It was not immediate, it was not even consistent. There was nothing overt or hostile about it, yet it was palpable all the same. Some uncertainty entered their relations, some diffidence that grew into the watchful reserve of two men who have lost faith in each other but are not prepared to admit it. Whilst Constance was on hand, it represented nothing worse than a nagging unease, for the confidence she placed in the future was more than sufficient to eclipse their unspoken misgivings about each other. But when, in the middle of February, she decided that James’s recovery was complete and that she was free to pay an overdue visit to Salisbury, Richard sensed that, without her, some form of crisis was inevitable. In many ways, he was relieved at the thought, for he had come to crave an end to their pretence of fellow-feeling, however it might be wrought. Perhaps, for all he knew, James had, too.
On the fourth morning of Constance’s absence, the two men breakfasted together as usual. Watching James select his food from the hot dishes on the sideboard whilst he pretended to be absorbed in The Times, Richard asked himself once more the questions that had dogged him for two months past: Is he really James? If not, does he take me for a fool? Yet, if he truly is my cousin, how much worse than a fool would he think me for doubting him now?
A letter had come for James that morning and lay beside his place at the table. Richard watched as he sat down, opened it and smiled at the contents, a glimpse of which reminded Richard that this was St Valentine’s Day, a date when secret love can show its hand. For an instant he toyed with the idea that the sender might be the woman he had seen at the hospital. Then, as if reading his thoughts, James said, ‘It’s a valentine,’ adding, after a significant pause: ‘From Constance.’
‘Of course,’ Richard replied, clearing his throat nervously.
‘Did you think it was from somebody else?’
‘Certainly not.’ Richard tried to smile. There could be no doubt now that James was daring him to go further. Irritated by his own discomposure, he decided to do just that. ‘Though I suppose it’s not impossible that some young lady lost her heart to you whilst you were in Philadelphia.’
‘Perhaps not impossible,’ James replied levelly. ‘But not, in fact, the case.’
‘Still, you must have made some friends over there.’
‘None to speak of.’
‘No?’
This time James did not answer. He only smiled and promptly changed the subject. ‘I believe Prince Napoleon’s back in England.’
‘Yes. I gather he is.’
‘Have you been following the case in the papers?’
‘It’s been difficult not to.’ The Prince’s recent maladroit manoeuvres in French politics had indeed been given wide publicity. They had ended with his permanent expulsion from the country. He had taken refuge in London, where Richard suspected nothing short of absolute necessity could have driven him. The Prince appears to be as unlucky as he is ill-advised. He has a positive gift for misjudgement.’
‘I fear so.’
Suddenly, Richard saw another opening, one which, this time, might give him the advantage. ‘He certainly misjudged you – did he not?’
‘Did he?’
‘You caught him off guard, I remember, with a reference to events at Cleave Court in September 1846.’
‘Did I?’
Richard struggled to suppress any hint of overeagerness in his voice. ‘What were they, by the way? You’ve never said.’
James frowned. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘I mean what were the events that so embarrassed the Prince?’
James did not reply at once. He returned Richard’s gaze calmly, raised his coffee-cup to his lips, took a sip from it, then said: ‘I don’t know. I must have been bluffing. Poor Plon-Plon’s whole life is an embarrassment to him. I must have calculated it was odds on his first visit to Cleave Court being no exception.’
‘Yet you specified an exact date.’
‘I can’t remember being that detailed.’
‘You were, believe me.’
‘Then, it must have been something Papa told me about. I’m afraid I can’t bring it to mind now.’ He smiled defiantly. ‘But I’ll certainly let you know … if I remember.’
Richard said nothing. He could not accept for a moment that James had forgotten the information he had used to threaten the Prince, but his reluctance to recall it now proved nothing beyond what Richard had already sensed: that their distrust had become mutual. He stared down intently at his newspaper, silently cursing his outspokenness. He had gained nothing by the exchange: nothing at all. The crisis had been neither confronted nor averted. It had merely been postponed.
II
Plon-Plon had risen late and bathed lengthily. Recent weeks had seen so many of his plans go awry that he was in no haste to stir abroad, in case yet further misfortunes should crash about his head. He sat, gloomily wrapped in a vast velvet dressing-gown, empurpled by invading sunlight, confounded by an unkind destiny and confronted by an English travesty of petit déjeuner. At length, he lit a cigar, sipped some coffee and pondered what malevolent working of fate had brought him from the brink of preeminence to an ill-aired suite of the Buckingham Palace Hotel.
It had all been Gambetta’s fault. If the driving force of French Republican government had not contrived to die so unexpectedly on the last day of 1882, Plon-Plon would not have judged the early weeks of 1883 such a propitious time to reassert his leadership of the Bonapartist movement by publishing a revolutionary manifesto in the pages of Figaro. The objective of outflanking his upstart son and the loathsome pack of Royalist pretenders had been achieved, but only at the expense of a month’s imprisonment on a preposterous charge of ‘endangering the State’. Then, within three days of being acquitted and released, he had been banished from his homeland by decree of the Senate. So it was that he now found himself where he least wanted to be: in London, within walking distance of the court where the case of Norton versus Davenall would be tried in seven weeks’ time.
Suddenly, there was a commotion in the outer room. Plon-Plon looked up from his brackish English coffee and scowled. An over-zealous chambermaid, perhaps. But no: there were male voices, raised in argument. One was his secretary’s, the other … not wholly unfamiliar.
The door was flung open and Sir Hugo Davenall strode in, brushing off Brunet’s attempts to stop him. ‘Good morning … Count!’
‘Mon Dieu! Hugo, what do you mean by—?’
‘Call your lap-dog off!’
Plon-Plon restrained himself, for fear of aggravating a grumbling headache. ‘Un de mes amis, Brunet. Je lui parlerai.’
The secretary recovered himself and withdrew.
‘Hugo! To what do I owe the pleasure?’ In truth, he felt no pleasure; nor, it seemed, did his guest. Hugo looked thinner than when they had last met and somewhat wilder of eye. He was unshaven and perceptibly unsteady on his feet. Had it not been for the cigar-smoke, Plon-Plon suspected he would have been able to detect alcohol in the late-morning air. ‘I am not travelling under an alias, mon ami. Why did you address me as “Count”?’
Hugo shrugged his overcoat off his shoulders and pitched it over a chair, then leaned against the chair-back, swaying slightly, the muscles of his jaw and forehead working convulsively.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘I’ve just come from our new solicitors, Plon-Plon. They’re the very best. The most expensive.’
‘They are equipped with a bar?’
‘All right. I stopped off somewhere. God knows, I needed to.’
‘Your solicitor is no longer your cousin Richard?’
‘He ran out on us. Didn’t you know?’
‘I may have read of it. A sad business.’
‘Of course you damn well read of it!’ Hugo’s words came in a rush of bitterness. ‘You’ve been hiding over there in Paris these past four months, reading of my misfortunes. I could hardly believe it when I saw in the paper this morning that you were back. But it’s only be
cause you had no choice, isn’t it? It’s only because you had nowhere else to go’
Plon-Plon bridled. Why should he be interrogated by this impetuous young man? ‘I was not in hiding, Hugo! I never hide!’
‘Call it what you please: it amounts to the same thing. You were there, hatching your damnable political schemes, while I was left here to face Norton alone.’
‘Come, come—’
‘Didn’t you ever spare a thought for me? Didn’t you ever think you should try to help me?’
‘L’imposteur Norton gave me an uncomfortable half-hour last October. Why would I expose myself to him again?’
‘For my sake, of course.’
Plon-Plon sighed: this was becoming painful. He rose from the table, walked across to Hugo and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I am sorry for you, mon jeune ami, but I am too old for sacrificial gestures. You should know me well enough to realize that.’ At such close quarters, he could see the reproachful cast to Hugo’s expression and was genuinely puzzled by it. It suggested a naïvety he had never associated with him.
‘My mother’s told me the truth. There’s no point trying to bluff your way out of it.’
‘Out of what?’
‘I could hardly believe it at first. You, my father’s oldest friend …’
‘What are you trying to say?’
Hugo’s knuckles blanched as his grip on the chair-back tightened. ‘That I am the son of Sir Gervase Davenall in law only, of course. I’d suspected it long enough, God knows, but I never thought … never guessed …’
‘What?’
Hugo looked into Plon-Plon’s eyes with undisguised hostility. ‘You have the damnable nerve to ask? I can’t believe you don’t know. You must know. My father was probably still in the Crimea when you bedded my mother; still fighting for his country … when I was conceived.’
Plon-Plon stepped back amazed. Among his many conquests, Catherine Davenall had never figured. Nor had he wanted her to. Hugo’s accusation was absurd. Yet all he could find to say was: ‘This is not true.’
‘Are you calling my mother a liar?’
‘Did she tell you this fairy story?’
‘She admitted you were my natural father.’
‘Incroyable. Then, yes, mon ami. I am calling your mother a liar. When am I alleged to have cuckolded your father?’
‘You know well enough. The summer of 1855.’
‘Impossible. The Emperor entrusted me with the organization of the International Exhibition that year. I was busy in Paris throughout the summer.’
‘You could have found time to visit Cleave Court. For that matter, my mother could have visited Paris.’
‘All things are possible, but I think I can prove I did not meet your mother at all during 1855. In other words, I can prove I did not seduce her. I can prove she is a liar.’
All the strength seemed to drain from Hugo. He pulled the chair back, slumped down on to it and put a hand to his forehead. ‘Damn,’ he muttered. ‘Damn it all.’
‘I am sorry, but she has misled you.’
‘For God’s sake, why should she?’
Plon-Plon shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows? Perhaps to protect the true culprit. The strategies of women would elude the finest general.’
Abruptly, Hugo rose to his feet, his face crimson from a mixture of embarrassment at having revealed so much and resentment at having been deceived so completely. ‘By heaven, they’ll elude me no longer! I’ll have the truth out of her if it’s the last thing I do.’ He grabbed his coat and swept to the door.
‘Hugo—’
But it was too late. He was gone, leaving Plon-Plon to stare down into an insipid cupful of English coffee and think of Catherine Davenall. It was true: they had not met during 1855, nor had they wanted to. Their meeting at Constantinople in late November 1854 had left them with a powerful dislike of each other’s company. It had been a meeting, indeed, that neither of them was likely to forget – or forgive.
Plon-Plon returned to Constantinople that afternoon in a mood of ill-humoured savagery. The humiliation he had suffered at Scutari still squirmed within him, and he was determined to make somebody pay for it. It could have been anybody – his aide-de-camp, an emissary from the Sultan, an inquisitive journalist – but it was not. Fate decreed, instead, that Catherine Davenall should come calling before he had yet changed out of his blood-stained uniform.
‘Prince! What has happened to you?’
Catherine was still then the young and winsome creature Gervase had married. She had not yet become the stern inflexible woman of her middle age. But neither her charm nor her vivacity could quench the blinding anger which Plon-Plon felt. ‘Un accident, madame. What do you want with me?’
Pulling up halfway across the room at sight of his thunderous expression, she said: ‘Why so gruff? I hoped you might have news of Gervase.’
At another time, Plon-Plon would have recalled Gervase visiting him after the battle of Inkerman and asking him, when he heard that the Prince was about to quit the Crimea, to look up Catherine in Constantinople, to where he had sent her some weeks previously on account of the danger from cholera. He would have recalled his friend’s jovial confidences about the advantages of his wife’s absence and would have respected them, would have smiled at Catherine and assured her that all was well with her brave and faithful husband. But not now. Not when this dark and boiling fury was upon him. ‘I have no news of Gervase, madame, that his wife should hear.’
‘What can you mean?’
‘I advise you to go home to England. Leave your husband to his … consolations.’
Catherine frowned. ‘Are you quite well, Prince? You seem out of sorts. It was reported that you had been ill, of course, but—’
‘But you did not believe it!’ Plon-Plon crossed to the french windows that gave on to the balcony and flung them open to the stagnant late-afternoon air. ‘Smell that, madame: the perfume of the Orient. It is the only thing you should believe about the Turks: l’ordure.’
‘All I meant was that I understood you had recovered.’
‘Do you know where I have been today? Scutari. I went to visit your famous Mademoiselle Nightingale. But I did not see her. Instead, I encountered a friend of yours.’
‘Of mine? Who was it?’
He swung round from the windows to face her, smiling triumphantly as he did so. ‘Vivien Strang.’
‘Good heavens.’
‘She insulted me before a mob of journalists. She threw a basin of bloody water in my face. She shamed me – on your husband’s account.’
Catherine sank into a chair. Her face had lost its colour, her mouth its firmness. ‘I do not understand. What is she doing here?’
Plon-Plon had always disliked Catherine for her haughty sanctimonious ways. Now hatred was added to that dislike, a hatred of all the effortlessly disapproving English gentlewomen who had ever come his way, a hatred which convinced him that this one must be made to suffer. ‘She is one of the nightingales, madame. She is nursing. Nursing a grievance, you might say.’
‘A grievance against Gervase? Why?’
‘She lost her position as your governess because of him.’
‘No. It had nothing to do with him. She stayed out all one night and refused to say where she had been. Naturally, my father—’
‘She was with Gervase!’
‘If she says that, she’s lying.’ Catherine’s gloved hands had tightened into tiny fists of determined disbelief.
‘She does not say it, madame. I say it, because I know it to be a fact. Gervase lured her to the maze at Cleave Court that night and raped her.’
‘No!’
‘He had been obsessed with her for months. That night, the obsession ended.’
‘It cannot be.’
‘There is more. She had his child, madame.’
Catherine rose to her feet. ‘I won’t listen to such nonsense. Either she is lying – or you are.’
‘She refused to tell you wh
at had happened because she knew she would not be believed. You never liked her, I think. You were glad of the excuse to have her dismissed.’
‘None of this is true.’
‘Ask Gervase. See if he denies it. Ask Mademoiselle Strang. She is at Scutari now: you could confront her easily enough. You will not, I know. You will not, because you know I speak the truth. You must have realized your husband’s taste for … variety. That is why he sent you here. So that he could be free to … indulge himself.’
Catherine had heard enough. She turned and hurried to the door.
‘So there’s news of Gervase for you to take away, madame: news of the woman he preferred to you, news of the bastard she bore him!’
The door slammed shut. He was alone. The rage began to drain from him, leaving a dragging emptiness in its place. He went out on to the balcony and watched Catherine’s carriage drive away. The sun was beginning to set now, casting its sickly glow on the minarets and mosque-domes of the city. There was a rush of plover-flight across the roof behind him as the muezzins took up their ritual cry. On the Asian shore, beyond the Bosporus, the Barrack Hospital loomed vast and strangely anodyne in the pink declining light. Below him, in a narrow alleyway, a Greek was whipping a thin and overladen donkey. Suddenly, the stench of friendship betrayed filled Plon-Plon’s nostrils. He turned and retreated into the room.
‘Brunet!’ Plon-Plon called when he had finished dressing. ‘We shall be leaving London.’
‘When, mon grand seigneur?’
‘Immediately.’
‘But … to go where?’
Plon-Plon frowned. Where to go indeed? He could neither remain in London nor return to Paris. Turin contained his wife and, which was worse, her family. None of the alternatives appealed, but to one of them he would have to go. ‘Anywhere, Brunet,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Anywhere.’
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