Chapter 52 #2
Vivienne smiled a little wearily. ‘It’s not as bad as it might have been, we’ve discovered.
The estate is not entailed, thank God, and it is to be sold as soon as possible.
You wouldn’t think that anyone would want to buy a crumbling ruin like this, but our lawyer tells us that it is considered romantically Gothic, and he seems confident it will find a buyer soon enough, at a fair price.
The house comes with the title of Lord of the Manor of Pallant, which is quite distinct from the barony, and apparently, men who have made fortunes through their own efforts sometimes care for such things.
There should be enough left from the wreckage to buy Sebastian a lieutenancy in an unfashionable regiment.
He’d have been better off doing that years ago, of course.
But I hope it’s not too late for him. I hope he might have a small chance of becoming a halfway decent person without Oliver’s terrible influence.
As you can see, he is already changed by the shock from what he was a short while ago, and I can only hope that it will last, and be the making of him. ’
‘And you?’
‘There should be a little money left for me too. Enough to live on, in a modest way, perhaps in a cottage of my own. I do not know if I will stay in the area or not. I’ve always thought I hated it here; I’ve always thought I could ask nothing better than to escape, but now I’m not so sure.
I don’t care for the idea of going somewhere where I am not known, being welcomed there as a person of quality, even if impoverished, and then people’s faces and manner changing when they found out…
what my brother was, and how he died. I’d rather not live with that sort of disagreeable suspense, and at least that cannot happen here, because everyone knows everything already.
’ She hesitated for a moment, then went on painfully, ‘I am sorry, you know. Truly, I am. The way I’ve treated you is my greatest regret.
If I could go back and do things differently… ’
‘What things?’ Bea wasn’t quite sure what she was meant to understand by this.
‘I wish I had told Oliver nothing. I couldn’t have stopped his wicked plan to seize your sisters’ fortunes, but I didn’t have to play a part in it myself.
I didn’t have to tell him about you, nor share the things we did together.
His face as I told him – that’s one of my worse memories, and wakes me in the night.
If he wasn’t dead, he’d be blackmailing you and your sisters now, in the worst way imaginable. I know you know that.’
‘Yes. We all do. I’ve told them, told them everything – but not my mother, of course.’ And then a horrible suspicion crept into Bea’s mind, and in an instant, she was sorry she’d admitted as much.
Vivienne’s answering smile was tinged with bitterness; it seemed she could read her companion’s face easily enough. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not quite as bad as that,’ she said. ‘I’m not a blackmailer. All your secrets are safe with me now. But I know you have no reason in the world to believe me.’
Bea shook her head in some form of denial.
‘I think about you all the time,’ she said rawly.
‘I miss you – your company, not just… But I don’t trust you.
And then I feel horribly guilty. I tell myself that you have lived as a prisoner, and I cannot know what you have suffered, and what it made you do against your better nature.
But still I find I am not able to place any reliance on your honesty.
I don’t know if I ever will, or if I even want to.
Whatever your excuse, you have hurt me, and I cannot overlook it. ’
Vivienne shrugged, her face crumpled, like that of a child about to cry.
‘I don’t trust myself, although I do know for certain that I would never use what has been between us against you, never again, never, and I am happy to realise it.
The fact is, if you had come to me and said that you forgave me everything, that you wished we could find a way to be together, I should still have said to you that I need to be alone.
I need time to learn who I might be, if I did not always have to live in fear.
I am not fit to share my life with anyone, not even a dog or cat or a caged bird, until I discover that.
Does that make any kind of sense to you? ’
Bea had a little difficulty in getting the words out.
‘Of course it does. I do understand, at least in part. I will be here, you know. If I go away, to visit one or other of my sisters, I will always come back. This is my home now, for my life. I’m not making any kind of promise, except that… I will be here.’
‘Bea,’ Vivienne said thickly, ‘I have no right to ask anything of you, but… It’s curious, I have not wept.
When they told me my brother was dead, when I understood how and where and why, when we buried him, I have not shed a single tear, for him or for myself.
Of course I was not sorry, and did not want to pretend to be, like some dreadful hypocrite.
But now I think I could cry, I think I need to, and if I might not do so alone, this first time, that would be something.
Will you hold me, just for a little while?
Could you bear that? I don’t ask anything else of you. ’
She looked up, not hopefully, and Bea was at her side in an instant in a rustle of muslin, and took her very tenderly in her arms. ‘Of course,’ she said.
‘My dear, of course.’ And Vivienne put her head on her shoulder and sobbed like a broken creature, and Bea held her steadily as she did so, and stroked her lovely hair, weeping a little herself.
As the seconds and the minutes ticked by, as she held Miss Pallant and comforted her, she thought that in the end, it might, just possibly, all be well somehow, in some distant future they could one day dare to dream of.