Season of Light (25 page)

The music in the ballroom was familiar. A minuet. Played … yes, in Paris, at the salon of Madame de Genlis, when the doors were flung open and she first saw Didier. With that surge of memory came a slow awakening of other senses: the smell of Shackleford’s book room, the oiled wood of the shelves and panelling, fresh paper, leather. She sat upright, puzzled by a reflected halo of light, and saw that the candle nearest her right hand was illuminating a sheet of glass. At first she could not see past the smear of light, then she realised that what she saw was a display case and that within it was the model of a ship, the length of her forearm, built in light-coloured wood, perfectly to scale even down to the railings on the deck and the windows in the state room; a three-masted frigate with fine thread for rigging and stiffened linen for sails. Asa picked up the candle to take a closer look at a small brass plaque: the
Tranquillity
.

The flame dipped as the truth of the book room dawned on her; flickering light reflected from the gleam of oils in a portrait over the mantel, presumably of the late Mr Shackleford, his hand on a globe and his monstrous wig framing self-satisfied, somewhat brutal features. Deeper in the room she found more etchings of idle white men, bewigged and tricorn-hatted amid darker-skinned natives busy landing canoes on exotic beaches. Her toe caught on a rug composed of the luxuriously furred skin of some hapless animal, and her hand, when she reached out to balance herself, fell on a cabinet enshrining a thick golden chain, ivory carvings of a lion and an elephant, heaps of beads and some kind of ceremonial sword with a jewelled handle.

Beside the desk, where she had often glimpsed Shackleford at work, was a row of massive ledgers bound in red leather, tooled in gold and labelled
Shackleford Plantations, 1760, 1761
and every year to the present. There were piles of shipping logs, gazetteers and scrapbooks, and covering the blotter on the desk an open newspaper:
Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal
, with an article circled in pencil concerning a slave convicted of assassinating his overseer.

The music, seeping beneath the door, was another assault; such freshness in an unyielding mausoleum of a house. She glanced back at the chair in which she had been kissed by Shackleford. How could she have allowed it? Gratitude for saving Warren, that must be the excuse, and the demands of her treacherous body, starved of touch.

Stumbling, aching, she left the room, headed along a passage leading to a servants’ staircase and slipped from view. Step by step she was shedding Shackleford, the ball and all the seductive places in which he and she had talked together. From her bedchamber she could make out the ghostly shapes of women who still lingered with their escorts by the black waters of the lake. She closed the window, then the shutters, dropping the metal bar into place as if afraid they might suddenly burst open. She carried her candle to the bed, where a small brown paper package lay on the silken quilt.

The address,
Miss Thomasina Ardleigh, of Ardleigh Manor, Sussex, Grande Bretagne
, had been crossed out and the package redirected to Compton Wyatt.

Her hands shook so much she could not at first untie the string. And yet she would not cut it, instead spent minutes on the tight knot. Inside, two items. One, a slip of paper, scribbled in an exquisite French hand.
Viens. J’ai besoin de toi
. The other, a crumpled white parcel, held the insubstantial weight of a square of faded turquoise silk. She took it by the corner, delicately, as if it were a membrane, and it fell open in a shimmer of water-smooth fabric and the faintest hint of perfume.

Didier.

Asa did not sleep. Because her door had no lock she stacked furniture and packing cases against it, though whether to keep herself in or Shackleford out she could not have said. When he knocked, barely ten minutes after she’d left the library, she retreated to the far side of the room and would not answer. Three times he spoke her name. From downstairs came the clamour of departing guests. Later Shackleford’s distant voice bade farewell to yet another visitor. After another half hour or so he knocked on Asa’s door again and murmured her name.

In the small hours, when she unlatched the shutters and peeped through, she saw him pacing up and down by the lake and had to clasp her hands behind her back to prevent them from hammering on the window. It was as if the
Tranquillity
had been moored up ready to carry them away. Such, surely, would be her life with Shackleford. Far too tempting to sink into his arms, to seek another long, lovely kiss and be rocked by his infinite wealth. She saw another version of herself, in her pearl-pink dress, floating across the terrace towards him. This other Asa tucked her arm through his and off they set along the shore, back into the woods to spend the hours of the night binding themselves with promises.

Instead, there on the bed, was Didier’s letter and his turquoise silk like a flag unfurled.

At one point Asa ran to the door, moved the furniture and went out into the passage. The guests had all gone and the house was silent. She trod polished oak boards and antique rugs, passing one closed door after another and, at the head of the stairs, the bust of some Greek deity torn from its niche in Athens. A footman swayed with exhaustion in the hall below, supporting himself with one hand on the banister. Asa crept back to her room.

In another hour a maid brought hot water and fastened Asa’s gown. Shackleford was waiting at the foot of the stairs and ran up a few steps to greet her but she would not look him in the eye, only gave him a bland smile as she swept past. Madame de Rusigneux and Georgina were at breakfast. Nobody spoke much except to comment on the excellence of the ball and the promise of another fine day. Warren was not present. Asa left a note for Susan propped against a coffee cup.

When they parted on the grandiose steps Asa barely skimmed Shackleford’s hand with her own and kept her eyes averted from his face. He spoke low and vehemently: ‘Miss Ardleigh, last night you were gone so suddenly. Please believe that I wish you well. If there is anything …’

‘Thank you for all you’ve done. You have been very kind to my sister and me. I’m sorry, I realise that must be all.’

She ran down to the carriage and did not look back as they drove away.

Georgina melted from Asa’s life in the hazy dawn of a May morning. One moment she was in the carriage, the next she and Warren – who had travelled sullenly on horseback – transferred to a covered goods wagon. Thanks to the presence of Madame there was no opportunity for private discussion between the sisters. In any case Georgina’s determined cheerfulness, the way she fixed her eye on Asa as if to say, Don’t you dare, forbade interference. They embraced briefly in the carriage while Madame and Warren kept their distance.

So Madame de Rusigneux and Asa were alone most of the journey home, which was prolonged by the age of the Ardleigh carriage. The interior was so ill sprung and stuffy with the sun baking on the roof and the lanes too dusty for a window to be opened that neither woman had the stomach to read or work. After a particularly lurching descent, Madame went quite green and had to walk in the lane for half an hour. When they set off again she produced a couple of plain fans from her portmanteau to ward off the nausea.

No amount of fanning would cool the turmoil within Asa. How could one body contain such a mix of pain, excitement and dread? On the one hand Didier’s note was a clarion call, jolting her wide awake. What had she been thinking of, falling into the arms of a slaver? Had she so forgotten herself that she could waste a moment on Shackleford when waiting for her, across the Channel, was not only Didier but the remains of her bold, idealistic self? On the other hand, Didier’s note was equivocal. Where exactly was she supposed to go? And she rebelled at its suddenness; months of silence followed by a peremptory:
J’ai besoin de toi
… But then, given the upheaval in his country, did she really expect a man such as Didier, who had spent the last five years striving at the heart of change, to waste time on soft words? Wasn’t it enough that he had called for her?

At regular intervals she dipped her fingers into her bodice and touched Didier’s handkerchief or, if Madame slept, pressed it to her face and tried to discern the scent of him. Sometimes her hand strayed to the bruises on her neck beneath her muslin scarf and then her thoughts would swerve to the book room at Compton Wyatt, and Shackleford. She felt the sturdy grip of his hand, the extraordinary sense of homecoming as she allowed her body to fall against his.

Madame scarcely spoke but held herself at a distance, as if she too were sunk into an internal world until, on the second day, they were about ten miles from Ardleigh, in the heart of a forest. Through the greenish light her eyes fixed on Asa. ‘
Tiens
,’ she said, ‘
Mademoiselle. Je voudrais dire … c’est fini, je pense
.’

By reverting to French she tapped directly into Asa’s obsessive mental examination of Didier’s letter. ‘To what do you refer, madame?’

‘My task is accomplished,’ she said in her low, dark voice. ‘You have found yourself a husband so all is well and there is no further use for me.’ She added, with a hint of impatience: ‘Monsieur Shackleford. Did he not propose, during the ball? I saw you walking with him in the garden and I surmised …’

‘Ah, no. No.’

‘
Mais je croyais que c’était décidé?
I don’t believe it. My work is done.’

‘You are mistaken, madame. I do not intend to marry Shackleford.’

Madame’s small hands were folded in the blue-black mass of her old gown and there was a sheen on her sallow skin. ‘But he loves you so. I do wonder at you, mademoiselle.’

‘How do you know he loves me?’

Madame studied Asa’s face. ‘Only a fool would not see,’ she said a little coldly. ‘He cannot keep his eyes from you and he is a different man when you are present. The rest of us are shadows to him.’

For a moment, Asa contemplated banging on the roof of the carriage and demanding that they turn round at the next gate, but Madame spoke again, in quite a different voice: ‘In any case I would ask you to release me because go I must.’

‘Go, madame?’

‘I am needed in France.’

‘
France?
It is surely far too dangerous for you there.’

‘Even so I should never have come away. I curse my weakness.’

‘You are not weak, madame. Nobody could ever believe such a thing of you.’

‘Nonetheless.’

‘We have heard that the revolutionary government in France is unforgiving towards émigrés who failed to return by the beginning of last year.’

‘I care nothing for my life.’ Madame leaned her elbow on the worn cushion and put trembling fingers to her forehead. She seemed so very slight, so full of appalling memory, that Asa regretted having pressed her so far. ‘I shall go to Paris to find out where they buried my brother.’

‘But you are alive and your brother is dead. Surely he would not have wanted you to risk your life for this? And why now? If you wait, perhaps everything will change and it will be safer.’

‘How much longer must I wait? Who knows what will happen next? I failed him by allowing myself to be sent away when I was a witness to his murder. I shall not fail him again.’

‘Your devotion puts me to shame, madame.’

‘What cause have you to be ashamed? Would you not do the same for one of your sisters?’ Madame turned her face to the window. ‘I wish you had met my brother. Then you would understand. In looks he was very like me, thin and dark eyed, but unlike me he thought nothing of his own needs. He could have been a saint, if a saint can be full of laughter, as we were when children.’ Her smile was the merest compression of the lips. ‘In a garden where we used to play there was a great empty urn in which he hid himself once, for half an hour, then popped out when we’d all thought him lost. That was typical of my brother, endlessly patient, playing the fool. He was lured to his death like an innocent …’

‘Lured to his death?’

‘I brought him to Paris to keep him safe. We were both betrayed.’

‘You have said before, madame, that you led him into a trap. You are very harsh on yourself. You must have believed that you were doing the right thing.’

‘Gabriel would probably have been quite safe where he was, an insignificant parish priest. What happened was that after Gabriel refused to sign the oath, the authorities sent a so-called constitutional priest, Père Ballard, who
had
signed, to take over Gabriel’s humble flock. But because they were loyal to Gabriel, the congregation refused to respond when Ballard said mass. As he processed down the aisle one of the bolder women even followed with a broom to sweep up the contaminated dust from his shoes. She was punished severely – thrown into prison for a fortnight to reflect on her crime.’

‘Who arrested her? Surely the Revolutionary Assembly promotes religious tolerance?’

‘Is that what you think? The fact is, the woman was punished and Gabriel was afraid that others would suffer because of their loyalty to him. But actually in parishes up and down the country priests like Gabriel have survived by hiding themselves away, biding their time and saying secret masses. The trouble with Gabriel is that he made the mistake of consulting me and I urged him to come to Paris. It was what I was told to do.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Enough to say … I was in love.’ Madame’s glance flickered to Asa ‘I believed the words of my lover. So Gabriel was lured to Paris in order to be destroyed.’

‘But why would anyone do that?’

Gabriel was good and true and unswerving. Paris last summer was a dangerous place to be for a fugitive priest: the king was more or less a prisoner; foreign, royalist armies were gathering at the country’s borders; people were still starving; harvests were still failing; the very poor remained very poor. These counter-revolutionary forces were very threatening. What was quite clear to leaders such as Danton, Marat and Robespierre was that if you weren’t
for
the Revolution, you were against it and against France, and therefore must be punished. And an easy target for this new purge was the priests who had refused to sign the patriotic oath.’