‘Morveth – they asked her to look after Loveday for a few days to get her out of the house when things were at their worst. And I think my father must have told Jago – they were good friends, and he always went to him for advice.’
‘Do you think Loveday had any sense of what was going on?’
‘No, she was far too young to understand.’
She wasn’t too young now, though, Archie thought, and there was no way that all the complexities of Harry’s love for Morwenna would have died with his parents. ‘Loveday said you’d argued a lot with Harry recently, and that you even had to lock yourself in your room to keep him away.’
‘She told you that?’
He hesitated. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Ah – she told your friend, then. How useful for you to have a spy in residence.’ Archie started to deny that it was like that, but of course – in effect – it was. ‘You might as well hear it from me, I suppose,’ Morwenna continued. ‘Strangely, no one seemed to suspect that the fire was anything other than an accident, but that left Morveth with a dilemma – if Harry was sent away, who would support Loveday and me? You know how it is – breaking a family up is the last resort and the Union gates are always open, so Morveth allowed him to stay on the condition that we behaved ourselves.’
The flippancy of her words would have annoyed Archie if he didn’t know her well enough to see through it. ‘And you managed to convince her that you could?’
‘We did better than that – we did stop, at least the physical side of our relationship. It went against everything in my heart and you’ve no idea how badly I craved that sort of affection, but it was the only thing to do. We had a responsibility to Loveday, and sometimes I’ve hated her for it.’
‘And Harry accepted that?’
‘Yes, because it was only supposed to be temporary. I let him think that we’d begin again when she was grown up, and I suppose it was easier to tell myself that as well. We started pulling together for us, for some sort of mythical happy ending. It’s funny – everyone admired Harry for taking the disappointment of missing out on his new life so well. As far as most of them were concerned, he’d given up his future to do his duty, when in reality he didn’t have a future that wasn’t here with me.’
‘But you obviously knew in your heart that things would never work out for you.’
‘I didn’t love him any less, but things were different after the fire and after what he’d done – different for both of us, I think. We kidded ourselves that we could simply emerge from behind our secret one day and live a normal life, but our relationship was never going to be a permanent sanctuary. You can’t be responsible for a death and not be affected by it. The beauty of our love was that it was exclusive – there was no one else in the world but Harry and me. Suddenly that changed. There was Loveday to worry about, and the spectre of my parents hanging over us, and all the guilt that we’d kept at bay for so long was with me all the time. When Loveday was older, he started to talk about us again, and tried to pick up where we left off. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted – locking my door was as much about keeping myself back as keeping him out – but I couldn’t do it. It was tainted, somehow, and I think that deep down he knew that.’
‘How did he react?’
‘Badly. He drank, he gambled, he took his frustration out on everyone. And he… well, he looked elsewhere.’
‘That must have hurt.’
‘Yes, but it was my choice. I could have brought him back to me at any time, but I didn’t.’
‘Who did he turn to?’
‘No one you know,’ she said quickly, and he detected the first lie of their conversation but was reluctant to press her. Was it Nathaniel, he wondered? Had the curate – out of loyalty or out of shame – only told him half the truth?
‘Did Nathaniel ever find out that you and Harry were lovers?’ he asked.
‘No, although he may have guessed in time, I suppose. But, as you said, he wasn’t the type to cover up what he knew and I’m sure he would have tackled us about it if he’d known.’
‘How did Harry feel when Nathaniel confronted him about the fire?’
‘Betrayed. Things had been strained between them for some time, and Harry could never work out why. He said he kept going out of his way to be friendly towards Nathaniel, but all it did was drive him further away. He finally understood what had gone wrong between them when Nathaniel came to see him about the fire, but that only made things worse. Harry thought true friendship was strong enough to withstand anything – you were loyal to him or you weren’t, you loved him or you didn’t. He wasn’t unlike Loveday in that respect. It sounds simplistic to you, I suppose, but he expected Nathaniel to be on his side, to know that he’d have had his reasons and to trust him; the fact that he didn’t was unforgivable, but by that time he was mixing in very different company anyway.’
‘The argument you had with Harry on the night before he died – was that about renewing your relationship or Nathaniel’s knowledge of the fire?’
‘Both, I suppose. They were interlinked by then, and there were always new variations on that old theme.’ Morwenna closed her eyes briefly, as though wanting to shut out the image of that final night. ‘We had a terrible row, and I accused him – amongst other things – of never having truly loved me. I said it in the heat of the moment, but if I’d sat down and thought for hours I couldn’t have come up with anything that would have hurt him more. He hit me – just a slap, nothing more, and I deserved it, but it horrified him to realise that he could do such a thing. Anything other than tenderness was alien to him as far as I was concerned. Then he stormed out, and I heard him take Shilling from the stable.’
‘And that was the last time you saw him?’
She hesitated. ‘No. I saw him once more, not long before he died.’
‘Where?’
‘At the boathouse by the Lodge.’
‘What were
‘I couldn’t take it any more, Archie,’ she said, unable to hold back the tears any longer. ‘The pain of living with Harry and not being with him, of bringing up Loveday in some sick parody of a happy family. And he’d changed towards me – he’d look at me sometimes as if the hopelessness of it all was my fault, as if I’d wantonly destroyed our happiness. You have no idea how claustrophobic I felt in this house. We couldn’t get away from each other. And with everything that Nathaniel had said, it could only be a matter of time before it all came out. I just needed peace – peace for me, without having to bear the responsibility of Loveday and Harry’s feelings, and there was only one way I could think of to make it all go away.’
‘You were going to take your own life?’
‘Yes. I left the house shortly after he did, just to get away from these four walls, and I didn’t even stop to think about Loveday. I walked by the lake for a long time. You know what it’s like at night – there’s nothing as quiet, nothing as close to oblivion as that water when it’s still. I made my way to the boathouse, knowing that there was no one at the Lodge to see me, and I decided to take the boat out to the middle and put an end to the misery – for all of us. I sat on the landing stage for a long time, watching it get light, thinking about what a mess everything had become and how our parents had died for nothing, and trying not to think about what would happen to Harry when he knew what I’d done.’
‘But he found you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘How was he?’
‘He looked terrible. He’d been drinking again and fighting, and his face was cut and bruised, but he was different, somehow – calmer, resigned. I think he guessed immediately what I was going to do, although he didn’t say so; he just talked to me – gently, like the old Harry, convincing me to live. He said nothing could ever take away what we had, but he realised that he had to get away from the estate and everything that had happened. We walked back here together, and he told me he would always love me, no matter where he went. I had no idea what he meant to do, and I didn’t have the strength to argue with him any more. I thought he was going away, just like he was supposed to all those years ago. I didn’t know the selfish bastard was going to ride his horse into the lake.’ She broke down completely now, and Archie got up and went round to the other side of the table, unable to do anything but hold her. ‘How could he let me down like that? He forced me to go on without any hope of him, looking
