Theirs Was The Kingdom
Also by the Author
A HORSEMAN RIDING BY
Long Summer Day
Post of Honour
The Green Gauntlet
THE AVENUE STORY
The Dreaming Suburb
The Avenue Goes to War
THE SWANN SAGA
God Is an Englishman
Theirs Was the Kingdom
Give Us This Day
To Serve Them All My Days
Diana
Come Home Charlie, and Face Them
Seven Men of Gascony
Farewell, the Tranquil Mind
The Adventures of Ben Gunn
Copyright © 1971, 2009 by R. F. Delderfield
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Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1971.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Delderfield, R. F. (Ronald Frederick)
Theirs was the kingdom / R. F. Delderfield.
p. cm.
Sequel to: God is an Englishman.
1. Upper class families—England—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837-1901—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6007.E36T48 2009
823’.912—dc22
2009014343
Printed and bound in the United States of America
VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my old friend and colleague
Eric McKenzie, as enterprising
as any Swann. Salesman and
cheerleader extraordinary.
1
T
OWARDS NOON, WHEN SWANN’S CARTERS, STABLEMEN, AND VANBOYS GATHERED in the yard and about the sprawl of sheds and warehouses, munching their bread and cheese and spilling shards of pastry from penny pies bought at the stand lower down Tooley Street, cohorts of London sparrows attended them. But when dusk fell, when the gates were locked after the last homing waggon and the only men inside the enclosure were watchmen, the sparrows, most knowing of London’s cadgers, flew west to scavenge Covent Garden, abandoning Swann’s Bermondsey headquarters to a pair of robins. The robins then assumed private ownership of the rectangle and were always in hopes that the tall, broad-shouldered man with the friendly eyes, and the curious rolling gait, would stay overnight and be on hand to provide breakfast at first light, pushing wide the tower casement and calling them to perch on the sill of the old belfry.
Often enough he appeared, having slept on the camp bed he had there, and they heard his cheerful shout this morning, as the grey light probed the swirling river mists, so that they took off from the warehouse gutter, dropping down within pecking reach of his large, horny hand.
He called, as always, “Hello, you two! Help yourselves. Take the chill off the morning”; and grinned as they advanced warily to feed from his hand, paying no heed when he cleared his throat, threw up his head, and sniffed the damp air, accepting him as one of the regular early risers hereabouts, with time as well as pasty crumbs on his hands, and a geniality he would shed once the working day had begun and he had opened his newspapers and settled to his desk.
His presence there, at this hour, was irregular. In spring and summer he might watch the dawn from the tower casement no more than once a fortnight, but at this season of the year, coming up to Christmas, he was sometimes there for days at a stretch, a strongly made, shambling man, who seemed to enjoy his isolation high above the wilderness of slate and tile, a man who had a word for them even when that great desk of his was spread with papers and he seemed absorbed in a never-ending task.
In summer and early autumn, between late May and mid-October, the sour whiff of the river predominated, a compound of bilges, decaying flotsam, spoiled vegetables, drowned cats, and half-starved, ownerless dogs, spread across a twenty-foot margin of hard-packed, bluish mud that was the permanent residue of Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Georgian sewage. A miasma so focussed, and so indigenous, that it sometimes seemed to enfold the entire South Bank in a fond, foetid embrace, like a cloud of marsh gas stealing up river from the wastelands of both sides of the estuary. But that was the summer scent of the yard.
In mid-winter, as now, the river whiff moderated, taking a modest fourth place to the reek of the adjacent soap factory, the more pungent stink of the tannery nearer the bridge, and the sharp, acrid smell of innumerable horse droppings in the clubbed approaches to the tideway.
Adam Swann was never conscious of the reek, summer or winter, having had twenty years to get acclimatised to it. On a morning like this, for instance, when he had been up here a day and a night summarising his annual reports and assessing the turnover of his regions in order that he could apportion the Christmas bonuses, he thought of the long river reach, stretching from London Bridge to the forest of masts marking the most westerly moorings of the Surrey Commercial Dock, as his private demesne, something peculiarly his, like the queer, octagonal tower he had used as his office ever since he settled here in the autumn of ’58. Vast business expansion had never tempted him to shift his headquarters to a more salubrious spot and he could have told you why. Indeed, he occasionally did tell customers, family, and underlings why, whenever he saw them wrinkling their noses beside his open casement.
He would say, with a hard grin, “Where else could I keep finger and thumb on the pulse of the nation? Look at that string of barges, those lighters and wherries making rendezvous with the ocean-going shipping lower down the river. Why, dammit, I can stand here taking stock of my own concerns and everybody else’s at one and the same time! Could I do that anywhere else in the city at seventy pounds a quarter?”
And those among them who fancied they knew him well would shrug at his conceit and descend the spiral staircase to the teeming yard where his waggons came and went and his horde of retainers heaved and cursed and pottered, reflecting that Adam Swann was a queer chap, an amateur who had outdistanced all the professionals in the square mile, a man who took more pleasure in the cut-and-thrust of commerce than he had ever taken as a mercenary in the field. And that despite the fact that he had been present at battles which had now taken their place in the history primers at every redbrick board school in the country.
Invariably he forgot his visitors as soon as their steps had died away on the stone stairway, lunging back into the embrasure and slowly massaging the muscles of his thigh where the straps of his artificial leg had chafed during a long session at the desk. But before he addressed himself to his work again he would glance out across the river at the Conqueror’s tower, far higher, bulkier, and more majestic than his but not all that much older, for the Carmelite convent that had preceded the brewery, the livery stables, and the waggon park here was twelfth century, or so they told him, and the beam that had supported a bell that summoned the sisterhood to prayer was still there as a bulge in the plaster ceiling of the eyrie.
That was usually how he thought of it when he was up here alone at first light, with the river mists shredding and the blurred outlines of the bridge taking shape before his eyes. An eyrie, owing absolutely nothing to anyone else alive, a place where he could assess his personal destiny in terms of past, present, and future, so that his review sometimes took the form of a jaunty, self-congratulatory circuit of the octagonal room, where everything he saw and touched was part and parcel of his odyssey. The walls up here were plastered with maps representing every square yard of his territory, and sometimes it seemed to him they trumpeted an astounding achievement, not only on his part as creator, but also on the part of the handpicked men who staffed the fifteen regions known by a string of odd, quirkish names— The Border Triangle, The Lancashire Polygon, The Mountain Square, The Western Wedge, and so on; names his fancy had found for them when he slashed his territory into a dozen different slices, drew up his maps, and pinned them to the wall.
He thought of them now as children, with characteristics and idiosyncrasies far more diverse and far more interesting than the eight children he had sired on his eighty-acre estate fifteen miles to the south, and he supposed there was a logical reason for this. For the Swanns of Tryst, from nineteen-year-old Stella, now off his hands, to the family postscript whose arrival last January had astonished him, owed no more than a small segment of their individual egos to him, whereas the segments of his wall maps had been a conscious act of creation on his part and had been nurtured, over two decades, on a diet of edicts emanating from this tower and directed by his hand and brain.
The view of the river was one thing—his private “Peak in Darien,” from which he could feel the nation’s pulse. The regional maps, proclaiming the steady growth of his enterprise, were something else. But there were other random features of the tower that were permanent reminders of the stages in his twenty-year haul, and when the stocktaking mood was on him he would review them severally and collectively, making a kind of mosaic of a life he always saw as beginning the day he came here in his thirty-second year.
He discounted the wasted years prior to that. His childhood and boyhood were dim now, a period spent in preparing himself for a career that had become, over the centuries, obligatory to a male Swann, one of following the drum across the world until sword, bullet, arthritis, or half-pay cut the process short, leaving survivors to feed on their memories. The years that mattered had been his middle years, from his thirty-first birthday onward, and he was fortunate in that he could calculate to the exact minute the turn of the tide on the littered field of Jhansi at the very end of the Sepoy Mutiny, when he had fallen beside the Ranee’s necklace, reached for it and stuffed it into his sabretache before losing consciousness. From that moment he regretted nothing. From then on, buttressed by the yield of the rubies, he had groped his way forward with a definite sense of purpose, making his mistakes certainly but profiting by the least of them and, just occasionally, when challenged by a fortuitous set of circumstances, propelling himself and his enterprise forward in a series of prodigious leaps. The evidence was all around him. It warmed his heart to contemplate it piece by piece.
In a wall niche directly opposite the window was the silver frigate with its commemorative plaque, a craftsman’s scale model of one of his two-horse, medium-weight vans, presented to him on his return to work after eleven months’ absence learning to walk on a tin leg. He never looked at it without recalling the moment, thirteen years ago, when he had limped in here, making heavy weather of that spiral staircase, and read the little pyramid of names inscribed below the Swann insignia, a swan with a wheel where the port wing should have been. It was a trophy that would never leave here while he lived. It did not belong anywhere else, only here, where the argosies of the men whose names it bore came and went. It represented not merely loyalty on the part of sixteen men and one woman, but also the thrust he had transmitted to them as they wrestled, year by year, to build something out of nothing. The Ranee’s necklace, his starting capital, had been valued at nine thousand pounds. To Adam Swann the price of the silver frigate was incalculable.
Above it was another, very different trophy, a map less than half the size of the other seven and the only one hanging there that had been drawn by another hand. A railway map, antedating his enterprise by a few months and given him, half in jest, by a man called Walker, erstwhile depot manager of the Great Western at Plymouth, who had sparked off the entire adventure by a single, casual remark. Over the years Swann could still hear Walker’s bantering voice—“Don’t invest a penny in railways, your own or anyone else’s. If I was your age, and I wish to God I was and starting all over again, I’d do something better. Study that map and fill in the blank spaces.”
Well, he had done it within months and the process had led him, more or less directly, to the most ungainly trophy in the room, an object—it defied a more definite name—that made every stranger who crossed the threshold cock an eyebrow, and wonder what a transport magnate could want with a huge costumier’s display stand, that spun on a pivot and seemed, in motion, to take on limited animation, as though it was a cross between an anarchist’s infernal machine and a pot-bellied robot. They were not so far wrong. In a way it was a robot; at least, it had a robot’s name and was known to everyone familiar with Swann’s methods as “Frankenstein the Fact Finder.” He spun it now, smiling a little at his own cleverness and eccentricity, and recalling the night he had sat up here inventing it as a short cut to milking facts and figures from his head clerk’s canvass of their first four regions. He did not use it overmuch now. Most of its data was filed inside his head, but he was always eager to demonstrate it to anyone politely interested; and whenever his captive audience included a hard-headed businessman he knew, somehow, the thoughts he took away with him. Swann, of Swann-on-Wheels. A very warm man, it was rumoured, with a streak of originality that somehow had established him as the fastest and most reliable transporter of goods in the country. But still, somehow, an amateur among professionals.
He did not quarrel with that, having long since decided that the country was thronged with amateurs, that the Empire had been acquired and administered by amateurs, that, but for amateurs, the industrial revolution would have been stillborn a century ago and some other tribe would have cornered the world’s trade.
Up here, whenever he was camping overnight, he lived in a rough, bivouac fashion. Creature comforts made no appeal to him and he had never cared a straw what he ate or drank, or where he coiled himself under a horse blanket borrowed from the night-duty stableman. He lunged past Frankenstein, giving it a final spin, and paused at the end of his great oak desk, piled with the results of his twenty-four-hour foray. A foolscap sheet lay there, covered with his neat, angular writing, a list of fifteen regions with the area manager’s name in brackets alongside, and underneath the calculated bonuses based on their individual turnover. He gave the sheet a long minute’s study, comparing it, in his mind’s eye, with the previous year’s list and noting that Fraser, away up in the Borderlands and beyond, had at last overhauled his nearest rivals, Godsall, of the Kentish Triangle, and Rookwood, of Southern Square. Well, he was glad of it. The circular that his head clerk Tybalt would send out as a result of his night’s labours would keep those comparative youngsters on their toes and this would be Fraser’s last full year before retirement. Fraser was a trier. Runner-up for six years in succession and now top of the list, with the whole of Scotland under his thumb. Experience counted for something after all.