‘Never,’ he said bitterly. ‘It’s too late for me.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I can’t change now. Even you can’t do that for me.’
He released her arm and raised his hand just enough for his fingers to brush against her cheek, her lips.
‘We have a business arrangement,’ he murmured. ‘I think perhaps we should keep it that way. Let’s both be- sensible.’
She didn’t believe him. At any moment he would kiss her, as she was aching for him to do. But he didn’t. Instead he pulled quickly away and hurried out of the room, leaving her desolate.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE night before the wedding every guest room in the castle was filled. Some, but not as many as Jarvis had expected, were taken by Meryl’s friends who’d arrived from America in the previous few days. Most were taken up by local people, Jarvis’s tenants and neighbours, whom Meryl had insisted on inviting to stay that night and the next one, so that they would have no trouble with the tides.
It was the kind of thoughtful gesture Jarvis was coming to expect from her, and it increased his eerie feeling of watching two people. She was the warm-hearted woman who reached out to the people of Larne, eagerly seeking their acceptance. Or she was the temptress hunting his scalp before vanishing with a triumphant laugh. He would watch her, wondering which woman was the true one, and whether she knew the difference herself. Sometimes she seemed to change from one to the other with a smile, the turn of her head.
Dinner on the last night was a cheerful meal, with everyone in good spirits. Meryl’s particular friends, Brenda and Everett Hamlin, a married couple who bred horses, were over from Long Island, and struck up an immediate bond with Sarah. Meryl found herself next to Harry, whom she’d been anxious to meet.
Harry was the local historian, a retired university professor, who knew more about the Larne family than any man alive, including Jarvis. He was elderly and small, with a bald, bullet head and sharp, twinkling eyes.
‘You’re not a sentimentalist, I gather,’ he said when they’d talked for a while.
‘You mean, do I regard myself as the reincarnation of Marguerite?’ she said. ‘Not at all. Ferdy was going to have that ballad sung at the wedding breakfast but I’ve forbidden him on pain of having his toes stamped on. Jarvis would hate all that stuff about a “rich man’s daughter”.’
‘Quite right,’ Harry said approvingly. ‘I’m afraid that prickly sensibility has taken too firm a hold on him to be quite abandoned now.’
‘But it’s strange. I thought British titles often made this kind of marriage.’
‘You’re right. It’s certainly been the norm in the past, but the Larnes have always had a possessive streak, and in him it seems to be doubled. When he was nineteen he became infatuated with the daughter of one of the tenants, a feckless character who was always behind with his rent. Her name was Gina. Pretty girl, very good- natured, but with a laugh that could cut glass. Mallory Larne tolerated the relationship as long as he thought Jarvis was just fooling.’
Harry laughed. ‘Well, it’s true that you’ll see the Larne face all over the estate, but they come down from the past. I don’t think Jarvis has ever made a contribution. He’s got strict notions of what’s right and proper, and sometimes they get in the way of what’s sensible. He took it into his head to marry this girl, which caused a family bust up. Mallory took action and the girl vanished.’
‘What a horrible story!’ Meryl exclaimed. ‘Did Jarvis ever find out what had happened to her?’
‘Oh, yes. Years later he ran across her behind a bar. Mallory had bought her off and she’d used his money to get a pub. By that time she’d had three husbands and five children-or maybe the other way around, I forget. They had a chat and she admitted that she’d been getting bored with Jarvis anyway. Too serious for her. So it was a weight off his mind, but by that time it was too late. He’d fallen into the habit of expecting to be deserted, and it’s a hard habit to break.’
‘That’s so sad.’
‘Very. There’s usually a prosaic explanation, isn’t there? Marguerite, for instance, was supposed to be a witch, solely because she was never heard of again. According to old Giles she lulled him into a false sense of security by coming to his bed the night before and ‘gave him love in word and deed’, as one contemporary scribe put it. When he awoke next day, she’d gone. She probably settled down somewhere with her steward and lived on whatever the jewels brought them.’
‘It’s the way she left her baby behind I can’t come to terms with.’
‘Women of her rank didn’t see much of their children. There were nurses and wet nurses. They say Giles used to go into his nursery and weep over “his innocent child, left motherless”.’
The evening ended early, and the guests drifted off to bed. As Jarvis headed for his room he found Meryl waiting for him in the corridor.
‘I have a wedding gift for you,’ she said.
‘But you’ve already given me one.’
‘The car was for the estate. This is for you. Come with me.’
There was a fresh eagerness about her which touched him. Half smiling, he followed her into her room.
‘I didn’t dare wrap it, because it’s so big and I was afraid of damaging it,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’
He did so, listening to the sound of something being hauled from a hiding place, until she said, ‘You can look now.’
He opened his eyes, and what he saw made him stand in transfixed silence, for almost a minute.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I love it,’ he said.
Propped on a chair was a large framed picture of Rusty and Jacko. The artist had caught the dogs exactly, the colour of their coats, the way they lay, their expressions of dopey amiability.
‘I commissioned it from Ferdy,’ Meryl said. ‘I think he’s caught them rather well.’
‘He’s caught them perfectly,’ Jarvis said. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the picture, and Meryl wished he would look at her.
‘You talked about losing them soon,’ she reminded him, ‘and I thought-’
‘This will remind me of them at their best,’ he agreed.
He did look at her then, with a smile that was kind and gentle.
‘It was a lovely idea, Meryl. Thank you.’
‘I was afraid I’d got it wrong.’
‘No, you didn’t get it wrong.’
‘Let’s take it into your room.’ She opened the door that led into the little connecting passage. But this was a mistake.
‘We should have gone around by the big corridor,’ she puffed as they manoeuvred carefully. ‘This passage is much too narrow.’
‘Yes, I’ll never know why they didn’t build it bigger.’
They managed it at last and set the painting up over a chest of drawers between the windows, facing the bed.
It was the first time she’d seen his room, and she looked around with interest. In some ways it was the mirror of her own, the tapestries, the four-poster bed, the oak furniture, the huge fireplace. When she looked around for individual signs of the man’s personality they were harder to find. A few books about farming and accountancy, some history. There was a photograph of a middle-aged man and woman that caught Meryl’s attention.
‘My parents,’ Jarvis said.
‘Your mother looks very sweet,’ Meryl said, studying the picture.
‘She
‘How sad. Were you with her?’
‘No, I was at boarding school. They didn’t tell me until I came home and by then she’d been dead for weeks.’
