Distant Choices (7 page)

‘So-like-you-in-every-way,' jerked out Maud, as rigid, in her fury, as a marionette.

‘Oh dearest – how sweet of you to say so – I am so pleased. But just let me say one thing more – to Cook this time. Dear Mrs – Loudon, isn't it? – oh,
Lowther
, I do beg your pardon. Dear Mrs Lowther – thank you for a truly succulent roast beef last night – and Wednesday night too, I seem to remember – and the vegetables so very fresh from the garden, I feel certain. So plainly dressed too, which – I absolutely agree – may be quite the thing for healthy young appetites such as – well, every single one of the many Misses Saint-Charles and their various brothers. They
did
tuck in, I noticed. But the guests I shall be inviting from now on will be rather less famished – my dear Mrs Lowther – and considerably more discerning. You will see to it, I know, and get out your more adventurous recipes? Delicacy, I think, rather than just – bulk?'

Maud, a stainless virgin in her physical inclinations but a warrior-mother in her heart, watched the offended Mrs Lowther withdraw and then turned at once to Evangeline, who certainly awaited her.

‘Do I understand that my Saint-Charles nephews and nieces – your husband's close family – are no longer welcome here?'

Evangeline smiled very slowly, visibly wondering what Maud would dare to do about it if they were not.

‘My dear – of course they are welcome. Although perhaps not quite so often and absolutely not
en masse
. One rather fears to overwhelm one's other guests. Do you suppose that Lowther woman can cope? I find her menus uninspired, to say the least.'

‘She has been here, without complaint, for fifteen years.'

‘Really?' Evangeline was clearly surprised that Matthew, at least, had been able to bear it. ‘Then perhaps she would be glad to make a change. No doubt a simpler household would suit her best. Is there anything else you particularly wished to say to me – Maud dear?'

‘There is.'

‘Ah – yes?'

‘It simply occurs to me that – since you are set on giving some share of household responsibility to your daughter – that you should do the same to Kate. It will be
her
house, one day, after all.'

Evangeline smiled. ‘Dear Maud,' she said. ‘Did you really think I had forgotten that?'

Indeed, who could forget the whirlwind that, descending on the household at breakfast time, would continue to blow hot and cold, fast and furious, throughout the day. Kate, bringing chaos in the untidy folds of her skirts, strewing hair-pins and ribbons and odd wisps of fur and leaf and feather in her wake, mud on the soles of her shoes, the hem of her dress damp and torn and coming down. Where
had
she been?

‘Up a tree, Aunt Maud.'

‘Are you being insolent, child?'

‘I expect so.'

She usually was. Indiscreet too, unpredictable, full of nervous fits and starts. So like her mother, thought Letty who did not really wish to be unkind, and Maud to whom unkindness came fairly naturally.

‘Can't stop a moment, Aunt Letty. I'm just off to Arabia on a camel.'

This
, spoken at the top of her voice, in Letty's drawing-room one day at tea-time, with half the parish gossips looking on, elderly spinster ladies, most of them, with nothing else to do but remember how restless and careless Eva Kessler had been, how prone to sit like an awkward schoolboy, twisting her thick, dark hair in an irritable hand, and then go suddenly rushing off, like Kate, with no proper explanation.

By camel to Arabia! Letty, shuddering slightly, could well imagine Eva Kessler saying something like that. Could imagine her doing it, if Matthew had not managed, through the years, to restrain her to a point where – at least – there had been no more embarrassing remarks and hectic comings and goings. Just the disconcerting,
listening
silence into which she increasingly fell, her eyes half-closed, her mouth mutinous, or sarcastic.

Like Kate. What a terrible, tormenting, tragically
essential
wife she would be to Quentin.

‘Do sit up, Kate dear,' Letty reprimanded her one day in the South parlour at High Grange. ‘A lady never leans her back against the back of her chair.'

‘Why not, Aunt Letty?'

‘Oh –' Letty had never been a match for her. ‘It is just that no lady ever does. It is how one tells a lady apart from someone who is – well –
not
so …'

‘Oh. I see.' Kate, in this mood, always sounded agreeable. ‘Thank you, Aunt Letty. I had not realized it was so easy. Being a lady, I mean.'

‘Dearest …?'

‘Yes. What a relief. Knowing all one has to do is not lean on chairs …'

‘Kate.' They had all known, of course, that Maud would intervene. ‘You are insolent again. Go to your room and stay there.'

‘Oh …' Kate's dark, fine-boned head tilted to one side, making a decision where none – surely? – ought to be needed. Since it was a standard punishment, after all, to which young persons in general, and Kate Stangway very much in particular, were quite accustomed.

‘I don't think I will,' she said.

‘Are you defying me, child?' No one – except Oriel perhaps – quite believed it. But once again the dark head tilted to one side, slowly considering.

‘Do you know, Aunt Maud, I believe I am. Perhaps I won't go to my room. And what I wonder – yes, really I do – is how you can make me?'

She was not the only one who wondered, Letty appearing shocked and definitely tearful, Evangeline very much amused, Oriel appearing to notice nothing amiss as Maud rose to her feet, her back taut and dangerous as a hot poker, knowing full well – as they all knew – that she could not let this pass.

‘What can I do? I can inform your father, for one thing. In fact I feel I must do so …'

‘Oh Aunt Maud.' Kate sounded almost disappointed, as if she had expected Maud to do better than that. ‘Tell my father? And what will
he
do? Tell you to deal with me yourself – as he always has – as you always have …'

‘Yes. And it has never been a pleasure, Kate.'

‘No, Aunt Maud. It hasn't. I agree with that.'

No one in the tense, astounded parlour had ever heard a young lady speak with such defiance, such open contempt, to an adult. Letty, indeed, had not thought such a thing to be possible, while Evangeline simply remarked, with some satisfaction, that no one had ever spoken like that to
her
.

Nor to Maud either, until now, in this too public place, with Letty absolutely relying on her to deal with it, Evangeline hoping smugly that she could not, the parlourmaid, who had just come in with the tea-tray, standing there all agog. And that dark, Kessler stare asking her, all over again, the same question.

‘I don't think I will go to my room. And if that's what I decide, how can you compel me?'

And for good measure Kate got to her feet, reminding Maud that although not tall and with no weight anywhere about her, she was, nevertheless, too strong now at just eighteen, too agile, too
fierce
, perhaps, to be picked up – screaming, she well remembered – and carried upstairs to be locked away, without a candle, behind her bedroom door. Or to be led there, blanched by temper and horror – since she was afraid of the dark – with Maud's hard fingers pinching her ear.

She put her hand to her ear now, recalling the tugging pain: and smiled.

‘I rather think – Aunt Maud – that I shall go where I please.'

Because not even Maud Stangway, in all her wrath, could really order the footmen to take, one by the shoulders, one by the ankles, their master's only legitimate child and bear her – kicking, no doubt, and caterwauling – away. They all knew that.

‘I pity you, child,' Maud hissed at her, goaded by the sheer weight of her mortification, to cruelty.

‘No – no – Aunt Maud. I don't think so.'

But Maud, seasoned campaigner, came back at her now like a whiplash. ‘
Anyone
would pity you, Kate. In fact everybody does so. Burdened as you are by such an inheritance …'

And as Letty caught her breath in alarm – for Quentin's sake – at this reference to Eva Kessler's madness, and Evangeline fanned herself with a leisurely hand, Kate shrugged her thin shoulders and did one more thing not expected of a young lady. She grinned.

‘Ah yes – my inheritance – you mean this house, of course, don't you, Aunt Maud? And the pit. And all my mother's money.'

Steadily rather than defiantly she gathered up her torn skirts and left the room, not oversetting anything but leaving behind her the impression that she had.

‘You have done your best with her, Maud dear,' said Letty. ‘You have nothing with which to reproach yourself.'

‘My word.' said Evangeline archly. ‘How very fortunate this makes me feel, since
my
daughter has never caused me one moment of anxiety.' And crossing the room in high glee she sat down with a sudden shriek of alarm on the pin-cushion, sharp side up, left by Kate in what everyone knew to be Evangeline's favourite chair.

Oriel retrieved the pin-cushion and, a while later, came upon Kate in the empty November garden, sitting like a cat in a pool of late sunshine, her back against a mossy wall, her knees tucked up to her chin. A schoolroom pose of dreaming into a guarded nursery fire had it not been for the sharp little breeze stirring through dry leaves, the low grey aspect of the winter sky.

‘Kate …?'

‘So it is.'

Had she been crying? But Oriel knew better than to ask any such thing.

‘Are you not well?'

‘Oh – a headache, I think. Unless the evil of my disposition is slowly poisoning me. Or Aunt Maud.'

Nothing, of course, could have induced Miss Oriel Blake, in her pale blue woollen dress, to sit on the ground. Nor did she particularly like the look of the low wall with its covering of slippery moss. Yet just the same, not liking to tower above Kate who was smaller and thinner and far more vulnerable than her calm and careful self, she gathered her own skirts together gingerly and sat, in silence for a while, until Kate, very abruptly, said, ‘Did I win a victory just now, Oriel? Or make a fool of myself?'

‘You may have done yourself harm.'

‘Made an enemy, you mean? Of Aunt Maud? That was done long ago – the first time she held out a charitable hand to feed me and I bit it … You would never have done that, Oriel, would you?'

‘No.' Oriel smiled. ‘I would have lacked the courage.'

‘You may have had more sense. I've watched you. Oriel, defending yourself by being always beyond reproach.'

‘And I've watched you, setting out to be a thorn in their sides. They won't like you for it.'

‘Does that matter? Being liked?'

‘It makes life easier.'

And they were both surprised, sitting there in the sharptoothed, irritable wind, how easily they passed the restraints of politeness to a point where they could talk to each other.

‘Is that what you want? An easy life?' And because Oriel had never quite dared to examine her desires too closely – in case there should be too wide a gulf between desire and probability – she quickly threw back the question.

‘What do
you
want. Kate?'

‘Oh –' The thin shoulders rose jerkily in a shrug. ‘To set off for Arabia on a camel.'

‘Kate.'

‘Oriel – I mean it. There – or anywhere else, so long as it is far away and I can go alone. Or without Aunt Maud, at any rate. And failing that, I'd like – oh, wildly ambitious things, like not feeling uneasy at dinner if father happens to be there. Not feeling sick whenever I have a set-to with Aunt Maud. Not marrying Quentin.'

‘Does he want to marry you?'

‘No.' The reply came with another shrug and the return of her wide, boyish grin. ‘He wants to be rich and influential and to get away from all his hopeless brothers and sisters. I think he may want to get away from his mother, too. I suppose one can sympathize with that. So – taking into account my Kessler money and my Stangway money – marrying me to get it is a sacrifice he's quite ready to make.'

‘Kate …' Oriel, to her great astonishment, felt an urge, which almost overcame her. to reach out and touch, to ruffle the thick, unruly hair with an affectionate – a
sisterly
– hand, and then, with her own calm, quick fingers, to smooth out its tangle, tuck every haphazard wisp in place with a secure hair-pin, a prettily arranged knot of ribbon. Scarlet, she thought, against the heavy tresses which would gleam raven-black, she felt certain, with some regular brushing. And what a tiny waist Kate would have if one gave her a wider skirt to show it off, instead of the skimpy rag she was wearing that looked like a hand-me-down with its disgracefully bedraggled hem.

‘They make me do my own mending,' Kate said, as Oriel's eyes remained speculatively on her gown.

‘So I see. If you leave that skirt in my room tonight I'll tidy it up for you.'

‘Why?' Kate's eyes, shooting wide open, looked suddenly hungry for a truthful answer.

‘Because I would like to. Will they make you marry Quentin?'

‘Aunt Maud and Aunt Letty will do their best. My father will not care. He tends not to care. It is really what he
does
. Not caring, I mean. And poor, brave Quentin, of course, will grit his teeth and march to the altar like a human sacrifice … and then they will all come and live here happily ever after. Except me, of course. I don't expect to be here. And what about you, Oriel? Men must always be falling in love with you. Who are you going to marry?'

And leaning forward a little, reaching out once again, Oriel spoke a cold truth into the wind.

‘Falling in love is not marrying, is it? When it comes to wives, men are very careful and I – well – I shall not find it easy.'