“Oh, God damn it.” His rebellion made her eyes narrow, she bit her lip. “How do you expect me to help you escape? What the devil can I do when this is Juxon’s doing and I’ve told you times out of mind that I cannot, cannot, cannot do anything?”
“Don’t be a fool! You have only to tell those damned men outside to absent themselves, take a glass of heavy-wet in the porters’ lodge — do you think they will dare gainsay you, particularly when they suppose that Juxon was merely carrying out your order to arrest me? As you have not scrupled to let the whole world think. This is not precisely a prison, not yet!” He paused, and noticed a strange expression on her face. “I tell you, I shall make my own escape if you don’t aid me, though it will not be easy, I don’t back myself to overpower two full-sized men at the same time.”
“A little too fast for me, sir,” said Meriel, in a voice very like that she used for addressing eager place-seekers. “Don’t seek to bullock me. I — I shan’t do it.”
“You —” He took a step towards her.
“I shan’t be hurried into anything. I am not going to set up such a damned bad precedent. You are never, never going to hold your affection over my head like a whip when it is all I have in the world — you are not going to threaten to withdraw it every time I refuse to fall in absolutely with your wishes, when I am married to you!” Her voice had gone right up the scale.
Auriol touched her on the shoulder, remembering that his firm soft touch had always been able to calm her. But he was so desperate now that he could not hold his hand steady.
“That was not my meaning. I don’t think I am guilty of that kind of blackmail, I love you too much. I am being honest with you.” His fingers gripped her again. “Meriel, get me out of this place, no matter what. I beg of you, if nothing else will do for you!”
“For God’s sake, can you not try to endure it?” she cried, twisting away, her face ugly with strain. “Don’t you see that if I do that I will be ruining you, making you appear guilty? What would our future be when we told the truth, if I did that? I couldn’t protect you! I must go with you to Bury Winyard as soon as you’re due for release, it’s the only way I can and will help you escape!”
“No!”
“Yes! You may lose all your love for me, because I own I’m too loathsome, but I’m damned if I’ll sign your death-warrant by letting you break the law!” She picked up her hat and gloves from the table, and looked at him.
Seeing that his face was now as much troubled as angry, and was certainly less rigid than before, she seized his hand and raised it to her lips. “For God’s sake, sir, believe me when I say I will do all for the best. I’ll think about your scheme if that will comfort you, but I can promise no more!” She let go of his fingers and walked across the room, and as she opened the door into the cupboard-sized antechamber, she gave a shy inclination of the head. She had not done that since the early days of their friendship.
*
Meriel was obliged to receive the Senior Member of the Court of Citizens when she returned to Marquis’s Court, and to talk with him about a future in which she would remain exactly what she was now. He remained with her for nearly an hour and when at last he left, she had a headache throbbing over her eyes.
Rain, which had seemed to be waiting to fall for two muggy days, had spattered the windows during the Senior Member’s call, and the sky had now cleared a little. Meriel decided when she saw this to go down to her little walled garden, and read a book to distract her from her two lives. From the selection of twelve volumes in her closet, she took a favourite treatise on political economy, written in simple language and argued with common-sense. She had given a pension to its author five years ago.
The garden was damp and cool and no suitable place for reading, but Meriel stayed because she was perfectly alone there. She wondered why she did not make use of it more often, and remembered how once, when for some reason she and Auriol had been perfectly sure that no servant would either come down or look out of the closet window, they had made love behind the stubby elder and currant bushes at the very back. At that time, the elder-flowers had been in bud; now their saucersful of blossom had gone, and turned into sprays of tiny berries, hard as the green apples on the trees that grew up against the wall. It would be a rich autumn even here at Castle West, now that the long drought had ended. At Longmaster Wood, they were expecting a first-rate harvest and a very good pheasant-shooting season.
I won’t cry, thought Meriel, I will not. I can’t give in to him. Her headache continued to cause her pain as she thought of his righteous wish to make her see that he too was a powerful male.
She wondered whether indecision and opposing desires would tear at her all her life, or whether once she was settled, they would disappear and she would become a relatively simple and consistent personality, like everyone else in the world. They must disappear. They must.
Meriel laid her unopened book down and got up from the bench. She caught sight of her own reflection in the dusty lily-pond that occupied the middle of the garden, and slowly crouched down by its edge. She blinked her eyes. Above her head there was the shadow of bumpy clouds: they looked as though they were bearing down upon her far less well-lit, worried grey face. Reflected in the water, her hair seemed almost colourless. She put a hand to the black ribbon that tied it back, and moved her lips, practising self-observation.
Only very recently, since Auriol’s imprisonment, had she started taking an interest in her own face and thinking to herself when she passed by a mirror: that is you, that is how you look to others, you might be any person in the world. You exist. Not all the passion she had shared with Auriol had made her believe that she had a visible head as well as a touchable body. She thought her face was that of an ugly woman, extremely recognisable even when not known to be that of the pretended Marquis of Westmarch.
Looking at it, using it, she wondered whether other people, who did not belong to both sexes, could have feelings as complex and conflicting as her own. For the first time, though she was twenty-three already, she realised that even had she been born a true man or an obvious girl, her inner life might not have been easy.
There was a cough behind her. Meriel jumped, and shouted in a high voice, “What is it?” Then she saw her major domo, and just in time, stopped herself from leaping to her feet as though he were some superior who could read her mind. Her grasp on reality was slipping because of Auriol.
“My lord Marquis, the Steward has called. I know you wished to be told of all his visits.”
“Yes, very true. Is he still here? Send him down, if you please.”
Esmond bowed, and went back into the house. Meriel retired to the arbor in the east wall to wait for Juxon, who seemed to take a long time in coming down. She did not know quite why she had decided to see him for surely, she thought, the sight of his face was the last thing she wanted. The conviction that he was somehow the prime cause of this latest misery had not left her, despite reason. It was not as though she had any intention of telling him how desperate Auriol was, and asking his advice.
He came tripping over the lawn, dressed in white and pale green that might have been designed to complement the garden, and she invited him to sit down beside her. Juxon did so, a little surprised at her courtesy, because he could not remember having shared a seat with her since she was thirteen years old.
“Marquis,” he began. “Such a charming garden as this is! So very rustic, verdure must always be pleasing to the eye. It seems an age since I entered it last.”
“Very likely,” said Meriel. “But is there anything of importance you wish to discuss?”
On impulse, Juxon touched her knee, then tucked the hand into his sleeve to combat her look of what he thought was humiliating amusement.
“Yes, Marquis — I think the time may have come. But I must be sure.”
She sat up straight then, and asked quickly, “Has the reply yet come from the Island Palace?”
“To your enquiry about Kn
ight Auriol? No, Marquis.”
It took a fast messenger four days to ride from Castle West to the Island Palace, and the ordinary journey by carriage and canal could take nearly a week. Meriel had been waiting for a response from her cousin’s minister for two days now, having allowed a total of nine days for her letter to reach Bury Winyard and be answered, and for the reply to be sent back. She had assumed that her enquiry would be dealt with at once.
Meriel looked across at the apple-trees, and Juxon saw that she was trying to control herself. Frustration, he knew, was unpleasant.
“Marquis, will you think me impertinent if I ask whether you are — undecided about Knight Auriol?”
“Undecided? Yes, I’m undecided.” Meriel was polite and incurious because she was not in fact paying him very much attention. She was deliberately ignoring him, for fear of what she might do to him or at least say to him if she did not. “My dear, believe me, I have observed the unhappiness under which you have been labouring of late. I understand what it is that troubles you.”
“Do you!” Juxon’s understanding speeches prefaced his litany of horrors that would result from her passion: treason-trial, Female College, forced marriage, rejection as a monster by the whole of the world. Occasionally, when she was alone, that remembered litany could throw her into panic, but only very rarely did she tell Juxon when he was speaking to her to go to hell and torture her with no more half-truths.
“You seem —” Cautiously he stopped. “Has something very bad happened today? Are you in great fear, great distress of mind? I know of course that you visit Knight Auriol every day — though you never do mention it, do you?”
“Do not think to extract confidences from me, Juxon.”
He searched her profile for signs of torn hopes and despair, and believed he found them. Such strong misery could come from only one cause: doubt as to the value of Auriol Wychwood. It was a pity that nowadays, Meriel never would reveal her thoughts to him and so allow him to be absolutely sure, but on the whole, he thought, his plan was bound to work. And he had no choice but to uncover it now, when the letter she thought on its way from Bury Winyard was two days overdue.
“Only tell me this, Marquis,” he said gently. “Are there moments, perhaps, when you wish that Knight Auriol were — that he had never come to Castle West? I will say no more.”
“Naturally there are, and it’s as well you don’t say more.” Tears came into her eyes, and Juxon’s heart jumped as he saw they were bitter tears, neither tender nor sad, he was sure.
Meriel was still wondering feverishly about how different she really was from the rest of the world. She remembered how she and Auriol had rolled over each other, whimpering, time out of mind, for months past, and remembered how, though they had comforted each other, the first few times had not been very delightful at all. Were other people clumsy, did they in fact find that practice was necessary as she had done? In romances the thing was assumed to be an instant hit. Would she and Auriol have gone on to discover the coarse wonders of difference of sex if their situation had not forced them to carry on trying?
To have stopped after one or two nights would have been impossible, she saw that now, as she imagined he had done at the time: embarrassment and fear would have driven one or both of them to do something dangerous. From the moment she told Auriol that she loved him and was not a man, neither of them had had any choice but to become and remain lovers. Did other people have a choice? She knew almost nothing, she realised, about love.
While Meriel thought of all this, Juxon spoke. He did not notice that she was lending him only one ear, for her replies to his probing comments, though ambiguous, were relevant. Her hint of tears had made him think that she was softened, fully ready to hear the truth, and might even turn to him as her preserver.
“I have a confession to make. I have practised a little deception, with your true interest at heart, and my dear, I so hope that you will forgive me,” said Juxon.
She turned her head towards him, and her eyebrows drew together over her nose. “Forgive you for what?”
Juxon wriggled with anticipation and took a fan from his pocket. “When I asked, did you know that there was no truth in that letter from Bury Winyard, I did not mean quite what I think you supposed. That letter, Marquis, was a forgery. It was I who wrote it. Neither your cousin of Southmarch nor his Minister of Police entertains the least suspicion of Knight Auriol.”
Meriel’s mouth opened. Her first sensation was slow joy at discovering that Auriol was not in real danger, and that the whole nightmare of complications at the Island Palace had vanished. Love would come back.
“Neither — it’s not true? They don’t?” she said, grabbing his wrist. Then, as he looked a little startled, she remembered the other part of his revelation, and her memories of lovemaking faded wholly from her mind. “You wrote it? That did occur to me, indeed I’ve always thought — but why? What was the necessity? What was your aim — you were protecting him from, from what? Why didn’t you tell me before?” Her brain was in too much turmoil to allow her to grasp the implications all at once, and the expression on her face was still one of astonished pleasure. “Southmarch don’t have designs against him? You swear that?”
He too looked pleased, but wary. Secretly he was disappointed, because he had expected at least brief show of rage.
“Oh, Marquis. It was for your good I did it. And had I explained at once, would you have listened to me? No, Southmarch has no designs — only you ever could have designs!”
She took no notice of this. “How did you do it? You couldn’t have done it, why are you telling me such stuff? It was sealed. The seal was genuine, sir, Wychwood made sure of that.”
“Did he so!” said Juxon, spreading his fan and snapping it shut again. “Ah, but Marquis my dear, it was not genuine. It was I who made it! I made an impression of an actual seal.”
“An impression?”
“Wet clay, my dear.”
After a few seconds, Meriel understood. Her eyes grew very large in her face.
“Oh, no,” she said. She felt as though she had just been kicked in the stomach.
Southmarch and the Conybeares might have no designs on Auriol’s life, but Juxon had. A fear which had been a mere bogey, a form of self-indulgence, a result of her dislike of him, had come true. But Juxon, the real Juxon, surely could not do it, could not have the designs she had imagined in dark moments.
“You’re mad,” she said.
“Mad? I?”
But he must be powerless, he’s my servant, no more! she thought. “Go on. Go on, what have you been plotting?” He was not powerless, no, he never had been. And neither was she. Their stalemate could never be broken.
“Marquis, I know how much you dislike to be managed, and nothing shall be done against your will, if it is against your will, and so I promise you. How could I do otherwise? I have but made it easy for you, should you wish to do as I wish. From the very first, my love, I intended that the horrid creature should be put to death with due process of law. A mere putting out of the way, you see, would not answer the purpose at all, and would be bound besides to give rise to vulgar speculation! Alas, you cannot openly punish him for his real crime, for his pollution of you, as I know you feel it now to be, despite your own — passions, but my little scheme will answer very well. You need never fear blackmail by him, if he is dead. Mr Conybeare may very easily be bribed to give false evidence against him, of that I’m very sure. His debts are something shocking, I believe.”
“Conybeare,” she whispered. Her voice rose, in volume but not in pitch. “I always thought it was you was behind this.”
“So I was. So I was. Your essential shrewdness, Marquis, is greater by far than your knowledge of the world. Perhaps I have kept you too close, eh? You wished to spread your wings a little. And so you have done. But the worst consequence may be avoided, if you will but follow your true inclination, to kill him, which would be submitting to a higher duty, by making use of t
he means I have provided, my poor darling.”
She was indeed shrewd, he thought, shrewd and commonsensical. Sometimes he wished that the object of his attentions could have had rather more intellectual talent. He would have liked to breed a philosopher or man of letters in woman-form, but of course, such a person would hardly do for a Marquis. Yet Meriel, incapable though she was of understanding anything more refined than political economy, could not be called a good Marquis.
Meriel’s brain was working quickly. She was going to control her feelings till she had found out exactly what he had done, then behave according to what she had learned from him.
“Juxon, tell me now. Tell me the truth. What precisely have you done to date? Have you made any — arrangements — for disposing of him — on your own account? Do but tell me. I need to know.”
Never in her life had she been so discreet, so cautious, so aware of reality outside herself. She was no longer a blustering baby, she was aware of that as she spoke.
“Marquis,” said Juxon, “I have done nothing but enquire of the new Minister of Police, with whom as it happens I am a little acquainted, for he is by no means so high in the instep as some, though perfectly the gentleman, as to whether he has — or rather, as to whether he might be interested in certain letters, written by Knight Auriol, which have fallen into my hands. Of course they have not, Knight Auriol has done no such thing, but I fancy that my little imitations will pass the scrutiny of willing and untutored eyes. For I have mastered his hand, you know. But to be sure, I have not sent them as yet for his perusal, and if you so desire, I may very well pass them off as having been newly discovered to have been forged, forged by someone other than myself, as I do not need to tell you. And then no more need be said. But despite the prejudices of certain persons at Bury Winyard, all depends on you! What do you wish, now?”
The Marquis of Westmarch Page 25
