‘“Horrified by what had happened, Mary Davenall fled to Ireland, hoping to ensure by exiling herself there that there would be no repetition of the incident. No doubt Gervase hoped the same. Then came his foolish duel with Thompson and his father’s decision – irony of ironies – that he should live with his mother until the dust had settled.
‘“Is it hard to imagine what inevitably followed? Thrown together in a remote part of Ireland with few distractions from their own company, how could they not remember what they had once been to each other? How could they not re-enact their crime?
‘“When he left Ireland to return to England in the autumn of 1842, Gervase must have believed it was the final break. His mother would remain at Carntrassna, mortifying her soul for what she had let him do. He would rejoin his regiment, find some sweet young heiress to marry and bed sufficient whores and serving-girls to purge his memory of all recollections of incest. The only fact he had overlooked was that his mother was not past child-bearing age. He had left her pregnant, and you, Stephen, were the son she was carrying.”’
IX
Freddy was still staring at Hugo, hoping in vain that he had somehow misunderstood his friend’s intentions and quite oblivious to what Major Bauer was saying, when Sir James stepped between them, raised Freddy’s right hand and slipped a coin into his palm.
‘Do as the Major asks, Freddy, there’s a good fellow.’
‘What?’
‘You have to toss for the right to signal.’ James smiled in reassurance, as if, for all the world, Freddy, not he, were the one about to risk his life.
‘Yes, Herr Cleveland,’ Bauer put in. ‘What are you waiting for?’
It was the strange, bizarrely solicitous expression on James’s face that still dominated Freddy’s attention as he looked at the coin in his hand. At last, with a sigh of resignation, he balanced it between thumb and forefinger, flipped it into the air and watched it climb above his head before falling towards the ground. A second before it hit the sand, Bauer called.
‘Heads!’
Freddy stepped forward. Until now, he had not noticed that the coin was a gold Austrian schilling. But now the fact could hardly escape him. For it was the head of the Austrian Emperor which glinted up to greet his stooping gaze.
‘Heads it is,’ said Bauer from close behind. ‘I win the toss.’
X
‘Worse than it seemed possible for the worst to be, harsher than any truth yet told, surely this retribution, alone of them all, was undeserved. Yes, I was the first-born son of Sir Gervase Davenall. Yet I was also his brother, child and companion of the one sin his conscience would never let him forget. This was one revelation too many. Since hearing it, I have felt sickened by the very thought of it, sullied by the knowledge of it beyond any power of cleansing, revolted by what I find, after all, that I am.
‘Every time I glimpse my face in a mirror, or hear my own voice, or see my hand reach out in front of me, I shudder and shrink away. Can you imagine what it is really like to be disgusted by what your own existence signifies? An abomination. An unspeakable sin. A horror in the eyes of God and man. It is all that and worse. And something else as well. It is what James must have felt when he took his own life. It is, irony of ironies, just what he suffered, too. Neither of us deserved what our father left us to remember him by. Yet we must either bear it or end it, as James chose to do.
‘I hardly know how, or with what words, I left Madeleine at the aqueduct. I remember running, as James must have run that summer’s day in 1871, north along the empty towpath. There was only one face I wanted to see now, only one confession I needed to hear. If nemesis had truly found me, then I was determined to lead it also to Alfred Quinn. For he had made me an accomplice in my own mother’s murder.
‘My mother. She who was also my grandmother, the remote forbidding mistress of Carntrassna House, whom I had spoken to perhaps a dozen times in my whole life. Now I knew why she had ensured I had a good education, why she had been willing to give Andrew Lennox whatever he demanded in return for raising me as his son. No doubt she harboured some maternal affection for me that even her shame could not erase. As for my real father, he must have been horrified to learn that I had ever been born. Simply by existing, I reminded him of what he most loathed about himself. Small wonder, then, that he was prepared to pay Lennox ten thousand pounds to remove me from his sight and his knowledge. It did not work, of course. What they tried so hard to destroy every record and memory of outlived them all – and survives in me.
‘The proof of it is that, but for me, Harvey Thompson would be alive today. Madeleine had paid him well to tell nobody else why he and Gervase had fought their duel. But, when the hearing brought my name into the newspapers, he guessed what she had already guessed and tried to capitalize on it. The poor fellow can have had no idea what he was meddling in. When you told Madeleine that you were to meet him, and why, his fate was sealed. She alerted Quinn whilst you were asleep, so that he could keep your appointment for you – and kill Thompson before he could tell anybody what he knew.
‘What I tried to do was wrong through and through, but never as rotten and cankered as Quinn had forced it to become. Your incarceration was enough for my conscience to bear, but Quinn had added two murders to that, plus a host of lies which screamed in my ears for justice. Yet I was powerless to put right the wrongs I had set in train. My only excuse rang still with Madeleine’s scorn. Gullible? Yes, I had been that. Greedy? Foolish? Vain? All of those, too. But I had not intended, not planned, not foreseen the smallest fraction of what Quinn had willed upon me.
‘All thoughts of maintaining the pretence were gone in the wake of what I had learned, all hope of returning to Constance shattered. I had only one end left in view, only one intention to sustain me through the hideous eternity Madeleine had made of my every empty hour. I would have the truth from Alfred Quinn. And then I would make him pay for it.’
XI
Major Bauer had produced a tin whistle from his pocket and given a demonstration blast on it sufficient to rouse Freddy from his reverie and force him to attend to the Major’s words. ‘That, gentlemen, will be the signal. Let me remind you that there will be three such signals. At the first, you will commence walking towards each other, guns cocked but held pointing to the ground. At the second, you will raise your guns and take aim. At the third, you will fire. Should either of you pre-empt one of the signals, you will be required to stand your ground whilst the other has a free shot. Is that clearly understood?’
James and Hugo nodded in confirmation.
‘Very well. You will kindly stand back to back and take twelve paces each, then turn to face one another. Herr Cleveland and I will then withdraw to the top of the dunes, where I will signal that the duel may commence.’
XII
‘It was dark when I reached Newmarket, but I waited several hours before walking out to Maxton Grange. Quinn had told me the time of his regular evening patrol, and that, I knew, would be the best opportunity I would have to speak to him alone.
‘I reached the stable-yard shortly before ten o’clock. Within a few minutes, Quinn appeared. He did not seem surprised to find me waiting for him. For once, indeed, he looked almost pleased to see me. Since establishing himself at Newmarket, he had acquired a proprietorial air and a cock-of-the-walk confidence which lent a superficial joviality to his manner. But the transformation had come too late to deceive me.
‘“Sir James,” he said, smiling and drawing on a cigar. “What a relief it is to know you’re still a free man.”
‘“No thanks to you,” I replied levelly.
‘“How did you get away with it?”
‘“O’Shaughnessy decided he didn’t recognize me after all.”
‘“That was fortunate. Very fortunate.”
‘It was as I stepped towards him and entered the pool of light cast by the lamp above the stable-clock that he saw the expression on my face for the first time. Then his tone altered.
<
br /> ‘“What brings you here, Sir James?”
‘“The truth, Quinn. I will have it now, if you please.”
‘“The truth? What do you mean by that?”
‘I told him then what I had learned from Madeleine. Though he went on smoking his cigar calmly enough as I spoke, leaning against the paddock rail as if my words meant nothing to him, I noticed his eyes narrowing in steely concentration. By the time I had finished, he must have realized I could no longer be deceived.
‘“Hell hath no fury, eh?” he said. “I see you’ve found that out in the end. You should never have crossed her, you know.”
‘“Forget Madeleine. Just tell me whether what she told me was true.”
‘“As far as it goes, yes.”
‘“What do you mean – ‘as far as it goes’?”
‘“She doesn’t know everything. She only thinks she does.”
‘“But you did murder Thompson?”
‘“I killed him, yes. To protect our interests.”
‘“And my mother?”
‘“Is that what you’d call her? Your ‘mother’?”
‘“What would you call her?”
‘“I’d call her an obstacle … which I removed.”
‘“When you came to me in San Francisco, you said she was already dead.”
‘“I lied. I took you for the squeamish type and I reckon I judged you right. What difference does it make whether she died with or without a little assistance?”
‘“The difference is that she was my mother.”
‘“That may matter to you, Sir James, but not to me.”
‘I restrained a rush of anger and continued talking in the steadiest tone I could manage. “You were planning this for years before you approached me, weren’t you?”
‘“Yes.”
‘“How could you be so confident I’d agree to play my part?”
‘“It was an offer too good to refuse. Don’t try to blame your own greed on me.”
‘“I might have been rich in my own right. I might have been happy and successful. Then I’d have wanted no part of it.”
‘“But you were none of those things, were you?”
‘“How did you know I wasn’t?”
‘He chuckled. “Because Andrew Lennox’s widow wrote to Sir Gervase from America two years before she died, hoping he would agree to help you. She told him all about the life you were leading, the kind of man you’d become. She even sent a recent photograph of you. It proved that your resemblance to James hadn’t dimmed with the years. Of course, what she didn’t know was that James was no longer on the scene.”
‘“And that’s what planted the idea in your mind?”
‘“Not exactly. Sir Gervase planted it in my mind. It was his idea. His last, mad, syphilitic scheme. He hated his wife for bearing a son by his cousin. And what he hated even more was the thought of that son succeeding him as baronet.”
‘Deceived in turn by every false conclusion, I saw him now for the first time. I was within reach of him at last, within a faltering grasp of his shrinking shoulder, and I no longer doubted what I would see when he turned to meet me. His face, rotted through, eaten away by the death he had brought upon himself and his son, sustained by nothing but the mocking grin Quinn had preserved for him: the life he had made for me was the lie he had borne laughing to the grave.
‘“How did you think I came by all that information, Sir James? The dates, the times, the places, the people. The photographs, the letters, the proofs, the means. Who could have given me a copy of James Davenall’s suicide note but the man he sent it to? Who could have equipped me to make you a replica of James Davenall but his own father?”
‘Richard told me once of a dinner he had had at Bladeney House in the summer of 1878, when he had tried and failed to persuade Gervase to have James pronounced legally dead. Gervase’s final reason for refusing had seemed to Richard incomprehensible. “My son lives,” he had said. “And I will stand by him.” Now I knew what his words had meant.
‘“Sir Gervase knew he only had a few years left to him. He made me promise I would track you down after his death and inveigle you into impersonating James. Then he gave me all the evidence he could lay hands on and told me everything about his son that he could remember. At first, I went along with it just to humour him. After his collapse, I dismissed the idea from my mind. I even went so far as to sell some of the things he’d given me. That was the pretext his bitch of a wife used to have me dismissed. And that’s when I started thinking. Why not do it after all? Why not see if the old man’s scheme might not actually work?”
‘It had worked. God knows, it had worked better than he could have imagined. I had supplanted Hugo. I had taken what would have been James’s. I had dispossessed Gervase’s hated wife. But victory had exacted a heavy price. There was blood on my hands and murder on my conscience.
‘“To do the old man justice, I must tell you he didn’t expect me to act while either he or his mother was still alive. I was happy to wait the short time he had left, but she was a different matter. On my last visit to him, in the nursing home, I told him she’d died and that nothing any longer stood in our way. He must have died a happy man, thinking of the havoc I’d make you wreak in his family.”
‘“You don’t regret any of it, do you?” I said at last.
‘“Why should I? It’s made me a wealthy man. Sir Gervase’s scheme has given me what his wife tried to deny me: a comfortable retirement.”
‘“But what about me, Quinn? What’s it given me?”
‘He reached out and ran his finger and thumb along the hem of my shoulder-cape. “It’s given you a gentleman’s coat to your back, Sir James.” He slapped me on the chest. “It’s put money in your wallet.”
‘“And for that you expect me to forget two murders?”
‘“I don’t care how you square your conscience, Sir James. That’s your problem, not mine. It was you who insisted on knowing the truth, not me on telling you. I don’t really know what you’re complaining about. The death of a senile old woman and a decrepit old soldier? A small price to pay, I’d have thought, for title, wealth, property – and another man’s wife.”
‘He was right, of course. I had benefited as much as he had, if not more, by Mary Davenall’s death and, whilst I had never condoned her murder, I had been prepared to ignore it. But now it was different. Now she was my mother, who had done her poor best to ensure I did not suffer for the perversion of my birth. She was my mother, whose only reward for trying to protect me from the truth was to be murdered in my name so that a lie might flourish.
‘“You should be grateful to me, Sir James. After all, where would you be without me?”
‘Where indeed? Quinn, I did not doubt, had learned early – and never forgotten – that he who cares least survives longest. But therein lay his mistake. For, though I shared his crime, I did not share his ruthlessness. “What would you say, Quinn,” I asked, “if I told you I wasn’t going on with it?”
‘At that, he snatched the cigar from his mouth and stared at me intently. “What do you mean – ‘not going on with it’?”
‘“I mean I’m throwing in my hand. Admitting that I’m an impostor. Making a clean breast of the whole damnable business.”
‘“You can’t be serious.”
‘“Never more so.”
‘He laughed. “You’re mad.”
‘“Yes. Perhaps I am. But I mean to do it.” With that, I made to turn away, but he seized me by the shoulder with sufficient force to stop me in my tracks. When I looked back at him, the lamplight casting shadows across his face, I could not see his eyes clearly nor tell from the shape of his mouth whether he was smiling or in earnest, but still I guessed, before he said it, what his parting taunt would be.
‘“Confess now, Sir James, and you’re more likely to end up in a lunatic asylum, like Trenchard, than a prison cell; but, either way, I won’t be there with you. What evidence there is to link us can be destroy
ed. And evidence that I murdered Thompson and the old woman just doesn’t exist. So make a fool of yourself, or not, as you please. But don’t think you can take me with you.”
‘Everything he had said was true, and this last was truest of all. By confessing, I could destroy myself and others besides, including the woman I had come to love, but Quinn would do what he had always done: survive. It was the sure and certain knowledge that he would escape whatever fate I willed upon myself that provoked me, as much as the pressure of his hand on my shoulder, as much as the sudden realization that, with the same hand, he had ended my mother’s life. From some deep rebellion within me against the lie he had forced me to live came a surge of violent anger, so engulfing that what happened next is still only a hazy recollection – a glimpse, it seems, of the actions of another man. Perhaps, indeed, they were the actions of another. Perhaps it was James Davenall’s strength, added to mine, that enabled me to overpower Quinn. Perhaps I was his vengeance for the telling of his secret.
‘All I can say with certainty is what I felt in that instant. I wanted to rid my sight of Quinn’s face, my ears of his words, my mind of the knowledge that he would survive me. I wanted him dead. And I had my way. The spasm of violence, the convulsive struggle as I held his head beneath the water, the spluttering and choking, the reaching, clutching, straining hands: they form now no ordered picture in my memory. But the silent seconds after – the body sagging in the trough, the pools of spilt water at my feet, the slowing percussion of drips from the rim, the yellow and black pattern that the lamplight made of what I had done – seem more real than wherever the present finds me. They recur whenever my mind’s determination to resist them slackens. They spring forth if I merely close my eyes for an instant, to paint themselves upon the darkness.’
XIII
Freddy Cleveland was slumped at the top of the dune-bank, staring incredulously at the two figures who had measured out their paces and turned to face each other across a chain of Belgian sand. Only the meticulous, impassively observed formalities which had culminated in this moment could explain the transfixed immobility with which he awaited and thus condoned the final act. He knew he should either try to prevent it or at least deny them the sanction of his presence. But still he sat and watched, aware that Major Bauer, standing beside him, was about to raise the whistle to his lips.
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