Distant Choices (52 page)

On the floor at one side of the hearth stood a vast copper bowl of winter hyacinths and plants he could not name with delicate, many-coloured foliage; an oval basket at the other side, containing, among bright blue cushions, a mother cat and a further selection of much younger kittens.

‘You seem to be much concerned,' he said, smiling down at them, ‘by things feline.'

She smiled down at the basket too and shook her head. ‘Yes, although not entirely by design. I grow valerian in my herb garden which brings the cats here like magic. It goes to their heads too – my goodness. So whenever one of them turns up on my doorstep in
that
condition, I feel obliged to take her in. After all, giving birth in my fireside basket must be better than in a ditch or a haystack somewhere – wouldn't you think?'

He thought so. And if it occurred to him to wonder – as it did – whether or not she was disappointed, grieved, or even thankful at never having given birth herself, he betrayed no sign of it.

‘What happens to them when you are away?' he said.

‘Oh – they have excellent service. There is a kind lady from Howtown who comes every day to look after their house and feed them. And to distribute them, too – or as many as she can – among her acquaintances. As I do myself. There is a very handsome selection of Lakeland cats keeping down the mice in Lydwick. I feel quite proud whenever I meet one. And now, Francis, what may I give you? – it
is
a cold morning.'

Now in that warm, fragrant room where, having accepted a glass of Madeira and several slices of pale, lemon-scented cake to match, he found it easy to lean back and stretch out his legs on the hearthrug, almost glad to have been spared a high-strung interview with Kate. Glad, that is, just now when he was still feeling the strain of his Roman ramblings and had got up before dawn that morning to join a shooting-party of self-important city gentlemen who had found nothing endearing about his skill with a sporting gun.

Yet Kate, high-strung or not, would have to be faced some time. And, in the middle of telling Oriel how his shooting companions had felt inclined to penalize him on finding out that he had been a soldier and something of an explorer – although no one remembered that very clearly now – he suddenly paused and said, ‘Was it really urgent, do you think – her trip to France?'

‘It was urgent for her, Francis.'

‘Indeed. So is keeping out of my way. Could that be why she went, I wonder?'

Oriel smiled and shook her head. ‘No. Not this time.'

‘You sound rather more certain, I confess, Oriel, than I feel.'

She smiled again, very pale, very slender in her heavy mourning dress yet by no means crushed by it, looking capable and serene, her elegant feet on firm ground, her hair tied up only by a black ribbon and hanging all the way down the long arch of her back to a waist so small he thought it likely he could encircle it with his hands. Realizing that he felt much inclined to do so, he looked at her even more closely, wondering how fiercely she would – or would not – repel him, and then concluding that it made no difference, since he would never make the attempt.

He had had a fair number of casual lovers these past five years, beautiful women some of them, all of them richly married and intending to remain so, the greatest attraction of each one in turn having been that he could desire her body, sometimes with real ardour, while the mind, the self, the identity within it meant nothing to him at all. And the last thing he wanted now – or at any other time, he rather suspected – was an involvement with a woman who might, who certainly
ought
, to mean a great deal.

No. He had made up his mind, a long time ago, that in a pure spirit of fairness to all concerned he must confine himself to physical excitements in the company of physical women, avoiding, no matter what it cost him – and, indeed, it did not cost him very much – all who showed even the slightest signs of wanting something else. Already, yesterday evening, on his arrival from Penrith, the wife of one of his shooting companions had indicated to him, very clearly, her willingness to relieve his natural tensions. Good enough, he thought. Ample. While, as for the rest, he had his daughter Celestine to unlock and absorb his powerful instincts to protect and cherish; the memory of his wife Arshad to cause him a kind of grief now that had its element of pleasure; his engaging fantasy – today – of the British tribal chieftain's daughter; another fantasy, just as engaging, tomorrow.

There was also Kate. And, having made up his mind, on his Roman ramblings, that the only way he could settle his conscience about the Kessler money would be to ask her to return to him and, furthermore, actually to take her back if she so chose – as wife, sister, lover, anything she pleased so long as she left him a certain freedom to please himself – he thought it time to make a start.

‘I am sure she wrote to you,' said Oriel. ‘She wrote to me, and since she has probably put the same things in your letter … Well, she has gone off to welcome a friend of hers out of prison. A political prisoner, of course. Somebody who opposed this new Emperor Napoleon who – quite understandably – locked him up and has now let him out again. Not so understandably. Kate was very surprised about it, and thrilled, and wanted very much to be there – with the man's wife and children and other people – to welcome him home.'

‘Oriel,' he said very gently. ‘It was kind of you to mention the wife and children, but quite unnecessary. The question of jealousy, or anything like it, does not arise, you know. Happily, I think. Would it help, in your opinion, if Kate knew that?'

He saw her hesitation and, leaning towards her, said with an urgency he knew would touch her, ‘Please, Oriel. We have known each other long enough and well enough to be frank. And you understand how important this is. I have already inherited High Grange with all its land and its very profitable colliery. In a few months time I shall have the Kessler money falling on me like a snowstorm of pure gold. All because, and only because. I am Kate's husband. The law may call it mine –
does
call it mine – but the truth is that until I find out what
she
wants to call it, I really don't know what to do. We are talking of her family home, after all, not mine, and it can hardly stay in dust covers forever. I have no intention of ever living there. Kate may do so – if
that
would please her – with my blessing. Otherwise I shall have to put it up for sale. Unless Miss Maud Stangway should beat me to it, that is, and burn it down, as she threatened.'

It was quite true, remembered Oriel, very calmly now, that Maud, giving way for the first time in her life to hysteria at Matthew's funeral, had screamed out her intention of setting fire to her ancestral home, preferring to see it consumed by flames and herself with it rather than lived in by a stranger; even by the strumpet Kate for whom the ‘wages of sin' had turned out very profitable indeed. Just as they had for that other strumpet, Oriel Keith, daughter of the woman who, albeit from the grave, had murdered Maud's beloved brother.

A terrible day, that second funeral, neither Maud nor Letty, nor any of the ‘friends and neighbours'for that matter, being prepared to accept that Matthew Stangway had killed himself for anything even remotely approaching love, putting it down entirely to the shame with which his wife had covered him, the wounds inflicted by her on his sense of honour which, turning to gangrene, had been too much for him to bear.

Evangeline – Maud kept on repeating, to the accompaniment of Letty's tears – had murdered him. An opinion shared so fiercely by all but an approximate half-dozen at the funeral that few had felt any need to be even civil to the murderess's daughter, although rather more clemency had been shown to Kate who – should the Kessler money lure her back to her husband – might well, as the mistress of two noble estates, become a social force to be reckoned with.

But Kate had paid little attention to anyone, not even to Dora Merton who had come in person this time to deliver her own posy, along with an ornate wreath from her sister Adela – still in Cheltenham – and a letter from her mother's new secretary-companion – still in Scotland – expressing Lady Merton's regrets.

‘I find your logic somewhat faulty,' Kate had told her Aunt Maud, the Merton letter in her hand. ‘If my father's death was an inevitable result of his wife's adultery with Lord Merton then how is it that Lady Merton – who was made just as much a fool of – is doing so well?'

A remark which had caused Maud to aim a slap, expertly ducked by Kate, and to begin crying out, very loud, her hysterical threat of arson and the casting of her own person into the flames.

Yet she had packed her bags quietly enough a few days later and moved back to the vicarage, her services as caretaker having been declined by the new master of High Grange, who had dependants of his own, a surfeit of Ashington spinsters and retired gentlefolk all with a greater claim on his conscience than the Stangway relicts, thus obliging Maud, like all the rest, to accept the authority of a new generation, her power at an end because no man of property now existed who either relied upon her services or respected her advice. And although her brother's will had set aside a house on the estate for her use during her lifetime and a sufficient income to maintain it she had remained, so far, at the vicarage, not only taking taking over Letty's domestic responsibilities once again but upholding the fiction that her sister was unfit to cope with them herself. An arrangement which enabled Letty to remain idle, and Maud important.

Oriel herself had inherited her mother's house at Lydwick Park which Garron had immediately put up for sale, along with a sum of money her mother would have called ‘reasonable' – enough to imply affection, too little to cause gossip – which she supposed had been paid into Garron's bank by now and would, she hoped, give him some satisfaction, since it meant nothing to her. Her mother's jewellery had been locked up in the safe at Lydwick Green to which only Garron had the key, with – as it happened – her permission although, remembering his marked disinclination to see her wear it, she supposed he would have done it anyway.

Only the blue velvet bag had been kept from him.

Kate had inherited the bulk of everything else with more to come, free of all entail or any other encumbrance except, of course, that it belonged as completely to her husband as, in law, she belonged to him herself. A union
she
could only dissolve, it seemed, by dying although
he
could put an end to it should he be willing to pay out the small fortune such a rare and cumbersome procedure as divorce could cost. A decision no responsible friend or legal adviser could ever urge him to take, the woman having no right to claim so much as one penny from him, no right to see her child unless he chose to consent, no right to set foot in what had been her ancestral home without his express permission, no right to remain there the moment he told her to go. He could sell High Grange if he chose without her knowledge, much less her permission. Or he could live there in luxury with a bevy of expensive courtesans, while his wife starved outside at the gate. He could take the Kessler money and gamble it or squander it on other women in the comfortable knowledge that the law allowed his wife no room even to complain.

Yet it was not with legal wrongs and rights but with his own view of reality that Francis was now concerned.

‘I have to settle it,' he told Oriel. ‘And quickly. I don't care too much about the property. Money sits quietly enough in a bank. They seem to know what they're doing at the colliery. I can see to the running of the estate easily enough. I don't mind her taking her time there. But there's Celestine.'

Yes. Oriel had known it would be that.

‘I'd like to know her intentions for my own sake, Oriel, I can't deny it. But for my child's sake I
have
to know them. Everybody knows she's here. Everybody has their own version of why, and how, and for how long. And people gossip. My housekeeper and nanny and all the housemaids gossip. So do the tenants and the village people and the neighbours. So do the men I hunt with and shoot with and even my colleagues on the bench of magistrates. And they sympathize – with me – quite loudly whenever they get half a chance. Celestine is six now and I can't know what she overhears or what she makes of it. She asked me once – about a year ago – where her mother was and I told her the truth. Abroad. She didn't ask me why. It didn't seem to matter. So I thought I'd take it at her pace, wait for the next question and deal with it as it came. But not now, with Kate flitting backwards and forwards between Paris and Hepplefield, and that damned Kessler fortune about to fall into my hands – making me seem a “damned lucky fellow” to some people, branding me a fortune-hunter to others. And I don't want my daughter growing up with any suspicion in her mind that I married for money. Or that I did less than everything in my power to share it with the woman who brought it in.'

‘Of course not.' No one could deny him the right to be hard and angry in the defence of his child. Kate herself did not deny it.

‘You've spent a lot of time with her, Oriel, these last few weeks,' he said. ‘Do you think she wants to see Celestine?'

She paused, a long moment going by before she gathered her words into what she thought – hoped – might approach the truth. ‘I think –' and it was not at all easy to describe, ‘I think she
wants
to see her … Lord – that sounds …'

‘I understand.' Thankfully she saw that he did.

‘To begin with she felt so unfit to be a mother. She felt she was doing Celestine a service by going away. And – yes – perhaps she was. She thinks if she'd stayed at Dessborough she'd have kept you so busy and so worried about
her
that neither of you would have had much time for Celestine. She knew she couldn't be a mother but she wanted to give her child something – something vital, just the same. So she gave her you.'