Speak Its Name: A Trilogy (20 page)

He propped his cane against the wall and leant heavily on the balustrade. I was torn between wanting to leave—for the gentlemen would have joined the ladies by now, I was sure, and my father would be expecting me to monopolise Miss Pelham—and wanting to find out why this man was being such an irritant.

I asked him the question I had been wanting to ask since almost our first exchange. “Why had you set yourself to disliking me?”

“A soldier’s question,” he said, quietly, his face in shadow. I wanted to see his eyes to try and gauge his thoughts. “Sharp and hitting true. To the point. I engage. Put yourself in my shoes, Chaloner. Give me one good reason why on earth I
should
be pre-disposed to like you?”

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In which I learn nothing but what is expected of me.

I stared at him. In the light of the conservatory behind us, I could hardly see his face, but I could tell by the set of his eyebrows that his expression was unfriendly.

“Mr. Heyward,” I said carefully. “You have me at a disadvantage. I am a guest in your aunt’s house and you have treated me in a way that has me at a loss.” In another country, in another year, if he had been another man, I would have called him out. “I do not wish to cause you any further offence, so if you will excuse me, I will rejoin the ladies.” His changing demeanour had me confused; he had begun our acquaintance on a more friendly basis and he had swung so far in his manner as to be defensive and off-putting. I went as to step past him, but he turned, putting his face full in the light and checked me with his cane. Another man—taller and more whole—I might have pushed to one side, but I was still trammelled by my father’s expectations. “Kindly allow me to pass,” I said, attempting to keep my voice under control. He had pushed me almost to the limits of my civility, damn him. “I will not quarrel with you, sir; particularly as I do not know what your quarrel with me might be.”

I took hold of his cane and moved it gently, but with strength and without mercy, to one side. Our eyes met; I hope I gave him the impression that I was not a man to back down and that he could not rely on his infirmity to bully me. With a deft movement I twisted the cane in his hand and gained possession of it. As I opened the conservatory doors, I turned and threw the article back at him. I admit now, and am a little ashamed of it, that I took a perverse pleasure in seeing how he nearly fell as he attempted to catch it. I left him then, confident that, if he were to follow me into the ladies’ withdrawing room, he would not now continue his harassment.

A servant found me wandering the corridors and led me into the ladies’ company. All the party was now assembled together again and the conversation stilled somewhat as I entered. I knew I had a scowl on my face and I had to rearrange my features when my father waved from across the room. He was seated in a square with Lady Pelham and her daughter; and there was a convenient empty seat beside him. It was almost enough to make me go back to the balcony, but I had no choice but to march, back straight, hand on sword, into the dragon’s den. Once, incidentally, I was called before Wellesley himself (hence the snippet of information about his aversion to over-sprung carriages) and I had felt less timorous then than I did as I sat beside my father. I assumed what I hoped was a bland but pleasant expression, but it was an expression difficult to maintain at any level when Heyward appeared not long after I had settled myself. I was listening to Lady Pelham telling a tale of her one voyage to India. It was meant to be extremely amusing, with anecdotes of the natives she had met and the substances she was expected to eat and drink and the conditions under which she was expected to live (“my dears, positively horrid”) but I found it boring at best and, having spent a year there myself in T—’s regiment in ‘05, wildly inaccurate.

Heyward’s expression was no lighter than mine, and he did not take any pains to make it more appropriate to the occasion. He limped through the throng, again ignoring all and being ignored, until he reached our party where Lady Pelham astounded me—having not shown much attentiveness to her nephew before this—by fairly leaping from her seat with a cry of concern.

“Adam, my dear boy. You look pale. Are you well? You are burning up, I do declare, you should go and rest. Where have you been?”

The young man pushed her solicitude aside with a grimace, and refusing the space between herself and Miss Pelham he sat between me and my father, there being ample space as we were of no inclination to sit closer than we were.

“I’m well enough, Aunt. I was outside on the terrace.”

“In this weather? It’s far too damp for you to be out.” She turned to my father and spoke confidingly for all the good that would do in a crowded room, whilst young Heyward’s face went from a scowl to a look of pure anger. “Sarah, his mother, was a Burroughs before she married. She was so delicate, never well enough for so many pursuits, but spent many years in bed—at one time the doctors thought she would never be able to walk again, but she recovered, although she was never strong. She was my dearest, dearest friend, and although she was never well enough for school, we were tutored together and our families were very close.

“I can’t tell you what pleasure I felt when my brother asked for her hand. Can you believe that she hesitated? She considered that she wasn’t strong enough to be a soldier’s wife.” She looked pointedly at Miss Pelham, who blushed hotly. “Of course I encouraged her, ‘No one,’ I said to her, ‘will be more solicitous of your health than my dear Adam.’”

“Perhaps she should have ignored your advice,” Heyward said. Miss Pelham gave the smallest of gasps, but Lady Pelham just smiled indulgently.

“I for one am very glad she did not. She was proved right, of course, the travelling and... well...,” she gazed fondly at Heyward, “proved her undoing, but I do believe she was the happiest of wives.”

“For ten months.” The bitterness in Heyward’s voice was unmistakable.

The older Heyward gave a gruff and very decisive cough. I knew the signs and had that noise come from
my
relation, I would be duly chastened. “That’s enough,” he said. “Not a fit subject for company.” I was glad he interceded and considered that that would be the end of the matter but Adam Heyward proved himself less cowed by his elders than I. He pushed himself to his feet with a slight grunt of effort and walked out without another word to anyone, leaving a silence in his wake. As he left I couldn’t help but notice his lame foot; one of his boots was specially made, with a thick raised sole. I felt a pang of empathy and a glimmer of why the young man was quite so prickly. He had a club foot.

The elder Heyward excused himself and stalked out after his grandson. The silence that ensued was thick and heavy, and in the end, it took my father with his usual sledgehammer precision to break it and to turn the conversation to his plans to visit Bath for a few weeks. Lady Pelham seemed quite discomfited by young Heyward’s departure and it took her a minute or two to be able to concentrate on what my father was saying.

“Are we? Oh... Yes,” she said, her gaze flying to the door as if expecting it to open on her nephew and father.

To my great surprise, Miss Pelham turned to my father with complete composure and said, “We always go to Bath for the second two weeks in March, and then on to Wensom for the summer.” She spoke as if I knew what Wensom was, but I was not given the opportunity to ask for such clarification.

“Capital!” my father replied. “We have rooms booked in George Street.” He rose, surprising me, and I hurriedly joined him. “I trust we will see something of you whilst we are there?”

Lady Pelham smiled, the first time since her nephew had left the room, and said that she would be delighted; I was pleased to note that did seem to mean it, she appeared to be genuinely friendly with my bluff, unforgiving parent.

It was not late when we emerged onto the pavement, but the rain had started, a cold relentless drizzle. As tempting as home was, I told my father that I would go to my club. I was restless and annoyed in turns and would feel better perhaps after a glass or two of brandy and a round or two of fencing, should there be anyone around to spar with. “Let me find you a cab, sir,” I said, turning away from him. There would be vehicles at the far end of the square, I knew.

“I’m not senile, Geoffrey.” He growled. “I’ll walk. Do me good. You’ll likely be in at dawn and too drunk to converse sensibly before luncheon, so tell me now. What did you think of her? You’ll take her, what? Of course you will.” His voice echoed around the now damp pavements and I shuddered inwardly at his inability to keep his voice down to anything less than a stentorian roar.

“Do you wish me to come home now, father?”

“Don’t change the subject!” My father bellowed. “You can do as you like, you always do, damn you!”

I clenched my teeth at the injustice of
that
particular remark. “As for Miss Pelham, I find her pleasant enough. A little shy, but, Father— I’d really rather not discuss it on the street. We’ll both go home and...”

“No no,” my father said, changing mood as swiftly as a wind shifts direction. He was beaming—no doubt at my declaration that I found the girl pleasant. To my father that would be an assertion that I’d be buying a ring the next day. “Go and enjoy yourself, sow those oats.” Again, I shrunk from his words bellowed in public. “Little enough time for that now—for you’ll make your offer in Bath, yes yes, perfect for an autumn wedding, then. You’ll make your offer in Bath.”

He turned away, waving at me with a dismissive hand and marched with surprising speed up the wet street and turned the corner, leaving me damp in body and damper in spirit.

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In which my brothers prove they never change and Heyward tests me in many different ways.

I had had no idea that my father was planning to relocate to Bath this late in the Season. He had been known to go before, but had usually been more than a little scathing in his disapprobation of the place. “Full of twittering quizzes and old men who take too much pleasure in their own bad health, and even more pleasure in describing it.”

On the day that he’d made this now infamous statement in Bath itself, it had been as if no one else was speaking and the Pump Rooms stilled into a shocked silence. However, I have to say, it was probably one of the only times that I have thoroughly agreed with my father, as I was not overly fond of the place myself. I’d visited it many times during the war years and found the behaviour of some soldiers—not all, for it would be unfair to tar all my fellows with the same disgraceful brush—to be, if not beyond the Pale, firmly on its outskirts. There seemed to be something about the place, and I don’t know what blend of circumstances brought it about, that encouraged an officer, who was probably of fairly solid stock away from Bath to lose his head when in that city, whether it be for the tables or for the girls, or both.

It baffled me as to why any self respecting mother would bring her daughter to such a place. Perhaps it was the possibility of the prizes that were on offer that was worth the risk running the gauntlet of the roués and the cads. And it has to be said, that many a dissolute son was the son of this Lord or that one, so perhaps that fact alone allowed certain imperfections to be overlooked.

I was soon to find, by the flurry of correspondence that my father entered into from the next day onwards that he had had in fact, no plans at all to go to that town, and that he had to pay the over normal rate by several times to persuade a family to leave their lodgings early. There was little point me suggesting that he settle for a lesser address, as once my father had said something, he considered it done. George Street was the address he’d mentioned and therefore George Street was the only place that would do.

My brothers and their wives dined with us the night before we were to set off, and I couldn’t help but notice the amused glances both Charles and Edward were exchanging every time my father mentioned Bath or the Pelhams. I had little opportunity to catch either of them out of the earshot of my all too astute parent until we were all in the parlour together, but I took Edward aside under cover of showing him some mementoes I had brought back from Waterloo, and quizzed him thoroughly.

“I’m afraid you have no recourse for mercy, my dear Geoff,” he’d said, clapping me on the shoulder with a grin. “You are hooked and landed. I’ve met the girl once or twice. Cripplingly shy, of course, which is why she’s not been the magnet she should be—with the title an’ all.”

I stared at him. “Title?”

Charles joined us, sitting down and pretending to show an interest in what we were pretending to inspect. It was a ruse we’d used over the years, to be circumspect under our father’s eyes, far more effective than trying to be secret elsewhere in the house, for he always discovered us.

Edward leaned forward, a piece of shattered cannon in his hand, “Charles, our idiot brother says he didn’t know about the fair Miss Pelham’s rare prospects.”

“Well, he
is
an idiot, so one shouldn’t be surprised. If it’s not a horse or a gun, he’s not interested in it.”

“Ride it, or shoot it, or both, eh?”

Our father called out to us to stop being unsociable and I spoke urgently, irritated by them treating me like an infant. “There’s no time for this, and in case you both have not noticed, I am six years old no longer. What is it I don’t know?”

Edward stood up and pretended to yawn. “Miss Pelham, as you probably know, has not a penny to her name to speak of.”

“Yes. I knew that.”

“So why,” added Charles, “is father of all people, so very desperate to have you marry her?”

“To be allied to a titled family, of course, it’s what he’s always wanted.”

“Tut tut, Minimus,” Charles said, patting me patronisingly on the head. “Wrong. There are many Honourable young ladies who are blind enough to have you, incredible as that seems to the saner portion of the population. But no. The Pelham title was written by writ and not by patent.”