Give Us This Day (31 page)

2

As she had half-expected, there was worse to come.

She never recalled a period as sustained and depressing as this, for the crisis in 1865, when they came to her for permission to amputate his left leg, had lasted no more than a few weeks. After that, with him absent and on the road to recovery, she was able to adjust, losing herself in his concerns at the yard and watching the calendar against his return.

This crisis needed more stamina and patience than she possessed. Wretchedness and uncertainty stretched into months, right through the remainder of the summer, the autumn, and into the new year, when a mantle of sadness settled over the whole nation with the death of the Queen at Osborne.

It was September before they were called upon to face the fact that Hugo would never see again, that further surgery and visits to Continental doctors were pointless. But, mercifully perhaps, the sharp edges of Hugo’s tragedy were blurred by the long spell of agonised waiting for news of Helen and Rowley, and finally the shattering announcement that Rowley had been murdered by those Chinese fiends and that Helen had survived the horrors of a seven-week siege.

There was relief, to be sure, in the news that she was alive and was on her way home, but Henrietta, entirely without experience of this kind of situation, was not in the least sure what she would do with the girl when she arrived. She was sad then that Helen had no children to take her mind off the tragedy and very relieved when Joanna wrote from Dublin saying that, as soon as her sister had rested, she would be glad to welcome her for an indefinite stay. The two had always been very close, and Joanna’s jolly household would surely have a more beneficial effect on a young widow than a sojourn at Tryst just now, with everyone so cast down about Hugo. Adam approved the plan at once, saying, “Best thing in the world for her. There’s only young Margaret here and the age gap is too wide. We’re in no fettle to cheer her up, are we?” And then, advertising his lifelong detachment from the brood once again, “How old is she now? I never can remember the order they came in.”

“She’s thirty. Just a year younger than Hugo.”

“Ah,” he said, vaguely, “then I daresay she’ll marry again soon enough.”

“I really don’t know how you can say such things,” Henrietta protested. “For heaven’s sake, don’t mention such a thing in her presence.”

“I’ve a damned sight more sense than that,” he said, smiling, “but it’s the best thing she could do for all that. No sense in making a fetish of a dead husband like Queen Vic. Oh, people are sympathetic for a year or so, but after that they go out of their way to avoid you. Just remember that when I pop off, Hetty.”

He meant it jocularly enough, she supposed, but she did wish he would save his gallows humour for George and his male cronies. The prospect of widowhood, even at an advanced age, terrified her, notwithstanding a tribe of children and grandchildren, and she could never forget he was her senior by twelve years. She said, “I daresay you’ll outlive me, and I hope to goodness you do,” and went about her business, getting Helen’s old room ready in the west wing beyond the gallery and remembering, as she entered it, how gay and hoydenish those girls had seemed growing up here in the days when their safety bicycles were novelties.

She managed at last to put Rowland Coles and his horrid death out of mind. She could always do that with people who were not her flesh and blood and when Helen did arrive, in the last golden days of October, she was agreeably surprised to discover that the girl, outwardly at least, did not appear to be devastated by her frightful experiences. She looked sallow and peaky to be sure, but who wouldn’t, after having one’s husband murdered and afterwards enduring a seven-week bombardment in a fortress with temperatures into the hundreds, horsemeat for rations, and the prospect of butchery held at bay by a few barricades and one’s own fortitude?

Adam helped more than he realised, questioning her closely about the siege as soon as he realised she didn’t mind discussing it, and as more and more horrific details emerged Henrietta began to feel a glow of pride in her daughter’s hardihood. She was sure she could never have behaved so gallantly and upheld the honour of the flag in that way, not even if Adam had been by her side. She was shocked, however, to learn that Helen had not only killed a man but gloried in the fact.

“You mean you… you
know
you killed him? You weren’t just… well, there, with a gun in your hand?”

“I killed him, sure enough,” Helen said blandly, “and if you can bring yourself to believe it, killing him did me a great deal of good. I would have killed a few more if they had given me half a chance.”

“Well, I can understand you feeling bitter and… well, full of feelings of revenge,” Henrietta said, turning away from her daughter’s hard, rather brittle smile, “but I mean… well… it couldn’t have been a
pleasant
experience. Not even in the circumstances. And I really don’t understand how it could make you feel any better about poor Rowland.”

“Well, it did,” Helen reaffirmed, “but as to expecting you to understand how, I don’t think I could do that, Mamma. You would have to have lived in China and been there and listened to those savages howling for blood. Maybe Papa would understand, having served in the Mutiny and buried those women and children slaughtered at Cawnpore.”

Adam understood and the curious change in the girl interested him, bringing her a little closer somehow. He said, when Henrietta had excused herself on some domestic pretext, “Do you mind if I add something to that? Keep up the attack, girl. Don’t ever let self-pity creep up on you. That’s no road out of the woods, believe me. Came close to letting go myself when I had to learn to walk again at dam’ near forty but I held on somehow. Matter of professional interest. What make was that rifle you used to swat the Chinaman?”

“A Martini-Henry,” she said. “I found that out later.”

“It had a devilish kick, didn’t it?”

“It left a bruise on my shoulder as big as an orange.”

“And popping that fellow didn’t get into the official reports?”

“No. I never told a soul about it until now.”

“That was wise,” he said, thoughtfully, “for you’re full young and can begin again. Go over to Ireland. Take it easy and look around. Ease yourself back into the mainstream as I did. It can happen. I’m proof of it. How are you off for cash?”

“I’ve still got your two hundred a year, and I’ll get a pension, they tell me. Plus compensation for all we lost at the bungalow, but it will take time to come through I suppose.”

“I’ll double the allowance and see that it’s paid through our Dublin branch.”

“That’s very generous, Papa.”

“Is it? I wouldn’t say it was. Not for a girl who can tote a Martini-Henry and live seven weeks on horsemeat and champagne.”

He kissed her absentmindedly and went out into the autumn sunshine and down the drive to his observation mound behind The Hermitage, pondering with the slow, massive strength of an ancestral tug. Swanns had been in the killing business for centuries and here it was, cropping out in a girl who was the daughter of a tradesman and reared in what most people would regard as genteel circumstances.

* * *

Lady Sybil brought Hugo on his first visit shortly after Helen had left, and Adam read them all a brief lecture the day they were due to arrive.

“Don’t treat that boy as a helpless invalid,” he warned. “Nothing more irritating when you’re crocked than people fuming and fussing about you, handing you this and that and telling you to watch out. God knows, you don’t need hourly reminders of a handicap of that kind. Leave all the gentling to his wife. She’s a professional and knows her business if I’m any judge.”

She did, too, as he was very quick to note. She didn’t let the boy out of her sight, but her ministrations were wonderfully unobtrusive so that he gained the impression she was working round the clock to accustom him to routines that would build up his confidence. As to whether she was making real progress, it was difficult to say. Hugo was very subdued and sat about mostly, like a big, ageing collie, too old and tired to frolic. Who could tell what the boy was thinking when he felt the sun on his face or the wind in his hair?

Adam had a private word with Sybil about his future and, as he had expected, she had specific plans for him. “He’s going to take a course as a masseur at one of the big military hospitals,” she said. “It’ll keep him in trim and give him something to think about, as well as contacts with other handicapped men of his kind and age. I’m going to make sure he rides, too, on a leading rein, and I’ve engaged a retired sergeant-major as his personal batman. Truscott, he’s called, formerly of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. I chose him because he was once a well-known amateur walker. He has as many trophies as Hugo, I wouldn’t wonder. He’ll be reporting here tomorrow if that’s agreeable to you, Mr. Swann.”

“Splendid idea,” he said, his approval of her increasing with each new encounter. “The more mobile he is, the easier he’ll adjust, and after all these months in hospital he needs all the exercise he can get.”

Truscott was an instant success, a sunburned man about fifty with legs like saplings and a jerky way of carrying himself, as though he was forever on the point of breaking into a trot. He had the traditional parade-ground bark, even when he was trying to please, and his yell of “Sah!” every time Hugo summoned him so intrigued the grandchildren that they at once incorporated him into their games. Indeed, within days of Truscott’s arrival the game of “Sah!” took over from hide and seek and prisoner’s base, and soon Hugo’s batman was a firm family favourite. Adam watched them set off one morning on their first tramp over the plateau that enclosed Tryst from the east and noted with relief that sightlessness had done nothing to shorten the effortless stride that had carried Hugo to victory over so many miles of track and steeplechase course. He thought, seeing the pair move into the screen of elms that topped the spur,
He’ll do, so long as that woman sticks to him
… and went into his study to report on both Helen and Hugo in a long and explicit letter to Giles. Of all his children Giles alone shared his complete confidence.

3

On January 22nd the news was broadcast from Osborne to the remotest corners of the world, tapped out on countless telegraph keys, spoken over thickening clusters of wires that were beginning to enclose every sizeable city of the land, passed from mouth to mouth across the island that had once been marked as “Tom Tiddler’s Ground” on the Swann waggon maps, then over the Solent to the mainland, then out across the shires to the coasts of Donegal, Sutherland, and the Empire beyond the seas. The impossible had happened. Victoria had slipped away on a grey winter’s day and a curtain of black fell on an era.

It was as though nobody had ever died before. As though, to yield up the spirit, and be trundled away in a coffin, was a privilege extended to the very few, a singular dispensation by Providence as a reward for spectacular services on earth.

The face of the nation changed overnight. Every public building was hung with circular wreaths that looked like so many black lifebelts and many were shrouded in yards of whispering crêpe. Black crepe was at a premium. Top-hatted city gents tied it about their arms, cabbies tipped their whips with crêpe bows, and every woman who valued her neighbour’s regard (and quite a few who did not) went into full mourning, including the ultra-loyal among the London prostitutes who continued, however, to ply a brisk trade among the thousands of provincials who travelled up to town for the occasion.

Adam, secretly amused, was among them, reminding himself that he had no business witnessing the event for he had been born two reigns ago and could recall wearing crêpe round his straw hat for Silly Billy, the Queen’s uncle.

The ceremonial of the four tribes had always interested him, however, and he sauntered about glancing at solemn faces and hoping to catch one of them offguard. He was unsuccessful. On a ‘bus ride from London Bridge to Kensington he did not record so much as a single smile, and even the Thameside costers looked as if they were losing money on every hot potato they sold in response to their dolorous cry of “Warm yer ‘ands an’ warm yer belly for ‘apen’y!”

When he read that the royal corpse was being conveyed by state procession to Paddington for its final journey to Windsor, he took a fancy to travel up again and avail himself of an old customer’s offer to watch its departure from a hotel window overlooking the station approach. Henrietta declined to accompany him and not, as she claimed, on account of the cold, foggy weather. Her dismay was genuine, more genuine than even he realised, for more and more of late she had begun to identify with Victoria, and there seemed no point in reminding oneself of one’s mortality at this chilly season of the year. So he went alone, staying overnight at the Norfolk and booking an early cab to his vantage point where his host had a comfortable sitting-room with balcony and a supply of hot toddy to keep out the cold.

It moved him more than he would have believed, all those cloaked potentates marching behind the gun-carriage with its pall topped by the Imperial crown; the silent ranks of infantry standing with bowed heads and reversed arms between the cortege and dense phalanxes of Cockneys, Londoners without a speck of colour about them save the odd splash of undertaker’s mauve. He had never liked the woman much (though he had always entertained respect for her dead husband), but he did not begrudge her her eight cream-coloured horses. One had to admit she had stayed the course better than most monarchs and had even succeeded in pulling herself together somewhat after the first twenty-five years of widowhood.

He had plenty of time, as the cavalcade crawled past, to let his mind range freely back and forth across the decades, as it often did on occasions of this kind. Odd, irrelevant thoughts occurred to him, tiny tributaries of the national stream of history personally explored by him over many years. He remembered when the army had discarded traditional headgear in favour of the German pickelhaube, a curious concession to the widely accepted belief among military men that the Prussian army’s performance against the French in 1870 entitled them to set military fashions, as though the design of a man’s helmet determined his prowess in the field. He found it difficult to see the heavy, tired-looking man riding behind the bier as the future King, remembering, with an inward chuckle, all the fuss there had been about Bertie’s frolics with the girls and at the gaming tables, that had earned him his mother’s disapproval since he was eighteen or thereabouts and breaking out from the frigid mould she and Albert had cast for him. And on the King’s immediate right he had more serious doubts about Vicky’s unpredictable grandson, the German Emperor, wondering if he was qualified to run a village skittles team, much less a thrustful nation of eighty million. He seemed on his very best behaviour, however, reining back as they approached the station entrance in order to allow Uncle Edward to exercise his priority rights. He could see nothing of the new Queen and princesses, in their closed carriage pulled by a mere four horses, so that his mind was free to conjure with the secret thoughts of the spectators, wondering how genuine was their involvement in this splendid panoply of death. Reasonably so, he would imagine, but not for the obvious reasons. Very few of them down there could recall any royal symbol other than the little old woman on that gun-carriage, now on her way to lie beside her beloved Albert so that they would see this, he supposed, as a break in the continuity of their lives. That would disturb many of them. The English did not like their continuity broken, fearing changes in the national pattern as much as the French and Italians welcomed them. All their lives she had been there, as unchangeable as a feature of English topography, the cliffs of Dover or the curves of the Thames. Ever since childhood her double-chinned silhouette had crystallised their awareness of national prejudices and preferences, and whereas her withdrawal, in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, had made her unpopular, the two Jubilees had restored her to her place at the pinnacle of the royal pyramid. So that it followed they were watching not her exactly but their own past, a past transforming itself into a future, and that meant uncertainty for most. Especially those no longer fortified by the arrogance of youth.