A Company of Swans (37 page)

"Good heavens, Mr. Fortescue!" Louisa, with Mrs. Belper hovering behind her, was waiting in the hall. "Whatever does this mean?"

"It means that I am taking away your patient immediately," said Rom. "I have diagnosed pernicious anaemia, tuberculosis of the lung and an incipient brain tumor. It is possible that I can save her with instant treatment at my clinic, but there is not a moment to lose."

"But that's impossible… I must consult my brother. This is not what we expected at all…" Louisa was entirely at a loss. "And the fees at your clinic would be quite beyond us."

Rom took a steadying breath. "If you want a corpse on your hands, Miss Morton, and a court case, that is your affair. You have called me in; I have given my diagnosis. Now, please fetch the patient's birth certificate at once: it is required by the governors of my clinic as a condition of admission."

"I told you she was too thin," bleated Mrs. Belper.

Totally flustered, Louisa made as if to go to the telephone, only to find the extraordinary surgeon standing in front of it while still holding Harriet in his arms.

"Her birth certificate," he said implacably. "At once."

The Rolls had driven off and the ladies were trying without success to calm themselves in the drawing room, when the doorbell rang again.

"Good afternoon," said the obese, gray-haired gentleman standing on the step. "You are expecting me, I know. My name is Fortescue…"

Professor Morton was lecturing, pacing the rostrum, his gown flapping, his voice managing to be both irascible and droning; while in the front row Blakewell, a fair-haired, good-looking young man destined for holy orders, wondered if boredom could kill and kicked Hastings who had gone to sleep and was sliding from his chair.

"And this man who calls himself a scholar," rasped the Professor, "has the effrontery—the unbelievable effrontery—to suggest that the word hoti in line three of the fifth stanza should be translated as—"

The door burst open. An agitated College servant could be seen trying to restrain a man in an extraordinarily well-cut gray suit who pushed him aside without effort, closed the door in his face and proceeded to walk in a relaxed manner to the rostrum.

"Professor Morton?"

"I am Professor Morton, yes. But how dare you walk in here unannounced and interrupt my lecture. It's unheard of!"

"Well, it has been heard of now," said the intruder calmly, and the students sat up with a look of expectancy on their faces. "I came to inform you that I have removed your daughter firmly and finally from your house and to ask you to sign this document." He laid a piece of paper with a red seal on the lectern. "As you see, it is your permission for my marriage to Harriet."

The Professor grew crimson; the Adam's apple worked in his scraggy throat. "How dare you! How dare you come in here and wave pieces of paper at me! And how dare you kidnap my daughter!"

"I think the less said about that the better. I found Harriet half-starved and confined like a prisoner because she tried to have a life of her own. If you would like me to tell the students of the state in which I found her, I should be happy to do so."

"How I treat my daughter is none of your business. Harriet is sick in her body and sick in her soul—" But he took an involuntary step backward, aware of a sudden menace in the stranger's stance. "Who are you anyway?" and rallying: "I won't be blackmailed. Harriet is under age—"

"Professor Morton, it is only because you are Harriet's father that I have not actually throttled you. Anyone else who had treated her as you have done would not have lived to tell the tale. I choose to believe that you are misguided, pompous and opinionated rather than sadistic and cruel. But unless you sign this document without delay I will take you out into the courtyard, debag you and throw you into the fountain."

The look of expectancy on the students' faces changed to one of deep and utter happiness.

"You wouldn't dare!" blustered the Professor.

"Try me," said Rom. He looked down at the row of upturned faces. "I can do it myself, but it would be easier if I had help. If anyone is willing to help me debag the Professor, would they put up their hand?"

There were fourteen students in the lecture room and thirteen hands shot up without an instant's hesitation. Then Ellenby, sole support of a widowed mother, shook off his moment of cowardice and also raised his hand.

"I think you should sign, you know," said Rom pleasantly. "After all, it's no tragedy to have your daughter installed as mistress of Stavely."

"Eh? What?" The Professor peered at the document and registered the fact that Harriet's suitor was Romain Paul Verney Brandon of Stavely Hall, Suffolk. "Good heavens!"

If the Professor had continued to defy him, had kept up his bluster, Rom might have felt a reluctant respect for the detestable man. But over Professor Morton's face there now spread a look of servile amazement and awe—and unscrewing his fountain pen, he signed his name.

He was, however, not destined to resume his lecture. Rom might have left the room, but he had shown the students a lovely and fulfilling vision; he had unleashed primeval forces which were not to be gainsaid.

Blakewell rose first and even when he became a bishop he was to speak with nostalgia of this moment of release. Hastings followed—then Moisewitch, whom the Professor had humiliated in front of the entire tutorial group, took off his spectacles and laid them carefully on the window sill. No words were necessary as every student in the hall moved as one man toward the rostrum.

"His trousers first," said Blakewell. "Start with his trousers…"

Rom drew back the curtains and looked out on Stavely's moonlit avenue of beeches, the silver pools of light in the meadows of the park, drank in the sharp clean smell of the air with its first touch of frost. He was back home and with every reason to rejoice. To the place he had left as a penniless and rejected youth, he had returned as master—and he had brought his future bride. Away to the left he could see the chimneys of Paradise Farm, but no light showed from the house. Isobel was back, having sulked all the way across the Atlantic, but she had decided to remain in London and spend some of the allowance Rom had bestowed on her. Her son was with her now, but a message from the housekeeper had informed Rom that he could expect Master Henry at the end of the week. Clearly it was not going to be difficult to keep an eye on his nephew!

He stayed for a while, still, by the window, but the dreams he had had for Stavely eluded him. It was probably just reaction from the constant exercise of will, the long journey and fruitless delay in Russia, that made him feel both restless and weary. What else could ail him, after all—and knowing that he would not sleep, he nevertheless turned from the window and began to prepare for bed.

He was interrupted by a knock at the door—quiet, but not noticeably timid—and Harriet, still in her Aunt Louisa's appalling nightgown, entered the room. At which point Rom became aware of what had ailed him… and ailed him no longer.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," said Harriet, "but I woke up and I wondered if I could make a request of you?"

She had folded her hands and now with a rush of expectancy he looked down at her feet which she proceeded to fold also.

"What request would that be, Harriet?" he asked, matching her own grave and measured tones.

"Well, you said we were going to be married tomorrow, didn't you? Because of the special license?"

"Yes, I did say that. If you wish it, that is?" he teased.

How did she manage to look like that after the ordeal she had been through? Did she somehow consume and metabolize love; this extraordinary girl?

"I do rather wish it," said Harriet. "I wish it like someone who has been lying in a cold grave might wish for the day of resurrection. Or like an extremely hungry lion might wish for a Christian. And I mean to be immensely respectable and wear a mob-cap and have quarrels with you about the coal bill to show how independent I am. Only there is one thing I so very much want to do, still, and it isn't a very married thing. I know you don't approve of it and I do understand that, but it would make me so happy because you know how interested I have always been in Suleiman the Great."

He looked at her and felt the tears spring to his eyes, because after all she had been through she had kept the gift of laughter, could offer him what he longed for with such gallantry and grace.

"You want to creep from the foot of the bed into the presence?" he asked with mock severity.

Harriet admitted that this was so. "They weren't abject, the odalisques," she explained. "People have that wrong. They just worked very hard at love—it was all they had."

But Rom, aware that the time for conversation was running out, was applying himself to the practical aspects of the problem.

"Under the counterpane or over it, do you wish to creep?" he inquired.

Harriet's face crumpled into its urchin grin, acknowledging a hit. Then she raised her arms as does a child who wishes to be gathered up and in two strides he was beside her.

"We will creep together," announced Rom idiotically and carried her—this lightest and most beloved burden—to his bed.

Epilogue

"Hurry, girls!" cried Hermione Belper. "The bus will be here in a minute."

The "girls," however, were not easy to hurry. It was not as in the old days, when a word from their president had the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle jumping to attention. Now, ten years since they had last been to visit Stavely, the changing times had taken their toll. Bobbed hair, a penchant for rag-time and radical ideas of all sorts had spread through the ranks. Even Eugenia Crowley, one of Harriet's erstwhile chaperones, wore a skirt which cleared her ankles by a good nine inches.

But it was not the fact that the ladies no longer sprang to attention at her command which annoyed Mrs. Belper; it was the condescending and superior behavior of Louisa Morton, who had declined to accompany them.

"My dear, I regard Stavely as my second home," she had said snootily. "It is hardly necessary for me to go there in a charabanc."

The remark was quite untrue, of course. Harriet was polite and friendly to her aunt, as she was to her father, but Romain Brandon—who mercifully had come through the war with only an arm wound and a string of medals—always seemed to be absent or unavailable when the Mortons visited. What was true was that Louisa was compelled to spend more and more time looking after her brother, for since that extraordinary episode when his entire class had thrown him in the fountain and gone virtually unpunished, the Professor had become something of a recluse and now took almost no part in the life of the University.

The bus arrived. Mrs. Transom's daughter had died of Spanish influenza in the last year of the war, as had Mr. Belper, the president's undersized husband; but Mrs. Transom (now in her ninety-eighth year) seemed to grow younger every day and was easily hauled aboard by her attendant.

"This will be no ordinary outing, Cynthia," explained Mrs. Belper to her god-daughter, who was paying her a visit. "As I have told you, I have known Mrs. Brandon since childhood. I understand we are to be shown around by a member of the family and that there is to be a sit-down tea!"

As they drove in between the tall gates, the ladies were amazed by the change in Stavely. The Hall had been a military hospital during the war but now, three years after the Armistice, all signs of the army's occupation were gone. Making their way to the front door, the visitors passed through one of creation's undoubted masterpieces: a lovingly tended English garden on a fine day in June.

And sure enough, a member of the family was waiting to show them around! Not Harriet Brandon, shortly expecting her third child, but a tall good-looking young man with russet hair—the owner's nephew, who had grown up at Stavely and was to inherit Paradise Farm and a substantial parcel of land as soon as he came of age.

"That's Henry Brandon, Cynthia!" hissed Mrs. Belper, pushing her god-daughter forward and wishing that the girl's mother had had the sense to do something about her teeth. "Stay close by his side and ask questions. Gentlemen always like to tell you things."

Henry has shed his fears and his spectacles, and his good nature was proverbial. Nevertheless, his detestation of the "Tea Ladies" who had made Harriet's childhood a misery was almost as great as his uncle's. If he had volunteered to show them Stavely, it was by way of a thank-offering—for on the previous day he had won his long-standing battle with the man who had been more than a father to him. Rom had fought harder than the old General, for Henry was an excellent scholar and to let him turn down three years at Oxford seemed madness; but in the end he had conceded defeat.

"Go back, then, if you must. God knows they'll welcome you with open arms at Follina. I don't think the good times will come again, but perhaps one doesn't want them to—the world's a different place now and something can be done still, I'm sure. Alvarez' report actually throws up some interesting angles where the minerals are concerned. And of course Harriet will expect you to have the Opera House open again for Natasha's debut!"

If his offer to show the ladies around had sprung from gratitude, Henry found himself enjoying the tour, for he never wearied of pointing out the beauties of Stavely or ceased to take pleasure in the contrast of the cold, neglected house or his early childhood and the lovely cared-for place it had become.

"Goodness, who is that lady?" asked the buck-toothed Cynthia, who was obeying her god-mother's instructions to the letter. "She looks most unusual!"

They had reached the picture gallery on the top floor and that part of the house reserved for recent portraits of the family and friends.

"That's Galina Simonova—the ballerina. It was painted in 1913 after her triumph at the Maryinsky. That diamond star she's wearing was given to her by the Tsar."

The slight melancholy which attacked the ladies at the mention of the murdered Tsar was dispelled by the next picture—that of an imperious-looking, red-haired woman in a white gown, standing on the steps of a flag-bedecked mansion and flanked by a pair of elephants en grande tenue.