Inheritance Feud

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

She closed her eyes, remembering. It had nearly killed her, that birth. The physician had said, afterwards, that she could never bear another child, and she was glad. The distress and humiliations of pregnancy, the prolonged agony of labour, the final wrenching of one's body apart, as though one were a mere vessel devoid of will, was something she would never let herself recall or think of. It was it was like the animals, coarse, painful, grotesque, unmentionable. And before that there had been the other things she would never mention again.

For Theon had been wrong; Godfrey at the time of their marriage was not quite impotent. Godfrey, whose mind was as fine as a surgeon's knife, as a great painting, as a cathedral, and whose body was a pitiful thing, with so little strength in its reins that he could only stimulate, never satisfy ... Godfrey had tried to become her lover. She had endured all of it; the uncertain, groping touch, the obscene jerking and fumbling, the growing awareness of failure which had ended, always, in the same way, with his head laid like a child's against her breast while he sobbed in bitter humiliation and distress. Hermione had not withdrawn her breast, or herself; she had tried to comfort him.

Then Kitty had taken a hand. Kitty, filled with her usual overt curiosity, knowing, though no one had discussed it with her, that all was not fully well with the marriage; determined, in her foolish and mistakenly loving dependence, that it should be; Kitty, serving them both night after night with wine which tasted bitter.

It had happened, accordingly, soon after that, but not in

bed. It had happened in the small shed with glass windows

where she and Godfrey, before winter should come on, were

constructing an indoor garden on low shelves he could reach

from his chair. He'd been seated in it by her, and she'd turned

and laughed up at him about some small matter, whatever it

was; and had seen at once that something troubled him, and

the great pearls of sweat beading his forehead, and had gone

to wipe them away. And then it had happened. It had been embarrassing; she hadn't liked it, but she'd endured it, for as long as it took for the thing to be done. Afterwards Godfrey himself had been ill. That evening she herself had gone straight to Kitty Bowes and told her, with unaccustomed anger burning bright in her cheeks, that she must never, never do such a thing again; it was bad for Godfrey's health and she had no right to do it; what had she put in the wine? And Kitty, trembling and giving way to facile tears, had shown Hermione a little box, in which she kept certain iridescent green powders left over from Bowes in the days of his exces ses; they'd never failed her and Bowes, she said.

Well... she'd felt soiled. But it had let the fact of her pregnancy be announced, a little while later, without question from the family. Only Clairette, with her furtive dark glance and her half-smile, had made Hermione feel uncomfortable And, since the birth, of course, with Godfrey's condition and her own, and the migraines which troubled her and for which Cecily's cure, which she'd tried after Paul brought it over and which had proved to be no better than anything else... with all that, separate bedchambers were a necessity. It was understandable; certainly Godfrey understood it, and it was never now discussed between them.

"Shall we have a quick round of vingty after all?" said Kitty indefatigably, coming in by the long window. "The lilacs are in grand leaf, Godfrey darling; we walked in the shade of them, and they've only been planted three years; how well they've grown!"

"It is becoming a pleasure-garden," said Hermione, smilingly dealing out the cards as they all sat down, Clairette evidently having been persuaded to behave more graciously than was her habit. It was an hour yet till the meal; they played till darkness fell, then desisted when the servant brought the candles in, because of Godfrey's eyes. These had grown weak lately, and he only played in daylight. Afterwards Hermione half regretted the absence of the young Berrys, who would have made music for him; but they were elsewhere.

Later, after the two Bowes women had gone up to bed, he had an asthmatic attack. These often assailed him in summer, and the physician put it down to the heat; so Hermione obed iently went and opened the windows, allowing the mingled night scents of stock and honeysuckle, grass-flowers and early roses, to flood in; was it her fancy that Godfrey grew worse with the scents? She went out, and shortly brought in what sometimes relieved him, a small, freshly-plucked sprig of peppermint from the herb-garden; the tiny round leaves emitted a charming fragrance, which sometimese refreshed him. He gasped, pressed the sprig against his nostrils willing ly, and when he could, thanked her. But his face was still swollen and his eyes ran, and he put a hand to his chest; there was a pain there, he managed to tell her, which wasn't asthma; it came sometimes.

The attack passed and with it the pain, and she closed the window again; as always, in his courageous way, Godfrey be gan to talk after that of other things, as if nothing out of the way had happened. But his breaths were still laboured, and later Hermione eased his pillows and sat by him till George Oakes, who slept on a pallet in the room nowadays, came. Godfrey was meantime talking of a letter he had received that day; he had meant, he said, to ask her about it.

"You know I'd have made over Baron-to you-and the remaining farms and and Mains." He struggled for breath, and she soothed him; what did it matter, she told him again, the marriage settlements made it unnecessary, a complication, leaving out the question of Sybilla. "We share everything, my darling." She felt her deep affection for this brave man rise; it wasn't like other love had been, not physical, but-but last ing; sometimes, when he was ill like this, she wondered, with a clutch of terror at her heart, what any of them would do without Godfrey. He talked on. An English firm of lawyers, he said, had written to know if he would be prepared to con sider a tenancy for Mains; their client wanted a retired life, and was returning from abroad, and would like to take the dower house for a period of five years, at the outset. "What do you think?" Godfrey asked Hermione. "I'd thought of keeping the house lest Clairette marry, but so far-”

"Five years," she oed. "How did this man know of the house?" The country was remote; he must be someone who knew of it, had been here once, perhaps, or-Fear sprang in

her. "Have they seen this man?" she said sharply. "Do they know him?"

"Presumably, as he is a client." Godfrey smiled through his remaining breathlessness; it gave him, at times, a pleasant sense of masculinity to instruct Hermione. He told her, as was true enough, that the dower house would be better to be lived in and fired, having had only occasional attention since aunt Galadriel's death. "I'll set them tomorrow to clear the garden," he said. "At present, the Englishman won't get through to his front door. Fosse of course will have to deal with it, and can take instruction from the London firm." Fosse was the Edin burgh lawyer.

So he had already decided on it, she told herself; and tried to quench her own disquiet. There was, after all, no reason why the Mains should not have a tenant, if any desired to come.

III

SOME weeks after the foregoing events at Baron, a hired coach was negotiating the steep, crowded cobbles of Edin burgh High Street. The comings and goings of the lawcourts impeded its progress and caused one of the inmates to rap, impatiently, for the driver to bestir himself. That personage shrugged, and gave a routine flick of his long whip above the horses' idle rumps; as if they were used to this treatment, they shrugged likewise, so that the sharp reminder might have been no more than the bite of a passing cleg or gnat; and continued their slow pace.

"This is intolerable!" said Theon Doon to his companion, who lounged opposite him in the coach-interior, a plain beaver hat pulled down over his eyes. "We are an hour later than we intended already; the attorney will have gone to his tavern."

"Not so," replied the other soothingly, in the accents of a foreigner. "The courts are only now emerging."

"Scaling, they call it here, if nowhere else; add that to your vocabulary, Samson. What a country! Since the Parliament left it, in my great-grandfather's time, the capital is nothing but a lawyers' warren where proofs pile up." He himself, long unable to see even so unworthy an aspect, stared with sightless eyes beyond the window, where, he knew, past the press of black gowns and white wigs the brooch-tower of St. Giles' raised itself, and further up the bulk of the Castle; the light eyes, bright as a falcon's, rested on them unseeing. Theon Doon had lived in darkness since the customs-fight, seven and a half years back; the deep wound to the nerve-centres at the back of his brain had taken his sight, though the eyes them selves were uninjured. The passing of time, in such a condi tion, had altered Theon in immediate appearance very little; a thick white lock of hair grew at the site of the old injury, but he had covered it today with the wig which he wore be neath his hat. A ruthless quality about the thin mouth, a masklike lack of expression in the face, might have told those with eyes to see that this man had lived long with horror; but most men, seeing him pass by in the coach, would notice only a well-to-do citizen clad in the fashion of, perhaps, ten years back; he had had the suit of clothes made to order in Port Jackson, and they were still of the cut he remembered before leaving home. His coat was of broadcloth, of good imported quality, with modest braiding on the fastenings and turned back cuffs, and he wore a gay waistcoat of French brocade, which had cost a great deal; his shoes had silver buckles. He had made, as his appearance suggested, a reasonable fortune in Australia; old Aaron's legacy had come at the right time to permit him to buy, at low rate, a strip of land to clear upriver. With Samson as foreman, and native labour, it had shortly become a productive farm; before leaving, Theon had sold the land and equipment at auction, making a good profit. He smiled; that wasn't the only pair of irons he had in the fire; the man Tom Neilson had been sent to Abel Judd with in structions to proceed in a certain way over the money still hidden, and the contacts they retained in France.

Theon's companion in the coach was attired similarly to his master, although his waistcoat was plainer. The noticeable thing about him-leaving aside the dusky colour of his skin, for he was a mulatto, a half-black-was his strong frame, compact and massive as a bull's rather than very tall; he had average height. His eyes, surprisingly, were smoke-grey, and surveying the teeming streets now with a kind of resigned acceptance. Now and again he would pass a pink tongue across his lips, and his teeth, when once or twice he smiled at some saying of Theon's, were ruinously decayed, more like a white man's than a n***o's.