Theirs Was The Kingdom (17 page)

She noticed that, despite his impatience to get moving, typical of his approach to every crisis in the past, he seemed unwilling to leave her. The clock pointed to ten minutes to five. He had about twenty minutes to wait for the London train.

Suddenly he said, “You and Tom, you’re well suited and very happy, I believe. I’m grateful for that, Edith. I should have told you long since.”

“There’s something I should have told you long since, Adam, but never did. I’ll tell you now, however. It’ll take your mind off your own troubles, and maybe give you something else to think about on the way home. This business with Stella, and it getting talked about among your staff and customers. It isn’t all that important, providing you and Henrietta hang on to a sense of proportion. Tom and I faced worse and came through with our chins up. You never heard how we met, I suppose?”

He looked at her sharply. “He was a waggoner in your yard, wasn’t he? At the time I lost my leg in that train smash.”

“He was a professional thief. He signed on with us for the sole purpose of stealing a consignment of precious stones we were sending to Harwich by train parcel.”

He stared hard at her and she realised then she had at least succeeded in diverting his mind from his daughter for a time, probably the time it would take him to reach his wife and get the full story from her.

“You married him? Knowing that?”

“Because of it. Or so I like to think. But not before pouncing on him in the guard’s van when he was making off with what he thought was the package. I won’t bother you with the details now for there isn’t time. The fact is I was able to stop him but in doing it I learned just how and why he became a thief, and why he carried a revolver strapped to his wrist. He had served two years in broad arrows and had made up his mind not to be taken alive again. Well, somehow I managed to change that, to help him along once he came to me and asked for help. I didn’t know then I was doing myself a more useful service than I was doing him.”

He was silent for a while. Finally he said, “I would have trusted him above most of the managers. I think I still would.”

“Yes, I know. And he knows it too. That’s why I don’t mind telling you now. Left to himself he would have told you years ago. He was always afraid of you finding out by chance.”

It moved him very much that she was prepared to trust him with such a secret and for no other reason he could discern than that of switching his thoughts from a gloomy personal dilemma. He said, after a brief pause, “The problem you faced then, and the one that confronts me now—they haven’t much in common, have they?”

“I think they have.”

“Then tell me.”

“ We solved ours by a mixture of patience and faith in each other. I’ve no doubt you and Henrietta can do the same.”

“It sounds a pretty sordid story.”

“About as sordid as I’ve ever heard. She’ll need all the help you and Henrietta can give her. If I were you I wouldn’t let yourself be influenced by sniggering tittle-tattle. That isn’t in the least important. It’s the girl who matters right now.”

She thought it wise not to press the point and extended her hand again. “I’ll go to her now and I’ll keep in close touch by letter. She’s among friends, Adam.”

“Yes,” he said, and then, with a touch of the old devil-may-care approach he had brought to so many crises in the past, “Take Tom into your confidence if it helps. I don’t mind him knowing. In view of what you’ve just told me, he’s probably very familiar with people like the Moncton-Prices and their propensity to ride roughshod over people like us, who have had to fight every inch of the way.”

He nodded then and turned away; she watched his tall frame thrusting itself along the platform, with that peculiar bobbing gait he had acquired along with his artificial leg, she was conscious of a great surge of tenderness for him, far more broadly based than the instinctive sympathy she felt for his wretched daughter. Stella’s problem was personal and could be resolved, one way or the other, inside that arena of time that was the prerogative of the very young, but his involved not so much his family as the whole edifice of his life, erected after years of toil, thought, and risk. Perhaps it was foolish to assume that an enterprise as sound as his could be threatened by what most people would see as a purely domestic crisis, albeit a very unsavoury one, but she knew Adam Swann well enough to understand that for him commercial probity and domestic background were inseparable and she did not think the worse of him for viewing it in this light. His entire being was absorbed in what he had created over the years with his own hand and brain, and his first line of defence in a situation such as this was necessarily the health of the network rather than his daughter’s personal happiness. She turned away and passed out into the street, hailing a cab to take her back to the yard where her trap was waiting. She felt older and sadder than when she had stood watching his train slide into the platform.

4

It was nearly midnight when he turned his gig into the avenue that led up to the house under the outcrop, just visible as a cluster of winking lights on the first crest.

He had always seen the big, sprawling house as an unequivocal pledge of his powers to bluff and cozen, to scheme and hold on as though, in the first instance, it had been a citadel in enemy hands and he was the man charged with storming it and making it his, a vast, rambling, weather-beaten pile, set there three centuries ago by a man just such as he, who put an equally high price on himself. But tonight, in a curious way, the house seemed to mock him, as though those lights winking through interlacing branches were signalling a fresh challenge that had the power to frighten him a little, reminding him that challenges of this sort were for the young and hale, not for someone well advanced upon his fifties, with a truncated leg tormented by a March wind that probed among the raw nerves of the stump, much as it tormented the boughs overhead.

He said aloud, giving vent to his exasperation, “God damn that stupid girl for landing me in a mess like this!” Then he remembered that he had always claimed to be the arbiter of his own destiny and that he was far more to blame than Stella for failing to reconnoitre the situation before permitting her to rush into an alliance with people he hardly knew and was not much disposed to know.

Henrietta, as always, came down to the stableyard, having glimpsed the lights of his gig from the drawing-room windows. She called into the gloom, “Is that you, Adam…?” He called back, “Yes, it’s me!” mumbling, “Who the devil would it likely be?” as Stillman emerged yawning to take charge of the gig, saying that the groom had waited up until eleven but had now gone to bed, assuming that he would stay overnight in London.

There was restraint in their greeting but this, he told himself, was partly due to a feeling of extreme exhaustion that had overtaken him during the long, cold drive from Croydon. What he needed more than anything, more than rest even, was a stiff brandy and water, and she mixed him one while he was disposing of cape, hat, and gloves. When, gratefully, he was rolling the spirit on his tongue, she said without looking at him, “You got my wire at Peterborough? Tybalt wrote saying you were due there today. Did you… stop off and see Stella?”

No, he told her, he hadn’t. Edith Wickstead had urged him to press on home and hear the story from her lips. “She has some woman’s prejudice that it wasn’t her place to tell it,” he added. She replied, “Yes, that would be Edith’s way. You think I did right to send the girl to her?”

Her uncertainty touched him a little so that he set down his glass, crossed to the hearthrug, and put his arm across her shoulders. “Of course. I suppose you anticipated a descent by the Moncton-Prices. Have they been over here demanding her return?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ve been to them.” And then, more assertively, “It’s all more or less settled, providing you approve, of course.”

He looked at her in astonishment. “
Settled?
How the devil do you mean, settled? She’s still married to him, isn’t she? And there’s the matter of the thousand a year I made over to them. Edith told me practically nothing. I’ll have to know precisely what led up to it and how that old roue Sir Gilbert views it.”

She refilled his glass then and said, in an uncompromising tone, “Sit down, Adam. And just you let me have my say before you make one of your snap judgements. They serve well enough in your business, I daresay, but they won’t help one little bit here! That’s why I asked Mr. Stock down.”

“Stock, the lawyer? But good God, woman…”

“He’s here now but he had a dreadful cold, poor man, so I sent him to bed with a hot toddy when I guessed you were likely to be home tonight. You can talk to him in the morning, when you have both had a good night’s rest. Now then, will you listen? Without interrupting?”

He nodded, smiling in spite of himself. It always amused him to catch her in one of her bustling moods, when she tried so hard to treat him as one of the children.

“Say your piece. I won’t interrupt, and I won’t make a snap judgement.”

“Very well. In the first place Stella can’t possibly go back there. Nothing would make me agree to that, you understand? In the second place, and Stock can confirm this, it isn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, for we have very good grounds for a divorce.”

The word scared him, as she knew it would. He frowned. “Great God! On what grounds?”

“Stock had a lawyer’s word for it. It was non-something or other!”

“Non-consummation?”

“That was it. She never has been a wife to that… that monster. What she must have gone through these last few months is more than I care to think about. I still can’t begin to understand why she didn’t come to me weeks ago, or at least say something that made sense when they were here at Father’s funeral last January. It seems he’s only half a man, and his father made no bones about it. But that’s not the worst of it.”

It didn’t surprise him all that much, remembering Lester’s womanly mouth and that fastidious, catlike walk of his, but he growled, “What the devil
could
be worse than having that kind of thing dragged through the courts and printed in the newspapers?”

“I’m not concerned with publicity and scandal. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’m thinking of something you couldn’t lay before any court.” She took a deep breath and looked directly at him. “That dreadful old man made a… well… a certain proposal. It was that that sent the girl flying into the dark like a mad thing. What might have happened to her, if she hadn’t been found and taken home by that Fawcett boy, just doesn’t bear thinking about. Denzil behaved splendidly but I’ll come to that.”

He was puzzled now. “The old man made a proposal? What kind of proposal?”

“He asked her to stay on and live out the lie for the rest of her life.”

“Well, that’s not surprising. He wouldn’t want a scandal any more than we do. Or not a scandal of that kind, reflecting on him and his.”

It amazed her then that a man who had roamed half across the world, and fought in wars and rubbed shoulders with men of every kind, should need such an explicit statement. For a moment she thought of fobbing him off with a half-truth, but then she realised it could never be sustained, or not for long, between two people as close as they had been since they married more than twenty years before.

She said, “You’ll have to know. Otherwise you’ll never understand. That scoundrel suggested he should… well… take the place of his wretched son. It seems he’s anxious to get an heir…”

She broke off, watching him closely, her eyes never leaving his, so that she was able to gauge the impact of her words, watch his senses recoil, and then, like a prizefighter absorbing the shock of a tremendous buffet, fight back to secure a firm grip on himself. He was a man, as she well knew, capable of exerting tremendous self-control and his training, as a soldier and a commercial freebooter, helped him now. Slowly he unclenched one fist and reached out for his brandy, lifting the glass and draining it at a gulp.

He said, between clenched teeth, “So that was it. Edith hinted… she used the word ‘unsavoury’ …But it isn’t that, is it? It’s an outrage!”

It was time then to run in under his guard. “You promised to listen, you promised you wouldn’t interrupt…”

She could hear the whistle of his breath. A vein in his temple pulsed and he seemed aware of it, reaching up and slowly massaging that side of his face where a crooked seam of flesh marked the passage of a splinter lodged there at the time of the Staplehurst crash. She had grown so accustomed to the scar that she rarely noticed it, but now, in the soft glow of the lamp, it looked livid and half-healed. He said, at length, “Go on. Finish it.”

“Stella did the best she could under the circumstances. It was late at night and she was in her nightclothes. She got rid of him on some pretext, pulled on some clothes, and ran out through the French windows.”

“Ran where, for God’s sake?”

“She was on her way here but luckily she met young Fawcett at Carter’s Copse, out seeing to his lambs. He took her to the farm and Mrs. Fawcett fed her and put her to bed. Then he came straight here to fetch me.”

“So as well as the Fawcetts the whole damned household knows what happened!”

“No, we were very lucky. I came downstairs, after the paddock oak crashed down in the gale, and I was the only one about when Denzil arrived. I went with him as soon as it was light.”