The Marquis of Westmarch (8 page)

“To
me
,” he said, “your lack of fortune matters not a jot.”

“I daresay I do have some romantical notions,” said Rosalba, “but I hope I am not missish, sir.”

He thought how much older than sixteen she looked at this moment, and said, “Well, well, you are very young, after all, my dear, and I assure you I take no account of your fancies. And so you don’t hold me in aversion! What do you say to an immediate announcement, eh?”

“I don’t —” Rosalba heard her aunt’s footsteps on the stairs and from fear of her and her unguessed ambitions, tiredness and a longing for some kind of peace, she turned to Mr Marling. “Very well,” she whispered.

Now she would never grow into an old maid, the companion of her frustrated aunt who, if her secret schemes for marrying her to some richer better man came to nothing, would reproach her everlastingly for not taking Mr Marling.

“And I hope we can be married in Month of Roses. There, my dear!” He squeezed her hands between his own; both hands, not one as at the start of their private talk.

“As you wish, sir.” Her aunt seemed to have paused on the stairs. “And I don’t wish to stay here — I don’t —”

“Why, we’ll say the twelfth, then!”

“Yes, Mr Marling!”

Marling pulled her towards him and kissed her hard on the mouth, making her squeak under the coarse pressure of his lips. He released her. Marquis, she thought, as Mistress Philoclea came back into the room, and saw her standing there, with Mr Marling politely clasping her hand.

A smoking lamp lit the tap-room at the Green Garter, and two red fires, lit to warm the many passengers who had alighted from the public barge, filled it with damp heat. As soon as they walked in, the noise of clamouring, banging, laughter and complaints hit Meriel and Auriol so hard that drenched as they were by the rain which had pursued them all along the post-road, for a moment or two they could hardly concentrate on what they wanted. They had entered by the first door they found, and they saw at once that this was not their place at all.

Auriol’s height soon drew attention to them, for his head almost touched the room’s stained ceiling. Someone called out, “Ho there, landlord, don’t you see there’s Quality come to join us? Don’t see the gentleman, eh,
I
don’t know why, he’s big enough for a sideshow at the fair, he is!” There were guffaws at this.

Meriel noticed that Auriol was angered, unreasonably angered, and she thrust herself in front of him.

“Landlord!” she said as the man turned and came hurrying up. “There was a private parlour bespoken for Knight Auriol Wychwood. Do you show us to it directly, if you please.”

“Yes your honour, indeed there was! Knight Auriol Wychwood, indeed!” the landlord said, bowing to Meriel.

“I am Wychwood,” said Auriol, putting himself forward. He took off his hat, and shook it so that water bespattered the floor.

“Yes, your honour.” He led the way across the room. “Now do you come on out this nasty, low taproom, sir, you’ll find the coffee-room
very
quiet. And your parlour, to be sure! Any port in a storm, they say, and that door is closest to the stables, I can’t deny.” He glanced behind him, to see whether he ought to
apologise for the drunken insolence of the man in the taproom, or to pretend he had not heard.

“Exactly so,” said Auriol, looking cold but not threatening.

The Green Garter was a very large inn, employing thirty people and catering chiefly for the rich. It was a long and narrow, grey-stone building, conveniently placed both for travellers on the post-road and for the end of the Northmarch Canal. The house was famous for its comfortable rooms, its excellent food, and its high prices.

The private parlour assigned to Meriel and Auriol was a little room, furnished with cherrywood and painted blue. It had small windows and a ceiling nearly as low as the taproom’s, but bad paintings and an elegant fireplace had been introduced to raise it above the common. Logs were burning in the grate, and there was a vase of daffodils and green tulip-buds beneath one brightly twilit window. The recent, heavy shower had passed over out to sea.

The room was warm and dry, the walls were thick, and the door was solid. As soon as Meriel and Auriol had been divested of their outer clothes, they were left alone there, to recover from their encounter with the world of other people which, as they chased each other along the road, knowing that they needed a rest from emotion, light and warmth and food, they had never expected to be such a shock.

Meriel was thankful that she had been the first to take control in the tap-room. Her doing so proved that despite her confession, her love and her loss of control, she was the same person she had been three hours before.

“I wish you might know how vastly disagreeable it is to be a giant and to attract the attention of the vulgar,” was Auriol’s first remark. He kicked the logs in the fireplace and sparks flew out.

Meriel said, “I think I understand well enough what it is to be subjected to unwanted remark, sir. My affairs are of interest to all the world, I think you forget.”

“Being so large has made my life well-nigh intolerable.”

For a few seconds, they listened to the loud ticking of the pendulum clock on the wall, which was as big in proportion to the room as was Auriol.

“If you had not been so very large I would scarcely have dared to — say all I have said to you,” Meriel told him slowly, deliberately
going back, in this new setting, to their improbable conversation on the beach. “I know well enough how men dislike very tall — females. No man of common size would forgive me for being six foot one, whatever else he might forgive me.”

“Very true,” said Auriol, gazing into the fire with his boot on the fender.

Now she longed for him to change, to be loving, even to protect her from her violent self.

“Wychwood …” she said in a threatening voice, which then broke. “Were I to have lived as a female, what should have become of me? Do you think I would have been a whit less outrageously noticeable than you are?” She thumped the table.

Suddenly, he turned and slowly smiled. “Westmarch, Meriel, you are a terrifying creature.”

“I hope not, sir, to you,” she stammered. Meriel was sweating and shaking, because she had never expected his reaction, his smile, to mean quite so much to her. Meriel’s knowledge of ordinary life was almost nothing, but instinct told her that he might very easily have turned frigid with fear and disgust.

Auriol leant forward, grasped her fingers, and drew her towards him, and as he put his arms round her shoulders, she hugged him still more tightly than he was hugging her. Little noises escaped them both. They had no choice but to cling to each other, in the circumstances; neither could face the humiliation and danger of quarrelling to find relief for their disordered nerves, and there was no middle way. Thank God he is truly willing, thought Meriel, thank God, it was he touched me first this time, to be sure that is important.

“It will be well,” Auriol said, “all be well.”

“Yes, it will. Wychwood. My dear.”

Uneasily they separated, and at that moment the door opened. Both stared at the waiter who came in with glasses and knives as though he were a monster.

“The mistress says I’m to ask whether your honours would fancy some parsnips in sauce as a side-dish,” he said.

“Thank you, neither of us is at all fond of parsnips,” Wychwood replied, and his voice seemed to boom. They had realised at once what the man had nearly seen and heard, and they wondered how they could possibly not have thought before they
acted; but overlaying all their instant fearful thoughts was a feeling of commonplace embarrassment. Meriel was unaccustomed to that sensation.

“Good God,” muttered Auriol when the waiter had gone.

“I am glad you are sensible of what might have come of that,” Meriel said, her voice equally low.

“Sensible of it!”

Meriel tried to smile. “How I hate discretion — never thought I would forget it.”

“It is eminently necessary in our case. Do you know what the man would have thought of us?”

“Yes.” She was thinking of total and accurate revelation, he of homosexuality.

Auriol searched his pockets for his spectacles, and when he found them, began to polish them, whilst Meriel watched, leaning exhaustedly against the mantelpiece. She was longing to sit down, but felt obscurely that to do so would be a form of moral collapse.

“They will be back in a moment,” he said.

“Yes — with the parsnips.”

Their eyes met and, each adoring the other for possessing a sense of the absurd, they started helplessly to giggle. Meriel came to table and fell into her chair. They were still giggling when the waiters returned with their dinner, and they sobered up only when the two men had gone.

“Gad, what fools we are,” said Meriel at last.

“Yes, but I think we shall deal extremely,” said Auriol, wiping his eyes. “Don’t you?”

“Yes, indeed. Sir,” Meriel said, as she reached for the ham, “I wish you will talk to me about yourself. I don’t think I can endure discussing — this, Maid Rosalba, Juxon and so forth, tonight. And I wish to understand you — I know so little about your life, we have confined our talk so much to subjects of common interest. Do you understand?” There was a frown on her face, and she was concentrating hard upon carving the ham.

“Why, yes.” Auriol poured out wine for the two of them, and they drank in silence for a while. At first, neither looked at the other, but then Auriol turned his head and watched Meriel as she sipped her wine, scowled, smiled, and poked at the food. Her eyes were not on him.

He wondered how he could ever have truly supposed she was a man. Though she tried to shave, her complexion betrayed her, and so did the slimness of her wrists, the size of her feet, her long neck, and her arched forehead. Her voice, though deep for a woman’s, was high for a man’s.

Once, he had thought the Marquis’s face spoilt by its stiff and watchful expression; but her face was fully alive now, and he could perceive it as it was. The little room’s dull and flickering light made her skin gleam, and cast shadows to show up her high cheekbones and pointed chin, and the set of her not quite human eyes.

Meriel’s eyes were of an unusually pale grey, and they would have been insipid if their irises had not been rimmed with darker colour. As it was they were brilliant, slanting and sharp, and the brows above them were like black antennae, swooping up from her nose towards her red temples. The whole effect, Auriol decided, was of an elf-prince in a story-book and not of a boy, or a woman. Her other features matched those eyes, for though her nose was rather long it was very straight, and had flaring deep-cut nostrils; and her delicately curving mouth was thin and overwide. It was also highly coloured, and that made her look passionate.

Examining Meriel for the first time in the knowledge that she was a woman, Auriol was first impressed by her potential animal beauty. She had features and colouring which, depending on her mood, could make a very unpleasant face one day and a magical one the next. But when he continued to study her, he saw that her looks were on their way to being ruined by over-exertion, insufficient sleep and food, too much brandy, misery and fear.

She was hollow-cheeked, and unhealthily white, and there were dull shadows under her eyes. Soon, he could tell, tiny broken veins would begin to appear on either side of her nose. Above all, she was far too thin, and because of this she could not possibly be as strong as she seemed.

Several times in the past few months he had seen Meriel dismount trembling from one of her powerful horses, looking as though she were about to be sick, seen her staggering round with glazed eyes and ugly face after a night’s hard drinking, and each time he had felt an impulse to prevent the Marquis’s overtaxing
himself again. Now, it was quite understandable that he should have felt like that about Meriel. Now, Meriel was going to grow into real strength, health and beauty, and he would be responsible.

“Well sir, you are looking at me!”

Auriol jumped. “Yes — thinking you might have been a nonpareil, you’ve something more than beauty.”

“Gammon, Wychwood.”

“As it is, you drink too much.”

She was surprised. “Thank you, sir, I will engage myself to drink any man under the table without feeling any the worse.”

“That’s not my meaning. I know you can do that, I’ve seen it. But it is not good for you.”

“Propriety, Wychwood? It ain’t the thing? Do I not conduct myself as a well-bred female should? Is that what you mean?” Meriel lifted her eyebrows.

“Good God, no!” He was quite angry. “I mean you’ll drink yourself to death one of these days — perhaps that’s been your intention.”

“Perhaps it has. Sir, I thought you was to talk with me about yourself. Don’t think I am not devilish obliged to you for your solicitude.”

“Oh, are you? Well — no, we must not quarrel.”

“No,” said Meriel. “It would be the merest irritation of the nerves.”

They ate.
A
nonpareil
, thought Meriel, my God.

“Have you always been lonely, Wychwood?” she said lightly five minutes later.

He was grateful to her for being the first to raise the subject of himself. “How did you guess that I was lonely?”

“Oh, I have suffered myself, you know, and I’m well able to see when a man is not perfectly at ease in company, dislikes the generality of his acquaintance — something in the eyes — you live in the world but are not of it, as they say, like myself.”

“No, indeed. Yes, I suppose I have been lonely very nearly all my life, as you have been — except that is in the last few months of my marriage, before she died.”

“Your wife, sir, Maid Clorinda? What was she like?”

“Delicate,” he said briefly. “She made me feel clumsy as the devil. At first, I was afraid to approach her for days for fear I
might break her in two, or some such nonsense.” Auriol slowly tore a piece of bread to pieces with his large handsome hands. There was an unhappy smile on his face.

“Did she wish to marry you?”

“No, our parents made the match, her own wish was to enter a Female College — or so she used to say.”

“Was it! My own greatest fear — I should not object in the least to being garrotted if ever I were found out, but the thought of being confined in a college as Juxon says is a deal more likely — and so she was bookish, I collect?” said Meriel, returning with difficulty to her friend’s affairs.

“Yes, she was. Well, we grew to be fond of each other — in alliance against my father and my brother, I think. I never was in love with her, but she was a friend,” he said.

As I am, thought Meriel. “I see. She died in childbirth, I think you once told me?”

“She did and the child with her.”

“A hateful thing.”

“Here,” said Auriol, “I have her miniature inside my watch.” He took the watch out of his pocket, opened it and handed it to Meriel. Both had a rest, while Meriel examined the little oval face depicted on the inside cover.

Clorinda Blandy Wychwood, she thought, must have been a stern, determined woman, for all her fragility. Her miniature showed hooded grey eyes, a thin nose, a square jaw, and an unusually high forehead, all surrounded by wispy, curling, flaxen hair which did not seem to match her features. She looked like a wise child.

“She was determined to hate me at our first meeting,” said Auriol reminiscently, rubbing his chin. “The Blandys had tried to marry her off twice before but she would have none of it, so they forced her into this vastly inferior match with me. I remember we avoided each other whenever possible for weeks — I was a young fool in those days, wanted nothing so much as to marry the innkeeper’s daughter.”