A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  And then he had to find his brother.

  He had no idea whether or not it would be straightforward to locate Sir Henry Lacey in the metropolis so he went to the University Club in St James’s.

  “The gentleman is known to us, but is not seen often here. You will likely find him at the Carlton.”

  At the Carlton he was told Sir Henry would normally be in attendance by ten in the evening.

  “I will wait then.”

  “Whom may I say is waiting?” the concierge asked with a superior tone. He did not like the look of the tanned, scrawny man who spoke with an accent he could not fathom.

  “I am Sir Henry’s brother, William Lacey.”

  There was no discernible change in the man’s attitude. “You may wait here in the foyer. I cannot allow you into the club as we have no one’s word for that but yours.”

  When eventually Henry appeared William held out his hand. Henry did not respond, and showed no surprise at seeing his younger brother.

  “It’s been a while William.”

  “Indeed.”

  The concierge showed no sign of particular interest as he watched the two men walk into the smoking room. He had thought he knew everything there was to know of importance about the members of his club but had had no idea Sir Henry had a brother.

  The two men sat appraising each other for some minutes as the attendants left a decanter of brandy and two glasses on their table.

  “You look somewhat weather-beaten.” Henry eventually broke the silence, speaking with obvious disdain.

  “I have been in the Colonies.”

  “America?”

  “Australia.”

  Conversation did not flow easily between the two.

  “I suppose you were indulging your love of rocks?”

  “I was. And I suppose you have simply been indulging your love of yourself?”

  “I have. With great energy.”

  “You sold the Oakridge Estate?”

  “I had no use for it.”

  “Are you married yet?” William persevered in making conversation. “Have you the son and heir you defined as your responsibility?”

  “I have not. Have you? How is Josephine?”

  “I have seen no one for nearly seven years. That is how long I have been away.”

  “So you will soon be married. She will have waited for you, chaste and virginal. You are welcome to her, brother, I have no taste at all for virgins, they have no idea how to give pleasure to a man.”

  Ignoring his brother’s crudity William kept his voice level as he replied. “I have hopes that, despite my prolonged absence, she will agree to be my wife.”

  “Just as selfish as you ever were.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She is no longer young, you have ruined her prospects and now, should she dislike you on sight, which I have to say I would consider the civilised reaction, she is too aged to find another. I tried to persuade her that her future lay with me. I told her you were either dead or uncaring but she was obstinate in her belief in you. I will await correspondence to say you have failed and she has, after all, decided to take the only offer left to her.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Me, my title and, of course the irresistible clincher, my fortune.”

  William smiled, uncrossed his legs, straightened his back and re-crossed his legs. “If she will have me still she will be very comfortable,” he replied calmly.

  “How could she ever be comfortable with the younger son?”

  “She chose me, brother, remember that and forget any idea of taking her as your wife.”

  “Then I will take her as my sister! One way or another, brother, I will take her. Even should she be sufficiently desperate to become your wife, one day, brother, I will have her beneath me, I shall see what it is she hides between her legs.” He slapped his thighs and finished his glass of brandy.

  Still William did not rise to his brother’s crudeness.

  “You do not hit me?” Henry taunted. “You don’t lash out in defence of your lady’s honour? You are weak as you ever were.”

  “I will not rise to your rather pathetic attempt to make me envy you. Why would I? I will have everything in life that I need.”

  “You may have the woman and you may have your rocks but what of money? You have nothing but the pittance allowed to the younger son. I would never stoop so low as to be dependent on a wife’s money.”

  “I have wealth of my own Henry, far more than you can imagine. Where do you think I got this skin? Australia. And what are there in abundance in that colony? Minerals. And what did I find in great abundance? Minerals. You say I have my rocks, indeed I do, and those rocks are gold. So don’t talk to me of wealth. I have more than you could possibly imagine.”

  Henry realised through the haze of hatred that it was possible that what his brother said was true, so he did as he always did when in danger of losing an argument, he stayed silent.

  William knew the tactic of old and did not respond. He would wait until Henry’s curiosity got the better of him, as he knew it would. Eventually the silence was broken and Henry asked, “Why have you sought me out?”

  William had rehearsed his meeting with Henry many times during the last part of his passage from Australia and he was pleasantly surprised that it had gone in much the way he had expected.

  “I wanted to see if, after the passage of so much time, we could overcome the bad feeling between us.”

  “There is little chance of that.”

  “There were objects at Oakridge I would have liked to have kept. Have you anything from the old house with memories of our mother and father?”

  “I have kept nothing. And even if I had you would have no right to any of it.”

  “Is that the way you feel?”

  “What other way is there?”

  “I had hoped that we could, once again, be friends.”

  “We were never, and will never be, friends.”

  “Perhaps you can answer me one question though, and I would appreciate an honest answer.”

  “You can appreciate whatever you like.”

  “Did our father ever leave anything of his past, of his history? Did he ever talk to you of his experiences during the wars in Europe? Did he ever mention anything about his role in that dangerous period of war and revolution?”

  Even asked a direct question Henry could not give a direct answer. “War? Revolution? Danger? You live a romantic life if you imagine anything our father did was in any way important. He was a country landowner from a family of country landowners. He probably never left the Isle of Wight in his life.”

  “You know better than that. Have you forgotten our uncle telling us of our father’s origins in the Americas? Have you forgotten how he told of his respect for our father and his bravery?”

  “Tosh. Lies. Total fabrication manufactured to cause us to be unsettled. My father was from a long line of honest and respectable Englishmen.”

  “So he never fought in the wars against Napoleon?”

  “I suppose our uncle has fed you with such ideas. You are a sop to believe anything that man would say. He isn’t even English.”

  “He is from Jersey.”

  “That is as near the continent as it is possible to be. He is no Englishman. You are a fool to believe anything he says. You need only look at his face to know he is no Englishman. He is too swarthy, and his accent is rarely precise. I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t make it my business to find out who the man really is because if he is Claude Olivierre of Jersey I am Louis Napoleon of France! He is undoubtedly a Frenchie who skipped parole.”

  “Whereas who are we, Henry?”

  “Our family is as I said, descended from a long line of honourable Englishmen. Everything the man says is a lie.”

  “He never spoke to you as his heir? He never gave you anything that would tell us of his life, of who he was and where his family came from?”

  “My father
gave me nothing,” Henry lied. He fought back memories of the unpleasant interview with his uncle when he had been told William was Josephine’s choice. He thought of the small packet and the letter tied together in legal ribbon. He had been made to swear that he would not break the seal and he had not. He had thought of destroying the reminder of his father’s disgrace but he had, almost ashamed of his obedience to his uncle, kept it to give to his own son, just as he had sworn he would do. “Nothing. He gave me nothing,” he repeated.

  William looked at his brother and felt a sudden sympathy for the man.

  In those years before their mother’s illness and their father’s death, when they had been young children in a happy home, Henry had been his friend. They were twins, it had been the two of them, feisty and inquisitive, together against the world. But then they had been taken away to school. They had stuck together but nothing had been as it had been at Oakridge. They had grown apart as they grew older and now, as they approached thirty years of age, they were strangers.

  “I suspect you are an unhappy man.”

  “What kind of statement is that? Happiness? What is that? I eat when I am hungry. I drink whether thirsty or not. I gamble though I have ample funds and I buy the favours of women as I choose. Is that happiness? I think it is and therefore I am happy.”

  William had no answer to the cynicism and bitterness in his brother’s voice.

  “Now leave me. I have guests arriving and a game to play. Go back to your virgin and your comfortable provincial existence. Breed. Just don’t bother me with the details.”

  William was angry with himself for losing what he knew would be his last opportunity to question his brother about the question that had been worrying him since his latest visit to St Helena.

  *

  He had been aware that his route back from the Antipodes would mean a visit to St Helena and he had looked forward, in the long repetitive days at sea, to meeting again with the friends he had left nearly four years before.

  On the third of the three days his ship spent anchored off Jamestown he had taken the opportunity to walk into the centre of the island and there had fallen into conversation with an old woman who had worked in the house where Napoleon had lived.

  She had been quite drunk when she had sat down uninvited at his table and said, “You have the look of ‘im.” When William had asked her to whom she referred, more by way of hastening her leaving him than in serious interest in her comment, she had replied, “Mister Lacey. We ‘ad to call ‘im Mister though ‘e were no gen’leman like what he said ‘e wuz.” As William had asked her for more detail his mind raced at the coincidence. The old woman continued. “I never did trust that Mister Lacey. He were a rough sort. It were thirty year ago but I remember ‘im. He weren’t the sort you forgot once you’d crossed ‘im.”

  She did not answer William directly when he had asked if she had crossed ‘Mister Lacey’. She shook her head and continued in a changed voice. “I don’t believe it were ‘im, the other one, the Frenchie, ‘e were no Frenchie. ‘E were drunk one night and talked of a place called Carnwarll an’ ‘e said Lacey would be the death of ‘im and that Boney wer’n’t Boney at all an’ when I talked of it to Mister Lacey he tell me I wuz wrong. ‘E was angered, very angered. Oh yes. I crossed Mister Lacey.” She had then given William a sly look that he caught and then wondered if she wasn’t as drunk as she was making out. “You’re Mister Lacey too ain’t you? You were ‘ere before.” He had nodded. “You ‘is boy?” He had nodded again. “You tell ‘im I knowed all along but said nothing.” William had told the woman that his father was dead and she had shaken her head. “He weren’t ever goin’ to make old bones, ‘im. Never.”

  William had spent many hours of the final leg of his journey back to England wondering what link his father could have had with Napoleon Bonaparte and the island of St Helena, and whether the ‘Lacey’ Maitland had remembered from his time during the wars with Napoleon may, indeed, have had a connection with his family.

  He had decided, as the ship was being buffeted by Biscay storms, that when he got to London he would seek out his brother. Henry had spent so much more time with their father, he had been the heir, the elder, and therefore would inevitably have been taken more into their father’s confidence than the younger son.

  But William had learned nothing from his interview with his brother and the only person with whom he might raise his suspicions was the man who, William suspected, might have the most to lose by answering them.

  *

  “You were away somewhat longer than anticipated William.” Josephine spoke shyly as the carriage took them from Newport towards The Lodge.

  “Somewhat.”

  They were both unexpectedly shy with each other, a situation about which Patience felt entirely happy. As she sat next to her daughter, opposite the man who William had become, she knew that everything would be well. They were no longer brother and sister, they were young lady and young man, bursting with interest in each other.

  *

  That evening William and Claude sat together after dinner and William told Claude something of his time in Australia.

  “I must thank you for your letters, my boy, certainly in the earlier years of your tour. I have kept them all, I had to have them bound as I have read and re-read them so frequently. Now they sit in my library along with the publications to which you have contributed so magnificently. We have all been very proud of your achievements. And now you are an independent man are you off again on your travels or are you ready to settle here?”

  “I would be honoured if Josephine would have me.”

  “I have no doubt of that. You have become a fine man, William. Your father would have been delighted with you.”

  Talk of his father gave William the opportunity to voice his thoughts, possibly wild imaginings, of his father’s relationship with St Helena.

  “I have bought you a cutting of a plant from the island of St Helena.”

  “I shall enjoy watching it grow. There will be some part of that God-forsaken island thriving here. How interesting.”

  “Uncle,” William’s tone changed, “before I left you suggested my father had visited St Helena and I discovered that that was correct. He was known and remembered there. I met someone who knew him and she was very mysterious. Do you know why that might be? Are you able to tell me?”

  Claude looked hard into William’s eyes.

  “I am pleased that he is remembered. What did this ‘someone’ have to say?”

  “That he was not who he was meant to be and that neither was the other man.”

  “Do you think there was anything to be believed in what she said?”

  “She made out that she was very drunk but I wonder whether every word she said could be true.”

  Claude was silent for a while, unsure whether this was a time for truths to be told, but he decided he could not risk his daughter’s knowing how he had allowed her to remain in ignorance of so much for so long.

  “I think it is best not to ask questions that can never be answered truthfully.”

  In the following months William’s attempts to turn conversations with Claude to his father’s relationship with the European dictator always met with a change in subject. Eventually it passed to the back of William’s mind as his marriage, a year to the day after his return, was soon followed by the news that his wife was anticipating the birth of their child.

  *

  “It will be over soon,” Claude said almost inaudibly.

  William wondered whether Claude was referring to Josephine’s suffering or his own.

  “Why is this giving birth so very dangerous?”

  Claude answered obliquely. “It is as dangerous for the child as for the mother.” He had been thinking of the two sons and the daughter he had lost before his wife had been safely delivered of the healthy daughter who was going through that dreadful experience herself in a room above them. He had been thinking, too, of his wife’s sister w
ho had nearly died giving birth to her twins and had succumbed ten years later being delivered of their dead sister.

  The two men sat, trying not to imagine the worst, waiting for nature to take its course.

  As Claude’s thoughts turned to the small stone coffins in the mausoleum in the old chapel in the woods he remembered the packets hidden with Mary Lettice. He wondered, as he often did, whether he had been wrong in not trusting Henry sufficiently to give him his father’s writings and once more he considered telling William of their existence.

  After some minutes of silence Claude spoke with an attempt at confidence. “Josephine will come through.”

  He knew that, just as William had looked forward to this day, he had feared it as if it were the end of his world. Childbirth had taken his mother and the child who would have been his sister, and as the hours passed he wondered whether his father had made the same pact that he was making with fate, that if one had to be taken it should be the child, leaving the mother.

  “If only one can live it must be Josephine,” William said with weary resolution as his wife’s labour entered its second day.

  “It will not come to that, my boy, you will have both.”

  “I pray so.”

  Claude looked sharply across at his son-in-law. He knew William was not a man of religion. Claude attended church every Sunday, as was expected of a man of his station in life, and he ensured he was accompanied by his wife and daughter and the senior servants of the house, but he could not make William join them. Claude’s own beliefs he had always preferred to keep to himself. He saw many uses for organised religion in maintaining order in society but, although he never acknowledged it, he could not believe everything he heard or read and was more in tune with William’s defiance than he could admit.

  “You do not pray, William.”

  “It can do no harm.”

  “Remember that what is happening is nature, my boy, it is nature, and nature probably knows more than any god that may or may not exist.”

  They sat in silence but no matter how assiduous Claude had been at closing doors nothing could stop the sounds of Josephine’s cries reaching her husband and her father.