Theirs Was The Kingdom (92 page)

They both set to work at once, and it would be difficult to say which of them displayed the liveliest imagination. Mary managed to produce a seventy-page script depicting the history of Scotland’s royal family without once mentioning the word “England,” rounding it off with a delightful epilogue portraying the many happy sojourns of Albert, Victoria, and all the little princes and princesses beside the Dee in the dear yesterday, when Her Majesty was wont to walk abroad in tartan and widow’s weeds, her costume for so long now.

Jake, himself working round the clock on his own display of loyalty, took time off to watch the dress rehearsal, and if he was slightly puzzled by a diminutive Albert addressing the ten-year-old starlet in the broadest Scots dialect, and Victoria answering in the same, he did not say so. Instead he told his wife that dramatic authors had been ennobled for less.

By then, of course, his own endeavours were beginning to be noticed in the city, and in all the highways and byways of the Lothians and the Border Counties. Unlike Rookwood, Jake Higson had never set much store by dignity, but he had a cockney’s love of display. Swann waggons, hauling coal and pig-iron south; hardware north from the Tyne basin; fish, fowl, and vegetables citywards from sources as distant as Saltcoats in the west and Tayport in the east; might easily have been mistaken for units in the victorious army of Douglas-led moss-troopers, laden with Sassenach plunder. Each of them bore, in addition to the Swann insignia, a plywood, weather-proofed shield depicting Britannia robed in Stuart tartan and, on the nearside, a stencil of the Royal Family at Balmoral. Floating proudly above a diminutive and apologetic Union Jack (wedged low down in the whip socket) was the proud banner of St. Andrew.

The stencil, measuring some five feet by four, had been limned by the yard carpenter, who fancied himself as a landscape artist, but it was his first essay into portraiture. Even so, the early roll-offs were recognisable likenesses of the late Prince Consort and the Queen, but as some three hundred were required, and the creator was working under constant pressure, the later stencils had a woolly look and the royal visages tended to become fuzzy, suggesting to the hypercritical an impressionist’s version of blear-eyed clansmen, assembled in front of a keep and a pile of pink cannonballs resting on mounds of snow. Peering closer, however, bystanders got the correct impression. The clansmen were male and female, and the pink cannonballs were the heads of royal children wearing long, white mantles.

Finally, hearing over the network grapevine that Rookwood had decreed that all his waggoners wore red, white, and blue cap cockades, Jake approved the notion. Instead of red, white, and blue rosettes, however, he persuaded a sempstress to make him three hundred good Scots thistles.

Garish it may have been, but the display made the news. A reporter, seeing a Swann waggon pass under his office window, persuaded his enterprising editor to offer a prize for the best-decorated vehicle plying in Edinburgh that week. The loyal committee naturally awarded it to the Swann yard.

It was a day or so after the celebrations had ended, and the debris (burned by the improvident English) was being folded and laid aside in anticipation of the Diamond Jubilee, that Jake happened to ask Mary why it was that Her Majesty spent so much of her time at Balmoral, when she was known to possess two royal palaces and so many splendid English houses. Mary said, drawing close to him, “Why, man, she and Albert were very happy up here when they were first married. Wouldn’t I feel the same about Rothesay, if you were taken from me, Jamie?”

His eyes misted at that for Rothesay, in Bute, was the place where they had spent their first three days as man and wife, and Mary had taught him bridegroom’s manners in much the same way as she had put him on the road to becoming one of the most influential merchants in Scotland.

4

There was no gainsaying it. Indeed, Adam Swann had once remarked on it when discussing monthly returns from the regions. Wherever a viceroy was bedded down, so to speak, with the right kind of wife, his region prospered, whereas bachelors, however young and pushing they might be, did not seem to possess the stamina to hoist them to the top flight of a Swann progress chart.

There was Young Rookwood and there was Jake Higson, consistently vying with one another for the end-of-year accolade and bonus. There was Bryn Lovell in the Mountain Square, who had never made much of Wales until he married a half-caste and adopted her coffee-coloured children. There was that old dodderer Hamlet Ratcliffe who, so long as his wife Augusta was around to prod him, still held his own in the Western Wedge. There was Morris, of Southern Pickings, who had married money and was said to extend the same elaborate courtesy towards an elderly wife as Disraeli had shown the Queen in his heyday. There was Godsall in the Kentish Triangle, whose wife was a cut above all the other vicereines, and whose social contacts had kept the Triangle in the upper bracket for twenty years. And finally (all the other, more laggardly regions being ruled by single men) there was Tom and Edith Wickstead, who now managed the areas once designated Crescent South and Crescent Centre, based on Peterborough.

Married or single, the managers of all the regions, exclusive of Rookwood’s and Higson’s, made no special effort to use the Jubilee as a trade festival. At Peterborough, however, Tom and Edith contrived, almost by accident, to convert it into a personal anniversary, for June the twenty-first happened to be the day they had married, in 1866, within a week or two of Adam Swann’s return from the dead.

Tom Wickstead had had his hands full in the period leading up to the event, and it was not until the morning of the nineteenth when, throwing wide the bedroom window, he watched the band of the Northamptonshire Volunteers march by playing “The British Grenadiers,” that he said, gaily, “Have you forgotten we have our own celebrating to do on Jubilee Day? Damn it, woman, it’s
our
coming of age, as man and wife! Twenty-one years of it, and nobody’s offered us the Dunmow Flitch. Why don’t we take a trip somewhere and get away from this brassy uproar?”

She joined him at the window, still occupied with her hair, long enough (as Tom would tell anyone prepared to listen) to sit on.

“No matter where we go on the day,” she said, “we won’t escape crowds and noise.” And then, smiling, “No, I hadn’t forgotten. Have I ever forgotten, as you do, sometimes two years running? As a matter of fact, I’ve got a present for you. Seeing as it is a rather special anniversary.”

He said, reflectively, “That first time I had a little something for you, remember? And it caught you on the hop, by God! I never did see a woman look more confounded, come to think of it.”

It was an old joke, qualifying as a family chestnut by now, but today it sparked off a chain of happy memories in her mind so that she exclaimed, “But there
is
somewhere I would like to revisit, Tom! Somewhere we’ve never been since. Can you guess where?”

“Aye, I can at that,” he said, “and we’ll celebrate by going there tomorrow. Once there I daresay we’ll find our own formula for travelling backwards, the way everyone will be doing on the twenty-first,” and her answering laugh left no doubt in his mind that they were sharing thoughts of a little country inn called The Garland on the outskirts of the Welsh border town of Ludlow, whither she had gone to lie in ambush for him on the eve of her thirtieth birthday.

It was a simpler journey nowadays. Then, she recalled, scared half out of her wits by what she was resolved to do, it had been a tedious cross-country traipse, with any number of changes. But now, with special trains running over every stretch of main line in the country, they were outside the inn long before sundown, and looking up at its half-timbered façade, as if it stood for something very meaningful in their relationship.

He said, eagerly, “Do you suppose we could get the same room?” and she replied, gaily, “We could try, Tom,” and marched in, remembering as she did how forlorn and desperate she had felt when she approached that same desk more than twenty years before, signing herself in as “Mrs. Wickstead,” with him not even aware she was this side of England. And after that there had been the long nerve-wracking wait until he returned, with her entire future balanced very precariously on the moment of recognition, and how he was likely to regard this extreme impertinence on her part. But then, almost effortlessly, the drama had resolved itself into farce, for, seeing how it was, he had produced the ring she now wore, bought with the first honest wages he had ever earned in the whole of his life. A month later she had the right to sign herself Mrs. Wickstead.

They were lucky. The inn was half empty, despite the blare of the town band and the gala trappings in the streets. Almost everyone, it seemed, had gone to London on a cheap excursion, or to Shrewsbury, where there was a pageant and sports meeting, or to the coast for a breath of sea air, and local celebrations looked like being parochial. They were not here on a public occasion, however. From the window they watched traps and market carts making their way towards the castle green, where the Morris dancers were assembling, and presently a troop of cavalry jingled by in dazzling dress uniforms that Edith felt obliged to admire, saying they looked like a party of latecomers hurrying to Waterloo. He said, half-seriously, “I wore the Queen’s uniform myself once. But it wasn’t a good fit!” and she replied, in the waspish tone she always used whenever he referred to his convict past, “That’s enough of that, Tom Wickstead! You didn’t wear it for the reasons most lawbreakers do, and today is not the day to remind me of them, even in jest!” But then, seeing him look a little nonplussed, she kissed him, saying, “Dear God, it was
me
who was lucky to run into
you.
Sooner or later you would have straightened yourself out, without my help! Come, let’s see what they have for dinner, for I’m sharpset and I’m sure you are.”

“Not for food,” he said, unexpectedly, “and certainly not in here, remembering,” and he drew the chintz curtains so that the pleasant, low-ceilinged room was rosy with filtered sunlight.

Lying in his arms she remembered (as she often did on these occasions) the two other men in her life, Matt Hornby, drowned off Holy Isle on the eve of their wedding, and Adam Swann, who had half-resolved to make her his mistress but had thought better of it on her advice, for she had sensed, somehow, that he would regard the price paid for her too high for his peace of mind. And after that, thank God, Tom, stronger and more masterful than either of them, yet gentler, much gentler, and more in need of her, so that they had set out as partners and had remained partners all this time.

He sat up presently and smiled down at her, reaching out his hand as though to establish some kind of order in the tumult he had made of her hair, wondering a little at her youthfulness, and the joyful gusto of her responses, very rare, he would say, in a woman turned fifty. He said, boyishly, “It was a good idea of yours to come back here, Edith. Sentimental, maybe, but encouraging at our age,” and she replied, “Not as encouraging as my original expedition, I think. For I’m quite sure, ring notwithstanding, you would never have got round to proposing, Tom. You really did need some positive encouragement that time. Will you admit to that after twenty-one years?”

“Aye,” he said, “perhaps, for what the devil did I have to offer a bonnie little baggage like you? I wanted you the moment I laid hands on you, but I wasn’t eager to press my luck. I owed you too much already and that’s a fact.”

“You never owed me anything,” she said, hoisting herself up and reaching out for her hairbrush. “Except maybe, the excuse to stop lying to myself that I was engaged on missionary work. I wasn’t, of course, not even the night I caught you looking for Solly Beckstein’s diamonds in a Swann mail sack. I daresay I thought I was, but I wasn’t. I was man-hungry and all I was looking for was someone who wanted me as a woman and not a yard gaffer willing to accommodate him after business hours.”

“Is that how Adam Swann thought of you?”

“More or less,” she said, “but don’t hold it against him. He didn’t know his own wife in those days. If a man as dedicated and lusty as Adam Swann was finds a woman he can use as workmate and bedmate as fancy takes him, can you blame him making the most of it?”

“You said ‘was.’ Does that mean disenchantment setting in for Swann?”

“I think it is. He’s had his disappointments, along with the rest of us. Besides, when a concern goes on growing, as his does, there comes a time when it becomes too bothersome to manage. He’ll step down soon, mark my words. And the moment he does the fun will go from it for all of us.”

From the castle yard the strains of the Morris dancers’ accompaniment reached them, a very English sound, she thought, that invoked the essence of all that had happened to them under the Swann aegis. Not merely herself and Tom but the long muster-roll of men who had driven over every foot of the country, hauling British goods that were the sinews of the nation and the touchstone of the orgy of chest-beating that had no parallel in history, not even if you looked back two thousand years to Imperial Rome. She heaved herself clear of the bed and began pulling on her clothes. “What are we doing, lying here discussing the future of Swann-on-Wheels, as if we still had our way to make in the world? For heaven’s sake let’s eat, man. I could have lived on love in the old days but not at my age. Besides, we’re supposed to be on holiday, aren’t we?”

5

Less than a day’s haul to the north of Ludlow, another Swann manager was using the occasion to take a private holiday, and one that had as little do with Victoria’s longevity as the Wicksteads’ sentimental journey. Yet again, like their expedition, it had its roots in the past. More than twenty years before, Bryn Lovell remembered taking his four coffee-coloured stepsons on the same expedition as he now led three of his grandsons. To the mountains that is, to see a Wales that owed no allegiance whatsoever to the House of Hanover, or to any of its predecessors either. For, as he was careful to point out when the little party looked up at a cloud-free Snowdon, this enclave had never sworn fealty to anyone but men like Llewelyn and Glendower. And after Glendower, perhaps (stretching it a little) to the evangelist John Wesley, who had checked the drift back to paganism.