She gazed steadily at him. His skin prickled. ‘I hope you will understand that I mean no disrespect to your mother and father when I say that their good opinion is not a consideration to me. Except insofar as the lack of it might trouble Hugo. I am no longer a young girl. I have money. And I love Hugo in a way that I never could have believed possible.’
If he had been bold, then Rachel had repaid him in kind, and with interest.
‘He’s extremely lucky.’ Harry meant it, but regretted the platitude, and his slight embarassment may have prompted him to add: ‘But then, he’s been the catch of the county for some time.’
‘He could have had any lovely young thing for the taking, and look what he chose . . .’
Harry was appalled. ‘That is not what I meant.’
‘Oh, but it is. You said that you were jealous, which I don’t believe. But if there is even a hint of jealousy it is because, like your parents and everyone else—’ here her eyes flickered for a split second around the table ‘—you are utterly baffled by Hugo’s choice.’
Before he could stop himself Harry said: ‘And yours also.’
‘What a mystery it all is.’ Even on such a brief acquaintance he should have known better than to expect her to be offended.
Maria rose, and as Rachel prepared to follow her hostess’s lead she gave him a look that was like a slow, sensual shrug.
‘Mine was not a choice.’ From that moment on Harry, too, had no choice. No choice but to think of Rachel Howard.
Next day the brothers rode out, on a grey blustery morning spiked with the threat of sleet – Hugo on Piper and Harry on Percy’s cob, Darby.
‘So what do you think?’
Harry had prepared himself for this question.‘She’s a remarkable woman.’
‘Isn’t she, though?’
‘You are embarking on an adventure.’ There it was, the echo of last night’s conversation with Rachel.
Hugo flourished one fist. ‘I am! And how many men can say that as they contemplate marriage, Hal? Most would say that on the contrary then adventures were over.’
‘Hugo—’
‘Ah. Here it comes.’
‘What?’
‘The word of warning, the hint of caution, the voice of common sense.’
‘That isn’t fair. Or correct. I was about to make an observation.’
‘I’m sorry, then do.’
They were moving along the flank of the valley, heading west, with the White Horse to their left and the site of the old settlement protruding like a jetty from the hillside to their right. Abruptly, Hugo drove Piper up the steep side of the promontory, the horse striving and struggling beneath him until they reached the flat top. He shouted over his shoulder: ‘Come on!’
Harry and Darby joined them by a less challenging route, zig-zagging up the main hillside until they reached level ground. On the edge of the manmade plateau the wind boomed round them and the grass raced like fast-flowing water beneath the horses’ hooves.
‘What were you going to say?’ yelled Hugo above the wind.
‘Be careful you don’t love too much!’
Hugo tipped his head back and roared with laughter. ‘I have been warned!’ He turned Piper’s head and began moving away. ‘But don’t worry, there’s no such thing!’
They passed a couple of farms, at the second of which Hugo had some tenants’ business to attend to. A mile after that the incongruous Gothic turrets of Vayle Place came into view.
‘Shall we pay our respects to my betrothed?’ asked Hugo, whose plan it had clearly been all along.
‘If you’d like.’
‘I like!’
In the event they encountered Rachel before they reached the house. She was walking, wrapped in a cloak, and accompanied by a huge, broad-headed dog, along the path towards them. On seeing them the dog gave a booming bark and she caught it by the collar as Piper shied.
‘Cato! I am sorry, I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone.’
Hugo slipped off Piper and Harry, hanging back, held out his hand to take the reins. Rachel put the dog on its lead, but it was quiet now and laid its ears down subserviently when Hugo patted its head. Here the wind was a distant presence, churning and whistling beyond the lee of the hill.
Harry could not hear what was being said between Hugo and Rachel, nor did their hands so much as touch, and yet he felt like the grossest intruder. To see that still face and those pale, all-seeing eyes turned towards his brother, the air of concentrated containment which promised so much, all for Hugo . . . He felt the ugly twist of a most unfraternal jealousy.
‘Good morning, Harry,’ she said, walking towards him with the great dog padding beside her. ‘How rude of us. And how patient you are.’
At the end of May (almost indecent haste, Maria called it) they were married. At the bride’s request, the wedding took place not in the parish church of St Catherine’s but in the tiny, windswept church on the hill which marked the spot of some long-ago pilgrims’ shrine. Of necessity the congregation was small, comprising the Latimers and a few select friends, but then Rachel brought no one except the saturnine elderly lawyer who gave her away.
‘Has she no family?’ asked Maria before they took their places. ‘No friends? It is extraordinary.’
It seemed odd to Harry, too, but he wished to defend her.‘Perhaps she has decided not to invite them – or has none that she wishes to invite.’
‘But why would she decide such a thing? Is she ashamed of them? Or—’ Maria’s nostrils flared at the outrageousness of this possibility ‘—of us?’
‘Neither, I’m sure. She is simply someone who does not like a fuss.’
‘But this is her wedding!’ His mother’s voice rose emphatically. ‘It’s supposed to be a celebration!’
‘The most important people are here,’ he pointed out. ‘You look wonderful, by the way.’
‘Hmm. Percy thinks my hat is de trop.’
‘For once Father’s wrong.’
With a toss of her head to show off the hat, Maria, only slightly modified, turned towards her seat. The swish of her skirts gave off a thick, warm scent. There was no organ in the little church, but Hugo had secured the services of Paget, a fiddle-player from the village. His robust, untutored talent was more usually employed at dances, and even during the sweet meandering of his playing before the bride’s arrival one had the sense that a foot-tapping jig was waiting in the wings.
‘Can this fellow play hymns?’ asked Percy, leaning across.
‘I’ve no idea, but I should think he can turn his hand to anything.’
‘Yes, but generally with help from the brewer.’
‘We can always sing unaccompanied.’
Percy grimaced. ‘Surely I’m not the only person here who needs a note?’
Hugo came in from the porch, combing his hair back off his face distractedly. ‘Where is she? I want this to be over.’
‘You are about to be married, my darling,’ said Maria, ‘not have a tooth extracted.’ She cast a sidelong what-did-I-tell-you? look at Harry.
As they went to their places, Hugo muttered: ‘That’s it, I want to be married and for all this to be over and done with.’
When the bride did arrive Paget rose to the occasion, giving the ‘Wedding March’ certain stirring glisssandos and vibratos of his own devising. His long face, reddened by beer, the weather and an unaccustomed cold shave, twitched with effort.
The lawyer, a shy elderly gentleman not used to the limelight, relinquished his charge and his responsibilities and retreated to the pew behind Hugo and Harry. As Rachel took her place next to his brother Harry saw that she wore a plain ivory high-necked dress, without a veil – a combination of restraint and candour which he already considered characteristic of her. She carried no flowers and the prayer book in her hand had a worn, brown leather cover. The face she turned to Hugo was as composed as ever, though Hugo’s own hand shook as he took hers. She has such power, thought Harry, does she know how mu
ch?
Throughout the short service he watched her, but if she knew she was watched she betrayed no sign of it. She followed the hymns in her prayer book, but though she did not sing, nor say ‘amen’ after the prayers, she spoke the responses in a low, clear voice that carried through the church. When they went to sign the register she proffered her cheek to Maria, to Percy. To him. And as they walked down the aisle she seemed still entirely her own person, attached to Hugo by only the lightest pressure of her hand on his arm; there was none of the triumph, demonstrativeness and dependence of most young brides.
Later that day, when the champagne and cake had been consumed, some carefully worded speeches delivered, and Rachel was changing into her travelling clothes, Percy questioned Harry man to man.
‘Shall they be happy, do you think?’
‘I’m certain that they will. I rarely saw such strength of feeling between a couple.’
Percy surveyed his son narrowly. ‘Equal strength of feeling, in your opinion?’
‘Equal, I’m sure, but different.’ Harry chose his words carefully. ‘As you would expect in two such different people.’
The pointedness of this second observation was not lost on his father, who let the subject lie there.
They left in the trap for the London train, with Colin Bartlemas at the reins. The sun came out. Rachel was neat in brown velvet and a bonnet with a broad apricot ribbon, Hugo exuberant, standing and waving, clasping his wife and kissing her on the lips, to cheers. She was neither blushing and awkward, nor apparently in the same extravagant mood as her husband. But when Hugo kissed her Harry detected in her attitude the merest trace of something less than maidenly – the angle of the head, the lowered lids, the gloved hand that half-rose – that spoke of many such kisses, perhaps more, in the past.
He was scalded, again, by jealousy.
Some two weeks later at the London garrison he received a letter from Hugo in Italy. The large, racing black handwriting, scattered with dashes, exclamation marks, underlinings and crossings-out, was so typical of Hugo that it was almost like hearing his voice, and indeed his epistolary style owed little to grammatical construction and everything to the boisterous informality of his speech.
. . . life with Rachel – I will not call it married life because that sounds so dull – is more than I ever dreamed of – she is DEFINITELY A SORCERESS as you said, and I hope the spell may never be broken. Every day is sun, and simple food and wine, and the pleasure of each other’s company which grows greater not less, and every night is even more . . . My little brother, I only wish that you will find in the woman you may one day marry but one half of this – what can I call it? bliss! ecstasy! that I enjoy. My only terrible fear is that nothing so passionately perfect, so diabolically divine, can last, but if that means we are going to die of delight, then what better way to be consumed? You will gather from all this that I have become the very uxorious husband we talked about didn’t I tell you? Only then it was my belief and hope, while now it is the astonishing and wonderful truth . . . It is hard to imagine life at Bells, with Rachel as the lady of the house, and all the usual day-to-day nonsense to be attended to, but while we have each other nothing can be dull . . . And now we are going to swim in a river – in our skin, Harry, with the sun on our shoulders! And then who knows what? And supper on our vine-draped verandah under the stars . . . I shan’t ask you to think of us, it would be too cruel, and you gone for a soldier and all! To think I envied you – I never want to die, especially not young, no matter how gloriously.
Your ever-loving brother,
Hugo
One year later, he was dead, with his first child no more than a pulsing, translucent comma of flesh in Rachel’s womb.
Poor Hugo, his honeymoon wish confounded on both counts. His death was both premature and, in its own quixotic way, glorious. So like him, everyone said, to lose his life on the crest of a wave, on the very morning that he learned Rachel was expecting their child. A mood of wild, joyful celebration had killed Hugo, a mood to which he was physiologically disposed as others were to consumption or fits. All agreed that it was a tragedy, but a poetic one.
Harry was at Bells that day, and saw it happen. With war in the offing, he had come down primarily to visit Percy and Maria, who were somewhat fractious in the dower house. He had been pleased to find that Rachel was managing Bells more than competently and had had the good sense to change little. At the same time she was every inch the chatelaine, and it was clear that she managed in every sense for in what had been Percy’s study it was now her fine, small handwriting on every document. Cato lay watchfully beneath the window. Rachel had made the house her territory.
‘He’s out riding,’ she told Harry when he asked about Hugo. ‘But he knows you’re coming. I’m sure he won’t be long.’
‘Which way did he go?’
‘Not far.’ She smiled warmly. ‘Only in the park itself.’
The smile was so unusual, and therefore so unsettling, that Harry absented himself on the pretext of meeting his brother.
He walked fast away from the house and across the open ground towards the trees, with the spaniel Merlin running beside him. Here and there on the grass were drifts of the small, wild, sweet-smelling narcissi that Maria had set, and the branches were just beginning to be beaded with sharp green. On this fine, still morning he heard the hoofbeats long before he saw horse and rider, and stopped, wanting to savour the moment. Merlin, perfectly trained, halted also, standing with one paw raised, anticipation made flesh.
Hugo, when he came into view, was riding Piper bareback. They were cantering steadily, but when he saw Harry he gave a war-whoop and lifted his arm. Piper sprang forward, lengthening his stride. The sleeve of Hugo’s raised arm caught on a branch, and his ‘Halloo!’ sharpened into a scream of pain as his body was whipped round and came crashing to the ground, bringing part of the branch with it. Piper thundered past Harry too fast for him to catch but stopped, blowing in terror, flanks heaving, between him and the house.
There was a sudden, shocking silence. Even the birdsong was stilled. Hugo lay exactly as he’d fallen, in a fixed, puppetlike attitude, one leg bent up, his near shoulder raised slightly from the ground as if he was about to sit up. The fingers of his left hand trembled slightly.
Merlin was first to move, trotting forward with his ears down to investigate. He sniffed, backed off slightly, sniffed again. Whined.
Hugo was dead, his neck broken and his eyes wide open. Harry was to see a great many deaths, but none that would strike him with such brutal force as this. The instant that he looked down into the staring, mocking emptiness that had been Hugo was the instant everything changed.
He thought he heard someone call his name, and saw Rachel standing by Piper. The horse was quiet now, and her hand was on his mane, but her eyes were fixed on Hugo. Harry took a step back from the body, and as he did so she walked forward, erect and unflinching, armoured already in her widow’s dignity.
If she wept at all, no one ever saw her. Pale and practical, head held high, her condition closely covered up, she went about her business. That she won the respect of all and the affection of few was not surprising. It would have taken a woman of altogether different character to achieve that – a woman of less competence and more tears, a woman prepared to expose her grief.
Rachel allowed people to think what they liked. They could assume she was cold and unfeeling, or that her feelings were held deep inside her. In either case they would not warm to her and she would not court their sympathy.
Apart from Harry only Maria – curiously enough – understood this iron control and the pride from which it drew strength. She never admitted as much, but her actions spoke louder than words, and the two women formed an intuitive alliance, based not on intimacy and the exchange of confidences, but on a guarded and unspoken understanding.
Harry himself knew now if he had ever been in doubt, that he was lost. In dying, Hugo had left him with a double burden of grief an
d hopeless love.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Are you there?
I’ve been expecting you;
Please answer if you’re anywhere
Out there.’
—Stella Carlyle, ‘Are You There?’
Stella 1990
The next morning she woke up alone, and eerily calm. Serene – she felt serene. A cold, uncompromising sun was shining. She’d made him (they hadn’t exchanged names) drive her home via the Curfew and ask the stage doorman to get her bag, so she was solvent and mobile.Also it was Sunday, which happily precluded making sensible moves such as phoning her solicitor and accountant, not to mention Teresa. She could do as she liked.
‘Oh, what a treat,’ said her mother. ‘But don’t hurry, we’ll hold lunch.’
After the excesses of the previous night she wanted only to be comfortably androgyne. She put on baggy jeans, desert boots shiny-toed with age and a man’s frayed sweater whose provenance was lost to memory. She wore her glasses and no make-up. Her hair, flat and fine without attention, she scraped back into an elastic band.
The prep school of which her father was headmaster was on the Oxfordshire-Wiltshire border, but the van could almost have done the two-hour drive without her. Unusually for her she was perfectly content to observe speed limits and let other motorists whizz past. As the female driver of a battered white Bedford she was used to being treated with a certain wariness by other road users. To be law-abiding made her feel honourable, as though she were repaying a debt. The awful thought occurred to her that perhaps this was the beginning of being grown up, but was soon sent packing by the recollection of recent events.
There was no question of lunch having to be held. It was a case as her father would have said of more haste, less speed. In this benign and accommodating mood she was within ten miles of her destination by eleven-thirty, and pulled off the main road to stretch her legs. Her choice of a stopping place was not arbitrary – from here on a clear day like this you could make out the White Horse in the middle distance, cavorting on its hillside in an attitude which might have been one of aggression, fear, sex, or sheer high spirits. Like a primitive mask it absorbed and reflected back Stella’s buoyant mood on this first icy, sunlit morning of her new life.
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