The Marquis of Westmarch (29 page)

Berinthia, whose wedding dress was sewn all over with now-wilting live flowers as convention demanded, though the style did not flatter her mature good looks, said, “It seems a little odd, certainly, cousin, your retiring to the country in the company of the man you felt obliged to shoot.”

Rosalba, who for her part was no longer even capable of remembering what the Marquis had once been to her imagination, went to talk with a young man who thought she was looking unwell, and offered to fetch her husband to her. Pregnancy was her protective glass, guarding her from emotion.

“But our quarrel was not serious, you know, cousin, and this is my peculiar way of confessing I was a villain! I own, I wish it had been possible to keep the truth from leaking out, but since it was not, I’m damned if I’ll refrain from talking about it,” said Meriel.

“Not serious?” said Hugo.

“No, a mere exchange of insults, but the result was unavoidable.”

They will see it, thought Philander. They
must
see you for what you are, you little, silly, splendid fool!

They did not, even when Meriel drew her veined eyelids down over her glinting light eyes in a way that struck him as positively maidenly, and then moved away with great dignity to seek out her mother who had not heard the news.

“My Lord Marquis!” said Dr Moxon. “Pray, one moment, I must tell you — Knight Auriol has taken a turn for the worse.”

Meriel, whose hand was on the bedchamber door, slowly turned her face towards him. Dr Moxon, who was still unaccustomed to her behaviour in the sick-room, composed himself and fixed his eyes on the long table.

“It is several days, my lord, since his wound, I fear to say, contracted an unpleasant infection. I had thought it nothing serious, for Knight Auriol’s constitution is a strong one, but —”

Meriel interrupted. “What are you saying?”

“My lord — he is ill.” His fingertips stroked the table-top.

“Yes, he is ill! What’s your meaning?”

Moxon glanced at her eyes, and lowered his own again.

“Knight Auriol is extremely ill now, my lord.”

“This morning,” said Meriel, “only this morning, do you remember, he assured me that in two days’ time he would be more than fit to travel. Now you say he is worse.”

“No, my lord — he cannot make any kind of journey.”

“He is going to make one. We shall travel by easy stages, and you may accompany us if you think it necessary.”

“My lord, I think he is dying,” said Dr Moxon.

Meriel did not move. She had been standing before the door, completely rigid, since he had said ‘turn for the worse’.

“Forgive me, I tried to soften the blow, but upon my word, I think I cannot do so. My lord, I am so very sorry!” Pity, anxiety and fear made the doctor spit out his words without looking at her. “You were aware I fancy that there was proud flesh in the vicinity of the wound, my lord, that I did tell you — proud flesh, more properly described as septic flesh. Septicaemia is a common
consequence of such accidents as Knight Auriol’s. My lord Marquis, I beg you will seat yourself!”

Meriel could hear loud buzzing in her ears. She blinked.

“It’s not true,” she said. It was as though incomprehension were crashing down over her head in waves, like waves of the sea. There were pauses for recoil between each wave, pauses in which she understood everything perfectly, but they were very short.

“There is still, still a very faint chance — I never saw a man with so strong a constitution, and yet often with these big men, these strong men, the breaking-down of health when it does come comes with remarkable swiftness. My lord Marquis, pray allow me at least to fetch your man to you — you ought at least to take a little brandy! I would not have had this happen for the world, I would have cut off my own right hand to prevent — I thought Knight Auriol strong enough to resist, defeat the miasma, seldom have I seen a man with so great a will to live, and so though I was troubled I did not think to distress you with my own doubts — my lord.”

“He is not dying. He can’t be dying. He was well.”

The doctor said no more. Meriel pulled open the door and walked into the bedchamber.

There Auriol lay, in the half-shuttered room, asleep and noisily breathing. His face was flushed, lined, heavy, ill. Meriel’s first emotion at the sight of him was thankfulness.

Her shocked mind had not yet distinguished between ‘dying’ and ‘dead’. Odd though it began to seem to her, the first word, spoken by her own lips, had made her imagine a quite different, unreal scene, nothing to do with a dying man. She had expected to see nothing but an empty bed, flat and hard as a table, untouched as it had been for many many years. She had expected Auriol to have vanished completely, like Juxon, perhaps as a punishment for her own glee at Juxon’s disappearance.

She stood on the threshold, looking at the bulky bed. Then she saw that she was not alone: one of the young nurses was fixed in the corner, watching her with wide eyes, a brandy-bottle in her hand. The nurse felt unable to run past Meriel, out of the room, but that was what she wanted to do, for the Marquis’s face was very ugly.

“What have you been doing to him?” said Meriel. Her voice
was low and strong, and her words quick. She noticed how the nurse’s eyes bulged, like a hare’s, as she answered, “It’s laudanum, my lord! To ease the pain, see, make him sleep. He’ll sleep like a baby.”

“He’s been in pain.”

“Yes sir, my lord.”

“Get out — please.” Meriel walked towards the bed, and unseeing, heard the nurse slam the bedroom door behind her.

Six hours had passed since Meriel last saw Auriol. He had looked yellow and a little feverish that morning, but had sworn that country air and her presence were all that was needed to set him to rights. She had believed him, she had never once doubted him.

Resist, defeat the miasma, Dr Moxon had said. How, thought Meriel, could a man fight, resist so intangible a thing as a miasma? What precisely was a miasma? Why had he not resisted and defeated it? She remembered then that he was still alive, and that Dr Moxon had said there was still some very faint chance.

Meriel sat down on the edge of the bed. For a moment, she felt as though she were already in a remote prison of cold, loneliness, and orphan-like hunger, as though she had already been bereaved for a month. And yet, there was hope, she knew that.

“Wychwood,” she said, and creeping forward, she took hold of his hand. “Wychwood.”

His body was warm, of course, and in touching him, Meriel became aware for the first time since opening the door of how subtly disgusting was the air in the bedchamber. Scented with camphor and flowers though it was, there was an under-drift of sour vomit, and sweat, and sweet thick faeces, and her lover’s foul breath that came from between slimy teeth. All made Meriel want to vomit herself.

Auriol’s chest heaved, and one of his legs lumbered towards her under the blanket. She watched him, with one hand pressed to her mouth: his face, though crunched up now with some kind of dreamy effort, looked very small and soft in its nest of pillows. He opened an eye, and shut it again, in pain — then a smile fixed itself on his face. Despite the large amount of laudanum he had been given, he was capable of recognising
Meriel, and even of grasping one of her fingers, though not of speaking aloud.

She thought: dying, dying, dying, dying.

*

Rage at injustice and irony seized Meriel’s mind when Auriol finally died, one day later, exactly a week after Meriel shot him. While he still lay breathing and murmuring, constantly smiling under the influence of laudanum that made him dream of a strange but ideal future at Wychwood, she had sat rigid, unable to show or feel anger while he was still there. But when he was dead, a dummy, her own fury was a kind of comfort to her, a distraction from grief and guilt.

She was the man who had shot him, and would never now be anything else in the eyes of the world, and that enraged her. She would never be his mistress again, his lover, his master, his wife, never be able to show that she was truly bereft without seeing astonished and embarrassed disapproval on the faces of others. When there were no real faces about her, she imagined them, and so lashed herself into committing excesses which attracted precisely that kind of horrified attention she did not want.

Meriel turned savage. She struck Dr Moxon, Esmond and Philander, tore briefly at her own face with nails too short to draw blood, ripped up the sheets of the crimson bed, smashed ornaments, threw down pictures, kicked the coffin, and howled. It was an attempt at suicide, for she hoped to die of a brain exploded in frenzy, or perhaps to be killed by someone who thought her mad, even one of her own footmen would do — and thus to be protected from reality forever, as good men were.

*

At last, she grew calmer, she could not do otherwise. She had suffered three bouts of raging in two days, in between sedative doses, and when the last of those wore off she found she could not escape into madness a fourth time. She was too tired to do anything but remember her tortures, and be numb for a while before she started to mourn quietly, in a grey fog of pain.

Once, as a child, Meriel had been lost in a fog on a moor in winter, and had panicked, thinking that never again would she see another human being. In fact, it was her screams of furious
fear that had enabled people to find her, and then all had been well. She remembered that.

She was not precisely afraid of mists now, but she disliked them, and thought of them and of moors as symbols of desolation. So, she thought: grey fog.

As it happened, it was a grey and sodden day outside in the small wild garden. Meriel, standing by the closet window, did not move away, but slowly put her hand out, and rubbed it on the shining dirty sill, and watched the heavy rain-drops break on its back and run down her fingers. Then, herself aware of the crudity of such a stimulus as dreary weather, she began to weep for the permanent loss of gentle Wychwood, her dear: not for the loss of the future, the ruin of her plans, and her own evil disposition as before. Wychwood the good. She came closer to dying then as she wept than she had done in all her barbarian furies, intended to kill her though they had been. It was too soon yet for her to think of more direct, painless and certain ways of killing herself.

*

Hours after, Meriel’s major domo opened the closet door, and saw her at the window. She had had a rest, then returned to the little view, unable to cope with anything larger. Her sobs were not quiet, but neither were they hysterical; they seemed to Esmond to be coming up in solemn gusts from her intestines. She did not notice his entrance, and after a moment he withdrew, and walked through her apartments to the main saloon, polishing his spectacles all the way.

“Esmond, how does his lordship go on?” said Philander, who had just come through the main doors. He walked quickly across the floor to join the major domo, who had started a little at the sound of his voice.

“Mr Grindal sir. I was upon the point of going over to Chapel Court myself, to consult with you.”

“He is not worse, I trust?”

“No sir — nothing such as we have seen these past two days, but — I am, truth to tell, somewhat disturbed. It is not, I fancy, a case for calling in a physician — not Dr Moxon! — but
you,
and his lordship himself to be sure, must decide that sir.”

Esmond had gone to fetch Philander when Meriel first lost all control of herself, knowing that with Auriol dead and Juxon
vanished, the Marquis could have no other possible person to turn to. The members of the Longmaster family so disliked each other that it was useless to think of Hugo or Saccharissa. Since then, the two men had formed an alliance against Dr Moxon, who had begun to talk of strait-waistcoats after Meriel knocked him down for trying to force a sedative on her. For two days past, Philander had worried chiefly about the possibility of Esmond’s guessing her true sex: he visited the Marquis’s apartments constantly, not so much to be with Meriel as to assure himself that there was no look of knowledgeable cunning in the major domo’s fat face. There was still none, he saw.

“Don’t tell me more. I’ll go to him and see whether I can be of some service to him,” Philander said. He prayed that he would find her in the right state of mind to be told that he, her old friend, knew the truth.

“Yes, sir.” Esmond watched the other walk on down the room. Though he had been shocked by the suggestion of a strait-waistcoat for the Marquis, he thought Meriel indisputably mad, but dared not say so to anyone yet.

Meriel was no longer at the window when Philander entered her closet, but sitting on a chair, doubled up and moaning like a wind. She raised her head when he came in, and her successful attempt to look quietly resolute touched him very much. Perhaps it would be best if she killed herself, he thought — just as marriage would once have been best. He was about to tell her, very gently and shyly, what he knew, when she said, “I know he, Wychwood, is not yet buried. Has he been embalmed?”

Philander took a moment to reply. “Well yes — so I suppose. In this weather —”

“He has no friends, no kin, no one to object. I wish him to be buried at Longmaster Wood, or if he has not been embalmed here, with us, inside the wall.” She planned to be buried next to him, whether at Castle West or Longmaster Wood, but did not say so.

Cautiously Philander said, “It might be possible. As you say, he had no near relations living.”

“Do not tell me it will be
quite
improper
!”

“No,” said Grindal.

He was not usually so abrupt, but he had been taken aback:
Meriel had given that order in a voice full of irritated challenge, familiar to those who knew her well, and not heard for three days. He pulled out a chair, and sat down, carefully spreading his coat-skirts and crossing his legs. There was a mark on the knee of his breeches, he noticed, and he rubbed at it, remembering that before Wychwood died he had had a dream about being raped by Meriel.

He had come to envy Auriol Wychwood. He thought secretly that to be mourned in such a way as Meriel favoured was something indeed, and that no doubt if a man was six-foot-seven and broad to match, however silly-faced, he could surrender his body to a Meriel with impunity. Now he, Philander, pitied Meriel for having killed fate’s miraculous provision of a suitable lover for her.

“Did you mean to marry him?”

He was simply being clumsy; he did not mean to be cruel.

Meriel straightened her long body. She stared at Philander, closed her eyes, and continued, blinking, to stare. Her lips did not move and her cheeks looked almost grey. Philander saw that her nose was distorted with crying but that otherwise her face had been improved by tears: her damp eyes, surrounded by delicate shiny pink skin, looked larger and brighter than usual.

“I have known only since that day in the field! Meriel — my dear old friend, don’t I beg of you, do anything — what would he have wanted? And I have told no one, no one at all.” Thus the essence of his prepared speech came out disjointedly in less than a minute.

The clock in the corner suddenly struck three: whirr, ting, whirr, ting, whirr, ting. The noise greatly fussed Philander, it seemed undignified to him.

At last Meriel said, “Why have you not?”