It was a good wind, a skirt-lifting force five or six; just enough to break some water across our bows. I could feel the raw and lovely power in Sunflower’s big sails now. She was hissing in the water, smashing the waves, creaming them back, driving through a five-foot swell like a thoroughbred. The wind was more westerly than south, a perfect wind to cross the Channel. I had to keep an appointment in Jersey before I left home waters, then I would be gone to the wild seas. Just one more duty, then I’d be running alone and the bastards couldn’t touch me ever again because, once more, I would be alone and lost and free.
They called it a Convent Hospital, but in truth it was just a big Victorian house that stood on the heights near La Corbiere Point. The sisters and their patients enjoyed six acres of land that fell steeply towards the sea. I left Sunflower in the St Helier Marina and rented a bike that I pedalled along the island’s southern shore.
“She’ll be glad to see you, so she will.” Sister Felicity limped beside me down a path which twisted between laurels and rose bushes. I had tried to persuade her not to walk with me, for she looked desperately tired and old, but she had insisted on coming. “I’m not so old that I can’t lean on an old friend’s arm,” she told me. “And when I heard you were coming, Johnny, I promised myself I’d have a day out of bed. And how are you?”
“I still seem to be getting into trouble, Nanny. I don’t try, but it comes all the same.”
“It’s your Irish blood, Johnny. But I have faith in you, so I do. One day you’ll take responsibility for someone, and that’s the day you’ll settle down.” Sister Felicity was pure Irish. She had once been our family’s nanny at Stowey, but after we had all left the nursery she had gone to take the veil. Her fondness for and familiarity with Georgina had made this pleasant house an obvious refuge for my younger sister. “Mind you,” Sister Felicity went on, “it’s past time you did settle down. You can’t gallivant for ever.”
“Why ever not?”
She paused to take breath. I was worried for her health, but she was more worried about me. “You should have children, Johnny. What will happen to the Earldom if you don’t make an heir?”
“The Earldom’s gone, Nanny,” I said bleakly. “It disappeared with the house. We’re nothing now. We’re just a tired old family that has squabbled its life away. In a few years we’ll all be gone and no one will even remember us.”
“You’re so full of it, your eyes are brown!” She smiled at her own coarseness. As a child, as now as a man, I loved this woman far more than my real mother. Felicity had no guile, just a heart of pure affection. Now, unwell, she held my arm tightly as we began to walk again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t cross to England for your mother’s funeral,” she told me, “it wasn’t one of my well days.”
I wondered if she ever had well days any more. “You should rest, Nanny.”
“Ah, the Lord will give me rest in due time. But I wept for your mother, poor thing.”
“I didn’t,” I confessed brutally. “I haven’t even requested a Mass for her.”
“You should, Johnny. She was never good to you, but she gave you life for all that.”
“And she accused me of stealing her painting.”
“Who cares about a painting?” She stopped where the steps turned towards the sea and we could see a small sun terrace where three patients and a nun sat on wrought-iron chairs. “And there the dear thing is!” Felicity said. “You go on alone, Johnny, I’m not sure I can manage the last steps.”
The ‘dear thing’ was the Lady Georgina Rossendale, but I did not go straight down to her, preferring to stay a few more seconds with Sister Felicity. “Is everything all right here, Nanny?”
“With God’s blessing it will be. The diocese is always talking about selling the house, and I could see why they’d want to because it must be worth a wee fortune, but so far, thank God, they haven’t done it. But if they do, Johnny, we’ll just pick up our skirts and find somewhere else. Don’t you worry yourself.”
“And Georgina?”
“On her good days she misses Stowey.” Felicity made a small gesture of resignation. “Not that she has many good days, but when she does I sometimes think her understanding is just beneath the surface, like a bubble that only needs a little nudge if it’s going to burst, but then she falls away again. Poor thing. But she’s never any trouble, never at all. She’ll be glad to see you.”
I went down to the terrace, but it was not one of Georgina’s good days. At first I was not even sure that she recognised me. She was placid, smiling softly, and gentle. I told her about Sunflower, and perhaps she understood some of what I said, for she pointed out to sea where a slew of yachts were catching the tide before turning north towards Guernsey. Lunch was brought to the terrace on trays and I gently fed Georgina and mopped up her spills.
I left her in mid-afternoon. I climbed the steps, and only then did I learn that Georgina had remembered me, for, just before I would have disappeared behind the screen of bushes, she called my name. “Johnny? Johnny?”
I went back to her. “My love?”
She was crying. She was crying very softly, but the tears were flowing in copious and silent misery. She reached desperately for my hand. “I want to go home.”
“Are you unhappy?”
“I miss you.”
“Nanny’s here,” I said, then, in case Georgina had forgotten the nursery at Stowey, “Sister Felicity’s here.”
“She’ll die! She’s going to die, Johnny, and I’ll be alone.”
“No, no, no.” I held her tight, and I cried because there was sweet sod all I could do. I held her for a long time. Dear God, I thought, but what misery lay in this girl’s madness? I remembered that the last time I had been with Georgina in this garden had been after our brother’s death. Did she, somewhere in her tangled mind, connect me with death? John, Earl of Stowey, death’s messenger? I held her tight.
When I relaxed my embrace to look into her face, I saw that she had gone back into her mysterious world of gentle nothingness. I kissed her cheeks and she smiled at me, remembering nothing of her desperate fears. She seemed happy again, but I was still crying.
I climbed the garden steps and let myself into the main house to seek out Sister Felicity, but a young nun told me Felicity had been ordered back to her bed. I thanked the girl, then pulled out all my small change which I put into the box beside the door. I wouldn’t need British coins again for a long while, maybe never.
“Behold a miracle! The Earl of Stowey is giving money to charity!” I turned, astonished, to see my twin sister Elizabeth coming from the convent office. Her husband, Lord Tredgarth, was two paces behind her. He nodded at me with heavy disapproval, while Elizabeth just looked scornful. “I heard you had come to visit this morning,” she said, “but I hardly expected to find you still here.”
“I came to say goodbye.”
“You’re going somewhere?”
I shrugged. “Wherever.”
“Don’t let me stop you, brother.”
I didn’t move. The meeting, was unexpected and sudden, yet, despite Elizabeth’s rudeness, it seemed churlish just to walk away. I was also very curious about what had brought Elizabeth here. She looked very chic in a black summer dress and with her bright blonde hair cut expensively short. She wore a single row of pearls and had an expensive-looking handbag. Peter Tredgarth was certainly not paying for such baubles, and I wondered who was. She glared at me, expecting me to leave, but I stayed put as the silence stretched in the big cool hallway which smelt of wax polish and disinfectant. Lord Tredgarth was the first of the three of us to be embarrassed by the silence. “You found Georgina well, John?”