Theirs Was The Kingdom (3 page)

For once, however, he was wrong about her, as wrong as he could be. Henrietta Swann, standing demurely beside husband and children, trilling out the verses of the familiar, full-blooded hymn, was not, as it happened, thinking of the old Colonel, the occasion, or the obligatory proprieties it demanded of her. Instead she was trying hard to arrive at a conclusion concerning the marriage of her daughter Stella, now standing three children away from her, and sharing a hymn-book with her well-bred, impassive husband, Lester Percy Maitland Moncton-Price, heir to Sir Gilbert Moncton-Price, Bart., of Courtlands, in the county of Sussex, whom she had married quietly and quickly late the previous summer. Quietly, because at that time the old Colonel was expected to die at any moment; and quickly because Lester had been a serving officer when they became engaged and was anticipating a posting to the Cape to join his unit.

The girl had been in a rare tizzy to see herself installed as chatelaine of the great, draughty place the Moncton-Prices maintained just across the county border, but there had been no occasion for the hurry after all. The moment Stella’s settlement had been agreed Lester Moncton-Price threw up his commission in the Hussars and joined his father in what he advanced as a filial endeavour to recoup the summer’s flat-racing losses on the autumn steeplechases. Henrietta had not been informed whether their string of successes had resulted in keeping the creditors at long range, but she was in no doubt at all as to what had induced the Moncton-Prices to marry into trade. That much, she supposed, must be general knowledge in the area, but nobody, seemingly, found it degrading, not even Adam, who argued that men like Sir Gilbert, whilst they were almost always short of ready money, could never be hounded beyond a certain point, so long as they owned land and had family ties with influential people at Court and Westminster. On the whole, he told Henrietta privately, he approved of the match. Marriages of this kind, he said, were recognised as a means of national compromise nowadays and Stella, a tradesman’s daughter, would be unlikely to do better down here in the country if that was the life she hankered after. It was out of the question to give her a season, like that accorded the daughters of deeply entrenched county families. In twenty years or so, seasons would be obligatory on the part of successful tradesmen’s daughters, but changes of this kind took time. As it was they were still the prerogative of people who inherited money.

So they were married in this same church in September and Stella, pink with triumph, drove away behind a pair of matched bays to Courtlands, and Henrietta, thereafter, held her peace. She did not even inform Adam that he had entirely misunderstood her concerning her doubts. They had nothing whatever to do with the mountainous losses of the Moncton-Prices at Newmarket and Epsom, and even less with young ladies’ seasons and the rituals of husband-hunting in London drawing rooms. They were instinctive and deeply personal, arising out of her own discoveries concerning the nature of men and marriage, that told her good manners in public, a generous settlement, and the prospect of a title were threadbare substitutes for a shared sense of humour and the prospect of a romp down the years with a lusty, tolerant husband. She would have been more likely to make a determined stand had she not long since made up her mind that Stella—whilst undeniably pretty, graceful, and an expert in croquet, dancing, and small talk—was very short on humour and therefore unfamiliar with the hidden meaning of the word “romp” as applied to marriage. Had she not been she would have shied away from a mincing, rather effeminate beau like Lester, and possibly gone as far as climbing out of the bedroom one night and running off to Gretna Green with someone like that lumping great farmer’s son, Denzil Fawcett (or Follett, was it?) who had been mooning after her—poor, deluded oaf—since she had put her hair up when she was thirteen. For that, or something like it, was what Henrietta would have done in her shoes, but mother and daughter had very little in common, and perhaps Stella did not deserve anyone better than Lester Percy Maitland Moncton-Price and the clutch of long-nosed children he was likely to give her. She was certainly not equipped to appreciate the fearful ecstasies of near abduction, shared adventure, and breathless submission to a man like Adam Swann, who had shed a family tradition like a housewife discards an empty peapod and gone about making his own way in the world with a gusto that would shake the dust from any number of Moncton-Prices. It was very difficult, she supposed, to view this kind of thing through another woman’s eyes. For herself, looking back, she would have felt cheated had she been denied the pleasure of finding a man for herself and learning for herself how to anchor him.

She stole a cautious sidelong glance at daughter and son-in-law, seeking confirmation of her suspicions that some of Stella’s colours were beginning to fade and found it, or thought she found it, in appraisal of Stella’s waistline. It was still as slender as the day she married, eighteen inches or a little less, and that after five months as a bride! She noticed something else, too, and it seemed to her even more significant. Man and wife were sharing a hymnbook but their fingers were not touching. They were singing listlessly, without physical awareness of one another, and Lester’s face wore its customary expression, the carefully measured arrogance of the privileged and well-britched. The family look, Henrietta told herself, was already beginning to transfer itself to Stella, for she too looked impassive. Impassive and a little wan.

The appraisal had the power to depress Henrietta so that she at once sought to restore her spirits by transferring her glance to the rest of her flock, deliberately repressing thoughts of the Colonel, whose presence at Tryst all these years had been a benediction. There was surely no profit in mourning such a gentle, whimsical creature, for as long as she lived she would never forget him, and whenever she remembered him it would be with gratitude. But he had been old and feeble whereas her brood, ranged on either side of her, were young and full of promise. Without the necessity to follow the close print of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” she let her discreet glances range left and right whilst she continued to sing lustily, first in the direction of that ebullient rascal George, who was looking as merry as a cricket, notwithstanding the solemnity of the occasion, then towards Giles, who she felt sure would miss the old man more than any of them, then to the three post-crisis arrivals. Joanna, almost twelve; Hugo, ten; and Helen rising eight, and finally to the tall, dark, self-contained man who had sired them so absentmindedly, with more than half his mind on his waggon routes over the Pennines, and the rate of haulage from Grimsby quays to the fish-markets of cities southwest of the Humber.

She contemplated them all severally and collectively, her heart swelling with pride, as it always did when she saw them assembled together. George who, as Adam always declared, had been born laughing; Giles, the solemn, gentle one, who sometimes seemed so much older and wiser than any of them; Joanna and Helen, as pert and pretty as a pair of wedding posies; and Hugo, who shared her passion for soldiers, and was obviously enjoying every moment of this colourful occasion. As splendid and individualistic a bunch as you could find singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in any pew in the land. The eldest married and off her hands; the next, Alex, at this very moment calling the Zulus to account for daring to reject the benefits of absorption into the Empire, and the long tail of the procession right under her hand. Seven in all—no—whatever was she thinking of?—
eight
, counting the one-year-old surprise packet at home with Phoebe Fraser, the nursery governess. And all in twenty-one years.

Did she want to add to the tally? Was it even likely, with herself entered upon her thirty-ninth year, and Adam coming up to his fifty-third birthday? She didn’t know and she didn’t care. For herself she was as strong as a horse, and for a matriarch approaching her forties still in possession of a surprisingly good figure—the legacy, she assumed, of her father’s splendid health and any number of Irish peasants on her mother’s side.

At times like these she sometimes caught herself feeling as smug as the ageing Victoria, seen in garlanded magazine illustrations, palisaded by a tribe of royal descendants; but it was not, she reminded herself just in time, a day for smugness. They were here to say a final goodbye to the Colonel, and she would have to master the impulse to blubber at the graveside when those six dragoons lowered him into Kentish soil. She knew, of course, that women were expected to blubber at funerals, but it was a concession she was not prepared to make, not even for decency’s sake. All her life, even before Adam found her, whisked her on to the rump of his mare, and carried her off like a freebooter’s prize, she had taken pleasure in standing on her own two feet and looking the world in the face with a judicious mixture of pride and impudence. The approach had served her well and was, she knew, wholly approved by Adam, himself as proud as Lucifer and as daring, in his quiet, deliberate way, as Mr. Stanley in search of Dr. Livingstone. Besides, nobody would be watching
her
at the graveside. Their eyes would be for the panoply out there among the leaning tombstones of so many homespun Kentishmen… She hoped the snow would hold off a little longer. Not merely for the sake of so many bareheaded mourners, but also for the sake of Giles’s cough and her own devastating bonnet, arched high over the forehead and crowned with three cunningly wrought cloverleaf bows. Even two yards of crepe could add elegance to a bonnet if it was artfully trimmed, and why not? The old man had always had an eye for a well-turned-out woman.

The hymn came to an end and she gave Adam a nudge, lest he should disgrace them all by nodding off again during the final prayer. Then, as the dragoons clumped forward to lift the coffin, she straightened her long, black gloves, tucked her arm through Adam’s, and took her appointed place immediately behind the pallbearers.

3

His drowsiness left him as they moved into the open. There had been a light fall of snow during the service and the path beside the yews lay white as a freshly laundered sheet until it was soiled and scuffed under the bearers’ jackboots. The coffin, he thought, looked ludicrously light, not much heavier, he would judge, than that fancy casket the Ranee’s steward had carried on his saddle bow during the ambush at Jhansi. He thought about the casket as his senses absorbed the timelessness and essential Englishness of the scene: a starveling crow lumbering out of a bare-branched elm, the nostril-stinging crispness of the winter’s day, the long, winding procession with the big blob of scarlet at its head, the fruity tones of the chaplain, intoning English cadences. It wasn’t really a solemn occasion. No more than the passage of a tired old man moving his last few yards over powdered snow in a box like the one that had held the nucleus of Swann fortunes, a thirty-stone ruby necklace that had provided the capital for the first fleet of Swann waggons.

He wondered why he should think of that at this moment, and then he knew, for as they approached the junction in the paths the slim figure of Deborah Avery slipped from behind a yew to take her proscribed place in the string of immediate mourners. Behind the youngest, bonafide Swann as befitted an adopted daughter, but ahead of the staff and the old man’s intimates, for in everyone’s mind Deborah ranked as family. He smiled at her and she smiled back, probably the only person here who shared his doubts concerning immortality, and that despite her youthful sojourn among all those French nuns, while her father, his former partner Josh, was racketting about in the company of whores and blackguards of one sort or another. They had formed an understanding, he and Deborah, soon after she had returned from that fancy school of hers in Cheltenham, pledging herself to a life of thankless social work in the stewpots of the wealthiest civilisation in the world. He tolerated her obsession with the unwashed and underprivileged, whereas she, for her part, accepted his dedication to commerce to the exclusion of all other claims on his conscience. He liked Deborah. She had brains and charm and was a credit to him and to that rascally father of hers who hadn’t been seen or heard of in years.

Beyond the row of elms, no more than a few short miles across the Kentish ploughland and coppice, stood Charles Darwin’s many-windowed house at Down. Deborah would probably see Darwin as a pioneer in the nonstop war on cant, the man who had made nonsense of Genesis and plunged all England into a welter of doubt, but for himself he did not give a damn about the authenticity of the Scriptures, or whether he was cast in the image of God or an equatorial ape. His watchword, now and always, had been “sufficient unto the day…,” and the only parable that made commercial sense to him was that one about the steward who buried his talents. Life was for living and money was there to be made and spent on comfort and material progress. And after comfort and progress, he supposed, compassion, so that he saw himself as occupying a halfway house between the advocates of laissez-faire and the swarm of clamant reformers in which his adopted daughter had enlisted. Change was inevitable but it would stem from capital, not consciences. Recent history proved as much. Shaftesbury, crusader extraordinare, wouldn’t have saved a single seven-year-old from slow death in the mines and factories if he had not been able to launch his crusades from a base of privilege and wealth.

The Guard of Honour’s volley, when it came, startled everyone but Adam, whose eye had been on the angled carbines and contemplating—of all things— the curious phenomenon of smokeless powder. A volley like that, fired over a grave twenty years ago, would have produced six puff-clouds of sulphurous gas. Now there was nothing to be seen above the raised barrels but a thin film of impurity that hung for a matter of seconds in the keen, frosty air. He saw the massed ranks of the mourners waver and then the gleaming barrels came down in concert, and the chaplain folded the Union Jack and tucked it under his surplice, as though he feared it might be mislaid in the dispersal and he would be asked to account for it by his quartermaster at Hythe. He looked at Henrietta again, surprised to find her dry-eyed, and then at George and Giles, standing close together, looking down into the open grave. Their dissimilarity struck him again, the older boy relaxed but absorbed, as though witnessing an interesting bit of pageantry, his younger brother caught up in the glum finality of the ritual. He thought, idly, “What the devil do any of us know about the chemistry of the body? Two lads, with common parents and common ancestors going back to the year dot, but they come from different planets”; and then his daughter Stella touched his elbow, and his sense of detachment left him to make room for sympathy, for she was shedding the tears he had expected of her mother and seemed, indeed, devastated by the ordeal.