The Marquis of Westmarch (17 page)

“I think I have been meaning to say what I said just now for a long time,” said Auriol, sitting down heavily in a chair that creaked, “without fully knowing it myself.”

Meriel blinked, composed her lips, and set her candlestick down on the mantelpiece. A secret marriage, I suppose, she thought, knowing it could not be anything so painless and pointless as that.

“Well sir, it is a very pretty notion, but nonsensical. Especially if you happened to mean I should come as near as makes no odds to
eloping
with you, like some bread-and-butter miss.” Looking across at the bookshelves, secretly she acknowledged that that same idea had occurred to her, then repressed the memory.

“Don’t talk gammon!” he said, startling her. “It is the most sensible
notion
I have ever had. Pray don’t try to humour me as though I were an idiot, Meriel.”

“Sensible!”

She went to stand in front of the grate with her legs apart and her hands clasped behind her back.

“Yes, I think I see what you are thinking,” said Auriol, with his eyes on the space between her legs. The candles were too ill-placed for her to see his face. “Let me explain!”

“Yes sir, pray do explain.” Meriel concentrated on remaining calm and dealing swiftly with this subject. “Now, you wish me to marry you, and take you back to Wychwood — take me there? Are you suggesting we should remain there forever?”

“Meriel, do but consider! Consider what happened three days ago. If we go on as we are, don’t you see what we shall have to endure, the intrigue and concealment and above all the
danger
? That was but the beginning. It’ll drive you out of your senses, in the end.”

“I think I am the best judge of that.”

“Own to me at least we
must
think of the future.” Auriol pulled out his little silver spectacles and bent the arms back and forth, as she watched him, and swallowed. He looked up. “How long do you expect to live — another thirty, forty years? Do you never think that you
cannot,
even if you wish, maintain this charade over such a period. Yes, you are a consummate actor, you
are
half a man, do not be thinking I am denying it. I know what a point it is with you, and very understandably. But any number of accidents may occur. Pray listen to me! Suppose that one day you were to take a rasper out hunting and come to grief, as you must have done already scores of times, God knows, but were to be picked up
unconscious,
Meriel, and examined by those with you?” Meriel made a movement, and he went on regardless. “Did you not tell me that once you had the devil of a
time with a broken collarbone, insisting you would let no one but Juxon set it, and having to send to Castle West for him?”

“I contrived the business very tolerably. It would have been very well had he not chosen to enact me a tragedy.”

“I know it was thought very eccentric in you. But supposing you had sustained a blow to the head? Don’t you see what I am saying? I wonder Juxon ever let you ride at all, upon my word I do!”

“He let me ride, and hunt, and drive my curricle,” said Meriel through stiff lips, “because I told him that sooner than be entirely confined to sedentary pursuits, like a sickly girl, I would tell the whole world I was not a man. I rode to escape from him, what do you think! It was a choice between his utter domination and — I know the risk, sir, be sure!”

“Are you hating me for talking in this style, Meriel?”

“No,” she said.

Suddenly he asked her, “How old are you? I cannot precisely remember.”

“Three-and-twenty!”

“Yes, quite old, and you have no beard for all you try to shave. I want —”

“I rub my chin sometimes with powdered cinnamon,” said the Marquis, taking her clay pipe from the mantelpiece.

Auriol turned in his chair. “Meriel, it serves very well now, when you’re little more than a stripling, but when everyone knows you to be thirty, forty, how can you suppose it will? You can pass as a
boy
, but when you are a middle-aged woman you will never be able to pass as a man!” He paused, and saw her chest heave. “I must say these things to you. I ought to have done so weeks ago, but the truth is, your hold on me is such I never even thought of them till we came here.”

Meriel lit her pipe with a taper. “Thank you, Wychwood, you have succeeded in terrifying me, will you now play me at piquet and please hold your tongue?” Brandy-glasses, card-table and cards had all been set out in the library before they dined, just in case they should want them. They had not played cards once since coming to Longmaster Wood.

“No, I will not, and I wonder you should
dare
ask it of me when you must know how hard it is for me to say these things to you! I
will
be heard.”

She brought her fist down on the mantelpiece and shouted at him, “Do you think I have not thought of them? Do you think I have not
tortured
myself wellnigh into madness?” Afraid of her voice’s rising to a female pitch, Meriel had trained herself years ago never, ever to use all her lung-power when she shouted, no matter how angry she was. In fact, as Auriol noticed with slight selfish disappointment, her scream was a passable counter-tenor roar.

“Meriel,” said Auriol, to whom another argument had occurred, “I know you live in terror of the constraints of female existence, but only think how your life is circumscribed now. No female has to be forever on her guard as you have to be!”

“Oh, yes,” said the Marquis. She felt very weak, having let herself go, but would not sit down. “Yes, I am forever on my guard, Wychwood. That I think can scarcely be denied.”

“I can’t offer you power or rank, indeed I am asking you to sacrifice both, though you have an absolute right to them in my view,” said Auriol, “but — but, oh, damn it, I wish I could put it as I would like, so as not to offend your precious sensibilities, Meriel! All I can think to say is that we might live at Wychwood as we
ought
to be able to live here.
This
is your home, as you have so often said.” He swallowed. “Could you not be happy with me? With me as your only — subject?” He knew that the exaggerated word would touch something in her, because since she was twelve, she had never felt herself to be any kind of true prince or princess, but only a sneaking unjust tyrant. “Meriel, have you never thought of it?”

“Yes,” Meriel said slowly, drawing on her pipe. “I will own to you I have thought of it, as you must know, for I showed no true surprise when you first mentioned the matter, did I? Yes, it would mean giving up only what is valueless to me. In a sense, and yet —”

He ignored that. “Then would it not be brave, and right, to put an end to this charade?” Thank God we understand each other, thought Auriol, my little Marquis.

“You don’t understand! It is the Marquisate that is valueless to me —” No, it is not, said a voice in her head “— but I could not, could
never
allow the whole world to know I am a female, and it could never be done without that, if you’ve thought at all, you’ll
know that. Have I not explained it to you? The shame, the disgrace, the
dirt,
sir!”

“Yes, you have indeed explained it.” Auriol poured himself some brandy. “Meriel, I have been meaning to say this to you. When I saw you at your election I thought for the first time that femaleness ought in
justice
to be no bar to office, public life. Indeed, I feel a fool and a brute for never having considered the matter in such a light before. For what evidence is there of female inferiority that cannot be traced to a stupid piddling upbringing? How can you feel yourself to be
dirty,
morally an impostor? Is your predicament not proof that it is the notions of society which are nonsensical?”

Meriel was amazed and delighted to know that he had had such thoughts, but she concealed it. “Yes, Wychwood, I am no such fool as you think, I have considered the whole matter. But you don’t understand, cannot understand, because you are not accursed yourself, I tell you that if the whole world were turned upside down and there were perfect equality, formal equality, between men and women, still it would be hell on earth to be a woman!”

“Why? Why?”

“Sir, imagine that your parts were cut off.” She made a gesture, and he hunched his shoulders, then quickly straightened himself and glowered at her. “Ay. How would that be? Imagine that you had no shoulders, and ugly little short bow legs, and fat hips — by God it is intolerable — and not only that, but that your body was filled with a great bleeding, stinking, cancerous wound —
how
could
you
feel
yourself
to
be
the
equal
of
a
man
? That is how women feel, ay, though few of them know it themselves as I am forced to do! Oh, the mind is well enough, it’s the body, the slavish vileness of the body! Do not tell me women could ever be equal to men. Oh, the laws could be changed, and should be, but equal, no, never!” She drew breath.

Auriol wanted both to hold her and comfort her and to slap her face, because the knowledge that in all these months her mad views on the subject of woman’s filthiness had not really changed filled him with helpless disappointment and awareness of his own unseeing arrogance. He tried to speak, but Meriel swept on, trying to sweep him down on to the floor, because she loved him and wanted him to understand her only intellectual passion.

“You seem to forget I have lived all my life among men and I know as other
females
cannot quite how intensely they hate and despise them and long to make them wretched. No, they are not human, they do not exist, not females. And I tell you they never will be, never will exist in men’s eyes, whether legally free or no.”

“That is a great piece of nonsense,” he managed to say.

Meriel walked over to him, and did not touch him, but poured herself more brandy. “If I were indeed a man you would never
dare
say that to me. You would acknowledge the truth, not dismiss it.” Looking down at his face, she then said with sad quick gentleness, “God damn it, Wychwood, why could you not have accepted the Wardenship?”

“The Wardenship?” he said, bewildered.

“I offered it to you, do you remember? To remove the damnable temptation of your being at Castle West. I would to God you had taken it, that’s all. Yes, I do. Then none of this would have happened, none.”

Auriol got up from his chair at last, and brushed past her. “Do you? Are you in earnest, Meriel?”

“I don’t know!” she cried.

“It is infinitely horrible to me to think that you might indeed regret all that has passed between us. I hope you were not merely seeking to hurt me, I would find that unforgivable.”

“I was not, as you know. Regret it, how should I? So much — so — but it has been folly and if I did not love you to distraction I would not consider even for a moment continuing with you under any guise at all! Friend or mistress or wife, sir.” I would have to kill you, she thought for the first time; and that realisation made her think more favourably than before of giving up everything for his sake.

“It would have to be as wife unless we go as we are,” Auriol said quickly.

“I know it.”

Meriel was blushing. Auriol, thinking she was afraid, squeezed her shoulder.

“Then you have indeed thought of it.”

“Yes.”

Both smiled faintly, looking anywhere but at each other, to think of having had very similar but entirely separate, unmentionable
visions of their secret wedding, flight into Southmarch, and dignified communication of their news to the world.

As Auriol’s wife, safe in Southmarch on a remote country estate, Meriel would be of little interest to the various Island powers after a year or so. Protected by her husband’s name, by being some man’s property, she would be merely the cause of the most colossal and fascinating scandal in Westmarch since her three-times great-grandfather had been murdered by a catamite of whom no one had heard before. It was the thought of being so unimportant as to be unworthy of the fate she most dreaded, incarceration in a Female College, which made the thought of attaching herself to Wychwood intolerable to Meriel.

She also delighted in the idea. But in such moods, when she was possessed by a picture of herself as ruler of a tiny but rightful kingdom, she was able mentally to abolish the rest of the world. Whenever, later, she remembered that she could not kill the world, could not prevent it knowing she was female, she felt hatred rise up in her like a choking tide.

The tide mounted up again now for the second time that evening. Her face became rigid.

Seeing it, understanding, Auriol touched her, drew back and said, “So I have been powerless to change you.” That attracted her attention, and he went on, using inspired words but clumsy haste. “You are still
my
lord
Marquis,
are you not, Meriel, and only that? You are not human in your own eyes, no, I have not made you know that you exist, that you are Meriel Longmaster, man or woman does not signify. And all I desired was to give you yourself. Because that is what you have never had, you were a void, before, and I would to God you could cease to be one.”

Her response was, “Either a void or a toad! Don’t shout at me! Good God, do you suppose I should not like to live with you, openly, for the rest of my life, without a pack of fools and coxcombs and place-seekers and toadies about me? Oh, you have indeed given me myself, sir.” She stared at him. “Wychwood, do you understand, if only it were not necessary to have them know I am not a man.”

“And yet that must come at some time and far more disastrously than if we were to marry and go. Oh, we go round in hopeless circles.”

Meriel turned away from him and sat down in the chair he had vacated. Knocking out her still-full pipe, she said resignedly, sounding far more feminine than usual, “We always will. I go round in circles as you say in my own head, sir.”

“Do you?”

“There are times I promise when I almost long to shout the truth about us, my condition, from the top of the Tower. Which I suppose is scarcely to be wondered at, though I’ve never had such a wish before. Oh, you must have guessed, how else could you have spoken as you have? I think, think sometimes it might be a most glorious
rebellion,
sir, to run away with you, and tell them all how I deceived them these past ten, eleven years. Vastly diverting it would be, too, only to see their faces, which to be sure I should not. Damn it!”