Ever After (9 page)

A mile the other side of the village they could see at a distance a great colonnaded Georgian mansion set on a low hillside above the river, with acres of lawns running down to the water. The Major pointed it out as the favourite country seat of Lord Enstone, and said the Earl was in residence with his family. “I had one of the boys with me at Firket,” he went on. “The third son, I think he is. Led his wing with great dash and got a spear in the wrist. Lucky not to lose his arm, but it wasn’t bad enough even to get him sick leave to England. Lord Enstone is a great old boy himself, one of the very best. They’ll come to call while you’re here, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Jolly,” said Virginia. “What is his wife like?”

“She’s been dead for years, I can hardly remember her. It’s a largish family, rather scattered now. Lord Alwyn, the eldest son, lives here at the Hall, being a bachelor—he’s very keen on hunting. And there’s a younger boy, down from London for Easter—the one
that’s reading for the Bar. There is also a remarkably beautiful daughter,” he observed for Bracken’s benefit.

“Do you know the Earl well?” asked Sue, impressed.

“Oh,
rather
, he used to command my regiment! Retired now, of course, but still going strong. I dined there last night, as a matter of fact. Always do, when I’m here. He and Aunt Sophie were cronies, so he’s interested in what becomes of the house, you know. Just a bit stuffy at the idea of Americans having it, but I fixed that, I think!” He smiled round at them all, amused, and added to Bracken, “You’ll find him interesting, if you can get him talking. He’s convinced we’re for it in South Africa, now that the Balkans have boiled over. Greece hasn’t a hope, I’m afraid.”

As a journalist, Bracken had been reluctant to leave London even for a day now that news had begun to trickle in from the Thessalian frontier. Turkish ships had touched oft the war by firing on Greek ships at Prevesa, and the Turkish Army was advancing through heavy fighting towards Larissa, which was believed to have fallen by now. The Albanian troops around Janina had revolted against their Turkish masters, and the Greek fleet might attack Salonika any day. But the European Concert of Powers, dominated by the Kaiser and the Czar, was blockading Crete in a wrong-headed attempt to let the Balkans fight it out among themselves. There was an uneasy feeling in London that it lacked only an incident now to bring on the general European war which everyone had begun to dread without being able to see why it should seem so inevitable in an enlightened age like the present. It was easy to blame the Balkans, a notoriously contentious region. But people were also inclined to blame the Kaiser, who always fished in troubled waters.

Since the Fleet Street office of the
Star
was still in process of organization and not yet functioning as an independent unit, Bracken had decided that it would be better for him to take a holiday now, leaving Nelson to carry on in the usual way, than later on when his personal routine was more fixed. “I don’t care what you do or how you do it,” Cabot’s parting injunction to him had been. “All I care about is what results we get. I want more news faster. Use money. Use cables. Use the brains you got from me.”

But it was with an envious sigh that Bracken had seen an eager young man named Hilton set out for the Balkan front, where he himself desired to be. Hilton couldn’t whip the London office into working order for him, and Hilton couldn’t play nursemaid and master of ceremonies to Sue and Virginia. So Hilton went to Thessaly and Bracken went to Gloucestershire, and that was the way it was meant to be.

Another mile beyond the Hall gates they turned left and entered
an avenue of greening chestnut trees which nearly met overhead, and then Farthingale was before them. Grey stone it might be, but Cotswold stone, which weathers so that it has a golden patina as though perpetual sunlight lay across it. The house was irregular in shape, high at one end, for the original Elizabethan manor had been added to as the family prospered, and an L jutted out. But two hundred years had passed over the new part, now, so that it was weathered and vine-clad like the rest. While its windows were larger, they marched in the same narrow mullioned rows as in the old façade. The roofs were as steep, the gables as sharp, the chimneys as simple.

Jonquils and forget-me-nots bloomed against the stone
foundations
. The grass seemed an almost artificial green, with the last molten rays of the setting sun in long stripes across it. The lawn ran smoothly to the edge of the brimming stream, too wide for jumping, which flowed towards its meeting-place with the
Windrush
in the woods half a mile away. The far bank was pale with primroses, and great chestnuts overhung the water. Beyond the house on the other side the lawn was bounded by a long flower border, not yet come into bloom, where in the middle distance a very old gardener in a faded blue smock was working, assisted by a very young boy with a red wheelbarrow.

“Oh, Bracken!” cried Virginia, and squeezed his arm. “It’s
ours
!
I want it!”

“Looks like a picture postcard,” said Bracken, while something inside him, possibly the blood of St. John Sprague, turned warm and quick, and he felt a stinging in his eyelids.

Sue said nothing as they helped her down from the carriage, because her throat was tight with longing for Sedgwick, who should have been there to see it too.

The door was opened by a smiling country girl in parlourmaid’s black dress and white apron, and a starched cap with streamers. Tea, she murmured, was in the drawing room, and did the ladies wish to come up to their rooms first? Virginia said the ladies were dying for their tea, arid the rooms could wait. The parlourmaid, whose name was Melchett—she had found it hard at first to answer to anything but Lucy—took their coats, lifted one respectful glance to Bracken’s face and vanished. The kitchen was enlivened to hear that the American ladies were both pretty and smelled heavenly, and the American gentleman was young and had smiled at her as kind as could be.

Farthingale was indeed an Elizabethan manor, but not so much so that great bare black rough-hewn beams overhung you
everywhere
, or bent to crack your head if you were tall. The oak
staircase
rose broad and uncarpeted from the hall, with a carved griffin
on the newel-post. The drawing room was in the new wing, and was lighted from two sides, one of them a westward bay. Its walls between fluted pilasters were covered with damask in a gentle blue-green. The worn brocade hangings and upholstery were dark gold. A log fire burned on the hearth beneath a carved oak
overmantel
. The furniture was easy and cushioned, and a long sofa and armchairs were grouped around the fire where the tea-table waited, bright with old silver. The last of the sunset was shining through the stained glass heraldic shields which were let into the upper panes of the bay.

“Welcome home!” cried Virginia, as though the house had spoken. “Sir Gratian, you’ll never be rid of us now! It seems to me we’ve all been here together before!”

“I’m glad,” he said simply, and seated Sue behind the tea-urn where a spirit-lamp had been lighted.

Almost in silence she made and poured their tea. She put sugar in the right cups, and left milk out of Bracken’s because he
preferred
it that way—but her mind went on hearing Virginia’s light words.
We’ve
all
been
here
together
before
. But Sedgwick too, Sue insisted inwardly while she poured their tea. This warmth of heart; this peace, this sense of
return,
were in Sedgwick’s blood too, stronger than in any of them. It was Sedgwick who had remembered about this house in England and wanted to see it. Already she was writing in her mind the letter she would begin to Sedgwick as soon as she was alone. And do you remember, she would say to him in the letter, how at sunset the light comes through the stained glass in the drawing room and makes little rainbows on the carpet all the way across towards the fire….

B
RACKEN
, for all his good humour and seeming spirits, was sleeping very badly and had times of black depression which he always contrived to keep to himself. He had discovered some time ago, when the trouble with Lisl first began, that work was the thing—work, and good, solid, human companionship, leaving no time for brooding, no room for despair. The multitude of details
connected
with the new office came in handy to keep his mind off himself. Sue’s childlike enjoyment of everything she saw and did kept him busy devising schemes for her entertainment. But he hankered at the same time for some more violent preoccupation—such as war.

There was always at the back of his mind a submerged conviction that if he could only go to the war in Greece something might happen, something swift and merciful and final, that would save him years of worry and fortitude. He knew that this was morbid, and would not allow himself to contemplate it at any length, but he knew it was there. If only he went out to Greece and got killed in the line of duty, how simple everything would be.

Overtired now from the extra work he had taken upon himself in order to clear the way for this Easter holiday, when he was already beyond normal human endurance, he slept hardly at all the first night at Farthingale. There was no fault to find with the bed in the master’s chamber where he lay. It was a fine four-poster hung with India print and recently endowed with a new mattress. They had all jealously inspected each other’s quarters when they went up to change before dinner, and all the bedrooms proved to be chintz-hung and cheerful with fireplaces and four-post beds in each one of them. The old moulded timbers still criss-crossed the ceilings upstairs, except in the master’s room, where they had been covered by charming Gothic plasterwork.

After the light was out, Bracken lay watching the dying fire and thinking of what Virginia had said when they arrived.
It’s
ours,
she said at her first sight of the house. And then—
we’ve
all
been
here
before.
Well, yes, they had in a way, through St. John Sprague—that gay and gallant man who had gone out to America in 1771 to claim an unknown inheritance. St. John had stayed there, sending back for his favourite sister Dorothea to join him, for he preferred what he had found in far-off Virginia to the role of younger son at home. He served as aide to George Washington during the War of American Independence and married a famous Williamsburg beauty and became a lively legend to his descendants. And he must have carried in his heart until he died a memory of this Cotswold house which had given its name to the brick
plantation
mansion built by his uncle before him, another younger son, who had made a modest fortune in tobacco and willed it to his nephew St. John. Lying there while the firelight faded, in the very bed where St. John might have been born, Bracken wondered….

The house had a tranquil aura which came of the happy,
uneventful
lives it had sheltered. It was a fortunate house, he was sure, as some houses undoubtedly are, just as others are unhappy and haunted. Even the Major’s nebulous Aunt Sophie must have enjoyed herself there, even after she was old and lonely. You wouldn’t be altogether lonely there, for the house in its gracious memories of old dreams and old griefs and old joys which had crystallized in wood and stone and silver and worn, enduring
fabric would be company in itself. By the end of the summer, Bracken thought drowsily, if they stayed on here, the house would own them too, it would be a part of their lives, they would never be able to go away and forget it and the things they had thought and done and learned within its walls. A house you came to love was like a person, and loved you back, and then you belonged to it for ever after. In less than twenty-four hours Farthingale had taken them to its heart, for they were its lost
children
by the blood of St. John Sprague in their veins. The house had not forgotten him. And when the Sprague line ran out, as it had done in England two generations ago, and strangers moved in, the house had been patient with them, and kind to them, for they were not to last long, the Sprague blood would still bring Spragues to Farthingale, the house had only to wait….

When Bracken roused, the room was full of early sunlight and for a moment he had to think where he was. It had been nearly dawn when at last he had dozed off, and his head felt thick and his body seemed glued flat to the bed in an ecstasy of weariness. He turned on the pillow just to see if he could really detach his spine from the sheet, and buried his face in the cool linen with some idea of sleeping till noon in blissful holiday sloth. But his stretched nerves denied him sleep again, beyond the minimum exhaustion demanded. He began to think of the Fleet Street office and its problems and decisions—because if he didn’t put his mind on that at once he would be thinking of Lisl and the man from California. He pulled the pillow over his head and swore. Not here. Not in this nice clean house on a holiday in spring. And then he remembered that the Major had mentioned riding horses lent by Lord Enstone’s stables for his use during the visit. He rose and shaved and dressed and went in search of them. A ride before breakfast never hurt anybody.

The Farthingale stables, at the back of the old wing and across a wide paved courtyard from the kitchens, were quiet and deserted at that hour, as he had anticipated. He found his way in through the harness-room and came upon several sleek hunters in roomy loose boxes who regarded him with friendly interest.

“Hullo,” said Bracken aloud. “Do you speak English?”

The, horse nearest him breathed heavily in his direction as though in applause. Bracken accepted the tribute with thanks, saddled, and led the animal outside. It was a glorious morning, even as the Major had prophesied, and the early mists were burning away under a warm sun.

“We shall now go out and hear the first cuckoo and talk about nothing else all day till everybody hates us,” said Bracken to his mount and swung into the saddle.