The Marquis of Westmarch

by Frances Vernon

  She was wishing to herself that something very disagreeable would happen to Meriel when the music came to an end.

  *

  When the Moon Gallery grew so hot with candle-flames and overdressed bodies that the paint on several faces began to shine and smudge, Meriel had three of the long windows flung open despite her mother’s protests about dangerous night air. Saccharissa hinted at worse dangers to her Maids of Honour, but would not be precise, though Meriel understood her, and laughed. There were yew hedges in the unlit courtyards outside, tall and elaborate enough to seem as good as a maze to couples wishing to hide themselves; but for fear of being noticed, few chose to slip away. The Marquis did choose to leave her ball for a few minutes.

  The moon was only just short of the full, but it was hidden by a drift of cloud, and glowed faintly in the blackness like a pallid streak in a painting. Together with the Gallery windows, it cast just enough light to show up the courtyard’s hedges as thick, impenetrable walls. At last alone, Meriel breathed deeply, enjoying the mixture of hot human scents and the smell of invisible lavender, dry lawns and yew. The air out here was soft and warm as fur.

  She did not want to be observed, and remembering this, she quickly walked deeper into the garden. When she was out of sight behind a piece of topiary, she cast an affectionate and conscious glance over her shoulder at the building’s yellow-lit arches crowded with life. Meriel sighed, exuberantly hugged herself, and closing her eyes sat down on the grass.

  The noise of the fiddles pulsed over her, and they sounded far more enchanting out here than they could ever do inside. So very much alive, and yet I could fall asleep and cause a scandal, she thought, preparing to lie down for a moment.

  “Marquis — Meriel!”

  Her shoulders jerked. “Oh, is it you sir?” she said, turning her face up and smiling as she recognised Auriol. The sharp line of his falling hair as he bent over her would have been enough to tell her who it was, if she had not known his voice or noticed his size. “Did you come upon me by accident? I thought you might, indeed, somehow.”

  “No, I saw you step out. I’m exceedingly glad you had the windows opened, Meriel, we may dance together out here with impunity,” he whispered, looking over the hedge at the ballroom windows. “There’s no one about just now.”

  “Yes, perhaps. You wish to dance with me?” She admired his dim profile, the short nose and heavy chin she remembered once thinking underbred.

  “Come!” Auriol helped her up, and she stumbled, then yawned and straightened herself, still a little puzzled by his evident need to dance with her.

  “But I do not know the woman’s part, her steps,” she said. “And neither do you, so that won’t answer.”

  “It’s a minuet, the parts are as similar as makes no odds. I hope you may not have ruined your coat sitting on the grass like that, Meriel. Such a pretty coat!” He rubbed her arms and nuzzled her neck, and she gripped him by the thigh, running one hand up, over his buttocks and tensed back.

  “Fustian. Ah,” she whispered, kissing him on the mouth.

  “Let’s dance, come,” said Auriol, laughing and breaking free.

  “Do you think we might not better employ ourselves? Such an opportunity as this maze affords!” Her face looked blue-grey in the night, but her eyes could be seen to sparkle and her lip curled with desire.

  “No, I do not.”

  “Why, I have never had to deplore a want of spirit in you before, sir.”

  “Oh, have you not?”

  She decided to indulge him.

  Trying not to make a noise, yet provoking each other to giggles, they trod a few inaccurate measures. And then they froze, ducked, and fled from each other at the sound of some other lover’s voice beyond the hedge. One minute after it was over, their brief minuet became an odd and frightening experience in memory. Panting at opposite ends of the garden, both longed for the security of the day after tomorrow, when they would be a hundred miles away at Longmaster Wood.

  In the Moon Gallery, Hugo Longmaster went over to the Marchioness’s sofa to report that he had overheard two men say that he and Berinthia made a very handsome couple, and would likely make a match of it. This was a toned-down version of their remarks on Meriel’s incompetence.

  “I beg of you, do not be telling all the world! Lower your voice. Well, I am obliged to be pleased — what fools some persons can be, to be sure!” said Saccharissa. An important ball usually had a tonic effect on her, and this evening she was feeling well enough to sit upright, and even to move about a little.

  Heavy-set diamonds frosted her hair and her bare wrinkled arms, her neck and her thin bosom. They took away her usual puppet-look and turned her into a hard little idol, an impression of which she was aware. Only a sense of what was right kept her from using her diamonds all the time.

  “Mr Juxon, I thought, looked on our last little display with complaisance. I thought it as well to kiss Berinthia’s hand in the supper-room, aunt.”

  “Mr Juxon, my dear Hugo, fears a wife’s influence over Meriel above all else in the world. One has merely to look at him to guess that. Ignorant jackanapes.” She was not concentrating on Juxon: her mind was on the amusing fact that both Hugo, whom Meriel detested, and Wychwood, whom she now privately accepted as her son’s true love, had chosen to wear exactly the same shade of gold-braided dark olive silk.

  “I wonder where he can be? In general, at these affairs, he seems to be forever hovering where he is least wanted,” said Hugo.

  “I have no notion. He will be insufferable for weeks hereafter, he does so enjoy this wretched election-nonsense! Where is Meriel? It is too bad, he cannot have absented himself from his own ball?” Saccharissa had been impressed by Meriel’s appearance and behaviour tonight, and felt quite loving towards her son, despite Berinthia.

  “Of course he has not, ma’am! Mistress Amarantha, how do you go on? You look delightfully,” Hugo said to an approaching lady who was famous for her easy morals. He flirted with her, longing to go out and enjoy the night air, but coping with the noise and heat and demands of his position by drinking plenty of wine.

  Juxon had retired into the garden, and there Meriel found him behind one of the hedges, looking into the faint glitter on the surface of a black rectangular pond, trying perhaps to see his face. She was still a little breathless after her escape from Auriol, and she stopped, and swallowed.

  “Why, Juxon!” she announced, coming up behind him. Her voice was casual, even condescending. She thought it best to speak, because she was still afraid of Juxon, and thought he might be able to discern her presence and her guilt by witchcraft if she tried to go away.

  To her great surprise he turned quickly, seized her hand, and gazed up at her eyes. “Oh, Marquis. I had been hoping you were here, out here, but had not thought it possible!”

  After a moment’s pause she said, “Well, one must take the air, you know, the heat was becoming insufferable.”

  “Yes, yes, but that is not what I want to say. Marquis, I so wanted to tell you, now we have a moment alone together, how — how very beautiful you are tonight. White does indeed become you!”

  “You are too good, sir.” The expression of mixed rapture and pain on his bleached face could only just be discerned, but it disturbed her very much. For years, she had not thought Juxon capable of serious emotion; she wished now she could say something adequate, and calm him.

  He hurried on, clasping both her hands. “I love you so. My dear. My dear, you are leaving me tomorrow and I wanted to tell you now. So often as I have lain awake at nights, tormenting myself as to whether I did what was right, for you, in enabling you to preserve your secret! Did you know that? Did you? Whether you would not have been happier had we done as the world would have said we ought, and not concealed the truth. You seemed so often so unhappy, so lonely and afraid, I feared for your reason, never could I reach you, give you the companionship, the comforts of domestic affection even which might have been yours — but now I know
that I was in the right of it. I saw you tonight, so happy, so beautiful, so glad to be Westmarch, for the very first time, and it quite compensates me for everything, my dear, dear Marquis.” He said all this in her ear, which she had bent down to his lips to encourage him to murmur, for there might be people about.

  “Juxon,” Meriel stammered, “this is not like you.”

  “Oh, there are tears in your eyes. Yes, I can see them. I cannot have distressed you! I would not for the world, Marquis.”

  She then wiped them away with one hand, but did not remove the other from his grip. Instead, she patted his shoulder.

  “I had not thought you cared for my true happiness, sir,” she told him simply. “I’m touched. I’m glad you do. Yes, I am happy. You quite took me aback, that’s all.”

  “I told you often and often, my dear, that it was your true interests I cared for, but full well I knew you did not believe me, thought only that I was self-seeking in some most devious way.”

  “Yes. But I see things now as they are,” said Meriel.

  “You were cutting my heart to pieces, you know, for you are all in all to me, and I know, I know I am nothing to you. May I tell you this? Will you forgive me so unbecoming a display of sensibility, Marquis?”

  “There, Juxon. All will be well, you’ll see. And don’t I owe you everything?” she said, still leaning over his face in a way she knew must look very odd.

  “To see you in the flower of your glory — oh, you are not a woman in any vile sense, you have the mind of a man, a glorious man, as I thought, and I hope you will always do as you will, as you like, with me, with everyone, Marquis.”

  Her heart bulged out towards him, and everyone. “I shall,” she said, very low. “Juxon —”

  “I feared Knight Auriol, because he wrote that shocking pamphlet,” said Juxon, “but though most amiable he is not a very intelligent man, and I see now I need not. Five months he has been living now almost in your pocket, and not a sign he guesses, you conceal it so very very well!”

  He felt the twitch of her hand in his, and Meriel explained it by saying: “You insult my intelligence, Juxon. Of course you need not fear him. He is an excellent fellow merely — and you know, I do need youthful companionship. I hate to be beset — do you bear with my odd humours, sir, when I ask you not to meddle.”

  Meriel pulled herself upright. At present, she was too much moved by Juxon’s eager, modest words to feel contempt for his obtuse self-deception with regard to her lover, or any desire to laugh.

  “Oh yes, I shall,” said Juxon. “I hope you enjoy your repairing lease, and shoot many, many rabbits, Marquis — and come back to me most thoroughly repaired.”

  “It is a pity he is such a plain-looking man,” said Meriel, knowing this to be a typically feminine piece of adroitness, and feeling dirty. “Juxon, I am very glad — vastly glad to know you do in fact hold me in affection. How odd that you should tell me, now.” She gave a tearful laugh. “I shall — take care of you, see you don’t suffer, never fear.” She meant that she would never distress him by telling him the truth about Auriol: as it had briefly occurred to her to do when he revealed that he hoped she would do whatever she liked, implying that he would never prevent her.

  “My little Marquis.”

  This time Juxon was too carried away by his feelings to notice the start Meriel gave. Passionately he kissed her hands, and he closed his eyes as a particularly lovely strain of music reached them from the ballroom. He knew that life would bring him no greater satisfaction than had been his tonight, and when the Marquis left him to dance with Berinthia Winyard, he saluted the one star out in the sky.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Longmaster Wood

  Tall white and purple foxgloves curved upwards in the green gloom of the oak plantation. The earth beneath them was rich as a cake from yesterday’s rain, blotched in places with piercing light; and between the branches and the ground, the air was thick with growing, sweet decay. In a clump of young bracken, Meriel and Auriol dozed naked on their piled-up clothes, breathing heavily as they listened to the movement of insects and leaves. Their sweating bodies were pale, and looked exceedingly tender, thoroughly exposed, although they were so well hidden. Spent cartridges and guns for shooting wood-pigeons lay beside Meriel on her left.

  “Little Marquis — my little Marquis, ah,” Auriol grunted, as he felt her hand touch the faint hollow in the side of his hip and then rise up, round and over, to finger a red line worn into his skin by a crushed fold of cloth. Meriel’s other hand twined in his hair, and she fixed her lips to his great damp shoulder.

  Auriol opened his eyes and turned his head. Until today, he had never seen Meriel unclothed, for though she liked him to be nude whenever she thought it safe, she had always refused to be naked herself.

  Auriol was not surprised that she had been nervous at first of showing what looked like the chastest, coldest and most private of bodies, with its bowl-like collar-bone, large ribcage, and white, hard-muscled arms and legs. He knew them all by touch and loved them, they were covered with the finest of skins. It had been a triumph even so to persuade Meriel to undress. She was afraid above all of disgusting him by the signs of her female sex, because these were disgusting to her.

  The overgrown part between the Marquis’s legs, which had caused her to be taken for a boy twenty-three years ago, was still visible. But it was nowhere near large enough to be mistaken for a male organ now.

  As Meriel touched his own rosy rising virile member, and tucked one of her legs round his, Auriol heard a loud noise of crackling in the bushes to his left.

  “Dang me if it ain’t a trap!”

  “His lordship don’t use no traps.” Pause. “Lily-livered you are, bit of old harness that is. Traps! You’ll be tripping in one of your own rabbit-snares if you ain’t careful, and screeching fit to bust, and then where’ll we be I’d like to know?”

  Each hissing word rang in Meriel’s ears as though it had been shouted. Gazing up at her, terrified himself, Auriol smelt the fear on her. He had never seen her face so white. He tried to make his mouth form the words: “Put your head down! Down!”

  More noise came from the bushes. Poachers out after rabbits, thought Auriol. Just poachers out after rabbits — Meriel flung herself down on top of him in a parody of love, gripped his hips with her knees and buried her face in his neck. Auriol could feel the faintest of little begging curses coming from her lips, once she was comparatively safe. Very slowly, he put his arms round her back and clutched her, as her nails dug into his shoulders.

  Auriol saw that there was a gap in the bracken nearly a foot in width, next to Meriel’s thigh. Through it he could see dying flowers on a scrubby rhododendron and beyond, he was almost sure, the edge of a countryman’s green coat.

  “Dunderhead!”

  A minute passed, and they sweated motionless together while the poachers quarrelled. Then Meriel inched her legs along the outside edge of Auriol’s, causing both of them more pain, and pulled them quickly up on top, hoping that if she lay between his legs instead of astride them she would look more like a man. Auriol parted his in response to her pressure, and made the bracken rustle. He felt furious with her.

  “That was a shot,” said one of the poachers.

  “It was a dead branch. Come from over there!”

  Oh, thought Auriol, yes, they are frightened too. Oh, no. No. Not from here.

  “Dead branch? ‘His lordship’s out shooting pigeons today with his fine friend,’ says you. ‘Won’t be in this part of the wood, oh no, acos them young trees is too thick to allow of a shot. And no keepers neither,’ says you, ‘like there’ll be come night-time, acos my lord tells ’em to keep away, when he’s shooting!’”

  “It weren’t a shot and you’ve got four conies already so shut your bone-box!”

  “God damn you,” whispered Meriel.

  “I’m off and if you’ve any sense you’ll come with me. S’pose it was a busybody keeper, with a nice big gun?
Or his lordship? What’d we do? Hide in the nettles? Very pretty that’d be! If you’ve a mind to be flogged and set to road-mending I haven’t.”

  They went, walking off in the opposite direction from the foxglove glade but so stealthily that it was hard for Meriel and Auriol to tell which path the men had taken. They did not dare to think for some time that the poachers had really gone.

  After three minutes’ silence, Meriel relaxed enough to let herself sob with rage, and crawl slowly away from Auriol. Her whole front felt cold when she removed it from the sodden heat of his body, and the change in sensation, combined with her release from immediate terror, made her vomit violently.

  Auriol scrambled up and held her head over a clump of forget-me-nots.

  “They’re gone, Meriel,” he said. “They’re gone, don’t you see?”

  She carried on retching, and his hands shook so much that he was of very little use to her. He remembered how angry he had been when very sensibly, she had forced his legs apart to make herself look more like a male: he supposed suddenly that she had been preparing to blast the poachers with some few words appropriate to a marquis discovered naked making love to another man. Oh, my God, thought Auriol.

  She was so brave, and so weak now, that he could not be angry with her. He ought never to have been so.

  “It’s all right.” He heard the laughter of relief trembling in his own voice.

  Meriel finished being sick, and immediately broke away from Auriol and hunted for her clothes. Distressed, he watched her, without putting on his own.

  “Dress,” she said, looking briefly at him.

  “Yes, of course!”

  They put their clothes on in silence, fumbling rather with their buttons and watch-chains. When he was dressed, Auriol took another look at Meriel, who was tying back her hair, and was disturbed to see no trace of the hysterical amusement which would be natural in the circumstances in her face. Having vomited, she seemed to be in quiet, untouchable agony.

  Meriel spoke. “I shall have man-traps put down and they must both be apprehended and flogged,” she said in a low voice, and passed the back of her hand over her evil-tasting mouth. Auriol was relieved to hear her make such a worldly and understandable announcement.