Theirs Was The Kingdom (32 page)

“What’s that, Denzil?”

“Your folks. Your Mam especially, for she’s a rare trier when she’s up against it, as she showed that time I drove her over to Moncton-Price’s place. I got a lot o’ respect for Mrs. Swann and if she set her face against a girl of hers being a farmer’s wife, and that within shouting distance of her own place, I wouldn’t run against her. It wouldn’t make for harmony, so you’d best think on that and sound her out.”

It was strange, she thought, that he should fear her mother and discount her father altogether. But then she saw that this was how he was made, someone who went right to the heart of things, judging people by standards he set himself, that had nothing whatever to do with money and power but everything to do with the qualities of self-reliance and human dignity.

“Mother won’t stand in our way,” she said. “I know that well enough. I believe she had something like this in mind when she ordered me over here, the night your place burned down. In many ways she’s got far more horsesense than father.”

“Aye, but it won’t do to run against him either. He’s a big man, the biggest round here, I’d say.”

She said, calmly, “We’ll jump that ditch when we come to it. I’ll be twenty-one in April, and could please myself. That’s the day I’d like us to marry if you’re willing.”

“April? Two months from now?”

“Why not? The place will be ready enough to live in, and you’ve just said yourself you’re tired of waiting.”

She would like to have added something to this. She would have liked to have burned every bridge that linked her to the old life and done it here and now. So many things that had been obscure to her were suddenly startlingly clear, and one of them, that made her tremble with delight, was the prospect of assuring him beyond all doubt that she was his for the taking. She sensed, somehow, that only the closest physical contact with him could obliterate the last traces of the shame and degradation attending that last night over at Courtlands, where that pomaded old roue had looked her over as if she was a horse at a fair. To lie under him, to absorb him completely, translating his worship into workaday terms—that would equalise them, as they could never be equalised by words, and it seemed to her something that ought not to wait upon the empty rituals of marriage. But she knew him well enough to understand that this was something that he could not be expected to view in her terms, that to him the rituals represented something not merely specific but highly desirable. That did not mean, however, that she was prepared to forgo all the pleasures of courtship denied her in the past, so she said, briskly, “You can leave my family to me, Denzil. You won’t have to come asking in the usual way. I think a man like you would find that intolerable. Is it to be on my birthday, as I said?”

“By God, yes!” he said, joyfully. “Nothing c’n come between us from here on!” Then she realised that she had, after all, misjudged him to a degree, for he seized her in an embrace that drove the breath from her body and covered her face with kisses so that when, reluctantly, he released her, she was not merely breathless but limp. She learned something else about him in those few moments and it added, if that was possible, to her sense of fulfilment. He was not, it seemed, so shy in his handling of a woman as she had supposed.

One

1

B
RAZEN IT OUT. LET THE COUNTY SNOBS STAY HOME AND CLACK BUT LET THE village folk, who wished them well, have another Swann spectacle for their money, especially as it was spring and the altar was loaded with churchyard-grown daffodils and narcissi.

That had been Henrietta’s advice, and he took it. It made good sense to him and he applauded, as always, her audacity. For she made no effort at all to conceal her utmost satisfaction concerning the match. Or, for that matter, the fact that it was she who had accomplished it.

It was a happier if less spectacular demonstration of Swann solidarity than the old Colonel’s funeral, more than two years ago. No one outside the family and firm was invited, yet people came, more than two hundred of them, filing into the little church to witness the Swann filly’s second try over a dramatically lowered jump. Marrying a rustic, no less. Some said with indecent haste but others, a majority, were more charitable. For the Swanns, to give them their due, had never been noted for putting on side.

There they were then, almost a dozen of them, absorbed in the bridal group or wedged hugger-mugger into the front pew, for this time there was no protocol to observe on behalf of the military.

A Swann rally and a Swann occasion. A whole boiling of them arrayed in their Sunday best. Adam Swann (whose jaw, the wits would tell you, had set a thousand waggons rolling); his handsome, unapologetic wife; Lieutenant Alexander Swann, in scarlet bumfreezer and braid; and all the lesser Swanns, from Giles down to pageboy Edward, rising four. As impressive a spread as you would be likely to find anywhere in Kent on a fine April morning, with a brisk southeasterly herding a flock of laggard clouds across the Sussex border.

Two only were absent. George, learning coach-building (why coach-building, when his father was said to buy waggons by the gross?) and away in foreign parts, and baby Margaret at home in the nursery. But all the others made such a fine showing that everyone was prepared to forget that this was Stella Swann’s second time round in thirty-two months, fast going by anyone’s reckoning for a filly who came of age that very day.

The villagers turned as upon a single spinal cord when Mr. Gibbs, the organist, received his signal and began to play, and in she marched with her blushes (if she had any left after all those months as Denzil Fawcett’s journeyman) concealed under a veil that was, they supposed, a compromise between virginity and widowhood. They were not exactly clear what had happened, but whatever it was it must have been blessed and it must have been legal or she wouldn’t have been here at all, and looking so pleased with herself. Down the aisle she swept on her father’s arm, while Denzil, poor wight, was the only one present unable to turn his head and mark her bearing on account of a three-inch collar, which had his neck in a splint and obliged him to continue to stare fixedly at the altar candlesticks and listen to heartbeats that seemed to him loud enough to drown the organ.

It was all very pastoral and cosy, all very much in keeping with the end of a sharp spell of frost that had stopped hunting but enabled amateur skaters to acquire a spread of bruised buttocks and scabbed kneecaps on the river below the islet. Twyforde Green, settling back, could gaze its fill, familiar, of course, with the two younger bridesmaids, Joanna and Helen, in their blue satin frocks, their Kate Greenaway bonnets, elbow-length mittens, and posies of hot-house anemones, but wondering at the rows of strange attentive faces in pews further back, representing, so they were told, Swann hirelings from all over England. It occurred to the more prescient then that this was not so much a wedding as a Swann muster, a carriers’ convention that stamped Adam Swann’s seal upon the locality. However, nobody guessed that this public unfurling of the Swann banner was a deliberate act, the outcome of a compromise between man and wife when the latter informed the former that his daughter’s hibernation was over, and that he was likely, God willing, to prove the grandfather of a string of Kentish yeomen once the new thatch had weathered over at Dewponds Farm.

Adam remembered it, however, smiling one of his sardonic grins as he stood beside his daughter, and it occurred to him again that Henrietta did well to indulge a passion for soldiers, for she was temperamentally equipped to conjure with tactics and stratagems. Little by little, he told himself, the balance of power was shifting at Tryst, but then, he had never subscribed to the Victorian cult of the patriarch. Patriarchs sported beards whereas he remained obstinately cleanshaven. Besides, this was her victory. The match, it seemed, had been engineered by her. But that, he would say, had not been the beginning of it, recalling now the part that lumping great bridegroom had played in the first act of the tragic farce. Since then, he imagined, it must have been a devious story, and very much a woman’s story, concerning which he had no real curiosity. He was content to accept their presence here as a traditional happy ending, although it did occur to him that he and others might have been spared a pack of trouble if that stupid girl of his had made a grab at her rustic years ago, before leading everybody such a cheerless, cross-country dance.

He glanced sideways over his daughter’s shoulder and what he saw reassured him. Denzil Fawcett was undeniably a chawbacon by a city man’s standards, but it needed little imagination to identify his unique qualifications for groom at this particular ceremony. He was not even listening to the words that invested him with the Swann-on-Wheels insignia but was gazing at the bride as if vouchsafed a vision of Thetis, the silver-footed sea-goddess. And there was relevance here unless his classical memory was at fault. Thetis had been condemned to marry a mortal and this mortal, judged by his expression of stupefied reverence, had no quarrel with the judgement of Zeus.

He would have liked very much to have looked over his shoulder at Henrietta, if only to assure himself that the smug expression he had noticed when she set out for the church was still there, but he did not dare. He had been enjoined, given the special circumstances surrounding this remarkable event, to be on his very best behaviour and on no account to let his attention stray, as he usually did when he accompanied the family to church.

The expression was there: the look of a merchant who, against all probability, had recouped heavy losses by investing in a venture that promised a steady trickle over the years. For she did not care a curse what the croquet-lawn gossips said (and she knew them well enough to realise they were saying a great deal) for this was not a match in the conventional sense of the word. It was more of an adjustment from a state of bankruptcy to the status quo, and what woman in her senses would not prefer a rustic son-in-law to a daughter mumbling prayers behind a convent wall? God knows, she had reason enough to congratulate herself. The game had been as good as lost when she took it in hand, but here they all were, confronted with a healthy, beaming bridegroom and an almost embarrassingly felicitous bride, and all in a matter of eight months. And no one save Giles was a penny the wiser concerning the horrible scare that had set it in train.

She looked across at Giles, noting that he was absorbing every word of the ceremony, and it occurred to her that he would be likely to see this not as the direct result of his troubled confession but as a triumph of true love. For Giles, alone among them, was a romantic.

It was a pity, she reflected, that Alexander was not, remembering his bleak stare when told the news. He was bearing up, however, and this no doubt was due as much to his kind heart as to her cautionary lecture, for he had said, on being asked for loyalty, “Very well. I suppose a fellow can’t really be held responsible for the chaps his sister takes up with, and from what you say there’s no denying the gel went through a beastly time while I was away.” The transposition of the word “girl” to “gel” did not pass unnoticed. That would be Sandhurst rubbing off on him, she supposed, but he had clearly taken her point. A beastly time, forsooth! Thank God he was unlikely to discover just how beastly; and she assumed, her eye reverting to the groom, that poor Denzil was likely to remain equally ignorant if Stella had her wits about her. And even that, when you came to think of it, was something to be grateful for. She wasn’t coming to him secondhand but as a bride should, and it might not have been so had Stella shown less fleetness of foot the night the Conyer oak came down in the paddock.

Henrietta usually enjoyed a wedding, but this one gave her more than the customary flutter. It produced a warm, pleasurable glow under her heart, and this on account of its shape and lightness, for surely, all things being equal, nothing frightening would ever happen to Stella again. Denzil Fawcett would make sure of that and watching them, in the act of giving and receiving the ring, she did what she always did at a wedding, that is to say, compared the immediate prospects of the bride with her own experience at eighteen. There was a difference, of course. One only had to glance at the boy to know he was also virgin, so that at least they would start level. He was sure to be gentle too, and far more patient than most men, having already waited so long and so hopelessly. Well, the very best of luck to them, tonight and every night. All in all, mother and daughter had every right to exult. One had exchanged a bad husband for a good. The other had completed a smart exercise in salvage.

2

The precise significance of his substitution of Swann’s viceroys for bonafide wedding guests had escaped her until the return from church. The entire muster, suitably awed she noted, reassembled in the hall before passing, two by two, into the drawing room where bride and groom stood beside the table supporting the three-tiered cake that was crowned—God forgive him—with a sugar-icing Swann waggon instead of the usual assortment of cherubs and angels. Then she understood that it was not, as she had imagined, a piece of buffoonery and that like her, he did not see this wedding as a conventional match. It was not and could not be, with the best will in the world. For him it had another and distinct function that was characteristic of him and had impelled him to make it a private family occasion;
his
family, not Stella’s or Denzil’s. It was at once a sneer and a challenge, underlining his creed that commercial undertakings, in this day and age, had far more relevance than dynastic alliances of one kind or another, and here was his fanfare played in public and be damned to what the local quality thought about it.

Henrietta stood slightly apart, observing the guests’ advance and remembering to smile, but her smiles were really for Adam. Most fathers would exhibit paternal pride in a pretty daughter on an occasion like this, but his was reserved for the guests. She noticed something else that escaped the bridal pair. As the guests advanced for the presentation, they made no more than token obeisances to the sweating groom and the composed and radiant bride. Their fealty was for Adam, standing there on his gammy leg, dispensing a mixture of patronage and geniality, so that she thought, as she kissed Edith Wickstead and shook hands with Edith’s Tom, “There’s really no curing the man! And no making a real father out of him either! Here we are, celebrating the miraculous reprieve of our eldest daughter from a nunnery, and what will he and this mob of freebooters talk about the moment the toasts are behind us, and poor Denzil has retired to Dewponds with his glittering prize? Not the wedding, certainly. More likely the cost of a haul of bacon from a Wiltshire curing factory to the nearest siding, or the wastage of horseflesh on roads half-ruined by the spring thaw!”

It was Edith, who knew him almost as well as she did, who put this into words when she whispered, slyly, “Don’t mind him, Henrietta. Or us either, for that matter! We wish
her
well
because
of him, don’t you see?”

And she did see, and had to laugh in spite of it all, reasoning that there were many more than nine to his family.

3

To Edith Wickstead who, as Edith Wadsworth was the only woman present to have held an independent command in the regions, it was like visiting her home town after an absence of half a lifetime.

Moving among the clamorous males and their fashion-conscious wives from every corner of the Swann empire, the past came alive to her in a way that it never had after she had turned her back on the Crescents and become, at thirty plus, a wife and mother, as well as tutor to the husband who succeeded her.

For Edith, nibbling wedding cake and isolating the burr of a dozen provincial accents, the enterprise was invested with a kind of magic, conjuring up, at one and the same moment, fanfares of trumpets and the laughter of circus clowns. For they were all, she told herself, compounds of swashbuckler and mountebank, pedlar and packman, freebooting mercenary and commercial pace-setter, and there was both poetry and logic in this. Adam Swann, who had been and still was all of these things, had fashioned each of them in his own image, singling them out one by one as his dreams expanded, imbuing them with his distinctive sense of vocation, almost as though he had been recruiting missionaries to go out into the highways and byways and proclaim the gospel of first-come-first-served on the assurance that God (whom he probably saw as an English wholesaler) would help those who helped themselves.