The Marquis of Westmarch (18 page)

“Little Marquis,” he said. “I think it would be.” He went to sit beside her, cross-legged on the ground, and took hold of her booted ankle. “It would indeed be infinitely diverting, and a most glorious rebellion! Of course it would. My love, it is the only thing to do. Let us only be brave. I’ll die before I let them harm you, if it comes to that,” he finished, feeling inadequate.

“You’d best kill me,” she said, but he could see he had moved her, because her lips were softly working. Snail-trails of tears were shining on her cheeks. She was not looking her best tonight, for drink, distress, doubt and fear so easily spoilt her changeable face. He had noticed before that brown candlelight suited her less well than the hard light of day.

“Is it yes?” he said.

She imagined it. She thought of the ruin of Juxon who, it seemed to her at that moment, had done her a terrible disservice in making her live in disguise. At twelve, she might have become accustomed to being a girl, or would at least have wholesomely killed herself if he had tried to make her live as one: now, unless she ran away with Auriol, she would never be able to abandon her Marquisate. If she were deprived of it, suicide would be beyond her strength. She was too corrupt and had not enough rage left. She hated her present life, she decided, without reservation; only Auriol made it tolerable, of course.

Her thoughts changed direction, and turning, she told him, “Wychwood, I have seen enough of the world to know how very
fortunate we are, how very rare it is for two people to love each other with equal strength and to be suited besides.” She had realised a moment before that whatever happened, she would not be able to kill herself not only because she was too weak as she had thought, but because she liked the earth too much now, and thus, was also too strong. “It is almost an impossibility, as I don’t doubt you know.” She hesitated, and took in the reality of his kind dark blue eyes, fixed on her as they ought to be. “I remember, remember how you held me, that night at the Green Garter, after all I had told you, sir. No, we cannot throw it away. I cannot.

“Yes. I think the answer is yes, I’ll marry you — but I shall never breed, sir.”

Breed. For the first time, the word struck him as ugly: as meaning to do with maggots, rottenness, rats, and poisonous miasmas. Briefly, Auriol saw Meriel’s womb through Meriel’s eyes, but the vision faded instantly when he looked at her. No, she would never breed.

She went on, “I shall continue to live and dress as a man in private, and so I tell you, that is if I don’t die of the scandal before I’ve had my chance!”

Meriel’s legs were tightly crossed, but her right was swinging in circles over her left. Auriol laid his head on its foot.

“Dear one,” he said. “Dear love. Of course you will, how could I think otherwise? We’ll go tomorrow, shall we then?”

“No. Look at me.” Removing her legs, Meriel spoke with gentle earnestness, still quietly crying. One look at his surprised face made her say, “Ah, don’t say I’ve put you out of humour only because I ask you for a little time, which you
must
see I must have. Give me a fortnight, sir. I can’t go from here. I must have two more weeks as what I am, of the masquerade if you will, in order to
think,
at Castle West. I cannot decide absolutely as yet! If I go, sir, remember, I’ll never see it again. A fortnight.”

He did not argue, but waited until she began to fidget with her pipe again. “A fortnight,” she repeated.

He said, “I think it would rather be best to make a clean cut, but I cannot force you to it and I should never wish to.” He touched her foot again, lightly. “I collect you will be trying to enjoy being Marquis to the full, for a last two weeks. I don’t
suppose you will enjoy it in the least, but it’s of little consequence, indeed I had liefer you detested it! Do I have your word that you will do it in the end? Marry me and come? Meriel?”

“No,” said Meriel. “Not my word of honour, sir, I can’t give you that, not yet. I say ‘perhaps’ — which is a vast deal better than ‘never’, surely,” she added quite tartly.

Of course, he thought, she is a woman of spirit. “Very true,” he said. “Very well, we’ll go back to Castle West. I can always abduct you, after all, and it will be easier to do so from Castle West, so much closer to Wychwood as it is.”

“Oh, indeed?” said Meriel.

Suddenly he laughed, and watched her face with a gleam in his eyes, stroking his chin all the while.

“Well sir, what’s so diverting?”

“Oh, I was but just thinking to myself that I ought to tell you —
one
reason for my pressing you in this way now. It is merely a thought which came to me only very lately, a most tedious complication, ma’am — well, unless we go off in this foolish fashion we shall have nowhere to make love to each other when winter comes. We’d never be able to make use of a bed, you know, and you know well enough it was cold enough in all conscience outdoors even in Flowers! Am I not in the right of it, Meriel?”

The Marquis felt momentarily insulted; then she laughed too.

Meriel, who had taken upon herself the arranging of their lives till now, left Auriol to work out the practical details of their elopement. She accepted that she would spend her life in exile, sincerely looked forward to that free life now that the decision was all but taken, and meanwhile spent their last two days in the country attending to the estate business of Longmaster Wood. She and Auriol behaved affectionately towards each other, exchanged odd nervous or sly smiles, but did not indulge in difficult conversations, and did not try to make love.

Meriel experienced quick, irresistible longings to go down on her knees and hug Auriol round the hips and cry out her gratitude to him for loving her and for being himself, but when these fits came on her, he never happened to be present.

Auriol longed to be off. He felt absurdly jealous of the servants and tenants of Longmaster Wood, who seemed to be entirely at ease with Meriel and to think nothing of the fact that when she was away from them, she was something more than their squire: to them, Castle West seemed a long way away. He was jealous of her, too, because she behaved towards them with such grace, and never once seemed to think it necessary either to give in to some unreasonable demand or to play the great man and be proudly insolent. Her behaviour was quite otherwise at Castle West.

She asked him once what on earth his people at Wychwood would think of her, and he blushed to think that this consideration had not crossed his mind. Her words made him realise that he had never quite thought of his social inferiors as full human beings, even though he would be less likely to treat them with rudeness or unkindness in a bad-tempered moment than Meriel herself. But the idea that his qualities and hers balanced very well,
that each would supply the other’s deficiency, filled him with expectant pleasure. Back at Castle West, he was sure, they would feel able to make love in their gorse-screened place on the cliff-top. Then, Wychwood.

On the final morning, Auriol breakfasted alone while Meriel spent a last hour in the paddocks, discussing a potential champion colt and making plans for her supposed return at the end of Month of Sun. When he had finished eating he wandered out into the stable-yard, where the black post-chaise was already waiting, piled high with baggage. Meriel was sitting on the mounting-block with a mug of beer in her hand.

Seeing her, Auriol realised for the tenth-odd time since their fright in the woods that his love for her at last had nothing to do with his being either merely very lonely, or dazzled by a queen in disguise. Tears came into his eyes at the thought that within a very short time they would be leaving this place. He had gone through a day of horror after that near-disaster in the foxglove glade, thinking that Meriel had tired of him; but it was not so and never could be, he knew that. They had been irredeemably softened and made happy by contact with each other and by three months’ freedom to adore without restraint, and not even if they wanted to be grimly cold could they be so. They were a little depressed now only because their energy was spent, and there was still a fortnight of life at Castle West to endure.

“Wychwood!” Meriel called out when she saw him. He smiled and raised a hand, which was not necessary, and when he came over the groom to whom she had been talking walked away.

Meriel picked up a piece of straw from the step beside her and started to tear it with her fingers. “I shall be riding the first stage, it is too fine a day to be boxed up in a carriage. You’ll ride too?”

He looked down at her. “No,” he said, smiling. “To my mind it’s no such fine day, it looks uncommonly like rain to me.” He wished he could say aloud that he knew she wanted to see the last of her home, and that without his watching her, but the stable yard was full of people.

A team of fretting chestnuts was brought up and hitched to Meriel’s chaise. Auriol quickly entered the carriage, together with Meriel’s old pointer bitch, whom much to the surprise of her household she had decided to take down to Castle West. The dog
was unused to town life, but Meriel thought she would soon grow accustomed to Wychwood. She was taking no other beloved object from Longmaster Wood.

The Marquis mounted Black Belinda, turned round in the saddle, and took a last look at the stable yard. Here, she reminded herself, she had been set on her first pony, taught to shoe a horse, chased away by Juxon, introduced to beer and tobacco and the facts of reproduction, and assaulted with a hunting-crop, that once, by her father. She found herself unable to feel anything very much, and wondered whether if the yard had been old and picturesque, or perhaps reeking and tumbledown, her memories of it would be more poignant now. But the redbrick stables at Longmaster Wood had been rebuilt by Marquis Elphinstone in the year of her birth, and were as solidly practical as any building could be. Meriel supposed that in time to come she would be sharply sentimental about the place, as, in fact, she had been in the past. She wished of all things that she could imprint this last picture of it on her memory, but it was no use: it meant nothing to her, today of all days. She smiled, and her own smile made her realise that this was no sad occasion.

Loudly she called out to the postilions bestriding the carriage-horses, and their little cavalcade set off to glad farewells from the stablemen. They rode out of the yard, away from the house and the lake and the woods, across a small expanse of sheep-bitten park, and through the iron gates which Meriel had climbed when she was eight. She had fallen down from the right-hand post and injured her hip on that occasion, and that had been the last time anyone, save Juxon and Auriol, had seen her lower half unclothed.

Ten miles on, they passed through the village where Meriel’s old nurse now lived. She had been among those who had attended to Meriel’s dislocated hip, fifteen years before. She was eighty, but she came out of her house to wave to the Marquis. Cantering onwards, Meriel waved back behind with a vigour that surprised the half-blind old woman. She had been devoted to the child Meriel, and had suffered for years because her once affectionate charge had seemed to find it hard even to speak to her from the time of his father’s death.

“Goodbye! Goodbye, Araminta!” yelled the Marquis through
the dust kicked up by Black Belinda. She wanted to yell: I’m happy now, I’m never coming back!

Hearing Meriel call out from inside the chaise, Auriol guessed what was happening, and felt fiercely loving pity mixed with foolish causeless guilt.

*

They made a fast journey, and arrived at Castle West at sundown less than two days later, having spent one night on the road. As soon as she climbed down from the chaise Meriel, blinking and exhausted, saw Juxon tripping towards her across the cobbles. She found it hard to believe it was really he, for he never even entered the stable-courts as a rule, because he was afraid of horses. “Look,” she said to Auriol.

“My lord Marquis, I wished to be the first to apprise you of a most shocking piece of news!” Juxon said when he reached her, releasing his diaphanous coat skirts, which he had been holding up out of the dirt, in order to make her a bow. “Knight Auriol sir, you I am persuaded will be as much shocked as the Marquis.”

The two of them stared at him, and so did the grooms, postilions and stable-hands whom he pretended to ignore. He knew what a figure he made in these coarse surroundings, with the sunset turning his pink hair to glowing orange, and his powdered face fascinating with the effects of agitation.

Meriel sighed in a worldly fashion. “I’m sorry to hear it, Juxon, but you’re talking in riddles. What is it?” She could have cried with frustration at being disturbed like this.

“I daresay it is nothing of such great moment if the truth be told,” Auriol observed, his voice seeming louder than anyone else’s, though it was not. “Else you would not accost the Marquis in public, would you sir? But minor disaster, properly presented, is always so vastly entertaining.” He was furious.

“Is that your opinion, sir? Is it? Well, you will discover whether or no it is, in fact, a case of
minor
disaster
!” said the other, screwing up his eyes and swinging round immediately to Meriel. “Marquis, I wish you will come with me and I shall tell you the whole,
alone.
You, my Knight, will no doubt learn the greater part of what I have to report quickly enough!”

“I think Wychwood’s in the right of it, but I’ll come if only to
put your mind at rest,” said Meriel, looking at Auriol. “I’ll see you tomorrow, sir, I don’t doubt.”

“Tomorrow,” he agreed, looking at Juxon because he would have liked to knock him down: not for insulting his intelligence, but for interfering, for depriving him and Meriel of even a quarter of an hour’s pause in which they might have accustomed themselves to being back in the dryness of Castle West, might even have persuaded themselves that it was a place of beauty, especially now in the evening with many-coloured shadows fading on its walls. Juxon made him long to run away from it immediately, and he hoped that the sight of him was filling Meriel with a similar and perhaps more ardent desire.

Meriel watched her lover stalk away in the direction of his own rooms, and then allowed Juxon to follow her to Marquis’s Court. He talked all the way.

She learned that news of a political intrigue had reached Castle West yesterday morning and that nothing else had been talked about since. It seemed that at least sixty officers of the various Island Guards, and members of the Quarter-Councils, had been bribed by Tancred Conybeare to help him foment rebellion in all three Quarters of divided Northmarch, and then restore him to the Marquisate; or, at least, to accept that when he occupied his ancestors’ palace they would be properly rewarded for not suppressing rebellion efficiently now.

To this Meriel said with simple anger, close to tears, that Tancred had always been a fool, and that she hoped no Westmarcher would turn out to be so deeply embroiled in treasonable conspiracy that she would have to countersign the Citizens’ Justice order for his execution, because from now on, she would not countenance anyone’s execution, no matter what was the spirit of the law.

Juxon then told her that a letter, probably written by Tancred’s youngest brother Ninian, had been found by the Marquis of Southmarch’s intelligence service. Southmarch had been good enough to send a copy to her, which he, Juxon, had taken the liberty of reading. It was disturbing, he said, because it described an excellent method of murdering Southmarch himself. The method would involve the co-operation of at least one man who was close to Southmarch, and the author of the letter had
remarked that it was a great pity that when he was one of the Gentleman-Valets at the Island Palace, Knight Auriol Wychwood had wasted a dislike of his patron which might have proved useful on writing a mocking pamphlet. The author added that alas, despite possible appearances, in politics at least Wychwood had always been a worthy provincial full of odious integrity, and would in fact have been a danger rather than a useful man if he had kept his place.

Juxon quoted this description word for word, without comment, for fear of offending Meriel.

“What?” said Meriel. “You don’t mean to say
Ninian
Cony
beare
has sense enough to perceive that Wychwood ain’t a traitor and a murderer? You astonish me. No, Juxon, if that’s what the letter said, it can’t have been Ninian who wrote it, and so I shall tell Southmarch. I own that it might possibly have been Endymion.”

For some reason, the insulting compliment to Auriol made her laugh whenever she thought about it; and feeling this to be rather disloyal, she chided herself, and did not tell him about it although she knew he too might think it an excellent joke. She was kept very busy, dealing with the Westmarch repercussions of the plot, and had little time to talk to him in any case. She deeply regretted this, because in the circumstances, it was so hard to remember that in another two weeks this life would be over: and thus she badly needed injections of his company.

*

Sixteen days had passed since their return from the country, and Meriel and Auriol were still at Castle West.

At their last meeting on the cliff-top, the Marquis had explained that she could not leave yet, not while the Conybeare plot was still occupying most of her time and two gentlemen of Westmarch had to be garotted, because it would look both callous and irresponsible. Passionately she wanted her Marquisate to be well remembered. Auriol, understanding, had accepted her decision; then, for the first time since their affair began, he had made passionate, violent, love to Meriel, holding her down as so often she had held him.

Late on the sixteenth night, Meriel was sitting at the faro-table, losing steadily, with her hair untidy and her neckcloth loosened because she was not quite sober. Juxon, arriving at the party,
thought he had never seen a more exquisite picture of a dissolute prince than she made, sitting there among the men under a guttering chandelier. He gave her only one discreet glance, before going over to greet his host Mr Florian Sylvester and apologise for his excessive lateness. Florian Sylvester was playing quinze with Auriol Wychwood, who was looking across at Meriel whenever he dared.

Sylvester, a bachelor and a large handsome man, was one of the few men at Castle West who rather liked Juxon. “No, upon my word sir, it don’t signify, very glad you was able to come at all,” he said in response to Juxon’s stricken apology. “Westmarch told me very likely you would not be able to, and it ain’t a formal party, you know, not formal at all.”

“Westmarch?”

“Have you not seen him? Over there. Plunging deep,” explained Sylvester, nodding in the direction of the faro-table. “Which is not his way in the general way. Daresay he ain’t, after all.”

“Is he
plunging
deep,
Knight Auriol? Do you know?” smiled Juxon.

“Good evening to you, sir. No, I don’t,” said Auriol, momentarily laying down his hand. “It’s no concern of mine if he is, though I hope he is not.”