by Caro Peacock
‘Polly says he’s a dry old stick, but fair minded.’
I set her to collecting salad leaves from the garden for our lunch and went down to stroll by the river, marvelling at where loyalty had led this dry old stick. Keeping faith with a family that seemed to have done little to deserve it, he’d lied on oath and hindered the investigation of a murder. He’d admitted that Oliver Lomax had coached him to tell lies at the inquest. The risk that the lawyer had run was breathtaking. He’d committed a sin that would ruin him professionally if it became known. Surely the only thing that would persuade him to do that was an even greater risk to a member of his friend’s family. Even then, it was hard to account for a loyalty even more extreme than the steward’s.
In the afternoon, I changed into my blue cotton print, fit for another social call. For once, I didn’t have to wear sensible shoes for walking because Lady Brinkburn was sending for me. I sat on the bench outside the door, enjoying the scent of the roses and waiting for the rumble of a gig or carriage wheels on the rutted drive through the woods. At half past three I began to think that she’d forgotten me and I’d have to walk after all. I was on the point of going upstairs to change out of my blue kid shoes when a rhythmic splashing came from the river, then the sound of oars clunking into rowlocks. So she’d sent a man with the rowing boat instead. What a good and sensible idea, much more pleasant to glide on the river rather than rattle along the dusty road. Footsteps swished through the long grass up the garden. I stood up, smoothing my dress, then must have gaped open-mouthed at the figure walking along the path. Robert Carmichael.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Lane. I hope you have no objection to travelling by water.’
I managed to stop gaping and to wish him good afternoon, but my voice seemed to be coming from a long way off. In my mind, the picture of him standing over a bleeding Lord Brinkburn at the foot of the staircase was much more vivid than the smiling man standing there among the flowers. I’d known I’d have to meet him again, but had wanted time to be prepared for it, not allowing myself to be taken by surprise like this.
I followed him down the path to the river bank, saying nothing. The rowing boat was tied to the root of an alder tree. He pulled it parallel to the bank and offered a hand to help me in. I ignored it and settled myself on the seat in the middle of the boat. He took off his hat and jacket, folded them neatly in the prow, then cast off, stepping in lightly and settling himself on the rowing bench. A few strong strokes with the oars brought us through the water lilies at the edge to the middle of the current, facing upriver towards the hall. He rowed with a steady rhythm, still smiling as if this were the most delightful of pleasure trips. With his back to the direction of travel, he was facing me so that his face dipped towards mine with each stroke, then away again. In spite of the ease of his rowing, there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, but then it was a hot day with no breeze, not even here on the river. I tried to keep my face impassive and look over his shoulder at the scenery, but was aware all the time of the bend and stretch of his arms in their fine white linen, the pale nape of his neck when he leaned forward. A mad impulse came to me to ask him there and then, Are you and she lovers? I fought it down. It had to be asked at some time, either of him or her, but not now. The rhythm faltered.
‘Look, a kingfisher.’
He was looking towards a willow, oars lifted from the water.
‘I missed it,’ I said.
The look he gave me suggested he was aware that something was wrong. He bent his head and resumed rowing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As soon as we entered the house, Robert Carmichael handed me over to Lady Brinkburn’s maid, Betty, and disappeared. Betty led me along the corridor and up the private flight of stairs by the library door. Lady Brinkburn was waiting in the doorway of her suite at the top. She wore a blue silk wrap and was barefoot, her hair loosely tied with a white ribbon. Her face was pale and papery in texture, with violet semi-circles under her eyes. The eyes themselves seemed remote and other-worldly, the pupils no more than pin-pricks.
‘Miss Lane, I hope you will excuse my receiving you so informally. I’m so plagued by this heat I can scarcely think or stand.’
‘You’re not well,’ I said. ‘I’ll go away.’
I was alarmed by the look of her, and even more by the nervous energy that seemed to charge the air round her. When she put a hand on my arm I felt its heat even through my dress sleeve.
‘Don’t go. Please don’t go.’
She kept her hand on my arm, her eyes on my face.
‘Then I’ll stay, if you want me to.’
She sighed with relief and drew me into the room.
‘May I call you by your first name? I’m Sophia.’
‘My name’s Liberty.’
‘Such a splendid name.’ Then to Betty, ‘It’s all right. We have everything we need here.’
She closed the door on the girl’s concerned face. All the windows of her sitting room were open, their white muslin curtains motionless in the heavy air, framing views of the lawn and river. She could, if she’d wanted, have watched Robert Carmichael and me walking up the grass. There were tea things set out on a table, a silver kettle on a small spirit burner. Waves of heat shimmered from it.
‘We’ll have tea here, just the two of us.’
She concentrated hard on making the tea, as if it were some dangerous scientific experiment. There were lines of pain on her forehead.
‘You have a headache?’ I said.
‘Yes. I always do when the atmosphere is oppressive. Don’t you find it so?’
‘You should be lying down,’ I said.
An inner door to her bedroom was half open, showing a broad white bed under a muslin canopy, the quilt as smooth and plump as a snow drift. A dark glass bottle and medicine glass stood on the table beside it.
‘I’m tired of lying down. I’ve hardly slept for two nights.’
‘I heard about your husband,’ I said.
I could hardly fail to refer to his death, but formal commiserations did not seem in order, especially in the face of her obvious refusal to wear mourning.
‘Do you think I should be in black for him?’ she said, looking me in the face as if she really wanted an answer.
‘No.’
She ran a hand down her blue silk.
‘Betty put out my black bombazine, poor girl. I told her to take it away and burn it.’
She poured tea and handed me my cup. ‘I hope you didn’t object to arriving by boat. We thought it would be cooler on such a day.’
It might have been a brave attempt at social chat, only there was a shade of emphasis on the ‘we’ that invited me to notice it, and her eyes were fixed on mine.
‘That was thoughtful of you.’
‘Robert rows well, doesn’t he?’
No doubt about it this time. She wanted me to notice the use of his Christian name.
‘Yes, very well.’
‘Robert is very dear to me. I don’t know how I should manage without him.’
Her eyes were tired and full of pain, but there was challenge in them too.
‘I think Mr Carmichael is very anxious to protect you,’ I said.
‘You’ve heard the story, of course?’
‘Your husband threatening to break down the door with an axe?’
‘Yes. This very door and that very staircase. It happened.’
There was a terrible openness about her face and her eyes, as if she were willing herself to be transparent. I said nothing.
‘Miss Lane, if I were to tell you that Robert and I are not lovers, would you believe me?’
I thought about it, and all the time her eyes were on my face. In the end, I said, ‘Yes.’
She nodded, as if that settled the point, but I noticed she didn’t make the statement.
‘Did what happened on your husband’s last visit make you decide to tell people about Stephen and Miles?’ I said.
‘No. I kept silent about tha
t dreadful business as about so many other things, only of course you can’t stop the servants from talking. He went away again, as he always did, and left me in my tower by the river.’
It wasn’t a tower, of course, but I guessed she was thinking of The Lady of Shalott again. In this mood, there did seem something fey about her, like a woman shut away from the world by a spell.
‘So why did you decide to talk about it?’
She wanted to confide in me, or in somebody at any rate, but couldn’t quite bring herself to make the irrevocable leap. All I could do was ask the questions that had been in my mind and see what happened. If she was angry with me and told me to go, then that was her decision.
‘Because I knew my husband was dying and his mind was quite gone. I never expected that to happen. He was still a vigorous man when I last saw him. I was quite sure that I’d die first, then things would have to go however they went and it wouldn’t be any fault of mine. Once I knew he was incapable of acting, the injustice would be my fault and I had to speak out.’
‘But now he’s dead, the title and the estate go to Stephen,’ I said.
‘If he’s not his father’s legitimate son, they’d have to alter it, wouldn’t they?’ she said. ‘These things have to be done properly or the whole system of inheritance would fall down.’
Personally, I thought that would be no bad thing, only it wasn’t the time to say so.
‘Do you dislike Stephen?’
The pause before she answered lasted a long time. At last she said, ‘No,’ but uncertainly. Then, after a shorter pause, ‘When he was a baby, I could scarcely bear to touch him. But I got past that. I told myself none of it was his fault. He was a little boy, like any other boy, laughing, bringing things for me to see, playing with his animals. How could I dislike that, whatever the circumstances? But then…’
She looked at me, biting her lip.
‘Something changed?’
‘Yes. He went away to school, of course. I suppose that makes all boys different, but it was more than that in Stephen’s case. The year he was fourteen, he came home for the summer holidays. I can still remember it so clearly, it won’t go out of my mind. I’d arranged a little tea party for the two of them as a welcome home, in the summer house. Stephen came striding in and glared at me, then before he even took off his hat he said to me in a terrible, cold, grown-up sort of voice: “Why did you drive my father away?”’
The pain in her eyes and voice was beyond help, but I tried.
‘Boys can be cruel,’ I said. ‘They talk to impress each other at school, thinking they’re adults. They don’t realise…’
‘He realised,’ she said. ‘It was his father coming out in him. Stephen is his father’s son.’
I stared at her, trying to make sense of it.
‘But…but the point of all this, surely, is that Stephen is not Lord Brinkburn’s son…that is, unless I’ve totally misunderstood…’
‘No, you don’t understand, do you? A person can be his father’s son in one sense and not in another.’
She spoke softly and sadly, but I felt that we’d just left firm ground and stepped on the quivering surface of unreason. Sensing my confusion, she touched my arm as if she were trying to comfort me.
‘Don’t look so sad. I still had Miles, after all. My little knight. He was only twelve years old at the time, but he stood up for me and tried to hit his brother. I had to stop him or Stephen might have hurt him.’
‘But Miles is his father’s son, after all,’ I said.
‘Yes, he is his father’s legal son, but I don’t believe he has a particle of his father’s nature in him. Miles has all my qualities and probably all my faults as well. I willed that. Don’t you think women can will qualities into their children?’
‘I don’t know. The fact of his birth–does it mean you and your husband were reconciled for a while?’
She laughed.
‘We were never reconciled. You’ll have heard Lord Brinkburn came here now and then to inspect his property. The property included me: a husband’s rights, you understand. After those first few times, I locked myself away. He never tried to break the door down, until that last visit.’
‘So Miles was the result of…?’
‘One of those first property inspections, yes. I lay there in the dark, thinking that if there was a child it would be mine and only mine. I tried not even to think of his father all the time I was carrying him.’
‘And the man who came to the tower, did you think of him?’
She shook her head and, for the first time in the conversation, dropped her eyes.
She offered more tea. I accepted.
‘I read your journal,’ I said.
‘All of it?’
‘Every word, and I enjoyed the pictures too. You have a great talent for sketching.’
She thought I was guiding us back to the shallow waters of social chat. There was both relief and disappointment in her eyes. I put down my cup and picked up my reticule.
‘I came across another example of your work the other day.’
I unrolled the sketch of the boy Handy and put it down among the tea things, weighting it with the sugar tongs. She leaned forward to look at it, simply curious at first, then with an intake of breath and a flinch as if I’d hit her.
‘Where did you get this?’
After the first shock, she was angry with me.
‘Handy was friendly with a woman named Violet in the village,’ I said. ‘He’d given her some papers to keep for him. This was among them.’
She picked it up with the sugar tongs and held it in the flame of the spirit lamp. The thick paper was reluctant to burn at first and writhed and twisted, but she held it steady until it fell to the table in curled leaves of ash.
‘You didn’t always hate him,’ I said. ‘There was kindness for him in that sketch. And when he was wet and cold at Antwerp you had him wrapped in a blanket and made tea for him.’
When I’d first seen the sketch in Violet’s bundle, it had reminded me of something. Hours later my mind had made the connection with the boy in the journal, ‘wet as a herring’.
‘I didn’t know him properly then,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know until later.’
‘He was with you on the honeymoon tour, the boy riding on the back of the coach. I suppose he’d have been no more than twelve or thirteen then.’
‘Yes, clinging on the back of the coach like a demon in a nightmare. All the way to Italy and back.’
‘How could a boy that young be a demon?’
‘It was born into him, I think. My husband saw that in him. That’s why he chose him.’
The fierce energy was draining out of her, as if burning the picture had taken it away. She lay back on the couch, eyes half closed. I offered again to call Betty, but she shook her head.
‘I want to tell you, I think. You’ve guessed so much already. Only, give me a moment.’
A sudden breeze came through the open windows from the river, whipping the light curtains into the room, then died away as rapidly as it had come, leaving the air feeling even more heavy. Still with eyes half closed, she started speaking.
‘He was a birthday present to my husband. When he left school, his father told him he could have his own servant. His father thought he’d choose somebody from their estate in Northumberland. Instead, he picked out this ragged boy pulling a truck in a coal mine they visited.’
‘A generous impulse,’ I said.
‘There wasn’t any generosity about it. He saw Handy playing some mean practical joke on one of the other boys. Cornelius’s sense of humour was always childish. It appealed to him and he took the boy on a whim. When he got his own carriage, he called Handy his tiger, dressed him in a suit of livery and had him riding on the back. Naturally, he came with us on our tour. Cornelius would no more have left him behind than one of the wheels. But Cornelius wasn’t always kind to him. Some days he’d cuff him for no particular reason, other days he’d be fee
ding him cakes and letting him drink wine as if he were some kind of pet. I was sorry for him at first, as you saw.’
‘What made you change?’
‘It came gradually. I noticed him looking at me side-long, and grinning as if he knew something I didn’t. Then Suzy came to me one day and said he’d tried to put a hand up her skirt–a boy of that age. I spoke to Cornelius about it and he only laughed and said that’s what you’d expect a boy to do and Suzy was making a silly fuss about it. It was almost as if he was pleased to hear about it. After that, I tried to keep a distance between Handy and myself, but I couldn’t help noticing things.
‘What sort of things?’
‘If we stayed in a place for more than a day or two, Cornelius would always go out in the evenings. He seemed to find acquaintances everywhere, though he wouldn’t always introduce them to me. Handy would invariably go with him.’
‘That was natural enough, I suppose. He’d need a boy to carry a torch and so on.’
‘It was more than that. Sometimes they’d come back very late. I’d hear them laughing and singing, as if they were equals rather than master and boy. Then, next day, they’d be catching each other’s eye and grinning as if there were some secret between them.’
‘Did you say anything to your husband?’
‘I tried not to think about it and to focus all my mind on the places we were travelling through. Even then, I had a presentiment I was seeing them for the first and last time.’
For a woman in her early twenties, that seemed intolerably sad. Perhaps even then she had a tendency to melancholy.
So you didn’t ask questions?’
‘Not until some time after we’d arrived by Lake Como. There was one occasion when they weren’t back till dawn. Cornelius didn’t get up till the afternoon. I told him that he was corrupting the boy and he’d have it on his conscience. I’ll always remember what he said: “The boy was born corrupt, that’s why I like him.” I told him it was indecent to make a joke of something so serious, but I believe now he was telling the truth. Handy was born corrupt, and so was my husband.’
She lay back on the chaise longue, eyes closed. Telling all this seemed to have exhausted her, but I knew it was only half the story. Bad though it was, it couldn’t explain the intense hatred she’d felt for Handy.
