My Cousin Rachel (31 page)

I hauled up the weight and pulled back to the boathouse, made the boat fast, walked through the town, and up the rope walk to the cliffs. I think I covered the four miles to home in forty minutes. Rachel was in the library waiting for me. Dinner had been put back because I had not come. She came towards me, anxious.

“At last you have returned,” she said. “I have been very worried. Where were you, then?”

“Out rowing, in the harbor,” I answered her. “Fine weather for excursions. Far better on the water than inside the Rose and Crown.”

The startled shock that came into her eyes was all I needed for the final proof.

“All right, I know your secret,” I continued. “Don’t think up any lies.”

Seecombe came in to ask if he should serve dinner.

“Do so, at once,” I said, “I shall not change.”

I stared at her, saying no more, and we went in to dinner. Seecombe was all concern, sensing something wrong. He hovered at my elbow like a doctor, tempting me to taste the dishes that he proffered.

“You have overtaxed your strength, sir,” he said, “this will not do at all. We shall have you ill again.”

He looked at Rachel for confirmation, and for backing. She said nothing. As soon as dinner was over, which each of us had barely tasted, Rachel rose to her feet and went straight upstairs. I followed her. When she came to the door of the boudoir she would have closed it against me, but I was too quick for her and stood inside the room, with my back against it. The look of apprehension came to her eyes again. She went away from me, and stood by the mantelpiece.

“How long has Rainaldi been staying at the Rose and Crown?” I said.

“That is my business,” she replied.

“Mine also. Answer me,” I said.

I think she saw there was no hope to keep me quiet, or fob me off with fables. “Very well then, for the past two weeks,” she answered.

“Why is he here?” I said.

“Because I asked him. Because he is my friend. Because I needed his advice, and, knowing your dislike, could not ask him to this house.”

“Why should you need his advice?”

“That, again, is my business. Not yours. Stop behaving like a child, Philip, and have some understanding.”

I was glad to see her so distressed. It showed she was at fault.

“You ask me to have understanding,” I said. “Do you expect me to understand deceit? You have been lying every day to me for the past two weeks, and cannot deny it.”

“If I have deceived you, it was not willingly,” she said. “I did it for your sake only. You hate Rainaldi. If you had known that I was meeting him, this scene would have come the sooner, and you would have been ill in consequence. Oh, God—must I go through this all again? First with Ambrose, and now with you?”

Her face was white and strained, but whether from fear or anger was hard to tell. I stood with my back against the door and watched her.

“Yes,” I said, “I hate Rainaldi, as did Ambrose. And with reason.”

“What reason, for pity’s sake?”

“He is in love with you. And has been, now, for years.”

“What utter nonsense…” She paced up and down the little room, from the fireplace to the window, her hands clasped in front of her. “Here is a man who has stood beside me through every trial and trouble. Who has never misjudged me, or tried to see me as other than I am. He knows my faults, my weaknesses, and does not condemn them, but accepts me at my own value. Without his help, through all the years that I have known him—years of which you know nothing—I would have been lost indeed. Rainaldi is my friend. My only friend.”

She paused, and looked at me. No doubt it was the truth, or so distorted in her mind that, to her, it became so. It made no difference to my judging of Rainaldi. Some of his reward he held already. The years of which, so she just told me, I knew nothing. The rest would come in time. Next month, perhaps, next year—but finally. He had a wealth of patience. But not I, nor Ambrose.

“Send him away, back where he belongs,” I said.

“He will go, when he is ready,” she replied, “but if I need him he will stay. Indeed, if you try and threaten me again I will have him in this house, as my protector.”

“You would not dare,” I said.

“Dare? Why not? The house is mine.”

So we had come to battle. Her words were a challenge that I could not meet. Her woman’s brain worked differently from mine. All argument was fair, all blows were foul. Physical strength alone disarmed a woman. I made one step towards her, but she was at the fireplace, with her hand upon the bell-rope.

“Stay where you are,” she cried, “or I shall ring for Seecombe. Do you want to be shamed in front of him, when I tell him that you tried to strike me?”

“I was not going to strike you,” I replied. I turned, and opened wide the door. “All right,” I said, “call for Seecombe, if you wish. Tell him all that has happened here, between us. If we must have violence and shame, let us have it in full measure.”

She stood by the bell-rope, I by the open door. She let the bell-rope fall. I did not move. Then, tears coming to her eyes, she looked at me and said, “A woman can’t suffer twice. I have had all this before.” And lifting her fingers to her throat she added, “Even the hands around my neck. That too. Now will you understand?”

I looked over her head, straight at the portrait above the mantelpiece, and the young face of Ambrose staring at me was my own. She had defeated both of us.

“Yes,” I said, “I understand. If you want to see Rainaldi, ask him here. I would rather that, than that you crept to meet him at the Rose and Crown.”

And I left her in the boudoir, and went back to my room.

Next day he came to dinner. She had sent a note to me at breakfast, asking permission to invite him, her challenge of the night before forgotten no doubt, or expediently put aside, to restore me to position. I sent a note back in return, saying I would give orders for Wellington to fetch him in the carriage. He arrived at half-past four.

It happened that I was alone in the library when he came, and by some error on the part of Seecombe he was shown in to me, and not into the drawing room. I rose from my chair, and bade him good afternoon. He seemed greatly at his ease, and offered me his hand.

“I hope you are recovered,” he said, in greeting me. “In fact, I think you look better than I expected. All the reports I had of you were bad. Rachel was much concerned.”

“Indeed, I am very well,” I said to him.

“The fortune of youth,” he said. “What it is to have good lungs, and good digestion, so that in the space of a few weeks all traces of sickness leave you. No doubt you are already galloping about the countryside on horseback. Whereas we older people, like your cousin and myself, go carefully, to avoid all strain. Personally, I consider a nap in the immediate afternoon essential to middle age.”

I asked him to sit down and he did so, smiling a little as he looked about him. “No alterations to this room as yet?” he said. “Perhaps Rachel intends to leave it so, as giving atmosphere. Just as well. The money can be better spent on other things. She tells me much has been already done about the grounds, since my last visit. Knowing Rachel, I can well believe it. But I must see first, before I give approval. I regard myself as a trustee, to hold a balance.”

He took a thin cigar from his case, and lit it, still smiling as he did so. “I had a letter to you, written in London,” he said, “after you made over your estate, and would have sent it, but that I had the news of your illness. There was little in the letter that I can’t say now to your face. It was merely thanking you, for Rachel’s sake, and assuring you that I would take great care to see there was no great loss to you in the transaction. I shall watch all expenditure.” He puffed a cloud of smoke into the air, and gazed up at the ceiling. “That candelabra,” he said, “was not chosen with great taste. We could do better for you than that, in Italy. I must remember to tell Rachel to make a note of these things. Good pictures, good furniture and fittings, are all sound investments. Eventually, you will find we shall hand the property back to you with double value. However, that’s in the distant future. And you by that time, no doubt, with grown sons of your own. Rachel and myself, old people in wheeled chairs.” He laughed, and smiled at me again. “And how is the charming Miss Louise?” he said to me.

I told him I believed that she was well. I watched him smoking his cigar, and thought how smooth his hands were for a man. They had a kind of feminine quality that did not fit in with the rest of him, and the great ring, on his little finger, was out of place.

“When do you go back to Florence?” I asked him.

He flicked the ash that had fallen on his coat down to the grate.

“It depends on Rachel,” he said. “I return to London to settle my business there, and then shall either go home ahead of her, to prepare the villa and the servants for her reception, or wait and travel with her. You know, of course, that she intends to go?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I am relieved that you have not put any pressure upon her to remain,” he said. “I quite understand, that with your illness you became greatly dependent on her; she told me as much. And she has been anxious to spare your feelings in every way. But, as I explained to her, this cousin of yours is now a man, and not a child. If he cannot stand upon his own feet, he must learn to do so. Am I not right?” he asked me.

“Perfectly.”

“Women, especially Rachel, act always from emotion. We men, more usually though not always so, with reason. I am glad to see you sensible. Perhaps in spring, when you visit us in Florence, you will allow me to show you some of the treasures there. You will not be disappointed.” He blew another cloud of smoke up to the ceiling.

“When you say ‘we,’ ” I ventured, “do you use it in the royal sense, as if you owned the city, or is it a legal phrase?”

“Forgive me,” he said, “but I am so accustomed to acting for Rachel, even to thinking for her, in so many ways, that I can never entirely dissociate myself from her and so fall to using that particular pronoun personal.” He looked across at me. “In time,” he said, “I have good reason to believe that I shall come to use it in a sense more intimate. But that”—he gestured, his cigar in hand—“is in the laps of the gods. Ah, here she comes.”

He stood up, and so did I, when Rachel came into the room; and as she gave her hand to him, which he took and kissed, she made him welcome in Italian. Perhaps it was watching them at dinner, I do not know—his eyes, that never left her face, her smile, her change of manner with him—but I felt, rising within me, a sort of nausea. The food I ate tasted of dust. Even the tisana, which she made for the three of us to drink when dinner was over, had a bitter unaccustomed tang. I left them, sitting in the garden, and went up to my room. As soon as I had gone I heard their voices break into Italian. I sat in the chair by my window, where I had sat during those first days and weeks of convalescence, and she beside me; and it was as though the whole world had turned evil, and of a sudden, sour. I could not bring myself to descend and say good night to him. I heard the carriage come, I heard the carriage drive away. I went on sitting in my chair. Presently Rachel came up and tapped upon my door. I did not answer. She opened it, and entering the room came to my side, and put her hand upon my shoulder.

“What is it now?” she asked. There was a sort of sigh about her voice, as if she had reached the limit of endurance. “He could not have been more courteous, or kind,” she said to me. “What fault was there tonight?”

“None,” I answered.

“He speaks so well of you to me,” she said, “if you could only hear him, you would realize that he has a great regard for you. This evening you surely could not take exception to anything he said? If only you could be less difficult, less jealous…”

She drew the curtains of my room, for dusk was nearly come. Even in her gesture, the way she touched the curtain, there was impatience.

“Are you going to sit there, hunched in that chair, till midnight?” she asked. “If so, put a wrap about you, or you will take cold. For my part, I am exhausted and shall go to bed.”

She touched my head, and went. Not a caress. The quick gesture of someone patting a child who has misbehaved, the adult finding herself too lost in tedium to continue scolding, but brushing the whole aside. “There… there… For heaven’s sake, have done.”

That night fever returned to me again. Not with the old force, but something similar. Whether it was chill or not, caught from sitting in the boat in the harbor twenty-four hours before, I do not know, but in the morning I was too giddy to stand upright upon the floor, and fell to retching and to shuddering, and was obliged to go back to bed again. The doctor was sent for, and with my aching head I wondered if the whole miserable business of my illness was to set in with repetition. He pronounced my liver out of order, and left medicine. But when Rachel came to sit with me, in the afternoon, it seemed to me she had upon her face that same expression of the night before, a kind of weariness. I could imagine the thought within her, “It is going to start again? Am I doomed to sit here as a nurse to all eternity?” She was more brusque with me, as she handed me my medicine; and when later I was thirsty, and wished to drink, I did not ask her for the glass, for fear of giving trouble.

She had a book in her hands, which she did not read, and her presence in the chair beside me seemed to hold a mute reproach.

“If you have other things to do,” I said at last, “don’t sit with me.”

“What else do you suppose I have to do?” she answered.

“You might wish to see Rainaldi.”

“He has gone,” she said.

My heart was the lighter for the news. I was almost well.

“He has returned to London?” I inquired.

“No,” she answered, “he sailed from Plymouth yesterday.”

My relief was so intense that I had to turn away my head lest I showed it in my face, and so increased her irritation.

“I thought he had business still to do in England?”

“So he had; but we decided it could be done just as well by correspondence. Matters of greater urgency attended him at home. He had news of a vessel due to sail at midnight, and so went. Now are you satisfied?”