She might have despised herself for being so manipulative; might, except for all that was at stake. She could not, would not allow another diseased blight to take root here. She would fight it to the last cell of her body.
“You’ll change your mind,” he said, dismissing her and her concerns out of hand. “Especially when you’re out, when you’ve had a real London season, when you’re going to parties and balls and the theater—you’ll like cities so much you’ll wonder how you ever thought a pasture worth bothering your pretty head about. Heh—and when you start seeing how much of the ready it takes to buy all those gowns and froofahs and things you ladies are so fond of, you’ll realize just how much good a factory could do your pocket-book. Can’t be seen in the same frock twice, don’t you know. You can’t support a lively Town style on farm rents. It needs a lot of the ready to be in the mode.”
We’ll see about that, she thought grimly. If the choice was between fine feathers and the preservation of this land—she would be willing to make a regular guy of herself in London. She would do without that promised London season! No gown, no string of balls, nothing was worth despoiling Oakhurst, raping the land, poisoning the waters.
The real question was—since she had no direct control of her property, how was she to keep Reggie from plunging ahead with his plan no matter what she wanted? She had no doubt that Madam would be only too happy to give ear to this idea, and Madam was the one who was making the decisions at the moment, where Oakhurst was concerned.
“Oh, Reggie, you can’t want to make me miserable!” she pouted. “That pottery just gave me the awfullest headache, and I just know I’d have nothing but headaches with one of those things right in the next field!”
“But you wouldn’t be here, you’d be in London,” he tried to point out, but she sighed deeply and quivered her lower lip.
“Not all the time! And how can I have house parties with a factory in the next field? People don’t come to house parties to see factories, they come to see views, and to shoot—and oh, everyone around here of any consequence will just hate us, for the shooting will be quite spoilt for miles around!”
That actually seemed to get through to him, at last, and he looked startled. Encouraged, she elaborated. “Oh, we’ll be a disgrace! My season will be a disaster! No one will want to be seen with the girl who had the audacity to drive all the game out to the moor!”
“Well—not to the moor, surely—” he ventured, looking alarmed.
She turned an utterly sober gaze upon him. “I’m the country-cousin, remember? Oh, do trust me, Reggie, all it will take is for your factory to drive the red deer out of this neighborhood—or worse, the pheasants!—and we will be entirely in disgrace and everyone who is anyone will know what we’d done and who’s to blame! You just wait—wait and see how your London friends treat you when shooting they were counting on isn’t there anymore! Not everyone goes to Scotland, you know—people depend on Devon and Surrey for their sport!”
That turned the trick; he promised not to do anything about his plans until she knew she would want to live in London and not at Oakhurst, after all—and until he had made certain that there were no notable shoots anywhere around the vicinity.
“But you just wait, little cuz,” he laughed, as he escorted her back to their compartment. “Once you’ve had a taste of proper life, you won’t care if I blow the place up if it buys you more frocks and fun.”
She settled herself in the corner under one of the ingenious wall-mounted paraffin lamps that the steward had lit in their absence. He dropped onto the seat across from her beneath the other and opened his paper. She took out her poetry book and stared at it, turning the pages now and again, without reading them.
“You won’t care if I blow the place up if it buys you more frocks and fun.” Callous, unfeeling, greedy, selfish—but is that evil? Evil enough to account for that horror beneath Exeter? Or is it just plain, ordinary, piggy badness? It didn’t equate, it just didn’t—evil wasn’t bland. Evil didn’t worry about ruining its reputation by running off the game. Evil probably would be perfectly happy to ruin anything.
If not the son, what about my first thought, the mother? She’s the only parent he’s had for ever so long, so she’s had the only hand over him—he should reflect her. Madam was cold, yes. Selfish, yes. Utterly self-centered. And she’s all business and money and appearances. Still. That doesn’t add up to horror either. Evil should slaver and gnash its teeth, howling in glee at the rich vein of nourishment beneath Madam’s office. It shouldn’t wear stylish suits and smart frocks and give one strenuous lessons in etiquette.
There was only one possible conclusion here. There had to be something else behind the cesspit of vileness back there in Exeter.
And she would be hanged if she could figure out who was feeding off of it. Or what.
My head hurts. She felt a sinking sort of desperation. Out of her depth, unable to cope. Too much was happening at once, and on such wildly disparate levels that she couldn’t begin to imagine how she was to deal with it all. I am out, completely out, of ideas or even wild guesses. She stared at her poem, unseeing, as the railway carriage rocked from side to side. Someone else will have to solve this mystery. They can’t expect me to solve it—all they asked me was to see if there was anything there, after all… come to that, they never asked me, I volunteered to look.
She told herself to breathe deeply, and calm down. No one was expecting her to do anything—except herself. And anyway, it wasn’t her outlook to actually do anything about it either! Hadn’t Dr. Pike and Mr. Davies virtually volunteered to be the ones to track this thing down to its cause and eliminate it? She was only seventeen, after all, and no Master of her element! She wasn’t anywhere ready to go charging off, doing battle with vile magics!
They simply can’t expect me to do anything about this! It would be like sending me out into the desert after the Mad Mullah, for heaven’s sake—with only my parasol and a stern lecture to deliver! At some point, Marina, she continued, lecturing herself in her thoughts, You simply have to let someone else do things and allow that you can’t.
Well, there was one thing at least that she could do—and that was to let the proper people know about the—the vileness.
And another—to keep that poison away from Oakhurst.
She didn’t have any more time to think about it, though, for the train was pulling into the station, and Reggie was making all the motions of gathering up their things.
Reggie opened the door and helped her out onto the platform. The carriage was waiting for them, the coachman already taking up the parcels from the shops and stowing them away as they approached; they were inside and on the way within minutes. The coach rattled over cobblestones, passing the lights of the town, then jolted onto a dirt road; a crack of the whip, and the horses moved out of a fast walk into a trot. The coachman seemed in a monstrous hurry, for some reason; perhaps he sensed yet another wretched March storm coming, for he kept the horses moving at such a brisk pace that Marina was jounced all over her seat, and even Reggie had to hang on like grim death.
“I’ll be—having a word—with our driver—” he said between bounces. “Damn me! See if I—don’t!”
But the moment he said that, the reason for the rush became apparent, as the skies opened up and poured down rain.