The Misbegotten (64 page)

‘Good idea.’ Their voices made a bird clap its wings in the leaves overhead. ‘You know, Starling, when I marry Jonathan, he will be your brother.’

‘He will?’

‘Of course. You’re my sister, so he will be your brother. Do you know what that means?’ Alice glanced down at Starling, swinging her arm in time with their languorous strides. ‘It means no harm can ever come to you. It means you will always be looked after, and kept safe.’

‘But having you for my sister means that already, doesn’t it?’

‘I wish it did, dearest.’ Alice turned her face to the moon; she was grey and silver, bathed in its light. ‘But women alone are never safe. Not truly. It is the men who rule us that decide it all.’

‘Are we not safe at Bathampton, then? You and me and Bridget?’ Starling was troubled by this news.

‘We are safe. But only because of Lord Faukes, and his good grace. Do you see? But when I am wed to Jonathan, then he will be our
family.
And that is the safest thing of all,’ said Alice. Starling thought about this for a moment.

‘A brother like him would be a good thing,’ she decided. ‘When will you marry him?’

Alice chuckled. ‘Just as soon as I can.’

In the distance a dog barked, and they heard the clatter of a gate latch closing. Alice sighed. ‘As soon as he is free, and it can be no secret, and be celebrated instead. People like him are rare, I think – people in whom the goodness runs right through. People like that should be cherished,’ she said. Starling felt a little guilty as she considered this.

‘
I’m
not like that,’ she confessed, sombrely.

‘Nor I. But we that aren’t can always strive to be. And you and I can cherish each other regardless, can’t we?’ said Alice, putting her arm around Starling’s shoulders again. They reached the George Inn, and turned along the towpath to take them back to the farmhouse. The more that Starling thought about it, the more she wanted it. She pictured life after Alice was wed, and it looked like a wide, open space in which there was freedom, and peace, and no more warnings in the back of her head. A place full of Alice’s smiles, and Jonathan’s pleasing laughter. ‘I shall very much like having Mr Alleyn for my brother,’ she said quietly, as they carried on towards home through the warm, unhurried night.

By February, the three of them were ready to leave Bath. The weather had set fair, though the air was still freezing; the sun was richer, softer, seemed finally to hold the promise of a spring not too far away. With the furniture sold from the house on Abbeygate Street, Rachel watched her trunk loaded onto a cart that creaked and clattered away, just five months after it had arrived.
But how much longer it seems. A lifetime.
The cart would go on ahead of them to the new house near Shaftesbury, a market town snug in the rolling, wooded hills of Dorset. It had taken time to find a house to rent, and for Rachel to settle her husband’s affairs. There was little of the business left to sell once the main part had been set against Richard’s debts, left here and there all over Bath. At inns and gambling halls; with his tailor; with their landlord. The remainder of his stock, and his account books, were sold to a rival. Duncan and Richard Weekes lay side by side in the dank little cemetery on the southern edge of the city. Rachel had been there a few times over the winter, to say a prayer and lay flowers on their graves.
Would I come to the son if the father did not lie beside him?
Perhaps she would, she decided, compelled by the guilty heart of a wife who did not grieve, if nothing else.

Once the cart was out of sight Rachel went upstairs to the kitchen-cum-parlour and listened for a while. Through the walls and ceilings came all the usual muffled sounds, of voices and footsteps, scrapes and thuds, snatches of song. The shutters were closed, but a shaft of sunshine eased between them and cut across the floor. Rachel stood in the light and felt its feeble warmth.
Soon there will be nothing of either of us here but the dust we leave.
She was glad of it, she could not wait to go; and yet she felt the need to observe the moment, and not let it pass unheeded. She shut her eyes and imagined how different everything would have been if she had not, by pure chance, resembled Alice Beckwith.
I would have stayed at Hartford, unwed all my life. Or I would have lived here, married to a man made miserable by his own guilt and failings. And he would have beaten me for it, and ruined us with bad debt. I would never have known Jonathan, or Starling. Or happiness.
And the city of Bath would go on just as it ever had, and the troubles and laughter of the lives all around would carry on seeping through the walls, and she would have no part in any of it, from that day. Her boot heels were loud on the wooden boards as she left the house at last, locking it behind her and handing the key to the landlord’s clerk.

At number one, Lansdown Crescent, the carriage and four was waiting in the side alley, and Falmouth was overseeing a pair of boys as they loaded and secured an array of boxes and trunks.

‘I’ll have that one inside with me,’ Starling told Falmouth, as Rachel approached. ‘Oh, never mind. I’ll put it in myself,’ she muttered, taking her own dowdy bag from the frigid butler and climbing up into the carriage.

‘You should let them do it, Starling. You’re not a servant any more,’ said Rachel, smiling. Starling rolled her eyes.

‘I am as I ever was – pitched halfway between gutter and gentry, and owned by neither one,’ she said, climbing down again, putting her hands on her hips. She wore her plain servant’s dress, but the work apron that normally covered it was gone. Her coppery hair was hidden beneath the only good hat she owned, a straw bonnet with a lilac ribbon that had previously been saved for church. ‘Your things have gone on ahead?’ she said.

‘They have. And Mr Alleyn?’

‘Around here somewhere.’ As Starling spoke, Jonathan appeared in the doorway, narrowing his eyes against the light. The cut on his head, from his fall on the common, was a faint red line.
A reminder I’ll always have, of how wrong it is possible to be.

‘Mrs Weekes,’ he said, coming carefully down the steps. His lame leg had grown stronger, as he used it more, but stairs were still hazardous. He gripped the railings tightly, but refused to use a cane. He did not smile; there were still shadows under his eyes, and he was as pale as ever.
Come the summer that will change
.

‘Mr Alleyn, are you well?’

‘Tolerably.’ He took her hand and kissed it.

‘You have not slept,’ she said.

‘No. But tonight I will, I think. In a strange and blameless room.’ He smiled briefly; kept hold of her hand. ‘Are you ready, my dear Mrs Weekes?’ he said quietly.

‘I am, sir. I have been to see Captain and Mrs Sutton, to take my leave.’ At mention of them, Jonathan’s face darkened. Rachel squeezed his arm. ‘I told them we would write to them soon. And I . . . I would speak with your mother, if I may. Just a word of farewell.’

‘You will not find it a fond one.’

‘No. I do not expect to.’

Rachel found Josephine Alleyn in the grand front parlour, in the exact place she’d been when Rachel first saw her – standing in the window by the now empty canary cage.
Why does she not remove it, or get another bird?
She was wearing a severe dress of midnight blue, long-sleeved and high at her neck; a swaddling of darkness to show her displeasure.

‘Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel, determined not to be cowed by her composure, or the chill that radiated from her.

‘Oh, leave me be, can you not? You come to gloat, I assume.’ The older lady kept her face to the window, as if determined to turn her back to everything that went on that day.

‘No, madam.’

‘No? And how long was your husband in the ground before you became engaged to my son?’ She spoke savagely.

‘Scant weeks indeed, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Rachel, evenly. ‘But I need not answer for it to you, I think, who’d kept Richard Weekes in thrall all his life.’ At this Josephine turned at last, with a wintery smile.

‘Yes. It was I that had his heart, not you. It was never you.’

‘And you are welcome to it, madam.’ Rachel heard her voice shake; she took a slow breath to steady it. ‘To the memory of it, anyway.’

‘What do you
want
, Mrs Weekes? Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you stolen my son from me – and isn’t that enough?’

‘Can you not be happy, that he wishes to move on? That he starts to forget his pain, and has a chance of happiness now?’

‘I shall never be happy to be separated from him. If that is all you came in to say, then leave me in peace and get you gone. It pleases me no end to know I will never see your face again.
That
face.’

‘I pray you might,’ Rachel said quietly, and Josephine frowned. ‘What I came to say is this: I know the pain of losing family. I know the loneliness of believing yourself separated from them for ever. I know how you must . . . suffer, now.’

‘And you delight in it?’ Josephine whispered, shaking with feeling in spite of herself.

‘I do not. Jonathan . . . your son knows loss and suffering too. You told me he hadn’t the strength for it, and that was why he did not heal, but you were wrong. He only needed some way to set it down, and break from it. He will always remember it, but his anger will burn itself out. I believe he will forgive you, in the end; and I will try my best on your behalf. I will try to remind him of how greatly you have suffered, and how greatly you suffer still.’

For a long time Josephine only stared at her. A tremor passed through her, a shiver of pain, or revulsion, Rachel couldn’t tell.

‘Leave me be,’ Josephine whispered.

‘It will take time – he needs time. But I will not forget, I promise you. Family is too precious a thing to set aside.’

‘I wish you had never come here. I wish that wretch Starling had never convinced me to let you in!’ Josephine spat.

‘But she did, and now all can move on. I hope . . . I hope one day your anger will also burn itself out, Mrs Alleyn. Or you risk that it consume you utterly. I . . . I will write to you, if you wish it.’

‘Mrs Weekes, I have never once got any of the things I wished for.’ With that, Josephine turned back to the window, her shoulders rigid above her straight spine, draped in inky darkness. She was a silhouette against the sunlight; a single still figure, like the drawing of a woman, all hollow inside.

‘Farewell, Mrs Alleyn,’ Rachel murmured, dropping into a curtsy that nobody saw.

Outside, Jonathan handed her up into the carriage. He frowned at her serious expression but did not ask what had passed between his betrothed and his mother. Starling sat perched on the edge of the leather bench inside, looking desperately uncomfortable, as though she ought not to have been there at all. When Sol Bradbury appeared on the servants’ stair, she swore and climbed out again, rushing over to the cook and hugging her. Once she was back and seated the coachman stirred up the horses, and Starling turned to look back at the house, craning her head out of the window. Jonathan did not look back, and neither did Rachel. He gripped her hand so tightly it was almost uncomfortable, and kept his eyes set straight ahead. Rachel felt Josephine’s sorrowful scrutiny like a cold shadow behind them.

‘We must stop in Bathampton,’ said Starling, as Lansdown Crescent passed out of view behind them. ‘I must see Bridget.’

The carriage waited at the side of the Batheaston road. Jonathan and Rachel stood on the miller’s bridge, against the parapet; looking west, downstream along the river. The sunlight on the water was blinding, the sky too bright to make out the edge of Bath. Below, along the riverbank, the lovers’ tree stood where it ever had; a little older, a little more gnarled. It trailed its long fingers in the water, and didn’t feel the chill. Rachel had imagined it as a more graceful tree, and further from the road, out of sight of passers-by. Perhaps in some secret dell somewhere. She looped her arm through Jonathan’s, and waited for him to speak.

‘I scratched out our initials. I wish I had not,’ he said, shielding his eyes with one hand. ‘I remember it now.’

‘Your initials?’

‘Mine and Alice’s. An A and a J. We made them when we were ten years old – painstakingly, I might add. It took me hours to do. When I found the note there, after she vanished . . . I took out my knife there and then and destroyed the carving.’

‘Richard Weekes’s note, it must have been,’ Rachel said softly. Jonathan glanced at her.

‘Would it upset you to see it?’

‘You have it? I thought it lost?’

‘So it was. I found it as I emptied my rooms. It had fallen through a split in one of the drawers of my desk, and was caught beneath it all this time.’ He handed it to her; a small square of paper, yellowed with age. She knew the writing at once, and thought of the letters Richard had written her when they were courting, all full of love and promises. That crabbed hand with each letter drawn separately, laboriously. She’d burnt them all, in one bundle and without feeling, as she’d packed up her own few things. ‘Is it his hand?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Yes.’ Rachel nodded. ‘Of course it is.’ He took the note back and looked down at it, frowning; it fluttered in his fingers.

‘One day, only,’ he said softly. ‘She went to meet him for the last time the morning before my return. I missed her by just a single day.’

He read the note once more and then let the breeze take it. The paper vanished into the sunlight; they glimpsed it further downstream – a yellow fragment, hurrying away. The breeze rattled the winter trees beside the bridge; the river made a quiet slithering sound. Behind them the sluice gates were closed, the race dry, and the mill wheel sat silent and still.

‘Your eyes are sad, love. Tell me your thoughts,’ said Jonathan. ‘Are you sorry to leave Bath behind?’

‘No. How could I be?’ Rachel smiled, tightening her arm around his. ‘I was thinking again, as I have before, how strange it was God gave me this face. Gave it to Abi and me, and also to Alice.’

‘But it is not the same face. Similar, but not the same. When I first set eyes on you, I saw Alice, but I was mad and addled then. I saw what I wanted to see. Now when I look at you, I see only Rachel.’ He reached up, brushed his thumb across her cheek. ‘It is this woman that I love, and she is very different to the girl I loved before. And I like to think it was fate, besides.’