Her eyes narrowed at him.
“How poorly you have sketched my nature!” she said with a flippant and caustic tone. “I have no objection to balls and parties. What is the point of shining if there is no sky to shine in?”
There was a warmth in his smile, though the knife was in it as well. “That is my girl.” He got up, not waiting for her to do likewise, and began to walk the length of the room toward the windows, his supper finished, his wine-glass in hand. At such a vantage he appeared well physically, framed between two lit candelabra, dark, tall, clad in a deep moth-wing grey tunic. She might have hated him less had he been homely or a hunchback, but her heart blistered with the heat of her hatred for him because he was chiselled and handsome, like a god of war, and he knew it.
I despise you
, she mouthed the words. Aloud she said, in an altogether new tone, “I have one objection, though.”
He turned his hawkish profile on her, one brow rampant.
“I do not think it is appropriate that we should go to any ball in these circumstances.”
He swung about, the light flashing wildly and redly in his glass. “My dear Margaret,” he said softly, the way a cat purrs. “My dear Margaret—these circumstances? You hold the power to change them in your hand.”
Impulsively her left hand, which lay in her lap, closed until the nails bit into her palm.
The cat’s purr, the cat’s smile, the cat’s little flicker of enjoyment in the eyes all played about Rupert. “If you think it is inappropriate for us to appear officially in public until we are married, only say the word.”
She did not recall getting to her feet. She did not recall throwing down her napkin. She only knew that she was leaving the room, skirts rustling anxiously around her, and she could hear Rupert’s mocking laughter in her mind. He was not laughing, but she could hear it. She could hear it as plainly as if he stood beside her.
I despise you. I despise you!
The words beat to the cadence of her feet on the stairs upward.
I despise you all!
Once in her own room she shut the door and went directly to the window, throwing back the curtains to let in the strong electrum light of the earth. It was in waning gibbous, if she could call it such, and its light was powerful, flooding over the lawn and paddock, fields and dale. Far away the Marius Hills were a bulk of dragon’s shoulder lifted against the terrestrial glare, silhouetted and black as the mother of all shadows. She stared up past them, up past the oak that grew on the lawn, past the pale tendrils of cloud that had been torn by high winds across the sky, up at the earth.
It no longer rattled her as it had that first night. She did not often look it squarely on, if she could help it, but she did so now for no reason she could put into words. She gripped the casement in a light but steady hand and stared into the half-pearl eye of mottled white and blue.
She was caught between two evils. Which did she choose, since she had to choose—Rupert, or her own family? At her back breathed the threat of her suitor’s proposal, before her loomed the impossible distance of space and the dislike of her own kind.
“A little more than kin and less than kind,” she murmured. Her breath fogged on the cold pane, and for a moment the glaring light was diffused through a mothy web of silver, and it was almost beautiful. Then, with a painful unchanciness, her mind jerked aside to Skander. Was he a way out? Was he the
tertium quid
she hardly dared believe she could have?
No. That thought was dashed almost the moment it came into her mind, leaving her pained and empty inside like a fly that has been a spider’s dinner. She knew Rupert little—she wanted to know him little—but she understood him well enough to know he would not stay his hand should anyone or anything come between him and his ambition. Nothing would be spared, not even the life of his own cousin. She could not put Skander in a position to suffer such a fate.
From the northern head of the dale came the muffled sound of autumn thunder.
With a gusty sigh Margaret folded her arms across her chest, rubbing her hands viciously on her upper arms in an attempt to warm them, for the air seeping through the pane was very cold. She wore a gown of cambric and the fabric made the softest, most whispering noises under her absentminded hand.
At last she turned away from the window. She cast a quick eye about the dark room and saw that everything was in order. Rhea might or might not return to see if she needed anything. It would be well for both of them, thought Margaret, if the maid chose to surreptitiously forget her evening duties to her mistress. As she turned her back on the glare of earth-light, her own shadow long and looming dark across the floor, she knew there was only one answer. Earth was too far away for her to reach, her family too ignorant and uncaring to reach out to her. She was caught between Rupert’s thumb and first finger, a pawn in his hand, and she could only do his bidding.
Her eye lighted on the door. He would not have gone to his chamber yet. He might still be in the dining room, standing at the window, looking out on the lawn even as she had—but across at the hills and down into the valley, which were his, and not up at the oblong gash of planet that was hers. If she went now she would find him and tell him she would accept his proposal. What else was to be done? She had no other way out, and he was handsome and rich and attentive, if sometimes cruel and dark, like the dark side of the moon. She stirred, half-heartedly, like a bird in its feathers…
But she did not move forward. Perhaps it was mere apathy that held her back, or the single spark of pride in her that Rupert had not found and stamped out. She reached behind herself and began to earnestly tug at the buttons of her gown, dismantling it and casting it heedlessly on the back of a chair. She hastened into her lawn night-gown, which was even cooler than the air of her bedroom, all the while telling herself with renewed vigour that though it was only a week to the gala she would go with her head held high and unshackled. Skander had called her a force to be reckoned with, well—let Rupert reckon with her. She climbed into bed and turned her face into the full glory of the earth’s light. She could not reach it, but its unwilling ambassador to Plenilune would make it proud.
She lay back, staring up at the canopy of her bed with her arms tucked behind her head and pillow. Everything was broken up in ebony and white; from within the pool of earth-light she could not distinguish the shapes of her own bedroom. But she knew that in one corner, underneath a cloth, was the red dress that she was to wear to the gala. It was very nearly done; it did not need a whole week to complete it.
The light began to hurt and she shut her eyes. Far away, but rolling and angry and long as the length of a dragon, growled the thunder.
The red looked well on her. It brought out the subtle red tones of her hair and made her cool eyes flash, and even if she looked to herself totally foreign, she had to admit that it became her. She smiled, coolly and a little scornfully, at the thought of her mother’s long monologues on what a girl could do to look beautiful.
I am English
, she thought, rolling over and pulling the blankets close to her chin,
and we have no beauty but in our tempers.
5 | Exile
The storm broke over Seescardale and Marenové House in the cobwebby-grey of the early morning, and kept the world wrapped in cobweb-grey to the threshold of the New Ivy Moon. The bad weather kept both Margaret and Rupert indoors, and as vast as the house was, she could not quite avoid him. She felt at times that he was deliberately following her, or deliberately preceding her; once she stepped into the long upper hall above the kitchen wing and found him standing at the bank of windows, looking out westward into the rolling surge of the storm, his body bound up in a cloak so deeply purple it was almost black. There was the briefest flicker of worry between his brows in that single instant, then he caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye and turned to look directly at her. It was strange, but in the jab of his eyes—a jab that hurt her breastbone—she felt as if the storm were all her fault.
She picked up her skirts and left him without a word.
It was with a vindictive sense of satisfaction that Margaret rose from her bed on the morning of New Ivy Eve and, turning back the curtains, found the world drenched in a blinding clear gold. The storm was gone: the freshness, the brightness, the crispness of Plenilune autumn burned across the landscape as Margaret had never seen an autumn burn before. The lawn and lane were covered in a fish-scale coat of brown and red leaves—and gold in places, where the half-wild maples had thrown down their mantles. The horses were in the paddock, leaving tracks in the dew where they went. At the end of the kitchen wing she could just see old Hobden splitting firewood.
Inexplicably she pulled back, letting the curtains drop in place again. She felt now as she had when she had looked down on Rupert’s old Manor: a mingled sense of beauty and of pain, and everything that was worth anything seemed as far away from her as earth.
Rupert was not at breakfast. When she went down, Margaret found a neatly-cut card on her plate which read:
“I have gone up-See to fetch one last touch for your gown. I will be back by dinner. Take care of yourself, my dear—Rupert.”
It was brisk, touching, caring, and Margaret tossed the card away with a flick of her wrist. It fluttered feather-wise on the tabletop, sliding on the smooth surface, and hid itself under the edge of a silver candelabra. She let it lie, out of sight and out of mind, and ate her breakfast in solitude.
It was her first clear day in almost a week. There was no time to dawdle. She put on a frock of fawn-coloured corduroy and stepped out of doors, following the sound of the slow, incessant chopping.
It surprised her how very much old Hobden looked just as she had left him. His bent, wrinkled, nut-brown body was encased in the same cotton shirt, the same tattered leather vest, the same corduroy trousers and boots. He made the same soft, irritated grumbles as he always did. For no reason she could explain, she thought he ought to have changed; for no reason she could explain, she was glad he had not.
“Good morning,” she said graciously, finding a seat on a giant block of wood. Her fingers dug into the hard, sun-warmed bark and she felt the rough rings of the tree’s heart under her palms. In this little southern corner of the House, the sun of late autumn, the sun of early morning, dreamed of being warm.
With a slow, circular, ambling movement Hobden swung the axe down and away and gave a little salute, tugging with thumb and forefinger on his forward tuft of hair. “G’moornin’,” he rejoined in that rich, raspy, walnut tone of his. He squinted northward and added, “Mus Rupert’s gone away for the day, hmm?”
Margaret nodded.
Hobden turned away and fumbled with his handle on the axe-haft, grumbling under his breath like a badger all the while. “ ’Tain’t for
me
to say, but I knowed Marenové took a breath of relief when ’e passed beyond t’intake.”
“Marenové and I both,” murmured Margaret, with her head turned away so that Hobden would not hear.
Old walnut Hobden went back to his work, swinging slowly away at the wood while the wood fell away beneath his blows, sheering off in even twos so that he was presently surrounded by a pile of large, split, almond-looking pieces of wood. He did not seem to tire, but went on with all the steadiness of an engine. Margaret watched him absentmindedly for some time, wrapped up in her tartan against the November chill; but presently, as he showed no signs of stopping, she began to grow tired of the monotony. She got up, skirting him carefully, and began to wander along the southward arm of the home-meads which were less cultivated and bore the stamp of the wild encroaching fells more clearly than the other gardens.
Broom and furze, whose flowers had long since fallen, and bramble, whose berries had long since been picked, made a kind of wild hedge at the end of the low slope that took and channelled the little stream. It seemed to be the oldest piece of garden; there was no foot-bridge over the stream, which Margaret would have expected to find elsewhere on the grounds, but a mere loose collection of flat stones rising out of the stream-bed. She took the stones without another thought, crossed a bit of grassy, unkempt soft turf that might have been a flower-plot once, and squeezed gingerly through the thorny gap in the intake hedge.
After that there was a thin, short wood of alder that did its best to sink its roots into the stream. She climbed through it and out, with the suddenness of stepping from one world into another, upon the tawny shoulder of the fell. The wind was all around her as it had not been in the low hollow of the House grounds: it boomed and galloped, thundering, brushing, lunging and kicking like a stampede of horses round her shoulders. It was a golden wind, golden and bronze like the wings of an eagle, and the bright colour of it swelled around her with a potency like water. She moved through it, borne and buffeted by it, with the House falling away behind her like a bad dream.
A narrow goat-path, a mere thrush-coloured thread in the tawny turf, stretched upward before her, skirting the steep side of the fell, but always stretching upward, upward and around and out of sight behind the distant shoulder of the fell. Without a thought she struck out on it, climbing upward with the swell of the air all around her. It became a bother to wrestle her wrap around her shoulders and she let it go, holding onto it with only one hand so that it flew out before her like a multicoloured banner of primitive war, fierce and free, its snapping and billowing the very laughter of its genius. She felt it stirring something in her blood.
After a quarter-hour of walking, the wind had slackened into a soft constant rush, and she paused on the goat-path to look back. She had come far and high; Marenové House lay below her, the view of it unobstructed by trees—if she strained she could just make out the tiny toy-figure of Hobden still at work. If she was careful, if she stood perfectly still, with one hand up to shove her wayward hair out of her eyes, she could almost imagine she was not wearing Rupert’s collar and leash.