The Buccaneers (43 page)

Planted where H.R.H. had left her, her fetching tragic-comic mask fixed in a grimace, Lady Churt took the arm of the groom-in-waiting and, as if continuing a conversation, declared in penetrating tones:

“Yes, an American. But they behave so oddly. Like pirates. You know the Duchess of Tintagel, who's one of them, squeezed eight hundred pounds out of the wretched Duke. She
said
it was for someone who was being blackmailed on account of her, but everyone knows it was
she
who was being blackmailed. It seems she'd had someone in her bedroom on Christmas Eve: Sir Helmsley Thwarte's son, Guy.”

 
Breathless, Hector Robinson watched the unfolding of this new act in the drama he had seen open at Runnymede. Nan's great brown eyes widened and she went red and then ash-white, almost reeling under such an assault by a woman who was a total stranger to her. Virginia blazed at Lady Churt: “You know the Duchess is my sister!” Conchita put her arm around Nan; Lizzy, on Nan's other side, took her hand; and Mabel told Lady Churt distinctly: “
This
is the Duchess of Tintagel!”

As the invaders closed ranks, Lady Churt raised a lorgnette to examine Nan from head to foot and then, shrugging, again addressed the company at large. “How shamingly idiotic of me. But how could one possibly guess that
she was
a duchess?”

“Darling, of course you couldn't.”

Lady Churt swung to face Conchita, who let her eyes travel over her old friend's face, from scowling forehead to mascara-ed lashes to painted mouth taut with hatred, before continuing: “No one could, Idina darling, because she is so young and fresh—unlike poor old scare-crows like you and me.”

“We must leave,” Mr. Robinson muttered.

“Not till the Prince goes,” his wife admonished him
sotto voce.

While they waited, Conchita whispered to Nan, “I didn't tell anyone about the five hundred, only Miles, but I haven't seen him for ages, he was becoming a bore....”

 
“Could there be something in what Lady Churt said, not just servants' gossip, do you think?” Mr. Robinson, worried, asked Lizzy when, after a dinner at which conversation had avoided the one topic of burning interest to all present, final good nights had been said and they were beside the hearth in their bedroom. “If so, you must urge Annabel to be sensible.”

But Lizzy's private speculations over the Bainton incident had been taking her in a different, and bolder, direction. She shook her small regal head decisively. “If she's in love with Guy Thwarte ... if there's trouble between her and the Duke... If she wants to leave the Duke we should encourage it ... but not be seen to do so.”

“Leave the Duke?—Leave—?” Hector gabbled, half rising.

With an abstracted “Nan was always one to do the unexpected,” Lizzy pondered possibilities. “If Nan went off with Guy Thwarte, the Duke might want
not
to divorce her, to prevent her re-marrying; but he'd have to, because he must have an heir, and to have an heir he would have to re-marry.”

“And so—?”

“So, we have here, at Belfield, not only Annabel but the perfect next Duchess.”

As soon as Hector was with her, he flamed with admiration. “Ah! Lizzy, you are a strategist! ... It—just—might—be done.” He laughed. “After all, Mabel is the widow of a King.”

“And wouldn't it,” his wife asked gently, “be a nicer way to manoeuvre for a peerage through my sister than through... the Heir to the Throne?” She eyed him curiously. “Did you really suppose I would... ?”

But Mr. Robinson's surge of husbandly supremacy at Bainton House had left its mark. “Did you really suppose,” he countered, “that I would let you?” And Lizzy dropped her eyes, then held out a hand, which he took to his lips.

XXXV.

Nan had left the drawing-room early. Virginia, whom she'd expected to insist on catechizing her, had been too absorbed in conversation with the Dashleighs—notoriously the most boring couple in all South Kensington—to look in Nan's direction even once. Nan understood. Jinny repented her grand gesture of solidarity, and wished to be seen as dissociating herself from a compromised sister. Conchita had caught Nan up at the door, saying, “I'll come up; you mustn't care about Idina Churt,” but Nan had begged, “Tomorrow, Conchie; I'm dreadfully tired,” and had been thankful when Conchita, with a reluctant nod, returned to the bewhiskered, faithfully and hopefully attentive Sir Blasker Tripp.

That afternoon, Annabel had undergone the greatest shock of her life. Her honour and integrity had been savagely attacked, and her deepest privacy violated. A love which she had only the other day acknowledged to herself, and the enraptured discovery that she was loved in return, had been blared out, hideously deformed, before a crowd.... As Annabel sat at her dressing-table having her hair brushed, she set her teeth so as not to betray her torment to Mabbit. Her eyes were fixed on the whitely face in the glass, but what she saw was the exquisite, cunningly made up, clever, malignant visage of Lady Churt.

When at last she fell asleep she knew she was lost, somewhere out of doors. She saw her mother looking for her and ran to her, arms out, wailing; but Ceres said, “Don't touch me, darling, your hands are dirty,” and Nan found herself on the verge of a black sulphurous crevice that suddenly gashed open a field of poppies. She woke in time to save herself from falling in.

How could she spend the rest of her life in the shades? Why, she might live to be fifty. Or older.

 
At breakfast, while Mr. Robinson absorbed his
Times,
Sir Blasker looked up from the
Morning Post
and boomingly announced to those at table—Jinny, Mabel, and Conchita had not yet come down: “So, it's not just a rumour: Thwarte is withdrawing his candidature.”

Hector gave a jerk to the outspread paper that shielded him from view. Lizzy glanced at Nan, whose unguarded face revealed only surprise—and not happy surprise. “She didn't know,” Lizzy thought, passing her the toast-rack with a reproachful “You're not eating a thing.”

“Who but that fool Tripp,” Hector growled in Lizzy's ear when they left the table, “would have had the blasted stupidity to bring that name up, after yesterday? I hope,” he told his wife accusingly, “you haven't asked him to stay on!”

 
 
Nan went out into the fresh air of the dormant garden and walked up a path edged by box and holly to a bench overlooking the fields she had seen from her room. Far to the right, half obscured by a grove of oaks, lay Bainton House.

Her smooth brow wrinkling, she tried to understand the news that Sir Blasker had reported. Why had Guy resigned his candidacy? Nan realized by now that Lady Churt had not fabricated her lies out of thin air; they must have been a wanton distortion of rumours already going about. Guy must have thought that the scandal would make him a drawback to his party, and removed his name for that reason. “How can he not be angry with me?” she asked herself, sick at heart.

That
might be why he had declined the invitation to Belfield.

When she went indoors, Lizzy handed her a note. “It's just come. From the Duke, I think. His carriage is outside.”

“My dear Annabel,” the Duke had written, “I am at Folyat House and wish you to join me here. The carriage which conveys this message will bring you into town. Yr affectionate husband, T.”

The Duchess passed the note to her hostess, saying: “I should be back by mid-afternoon.” Her only preparation was to put on, without even looking in the mirror, the hat and jacket that Mabbit fetched, and pick up her purse.

 
 
The carriage drew up before Folyat House. The groom-of-the-chambers conveyed Annabel through the oval lobby and rectangular hall and along the wide vaulted corridor issuing from the hall, past the high doors to the gallery where she had shyly presided at dinners for ambassadors, ministers, and minor royalty, and the private dining-room where she and Miss Testvalley and the Glenloe girls had laughed about an elephant, to the Duke's study.

The Duke did not come at once. Nan walked back and forth in a ceremonious room almost as large as the study at Longlands, darkened by mahogany panelling and a purple carpet, its glazed book-cases faintly reflecting the feeble light that penetrated stiffly curtained windows. Seeing a dishevelled image in the mirror above the fireplace with its unlit coals, she took off her hat to pat her hair, but threw it on to a chair when her husband entered. He came to her soberly and kissed her on the cheek.

“It is time—” The Duke interrupted himself to motion Nan to a seat, and placed himself in a chair facing hers before resuming: “It is time that you return where you belong, and do what you ought to do. If your absence continues people may begin to talk.”

“People
are
talking.” Nan blurted it out. In her disarray she had neither considered in advance what the Duke might say to her nor prepared replies: nor, indeed, thought of a need for preparation—or for discretion. “And I'm sorry; but, Ushant, I have done nothing dishonourable. The five hundred pounds were for a friend, but
not
for Mr. Thwarte; for someone I knew I
must
try to help.”

She saw that, if the Duke had come more prepared than she, it was not for those words. Fingering his sandy moustache in obvious bewilderment, he replied: “I do not accuse you... do not suspect you of ... dishonourable conduct. I do not—I am not reviving the subject of the money. But my mother has been upset to learn that you left Champions, for people whom we do not know, without asking my permission.”

“I didn't know I needed—” Nan began again: “My sister was there”—and halted. She longed for some recognition by him, even if it took the form of accusing her of serious wrong-doing, that there were difficulties in their marriage that went deeper than his mother's displeasure over what was at most a peccadillo. “Ushant, it's more than that.... If I could explain...”

“Explain what?” he asked coldly.

Nan looked helplessly at his closed, colourless face. “He always keeps his gloves on,” she thought; “he can't bear to touch anything important directly. He can't talk about his own heart.—If I could make you understand ...” But... how could she “explain” the long-accumulated misery that was filling her nights with dreams of death and hell? She gave a protracted painful sigh. “I do nothing but disappoint you; I realize that more and more. I don't justify myself... but I am not right for you; you need a different kind of wife....”

The Duke moved his head from side to side, as if trying to shake off a gnat. “It is not a question of a ‘kind' of wife. You are my wife. That is the fact, and it is all that matters....” As Nan merely looked at him without speaking, he rose and went to stand with his back to the hearth.

Nan had come to a decision. She rose too. “Ushant, you need, you
deserve
a wife whom you can love and... respect; and who loves you. I—don't, and I want to leave you.” As he looked at her open-mouthed, she continued, making a great effort: “I must tell you that I love—someone else.”

The Duke's face tightened, but he made no sound.

“But he doesn't know it, and he won't. There has been no misconduct.... And there won't be.... That's not why I'm leaving; it's because I'm so unhappy about the way you and I live.... Ushant, I don't even know where I'll go....”

If this announcement of intention had the elements of a cry for help, the Duke did not treat it as such. He said collectedly: “This is all nonsense, one of your fantasies. You appear to think that it's for you to decide what to do—‘where to go'—! But it's not. You are bound to do what I say, and I shall see to it that you do.”

Annabel looked at a man who had taken her to him passionately on their wedding-night, had been exultant when he learned that she was with child—a child he could not let her forget she had killed. His present remoteness chilled her, yet he had loved her; and everything about him spoke unhappiness. Perhaps it did hurt him to know that she loved someone else.... Unexpectedly sorry, she put both hands flat to his breast. “I've outlived fantasy. I don't expect happiness. Even now, if I could think you wanted me to stay with you because you miss me ... love me ...” Earnestly, intently, Annabel tried to see into his eyes and read his heart.

The Duke returned a stare as unblinking as hers, but his eyes, pewter-gray, clouded and opaque, gave no spark of response, of awareness that something of import was going on.... Without repelling her, he backed away from her hands.

“It's not a matter for you to argue about, or appeal... for you to decide,” he said hoarsely. “You are to come back to Longlands with me now, and you are to live as my wife. You have no choice but to obey.... If I have to force you to, I will.”

“Ushant—goodbye.” Nan turned toward the door.

“You are not to leave this house!” The Duke strode past her, opened the door, called out, in the direction of the great hall, “Don't let anyone leave the house!,” and slammed the door shut.

“You can't keep me from going!” The old Nan St. George the Duke had never known flashed at him with such fury that Annabel expected him to seize her by the arm and hold her there, but he crossed to the massive desk beyond the fireplace and pulled the bell-rope.

Nan walked out of the room. Far to her left, moving shapes were silhouetted against the daylight entering the lobby. The footmen had gathered there. Guards. To them, she must be in darkness. She pushed at a green baize door farther along the corridor.

It opened on a narrow passage. On her right was the half-open door, labelled “The Clerk of the Kitchen,” of an office with a table and papers. A bell rang in the passageway ahead, the Duke repeating his summons, and a door ahead opened toward her. She stepped into the office and pressed herself back against the wall as Ogilvy, the butler, hurried by and, approaching the baize door, slowed to assume a more dignified gait.