*
Ten minutes later, the young footman was on his feet in Juxon’s closet, trembling at the sight of the Steward’s face. To his own surprise, Juxon’s shrewd valet had admitted him at once, without a sign of outrage, when he knocked on the door; yet now he was being made to feel more like a criminal than like a good servant and important emissary.
Unpainted at this hour, Juxon’s face was like a warty paper mask. Gone, he thought. Eloped. I’ll fetch them back. He said, “You let them go? You let them go? And waited an hour before coming to me?”
“But Sir Steward, I thought — I thought — well, I was only trying to do what’s right, I couldn’t deny his lordship sir, I didn’t know!” cried the young footman, suddenly defiant.
“You thought! How dare you think, do you think I am interested in what you thought? You will suffer for this, fellow. And for your insolence.”
“His lordship said I shouldn’t, sir!”
“What?” The pause was horrible. “Take a month’s wages, you are dismissed!”
“It’s unjust!” shouted the footman. “And so you know it!”
“Unjust? And what of the injustice done to me?” Juxon flung open the closet door and pushed the other out.
For a moment, he stood, a little bent, over the handle of the door. Then he straightened himself, and stared into the room. The blood was thumping in his head but he did not think, seeing his reflection in the mirror opposite, that he was going to faint.
Meriel and Auriol were gone, and though he had vowed otherwise when he was first told what they had done, he realised he could never bring them back. Juxon wasted no time in asking himself why the eloping couple had thought it necessary to have an escort of two men: for the first time in his life, he was presuming that Meriel knew her own business best. He had his own future to think of now and could not trouble himself over her.
She would become Wychwood’s wife, confess to Hugo, cause an uproar, be exiled in Southmarch for a few years, and then be re-admitted to society. Now his life with her was finally over, Juxon could perceive the likely future as prophesied by Auriol Wychwood without needing to deceive himself. He regretted the loss of all his fantasies, but could no longer afford to believe in them. Not till he was out of Castle West would he indulge in angry regrets, sorrow and self-blame.
Yes, he thought, going over to his desk, gone forever!
Coldly he made his preparations, knowing that he would have to hide for some time in a large town where he was unknown, for Meriel would certainly have taken no measures for his protection, and if anyone were punished for her twelve-year charade it would be him, Juxon the upstart. Not the new Lady Merelinda Longmaster Wychwood. No doubt when she was safely in petticoats she would enjoy reading accounts of his trial and sentence — though quite what offence he could be tried for he did not know; his action had been unique.
He rang for his valet and ordered him to pack a small trunk, sent a footman out into Castle-town to hire a postchaise, and counted his supply of money. He had some nine thousand crowns in bills, secreted behind one of the bookcases in his closet. It was a modest sum that he had been saving honestly, bit by bit, since Marchioness Saccharissa first summoned him to Castle West. Taking out the rolled-up bills for the first time in years, he noticed how long ago were some of their dates: always, he thought, he had distrusted investments, because he had known with his infallible instinct that he would one day need to carry off large sums of cash. He had always known that when catastrophe came, it came swiftly. His instinct had never failed him, except of course when he applied it to Meriel.
All the while he was being so very efficient, unformed thoughts were simmering in his head, preparing to come into the open later. Chief among them was the realisation that he had been the stupidest of blind, besotted fools, seeing nothing, never fully understanding that Meriel was first of all a woman in love and had been rich with love ever since Month of Showers. Women in love were too slavish ever to hurt their lovers. And they were cunning, as Meriel had been in allowing him to believe that she was not as other women, and would indeed one day take advantage of his scheme allowing her to kill her lover.
Deep down beneath these reflections there was guilt at what he, Juxon, had done to her, what he had made her suffer. Perhaps, he thought composedly, packing up his money, he would kill himself.
At that moment his valet came in and said:
“Sir, for how long will you be gone? Will you perhaps require the new worked muslin jaconet evening tunic?” His eyes widened at the sight of the bills, but Juxon, full of courage, pretended not to see.
“Evening tunic?” he said casually, and looking at his servant, briefly felt the romance of exile, where evening tunics were unknown. “Why, no. The fact is that I do not know for just how long I shall be gone, Silbrook. However, the case is that I am obliged to go immediately — as you see — into the Westmarch Quarter — and so I will require a number of country suits.”
“Yes, sir.”
Juxon had spoken in a moment of inspiration, saying that he meant to go north to the Westmarch Quarter when it came to him in a flash that his hired postchaise must take him as far south as Marsh Lynn. From there he would go to King Clairmond’s Town in Eastmarch by public barge, because the public barge route from Marsh Lynn to King Clairmond’s Town was so obscure, slow and complicated that no one would expect a fugitive to take it.
Under a second inspiration, Juxon took out a piece of paper from his bureau drawer as soon as the valet was gone. He was about to perform a magnanimous, though perhaps unnecessary action. He wrote, in a far larger hand than his usual one:
‘I, Florimond Juxon, formerly Steward of Castle West and First Secretary to Meriel Longmaster, Marquis of Westmarch’ — he hesitated over that designation, but decided that it would be sweetly ironic to leave it in — ‘do hereby declare that Knight Auriol Wychwood is entirely innocent of that charge upon which I most shamefully, falsely and feloniously confined him, for my own ends. May he forgive me, and may all who love him live prosperously to the end of their days!’
He sealed the note, and wrote on the outside TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. In this way, he would leave a puzzle behind him at Castle West, while vanishing like a magician in a cloud of dust.
*
They faced each other at a distance of twenty-five paces, carefully measured. Between them ran a flattened channel of corn and frail poppies, brushed down by their solemn legs. The sky was golden-white now, and the sun a disc pale enough to be looked on, but the seconds had made sure it was in neither of their eyes. Each was to have a perfectly fair chance of killing the other.
Philander Grindal was standing between them, exactly twelve paces away from each principal. He took a few steps backward, out of the line of fire. Some way behind him, the doctor stood with his back turned. Far to Auriol’s left there was Fabian Blandy, trying to control the hay-fever which made his eyes itch intolerably and would ruin his view of the proceedings.
Philander, remembering how three weeks ago he had given the signal to start Meriel’s race against her cousin, lifted a handkerchief and let it flutter in the wind. He prayed that nothing might happen, and saw that both principals were watching him intently from the corners of their eyes. Their heads were resolutely turned to face each other.
Their hearts were beating very quickly, their stomachs were grinding, and both found it hard to keep perfectly still. Meriel hoped to God she looked dignified, and reminded herself both that Auriol might use that barely visible gun to make an end to her life, now, and that she must not think about it. Auriol wished to God he had thought to tie back his hair as Meriel tied hers: it had grown down to his shoulders during his imprisonment, and was now blowing all over his face. Yet it was not necessary for him to see in order to make his aim.
“Fire!” said Philander, and dropped the handkerchief.
Auriol raised his arm over the world and his pistol cracked upwards, into the air. Meriel realised that she was alive, and sa
w the bitter blue smoke from his pistol hanging for a moment up above his head. The wind blew it away. Her legs began to feel hopelessly weak. She had been unable to distinguish his features before he fired; now she thought she could see a smile of indescribable tenderness on his lips.
Philander Grindal, thankful that Auriol had done as he promised and deloped, saw Meriel’s pistol still poised, and wondered why she did not fire and get it over with. He moved his lips. Meriel was too busy looking at her lover to notice.
Auriol’s voice called out across the field as he lowered his gun.
“I’ve done as I ought,” he shouted, “and now I’m going to say something about the truth.”
No one else could speak.
Auriol said, “It was peculiarly bad in me to have struck Westmarch as I did.”
Meriel’s violent little hand was still stuck to her pistol, but it began to quiver visibly as Auriol went on, and started to move.
“The reason for that is simple.”
Her own trembling, trembling which she had suppressed for minutes together, filled her with shame. Her attention was split between her shaking hand and Auriol’s figure, though she kept her eyes exclusively on him. Auriol trod down the field towards her as she stood there, alone.
“Though it’s not at all what you supposed. It is that he is not a man, he is a w —”
Meriel fired. Auriol meant to abolish her, have her dragged back to Castle West a female prisoner. And so she emptied her gun.
She screamed “No! No! No!” in the highest voice of embattled hysteria, then realised as her last cry died away that she had, in fact, shot and silenced him. She was safe. She saw him keel over: the wheat covered him, and then she saw nothing.
Meriel crouched like an animal in her own patch of corn, quietly panting, unable for several moments to pay any attention to what was going on around her. At last, half unwillingly, she began to listen and to hear. Auriol’s groans did not reach her, but she heard the sound of scuffling, curses and commands: they made her think.
But he could not have taken such a most terrible revenge? said her mind. Far worse than killing me, oh, I nearly died — how can I know, for sure?
Not until then did it fully occur to her that Wychwood, not herself, might be dead now, dead for ever. She had aimed at his heart, but only to silence him, not to kill him, she knew. Meriel raised a head like a horrified child’s: she was a very good shot.
Philander Grindal was standing over her. Thinking that he could be of no use to the doctor, he had gone over to Meriel straight away.
“My God he’s not dead he’s not dead?” she managed to say.
“Westmarch, what the devil possessed you? I heard Blandy saying you’d got him in the shoulder! What were those heroics of his — what is this? What was it — Meriel?”
It took her a couple of seconds to reply “Oh, nothing in the world! He’s not dead? Shoulder, you said?”
“I daresay he may die yet, Westmarch, I do not know.”
Her eyes were roving. “Don’t ask questions.”
“Here, take this!” said Grindal, pushing an open bottle of smelling-salts into her hand.
In surprise, Meriel paused, looking down at them, then she snatched the bottle, and ran as best she could through the wheat to the gradually looming bulk of prostrated Auriol.
Philander watched her, with a strange expression on his face. He could not yet believe he had seen what he thought he had. He licked his lips, trying to remember just how she had lifted her face, then spoken, then taken his vinaigrette.
“Doctor, I’ve not killed him, he’ll live?” Meriel burst out as soon as she was within speaking distance.
Blood, she saw, was welling up from Auriol’s shoulder, where the flesh was not only pierced, but torn. There was a dark stain on his brown coat, and his ripped-off shirt was streaked and dappled with clean red. His eyelids were flickering. At present, he was alive, and she meant him to remain so.
Meriel covered her face with her hands, unafraid now of losing consciousness, while Blandy struggled to help the irritated doctor, and Philander made his slow way down the field.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Wedding
‘An Essay Upon the True Distinction of the Sexes, Containing the Astonishing Histories of Marmion B —, Corn-chandler, and Mistress Columbina G —’ lay open on Philander’s lap. To avoid his wife and all other questioners, he had spent yesterday searching the booksellers’ shops of Castle-town, and had found this second-hand pamphlet, which he had already read twice since he bought it. It was vague in parts, but it provided information enough to allow him to cobble together the whole history of Meriel’s life, enough to make him feel as knowing and inventive as a god.
On the other hand, the mere fact of understanding Meriel’s real secret made Philander feel alienated from the whole of Castle West: he wondered what Meriel’s own life and feelings could have been. They did not bear thinking of, but when Castle West was speculating as to why the Marquis had shot his greatest friend in a duel and the Steward had run off the very same day, they must be thought of. He had to decide what to do next, and that decision must depend a great deal upon his considered opinion of the nature of Meriel.
Well, he admired her, and found her terrifying. Philander started to pace round the room with his hands behind his back in an exaggeratedly masculine way. He could hear his wife, seated next door in the drawing-room, talking with perfect ignorance about the two dramas, thinking she knew more than most people and was being discreet, which, he supposed, was true.
Philander admired Meriel’s determination, her strength, and her courage, and found her willingness to deceive the world quite understandable, when he remembered the life she had led as a boy, the life he had shared (extraordinary to think of it) and the future for which she had been bred. Juxon’s part in the deception was obvious, and he thought it vile. Juxon deserved to be brought back to Castle West and publicly flogged, but Meriel, wrong though she had been, deserved sympathy. Philander presumed that Juxon had used outright blackmail to have himself made Steward.
He could even understand Meriel’s willingness to fight a duel with Wychwood, and her shooting him on outraged impulse when he began to speak in that way — to tell the truth about her without permission when she had a gun in her hand. Philander did not know whether Auriol’s action had been villainous, or merely foolish, but clearly Meriel repented of hers, as was right. She was attempting to nurse her lover now.
Auriol was lying, half-alive, in her state bed, where she had insisted he be put as soon as they reached Castle West. Yesterday, the day after the duel, Philander had gone to see her, and had been touched by the scene in the crimson bedchamber, though he had thought it mad.
Meriel’s nursing consisted of coldly watching the two real nurses, refusing to leave the room, trying to get rid of them, and trying to extract assurances that Auriol would survive. It had been very obvious to Philander that she was the man’s mistress, it had seemed to him that she was no longer even trying to conceal the fact, she cried so much. At one moment, he had wanted to urge her to be careful.
And yet it was her great and charming love for Auriol that frightened and almost disgusted Grindal. If she had kept herself chaste, had concentrated on being Marquis of Westmarch, he would have felt nothing but admiration for Meriel — and a little jealousy, because she was so very successful a man, and so tall. Because she had not, he could not.
Philander had a good imagination, as well as knowledge of Meriel, and he had formed a tolerably accurate picture of her behaviour in love. It was a little exaggerated. He could see her making protestations, treating male rejections as a form of coy desire, could imagine her kissing, embracing, enclosing. How such a man as Wychwood could enjoy being treated as a pretty girl, he wondered very much. (Being ill-treated by a woman was quite another matter.)
Ordinary women of Meriel’s temperament entered Female Colleges, and made love to other, gentler women; they did not inflict the
mselves on men, they could not be so presumptuous as that. If Meriel had fallen in love with Maid Rosalba Ludbrook as at one time he had thought, Philander would have been able to understand it. Even if her impulses had been sadistic, and directed towards men as well as women, he might, knowing her whole story, have understood. But a woman’s desire simply to love a man, to give and not receive, and yet make open demands and expect to have them met, was a far worse perversion than either of those things. To express such desires would, in an ordinary girl, be an attempt to undermine the foundations of society, of sexual sanity, of true distinction as the essay’s title said.
Let women, thought Philander, demand and be given the right to liberty and property, if only the nature of true love might remain unchanged! Of course Meriel could never influence other women. It was her clitoral deformity that had affected her passions; without it she must have been incapable of them. She was not a danger.
Convention and intelligence fought inside Philander. To escape from difficult thought, he made himself blush by trying to imagine Meriel mewing helplessly and delightfully in a powerful embrace (something his wife never did, but then she was his equal in size). It was impossible: Meriel was Westmarch, his boyhood companion still, in spite of everything. He wondered whether her lover appreciated that.
Yes, Auriol Wychwood’s openhanded blow had been no assertion of protective authority, but a woman’s slap, a little rebellious protest against Westmarch’s power. He had seen that in the man’s face at the time, he thought now, and without understanding then, had still thought there was something ghastly about it.
Of course, Wychwood had not been deprived of all his virility, extraordinary though that was; his attempt to expose Meriel and reveal himself on the duelling-field showed that. Quite what he had intended to do after, if Meriel had not shot him, Philander could not guess. One answer was that he had meant to abduct her, take her away in Blandy’s phaeton, marry her, and live with her in seclusion far away — but Philander dismissed that solution as fantastic. No man could possibly dare try and do such a thing to Meriel.
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