by Sophia Tobin
‘I am thankful that the little one is home,’ said Mrs Quillian. ‘I cannot help but think that those other deaths were accidental – but you can hardly wonder that the town is on edge.’
Delphine turned to look out of the window. Her spirits were too dull to disagree and remind Mrs Quillian that she had not been on the beach the day that Bessie Dalton had nearly died, and seen the terror in the faces of the Dalton children.
‘As I say, we are grateful for the happy conclusion of events,’ said Miss Waring, and there was a slight sense of reproof in her voice, for she had been interrupted. ‘And Alba is grateful that Mr Hallam came to bring her from Northdown.’
Delphine’s gaze darted to Miss Waring’s face. Her little eyes were shining, and her lips were curved upwards in a bright smile, so that Delphine for the first time could almost see the young woman Miss Waring had once been. Then she followed the woman’s gaze. She was looking at Theo’s face.
He was, she thought, the same Theo, the clergyman, though his eyes were not alight. Then he licked his lips, and she noted that his hand had frozen, in the handle of his teacup, but he was not raising it. She sensed his nerves, saw the slight crease in the centre of his brow and looked closely at him, as closely as he would study one of his grass samples under magnification, her mind suddenly trying to describe him, as he was, in this one moment.
As she looked at him Delphine felt Alba’s cold hand enclose her own, and she was reminded of that morning in the inn at Reculver, that cloying, cold, babyish hand which refused to let go of hers. She looked at Alba, at the beautiful face, the unalloyed cheer of her expression, and wondered why she had ever thought they were alike. But she fought this feeling, recognizing even in that moment that it was only jealousy; an emotion she had thought dead in her.
‘He was so gentlemanly,’ Alba whispered to her as the others conversed, ‘when he came to Northdown, when he found me. He waited with me, and rode alongside the cart all the way back, and saw me into the hotel with many gentle words. I see now, all along, how he has wished to protect me, to shield me from difficulties. He has not yet declared himself, but – I believe, all will be well, Mrs Beck, as you told me it would be. His words were almost a declaration.’
Delphine did not blush or faint, or do anything other than sit where she was, straight-backed, her black dress spread out around her. Julia joined in the conversation in an animated fashion and, as she spoke, briefly touched her cousin’s hand. Delphine was grateful. She knew that Julia had heard, and was shielding her, but in a moment she too found her voice and was able to say, with perfect feeling and correctness, what was right, what was expected of her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
How the English amuse me, with their great gift of politeness. Their smoothing over, with silence. I had thought politeness a tyranny, another bar in the cage that kept us confined, but in fact it served to heal. Mr Steele begged that we might stay a few weeks, saying that things would calm down if I would only stay off the beach in the mornings. He did not wish to be parted from Julia, and he felt an obligation to stay at the parsonage a while longer. What the content of that obligation was, I did not know. Word came that Mr Benedict had settled a cottage and a pension on Polly Gorsey; no one mentioned the matter again, and though Miss Waring expressed, with great conviction, her low opinion of him, Mrs Quillian received him one day for tea – though not at the Albion – so it appeared he was forgiven.
Like the sand-sifters in the evening, searching for valuables left on the beach, so we scoured the landscape for some pleasure in our last days there.
‘I haven’t seen you for a good long time,’ Solomon said.
Delphine smiled, and drew on her cigarette. It was early morning, and the bay lay, peaceful and calm, beneath the cool white of an autumn sky.
‘I have come to say farewell,’ she said. ‘We are engaged to watch you all sail, at the Ramsgate Regatta, and then we will be leaving immediately afterwards.’
‘It’s best for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had trouble. You only need to be a little different here, madam, and for one voice to pick you out, and then . . .’ He gave an expansive gesture.
‘There is no need to worry for me, Solomon. I wanted to bid you farewell, and see the bay one more time.’
‘But not to paint it?’ he said, kicking at a piece of seaweed with his booted foot.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not to paint it.’
The trunks were packed, the house in London empty and waiting for them. Mrs Quillian had arranged the trip to the Regatta, mentioning cheerfully that they would meet Mr Benedict and his wife there, as though the Gorsey incident had never happened. Delphine wished to leave, but she could not deny Julia one last day with Edmund, for he had promised to stay with Theo until the end of October, when he would return to London for the wedding.
It was like old times. Mr Hallam and Mr Steele rode alongside the carriage which carried the ladies. Delphine could not help but notice that Alba did not look at Mr Hallam as he rode; her eyes were not drawn to him at all. She was the same old Alba, her face against the window, staring out at everything and nothing, occasionally responding to her aunt. But there was no more reading from guidebooks. It seemed certain that the clergyman would ask for her hand before the end of the season, so her great effort was over.
It was with some misgiving that Delphine looked from the window down the long sweep of the road to the harbour, at the grand marina of Ramsgate below, crowded with ships, their coloured flags flying in celebration, and the light sparkling on the water.
‘It is very different from Broadstairs,’ said Julia. ‘How fine it looks, how crowded and busy, almost as though it is ready for a carnival.’
‘Perhaps we should have come here for the season,’ said Delphine, earning hurt looks from Mrs Quillian and, briefly, Alba.
Perhaps, she thought, I would have been friends with poor Mrs Benedict, herding her children along the beach. Perhaps I would have painted different scenes. Those girls’ deaths would have been distant things; I would not have even heard of them.
Mr Benedict greeted them at the Custom House, and Delphine wondered how long he had been waiting for them. Mrs Quillian went to him first, and shook his hand. He looked dapper and neat, clerkish in the way he had that last time she had seen him, and he was not wearing any of the jewels or flamboyant scarves he had favoured at Broadstairs. His hair was still long, of course, but other than that he was simply a respectable wealthy gentleman. His wife, her hand resting lightly on his arm, received each person graciously. She was, Delphine thought, painfully beautiful, with blonde hair, pale blue eyes and a delicate, aquiline nose – but her features held their beauty because they had a certain sweetness and other-worldliness.
She longed all at once to pay obeisance to Mrs Benedict, and to punish Mr Benedict, who had always cast his family to be such a burden – if not directly, then with many implied words and looks. But despite the children that crowded around her, Mrs Benedict was slim, graceful, and had nothing but kind words for the people to whom she was introduced. Five years before, Delphine thought, she would have put Alba into the shade, and indeed the girl seemed suddenly shy in the presence of this elegant woman, who let no shadow of suspicion fall across her beautiful features when Mr Benedict greeted Alba with wariness.
They walked along the harbour arm, remarking on the beauty of the boats and the stillness of the water, and Delphine found herself suddenly alongside Mr Benedict, who offered her his arm. She took it, because in that moment she could think of no way to refuse it. As they walked she saw him tip his chin up to the sun, luxuriating in it like a sunflower, this sensual man, and she felt the sadness of envy curl in her stomach. The ribbons on her bonnet caught in the breeze and rippled and danced like the sails of the boats in the harbour.
‘I am not forgiven, even now?’ he said softly.
She said nothing.
‘I am sorry for speaking to Polly about your past,’ he said. ‘It was an error
in judgement, but you have misunderstood me if you ever think I meant to cause you harm. I am a little over-dramatic, when I am spurned. You and I are alike – no, I do not jest with you. There is something of the same spirit about us, I think, and we both express it through painting. I said as much to Emma last night.’ He glanced over his shoulder at his wife, caught her eye and smiled. Delphine turned and saw his wife smiling back at him – not innocently, but with a kind of knowing that spoke of the intimacy of marriage. Benedict continued.
‘I thought, from that first moment, that you and I are both looking for purity in a world which is not pure. When I discovered, as a very young child, that I had a rare facility with the pencil and the brush, do you think in that same moment of joy, I learned how to flatter and charm? I did not. I pursued only my gift at drawing and painting, and with a wolf-like energy which, even now, I still wonder at. Like you, I did it for the joy of it. The moments when I saw something – a turn in the light, an expression on someone’s face – I became enfolded in the curiosity of that moment, and sought to capture it.
‘I have made compromises to become what I am now. I paint what the public wishes to see, and I am mocked for it – but one must live, mustn’t one? And one must have money to live. I have taken this route, and there is nothing I can do now. “Conventional” – how you wounded me when you said that, perhaps all the more so because it is true, and refers to my painting as well as my life. I have tamed my art, to make it palatable. Despite my mocking of Mr Hallam, I am no more a true follower of Turner than he is. Yet when I remember leaning over my sketchbook as a child, a piece of chalk clutched in my chubby fingers, it turns something like a key in my breast. Nothing in my life has ever come close to those moments. I still seek it, though, and sometimes in the worst places – seeking sensation after sensation, as though that might surprise me again.’
They drew up. Ahead, Alba was remarking on a colourful craft, pointing the details out to Mr Hallam and her aunt.
‘I do not want to listen to your excuses for ruining people,’ Delphine said. ‘You repeated rumours about me, when you did not know the truth.’
‘Oh, I am past excuses, Miss Sears,’ he said, and the use of her real name made Delphine’s heart jump in her chest. ‘I think Amy is a pretty name,’ he went on. ‘I remember that day, long ago, when Miss De Witt fainted at the sound of it – the name of the dead girl, Amy Phelps. Did she think you had been found out?’
Delphine looked at him coolly.
‘I wish I did know your story,’ he said. ‘I will not harm you, for not telling me. I am only trying to get your attention, to make you see the truth. For all my courting of convention, the truth is I will never be accepted, not really. When I went to the Royal Academy, saw all the grand gentlemen grouped together – did you believe that was easy? You think me a proper swell now, don’t you? Easy in my words and manners. But then it was forced. And the real Ralph Benedict remains within me – an outsider, like you. I am sorry for wounding you. My darling!’
A child had come barrelling out of the group, a little girl in a white dress, running at him, her arms outstretched. Mr Benedict caught her up and swung her around. They were both laughing, and Delphine saw that some of the onlookers thought them vulgar.
‘This is my best girl,’ said Mr Benedict to Delphine. ‘This is my Daisy. Does she not look like her mother?’
Delphine managed a weak smile for the little girl. ‘She does,’ she said. And Daisy smiled at her with perfect confidence, utterly secure in her father’s arms.
Only a week before, Mr Benedict told them, the boatmen had been dragging in the carcasses of over a hundred dead sheep, drowned in a wreck, for which they had the right of salvage. But now such a scene was unimaginable, the sea glittering with sunlight as the boats bobbed in the harbour, the boatmen brown-faced and smart in their best clothes. There was the smell of burnt sugar and the salty sea breeze; there was colour all around, and talk of fireworks, later.
The group took lemonade on the harbour arm, a long, picturesque walk built of grey stone, and when Julia tucked her hand in the crook of her cousin’s arm and bade her stop, Delphine framed the view with her hand. ‘It is so beautiful,’ she said, ‘but I will not be sorry to leave, I admit. And neither will you, my dear – for you have your new life ahead of you.’
She could see Julia’s pensive expression beneath her veil, and continued, wanting to rouse her into happiness. ‘I am so glad for you,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell you how full my heart is at the thought that you have found joy. You should never think otherwise, you know. I am truly happy for you.’
‘I must ask something of you,’ said Julia, so softly that her words were almost carried away by the sea breeze.
‘Anything,’ said Delphine, savouring the bitter sweetness of the lemonade on her tongue.
‘That you listen to what I have to say, and once I have said it, you let me return to Mr Steele’s table; and that you will think on what I have said before you make any judgement, for it will have a bearing on our future relations with each other,’ said Julia.
The smile faded a little on Delphine’s face.
‘I did not wish to spoil today,’ said Julia, ‘but I cannot bear to speak to you in the cottage, where we have been so happy in our quiet moments together, and I have, for weeks, been trying to find a way to tell you what I have to say. I have spoken to Mr Steele of it, and he agrees with me that I can only begin my new life with my old one quite clear of all its debts. I have lived in the shadow of this too long. Now I must speak to you, before my courage fails me.’
She tugged on Delphine’s arm and led her a little way from the group, to a bench where they sat down together. Julia pulled the veil back from her face. She was wearing lilac, a colour that usually suited her and brought out her golden hair and blue eyes, but today it made her look drawn and ill, her pallor alarming once the veil had been lifted. Delphine almost exclaimed at it, but something in her cousin’s expression stopped her.
‘You used to ask me why I travelled with you,’ Julia said. ‘In truth, it was not because I was bored of life as a New York old maid, nor was I merely being dutiful to my parents. You said – when you were disgraced in New York, that night – you thought it was one of your parents’ enemies who saw you speaking with that man, from their carriage, and spread the gossip. The truth is, it was not. It was me.’
Delphine let go of Julia’s gloved hands. Julia continued, the words crowding from her lips.
‘I had been to the theatre with Aunt Rose and I saw you from the window of her carriage, walking alone with Mr Clare. I told Mrs Moulin, the next day, when I visited her for tea, knowing full well that it would damage you.’ Her voice failed; she put one hand over her mouth, as though to stifle a sob. ‘I am sorry,’ she whispered.
Delphine kept her gaze on the wooden slats of the bench. She felt sweat glisten on the back of her legs; it had only been a few moments, but now the sun seemed unbearably hot, the contrast of the cold sea breeze sickening to her, as though the juxtaposition of heat and cold had been designed to torture her.
‘Why?’ she said.
Julia took a breath, a deep, conscious breath, as though she wished to take in enough air to say all of her words in one go. ‘I was jealous of you. You were fêted your whole life, sure to make one of the finest matches. Beautiful, elegant, clever. Thoughtless. And you had him – Edward Clare – hanging from your every word. I told you once I had known someone I thought I could marry. It was him. I would watch him at the parties and breakfasts; handsome, gifted, so full of confidence in the world. If I had the love of such a man, I thought it would save me. But he wanted you.
‘So I told Mrs Moulin when I took tea with her the next day, and made her swear never to tell it was me. But even as I walked out of her house, I regretted it. There was no taking it back, however. I would ask you to believe me when I say that I had no real idea of how bad it would be; how comprehensively you would be disgraced. I did not know that Clare
would turn against you, too.’
‘I rejected him that night,’ said Delphine.
‘I know,’ said Julia.
‘That is why he said what he did. Telling our family that I had asked for the meeting, that I had begged for an elopement. And the gossip spread fast; the number of callers dwindled to nothing. My mother would sit and wait, the tea-table set, and no one would come. Father kept himself to the office, but our grandfather – he could not look at me; he would not listen. He said that I had disgraced the family, that it would have been better if I had died.’
‘I know,’ Julia said again.
‘Of course you do,’ said Delphine. ‘Because I have told you it again and again as we travelled – on mountain ranges, high seas, across continents – and yet you never thought to say – to mention – that you helped to destroy my life?’
‘I truly did not know what the consequences would be,’ said Julia, her voice wavering a little. ‘There was a whole storehouse of jealousy towards you in our New York circle which was waiting to be ignited like gunpowder. A woman can be clever, or elegant, or beautiful: she cannot be all three. And you were; you were. I made a mistake that could never be undone. When you made arrangements to go, when that became necessary, I knew then that I should go with you, to serve you and protect you as best I could. I owed you that.’
Delphine raised her hand to silence her. She felt numb, and was grateful for it. The two women sat in silence, side by side, the whole world of the seaside moving around them, the sights and smells and sounds a world away from where they were in their minds; the large rooms of a New York mansion.
After a few moments, Delphine could bear it no more. ‘Please go,’ she said.
‘I am sorry,’ said Julia. She leaned over and kissed Delphine lightly on the cheek. Then she quietly rose, flattened down her skirts and walked back to where Edmund Steele was sitting, watching them.
That afternoon, the hovellers raced each other in their luggers, in a sailing match that was watched with much joy by the spectators, excepting Delphine, who managed to keep herself a little way apart from them. Whenever Alba tapped her, and pointed out one of the boats – ‘Look, Mrs Beck, it’s the Petrel from Broadstairs!’ – she would nod, and she soon learned that was enough to satisfy Alba, or anyone else who spoke. Julia kept away, leaning on Mr Steele’s arm, and if Delphine ever looked, she saw that her cousin’s head was lowered and her gaze bent downwards, so different from her normal, graceful carriage.