The Love Knot Read online

  ‘I can honestly say,’ she began again, ‘that your stiff approach to courtship and the ties of marriage has by no means increased my regard for the institution. Of course I realize that if I do not say yes you may well go away and ask some other hapless and ignorant young girl for her hand in marriage – and I am sure you can find someone more beautiful, more rich, and more conventional – but if we are to be married, above all things, surely we should have a better understanding of each other than we now have? My father would be appalled to hear me speak in this way, but I am not a parcel to be left by the carter at any gentleman’s door. I have more feelings than a parcel.’

  Mercy found herself pacing up and down in front of the drawing room fireplace, her hands clenching and reclenching themselves in such a way that to an outsider she must have looked quite frantic, but as it was she found that she was caring less and less. She did not know why she had suddenly had cold feet about Mr Brancaster and his proposal of marriage, but what she did see was that he was now facing her with all the warmth of a piece of marble, and his attempt at humour had quite fled in the face of her spirited opposition.

  It was not just that she felt as if she was a parcel, what with her father and him discussing her, handing her over, as it were, one to the other, but that he had made her feel as if he thought of her merely as a parcel, or a bag of washing, to be collected, or not, as the whim took him.

  Perhaps too it was the memory of Mrs Dodd and the poor dead girl, whose only enjoyment in her marriage had come from her little dog’s misbehaviour. Perhaps in the story of her all too short life Mercy had seen that marriage was not always the solution for women. Also, she had seen that there were other choices beyond becoming an old maid scuttling about the family home with pieces of lame stitching and an apologetic look. Perhaps she had seen, in Miss Lynch and again in Lady Angela and her nursing home, that there were more exciting ways to live your life than being pushed into marriage by your family and accepting the common lot of a wife and mother, and all too soon a matriarch and dowager.

  She turned back to Mr Brancaster. Although she could see that he was very exciting as a person, that he was tall, impeccably dressed, a sportsman, fabulously rich with – Clarice had told her excitedly – three ’ouses, not to mention a villa in Italy and heaven knew what else, he could hold no appeal for her if his heart was as cold as the marble chimneypiece in front of her.

  The point was that he did not love her! Certainly not, as she had realized from the first, the way that she was prepared to love him. He did not feel the same excitement that she had felt when he first came into the room after seeing her father. In fact it had been all too obvious to her as he came into the drawing room that he had felt nothing but the kind of feeling a man might feel who has decided to go to church on a Sunday and after that intends to resume his life as usual.

  He was determined on being married, probably because he was of an age to marry, but not because he was in love.

  ‘I am afraid the answer is no, Mr Brancaster,’ she said, her head a little on one side as she turned back to him, and her eyes suddenly feeling over-large with her determination to recognize some kind of truth in their situation. ‘It has to be no because although you are undoubtedly a great catch and a famous sporting man, Mr Brancaster, I – I cannot marry someone who does not love me. Death in my opinion would be preferable.’

  ‘I can learn to love you.’

  ‘There it is again! Love as a lesson. And what a dreadful, cold notion that is. As if love was like Latin. Or history. Or French. Time for your love lesson, my dear! It sounds like the title of a classical painting.’

  She smiled briefly.

  ‘No, Mr Brancaster, love is not in my opinion a lesson to learn, it is a fire, a passion, something so great and so wonderful that beside it all else that life can offer – money or power, the finest gifts imaginable – is just a paler shade of grey. Without it life has no colour.’

  He stared at her, openly astonished, his guard down.

  ‘Have you – I mean, you have felt this feeling, for someone, for a man?’

  Mercy was quiet for a second, but still feeling brave she finally nodded and turning away she admitted, ‘Yes, yes, I have.’

  ‘May I know the name of this lucky fellow?’

  She walked off down the room, as far away from him as possible, quite surprised by the firmness of her own behaviour, but nevertheless determined to be honest, no matter what. She could not name the man who made her feel quite faint when he came into a room, whose voice made her pulse race, whose looks haunted her when she was not with him. But on the other hand it would be more than dishonest, when castigating Mr Brancaster for his lack of feeling towards her, not to admit her own towards him.

  ‘I would rather not tell you the name, unless you insist.’

  ‘Miss Cordel, am I not already humiliated enough? I have been put through my paces by your father, and now by you. You must at least let me know the name of the man who could inspire in you what you have just described. Surely you owe me that?’

  Mercy turned, and finally said baldly, ‘John Brancaster.’

  She had spoken so flatly that for a second she saw that the words did not really sink in, and that he was about to say something, but stopped, quite suddenly, on assimilating the name of the ‘lucky fellow’.

  ‘John Brancaster? But…that is I.’

  ‘Exactly. It is you.’

  Mercy knew it was not the kind of thing that she should admit, but since she now had no intention of marrying the man what did it matter if he knew that she loved him, for heaven’s sake?

  ‘But if that is so, if I inspire in you those feelings that you have just described, then – forgive me, but why do you insist on humiliating me? Why will you not marry me?’

  He was looking really very wretched and at the same time pleased, yet somehow appalled at his own lack of understanding, frowning, as if he was unused to being asked questions about his emotions – or indeed anyone else’s.

  As she saw all this passing across his face, Mercy realized that Brancaster had never been brought to face his own feelings, let alone those belonging to anyone else. He might be sans pareil when it came to sport, but he was an ignoramus as far as the humanities were concerned.

  ‘You do not understand, Mr Brancaster. You just do not understand. You inspire those feelings in me, but I do not inspire them in you. So do you not see that from the first the marriage would be hopelessly unequal? Awful for you, and terrible for me. Frankly there would be no point to it. I want to marry for love, not just someone whom I love, but someone who loves me in return. I realize that this is stubborn and awkward of me, that I am not conventional, and that I should be more than grateful to have the love knot tied about me, but I am not.’ She turned her back on him. ‘I am sorry, but that is how it is.’

  Perhaps there was something about Mercy’s long neck and her hair piled up that gave her a vulnerable air, or perhaps it came to him that this plain little daughter of Duffane’s had more to her than he thought, but Brancaster walked across the room and touched her on the arm. Firmly he turned her back to face him, taking her hands in his. Hands that were tense with emotion, his own being the same.

  ‘But don’t you see, Mercy? I am already just that – at your mercy. I am already feeling more towards you than I would have thought possible a week or even a day ago. I am not learning to love you, I am being inspired to love you!’

  ‘Can that be possible?’

  She drew in a deep breath and as she did so Brancaster pulled her towards him.

  ‘It is happening already. I love a woman with spirit and verve. I quite literally detest a doormat, and you have demonstrated so much honesty and determination in the last few minutes that you have more than convinced me that you are the perfect wife for me. Besides, I love a woman who makes me laugh, and you make me laugh a great deal. I am falling in love with you minute by minute, second by second. I promise you, you have inspired me to love you.’
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  Mercy stared up at him, but the expression in her eyes was still one of suspicion.

  ‘I do not think that I can believe you, Mr Brancaster. You sound to me as if you have been inspired more by convention than emotion.’

  He let go of her, and stood back.

  ‘No, of course you can not believe me, I perfectly see that.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You are not able to believe me any more than I am able to prove to you how I feel.’

  ‘No, love can not be proved. It is not a hat to be taken out of a box and admired.’

  ‘Except, of course, perhaps with a kiss. You have never been kissed, but I can prove to you in my kiss that I am falling in love with you.’

  He walked back to her and, looking down at her, suddenly and boldly put his hand under her small chin and kissed her on the lips.

  Mercy stood back from him.

  It was true. He could prove to her that he was falling in love, and maybe, perhaps, he just had.

  ‘My nurse would tell you that now I have kissed you, you have to marry me! Now that you have been kissed.’

  Mercy turned away. His nurse was right. She would have to marry him. Not because he had kissed her – she was not so provincial as to be convinced by that – but because one kiss had sent her into such a spin as to be utterly unimaginable. Just one touch of his lips on hers and it seemed to her that she understood everything that she had never known, and a great deal that she had hoped might be true became so. Shakespeare’s sonnets, love songs, paintings, death, in one small clutch of seconds, had all become so simple.

  ‘So?’ He sounded impatient, and yet the look in his eyes told her that he was, at the same time, in an agony of uncertainty. ‘So, will you marry me, or will you not?’

  ‘I will marry you, but only on the sound understanding, Mr Brancaster, that you will continue to be inspired!’

  The sun, fortuitously, had decided to come out, making one of those beams of light in which dust, or fairies, Mercy could never make up her mind which, are to be seen dancing. Brancaster took Mercy’s hands in his and to her astonishment she saw that even in the last few minutes he had changed.

  Could such a thing happen, she wondered? Could a man change in a matter of minutes? And yet, unbelievably, he did seem to have done so. It was as if he had seen a vision of something. It was as if, of a sudden, he had seen how things could be, not as he had come to accept them, but as he had perhaps, long ago, resigned himself to the fact that they never could be. That he and she might be able together to create a household filled with happiness, that they might love each other not in some false way that made women into goddesses, doomed to be forever failing their disappointed gods, but just as they were, loveable, and still loving.

  ‘I think we will be fine together, do you know that, Mercy? As a matter of fact I thought so when you first told me that story about your birth, about how you came to be called Mercy! I thought, this young girl is so honest and so full of gaiety, I think I might like to spend my life with her.’

  Mercy pulled her hands from his and laughed.

  ‘Now my nurse would say “Master John is eating pickled peppers”, which was her expression when she did not believe someone.’

  He took hold of her small, white, long-fingered left hand and looking down at it asked, lightly, as if he knew exactly what the reply was going to be, ‘Now, without more ado, would you like it if I ordered you a nice big engagement ring, surrounded by large diamonds, that will be the talk of the town?’

  Mercy wrinkled her nose and looked up at him in astonishment.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, do you?’

  He laughed and groaned at the same time.

  ‘Yes, I do, as a matter of fact, or I should not have said so. I happen to quite fancy giving you a large ruby, perhaps, surrounded by diamonds.’

  ‘I had really rather something less conventional. Something more Arts and Crafts perhaps? Large stones surrounded by diamonds are always seen on old hands at balls. I should prefer something more modern, with less of the flavour of the dowager to it. I have seen too many young women made old by jewellery. Besides, rich as you are, I had rather not spend your money on some sort of extravagant ring for me, but on something we can both enjoy – a pair of good thoroughbreds, or a motor car.’

  ‘How original you are, and how lucky I am!’

  When it arrived from Tarleton a week later, the ring was indeed, by common consent, one of the most original and beautiful rings that the famous jeweller had yet designed. The pattern was based on a love knot, set about with tiny diamonds and sapphires so small that they looked like stars, the rest of the ring being made of the oldest gold that the jeweller could find.

  Only Lady Violet looked a little thoughtful every time the tiny perfect jewels on Mercy’s left hand flashed in the light, and Mercy imagined that she must really rather disapprove of such an unconventional ring.

  But the real reason for Lady Violet’s strangely ambivalent expression was buried in the past, a past longing, as the past always does, to spring out of its dense darkness and confront the world with its venomous secrets.

  Eight

  Mercy had always imagined that honeymoons would be tiresome, full of long silences and a great deal of discomfort. Two people sitting about longing to be able to talk to each other, and yet still quite unable to hold a conversation of more than a few words.

  Two people who did not yet know each other well enough to even take a holiday together, of a sudden thrown together for days at a time, very often in an uncomfortable and foreign situation, and making love before either of them had had the time to find out whether it was pleasing, or not, to the other.

  She was to be agreeably surprised.

  First, she had the good luck to marry not just an older man, but, more important and delightfully, an experienced lover, and so their time together was rapturous in every possible way. And secondly it was only on honeymoon that she came to realize how unimportant beauty was when it came to character, for, as John reassured her when she worried about her lack of looks, ‘Time never speeds by just because you happen to be with someone with a perfectly straight nose, or a brilliant pair of eyes. Time is spent with a person, not their features.’

  On the way back from the south of France where they had stayed both on Brancaster’s yacht and in a borrowed château, Mercy said contentedly to her new husband, ‘We have enjoyed ourselves, haven’t we, John?’

  He smiled across at her. ‘More than that, my darling. We have been happy.’

  There was yet more to come for which Mercy was to be grateful. For one of the pleasing side effects of marrying a sporting figure was that he was totally uninterested in the decoration of his houses, or indeed in anything that did not concern either the stables and the horses, or the direction of his sporting estates, his guns and his dogs.

  ‘You can do as you wish, where you wish. As long as the food is hot and I have a warm bath and clean sheets I will be for ever in your debt, my darling. The house is yours and yours alone, just so long as you keep away from my stables, my motor stables, my horses and my dogs. Those are mine, and mine alone.’

  Her first morning up, and looking around Brindells, the main part of which she gathered she was supposed to live in, Mercy had no trouble in believing that the house had been occupied by bachelors for more than twenty years.

  John had inherited the property, a medieval hall set about with wings added in the 1850s, from his uncle, a bachelor and sporting man, who had made his nephew his heir from the moment his brother’s child had made his appearance in this world. For, as he said, more and more often the older they both became, ‘A woman can never take the place of a horse, and let us face it, you can not, even in England, alas, marry your horse.’

  So, happily for Mercy, her husband’s heart was in the stables with his horses and motor cars, or in Leicestershire in his hunting box, and she was left, at the ripe old age of eighteen, to bring Brindells into the newly arrived twentieth century.
r />   At that time it was fashionable to look back not just to the eighteenth century, but still further. Indeed, as can so often happen at the start of a new century, everywhere in monied circles people’s tastes were turning back to Tudor days, to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the idea of life in the old days of rush matting and pewter plates, to the simpler weaves and woven tapestries of olden times, to smoking fires, and the reading of Horace and Virgil.

  ‘Just imagine,’ she teased John, ‘with rush matting and pewter plates, with minstrels playing in the gallery, you will be able to spring off your horse, bring the game in from outside and just throw it across the hall table for the servants to put onto a spit and cook.’

  It seemed that John found Mercy’s interest in turning Brindells into a comfortable home all too gratifying.

  ‘A woman who is not interested in the home is not interested in the man.’

  ‘Not your nurse again?’ Mercy teased him.

  ‘But of course. Every good Englishman is brought up by a nurse who makes old saws the bane of his life. It is what forms his character and makes it easy for him to understand, not just the rest of his life, but everyone else he should ever happen to meet for its duration. Without Nurse and her old saws we would grow up to think that we are the inheritors of the earth, instead of, if you are British, just one third of it!’

  ‘Do you know, John?’

  This morning Mercy looked up from her newspaper. He loved the way she said Do you know? every time she wanted to claim his attention.

  ‘Do you know that, at this moment, as much is spent on hunting, racing and gambling in this country as is spent on the whole of the Empire’s navy? Imagine!’

  ‘I can perfectly believe it, and what is more’ – he looked back at her, halfway to the dining room door, the outdoors already beckoning him – ‘I find it perfectly understandable that it should be so. After all, there are more English gentlemen around today than ever there have been at any other time. And we are the richest nation on earth. Once they have money people have to be amused, and if there was no sport, no hunting and no shooting, no racing and no breeding, what would the rich do, Mercy, my dearest? Go to church?’