Page 56
THE POWER OF A KISS
Madeleine awoke with a start. Her arm was numb from the weight of her head and her cheek had a pink pressure mark upon it. She did not wish to see Lord Lockhart over breakfast and longed to escape the house. The only place she could think of to which she could flee was Brook Street, where Mr Shilton and the Wolfes had their houses. She could not call on them until at least eleven o’clock so decided to eat some breakfast in the kitchen with the servants. Mrs Porton and Dot ruled in the large candlelit room, cutting bread on the scrubbed table ready for the toasting-iron. Everyone was wreathed in the steam rising from the kettle on the hob. It was the warmest and most welcoming room in the house and Madeleine was happy to be waved to take a seat in the old smoke-blackened Windsor chair. She stretched her hands out on the table and laid her head on the smooth wood.
She was in a devilish fix. This unexpected legacy had brought more troubles to her than solutions. It seemed that even giving most of it away did not quench the animosity on her cousins’ part. Lord Lockhart alarmed her and showed her how vulnerable she was when he was in his cups. But, worst of all, her precious, inflammatory book had disappeared and she was sure it was only a matter of time before it was in the Lockhart family’s hands, causing her unimaginable embarrassments and crises. She felt uncommonly fatigued by the threat of any more emotional upheavals.
With a chuckle, Mrs Porton looked across at her. ‘So, Miss Madeleine, the old lady’s upsit th’apple cart, ain’t she?’ Madeleine’s startled expression made her break into a hearty laugh that sent the flour on her apron scattering to the floor. ‘Nothing passes by us servants. We know all, oft-times before our masters do.’
‘Oh, that’s so, Mrs Porton. A tangled skein to unravel, indeed.’
‘We like ye, miss, don’t take it wrong when I say Dot and me hope ye won’t be obliged to marry the young master.’
Madeleine gave a wan smile. ‘I think that would truly confuse even the meagre threads of my life.’
She finished her coffee and thanked them. ‘Would I be able to borrow Dot as a chaperone at eleven?’
Mrs Porton gave her a smile in assent and Madeleine returned to her room.
She rummaged under the mattress to check once more. She could still barely believe her book was not there. Had it slipped down against the wall, or become wedged against the headboard? But no, there was not a sign of it. She had checked again the cushion in the library window seat where she often wrote and occasionally slipped her book out of sight, but her hand had met only the cool oak. She had to face it, the worst had happened. Madeleine sat on her bed and burst into tears. Not only was she frightened of it being read by Lady Lockhart, but she missed it as her dearest friend.
There was a quiet tap at her door and Dot came in, her birdlike face bright with feeling. ‘Miss Madeleine, I was helping Betty, the under-housemaid, with the dusting and found your book on the table by her Ladyship’s bed. Betty had found it in the library and gave it to her Ladyship, who showed little interest. When she saw your writing, she snapped it shut and said she wasn’t interested in schoolroom maundering.’
Dot held out the book and Madeleine flew to her side. ‘Oh Dot, thank you!’ She held it fast to her heart and had to work hard at not bursting into tears again in sheer relief. Her emotions still febrile with shock and loss, she began to read the last few pages and was surprised by grief at having to relinquish her characters to their own destinies. She loved them as friends and now they would no longer need her to manage their lives and protect them. How she would miss them!
In some vexation at how much of herself there was in this story, she picked up her quill to write the last few paragraphs. When she was a girl, Madeleine had read a poem that had impressed her with its romantic atmosphere. She tried to remember something of that feeling to put into her lovers’ mouths. Could he say to her, ’Impossible was my love, despair was my song, and longing became a creature of my imagination in fated opposition to the stars’?
And flying into his arms, could her heroine reply, ‘Now our lives, long parallel and never meant to meet, have crossed like two vines on a wall, tendrils entwined, never to be parted’? As a child, she had tried to disentangle two pea plants without breaking their delicate spiralling tendrils and realised it could not be done. Separate but together, they clung through an infinite number of twining connections and would grow like that forever.
* * *
Madeleine sat looking out of the window on a brilliant morning, pondering the ending of her tale. For two days, London had been startled by summer storms, swirling up out of hot, cloudy skies. Cracks of ominous thunder and lightning and sudden torrents of rain sent the populace scurrying for cover. The days that followed were swept clean of cloud and with a sparkling pellucid sweetness to the air. It was one of those still mornings when everything shimmered with meaning. The airy clouds hanging in the blue slowly formed and reformed in allegorical shapes. There must be a breeze in heaven, Madeleine thought, as she watched one small wisp of cloud blown across the sky to blend with another and slowly twirl in a dance together, before parting again.
That’s it! She stood up abruptly. The words alone in her novel did not convey the mythological power of her lovers’ quest for meaning and love. At this significant point in the narrative, they had to kiss. The tension in their recognition of each other, their years of hopeless longing, must be released at last by a kiss.
For the first time since embarking on her story, Madeleine felt at a loss. She had only written about the world she understood, her characters were those she found around her – with added gothic ornamentation, it was true. Although she thought Mr Shilton was as truly heroic in real life as in fiction, she suspected his character was far more contradictory and interesting in reality. But now the need for the kiss in her finale gripped her imagination with its potential for dramatic power and catharsis.
There was a problem, though, as she had never known what it was to be kissed by someone you liked, let alone someone you loved and longed for. To kiss the beloved’s lips with desire must be a quite different sensation from kissing a hand or a baby’s cheek. And completely different from holding off a drunken cousin, his face sweaty and breath foetid with alcohol. She shuddered at the memory.
The crystal clarity of the morning filled Madeleine with unusual boldness. Her heart was beating with anticipation. She knew who she must ask for help. Still in half-mourning, she wore a subfusc gown of muted violet, but decided to don her bonnet with the bobbing coquelicot feather as a symbol of gaiety and courage. She called at the kitchen door for Dot and they set off together towards Brook Street, her precious novel hidden in the folds of her pelisse.
Today felt momentous, whether it marked the finish at last of the romance she had been writing, the first great endeavour of her life, or something quite different, Madeleine could not know. But it was clear to her that a bouleversement was about to happen. Her senses were as alert as a faun’s. She noticed her immediate world with thin-skinned discernment. Everything had the lustre of significance: the dusty scent of the air, the sounds of the city, the blackbird carolling over the cries of a costermonger with his harvest of fruit, and the clank of wheels on cobbles. The young women walked quickly, navigating the puddles and holding their skirts away from the mud splashing off the horses’ hooves and passing carriages.
As they turned into Brook Street, Madeleine could see the portico of Mr Shilton’s house and recalled finding baby Billy in the apple crate just a few weeks before. How much had happened since that extraordinary morning. She and Dot now walked up to the front door and before Madeleine’s courage failed her, she knocked. It opened almost immediately and Maltby’s lugubrious face softened on sight of her. ‘The master’s in the library. He’s been up for a while.’
* * *
Mr Shilton was in his favourite chair gazing into the fire and wondering what had just happened to him. His betrothed in high umbrage had released him from his contract to marry. Simultaneously, he had recognised he no longer wished for such a business-like arrangement. Knowing it nonsensical, he instead longed to live intensely like a poet, with days of birdsong and his path strewn with flowers. Am I losing my mind? he idly pondered, watching the flames curl round the log in the grate. But every fibre of his being longed for a looser way of life, one centred on the heart and senses, one with the possibility of joy.
He had missed breakfast and was drinking brandy – could inebriation explain the unfamiliar confusion of shock and elation that coursed through his veins? He heard the lazy crackle of the fire and the steady ticking of his father’s mantle clock marking off the inexorable passage of time. Ferdinand Shilton was thirty years old and had known nothing but friendship, ease and pleasure, skimming over the turbid waters of profound emotion in an animated pageant of a young buck’s progress. He now wished to plunge his cup deep, fill it to the brim and live. But to really live, he had to love. And he realised with a jolt that he was listening out for the voice of his beloved, believing against reason that unbidden she would come to him, he would hear her step in the hall.
Mr Shilton leant his head against the chair back and stretched his long legs towards the fire. He was still not properly dressed, but the usual strict etiquette of the best-dressed and most charming man in London had been shaken and he felt disinclined to take up the strictures again quite so soon. Had something of Max Flambard’s careless zest for sensation infected him? he languidly wondered.
In a luxuriance of warmth and freedom, lubricated by the best French brandy, he let his mind drift over the matchless beauty of his horses, his love of his estate at Nonsuch, the charm of baby Billy, the affection of his friends. These pleasurable thoughts centred on the face of Madeleine Rose, sensitive and expressive; could it be she who, despite all the odds, bound together these strands of delight in his life? Even the possibility of her accepting Lord Lockhart’s offer of a marriage-merger did not trouble him. In this relaxed mood of bonhomie, he felt equal to anything.
Then, miraculously, he heard the longed-for footstep in the hall. Maltby knocked and there, behind his shoulder, Ferdy glimpsed Miss Rose, her eyes gleaming with knowledge of her own destiny. He sprang to his feet, losing one of his embroidered slippers in the process. Unused to meeting friends in this informal state of undress, he coloured slightly and stooped to replace his slipper, but not before Madeleine had seen his pale naked foot, elegant as the rest of him but previously hidden and mysterious. She felt a jolt of excitement at the unexpected intimacy of the sight, and her cheeks flushed too.
‘Good morning, Miss Rose. Come in.’
Madeleine divested herself of her pelisse and bonnet and gave them to Maltby, and Dot headed quietly to a window seat, where she withdrew some mending from her reticule. Ferdy offered Madeleine his arm and walked her to a chair opposite his.
