‘Yes,’ Jane lied. ‘She talked of you.’
The old woman nodded, gratified. ‘And Miss Anne? …’ she hesitated. ‘She’s living …?’
Jane shook her head. ‘My mother is dead.’
Kate nodded, and there was no surprise or shock on her face. ‘I never thought to see the day that would bring her to Blake’s Reach again. She went away with no love in her heart for Blake’s Reach and the Marsh. Glad to go, she were.’
A fierce gust of wind whipped her skirts about her thin frame. She clutched the shawl tighter. ‘They do say, though, that blood be thicker than water.’ Again she reached out and touched William’s curls. ‘You have come back ‒ Miss Anne’s children!’
‘And my grandfather?’ Jane prompted. ‘Is he here? ‒ is he well enough to see us?’
Kate’s jaw dropped. ‘Ye don’t know?’ she said in a thin whisper.
‘Know what?’
She looked at them solemnly. ‘Yer grandfather, Spencer Blake, has been dead this month an’ more.’
‘Dead!’
Jane echoed the word, hearing it on her tongue, knowing the finality of it. Spencer Blake was dead. More than a month he had been dead, and she and William were his only living descendants. She didn’t feel grief and shock at the idea that an old man whom she had never seen was dead. His death was safety for herself and William; there would be no one now to deny them entrance to Blake’s Reach, no one who had the right to send them away. Blake’s Reach was a slight inheritance ‒ but it was a roof, and a place to be. It was a purpose for existence, an identity. She was a Blake, and William was a Blake, and this decaying house was a refuge for them for as long as they had a mind to stay. Her eyes swept over the building again, and now she felt some affection for the crumbling walls.
‘Aye … he’s dead,’ Kate said. ‘An’ I thought ’twas the news of it had brought ye here. I thought Mr. Turnbull, the Blake solicitor in Rye, had found ye, and ye’d come to wait here with me for Charlie.’
‘Wait for Charlie? What do you mean, Kate? Who is Charlie?’
‘Why ‒ Charlie Blake! Yer mother’s first cousin ‒ the one that ran off to France. He be the one Spencer named in his will. He be the heir to Blake’s Reach.’
Jane gave a strangled gasp. ‘Heir! That isn’t true! Charles Blake is dead!’
Kate shook her head. ‘That’s what we first heard, but then the news came that ’twere a mistake, and he were still in prison in Paris. Robert Turnbull came out here to tell me about it. He told me that I were to bide here, and keep the house against the time when Charles should come back.’
‘Come back …!’ Jane echoed the words dully.
‘Aye,’ Kate nodded. ‘’Tain’t a sure thing he’ll ever come. Mor’an likely he’ll lose his head in Paris. But until he does, Blake’s Reach belongs to Charlie, and I must wait here for him.’
She surveyed the house in much the way Jane had just done; looked at the tall broken chimneys against the racing clouds, looked at the garden desolate in the rain.
‘Aye ‒ I must wait here until Charlie either loses his head, or comes to claim his own.’
Two
So they were all waiting for Charlie … They were waiting for Charles Blake to come and claim his inheritance.
Jane sat with slumped shoulders before the fire Kate Reeve had lit hastily in the room that had been Spencer Blake’s sitting-room; her stunned brain repeated the words over and over, trying to make herself grapple with the fact of this new disaster. Somewhere in a Paris prison Charlie Blake awaited trial, and if he should live, then she and William were again homeless and rootless. Her mind stirred sullenly in revolt at the thought; it seemed an overwhelming injustice that Charles Blake, who had cared for Blake’s Reach no more than Anne, who had run away from it just as Anne had done, should be named in Spencer’s will. It wasn’t just, and its injustice spoke of Spencer’s bitterness towards his daughter; the whip of an old anger and hurt had been meant to reach out and touch Anne. Jane shivered a little. If Spencer Blake had been alive when she and William had presented themselves at his door she now believed that he would have refused to see them.
Then, as she considered this chance, Jane shrugged her shoulders with a grim kind of resignation. With Spencer dead, things were difficult enough; had he been alive they might have been a great deal worse. The thought took hold. They said possession was nine points of the law. She was here at Blake’s Reach; Charles Blake was shut away in a prison in Paris. For the moment she was decidedly better off than he. And one could only live for a moment at a time; the future was anyone’s guess.
But the present was with her now, and she would have to tackle it. Whatever happened to Charles Blake, she would still have to get herself and William through the next day, and the next week. The present crowded upon her; with growing interest she began to look about the room.
She knew without being told that Spencer had used no other room at Blake’s Reach but this and his bedchamber. This room had a look of wear as well as neglect about it ‒ books tumbled haphazardly on the shelves, papers still littered the tables, there were mugs and glasses on a battered oak sideboard, and many candles about, and the spatters of candle grease on the floor and furniture. She knew what had happened here; this was the orbit of a man who had withdrawn to live within one room, to eat his meals here, to doze here before the fire, to seat what little company came to Blake’s Reach in the great high-backed chair facing his own. He had drunk his brandy here in solitude; she wondered if he had invited neighbours here to gamble ‒ or if he had lost his acres and money in the taverns and inns at Rye and Tenterden and Dover. She saw the dust on the bookcases, the threadbare rug, the curtains whose silk had rotted and was faded to dusty rose colour. There was apathy and bitterness in this room; perhaps, before he died, Spencer had hated Blake’s Reach as much as Anne. She suddenly became impatient with the Blakes. It didn’t take much skill to be unhappy, and to hate; it was too easy. She was impatient with Spencer and Anne, and even the unknown Charles because they had let themselves be defeated.
Now she looked about the room, and felt superior to the man who lived here with his brandy and his hate.
There was a sound outside, and she stirred, and looked expectantly towards the window. But it had been a distant sound carried by the wind, and no one came. She was waiting now for Robert Turnbull, the Blake’s solicitor, and executor of Spencer’s will. Kate had routed out a tow-headed youth ‒ who was one of the only two hands left on the farm ‒ to take a message immediately to Turnbull. It was more than five miles to Rye, the rain was coming down in torrents, and the boy’s horse had been a miserable creature. It would be after dark before Turnbull could arrive. Kate had gone off towards the kitchen murmuring something about preparing food; Patrick and William were in the stable tending the greys. Jane moved her feet restlessly. She wanted to see beyond this room, and the dark panelled hall with the great staircase where her boxes were now piled. But it needed Robert Turnbull’s arrival to sanction her presence here. It was too soon to go wandering towards the kitchen, or to open the heavy double doors that led off the hall. As curious as she was, she must wait.
The sounds of his arrival came much sooner than she expected. The dusk had come imperceptibly with a darkening in the rain clouds over the Marsh. The shriek of the wind was high and strong. She had grown accustomed to the absence of human sound in all that clamour, and it almost startled her to hear voices and the clopping of horses’ hooves on the weed-choked gravel. She had a quick glimpse of a man in a tall hat muffled in a heavy coat, followed by the tow-haired boy, before there came the sounds of his knocking. Instantly she rose, and was half-way to the window before she recovered her sense of dignity. She returned to her chair, and spread her skirts, taking deep breaths to calm the beating of her heart.
She knew why Robert Turnbull had come before time. There had been no need to send for him. She remembered the interest of the host at The Mermaid, and knew that in the towns that bordere
d the Marsh, a stranger did not enquire for Blake’s Reach without arousing curiosity, especially if the stranger’s hair and face called to mind too vividly the Anne Blake of twenty years ago.
She knew that Robert Turnbull had been told of the carriage and pair heading towards Blake’s Reach; he had set out of his own accord without waiting for the summons. The tow-haired boy had met him on the road to Rye.
She sat stiffly and waited for him to enter.
II
A little more than an hour after Jane had driven over the Marsh road which led to Blake’s Reach, Robert Turnbull also turned his horse right at the fork signposted to Appledore. He carried a strange, half-bitter ache in his heart.
For many years he had followed this road back and forth to Blake’s Reach ‒ ever since he had entered his father’s law firm in Rye. Blake’s Reach had always been important in the Turnbull firm, because none of them were able to forget that their prosperity dated from the time, early in the century, when John Blake, lately back from serving with Marlborough, had placed the legal affairs of Blake’s Reach with the newly-founded firm of Turnbull & Son. The prestige of the Blake name brought a flurry of business to the offices in Watchbell Street ‒ smaller squires and farmers hastened to follow where the Blakes led, as well as the few more important men who trusted John’s recommendation because he was their friend. It had been an easy matter to serve the Blakes when they were in the full flood of riches which John’s loot from the wars had swollen; the rent roll was fat then, and the sheep from Blake’s Reach fetched a high price in the market. John managed his farm with a soldier’s precision, making every quarter acre yield its share; his wife had brought him a dowry of lands and money and at her death his manipulations had doubled them in value. Then with the extravagance which was lacking in none of the Blakes, he built and endowed a church on the hill above his house; it didn’t matter to him that it was more than half a mile from the nearest village ‒ he had wanted his church on the highest point above the Marsh and the inconvenience caused to the people in getting to the service held every third Sunday only served to remind them that John Blake was a man not swayed by the wishes of any clergymen or bishop. John brought new lustre to a name that had been a power on the Marsh for a long time; he built up a new fortune for his descendants, and his descendants betrayed him.
His only son, George, wasted and spent and mortgaged with a cheerful lavish hand; George’s sons, Spencer and Richard, were bent in the same direction until Richard removed himself by marrying a French heiress and going off to mismanage her estate in Normandy. Spencer continued to indulge his passion for gambling unchecked, believing that he was possessed of his grandfather’s genius for investment, and that if he were patient there were fortunes to be made by the turn of the card, or from the tobacco plantation he had bought, sight unseen, in Virginia. He woke one day to the realization that his only child Anne, was beautiful, and that in her, not himself, lay the hope of lifting Blake’s Reach free of its debts.
The Turnbull firm had been with the Blakes through all the changes; the memory of what John Blake had accomplished for them by putting his business in their hands, was sufficient to make it a tradition in the firm that the Blakes must be served, no matter for how many years the services of the firm went unpaid.
For young Robert Turnbull it was something much more personal than a tradition of service. He was only two years older than Anne, and he had watched the spoiled, imperious child grow into a woman of startling beauty. It was not simply a matter of knowing that he loved Anne, that she was a bright flash of brilliance and romance in his plodding existence. Along with loving her he must recognize that loving her was all he could do. The Turnbulls were servants to the Blakes, and Robert Turnbull was no more than the young man she consented to chat to while she waited impatiently for Spencer to be through with his business in the Watchbell Street offices. Not only was a marriage for a Blake with a Turnbull unthinkable, but Anne herself barely knew he existed. Robert knew very well what Anne’s marriage was supposed to accomplish for Spencer and Blake’s Reach; even in the unlikely circumstance of Anne’s loving him there would have been no hope of marriage.
So Robert allowed himself only the indulgence of loving her, and inventing excuses for going to Blake’s Reach. It was no surprise to him when the news came that Anne had got herself out of the marriage Spencer had arranged for her to Roger Pym by running away with Tom Howard. Tom Howard he knew only by sight ‒ a gay, laughing Captain of Dragoons without a penny to his name, and only average luck with cards. They went to London, Tom resigned his commission, and when Spencer tried to have the marriage annulled on grounds of Anne being under age, she wrote that she was already pregnant with Tom’s child.
That closed the matter. Anne’s name was never again mentioned voluntarily by Spencer. His gambling continued, and now there were stories of his heavy drinking to add to it. His affairs grew more knotted and more complex for the Turnbulls to manage, with I.O.U.s written in a drunken scrawl turning up for payment, and lands being sold to meet them. The Virginia plantation hadn’t shown a profit for many years. Spencer was drinking too much and refusing to listen to Robert’s pleas to get rid of it. There was no reasoning with him; a kind of mad obstinacy had fallen on him now that Anne wasn’t there to soften his moods.
Then two years after Anne had left, her cousin, Charles, who was then thirteen, also ran away. He was Spencer’s nephew, and he had come unwillingly to England when his parents had died during an epidemic of typhoid fever in Paris. Richard’s will had appointed Spencer as Charles’s guardian. He had come to Blake’s Reach when he was nine years old, and he had clearly detested the place. He managed to make his way to France, where his mother’s family took him in. Spencer retaliated by keeping the money Charles’s estate paid him for the boy’s upbringing until Charles was of age to inherit. Spencer had never cared for the slim, dark-haired boy who had rarely spoken to him, but his going was a deadly insult. He was now quite alone at Blake’s Reach.
As best he could Robert Turnbull followed the events of Anne’s life. He was not subtle about asking for news of her from the occasional inhabitant of the Marsh who happened to go to London. He heard about Tom Howard’s death in the debtor’s prison, and had flinched to hear the horrible derisive laughter of Spencer when he had been told. By one means and another Anne’s career as the mistress of rich and fashionable men became known in Rye. The town buzzed comfortably with the scandal for years until it heard of Viscount Hindsley, whose prominence and wealth at once bathed Anne in respectability ‒ which lasted only until he died. Anne never answered the letter Robert wrote her at that time, and the neglect hurt him more than he wanted to admit. It was then he gave up the struggle to make himself like some other woman well enough to marry.
It seemed to Robert that, even with the amount Spencer was drinking, it took him so long to die that he stood a good chance of gambling away the roof over his head before it could happen. Through the years Robert watched the Blake’s Reach acres shrink, the land sold freehold to tenant farmers, and gone for ever. The Blake barns leaked, and one wing of the stables was burned down. Spencer’s farming methods were a laughing stock right across the Marsh. But the ageing man, shut up in his sitting-room with the brandy decanter, cared for nothing that was said about him. No one was bidden to tend the garden, or fix the broken windows; few people came now to Blake’s Reach, and those few were at pains not to notice the disorder and neglect. Sometimes Spencer was to be seen walking on the Marsh itself, his shabby stained coat blowing in the wind. The farmers who met him raised their hats and hurried on.
Robert came to dislike and even dread his necessary visits to Blake’s Reach, and to resent the tradition of service to the Blakes handed down to him since the days of his great-grandfather. He gritted his teeth and endured Spencer’s sneers and bitter hatreds; he salvaged what he could of the wreck Spencer was bent on making of what remained to the family. Knowing that Anne had a legitimate child by Tom Howard he ev
en ventured to protest Spencer’s will which gave Blake’s Reach to Charles. He had not been received at Blake’s Reach for a year afterwards for his pains. Spencer, he knew, hated both Anne and Charles ‒ it was a question of which one he hated more.
Now Spencer was dead at last, and Anne’s child had come to Blake’s Reach ‒ a girl so like Anne that it had sent Dick Randell at The Mermaid scuttling along to tell him. Robert didn’t know why the girl had come, but he sensed trouble, and he sensed that the complication of the Blake affairs had begun all over again.
But trouble or not, for the first time in almost twenty years he made the journey to Blake’s Reach hopefully. Times and events were changing, he thought ‒ the old things worn out and the new coming to take their place. A new and young Blake had come to the Marsh ‒ maybe this time one with the blood of old John Blake, Marlborough’s general, strong in her veins. Sometimes, just sometimes, miracles happened. The Blakes had need of a miracle now.
The wind blowing from the sea was like a knife in his back. Blake’s Reach looked no different ‒ slashed by the rain and showing its neglect painfully. Robert sighed. Anne’s daughter would need all of old John’s spirit and toughness.
When she rose to greet him, he knew that his premonition hadn’t been wrong. He had seen the portrait of old John too many times not to know by what stick to measure his descendants. Here was old John’s face in a feminine mould, the face of a young woman boldly drawn, with the familiar red hair curling crisply back, and greenish eyes that regarded him, not with apprehension, but a certain caution. She accepted his greeting with reserve.
He bowed. ‘Your servant, ma’am. My name is Robert Turnbull.’
She inclined her head. ‘I am Jane Howard.’
He approved of her; not knowing whether he was friend or enemy, she didn’t commit herself to any overtures. She met his stare firmly, not yielding an inch in confusion. She merely waited for him to speak.
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