The Marquis of Westmarch (16 page)

“Of course he has not, ma’am! Mistress Amarantha, how do you go on? You look delightfully,” Hugo said to an approaching lady who was famous for her easy morals. He flirted with her, longing to go out and enjoy the night air, but coping with the noise and heat and demands of his position by drinking plenty of wine.

Juxon had retired into the garden, and there Meriel found him behind one of the hedges, looking into the faint glitter on the surface of a black rectangular pond, trying perhaps to see his face. She was still a little breathless after her escape from Auriol, and she stopped, and swallowed.

“Why, Juxon!” she announced, coming up behind him. Her voice was casual, even condescending. She thought it best to speak, because she was still afraid of Juxon, and thought he might be able to discern her presence and her guilt by witchcraft if she tried to go away.

To her great surprise he turned quickly, seized her hand, and gazed up at her eyes. “Oh, Marquis. I had been hoping you were here, out here, but had not thought it possible!”

After a moment’s pause she said, “Well, one must take the air, you know, the heat was becoming insufferable.”

“Yes, yes, but that is not what I want to say. Marquis, I so wanted to tell you, now we have a moment alone together, how — how very beautiful you are tonight. White does indeed become you!”

“You are too good, sir.” The expression of mixed rapture and pain on his bleached face could only just be discerned, but it
disturbed her very much. For years, she had not thought Juxon capable of serious emotion; she wished now she could say something adequate, and calm him.

He hurried on, clasping both her hands. “I love you so. My dear. My dear, you are leaving me tomorrow and I wanted to tell you now. So often as I have lain awake at nights, tormenting myself as to whether I did what was right, for
you
, in enabling you to preserve your secret! Did you know that? Did you? Whether you would not have been happier had we done as the world would have said we ought, and not concealed the truth. You seemed so often so unhappy, so lonely and afraid, I feared for your reason, never could I reach you, give you the companionship, the comforts of domestic affection even which might have been yours — but now I know that I was in the right of it. I saw you tonight, so happy, so beautiful, so
glad
to be Westmarch, for the very first time, and it quite compensates me for everything, my dear, dear Marquis.” He said all this in her ear, which she had bent down to his lips to encourage him to murmur, for there might be people about.

“Juxon,” Meriel stammered, “this is not like you.”

“Oh, there are tears in your eyes. Yes, I can see them. I cannot have distressed you! I would not for the world, Marquis.”

She then wiped them away with one hand, but did not remove the other from his grip. Instead, she patted his shoulder.

“I had not thought you cared for my true happiness, sir,” she told him simply. “I’m touched. I’m glad you do. Yes, I am happy. You quite took me aback, that’s all.”

“I told you often and often, my dear, that it was your true interests I cared for, but full well I knew you did not believe me, thought only that I was self-seeking in some most devious way.”

“Yes. But I see things now as they are,” said Meriel.

“You were cutting my heart to pieces, you know, for you are all in all to me, and I know, I know I am nothing to you. May I tell you this? Will you forgive me so unbecoming a display of sensibility, Marquis?”

“There, Juxon. All will be well, you’ll see. And don’t I owe you everything?” she said, still leaning over his face in a way she knew must look very odd.

“To see you in the flower of your glory — oh, you are
not
a
woman in any vile sense, you have the mind of a man, a glorious man, as I thought, and I hope you will always do as you will, as you like, with me, with everyone, Marquis.”

Her heart bulged out towards him, and everyone. “I shall,” she said, very low. “Juxon —”

“I feared Knight Auriol, because he wrote that shocking pamphlet,” said Juxon, “but though most amiable he is not a very
intelligent
man, and I see now I need not. Five months he has been living now almost in your pocket, and not a sign he guesses, you conceal it so very very well!”

He felt the twitch of her hand in his, and Meriel explained it by saying: “You insult
my
intelligence, Juxon. Of course you need not fear him. He is an excellent fellow merely — and you know, I do need youthful companionship. I hate to be beset — do you bear with my odd humours, sir, when I ask you not to meddle.”

Meriel pulled herself upright. At present, she was too much moved by Juxon’s eager, modest words to feel contempt for his obtuse self-deception with regard to her lover, or any desire to laugh.

“Oh yes, I shall,” said Juxon. “I hope you enjoy your repairing lease, and shoot many, many rabbits, Marquis — and come back to me most thoroughly
repaired
.”

“It is a pity he is such a plain-looking man,” said Meriel, knowing this to be a typically feminine piece of adroitness, and feeling dirty. “Juxon, I am very glad — vastly glad to know you do in fact hold me in affection. How odd that you should tell me, now.” She gave a tearful laugh. “I shall — take care of you, see you don’t suffer, never fear.” She meant that she would never distress him by telling him the truth about Auriol: as it had briefly occurred to her to do when he revealed that he hoped she would do whatever she liked, implying that he would never prevent her.

“My
little
Marquis.”

This time Juxon was too carried away by his feelings to notice the start Meriel gave. Passionately he kissed her hands, and he closed his eyes as a particularly lovely strain of music reached them from the ballroom. He knew that life would bring him no greater satisfaction than had been his tonight, and when the Marquis left him to dance with Berinthia Winyard, he saluted the one star out in the sky.

Tall white and purple foxgloves curved upwards in the green gloom of the oak plantation. The earth beneath them was rich as a cake from yesterday’s rain, blotched in places with piercing light; and between the branches and the ground, the air was thick with growing, sweet decay. In a clump of young bracken, Meriel and Auriol dozed naked on their piled-up clothes, breathing heavily as they listened to the movement of insects and leaves. Their sweating bodies were pale, and looked exceedingly tender, thoroughly exposed, although they were so well hidden. Spent cartridges and guns for shooting wood-pigeons lay beside Meriel on her left.

“Little Marquis — my little Marquis, ah,” Auriol grunted, as he felt her hand touch the faint hollow in the side of his hip and then rise up, round and over, to finger a red line worn into his skin by a crushed fold of cloth. Meriel’s other hand twined in his hair, and she fixed her lips to his great damp shoulder.

Auriol opened his eyes and turned his head. Until today, he had never seen Meriel unclothed, for though she liked him to be nude whenever she thought it safe, she had always refused to be naked herself.

Auriol was not surprised that she had been nervous at first of showing what looked like the chastest, coldest and most private of bodies, with its bowl-like collar-bone, large ribcage, and white, hard-muscled arms and legs. He knew them all by touch and loved them, they were covered with the finest of skins. It had been a triumph even so to persuade Meriel to undress. She was afraid above all of disgusting him by the signs of her female sex, because these were disgusting to her.

The overgrown part between the Marquis’s legs, which had
caused her to be taken for a boy twenty-three years ago, was still visible. But it was nowhere near large enough to be mistaken for a male organ now.

As Meriel touched his own rosy rising virile member, and tucked one of her legs round his, Auriol heard a loud noise of crackling in the bushes to his left.

“Dang me if it ain’t a trap!”

“His lordship don’t use no traps.” Pause. “Lily-livered
you
are, bit of old harness that is. Traps! You’ll be tripping in one of your own rabbit-snares if you ain’t careful,
and
screeching fit to bust, and then where’ll we be I’d like to know?”

Each hissing word rang in Meriel’s ears as though it had been shouted. Gazing up at her, terrified himself, Auriol smelt the fear on her. He had never seen her face so white. He tried to make his mouth form the words: “Put your head down! Down!”

More noise came from the bushes. Poachers out after rabbits, thought Auriol. Just poachers out after rabbits — Meriel flung herself down on top of him in a parody of love, gripped his hips with her knees and buried her face in his neck. Auriol could feel the faintest of little begging curses coming from her lips, once she was comparatively safe. Very slowly, he put his arms round her back and clutched her, as her nails dug into his shoulders.

Auriol saw that there was a gap in the bracken nearly a foot in width, next to Meriel’s thigh. Through it he could see dying flowers on a scrubby rhododendron and beyond, he was almost sure, the edge of a countryman’s green coat.

“Dunderhead!”

A minute passed, and they sweated motionless together while the poachers quarrelled. Then Meriel inched her legs along the outside edge of Auriol’s, causing both of them more pain, and pulled them quickly up on top, hoping that if she lay between his legs instead of astride them she would look more like a man. Auriol parted his in response to her pressure, and made the bracken rustle. He felt furious with her.

“That was a shot,” said one of the poachers.

“It was a dead branch. Come from over there!”

Oh, thought Auriol, yes, they are frightened too. Oh, no. No. Not from here.

“Dead
branch
? ‘His lordship’s out shooting pigeons today
with his fine friend,’ says you. ‘Won’t be in
this
part of the wood, oh no, acos them young trees is too thick to allow of a shot. And no keepers neither,’ says you, ‘like there’ll be come night-time, acos my lord tells ’em to keep away, when he’s shooting!’”

“It weren’t a shot and you’ve got four conies already so shut your bone-box!”

“God damn you,” whispered Meriel.

“I’m off and if you’ve any sense you’ll come with me. S’pose it
was
a busybody keeper, with a nice big gun? Or his lordship? What’d we do? Hide in the nettles?
Very
pretty that’d be! If you’ve a mind to be flogged and set to road-mending
I
haven’t.”

They went, walking off in the opposite direction from the foxglove glade but so stealthily that it was hard for Meriel and Auriol to tell which path the men had taken. They did not dare to think for some time that the poachers had really gone.

After three minutes’ silence, Meriel relaxed enough to let herself sob with rage, and crawl slowly away from Auriol. Her whole front felt cold when she removed it from the sodden heat of his body, and the change in sensation, combined with her release from immediate terror, made her vomit violently.

Auriol scrambled up and held her head over a clump of forget-me-nots.

“They’re gone, Meriel,” he said. “They’re gone, don’t you see?”

She carried on retching, and his hands shook so much that he was of very little use to her. He remembered how angry he had been when very sensibly, she had forced his legs apart to make herself look more like a male: he supposed suddenly that she had been preparing to blast the poachers with some few words appropriate to a marquis discovered naked making love to another man. Oh, my God, thought Auriol.

She was so brave, and so weak now, that he could not be angry with her. He ought never to have been so.

“It’s all right.” He heard the laughter of relief trembling in his own voice.

Meriel finished being sick, and immediately broke away from Auriol and hunted for her clothes. Distressed, he watched her, without putting on his own.

“Dress,” she said, looking briefly at him.

“Yes, of course!”

They put their clothes on in silence, fumbling rather with their buttons and watch-chains. When he was dressed, Auriol took another look at Meriel, who was tying back her hair, and was disturbed to see no trace of the hysterical amusement which would be natural in the circumstances in her face. Having vomited, she seemed to be in quiet, untouchable agony.

Meriel spoke. “I shall have man-traps put down and they must both be apprehended and flogged,” she said in a low voice, and passed the back of her hand over her evil-tasting mouth. Auriol was relieved to hear her make such a worldly and understandable announcement.

“No Meriel, surely not! You are known for clemency in such cases, it would cause a deal of remark — and you are not cruel, are you?” he said, without thinking. It was as good a response as any other he could have made.

“I care nothing for that,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“You were exceedingly brave, Meriel.”

“We never undress again, d’you hear?”

He did not reply to this, but touched her shoulder and said:

“It is a thousand pities this should have happened here, where you are generally known, I know. Forgive me, I am no very adequate comforter — but, but I love you so very much! And it’s all well again, now.”

“Generally known, ay, very true, sir!”

She had spent the first twelve years of her life almost exclusively at Longmaster Wood, and was still known to many ordinary people in the district as ‘Mr Meriel’. Her hair alone would be enough to reveal her identity anywhere within twenty miles of the hunting-lodge, whereas in the country round Castle West she was merely a name, the Marquis, and only those who had some connection with the castle knew what she looked like. It crossed Auriol’s mind that they would all be surprised to know that though she was red-headed the fine well-placed hair on her body was nearly as dark as her eyebrows.

Very calmly she said, “I am very sure one of those men was the under-keeper Glasbrook was obliged to turn off for pilfering last winter. I recognised his voice.”

“I’m sorry for that. Don’t distress yourself overmuch, Meriel!”

She turned to him. “You expect me to be wonderfully relieved — happy — even to find this diverting, now it’s over. Don’t you? Or at the very least to throw myself into your arms. Can you not see how extraordinarily horrifying it is, for me? I shall never recover, sir.”

He dropped his eyes. “Yes, I see. I understand.”

“It is very extraordinary, but never, never once, has anything of this nature happened to me since Juxon discovered. I have never had real cause to be frightened till now.”

A sudden, terrible sense of loneliness and shame possessed Auriol. When she saw the expression on his face, Meriel laid down the gun which she had been reloading with a deep frown between her brows, touched him tenderly though she was still looking grim, and led him away by the sleeve.

*

Auriol had always found Longmaster Wood a faintly sinister place. Set in a valley, between a brown-watered artificial lake and a meandering river, the house was surrounded by oaks, beeches and chestnuts of great size and strange growth. Long untrimmed branches dangled to the ground and creaked in any wind, and everywhere but under the grey beeches’ shade the undergrowth was rank. Fogs rose up from the river and the lake, delicate in summer, but often so blighting in winter that the valley was dark by early afternoon. Only the wide hawthorn-edged fields and gentle hills that made this good hunting country gave Auriol real pleasure, and he could not hunt in summer.

Meriel had been so badly disturbed by their adventure in the oak plantation that she avoided Auriol for three days after, finding estate business to occupy her and knowing very well that she was wasting precious time. With each passing day Auriol felt less able to foist himself upon her and, needing to exhaust himself with exercise, though tiredness only caused thoughts to chase each other round in his brain, he rode over the fields alone. He did not go into the woods with his gun as Meriel once suggested he do. Auriol thought he never again wanted to smell the stuffy odours of a midsummer wood which had choked him in the glade when Meriel was on top of him, or see the tangled rushes and briars and ranks of nettles which flourished in that perpetual damp.

The weather continued hot. The third day of their nervous estrangement was particularly fine, beginning with a primrose mist, and ending with last shafts of sun that turned half the windows of the hunting-lodge to pale brass, and made its brick seem warm as a ripe tomato. Though they knew it to be foolish, Meriel and Auriol were affected by so much wasted sensual beauty which had nothing to do with them. It made them rebellious as well as sentimental.

They met that evening at table when the sun had gone down. Dinner was served late in summer at Longmaster Wood, because Meriel did not like to waste daylight on eating.

For two nights past Meriel and Auriol had made dull and friendly conversation at meals. Tonight, wanting to revert to the early days of their courtship and talk at length about themselves and each other, they were completely silent. Auriol watched Meriel eating too little and drinking too much, and longed to feed her himself. He wanted her to take pleasure in the excellent dishes provided by a cook who had tried to tempt her appetite for years. He understood that she could not afford to put on flesh and perhaps develop a bosom, but thought she ought to taste her food instead of swallowing it whole.

Meriel saw him look up with annoyance at the footman who was helping him to peas, and guessed he wished her to tell both servants to go. It occurred to her that perhaps Auriol did not like her habit of employing remarkably good-looking men to wait on her. She must tell him that they were no threat to him; but of course, he must know that they never could be. He must know that if she tried to realise her fantasies of sleeping with all of them turn and turn about, she would be killing herself. No, she thought rather desperately, do not exaggerate.

Eventually, Meriel did tell the footmen to bring in more candles and leave. When they were gone, she looked at Auriol, and said, “Wychwood, I am sorry for having neglected you these past few days. It was an absurd fear, nothing more, fear that after what happened someone or other would guess, merely seeing us together in the regular way.”

The words were obviously rehearsed. Auriol, trying to keep his hands steady as he peeled an apple, wondered what exactly had gone through her mind; and wondered why he was so much
moved, when he had known all along that before they left Longmaster Wood Meriel, being Meriel, would say something of the kind out of the warmth of her heart.

“Why sir, you’re crying again! Oh, my love!” her voice went on as his hands continued shaking.

“What have you done to me?” said Auriol.

Just as instantly, Meriel replied, “I’m not a witch, sir. It is only that I have faults.” He cannot think me a witch, she thought, how should I think he could?

He was choking. He had cried only once in the past three days, and never so violently since he was a child.

“I can’t endure this, Meriel, this being entirely dependent upon you. I never was like this before. Give me something. If it is your wish — to make me happy, as you’ve said I know not how many times, come away with me, give this up, I beg you to
trust
me. Marry me and we’ll live at Wychwood.” He stopped as soon as he had said this.

When she thought she had understood him correctly, Meriel withdrew her hand from his knee. Then, deciding to be gentle with him, because it was her fault he was so much upset, she said, “You are beside yourself, my love. You know full well I can’t do that. There.” She raised her eyes to his face, and saw that he was now looking more thoughtful than wretched. In her brisk normal voice she added: “Let us go into the library. I don’t know why we are sitting over the remains of our dinner in this way.”

“Yes,” said Auriol.

Taking the candles with them, they left the dining room. The library, just across a narrow passage, was a small room with green-painted panels and a view of the lake, furnished with shabby chairs and birchwood bookcases. Meriel had done her lessons here when she was a child, when Marquis Elphinstone had insisted that until she reached puberty she should lead the quiet life of any country squire’s son.