The Lorimer Line (44 page)

As the invitation was written and dispatched, she felt little doubt what the decision would be. When they first started their training, Lydia had been as emphatic as herself that marriage would never tempt her away from her work and the memory of her dead love. But Margaret knew that in her own case she had not been able to subdue her nature: she still longed for a family life, with a husband and children. If Charles were suddenly to find himself free … She shook the dream out of her head. But there the impediment was personal to Charles and herself. Lydia must often have felt the same longings and in her case there was no reason why she should not be grateful for this chance. Ralph had admired her in the past, and Lydia in return had welcomed the interest he showed in her. If she came to Brinsley House, Ralph would propose and Lydia would accept him.

Her prophecy proved to be correct. Ralph and Lydia were married that summer and sailed for Jamaica a few
days after the ceremony. Margaret said goodbye to her friend with a heavy heart. She was uneasy about the hazards of a tropical life and, for her own part, knew how much she would miss her companion and confidante. Lydia's departure marked the end of that happy period in which they had lived together as fellow students and fellow doctors, and it brought a finality to the remnants of Margaret's relationship with Charles. She had already had time to accept that her friendship with him was over and that her love could never be expressed, but now she had lost the one person with whom it was possible to discuss her feelings.

Even had Margaret been tempted to uncover her thoughts, however, they would have been overwhelmed by the happiness which shone in the eyes of both bride and bridegroom. They had both thought themselves condemned to solitary lives, and both were overjoyed by their good fortune in finding each other. There was no reason to doubt that the marriage would be successful. They would be happy, and Claudine was happy already. William's lies had done nothing but good, it seemed - but they could not alter the facts.

As Margaret stood on the quayside at Portishead and waved her friend and her brother goodbye at the start of their voyage, she reflected on the most important fact which could not be changed: that in a Dordogne farmhouse lived a boy with straw-coloured hair who was the grandson of John Junius Lorimer. He was never likely to visit England, would never speak a word of English, would never meet his father - but he was, all the same, part of the Lorimer line.

Water was the life-blood of Bristol. It brought prosperity to the port, but at the same time it sapped the strength of those who lived there. The dampness of the city, with its high rainfall and the frequent flooding of the low-lying areas around its two rivers - the areas in which the poorer families lived - provided fertile ground for such diseases as pneumonia, bronchitis and consumption. As an untrained charitable visitor, Margaret had once visited such suffering families with palliatives but without cures. Now she visited as a doctor - and all too often found herself almost as ineffectual as before.

Her efforts to obtain a hospital appointment in Bristol had proved unsuccessful. The growing number of female medical students in the capital was gradually breaking down resistance to their employment there, but this enlightened attitude had not yet reached the provinces. Margaret had to be content with the opportunity to act as locum for a doctor who had caught consumption himself. More fortunate than his patients, he was able to prescribe himself a year in a Swiss mountain sanatorium. In finding someone as well qualified as Dr Lorimer to look after his practice, he was too grateful to hold her sex against her.

As well as the practice, Dr Miller's house in Portland Square was at Margaret's disposal, so that she could live near to her patients. When she first returned to Bristol, she had considered the possibility of making her home in Lower Croft, the house which John Junius had given her. But it was too large, and too expensive to run for a woman alone. Instead, she had taken William's advice and sold it
to the convalescent home in whose grounds it stood. She used some of the proceeds to pay William himself the balance of the money with which he had financed her studies, and allowed him to invest the remainder in a way which brought her in a small income every quarter.

William had made no secret of the reason for his advice. He wished her to live at Brinsley House. If his sister insisted on working in Bristol, it was necessary to his pride as head of the Lorimer family that she should be seen to be under his protection. As politely as she could, Margaret rejected the invitation. Dr Miller's house was dark and damp, with the neglected air of a widower's establishment, but she was glad to escape from Sophie's undisguised disapproval and be independent.

She was conscientious in her visits, although the neighbourhood was a poor one and the patients could pay little for the time she spent with them. Late one afternoon she was just ending the last of her day's calls, on a consumptive fourteen-year-old, when the girl's mother stopped her at the door.

‘There's another one upstairs, doctor.'

‘Another what?'

‘Another one sick, like my Kathleen. Sinking fast, she is. Too proud to ask for help when she'd no money to pay. But she told me this morning that her little girl had earned a penny or two. She couldn't give you much, but she asked me to say that she'd be glad to see a doctor, if one would come.'

‘I'll go up straight away. And don't forget what I said about Kathleen. If your sister could find room for her in the country, the air would be far better than any medicine I can prescribe.'

Tired though she was, Margaret climbed the bare wooden stairs and knocked at the door of the attic room. It was opened by a nine-year-old girl whose golden hair was tinged with red. She knew at a glance that this was Alexa.

Without that clue it would not have been possible to
recognize her old music teacher. Luisa lay on the bed beneath the tiny window like a bundle of bones and rags. She was not only ill but starving. Lacking the deceptive rosy-cheeked appearance of most of Margaret's consumptive patients, she was emaciated and gaunt.

‘My dear Luisa! How have you allowed yourself to come to such a state? Why did you not let your friends know that you needed help?'

‘Ill and couldn't work,' murmured Luisa through swollen lips. ‘No work, no money. No money, no way to get well.'

‘I have some money,' said Alexa, coming to stand beside her mother's bedside. ‘I want to buy medicine to make Mama well again.'

Margaret put an arm round the child's shoulders. Her own distress was so great that for a moment she could not speak, for it was plain to her practised eye that Luisa had sunk too low to be saved.

‘What your mother needs first of all is some food,' she said. ‘Can you carry a message for me?' She scribbled a note to Betty and gave it to Alexa, with instructions how to reach Dr Miller's house. ‘When you get there, give Betty this note. First she will find you something to eat, and then she will bring a bowl of broth for your mother. You can show her the way.'

The child nodded solemnly and ran off. Margaret looked round the room. She was about to ask what had brought Luisa to such a condition when her attention was distracted. Except for the bed, the room contained barely any furniture, but hanging on the wall was the portrait of John Junius Lorimer which had once taken pride of place in the line of Margaret's ancestors at Brinsley House.

‘How does my father's portrait come to be here?' she asked.

‘Because a picture of John Junius Lorimer has no value even to a pawnbroker. If it had, it would have gone like everything else.' Luisa attempted a laugh, but it turned into a cough.

‘But I mean, how did it come to be here in the first place?'

‘I bought it,' said Luisa. Her voice seemed to strengthen as she remembered a time when she had been better off. ‘In an auction at Brinsley House. I had a little money then. Your father gave me what he could. And no one wanted his portrait. It was very cheap. A bargain.'

‘I don't see why you should have wanted it.' But even as she spoke, Margaret began to understand. ‘Are you telling me …?' she began.

Again Luisa began to laugh; again the laughter turned into a cough. She held a handkerchief to her mouth as the coughing went on and on. When she lay back again, exhausted, Margaret could see the blood which stained it.

‘Your father was good to me, as long as he was able,' Luisa whispered when she was strong enough to speak. ‘I was fond of him. Sorry for him as well. He had little kindness from your mother, I think. But now I have upset you.'

Margaret felt herself blushing. If it was difficult, looking at the gaunt figure on the bed, to remember how voluptuously beautiful Luisa had once been, it was even more difficult to believe that her own father, in his seventies, should have had a secret life of such a kind. Both women were silent for a long time, one from weakness and the other from shock. Then Margaret forced herself to remember that there was a more urgent problem to be considered.

‘We must build up your strength, Luisa,' she said briskly. ‘It was foolish of you to starve yourself in such a way. If you were too proud to come to your friends, there are charities which would have helped you. And Alexa has been singing for money. You knew that, I suppose?'

Luisa nodded weakly.

‘I asked a friend who works the music halls to look after her,' she said. ‘I knew that she ought not to stay here and sleep in this room with me. It was hard to send her away, but for her own good. The little she earned hardly paid for
her own food and lodging. But she saved what she could, the dear child, and insisted on bringing it home. She has been away for six months, and returned today. I have been forcing myself to stay alive just long enough to see her again.'

‘You would have been more certain of succeeding had you provided yourself with a better diet.'

‘I had no money.' Luisa gave a deep sigh. ‘Everything that could be sold or pawned had already gone. One cannot eat rubies.'

‘Rubies?' queried Margaret. It took her a moment or two to collect her thoughts, and yet even as she asked the question she suspected what the answer was going to be.

Luisa lifted a thin hand from the grimy blanket which covered her and began to grope feebly beneath the bed.

‘You cannot imagine how glad I am that you are here,' she said. ‘Ever since I knew that I was dying, I have wondered who to tell about the rubies. It has been my great anxiety, not knowing who I could trust to look after them for Alexa. I did not know that you had returned to Bristol, otherwise I would have sent a message asking for your help. You were always a good friend to me.' Her hand dropped in exhaustion after the small and unsuccessful effort. ‘The box is under the bed. I cannot reach.'

Margaret stooped down and felt along the floor until she found a black leather box with a metal lock. The key was on a chain round Luisa's neck. Margaret held the box close so that the sick woman could unlock it.

She had seen its contents before - though in another age, it seemed. Even in this hovel the jewels sparkled with light and fire on their cushions of black velvet. Margaret drew out the three separate shelves of the box and stared at them. The mystery which had puzzled not only William and herself, but the whole of Bristol, was solved.

Her father must have had an exact copy made, presumably somewhere where he was not known. That much had been widely supposed already, although Margaret in her
loyalty had found the theory difficult to accept. Mr Parker of Bristol had made the genuine pieces, and Georgiana had worn them in front of the Prince of Wales at the ball; but it must have been the copies which were deposited in the bank the next morning. At a time when his ship of fortune was already leaking and would soon be wrecked, John Junius had chosen this method of providing for a mistress whose existence could not be openly acknowledged.

The moment was a bitter one for Margaret, reminding her of all she had suffered because of her faith that her father had been an honest man and intended to defraud no one. She had defended him against David's accusation that her engagement had been tolerated - even engineered -for discreditable reasons: but there could be no honest explanation of this gift to Luisa. Everything about it, from the surreptitious sale of the jade to meet the cost of the jewels to the equally furtive commissioning of the imitations, could only have been planned by a man deliberately intending to deceive and defraud his creditors. Margaret recalled her own struggles of conscience about the ownership of Lower Croft, how she had tried to think what her father, as an upright man, would have wanted her to do. Now she had his answer. He had been intentionally providing for his daughter without regard to his debts, as he had been providing for his mistress at the same time.

It was far too late for anger. When Margaret sighed, it was with sadness at the shattering of an illusion. Then she returned her attention to the problems of the moment.

‘How foolish of you to deny yourself so much when you had ample means of purchasing food and comfort at hand!' she exclaimed.

‘Some gifts are over-generous,' Luisa whispered. ‘What do you think would have happened if I had tried to sell the jewels? I should have been accused of stealing them. Who would have believed that a poor woman like me could have come by them honestly? And if I told truthfully how I was given them, they would have been taken from me to
pay your father's debts. Even if I gave no explanation, anyone in Bristol would have known that the jewels should have been part of his estate. Don't you remember all the letters written to the newspapers about this jewellery? I would not have been allowed to keep it, nor its value.' She was silent again, as though so much talking had drained her of all energy. But then she roused herself with some of her old passion. ‘Besides, the jewels are not mine to sell. They were given to Alexa. One day she will be the most beautiful woman in England, and she must be able to dress like a queen.'