Distant Choices (41 page)

‘Yes,' he had said after a moment. ‘I see.' And then. ‘Tell me what you can, Oriel.' Calmly – since what other way had there been to go about it? – she had told him, everything she knew, or guessed, or suspected, and in neat chronological order ??? that, about the events leading up to Kate's flight from Merton Abbey. Terrible, sorrowful things, some of them, about which – just then – there had been no time to break her heart, and to which he had listened without a tremor.

‘Do you suppose,' he had said, ‘in the circumstances, that she has left a letter for her husband? Taking into account his injuries and possible sedation …?'

‘Not with me.'

‘Which may mean, I fear, that she has left no letter for him at all.'

She had looked at him, very steadily. ‘Which means – I think – that, in your opinion, I should be the one to tell him.'

‘I fear so. When his doctor considers the time appropriate, that is.'

So had it been. She had gone at once to Merton Abbey and had waited there – rather a long time – for an interview with Francis' doctor, enduring the cool stares of Adela Merton – the only member of the family as yet in any way functioning – who, although not going so far as to turn her out, quite clearly could not imagine what business she thought all this might be of hers. What a pity, Dora's sister had even suggested, that Kate, whose business it surely was, did not seem much concerned since no one had even seen her, as yet. Still slouching in her bed, very likely, judged Adela. Or off on one of her wild escapades, having forgotten all about Dora's agony, the whole family's bitter despair. Did Mrs Keith happen to know where she was? Oriel had shaken her head, smiled, looked vague, and had continued to wait, not only for Francis to recover but giving Quentin time – before the whole family pack descended – to put the wheels in motion by which Kate might at least be found.

Not brought back, of course – unless she wished it, or her husband chose to exercise his legal right to compel her home, which seemed unlikely – but just to prevent her, somehow, from vanishing into thin air so that no one could help her, no one would ever know what had befallen her, which, no matter how bad it turned out to be, would be better, surely – Oriel had insisted – than the flights of a worried imagination.

‘She knows where you are, Oriel,' Quentin had said. ‘She could always get in touch with you.'

Yet, just the same, he had hurried off back to Hepplefield and the electric telegraph, the post office, the agents a clever lawyer like himself often employed in his work of uncovering or of seeing that others did not uncover his clients' secrets, knowing, as she had known, that by servants'gossip alone, the news of the accident to Dora and Francis, the rumours of other strange goings-on at Merton Abbey, would spread, drawing like a magnet all those who, under the guise of offering consolation, would feel fully entitled to ask a pertinent question or two. Not the least of which would concern the whereabouts of Kate, making it imperative that before that question began to echo all along the fan-vaulted passages of Merton Abbey she must have had her half hour alone with Francis.

‘Mrs Keith – I believe you are waiting to have a word with me?' Even now, in unguarded moments, the doctor's soft, courteous voice sometimes slipped into her head, reminding her of the stab of raw panic it had brought her that day. Yes – a word. She had been waiting for his permission to tell the man with whom she had once been very much in love that the woman he had jilted her to marry had now jilted him, and their baby daughter, for reasons it would be difficult indeed even to imply. Would her legs even carry her to the impersonal splendours of the Merton bedroom where he was now lying? Would her tongue move when she got there?

‘Mrs Keith …?'

‘Yes, doctor.'

And perhaps because it had seemed so impossible it had happened, not easily, but far more naturally than she could ever have supposed. He had looked pale, his arms awkward with bandages but, this not being his first encounter with pain, showing no resentment, no shock, having come to terms long ago with his body's susceptibility to breakage and damage; its sorry lack of anything approaching immortality.

‘Francis, you did a wonderful thing last night.'

‘Oh – yes. You may say that once, Oriel, but please not again.'

And, incredibly, there had been a moment of laughter.

‘How are you feeling?'

‘Strong enough, Oriel. Which is perhaps a good thing – is it not?'

No reason, then, to delay. No possible excuse for waiting any longer, for committing the crime – she realized it would be that – of allowing Adela Merton, or Maud Stangway, or her own mother, or anyone but herself to rush in and tell him
their
version of Kate's flight. And so she had given him Kate's letter and, his hands being bandaged, had held it out for him – steadily – at what she judged the best distance for him to read.

‘Thank you, Oriel.'

And then, sitting down beside him, she had given him the only gift she could even imagine, the truth, telling him, slowly and quietly, what had happened between Adela and Kate and what was happening now, at Dessborough, where she had stopped a moment on her way over to check the well-being of his child and calm the panic she had found already rife among his household staff.

‘Let me drive over with you,' the child's nanny had pleaded, much shaken, ‘to help him home.' But she had refused her permission and, receiving his nod of approval, had gone on – once again, very slowly – to tell him of conditions at the Abbey, where Dora had started to improve and Lady Merton, unaware of her daughter's accident, had collapsed afresh at the loss of her Persian rugs; and in Hepplefield where Quentin had already commenced his enquiries.

‘I am sorry, Oriel,' he had said. ‘
Sorry
.'

For Kate? Yes. They had both understood that. And for others too.

‘Yes, Francis. So am I.'

He had wished to get out of bed, then, to return at once to his own home and while he had bullied the doctor into helping him to dress, Oriel had gone downstairs to make his decision known to the Mertons.

‘Nonsense,' had declared Adela, who would be
Lady
Merton one day if her husband lived long enough to inherit the title and who felt altogether within her rights, therefore, to be as imperious as she pleased. Suspicious too, knowing that something was afoot, some new conspiracy of the ‘petty gentry'against her own ancient and extremely noble name. And if she thought the Stangways and Ashingtons somewhat beneath her she had expected to make short work of the wife of a common railwayman. But Oriel had merely smiled, agreed most pleasantly with every one of Adela's objections and then, when Francis was ready, had just as pleasantly walked out of the house with him and taken him back to Dessborough in her carriage.

And it was there, late in the afternoon, that Adela had ridden over to confront them, both together, with the treachery of her injured sister's newest fiancé which, considering her condition, had so far been kept from her, but which had sent Adela into a shaking, freezing rage through which she refused, absolutely, to accept her own husband's explanations as to why he could not seal off the ports, block the roads, and drag Kate home, preferably to her execution.

‘Men,' Adela Merton had snarled. ‘
Husbands
,' spitting venom at both her own and Kate's who – the shock of his burns, no doubt, turning his brain – had said in a voice which she, at any rate, had found unnatural: ‘At least it means she is not alone. Not for the moment, at any rate.'

And he had sounded glad of it.
Glad.

So too had Quentin Saint-Charles, knowing – although he had refrained from pointing this out to Adela – that a woman alone would have been far more difficult to trace than the wild young son of an earl who, if he wished his allowance to be paid on time, could not keep himself anonymous.

He had not done so, although just where Quentin had found him and what had transpired Oriel was uncertain, beyond the fact that the romance – if such it had ever been – had not lasted long, the young man returning home to marry, very quickly, a lady of awesome good breeding whose powerful father, at least, would know how to deal with him; Kate continuing abroad in circumstances which the Mertons, and some others, hoped – understandably, even Oriel admitted – to be of abject destitution.

Yet only a day or two after the elopement, long before there had been news of any kind, Garron Keith, returning from his extensive trip abroad, had called his wife back abruptly – brutally, it had seemed to her – to the confines of her own home and the concerns proper to her situation as his wife, which did not include any consultations about fallen women in the Hepplefield offices of Quentin Saint-Charles or –
most certainly not
– any running over to Dessborough Manor to see how the deserted husband was getting along and to lavish affection upon his motherless child.

‘It's not your business,' he'd said quite harshly. ‘
I'm
your business. And you have children … Well, enough of them, I should have thought …'

And realizing he had been about to say ‘children of your own' and then avoided it, since they were not hers and he had not wished to say ‘
my
children', had been unable, with any honesty, to say ‘
ours
', she had asked rather coolly, ‘Are you suggesting I neglect them?'

‘No. Not yet. What I'm telling you is not to start. Particularly not for
that
child.'

And it had been then – precisely then – that something tense and ugly had inserted itself in the air between them, hovering like a silent snarl of warning. Jealousy?

‘I beg your pardon, Garron.' She knew she could not let it pass. ‘What is wrong with that child?'

‘Nothing I know of,' he had answered, speaking through the tension, the ugliness, with a clenched jaw, and keen, hard eyes. ‘Except that her father meant something to you once, didn't he?'

‘Yes,' she had answered steadily, knowing she could not afford the risk of trying to lie. ‘I have always thought him a fine man …'

‘So it must have upset your apple-cart when he married Kate.'

And outwardly cool, inwardly terrified that he might forbid her to visit Dessborough Manor again, she had assumed, as always in times of crisis, her mother's crisp sophistication of manner, shrugging her shoulders and saying with Evangeline's worldly-wise composure, ‘Good heavens, Garron, one could quite see the reason for it. Kate is worth a fortune.'

‘Aye,' he said, heavily sarcastic, not quite liking to see so much of her mother in her, she thought, but resigned to it, even reassured, since such women were too careful of their comfort and their reputation to throw good homes – like his – away. ‘And I suppose
one
also sees – Oriel – that she can't take her fortune away with her, either. Which means her husband has now got the lot. Which further means he can afford to buy the very best care and attention for his daughter, and doesn't need you.'

Yet no express command had been given, the strength of her wedding vow of absolute obedience to her husband had not, after all, been put to the test, and, having done everything in her power to please him during the month he had remained at home, playing her role of wife-mistress-mother to the full satisfaction of all his domestic appetites, she had proceeded, as soon as he went off again, to make careful, discreet arrangements how best to please herself.

He had been away a great deal that year too, travelling thousands of difficult miles, driving himself every bit as hard as he drove others, racing always ahead of the demon ‘Time'which, this year, next year, certainly too soon, would bring the railway boom to an end; sleeping too little – what fool could spare more than an hour or two, here and there, for sleep in a world full of amateurs and opportunists waiting to steal a march on him? – eating and drinking too much, to
fuel
himself, as engines were fuelled, to stay the uphill course that would make him enough millions – and it would take more than one or two – so that, whatever happened, he would be secure. And it seemed, after all, that so long as his wife was always there, in his house, in his bed whenever he too happened to be in it, his children healthy and smiling and happy with the sackfuls of presents he brought them – Christmas coming a dozen times a year to the house on Lydwick Green – then he was satisfied. Or at least he saw no pressing need to complain.

‘I should hope,' she told him, ‘that you can trust me.' And, although deeply offended, as, shaking his head with a wry grin, he answered, without the least hesitation, ‘No, Oriel. One of the first things a man on the make learns is to trust nobody', she nevertheless consoled herself with the simple fact that she
knew
, absolutely for certain, that she was doing nothing wrong. For even had she been tempted to wrong-doing, her concern for her reputation, her old uncertainties about her place in the world, her need to think well of herself, would have prevented it. Indeed, she
was
to be trusted and it was soon clear to her that only because Garron knew this did he allow her – albeit grudgingly – her measure of freedom.

It was a life and by no means a poor one, by no means without its joys and compensations, by no means without its friends among whom she now counted Francis Ashington – since she could apply no other word to him – and Quentin Saint-Charles to whom she applied it with an open heart, even though he was often far from open himself, telling her only what he wished to tell her, in the full knowledge that it was not always what she wished to hear. And, as Kate had left this usually pleasant life of hers, Susannah had joined it again, her engagement to the curate, Mr Field, dragging on with little hope, on his part, or ever being able to afford marriage, and no wish on her part, it seemed, of ever being married at all, contenting herself with her missionary work on the local building sites and with correcting the turmoils and tribulations of every family she could – except her own, that is, at High Grange vicarage.