Rustication (40 page)

8 o’clock.

I crept up to her room and without knocking, pushed open the door. She was in bed with just one candle beside her lighting the room and she was holding something in her hands.

At the sight of me she jumped out in her nightshirt and stood nervously beside the bed.

I said:
Why did you tell my sister about us?

She said:
Miss Effie saw you leaving my room. That time you gave me a half-crown. She made me tell her what we’d been doing
.

I was furious and said:
Since you’ve told her everything about me, you can tell me everything you know. There is a man—a very tall man—who came to visit her until I returned. What happened when she told him she was in trouble?

He said he wouldn’t marry her. He said he had no money. He would only marry her if she helped him to get what was his due. I don’t know what that meant
.

It means my death
.

She cried out:
I didn’t mean any harm to you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you
.

It’s too late for that
, I said. In a rage I advanced towards her and she pressed herself against the wall and I seized her and shook her. Then the strangest thing happened. As I was staring into her face a few inches from mine in the flickering candlelight, I saw her eyes glistening with tears and realised that I too was weeping. This little creature, this illiterate drab who had been a mere object of pleasure to her own father and brothers, has believed in me when my own mother and sister have been plotting against me. How could I have spoken so harshly to her? The most innocent person in the house. And if I accused my sister of having made use of me, I had used Betsy as if she were an insentient object. An ignorant defenceless girl who was hardly more than a child.

I took her hand and drew her towards the bed and we seated ourselves on its edge. I kept my arm round her. I said:
Forgive me. I shouldn’t have been so angry with you. I know you had no choice
. Her eyes seemed to be enormous and they were filling with tears. I said:
Betsy, I’m
sorry I caused you grief. I thought you just wanted money
.

She said indignantly:
I never wanted money! I only wanted you to be kind to me
.

But you asked me for money! You wanted something nice, you said
.

I didn’t mean money!
She blushed.
It wasn’t money I was talking about. Not at first anyway. But you thought that was what I was after and I was so upset that I said it just to get back at you. That time when you told me to close my eyes and you gave me those ribbons, I thought you were going to kiss me
.

I took her in my arms and said:
Oh Betsy, Betsy, how silly I’ve been
.

She bent and picked up something from the floor. It was a child’s reading-book.
Look
, she said.
I was conning my letters when you came in. You made me feel so stupid that time you asked me to read something and I couldn’t. Miss Effie used to come up here at night to teach me or I’d go down to her. But we spent most of the time talking and crying. She was dreadfully upset when that man that’s dead, the earl’s nephew
,
threw her over
.

I tried to imagine. Was it a broken heart or wounded vanity or thwarted greed that had driven her into her murderous alliance? Or a mixture of all of those?

Betsy said:
And now it’s happened again
.

What do you mean?

She’s just had a letter from the other fellow. There’s a big fat woman-servant that brings letters from Thrubwell. Miss Effie went to the shop today and found one. She was very upset by it
.

He’s refusing to marry her?

Yes. He says he can’t be sure that the child she is carrying is his and not the poor dead man’s
.

It was grotesque, almost funny. But what had my sister expected? The man was a professional sharper who earned his living by fraud. What arrogance and vanity had led her to think she could outwit such a person?

Betsy was close to tears and I said:
You mustn’t ask me to feel any sympathy for her
. I told her as briefly as I could about the plot that my sister and her lover had carried out.

She hid her face and wept. Then she said:
That’s the most dreadful thing. It makes me even sorrier for her
.

I couldn’t understand that. I said:
Don’t you hate her for what she’s done?

She said:
I hate what she’s done but I still love her
.

You can say that even though she’s sending me to my death?

What do you mean?
she exclaimed.

You don’t know that the police think it was I who wrote those letters and killed the earl’s nephew?

She said:
That’s crazy
.

Crazy or not, they’re going to hang me
. I explained how I had been duped into incriminating myself.

She gripped my arm and said:
They mustn’t catch you. You must run away
.

I said:
How? There’s a policeman guarding the lane
.

Then run at him and knock him down
.

I managed a choked laugh:
I’m afraid he has a gun
.

Do something! Don’t just sit here waiting until they come for you. At least try to get away. Isn’t there anything you can do?

There is just one possible way out
.

Then take it!
she hissed.

She reached over to a little battered side-table and seized a small box. She opened it and poured out its contents on the bed. It contained the ribbons I had given her and some cash. She gathered up the coins and tried to put them into my hands saying:
Take this, you’ll need it
.

It came to about four shillings—all that I had given her and a few pence more.

I refused it and she wept and clung to me and said I had to go, even though she would miss me. I hushed her because I did not want Euphemia to hear us but I found I was in tears myself.

I left her at last.

· · ·

Although I pretended to myself that I didn’t, I knew that Edmund felt about me in a way that I could not reciprocate and I took advantage of that to accept money from him without thinking what the consequences might be. And now I’ve done something similar to Betsy.

½ past 10 o’clock.

I feel as if I’m no longer afraid of anything. All my life I’ve been scared. Now I realise that what I was frightened of was the truth. And when my mother threatened to make her devastating revelation, I was terrified not because I did not know it but because in some sense I did. I knew how my father’s ruthless selfishness had twisted and warped our family. That we all crept about in stockinged feet to avoid waking some slumbering monster. I knew my father was capable of any act to gratify his appetites even if I had not guessed the exact nature of his predispositions. All three of us suffered by having to adapt. My mother’s spirit was crushed by his demands and my sister and I were forced to learn how to defend ourselves by guile and flattery. Euphemia paid a higher price than I.

There is anger towards Euphemia in my heart and yet I can’t find hatred. I don’t know what power my father exercised over her but something occurred—some twisted exploitative love—that made it impossible for her to acknowledge to herself, as I have managed to do, that she hated him. And perhaps that hold our father had over her—whatever it was—drew her towards Lyddiard because his ruthless pursuit of his own interests reminded her of him. When I saw him as a cowardly bully brutally beating his dog, she was imagining him as her masterly and determined saviour from poverty.

11 o’clock.

Betsy is right. Better to die trying to escape than to wait here and let them hang me.

The idea that came to me this afternoon as I walked around with that policeman behind me—it would be foolhardy, crazy, dangerous. In the daylight it seemed possible and that’s why I went to the shop and laid a false trail. I made Mrs Darnton think my goal would be Rye but, in fact, if I were to risk the attempt, I would go west so that when my disappearance was discovered, the police would chase off in the wrong direction.

I cannot imagine what my mother must be feeling. She has sacrificed her son—for whom she must feel something however hard she has tried to stifle it—and now she realises that she has done it for nothing. Euphemia and she will be left with no resources and in a few months will be evicted from this house by Cousin Sybille.

I will give her one last chance.

A ¼ past 11 o’clock.

I have only four shillings and sevenpence ha’penny. That will not carry me far.

Once I was sure my mother and sister were upstairs, I went into the parlour and felt in the dark for the work-basket which I found lying on the sopha as usual. In the hidden pocket there were a number of sovereigns and some silver and coppers. I counted it: fourteen pounds, thirteen shillings and tenpence.

I left the money there and crept up the stairs to my mother’s rooms.

I tapped very softly on the door of her sitting-room and pushed it open. Empty. I did the same on the inner door and she called out to enter. She was sitting at her dressing-table brushing her hair and started when she saw me.

I put my finger to my lips to indicate that we should keep our voices low so that Euphemia would not hear.

I said:
I will be arrested tomorrow and if you don’t help me, you know what will happen to me, don’t you?

She kept her head turned away.

I said:
I will be hanged
.

She turned slowly to look at me, still holding her hairbrush. In a small voice she said:
That’s not true, Richard. It won’t come to that
.

I said:
Of course it will come to that. You’ve always managed to persuade yourself of the truth of what you wish were the case but you won’t be able to do it this time. The earl will not rest until the murderer of his beloved nephew is executed. All the evidence points to me
.

They’re not going to do anything to you. You’ve got these ideas in your head . . . You’ve been behaving so strangely. You’ve
. . .

If you want to help me you have to tell that policeman the truth. I don’t mean the whole truth. You can keep Euphemia out of it. But you must tell him everything you know about Lyddiard. He did all these things and Euphemia had no knowledge of them
.

She didn’t look at me. I suppose she knows she could not incriminate Lyddiard without endangering her darling daughter. He would drag her down with him out of spite.

I said:
Mr Wilson will be here to arrest me tomorrow
.

No response.

Very well
, I said.
In that case I have no choice but to try to cross the marsh
.

Cross the marsh? You can’t do that
. Now at last I had her attention and it gave me a sweet pain to see her so concerned.
Richard, you’ll be swallowed up if you try. Have you forgotten that story of the mad bride?

It will bear my weight if it’s frozen hard enough
.

She shook her head but did not speak. The foolish, foolish old woman. She puts me on a course that must end in my being hanged but tries to stop me drowning myself. However things turn out tonight, she will regret what she has done.

I said:
Then I must risk the marshes
.

She put her hands over her face.
I don’t know how it’s come to this
.

If I reach dry land, I have a chance of evading the authorities
.

She asked in a low trembling voice:
If you do, where will you go?

I hesitated.
I will circle round to the east and walk along the coast towards Rye and take the train from there up to London. I need money
.

I have none to give you. A few shillings. That’s all
.

I need at least two or three pounds. Do you really not have it?

She said:
Let me go and fetch what I can spare—ten or twelve shillings. No more than that
.

I wasn’t sure I could speak. I had to swallow a few times and then I managed to say:
Don’t put yourself to so much trouble, I beg you
.
If that’s all you can offer me, then there is no more to say. We will have to see what the morning brings
.

I walked out of the room without another word or a backward look.

I was so upset that I forgot to take the long way round by the back-stairs and I passed Euphemia’s door. It was open—which was rare—and I saw the dark shape of my sister’s head on the pillow and I hesitated just for an instant and as I did so it seemed that she half-opened her eyes and that I saw them glittering, but the moment was too brief to be sure.

Midnight.

It is as I said to her. I have no choice. That anecdote I heard at the Greenacres’—the poacher caught in a trap who severed his own leg. It haunts me. The man chose unimaginable pain, possible death, and a life of incapacity in preference to waiting there like a dumb beast to be caught, charged and transported. Perhaps I’ll die in the attempt, but if I do, that is better than submitting passively to my fate and dying for sure.

I will be walking out on my debts but I now see those values of honour and gentlemanliness for what they are: delusions. I blush to recall how proud I was of being a Herriard. Of having a “Lady” for a connection.

A severance. Whether I succeed or fail, I will never again see the people and places I love. What people do I love? Who loves me? Edmund who is dead and whose love was not of the kind I wanted. Betsy who believes she loves me but is not much more than a child. Can I say that my mother loves me even as she is arranging the noose about my neck? I suppose, strangely, she does. But though I am hacking her off as if she were one of my own limbs, it was she who made the first cut. She has made her choice. I can also make a choice.