Neither of them spoke. He pushed away his plate.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d better leave. We’ve given enough scandal without my spending another night here.’ He told her about Brady’s knowing looks. ‘I’ll call by in the morning.’
Only when he was alone on the unpaved, white road did pity filter into his mind. Her face reproached him in hindsight, and he remembered having seen her with that same stunned expression shortly after he first arrived. Then, too, it had been his fault. While he was living at Keogh’s, he had taken to retelling some of Guy’s stories to neighbours who dropped in after supper. They seemed to relish the entertainment, so he was taken aback when, one evening, Cait jumped up, declared it hateful and rushed out into the dark.
‘Tonight’s story upset her.’ Keogh had seemed to be wondering whether to say more.
What Adam had retold was Guy’s tale about a simple youth – he could have been one of that night’s listeners – who, on his father’s death, discovers that the old man had had a secret, illegitimate family. To avoid the impropriety of mentioning them in a will, a concubine and her small son had been left with no support. The father, however, relying on his elder son’s good heart, had left a letter asking him to look after them discreetly. Dutifully, the youth makes their acquaintance, plays shyly with his small half-brother and gradually finds himself taking his father’s place in the young woman’s life. The story – Adam now saw – might be embarrassingly like Cait’s private fantasy about what might happen to herself, who had also been a concubine.
‘What upset her,’ Keogh guessed, ‘may have been the story’s tolerance for compromise. I suppose that’s French? It acknowledges opposing needs.’ People like Cait, he noted, didn’t do that. They hated holding contradictory ideas in their heads. ‘It frightens them.’
‘You’ll tell me next that that’s why Catholics tell lies?’
Keogh had laughed. ‘Not, it seems, in France.’
Turning his mind to the present, Adam remembered what Cait had just told him about Keogh and wondered if he would wait patiently for his hopeless love for the Countess of Sligo to wane, then make a sensible marriage. Wasn’t that too a compromise? Slow, sad, serial and rather smug? The Protestant way?
***
Going home, he slept badly, rose early, then took a short-cut back to the hospital. It led through wet fields full of nibbling rabbits, a greedy dazzle of spiders’ webs and vegetation as tender as young lettuce. After scrambling through this, he had to scale a near-vertical cliff which crested some yards from the hospital front door. While doing this he was out of sight but within earshot of two people who seemed to have just met.
Cait’s voice rang out above his head. She was teasing someone – ah, it must be Bishop Tobin! – about his tall silk hat which gave him, she noted, added stature. Was this a formal visit, she asked playfully, and explained that she herself had just come from a farm, where she had got a jug of milk. ‘It’s still warm from the cow. Would Your Grace like a cupful?’
‘Cait,’ the bishop’s voice was embarrassed. ‘I’d best put my cards on the table. This is not a friendly visit.’
‘Ah!’
‘Reports have reached me of what is going on here, and the word they use is not friendly. It is “fornication”.’ Tobin’s tone was mildly apologetic, as he explained that the scandal left him no choice. He must intervene.
‘Why?’ Cait’s high-pitched fury struck the eavesdropping Adam as rightly intended for himself. The bishop, like a man passing a street fight, had been hit by mischance. Fornication, she scolded, was winked at when the gentry got up to it among themselves. No doubt her accusers’ objection was to her looking above her station? Who were they anyway? If they were anonymous, why did His Lordship believe them?
Because, said the prelate, the most vicious accusations had come from her brothers. ‘They say they’ll kill you if you bring more shame on them.’
‘More?’
‘We know what they mean.’
Impatient to interrupt this, Adam sped along a goat track which zigzagged up the cliff. Skidding, his foot dislodged scree while he heard the bishop say that he didn’t want to create bad blood in the village. The blood, Cait responded, was clearly already bad.
‘No more so than in the rest of my diocese.’
‘Your Grace lacks charity.’
‘What My Grace lacks and cannot afford is tact. I must talk to Adam. Alone. For at least half an hour. I suppose he’s inside?’
‘Your scandalmongers mislead you.’
‘But you are expecting him? Isn’t that why you fetched milk?’
‘Not at all. I myself, though Your Grace thinks me so sinful, do not drink penitentially black tea!’
Sounds of retreating shoe-leather signalled dudgeon, and a door banged. Gone. But not, Adam noted, before giving as good as she got. His papa – a polemicist famed at the hustings in his day – must have groomed her. So perhaps those two had been good for each other, after all? Clever old Gary and the sixteen-year-old Cait? Could they have been kindred spirits? And might Adam, even now, find in her the spirit of the man he had missed knowing when he was sixteen? Gary the shape-shifter.
Woa there, Adam! She misunderstands friendship. Keep in mind how dangerously her hopes rise! Merde!
She put him in mind of the bishop’s red setter dogs: affectionate, silky creatures whose bright coats matched her hair colour and who always flung themselves on him with wet, lolling tongues. It was wise to stop play before these reached his face or the play – in Cait’s case – was mistaken for a contract.
She behaved, it struck him, with the desperation of a much plainer woman – but perhaps, in this country, everyone had a desperate streak. Better not stay here, Adam.
Wondering, ‘Am I heartless?’ he cut across a last loop of goat track, grasped a root, hauled himself past a stretch of crumbling cliff and, like a pantomime demon, popped up by the bishop’s knees.
‘Adam! The very man I’ve been wanting to see!’
‘I’ve been spying on Your Lordship! You’ve been playing God! Ejecting and rejecting! Casting out!’
Shaking steepled fingers, the bishop said, ‘Let’s go in and make tea. I should have asked her to leave the milk. And before you stop me, let me say what I came to say which is that you, who are so quick to condemn your father, are doing precisely what he did to your mother!’
‘Just now the one tormenting Cait was you!’
‘Adam, I had to. She risks coming a cropper – as happened to your mama. Which is why I am begging you to either love her or leave her. For good.’
The comparison roused unmanning feelings.
‘Neither one of them,’ said Tobin sadly, ‘knew the world. But do you suppose either would listen to my advice? Women think celibates know nothing.’
‘Where has she gone?’
‘To the right place, I trust. Ah, you mean Cait? Flounced off. Are you going to give me that tea? To warm us.’
‘Unfortunately, I have no time.’ To change the subject, Adam plunged into an improvised account of why he must leave for France.
‘But you’ve just come from there!’
‘Yes, but I’ve had a disturbing letter.’ And he told of the legacy which he might be accused of having schemed to acquire. This fear, as he dwelled on it, grew worryingly plausible. ‘People may think me grasping,’ he realized. ‘Zouave donors certainly will.’ He wondered why the nudge to his conscience had been so slow.
The bishop asked about legal impediments, and was told that these seemed to have been cleared up. Perhaps, though, the bequest had been hasty, even dishonourable? Adam could no longer think straight. It was Congo booty, so how give it back? A jungle clung to it.
‘Greed,’ the bishop reminded him, ‘exists everywhere.’
Adam admitted this. ‘Bel-Ami, Guy’s tale of an unscrupulous careerist, shows him using women to help make his way. I, without meaning to, may have used Belcastel.’
Visibly flummox
ed by this new dilemma, Tobin had nothing to say.
‘Not,’ Adam confided, ‘that I can be described as “enjoying” property.’ This was true. His father’s was proving a worry and a drain. Possessions had set up a need of more possessions and, without the monsignor’s bequest, he could not preserve the status quo.
‘By the way, I see you came here in your trap. So perhaps you can drive us to my place so that we may have our talk over lunch?’ At home, Adam calculated, there would be less privacy, and it would be hard for Tobin to return to the thorny topic of Cait.
***
Sure enough, the prospect of cooking for a bishop threw the household into turmoil for, as Brady revealed, the cook was ill – which might mean drunk – and the only pudding on offer was two-day-old Caragheen Moss, a seaweed blancmange which Adam found repellent.
While maids scurried, Brady chivvied and the bishop repaired to the water closet, Adam spied a second envelope with a French postmark. Its return address was Thady Quill’s, and the handwriting that of Thady’s wife who wrote most of their letters. This one, though, must be a joint effort, for hyperbole throbbed through its prose – which bore news. Apparently, Monsieur d’Armaillé’s manservant, Didier, had sought out the Quills to report that his master was in such despair over the distress which his condition was inflicting on his wife that Didier felt it to be his duty to reveal that she, having had a lover, deserved no better. Little could be done for the maimed man’s body, but his mind, Didier argued, should surely be set at rest?
‘It is my duty,’ he insisted, ‘to tell him. And I will once he’s well enough to bear the blow.’
‘If this happens,’ warned the Quills, ‘Monsieur d’Armaillé may want to fight a duel. That is how he always dealt with trouble, and Monsieur Didier thinks that doing it now would bring him relief. He says men in Bath-chairs can use pistols and that if his master were to challenge you, he, as the injured party, would have the right to fire first. He is still a crack shot.
‘In the light of all this, Madame d’Armaillé should be got out of the way. Perhaps you could ask Father Latour to arrange for her to stay a while in some discreet convent.
‘We think that this visit to us may be taken as a challenge to you whose address we naturally refused to reveal. Such a proxy challenge, of course, needs no reply.’
Didn’t it?
An inky postscript in English gave it as Thady’s opinion that both master and man were off their heads, and that Adam would be wise to stay put a while longer in Ireland.
‘But if you feel that matters should be resolved, come and stay with us,’ urged Madame Quill in a pps. ‘You’ll need to be with friends.’
Conjugal disagreement registered like a watermark. Madame Quill clearly felt that Danièle might need help.
So, Adam told himself, I really have to go!
***
A week later he was in Paris – not Belgium. Going there might be rash. He must find out.
‘Monsieur d’Armaillé’s old orderly came looking for you,’ Father Latour told him. ‘He went first to the maison de santé, but Blanche was away, so he came here and hung about until I agreed to see him. As your friend Quill had alerted us to the man’s obsession, I considered it my duty to see if he was dangerous.’
‘And concluded?’
‘That he is. He put me in mind of animals – cats, for instance – whose movements body forth their brains. He is as focused as a knife!’ Latour closed his eyes as if assessing an unpleasant image.
Didier’s attachment to d’Armaillé, he had learned, was painfully close. ‘He told me that he nurses him “like a mother”.’ The priest grimaced. ‘Madame d’Armaillé may or may not be grateful.’
‘When last we met,’ Adam reminded him, ‘you advised me to disappear from her life. What do you say now?’
Latour’s response was blunt. ‘Keep well out of sight if you care for her safety.’
Adam didn’t argue.
‘She’s never alone,’ Madame Quill warned when told of Latour’s advice. Armies of aunts were said to be relaying each other so as to show solidarity, quash rumours and possibly restrain her.
‘Are they afraid of her husband or’ – Adam felt shy about asking this – ‘me?’
‘Possibly herself?’ Madame Quill shrugged. ‘We heard that they keep her semi-sedated.’
François Tassart, on dropping by to sell the last of Guy’s clothes, had reported this. As a Belgian and a servant, he sometimes got news of the d’Armaillé household which he described as uneasy. Something – possibly violent – seemed set to happen.
‘Why,’ Thady reproached Adam, ‘did you not take my advice and wait discreetly in Ireland?’
Ireland, Adam reminded him, was not discreet. It was secretive, which was different.
He was thinking of something Tobin had said at their recent lunch, after Brady removed the uneaten seaweed blancmange, and left them alone. While they lingered over coffee, the bishop’s mood had darkened. Studying the dregs in his cup, he confided that the clergy were tormented by knowing what went on in places like this: things like incest, sexual slavery and betrayal. ‘We don’t just hear of them in the confessional,’ he insisted. ‘People pick on us when they need to get them off their chest and pass the burden on – usually when it’s too late to help. Sometimes a family member is privy to a thing, or a doctor or magistrate stumbles on and helps cover it up. Because depravity must be hidden. Else people would despair. It’s why we sometimes seem tyrannical.’
‘Not you,’ Adam had soothed
‘No?’ The bishop’s smile was puzzled. ‘I was too soft. You see, as the gentry here are mostly Protestant, a man like me could be as lonely as a lighthouse-keeper. Thanks to your parents, though, I had the run of this house and a mount for the hunt when I wanted one. So when your Papa divorced us all – your mother, you and me – my loss was personal. Mind, I pitied his case – the clash of duties – and cheered on his bid to find a compromise. But none proved workable. One was to get the girl – Kate, remember? – to wait till you were older and marry you. Her dowry could then be promised, a contract drawn up and money borrowed straight away on the strength of it to save his estate. Maybe that too was unworkable? Anyway, Gary gave it up.’ Thoughtfully, Tobin poured himself the last of the coffee and said that he had come to see that Gary wanted both women. ‘He hoped to import some of the shine of his London life to this place where money was tight and the air tarnished by shadows. He was a hybrid, you see. Like yourself and – God help us – me!’ The bishop’s laugh was glum.
Some time later, when chatting with Thady in Paris, it occurred to Adam to ask if he too was a hybrid.
‘Divil a hybrid!’ said Thady cheerfully, ‘even if some call me “Monsieur Qui”!’ And he pointed out that in Ireland he would be seen simply as a servant, whereas here, on the rue St Lazare, he was a businessman. An entrepreneur! ‘That,’ he told Adam, ‘is why you are an exile, and I a settler. I,’ he thumped his chest, ‘have shaken the dirt of Ireland from off my feet!’
‘Thady!’ His wife called. ‘Monsieur Didier is across the street watching our door. He must know you’re here,’ she told Adam. ‘Maybe you’d as well see what he wants.’
***
‘Monsieur Gould.’ Teeth glistening, the ex-orderly held out a letter.
For a mad moment Adam thought it might be from Danièle. His glance slid over the extended hands, and he wondered whether they might make a lunge for him. But no. Men like this believed in ritual. Duels? Adam could have laughed. It was years since he had fired a gun and then only to kill rabbits.
‘Is Madame d’Armaillé safe?’
‘My master blames himself too much to let harm come to her.’
Adam took the letter. There was no envelope, just a sealed sheet of folded paper on which he couldn’t get a purchase. His hand shook, and he turned away to hide it.
‘It should be a challenge,’ said the orderly, ‘but, somehow, I don’t think it is. Read it, sir, and se
e if I’m right.’
More theatre, thought Adam resentfully. He asked, ‘Can you open this?’
Didier slid a tough, yellow fingernail under the sealing wax and levered it off. Still holding the letter, he said, ‘My guess is that he’s entrusting Madame’s happiness to you lest something happen to himself.’ Was there mockery in the small, lively eyes?
‘Is this some trick?’
‘Mais non, Monsieur.’ Didier returned the letter.
Adam read:
Monsieur Gould,
You and I know enough about each other to dispense with beating about the bush.
My wife knows nothing about the proposal I am about to make. This means that, if you so choose, you may refuse without embarrassment. Nobody will ever know.
Glancing at the patently hawk-eyed Didier, Adam saw the absurdity of this. He read on.
The proposal is that you tell me whether, if I were to withdraw from her life, you would undertake to ensure her happiness.
‘Well? I was right, wasn’t I?’
Looking up, Adam caught the unwavering blast of Didier’s curiosity.
‘He must have told you.’
‘No!’ Didier spoke with satisfaction. ‘But, you see, I know him. Even when he is not himself, I can tell what he will do.’ Clearly the sort of knowledge which Bishop Tobin found painful exhilarated Didier. But then, Adam reflected, Tobin had the care of a diocese full of souls and Didier had only one.
He went back to the letter.
There is a villa where people like me are looked after and the company is as congenial as it can be for men in my condition. I would let her divorce me. Then she and you could marry.
You may fear that I have a hostile aim, but I give you my word that I have not. To be sure, if we put this offer to my wife, she may refuse from pity or pride. This is a risk. My question is: shall we take it?
Adam handed back the opened letter. ‘Had you really not seen it?’
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