Authors: Jane Aiken Hodge
CHAPTER 4
It was over, it seemed, in a flash. Lavenham’s cold hand slipped the ring on her finger, the clergyman finished the short service, and she clung grateful and uncontrollably trembling to her husband’s arm as they walked down the church through the sparse and curious congregation to the vestry, where, for the last time, she signed as Camilla Forest. Then her father was kissing her enthusiastically, shaking Lavenham warmly by the hand and seizing the chance to press a more than paternal kiss on Chloe’s flushed cheek. Glancing up, Camilla saw Lavenham’s dark eyes taking this in.
“I should kiss you?” he said.
“It is, I believe, customary.” She held up her cold cheek to his still colder kiss. Then they were all outside, grateful for April sun after the winter cold of the church. There was laughter, a scattering of flower petals from the village children, a volley of farewells. The day’s journey to Exeter was so long that Lavenham and his grandmother had decided that any delay for a wedding breakfast was impossible. So bride, bridesmaid, and groom were loaded forthwith into Lavenham’s travelling carriage, while Camilla’s new maid, Frances, took her place with the valet, Jenks, in the second carriage with the luggage.
“Well,” said Chloe into the stretching silence as the carriage swung out on to the main road, “that was quick. I shall expect something quite other when my turn comes, and so I warn you, Lavenham.”
He laughed shortly. “I doubt if there are bride’s cake and champagne at Gretna Green.”
“Oh, that.” She dismissed her elopement as a youthful folly, long forgotten, then turned with a pretty gesture to Camilla: “You cannot conceive what an encumbrance I feel. To be acting third on a honeymoon party is a most monstrous piece of ill manners. Should I, do you think, ride with Jenks and the maid?”
Camilla, whose gratitude to Chloe for breaking the silence had indeed been mixed with a shade of regret at her presence, began a polite protest, but Lavenham interrupted her, telling his sister not to be more absurd than she could help. “You wished to be of the party; now you will put up with the consequences.”
Even Chloe found this something of a silencer and after exchanging a glance of quick sympathy with her new sister-in-law settled down to gaze out of the carriage window. Camilla, too, was silent, sorry that Lavenham had given his sister such a setdown, and yet sympathising with the almost intolerable strain under which she recognised him to be labouring. She longed to make some gesture of sympathy—after all, she was his wife—but restrained the hand that would have gone out towards him. The first advance, if there was to be any, must come from his side, not hers. She remembered Lady Leominster’s warning, “You will have to be patient ... patient as Job,” and sat back, quiet in her corner. So they travelled across the heart of England all day, almost as silent as if they had been three strangers in the public coach. By the time they reached Exeter, late in the evening, the silence of constraint had given place to that of fatigue, and Camilla observed a crease across Lavenham’s brow that she had never seen before. Was he, she wondered, regretting their marriage already?
Chloe brightened up at sight of the outskirts of Exeter with its promise of food and rest. For all her seventeen years and attempted elopement, she was enough of a child still so that the mere passage of time could put her at her ease in any situation. By now, her sense of awkwardness of intruding on her brother’s honeymoon was lost in the excitement of the journey. She began to chatter excitedly to Camilla and was soon running from side to side of the carriage in her attempts to see Exeter Cathedral. A lurch of the carriage as it hit the paved road overset her, and she cannoned heavily into her brother, who let out an exclamation of such black rage that Camilla shrank back in her corner.
Chloe did not seem particularly surprised, however, but settled back in her own corner with an apology, and added, “Have you one of your migraine headaches, poor Lee?” Her sympathetic tone and the use of the pet name, which Camilla had not heard before, showed that his start of bad temper had neither surprised nor alarmed her.
He admitted to the headache. “I am afraid I have been vilely bad company all day,” he said to Camilla. “You must forgive me, M—” He had almost said, “Miss Forest,” but remembered himself in time, coloured deeply, and contrived to turn it into “my dear.”
The mild endearment moved Camilla almost to the point of tears, which she however took care to conceal, remarking instead, in her gentlest voice, on the length of the day’s journey and enquiring what treatment he found best for the headache.
“Oh, nothing but to endure it,” he answered a shade impatiently as the carriage turned into the inn yard, and she could only admire the fortitude with which he endured the bustle of their late arrival. Fortunately, rooms and a meal had been bespoken for them, and a question, which had been troubling Camilla, of whether she and her husband were to share a room, had apparently been settled in advance. They found two large bedrooms with a sitting room between them ready for their occupation. Chloe’s presence, of course, had not been provided for, and the obsequious host was soon deep in apologies because he had no other room available that was fit for her occupation. But this was easily settled, “Of course she must sleep with me,” said Camilla, and felt herself amply rewarded for the sacrifice of comfort and privacy by her husband’s grateful look.
Dinner, the host told them, would be served immediately, and they retired to their rooms at once to repair the ravages of the long day’s journey. To Camilla’s relief, Chloe did not comment on the odd allocation of bedrooms, being far too busy hanging out of the window and counting the number of gentlemen’s carriages in the inn yard below. “If only Lavenham would eat at the ordinary like anybody else,” she wailed, “we might see their owners, but he is so mortally high in the instep he would never even think of it. And how am I to find myself a husband if I meet no one?”
Camilla paused with the comb in her hair and looked across the room at Chloe. The time, she felt, had come to be firm. “You must not speak like that of your brother,” she said, “and most particularly not to me. As for a husband, there is time enough to be thinking of that when the world has forgotten about your excursion to Gretna,” and then, seeing the ready tears in the child’s eyes, “Come, that is enough for a first scold, and I promise you we will never speak of Gretna again.”
When they joined Lavenham in their sitting room they found him staring pale and gloomily at the table which a man and a boy were engaged in loading with food. Chloe exclaimed with delight at the plenty before her, but it was soon obvious to Camilla that Lavenham ate only by a heroic effort of will. At last, she could bear the sight of his struggles no longer. and as Chloe embarked on her third helping of devilled chicken, asked: “Would you not be very much happier in the quiet of your own room, my dear?” She ventured the endearment he had used. “Chloe and I will do perfectly well without you, and, with your permission, I will come, presently, and see if I cannot massage the pain away. I used to do it for the poor Duchess of Devonshire when she had one of her headaches and she said it was wonderful how it eased her.”
He protested, but was obviously glad to leave them. Later, when she knocked timidly on his door and found him stretched fully clothed on his bed in the darkened room, he was obviously in too much pain not to be grateful for any chance of alleviation. He turned over obediently and lay flat on his face while her gentle hands worked their way over the tense muscles at the back of his neck where the dark hair grew close and curling. Gradually, as she sat there in the half dark, she could hear his breathing ease off into sleep and at last, very quietly, she rose to leave him. At the door, his voice stopped her: “Camilla.” he said, and then, as she paused, “thank you.”
“Good night,” she whispered, closing the door softly behind her.
They had another long day’s journey before them, and were up early again, but Camilla had already lain for a long time, listening to the noises of the inn yard, and Chloe’s quiet breathing, and thinking about her husband and the strange life before her. Later, the first sight of Lavenham was encouraging: he was visibly better, his colour nearly normal and the furrow gone from above his eyebrows. But if she had hoped for any increase in warmth on his part this morning, she was to be disappointed. He was brisk almost to the point of rudeness, both to her and to Chloe, and it was a subdued little party that climbed punctually into the carriage as the cathedral clock struck the hour. Chloe, however, had had enough of silence and, having ascertained that his headache was indeed gone, began to tease him with questions about Portugal. What was he to do there? Where were they to live? Did he like the Portuguese, and was their Queen really mad? And a thousand other questions, which he began by answering monosyllabically enough, but gradually, as the carriage rolled on through fitful sunshine and the sounds of spring, he began to thaw a little and answer her questions, and those that Camilla now dared to raise, more fully. Yes, he told them, Lord Strangford, the Minister Plenipotentiary, had already secured a house for them on the eastern outskirts of Lisbon; they would be able to go there directly from the boat. “I found the dirt and discomfort of my lodgings intolerable when I was last there and insisted that this time I would have a house—fortunately, as it has proved. You will find the Portuguese a good enough kind of people, I think,” he was addressing Camilla now, rather than Chloe, “if curiously unaware of dirt or discomfort. But the climate, I am sure, will make up for much, though I hope you neither of you find hot weather oppressive.”
They both assured him that it was of all things what they liked best and took advantage of his mellower mood to ply him with more questions, which he was glad enough to answer. “You are to form part, remember, of the diplomatic colony and much may depend on your behaviour.” This time, the speech was made very directly to Chloe, who laughed, blushed, stammered a promise of good behaviour, and changed the subject by reiterating an earlier question about the Queen.
“Oh yes,” he assured her, “she is as mad as you please, and shut up in her palace of Queluz while her son Dom John governs as Regent—and but a poor business he makes of it, I am afraid, though he is a good enough sort of man.”
“Is it true that he and his wife never speak to each other except on state occasions?” put in Chloe.
“True enough, but not the kind of thing upon which you will remark in Portuguese society,” was his repressive answer.
She was not to be cowed. “That is all very well, Lavenham, but how are Camilla and I to avoid making gaffes if we do not know these things?”
There was such obvious sense in this that he unbent still more and proceeded to give them a lively account of Portuguese society, its delights, such as they were, its tedium, and its pitfalls. “And above all,” he ended warningly, “you will avoid comment of any kind on their religion, which is, to the Regent certainly, and to many of his people, the most important thing in life. And, equally, you will avoid association of any kind with the French—oh,” he remembered, “forgive me, Camilla, but at least you are English now.”
She laughed. “And a good thing too, I can see. But do the French maintain an embassy in Lisbon, then? I had not thought of it.”
“Of course they do, since Portugal is, officially at least, neutral.”
“How do you mean, officially?” asked Chloe.
“Why, merely that, in past years, Portugal has always been our very good friend both at land and sea. Now, Bonaparte is trying to change all that, and is exerting the utmost pressure on Dom John to persuade him to close his ports against us.”
“And would that be bad?” asked Camilla.
“Disastrous.”
And you are going to Lisbon to persuade the Prince Regent that he must not give way!” exclaimed Chloe. “What a great man you are, to be sure, Lee.”
He laughed. “Well, call it, rather, to assist Lord Strangford in his persuasions. My cousin thought my knowledge of the country might prove of some service. I spent several years there when I was a very young man indeed,” he explained to Camilla, “since the rest of Europe was closed to me by this unending war. I hope you will find the countryside and the people to your taste. I have grown to find them good friends, for all their faults.”
She could not help laughing at this characteristically reserved commendation. “Do not praise them too high,” she begged, teasingly, “or you will raise expectations quite impossible of fulfilment. But I can see that we will have plenty to do, Chloe and I, in ensuring that we do not handicap you in your negotiations. Tell me, though, in what language will we converse with these paragons of yours, for I must confess that I know no more Portuguese than I do Greek.”
‘I am afraid that with the ladies you may find yourselves largely reduced to sign language,” he said, “for you will find their ideas of female education amazingly behind ours.”
Camilla laughed again. “So Chloe and I will find ourselves miracles of learning,” she said. “Well, at all events, it will make the chances of our offending considerably less if no one can understand what we say. Do you know any Portuguese, Chloe?”
“Why, yes,” she said surprisingly, “I do a little. I tried to learn it when Lavenham was there last, but I am afraid I did not make a great deal of progress: to tell truth, I could not believe that any human being could make such strange noises; but perhaps I will recall it when I hear it spoken.”
“You never told me that,” said Lavenham, with a mixture of surprise and pleasure that Camilla found most promising for his relations with his sister.
“You never asked me,” said Chloe simply.
The day wore on endlessly. They had left the red Devon fields behind now and were rattling over the dreary uplands of Cornwall. The fatigue and tedium of travelling had them all in its grip and conversation dwindled and died. Chloe curled up in her corner and fell asleep with the easy abandon of a child; Lavenham, in his, leaned back with eyes half closed, brooding—about what? Camilla wondered, and then warned herself against the vanity of imagining his thoughts were of her. It was far more likely that he was considering the difficulties of the mission ahead of him.
She had difficulties enough of her own to face. Impossible not to like Chloe, but equally impossible not to wonder just how their curious
ménage
a
trois
would develop. The prospect of working out some kind of possible life with Lavenham had been frightening enough without the addition of his lively sister to the party. And yet, she could not regret her suggestion that Chloe accompany them. It was obvious that much of her thoughtless behaviour was the direct result of her forlorn childhood. She had been a baby when her father was killed and her mother ran away and no one had really thought about her since. Her grandmother cared nothing for her; her brother hated women; she had been brought up by servants, bandied about from this casual relative to that, and finally deposited at a school in Wimbledon from which she had been lucky if she escaped once a year. It was really no wonder, Camilla thought, that she had leapt at the proffered affection of a music master. After all, no one else had cared for her. Nor was it surprising that her one idea now was, apparently, to get herself married as quickly as possible. She must be suffering from lack of family life and this was the only way she could secure it. Camilla and Lavenham would have to form themselves into a family, however odd a one, for her sake. At least, after his first outburst Lavenham seemed to have resigned himself easily enough to her accompanying them and indeed, considering how little they had seen of each other, brother and sister seemed to be on remarkably easy terms, and Lavenham had been visibly touched by her attempt at learning Portuguese for his sake. Perhaps it would do well enough yet. Perhaps, even, she and Chloe between them might contrive to teach him that women were not so very dreadful after all. And, smiling at this idea, she fell asleep.