by Tim Jeal
‘His lordship is dead.’
She thought a moment and he saw the paper tremble in her hand.
‘Is Tom after marrying her?’ she asked with real pain in her voice.
Charles laughed dryly.
‘Make no mistake, Miss Pike, if he entertains any such hopes he is making himself ridiculous. She is already promised to a man of distinction and public note.’
She thrust Helen’s address angrily into her watch pocket.
‘I’m glad I’m no lady,’ she murmured quietly, with a look of controlled hatred in her eyes. ‘Your visit has not been a wasted one, captain.’
‘You will say what I suggested?’
‘Perhaps I will; perhaps I will.’
Outside, Charles courteously took Lydia’s arm as she stepped into her carriage; then with deliberate irony he raised her gloved hand to his lips. Although he was caught in a heavy shower while in search of a hansom, he felt no irritation, so great was his relief at having saved what had seemed a lost cause. By himself he could have frightened Helen badly enough to have made her stop seeing Tom; but only with Miss de Glorion’s help could he destroy Helen’s love. Only that could make his father secure; revenge had nothing to do with it, nothing at all; and yet as the rain fell harder and dripped from the brim of his hat onto his shoulders, Charles could not help smiling.
34
Tom walked out through the stable-yard of the Angel where a solitary groom was cranking the pump, the water gushing in spurts and splashing noisily into the metal pail. The sun was just up, but the air still raw with a trace of lingering mist. In the street a string of bleating sheep were being driven towards the market cross, where already the first covered carts and tented stalls were being set in place. He could hear the distant sound of wooden stakes being beaten into the hard ground and men calling out to each other, but apart from a few farmers in their best clothes and the busy stall-keepers and tradesmen themselves, there were few people about. The market-day crowds would not arrive for another couple of hours.
Tom passed some closed shops, looking into the windows of the cobbler’s, admiring briefly the shining leather in the saddler’s, and then, beside the smithy, turned down a narrow cut where the bulging walls of the timbered cottages were barely a dozen feet apart. A few minutes later he was in a country lane walking between autumnal hedges bright with red holly and hawthorn berries and the orange hips of wild roses. Occasionally he picked and ate a ripe blackberry, feeling a touch of acid in his empty stomach after swallowing. Spiders’ webs glistened in the morning light. The lane led down to a ford and a narrow footbridge where some children were playing, swinging on the rails and laughing as they hung out over the water. On the far bank the bracken was already a deep russet, and the trees beyond, yellow and brown, glowing here and there with the deeper fiery red of the turning maple. Few leaves had started to fall, but the winged sycamore seeds were spinning down from a tree beside the bridge. Tom loved the transience of September with a lover’s passion for seizing the fleeting moment, enjoying the warmth before the long winter cold; happiness tending to nostalgia, sharpened by an ever-present presentiment of loss.
A pedlar, perched on a donkey cart laden with baskets full of seed packets, nuts, cakes and sweets, drove through the ford. Tom stopped him and bought some humbugs, which he tossed up to the children on the bridge, wondering as they thanked him in shrill voices, which were boys and which girls, since all were wearing passed-on clothing; the younger boys in skirts and pinafores once worn by elder sisters. He sat down on a low wall and watched the water flashing over the stones, casting shimmering diamond reflections on the dark underside of the bridge. The sun was growing warmer.
He had been in Barford with Helen for three days, and still it seemed like a dream: walks and picnics together, drives in a dilapidated hired gig, and, above all, her loving tenderness towards him, quite different from the brief embraces of their carefully planned meetings at Blandford’s Hotel. He imagined her as he had left her, before coming out for his early walk, a white arm hanging over the edge of the bed, her auburn hair spread like a glowing fan on the pillow, her clothes in a heap where she had dropped them over the oak chest at the foot of the bed – and no maid, no footman, no groom nor coachman: just Helen alone. Even if they were married he would not see her dress and wash, these things being attended to by her maid while he skulked in his dressing room. During the few moments of each day when she was not in his thoughts, he was still aware of a warm and delightful feeling of good fortune, the same sensation he had each morning on waking: the sense of guarding within himself a treasure of great value and fragility. Then seeing her, he knew the immense happiness of loving and being loved and could not imagine his life without this joy, could not think what had filled his thoughts before meeting her; everything, including his art, seeming trivial in comparison with his love. He had made one sketch since coming to the Angel, the view from their bedroom, which he had given her as a memento of their time together. When he returned to the room he would help her to dress, fastening the hooks and eyes at the back of her bodice, perhaps pinning her chignon. And later they would walk arm in arm through the market-day crowds, and he might buy some trifling present: a child’s penny trumpet or a cottage figurine, and then they would return to their room together, without separating or coming in at different times. They called the room ‘ours’, a thought that made his throat tight; what else save these temporary refuges would they ever be able to share? He got up from the wall and started to retrace his steps. He saw the shape of her life and his own brief part in it: an episode. He thought of the great houses she would stay in, the famous she would meet; all the world at her service, ideas, paintings, books no more than recreations to divert her, and people the same. A sudden panic made him run towards the street; a feeling that when he returned she would be gone. Then he slowed down, ashamed of himself. How could she leave so early before the post-coach and with no word?
He had asked so often in the past fortnight, and she had refused with such regularity to come to a small country town that he had given up hope, until one day to his amazement, for no new reason that he could guess at, she had herself suggested a town, and how they would go there and when, and for fear that she might change her mind, he had not faced her with her past objections, but had been thankful for her change of heart, and had deemed it another example of her mysterious and unpredictable nature that she should now do so easily what she had till then resisted with such firm and precise arguments. Yet he had allowed himself the indulgence of hoping that her new lack of caution and her greater affection might mean that she would seek to delay her marriage.
*
Helen had woken and lay in bed awaiting Tom’s return. For her their days at Barford had been agonising as well as happy. At times during the day before, she had forgotten her anguish: as when Tom had carried her across the thick mud around a field gate and had pretended not to be out of breath when he had put her down; when she discovered that he, and not the hotel staff, had placed flowers in their room; when he had produced cards and books on a day when rain had stopped them going out; on all these occasions she had been entirely absorbed by her love for him. But how, with the curtains still drawn, and his side of the bed empty, she could think only of the week before in London and Lydia’s angry tear-stained face. How perfectly she recalled her repeated questioning: How can you care for him when you know what misery you’ll bring him? How can you claim to know the meaning of the word love if you are ready to marry another man merely to protect your wealth and position? How delightful and exciting for a month or two to take a man of a lower class as a lover; how illicit and daring. But never a thought of facing poverty with him or caring for him if he were ill; never the smallest intention of risking social ostracism for his sake or abandoning the selfish habits of a lifetime. Are you any better than those rich old women who pay young men to make up for boredom and their husbands’ indifference?
Helen had neither tried to justify herself nor to p
oint out the falseness of the comparison. She had not mentioned her son, or the fact that her acceptance of Sir James had been before the beginning of her liaison with Tom. Lydia had told her how Charles had suggested she pretended to be with child, and she had then faithfully recounted everything else he had said; not, Helen thought, for reasons of honesty or fellow-feeling but because she had considered the truth more threatening than the lie. Helen had neither given her word to say nothing to Tom, nor had she made any promises about giving him up, although at the time she had felt shocked and frightened enough to consider going to him at once to end their relationship. But when the girl had gone, and Helen had called her carriage, she had not been able to bring herself to do what she was certain was inevitable. Instead, playing for time, she had written to Charles, in case he acted precipitately, naming a day late the following week for him to come to speak with her ‘on a matter which I believe has caused you concern’. Then she had sent an apparently spontaneous note to Tom, by her own footman, suggesting they go away together. He would at least have some happiness to remember before their separation.
Helen’s intention had been to give Tom no hint of anything amiss, until their last day at Barford, when she would tell him that Charles had had them followed and that they could no longer meet with safety. Yet the closer came the day for revelation, the more Helen doubted her capacity for telling him. Apart from her fear of weakening in the face of his sorrow, or of parting in anger or bitterness, she was no longer sure that she could voluntarily commit herself to losing him. She imagined him returning to Lydia and the thought increased her wretchedness. Instead of steeling herself to tell Tom, more often she found herself trying to think of some way in which she might defy Charles, even daring to imagine in detail the consequences of breaking her word to Sir James: her failure to pay the interest on the loans which had saved Hanley Park, followed by its sale and the inevitable destruction of the rest of Humphrey’s inheritance, and culminating with her own financial ruin and social disgrace; possibly Tom would tire of her when she grew a little older and was as poor as he; or she might come to hate him because of everything she had given up and lost forever for his sake. Caught between her inability to surrender her lover and her terror of losing Sir James, Helen abandoned the idea that she could continue to control her destiny. Fate, she told herself, would do that.
Two days before, she and Tom had learned that Russia and Turkey were at war. When he had asked her anxiously whether her marriage would take place sooner if the expected British declaration came, she had reassured him that it would not. Yet even then she had known quite well from Sir James’s most recent letter that the Admiralty had promised him a squadron in the Black Sea as soon as Britain’s participation became certain; then an early marriage would be inevitable. Unable to bear the thought of Tom’s unhappiness, she had kept this from him. In a week or two disclosure would be forced upon her; in the meantime she would not destroy or curtail even by a day the happiness still left to her. If lived fully, a week might be remembered as a year.
When Tom came in breathless and with ruffled hair, wearing the new coat he had bought specially for their trip, she held out her arms and kissed him fiercely, knowing she could no more speak about Charles or movements of the fleet than write a confession to Sir James. Suddenly she was laughing. There were no more decisions to be made by her; whatever happened now, would be because others willed it. Whether the stroke was dealt by Charles or James, or by the British Cabinet or the Tsar of All the Russias himself, it no longer mattered; still less, when she considered that they too would all believe that their choices had been dictated by forces they had neither understood nor influenced.
35
By the time Charles had reached Belgravia and was climbing the steps of Helen’s palatial stuccoed house, it was already growing dark and the lamp-lighters were at work. The ground-floor and basement windows were all shuttered, and when he stepped back from the tall twin pillars of the porch and looked up, he could see no lights burning on any of the upper floors. He tugged viciously at the heavy brass bell-pull and waited. As he was on the point of leaving, an elderly footman wearing a stained nankeen waistcoat opened the door and held up an oil lamp to get a better view of the caller. Charles pushed past him into the hall and said peremptorily:
‘Tell Lady Goodchild that Captain Crawford is here.’
‘Her ladyship sees nobody, sir. The house is just sold.’
‘Tell her,’ snapped Charles.
The footman muttered something under his breath and then, having lit a candle in a pewter candlestick on an upturned packing case, stumped off up the stairs. By the feeble light of the single candle, Charles could see that the hall was stripped and empty; he picked up the candlestick and pushed open the mahogany double doors of the principal reception rooms on each side of the main staircase. They too were bare and uncarpeted; only the watered rose-coloured silk on the walls recalled the former glory of the house in Lord Goodchild’s day. Then no footman in dirty clothes would have opened the door. Charles remembered the tall yellow-coated flunkeys in their powdered wigs and the brightly lit rooms filled with fashionably dressed people. But he was in no mood for nostalgia or sympathy.
In the early afternoon he had visited Mr Featherstone’s establishment and had been stupefied to discover that not only had Helen continued to see Strickland, but that she had actually spent a week alone with him in a posting-house in a Sussex market town. Without even waiting to give further instructions to Featherstone, Charles had at once taken a hansom to St John’s Wood, where he had arrived to find Lydia not at home. He had been obliged to wait two hours for her return. At first he would not believe that she had visited Helen, but when she had described the house and Helen’s appearance, he had been forced to concede that she had told the truth. From St John’s Wood he had lost no time in coming to Belgravia, becoming increasingly angry on the way. So that was how she had received Lydia’s revelations – and real revelations they had been. The girl had not hidden from Charles the fact that she had told Helen that he had had her followed and watched.
The week before, when he had received Helen’s letter, Charles had been in complete ignorance of Helen’s knowledge of his proceedings and had thought that the matter she had referred to in her note as having caused him ‘concern’ would be to do with Catherine’s unhappiness at Hanley Park or the final arrangements for Humphrey’s entry into the navy. Now it seemed that while perfectly aware that he knew everything, she had dared to try to fob him off for a fortnight with her letter, and in the meantime had had the effrontery to spend a week in the country with her lover, and had done so in spite of the knowledge that her every move with Strickland at Barford would be reported back by Featherstone’s men.
The footman returned and led Charles up the echoing unlit stairs to a small chamber which had once been Lord Goodchild’s dressing room. Helen, who had been writing at a small gatelegged table, rose with a slight frown.
‘Have you not mistaken the week, Charles? I was not expecting you today.’
‘I am aware of that.’
The room, like all the others in the house, was uncarpeted. A narrow metal framed bed was against the far wall; a dressing table and mirror and an armchair made up the rest of the furniture. When Charles had sat down, Helen resumed her seat at the table and finished the sentence she had been writing, then she put down her pen and said in a low voice:
‘Before you start, Charles, I ought to tell you that I received a letter from your father the day before yesterday. He has asked me to join him in Turkey. I intend to go. He wishes us to marry next month in Malta. I have written agreeing to this plan.’ Seeing he was about to speak, she motioned him to silence. ‘I give you my word that from the day I leave England, I will never see Mr Strickland again.’
Charles looked at her calm pale face in the candlelight and gripped the arms of his chair. Her hair was hanging loose to her shoulders and she was wearing a simple dark blue high-necked dress, fastened a
t the throat with a cabochon brooch. Her beauty stirred him against his will.
‘I might have known, madam, that you would be well prepared. However, your plans are not agreeable to me.’
‘You intend to warn your father?’
‘I have not decided.’
‘What might help you to a decision?’
‘Your compliance with my wishes, or your opposition to them. In the first place you will present yourself at the chambers of my solicitor the day after tomorrow to sign a prepared confession stating that while engaged to marry my father, you consorted with Mr Strickland.’
Helen had listened with apparent meekness, but when he had finished speaking she leapt to her feet and faced him furiously.
‘You have no legal right to force this confession. I am not guilty of breach of contract.’
Charles was momentarily taken aback by the violence of her objection. He had only thought of the confession in the hansom on the way from St John’s Wood and had therefore had no opportunity to consult his solicitor.
‘I am claiming a moral rather than a legal right. I am aware that since you intend to go through with the marriage there is no call for a confessio delicti. The document I want you to sign will be a purely voluntary confession of misconduct.’
‘May I ask your purpose?’ she asked in a choking voice.
‘The protection of my father’s name and reputation. Should I ever have the slightest reason to suspect you after your marriage, I would not hesitate to show it him. One might call it an incentive to good behaviour.’
‘If I refuse to sign?’
‘I shall inform my father of your liaison at once. Your refusal would suggest an intention to deceive him again when you are his wife.’
‘The evidence of your spies is quite enough to prevent that.’
‘I do not intend to argue,’ he replied sharply. ‘Will you oblige me?’
