The Marquis of Westmarch (19 page)

“Or of mine, indeed. He has been a man grown these five years, six years, time flies, and alas, I never could bring myself to be a strict guardian.” Juxon raised his lorgnette to his eyes and blinked through it at Meriel.

“I’m devilish obliged to Westmarch,” said Sylvester. “Wychwood here says he had the greatest difficulty in saving m’cousin from the garotte, but he did it, stood fast despite what the Justice told him so I hear. Unpleasant fellow, Lothair, but his wife wouldn’t have liked it, though it suits her well enough to have him exiled.” He added, “A pity he couldn’t have saved Everard Salamon, and Quintin, too.”

“Unlike your cousin, sir, they were both of them by far too deeply concerned in the affair,” said Juxon, dropping his lorgnette. “A pity, I daresay, that they are not of such low rank as would save them from the honourable, er, penalty. Eh, Knight Auriol?”

“Yes, I collect that Salamon in particular would have preferred
to be imprisoned. Westmarch had no notion he was a coward,” said Auriol. Everard Salamon had been one of Meriel’s early, unspoken loves.

Juxon told them, “In their case, the Marquis’s refusing to countersign would have been almost an outrage — in the eyes of the Citizens, to be sure, not in yours.”

“Ay, very true! No knowing what notions
they
will take into their heads,” remarked Sylvester with teasing sweetness, because Juxon was something lower than a Citizen by birth. “Long whist is your game, ain’t it sir? I know Lucy over by the window there has been wanting a fourth. Do you pray oblige me by obliging him!”

“Sir, I should be only too delighted.”

Meriel had lost roughly two thousand crowns so far at this sitting, and Auriol, despite what he had said to Juxon, did think it his concern. Until they came back from Longmaster Wood, Meriel had never played for high stakes and had preferred piquet to any other card-game, because it required so much skill and she was an excellent player. She had despised faro as a brainless waste of time and money.

Now the Marquis raked in a twenty-crown rouleau as the bank’s card turned up on the livret, and someone called out, “Luck’s turned, I see, Westmarch!” She inclined her smiling head to him. Auriol dragged one hand down his little table, nearly overturning it, his eyes fixed all the while on his own hand of cards.

There was an excitement in deep gaming which Meriel had never recognised till now, and she had discovered that the fascination lay not in winning huge sums, but in losing them. Losing was almost a physical, a faint-making excitement, she thought: comparable to being mastered by Auriol on the cliff-top instead of mastering him, an experience which her body had savagely enjoyed though all the while her mind had revolted, revolted not against Auriol but against herself. There had been no emotional pleasure on either side, she was sure, whatever carnal explosions had been produced by variety. And what had happened then would never be allowed to happen again, thought Meriel, for fear that one new, very small part of her sexual nature would swallow up everything else she was and meant to be.
Auriol could have told her that that was impossible, but she had no intention of asking him for his opinion.

Hugo Longmaster was holding the bank, sitting at the opposite end of the table from Meriel. He had recently dyed his hair midnight blue instead of crimson, and in his topknot now there was a pink rose, presented to him by a woman famous at Castle West for her chastity. He was talking about her in an idle voice, full of anxious arrogance. From his place, Auriol could hear snatches of the conversation at the faro-table. He found it very hard to bear, for he knew that Meriel was capable of letting general observation override her own experience, of believing that he, her lover, would sometimes talk or think in such a way. It was true that when he was eighteen and a virgin he had tried to do so. He also knew that she was addicted to listening to and even to taking part in this kind of talk, cold rather than coarse, which made her eyes glitter with hatred. She would hear no such foulness at Wychwood.

The conversation shifted from women to horses, but the minds of Meriel and Auriol remained on the former subject.

Hugo Longmaster said, “Now Westmarch’s new greys seemed to me at first glance to be as fine a pair as one could hope to see, but do you know I think one of ’em in particular is something short of bone.”

This was addressed, indirectly, to Meriel, but though she had her eyes on his ruddy, shining, painted face and idiotic rose, her mind was so much occupied that she could not hear the words for thinking how foul he was. She was pitying and hating other women, hating men more, thinking to herself that she could happily cut off the penis of every man in the room to teach him what it was to be a woman, force him to live as one for a week, and then see him garotted like Everard Salamon, who had turned out a traitor.

“Cousin?” said Longmaster, raising his eyebrows.

Meriel heard that, and focused her eyes upon him properly. “I beg your pardon, cousin, I was not attending,” she said, raising her own brows in return. Everard Salamon, she thought, had been so very beautiful: impossible, enchanting, and homosexual. Half the men at the table were looking at her, waiting. She realised that Hugo was about to attack her.

“I was but wondering whether you do not find those greys of yours a trifle short of bone. Haven’t you had them a sennight now? Only a trifle! But I should not have thought they were worth such a long price as I happen to know you paid for them.”

“My greys? Oh, they’re worth it!” said Meriel, sitting much further forward. She had imagined for a moment that he had been reading her thoughts.

“Thank you, Marquis!” interjected the man who had sold them to her, Mr Drogo Yendal.

“I don’t believe my cousin was provoking
you,
Mr Yendal,” she said, smiling a little. “Still, let us hear what you have to say, Hugo. Short of bone. What besides? Are you going to call them peacocky? Flat-sided screws? Incurable millers?”

Auriol caught up with the conversation at this point. Meriel’s voice was so quiet that it alerted him.

“My dear Westmarch, I am never rude, or unjust, I hope! Short of bone is all I say — and if you bought them for sixteen-mile-an-hour tits I should be very much astonished to hear that they are in fact what you bought them for. Mr Yendal, pray do not be thinking that I ascribe the smallest blame to you.”

“Do you not, sir!”

“I am no expert judge,” said Philander Grindal, who was seated next to Hugo, and whose mind till now had been on the folly of card-games. “But I should say that for my part I never saw a finer pair, and I know that when I drove out with Westmarch in his phaeton he had the devil’s own work to hold them down to sixteen miles an hour!”

“They were very fresh,” said Meriel mildly. But Hugo had wounded her, because despite Philander’s loyal remarks, the horses were in fact good only for fifteen and a half. It was true that she had had difficulty holding them in: when she bought them, Auriol had told her they were far too strong for her, and asked whether she wanted to break her neck before they left for Wychwood. He had also been angry at the seeming waste of nine hundred crowns. “Do you indeed think me a poor judge of horseflesh, coz?”

“Why no, coz, I should not go as far as that, and I will own that the oddest thing is that you are a capital whip.” The smile he gave her was positively affectionate. Philander Grindal, Auriol and
Juxon, listening with covert intensity and not the amused interest of the rest of those present, all hoped that now Meriel would allow the matter to pass.

“Do you suppose,” said Meriel, leaning back dangerously in her chair with her hands in her breeches pockets, and speaking more loudly than before, because it was very important that Auriol should hear her, “that those chestnuts of yours are vastly superior?” Why, she wondered, should she care quite so much.

“But certainly I do, coz.”

“Bravo, Longmaster!” said one tipsy young man.

“Do you mean you agree with him, sir?” said Meriel, swinging her head round. “In that case, I suggest we put it to the test.”

“A race, Marquis! Have a race,” said the young man, blushing and thumping the table. He added with nervous seriousness, looking round: “Put my blunt on
both
of you.”

“Hush,” Philander Grindal said to him.

“Exactly so,” said the Marquis. “Yes, a race.”

“Ah,” said Hugo.

Meriel was unable to stop a smile trembling on her lips. She knew she ought to be looking very grim. But her hatred of mankind had completely vanished, she was swollen with affection for the world and for Auriol, at whom she dared not look. She said, “A thousand crowns on the table, cousin. The course to be chosen by yourself and the day — shall we say three days’ time?”

Juxon amused his fellow whist-players by seeming to freeze to his seat as he stared at his former ward. Auriol took one look at Meriel and then shuffled his cards with hasty fingers.

“A thousand? Paltry, my dear Westmarch,” Hugo replied. He reached for his brandy-glass and flicked a rouleau with his fingernail. Meriel picked up her own glass.

“I’ll give you odds,” she said.

“Indeed?”

“Ten to one.”

Juxon drew in his breath and Auriol laid both his palms down flat on the table, holding his wrists stiff as though to push himself up on his feet.

Mr Sylvester whispered sympathetically, “Tomfoolery, I know. Devilish dangerous, these curricle races, and Westmarch
ought to have more dignity. But damme, shocking or not, it’ll be the event of the season, Wychwood!”

“Dear coz,” said Hugo’s voice softly, “do but consider the circumstances. If I were to
lose
such a sum I should be obliged to apply to
you,
as the head of the family, for a loan!”

At this there was a stir of amusement and two shouts of laughter. Meriel was amazed to see that Auriol was one of those who laughed. It was not pleasant. Turning back she said quickly and coolly, her heart beating fast: “Then we’ll say five hundred — ten to one. You are the most complete hand, cousin, I’ll give you that!”

“And the course?” said Hugo. “Do you choose, Westmarch.”

“Round the Circus.”

“Oh, a short course?”

“I wish you to have some little chance of winning, cousin,” said Meriel, looking across again at Auriol, whose head was now held upright in a way that made her long to throw herself down beside him.

“How very kind in you. Very well: I accept!”

“Huzzah!”

“Splendid!” said Mr Sylvester, thrusting back his chair.

“Where’s your betting-book, sir?” said Grindal, turning round. “You keep one, I know, your parties are of such a very unusual nature. Don’t you think we should enter this?” He meant that to go to one of Sylvester’s card-parties was like going to a common gaming-hell in Castle-town, something Meriel never did. There were limits to what was acceptable behaviour in a Marquis.

“Two hundred on you, Westmarch!” said someone.

“I prefer Longmaster’s chestnuts, myself.”

Neither Auriol nor Juxon moved. Nor did Meriel. Sylvester brought out his betting book and grinning, his red-faced guests made their entries, crowding round Longmaster. Meriel received odd glances of curious respect. She waited for Auriol to do something. Seeing him shift at last in his chair, she was seized by the fear that he was about to try and put a stop to her race. He did no such thing, merely whispered his regrets to Sylvester, nodded to the Marquis, and left, without even placing a small wager to show that he had faith in her.

When he had gone, Juxon sighed and said indulgently to one of his companions at the whist table, “Most imprudent, indeed, this is in them both, but I daresay that even the most straight-laced persons will sometimes acknowledge that young men, you know, will be young men! Ah me.” He was far angrier than Auriol at the risk Meriel was taking, the physical, social and political risk.

Meriel watched the door through which Auriol had disappeared. She meant to go after him as soon as possible. She had realised now that it was none of the obvious things about their elopement which disturbed her: even her fear that as Auriol’s wife she would be faceless as all women were, drowned in her own body, leading a life composed of equal parts of screaming pain and bread-and-butter as every female did, was unreal. She could not honestly believe that Auriol would try to rule her. What she deeply dreaded was contentment, because unlike misery and ecstasy, it was unknown to her, scarcely imaginable. Auriol could make her happy, and happiness, not open femininity, would kill off Meriel Longmaster. What would she do when she was happy, and who would she be?

“It seems that you have emerged the favourite, thus far, coz,” said Hugo.

Everard Salamon escaped from his prison in the town the day after that card-party in Sylvester’s lodging, and drowned himself in the harbour to avoid the garotte. It appeared that it had not been death itself he feared, but strangulation: he could not bear the thought of his bloated eyes being squeezed quite out of his head. Upon hearing the news, Meriel went to be sick, and Juxon informed her that to continue her race now would be unforgivable. She thought so too, but denied it. She longed to have it over with, and so would not give in. And the race was a distraction she needed, as well as an honourable challenge she could not escape.

*

“Do you think the Marquis will win, sir?” said Rosalba Ludbrook Marling, as her husband edged his phaeton through the press of carriages, swearing under his breath. She had been married for two weeks.

The large park known as the Circus was very close to the main gate of Castle West, and in the early morning, the shadow of the tower and of the eighty-foot-high castle wall fell so far across it that it was three-quarters in deep shade. Now, at one in the afternoon on a very hot day, it was dark only under the cedar-trees, of which the park was full. Rosalba, who disliked the heat, looked wistfully at the nearest clump, but every shaded spot within view of the finishing post was already occupied by people on horseback, in carriages, and even on foot. The Marquis and Longmaster were to race round the three-mile perimeter of the Circus, starting and finishing inside the south gate, and so already, an hour before the race was due to begin, a throng of spectators had gathered. Everyone, Mr Marling among them, seemed to be jostling discreetly to obtain a good view.

When he thought he had no more room for manoeuvre, Marling said, “What’s that? Will the Marquis win? My dear wife, I should very much doubt it, I don’t say he is not a first-rate fiddler, because he is, and those greys are a couple of prime ’uns, but Longmaster is quite his equal in skill, and he must ride all of fifteen stone. He is the more powerful man, he must be better able to control a high-couraged pair.”

“But perhaps, if the Marquis’s horses are pulling a lesser weight, they will have the advantage.”

Mr Marling was surprised by this evidence of his wife’s intelligence. “Longmaster’s horses are the more strengthy beasts,” he said briefly. “But upon my word, I hope the Marquis does win! It is no very pleasant thing to have one’s bride snapped up from under one’s nose, and by a member of one’s family, too. But he is the oddest fellow — seems not to mind in the least.” Hugo’s betrothal to Berinthia, announced just after Meriel and Auriol left for Longmaster Wood, had been the main topic of conversation at Castle West before the Conybeare scandal broke.

“I suppose he is not capable of love. They say love-matches are vulgar, but
I
think it charming that Mr Longmaster and Lady Berinthia should be able to marry for love.”

“Do you, indeed! Cream-pot love is what
I
call it, on his side, that is, to be sure: more than ninety thousand crowns they say she has. Are you feeling quite the thing, eh, my dear?” said Marling, who hoped his wife would soon be pregnant.

“Yes,” said Rosalba. “I had no fortune, I know.”

She fiddled with the gauze veil which drifted down from a comb at the back of her head and concealed her plait from view. It was an ornament which she had assumed on her wedding day, and she was still not used to it, though gradually she was beginning to like the thought that everyone knew her at a glance to be a married woman, and thus grown-up and free from women’s authority. Rosalba looked round the crowd and hoped that she was being noticed.

She and Marling had only just returned from their wedding-trip to an Eastmarch spa, and were now living in Castle-town in the house he had rented for the season when he knew Rosalba and her aunt were going to Castle West. They had not been inside the castle walls since their return, and Rosalba would never live
inside it again. Mr Marling had told her that he had no intention, ever, of paying some fabulous sum for a poky courtyard lodging when for the same money he could hire a fine house outside what he called the magic circle.

To Rosalba, who had weeks ago persuaded herself that she had once been loved and deserted by a Marquis, her husband’s sturdy attitude to Castle West was a torment and a disgrace, and the reason for everyone’s seeming to take no more than polite notice of her now. Sometimes she thought that if she could only have lived within the walls of her true home, she would not have regretted her marriage in the least. She did not love Mr Marling, but his ugliness gave her a pleasant sense of her own youth and beauty and good-breeding, and she had discovered that he was a more ineffective bully than she had once feared.

When, at last, Meriel carelessly drove her greys through a cheering throng to the starting post, Rosalba gracefully watched her through a powerful lorgnette. She thought suddenly how odd it was that when the Marquis had seemed to be paying her attention, she in her modesty and fear had not supposed he could really be in love with her, and that as soon as his interest strayed, she had realised that he must indeed have adored her. My life, she thought, as she kept her eyes on Meriel’s red pigtail, is over.

Longmaster drove up beside the Marquis, to louder but coarser cheers. He was dressed in a yellow silk coat fit for a ballroom, and wore a straw hat laden with artificial flowers. The coat’s huge sleeves had been turned back and pinned on his shoulder in order to leave his arms free, but the toilette still implied that he would win the race so easily he had no need even to be suitably dressed. Meriel was too much preoccupied to give any thought to the little insult, but she noticed how easily he handled his chestnuts, exerting only a part of his strength. Her own wrists were already aching.

“Well, coz!” he said, smiling. “I must confess that your pair is not quite so short of bone as I had thought. Dear me! I wonder whether those who have backed me will be disappointed after all?”

“I fancy yours are poled up too tight, Hugo,” said Meriel. Turning round to her groom, who was perched up behind her, she added, “Glasbrook, go to their heads! I must assure my mother
that I shall at least survive the engagement without a broken neck.”

Saccharissa’s barouche was stationed under the largest of the cedars, and had a clear view of the finishing post. She had insisted, when she was first told of the race, that she could never enjoy such a dangerous, disreputable spectacle, and had carried on insisting so until this very moment. Berinthia, who had never pretended to be other than entertained, was sitting up beside her in the carriage. Meriel made her way towards them, and when she drew close she was taken aback, and wonderfully pleased, to see Auriol, on horseback, just behind the barouche. She did not address him.

They had had an ugly quarrel in her closet the day before yesterday, during which she had told him that she could never give her word of honour to marry him and rather thought she never would, and he had told her that in future he would not allow her to risk her neck.

“I’m excessively glad to see you feel able to watch me, ma’am, it is very good in you to overcome your sensibility,” she said to her mother. “Cousin Berinthia, your servant!”

“Meriel!” said the Marchioness.

“I hope you have backed me to win, Mamma? Entered your bet in Sylvester’s book?”

“Certainly not,” said the Marchioness, unstopping her vinaigrette. “Berinthia and I have made a private wager. What a nonsensical boy you are, Meriel, and so improper, too! Not but what I hope you win, for Hugo is become so puffed up in his own conceit there is no bearing him, now he has won dear Berinthia
and
shown himself to be a most
admirable
person, having resisted poor Tancred’s lures.”

Auriol edged his horse towards the carriage, and looked down at Meriel.

The Marchioness went on without observing him. “People say that Tancred must have been a great gaby to have thought Hugo might turn conspirator, but I say no such thing, how should any one of us have guessed Hugo knew where to draw the line?”

“Exactly so, ma’am,” said Meriel, her thin hand twitching on the side of the barouche.

“Yes, he is a bad man,” said Auriol. Saccharissa jumped, and gave a proud distasteful stare, but with his eyes on Meriel, he did not see it. “He had no business to make such remarks as all but
forced the Marquis to challenge him to a race — at such a time as this.”

“Had he not?” said Berinthia, inclining her head.

Auriol jerked his horse’s bridle and blushed like a child. He had quite forgotten that Berinthia had become engaged to Hugo, and that partly through his own devices, what seemed like so long ago.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am, indeed! And yours, Marchioness. What made me say such a thing, I can’t conceive — I —”

“Oh, I can,” said Meriel. “I think.” She continued, facing Berinthia, “Cousin, you must own at least that Hugo’s rig is perfectly ridiculous. Come now!”

“Yellow does not become him,” Berinthia agreed.

“Nonsense,” said Saccharissa.

Meriel tightened the string of her hat beneath her chin and looked at Auriol. “I must be off, Mamma, I see Leoline Usher ready to fire. Cousin!” She bowed and walked away, out of the shade.

“Westmarch!” Auriol called after her, making her turn. His horse took two paces forward. “Be sure you win,” he said quickly. “I have fifty crowns on you — made the wager this morning. If you don’t, I shall be quite run off my legs.”

Meriel put her head back and smiled hugely. “Never fear sir, you shan’t lose!” Then she ran through the crowd.

Auriol watched her. He had decided today that he had been both cruel and foolish to expect her to come to an absolute, independent decision about whether to run away with him and become a woman or not. It was too great a responsibility for anyone to bear without encouragement. He now meant to kidnap Meriel, by drugging her one night and carrying her off in a hired postchaise. It was a disagreeably dramatic move, but he could see no alternative. When he had her to herself, in some inn on the Southmarch road, he would ask her for her decision, knowing that once the initial break from Castle West had been made, she would find it far easier to think and to see him as he really was.

There would be no question of forcing her. If she believed that she must remain Marquis, at least for the present, they would go back, and make some excuse for their one day’s absence. He had quite decided that. Oh Meriel, win this, he thought, win your
damned race and then you’ll come. The thought of his own plan for the future brought him close to panic.

The greys were fretting and pawing the ground, causing trouble to the groom who held them. Meriel swung herself into her curricle and took the reins, leaving him to jump up behind. Hugo edged up beside her, and Leoline Usher, a young relation of Philander Grindal’s who had agreed to start the race, surveyed the two of them critically. For the first time, as she looked at the colourful blur of laughing spectators, Meriel became aware of the full heat of the sun on her back. She guided her horses a few paces forward and pulled them in with grim hands in too-thick, damp gloves.

Leoline Usher walked to his post, screwed up his face against the sunlight and raised his starting-pistol. The crowd became flatteringly quiet.

“Well, coz?” murmured Hugo.

“Well?” she said.

At that moment, she realised that her cousin was more violently excited and eager to win than she was herself. But why? she thought. It could not possibly matter to him, he was a man and did not need to prove himself. She herself now thought she needed to race, and win, to prove to Auriol and to Castle West that whatever happened and whatever she was, she was a brave Marquis, fast and bold and proud and worth loving. Now Auriol had showed himself to be too generous to grudge her any triumph.

“Westmarch,” said Usher, making her start. She nodded swiftly. Then she tried to concentrate solely on her reins and the horses, and found it even at this moment as difficult as praying. Seconds passed, Hugo seemed very close, though their curricles were ten yards apart.

Usher’s pistol banged into the earth. Hugo’s horses were, by a fraction, the first to leap forward. Meriel had been thinking so hard about the necessity of being first off the mark that her real reactions had been slowed down. But he was slightly reining in his pair for this first part of the course, and she, not thinking it worthwhile to restrain hers over such a short distance, overtook him within a minute.

The sun dazzled her, and irritation at this made her whip her horses into a hard gallop. Hugo behind her increased his speed: he would never give her too great an advantage. Meriel’s arms and
back and shoulders were already in pain. Trickling sweat glued her neckcloth to her skin. She raced into and through a patch of shade cast by a chestnut-tree which she knew marked the first half-mile; she had studied a map of the Circus yesterday. A terror that one of her horses was running faster than the other persistently possessed her. She began to think of Hugo as a figure of vengeful justice. But it’s unjust, she thought, unjust.

The curricles were now out of sight of those watching by the gate. Lorgnettes were lowered and chatter resumed, though a few men who had risked large sums on the encounter waited in impatient silence, glancing at their watches and glaring at the course. Auriol, having strained his eyes for a glimpse of the last puff of dust driven up by the carriage-wheels, felt lost and sad when they were gone. The gabble round about him did not affect him; he scarcely noticed it as he rode unthinkingly out into the sunlight.

“Knight Auriol!”

It was Juxon, who had arrived too late to squeeze his own carriage into a good place, and had been obliged to take a seat in Dianeme Sandeman Grindal’s barouche. She had kindly offered it to him when she had observed quite how deeply it distressed him to be on foot in a crowd of horses, every one of whom he thought likely to kick.

Auriol blinked at him. “Mr Juxon, I trust I see you well? Mistress Dianeme, your very obedient!”