Distant Choices (46 page)

There was nothing to do but stay the night, unwillingly on the part of Oriel, and of Quentin who had appointments in Hepplefield the next morning, but with a great show of fun and frolic by Evangeline whose task as Muse and Inspiration – despite any personal fatigue – must be to transform every little inconvenience into a treat, so that when she drove away tomorrow every one of the Mertons would be saying ‘Whatever would we have done without her?' And even Lady Merton, often capricious and not always pleased to share her various homes with anyone to whom she was not closely blood-related, would be eager to invite her to London and to Monte Carlo again.

My one remaining pleasure in life is watching you at work – Evangeline my love. For wages, of course.

Hard work it seemed to Oriel and, lying in the by no means luxurious bedroom allocated to her on the third floor of the house, she hoped, like Matthew Stangway, that the wages would be adequate. Invitations to London and Monte Carlo, she supposed, at the very least, where Evangeline might meet other men richer and more powerful, far more to her taste than this present bemused and besotted little lordship. This much she knew her mother to be aiming for, motivated by a need to escape the fate and the malice of women like Maud, a need to arrange matters by her own light-handed, cool-hearted expertise so that when High Grange did become the property of Francis, or another, she would be in a position to laugh as she took her leave, driving off in her own carriage to pleasures of her own choosing, in her own home.

No mean achievement – thought her daughter – for a woman who had had nothing to begin with but her own wit and charm.

Working for wages.
Always that. Taking the chance as it came, whether it happened to be to her taste or not, doing whatever a woman, in this world designed by men, saw the need to do, no matter how little she cared for it, sometimes just to survive among them. Fascinating whoever could be fascinated, for as long as fascination itself could endure; for wages.
One merely hopes they will be adequate.
These words, of Matthew Stangway's, were in her mind when she fell asleep, and then, very quickly it seemed, woke again, chilled to the bone, stiff from the discomfort of a hard mattress and the alarm of finding herself in a strange place. A dark place, too, until her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and a silent one until her ears picked up the sounds she did not afterwards ever hope to forget. The sounds which she recognized at once, by some deep instinct, as tragedy.

Once before, when she had dined in this house, one woman had almost burned to death, another scarred by the guilt of it into taking flight. What now? She did not remember lighting her bedside candles, although later, she found them lit, a beam of winter moonlight pouring through her window and through a window at the end of the corridor too, so that when she flung open her door she had no difficulty in seeing the drunken, dishevelled figures staggering towards her, an old woman in a crumpled nightdress and a man half her size, in a gaudy dressing-gown who, because she could not stand up alone, was dragging her – painfully dragging her – bumping her and shaking her, with no thought of gentleness or care or of anything else but his own expediency, along the passage. A human, female bundle, causing him evident embarrassment, to be got rid of as quickly as he could.

Her mother.

She was aware neither of the speed with which she travelled towards them nor of the violence hissing through each word she threw at this ridiculous, besotted little man – besotted no longer? ‘What have you done to her?' A demand he was too breathless, too near the end of his always feeble tether to answer, so that it seemed to her, long afterwards, that somehow, by the sheer force of her anguish, she had gathered them up and swept them both along the passage, through the door she had left open, into the dismal little bedroom where she shoved the man away from her as she would have freed herself from a clinging, overheated dog, and laid her mother down on the hard, narrow bed.

Evangeline who had been eternal, and who now … Suddenly she was aware of her own body shaking, her own breath labouring to match the scraping agony that was her mother's breath, Evangeline's lips thinly drawn in a snarl not of temper but of raw pain, one hand, which had been young and supple only that evening, taut and ancient now, clamped like a claw over the source of it, within her chest.

‘Mother –'

But it was the gasping, gangling little lord, all in a rush, who answered. ‘She was taken ill … in my room, you see. Dreadful – dreadful. Couldn't leave her there. Couldn't have it known – servants and all that – and my wife in the house. You understand?'

Yes. Pausing a moment, in the chill half-dark, somehow to right herself, to find stillness and, through it, the calm she needed, she understood far too well. He had taken her mother into his bed that night, whether as a lover or a kind of doting nursery governess she could not tell, but certainly wanting her there, enjoying her, using her, putting her through her paces, whatever they were – for wages – until, like a bolt of thunder, the teasing, the titillation, the laughter, had become torment for her, shock and then embarrassment for him, the dread of servants'gossip and a wife who would not stand the humiliation, the reminder of neighbours who would snigger behind his back, and of a prim and proper queen who would never allow him – or his wife – in her presence again should his valet draw back his bed curtains, in the morning, to reveal a dying woman.

She understood. As she understood how, in the grip of blind panic, he had dragged that woman
out
, over his threshold, down one corridor and then another, up two short but quite likely fatal flights of stairs, along this final, dingy, third-floor passage to her daughter, in whose scanty, spare-room bed she might be found dead or alive, and no questions.

Yes. With a cold, bitter, utterly still part of her mind, she understood.

‘Bring someone to help me,' she said. And when he began to mutter about the need for absolute discretion – how servants talk – his wife – how
he
must not in any way be involved – therefore how could
he
go for help without letting it be seen he was ‘in the know'and thus giving the game away – she leaped to her feet and almost fell upon him, appearing twice his height herself as her mother had always done, and, seizing both his wrists like twigs in her savage hands, shook him to silence before hissing at him again, her mouth very close to his ear this time, her teeth bared – or so he might suppose – as if to bite: ‘Bring someone to help me.
Now.
And if you're not back in five minutes I'll go out into that passage and scream your house down. I warn you.
Do it
.'

A thought struck her, like a lifeline in raging floodwater. ‘Quentin,' she said. ‘He's in the house. Don't come back yourself. Send him. Five minutes.' And, her hands still tight around his wrists, more, than ready to break them, she dragged him to the door and pushed him hard in the direction she supposed Quentin to be, somewhere – not far, please God – on this shabby third floor reserved, by Lady Merton, for her lesser guests.

‘Be quick about it.' With one last hiss, one final shove between his brittle shoulder blades she sent him on his way, leaving the door open for light and for identification before dropping down on her knees again beside her mother, performing such small acts of caring and healing as she could, undoing the cambric frills around Evangeline's neck, propping up her heaving, grieving shoulders on those damnable, thin, insulting pillows, easing her mother's body on the scratchy mattress she would not have inflicted on a kitchenmaid. What wages were these? The very ones, she supposed, that women like Evangeline – and herself – had always dreaded.

‘Mother.' It was a time for love. Only that. If anything else could follow it, then very well. But love first. For who else did she have of her own in the world? Who else – in her fashion – had always protected, defended, kept both their heads above water, schemed never for one but always for two? Evangeline, a woman adrift in a world where women had never been a favoured species. Yet – nevertheless – Evangeline who had been eternal.

‘Mother – don't be afraid. I'm here. I won't leave you.'

That was Oriel's love which, in Evangeline, emerged as strong, but differently, a hand, older now than even a moment before, groping forward to clutch and compel, a frantic, wheezing whisper rushing out the words that had to be said,
had
to be heard, that she knew her hoarse, failing voice could not repeat. ‘Oriel – the diamond …'

‘What …?'

‘My ring –
take
. Take it. Yours. Say nothing.'

‘Mother.'

‘Here – on my hand.
Oriel.
I have asked him – Matthew – to give you my jewels. But one never knows. Take it.
Now
.'

She took it, slipped it for safekeeping on her own finger, tears pouring now, her own chest torn apart again with her mother's agony as, impelled by the urgently groping claw that was Evangeline's hand, she leaned forward, took her mother in her arms and held her, their wet, cold cheeks pressed together, Evangeline's hoarse, insistent whisper directly in her ear.

‘There's a blue velvet bag …'

‘Yes, mamma.' How often – how often – had she murmured that answer?

‘
Oriel.
Here – downstairs. In
his
room. Blue velvet. I always have it with me – always …'

‘Yes, mamma.'

‘Get it, Oriel.
Take
it. And say nothing … Nothing to Matthew. Nothing to your husband either …'

‘Mother?'

‘Blue velvet – remember.'

Her breathing now was a torment, the killing effort of speech shrinking her, draining her to an empty shadow within Oriel's embrace.

‘Three hundred pounds, Oriel. Enough to live on – for a year at least – whatever happens … You see? Time to get something else started. I never let it fall below three hundred. Neither must you. Take it now – keep it. Hide it.
Say nothing to your husband.
Oriel …'

But there was no more, her last word – Oriel – spoken on the tip of a knife thrust which turned her to a column of rigid steel and then collapsed her, dispersed her, although Oriel held what remained a moment longer, before laying it gently and with infinite care back among the shabby, lodging-house pillows, smoothing the damp hair, doing up the cambric frills of the nightdress, replacing the Merton diamond on the still hand, before turning to the presence in the doorway of which she had been aware for some moments now. She was uncertain how long.

It was Quentin who stood there, she recognized him, it seemed, not by sight but by some other hidden sense which would have rejected anyone but him.

‘I have sent a groom to fetch the doctor,' he said.

‘Yes.' She felt, with a spasm of pure horror, that her body was turning to cold, cumbersome marble. ‘Thank you, Quentin.'

He had also brought a maid to light the bedroom fire, a footman with lamps and candles, smelling salts, fresh water, brandy. Remedies no longer needed by Evangeline for whom the final gift – in this house – could only be a closed door, the decency of solitude. It was what Oriel needed too although, muffled within her cold, stone casing, she could not, somehow, force her voice to speak.

Take me somewhere to be alone before the stone cracks and I get out of it. I don't want these people – these of all people – to see me grieve.

‘Come,' he said.

She did not know how he had found a shawl but there it was, warm cashmere wrapping her from ankle to shoulder as she walked, still cold and solid, through corridors she neither saw nor wished to remember, to a room she knew, at any other time, she would have called pleasant, in which a fire was already burning.

‘The housekeeper's room,' he said. ‘As the family lawyer I am more of a servant here than a guest. So I know my way around the back stairs.'

She felt her mouth move in a smile, her head nod at him, mechanical acts of politeness too deeply rooted to fail even now, through this frozen cage which still held her body. Although the ice would crack, of course, was doing so already in places, fine hairlines appearing which the grief and rage in her would soon force wider.

‘Come and stand by the fire, Oriel, and drink a glass of brandy.'

She did so, although it did not seem to warm her, her most coherent feeling being gratitude, not for the shawl or the brandy or all the efficient management of death and disposal she knew would follow, but for his silence, because he had not pronounced the obvious phrases of consolation, had not said ‘You have had a shock. You will get over it. I do not think she felt much pain.'

But what did that matter? She was dead when she had wanted to be alive. She was helpless now, defenceless, at
their
mercy instead of they at hers, an empty body on a cheap mattress with only that extravagant diamond solitaire on her finger to show that she had been Evangeline.

Her wages.

‘Quentin,' she said, the ice having thawed now to a transparent screen through which she wanted, simply, to know that he, alert and silent and accustomed to cold himself, could hear.

‘Yes, Oriel?'

‘You may have found my mother vain and self-seeking …'

‘Yes,' he said quietly. ‘I may have done.'

It was not, of course, the right answer, not at all the thing he ought to have said, or that anyone else she could think of would have been likely to say to her – only to each other. Yet it was the one answer she could tolerate. The only thing she could possibly bear. The truth.

‘You didn't like her, Quentin?' And inwardly she was pleading for that whiplash of truth again, for the honesty which – being so rare – would finally shatter the ice and allow her, as she knew she must, to grieve and rage free.

‘No. But what does that matter? Your opinion of
my
mother will not be high. Which does nothing to alter the sense of responsibility I feel for her.'