‘Für Elise’ … did he remember, that formidably handsome man seated in the dusk behind her? Did he ever think of it, ever think of the time when he had been carelessly in love, had carelessly wounded and hurt, and nearly destroyed? Nicole’s fingers stayed with the haunting little rhythm, hoping that she would wake and shake him from the vast, cruel carelessness. She was playing too against her own hurt and pain of that morning, the rejection of the love she had offered Lloyd Fenton, the carelessness that she also had shown. She had thought love could be taken up for a time, and set aside, and taken up, again, and Lloyd Fenton had taught her that it could not be. Not all things were forgiven in love, as he had not forgiven her. So she was alone, and desperately lonely in this enormous emptiness left after her only love had gone. It was stupid, this feeling of aloneness, but it was there. At her age she should have been in and out of love half a dozen times. And she had loved only once, and now that love had gone. She knew that she would marry David Ashleigh; she wished she loved him, but she did not. She had waited too long for Lloyd Fenton, and he had come and gone as quickly as the summer.
She was thinking of herself then, Anna almost forgotten, the fingering of ‘Für Elise’ automatic, when John Ashleigh’s hand was laid fiercely on her bare shoulder. Looking up she could see in the mirror now only the whiteness of his shirt-front and the shimmering white of her dress.
‘Stop it! Stop that god-damn thing!’
She kept on. ‘Don’t you like it, Lord Manstone?’
He brushed aside the taunting question. ‘In God’s name, who are you? Has she sent you? Has she?’
The darkness was almost complete. She took her hands off the keys. His own hand fell away from her shoulder. She looked up at him, face pale in the dusk, the golden hair turning silver, as handsome as she had believed her mother’s love would be.
‘You remember her, then? Anna Tenishevna? She was ‒ is of course, my mother. No, she isn’t dead, as David believes. No, she didn’t send me. She didn’t send me here. She sent me to learn to become English, in a way she never could be. I’ll tell it all to you some day. And some day she’ll know that I have come back to the place where you brought her. You brought her here, and then you let her go. You did nothing to stop her going, offered her no comfort in that misery. Now you, Lord Manstone, are going to see your only child married to her only child. Strange how these things happen …’
‘You god-damned heartless little bitch! I don’t know how you’ve managed it, but you’ve done it.’
‘Yes, I’ve done it ‒ and yet I really didn’t do it. I didn’t lie in wait for David. As I said, things happen. David and I fell in the way of each other. If things had gone as I planned I would be marrying another man ‒ no, not Harry Blanchard. But the man I wanted to marry wouldn’t have me. And in his place, suddenly, was your golden, handsome, charming son. What girl wouldn’t marry him? I’ll make him a very good wife, you know.’
‘But why- why?’
‘Why?’ She half turned from him and struck an A on the piano. ‘It really needs tuning …’ She turned back. ‘Why ‒ because that is how it happened. When I tell you some time, when I tell you about Anna, and how we lived in New York, about how seriously she was hurt, you might, you just might begin to understand why I have come here. It has happened very quickly. If David had not fallen in love very quickly, it would never have happened. I couldn’t make it happen. I had almost forgotten your existence ‒ although I’m sure my mother hasn’t. I wouldn’t have done anything about the situation. Revenge is so melodramatic, isn’t it? But the man I loved turned me down ‒ and there was David. I didn’t know until this morning that David wanted to marry me. And now I know I will marry him. And I will do it with complete foreknowledge. I will live in this house. I will be its mistress. In time if I can ever find my mother, she will come here to visit. That is, if she consents to, which I really doubt. I will do all the things which you invited her to do when you asked her to marry you ‒ the things she was never permitted to do. The things you, and your mother, never let her do. Do you understand now? I have nothing to lose … so I will take your David, and I will be mistress here.’
In the darkness she saw the silver-gilt head shake. ‘No, you won’t. It’s very simple. I shall tell him. I shall tell him about Anna and myself. I shall say anything humiliating about myself that it may be necessary to say. Tell him I was crude, and cruel and mistaken. A coward. I don’t mind telling him those things. Until today I would have minded very much. No man relishes being stripped naked before his son. But I’ll do it. I’ll do anything so long as it prevents him marrying you. He has all his life before him … I won’t see it ruined by an ambitious little schemer.’
‘You’re quite wrong, Lord Manstone,’ she cut in. ‘Quite wrong. Tell David anything you like. The truth is bad enough. Will he respect your judgement any more? I really do think he has fallen in love with me in a very old-fashioned way. He’ll marry me, come hell or high water ‒ come whatever you may throw at him. After all, it wasn’t I who invited him to stay with the Milburns. I didn’t encourage him. When he first met me, he was quite sure I was going to marry Harry Blanchard. If you start making absurd accusations against me, you will only drive him to stubbornness. Being the heavy father isn’t going to make your case, Lord Manstone. In the end, you didn’t marry my mother. I sense, I believe, David will, no matter what you say, marry me.’
‘I’ll prevent it. He’s still under age.’
‘He won’t always be under age. I’ll wait. I can afford to. I’m not like my mother. I won’t be driven out. I won’t be frightened away. It is you, Lord Manstone, who will be driven away. Do you really want to lose your only child? I believe I can make that happen. I will, if you force it on me.’
‘I never believed anyone so young could be so cold-blooded.’
‘You were young ‒ and cold-blooded. I tried to excuse it ‒ she tried to excuse it. Youth and ignorance. But you shouldn’t have been so ignorant. You should have known how she would be treated by that cruel old woman outside …’ Nicole tossed her head in the direction of the open windows. ‘You exposed Anna to it all needlessly. You changed her for the rest of her life. You changed my life.’
She turned from the dark mirror-image to face him directly. ‘You know, perhaps it is rather fanciful of me to think it, but there’s a sort of inevitability about this. Perhaps I’m more Russian than I quite understand. I have a sense that this was meant to be ‒ that I was meant to be here in this place. As if I were taking her place for her. It’s as if a wheel has come full circle, yet none of us did anything to set it in motion. It started, by itself, all those years ago, when she was here. How will it finish, l wonder …?’
‘It will finish now. I won’t let it happen.’
She sighed and turned back to the piano. ‘You just can’t admit that you’re beaten. Time and circumstances have overtaken you, Lord Manstone. In our wildest imaginings none of us would have thought of this happening. Can’t you see it that way? ‒ see it, and accept it?’
‘I’ll never accept it. I’ll do my damnedest to stop it.’
She shook her head. ‘You’ll be very foolish if you do. You love your son, don’t you, Lord Manstone? Don’t force him to choose. Don’t hurt him. It isn’t necessary. I’ll be very good to David. I think I can be a good mother to our children. I have a lot of strength and energy to give if I have a purpose for giving them. David … and David’s children will have all of them. No …’ She shook her head. ‘No, I will not retreat wounded and hurt, as she was. She tried to make sure that whatever happened in my life, I would be trained, and ready. I am ready. This has happened. Accept it. Accept it now. Gracefully. You must accept it in the end.’
The tapping stick sounded on the paved walk of the terrace. ‘Why has the music stopped?’ the old woman’s voice cried to them. ‘I was enjoying it.’
‘It has grown dark, Lady Manstone.’
‘Dark? Then why don’t you have some light?’
She heard a movement behind her. In a second the sconces all round the room had been lighted; a small standard lamp beside the piano was switched on. She stared at the blanched and twisted face of the man who had confronted her across the piano. So like David’s face, but without its youth, and the splendour of its freshness. ‘And now, Lord Manstone, shall we have some more music?’
And she began on the simple, infinitely subtle shadings of a Mozart sonata.
She was aware that the tapping had ceased on the terrace outside. In a short time one of the great double doors to the Saloon opened, and David and his grandmother came into the room. Glancing up from the music, she looked at David’s face, and then, very quickly, towards Manstone. His gaze was directed towards his son with such a look of yearning that she almost was persuaded that he could risk as much as he had said he would. She thought of Anna, in this same room, and she was determined to risk as much.
She heard David’s voice. ‘Have you ever seen anything so lovely, Granny? Haven’t I been lucky to find her?’
She didn’t hear the Countess’s reply.
Chapter Six
How long was it, Nicole wondered, from the innocence of May, with the hawthorn in blossom in the hedgerows of Fenton Field, the time when she and everything about her had seemed young and carefree, to this swift dying of the summer at Lynmara? Much longer than the very few weeks that had actually passed. She had travelled much farther in time, and the days of innocence would never come back.
She stayed on at Lynmara, and it might have been possible to fall in love with David Ashleigh if she had never loved Lloyd Fenton. The days continued warm and dry, but there was a feeling of the ending of the season in the twilights that shortened, in the sound of the machinery which was already gathering the barley, the steady golden ripening of the wheat. The grass down by the river where David and she took picnics was burned and brittle. They drank chilled dry wine from the Rhine, and David said, ‘How soon can we be married?’
‘Soon ‒ very soon. As soon as summer’s over.’
‘Does that make a difference?’
She nodded. ‘I’d just like to have the last of the summer before any of the fuss begins.’ She turned to him sharply. ‘David, please let’s not let them make a big fuss of the wedding. I’d like it very simple …’
He looked at her wonderingly, grateful. ‘You really mean it? I thought all girls wanted ‒’
She silenced him by putting a finger over his lips. ‘Ssh … I’m not all girls. I’ll never be like any of the girls you’ve ever known. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Does it matter, David? Sometimes I wonder what the Countess ‒ and your father ‒ think of me. A stranger dropping out of the blue.’
‘Granny dotes on you ‒ because I do. I told you she’s spoiled me. She’s happy because I am. My father likes you. I’m sure of that. I see him watching you so much. Perhaps he wonders how I managed to get you.’
She silenced him once more. ‘Let’s never wonder about how we managed to find each other, David. It happened.’ She said the words that made him happy, and hated the lie. She watched him as he lay back in the dry yellow grass, hands behind his head, watched his smile reveal the perfect teeth. He was the golden, perfect boy, and she was cheating him. And yet how did she deny him the thing he thought he had when it was already gone, had been given, thoughtlessly, mindlessly, to Lloyd Fenton? If David did not miss it now, he never would. She vowed she would never let him miss it.
‘I suppose I’ll have to go back to Oxford. It’ll be strange, being up at Oxford, and married. I wonder if they allow that for an undergraduate? We’ll have to rent a house somewhere. Damn ‒ I hadn’t thought. I’ll have to eat in college so many nights a week. What will you do?’
She said it promptly. ‘Practise the piano, and have babies.’
The laughter broke from him. ‘How marvellous! How absolutely incredibly marvellous! How Granny will love the babies. She’s always wanted dozens around the place. It will make a difference to my father too. He seems so damn lonely at times. But babies … Nicole, you won’t mind missing all the things … the parties and all the rest?’
She gave a long look back to the great house at the top of the graduated steps of the formal garden, the house whose beauty had won her as no other thing before. ‘This house needs children.’
What she had not expected was the way she came to feel for Lynmara itself. The house seemed to reach out and possess her, like something living. A relationship grew between her and it, a personal thing that she believed had nothing to do with the feeling about Anna which had brought her here. She had not expected to love it, and yet she did, helplessly. As she walked its rooms, she felt in her being that she had done so before, that it lived in her memory like some dream which on awakening is only half-remembered. There was a sense of familiarity about it, as if she might have known it in some other time that existed before she was born.
They planned their wedding in the chapel of Lynmara. It was a small building with a square Norman tower, set some distance from the house itself in a grove of yew trees. The pieces of stained glass that remained from the thirteenth century were primitive and startlingly beautiful. It was now seldom used, and smelled of damp stone. ‘We must be married here,’ Nicole said when David showed it to her. ‘I couldn’t bear to be married any other place …’ But where would she have been married if Lloyd Fenton had asked her? She put the thought firmly aside. She must always remember that Lloyd Fenton had refused to ask her.
‘What?’ Lord Manstone said when David announced their decision. ‘You’re surely not going to give up a fashionable London wedding?’
Nicole shrugged. ‘We have so little time to get ready, and David has to get up to Oxford …’ She didn’t want him to sense how moved she had been by the sight of the chapel, nor to know the kind of emotional hold Lynmara had already taken on her. She was afraid to give him any bargaining strength, and loving ‒ loving a man or a place ‒ made one vulnerable. Let him find out later, if he ever cared to do so, how she felt about Lynmara.
Daily she walked its great rooms until they were like friends to her. There were the obvious things to admire ‒ the hammer-beam roof of the Great Hall which was said to be one of the finest in England, the collections of Turners and Constables that would have made any house notable, the splendour of the Saloon, and the more delicate beauty of the Green Room which had Fragonard panels and Louis XIV furniture. There was the Clock Room with its one hundred and twenty-three clocks, the Map Room, because some dead earl had been a member of the Royal Society and backed scientific expeditions to fabled places. The library had a ceiling thought to have been executed by one of Tiepolo’s sons from a cartoon by the master himself. There was a sense of a family having lived in, and used, this house for a very long time. She studied the faces in the family portraits. At times, in some generations, there had been numerous children. She wondered what had happened to them all. In the Victorian period there was a portrait of the old Countess when she had been young, by Sargent. Her only son was at her side. An almost identically-posed portrait of David and his mother existed ‒ both of them blonde and beautiful, but the face of Cynthia Barrington told Nicole almost nothing of her personality. A strange stillness seemed to have fallen on the Ashleighs with the advent of these two women, each with an only child, a son. It seemed to Nicole that the rooms had become too quiet because there had been too few children. There was a static quality about them, as if life had stopped and only existence continued. They almost seemed to be waiting for something to happen.
She longed then to fill them with children, to hear them laugh and quarrel, to collect butterflies and birds’ eggs, to take the beautifully bound books from the library shelves and actually read them. The clocks ticked away in the Clock Room, and it seemed that no one had listened to them for a long time.
Iris and Charles came for a hurried visit. ‘I think it’s absolutely monstrous,’ Iris said to Nicole as soon as they were in private. ‘Y
ou have turned down Lord Blanchard, and created a scandal by that. Now you are rushing headlong into a marriage with someone you scarcely know. Can you imagine what’s being said in London? Of course everyone knows you met David Ashleigh at Carrickcraig. You both left there at the same time. You came straight down here together. It really isn’t decent …’
‘I don’t care,’ Nicole said. ‘It’s right. It’s perfectly all right. Please, please, Aunt Iris, let’s not even discuss Harry Blanchard. I never could have married him. Aren’t you pleased about David …?’
‘I didn’t say I was displeased,’ Iris snapped back at her. ‘It’s just the way the thing’s being done. Why can’t you have an ordinary engagement, like any other girl? Why can’t you wait to be married until next year, until David has finished at Oxford? I’d have plenty of time to arrange ‒’
‘I’ve always thought,’ Nicole said in a dreamy fashion that she knew must infuriate Iris, ‘that the absolutely ideal wedding would be simply to get up one morning, put on a pretty dress, pick up a bunch of flowers, and stroll along to some lovely, simple, homey place like the chapel here, and just get married ‒ a few friends about, nothing else.’
‘You are wilful, stubborn, headstrong ‒ and at times, I believe, stupid. You could have a wedding any girl would remember for the rest of her life …’
‘I’m going to have that.’
‘‒ instead of which you’ve got your name in all the papers for the wrong reasons. It’s a scandal ‒ an absolute scandal!’
‘Well, then, don’t you think it’s about time we put a perfectly respectable notice in The Times that David and I are engaged? And you can invite a few carefully selected photographers down to witness the wedding of the year ‒ the simplest, the quietest, the most perfectly beautiful wedding of the year. Don’t you think Lynmara is a perfectly beautiful place? I must ask David why it’s called that. It’s an odd name for an English house …’
The Lynmara Legacy Page 24