Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  But no. No one calls after him, no one shouts his name, and, much later, no one will ask where he has gone.

  And the other watchers? Some of them, too, are frightened. Even Denton feels melancholy steal upon him; he thinks of his stiff joints, his shortness of breath, the closeness of the graveyard. Gwen, wearing her sealskin trimmed with ermine, standing next to Shawcross just as she planned, understands how expectation can be shriveled by reality.

  She had envisaged an unclouded happiness. Now her mind is troubled, rent in two by hope and panic. For the first time, today, she has questioned her own adultery. She no longer dismisses all the doubts at the back of her mind. She has admitted them; they throng. She loves Eddie; she does not love him. He loves her; he does not love her. She is a mistress; she is a mother. And now, for the first time, those two roles collide, and she fears, obscurely, some punishment.

  She has sinned. She looks at the comet and she knows it. Not erred, sinned. Eddie would laugh at the word, but for once she will not be influenced by Eddie. Nothing, she decides, can excuse what she has done. The shame of it sickens her. Again she sees herself, a child, sitting in the parlor listening to her father read from the Bible, and she knows now as surely as she ever knew then: Sin invites retribution.

  Eddie has taken her hand but she tugs it away. She will make amends, break off this affair, and she will never be tempted again. Eddie glances at her, but Gwen does not even notice. She is trying to calculate her punishment and, with a swoop of irrational terror, understands whence it will come.

  She will not be hurt—of course not. That would be too easy. No, someone she loves will be hurt. The loss will be her punishment. Frantic now, she searches the faces of the crowd for her children, her husband. Then, turning away, she stumbles back across the terrace toward the house.

  “Gwen, where are you going?” Shawcross calls. Gwen does not look back.

  “To see Steenie,” she says. “I have to see Steenie.”

  Steenie and Constance have been allowed to stay up. They are kneeling side by side at the window of the nursery. The window is wide open and they lean out over its ledge dangerously. Steenie’s face is flushed, excited; Constance’s face is pale and closed. They both stare at the sky, watch the light fade on the horizon.

  Nanny Temple, her gray hair in a pigtail down her back, well wrapped up in a red flannel dressing gown, fusses behind them. When Gwen rushes into the room and sweeps Steenie into her arms, Nanny Temple is aggrieved. The nursery is her domain.

  Gwen covers Steenie’s face with kisses. She insists that she must take him back to bed, give him his glass of milk, settle his pillows, feel his forehead, tuck the sheets and blankets up to his chin. Even then, she is inclined to linger. She remembers the nights she sat here when Steenie was ill, certain that if she left him her protection would cease and he would die. The fear of those nights is with her again; only when she is sure that Steenie is asleep, his breathing regular, will she consent to leave.

  Then, abstracted, she scarcely notices that Constance has been forgotten, and that only now is Nanny Temple insisting the child come away from the open window.

  The window is shut; the curtains are closed.

  “Time for the sandman,” Nanny says briskly.

  “Goodnight, Constance,” Gwen calls, leaving. Constance, who knows she will not sleep, allows herself to be led to her bedroom.

  “I buried a rabbit today,” she tells Nanny as she is tucked into bed.

  “Of course you did, dear,” Nanny says, extinguishing the night light. Nanny Temple (who does not like her) is well used to Constance’s lies; her policy is to ignore them.

  “It was a baby rabbit. A gray one,” Constance adds.

  “Off to dreamland,” Nanny says, and shuts the door.

  In the darkness Constance lies rigid and still. She flexes her fingers. She thinks. She hums, flatly, a metallic little tune. She waits, and after a while the albatross comes, as he comes each evening.

  Constance watches as he circles the ceiling; she listens to the slow beat of his huge white wings. This albatross is no bird of ill omen—how stupid people are. This albatross is her counselor, her friend, her guardian among the angels.

  And he is beautiful. Each day he flies to the ends of the earth and back again; each day he traverses the oceans of the world. One day he will take Constance with him—he has promised her that. She will sit on his back, and rest between his wings, as secure as a nut in a shell—and then she, too, will see the world. Constance looks forward to that. Meanwhile, she watches and she waits. Patiently.

  Downstairs, it is eleven o’clock; the chandeliers are illumined, the Cavendish drawing room glitters; Jane Conyngham is playing the piano.

  To begin with she has played the expected pieces: a tinkly waltz or two, a gentle mazurka, the kind of music a gentlewoman should play, the kind of music Jane detests and despises.

  To begin with, people were listening to her; they gathered in a circle, perhaps expecting that their hostess would join Jane at the piano, as she often does. Gwen has a sweet voice and her repertoire is designed to pluck at the heartstrings. But tonight, re-joining her guests with an easy apology, Gwen has declined to sing.

  Jane, lifting her eyes from the piano keys (she knows the wretched mazurka by heart), sees Gwen begin to circulate. Gwen begins with her most distinguished guests, the elderly earl and his wife, who rarely appear in society. She moves on to Denton’s sister Maud, and to Sir Montague Stern, the financier. She greets colonels and captains, statesmen and politicians, City men and stockbrokers. She encourages Boy and Freddie to circulate among the young women present. With a laugh and a smile she shepherds her husband and his sporting cronies in the direction of the smoking room, or billiards. A word here, a touch on the arm there. Gwen is good at this, Jane observes.

  The mazurka comes to an end. The circle around the piano disperses. Her playing will be background noise from now on. Jane rests her fingers against the keys. She does not mind; to be on the periphery is to be private.

  For a while, resting between pieces, she watches the other guests, remembers the comet. She did not look at it at first, not for some while, for her eye was held by the figure of Acland, separate as always, outlined against the light of the sky, arm outstretched, finger pointing.

  Jane bends her head to the keys. She is aware that Acland is not in the room and that he did not return from the gardens—although no one else seems to have noticed. No matter; she is being ignored, and so she can allow her mind to dwell on Acland. She thinks of his reddish hair, and how with that unearthly light from the sky, it flared like a halo around his head. She itemizes his features, which, for Jane, possess an endless fascination. Acland has pale skin of great translucence; it betrays his emotions as litmus does chemicals. When Acland is angry (and she has often seen him angry), he pales; when he is happy or excited or amused, color washes thinly over bone. When she thinks of Acland it is always in terms of speed. He has a quick mind, a quick tongue, a precipitate judgment. He must always move on—to the next place, the next idea, the next person, the next project, and in his company Jane often feels fearful. Acland, she senses, can be destructive; he is splendid, but careless.

  When she watched him earlier, outside in the garden, Jane felt as if a struggle took place inside her own skin. It was as if something inside her, something wild and rebellious, an incubus, were fighting to get out. Now that incubus is back; Jane can sense it. This incubus—which is no such thing, of course, but merely temptation—makes devilish suggestions. It sings a song of a wild world, a world outside the careful boundaries in which Jane lives. There, a different Jane could forget about such tiresome concepts as duty, discretion, and obedience. She could forget about her ailing father and the hopes of her widowed aunt, and she could be … free.

  Jane hesitates, then closes the music in front of her. She lifts her hands to the keyboard and begins to play from memory. This time, a piece of music she loves, one she respects, for this music
has no pat answers and its cadence does not reassure. Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” not a piece for a drawing-room gathering.

  Free, free, free. It is a difficult piece. As she approaches its close, she becomes aware that someone is standing behind her. A man. While the music lasts, she is convinced that it is Acland.

  But it is not Acland. It is Boy. He waits until she has finished; he claps politely.

  “I wonder,” he says as Jane closes the piano, “would you like some fresh air? I thought we might go into the conservatory.”

  Jane rises and goes with him. She knows what will happen in the conservatory; she knows she does not want to think of it. Instead, she keeps the music in her mind, and the comet, and an image of Acland pointing, not to the comet now but to a path, a route, a different course she might take.

  Camellias brush her arm; Boy kneels (he actually kneels); he places one hand in a tentative gesture in the region of his heart.

  “Miss Conyngham … Jane …” he begins.

  Jane fixes on the comet, on a halo of hair, on an absolute silence that, for her, echoed and reechoed, like guns.

  “… your hand in marriage.”

  Boy stops. Jane waits. There is a long silence. Then the daring of a few minutes ago deserts her, as she feared it would. Long lean years of spinsterhood—is that what she wants? And that is what lies in wait for her, after all. More christenings to attend—and all for other women’s children. What of the future when her father dies and her aunt dies and she is left all alone with her fortune?

  Spinsterhood. Or Boy, who is almost certainly her last chance. Turning toward Boy, she accepts (though she insists, in the next breath, that there must be a long engagement). She is prepared to wait, she would prefer to wait, until he is twenty-one.

  Boy’s face falls. Then his eyes brighten. He stands up. His knees make a cracking sound. Jane would like to laugh, it is all so absurd, but instead (pitying them both), she holds out her hand to him, and smiles.

  It is a night for proposals, possibly a night for love. While Boy and Jane become engaged, other promises and assignations are taking place.

  In the drawing room Freddie flirts with a young girl called Antoinette, vaguely connected to his aunt Maud by marriage, and even more vaguely chaperoned. Antoinette (fourteen but precocious) flirts back. Freddie swaggers.

  On the far side of the crowded room, his aunt Maud (wearing her famous sapphires) discovers she has much in common with the financier Sir Montague Stern. As they discuss opera, Maud eyes his waistcoat (loud and luxurious; it fascinates her). She tries to remember what she knows of this man whose name is a byword in London circles. A man who has risen fast, and a man of great influence certainly, rumored to have the Prime Minister’s ear; Jewish, of course, though that fact is discussed only behind his back, usually by those who owe him money. What is his real name?

  Not Stern, she is sure of that, and there are stories she has heard about him which she recalls vaguely as sinister, though the details escape her. A man some few years her junior, she estimates; around forty, though it is difficult to be certain, and he could be younger. A powerful man; a saturnine man; both amusing and unshakably urbane. It occurs to Maud that she has never been to bed with a Jew, and just as she is thinking this, she finds she has accepted an invitation to the Stern box at Covent Garden.

  “Delightful,” Maud murmurs, and casts her eyes around the room. “And your wife? Shall she join us? Is she here tonight?”

  “I have no wife,” Sir Montague replies, and something in the measured way in which he says this causes Maud’s heart to quicken.

  He waits a beat, exactly the correct beat, then inclines his head. “And your husband, the Prince?”

  “In Monte,” Maud says, her manner firm. They smile at each other. It is at once clear to them both that the Prince is disposed of; he need never be mentioned again.

  Sir Montague takes her arm; he steers her through the press of people toward a servant with a silver tray and champagne. They pass the elderly earl, who acknowledges Sir Montague in a formal way; a politician, who greets him with more warmth; Eddie Shawcross, who is perhaps slightly drunk, weaving his way toward Gwen.

  “Such a very unpleasant man,” Stern says; he glances in Shawcross’s direction and gently steers Maud to one side. The comment, coming in mid-anecdote, surprises Maud, for she had not expected Sir Montague to be frank.

  “Gwen likes him,” she answers, and at once regrets both the remark and the manner in which she made it—certainly indiscreet. Maud, who likes Gwen, who has no illusions as to how unpleasant it would be to be married to Denton, who finds it touching that Gwen should bother to be so private about her affair, now hesitates.

  “That is,” she adds awkwardly, “Gwen is interested in art, you understand. In books. And my brother Denton—”

  “But of course,” Sir Montague says in even tones, and at once changes the subject.

  Maud is reassured—as perhaps she was intended to be. All her instincts tell her this man will not gossip; her indiscretion is safe with him. Yet she also has the impression that this piece of information, inadvertently given, will not be forgotten. Just for a second, as her eyes meet his, she senses a man whose mind is banked with secrets, with snatches of information—possibly useless, possibly useful—all of which are stored away against some future contingency.

  A banker; a bank; stored power—is it this that gives Sir Montague that air of containment? Maud is not sure, but some power she can sense, and it is erotic; her pulse quickens again.

  A small silence between them; Maud looks into Sir Montague’s eyes, which are dark, heavy-lidded. She looks away.

  “In which room do you sleep tonight?” Sir Montague asks, and because he asks in this way, without preamble, without subterfuge, when only a few hours have passed since they were first introduced, Maud answers him at once.

  No coyness; no pretense at shock. Sir Montague likes her for that.

  “The first door on the left,” Maud says crisply. “At the head of the stairs to the East Wing.”

  “Twelve?” says Sir Montague, with a glance at his watch.

  “How impatient you are!” Maud replies, and lays her hand on his arm. “Twelve-thirty.”

  “In half an hour,” Eddie is saying. His voice is a little slurred. He grasps Gwen’s hand.

  “Impossible. It’s too soon.”

  “At midnight then. I’ll slip away just before, and I’ll wait for you there. You’ll come then? You won’t be frightened?”

  Gwen releases her hand, glances to right and left. Of course she will not be frightened; she is never frightened. She has met Eddie before in the woods, in the dark, and if she was afraid picking her way along the path in the dark, then the fear enhanced the excitement when she was embraced in Eddie’s arms.

  “Is it safe?”

  Gwen stares at Eddie, not understanding him for a second.

  “Is it safe?” he repeats, more urgently. “What about the keepers? You remember—at luncheon—your husband said the grounds would be patrolled.”

  This concern irritates Gwen; it smacks of timidity, and timidity is not a quality she expects from a lover.

  “Not tonight,” she says. “The whole village had the evening off. They’ve been watching the comet. There was a dinner for them too. They’re probably all drunk by now. Far too drunk to be worrying about poachers.”

  Eddie presses her arm. “At twelve then,” he says, and moves away.

  Gwen turns to another guest. Later, fifteen minutes before the appointed time, she sees Eddie slip out onto the terrace; five minutes after that and she, too, has left the room.

  The party is in full swing; no one notices her leave. She hurries up the main staircase to her bedroom. One hour, she tells herself. For one hour she will not be missed. She pauses on the landing and listens.

  From the billiard room comes the sound of male laughter; she listens. She can (she is sure) detect her husband’s voice. It is drunken; it is ba
ying.

  In the stable yard Acland waits and listens. He lifts his face to the night sky and hears from the distance, beyond the kitchen gardens, the murmur of voices. The estate workers, the villagers, some of the indoor servants—they, too, watch the comet. In a moment Jenna will slip away to be with him. Five minutes, ten—every minute is one too many. Hurry, hurry, Acland thinks, and glances back at the grayness of the house.

  There, on an upper floor, one light shines out. Silhouetted against the light he can just make out two small figures: Steenie and Constance. Even as he looks, Steenie disappears, retreats out of sight to the sound of distant protests; Constance remains at the window alone. For a second Acland has the sensation that she is staring at him; he draws back into the shadows. Constance Cross, the albatross. Acland dislikes her.

  A second later and he knows that dislike is not the correct term; he is wary of Constance, and this angers him, for Acland is wary of very few people, and why be wary of a ten-year-old child?

  She snoops, of course; that is one reason. Constance is a great listener at doors; she snoops and she pries—and when caught in the act (and Acland has caught her on several occasions) she exhibits a brazen-faced calm that astonishes him. “Do you make it a practice, Constance,” he said to her once, “to read other people’s private letters?” And Constance, then nine, caught red-handed going through Gwen’s desk, with a letter from her father in her hand, merely shrugged.

  “Sometimes. Why not? I wanted to know what my father had to say. Neither he nor your mother is likely to tell me.”

  This silenced Acland, the more so because he, too, might have liked to have read that letter. Furthermore, there was in Constance’s tone an inflection, a knowingness that shocked Acland deeply. For him to have had suspicions about his mother and Shawcross was one thing. To hear them suggested, almost confirmed, by a nine-year-old girl was another. Constance had this knack—he had marked it before—of involving others in her guilt. As she stared at him with that habitual stonelike expression on her face, derision flickering in her eyes, Acland felt tainted and involved—and then very angry.