The Distant Kingdom Page 36

  But Charles, what could I have done? Apart from what he did to her, which was bad enough in all conscience, I am so afraid of him turning on Richard. He is so young and so happy that it would be cruel to make him afraid. I suppose that is the difference between them: Richard has never seen the dreadful things that Charlie and Annie saw when they were so young. Perhaps it is only surprising that Charlie has done nothing worse yet.

  It is this kind of thing that I wish I could talk of to Marcus. He was there in Afghanistan too, and he could help them both, I am sure. But he will not. The burdens of memory are still with us, like the huge packs those poor sepoys carried, and we will carry them until we face what we did and what was done to us.

  There is yet more talk of war with all those rebellions last year. The croakers are certain that some predator will soon threaten us or our possessions. I pray that they are wrong.

  Perdita

  Venice, April 1850

  My dear,

  In spite of your advice, I escaped once again and left my mother and the unfortunate Emily to their regrets, to come here in search of another book. The late rebellion, which concerned you so much, provides a splendid excuse: Venice, so ravishingly beautiful, was once fantastically powerful for so small a place; yet now it is abjectly crushed beneath the feet of another imperial power.

  I wish I could show this island to you. Occasionally, in spite of Keats’s words, I dream of a time when we shall meet again, but…

  Charles

  My dear Charles,

  It is so good to be back

  London, November ’50

  here, working with Marcus, that

  I can almost forget my fears for poor Charlie. And Marcus is glad, too. The secretaries we found for him are clever, of course, and can do all the reading and writing he needs, but he says that he needs me too. We talk of everything now, except the past, and it is hard sometimes to remember how aloof he once was. But I still wish he would break his silence about the war. I believe that until he knows the truth, and accepts what happened, there will always be a barrier between us. But I dare not risk breaking my promise to James Thurleigh. It is cowardly, but I could not bear it now if Marcus were to turn from me in hatred for what I did to James.

  He is very dear to me, Charles. I would do anything if I could be sure it would make him happy.

  Annie has made several sketches of him and they are such remarkable likenesses that I am sending you one. Most of the time he looks as content as she has shown him, but there are still occasions when the old pain returns and I cannot seem to do anything for him.

  Perdita

  London, January ’52

  Dear Charles,

  No letters from you. Have I offended you by writing so much of Marcus? Or have you simply escaped again?

  Life continues here much as it was doing when I last wrote. Marcus says that Russia is still frightening the war party, this time because of Constantinople. They seem to think that the existence of Russians there threatens India once again. Where will it all end? What will happen next?

  Please write to me, Charles. I need you too.

  Perdita

  Venice, March ’52

  Perdita, my dear,

  Of course you have not offended me. I cannot think what has happened to all my letters – perhaps they are tumbled in a ditch somewhere in Europe after an accident with a mailcoach. Perhaps the Austrians think I was writing sedition. Who can tell?

  I am nearly finished here, and find the city and lagoon very oppressive. It is strange that a place as beautiful as this can be so melancholy and stifling. I thought of going home to write up all the notes I have made, but in the end I decided to return to India. I wrote to your father to ask if he would see me, and I have his reply here. I leave as soon as I can get a ship and shall be in Simla soon.

  Still yours, Charles

  London, August ’52

  My dear Charles,

  I think that this is the first time I have truly envied you your freedom. To go back – to see Papa again! You must know how much I miss him. Will you try to persuade him to come here, Charles? His latest letters have worried me, and I wish I could go to him. He writes often, and Marcus and I fancy that we can almost hear him talking when I read his letters aloud, but it is not the same, and I am afraid of his growing old in that country. Not that I would not live there if I could. I miss that too, in a way I had never expected. Will you tell me everything, from the moment of your arrival at Calcutta? I want to hear the birds, smell the scent of the flowers, see the colours, that light, all the things that are so different from their English counterparts.

  Please persuade Papa to come here, if not to stay then just for a visit. If he came overland, it need not take too much time.

  Perdita

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Simla, February ’53

  Perdita, my love,

  You see that I have reached old Simla at last. I was afraid too much might have changed and I should not be able to see the places we knew. It is true that the town has grown – with rather ramshackle houses in the most part – but enough is as it was. The hills are exactly the same, of course, and so is the air. I had forgotten what a contrast there is between the stuffiness of the Plains and this clear, brilliant atmosphere (from which you will have gathered that so far we have escaped fogs and snowfalls – there is plenty of snow, but it is not falling now).

  Your father, too, is just as I remembered him. He says that he has slowed down and that he creaks at the joints, as though he is an old piece of furniture. It is true that he looks older and he does seem tired, but his conversation has all the old vigour, and his welcome of me was as generous as the day I arrived here from Peshawar all those years ago.

  We do not talk much about that time, but he has shown me all the letters you have written to him since. He has kept every one, and has his favourites in that inlaid mahogany box you gave him beside his chair in the library so that he can reread them whenever he wants. He picked out several for me to read.

  He also showed me the kit-kat of Richard that you sent him last year. As I looked at it an extraordinary idea presented itself to me for the first time. I can’t think why it never occurred to me before. Perdita, am I wrong? You have told me how much the boy means to you, but very little else about him …

  Perdita put down the letter and picked up a miniature of her younger son, which stood before her on the desk. As she looked at it, noticing once again the delicately cut lips and the greenish eyes as much as the shape and structure of the face, she asked herself once more the question that Charles had not quite put into words. Was he Richard’s father?

  Suddenly she could not bear him to think that she had deliberately misled him and so she found a pen and, without stopping to think very much, wrote:

  My very dear Charles,

  I do not know. When Richard was born I knew that it was possible that he was your son, but I had no way to be certain. As he grew into childhood, people said that he looked like me and I let myself think they might be right, and told you nothing.

  But more and more I have wondered. In many ways he seems like Marcus: they share a peculiar gentleness and that tremendous, undeviating loyalty that Marcus has always shown but that I have only recently come to understand; and they are such good companions. This may sound sentimental, but it is not meant to: when Marcus lapses into one of his bleak periods, when I cannot reach him at all and I am so afraid of what he suffers, Richard can almost always wake him out of whatever thoughts are gripping him.

  Yet he is like you too, Charles. He has a joyousness about him that seems quite foreign both to Marcus and to me; it reminds me of you as much as his imperviousness to doubts and shyness – his rather engaging certainty that life will go his way.

  I wish I could be sure. All I know is that Richard is the most lovable child – and very happy in his life. None of us will ever be sure, but in all legal and practical ways he is Marcus’s son. And Marcus loves him. Char
les, you must see him if you wish, but I beg you not to speak to either of them about what might be. You know that I loved you and that the thought that he might be your son gives me great happiness, but it is a happiness that we must keep to ourselves. Marcus has been hurt enough for three lifetimes. Do not make him suffer any more.

  Perdita

  She folded her letter, sealed it, and directed it to Charles at Whitney House, marking it to go via the express Suez route so that he would receive it as soon as possible. Then she rang for one of the footmen to take it at once to the offices of the Peninsula and Orient Line.

  Once the man had gone, she tried to forget it, and turned to her other letters. When they were dealt with, she remembered other things she could do to keep her thoughts at bay and sent for the housekeeper to give her orders for the following week.

  There were to be a series of breakfasts for Marcus’s colleagues and a large formal reception for the leading members of the Opposition and their wives, and it was essential that everything should be arranged perfectly. As she waited for Mrs Ramsden, Perdita thought how incredible such an occupation would have seemed to the pathetic Miss Whitney of the Rectory at Fakenham. Looking back across the years, she remembered her conviction that her life had ended with her mother’s death, and that when she had sailed from England she had believed herself to be worth nothing and had even wanted to die. Terrible things had happened to her since then, but it was no longer those that she saw; it was the discovery of her father that seemed to shine out of the past, with all the good that had grown from it. It was he who had first taught her that she could be lovable, just as it was Marcus’s need that had shown her her own strength. Because of the way they – and Charles – had taught her how to value herself, she knew that whatever happened in the future she would never again despair. She would be able to deal with whatever fate did to her.

  She wanted more, of course; all kinds of guarantees of safety for the children and for the three men that she loved. And above everything else, she longed for Marcus to be different, to be able to be her lover as well as her husband and friend. Her years with him had given her so much that it seemed ungrateful to want from him also the kind of love Charles had given her; but at last she had learned not to be ashamed of wanting it. Marcus …

  A knock at the door interrupted her meandering thoughts, and brought them back to her task of ensuring that everything should go correctly when she received Marcus’s guests. Mrs Ramsden was the last and most capable of a series of housekeepers, and Perdita knew that she would do exactly as she was told, but that she had to be told. Nothing could be left to chance.

  ‘And please ensure that Rusham does not include any lilies in the vases this time,’ she ended. ‘You know how the scent disturbs his lordship.’

  ‘Very good, my lady,’ answered Mrs Ramsden. ‘I did tell him last time, but I shall make sure now.’

  ‘Please do. His lordship has enough to bother him without unnecessary annoyances like that. Oh, just a moment,’ she added as the plump, soberly dressed woman rose to leave, ‘where is Miss Annie today? I didn’t see her at breakfast.’

  ‘I believe she’s in that studio of hers, my lady. Sarah said that she had a tray in her room and went straight off to paint. Shall I send one of the maids to fetch her down?’

  ‘No, don’t do that. I shall go up myself. Thank you, Mrs Ramsden.’

  Perdita followed her housekeeper out of the elegant octagonal room where she had her writing table and went on up to the attics. A year earlier, when it had become clear that Annie had an exceptional talent, Perdita had given her a room of her own to paint in, and she knew that the privacy it afforded was highly prized. She rarely violated it, but was worried enough about Annie to do so then. Ever since Charlie had been sent back to school at the beginning of term, she had been unnaturally quiet, and her pallor and thinness reminded Perdita frighteningly of Aneila in the months before the consumption took hold.

  When she reached the door of the studio she knocked briefly and went in without waiting for an answer, to see Annie dressed in a long, cream-coloured linen coat working at a large canvas in the cold north light. She held a brush in her right hand and a pallette knife in the left, and she was peering closely at her work. She seemed unaware that there was anyone else in the room. Perdita stood silent by the door, watching.

  Annie’s eastern blood was obvious in her inky black hair and huge dark eyes, but her father had bequeathed her both height and a warm complexion. Perdita thought she looked splendid in the severe linen coat, although her hair was bundled back untidily and already there was a streak of carmine paint across her left cheek.

  ‘Annie?’

  At the sound of the voice, the girl looked up and quickly turned her easel to the wall. She put down the knife and brush and came towards the door, wiping her hands on a messy rag.

  ‘Good morning, Perdita,’ she said gravely to her half-sister, who had long since ceased to be ‘Mama’.

  ‘I did not mean to disturb you, Annie. Please don’t stop for me. Is it going well?’

  ‘Well enough. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Why, nothing. I came to see how you are, and to ask whether I could see the picture.’

  To her surprise, Annie blushed deeply and shook her dark head.

  ‘But, Annie, you have always let me see your work. What is the matter?’

  Aneila put her hands in the pockets of her long coat.

  ‘You won’t like it, Perdita. It will hurt you. And I don’t mean to do that or want to. It is just something I had to paint.’ The staccato sentences were so unlike her that Perdita began to be seriously worried. She walked over to the easel and without asking again swung it around under the fanlight. At first she took in little of the subject-matter in her recognition of the extraordinary advances in technical competence that it showed.

  ‘But, Annie, it is going to be very good: much better than The Charge. I like the way you have painted those snowy rocks.’

  Then she looked more closely and began to understand. The canvas, which must have been about six foot by four and a half, showed an almost photographically exact representation of the scene in the mountains behind Jellalabad when she shot James Thurleigh. There was the man under the stone, and the scrambling pony pinned down in front of a woman who levelled a revolver at them. Perdita was distressed to see that Annie had given her an expression of furious hatred, and she was about to speak when she looked again at the figure under the rock and saw that his face was Charlie’s. Without turning her head, she said sadly:

  ‘Oh, Annie.’

  ‘It is his nightmare,’ she answered in a dull voice. ‘I started it after he went back last time. He had only just told me about it. I thought if he saw it with his eyes instead of his mind it might go away.’

  Perdita lost her own shocked hurt in the desolation of Annie’s voice and went to hug her.

  ‘Come and sit down.’ They sat side by side on the model’s couch, and Perdita held her half-sister’s hands in a firm clasp.

  ‘Did he tell you why he dreams that dream?’

  The bent head shook slowly. Perdita stroked it gently.

  ‘He may have forgotten, but I will tell you. Do you remember the ride to Jellalabad in the war?’

  ‘Not really,’ she whispered. ‘Only the cold.’

  ‘There was a small earthquake on the last day, one of a series of shocks, and James Thurleigh, whom you and Charlie called Uncle James, was caught by a fall of rocks loosened by the tremor. I left you and Charlie with Papa behind a bluff and rode to see what had happened and I found Uncle James and his pony trapped. It was impossible to move them, and they were going to die. Not quickly, but of cold, starvation and whatever wounds the rocks had caused. He begged me to shoot him so that he did not have to suffer that. I had no choice, Annie. He died holding my hand.

  ‘When it was over and I went back for all of you, I found that Charlie had followed me. For a long time I have hoped that he had not seen what
had happened, but now I know that he did.’

  ‘Mama.’ Something in Annie’s use of that long-abandoned name touched Perdita deeply.

  ‘Annie, for years I felt guilty. I told myself that I had killed Papa’s dearest friend and that I was wicked for it. But then I learned to understand. There is nothing on earth wicked if it prevents the kind of suffering James would have had if I had refused to do as he pleaded.’

  The studio door opened at that moment and the butler came in, panting after the unaccustomed climb up to the attic. Perdita looked at him, angry that there had to be an interruption at that moment.

  ‘Yes, Hobson, what is it?’

  ‘Mrs Fawcett has called, my lady.’

  ‘Well, tell her that I am not at home,’ she said with rare asperity.

  ‘I did, my lady, but she was very insistent and asked if she could wait until you returned.’

  Without thinking of anything except getting rid of the butler, she said, ‘If it is so important please ask her to come back this afternoon. Oh, tell her … three o’clock.’

  ‘Very good, my lady,’ he said in a voice heavy with injured dignity.

  Perdita waited for Annie to speak again when he had shut the door, but she was silent. Perdita tried again:

  ‘Annie, I wish terribly that I had known of Charlie’s fear long ago, so that I could have explained it to him, told him what happened. But I am sure he knows, really, that I would never hurt him.’