The Marquis of Westmarch

by Frances Vernon

  In which case Wychwood must have wanted simply to expose her and then see what he, and Blandy, and the doctor would do: perhaps he thought the three of them would dare to force her back to Castle West and inform Hugo of her condition. Philander could appreciate Auriol’s need for revenge, but he thought his particular way of achieving it rather shameful, evidence of a mind and heart twisted and passion-engulfed. Philander disapproved of all violence, scandal, romance, cruelty, histrionics and passion. His courtship and marriage of Dianeme had satisfied all the taste he had ever had for such things; he found them repellent now.

  He sat down in his chair again and began to bite his nails, a habit he had abandoned when he was still a boy at Longmaster Wood, before Marquis Elphinstone died. Realising that he was doing it, he stopped, and took snuff. He told himself that his being shocked by the female Meriel was no reason for his condemning Wychwood’s taste and inclination. He, Philander, was a reasonable, tolerant, full-grown man.

  Into his mind there came suddenly an image of Knight Auriol Wychwood and Lady Merelinda Longmaster Wychwood as they might have appeared when announced by some footman at a ball. He could see them, a vast, handsome, happy couple, smiling over the heads of an entire assembly as they entered arm in arm. Meriel, heavier than she was at present by at least a stone, would be wearing black. There would be diamonds crowning her, diamonds lying on her warm bosom as pale as the moon … Philander raised a head as proud as hers, and thought how perfectly such a Meriel would contrast with her husband’s black-haired broad-shouldered person, and yet match it in vitality. The pair of them might breed up a race of giants, bright-eyed, highly coloured and exhausting, and the runt of the litter would be a slim dark girl five foot ten inches in height.

  *

  Dust-motes were moving in the white-wine sunlight of late afternoon that sloped down in a column over the foot of the bed. Meriel and Auriol were alone together in the crimson bedchamber, watching them, in silence.

  At last Auriol said, “Why have you not been with me before now?”

  “I was,” said Meriel, “I was until your recovery seemed certain.”

  “Then you thought it best to leave me?”

  “Yes. It’s a devilish awkward situation, ours.”

  “Very true.”

  “I’ve been obliged to talk to everyone — my mother, and Hugo, and the Senior Member. I’m nearly mad with talking,” she said. Five days had passed since the duel in the corn.

  “Were they very much shocked?”

  “Do you suppose they could not be! But your surviving makes the thing tolerable, of course. The Senior Member even was forced to own —”

  “I am glad to hear it. Ought I to be moved now that I am convalescent?”

  The Marquis fidgeted. “I see no reason for it, unless you wish to do so. My mother of course says that it is most improper for you to be here, I collect the whole of Castle West is talking about it. But that can’t signify. Besides, Dr Moxon says your wound is not healing quite as it should — something about proud flesh — and so I fancy you had best not be moved till you are perfectly restored — is it paining you, Wychwood?”

  “Yes, a trifle.”

  Silence dropped upon them again. Auriol opened the conversation a second time, still watching the movement of dust in the light. Meriel’s face was in shadow, so was his.

  “And what are Juxon’s plans for my future now?”

  Meriel stared at him. “My God, have you indeed not been told? Did I not tell you?”

  “No.”

  “But he’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Run for it, sir. Indeed, it’s so, I promise you!” She rushed on, gazing at his set face all the while, yet oddly, he thought, as though she were seeing through it to the other side of his head. But her expression was certainly happy. “Oh, Wychwood, he left a billet, which was handed to me — clearing your name entirely. Vastly obliging of him! And it was clear enough he thought we had eloped together — that’s why he left, he’d played out his little comedy and lost, you see. So he thought. Hired chaise, false direction, everything! It’s the greatest piece of good fortune ever I had — one of the men I dismissed from your door thought it proper to inform him of my taking you — and this was the result of that. You may be sure I rewarded him, the man that is — I was so overjoyed I gave him fifty crowns, as soon as I discovered just how it was, he all but went off in a swoon, sir. Oh, damn it, did I indeed not tell you?”

  Auriol, after a moment, made her repeat the story in coherent detail. She did so, smiling and looking rather embarrassed by her own pleasure in the telling. When her explanation was over, she stopped, and slowly a grave look settled on her face. Her eyes fell, and he guessed that she was very nervous.

  “You were overjoyed to learn that he had run off into the blue?” said Auriol. “Meriel? My dear, answer me.” For the first time in their interview, he took hold of the edge of her sleeve.

  “To be sure I was. Wychwood, don’t you understand what it means? Whatever we decide to do, whatever comes to pass, you know —”

  He slackened his grip, for to hold on to her increased the pain in his shoulder. “Yes. But I had thought — well Meriel, how was I to know but that you wished me to die? That you might be relying upon Juxon now in some way or other. I thought at moments. You did shoot me — it might have been no aberration, no temporary disorder of the nerves, for all I knew to the contrary, till now.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m sorry.” So Juxon has gone, thought Auriol. Vanished, and he never came once to see me. Poor coward. How I did long to talk with him, all that time.

  “If I had wished you to die,” Meriel whispered then, “would I have had you laid down on my own bed, so that you might not be intolerably cramped in that bunk of yours in Medlar Court? In defiance of opinion? Would I have sat beside you every moment till you were safe? Well?”

  “No. No. Meriel.”

  Her shoulders drooped. “You are in no condition to be listening to reproaches, forgive me. Yes, I shot you. But Wychwood, why the devil did you not wait till I had fired to speak your piece? Whatever was your intention. I was intending to shoot wide, what in God’s name did you suppose, sir?”

  “Oh, Meriel, I was mad. So were you.”

  “Yes. Listen to me, you never must take me by surprise, d’you hear?” She took a breath and looked away again. “Now — pray tell me, only this: was it your intention then to abduct me from the field — take me into Southmarch, knowing that unless you did so I should have been forced to go back with the others? As I told Grindal when I challenged you? Or did you mean rather to —”

  “Rather to?”

  “I can’t remember just how it was,” she said, looking straight at his eyes, “but I think that when I shot you, I had some notion of your meaning simply to disgrace me. Not to marry me out of hand. I thought you might force me back to Castle West and confront me with Hugo. Some such thing. I thought you wanted revenge. I had to stop it.”

  “Indeed, so I should hope! Meriel you cannot have thought such a thing.”

  “But I did. I did. Try to understand — my mind was so much overset —”

  “All I understood was that you were in no case to be coming back here with them, I never meant to allow you to waste more time. All I could think of was to tell them the truth, thinking they would be too much, too much put out of countenance, astonished, to prevent me from carrying you off! It never occurred to me that —” He stopped.

  “I wish I had let you do it.”

  “So do I. More than that, I wish I had never struck you.”

  “Pray,” said Meriel, “had you provided yourself with a gown for me to wear at my wedding? Because I could scarcely have been married in this rig — in what I had on then, rather.”

  “No,” said Auriol. “I had not. I meant to buy a made-up gown for you in Middle Lynn, supposing I could have found one to fit such a maypole as you are.”

  Utter desperation enveloped
them after this awkward exchange. Two huge obstacles had stood in the way of their being reconciled: Auriol’s ignorance of the removal of Juxon, and both their doubts as to the other’s feelings and intentions. These obstacles had been struck down, quickly and simply, and yet their mutual adoration had not been instantly restored to them as they thought it might have been. They were still uncertain. The blow and the shot continued to separate them, and always would, they thought: in other words, they were no longer lovers.

  Silence lasted five minutes, and both succeeded in not shedding tears.

  “The honeymoon is over, I think,” Auriol said, wishing that she, not he, had been the one to break this third silence. But he could have said nothing more apposite, more just, and that was a comfort to him.

  “What shall we do now?” she coldly replied.

  “What do you wish to do?”

  Meriel got up and walked round the room. Lying in bed, Auriol envied her her freedom.

  “Everything sickens me,” she said. “This room, all it means, it sickens me. Look at that portrait of Marquis Valancourt.” She gestured towards an evil-looking ancestor whose hand, Auriol saw, was on the shoulder of a blonde child bride. Meriel was indeed very nervous, he thought.

  “I can understand that.”

  “I want to know one thing. You said the honeymoon — Wychwood, after all that’s happened, do you think that you could still wish me to m-make love to you? One day?”

  He said, “Do you wish to make love to me? Now, at this moment? No, I don’t mean that, but — later?” His expression was even more intense than hers, her question had taken him quite by surprise.

  “Now! No! But I shall do — that I know, as certainly as I know that one day I shall die.”

  “You love me?”

  “More than anything. I never was so thankful for anything in my life as I was for your recovery, after all I’d done. You know that. I am no hand at pretty speeches!”

  “Oh, you have done very well, in the past.” Meriel was incapable of making love to him without shouting out imaginative words of passion, and she did not moan and sigh with pleasure, she screamed with it. That was one reason, he remembered, for their always having to meet out of doors when they wanted to strip off each other’s clothes.

  “Yes,” he said after a pause. “Yes, one day I shall want you to make love to me again. And I shall also want sometimes — sometimes — to throw you down, and make love to you, as I did that day on the cliff, you remember? When I held you down for a moment. Our last meeting — in that sense.”

  “That was a battle,” said Meriel.

  “But such a delightful one!”

  “It’s very well for you,” she said, examining her hands. “But — I think I never denied that my body enjoyed it, I only wished — perhaps foolishly — it had not.” In fact, they had never discussed that episode at all, till now. Quite loudly, Meriel went on, “I think, sir, that in future, we ought to, um, lie more often side by side — that I think will be best — but as to where, what we are going to do —”

  “Well?” said Auriol. “Well?” Oh yes, he thought, yes, I shall be your equal.

  She continued to pace. “If you wish to carry out our first plan, to marry me, I shall tell everyone that as soon as you are fit to travel I shall be going with you to Wychwood. We’ll do it, and finish the business there. It won’t be difficult now, because there’s no Juxon to put a spoke in our wheel.” She waited for him to speak.

  “Yes — we’ll do it,” he said.

  “It will be a simple matter I’m persuaded. If people are surprised at my going to stay with you — having nearly killed you — it won’t signify. In any case, they will think it all of a piece with my putting you in my own bed,” she told him.

  “Mm, yes, your own bed.”

  “More than big enough for two, ain’t it?”

  “It is indeed.”

  “We’ll be married, sir.”

  “We shall. Do you dread it?”

  Meriel went at last to sit down in an armchair.

  “No,” she said. “Before, you know, I was forever either dreading it or thinking it would be beyond anything great. Perfection or perdition!” That phrase made her smile, it was so articulate, so true. “I know that it will be neither. It will be damnably difficult, we’ll both find it devilish — but it is right, and if you still wish it — No, I don’t dread it. I think I have courage enough to do it now, and believe me, I shall always be yours, sir.”

  “I think that in the end, we’ll be happier than most,” said Auriol.

  “Yes, very likely.”

  In five or ten years, he thought, they would be friends. Probably they would be seeking their pleasure elsewhere by then — but not before. They were still capable of becoming blood-engorged at the sight of each other; there was quite enough exclusive lust between them to tide them over the first year or two at Wychwood. More than enough: he could not feel it at present, when there was such a pain in his pus-filled shoulder, but he knew it would be there, in his groin and his hands and his head.

  “My wife,” he said. My God, he thought, remember Clorinda — how extraordinary that in all these months I never directly compared them before.

  She coloured up, and frowned. “Yes. There is not the faintest chance any longer of my entertaining doubts, so don’t tease yourself on that head! I needed to shoot you to know my own mind for more than an hour together — ironic, ain’t it? We’ll do it, so soon as you are sufficiently recovered, and in comfort, too, in my own post-chaise. Now, do you occupy yourself with considering just how and when we are going to inform your servants, and find a suitable clerk to marry us — it’s your country we shall be living in, not mine, and I shan’t have the least notion as to how to go on!” Meriel got up, and smiled at him. Do you remember, she thought, how in the early days we used to be forever discussing the difference between my country and yours, feeling we could not discuss the difference between ourselves?

  “Marquis, it is always a pleasure to obey you.”

  She bowed to him. “Why, my dear, so I trust!”

  Auriol had a vision of a female Meriel very similar to Philander Grindal’s except that he pictured no children. He saw a swan-bosomed fighter in diamonds, who was a terror to every man in the room but himself. No, he decided, hardly that. One day she would not lack for dishonourable suitors. There would be men eager to try the most unusual woman of her generation, and ready to suppose they could hoodwink her husband. But he could count on her fidelity for a good five years, and her affection for ever, and so the matter was settled.

  *

  “To be sure I am excessively thankful for it!” said the Marchioness, waggling her hand at Meriel, who did not see it. Crossly she turned back to her companion. “Three nights did I lie awake, knowing that if the man were to die, dear Berinthia’s wedding would have to be postponed, for it would have been the height of impropriety, you know, for Meriel to be helping join their hands over the table if he had died! And after what lapse of time, pray, would it have been proper? What precedent is there which would enable me to decide?”

  “Very true, my love,” said her younger sister Aspasia, Meriel’s aunt, who had come to Castle West for the wedding. “But what cause did he give Westmarch? What provocation could he have given him? One so far above him in every way — every feeling must be offended!”

  “I have not the least notion. I trust I have too much female reserve to be enquiring into such matters, and of course no one troubles himself to inform me — if anyone knows, that is. And I fancy Philander Grindal does. Such a scold as I gave him! But let us not be talking of poor dear Meriel’s follies at such a moment as this. Dear Berinthia, how very becomingly she looks.”

  “Yes — such difficulties as you said you had in arranging this match, how very gratifying it must be! Do but tell me, sister, about that horrid Mr Juxon. Did he turn out a thief?”

  Hugo and Berinthia had that morning been married in the Chapel by the Prelate of
Castle-town, and their wedding-breakfast was being held in the Marchioness’s long gilded drawing-room. Beyond its doors, across the domed hallway, were Meriel’s silent rooms where Auriol still lay. It was because of him that this breakfast was not being held there.

  Meriel, appearing for the last time in public as Marquis of Westmarch, had played her part in the chapel-ceremony with unusual grace and calm. Now she was chatting with one of Berinthia’s bridesmaids, casting occasional glances at the cool and splendidly dressed new-married couple, who were still receiving polite congratulations from their guests. Standing silent with his wine-glass in front of one of the windows, Philander Grindal watched the Marquis as closely as he dared. He did not want even his wife to guess that Meriel was his chief object of interest at this important party. He looked at her, and could only think over and over again that she was so obviously not a man, that any moment now, surely, someone would see through her disguise. If they saw him watching her, they would certainly do so.

  Meriel ate a little ham, and surveyed the room. This was not only her last formal appearance in the world, but her first since the duel, and she fancied that she could see the world of fashion with new eyes, Auriol’s eyes. She almost felt that she too could write a little satire on the lines of his Adventures in the Polite World, now that she was neither excited nor miserable.

  She thought back over the past, trying to remember individual parties she had attended this summer, and succeeded in recalling Saccharissa’s musical evening, the first party of the season, at which she had been in a great taking over her mother’s expectation that she would marry Berinthia. Auriol had flirted with Berinthia, and she had not quite liked it, grateful though she had been to him. Maid Rosalba Ludbrook had looked very pretty, and young. Then there had been the great summer ball, at which Juxon had confessed his love for her.

  Meriel saw her mother, sitting on her sofa talking to one of Berinthia’s brothers, and narrowed her eyes. Saccharissa was dressed in yellow brocade, with pearl-grey stockings on her little legs and rouge on her face, and at this distance she looked like a wizened canary. Perhaps it was her ridiculously wide sleeves gave that impression; they were like wings. Well, thought Meriel, I shall never see you again — how very odd to think that I came out into the world from your inside, between your legs. I wonder what it was like in there, upon my word I do — her lips formed these words silently — no, you will never be able to reproach me for not being all you desired.