Theirs Was The Kingdom (79 page)

Then there were the two younger girls, copper-haired Joanna, favouring her, and a saucy brunette, Helen, who favoured Adam, nineteen and sixteen respectively, but showing no signs as yet of developing into girls likely to attract sober husbands. Oh, they were pretty enough, and great flirts into the bargain, but no man wanted a tomboy and neither of them, so far as she could discern, had a serious thought about anything, much less selecting a husband from the flock of lively young mashers who squired them at balls and tennis parties. Well, then, if needs be, she would do it for them, and go about it more judiciously than she had in respect of Stella, the first or second time round. For one farmer’s lad was enough for any family, notwithstanding the domestic bliss that prevailed at Dewponds. A first step, possibly, would be to confide in Phoebe Fraser and seek ways and means of taking some of the bounce out of them.

She was less concerned about the two youngest, Edward, now eight, and Margaret, six, for both were young enough to keep under close observation. Lately, moving in and out of the nursery, she had noticed a curious thing about “The Stragglers.” Each seemed to have taken on the looks and temperament of their grandfathers, in itself a very unlikely circumstance, for no two men could have been more dissimilar. Edward, strutting about house and garden with the air of knowing precisely what he was about, and getting his own way by a mixture of brashness and truculence, not only behaved like old Sam but was also beginning to look like him, with his solid, thickset frame, prominent blue eyes, and hard-set jaw, as square and uncompromising as the butt end of a carpenter’s plane. Margaret, on the other hand, had the old Colonel’s colouring and his meandering gentleness too, so that everyone made a pet of her, but she did not spoil easily and Henrietta had yet to see her in a tantrum. It was with a sense of shock that she discovered the child at work on a watercolour one morning, a very clever little painting too, if she was any judge—which she wasn’t really, although she had always exclaimed over the landscapes the dear old man had hung about the house. There she was, sitting at the nursery window trying to capture the movement of clouds over the spinney below the paddocks, her little pink tongue peeping out in just the way the Colonel’s had when he sat in front of his easel in that old boat-shelter on the bluff behind the house. It brought home to Henrietta, as nothing had up to that time, the realities of heredity. There must be many, many strains here, but she could only identify four. The wide-ranging Swann freebooters, the industrious d’Auberons from Gascony, the Rawlinson roughnecks, and her own Irish strain from the far west, of which she knew virtually nothing. It was rather wonderful, she thought, how all four had combined to produce the latter-day Swanns, bestowing a characteristic here, adding a trait there, so that each child was touched by one or more of their four grandparents, just as surely as by her and Adam. The Irish peasant was showing very plainly in Stella and the Swann military legacy in Alex. In George she could identify her father’s obsession with machines and in Giles the gentleness that had been, according to the Colonel, the one outstanding characteristic of his little Gascon wife. Hugo had something of her own ancestors in him, or why should she remember that remark of Mrs. Worrell about Irish kings; whereas both Joanna and Helen had Irish-Lancastrian sparkle, together with a generous dash of Swann swashbucklers. Young Edward was predominantly Lancastrian, with that aggressive jaw, whereas Margaret reverted to the French strain again, reproducing not only the gentle streak in some of the Swanns (so marked in all she remembered of the old Colonel) but also the daintiness of Monique d’Auberon, whose portrait still hung in the room that had been the old man’s. It was all very mysterious and some time, when he had a moment to spare, she must discuss the subject with Adam.

In the meantime, there was so much to do. At Tryst, with so many of them coming and going, there was always plenty to do. She went downstairs, intending to finish some neglected work in the sewing room, but was brought up short at the bend of the staircase, for there stood Alexander, looking up at her from the hall; when he saw her he grinned, but nervously, as though caught out in an act of mischief.

She began to descend then but he stayed her, holding up his hand and glancing over his shoulder at the closed drawing-room door. Then he moved up towards her and said, in a voice pitched so low that it was close to a whisper, “Someone here… someone I want you to meet… You’re not… not specially busy, are you?”

“No,” she said, knowing somehow that this was an important moment in his life and hers, “I’m not in the least busy if you’ve brought a guest.” And then, because he still looked a little confused, “It’s a young lady, I presume?”

Improbably he blushed scarlet, saying, “Did one of the children see us arrive and let on…?”

But she replied, soothingly, “Certainly not, it’s written in large print all over your face, dear boy. Come, we can’t leave her sitting alone,” and she moved round him to descend the stairs.

She was two stairs down when he swung round and shot out his arm, grasping hers at the elbow, in a grip that made her wince. “Wait! I’ve something to tell you. Something important.” He took a deep breath. “We’re to be married. Quite soon.”

“Married?”

“It has to be soon. I’m posted abroad… India…”

She had difficulty in keeping her voice low. “But, Alex! To someone we’ve never met, never even heard about?”

“It’s all happened so quickly and I’m due to sail a month from today. Her name’s Lydia, Lydia Corcoran, the Colonel’s daughter. I did tell you he had a daughter. I’m sure I told you, that time I came on leave from Ireland.”

She did not know whether to laugh or cry. He was so anxious and so hopelessly embarrassed that he was gibbering, and it astounded her that a boy who had faced enemy shot time and again since that first hair-raising adventure of his should prove so unequal to a situation of this kind. His eyes, she noticed, were slightly glazed, indicating that he had already been at the decanter, no doubt to fortify himself, and he was sweating freely at the temples. She saw him then as by far the most vulnerable of the flock, notwithstanding his seniority and battle experience. Maternal concern submerged her. She said, patting him, “There now, pull yourself together, lad. I’m not angry, just… well… bowled over, and you can hardly blame me for that, can you? Come now, introduce me, do,” and she shook herself free of his restraining hand and moved down another three stairs before he dived in pursuit and caught her arm again, shaking his head and opening and closing his mouth, but conveying nothing at all save a kind of agonised indecision.

They were level with the newel post then, ten feet or less from the drawing-room door, and suddenly impatience got the better of her. She said, sharply, “Really, Alex, this is quite ridiculous! You bring home a guest, a young lady, and tell me you’re to be married almost at once. Very well, then! You’re twenty-five, and can marry whom you please. But I may meet her, mayn’t I? For, if not, why did you bring her here?”

Her tone of voice rallied him so that his confusion ebbed a little and she saw him as she had seen him many times in her mind’s eyes over the last few years, a lanky boy scared half out of his wits but determined to set an example to those under his command, so that he had learned the trick of holding himself poker-straight and making his face expressionless. He said, doing just this, “Er, before you go in, mother… She isn’t pretty, like Stella and George’s wife. And she isn’t stylish, like you and the girls. She’s older than me, too, three years older. But she’s right for
me
, you understand? I’m sure of that. Quite sure.”

She paused with her hand on the latch, wondering what it had cost him to make that little speech, but then a burning curiosity swamped every other emotion and she said, swiftly, “Leave it there, Alex. Now let me judge for myself.”

He seemed to consider this and then nodded, circling her, opening the door, stepping back, and half bowing, in a way that struck her, even then, as being dreadfully old-fashioned and quite unlike any gesture his brothers would have made, although people were always complimenting her on their manners. She went in, blinking in the strong sunlight that patterned the waxed floor, bypassing the small, grey-mantled figure standing over by the tall window looking out on the paddock, but before she was clear of the threshold he shot past her at the double, crying, “Lydia… my mother… mother, Miss Lydia Corcoran!” The grey-mantled figure bobbed unsmilingly and raised a long, sad face to Henrietta, who at once thought of Gipsy the ageing, bottlenosed skewbald they had bought for the Colonel when he was too old and frail to sit a proper hack.

She knew why the skewbald came to mind. Horse and girl shared the same half-mournful, half-wistful expression and acknowledging this Henrietta’s glance dropped, shifting from Lydia’s face to her handkerchief dress, with its stiff cuirassed bodice, short basque, and fanned throat screen. A dress like that had been all the rage in 1880, when Lydia and everyone else was six years younger.

It was the costume that struck her more than the girl’s long, sad face, with squarish chin (Sam Rawlinson’s kind of chin), much at odds with the rest of her features. For while one was obliged to accept the face and figure dispensed by Providence, one was surely at liberty to do something about clothes and posture. “Not stylish” Alex had said, and it was a lover’s understatement. In her entire life Henrietta had never seen a woman with less claim to be called stylish, for even when it was in vogue the handkerchief dress was the last thing Lydia Corcoran should have chosen to wear. Its long row of buttons tended to flatten such curves as she had, whereas the lacy display at her throat drew attention to her short neck and rather angular shoulders. Even as she murmured a conventional greeting, directing Alex to pour sherry for all three of them, her mind was engaged in dressing the girl in a way that would enable her to pass in a crowd.

But then, telling herself she was rude and uncharitable, she pulled herself together and led Lydia to a chair, gesturing to Alex to hand round the sherry, and while Lydia reached for a glass at once addressed herself to the task of locating something—anything—to offset the poor little devil’s lamentable lack of charm. Slowly and carefully, her glance travelled from a middle-aged pair of buttoned boots, over the flattish chest, past the square, mannish chin, to the downcast eyes and here, at last, there
was
something arresting. It was the girl’s eyes, grey and widely spaced, with long curling lashes and a kind of steadiness one could look for in someone of authority, tempered by complete honesty. And perhaps, lurking behind the iris, there was courage for good measure.

She thought, wretchedly, “What
can
one say? What is there
to
say? None of them ever brought any one like this into the house, no one so… so
frumpish
! ” But then, as she once again contemplated the creased, dusty pouches of the bag-plastron under the almost nonexistent bosom, her attention was deflected by a silvery glitter and her glance shot up again just in time to see two large tears drive parallel courses over Lydia Corcoran’s prominent cheekbones.

The tears humbled Henrietta as she had never been humbled in twenty-eight years as a wife and mother. Not because they told her, unequivocally, that the girl was fully aware of her rawboned awkwardness, but because they performed a time miracle on Henrietta herself, whirling her back to a day when she had stood in Lydia Corcoran’s place, a travel-worn, tongue-tied stray, paraded for inspection in Colonel Swann’s Derwentwater home and feeling even more inadequate than Lydia looked after a hundred-mile cross-country journey as Adam Swann’s pillion-rider in the crinoline she had worn when she fled the embrace of Makepeace Goldthorpe.

Identification with the girl was so vivid and so compelling that she could have wept. Every nuance of that terrifying confrontation returned to her as clearly and faithfully as though she had been turning the leaves of a family album. For Alex, hovering nearby, was Adam, wondering wryly if he had just committed the crowning folly of his life by bringing her here, whereas she was Adam’s sharp-tongued Aunt Charlotte, honking dismay at the prospect of receiving such a bedraggled fugitive into her house; and in Lydia’s place was the forlorn little wretch Henrietta had been at that moment in time, so that pity welled up in her like some swift underground stream seeking the surface.

It made a difference. It made all the difference in the world. She no longer saw her as a drab, mousy little creature who, by means unknown, witchcraft possibly, had hooked her eldest son, but as she recalled herself nearly thirty years ago, in desperate need of love and, even more essential, what love might bring, absorption into a family unit, where she could hope to find an identity.

She reached out, took the sherry glass from Lydia’s hand, set it firmly on the occasional table, and said, fervently, “He told me, my dear, and I’m glad for you both! Alex needs a wife badly. Someone like you, to watch out for him—
there
!” and she kissed her soundly on both cheeks, tasting a triumph that was salty but rewarding.

Two

1

T
HE ORIGINAL SPONSOR WAS BONZO. BRASH, TOOTHY, OPEN-HANDED, BONZO Charteris commanded A Company, and was reckoned an experienced ladies’ man. For it was Bonzo who learned, in the course of a chance conversation as the port circulated, that “Lucky” Swann, posted to them as supernumerary whilst awaiting passage to India, had not yet paid a visit to the Empire, Leicester Square, highly recommended by Bonzo as “The resort of the most exclusive laced mutton in town.”

Alex, having spent more than five of the last seven years out of England, had not yet learned that “laced mutton” was the fashionable word for “harlot.” Last year, he recalled, it had been “rig,” and the year before “bint,” but one lost track of new slang on outpost duty and at advanced base, where laced mutton, if it was not off the menu altogether, was reserved for men who could outrank a captain, even a well-heeled one like Bonzo Charteris.

Bonzo, having extolled the bill of fare at the Empire, went on to say that the Colonel himself, (known by the subalterns as “Bejasus,” “Fwat-Fwat,” or “Vorwarts”) was himself a regular partaker of the Empire’s laced mutton but took good care, as did any man with his wits about him, to go there in mufti.

“Met the old boy there half a dozen times,” he said, “but we don’t let on, y’know. Pass one another with half a wink.”

It was this conversation that led to an invitation on the part of Bonzo to escort Swann to Leicester Square on their next weekend jaunt to town for Swann, reckoned a country cousin in the garrison town, was nonetheless respected as a man who had served three campaigns and been present, lucky devil, not only at Rorke’s Drift but also at Tel-el-Kebir.

It would have amazed Charteris to learn that Swann had been far from lucky in other respects, and that, at twenty-five, he was still a virgin. It was naturally assumed that a man who had spent so long on foreign stations had enjoyed the favours of numerous oriental charmers; Swann was very careful to do nothing to correct this impression.

His continence, as a matter of fact, was not from inclination, although he took careful heed of the surgeon-major’s dire warnings against contracting venereal disease when serving abroad. Rather it was from lack of opportunity, and the nature of the places where he had campaigned. Between times in Deal, Cork, and Malta, there had been three or four inconclusive encounters, but no sooner had he made a tentative lodgement than he found himself whisked away to some God-forsaken spot where the local women were off limits on account of the fact that medical supervision over them was impossible.

So it came about that Alex accepted Bonzo’s invitation, travelled up to town on the four-thirty, booked in for an overnight stay at a private hotel in Dover Street, and set out, in tails and opera hat, to do the town as Bonzo’s protégé. His companion’s air of genial patronage did not bother him, Charteris having served one campaign to his three.

They fetched up at the Empire round about nine, when the second showing of the tableaux-vivants was just beginning. Alex was excited by the colour, gaiety, and frankness of the stage entertainment, forgetting for an hour or so that this was merely the hors d’oeuvre and that the real purpose of the expedition was to seek out and price the best pieces of laced mutton on show.

The display, when it was at length presented to him on the promenades, made him gasp. Until then he had always taken it for granted that England was still a country of Puritans, and that the trade of harlotry, if practised at all on any scale, was confined to out-of-the-way corners in the seamier suburbs or that, where it did spill over into fashionable quarters, it was kept to the pavement. He soon discovered he was in error. Here, on the north side of Leicester Square, harlots plied in plush surroundings and under brilliant lighting, the promenades of the Empire being the regular resort, not of prostitutes, as he understood them, but of haughty courtesans who could easily have been mistaken for young duchesses on the Sunday after-church parade in Hyde Park.

The very least of them was a most impressive creature, tricked out in the very latest fashions and smelling like an English garden in high summer, as they glided past (they seemed to move on runners) and basked—there was simply no other word for it—in the admiration of boulevardiers.

Bonzo proved an inspired compere, but although he was obviously acquainted with many of the ladies, he was careful to refer to them all in the general rather than the particular. To do otherwise, Alex gathered, would have been considered caddish, for the kiss-and-tell code of the mess seemed to apply here as much as in a garrison-town drawing room.

“Some of them make a thousand a year,” Bonzo told him, “and from time to time one retires, snapped up by some well-heeled Johnny and installed in a love nest in St. John’s Wood or Maida Vale. God bless ’em, I say, although one can’t help feeling they must live to regret settling down with some balding old cove, who pops in Tuesdays and Fridays, spends the rest of the week behind his till, and makes sure he never misses church on Sunday. I remember one who cut her losses and came back. The chap who kept her discovered she had never been confirmed and wanted to haul her off to church and get it attended to, before he paid her another visit. A place like this is a refuge as well as a high-class market. The police don’t bother ’em here. They pay their five shillings entrance fee every night and they get a chance to look their clients over in the warm and dry. No risk of a dose with one o’ these doxies. They look after themselves, and they can be particular, mark my words. Give ’em the eye but don’t make a straight proposition. Let it be understood over a glass of champagne and leave me to talk terms. By the way, don’t waste silver on chocolates, like some of the greenhorns, old boy. They sell them back over the counter the minute you turn your back. Seen anyone you fancy so far?”

Alex had, a fair, wasp-waisted girl, sitting at one of the round tables at the far end of the bar and looking a good deal less haughty than most of the mutton on show. Every now and again she laughed and showed perfect teeth whilst listening to the conversation of a dark-haired companion who had the dignity of a dowager and looked scarifyingly supercilious when a young man wearing a gardenia paused at her table and offered her a cigarette from a gold case.

“Ai don’t indulge, thenk you!” she said, and her fair companion laughed again as though, like Alex, she was here to enjoy the fun and was in no mind at all to do business. He said, “Those two over there, do you happen to know either of them?” and Bonzo said he knew the dark one who was called “Miss Montcrieff,” and priced herself at around three guineas, exclusive of dinner, posing, champagne, and any other incidentals.

“Talking of names,” he went on, “don’t use your own, old son. Blackmail is rare here—wouldn’t do the place any good—but it’s not unknown, of course. I’ll introduce you as Captain Teamster, of the Bengal Lancers, and you can call me Eddie, and let on I’m a gunner, for they’re as sharp as needles here and would be sure to spot us for what we are if we tried to pass ourselves off as barristers-at-law or medical students.”

They sauntered over and introductions were formally made. Miss Montcrieff maintaining her bleak expression even when accepting a glass of champagne, but the fair girl, presented as Miss Cecilia Royston, “a cousin of Miss Montcrieff ‘s on a visit to London from the provinces,” seemed jolly enough and glad of his company, so they sipped champagne and made elaborate small talk until Bonzo proposed they took another look at the tableaux-vivants, the show being about half-way through the second run.

It was like taking part in a saraband, where every move on the part of one’s partner was carefully observed, and the level of conversation was more or less equivalent to that at one of his mother’s croquet-parties at Tryst. In fact, it seemed quite monstrous to imagine that the Misses Montcrieff and Royston were a couple of highly trained whores hoping, indeed resolved, to turn an honest sovereign or two before sunrise. This illusion of gentility continued right up to the time they paired off after supper at an Italian restaurant Bonzo patronised on Frith Street. Bonzo and Miss Montcrieff (she never did relax sufficiently to divulge her Christian name) then entered a hansom and went off in the direction of Tottenham Court Road, Cecilia telling him that she had rooms in Long Acre, so near as to be hardly worth a cab-ride.

By then Alex had reached a state of some exhilaration, the food and wine having been excellent and Miss Royston’s company pleasantly undemanding, for Bonzo did most of the talking. Yet he felt a little shy when they were moving through a thinning crowd of West Enders and the late night snarl-up of hansoms and growlers chivvying their way through the busy streets now that the theatres were emptying.

The girl, however, seemed to make allowance for this and settled for the sisterly approach, dropping the slightly arch accent she had employed earlier in the evening. She held his arm in the friendliest fashion as she chattered gaily of all manner of things, in a way that reminded him of one of the numerous husband-hunters he had partnered at regimental soirees in Malta and Cork.

No sooner had they reached the tall, narrow-fronted house and climbed two staircases to her quarters, however, than she became very businesslike, saying, “Your friend made the arrangements with mine. It’s for all night, isn’t it? Would you like a drink? I won’t myself, if you don’t mind, for I only keep whisky here and whisky doesn’t agree with me. Do make yourself comfortable. I should take off your boots if I were you.”

He took off his boots, accepted a generous whisky, and said, for something to say, that he had assumed she and Miss Montcrieff shared rooms, arid was surprised to find her living here alone.

“Oh, I’m not really alone,” she said. “Mr. Skilly, the landlord’s agent, looks after a dozen or more rooms, all let to Empire girls, I understand. Although I wouldn’t really know, for I really am a newcomer to London and I’m still on commission, and likely to be until Christmas. That’s the only way I could have possibly got on to the promenade. I was vouched for by Daisy—Miss Montcrieff—you understand? I’m her protégé and she has a private arrangement with Mr. Skilly in the suite below, and the rent is paid by her every Saturday. It’s nice here, I think, even though the market traffic does get noisy in the small hours, Covent Garden being no more than a stone’s throw away. I was right lucky to run into Daisy, I can tell you, for I’ve had real gentlemen for the most part. Will you unhook me, soldier-boy? You don’t mind me calling you soldier-boy, do you? I like soldiers. There’s never any nonsense about them. I mean, they don’t want to act stupid, and you can usually have a bit of a laugh with them, and they don’t count the small change, do they? Lucy, that’s the girl in the rooms immediately above, has a regular soldier at the moment, but he’s very old and quite past it I’d say, although he’s a rare trier, Lucy says, providing he hasn’t shipped too much before he gets here. Mostly he has, of course, and then she has to call Skilly to help him down and pack him off home. That happened earlier in the week, and I had to lend a hand, for he was having the horrors, or so it sounded, the way he was carrying on and wanting to fight everybody. Quite harmless, of course, but not good for the house, which is quiet and very respectable as a rule.”

While she was rattling on in this way, she had, with a little assistance from Alex, slipped out of her evening gown and hung it on a hanger in a recess curtained by some bright-coloured chintz with a pattern that made his eyes hurt. He said, “We don’t need this strong light, do we, Cecilia?” She said, “Why, no, not if you don’t wish it. I’m here to please. Most of them like it left on for some reason. I suppose to see what they’re getting. Either that, or they’re afraid for their pocketbooks. There,” and she turned off the overhead gas-burner, leaving a tiny jet over by the door, so that the room was thrown into part-shadow, relieved by the glow of the gas-light in the street below. She said mildly, slipping out of what seemed to Alex half a dozen petticoats, “You’re not a regular one for the girls, are you, soldier-boy? Oh, don’t misunderstand me, please. It’s nice to get a quiet one now and again, for a girl looks for all sorts in this line of business, doesn’t she?”

Her naïveté, assumed or not, was very appealing he thought, and he answered that he supposed a girl did, adding that he had spent the last few years in places where one sometimes went months without even seeing a woman. This touched a chord of sympathy in her somewhere and she said, “Oh, dear, that must be awful for you! I see now why you’re well… not in a tearing hurry, like most of the gentlemen, even the polite ones. I suppose… but there, it’s none of my business.”

“What were you going to say? You suppose what?”