Castle Orchard (8 page)

‘It is too handsome a thing. I should be tempted to purloin it.’

‘I suppose when I get my estate I shall have to have something to hang in it,’ Allington said, with a nearly imperceptible smile.

‘Why a whole estate? What is wrong with a little country house, a villa?’

‘I must have occupation.’

‘But surely you haven’t so much money you could buy one?’

‘Not yet.’

Tregorn reached for his hat. He said, ‘You continue to baffle me. I must go. Dreadful rabble on the stairs.’

‘Courtesy of my fellow tenant. He never pays for anything.’

‘Terrible, silly sort of fellow, but good-hearted.’

‘I am not sure I find him entirely so.’

‘Don’t come down with me. You will get a chill on your head or something. Lady Tregorn and I will always be pleased to see you at St Jude. You know that.’ Tregorn looked hard at Allington, as if looking could assist him in puzzling him out, ascertaining the state of his health, this man for whom he now felt responsible.

Allington suddenly said, ‘Are the lime trees flowering at St Jude?’

Tregorn had no idea. Though a countryman he did not necessarily notice such things. He said, ‘Now Allington, I will pay that allowance of yours, whatever your situation.’

Allington, from his window, watched his stepbrother go down the street to where the groom was walking the horses. In a moment his servant and Pride could be seen manhandling the picture, well wrapped, towards the door. Again he sat by the window, but now his mood had changed and he was sombre. He picked up the volume of Keats’s poetry, as if to recapture a lost moment, and started to read where he had left off:

Allington said out loud: ‘Ah, but only if it were like that.’

He got out his pocketbook. It was bound in green cloth and was larger than was convenient, about six inches by four. Pride made special pockets inside his coats to accommodate it, with a button and a loop to ensure its safety. The pocketbook was not exactly an
aide-memoire
because there was little Allington forgot, but he liked to write things down in it, sometimes a single word, sometimes a reflection.

Now he wrote:
John Keats died from consumption on 23 February 1821. Age 26. The squeezing of life from sick lungs, the coughing of blood.

He was aware of being so severely wounded at the age of twenty-three that he had been much more than
half in love with easeful death
. So many had died, with lesser injuries than his. For what had he lived, for what purpose, partially incapacitated as he was?

Pride came in and gave him a sharp look. He said, ‘You are not starting again, are you, sir?’

‘No, I’m better.’

‘What shall I do with this here picture?’

‘Lean it against the wall. I shan’t look at it now.’

‘Suppose I send round for Dan to bring you your longtailed grey. You could ride out to the country. You’re strong enough, that’s what I think. It would do you good. If you read all they books you’ll start thinking, and thinking ain’t good for you.’

Quarter Day had come and gone. It was July. Captain Allington had noted the going and the subsequent returning of his fellow tenant, with a slight cessation of the besieging forces of duns and creditors in the house in Half Moon Street.

It was a warm and sultry afternoon. He was seated at his desk, contemplating his accounts. He knew exactly what was in them. He could remember whole pages of figures without difficulty, but he liked to have his affairs in order, and order meant writing things down and making any necessary adjustments.

His one-time mistress he had paid two months’ rent and the wages for her servants. She was about to resume her career so that was to be the end of that. He stood up and went to his bookcase. His eye fell on a volume of Wordsworth. He took it down and went to sit in the window, opening the pages at random:

Here Allington stopped and laid the book down on his lap. ‘The child is father of the man’, he repeated to himself. ‘It is a wise father that knows his own child’. How complicated, the web of one’s inheritance and the stuff of which one was made. Had his childhood made him what he was? Or was he contrived entirely from that unknown being, Captain Frederick Robert John Allington, whose mother had been Spanish, which accounted for his appearance? That Captain Allington had died in Flanders fighting the French in 1793, a proceeding he himself had endeavoured to mimic more than twenty years later. The evidence of Spanish blood had been sufficient to convince him he was no son of Lord Tregorn. Even the soldiers, amongst themselves, called him ‘Spanish Allington’. It was not useful to cross-examine poets. They led one down unexpected labyrinths.

He got up and walked about the room. It was time he got out of London for a while. His portrait was there, leaned up against the wall. He still had not looked at it. Had he been cowardly for putting off the moment? He took a paperknife and carefully sliced down the wrapping, peeling it back. The process reminded him of a dressing eased from a wound.

A portrait of a young man in a Light Dragoon regiment ought to be neither remarkable nor painful, but painful it was. It jerked him backwards to what he had been, to lost youth, let alone lost health. The uniform was buttoned across the chest so there was nothing more than a rim of the brighter colour against the sombre blue of the jacket. He was bare-headed, cradling the felt shako in his arm, its short plume of red and white barely visible. There was a hint of the lavish gold shoulder belt, the epaulettes and the girdle, but little to distract from the face.

Allington said, in much the same tone as he used to the duns that flocked round Arthur’s door, ‘Good day, stranger.’

His younger self looked back at him with impatient eyes.

He remembered his mood at the time, impatient at sitting in the Bond Street studio, impatient with having a new uniform, impatient at the loss of his campaigning life and impatient at not being shipped straight to the wars in America. His stepfather had achieved for him the one thing that made him the envy of his fellows, a transfer to a cavalry regiment, but, unlike his fellows, he did not want it. He could not afford it. Lord Tregorn had paid for the uniform and insisted on the portrait, but he needed more horses, a charger, and the sort of allowance necessary for living with a smart set of officers. It was at this juncture he slid into the habit of raising the stakes when he played a game of whist or chess. It was not a perfect arrangement but it enabled him to pay his way.

How young he was, and what risks he had taken. The adventure, the constant activity, how much he had loved it. Looking at the picture, he wished he had been painted, if he had to be painted, in the brown uniform of an officer in the Portuguese service, but it would not have accorded with the grand notions of his stepfather, for whom he might have been some sort of plaything, to be shown off when suitable. He began to think of his company of Portuguese caçadores. Where were they now? Tending their olives, their vines, their sheep and goats, or so he hoped.

Pride came in. He took one look at the picture and burst into tears. After a moment he tried to summon some feeble self-control but, aided by alcohol, he only wept the more.

Allington said, ‘Go to your room, Pride. I shan’t want any assistance. You may occupy yourself by writing to your mother.’

This was the ultimate punishment and they both reflected on Pride not getting his sixpence. Allington, irritated by the world in general and more particularly by himself and his own servant, took himself away to the boxing salon to give serious punishment to the punching bag, a cure for a variety of ills.

Pride, sent to his attic bedroom, made an attempt to obey orders. He sat in a mild alcoholic haze and reread the last letter from his mother, which had run thus,

Her last sentence arose from Pride once having written, in an expansive moment, when extolling his labours on behalf of his master, that he slept on the floor by the bedroom door in order to be always at hand. His mother wrote to him at the beginning of every month with sentiments that varied little and always including the welfare, or otherwise, of his sister Sarah and her children, with whom she lived. Her notion of Captain Allington’s state of health sprang directly from her son’s repeated assurances that his master was too much of an invalid ever to be left. Pride, chewing his pen, had a pang of conscience as a vision of Allington’s present activities with the punching bag, let alone long days spent fox hunting or riding the grey round the countryside, rose before him, but the fib served its purpose very well in keeping him apart from his mother. What was more, he reflected, it was not wholly a fib, for it was hard to tell exactly when his master would be as prone as in the vision old Mrs Pride had of him.

He now wrote:

Pride thought a little alcohol a great aid to fluency with the pen. It was true Allington emptied out the sixpences, banked his savings, but he always allowed him a little pocket money for, he said, his dignity, even if it led to undignified conduct. His transgression on this occasion was owing to Lord Tregorn having given him a tip which had sat in his pocket until temptation overcame him.

Determined to do his duty whatever his condition, for his loyalty to Allington was unwavering, Pride crept out of his room in order to fetch hot water and lay out his master’s clothes for the evening, thus disobeying orders. The sight of the portrait brought on more tears but he succeeded in accomplishing everything he meant to do and was able to retreat upstairs just as he heard his master return.

Allington came in, washed and changed, making only a few minor alterations in what Pride had decided he ought to wear. He then walked to the Travellers. His presence effectively silenced the gossip and speculation on the subject of the death of Sir John Parkes. He said nothing and enlightened nobody.

Pride, having returned to his own room, sat down and allowed himself to be overcome by the deepest gloom, castigating himself for the drink and Allington’s disapproval. After a while there was a knock on the door and Emile came in. He gave Pride a look of such deep Gallic sympathy that Pride once more burst into tears.

‘Now, my dear friend, you must support yourself. What is the matter? Your master is not ill?’ he asked.

‘Oh no,’ Pride said, ‘but I’ve gone agin him and he never does care for me to be all in a state. It upset me so to see his picture to the life like he was the day we left for France and every day up to that Waterloo. A battlefield is a horrid place, like I told you, Mr Emill, with so many corpses huddled up over one another as far as the eye can see, and the minute the sun gets on them—’

‘Ah yes, so you did tell me,’ Emile interrupted him, fearful of receiving the descriptions all over again. ‘I beg you to think of something more cheerful. Now, tell me this, how did you come to be in the service of your master? Did you not save his life?’

‘So I did, but I’m not sure he wants it saved half the time. To be an officer’s servant in the Army is a privilege. Did you know that? A privilege I say, for you gets to look out to the baggage and need never go near the guns, though some servants follow their masters into battle, but my master never would have me do that. I was the worst soldier in the world and folks knew it. I could get out the pipeclay and polish better than any, but when it came to the fighting, I died every death. You mustn’t never duck when a cannon ball comes over – that’s cowardly, it might hit the man behind – but it’s mortal tempting, I can tell you, and what with the noise and the smoke . . . Captain Allington don’t think much of me. One night, when I’m on picket, we’re ever so close to the French. I has a little chat to the French picket,
parlez-vous
, we often does that, and he gives me swigs of brandy. His canteen were right filled with the stuff. Nicked it, I suppose. Well, you know me, a little goes a long way. Captain Allington is inspecting the pickets that night and I’m fast asleep, drunk as a lord. That may not seem a sin to you, Mr Emill, but it’s death to me. “Sleeping or drunk on duty before the enemy” is what they call it. Life is sweet when you’re young, even when it’s hard, but I’d rather die than be flogged. They tie you up to the sergeants’ spontoons and the drummers set about you with the cat, three hundred, five hundred strokes. If the surgeon says your pulse is weak they takes you down and packs you off to hospital, but when your back is healed, like, they straps you up again and gives you the lashes what you didn’t have before, and the regiment standing by to witness it. I’d rather be shot and that seems my fate when I wakes up and sees the master doing picket duty in my place. He gives me a cold, hard look and I knows I’ve no hope in hell but to run over to the French on the spot, but my knees is so feeble I can’t do it. Death, being quicker, thinks I, is better than a flogging and I might conduct myself more befitting. Terrified into sobriety I was, and I takes up the duty.