The Manor, when she reached it, proved to be in a much worse state than Albery Hall had been on their arrival. The trees and bushes that surrounded it were even more overgrown, and if there had been a tended garden surrounding the building once, not even a ghost of it remained. Ivy and other climbing shrubs had taken the ancient house prisoner, and what she could see of the roof was disturbingly mossy, with willow-herb seeding itself here and there in the gutters.
Beatrice went boldly up to the great iron-studded front door and pulled on the bell-handle; a discordant clanging could be heard from inside, but no servant came to answer. Perhaps there weren’t any left; this could hardly be a surprise. Fanny at least must surely have gone now that her lover was dead.
But she felt eyes upon her, and stood waiting patiently rather than turning away. A few moments later, the door opened a crack, and to her horror, Sebastian’s blond head appeared instead of Vivienne’s. They stood looking at each other in the most awkward of silences, and she absolutely refused to be the one to break it. What could she say?
‘Miss Constantine,’ he managed at last. Bea wouldn’t previously have known what expression a boy’s face could hold as he wondered what he should say to a woman who’d quite recently seen his brother lying dead on her chamber floor, having come to steal from her at the very least. Now she did. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said inadequately, surprising her. ‘You’ve come to see Vivienne, I suppose, and that is dashed good of you. Come in, please…’
She shot him a sharp look, and he laughed a little wildly when he saw it. His face was pale, and she thought he’d been drinking, and finding it didn’t help in the least. ‘You don’t trust us. Well, I don’t blame you. But I mean you no harm. Honestly, I don’t. I’ll go away and leave you with my sister. She will be glad of the company, for she has had none besides me all this while, and by now we do nothing but make each other uncomfortable.’
Bea realised she still hadn’t spoken. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, stepping into the house and feeling all at once how ridiculous ordinary words must seem in such an extraordinary situation. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, and I was taken aback… I thought you might be angry with us – with my whole family.’
He laughed again, in a lost fashion that made her pity him. ‘I was,’ he said with surprising frankness. ‘But Viv told me I was being stupid as an owl, and really, she was right. You didn’t ask my brother to break in and steal from you. You didn’t even ask him and me to woo your sisters. None of this is your fault… it’s ours. No, I can’t… I’ll leave you. Vivienne will be here somewhere, I’m sure.’
‘I am, Seb,’ Miss Pallant said softly from across the hall, and when her brother heard her voice, he looked at her helplessly, then wandered away.
Beatrice’s heart lurched violently in her breast. ‘I’m alone, as you see,’ she said a little unsteadily. ‘I wanted to come and see you. See how you did. But I’ll go away, if you wish me to. God knows I will understand if you have no desire to set eyes on anyone named Constantine.’
‘No, Bea… We have no servants now, and creditors have been… pressing, so we are careful how we deal with visitors. But I’m glad to see you.’ Vivienne closed and bolted the door behind her. ‘Let’s go to my sitting room,’ she said nervously. ‘The rest of the house is… Don’t look at it.’
Beatrice could hardly avoid looking, try as she might, but Vivienne whisked her rapidly through what seemed to be a medieval great hall, with a great deal of decayed panelling, rusty suits of armour and displays of antique weapons, into a much cosier and tidier small chamber towards the rear of the house. Here too the chairs and sofa were threadbare, the woodwork scuffed and shabby, but it was at least a feminine space, with no trace of masculine intrusion. They stood in it and looked at each other in awkward silence.
‘Thank you for your kind letter,’ Miss Pallant said at last. She was in unrelieved black, and though it might have been said to become her angelic fairness, she looked unhealthily pale nonetheless, like one who was not sleeping well nor taking any air. ‘I understand why you wrote as you did – Sebastian insisted on reading what you’d written, he was still angry then, and we argued over it, so I was glad that you had not committed anything more personal to paper. Even he could not take exception to a word of it; it’s not as if we received condolences of any kind from anybody else, not even any of Oliver’s so-called friends. But it was good of you to think of me, Beatrice; it has been a bright spot among a good deal of darkness.’
‘I have been thinking of little else. And I wondered if I should come to the funeral, but… in the end, I could not, for many reasons that seemed excellent to me at the time.’
‘I did not expect you to. The circumstances of my brother’s death… Apart from anything else, Sebastian might not have been reasonable about it, if he’d seen you or any of your family. I would not have subjected you to that for all the world. You’ve been through enough.’
‘I really haven’t. I saw nothing, apart from… the aftermath. Cecilia was the one who suffered, and even that was very brief. But how areyou?’
Miss Pallant seemed to realise with a jolt that they were still standing, and gestured to Miss Constantine to take a seat opposite her. ‘It was a shock, of course it was, but I’m glad he’s dead. That’s the plain truth of it, and I hope you won’t be too horrified to hear me say it. You have good reason to know what he was, and what he was capable of. Please, please believe me, Bea, when I say that I had not the least idea that he planned to steal anything from you, nor that he had the means to enter your house – good God, even your chamber! – as he did. I barely saw him on the last day of his life; I was avoiding him as much as possible, and he was drunk, I believe, and kept to his library. I was grateful for it.’
‘I never thought that you had any part in that. Nor did anyone else, I’m sure. It was his own crazy scheme, and he paid the highest price for it. But what will you do now?’
Vivienne smiled a little wearily. ‘It’s not as bad as it might have been, we’ve discovered. The estate is not entailed, thank God, and it is to be sold as soon as possible. You wouldn’t think that anyone would want to buy a crumbling ruin like this, but our lawyer tells us that it is considered romantically Gothic, and he seems confident it will find a buyer soon enough, at a fair price. The house comes with the title of Lord of the Manor of Pallant, which is quite distinct from the barony, and apparently, men who have made fortunes through their own efforts sometimes care for such things. There should be enough left from the wreckage to buy Sebastian a lieutenancy in an unfashionable regiment. He’d have been better off doing that years ago, of course. But I hope it’s not too late for him. I hope he might have a small chance of becoming a halfway decent person without Oliver’s terrible influence. As you can see, he is already changed by the shock from what he was a short while ago, and I can only hope that it will last, and be the making of him.’
‘And you?’
‘There should be a little money left for me too. Enough to live on, in a modest way, perhaps in a cottage of my own. I do not know if I will stay in the area or not. I’ve always thought I hated it here; I’ve always thought I could ask nothing better than to escape, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t care for the idea of going somewhere where I am not known, being welcomed there as a person of quality, even if impoverished, and then people’s faces and manner changing when they found out… what my brother was, and how he died. I’d rather not live with that sort of disagreeable suspense, and at least that cannot happen here, because everyone knows everything already.’ She hesitated for a moment, then went on painfully, ‘I am sorry, you know. Truly, I am. The way I’ve treated you is my greatest regret. If I could go back and do things differently…’
‘What things?’ Bea wasn’t quite sure what she was meant to understand by this.
‘I wish I had told Oliver nothing. I couldn’t have stopped his wicked plan to seize your sisters’ fortunes, but I didn’t have to play a part in it myself. I didn’t have to tell him about you, nor share the things we did together. His face as I told him – that’s one of my worse memories, and wakes me in the night. If he wasn’t dead, he’d be blackmailing you and your sisters now, in the worst way imaginable. I know you know that.’
‘Yes. We all do. I’ve told them, told them everything – but not my mother, of course.’ And then a horrible suspicion crept into Bea’s mind, and in an instant, she was sorry she’d admitted as much.
Vivienne’s answering smile was tinged with bitterness; it seemed she could read her companion’s face easily enough. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not quite as bad as that,’ she said. ‘I’m not a blackmailer. All your secrets are safe with me now. But I know you have no reason in the world to believe me.’
Bea shook her head in some form of denial. ‘I think about you all the time,’ she said rawly. ‘I miss you – your company, not just… But I don’t trust you. And then I feel horribly guilty. I tell myself that you have lived as a prisoner, and I cannot know what you have suffered, and what it made you do against your better nature. But still I find I am not able to place any reliance on your honesty. I don’t know if I ever will, or if I even want to. Whatever your excuse, you have hurt me, and I cannot overlook it.’
Vivienne shrugged, her face crumpled, like that of a child about to cry. ‘I don’t trust myself, although I do know for certain that I would never use what has been between us against you, never again, never, and I am happy to realise it. The fact is, if you had come to me and said that you forgave me everything, that you wished we could find a way to be together, I should still have said to you that I need to be alone. I need time to learn who I might be, if I did not always have to live in fear. I am not fit to share my life with anyone, not even a dog or cat or a caged bird, until I discover that. Does that make any kind of sense to you?’
Bea had a little difficulty in getting the words out. ‘Of course it does. I do understand, at least in part. I will be here, you know. If I go away, to visit one or other of my sisters, I will always come back. This is my home now, for my life. I’m not making any kind of promise, except that… I will be here.’
‘Bea,’ Vivienne said thickly, ‘I have no right to ask anything of you, but… It’s curious, I have not wept. When they told me my brother was dead, when I understood how and where and why, when we buried him, I have not shed a single tear, for him or for myself. Of course I was not sorry, and did not want to pretend to be, like some dreadful hypocrite. But now I think I could cry, I think I need to, and if I might not do so alone, this first time, that would be something. Will you hold me, just for a little while? Could you bear that? I don’t ask anything else of you.’
She looked up, not hopefully, and Bea was at her side in an instant in a rustle of muslin, and took her very tenderly in her arms. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘My dear, of course.’ And Vivienne put her head on her shoulder and sobbed like a broken creature, and Bea held her steadily as she did so, and stroked her lovely hair, weeping a little herself. As the seconds and the minutes ticked by, as she held Miss Pallant and comforted her, she thought that in the end, it might, just possibly, all be well somehow, in some distant future they could one day dare to dream of.
EPILOGUE
