Ravenscliffe (29 page)

‘I heard you, in actual fact. I was merely expressing my amazement at your audacity.’

‘At my—?’

‘Audacity, yes,’ Absalom repeated levelly. ‘You are either much mistaken or sadly deluded. The Netherwood Hall chapel is for the exclusive use of the Hoyland family and has been since the house was built almost two hundred years ago. Your mission here is simply preposterous and I must insist you leave.’

‘Now, just hold your horses, Mr Blandford,’ said Daniel, more stunned than angry. ‘I’m not seeking your permission for anything. I’m merely informing you of a kind offer made to Eve by the earl, evidently without your prior knowledge.’

The bailiff held up one hand as a barrier against Daniel’s words.

‘Mr MacLeod,’ he said. ‘Your – intended – cannot possibly have been offered the use of the family chapel. It would be inappropriate in the extreme. A gardener and a cook? I hardly think so.’

‘Why, you miserable, jumped-up Sassenach bastard!’ Daniel, all restraint and decorum abandoned, stepped forwards and placed his two large hands on Absalom’s desk, the better to hold a steady, hostile gaze. ‘I should knock your prissy wee head off your shoulders, except you’re not worth the trouble it would cause me. But let me tell you something. Eve Williams and I will be wed wherever on God’s earth we wish and if you have a problem with that then I’m afraid you’re going to have to swallow it.’

He moved back, away from the desk, towards the door. Absalom, briefly alarmed for his own safety, relaxed marginally.

‘Get out,’ he said, full of bravado now Daniel was leaving. ‘Or I shall throw you out.’

Daniel laughed. ‘I should like to see you try.’ He threw a final look of naked contempt in the bailiff’s direction then stalked out of the office, shoving open the door with such force that it swung violently back on to the brick wall outside then slammed shut again with the momentum. Absalom shuddered. The man was an animal, with an animal’s appetites and responses. He and the whore were well suited.

The Liberals took it, as everyone had known they would, but Amos was still the story in the following day’s newspapers, because he had given Webster Thorne an extremely anxious few hours when a recount was ordered because the result was too close to call. In the end, Thorne’s margin of victory was forty-five votes. The Tory candidate was never in the running, but everyone knew that it wasn’t his votes that Amos had so audaciously poached. On the makeshift stage in Ardington church hall, Enoch raised Amos’s arm in a victory salute and the small crowd of Labour supporters who’d stayed on for the recount – Anna among them – whooped and hollered their approval as if their man had been elected.

‘Next time,’ Enoch shouted at Amos over the racket. ‘Next time.’ And a small part of Amos believed his friend might actually be right.

‘B
y any normal person’s standards, I’m an abject failure,’ said Henrietta cheerfully. ‘Even Isabella pities me, and she’s only twelve.’

Thea ceased her rowing, allowing the little wooden boat to temporarily pick its own course through the steel-grey waters of the loch. Henrietta had been coming here to this stretch of water on their Scottish estate since childhood; she was happy, now, to be sharing it with her friend. The day was cold, and Henrietta sat wrapped in fur with her back to the prow, but Thea had cast off her coat and her face was flushed with exertion.

‘Well, snap,’ she said. ‘My parents have practically disowned me. It was their idea that I travel to England. They needed a break from the embarrassment I cause them.’

‘Did the Choates know what a flop you are?’

‘The Choates are darlings. Much more free-thinking than my folks. Caroline is all for girls learning Latin and math.’

‘Even so, I think she finds you a little wild.’

‘Oh, sure. And she’d much prefer it if I wore a girdle.’

‘Well, since you mention it, why don’t you?’

‘Why should I? I want to be able to move. You should
follow my lead and liberate your body.’ These last words she yelled, sending them out across the water so that they bounced back at them in duplicate from the hills beyond. Henrietta laughed.

‘My mother’s great fear, when she first met you in London, was that you were a suffragist.’

‘Was it?’ Thea looked immensely interested. ‘And do you know, that’s one thing she needn’t have worried about at all.’

‘I’d rather like to be able to vote,’ Henrietta said. ‘I think if I knew I could influence the outcome, I might take an interest in politics.’

‘Couldn’t much care either way,’ Thea said. ‘If someone gives me the right, I suppose I might. But I’m not waving a placard about it.’

‘Selfish girl,’ said Henrietta, but Thea just smiled at her and reached for the oars, which had, while they talked, lolled useless in the rowlocks. For a few moments they fought her, resisting her efforts to right them, but soon she had them tamed and began to draw them through the water. She was surprisingly adept at this, keeping a steady pace, cutting a straight and confident path back to the jetty.

‘If I could just bring myself to marry,’ Henrietta said in a musing voice, leaving her unfinished statement hanging in the air between them.

‘Have you been asked?’ There was no malice or judgement in Thea’s question, only genuine interest.

‘Well, no. I seem to sort of stop would-be suitors from pursuing romance. When I sense it coming I start to talk loudly about mining or duck shooting. It’s an affliction of mine, like an unfortunate birthmark or a nervous twitch. Quite beyond my power to cure it.’

The boat glided smoothly alongside the jetty and Thea leaned out over the side for the rope to haul them in and secure the vessel.

‘Do you know that house on Netherwood Common?’ she said.

Henrietta, surprised by this conversational about-turn, thought for a moment then said: ‘Ravenscliffe, do you mean?’

Thea nodded. She looked directly at Henrietta, who thought what a startlingly wonderful-looking girl Thea could be, and was, in this light, in that blue dress, with a light bloom of perspiration on her face and her eyes the fathomless green of the sea in summer. Her beauty was of the quiet kind: hidden initially by its imperfections, it stole up on you by degrees.

‘I saw it when Toby and I walked up there,’ Thea continued. ‘There was a woman outside, up a ladder, painting her own front door a beautiful shade of grey-blue, and I was so startled and – well, charmed, I guess.’

‘Probably Anna Rabinovich,’ Henrietta said. ‘Was she small and very blond?’

‘Her hair was hidden by a scarf. But she seemed so capable. So independent. Imagine, Henry, taking up a paintbrush to change the colour of your own door.’

Henrietta shrugged. ‘Not sure I’m following,’ she said.

‘No, Toby was kind of bewildered too. But to choose a colour, any colour you please, and apply it yourself, to your house – it seems to me the absolute epitome of freedom.’

‘I think Anna has to work jolly hard, to be honest.’

‘I don’t mean the freedom to do nothing. I mean the freedom to run your own life.’

‘Ah, yes. Now there’s a prize.’

‘We spoke for a while, Anna and I. She’s painting the whole house just as she wants it, and she’s making drapes for the windows. She seemed so …’ Thea hesitated, groping for the word that might adequately describe Anna’s particular quality: ‘… complete.’

‘And yet, so do you, to me,’ said Henrietta. ‘And you’ll probably marry Toby, then you’ll be complete to the rest of the
world too. Whereas I, I’m Lady Henrietta Hoyland and five seasons have fruitlessly passed since I was launched in society, and until I marry I shall be forever considered half a person.’

The boat was steady now, tied firmly by the rope onto an iron peg, but Henrietta and Thea sat on, looking at each other. Henrietta swallowed hard. High above them, a buzzard hung lazily, basking in a thermal current, keeping an eye on the water’s edge.

‘If I marry Toby,’ Thea said, ‘it’ll be as much because of you as of him.’

This statement was casually made and quite unexpected. Henrietta, who had believed her feelings for Thea to be a hopeless matter and quite doomed, didn’t speak but let the joy of Thea’s words blossom in the silence. She smiled, and Thea smiled too, and between them passed a moment of such magnificent understanding that Henrietta thought if she died now, in this cold, damp boat with the inhospitable waters of the loch all about her, she would die content. On land, behind them, a voice shattered the moment.

‘There you are! We’ve searched high and low even though Dickie insisted neither of you were worth it and we shouldn’t bother.’

Tobias and Dickie had appeared on the shingle bank, having emerged through the tunnel of Scots pines that led to the edge of the loch. It was close-planted, this footpath to the water, almost enclosed, and it lent the loch an air of privacy, an air of a place where confidences, once shared, were safe. Dickie, smiling affably at his brother’s blatant untruth, raised no objection and ambled along behind Toby, who jogged on to the jetty, his face radiant with the pleasure of finding Thea. He saw her, thought Henrietta, to the exclusion of everything else around him. Henrietta might as well not have been in the boat. He held out a hand, and Thea took it, returning his smile, matching his warmth.

‘What were you talking about?’ Toby said. ‘You looked jolly intense.’

‘Why, you, of course,’ Thea said smoothly. ‘Nothing else is half so interesting.’

They linked arms and walked away from the boat, leaving Dickie to lend a steadying hand to Henrietta.

‘They’re pretty thick these days,’ he said.

‘Yes, aren’t they?’ Henrietta smiled at Dickie, and she looked to him as though she was about to impart a secret, although she didn’t. Instead she sighed with evident satisfaction and said: ‘I do believe dear Tobias is about to be reeled in.’

Dinner time in the banqueting hall, and the talk was all of ghosts. At Glendonoch Castle there were three regular visitors from the other side, all of them tormented in their individual ways. The Blue Lady ran about the grounds pointing in distress at the knife that had been plunged into her trachea; Little Jim, a young black boy, haunted the kitchens and the weals of his regular whippings were clearly visible on his bare torso; and on the upper floors the ghost of the cowardly Earl of Storrey could be found in the oddest places, still trying to conceal himself from the Jacobite forces he was meant to be fighting. All the Hoylands, even Isabella, took an extremely equable view of their spectral housemates; it was an inferior Scottish castle that couldn’t boast a regular haunting. Among the present guests, however, there was considerable consternation.

‘Do you mean to say we shall see them? All three?’

This was Lady Hermione Hartwick, who was failing to conceal her agitation beneath the strenuously amused tone of her enquiry.

‘Well, not Little Jim obviously,’ said Dickie mildly. ‘And
the Blue Lady never comes inside. But old Storrey – he’s a regular in the ladies’ bedrooms.’

‘Gracious heavens!’ Alicia, the Duchess of Knightwick, had abandoned all pretence at sangfroid and was gaping un-attractively at Dickie. ‘What an odious prospect.’

‘Odious being an extremely apt choice of word.’

‘Dickie dear,’ said Lady Netherwood. ‘We’re still at the table.’

‘What on earth are you referring to?’ Thea said, perplexed rather than alarmed. ‘Does the Earl of Storrey smell bad?’

‘Rather!’ said Dickie, enthusiastically. ‘He was beheaded – somewhat messily – for his treacherous cowardice and he proved a coward to the end because everyone who’s encountered him has picked up the distinct odour of—’

‘Dickie! Desist!’ Lady Netherwood glared at her son.

‘Tell me later, Dickie,’ Thea said
sotto voce
, and winked at him. Vulgar girl, thought the countess. She shot a look at Teddy: a look that said, there – are you quite content with her? For although nothing had been announced, it was increasingly clear that it soon would be. Now that this battle was evidently lost, Clarissa unexpectedly found that Thea’s evident unsuitability – her gauche manner, her idiosyncratic clothing, her unfortunate accent – made her existence easier to bear. She was as sure as she had ever been of anything that Dorothea Stirling was wrong for Tobias, but this belief, rather than reducing Clarissa to despair, gave her strength and a certain amount of satisfaction. Her own high standards of beauty, style and good manners – for which she had always been renowned – would be set in sharp relief against the backdrop of Thea’s shortcomings. In this, she found considerable solace.