Distant Choices (26 page)

‘My darling,' Evangeline sounded rather bored with all such wonderings. ‘I find the subject hardly stirs my curiosity one way or the other.'

‘You have confidence in him, then?'

‘Dearest – I have never given the man a moment's thought. One would only need to do so – surely – had one any notion of accepting him? And since the possibility does not arise …'

‘Dearest …' Matthew's voice rang with affection as it often did at his most malicious. ‘Your daughter
has
accepted him.'

‘Nonsense.'

‘I fear not, my love.'

‘And you have done nothing to stop her?'

‘I? Ah – no. Let us say I hardly cared to spoil your pleasure in disposing of the matter yourself?'

‘How kind. Then please arrange my journey to that backwater at once.'

But having travelled north by uncomfortable winter stages to Miss Woodley's lakeside home, it was to meet a kind of resistance she had never encountered before in Oriel. A reserve of calm which seemed to extend for several yards around her, coupled with an infuriating disposition to agree politely with everything her mother said to her, while committing herself to nothing at all.

‘The man is impossible, Oriel.'

‘Yes, mamma.'

‘A common labourer in a good suit. Heavens – one even had qualms about inviting him to dinner.'
One
– she well remembered – had even judged him to be not quite good enough for Susannah and had said so, both to Maud and Letty. Even to Quentin, who would be sure to remember.

‘He seems to be rather rich, mamma.'

But what could the new-made fortune of a railway contractor mean to Evangeline now that she had tasted the splendours of Merton Abbey and Merton House in London's Grosvenor Square, or the Elizabethan manor in Kent where the elegant, if not truly honourable brother of Lady Merton, held his bachelor court? What could a solid residence, without either nobility or history to recommend it, purchased by Mr Keith in the solid little market town of Lydwick mean to her when, with a little contriving, a little patience, her lovely Oriel might have a Mayfair salon, or become the mistress of
inherited
acres and privileges in Kent? And because these dreams, although difficult, were not entirely out of the question, she felt justified in employing every weapon she could think of to restore Oriel to her senses. Even a little cruelty.

‘It will cause talk, Oriel. People might well say it had something to do with wanting to be married before Kate and Francis come home.'

‘Mamma,' said Oriel quietly. ‘It has something to do with that.'

‘Heavens, my darling – I know, I know. None better. But in such circumstances, one marries a king …'

‘Well – I dare say – but there seems to be none available. Do you see any, mamma?'

‘
Oriel
. They come in many guises – very many. There are kings of all shapes and sizes if one looks with an informed eye. And while waiting for one to come along, one wears a brave face, my love – as you know so well how to do. I can forbid this foolish match, of course.'

But, even so, Oriel was almost twenty-one, Mr Keith, at thirty-four, amply possessed of both the means to elope with her and a disregard of the social niceties which might well incline him to do so. Not a prospect in any way to be relished, particularly with the Scottish border so near and Miss Woodley far too concerned with searching for the first celandines along the lake's edge even to notice an elopement, much less put a stop to it.

‘Mamma, the very last thing in the world I wish to do is quarrel, or offend you.'

‘Oh – why trouble about little things like that, dear, when you are setting about breaking my heart? You are throwing yourself away, Oriel, and I don't even want to get over it.'

Yet no help, as she well knew, was to be expected from Matthew who chose, rather, to aggravate the situation by writing not only to congratulate Oriel on what he presumed to be her engagement, but to mention – oh so artlessly – that Kate and Francis were now expected home in May.

‘Then it would be best, mamma,' said Oriel very frankly, ‘for me to be married in April.'

‘Well – yes, indeed.' Evangeline had decided to try out her charm. ‘Unless, of course, you might care for a trip abroad instead? I expect I can persuade dear Matthew to foot the bill. Some elegant little watering-place, I thought, in the south of France – where one is hardly likely to be troubled by men with all this
new
money in their pocket …'

‘Mamma, one has to come home, you know, from holidays. And I
have
accepted him.'

It had been decided, irrevocably in Oriel's opinion, two days after the rioting in Penrith when he had come to Miss Woodley's house, by arrangement, not so much to learn her final answer as to claim it. She had endured a restless night, and, waking to a light covering of snow beneath clear blue skies and cool February sunshine, she had stood for a long time in Miss Woodley's garden, quiet fragment of cultivation among the wild northern fells, the lake a mirror of pure silver beneath her, its encircling hills outlined, that crystal morning, in sharp frost, giving her, as always in this place, an impression of no one stirring, that the nearest gathering of so often intrusive humanity must be at least a hundred miles away. Pure solitude, an undramatic blending of herself with the bare heights and wooded hollows of the land, the eternity of deep, still water, in no way disturbed by her quite accurate knowledge of the hidden but nonetheless thriving communities around her; of the hill-farms and cottages and the even more astonishingly isolated ‘great'houses one discovered, always suddenly, among the fells and dales; of the lakeside bay of Howtown, only half a mile away from her, with its low, slate-grey inn and obliging landlord who had never yet refused Miss Woodley the use of his dog-cart and sensible old mare; of the lovely, almost secret bay of Sharrow on her other side, with the village of Pooley Bridge a mile or so behind it, standing a tidy sentinel at the northern tip of the lake; of the scattered communities of Glenridding and Patterdale across the water, dominated by the grandeur of Helvellyn and the perilous way to its summit along the aptly named Striding Edge.

She had heard both of huntsmen and shepherds who, combing that Edge after foxes or high-grazing sheep, had never been seen again, the fox-hounds taking to the wild, one supposed, only the faithful sheep-dogs turning up again, eventually – having guarded the human corpse until its decay, she'd been told – to claim their canine ward of being pensioned off by the late master's fire.

But that morning, with no room in her mind for tales of local disaster, she had set out to climb the pathway along Hallin Fell, the lake disappearing behind her, and then, between high-sweeping expanses of bare, empty land, to the almost invisible village of Martindale and its old church, the small, stone building which seemed, in its sheer simplicity and complete lack of adornment, to be a natural part of the wind and weather, to have grown there, from the Lakeland earth, with the same sure ripening, season by season, as the giant yew tree which had grown beside it. Two ancient pilgrims, church and tree together, surrounded by a low stone wall and, on that day, a carpet of snowdrops.

She had opened the gate and walked carefully among the flowers, feeling slight and solitary and happy to be so, as she had always felt in this hidden place, and then, tasting fresh snow in the air, had taken shelter against the hollow trunk of the yew tree, the vast spread of its branches touching the ground to make a dark, sharp-scented cavern around her,

She had come here many times before to contemplate the pains and pleasures of her childhood and girlhood, leaning, either in joy or sorrow or an uneasy blending of them both, against the antique trunk, impossibly old, six hundred years and more, Miss Woodley had told her, her fingers tracing with wonder and a strange feeling of pity the gnarled, dry wood, the scars and veins of it and – she felt oddly certain – the raw patches, the aches and regrets of anything which had lived so long.

And it was there, in the secret melancholy cavern of the yew tree where she had hidden, in days past, from other figures of unease and authority, that Garron Keith had found her, having walked up the fell path – in accordance with Miss Woodley‘s instructions – and down the bare sweep of the dale with the long, impatient stride of a man on urgent business, scarcely noticing the frost on the grass or the shrinking flowers, but simply intent on
getting there
, as fast and as directly as he could.

And as he bent his head to enter her cavern, his feet heavy on the fast-thawing ground, his presence had been an intrusion only because he had seemed to fill the space she had claimed so long ago as her own, giving her a brief illusion of hiding and discovery. Of capture.

‘So here you are.'

‘Yes.'

‘Waiting for me, Miss Blake, are you? Or playing hide and seek? I'm away down to Yorkshire again, very likely in the morning. And I want an answer from you before I go. If it's yes then I can see your father …'

‘My mother's husband.' The correction had been instinctive. It even worried her that she had felt compelled to make it.

‘All right, then. The man in your mother's house. That covers everything. Shall I go and see him?'

‘Yes.'

‘So you'll marry me, then, Oriel Blake?'

‘Yes.' She heard her own voice speak the word. ‘I will.'

‘I'd like to hear you say more about it than that.'

She had closed her eyes and then, opening them very wide, looked at him carefully, seriously, ready to pledge herself in the words she had been considering for two silent days, walking in Miss Woodley's garden or among the first snowdrops at the margins of the lake. Days in which she had contemplated her situation deeply at times, clinically at others, showing herself no mercy, stripping away any clinging shred of hope – as a few shreds still
had
clung to her – of another Francis Ashington or the same one, in some miraculous fashion which did not require the demise of Kate – restored to her again.

It would not happen. He would come back from his honeymoon and live with his wife, bring up his children, at Dessborough, five miles away from her uneasy home with her mother. And although one did not marry one man to escape paying morning-calls as a single woman on another – of course one did not do that – she was in no doubt that in order to have a life of one's own, in order to exist in the world she knew, it was absolutely essential to marry somebody. And she could think of no man less likely than Garron Keith to remind her of Francis.

Not a good reason, perhaps, but if she could come to think of him as a refuge, then she believed it would suffice.

‘I will do everything I can to be a good wife to you,' she had said.

‘And what might that be?'

What indeed? ‘Whatever you want in a wife,' she had told him, with instinctive sincerity. ‘Will you tell me what it is?'

‘Aye. I'll tell you. As we go along – as it occurs to me. When something doesn't suit me, you'll know about it. When it does you'll know that too. I'm not devious. And I'm generous. I've no plan to be the richest corpse in the graveyard. What I earn I enjoy, which means you'll enjoy it too. Royally, if this railway boom goes on. And when there's no more space for another yard of track in England there's the rest of the world to go at. Enough to last my time out, I reckon, and leave you a wealthy widow. And my bairns provided for.'

‘When should I meet them?'

‘When I'm sure of you. When I've had my ten minutes with your mother's husband, and when your mother's had her try at convincing you not to throw yourself away on an upstart like me. Will you change your mind?'

‘No. I won't do that.'

‘Can you stand up to her?'

‘Mr Keith, when I am sure of doing the right thing I believe I can stand up to anybody.'

‘Even to me?' He was broadly smiling. ‘We'll see about that.'

What happened next she had known to be inevitable, the tree bark biting into her back as he leaned against her, his body hard and heavy and making a direct demand for which, those two days past, she had been preparing herself; not yet responding but not resisting a kiss which, even with her limited experience, she knew to be without hesitation or complexity, performed for the sole and simple reason that it gave him pleasure. And, from the start, they were both of the opinion that his pleasures must be her very first concern.

‘I'm not prepared to wait,' he had said. ‘Don't come to me with any tales of long engagements – or any engagement at all. The house is ready and so am I – the sooner the better. How long can it take to buy a white dress and a wedding veil?'

Until – according to Evangeline – her daughter should be restored to a proper sense of her own worth. An attitude not much softened by the house in Lydwick which, although large and solid and set in a garden extensive enough to be called ‘grounds', Evangeline found too new, too reminiscent of the upstart industrial classes among whom Kate, herself a wool-merchant's grand-daughter, would surely have been more at ease than Oriel, a true descendant albeit on the wrong side of the blanket, of gentlemen. While as for the diamond ring Mr Keith had given her daughter to wear – with Matthew's permission, it pained her to add – she felt no inclination whatsoever to compare it with the pearl and amethyst cluster given by Francis to Kate.

The diamond was large, without flaw, without history, and very expensive. The amethyst cluster, no matter how insignificant it
might
appear, had belonged to Celestine Ashington who had been Celestine Merton, to Grizelda Ashington before her, to Barbara Ashington who had been
Lady
Barbara Goreham before that. A contrast between a noble inheritance and an ‘asset'purchased with sordid pounds sterling which – felt Evangeline – spoke for itself.