Cashelmara (12 page)

I could see him thinking that he was to be sent to Oxford and allowed to spend his vacations at Woodhammer Hall. He had never been to England. By keeping him at Cashelmara, where Hayes and his wife had looked after him in my absence, I had underlined to him that despite my charity he was not to regard himself as a member of my family.

“That’s very generous of you, my lord.” He was so overjoyed that his eyes shone with tears. “I know I have no right to expect you to send me to the university after this.”

“Oh, you’ll go to a university,” I said. “You’ll go to Germany and study at the University of Frankfurt. And what’s more you’ll stay there and not show your face either in England or in Ireland for three years. Is that clear?”

It was. He was appalled. “Frankfurt! But, my lord, I don’t speak German!”

“Learn it,” I said.

That silenced him. I watched him as he gradually realized I had handed out a judgment that would be acceptable to both the Joyces and the O’Malleys: banishment but not total disgrace. I had washed my hands of him while still continuing to promote his welfare.

“It’ll be an interesting experience for you,” I said after a while. “Make the most of it.”

“But …” He looked very young suddenly. “I don’t know a soul there.” But he was recovering himself. I saw him slip behind his actor’s mask again and assume a pathetic woebegone expression. “I’ll be all alone.”

“Better all alone in Frankfurt with my money in your pocket,” I said, “than all alone in the world without a penny to your name. Very well, Roderick, the incident is closed, but remember that if you ever get into such trouble again you needn’t look to me when you start wondering where your next penny is coming from.”

He nodded, still shaken, and told me soberly that he would remember all I had said. But I wondered how far I could believe him, and before George returned to the drawing room to insist that I stay the night I wished I had never set eyes on that emaciated little orphan who had crawled long ago through the back door of Cashelmara to beg for a spoonful of gruel.

“SOMETIMES I THINK SPRING
will never come,” wrote Marguerite, and suddenly that sentence, repeated by her throughout the winter, seemed mechanical and cold. I read the letter again and again, and each time I became more convinced that the careful lines masked some troubled state of mind that she dared not reveal to me. She had written the letter in February, six months after she had last seen me, and she wrote as if she could not quite remember who I was.

I was in London by this time. Before leaving Cashelmara I had dispatched Derry to stay with some of his more distant relatives and had told him to stay there until I had made the necessary arrangements for him to travel to Germany. As for Patrick, I had decided that he should go to Eton when the new term started. I had been told once that Eton was the school that favored boys of gentler inclinations, and I hoped Patrick would find it easier to settle down there than at Rugby. Meanwhile, I was again obliged to spend time supervising his activities, but although this curtailed some of my attendances at Westminster, I was relieved; domestic issues were beginning to revolve around Parliamentary Reform again, a subject far removed from my interest in agriculture, and foreign affairs seemed to consist of nothing but a romantic but impracticable sympathy for Italian unification coupled with a hysterical Francophobia. Marguerite had asked me in her letter what was being said in England about the American crisis, but I could hardly tell her that despite last summer’s armistice people in England were still so terrified of a militant France once more stalking Europe that they would hardly have noticed if America had been wiped from the face of the earth.

Even Marguerite’s paragraph about politics seemed out of character. She wrote as if copying one of the letter-writing textbooks she had professed to despise, and the free, bright style of her first letters, in which she had skipped nimbly from subject to subject, had now disappeared beneath the leaden weight of formality.

In April, a week after I had received this disturbing letter, I had a birthday. Fortunately no one remembered. I spent the day trying to occupy myself as fully as possible, but that evening after Patrick had retired I drank so much port that for the first time in weeks I was able to sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

The next morning I felt ashamed of myself for my weakness, and after taking some salts for my headache I tried to reason myself into a sensible frame of mind. Even if Marguerite no longer wanted to marry me, there was no reason why I should not enjoy her company during her visit to England. Why should we not remain on friendly terms? I would treat her as a daughter, and, besides, had I not insisted on the long engagement and separation so that either of us might change our minds later if we wished? I had been worrying about Marguerite ending the engagement, but perhaps when I saw her again I too would have second thoughts about marriage. Why not? It was possible. Duneden might have been right when he had hinted that my American surroundings could have impaired my judgment, and although I had believed Marguerite was suitable for me, I might have been so anxious to find a new wife that I had attributed to her qualities she had never possessed.

But the more I reasoned to myself in this sensible vein the closer I felt to despair, and finally, unable to do anything but sit by the window of my room in numbing idleness, I noticed that outside in the square the leaves were in bud on the trees and the daffodils were beginning to bloom.

“Sometimes I think spring will never come,” Marguerite had written time and again throughout that endless winter, but spring had come at last, just as it always did, and now in less than six weeks I would be face to face with her once more.

I was dreading it.

Of course I made no arrangements for the wedding. That would have been tempting fate. I could hardly even bring myself to speak of Marguerite for fear the mention of her name would somehow cast a shadow over the future, and when Duneden inquired politely when she was due to arrive I could do no more than tell him the date and quickly change the subject. Fortunately I had no such inquiries from my daughters. Annabel had not communicated with me since our quarrel, and although Katherine wrote dutifully every month from St. Petersburg, she never mentioned Marguerite’s name. As for Madeleine, I was hardly surprised when I heard no further word from the convent where she had incarcerated herself. No doubt she was too busy remembering me in her daily prayers.

April ended; May began. Thinking it might be less awkward for Marguerite, particularly if she wished to end our understanding, if she and Amelia did not stay at my house, I reserved a suite for them at Mivart’s Hotel in Brook Street. They would be traveling alone. Francis had decided that his children were too young to make the long journey across the Atlantic, and of course Blanche was remaining with him in New York.

On the day the ship was due to dock I took the train to Liverpool, where I had arranged for us all to spend the night. Patrick was at Eton by this time, and so except for my manservant I was quite alone when I arrived at the Adelphi Hotel on that cool, wet spring day.

The train arrived on time at Lime Street, and thinking I would have at least three hours to spare before welcoming my guests, I walked without hurrying up the flight of steps and between the magnificent pillars into the hotel’s hall. I was astonished to find the hall crowded. There were piles of baggage everywhere, and as I stood staring at the milling throng I suddenly realized that, although the people nearest me were speaking English, they spoke with American accents.

My heart gave a great lurch. I pushed my way through the crowd to the clerk at the desk.

“Did the boat arrive early from New York?”

“Yes, sir, it docked two hours ago. A very smooth voyage, I believe.” He suddenly remembered me from my previous visit to the hotel on my return from America. Oh, Lord de Salis! Pardon me, my lord, for being so slow to recognize you! I—”

“Has anyone inquired for me?”

“Yes, my lord. Certainly, my lord. Yes, a Mrs. and Miss Marriott are waiting in the grand drawing room.”

The throng hummed noisily around me. After a while I became aware of my manservant asking if he should take the bags immediately to my suite.

I nodded. I did not look at him. I was in such a panic that I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, and then at last as I stood on the brink of the rejection I had dreaded for so long I was able to tell myself calmly: Worse things have happened to me, and I dare say I shall recover soon enough.

Finding the misnamed drawing room at the far end of the hall, I walked through the huge doorway into the elaborate saloon beyond.

She saw me before I saw her. The room was full. The unknown faces spun in a blur before my eyes, but suddenly I became aware of movement, of someone hurrying past the people and paraphernalia to the doorway where I had paused to stand alone.

She wore a dark blue traveling habit and a little dark blue bonnet, and her dark blue eyes blazed in her pointed little face. She seemed changed, and because she was not as I remembered her to be I found it hard to believe her presence was real. For a second I wondered if I were the victim of a hallucination, but when I noticed she was white with fright the reality of her presence streamed through me in a blistering blast of pain.

I cared for nothing then except to keep the pain hidden. I knew I must be very kind and very understanding and assure her fervently that I wanted only her happiness.

“Edward …”

I could hear her voice. There was a suffocating tightness in my throat.

“Oh, Edward, Edward, I thought spring would
never
come!” she cried, and the words I had read so often in her letters were no longer dead but infused with the most passionate life. I stared at her, not daring to understand, and she, terrified by my paralyzed silence, gasped wildly, “Oh, please say you haven’t changed your mind! Please, please say you haven’t changed it!”

And as I blindly reached out toward her she ran headlong into my arms.

“Your letters changed!” It was she who spoke, not I. “They became so cool and told me so little about what you were doing. Oh, Edward, I was so worried! I wanted to ask if anything was troubling you, but I didn’t dare, and afterward I found it harder and harder to know what to say to you.”

I had not intended to burden her with my worries, but before I realized it I was telling her all I had not mentioned in my letters. I told her about my quarrel with Annabel, about my trials with Patrick, about my troubles at Cashelmara, and all the time I was really talking not of my children nor of my home but of my loneliness, my isolation, the repulsion that filled me whenever I thought of facing the future alone.

“At least neither of us need be alone now,” said Marguerite. “How soon can we be married?”

I suggested that she might like time to prepare at length for a large wedding, but she shook her head in horror.

“I don’t care about the wedding!” she protested. “Why should we exhaust ourselves for weeks organizing a pageant that will achieve exactly the same result as a little ceremony before a clergyman and two witnesses?

All I want is to be married to you, Edward, and as far as I’m concerned nothing else is of any consequence at all.”

We were married five weeks later on the twentieth of June at the Berkeley Chapel in Mayfair. It was a quiet ceremony. The thirty guests were selected from my closest circle of acquaintances, and the American Minister, whom Marguerite had met in New York, gave the bride away. Not one of my children was present. Naturally I had not expected Madeleine to leave her cloister or Katherine to return from St. Petersburg, but Annabel had refused to answer my invitation, and Patrick, by his own behavior, had excluded himself from the guest list.

At the end of May, two weeks after Marguerite’s arrival, he ran away from Eton and hid himself at Woodhammer Hall. My butler’s letter telling me of Patrick’s arrival reached me the day after the telegram from the headmaster of Eton.

I did not stop to think. My patience was exhausted, and I had been keeping my anger toward him in check for too long. First I wrote to my nephew George to ask him to remove Patrick from Woodhammer and keep him at Letterturk Grange until I returned from my honeymoon, and then I took a fresh sheet of paper and told Patrick what I thought of him.

“My dear Patrick,” I wrote, “I was grieved to hear of your latest failure to behave in a manner which I might find in any way commendable and wish you to understand that I am deeply ashamed of your indefensible conduct. My shame is all the deeper since I have been obliged to ask your cousin George to escort you to Ireland and look after you until such time as I am able to attend to you myself. Pray make no attempt to journey to London for my wedding; in the circumstances I would feel unable to welcome you as a father should welcome his only son on such an important occasion. I remain your affectionate but disappointed father,
DE SALIS
.”

I received no reply from Patrick, but presently George wrote to say that he had followed my instructions and that he and Patrick were back in Ireland. I was able to relax at last. Patrick no doubt would have preferred to stay with Annabel, but he clearly needed a man’s supervision, and since George was probably only too anxious to avoid my wedding, I suspected that his new role of guardian would suit him as well as it suited me.

After that, determined not to let my perpetual worry about my son mar my enjoyment of Marguerite’s company, I put all thought of his disgrace from my mind. Patrick had failed me. I had done all I could for him and still he had failed me, but now that no longer mattered. Nothing mattered except Marguerite, and when I walked down the aisle with her at last on that hot June afternoon in 1860 I felt as if I were walking backward in time until I stood once more amidst the splendor of my youth of long ago.

We were married.