‘You look more distressed than he does, madam.’ Holdsworth was close to her now, and she would have liked to lean against him, as one leans against a tree. ‘You must sit down and recover. Would you like more tea, or perhaps brandy?’
She shook her head. ‘I will do very well as I am, thank you, sir. Are you sure he is unharmed?’
‘He is none the worse for making himself wet again. I am very vexed with him for frightening you, though. Mulgrave is upstairs with him, helping him change into dry clothes. I hope he will apologize to you in person before you leave. But in the meantime I do so on his behalf and my own.’
‘There is no need,’ she said. ‘He took me quite unawares, He seemed almost his old self at first, though subdued.’
‘What were you talking about when he lost control of himself?’
‘I mentioned his mother, and how much her ladyship wished to see him. That was when he made that foolish noise and ran off. It’s as if he’s afraid of her.’
‘We cannot hope to have him cured in just a few days, madam. I wish we could. What will you tell Lady Anne?’
‘I hardly know yet.’
She felt suddenly very weary and allowed Holdsworth to escort her back to the cottage. She stumbled as she crossed the threshold, and immediately his hand was under her elbow, steadying her. For an instant she let him take more of her weight than she needed. She felt less steady than before. He guided her to a chair.
‘I still believe that the only way to restore him to his senses is to find out what caused him to lose them in the first place,’ he said quietly when she was seated. ‘I think he trusts me a little now. Not much, perhaps, but it is a start. We need more time, ma’am. It is easy to forget how far he has already come.’
‘I shall tell Lady Anne as much.’
He sat down beside her and leaned closer. She stared at him. There was a terrifying sense of inevitability about what was happening. Was this what Sylvia had meant? To have this absolute need for someone? A compulsion to draw closer, an irrational power of attraction which had no more to do with will-power than gravity itself.
‘Madam? Shall I fetch you a glass of water?’
It was as if she had fallen from a cliff. The one thing she could not do was return to the clifftop and continue with her old life, with its familiar comforts and inconveniences. It was now merely a matter of wondering when she would hit the ground and what the impact would do to her.
Heavy footsteps were approaching on the path along the front of the cottage. Elinor drew aside from Holdsworth and took up Night Thoughts, which was at her elbow. He sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the table. Neither shifted their position more than by a few inches, but there was a suddenness about their movements, as well as an unsettling symmetry.
The doorway filled almost entirely with Ben’s large figure. He blocked the light, and it was as if evening had come upon them with tropical rapidity.
He made his obedience. ‘Pony’s done now, ma’am.’
30
It was at supper that Frank began to drink. He proposed toasts, he sang songs. He encouraged Holdsworth to match him, glass for glass. Holdsworth thought this must surely be a sign of returning health. It was, he reasoned to himself, natural for a young man to want to drink deeply. Frank, under Jermyn’s care since March, had had little opportunity to do so for three months.
Mulgrave had set up a table for them under the fruit trees. They drank first one bottle, then another. Frank called for a third and ordered a fourth to be brought in readiness. They talked in bursts interspersed with comfortable silences that grew longer as the evening slipped away.
Frank was cheerful enough, increasingly loquacious and as rational as the wine would let him be. His manner see-sawed between that of a lordly host and that of an awkward, confiding boy, but there was more of the latter than the former. He described episodes from his childhood; he dwelled in particular on his long visits to his grandfather Lord Vauden’s home in the West Country. When he spoke of the management of estates, he showed knowledge and enthusiasm. He asked Holdsworth about his apprenticeship, and Holdsworth found himself talking at length of the times he spent on the river with Ned Farmer and of their trips up the Thames.
With the third bottle, they grew quieter. It was still light, but only just. The air was soft and smelled sweet. Water rustled faintly. Mulgrave had gone to his bed in the kitchen. A solitary candle burned in the window of the cottage. There were pinpricks of light in the grey sky.
‘When did it happen?’
Holdsworth looked up. ‘What?’ He could no longer make out Frank’s face. It was as if a shadow had spoken. ‘When did what happen?’
‘Your wife, sir,’ Frank said, his face a blur. ‘Your son.’
Holdsworth did not reply. He heard the chink of glass on glass and the gurgle of wine.
‘You see, I wondered what it must be like to drown when Sylvia died,’ said the voice in the darkness. ‘And I suppose you must wonder, too. I – I do not wish to pain you. I wish to understand.’
‘My wife died last March, my son the previous November,’ Holdsworth said.
‘What were their names, pray?’
Holdsworth stared up at the sky. He caught the glimmer of another star. ‘Maria.’ He drained his own glass and stretched a hand out for the bottle. ‘Georgie.’
‘How did they die?’
Holdsworth told him. He told this rich, spoiled, mad boy things that even Ned had never heard. He told him about the little family on Bankside and the shop in Leadenhall, about the ghost light from the river, and about the day Georgie died at Goat Stairs. He told him about Maria’s search for Georgie and the charlatan who had preyed on her, about The Anatomy of Ghosts, the barrow of second-hand books and the headstone he could not afford until her ladyship had given him her money. In the darkness, his voice might have belonged to someone else, and he himself was standing aside, listening but paying little attention because the story was already familiar.
Frank fumbled with the corkscrew and a fresh bottle. ‘So it’s not to be wondered at, I suppose.’
‘What isn’t?’
He eased the cork out of the bottle with a soft explosion. ‘That you don’t like ghosts.’
‘And now it’s your turn,’ Holdsworth said.
‘My turn to what?’
‘To tell me about your ghosts.’
Frank said nothing. He drank.
‘It’s a night for ghost stories,’ Holdsworth went on. ‘It’s good to let them out and give them air.’
Frank laughed, and the sound erupted from him like a bubble from water. ‘You make ghosts sound as if they were our captives.’
‘Aren’t they, in a way? And a humane regime should allow its prisoners to mingle occasionally in society. Did you see the lady only once?’
‘Can ghosts appear in dreams? Some people say they can. In that case I saw Mrs Whichcote many times both when she was alive and when she was dead. She was very beautiful, you know.’
‘I have seen her portrait.’
‘I saw her ghost only once, though, in the garden.’ Frank’s voice was as slow and relaxed as a sleepy child’s. ‘That is, only once when I was awake.’
As a rational being, Holdsworth knew they were both drunk, that he was tired and Frank was overwrought. Nothing anybody said or thought or did was to be trusted. But, as Frank’s sleepy voice went on, it seemed to Holdsworth that he was not hearing the story that Frank told, he was in some sense living it.
‘Friday, the third of March,’ Frank said. ‘A fortnight after they found her body.’
Holdsworth was there, lodged behind Frank’s eyes, encased in Frank’s skull, trapped in another time and place. He was haunting Frank, perhaps, or Frank was haunting him; he wasn’t sure which. Did haunting flow in both directions? Was it a dialogue?