by Lorna Gray
The name scorched my mind. This was the second time today I’d heard the name and it sharpened my nerve. I’d only been about to observe that Mrs Cooke’s letter had mentioned a sister who was living in Gloucester and to ask Richard if he could remember the address. Now I said with a hard kind of impatience, ‘According to the rather fearsome ladies I met on that street earlier, Mrs Blake is their neighbour. And three years ago, Mrs Abbey was another. Surely if Mrs Abbey had been seeking to move and she’d mentioned it to her neighbours, the most helpful of them, Mrs Blake, might have happened to mention that the estate her sister worked for sometimes had vacant tenancies.’
I thought he must have sensed my determination. But his response was only a cautious, ‘She might.’
‘So it is perfectly probable that Mrs Cooke was the connection that brought Mrs Abbey to Eddington. Not John.’
His reply swept the thought away. ‘Don’t you find it a little odd that of all the rumours which abound about John, this is the first time that this one has come to light? Haven’t you wondered why Mrs Abbey has chosen this moment, this precise moment when her supposed lover is dead and her husband is released from prison – her violent, bruising husband, mind, who is stalking the neighbourhood – to risk some unverifiable scandal that might just jeopardise everything she holds dear?’
He was suddenly taking control over this discussion and it rocked me. This wasn’t quite about unpicking Mrs Abbey’s idea of truth any more. I watched with a kind of horror as he added with quiet force, ‘If she were claiming that the child was John’s and her purpose was to get the family to release funds for the boy’s care, wouldn’t you think that surely the swiftest way to reach that end must be an approach to the bereaved grandfather? For the sake of the dead son’s long-lost love child, she could be confident that the old man would fund a place at school, at the very least, even if he didn’t believe her. And yet my father doesn’t even know.’
This was for Richard. Again, the focus of this threat always came back to Richard. It hit me with a bolt.
‘No.’ The word was wrenched from me on a deep note of protest.
All of a sudden, I couldn’t look at him. The hillside around us was mottled black with grey patches where ant hills rose. Beside me, his presence was how I shall always remember him. Standing near by while I worked it through to its natural conclusion. Steady but not savage. He hadn’t wanted to tell me this, and for obvious reasons. There was a divide here; a severance of innocence; an acknowledgement that if I’d gone away on the train as he’d asked, I need never have known.
At the same time, though, I wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t relieved to be telling me now. That artificial idea of the purity of my innocence would have left a taint of a different kind; a divide with an alternative beginning but the same ending. Because knowing his character as I did, he would never have let me claim him while the secret of what he had tackled here – and presumably had been concluded – waited as a second trap to prove later that there was a world of difference between his experience of life and mine. Because somehow, and I knew this now without remotely understanding how, the secret must surely involve me.
I heard him draw in a sharp breath. Richard needed to admit it now. He led me to it. ‘You’re perfectly right – Mrs Abbey’s connection to my brother isn’t watertight. There is no real proof that he might ever have met her before her move from Gloucester, regardless of what developed between them afterwards. But—’
Suddenly I couldn’t bear it. ‘No.’
‘The evidence is there that I might.’
‘No!’
The cry silenced him. He waited there, a capable man with every muscle unspeakably braced. He looked, in fact, as he had that first day in the car when he’d first given me a glimpse of how much he was used to standing alone.
My breath snatched in my throat while I mustered the words to form my protest. They came in a desperate rush. ‘Your regiment might be the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, but you said you were based in Bristol, not Gloucester. And besides, you were away at war!’
Now there really was a powerful force in his stillness. My protest held every sinew in him chained. I truly believe he’d anticipated recriminations; that my cry had been a forerunner to turning away, to refusing to bear this, to delivering blame. Not, perhaps, to the point of admitting that I believed the charge – I think that last part was reserved for his nightmares rather than waking sense – but there was still, for him, the perfectly reasonable likelihood that the accusation in itself was too great a burden for me. I’d said all along that I couldn’t bear the darkness of conflict. If I had an ounce of self-preservation, I should refuse it now. Even the admission of Mrs Abbey’s insinuation had the power to run nastiness through every single vein. I could feel it working there; staining me with disgust, and impotent, disbelieving rage.
But not directed at him. The part I couldn’t bear wasn’t what he thought. In him, resolve was settling to a softer kind of certainty that belonged to a sense of my care for him, and his subtle acceptance of it caused a wrench in me that hurt almost as much as rejection.
‘I know,’ he conceded gently. ‘But still I think she’s levelling the charge.’
I was shaking my head. I couldn’t give it the substance of being spoken, so he said it for me. ‘You are going to have to believe me when I say that although she hasn’t levied her actual demands yet, the suggestion is there and I’m expecting them any day.’
‘Blackmail.’ It was said scathingly. In a sneer. Angry resistance, even though I’d suspected this was her end for long enough myself. ‘And for what?’
‘You’ve seen the state my father is in. If her threat to me is to expose me and mine to the attentions of the world, don’t you think it’s reasonable to imagine I’d work to shield him from further public humiliation? Or myself?’
Or me now. I supplied the addition in my head and felt its strain while he added swiftly, ‘She doesn’t want money. She doesn’t want any help of the kind that would be within my power to offer willingly because if she did she would have asked me openly in the car. This is about snaring me, and me specifically, because I have the skills she needs.’
‘Because you’re a soldier.’
I was standing with fingers tugging at one fraying cuff of the gardening coat and staring blindly at the darkened streambed below. Beside me, I sensed the way the shadow of his mouth twisted into a brief show of a bitter smile. ‘I think, Emily dear, you’ll find that’s your prejudice. I can’t imagine my choice of career even ranks with her.’
It was a poor attempt at humour. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘she’s chosen me because she believes I’m a true brother to John. This is her other motive for continually mentioning him, I think. I imagine she has a pretty shrewd idea of what he was capable of and she must imagine the same blood runs through my veins. She means to harness it.’
There was one grim second before he added, ‘I suppose it proves at least that one part of this madness is true. The danger this arsonist poses to her must be real. What other insanity would lead a person to resort to spinning lie upon lie to tame a man she barely knows and make him her servant, when she could simply tell us all the truth and report her husband’s activities to the police and ask for official help?’
I offered quietly, ‘Unless she’s already tried, you mean, and got nowhere?’
It was there again. An echo of the debate he’d shared with Phyllis, where the actions within a conflict were either rational or not. Cold and distant, the weight of what Mrs Abbey was expecting of him finally hit me. To me the woman was seeming considerably less like a helpless victim facing unspeakable revenge at the hands of a violent husband and more like this was her final word in the bitter scheming of an acrimonious divorce, where all parties saw betrayal as the currency for everything. And all the time I was coming back to the one simple truth that coursed through it all. That even if she were the victim – to choose this route, to enlist a man against his will to un
dertake this work when there must be other, gentler ways to save her … It was barbaric.
My voice was not my own. ‘She’s treating this like a debt you have to pay. Because of who you are.’
Richard had said nothing. He was standing there watching me as I watched the blank and dormant turbine house.
I thought I almost surprised him into reaching out a hand towards me when at last I added on a completely bewildered note, ‘She really doesn’t know you, does she? I mean, if she’s so alone and Duckett isn’t enough of a friend to truly help her and she wants you to intercede between her and this husband who seems to think it is a good idea to hedge her in with little fires, why doesn’t she just ask?’
I found I had made him smile at last. When he returned to the self-imposed distance after that one impulsive movement towards me and nothing else moved in the valley bottom, he said on a wry note, ‘Why not, indeed.’
I thought I’d actually made him laugh. He confirmed it with a sudden return to that brisker tone I knew. ‘Anyway, let’s not forget that it doesn’t really matter what she has in mind here – regardless of whether I’m supposed to lay a little trap for Abbey and lure him out into the open, or hunt him down where he sleeps. I am my own man here. This isn’t war. There are no orders, and the lines between right and wrong remain perfectly clear.’
He drew a little breath, gathering his thoughts before lifting his jaw with a grace that actually verged upon arrogance. ‘To be frank,’ he added, ‘we can guess all we like at the depths of her predicament, but we both know she’s put it out of my power to do anything about it by her own actions.’ I could feel the anger there, licking like fire beneath the resolve.
He told me, ‘And I haven’t brought you here, either, for the sake of frightening you with the responsibility of understanding her choices. I’ve brought you here because it is right to tell you the truth of mine. I don’t intend to serve up my conscience on a platter to her as a bargaining chip for the sake of anyone’s reputation – not John’s, not mine, nor my father’s and not even yours – come what may. My going away on Sunday should put me out of the way of being called to immediate action while I calculate what can be done for her through more safely regulated channels such as PC Rathbone’s man from the Gloucester station. But I can’t stop her from following her part of the threat to its end. If even a fraction of what she’s engineered here gets out, the gossips’ll feed on me for months and they won’t care who else gets dragged into the crossfire. Do you mind?’
Abruptly, the charged, intimidating sense of this night’s isolation broke into relief. This had been my dread; the part I wouldn’t bear. It had dwelt in the impossibility of imagining how he could both deal with this threat and keep his integrity intact. But this was how he would do it. And in amongst all that, there was also a glimpse of an assumption he was making about my future.
Suddenly it was easy to lift my head and smile quite genuinely. ‘You ask me that?’
My question was answered in the steadiness of those eyes, but the feeling didn’t quite reach his mouth. Grit turned under foot as he took a step closer. He shook his head before his gaze dropped its hold on mine and cast something very grim out into the gloom. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. I think you’ve made your position on the principle of sacrifice very clear at last, haven’t you? And you still have absolutely no idea what part you really play here.’
His gaze returned to me. I found I couldn’t quite understand what he meant by that. My mouth fractured to reveal the brittle self-doubt beneath. I knew he was confronting me with something about myself; the part of me that had made the unwilling confession earlier about refusing any new surrender of another person’s welfare for the sake of mine. For a moment I’d thought I ought to be happy because surely that was what I’d done just now – I’d wielded that power. But the hard evening spent debating conflict and salvation and the dreadful strain of being part of the world that called for both was suddenly taking its toll. And even if I didn’t yet fully understand what he had meant there, I knew full well what had been troubling him because it occupied the part that carried that note of temper. His doubt was in his sense of how my stubbornness would bear upon me, both now upon my happiness, and in the future as a person drawn in by my proximity to him. And for me even the thought of the debate that must be running through his mind about whether we would regret this decision to let me stay close – it made me angrier in a way that must leave permanent traces between us. It was all so desperately bleak.
‘Emily?’ My name came as a whisper on the air.
‘Yes?’
He hadn’t really meant the murmur of my name as a question. It was more a statement of fact. A simple assertion that I was still myself and unaltered and, like a ripple of the memory of the way he had looked earlier when I’d dared at last to call him by his name, I realised I must have gifted him this same sense of being valued.
It was probably the only word he could have used that was capable of sweeping all this hopelessness aside, as though he were wielding a little brush of light. The distance between us was nothing. He’d never been far away at all. The realisation was followed by a real whisper of his hand as it lifted to my cheek. With the lightest of pressure, he tilted my chin so that the features of my face were touched just a little by starlight. My body instinctively moved to follow the turn of his hand. I went to him with relief. My own hands found his chest and clung to his jumper there while his other arm closed about me, drawing me against him. I could feel his heartbeat beneath my fingertips. I thought he was going to finish this sudden relief of contact by enfolding me completely within the crush of his arms. But then his body stilled and his touch was held lightly against my jaw so that I had to look at him, and when he spoke, his voice was grave.
‘Ought I to have told you all this?’
He was reading every trace of every cruel second of my time in this place upon my face, waiting for a response to a question that had no happy answer. My reply was the faintest turn of my cheek against the warmth of his hand in place of a small nod.
Then I grew embarrassed and asked foolishly, ‘What do you think?’
I suspected there wasn’t a happy answer to that question either. The force of his life-blood beat beneath my palm, steadying and regular. Then he remarked on a quiet note, ‘I think you care for me.’
I could sense again that hint of doubt within the decisiveness that ran through every corner of his mind and, very faintly beneath it all, a disorientating confession of his need for me. But, suddenly, there was a shadow of a smile on that mouth. There was no need then for the strong rhythm of his heartbeat to set the pattern for mine. Because my pulse was hurrying, lifting into a lighter race really, and there was a wry twist of amusement in the darkness of this night.
He made my breath catch when he confided cheerfully, ‘I just wish I knew whether it was a reflection of who I am, or simply that you’re really, really kind.’
Chapter 23
The night didn’t end there. It didn’t neatly fade to black on an endnote of intimacy. Instead there was a sudden intensity of disbelief as we were climbing our way back up through the faint aroma of smoke because it struck me then that throughout all of this we’d been ignoring the detail that Mrs Abbey’s car was presently up on blocks, looking as though it had been there for years. Yet only a week ago it had been bearing wheels and parked outside her husband’s daytime haunt of the watershed, ready to meet Phyllis and her bicycle. Mrs Abbey might have been visiting him there. Or perhaps it was a coincidence. Or perhaps the husband himself had demanded the use of it. Whichever way it was, there was the sudden muddle of stopping Richard in the lee of the kitchen door with the urgency of saying, ‘You have considered that Abbey mightn’t be her enemy at all, haven’t you? But that this is wholly a trap for you?’
Then the Colonel snatched open the kitchen door. He’d been waiting there in the dark and I didn’t like to imagine what he thought he saw in a scene that had a young woman g
ripping his son’s sleeve and that man’s hand firmly over hers. The Colonel didn’t acknowledge me at all. He must have heard our exit, or at least discovered it later, because he had been waiting in the dark behind the locked door like a ship’s guard ready to repel all boarders. There was tension in his posture as he watched us step in through the door that made me think this was a welcome that had been enacted before; perhaps when the other son had returned from a night out with some girl.
Only in those days presumably the lights would have been blazing because the electricity would have been working and the old man wouldn’t have been required to sit in the dark so that he could watch undetected for the approach of an arsonist.
In the slow rise of light after the door was locked and an oil lamp was lit, the old man’s head was high and jutting from his neck. This was the old soldier preparing to fight a difficult battle and this one, I thought, was something of a rearguard action in the midst of a messy retreat. Survival was depending very heavily on standing guard here so that he could snatch the first possibility of speaking to his son. It was also immediately made very clear that whatever it was that he had to say so urgently, it couldn’t be said in front of me.
I couldn’t help looking back as I slid quietly through the door to the servant’s stairs. Richard’s father was red-faced and impatient to begin. Richard himself was possessed by that watchfulness that showed he wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but was going to meet it anyway. He spared one small glance for me. A tip of his head in gratitude for my discreet withdrawal was followed by a single bright flare of care.
My return to the bedroom was only temporary. Phyllis was snoring when I slipped back into bed, but she was awake and bouncing when I drifted groggily back into consciousness about three and a half hours later to find the room full of sunlight. My sense of befuddlement wasn’t improved by the fact that the first thing I had to say was, ‘Phyllis? Why have you stolen Danny’s dog?’