A smoking lamp lit the tap-room at the Green Garter, and two red fires, lit to warm the many passengers who had alighted from the public barge, filled it with damp heat. As soon as they walked in, the noise of clamouring, banging, laughter and complaints hit Meriel and Auriol so hard that drenched as they were by the rain which had pursued them all along the post-road, for a moment or two they could hardly concentrate on what they wanted. They had entered by the first door they found, and they saw at once that this was not their place at all.
Auriol’s height soon drew attention to them, for his head almost touched the room’s stained ceiling. Someone called out, “Ho there, landlord, don’t you see there’s Quality come to join us? Don’t see the gentleman, eh, I don’t know why, he’s big enough for a sideshow at the fair, he is!” There were guffaws at this.
Meriel noticed that Auriol was angered, unreasonably angered, and she thrust herself in front of him.
“Landlord!” she said as the man turned and came hurrying up. “There was a private parlour bespoken for Knight Auriol Wychwood. Do you show us to it directly, if you please.”
“Yes your honour, indeed there was! Knight Auriol Wychwood, indeed!” the landlord said, bowing to Meriel.
“I am Wychwood,” said Auriol, putting himself forward. He took off his hat, and shook it so that water bespattered the floor.
“Yes, your honour.” He led the way across the room. “Now do you come on out this nasty, low taproom, sir, you’ll find the coffee-room very quiet. And your parlour, to be sure! Any port in a storm, they say, and that door is closest to the stables, I can’t deny.” He glanced behind him, to see whether he ought to apologise for the drunken insolence of the man in the taproom, or to pretend he had not heard.
“Exactly so,” said Auriol, looking cold but not threatening.
The Green Garter was a very large inn, employing thirty people and catering chiefly for the rich. It was a long and narrow, grey-stone building, conveniently placed both for travellers on the post-road and for the end of the Northmarch Canal. The house was famous for its comfortable rooms, its excellent food, and its high prices.
The private parlour assigned to Meriel and Auriol was a little room, furnished with cherrywood and painted blue. It had small windows and a ceiling nearly as low as the taproom’s, but bad paintings and an elegant fireplace had been introduced to raise it above the common. Logs were burning in the grate, and there was a vase of daffodils and green tulip-buds beneath one brightly twilit window. The recent, heavy shower had passed over out to sea.
The room was warm and dry, the walls were thick, and the door was solid. As soon as Meriel and Auriol had been divested of their outer clothes, they were left alone there, to recover from their encounter with the world of other people which, as they chased each other along the road, knowing that they needed a rest from emotion, light and warmth and food, they had never expected to be such a shock.
Meriel was thankful that she had been the first to take control in the tap-room. Her doing so proved that despite her confession, her love and her loss of control, she was the same person she had been three hours before.
“I wish you might know how vastly disagreeable it is to be a giant and to attract the attention of the vulgar,” was Auriol’s first remark. He kicked the logs in the fireplace and sparks flew out.
Meriel said, “I think I understand well enough what it is to be subjected to unwanted remark, sir. My affairs are of interest to all the world, I think you forget.”
“Being so large has made my life well-nigh intolerable.”
For a few seconds, they listened to the loud ticking of the pendulum clock on the wall, which was as big in proportion to the room as was Auriol.
“If you had not been so very large I would scarcely have dared to — say all I have said to you,” Meriel told him slowly, deliberately going back, in this new setting, to their improbable conversation on the beach. “I know well enough how men dislike very tall — females. No man of common size would forgive me for being six foot one, whatever else he might forgive me.”
“Very true,” said Auriol, gazing into the fire with his boot on the fender.
Now she longed for him to change, to be loving, even to protect her from her violent self.
“Wychwood …” she said in a threatening voice, which then broke. “Were I to have lived as a female, what should have become of me? Do you think I would have been a whit less outrageously noticeable than you are?” She thumped the table.
Suddenly, he turned and slowly smiled. “Westmarch, Meriel, you are a terrifying creature.”
“I hope not, sir, to you,” she stammered. Meriel was sweating and shaking, because she had never expected his reaction, his smile, to mean quite so much to her. Meriel’s knowledge of ordinary life was almost nothing, but instinct told her that he might very easily have turned frigid with fear and disgust.
Auriol leant forward, grasped her fingers, and drew her towards him, and as he put his arms round her shoulders, she hugged him still more tightly than he was hugging her. Little noises escaped them both. They had no choice but to cling to each other, in the circumstances; neither could face the humiliation and danger of quarrelling to find relief for their disordered nerves, and there was no middle way. Thank God he is truly willing, thought Meriel, thank God, it was he touched me first this time, to be sure that is important.
“It will be well,” Auriol said, “all be well.”
“Yes, it will. Wychwood. My dear.”
Uneasily they separated, and at that moment the door opened. Both stared at the waiter who came in with glasses and knives as though he were a monster.
“The mistress says I’m to ask whether your honours would fancy some parsnips in sauce as a side-dish,” he said.
“Thank you, neither of us is at all fond of parsnips,” Wychwood replied, and his voice seemed to boom. They had realised at once what the man had nearly seen and heard, and they wondered how they could possibly not have thought before they acted; but overlaying all their instant fearful thoughts was a feeling of commonplace embarrassment. Meriel was unaccustomed to that sensation.
“Good God,” muttered Auriol when the waiter had gone.
“I am glad you are sensible of what might have come of that,” Meriel said, her voice equally low.
“Sensible of it!”
Meriel tried to smile. “How I hate discretion — never thought I would forget it.”
“It is eminently necessary in our case. Do you know what the man would have thought of us?”
“Yes.” She was thinking of total and accurate revelation, he of homosexuality.
Auriol searched his pockets for his spectacles, and when he found them, began to polish them, whilst Meriel watched, leaning exhaustedly against the mantelpiece. She was longing to sit down, but felt obscurely that to do so would be a form of moral collapse.
“They will be back in a moment,” he said.
“Yes — with the parsnips.”
Their eyes met and, each adoring the other for possessing a sense of the absurd, they started helplessly to giggle. Meriel came to table and fell into her chair. They were still giggling when the waiters returned with their dinner, and they sobered up only when the two men had gone.
“Gad, what fools we are,” said Meriel at last.
“Yes, but I think we shall deal extremely,” said Auriol, wiping his eyes. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, indeed. Sir,” Meriel said, as she reached for the ham, “I wish you will talk to me about yourself. I don’t think I can endure discussing — this, Maid Rosalba, Juxon and so forth, tonight. And I wish to understand you — I know so little about your life, we have confined our talk so much to subjects of common interest. Do you understand?” There was a frown on her face, and she was concentrating hard upon carving the ham.
“Why, yes.” Auriol poured out wine for the two of them, and they drank in silence for a while. At first, neither looked at the other, but then Auriol turned his head and watched Meriel as she sipped her wine, scowled, smiled, and poked at the food. Her eyes were not on him.
He wondered how he could ever have truly supposed she was a man. Though she tried to shave, her complexion betrayed her, and so did the slimness of her wrists, the size of her feet, her long neck, and her arched forehead. Her voice, though deep for a woman’s, was high for a man’s.
Once, he had thought the Marquis’s face spoilt by its stiff and watchful expression; but her face was fully alive now, and he could perceive it as it was. The little room’s dull and flickering light made her skin gleam, and cast shadows to show up her high cheekbones and pointed chin, and the set of her not quite human eyes.
Meriel’s eyes were of an unusually pale grey, and they would have been insipid if their irises had not been rimmed with darker colour. As it was they were brilliant, slanting and sharp, and the brows above them were like black antennae, swooping up from her nose towards her red temples. The whole effect, Auriol decided, was of an elf-prince in a story-book and not of a boy, or a woman. Her other features matched those eyes, for though her nose was rather long it was very straight, and had flaring deep-cut nostrils; and her delicately curving mouth was thin and overwide. It was also highly coloured, and that made her look passionate.
Examining Meriel for the first time in the knowledge that she was a woman, Auriol was first impressed by her potential animal beauty. She had features and colouring which, depending on her mood, could make a very unpleasant face one day and a magical one the next. But when he continued to study her, he saw that her looks were on their way to being ruined by over-exertion, insufficient sleep and food, too much brandy, misery and fear.
She was hollow-cheeked, and unhealthily white, and there were dull shadows under her eyes. Soon, he could tell, tiny broken veins would begin to appear on either side of her nose. Above all, she was far too thin, and because of this she could not possibly be as strong as she seemed.
Several times in the past few months he had seen Meriel dismount trembling from one of her powerful horses, looking as though she were about to be sick, seen her staggering round with glazed eyes and ugly face after a night’s hard drinking, and each time he had felt an impulse to prevent the Marquis’s overtaxing himself again. Now, it was quite understandable that he should have felt like that about Meriel. Now, Meriel was going to grow into real strength, health and beauty, and he would be responsible.
“Well sir, you are looking at me!”
Auriol jumped. “Yes — thinking you might have been a nonpareil, you’ve something more than beauty.”
“Gammon, Wychwood.”
“As it is, you drink too much.”
She was surprised. “Thank you, sir, I will engage myself to drink any man under the table without feeling any the worse.”
“That’s not my meaning. I know you can do that, I’ve seen it. But it is not good for you.”
“Propriety, Wychwood? It ain’t the thing? Do I not conduct myself as a well-bred female should? Is that what you mean?” Meriel lifted her eyebrows.
“Good God, no!” He was quite angry. “I mean you’ll drink yourself to death one of these days — perhaps that’s been your intention.”
“Perhaps it has. Sir, I thought you was to talk with me about yourself. Don’t think I am not devilish obliged to you for your solicitude.”
“Oh, are you? Well — no, we must not quarrel.”
“No,” said Meriel. “It would be the merest irritation of the nerves.”
They ate. A nonpareil, thought Meriel, my God.
“Have you always been lonely, Wychwood?” she said lightly five minutes later.
He was grateful to her for being the first to raise the subject of himself. “How did you guess that I was lonely?”
“Oh, I have suffered myself, you know, and I’m well able to see when a man is not perfectly at ease in company, dislikes the generality of his acquaintance — something in the eyes — you live in the world but are not of it, as they say, like myself.”
“No, indeed. Yes, I suppose I have been lonely very nearly all my life, as you have been — except that is in the last few months of my marriage, before she died.”
“Your wife, sir, Maid Clorinda? What was she like?”
“Delicate,” he said briefly. “She made me feel clumsy as the devil. At first, I was afraid to approach her for days for fear I might break her in two, or some such nonsense.” Auriol slowly tore a piece of bread to pieces with his large handsome hands. There was an unhappy smile on his face.
“Did she wish to marry you?”
“No, our parents made the match, her own wish was to enter a Female College — or so she used to say.”
“Was it! My own greatest fear — I should not object in the least to being garrotted if ever I were found out, but the thought of being confined in a college as Juxon says is a deal more likely — and so she was bookish, I collect?” said Meriel, returning with difficulty to her friend’s affairs.
“Yes, she was. Well, we grew to be fond of each other — in alliance against my father and my brother, I think. I never was in love with her, but she was a friend,” he said.
As I am, thought Meriel. “I see. She died in childbirth, I think you once told me?”
“She did and the child with her.”
“A hateful thing.”
“Here,” said Auriol, “I have her miniature inside my watch.” He took the watch out of his pocket, opened it and handed it to Meriel. Both had a rest, while Meriel examined the little oval face depicted on the inside cover.
Clorinda Blandy Wychwood, she thought, must have been a stern, determined woman, for all her fragility. Her miniature showed hooded grey eyes, a thin nose, a square jaw, and an unusually high forehead, all surrounded by wispy, curling, flaxen hair which did not seem to match her features. She looked like a wise child.
“She was determined to hate me at our first meeting,” said Auriol reminiscently, rubbing his chin. “The Blandys had tried to marry her off twice before but she would have none of it, so they forced her into this vastly inferior match with me. I remember we avoided each other whenever possible for weeks — I was a young fool in those days, wanted nothing so much as to marry the innkeeper’s daughter.”
“The innkeeper’s daughter?”
“Oh, you see, she was the first woman ever to take a fancy to me, something I had not thought possible. It prejudiced me at once in her favour. She was a deuced pretty girl, too, with an excellent figure — famous frontal development.”
“Oh.”
“Though I am not sure but what I don’t prefer slenderness in women — have always done so.”
“Indeed?”
He smiled a little. “I had not meant you — that is, I had, but I was not thinking of you just at that moment.”
“Why, sir, was it necessary for you and your wife to form an alliance against your father and brother?” said Meriel, handing back the watch.
“We all lived together,” he replied after a moment, winding it and putting it away. “We were forced to do so for lack of money — my marriage was intended to put things to rights but no such thing, Blandy took one look at my father and tied up all Clorinda’s fortune, which was not great in any case, I was no match for an heiress. A better one than either of them, though,” he added. “I must have told you that they were both of them gamesters, my father and Chrysander — needless to say they detested country life.”
“I see. Yes, I can picture the scene.”
Auriol continued, swinging the wine in his glass. “They tried to make me break the entail on Wychwood. Matters were so arranged that the thing could not be done without my consent — which I would not give.” He paused and shrugged. “Well, it was after that they insisted on my marrying. I was not yet twenty, Chrysander was ten years my senior — I think you can imagine what kind of pressures were brought to bear on me.”
“And I daresay you was big enough even then to floor the pair of them with one finger, Wychwood.”
“Oh, yes, they detested me for that! Though I was by no means so strong as I looked to be.”
“But you did not submit.”
“No, not to that, but it was a damnable life,” said Auriol, pouring himself more wine. “Do you know, they all died within a year, and I never expected any of them to die, thought they’d live forever to plague me — not Clorinda, I mean, she was a good girl as I said. Yes, it was Clorinda in Month of Flowers if I remember, my father’s apoplexy in Fruit, and then Chrysander was killed only two days later, a most extraordinary thing. Drove into a tree when he was foxed and broke his neck with the jolt, so I was told.”
The deadpan way in which he told his story made tears come to Meriel’s eyes. Auriol noticed this, and was mildly pleased, but he did nothing about it, did not touch her sleeve as it occurred to him to do. It gave him triumphant pleasure now to contemplate the miserable youth from which he was free, and it was because he treasured his old memories that, strange as it seemed to him, he did not really want to tell Meriel everything or to speak of them in the tones they deserved. But to remember the past made him feel deep down that he would be happy now with the incredible woman who loved him, and who had finally rescued him from isolation, from rustic boredom, and from the sense that he was ordinary. The friendship of the young, male Marquis of Westmarch had done a great deal for him and this, now, must do very much more.
“You hated them both?” said Meriel. “Always?”
“No, not when I was a child, before my mother died. She had a measure of control over both of them, and besides, in those days, before my father was rolled-up, he lived very largely at the Island Palace, not with us. Yes, my mother was an admirable woman.”
“You told me once you lived all your life down at Wychwood until your brother died. Did your father not take you even once to the Island Palace? I can scarcely credit it.”
“Oh, my dear Westmarch, he considered that the world of Fashion would do very well without me, and besides that in any case, I should not enjoy the life! In which he was quite right, a most irritating circumstance — naturally I had not liked being considered a boorish gapeseed, I even tried to turn myself into a dandy when I was sixteen or so. I blush to remember it — I was a little wiser, thank God, by the time I did go up to Bury Winyard!”
Meriel laughed. “Ay, you must have looked a figure of fun.”
“That is what I always felt myself to be,” said Auriol quietly, turning towards her.
“Of all things in the world you are least — Are you happy now?” she said with equal seriousness.
“Now? I — I think I am going to be. And I hope, so are you.”
Meriel found his shyness and awkwardness enchanting, though she herself was no more at ease. They were both of them blushing. “Damn it, yes, indeed, I hope so, though it is the most hideous coil and I know I ought never to have told you.”
“I must leave you, only for a moment,” he said, and pressed her shoulder as he rose, harder than he knew, so that it hurt her.
When he came back, the sight of Meriel gave him a shock. Unconsciously, he had expected to see her looking more female and beautiful than ever, perhaps even wearing a dress; but instead, she had rung for a clay pipe in his absence, and was now smoking it with her boots crossed on the fender. One hand was dug into her coat pocket, and her well-padded shoulders were hunched up so that they looked very large. Auriol, who in less than an hour had grown used to thinking of the Marquis of Westmarch as an enchantress, thought sickeningly that Meriel’s story could not possibly be true. It was just the same face he remembered, glowing red there in the shaky firelight, but now it seemed undoubtedly the face of a boy. He managed to say, “You do not look like a woman.”
“I hope I do not,” she said, turning, and looking no more feminine than before as she did so.
“I begin to think I must have imagined the whole.”
“No, you did not.” Meriel smiled slightly.
His eyes became accustomed to the sight of her and he sat down, reminding himself that her new attitude was in fact familiar. “You are extraordinary, Westmarch!”
“Well, what do you expect, of course I am.”
“Do you know,” he said, “for a moment just then I felt positively murderous — not certain whether it was you I wanted to murder, or myself, thinking it was all untrue.”
“The devil you did!” said Meriel, unable to cope. “Come, blow a cloud with me, Wychwood, I had the waiter bring a pipe for you.”
Auriol obeyed her and for a long time they remained smoking by the fire together, in silence. As they sat there, purposely immobile, watching the logs burn away before them, their minds each developed a calm, tough surface. Underneath there were feelings, shared, but not experienced always at the same moment. Waves of suppressed panic passed over them from time to time, and yet often, there seemed to be no tension in the room at all, not even a prospect of joy. They neither dared nor wished to speak, but sat on, smoking, like a peaceful old couple.
At length the clock struck ten. Auriol roused himself and his chair creaked as he moved and studied the clock-face.
“We can’t ride back to Castle West tonight,” he whispered, as though there were someone to overhear, and they were talking scandal. “Only see how late it is, they must give us rooms for the night.”
Meriel collected her thoughts. “The Senior Member is to wait on me at nine tomorrow, sir.”
“Then we must be up at five and go to bed directly.” Auriol raised his voice to normal level at this mention of her governmental life.
“We ought to ride back, you know we meant to do so.”
“I am too tired, and so ought you to be. Surely no one will think it odd in us, suspicious, if that’s what you fear. Will they?” he said.
“Very likely not. Ring the bell, then.” Meriel, having listened to his appeal, left her chair and stood up in front of the fire.
Presently the landlord came to attend them, but it turned out that none of the bedchambers was to be had.
“I’m sure I’m very sorry, my Knight, your honour, but the house is as full as it can hold. I’m sure I wish I could oblige you.”
“You have no rooms at all?” said Meriel.
“If it is necessary we will share a bedchamber,” said Auriol. Meriel put her hands behind her back and looked grim, at this. Her stomach was fluttering.
“Surely you have an attic or some such thing?” said Auriol. The landlord waved his hands.
“Well your honour, the only room I might offer you ain’t by any means fitting for such a gentleman as yourself! Indeed your honours would both of you be more comfortable at the Oaktree, they’ll have beds aplenty to spare, I’ll warrant.”
“My friend has taken a chill and I’ve no fancy myself to ride out at this hour.”
“Ay, where is this room?” said Meriel.
“It’s above the stables, sir, and just the one bunk, though it does have a feather mattress, that I will say. A common-sized bunk,” he added, turning to Auriol. “But if your honour would not object to sleeping on the floor …”
“I would not.”
“Very well, sir, I’ll have blankets taken up and I hope you will be comfortable enough.”
“Thank you,” they said together. They exchanged no words when they were left alone.
*
The bedchamber over the stables was cold but clean, lit by wax candles which the landlord had had quickly taken up to replace the tallow ones whose smell still lingered in the room. There was a warming pan in Meriel’s bunk, and a straw mattress on the floor had been provided for Auriol.
Meriel and Auriol began to undress, the Marquis throwing her clothes on the floor as she did so, and Auriol placing his with unnecessary care on top of a rickety table. When they had stripped down to their shirts and breeches, they faced each other, and Meriel held out her hand. “Goodnight, sir,” she said. Her skin was dark yellow in the light of two candles.
Auriol shook her hand, but dared not kiss it reverently as he would have done a lady’s, though he wanted very much to do so. He was a little hurt, thinking she did not need him, but at the back of his mind he knew that at another time, if things had been only a little different, he would have wanted to smile at Meriel’s attitude.
Each blew out one candle, and they climbed into their beds in the dark. Auriol lay stretched out on his back with his eyes open; he did not believe he would be able to sleep, and he did not mean to try. Meriel curled up in her bunk, and pulled the covers right over her head.
Five minutes later, she began to cry. She tried to remember who she was, but she could only sob and not let out the noise, as she had never let out any noise, until today. No sound came from under the bedclothes, but Auriol guessed. His eyes had grown accustomed to the faint light which came through the window from the other side of the inn’s courtyard, and when he slowly rolled over and stared at the bunk in the wall, he thought he could see the blankets shaking. For a few moments, he was unable to move, not knowing whether to ignore it, or to go to her. He knew that either way his decision might be of great importance, that Meriel might take his doing nothing as cowardly neglect, or might on the other hand be thankful for his not disturbing her. She might think that he meant to attack her, if he came near now. But when he consulted his own wishes, and realised that his pity was deep and he longed to comfort her and to receive comfort from her, he got up, and very nearly knocked over a chair.
As he looked fearfully down at the bunk, Auriol wondered whether these were tears of rage, despair and terror such as she had shed on the beach, or of sorrow, relief and hope. He thought he would never find out; then he lifted the bedclothes from Meriel’s head.
“Westmarch,” he said quietly, before there was a response. “Meriel, why are you crying? My dear, don’t — I can’t bear it.” He could not have said this if he had been able to see her, or she him. “I can’t bear you to cry.”
“I never meant you to hear,” she said, her voice just audible. “Never, d’you hear?”
On impulse, Auriol threw off the blankets, picked Meriel up, and held her body against his chest. Immediately he wondered at his own boldness, but he did not release her when she choked: “Leave me, damn you, let me go. Oh, Wychwood. Oh God in heaven what have I done! Let me go, I tell you.”
She is clinging to me, he thought, aware simultaneously of quite how thin she was, of how little her bones were, how her hair smelt of tobacco smoke, and of how cold were his own feet on the splintery floorboards.
“I won’t leave you. I won’t hurt you. I promise,” he muttered. “Little one, little Marquis. You’re so warm.” Auriol’s eyes began to water and Meriel, gripping his shoulders, gave a low wail.
“Meriel, Meriel.” Wrapping his arms more sternly around her, he lowered himself and her on to the bed, which sank under the weight. When she raised her face to shriek, he pressed it into his shoulder. “No, no, darling, others will hear.” She was shrieking for her Marquisate.
“Ah, God. Ah, I love you.” She gave a cry, and coughed wretchedly. “Thank G-God it was you I chose.”
“Ay, that was well done in you!” he whispered, weeping freely but silently himself.
“I wish I were dead. I do.” She scratched him on the neck. “I do wish — it.”
“No, no. Eh, don’t cry. No, cry if you wish. I am here. So are you.”
When Meriel tried to wriggle out of his hold, he would not let her, and she soon abandoned the physical struggle. She cried on, in an ugly way, for some time more. After a while, the quality of her tears did alter, and Auriol noticed it at once; though, afraid of gentle but penetrating sadness, she tried to regain her rage, because it was explicable and familiar to her as open sadness was not.
But at last, Meriel found herself quietly weeping away the friendlessness and silence of a dozen years, into his chest which she could not see.