

No coyness; no pretense at shock. Sir Montague likes her for that.

“The first door on the left,” Maud says crisply. “At the head of the stairs to the East Wing.”

“Twelve?” says Sir Montague, with a glance at his watch.

“How impatient you are!” Maud replies, and lays her hand on his arm. “Twelve-thirty.”

“In half an hour,” Eddie is saying. His voice is a little slurred. He grasps Gwen’s hand.

“Impossible. It’s too soon.”

“At midnight then. I’ll slip away just before, and I’ll wait for you there. You’ll come then? You won’t be frightened?”

Gwen releases her hand, glances to right and left. Of course she will not be frightened; she is never frightened. She has met Eddie before in the woods, in the dark, and if she was afraid picking her way along the path in the dark, then the fear enhanced the excitement when she was embraced in Eddie’s arms.

“Is it safe?”

Gwen stares at Eddie, not understanding him for a second.

“Is it safe?” he repeats, more urgently. “What about the keepers? You remember—at luncheon—your husband said the grounds would be patrolled.”

This concern irritates Gwen; it smacks of timidity, and timidity is not a quality she expects from a lover.

“Not tonight,” she says. “The whole village had the evening off. They’ve been watching the comet. There was a dinner for them too. They’re probably all drunk by now. Far too drunk to be worrying about poachers.”

Eddie presses her arm. “At twelve then,” he says, and moves away.

Gwen turns to another guest. Later, fifteen minutes before the appointed time, she sees Eddie slip out onto the terrace; five minutes after that and she, too, has left the room.

The party is in full swing; no one notices her leave. She hurries up the main staircase to her bedroom. One hour, she tells herself. For one hour she will not be missed. She pauses on the landing and listens.

From the billiard room comes the sound of male laughter; she listens. She can (she is sure) detect her husband’s voice. It is drunken; it is baying.

In the stable yard Acland waits and listens. He lifts his face to the night sky and hears from the distance, beyond the kitchen gardens, the murmur of voices. The estate workers, the villagers, some of the indoor servants—they, too, watch the comet. In a moment Jenna will slip away to be with him. Five minutes, ten—every minute is one too many.
Hurry, hurry,
Acland thinks, and glances back at the grayness of the house.

There, on an upper floor, one light shines out. Silhouetted against the light he can just make out two small figures: Steenie and Constance. Even as he looks, Steenie disappears, retreats out of sight to the sound of distant protests; Constance remains at the window alone. For a second Acland has the sensation that she is staring at him; he draws back into the shadows. Constance Cross, the albatross. Acland dislikes her.

A second later and he knows that
dislike
is not the correct term; he is
wary
of Constance, and this angers him, for Acland is wary of very few people, and why be wary of a ten-year-old child?

She snoops, of course; that is one reason. Constance is a great listener at doors; she snoops and she pries—and when caught in the act (and Acland has caught her on several occasions) she exhibits a brazen-faced calm that astonishes him. “Do you make it a practice, Constance,” he said to her once, “to read other people’s private letters?” And Constance, then nine, caught red-handed going through Gwen’s desk, with a letter from her father in her hand, merely shrugged.

“Sometimes. Why not? I wanted to know what my father had to say. Neither he nor your mother is likely to tell me.”

This silenced Acland, the more so because he, too, might have liked to have read that letter. Furthermore, there was in Constance’s tone an inflection, a knowingness that shocked Acland deeply. For him to have had suspicions about his mother and Shawcross was one thing. To hear them suggested, almost confirmed, by a nine-year-old girl was another. Constance had this knack—he had marked it before—of involving others in her guilt. As she stared at him with that habitual stonelike expression on her face, derision flickering in her eyes, Acland felt tainted and involved—and then very angry.

“Put that back.” He stepped forward and grasped her hand, shaking the letter out of it. Possibly he hurt Constance, for she drew back with a small grimace, but no cry.

“Why, you’re angry, Acland. You’re white. You always go white when you’re angry.” The black eyes glittered, as if it pleased Constance to have provoked this response. “And you hurt my hand. Don’t do that.”

With which, she reached up and, before Acland could move, scratched his face. One quick bunched movement of the hand, her nails against his cheek. She drew blood, and the two of them stood looking at each other, neither moving, neither speaking, until—a second later—Constance laughed and left the room.

An incident never spoken of again, by either of them, but it has remained with Acland, puzzling him and occasionally perturbing him, for he experienced emotions then that he did not understand and is still at a loss to explain. In a peculiar way Acland respects Constance. She is the antithesis of all he admires, with her deceits and her flagrant lies and her tight, barbed little remarks—and yet, in her way, she is honest.

Constance sees too much:
This thought speeds into Acland’s mind. It makes him uneasy. There are certain things he prefers Constance not to see, his hatred for her father being one of them. He glances once more at the house, but now the figure of Constance is gone; the light from the window is obscured; the curtains are drawn. Acland feels freed. He opens the door that leads to the loft stairs, and mounts them.

A sweet smell of hay; from below the rustle of straw as the horses shift in their stalls. Acland moves to the dormer window to the west. The night is still, the gardens dark; the comet’s light declines. Some exultancy lingers in his mind:
Oh, let Jenna come soon.

He fixes his mind on her: Jenna, who drives out the dark. When he is with her he can forget … everything—even his mother and Shawcross.

He throws himself down on the hay, smells its sweet dustiness, closes his eyes, summons the parts of her body, as another man might count the beads of a rosary: her hair, her eyes, her mouth, her throat. When he hears her footfall on the stair, he springs to his feet, then clasps her in his arms.

It is very quick. Jenna can feel his anger beating down on her. Knowing the source of that anger, she waits. Then, when Acland is calmer, she takes his hand.

“Still him?”

“Him. My mother. Everything. The comet maybe.”

Jenna kneels. Acland will not look at her. He fixes his eyes on the window to the west, his body taut, his face scowling.

“Why the comet?”

“No reason. Every reason. Urgency, perhaps. I could see time … slipping past me. And nothing changing. This place, this house, that man—it made me … violent. I wanted to do something extreme. Kill someone. Put a bullet through my brain. Set fire to the house—stand there and watch it go up, every picture, every stick of furniture, every evasion, every lie—one great, glorious conflagration.” He stops. “Is that mad?”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe it is. But it’s what I felt. It’s gone now—nearly gone. Did I hurt you? I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“Shall I make you forget all that?”

“Can you?”

“If you’ll be slow, I can. But you’re to do as I say, mind.”

Acland turns. He looks at her hair, her eyes, her throat, her breasts. Jenna, peering through the dusk of the loft, watches his face. A new concentration comes to it. She rests her hand on his thigh; she moves her hand a little higher; Acland sighs, leans back.

“I believe you. I almost believe you. Show me.”

Upstairs, her hands shaking, Gwen changes satin slippers for leather shoes. She retrieves her sealskin coat—if she is to meet Eddie, return, and not be missed, she must be swift—and then, the coat still in her arms, pauses, stares at her own reflection in the cheval glass.