Distant Choices (68 page)

‘You got the line finished on time then, didn't you?' she said quite gently, his loss of weight and sad gain of years due, she supposed – she hoped – as much to the Milne, Morrissey Bank as to herself.

‘Aye – as you'd expect. I got it finished, and the one after – and the next. I'm sound as a bell again.'

‘I'm so pleased.' She sounded no more than polite, her cool air of good manners tightening his jaw with a menace she well remembered.

‘Pleased? Aye – I reckoned you would be. The money's flowing in hand over fist again. Which brings me to the reason I sent for you today – no point in beating about the bush – not at the price this landlord is charging me for a place to talk to you. I could stay overnight at the George for what I've just given him.'

It was true, of course. Any landlord anywhere would have drawn the same conclusion. Garron knew that even better than she did, or, at least, had known it for longer. She experienced no difficulty, therefore, in answering his scowl with a limpid smile.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Leave the landlord out of it.'

‘Yes, Garron, of course. But he's quite a decent man, really, almost as famous as John Peel when it comes to hunting foxes – on foot, you know, like they do up here because they can't get horses over the fells – and with hounds a bit more wiry than ours …'

‘Listen to me,' he growled, his jaw visibly threatening her again, his grip so tight around his glass that, for a half-anxious, half-amused moment, she thought it would shatter between his fingers. ‘
This
is what I have to tell you. It's time you came back again. I need a wife. So long as you live I can't take another, and resident mistresses cause more problems than I'm ready to put up with now. In any case the girls seem to want you back. Even Jamie …'

‘Oh. I'm – so pleased,' she said formally, ‘to know that.'

‘Aye. So there we are. I'm away to Scotland tomorrow for ten days or so – time enough for you to pack your bags and make your arrangements. I'll call for you on my way back.'

It was settled then.

‘Thank you. Garron,' she said. ‘For your offer, that is. Not – of course – that I can accept it.'

And as her voice trailed away on a slight note of derision, in the exact manner of her mother Evangeline, the small, dark room seemed, for a moment, to retain its echo, filling her not with dread – although thinking of his hard jaw, his grasping fist, she rather wondered why – but
almost
of compassion. She saw that he had suffered, was suffering still, not only from the cause of his pain – herself – but from a bitter fury that
he
, of all strong, fighting men, could sink so low as to feel it.

She knew he loved her, as the dog who so often knocked her down and trampled on her in his passion loved her too: and the lean, grey cat – she did not for one moment forget him – arching himself fastidiously at her window to take note of her sanity and then gliding just as fastidiously away. None of it was a revelation. There was nothing here that she had not turned over and over in her mind these past months, during which she had drifted not always willingly towards the decision she knew to be right, and good, and quite inevitable, although by no means necessarily the one she might – just
might
– have made. Had she been harder – that is – or frailer, less acquainted with the truths and needs of love. Her own. And theirs.

‘I expect you know,' he said, ‘that all I have to do is ask some High Court Judge to order your return – which means I can take you by force if you won't come.'

‘I know.'

‘And what do you think of that?'

‘I think it's nonsense, Garron. I think it means you'd be getting a woman you'd have to rape every night and who'd lie there, while you were doing it, thinking how best to stab you in the back. She might mellow with time, of course, and settle for your money, cheating you of the odd hundred pounds or so whenever she could, and wishing you'd hurry up and die so she could have the rest. That's what I think …'

With an abrupt, yet heavy movement he turned away from her, his caped greatcoat draped around his shoulders, making a massive menace of him in the bar corner, reminding her painfully of the last time he had been unable to look at her, until – somewhat to her relief – he swung round again, his face taut but no longer a threat, and said dryly, ‘Yes. That's what I think too.'

Finding her own throat very dry she swallowed, rather quickly. ‘I didn't expect you to do it, Garron. Force me, I mean.'

‘Is that a compliment?'

‘Yes.' She was half smiling. ‘Because …' and now her smile fully broke through, ‘there'd be nothing in it for
you
, would there? Not really. It wouldn't be worth your trouble.'

There was a pause and then, the sigh wheezing in his chest – too many cigars, she supposed – he gave a brief movement of the lips that she thought it best to accept as an answering smile. ‘I reckon not, Oriel. Not in your case, anyway. Oh – make no mistake – there are women who'd rather put up with conjugal rape than starvation, and make the best of it. But they're usually the ones who have nowhere else to go. And your friends will-always look after you, won't they? I know that. I even knew it the night I threw you out. Or I did the next morning, when I'd come round – yes, sobered up – enough to know anything. And then your clever Mr Saint-Charles came calling to reassure me – he said – that you'd come to no harm and never would, so long as he had anything to do with it. I don't know why this matters – I don't know why the hell I should care – but I'd like you to know something. I put that damned cottage up for sale because it was the worst thing I could think of to do to you. It even struck me – that night – to come up here and burn the place down. Christ – there was a minute when I saw myself dragging you with me and making you watch. Making you go through the kind of loss – I reckon – you'd forced on me. Sometimes I still wish I had. But even so, when your Mr Saint-Charles put his men in touch with my men to buy it, I knew. I'd thought of it already, you see. I'd worked out what I'd do if I wanted to help you, and since buying that bloody cottage would have been it, I knew. And I let it happen. Do you believe me?'

Yes. Without any hesitation, she believed him.

‘Why, Garron?'

He shook his head and, beneath the voluminous black fox lining of his coat, shivered. ‘God knows. You do understand – don't you? – why I walked out of the house that night and left you alone …?'

‘Yes. I understand.'

‘I could have killed you otherwise. It might have come to that – believe me. And even if it hadn't you'd have been a mess … You've never seen a navvywoman, I reckon, after her man's caught her in the wrong bed. Christ – even then I couldn't do that to you. And don't thank me, for God's sake, or I might just do it now. It's what men
do
, where I come from – except the poor, bloody fools I never had any time for. Until I turned into one myself.'

Getting up slowly, walking carefully as if any sudden movement might startle him either to terror or to terrorize she crossed the room to stand beside him, his body slumped heavily against the bar, hers tall and arrow-straight, poised – she was well aware of it – half in compassion and half in flight.

‘All right,' he said, scowling at the whisky bottle as he refilled his glass. ‘All right. I didn't expect to impress you with a court order. Maybe I just wish I could. But this is your fault, Oriel – all of it – this grief you've caused to Morag, and Elspeth – and to me as well.'

‘All my fault?'

‘Yes – it bloody well is. Because if you'd been the woman I thought you were – the woman I bought and paid for – the luxury I treated myself to as soon as I could afford it – if that's
all
you'd been, and for a long while I thought it was, then I'd have just evicted you out of your squire's bed and mine both together and never given you much thought again. God dammit, I was willing to let you go your own way – wasn't I? – when the bank failed, with as much money as I could scrape together to pay you off. I'd have wished you luck. I meant it. You surely knew that.'

She nodded in what looked like pleasant agreement. ‘Oh yes. But what I couldn't decide was whether it was because you were generous and brave in adversity, a truly perfect gentleman. Or even that you rather cared for me. Or whether you just thought me an expensive nuisance it would be cheaper to get out of the way – like the pedigree hunter one sells to get the stable roof repaired …'

There was a short, very silent moment and then, with a familiar, defensive sneer he rapped out, ‘You aristocrats always have to make light of every damned thing, don't you – Oriel Blake? Such little matters as earning a living and keeping what you've slaved your guts out for …'

‘Ah well,' she smiled once more. ‘Could that be why we coped so well with the guillotine?'

‘What the hell does that mean?' he enquired curtly, a working man no longer but an industrial grandee responsible for the living wages of a thousand others, emptying his glass with an almost brutal sweep of the elbow but hearing, nevertheless, as clearly as she did, his own voice speaking to her on the night of the bank failure, the night she had refused his offer of a comfortable escape and given him herself instead. Or so he had believed.
God help you if you try to leave me now. And God help anybody else … who tries to take you an inch away
. And how many had tried? Susannah, the frantic, frigid woman who desired him but would have screamed rape and murder – he'd always reckoned – had he tried to touch her. Morag, his favourite child, who loved him too and was withering now, day by miserable day, before his eyes in her need for Oriel. As he was – God dammit … Withering, wanting her and ready to kill her for it, except on the days when he was even readier to fall at her feet. Or have her lay her body, once again, over his in the moonlight, as she had on that black night of crisis, pouring herself into him with what could have been love,
would
have been love – surely – at the end of those hard months of near bankruptcy when she had kept the keys to his safe so faithfully, defended his back, given him that extra reason, that extra spark, he'd needed to endure. The woman he'd played with and used for his purposes only for so many years, the woman he'd purchased as an indulgence, the cool and cultured luxury who had stood beside him more steadfastly in his time of need than any woman he had ever known or could imagine. His woman. And what he now wanted, urgently and essentially – vitally, he knew it – was to force himself to forgive her for what he had established as one night of sin.

‘Listen,' he said roughly. ‘I've had women enough all my life – a few of them after we were married, I admit it …'

‘Of course,' she murmured. ‘But men are allowed that, surely? Do many women complain?'

Was she asking a question?

‘Don't be clever,' he said. ‘For God's sake, don't provoke me. I'm not boasting. I'm just admitting I wouldn't want to be blamed for the rest of my life for something I'd done in a few hours – and which may not have meant much to me at all, or no more than those few hours could cover …'

‘That's very wise of you, Garron.'

‘And if that bloody woman hadn't sent me that letter we'd have been happy now, I reckon. Wouldn't we?'

‘Yes, Garron. And so would Morag. And I don't think Elspeth would have been engaged to poor Tom Landon. I might have put a stop to it.'

He reached out a hand to his glass and then, changing his mind, gave her a hard stare. ‘You'd be a fool. Oriel, not to take me seriously.'

But her smile was undimmed. ‘I know, Garron. I've always taken you seriously. I've always respected you. I didn't much like you when we first met because I'd been taught to set too high a store by “good social behaviour”. But that didn't last. And even from the first I felt I'd like to know you better. Well – not from the
first
, perhaps – but soon enough. I felt there was a great deal
to
know. Yes, your money did matter when I married you. If you hadn't had any I'd never even have met you, would I? And there have been times – yes – when it seemed to me you quite liked having bought yourself a “lady of quality” as a housekeeper.'

‘Maybe I did. Maybe I used to look at “ladies of quality” in my labouring days, and wonder just what made them tick over.'

‘Girls like me? Half of them as feather-headed and silly as half the girls in your navvy camps, and the other half just as nice and clever.'

‘Aye, I know. And I've always known which half you came in, Oriel. I got what I paid for, I admit it, even in the days when the only real thing between us was the money. You did everything I asked, and more – things I hadn't even known I'd wanted until you gave them to me. You were a perfect wife. A perfect woman. I'd have taken an oath there wasn't a fault in you. And – I'll tell you now – in anybody else so much perfection would have bored me – made me suspicious – I'd never have trusted it. I tend not to do much trusting in any case. I trusted you …'

‘Then I can tell you …'

‘What? That it only happened once with your squire?'

‘Oh – is that what I was going to tell you …?'

But in the sheer effort of speaking about it, thinking about it, admitting that it had happened, he was not listening to her.

‘Don't tell me. I believe it was – just once. Oh no – it's not a question of having faith in you, Oriel, nothing so damned fool romantic as that. I've never been much acquainted with faith anyway. I hired a detective who accounted to me, eventually, for your squire's movements around that time – except on the day Morag saw him with you. And the night before.'