The Marquis of Westmarch (3 page)

“Yes,” said Meriel.

“Do you remember only to wear your flannel under-waistcoat, Marquis.”

“Juxon, you said yourself I’m not a grubby brat.” Meriel did not smile as he said this, and he left immediately. Footmen bowed as he passed through his rooms, five minutes after his cousin’s departure.

From the window, Juxon watched the Marquis walk out into the court. He thought the young man had done him a slight injustice in saying he would necessarily disapprove of Knight Auriol’s Wardenship. In many ways, he approved. He disliked Meriel’s growing friendship with so charming a man, and would prefer to have Knight Auriol out of Castle West. But he wished very much that the Marquis had confided in him.

*

Meriel Longmaster detested Castle West, where he was forced to mix in society and live with a certain amount of pomp. Sometimes he thought he detested being Marquis. He had great influence rather than outright power, but responsibility weighed heavily upon him all the same. He used his influence chiefly to remove those he thought corrupt, or less suited to their high positions even than he was to his own. This made him unpopular. Yet he doubted his own judgement, ignored what business he could, and always longed to be back at his hunting lodge, Longmaster Wood, where his grooms and keepers and huntsmen and foresters held him in affection and respect. Sometimes Meriel considered resigning the Marquisate and going to live permanently in the country. But that was impossible, and not only because he loathed the cousin who would have to succeed him. The Marquis’s father had been known, at least for one splendid year, as Good Marquis Elphinstone and, Meriel told himself, he would never have forgiven his son for deserting the post which he too had disliked. Marquis Elphinstone had been dead eleven years.

Meriel thought it was his duty to offer the Wardenship of the
Westmarch Quarter to Knight Auriol Wychwood, because the quiet Southmarcher seemed to him so very good, a much improved version of himself. That was not perhaps the best type of person to put in full charge of a turbulent and backward part of the Island, but Meriel did not care for that. He wanted to honour Wychwood, who had been very down on his luck not long ago, and meant to do so even though he thought he would be wretchedly lonely if the man left Castle West.

He looked forward to talking with him at great length about the worry and annoyance caused by politics, power, and responsibility.

*

To Knight Auriol Wychwood, Castle West seemed engagingly informal after the rigidity and glitter of the Marquis of South-march’s Island Palace. He had not yet seen it during the season, but he imagined that even then, the place would be more like a fashionable seaside village than like a court.

Castle West, on the west coast of the Island, could not be described as a castle proper. It was surrounded by a huge, six hundred year old outer wall, which had once enclosed both a town and an inner fortress, but the fortress had been pulled down long ago. The town now spread out along the coast beyond the great gateway of the castle; and inside the wall there was only a maze of white-painted quadrangles with roofs of blue tiles: buildings which were slightly rustic, inconvenient, and very expensive to rent. Tall, arched first floor windows gave these quadrangles a kind of dignity, and in every wall there were narrow dark doorways, with numbers above them, which led to the staircases of private lodgings.

The various courtyards were connected only by wide open archways and odd narrow passages, so that those who wanted to go from one part of the building to another were always obliged to step outdoors. The largest of them was Marquis’s Court, where a graceful outside staircase ran up to the first-floor apartments of Meriel and of the dowager Marchioness; but even that, to Southmarch eyes, looked countrified and irregular. Like the many lesser courts, the Marquis’s was built of local white-washed brick and not of good dressed stone.

Knight Auriol’s own lodging was in Medlar Court near the
gateway. His two rooms were on the second floor, and each had a pitched, beamed ceiling, very high in the middle but so low at the sides that he, who was almost a giant, could not stand up there. The windows, which gave a view of a kitchen yard on one side and a garden full of fruit trees on the other, went down almost to the floor and stopped at his shoulder height. The rooms were not cramped, but to live in them was rather like living on a ship. Wychwood did not mind this. The Marquis had tried to persuade him to take a better lodging, but Knight Auriol had insisted on taking nothing he could not really afford. The Medlar Court rooms also had the advantage of being very far removed from the lodging of his late wife’s parents, the Blandys.

He had come to visit the Blandy family last autumn, intending to stay only for a few weeks. But then the Marquis of Westmarch had taken a liking to him, a liking which he returned.

Knight Auriol was rather hurt, because he knew that the Marquis had returned from a recent visit to Longmaster Wood several days before and yet he had not come to see him or asked him to pay a call. A series of nuisances, of which the old Warden’s death was the latest, had obliged Meriel to spend more time than was usual in winter at Castle West. He had seen a good deal of Knight Auriol when he was last in town, and not long ago he had gone so far as to ask him to spend a few days’ good hunting with himself and the Grindals at Longmaster Wood. That visit had been agreeable, but awkward in some ways, because the Grindals were surprised by Meriel’s sudden choice of a new friend. Juxon had not been there.

Wychwood sat beside his fire with a book in his hands, thinking about the Marquis and about the hunting he had missed this season. As he leant forward to poke the logs, a footman came into the room; and he knew what to expect. He smiled.

“My Knight, my lord Marquis is without.”

Without replying, Wychwood got up, took off his spectacles, and went out on to the staircase to greet the Marquis. He was already intimate enough to address him as “Westmarch”, but not yet so intimate that he could remain in his rooms without seeming abominably rude.

“Good of you to receive me, sir,” said Meriel. His small hand
was lost in Wychwood’s, but he gave it a hard, warm shake nonetheless.

“Not at all.” They went in, and closed the doors.

Two days had passed since Hugo’s visit. Meriel had avoided Wychwood only because, though his name had been the first to come to mind, he had taken a long time finally to decide that he was the man to be Warden of the Westmarch Quarter. It occurred to him now that if he had not told Hugo on impulse that he was thinking of Wychwood, he might have refrained in the end from offering him the post. He felt committed now, and he intended to come straight to the point; but there was something about Wychwood’s presence that abolished nervousness and urgency, and all considerations of work.

“A beautiful day it’s been, has it not?” said Wychwood. He said this not simply in order to make conversation, but because the beauty or ugliness of the day was a matter of real interest to him. He had eyes, thought Meriel, like himself.

“Yes, it don’t signify that the ground’s like iron and one can’t get out when one can feast one’s eyes on such a sight as that,” Meriel said, nodding at the window.

Fresh snow had fallen, then freezing, sunny weather had fixed it even to the smallest twigs, and covered the castle’s many lily ponds with a layer of ice like coarse dark glass. Black trees cast blue shadows on the snow, sharp as the pattern on a china plate, and behind the sky was perfectly white.

The Marquis took a deep breath, as though he were outside in the snow. “Shall you be fixed at Castle West the rest of the winter, Wychwood?”

“Yes, but I think I ought to pass a few days at Temple Moor with my parents-in-law, you know. I had a letter from Mistress Musidora yesterday, telling me it would only be civil in me to come — promising me good sport and any number of prayer meetings — everyone doing penance for the sins I may have committed during the day.” They laughed.

“Poor old Mistress Musidora. My mother says she’s devilish fond of you in her way, you know. But do you come on to Longmaster Wood, after, only to take away the taste?”

“Thank you! I’m obliged to you — delighted, Westmarch.”

Auriol Wychwood was six foot seven inches tall, a man with
heavy broad shoulders, slender hips, and long thighs and small buttocks both stiff with riding-muscle. He was twenty-seven years old, and for quite fifteen years of his life his enormous size had made him miserable. He still wished he could be the Marquis’s height; while Meriel wished that he could tower over the world as Wychwood did, and have that magnificent figure.

“That wasn’t what I meant to ask you,” said Meriel.

“Which was?”

Auriol had dark hair, very straight and silky, cut off at the chin and allowed to fall loose in the current Southmarch fashion. His complexion was pale olive, and his cheeks were neither full nor lean. He had a short, straight nose like a pretty woman’s, a gentle mouth and an over-large chin. His eyebrows were black and middle-sized, and he had short but heavy eyelashes. Auriol’s eyes were his best feature: they were oval, wonderfully kindly, and of a rare dark blue in colour. They were one degree too small for beauty, and his cheekbones were too broad.

“You know that Chrysander Blandy died t’other day?” Meriel said. “He was some sort of cousin to your wife, of course. I came to ask you if you’d care to succeed him as Warden of the Westmarch Quarter.”

“Marquis — Westmarch. Oh, no!”

Meriel stepped back. “What the devil is there in it to horrify you?”

“Horrify me? No! But I was so much surprised — I’m no politician, Westmarch, as you must know already.” He felt ashamed of his first reaction.

“You’re an honest man. I don’t want a damned self-seeking politician. Take it, sir — it’s worth eight hundred crowns, you know, and there’s the Warden’s House at Mackerel Bridge. And you would be first in consequence in Westmarch, after me, you know — not that such considerations would ever weigh with you, I’m well aware. That’s one of my reasons, can you not see?”

“Westmarch, I’m vastly obliged to you, but indeed I could not.”

“Damn it,” said Meriel, turning away.

“It is a very great honour,” said Wychwood slowly. He was puzzled, as Juxon had been two days before. The Marquis seemed to like him very much, and so why was he anxious to send him
away, bowed down with an enormous preferment he did not deserve?

“Oh, gammon. I’m persuaded you would make a first-rate Warden, there’s nothing else to be said.”

“But I’ve never so much as visited the north. And it’s not only your cousin Southmarch who would vastly resent my appointment, but the Conybeares as well.” The head of the Conybeare family had once been the Marquis of Northmarch, and its present members, though not allowed to use their titles or enter their old domain, were nonetheless rich and influential. They were related by blood and marriage to the other great families: the Winyards of Southmarch, Quartermans of Eastmarch, and Longmasters of Westmarch. The Marquis of Southmarch, Auriol’s former patron with whom he had quarrelled, was nearly related to Meriel.

“I thought Tancred Conybeare was a friend of yours.”

“Tancred, yes. Sometimes I think only because he detests Southmarch who as you know suspects him of all manner of crimes. But Ninian and Endymion distrust me to say the least — my relations with their sister, at one time …” Wychwood hesitated, and shrugged. “They thought —”

“Oh, yes. But by all accounts you came well enough out of that affair, sir. It was not as though you had given some little innocent a slip on the shoulder, after all!” The Marquis flushed a little as he talked about this.

“I made her unhappy,” said Auriol, looking at the fire. “I must blame myself for that.” He had made her unhappy not by seducing her, but by failing to do so; but he was not going to tell Westmarch that.

“Well,” said Meriel, “so you think you are no fit person.”

“Yes, I should be very unwilling.” Auriol took out the spectacles he used for reading, and started to polish them. They were little, round ones, rimmed with silver.

“I can hardly force you to accept. But dammit, whom am I to appoint? Half a dozen men are snapping at my heels — toadeaters wanting to feather their nests, every one of them. No more well suited than you are. And at least you have military experience, Wychwood.”

Auriol pulled a face. “Six months in the First Palace Guards?”

“More than I ever had! And then you was married to a Westmarch girl, sir, you’re connected with the Blandys, which makes you by far less — less ineligible for the post than might seem at first. Your wife’s friends would be in transports over your appointment, surely.”

“I wish I might see it! Has my father-in-law not been doing his all to bring that prosy son of his by his first wife to your notice?”

“Very true!” said the Marquis, and laughed unwillingly. “Well, if you will not, you will not. But be sure sir, if you should wish it, I would provide you with some other place. At Castle West. I know you’re not by any means beforehand with the world just at present.”

“Marquis, you are too good.”

Meriel looked up. “Don’t be proud, Wychwood! You’re not insulted, man?”

“No, indeed, never that.”

“Well then.” The Marquis looked deeply relieved, and pulled at his pigtail. “Whom am I to appoint? The decision, you know, rests entirely with me, very odd in me it would look if I were to consult even the Citizens’ Senior Member.”

“Juxon has no views?”

The Marquis sat down. “I am not prepared, sir, to consult Juxon at all turns. Of his own accord he’s recommended Mr Corydon Wiseman, whom I won’t have on any account.”

“Yes, he’s a loose fish.”

“He is indeed. Clever, though, and he’s a military man. Knows the Quarter well.”

“Yes, but he’s not — well, a man of principle.”

“Exactly so. He toad-eats Juxon, for one thing.”

“Ay, very likely!” Auriol smiled.

“I see we are in perfect agreement on this head, sir. No, I won’t press you again, never fear!”