They came to the oak, near Brandy Island.
He heard a sound. As he turned, a silhouette separated itself from the darkness of the tree trunk.
‘Robin!’
‘You took your time!’
Armstrong dismounted. In the semi-darkness his son hunched against the cold and shivered in his thin jacket. His words had been spoken abruptly with a man’s swagger, but a quiver cut into his voice and left the boldness in tatters.
Compassion flared instinctively in Armstrong, but he remembered the curved line of red on his daughter’s neck. ‘Your own sister,’ he said in a dark voice, and shook his head. ‘It is beyond belief …’
‘It’s Mother’s fault,’ Robin said. ‘If she’d only done what I said, it need never have happened.’
‘You blame your mother?’
‘I blame her for many things, and yes, that is one.’
‘How can you try to make this her fault? Your mother is the best woman in the world. Whose hand held the knife to Susan’s throat? Whose hand has the knife still?’
There was silence. Then:
‘Have you brought the money?’
‘There will be time to talk of money later. There are other things we must speak of first.’
‘There is no time. Give me the money now and let me go. There is not a minute to lose.’
‘Why the rush, Robin? Who is after you? What have you done?’
‘Debts.’
‘Work your way out of debt. Come home to the farm and work like your brothers.’
‘The farm? It’s one thing for you to get up at five every morning to feed the pigs in the cold and the dark. I am made for a better life.’
‘You’ll have to come to some arrangement with whoever made you the loan. I can’t pay it all. It’s too much.’
‘This isn’t some gentlemanly loan I’m talking about. This is not a banker, ready to renegotiate terms.’ There came a sound that was a sob or a laugh. ‘Give me the money – or you send me to the gallows. Hush!’
Their ears strained in the darkness. Nothing.
‘The money! If I do not get away tonight—’
‘To go where?’
‘Away. Anywhere. Where nobody knows me.’
‘And leave so many questions behind you?’
‘There’s no time!’
‘Tell me the truth about your wife, Robin. Tell me the truth about Alice.’
‘What does it matter? They’re dead! Finished. Gone.’
‘Not one word of sorrow? Remorse?’
‘I thought she was bringing money with her! She said her parents would come round. Set us up in life. Instead she was a millstone round my neck. She’s dead, and she drowned the child, and good riddance to the pair of them.’
‘How can you speak so?’
The slim, shaking silhouette stiffened suddenly.
‘Did you hear something?’ Robin asked in a low murmur.
‘Nothing.’
His son listened intently for a few moments, then returned his attention to Armstrong. ‘If he’s not here yet, he soon will be. Give me the money and let me go.’
‘What about the child from the Swan? The one you neither claimed nor relinquished. That charade at the summer fair. Tell me about that.’
‘The same thing as always! Don’t you know me by now? The same thing that is hanging from your belt in the leather pouch.’
‘You expected to make money out of her?’
‘From the Vaughans. It was plain from the minute I walked into the Swan that night that Vaughan knew the girl wasn’t his. She couldn’t have been. I knew it, and he knew it. I knew there was money to be made if I only had the time to think it through – I fainted, or they thought I did, and worked it all out there and then, flat out on the floorboards. They wanted the girl and had money. I wanted money and could claim the girl.’
‘You meant to pretend a claim and then sell it?’
‘Vaughan was on the brink of paying up, but once Mother had sent the girl back, he had no need. I was in debt, thanks to her.’
‘Do not speak ill of your mother. She taught you right from wrong. If you had listened better to her you might be a better man today.’
‘But she did not do right, did she? She only talked of doing so! I’d have been a better man if she’d been a better woman. I place the responsibility at her door.’
‘Watch what you say, Robin.’
‘Look at the three of us! She so white and you so black! And look at me! I know you are not my father. I have known from a child that I was not your son.’
Armstrong took a moment to find his words.
‘I have loved you as a father loves his child.’
‘She tricked you, didn’t she? She was with child by another man and desperate for someone to marry her, but who’d want a lame and boss-eyed woman for a wife? Not the baby’s father, that’s for sure. But then you came along. The black farmer. And she set her cap at you, didn’t she? What a trade that was. A white bride for a black farmer – and me, eight months later.’
‘You are wrong.’
‘You are not my father! I have always known it. And I know who my true father is.’
Armstrong flinched. ‘You know?’
‘You remember when I forced the bureau drawer and stole that money?’
‘I would prefer to forget it.’
‘That is when I saw the letter.’
Armstrong was puzzled, and then his confusion cleared. ‘The letter from Lord Embury?’
‘The letter from my father. That says what is to come to his natural son. Money that you and my mother have kept from me and that I have taken from you by stealth.’
‘Your father …?’
‘That’s right. I know Lord Embury is my father. I have known it since I was eight.’
Armstrong shook his head. ‘He is not your father.’
‘I have read the letter.’
Armstrong shook his head again. ‘He is not your father.’
‘I have got the letter!’
Armstrong shook his head a third time and opened his mouth to repeat himself again. The words sounded in the wet air – ‘He is not your father!’ – but it was not his own voice that spoke them.
The voice struck Robert Armstrong as being distantly familiar.
Robin’s face twisted in despair.
‘He’s here!’ he moaned under his breath.
Armstrong turned and looked all around, but his eyes could not penetrate the darkness. Every tree trunk and every shrub might conceal a figure, and a throng of phantoms hovered mistily in the black dampness. At last, by dint of staring, his eyes made out a shape. Half-water, half-night, it waded towards them, a stunted form whose wide garment trailed in the water and whose hat sat low and concealed its features.
Splash by splash it came closer to Robin.
The young man took a step back. He could not draw his fearful eyes from the approaching figure, but at the same time he shrank from it.
When the man – for man it was – came to a spot five feet from Robin, he stopped and the moonlight suddenly illuminated his face.
‘I am your father.’
Robin shook his head.
‘Do you not know me, son?’
‘I know you.’ Robin’s voice shook. ‘I know you are a low-born villain, a base man who lives by the knife and by crime. I know you are a charlatan and a thief and a liar, and worse besides.’
The man’s face creased into a proud smile.
‘He knows me!’ he said to Armstrong. ‘And I see you know me too.’