The Flood-Tide (45 page)

‘You always know best, my darling, and if you say the bells are best, the bells it shall be. I shall just have to get used to it. But where are all these busy servants to gather while they wait for their summonses? In the kitchen?'

‘There'll have to be a reorganization of the offices,' Allen said, his face lighting with enthusiasm, for if there was one thing he relished more than another it was anything to do with architecture and the designing of houses. 'I've had some ideas for that. The pantry, you know, is hardly used, and if we knocked that into the kitchen and divided the kitchen off at the end, we could make a very good servants' hall. Then the buttery could become the butler's room, and all the store houses along that wing could be rearranged - wait, I've got some drawings in the steward's room that will explain it all. Would you like to see them? My arrangement would mean that all the new pantries could be reached without going out of doors, and if we put in a new chimney between the bakehouse and brewhouse, then we'd have room for a laundry too. And—'

‘Yes,' said Jemima gently, 'by all means let us go and see your plans.' It would take a deal of getting used to, she thought, to ring a bell and wait for someone to come, like an invalid, not even knowing whether the summons had been heard, instead of shouting and hearing an answer at once; but other people had got used to it, and if Allen thought that their dignity would be better served by the new method, she would go along with it - with the private reservation that if no one was looking, she would probably just go and do whatever it was herself.

With poring over the plans together, and all the other things they had to do in the morning, Allen did not get a chance to read the newspaper, and it was therefore Edward who brought up the piece of news from it that would probably most have interested him. They were seated at dinner when Edward said, 'By the way, Father, did you see the paragraph about the West India squadron? Another seven ships came in from the West Indies, all to be paid off - and
Daring
was amongst them.'

‘
Daring?
Does that mean William will come home?' Jemima asked, looking from her son to her husband.

‘Unless he gets another commission,' Allen said. 'But the fleet is shrinking all the time - those ships being paid off are mostly being laid up, for now the war is over there's no need of 'em. So many of the officers will find themselves beached.'

‘The senior officers, and those with influence at Court, will probably get commissions,' Edward said. 'I don't know whether anyone will speak for William. Sir Peter Parker might, perhaps - but he comes from a large family, and he will have nephews and second cousins, no doubt, all eager for places. I fear William may find himself on half pay for a long time.'

‘You speak as though that were a tragedy,' Jemima said. ‘Surely, if it means he can come home - after all, the war
is
over, and if it hadn't been for the war, he would never have gone to sea.'

‘Mother dear, I don't think William will agree with you,' Edward smiled. 'The sea is his chosen career.'

‘Was,' Jemima corrected stubbornly. 'And if he can't get on in it, he'll have to come home and do something else.'

‘You are very illogical, Mother,' James said with a sigh. ‘Here you are rating me every day because I haven't gone out and found myself a career, and pining for William to stop having one. And here's Ned, eating his head off at home, and you've no word to say against him. Why didn't you get yourself ordained when you took the notion, Ned? You'd have made a jolly churchman, 'pon my oath.'

‘I pretty soon got rid of the notion again,' Edward said. ‘As soon as I realized how much there is to do here at home.’

James opened his eyes wide in affected innocence. 'Is there a great deal to do at home? Why then, I had better tell Mother that I will stay at home after all, instead of studying for the bar, as I planned.’

Jemima could only laugh at the idea of James studying for anything. 'You'll see the bar from the other side one day,' she warned him genially. 'You'll be hanged sooner or later, I've always said so.’

James grinned, and ran a finger round inside his cravat. ‘I've never liked anything tight about my throat, Mama. Dash it, you make me nervous, talking about it. I think I'll go up and see old Father Ramsay, and get myself absolution while I can.' And he stood up, bowed, and strolled gracefully away.

Jemima watched him go with affectionate exasperation, and Edward said, 'The oddest of all the odd things about my brother is the hours and hours he spends with Father Ramsay. What can they have to talk about, do you think?'

‘Father Ramsay is very fond of him,' Allen said. 'He always was, though I confess it puzzles me.'

‘It puzzles me, too, when I think of how savagely the reverend father used to beat William and me,' Edward said. 'Perhaps he really does confess his sins and ask for absolution. That would account for the length of time it takes - James's sins would fill a couple of hours in the recital.'

‘I don't believe it for a moment,' Jemima said. 'I think he simply practises on Father Ramsay. If he can charm him, he can charm anyone.’

*

A few days later a letter came from William to say he was coming home. It gave no detail, except that he had been paid off at Portsmouth and would make his way home by stage, but that he would stop in London for a day or two on his way, to call at the Admiralty, so they had no idea when to expect him.

Allen lost no time in putting his plans for the kitchen and offices in hand, and it was only when work began that Jemima appreciated the extent of the disruption it was going to cause. Installing the bells was the simplest part of the matter, though it involved taking down panelling, cutting holes through walls and floors, chipping out channels in plaster and laying what seemed like miles of wires in unlikely places. The rebuilding and redesigning of the kitchen wing was a far bigger task, and would involve months of tearing down and building up, of brick dust and plaster dust and saw dust, of rubble underfoot, workmen in the way, meals delayed or missing altogether, cold food and sulks from the kitchen.

The servants, who loved a disaster and an excuse for complaint, approached the whole matter with lugubrious relish, and took such a perverse delight in telling Jemima that any order she might give was impossible to carry out because of the building that she finally gave up on the whole business, and absented herself from the house as much as possible, spending her time with the horses. The grooms at Twelvetrees would find her something to eat during the day, and she returned home to whatever scran had been assembled for the family with the serenity of one who has nothing to hope or fear from developments. The closest Allen got to acknowledging that he wished he had left the business to the next generation to effect was to say to her one night as they climbed between their gritty sheets, 'If I had only been able to arrange it, it would have been a good thing for us to go away for a holiday while the building was going on.’

Fortunately the weather had stayed fine, and so Jemima was quite happy to be out of doors all day. One day she was lungeing a young colt in the home paddock when she saw a stranger watching her from the rails. She had been so absorbed in her task that she had not seen him approach, and now she squinted against the sun trying to see who it was. He was standing full in the sun's eye, and all she could see was that he was tall, and had white hair, though his body was not an old man's. She checked the colt, brought him in to her, petted him, and then in courtesy led the horse over to the stranger to see what he wanted.

He stood quite still, waiting for her, and it was only when she moved into the shadow of a tree that she was able to see him properly.

For a long time she stood looking at him over the fence, while the colt nodded his head and shifted his feet, so that the sound of his bit chinking and his hooves rustling the grass became the accompaniment to that moment which she always remembered. A tall young man, it was, with a face very brown from sun and salt wind; a firm face, used to command; pale bright eyes, with the long steady gaze of one used to watching a more distant horizon than any he now saw; strong shoulders and hands; and fair hair, burnt white by the sun, drawn back into a long pigtail that hung forward over one shoulder, and breaking into soft wisps about the brows.

She knew, of course, who he was, but that was all: she didn't recognize him in any other way. There was nothing in this young man of the frail little boy she had parted with so reluctantly, with such fear for his life. He was big and strong - he looked stronger and older than Edward by far, though he was a year younger. The colt tugged at her restraining hand, and she let him put his head down to graze, and reached out very tentatively to touch the long silver-blond plait, as if she thought it might not be real.

‘I heard that sailors tarred them,' she said. It was heavier than it looked, and felt rougher. She looked up shyly into his eyes. 'William,' she said.

‘I left my dunnage at the inn, and walked,' he said, and it struck her with a terrible pang that she did not know his voice. Had she expected him to speak in a child's treble? No, not quite - yet she would not have known him for her son if she had heard and not seen him. It was the resonant voice one might have expected from a more barrel-like chest than his, though of course he had got the trick of pitching it to carry, as an actor does. Where the knowledge of his life should be in her mind, there was a blank. He had walked decks, looked out upon strange places, done things and seen sights, and she knew nothing of them at all. He was a stranger in more than looks: his life had gone so far apart from hers that he was truly a different person, someone she had never met before. She wanted to cry, and she wanted to touch him, and she could do neither, for they were both inappropriate.

‘Everything's changed,' he said suddenly, his voice rising a little as if in protest. 'I would not have known where I was - fields - the strips gone - fences and roads where they didn't use to be. And a bridge over the beck where Charlotte and I used to catch guppies.’

I understand, she wanted to say. You have come home a stranger to yourself. I am as little your mother as you are my son, and we are both bereft. She touched the pigtail again, and then let her hand rest - very lightly, in case it offended - on his shoulder.

‘It is the enclosure,' she said. 'It didn't occur to me how different it would look to—' she almost said 'a stranger' -'someone coming back,' she finished.

‘Everything's different. The trees are bigger, but the house looks smaller. And you—'

‘I know,' she said quickly. 'I didn't recognize you, either.' She searched for something to say to reach him, or comfort him, and could find nothing. In the end she said, ‘The swans are still there, on the moat.'

‘Oh Mother,' he said, and began to laugh. He wasn't laughing at her - it was just his way of not crying, and in a minute she laughed too, for the same reason.

*

The household greeted William boisterously, or heartily, or tearfully, according to individual character, and there were endless exclamations of how he had changed and grown and become a man, but no one else, she thought, felt the strangeness as she had. Even for her, of course, it soon wore off, and the tall blond sailor took the place in her heart and thoughts labelled for 'her son William'; yet even so, through the evening, she found from time to time that she and William would steal glances at each other like shy young lovers, hopeful, but unsure.

Abram, who had been sulking quite frightfully since the beginning of the building works, refusing either to cook himself or to let anyone else do it for him, pronouncing, like one affirming an Article of Faith, that no food fit to be eaten could be prepared under such conditions - burst into almost simultaneous tears and smiles and rushed off to prepare a supper worthy of such an occasion. Allen gave the cellar keys to Oxhey with directions as to which bottles to open, and while they waited for the feast to appear, the family gathered in the drawing room to hear all William's news.

The first thing he wanted to tell them was that he had been made lieutenant. By the favour of the new captain of the
Daring,
he had sat for his examination in Kingston as soon as he attained the age of twenty, and, as Thomas had predicted long ago, passed it with the highest marks of the batch of candidates. A lucky combination of events - the fourth lieutenant of the
Daring
dying of the fever at a time when the Admiral was on hand to make the appointment - had led to his being given a commission just before his ship was recalled to England to be paid off.

‘For you know, as soon as we knew the peace was signed we knew that the navy would be reduced. If I hadn't been made then, there would have been no chance at all of it. At least now, if I ever do get another ship, I shall go in as lieutenant.'

‘You think it unlikely, do you?' Allen asked. William shook his head.

‘They were saying in Portsmouth that four in five ships are to be laid up. I went to the Admiralty as soon as I could get to London, but so did everyone else, of course. Now they can pick and choose, it will be the fellows with rich patrons who get the commissions. But I'll keep trying -you never know, we might go to war with someone else by and by. And at least I'll get a lieutenant's half pay.'

‘You want to go back to sea, then?' Allen asked the question, for Jemima's sake rather than because he doubted it.