Distant Choices (25 page)

‘Sorry? For my wife? Yes – I'll allow that, I reckon. She'd have been a rich woman now, after all, taking her ease in her own carriage, and all the other little luxuries Miss Blake has been taking for granted all her life. Aye –' He smiled suddenly. ‘And who knows how she'd have taken to all that? I'm not certain. But her daughters, now – they'll
have
to take to it. They're a different matter. I can handle the boy. But how do I set about teaching those scamps of mine to be young ladies? Can you tell me that, Miss Blake?'

Most assuredly she could tell him. ‘My friend, Miss Woodley,' she said crisply, ‘ran an excellent school for young ladies in Carlisle. She would be pleased to recommend some similar establishment. Or, failing that, a good governess. There are several agencies. My mother would know.'

He allowed a moment to pass by during which she heard every sound in the room around her quite separately, the logs crackling, wood against black iron in the hearth, the inquisitive patter of rain on the close-curtained window, the slow, deep-chested, assertive breathing of Garron Keith who was playing with her now, she well knew it, with all the concentrated pleasure and lazy cruelty of a cat.

‘And if your mother were here now,' he said, ‘she would know very well – as you do – that it is not a governess I am thinking of.'

Here too she had learned a formula, to be pronounced
absolutely at once
to any gentleman on the point of making an unwelcome declaration, thus saving embarrassment all round.

‘Mr Keith, I think it only right to make clear to you that I …'

‘That you don't wish to be troubled by the impertinences of a common man? Do you have any choice, Miss Blake – just now – if I choose to trouble you?'

She got up, her legs far from steady yet enabling her, because she demanded that they should, to stand very tall, her voice strained but steady.

‘Mr Keith …' And this too was a formula, unoriginal, bland, not likely to afford her much protection but better, surely, than nothing at all. ‘I feel this conversation has gone far enough.'

He stood up too, much taller, his eyes touching her with an appreciation she knew to be sensual, an enjoyment wholly and frankly of the appetite. ‘I used to see girls like you driving past in their carriages, Miss Blake, when I worked on the turnpikes. Mending the roads for your pleasure, ma'am …'

‘How kind.'

‘So it was, when I remember the wages they paid me. But things change. Don't they?'

‘Indeed.' She was speaking words – she knew it – without regard for their meaning, any words so long as they sounded distant and cold. A defence she saw to be useless as his eyes touched her again, assessed her, decided.

‘All right, Miss Blake. I'll tell you straight what I'm after. Marriage, my bonny lass. But you must know that.'

‘Oh dear.' And it was Evangeline, as so often at times of crisis, who spoke within her. ‘I have been aware, from time to time, Mr Keith, of your admiration, which I have been at some pains never to encourage …'

But the destructive phrase had no greater effect than to make him smile.

‘I handled contracts to the value of two million pounds last year, Miss Blake, and made myself a handsome profit …'

‘How very gratifying for you.'

‘And this year I shall do better still.'

‘I am sure you are to be congratulated.'

‘So I have bought a house in Lydwick, in your Gore Valley – since a man has to settle somewhere. A fine house, such as they call fit for a gentleman.'

And he needed, along with his Turkey carpets and his crystal chandeliers, a lady to put inside it, a decoration for his dinner-table, a wife for his bed, a social mentor for his children. It was the compromise to which her life had long been leading her, a simple acceptance – in fact – to be paid, for the services she would render, in wages rather than in love.

‘I can provide –' he said, his keen eyes fixed on hers ‘– right handsomely. And if I should hurt you myself, as men do, I reckon, without meaning it, maybe without even knowing I had, then nobody else will hurt you. I can promise you that.'

No other hand but his own, he was telling her, would ever touch his woman. No other men would lay claim to her attention or take liberties with her pride, her conscience, her sensibility ever again. No woman either. No baronets and squires who would only pick her up to throw her down again. No Kate to call her over to Dessborough and make a ‘favourite aunt' of her, if she had a demanding home of her own.

And Mrs Garron Keith would be well provided for.

Food, shelter, protection. Possession. The basic offerings, surely, down long ages, of a man to his mate, to which only the niceties of ‘Society', of ‘Civilization', had given the names of ‘a house in Lydwick' – or Dessborough – ‘money in the bank', ‘duty'and ‘love'. But he had not spoken of love. She did not suppose he had thought of it either, except in terms of hungers well satisfied, a primary need fulfilled, pride of possession and curiosity at rest.

A proposal which, if one could say nothing else for it, was not deceitful.

The door opened, bringing them a heavily laden tray of cold beef, game pies and pickles, a plum cake, a bottle of claret, the maids glancing at her as they hurried away, with the curiosity – she realized – of decent girls for a woman dining alone, at night, with a man to whom, they were all aware, she was not a wife.

Had he compromised her then? As Kate had compromised Francis?

‘Mr Keith, please tell me the truth. Is the road to Ullswater really impassable tonight?'

‘Oh, as to that …' And he was smiling, quite unabashed. ‘I expect I could have got you there, had I cared to try.'

‘Then why – exactly – did you not?'

‘Because I am a man who takes his opportunities. I told you that. And if I'd taken you to Ullswater you would have thanked me nicely and that would have been the end of it.'

‘As I shall thank you tomorrow morning.'

‘I dare say. But, by then, you will have spent the night with me.'

‘I beg your pardon …'

‘My word,' he said, looking very well pleased. ‘Such alarm. But there's no need – sadly, perhaps. But there it is. No need for panic, for the good reason that I've no need to lay a hand on you. No need at all. You've been here already, you see, for several hours, alone in the private parlour of an inn with me. And the inn knows what it thinks of that.'

‘The inn is mistaken.'

‘So it is. Yet I could take you now, Miss Blake, if I chose, and have your relatives begging me to marry you afterwards to save your reputation. Couldn't I?'

‘I couldn't recommend it, Mr Keith. It would hardly be wise.'

‘I know. Because you'd hate me for it. So would I, bonny lass, in your place. And I don't want a wife who shudders every time I touch her. So all I've done is create a situation where people would be bound to wonder. A little measure of insurance, should the need arise.'

Could her reputation stand it? he was suggesting. Or her mother's? The chin of Miss Oriel Blake rose to a sharp angle, her light eyes taking on the brilliance of ice.

‘Mr Keith, I am not open to persuasion by such methods. The people who know me would take my word and I care nothing for the rest …'

But Evangeline would care. She realized he knew that.

‘Dear Miss Blake, have I said anything about persuasion? Surely I'm just giving you an example of my generosity – of what I could do if I had a mind … And an example of restraint to go with it – yes, Miss Blake – restraint, my admiration for you being such that I could so easily – well – succumb to the temptation …'

‘Which – of course – you will not.'

‘Only if you – Miss Blake – should wish me to …'

Once again she was conscious of each sound around her, the crackling fire, the creaking of old boards overhead, the intake of her own shallow breath as he came towards her and, without speaking a word, removed a pin from her hair, and then another, watching each tress uncoil, his eyes narrowed with pleasure, until each one hung loose and smooth around her shoulders and the curve of her back. An act of possession to which she made no resistance, her stillness and silence absolute as he combed through the fine, pale mass with deft, pleasure-seeking, assertive fingers.

‘Are we still speaking of marriage, Mr Keith,' she said at last, waiting until he had taken his hands away from her head.

‘We are.'

‘Then there are certain – matters – of which you should be made aware.' And even with him it would not be easy.

‘What matters?'

‘For instance – that I have no money.'

His eyes on her hair again, he laughed at her. ‘So you say. But you'll have more money at the bottom of your handkerchief drawer without even noticing it, than Morag – my wife – managed to scrape together in wages in the six months before I married her. And as for the rest, I'm taking a wife, not buying a dog. I don't need a pedigree. So long as the breeding shows – and it does – then that's good enough for me. So rest easy. Come and have your supper in peace. You've got nothing to fear.'

‘Did I say,' she murmured, walking slowly towards the table, taking her time as he had taken his, ‘that I was afraid?'

A silence fell, a moment of assessment, of measuring, that was almost acceptance on her part, almost a victory on his.

‘You're a fine, strong woman, Oriel Blake.' It was a tribute. Lifting her head, shaking her hair away from her face so he could see it, she looked at him. ‘So I am,' she said.

Mr Garron Keith's return to the Gore Valley, some five days later, was occasioned by an incident on a short stretch of the line just below his own site at the Merton Ridge Tunnel. A mishap by no means uncommon whereby the contractor, a smaller man in every direction than Mr Keith, had found himself quite suddenly unable to pay either his suppliers of iron and bricks and wooden sleepers or, perhaps more drastically, his labourers' wages; thus turning loose upon the horrified villages of Dessborough and Merton a horde of angry, hungry men who, in need of sustenance before going on the tramp to look for work elsewhere, descended upon them like a plague of locusts.

Hen coops were raided, both eggs and chickens carried off and devoured over camp fires on Dessborough Moor. Farmers'wives found their kitchens invaded, not uncheerfully, by roving navvy gangs who, strolling casually inside, still resplendent in their moleskins and velveteen jackets and scarlet hat-bands, made off with anything that pleased them, hams and cheeses, and home-brewed ale and, on occasions, the virtue of a not altogether unwilling dairymaid. And when the men of Dessborough and Merton felt obliged to make their protest, there were ugly confrontations, fisticuffs between farm-boys not noted for their murderous dispositions and young buck-navvies who knew of no time to stop a fight until the finish. A bloody finish, more often than not, with the pride and joy of several Dessborough mothers losing teeth, suffering broken noses and smashed knuckles, and with the owner of one particularly fine rabbit warren beaten within what looked an inch or two of his life, when he lay in wait to protect his stock.

‘Damned contractors,' groaned the great engineer, Mr Morgan de Hay, who happened to be in the neighbourhood. ‘Damn the whole plaguey lot of them.' Yet, nevertheless, it was to one of the ‘plaguey breed' that he addressed himself for help, Mr Garron Keith in fact, who, at a price he felt entitled in the circumstances to name, agreed to take over the abandoned contract and as much of the workforce as suited him. Such members of it, that is, who had neither taken to the hills and fled, nor been detained at the pleasure of the local magistrates in Lydwick jail.

The remaining men were assembled by Mr Keith who, having picked out a few he recognized, stated his terms and expectations in a language easily understood by the rest. He paid wages weekly, not monthly like some contractors, or not at all like others. And if that meant there was a ‘randy'every Friday night instead of just one Friday in four, then he had nothing to say to that so long as there was a full turn-out for work on the following Saturday morning. And Sunday too, if it came to that. No tommy-shop either. No food tickets. Cash. Paid out in small change from a hut on the site, not in a beer-shop – as some contractors did – in large notes that had to be changed across the bar counter, usually into ale, with the contractor taking his percentage of every pint of it.

‘Fair's fair,' said Garron Keith. ‘I pay on time. You get the job done in time. Or else you can all sod-off.' And having settled that small matter to his satisfaction he paid a call on Mr Matthew Stangway, in passing, to make known his intention of marrying the daughter of Mr Stangway's wife. A statement – by no means a request – causing a degree of irritation which Matthew had converted, almost at once, to amusement, his very favourite emotion, which he had been more than pleased to demonstrate to Evangeline on her return from perhaps only a partial triumph in London.

‘Impudent, of course,' Matthew told her, counting upon her fury like a treat in store. ‘He sat there, my darling – just where you are sitting now – with his legs stretched out on the hearthrug, and even had the effrontery to tell me he wasn‘t bothered about getting any money with her. He'd take her with nothing but her petticoat, was the phrase he used. Crude but effective, of course, like the man himself. And one couldn't help but feel how much he was enjoying shrugging aside the issue of the dowry which one always finds to be so crucial with …'

‘With gentlemen?'

‘Indeed. So he was giving himself a high old time, one felt, by throwing it back at me – making sure I knew he didn't need it, that he could afford to support your daughter rather better, I do believe he implied, than the manner to which
I'd
accustomed her. I wonder if he can? Today, perhaps. But one wonders, with these speculators, about tomorrow. Really – one wonders.'