The Marquis of Westmarch

by Frances Vernon

  Over some years she expressed to me a wish to die. She’d say, ‘I wish I was dead,’ or, ‘I don’t know if I can stand it any more.’ There is nothing you can say to that … you don’t dismiss it, but I didn’t feel it was something that ordinary advice or listening could really resolve. I’m sure I wasn’t as helpful as I could have been. But in reality I don’t know what I could have done.

  What would be Frances’s final novel, The Fall of Doctor Onslow – originally entitled ‘A School Story’ – was inspired by her reading of the memoirs of the writer and homosexual John Addington Symonds, wherein he exposed the commonplace incidence of homosexuality at Harrow School in the 1850s, among pupils and indeed between boys and senior staff.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: Onslow was based on a true story about a headmaster at Harrow, who was effectively blackmailed or bludgeoned by the father of a pupil into leaving the school and wasn’t allowed to accept any preferment in the Church, such that when he tried to a few years later he got set back. It was a very powerful story and Frances managed to convey it very well. It seemed to me her first novels were very good but of a certain type, novels of manners and mores, but they didn’t really go further than that. Whereas I felt that Onslow had more depth.

  SHEILA VERNON: Frances’s sense of humour wasn’t commented on. But it’s there in Onslow, especially in Doctor Onslow’s wife Louisa, who is a great character, I think. Nothing’s explained to her but she knows quite a lot. When she speaks of Onslow’s devotion to his pupils and then realises what she’s said … And when Onslow says he’s ‘upset over a boy’, she does know there’s something hidden. Or when they go together to a hotel and she comments on their lack of luggage, to which he replies, ‘A clergyman is always respectable …’ Even he has a joke at himself. Frances was very succinct in her writing, including her humour.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: Gollancz, who published Westmarch, turned down the first version of Onslow. It was a huge blow to Frances, and she was reluctant to rewrite it, but she did, quite considerably. She must have finished it not long before she died. And it was almost as though she had decided it was the work she had to finish, she had no ideas beyond that – and by finishing it, I think she felt released.

  Frances died by her own hand on11 July1991 after what The Times obituarist would describe as her ‘long struggle with depressive illness’. Having promised her psychiatrist not to end her life using pills he’d prescribed for her depression, Frances created a ‘herbal’ concoction, which she took, and then lay down to die, apparently calmly and peacefully.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: It wasn’t sudden, it was a continual worsening. It was a cloud over her and it grew blacker. She seemed less able to escape from the blackness. When it happened I was certainly shocked. But it was not in the least unexpected. And I felt thereafter that nothing would have saved her.

  SHEILA VERNON: I go over and over thinking how we might have done things differently, and probably we should have, you can’t help wondering. But … you just have to live with it as best you can. In a way it was rather like someone with a terrible illness that couldn’t be cured, and you don’t want them to go on and on suffering.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: A few months after Frances’s death I sent ‘A School Story’ back to Gollancz in its rewritten form but they turned it down. I got in touch with her agency Blake Friedmann and asked them to suggest other publishers who might be interested. They sent me a list of about twenty, to whom I sent copies, most of whom turned it down until André Deutsch accepted it. And I think it’s the best of Frances’s novels.

  The Fall of Doctor Onslow was published finally in July 1994. Ben Preston for The Times called it ‘a searing indictment of the process of education … tersely written in a style that successfully captures Victorian restraint and its stifling sensibilities’. In the Tablet, Jill Delay reflected that ‘it is difficult to believe when reading it that the author was a child of our times and did not actually live in the middle of the last century: she recreates that world so vividly, with such understanding of its characters, such an ear for its speech, such feeling for its attitudes and taboos’. Lucasta Miller for the Independent observed that the novel’s ‘posthumous appearance is both a tragic reminder of what she might have gone on to do, and a testimony to what she did achieve’.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Warden

  “Good day to you, Esmond! Is the Marquis at home?” said Mr Hugo Longmaster, handing his hat and gloves to his cousin’s major domo.

  “Good day to you, sir. I am sure we had not looked to see you back at Castle West this early in the season. I trust you had a pleasant journey from King Clairmond’s Town, sir.”

  “Indeed,” Longmaster said.

  “As to whether his lordship is at home to visitors, sir, I shall enquire.”

  “Pray do so.” Longmaster turned on his heel and marched over to one of the saloon’s tall windows. The major domo waddled down the length of the room, passing eventually through the inner apartments.

  Longmaster glanced out at the grey and empty courtyard where a pair of seagulls were unhappily examining the half-frozen pond. Then his eye was caught by a copy of the Westmarch Gazette lying folded on a chair beside him. Quickly, he opened it. He could find nothing about the matter which interested him, and his constricted throat relaxed. He put the paper down.

  Presently the major domo returned. “His lordship will be pleased to receive you in the bedchamber, sir.”

  “Very well,” said Longmaster. “Do not put yourself to the trouble of announcing me.” He strode towards the far doors under the eyes of the Marquis’s footmen who he imagined, quite unreasonably, must guess his errand.

  As Longmaster closed the doors of the bedchamber behind him, a tall, slender young man rose up from an enormous crimson armchair, and said, “This is a surprise, Hugo.”

  “Don’t I merit a reception in your closet, cousin?” Longmaster tried to sound pleasant.

  “No,” said the Marquis. They looked at each other. “You’ve come to wait on me in all your dirt, without warning, why?”

  “So abrupt as you are, cousin!”

  “I know,” said the other. “I’m busy, Hugo. What do you want of me?”

  “May I sit down?” said Longmaster.

  “Yes.” The Marquis returned to his chair at the foot of the great railed bedstead, and drummed his fingers on its arms.

  “Well, as you are so determined to dispense with all common civilities — doubtless rightly — cousin, I may as well tell you — but could you, perhaps, provide me first with a glass of wine?”

  “Help yourself,” said the Marquis, indicating a tray on the side table with a movement of his head.

  Longmaster got up with unnecessary speed. He poured a glass for himself and then one for his cousin, reflecting as he did so that it would be quite impossible for him to put in a good-humoured, humble plea for what he wanted. He had never done so before, and he would make himself ridiculous.

  “Thank you,” said the Marquis, raising his eyebrows as Longmaster handed him the glass of wine. He had always been rather afraid of his older cousin, but hoped he had never shown it.

  “Dear coz,” said Longmaster, fingering his purple top-knot with one hand and flicking open his snuff-box with the other, “I came in such haste because it was only very lately that I heard old Chrysander Blandy had died — not a fortnight ago, I think. Apoplexy, was it not? I hope — I do most devoutly hope — that you have not appointed his successor, because I have a fancy to be Warden of the Westmarch Quarter myself.”

  The island on which Hugo and Meriel lived was divided into four independent provinces, called Marches, of the West, South, East and North. Three were ruled by their own Marquises, of whom Meriel Longmaster was one; but for more than a century, Northmarch had been equally divided among the other three principalities, and each third was called a quarter. The Westmarch Quarter was the most ruthlessly run and most disaffected part of the northern territory, quite unlike Westmarch itself.
/>   “Good God,” said the Marquis; and laughed, which he rarely did.

  Meriel Longmaster, Marquis of Westmarch, was white-faced and red-haired, and twenty-three years old. He was far too thin for his six foot one inches, riding less than ten stone, and his hands and feet were unusually small. He wore his hair tied back with a black ribbon, in a mode preferred by his dead father and long since abandoned by fashionable people. He had the face of an unworldly, unhappy, deep-thinking boy; but the Marquis was in fact careless, commonsensical, and a hard rider to hounds.

  Hugo Longmaster shared the narrow, slanting features of his cousin, but his complexion was ruddy, his hair’s natural colour was brown, and he was only five foot eleven, though his figure was broad to match. Most people considered him the handsomer man.

  “Never tell me you are in earnest?” said Meriel.

  Hugo took a pinch of snuff and struggled for well-balanced words. “Very likely I never was in earnest before,” he said, “but oh, I am very much in earnest now. That I promise you. Have you appointed someone? There was nothing to the purpose in today’s Gazette.”

  There was a pause. The Marquis looked over at the darkening window and said, “I’m sorry, cousin, I cannot appoint you. And — no I haven’t appointed anyone yet.”

  Longmaster got up. “Then appoint me.”

  “Hugo,” said Meriel, quite gently, “I shall never give you any responsible post. You must know that.”

  “Damn you.”

  This remark of his cousin’s made the Marquis feel very powerful. For years, Longmaster had managed to make him feel that he was in some sense a usurper.

  “It is scarcely my fault that my birth put your nose out of joint, cousin,” Meriel said suddenly, making the other start. “Besides, you are still my heir, you know.” He smiled a little.

  Hugo swung round. “Then in that case as your heir, cousin, some such position as the Wardenship is my due!”

  “It would be, if you wasn’t a damned fribble!” Meriel shouted. “Do not dare speak to me like that!” He was taken aback by his own outburst. “Why do you want the post? Pockets to let again? It’s worth no more than eight hundred a year, you know.”

  “So,” said Hugo, “you think I’d be dishonest.”

  “I’ve paid your debts so often that I can’t be expected to think you an honest man. Are you telling me that it’s your intention to reform?”

  Hugo sat down. “A hackneyed phrase which I avoided using but yes, dear coz, I am.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come,” Hugo said, “allow me at least a period of trial. You cannot like to be in town at the height of the hunting season. Appoint me and you will be able to return tomorrow to Longmaster Wood.” He attempted to smile. “Is it that you think Juxon will never countenance my appointment?”

  Outside in the gilded saloon, Esmond was telling Mr Florimond Juxon, the Marquis’s First Secretary and Steward of Castle West, that the Marquis was engaged with Mr Hugo Longmaster.

  “In that case, I shall wait for him in the small dining room,” said Juxon. “Thank you, Esmond.” He brushed past the major domo, went through to the next room and at length put his ear to the keyhole of the bedchamber door.

  “It may surprise you to know that I don’t allow Juxon to bear-lead me,” Juxon heard the Marquis say.

  “It does.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” Meriel said. “I have a man in my eye, though I haven’t spoken to him yet. I don’t believe Juxon will much like the notion of making him Warden — to prove my point, cousin. He’s a Southmarcher; Juxon don’t like foreigners.”

  “No, indeed! And who is he?”

  “Knight Auriol Wychwood. Strikes me as an honest fellow — as a man of sense and principle,” said the Marquis.

  At the keyhole, Juxon drew in his breath. He was more puzzled than shocked by the suggestion of Knight Auriol: the Marquis had seemed to like Knight Auriol so much that he would surely miss him if he went up north to the Westmarch Quarter.

  “As to that, you can have no idea,” Hugo said. “A man who only came to Castle West a matter of two months ago and whom you never saw in your life before. Really, cousin, you have some very odd notions. And of whom you have had bad reports, for all you think him an honest fellow!”

  “Well,” Meriel said, taking no offence and drawling rather in Hugo’s own style, “I can only think that a man who had to quit our cousin Southmarch’s household because he was a deal too — too clear-sighted — to suit Southmarch’s convenience has something to be said in his favour.”

  “Very true! But it won’t fadge, cousin. You can’t appoint him. Southmarch would be outraged and that, I think, you can scarcely afford at present.”

  “I told you,” said Meriel, “not to talk to me in that style.”

  “A thousand pardons, my Lord Marquis!”

  “Go to the devil.”

  “Cousin,” said Hugo, getting up and beginning to pace, “the world will think it very odd in you if you don’t appoint me.”

  “The world would think I’d run mad if I did.”

  “I tell you I’d make a pattern Warden!”

  “Would you.” Meriel watched him, then said, “Do you indeed wish for responsibility?”

  “Yes, sweet coz, I do.”

  The Marquis raised himself, and pulled a sheaf of papers out of his coat pocket. He held one out in front of him. “This is the third bill of yours I’ve had sent me in five months. Your creditors don’t hesitate to dun me when you don’t pay — you’ll be asking me to pay your gaming debts soon, I don’t doubt. Nine hundred crowns for a racing curricle! Is it studded with diamonds, or what?”

  Hugo stood still, heaving, as his cousin went on.

  “Here, take the damned thing. Did I not give you five thousand not three months ago, expressly to settle your debts? All of them? Live within your income for a year, and I’ll make you a Councillor or some such thing, but as for the other — if you asked me to let you replace Juxon as Steward, I’d say no.” He pushed the bill at Hugo, who did not take it, and so he let it flutter to the ground.

  “I hope,” said Hugo, “I sincerely hope you may regret this.”

  “Nothing would please me more than to think you worthy of such a post, be sure, if that’s what you mean. But I will not be tyrannised by you. So don’t think it.”

  I am the head of this family, thought Meriel, it’s only that I’m young, as Juxon is forever saying. But I ought to have said: I will not endure your insolence.

  I shall have revenge on you for this, thought Hugo, knowing it was childish. “My dear Westmarch, when have I ever tried to tyrannise you? You are not quite a child, you know,” he said.

  At a disadvantage, Meriel said, “I think you’d best be on your way. Come. I’ll go with you to the antechamber.”

  Juxon left the keyhole, and sat down in haste at the dining-room table.

  “I thank you, cousin! Is it so important that your footmen think we are on terms?”

  “Is it not, to you?” said Meriel, looking Hugo up and down. There was a little colour in his face now.

  “I’ll see myself out. Your servant, Westmarch!” snapped Hugo, and pulled open the door. He saw Juxon, and halted.

  “Why, Mr Longmaster!” said the Steward, rising.

  “Juxon.”

  The Marquis said nothing, but came out quietly behind his cousin.

  “I trust I see you well, sir?” said Juxon.

  “You do. I beg you won’t think me uncivil, but I’m in something of a hurry.” Hugo turned to Meriel. “Economy obliges me to take the public barge to Marsh Lynn, cousin, and it leaves at six o’clock, you know. Good day to you both!” Hugo bowed low to Meriel, turned and left. His boots stamped away.

  The Marquis raised his eyes, from which the light of amusement had gone. He did not like to be included with Juxon in that “both”.

  “I think,” said Juxon, “that our dear Mr Longmaster is something out of humour.” He prepared to ask a cautious questio
n, but Meriel forestalled him.

  “You may well say so. He came to ask me for the Wardenship.”

  “My dear Marquis!”

  “Oh, don’t put yourself about.”

  “You said no?”

  “I did.”

  It did not occur to Meriel that Juxon had been listening at the door. He often found his Steward’s excessive curiosity annoying, but he could not imagine anyone but a paid spy or a maidservant doing such a thing as that.

  Florimond Juxon was a small, thin and elegant man of sixty who dyed his white hair a delicate shade of lilac. His only extravagances were his clothes and his snuff; he did not gamble, ate sparingly, kept no mistress (he was in fact still a virgin), and always mixed his wine with water. He was assumed all the same to be a rich man, and because he was only the son of an apothecary, his money was thought to have come to him in dubious ways.

  Juxon loved the Marquis, whose governor he had been for five years after Meriel’s father’s death. He loved him in spite of the fact that because he was low-born, people hated him, and said he must have some unnatural hold over the Marquis. As Meriel’s governor, he had had a certain power over him; and now, as Steward of Castle West, he had power over all those who sought to hire lodgings in the castle for the spring and summer months. He allotted the best lodgings to those who, in his opinion, honoured Meriel, and were not merely civil to himself for reasons of self-interest. Juxon realised that it was not easy for frivolous people to take a kindly view of the Marquis. He was so reserved that there were only three people whom he preferred to his favourite horse and his dogs: a man called Philander Grindal, who had been his fellow pupil when he was a boy, Grindal’s wife Esmeralda, and of course Juxon himself. Juxon considered that Meriel had never had cause to feel lonely: three friends were surely more than enough.