The Shadowcutter (29 page)

“I am going to speak to the house agent,” he said. “Since you have been hospitable, in asking my wife and myself to stay, sir, I will give up the house here today.” Lord Rothborough inclined his head graciously. “We were only supposed to be there another week, after all. When this business at Holbroke is done, we will go straight back to Northminster and not impose on you any longer.”

“It is no imposition at all. You must take your full furlough with us. Maria will not forgive me if I let you take Mrs Vernon away any earlier that is strictly necessary. The place agrees with her. Last night at dinner – well, you will not mind me saying this, I hope – she was on sparkling form! And her playing – quite beautiful. ”

Major Vernon took his leave and Felix was left alone with Lord Rothborough.

“I’ve just remembered something,” Felix said, and went running from the room after Major Vernon. He chased him halfway down the stairs.

“I think I should speak to him about Dona Blanca,” Felix said. “It seems only fair.”

“Yes, perhaps,” said Major Vernon.

“Perhaps?” said Felix.

“I don’t know quite what I should say to you,” Major Vernon said. “I’m sorry. It is an extraordinary situation. But yes, perhaps you should warn him that she is here. It could be a great embarrassment for them both otherwise.”

“That is what I thought,” Felix said, and went back.

This was not true. Sparing Lord Rothborough humiliation had not crossed his mind. He was overflowing with questions and accusations. The subject was an immense one, like a great, stormy ocean which had to be navigated in a gravy boat.

“What was that about?” said Lord Rothborough when he returned.

Felix sat down at his place.

“Dona Blanca,” he said, and reached for the glass of wine which he had not previously touched.

“Ah yes,” Lord Rothborough smiled. “I had hoped to hear more on that subject. Major Vernon was tight-lipped. I wonder why.”

“Because she is my mother,” Felix said, thinking there was nothing to be lost by being anything but blunt. “Or at least, she implied she was. Just before you arrived.”

“Good God,” he said rather quietly. “What did she say?”

“I told her I remembered her – which I do. The other day, when I saw her before Don Xavier was buried, we had the strangest passage together, and I thought I knew her,” Felix said. “And when I saw her again today, I was sure of it. I knew her in Paris. So I said so. And she was affected by my presence and she knew my name. The first time I saw her, and she heard my name, she reacted to it. It was impossible not to see that. And then today, when I said I was barely two when I left Paris, she said I was exactly two years and two weeks and when I asked if she had cared for me after my mother abandoned me, and she said she had not –”

“What? Slow down, Felix.”

“She said: ‘I did not abandon you. I gave you to him.’ What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Lord Rothborough.

“You don’t know?” said Felix. “Of course you do! You were there. You said that she abandoned me, and she flatly denied it.”

Lord Rothborough covered his eyes with his hand and murmured, “Dear God in Heaven.” He exhaled. “Irish, you said.”

“Yes.”

“Her name was Blanche Halloran. Blanca I suppose would be the Spanish form. She may have adopted it when she married Martinez. If this is she, of course.”

“Why would she claim it, if she is not?”

“To blackmail me, of course!” said Rothborough. “And, if she is who she says, there is still no end of trouble she could make if she is so inclined. She is very good at trouble, I can tell you that for nothing, Felix, before you allow yourself to be carried away on a tide of sentiment. She has come here to make mischief, there is no doubt of that. How else would she know who you were? She did not know to whom I intended to give you. She has found that out, the little schemer. An excellent tactician, a power behind the throne – well, it makes perfect sense! Blanche, oh God, Blanche!”

He got up from the table and began to pace the room.

“She was young and still utterly beautiful when we parted. There is no reason that she could not still have made a respectable marriage. She had an enterprising nature after all.” He shook his head. “Don Luiz even told me it was her idea that they came to Stanegate. He had never heard of the place! She arranged the whole thing to see you. We shall have to be careful, Felix, very careful indeed.”

“I do not see it like that. She was genuinely upset,” Felix said. “She regretted being so unguarded. She apologised to me and ran away the moment Major Vernon said you were coming. She was in tears.”

“She can cry to order. I have seen her do that on many occasions.”

“You saw it over twenty years ago!” Felix said. “What do you know of her now?”

“I know that she cannot have come here except to cause us trouble,” Lord Rothborough said.

“I do not believe that. I think she has trouble all of her own – to do with those Santa Magdaleans. She gave me some documents to look after and she was insistent that Don Luiz should know nothing about it. She struck me as quite genuine and troubled by her brother-in-law’s death, which was odd enough in the first place.”

“She has got her hooks into you, then,” said Lord Rothborough, with a sigh.

“And you are as bitter as if were yesterday!” Felix said.

“Of course. What she did to you was appalling. I cannot see how you do not feel it.”

“I know it,” Felix said. “But seeing her, I do not feel it. She was adamant that she gave you to me.”

“That is a form of words. That is all. It is no defence!” he said. “I know what happened. It was shocking.”

“I want to speak to her,” Felix said going to the writing table in the corner of the parlour and sitting down. He took a piece of paper and picked up the pen. “I shall send for her. We will have this out for once and for all. She has a right to defend herself to me. I want to know the truth of it.”

“I have always told you the truth, Felix,” said Lord Rothborough. “Please, I beg you, do not write to her.”

Felix sat with the pen in hand.

“Your truth,” he said. “Not hers. I looked her in the eyes, and she was – it was as if she were in pain. And I felt –” He looked round to where Rothborough was standing, his hands gripping the back rail of a chair, his head bowed. He, too, looked as if he were in pain. “If you really do not want me to, sir,” he said, putting down the pen.

There was a long silence and then Lord Rothborough straightened himself and came over to the writing table. He laid his hand on Felix’s shoulder.

“Write to her,” he said. “Let us get this over with.”

-0-

She came, an awkward hour or so later, during which Felix pretended to read a newspaper. Lord Rothborough astonished him by reading his own newspaper with a great deal more attention, to the extent of making occasional notes in his memorandum book as he scanned the dense columns. Felix admired his self-control. He wished he did not feel awash with sentiment.

“You look well, Blanche,” Lord Rothborough said, when she had come in.

“And so do you, Will.”

Felix had never heard anyone address Lord Rothborough by his Christian name, let alone this diminutive.

“Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.”

He sat at one end of the table, she at the other, Felix between them. A servant brought in tea and put the tray down in front of Dona Blanca. She drew off her gloves, and the silence thickened as the tea brewed.

“I honestly do not know where to begin,” Lord Rothborough said.

“Nor I,” she said. “I could pour the tea.”

“Yes, why not?”

She began to pour, and after a moment Lord Rothborough said, “I remember how you said that your mother would not let you make the tea after dinner. It was always your older sister who did so. And I got a Wedgwood set for you, in Paris, and had tea sent from London, so you could make it for me. And we would take our tea and pretend, like the children we were. Tea was a symptom of our foolishness.”

“Yes,” she said, “indeed. I kept that set for many years. I took it to Santa Magdalena.”

“You are spinning tales.”

“No. A few cups and plates remain. At least they did before I left. I could not bring them with me.”

Lord Rothborough was shaking his head.

“That cannot be true.”

“It is. I swear to God.”

“You lied to me so often,” he said. “It was part of who you were, to deceive me.”

“No, no,” she said, softly. “Not so very often. But yes, sometimes, yes. I was so young.”

“Sixteen.”

“Yes, and in a trap. A terrible trap.”

“I did not trap you.”

“No, but it was a trap for us both. That world. That way of being. We tried to defy it. I thought we had, for a while, but then...” She broke off and took up the sugar tongs, and dropped a small bit of sugar into one of the cups. “That is right, isn’t it?” she said, and offered the cup to him.

“Yes,” he said, but he frowned as he took the cup. He sat down again, and stirred in the sugar, and said, “I wonder how it might have been if I had met you in Ireland, when you were still in your mother’s drawing room, not being allowed to make the tea.”

“You would never have been there.”

“Your people were respectable enough.”

“Only because they chose to be, and then it was always a struggle. That drawing room was smaller than this room. What would you have been doing there? My father was a Roman Catholic attorney, and not a good one, with too many children and a terrible taste for the whiskey. Our paths could not have crossed. Paris was the only place in the world where we could have met.”

“Until now,” Lord Rothborough said.

“Well, this is no accident,” she said. “That is the truth of it. But,” and now she turned to Felix, “I had only meant to see you from a distance. That was all I intended.”

“What do you mean?” Felix said.

“I meant only to go and look at you from a distance. I just wanted to see what you looked like. It always haunted me, that idea, and after my husband died and we came back to Europe, it was so much worse, that longing to see you. I knew you were in Northminster. I had made enquiries, and I meant only to go there and see if I could catch sight of you. I thought I might see you at church or some such, and that would be enough. And then I could go back. But then you walked in and told me that Xavier was dead and ever since, well, I don’t know!”

“You made enquiries?” Lord Rothborough said.

“Yes. I have done, over the years. Discreetly. I did not wish my husband to know. He knew nothing of my former life, and I did not want to disillusion him. He had such faith and trust in me.”

“And yet you lied to him, as you did to me.”

“A different sort of lie. One big one, instead of a lot of silly ones. I treated you better, I suppose, or perhaps you were better at getting the truth out of me. I tried to lie to you, and play the game, but you got it out of me. You read me right every time, Will, and you are reading me now.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Your behaviour – I can’t begin to comprehend it. You have puzzled me for a very long time. And what is this nonsense about wishing to see him from a distance?”

“Not nonsense,” she said, with a shake of her head. “What if one of your girls had been whisked away, Will, and you never saw her again? Would you not be wondering, thinking that you might –”

“Whisked away!” exclaimed Rothborough getting up, and leaning across the table. “Ah, now we are getting to it. Whisked away? How dare you imply such a thing! You left this apparently precious object, that you have been having all these fancies about, playing at the feet of half a dozen of the most expensive whores in Paris, remember! You left him, without a word to tell me what had happened or why, in that appalling place while you galloped away with that fat German prince who you told me, only three days before, was the most repulsive man alive!”

“I surrendered him because I wanted him to have a decent life!” she said, jumping up. “I knew that you would do the best for him, that you loved him and with you he stood a chance of something better. I pretended I did not care. I always fancied myself as an actress – I think it was the best performance I ever gave in my life. I nearly convinced myself. And I knew you wouldn’t stay with us forever, despite everything you said. You would go back and get married and that would be that. You made promises to me that were not promises, in truth.”

“I meant every word!”

“But it would not have been possible. I think you knew that even as you told me you would never leave: that your leaving would one day be inevitable. So I thought I would get it all over with as soon as I could. I would move on, find another protector while I still had my looks and my charm. I had my future to think of. I knew you would do your duty by our son,. So I gave him to you. And it was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life.” She turned to Felix. “There hasn’t been a day since, that I haven’t longed to see you, to know what you were doing. And your birthday – that was the hardest day of the year. And not even Juan knew, and of course he was very disappointed that I didn’t give him children, although he took care to conceal it. How could I tell him I had a son already? It would have broken his heart to know what I had once been. It’s a stain that can’t be washed out, not matter what you do. No matter how hard you try.”

Lord Rothborough sat down rather heavily.

“Then why on earth did you not leave some hint of this?” he said. “Even the those wretched women who leave their children in the Foundling Hospital try to leave a keepsake. You simply left him, like a piece of spoilt meat on the side of your plate! In a brothel, Blanche! What were you thinking?”

“I wanted him to be free of me. Not to have the burden of knowing he had a whore for a mother! What a fool I was to think that you would honour my silence!”

“What the devil was I supposed to do?” Rothborough said, getting up from his chair and striding over to where she stood. “Construct some senseless narrative about a smiling angel in heaven? Is that what I was supposed to do? Good God, Blanche! After that, how could I? A man needs to know who he is and where he is from, even when the circumstances are unfortunate ones. I was not going to lie to him about it. What precedent would that have set if I had lied about it? Mr and Mrs Carswell were in complete agreement with me. He was always to know. I have read of similar cases where the facts have been concealed and the results have been most unhappy for the individual concerned.”