“I should have supposed that was not one of your difficulties,” she muttered.
“Oh yes,” he said, hardly able to speak, “a very useful sort of stallion I have been to you, have I not, God forgive me? But of no further interest to you, oh no!”
“I beg your pardon sir, though it is perfectly true. And will you please understand me when I tell you the truth, tell you I c-can’t release you. And I would not, now, if I could — I wouldn’t let you run into danger when I can put an end to this vengeful idiocy of Endymion Conybeare’s. Wychwood — I beg of you.”
Breathing heavily, and thinking, they were quiet for a little while. Meriel sat down on the sofa, and Auriol looked across at her. His hour-and-a-half alone, unvisited by her, had not been good for him. It had induced ridiculous fancies in his mind, made him imagine that Meriel was evil, was behind a plot which he could now only believe was Juxon’s. If he continued to think her responsible, he would go mad — in fact, he realised it was mad to have supposed it for a moment.
“So Juxon has done this,” he said, keeping calm, “and you are supporting him because you desire to protect me, Meriel. That’s the case? I should not have shouted at you! I am sorry, believe me.”
“Yes.” She was looking at the floor, thinking miserably of his potency, which perhaps had poisoned her as Juxon said, and which she might never feel again.
“But I have no wish to be protected in such a fashion,” he said. Meriel moved on the sofa. “I swore I would never let harm come to you.”
“I know. But you will please allow me the use of my own judgement as to what will harm me!”
“You would not allow me mine,” she said, “not when I told you I believed it would do me terrible harm to abandon my — my independence. You persuaded me otherwise.” Her voice was dull: she had only just fully absorbed the fact that he was blaming her, that he did not trust her and thought power bad for her. Knowing this made her begin to doubt herself and her feelings for him. She reminded herself that his life was in danger.
Vehemently she told him, “I love you so very dearly still, I’ll save you, whatever is happening at Bury Winyard!”
Bury Winyard, Auriol thought. Of course, the Conybeares were involved, he might be carried off there before he could carry off Meriel. He must take the whole tale seriously. Yet somehow, he could not believe in the suspicions of the Minister of Police, because only Meriel and Juxon were real to him. And the thought that the outer world might really take possession of him when he had so much else to contend with was terrible, as terrible to him as perhaps it was to Meriel.
An idea came to him. He picked up the Southmarch letter and scratched at the edge of the seal with his fingernail. Meriel saw, and thought it merely a nervous movement, but then she noticed the intense expression on his face and the bobbing movement of his Adam’s apple. “Sir?”
A chip of wax fell on to his plate, and Auriol saw that there was a pale red stain on the paper where the wax had been.
“Sir? What is it?”
He said, laying the paper down, “I had been hoping that this might be a forgery. I thought perhaps — Juxon had taken the seal from some other letter and glued it on to this. But it is genuine.”
There was a pause, both felt they were being unnatural.
“What precisely I suspect him of I don’t know,” he said.
“I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that it is Juxon’s doing, either,” Meriel interrupted in a small voice, which attracted his attention, “and I have reason, because I know this has happened at such a very opportune moment, for him, or at all events he might well think so.” She went on, pulling her coat about her as though it were cold in the room, “Yesterday I told him that I meant, mean to elope with you — told him the whole as I must have done at some point before we left, for his sake — and he was — outraged, sir. Oh, I daresay I should not have done it! But I could not endure his fretting and fuming, about my swoon, and so I told him to take a damper because it would very shortly be of no consequence — everyone would know I was a female!”
Auriol said nothing, and she gestured towards the Southmarch letter. “But it is against all reason to suppose that what’s behind this is his doing — it is a terrible, hideous coincidence, this plot against you and my telling him, what else can it possibly be? Oh, Wychwood — oh God sir, if it is my blame, I am so very sorry!” Her voice rose an octave as she said this. She burst into tears, and rocked on the sofa, helplessly cuddling herself because she had lost control.
There was almost no rage in her sobs and Auriol, who had seen little of the gentler side of her personality, was moved against his will.
“It’s not your blame,” he said grimly, leaving his place and coming over to her. “I think it was unwise in you to have told him — but at least I know that if that’s what you did, I was not mistaken in thinking — I thought that if you won your race, you’d come to me. For you would not have told him you meant to quit this place and marry me if you had not entirely decided, would you?”
“No. No.”
He lifted her on to his lap and put his arms round her, though he was still angry. Both of them had so much wanted, two hours earlier, to make love and be full of joy.
“Then I must take comfort from that, I suppose. No, whatever you have done, you have not plotted to — to kill me, as I thought at one moment, or even to deceive me. Come, hush now Meriel, don’t be a fool!”
This morning’s sorrow could never be quite like their tearful, comforting night at the Green Garter, towards the end of Month of Showers, when they had not known each other.
*
Juxon sat alone in the ill-lit but darkly splendid closet which, in all his years as Steward, he had failed to make his own. Because Meriel had never loved him, he had never felt secure enough in his position even to choose pictures to hang on his walls. He blamed her for this, but in fact he liked the sensation of stealthily occupying another man’s place which it gave him to live like a hermit-crab in his predecessor’s unaltered rooms.
He was fingering the clay impression which he had taken, yesterday, of the seal on a letter from the Ministry of Police at Bury Winyard. It was this which he had used to stamp the red wax on the demand for Knight Auriol Wychwood’s immediate apprehension. Juxon could disguise his handwriting perfectly, and so that had been no difficulty, but he had been much afraid that either Meriel or Auriol would suspect something even so, because his imitation seal was not as clear-cut as it might have been. It seemed, however, that they were neither of them as worldly-wise as he was. They were both very young.
A danger had passed, but just what he meant to do next, he did not know. To poison Auriol was out of the question, Meriel would suspect at once, and on the whole, he believed her when she said she would stop at nothing to bring him to justice. Only if he could bring her to a full sense of her own glory as Marquis of Westmarch, and persuade her that to sacrifice her manhood and her power would be intolerable, not to him but to her, would she change her mind and hold her tongue when he took the action he thought fit. And he would have to wait.
It occurred to him suddenly that a servant, or even Meriel herself, bursting in, might find his imitation seal: a fascinating though awful thought. He paused, staring at it, then decided. The clay was only sun-dried, and he was easily able to break it into pieces and throw it out of the window.
Fragments fell among the tired roses in the flower-bed beneath. When he sat down once more at his desk, Juxon felt that he had acted on an unfortunate impulse. He might need to fake a Southmarch letter again: but he took up his pen and dismissed this self-stricture from his mind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Nature of Love
Nine days passed. Meriel gave out that Auriol had been confined to his rooms on her authority to prevent his being taken off to Bury Winyard, where everyone of importance appeared to have run mad, and this careless explanation was accepted by most people. Plenty of innocent men had come under suspicion in Sou
thmarch, and in Eastmarch too, and no one thought it sinister that Meriel should protect her friend in such a way while she fought the Island Palace bureaucracy.
It so happened that two rich sexual scandals had blown up at Castle West very soon after Auriol’s arrest; and as a result his affairs and the Marquis’s were low down on the list of suitable topics for conversation. Meriel, Auriol and Juxon were thankful for it, and their different senses of isolation increased.
*
Auriol’s rooms of which he had once been so fond quickly became repulsive to him, as might have been expected. Though they were cleaned regularly, they seemed to him always to be dirty, untidy, airless, dark, and inescapable. Often he felt claustrophobia beginning to choke him; but he had too much pride to let even Meriel see that he was sometimes close to panic only because he was forced to live in a space which seemed increasingly small, to her as well as to him. He saw no one but the chambermaid, the footmen, and Meriel herself. His dead wife’s family had gone into the country before the Marquis ran her race. If they had been at Castle West still, they would have tried to see him, and to help him, and reproach him, and he felt he could not have borne that.
One acquaintance of Auriol’s had in fact called on him soon after his arrest was made known, but Auriol had told him with sad politeness that he felt too unwell to receive anyone, ever. He knew that this looked dubious, but although in some ways he would have been glad of any distraction from his own thoughts, he did not trust himself not to betray the truth about Meriel to any casual caller. She made him feel wretched, even desperate, but she was his obsession and he longed for her.
Meriel came to visit him every day, and Auriol noticed that for the first time in their acquaintance, she was trying to look her best for him. In his better moments, he smiled at this.
They were able now to spend as much time as they wished alone together, in comfort, but they did not make use of Auriol’s bed. Auriol believed that if they tried to make love while he was her prisoner, he would be impotent; and if he did turn out to be impotent, he might do something terrible to her. Instead, they talked, reassured each other, and though they wanted to quarrel, behaved with a propriety that made them both feel exhausted.
The tenth day of Auriol’s confinement came. He was lying on the floor, wearing only his shirt and breeches, when Meriel came in at three o’clock in the afternoon.
“So,” he said, raising himself on his elbows. Meriel, neatly dressed in riding-clothes, saw that he had not shaved that morning.
“Are you very hot? It’s damnably humid, outside.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I wish we might see the sun. I detest these close, cloudy sort of summer days.”
Meriel sat down on a hard chair in front of his feet and put her hands on her knees. “You look — like a bear, sir. I’d like to — well, you know what must be on my mind.”
“It’s not on mine and never will be while I am here.”
“Very well.” The unconscious glint of desire did not leave her eyes, but she blushed a little at his rejection. She had not quite liked to make advances to him before, but she was feeling bold today.
Meriel was calmer and less worried now than either Auriol or Juxon, because she had made up her mind as to exactly what she meant to do, while they were both in confusion.
If, when Auriol’s thirty days were up, the Southmarchers were still demanding his return, she would go with him to Bury Winyard and astonish them all. They would find it impossible to persecute him while the Marquis of Westmarch was there standing over him. Then, once she had made sure that the Conybeares’ evidence was publicly dismissed and Auriol’s name completely cleared, she would go to Wychwood with him and there finally decide, having seen the place, whether to stay or not. She meant to stay forever and marry him, but she was wise enough not to panic herself by swearing a private vow to do so. She hated to feel trapped.
In the meantime, she was not unhappy, even though Juxon worried her constantly with his prophecies of how ugly her future would be if her true sex were ever revealed. Thanks to him, she suffered from a recurrent nightmare about Castle West’s turning into a gigantic Female College, but she refused to listen to him, and made herself concentrate only on Auriol, for whom she felt a new and most disturbing kind of lust.
To have him locked up in her power was exciting. She did not quite admit this to herself, but when she saw him sitting there on the floor with his black hair in a tangle, resentment and puzzlement in his face, she wanted to leap upon him. And yet, her mental love for him in his comparative helplessness was not the same, not as great, as it had been when he was free and had agreed of his own will to let her rule him in certain ways, while always letting her know that he would not be bullied. Meriel had loved him too much then to want to bully him.
She thought: I was wise not to let it be generally known that Juxon was not acting on my orders when he arrested you, wise to claim the action as my own. Pride matters a great deal.
He thought: she is destroying me.
“Well,” said Auriol proudly, “how does the great world go on? What have you been doing, Meriel?”
“Trying to persuade the Citizens that the Western Guard is in need of more funds. Waiting for the reply from Bury Winyard with regard to you. Wasting my time at ton parties I couldn’t contrive to avoid. Very much what you might have supposed.” She got up and walked over to the fireplace, which she kicked without energy or malice. “Sir, I made up my mind some few days ago as to what is to be done.”
“You did, did you?”
She explained that she would go to Southmarch with him, and support him through his ordeal, then go with him to Wychwood.
“I am vastly obliged to you, Marquis,” said Auriol, when she had finished, getting to his feet. She saw that he was looking down at her with bitter frustration in his eyes.
“Why, no — but — is it not what you would like? Wychwood?”
“Why did you not tell me this before? You say you’ve had the notion for days past? Why did you not tell me?”
“But I explained. It was somehow not in my head.”
“You devil. You heartless, little — are you so impossibly selfish?”
“No I am not! My God,” she said.
He put his hand on her shoulder, squeezed it till it caused her real pain, then released her with a sob.
She cried, “And I daresay I feared you would take it like this. I find the solution to our difficulties, your difficulties, and you reject it out of hand and assault me into the bargain, sir.”
Meriel waited a moment, then without thinking she took two strides, put one arm round Auriol’s heaving waist, and slid the other hand inside his breeches, aware all the while of the ache in her shoulder. “Oh, Wychwood. My love, it will all be well. Come. Ah, you are splendid, there’s no need to feel — caged.”
He took hold of her hand, wrenched it out, and let it drop. “Filthy,” he said.
Words came out of her shocked face with difficulty.
“I’m sorry. Yes — I am filthy, and selfish. Please forgive me. My passions are not — I did not know.”
That reassured him, it made him feel that the horrible truth which had been taking possession of his mind for the last few days might not be a truth after all. But he was still in doubt.
Many thoughts had tormented him, but worst of all had been the suspicion that Meriel’s rough, cold manners did not conceal a warm and passionately loyal heart which he had only to love and believe in to bring to the surface. He had felt sick and lost and frightened at the thought that Meriel’s misfortunes, Juxon’s influence, preyed on her deep below the surface and had made a core of unmeltable hardness inside which however hard he tried he could never reach. If that were true, she would have abolished him as a man despite the fact that for four months she had made him feel more alive and more virile than he had ever felt in his life.
She had made him believe that he alone of all men in the world could cope with her, that
her fiercely dominant personality could never threaten him in his gentle integrity and courage. And then, when he was arrested, that marvellous sense of himself as something infinitely greater than his father, brother and wife had imagined had been taken away from him.
“Listen to me,” he said, and she raised her eyes to him. “Your action just now has made me realise that to save our attachment, our love —” the word embarrassed him at this moment — “I must get out of this place, out of Castle West. Immediately, I mean. If you don’t help me escape now it will all be at an end, Meriel, I tell you.” He stared at her, wondering whether it were possible that she still loved him. “We cannot survive another fortnight of this, we’ll hate each other, no matter what happens after. I mean that. To save our affection for each other.”
“But it’s not possible!” she blurted out. “Southmarch —”
“Don’t say that to me, Meriel. I am not talking about anything except us, I don’t give a rap now for any other aspect of the case. It may prejudice my future as regards this charge if I break prison now, it may even ruin you, but I am leaving all that aside. Listen, look at me!”
She did so, having dropped her eyes when he said that it might ruin her to help him escape. She supposed he meant that she might be more likely to finish her life in a Female College if she helped him and the plan went wrong.
Auriol finished, “No affection is indestructible; ours will be destroyed if this goes on, and I want to save it, more than anything in the world. I will not allow you to take pleasure in having me at your mercy.”
She had fully understood everything he said, but instead of discussing it, cried, “You are not at my damned mercy! At any moment you might say what I am and ruin any scheme I might have for your — your — which I have not!”
“You know very well what I am talking about.” He took a breath and said, “You are not merely a — a mannish lover as I thought. I’ve just discovered there is a vastly unpleasant side to your nature and that I will never, never tolerate, Meriel, d’you hear? You admitted it yourself. And what is more, I won’t have you manage me, my future, without consulting me, for one moment longer!”
The Marquis of Westmarch Page 24