CHAPTER EIGHT #4
“No, you don’t understand. Why should you? Love in your world, Unice, is all sweetness and light, but I know better.”
Unice shrugged. “Verena, what is this? You speak of love as of some monstrous thing.”
Verena’s eyes filled. It was too much. She could no longer keep silent, not with the danger so close, with Nathaniel practically on the doorstep.
“Monstrous, yes.” Her voice grated on the word.
Then, instinctively, it softened as she let it out at last. “Oh, Unice, if you had heard, as I have from a child, the cries of fear and pain, the blows falling, and then seen, when at last you dared to enter where you had no right, the piteous bruises that disfigured that once lovely face, then — oh, then, Unice, you would not talk to me of love!”
“After that,” Unice said, ending her tale in a depressed manner, “she would say nothing more.”
“Dash it, Unice,” protested her spouse, pushing himself up on his elbow where he lay on the grass under the chestnut tree in the Ruishtons’ garden, whither he and Denzell had repaired in the morning heat to await Unice’s return and hear her report.
They had both discarded their frock-coats, and were lounging in shirt-sleeves. “She can’t have left the matter there.”
“Can’t she?” said Denzell, moodily throwing twigs across the lawn. “You don’t know how close she is.”
He was seated with his back against the tree trunk, his legs outstretched and crossed before him, his hat thrown to one side with his coat, and his long fair hair untidily ruffled from its contact with the bark behind him.
He had listened to Unice’s account with a heart growing heavier by the minute. He had wanted to know what it was that caused Verena’s barriers. There could be no doubting the meaning of the little Verena had told Unice, but its portent did nothing to uplift his spirits.
His first reaction had been one of intense compassion — both for Verena’s mama, and for Verena herself to have borne witness to the cruelties of which she spoke. Then followed the inevitable realisation of a Herculean task: how to persuade Verena that all men did not beat their wives.
Small wonder she was afraid. Everything she was under that cool veneer had been crushed by a fear so intense he doubted his ability to assuage any part of it. Even would she permit him the smallest opportunity to make the attempt — which of course she would not.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Unice was continuing, “but she managed to recover that serene face of hers, and behaved quite as if nothing untoward had occurred.”
“I can see her doing it,” groaned Denzell with feeling.
“But, dash it,” cut in Osmond, “she could not have supposed that you would be fooled by it after all that.”
“No, and I said so,” agreed his wife. “But for all the good I got by it, I might as well have spared my breath.”
“And she would say nothing about this Chaceley business?”
“My love, I had not the heart to bring it up after what she had told me. I tried to express my sympathies at least, but she would have none of it. She said that I should not mind it because she should not have said as much.”
“But she did,” Denzell put in, “and it is typical of her that she should clam up just at the point when you had made a breakthrough. I love her desperately, but I could willingly shake her when she does that.”
“For shame, Denzell. It is clear enough now why she cannot confide in anyone.”
“Yes, but I am not anyone. And as for this absurdity that she has no heart — I wish I might have her alone with me for five minutes, and we should see that.”
Osmond grinned at him. “Rising to the challenge, eh, Hawk?”
Denzell slumped back, sighing. “I wish I might. Unice, did she say nothing else at all?”
Unice shook her head. “She would keep repeating that I should not heed her since she was not herself, and then she invited me to remain to meet with her brother and Mama when they returned from the Rooms.”
A quick frown entered Denzell’s eyes. “So he’s back, is he?”
Osmond cocked an eyebrow. “That sounds grim, Hawk. What’s the poor fellow done to you?”
“Nothing,” came the short reply. “And yet…”
“He has been here once or twice since Christmas, Denzell,” Unice said, puzzled. “What of it?”
“What of it? Do you imagine I am coxcomb enough to believe that these haggard looks you have described are to be set solely to my account?”
“No one believes that, Hawk,” soothed Osmond. “Obviously can’t be so, if what Unice tells us is the truth. But why should you think the brother’s presence means anything?”
“Because she was agitated by his presence at Christmas. It was the first time I saw her control waver in company. There is something in the wind, I am sure of it.”
This certainty grew upon him when Verena failed to put in an appearance anywhere in company either that evening, or at Sunday service in the King Charles Chapel, even though both her brother and mother were present.
When she was again absent on Monday, while the company walked on the Pantiles in the morning, Unice, urged thereto by her house guest, paid her respects to Mrs Peverill and enquired after her daughter.
“The story is,” she reported to Denzell, “that Verena is feeling a trifle down pin with the gaiety of the season.”
“Fiddle!”
“Why, so I think,” agreed Unice. “And Mrs Peverill herself is displaying a degree of nervousness.”
“What about the brother?” Denzell asked, frowning.
“Are you at that again?” demanded Osmond. “Why don’t you go and talk to the fellow, then?”
“I might just do that.”
“I know,” exclaimed Unice. “You can find out from him whether Verena intends to go on this expedition to the High Rocks tomorrow.”
The Master of Ceremonies, Mr Tyson, with his usual enthusiasm, had arranged a picnic to the High Rocks which the majority of Wellsians were anticipating with eagerness.
“Is that tomorrow?”
“According to Mrs Felpham,” put in Osmond. “Dashed female has never ceased running around asking everyone if they intend to go. You can ask her if Verena is going.”
“I thank you, I had rather Adam Peverill was my informant. And if Verena is going, how will that serve me?”
“It will serve you if she is not,” Unice pointed out. “You may go and see her, and make what peace you can.”
Denzell brightened. “That is the first sensible suggestion anyone has made to me.”
It was not, however, until very late in the evening that he was able to beard Adam Peverill, and then by accident. In the expectation of the High Rocks expedition, there had been no entertainment arranged beyond the usual gathering for cards or chat in the Upper Rooms, and even that broke up early.
Feeling restless at Verena’s continued absence, Denzell did not accompany his hosts when they left for home, but went instead to the Gentlemen’s Rooms a few doors down, where a number of die-hards were engaged in dicing and wining, or smoking a pipe.
He discovered Adam Peverill slumped over a bottle in a corner. The boy was somewhat the worse for drink, he realised, as he came up to the small table. Adam looked up blearily at his approach.
Denzell smiled. “May I join you?”
A frown descended upon Adam’s brow, but he grudgingly moved a little to make room. Denzell pulled up a chair from close by and signed to one of the waiters. “Bring me burgundy, if you please.” He looked at Adam again. “I thought you had gone home.”
Adam made an effort. “Took my mother, thass all. Didn’t feel like g-going back to the New Inn.”
“I know what you mean,” Denzell agreed. “There is little enjoyment in drinking alone.”
“Want to be alone,” said Adam, and then his colour deepened. “I don’t mean — I mean, don’t mind you.”
“Thank you,” Denzell said, handing the waiter a coin and pouring himself a glass from the bottle that had been brought.
He looked the lad over. He was only a lad, for all the serious look of his face — dissipated just now, though, which told its own tale, along with the slurring of his words.
He must have suffered, too, under such a brutal reign.
Was this his way of dealing with it, through a too-liberal use of the bottle?
He leaned confidentially towards the boy. “Adam — may I call you that?”
A scornful laugh came. “Call me anything you like. Harsh as you like. I deserve it all!”
By George, what an opening! “Why, Adam, what have you done?”
He shook his head. “She hasn’t blamed me for it. Should’ve, though. All my fault.”
Verena? Had he not known it? But what was it? Really, it was almost as difficult to extract information from the boy in his cups as it was from Verena herself.
“Come, Adam. Your sister must know you meant no harm.”
“Harm? ’Course I meant no harm. She’s my mother. Think I want that devil to hurt her again? Swears he won’t. V’rena don’t believe him. Not sure I do either.”
Now they were getting somewhere. Denzell tossed off his glass and poured himself another. The boy had a loose tongue all right. It was not difficult to guess the rest.
“You told him where to find them, is that it?”
Adam dropped his head in his hands with a groan.
Yes, that must have been it, Denzell decided, nursing his glass in his cupped hands.
So that explained the mystery. Verena and her mother were in hiding here, and the boy had given them away.
Obviously he had not meant to. But if he was in the habit of drinking, and drink made him garrulous, what price loyalty then?
A thought struck him with stunning force. Was the man Peverill coming here? Oh, chaste stars!
“Adam!” he said imperatively, putting down his glass without sipping at it again. “Tell me this. Is Verena in any danger? Peverill — your father — will he hurt her?”
The boy dragged himself upright, and tried to shake his head.
“Not V’rena. Too clever.” He threw up a finger and tapped his own nose.
“Used her head. Not like me. Alwaysh flared, me. Got beat for’t.
Not V’rena. Quiet as a mouse, she was. Docile and ob-obedient, never say boo to a goose.
Thass what he thought. He’d look at her, never see anything in her face, never.
Give him no reason, she said, no excuse. ”
Denzell’s heart contracted. Oh, poor darling girl.
Was it thus her mask was built? All her warmth, the natural joy of her, pushed under for fear of what this man might do.
And he himself, who had fallen in love with what he glimpsed beneath the mask, to be tarred with a like brush? No, Verena. Oh no, sweet princess.
There and then a new determination was born. If it took him his life long, she would learn to discover him for what he was — not for what she imagined he might be. And he would, whatever it took, release her from that darkness she inhabited, into a world of light and laughter.
“Adam,” he said, on a note of strength brought about by the change in him the boy’s revelations had wrought, “tell me only this. Is Verena intending to go to High Rocks tomorrow?”
The boy shook his head. “Waiting. Won’t come out. Wants me to keep Mama out of the way, much as possible. Thass why we’ve been gadding about — without V’rena. Hopes to send him packing.”
“Then are you going to High Rocks?”
“Shouldn’t think Mama will go. Wants to see him.”
“What? Your mother wishes to see your father?”
Adam nodded. “See if he’s changed. Thinks she might go back then. Doesn’t want to ruin V’rena’s life. But ish no good, ’cos V’rena won’t let her go back. Nothing to be done about it.”
Oh, was there not? They would see about that, Denzell promised mentally. He did not know what might be done about it, not yet. But something had to be done. For there was another now who was not prepared to tolerate the ruin of Verena’s life.