The Marquis of Westmarch (6 page)

All the land they could see belonged to him, but Meriel took Wychwood’s remark to be an amiable mockery, implying that his power was or ought to be limitless, and ought to make him magnificently happy.

“I don’t own the sea,” he said, “as I need scarcely tell you.” He did not want to survey his property now, in front of Wychwood, but Auriol, smiling, backed his horse on to the side of the road and,
shading his eyes, looked over the flat land with its dykes and ditches and odd lines of elms and oaks. In the far distance, there was the thin white ribbon of the East Canal.

“No one could call it a picturesque landscape,” said Auriol.

“No, indeed! Hardly to be compared with your country,” said Meriel, slightly offended.

“Every man loves his own country best.”

“Ay, very true, though I have never thought this to be peculiarly my country, having been bred up at Longmaster Wood. I’ve no love for the fens, none at all.” He looked down at his horse’s ears.

“But they make for famous good partridge shooting and plentiful rents,” said Auriol, to cheer him up.

“To own the truth, partridge shooting is not my notion of good sport. I had liefer by far go out after wood-pigeons on my own — without so much as a loader. My father used always to say that if a man can shoot a wood-pigeon, he’s a good shot.”

“He was perfectly right.”

Meriel pulled at his horse’s bridle, smiled and said, “We ought to be on our way, I think sir. Come! There’s a village where I mean to leave the horses — near a vastly pretty little cove I should like you to see.”

As they turned their horses round, their legs brushed roughly together. Neither had realised their animals were so close.

The coast-path, which joined a string of fishing villages, ran more than a mile to the west of the main north road. It was too narrow and too rough for any vehicle but a farm-cart, lined with the long dead grass of last winter, with boulders, bushes and drifts of white sand blown up from the shore. Meriel and Auriol galloped along it. The noise of their riding drowned the screeches of the gulls, and the violent exercise prevented thought and conscious pleasure in being alone.

Some fifteen miles from Castle West, Meriel pointed down the cliff and turned back his head to shout, “There!”

They reined in their horses, and took a branching path. A grubby looking village of white-washed, shale-roofed houses, grouped round a tiny harbour, came into view. Meriel, with his loosened hair blowing all over his face, remembered that he must talk about his marriage to Rosalba. It was ridiculous, he told
himself, to imagine that because of her, this would be his last pleasant bachelor excursion with Wychwood.

*

“If she were only disengaged!” said Meriel, and silence fell. Both listened to the slap of the sea on the cliff nearby, and the deep roar of its foaming away.

They were sitting together in the cove on a flat slab of black and weed-patched rock, and their feet were buried in the oozing sand. A light, chill wind was blowing, and the tide was advancing slowly towards them as they looked intently out, over water as calm as an ocean’s ever could be.

“But she is engaged, Westmarch! It’s preposterous, this notion of yours.”

To Auriol, Mr Marling seemed to be the main objection. As the Marquis reflected on this, Auriol said slowly: “You seem not even seriously to have considered that she
is
in fact betrothed.”

“Juxon seemed not to think that the chief objection, to be sure,” said Meriel, with a small unpleasant smile.

“Juxon? You have discussed this with your secretary?”

The Marquis looked him up and down. “You forget he was once my Governor, sir, and for all his faults he was — often proves himself useful to me. I had thought he might very likely help me contrive the match, might be acquainted with some obliging clerk.”

“Yes, indeed, but …”

“Oh, you are perfectly right, sir, I dislike him!”

“Westmarch,” said Auriol, “I don’t believe you have told me the whole truth about this.” He paused, then spoke with amazing roughness. “You of all men wishing to marry for love, I don’t believe it! Why do you not take your cousin? You know your duty, why consult me, as well as your precious Juxon? And if you consider Maid Rosalba’s betrothal no impediment, the scandal as nothing, your mother’s discomfiture as something desirable, why do you not, not go first to Lady Berinthia —”

“To
Berinthia
?”

“Confide in her that you have formed a lasting attachment, the world is beginning to look askance at marriages of convenience, after all, and I daresay she is a good enough girl at heart for all her Island-Palace ways! Besides, you would owe so much to her, at
least, you’d spare her some degree of mortification, and females seem to like nothing so well as earnest confidences from men, so I’ve heard. Then make your arrangements,
marry
your Rosalba if you must. Why do you not? What is it? Do you indeed love Maid Rosalba as you say?”

“A thousand reasons. You are very much annoyed, Wychwood, ain’t you? I’m sorry for it.” He hesitated. “Indeed, I have not told you the whole truth yet.”

“Oh. Well — do not, unless you wish to,” said Auriol gently. He touched Meriel’s sleeve for a moment, withdrew his hand, looked away to the far end of the little beach.

The Marquis began to cry, quietly and with set features. “Oh, damn Juxon!”

“Is Juxon — forcing you for some reason of his own to make this atrocious match? Westmarch!” He saw the tears. Meriel swung round. “
What
?”

“I beg your pardon. But I don’t understand you.” He clenched one fist.

“No one can force me to do anything, anything at all sir, d’you hear?” Meriel thumped the rock, self-consciously.

“No. Though the Marchioness can put intolerable pressure upon you, I collect,” said Auriol. Don’t cry, don’t cry, he wanted to say.

“Pray how can you suppose Juxon is
forcing
me to marry Rosalba — as though such a thing were in his power — when I have told you precisely the opposite?” said Meriel more calmly. “He was against the match, do you not remember?”

“Westmarch, I don’t know, I ought never to have phrased it in just that way. But I have often wondered — especially now, you say you dislike him, yet you confide in him about an intimate matter — whether he perhaps has some hold over you. Forgive me if I am wrong, but as your friend —”

“Yes,” said Meriel softly, “he has, but then — well, I have some
hold
over him, sir. Indeed, the same hold.”

“I see,” murmured Auriol.

Meriel turned to him. “No, you do not. Try to guess.
Try
to
guess
what
it
could
be
!”

“How should I
guess
?” cried Auriol. “Is it some crime you’ve committed together? A crime of — what is this?”

Quiet.

“I love you and I want you, that is all I truly wished to say to you, ever, but did not dare,” said Meriel. He was breathing hard, his breath smelt of brandy from his hip flask. “To hell with Juxon and the whole rabble. It’s you.” So it’s done now, thought Meriel, how strange. “I do love you.”

Auriol’s mouth trembled. For weeks he had dreaded the possibility that he could be physically drawn towards a member of his own sex. Clearly that was what Meriel meant. Not even after the chance meeting with Maid Rosalba had he put the question crudely to himself: are you, are you, drawn to Meriel Longmaster. He had once wished sincerely that Meriel had a twin sister, but had thought that no doubt she would be as insipid as other women.

“Westmarch,” he whispered.

“Do you love me, in some fashion?” demanded Meriel, “Do you, do you sir?” He scrambled up and stood before him, feet sinking deep into the sand. “Say that you do.”

“Yes, yes I love you, but I am no sodomite, Westmarch. Good God!” For a single moment he had perceived the boy as a ravishing girl.

The Marquis gripped his shoulders and loomed over him, and Auriol felt faint with unnatural desire. “God bless you,” Meriel said, and smiled.

“Yes, I love you, but never in that way, God, no,” Auriol whispered, staring up into the other’s glittering, black-lashed, water-grey eyes. “You are my friend. I am not that way inclined! No, Westmarch, leave go of me!”

“My friend. Yes,” said Meriel very gently, touching Auriol’s cheek. He paused and swallowed and stood up straighter. “Do you know sir, you spoke of sodomites, but you need have no fears on that head.” Auriol listened, and Meriel at last removed his hands and vigorously rubbed them. “You said that Juxon had some hold over me and indeed, it’s true. You see as a man I cannot make a normal marriage, that’s why I thought of little Rosalba — Juxon is the only person in the world who knows, who knows that I am deformed, I am not a man, not a true man. I wish you might have cause to fear sodomy from me, indeed.”

There was another quick silence, unbroken even by a wave’s crash. “What do you mean — you are not a man?” said Auriol.

Now both were white-faced with tears in their eyes, but Meriel looked almost triumphant, like a young man drunk on tales of courage and gallantry imagining his own most glorious death.

“I cannot beget children. I am not properly formed. I — I’m not — in short, I am a woman, sir. So you see, you need have no fear, dammit.”

A whining seagull flew past their heads; out to sea a foghorn sounded.

“I am a woman,” said the Marquis, in a loud clear voice. “I am, it’s perfectly true.”

“Nonsense! What the devil d’you think you’re saying?”

The Marquis sat down unsteadily on a neighbouring rock. She would not sit with Auriol. She looked exhausted, but arrogant, and strangely young, and as though she were about to laugh.

“It’s true,” she said. “I — was born — with a deformity that caused me to be mistaken for a boy.”

“No. It’s not possible. A man — a person cannot change his sex! When do you —”

“Oh, but I did, Wychwood,” she interrupted. Her voice was very high and light. “I am glad, sir, very glad to have you know. I have been close to madness, so many times, with the horror of it. No, it was right to tell you.”

“Prove this to me, what you say.”

“What, damn it, would you have me show myself naked before you? No, never, oh, no!”

From that moment he began to believe her, though it struck him, commonsensically, that if they were in love, one day she would have to show herself to him if it were true. Imagining the scene, he turned red, returned to reality and said, “But this hardly seems to be more than a dream, how could it be otherwise? I don’t believe you! How can you expect me to believe you?”

“Come here, sir,” said Meriel, making room on her rock. “I will show you enough. Come.”

Slowly he obeyed her, but he did not sit down. “See my face,” she said, looking up at him with pinched lips. “Touch it if you will.”

The skin was as smooth and nearly as flawless as a child’s on the forehead, cheekbones, and nose. But when he touched the lower half, it proved to be rough, and then he noticed pale down
on the upper lip. It was such faint down as a woman might well have, but he exclaimed:

“Damn you, you
shave
!”

“How should I go about, looking like a
girl
?” She spat the word. “Oh, I try to shave, yes, sometimes. For the sake of appearance.”

“Have you run mad? What is this rigmarole?”

Meriel stood up, unbuttoned her riding coat, grabbed his hand and pressed it against her tunic. She fumbled for the right place, and held it there. “There. Will you still think me a liar? Will you?”

Auriol blinked rapidly. Through the cloth he could feel a little mound, scarcely bigger than half a peach. He said nothing.

“Excellent!” said Meriel, closing her coat.

“Are you a — a hybrid?” whispered Auriol, wiping the hand that had touched her on his sleeve.

“I think not — I wish I were, I might then feel safe — masquerading as a full man. You’re pale as a ghost, sir!” She was blushing, and she knew it.

“Westmarch. My God.”

Meriel started to laugh. “Yes, yes,
Westmarch.
You tell me you love me, but you can’t love a man, and I tell you I’m a woman, to make you see it is proper to love me, but to be sure in truth you can
only
love a man, and you look as any other would look, by God — something foul about a female, ain’t there? Oh, it’s rich, sir, it’s hell’s own jest!”

Like a young animal hunting prey for the first time, Meriel watched him: and yet her avid anxious face looked oddly pitiful, as she sat there seeking understanding.

Auriol was not yet able to give understanding. He said as gently as he could, “But how — how could it not have been discovered, till Juxon — till you were
twelve
years
of
age
, all but a woman! I know that at that time you were ill, and he was attending you, but why not before?”

“Oh yes, it was not six months later that I began to bleed.” Stiffly her woman’s face nodded at him, then she grew livelier. “Oh, don’t you see? How should anyone with no more than common knowledge guess, before I reached that certain age? Girl-children and boy-children are not unalike, but that the one has a protrusion and the other not! Mine was but a slight one. The part was
there,
sir, it seemed only too
small
,” Meriel insisted.
Auriol slowly began to believe her. She went on, with her back turned to the sea.

“My nurse, Araminta, she bathed me till I was six or seven years of age — and I’ll own I remember her looking at it, and my feeling a trifle uncomfortable, as any boy would, and so I asked that I might bathe myself. Then no one at all saw me unclothed, sir. By the luck of the devil I only once suffered an accident that required a physician’s attention, when I was eight, and no very close inspection took place. And after that my father forbade me to swim, so I never was seen naked. He thought I had a weak chest.” Meriel swallowed, and tried to laugh. “How I did resent it at the time, for Philander might swim, you know!” She returned to the real subject of argument.

“But my nurse must have thought only that it was oddly small — how could she, a woman of no education, guess it was no male part, no penis at all, but a female — Juxon did tell me the name — ay, vulva-clitoris, that was it. She must have thought only that it was a remarkably undersized organ — and God knows I have lived in dread of the mere thought that she might, in fact, have begun to guess! I’ve ignored her for years and years for fear she might guess now, remembering, and looking at my face, though she’s all but blind now. As for my mother, my nurse was to me what a mother is to a child of no family, mine as you know never stirs from Castle West, she scarcely saw me when I was at Longmaster Wood.” Meriel drew a deep breath, and tried to conclude, though her conclusion was only a repetition.

“But if my nurse
had
guessed she would have said so, would she not? She would not have held her tongue. And no one else saw me, and I myself, from the little I knew, thought only that I was undersized! That distressed me enough in all conscience — when I observed when I was ten or so that the thing did not grow with me. Do I put you quite out of countenance, Wychwood, by discoursing on such things?”

Auriol jumped at her slight and bitter change of tone. How very protected, he thought, Meriel had been — he tried to arrange his thoughts as he looked at her in silence. Marquis Elphinstone must have been an odd kind of man: as possessive and protective as Juxon in his own way, though he had, it was true, given her one young companion.

Meriel smiled down at Auriol with cynical concentration, and made a move as though to touch him, then drew back and said, “Wychwood, you were a boy. If
you
had suspected there were something ever so slightly wrong with your virile parts — having read a little, heard odd remarks, as I did — would you not rather have died than consulted anyone, out of shame?”

“Yes,” he said. “I would. But many boys, you know, fancy that —”

Meriel interrupted. “So you see — I guessed there was something not as it ought to be, by the time I was ten or so — but never did I guess the full horror of what had befallen me, till Juxon examined me when I lay ill — I was in a drugged sleep, I’d have never let him touch me awake. Oh no, no one but a devil could imagine the full horror, no.”

“Marquis, Westmarch — tell me if you wish,” Auriol said, not wishing to hear more yet, but not knowing what else to say. She did not hear his invitation. Oblivious, she talked of her own accord.

Meriel started to prowl along the beach, rubbing and waving her hands, pulling at her hair, shouting at the top of her voice and looking anywhere but at him.

“I’ve lived ten years with the terror of discovery, ten years, and now, I discover myself! I tell you I can no longer endure it. So now I’m ruined. D’you know, can you picture to yourself what it has been, to know myself to be filthy, essentially unfit for the position to which I was born, realising it not a sennight after my father died, and through Juxon, do you? Women are vile, vile, vile, breeding-sewers, idiots, stinking, and I know myself to be one of them — oh my God, could there be any worse punishment in all the world. Yes, yes, someone will discover, one day, and then it will be petticoats, and breeding, and propriety, and obedience, and impotence! I’d liefer be dead, would not you? Would you not?”

The declining light set her hair on fire, but made her face invisible to Auriol. Far in the west behind her the sunset was a gold patch of water and sky, beneath a stream of tiny purple clouds. The sea was still flat as a piece of silk, and the waves broke heavily over Meriel’s legs as she strode, and stamped, and shouted.

Auriol moved. “Westmarch! Meriel! Be silent, can’t you!”

“Oh, be damned to you! Love, love, love, who was it said
there’s no love does not take a man straight to the devil? Juxon expects me to love him, do you know that, love him and be grateful to him, for his help in maintaining this charade — my life, in short. Thinks he can ruin me at any moment, but I can ruin him too, by God, and he knows it. I’ll ruin myself if it pleases me. I have no friends, to be sure, friends are dangerous, too dangerous — like you, of course, oh, I wish I were dead.” At last, choking, she fell silent.

“You have me,” called Auriol, walking forward, “and I will
not
ruin you, and you are
not
vile, you
are
Westmarch though you may be a woman.”

His bass voice swamped the echo of hers, and she heard it. He had grasped, despite her crushing eloquence, the essences of her misery. But having spoken, he collapsed, and could only stand there, looking at her.

“Wychwood,” she said, coming towards him, water squelching in her boots. “I have distressed you, I’m sorry. I’ve distressed you.” She put one arm round his waist and hugged it tightly. He did not respond, though he wanted to do so. “The tide is coming in,” she said, gesturing, “come, there are the boulders, let’s sit there.” The upper half of the cove was full of smooth and oval granite boulders. “My — my little love.”

Auriol stopped. “
What
did you call me?”

“My little love. Oh! Yes, very true, sir!”

Enormous smiles opened on both their faces, and they shyly held each other, chortling, for nearly a minute.

“Little!” said Auriol.

“I’ve the devil of a headache,” said the Marquis.

“That don’t amaze me. Such an outburst as yours was bound to take its toll.”

His mention of her rampage made Meriel want to lose all self-control again, but she was in too much pain and had not the energy.

“It is an irony, is it not,” she said, “I have had to show by far more
reserve
in my life than any female living.”

“Yes,” said Auriol, thinking of Juxon, “in many ways yours must have been quite as much restricted — and sheltered as a girl’s.”

“Just so, sir.” Meriel looked around her, and was astonished to
see a brilliant low sky. “But it’s late … we must have wasted hours in talking. Oh, my God.”

“Yes, now — now what shall you do about Maid Rosalba?”

Meriel narrowed her eyes, and saw that he was anxious, not mocking. The relief was very great, and they began a calm, blunt, refreshing and real discussion, quite unlike their first on the subject.

*

Maid Rosalba had time to waste between her visit to the town and an hour’s tea-drinking with her aunt and Mr Marling. She chose to spend it in thinking sophisticated thoughts about marriage. To do so, she sat beneath the tangled vines of an arbour in Green Court, though she ought not to be sitting there, unchaperoned; but it was an obscure place, and the last threatening lecture from her Aunt Philoclea had made her feebly rebellious as well as tearful. There was also her love to sustain her.

Since her chance meeting with the Marquis and her sight of his unguarded face, Rosalba had made up her mind to the fact that he was not kind or good, but that he wanted her as men want women, and he should have her when she was married. To be torn to pieces by him would be a perfection of love. Last night, a fellow Maid of Honour had told Rosalba the facts of sex, and at first she had been horrified. She still could not bear to think of the act in connection with Mr Marling, she still panicked like a baby when she thought of it. But it seemed to her that to be used in that way by Meriel would be a terrible, but draining, wonderful martyrdom, like being beaten by him. She did not want kindness, she was no longer a little girl. Rosalba blushed and wriggled when she remembered that a month ago she had had daydreams about becoming Marchioness of Westmarch, or in wicked moments, about becoming the mistress whom Meriel kissed and adored.

She had been told by other young ladies at Castle West that no man in the world really liked innocent country girls, but only those who were up to snuff. Very soon she, Rosalba, would be fully up to snuff, and she thought she would use every discreet, smiling, long-approved art to seduce Meriel Longmaster. If he was charmed by her now, he would be far more so then: but she had changed and aged so much already, in two months, that she was afraid of losing her looks as well as her gaucheness before the
end of the summer. If Mr Marling had his way, she would be in the country by then, and she would never come back to Castle West, except, perhaps, if one of her daughters were to spend a season as a Maid of Honour to Marchioness Berinthia.

He meant her to grow into a plump and dowdy squire’s wife, given to gossip but never to fantasy. She would have turned dowdy to please Meriel with all her heart had he wished it: she believed she had no wishes of her own.

Moving her lips in an imaginary conversation with Meriel, Rosalba picked off some of the fat buds which sprouted on the old growth of the vine. Then she heard the chapel clock three courts away striking half past four. “Oh, no!” she cried, her thoughts reduced to nothing. She would be late for her aunt, who had wanted to see her in Usher’s Court some time before Mr Marling was due to arrive.

As she ran through the gardens to her aunt’s lodging, and climbed up the narrow stair, she thought how terrible it was to be young, and trapped, and female, and unable to speak one’s love, and her last thought as she opened the door of the frowsty pink drawing-room was: If only I were a man! She had never had that wish before, even as a child, and she found it shocking, for she was a normal girl.

“Rosalba, my love!” said Mistress Philoclea.

At the ‘my love’ Rosalba, feeling a catch in her throat, looked round for Mr Marling — but he had not yet arrived. Instead, a large, blonde woman was sitting on the window seat, talking with her aunt.