Painting The Darkness (73 page)

‘“Then, what did he succumb to?”

‘“The only weapon I had left to use: the truth.”

‘“What do you mean?”

‘“I told him the truth about you, Stephen. The whole truth – which you’ve never known. And, when he’d heard
it
, he agreed you should be left to live in peace as Sir James Davenall. As you would have done, if you’d married me. Instead, you chose to defy me. Well, you wouldn’t expect me to share O’Shaughnessy’s spirit of mercy, would you? Least of all when it’s failed to bring me what I’d hoped for. Accordingly, I see no reason why you should be left in happy ignorance of who you really are.”’

VII

Freddy had watched in a horror-struck trance the selection and loading of the guns. He could not understand why James and Hugo were both so unflustered in their handling of the weapons, so unhurried in their every movement. What he had hitherto refused to believe could ever happen was now, beyond question, about to occur. James and Hugo must have known that as well as he did. Why, then, were their preparations so calm and fluent, so damnably poised, whilst all he felt was churning anxiety and a paralysis of nerve? It was almost as if they were acting out a scene they had rehearsed together, staging for the benefit of others a charade whose end they already knew.

‘Herr Cleveland,’ snapped Major Bauer, ‘is Herr Davenall ready to proceed?’

‘What?’ Freddy glanced at Hugo, who nodded curtly in confirmation. ‘Well, yes. That is—’

‘Good. Sir James tells me that he has accepted Herr Davenall’s challenge to a duel
au signal
. You agree that is to be the method?’

‘
Au
… what?’

‘As Herr Davenall’s second, I assume you are familiar with the procedure?’

‘No, dammit, I’m not.’

Major Bauer tossed his head, sniffed and glared at Freddy. ‘To avoid misunderstanding, Herr Cleveland, I will explain the rules to you. The duellists take up position
twelve
paces apart, cock their guns and hold them pointing to the ground. At the first signal, they commence walking towards each other. At the second, they raise their guns and take aim. At the third, they fire. The timing of the signals is, of course, at the discretion of the signaller.’

Freddy stared back at Bauer in stupefaction. He had clung till now to the thought that inexperienced marksmen separated by the length of a cricket pitch were unlikely to do each other serious harm. Now even this consolation had been snatched away from him. The meaning of Bauer’s brutal sneering expression was clear: blood was certain to be shed.

In desperation, Freddy turned to Hugo. ‘There must be some mistake here, old man. You can’t have—’

‘Major Bauer is quite right,’ Hugo interrupted. ‘That is how I wish the duel to be fought.’

‘And I also,’ added James.

‘Were you not forewarned, Herr Cleveland?’ Bauer sarcastically enquired.

‘No,’ Freddy replied, searching Hugo’s face for some flicker of explanation but finding only a set impenetrable blankness. ‘I damn well wasn’t forewarned.’

VIII

‘Madeleine’s eyes never left mine as she spoke. “You have always been more gullible than me, Stephen,” she said. “That’s why you accepted Quinn’s story at face value. And that’s why I didn’t – not for a moment. I could never believe, you see, that Sir Gervase would have paid Andrew Lennox to take you to America simply because you looked like James. After all, what would it have mattered to him if the relationship
had
become known – to his wife, say? You had no claim on him. And, from what we know, he did not much care what his wife thought of him. He made no attempt to buy Vivien Strang’s silence. So why go to such lengths to buy Lennox’s?

‘“Amongst Dr Fiveash’s records, I found a newspaper article about the duel which had led to Sir Gervase’s banishment to Carntrassna in 1841. It was while he was there, living down the disgrace, that he fathered you. But why had he fought the duel in the first place? The article did not say. It occurred to me that the reason might explain his subsequent actions. So I traced the man Gervase had wounded in the duel: Harvey Thompson. At first, he didn’t want to talk about it, but eventually I charmed him into telling me why they’d fought. Then everything became clear to me and I understood why Gervase should have wanted you out of the country – at whatever cost. Because you reminded him of something far worse than merely seducing another man’s wife. You reminded him that he had seduced his own mother.

‘“Thompson had caught them in bed together after a coronation ball in 1838. He’d never intended to let Gervase know that he’d seen them, but he blurted it out in the heat of an argument three years later. That’s why Gervase challenged him and tried so hard to kill him: because Thompson had confronted him with evidence of something he wanted to pretend had never happened.

‘“I went to Quinn and demanded that he tell me the truth. Seeing that I had learned too much to be deflected, he did so.

‘“A beautiful young wife whose husband is too old to satisfy her is often driven to take a lover, of course, but Mary Davenall found herself drawn to a handsome and daring young man who happened to be her own son. Gervase escorted her to a country house weekend in Norfolk in June 1838, when he was twenty-one and she was not quite forty. He was jealous of her fortune-hunting suitors, she of his witless young admirers. Such an opportunity, under such intoxicating circumstances, had never occurred before. They succumbed to temptation.

‘“Horrified by what had happened, Mary Davenall fled to Ireland, hoping to ensure by exiling herself there that there would be no repetition of the incident. No doubt
Gervase
hoped the same. Then came his foolish duel with Thompson and his father’s decision – irony of ironies – that he should live with his mother until the dust had settled.

‘“Is it hard to imagine what inevitably followed? Thrown together in a remote part of Ireland with few distractions from their own company, how could they not remember what they had once been to each other? How could they not re-enact their crime?

‘“When he left Ireland to return to England in the autumn of 1842, Gervase must have believed it was the final break. His mother would remain at Carntrassna, mortifying her soul for what she had let him do. He would rejoin his regiment, find some sweet young heiress to marry and bed sufficient whores and serving-girls to purge his memory of all recollections of incest. The only fact he had overlooked was that his mother was not past child-bearing age. He had left her pregnant, and you, Stephen, were the son she was carrying.”’

IX

Freddy was still staring at Hugo, hoping in vain that he had somehow misunderstood his friend’s intentions and quite oblivious to what Major Bauer was saying, when Sir James stepped between them, raised Freddy’s right hand and slipped a coin into his palm.

‘Do as the Major asks, Freddy, there’s a good fellow.’

‘What?’

‘You have to toss for the right to signal.’ James smiled in reassurance, as if, for all the world, Freddy, not he, were the one about to risk his life.

‘Yes, Herr Cleveland,’ Bauer put in. ‘What are you waiting for?’

It was the strange, bizarrely solicitous expression on James’s face that still dominated Freddy’s attention as he looked at the coin in his hand. At last, with a sigh of
resignation
, he balanced it between thumb and forefinger, flipped it into the air and watched it climb above his head before falling towards the ground. A second before it hit the sand, Bauer called.

‘Heads!’

Freddy stepped forward. Until now, he had not noticed that the coin was a gold Austrian schilling. But now the fact could hardly escape him. For it was the head of the Austrian Emperor which glinted up to greet his stooping gaze.

‘Heads it is,’ said Bauer from close behind. ‘I win the toss.’

X

‘Worse than it seemed possible for the worst to be, harsher than any truth yet told, surely this retribution, alone of them all, was undeserved. Yes, I was the first-born son of Sir Gervase Davenall. Yet I was also his brother, child and companion of the one sin his conscience would never let him forget. This was one revelation too many. Since hearing it, I have felt sickened by the very thought of it, sullied by the knowledge of it beyond any power of cleansing, revolted by what I find, after all, that I am.

‘Every time I glimpse my face in a mirror, or hear my own voice, or see my hand reach out in front of me, I shudder and shrink away. Can you imagine what it is really like to be disgusted by what your own existence signifies? An abomination. An unspeakable sin. A horror in the eyes of God and man. It is all that and worse. And something else as well. It is what James must have felt when he took his own life. It is, irony of ironies, just what he suffered, too. Neither of us deserved what our father left us to remember him by. Yet we must either bear it or end it, as James chose to do.

‘I hardly know how, or with what words, I left Madeleine at the aqueduct. I remember running, as James must have
run
that summer’s day in 1871, north along the empty towpath. There was only one face I wanted to see now, only one confession I needed to hear. If nemesis had truly found me, then I was determined to lead it also to Alfred Quinn. For he had made me an accomplice in my own mother’s murder.

‘My mother. She who was also my grandmother, the remote forbidding mistress of Carntrassna House, whom I had spoken to perhaps a dozen times in my whole life. Now I knew why she had ensured I had a good education, why she had been willing to give Andrew Lennox whatever he demanded in return for raising me as his son. No doubt she harboured some maternal affection for me that even her shame could not erase. As for my real father, he must have been horrified to learn that I had ever been born. Simply by existing, I reminded him of what he most loathed about himself. Small wonder, then, that he was prepared to pay Lennox ten thousand pounds to remove me from his sight and his knowledge. It did not work, of course. What they tried so hard to destroy every record and memory of outlived them all – and survives in me.

‘The proof of it is that, but for me, Harvey Thompson would be alive today. Madeleine had paid him well to tell nobody else why he and Gervase had fought their duel. But, when the hearing brought my name into the newspapers, he guessed what she had already guessed and tried to capitalize on it. The poor fellow can have had no idea what he was meddling in. When you told Madeleine that you were to meet him, and why, his fate was sealed. She alerted Quinn whilst you were asleep, so that he could keep your appointment for you – and kill Thompson before he could tell anybody what he knew.

‘What I tried to do was wrong through and through, but never as rotten and cankered as Quinn had forced it to become. Your incarceration was enough for my conscience to bear, but Quinn had added two murders to that, plus a host of lies which screamed in my ears for
justice
. Yet I was powerless to put right the wrongs I had set in train. My only excuse rang still with Madeleine’s scorn. Gullible? Yes, I had been that. Greedy? Foolish? Vain? All of those, too. But I had not intended, not planned, not foreseen the smallest fraction of what Quinn had willed upon me.

‘All thoughts of maintaining the pretence were gone in the wake of what I had learned, all hope of returning to Constance shattered. I had only one end left in view, only one intention to sustain me through the hideous eternity Madeleine had made of my every empty hour. I would have the truth from Alfred Quinn. And then I would make him pay for it.’

XI

Major Bauer had produced a tin whistle from his pocket and given a demonstration blast on it sufficient to rouse Freddy from his reverie and force him to attend to the Major’s words. ‘That, gentlemen, will be the signal. Let me remind you that there will be three such signals. At the first, you will commence walking towards each other, guns cocked but held pointing to the ground. At the second, you will raise your guns and take aim. At the third, you will fire. Should either of you pre-empt one of the signals, you will be required to stand your ground whilst the other has a free shot. Is that clearly understood?’

James and Hugo nodded in confirmation.

‘Very well. You will kindly stand back to back and take twelve paces each, then turn to face one another. Herr Cleveland and I will then withdraw to the top of the dunes, where I will signal that the duel may commence.’

XII

‘It was dark when I reached Newmarket, but I waited several hours before walking out to Maxton Grange. Quinn had told me the time of his regular evening patrol, and that, I knew, would be the best opportunity I would have to speak to him alone.

‘I reached the stable-yard shortly before ten o’clock. Within a few minutes, Quinn appeared. He did not seem surprised to find me waiting for him. For once, indeed, he looked almost pleased to see me. Since establishing himself at Newmarket, he had acquired a proprietorial air and a cock-of-the-walk confidence which lent a superficial joviality to his manner. But the transformation had come too late to deceive me.

‘“Sir James,” he said, smiling and drawing on a cigar. “What a relief it is to know you’re still a free man.”

‘“No thanks to you,” I replied levelly.

‘“How did you get away with it?”

‘“O’Shaughnessy decided he didn’t recognize me after all.”

‘“That was fortunate. Very fortunate.”

‘It was as I stepped towards him and entered the pool of light cast by the lamp above the stable-clock that he saw the expression on my face for the first time. Then his tone altered.

‘“What brings you here, Sir James?”

‘“The truth, Quinn. I will have it now, if you please.”

‘“The truth? What do you mean by that?”

‘I told him then what I had learned from Madeleine. Though he went on smoking his cigar calmly enough as I spoke, leaning against the paddock rail as if my words meant nothing to him, I noticed his eyes narrowing in steely concentration. By the time I had finished, he must have realized I could no longer be deceived.

‘“Hell hath no fury, eh?” he said. “I see you’ve found that out in the end. You should never have crossed her, you know.”