Speak Its Name: A Trilogy (18 page)

My eyes travelled with the introductions. The mother was a ship of the line, impressively wide in dark lavender. She seemed as if her timbers would creak in the slightest breeze. The young lady, suitably pink about the ears and cheeks, was as pretty as any of a hundred ladies out in the sunshine, all of them armed with large nets to catch whatever suitors had limped home from France. In these less selective times, a suitor who may have been sure to be rejected by many a young lady might now find himself acceptable if he came blessed with the full complement of arms, legs and facial features. I knew of Miss Pelham from my father’s recommendations, although due to circumstances, I had not met her before. My father had expressed his views and I was under orders to fall in love where directed.

The dowager bent her head in response to my father and introduced the young man sitting beside her, dressed sombrely in black. “My nephew, Adam Heyward. After my brother of course.” She sniffed into a black laced handkerchief. Her brother, I knew, had been gallantly crushed by his horse at Hougoumont.

The young man, given his curtain, rose and bowed, and as he did so I felt something stir within me. It seemed a little like concern—a similar lurch to the insides that I recalled feeling when my eldest brother’s child rode his pony too fast. I was appreciative, I reasoned later, that perhaps that Lady Pelham’s horses were restless and that by standing, the young man was in danger of being thrown out, for he did not seem at all steady on his feet. But I wondered at my approbation all the same and was only deflected in my reverie as I saw my father fairly bristling beside me. I should have been prepared for this, for as we had circled the park he had been making his usual tally of men not in uniform.

“Not all men had the opportunity...” I had said not ten minutes before, but it was as far as I had managed; my father’s tirades on the slackness and abject cowardice (as he saw it) of a man who didn’t offer himself up as cannon fodder was well known, particularly to me, as since my regiment had returned to the capital, I was the only son now left at home and the only audience to his lectures.

“Well they should have!” he had declaimed, far too loudly and drawing the ear of all in the vicinity. “Don’t see how they have the gall to live in a country they’re afraid—afraid, do you hear me?—of fightin’ to protect! We’ve rid France of Boney. Let ‘em go and live there!”

Banishing someone to the wilderness of France was, to my father, who rarely set foot further south than Canterbury, the most revolting punishment. To consider anyone happy to live in such a place was beyond his comprehension, and should anyone dare suggest that France did in fact have some qualities that he might enjoy, he would go puce in the face and appear in some danger of apoplexy. I may have served my time under fire, but I was not as brave to be positively foolhardy.

It seemed that Lady Pelham knew his views as well as I, for she looked anxiously from her nephew to my father. I spoke before my father could say anything further, gaining myself a grateful smile from that lady, a blush from Miss Pelham and a cool look from the young man in black. “I knew your brother well, Lady Pelham,” I said. “A most gallant officer.” In truth, Major Adam Heyward had been a drunkard and a bully, and his heroic charge into the French lines at Hougoumont had been caused by a bullet in his horse’s rump. The matter had been hushed, (the bullet rumoured to have come from his own brigade), and Major Heyward had posthumously received honours he could never have hoped to attain in life.

Lady Pelham was suitably touched, and in consequence invited us to their town house that evening to dine. My father was delighted, so much so that I was grateful to drop him at his club. His enthusiasm at the meeting, which I was soon to realise was hardly accidental, and his subsequent ebullience at the invitation was overwhelming, and without a word being spoken between myself and Miss Pelham, it appeared that I was already married and buying furniture for town and country.

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In which the circumstances of myself and others are explained, a visit is made and the value of a pair of fine eyes is considered.

Now that you have met some of the principal players in this tale, a few sketches are needed to help you navigate the plot as it unfolds.

I am the child of my father’s autumn. Ten years after having lost his first wife to influenza, my father married again.

I have no memory of my mother, and though, naturally curious as a youngster, I tried to glean some information about her, I found it impossible. “Your mother’s name is never to be spoken in this house,” my father had said and he had refused to discuss it further. Stubborn as any infant, I went to my brothers. I went first to Charles for enlightenment and thereafter to Edward, but they were both silent and referred only to father’s instructions, both forbidden to speak of her, even in secret, and I grew to manhood as ignorant of her looks and her manner as I would be for a stranger of whom I had never heard. That she was alive, or had been when my father had divorced her, were the only two facts I ever learned, and there was no kindly aunt or favourite cousin who might have informed me further. I did not, heartless child that I was, follow the tradition of a little boy left alone in a masculine house bereft of feminine influences. I heartlessly declined to harbour any deep emotional need for her and my curiosity waned by degrees. My brothers had warned me to say, if my peers were to ask of her—and they did—that she was dead. I did not understand the import of this until I was much older, but I trusted my brothers and did as they bade me.

There was no thought of me not joining the army. England had been considerate enough to be at war for so long that she had trained, injured, and killed Chaloners in every generation. I was raised in a nursery (and I can only assume that my nursery-maid must have been as war-like as my father) that had walls decorated with bloodstained flags and with stirring pictures of men dying gloriously. I rode a dappled rocking horse replete with fiery eye and flared nostril, and I was more adept with a wooden sword than ever I was with a quill. I should, of course, were this a novel, assure you that this conditioning did nothing but make me eschew the very thought of war, that I would march against my fellow-man only reluctantly, if at all. And if I did so, it was only to rescue my companions or other such nobility.

But of course this would be untrue. With such a rich tradition of soldiery in the family, I thought as little of going to war as I did of anything else I knew that I would be doing in life. I did not race to meet it, for I knew that when I was sixteen, there would be a war willing to welcome me. I never doubted for a moment, at a bloodthirsty seven, that when my brothers marched away, I would not eventually join them.

Wiser and more lucid minds than mine have discussed every aspect of the war against Napoleon, and I will not speak of it more than is necessary. This tale has little relevance to it. In fact I came out of it relatively unmarked, as did my brothers, and if my father was disappointed that the generation of Chaloners that he had provided had not sacrificed one of its number as was the custom, surprisingly he did not enlighten us on the point.

I was then, that spring, living back with my father after years of campaign. The necessity of living with my father was very real, for although at twenty-six I wished for the independence my own rooms would give me, a major’s half pay did not make this possible.

As you may have already surmised, my father was a man of distinct opinions, and our close habitation was at times uneasy, for both of us were used to our own way. He had been of a bombastic nature all his life, and in my turn, I had long been used to the autonomy that the army provided. However, between my father’s club and my administrative duties, it happened that we met rarely enough; breakfast and dinner being the times when such skirmishes were likely to take place.

Such encounters were eased, therefore, when we were invited out to dine, and I dressed that night with the satisfaction that, for all his forthright and frank exchange of views with me over many subjects, he did at least know how to behave in company. I could not help but think, as I slid into my dress uniform, that I was rather glad that I had it to wear; men’s fashions, always a rather obscure and specialised subject to me, who had been in uniform for ten years, appeared, by the display in the park that day, to be spiralling into farce. Surely there must be a limit to how high a collar should be, or how many ruffles one could have at one’s wrist without losing the use of one’s fingers? The young man—Adam Heyward—had been the only young man I had seen who had not been dressed like a peacock, and it had pleased my eye to see him dressed soberly in neatly tailored black stuff, his chestnut hair cut fashionably short, if teased rakishly high at the crown.

My father, as usual, was ready before me; great-coated in anticipation and pacing in the hall when I appeared. I was rather hoping for a bracer before the fray, but he was impatient and waved away the manservant with a gloved hand.

“About time!” he barked at me. “Kept your men waiting like this, did you? Needed to look the dandy at Las Bras?” I suppressed an answer. It served no point and as all I had done was pull on my dress uniform, and had not, as my father had done, dressed painstakingly in the latest fashion, it would only make more of a disagreement. I climbed into the carriage behind him, and one of us sat in silence whilst the other complained of the state of the roads, the appallingly slow encroachment of the gas lighting, and the ruinous prices he was having to pay his equipage.

The carriage was dismissed at the door; my father, with his usual omnipotence, was certain of the weather and it was “no distance.” I was as sure as if he had said the words aloud that he was thinking that it could be no distance for me in particular, for I had once admitted to him that I had often given my horse to a tired or wounded soldier and had walked the roads of Europe with my men. That my father would object to such coddling hardly needs to be stressed.

The Pelham house was lit with no seeming regard for economy or concerns of ostentation, quite contrary to my father’s housekeeping, and had it not been for the Honourable Miss Pelham, no doubt lying in wait within, I would wonder what on earth my father could find in common with our hostess. We were relieved of our coats and announced into the drawing room. As I have said, I had visited the house once before, when Lord Pelham had been alive. He had been a man of serious tastes and had filled his life with the study of politics and philosophy. I remembered the visit clearly for I had trouble staying awake during the after-dinner discussion. Miss Pelham had been too young to attend, if I remember, and Lady Pelham, the only lady present when I dined there last, had retired and had not appeared again, no doubt well used to her husband’s pursuit of the intellectual.

If I had expected more of the same, I was pleasantly surprised. Gone were the great and the gloomy, and it seemed that in their place Lady Pelham had filled her salon with a younger and much more lively set than ever her husband had entertained.

As I bowed low over the good lady’s hand, I couldn’t help but be aware of my father’s reaction. With a speed that left me startled, he offered Lady Pelham his arm and led her to her seat, whereupon he sat beside her and was a man transformed; smiling and nodding at every word from her lips.

To save myself gawping like a landed trout at this miracle, I accepted a glass and stood solitary for a moment or two, appraising the company around me; Miss Pelham was seated on a settle by the windows, surrounded on one side by another young lady and on the other by a bluff old gentleman with great ornamental whiskers. I shrunk back to the fireplace and assumed a pose, wondering if the evening was going to be as dull as it already threatened to be. I was acquainted with no one in the room, and now that my hostess and her daughter were apparently occupied, was unlikely to be so. It was with some relief, then, that I spotted young Heyward making his way through the room, and I remember my feeling of very real surprise when I saw that he assisted his progress by use of a cane, and even with this support he limped quite badly. Here then, I realised, was the explanation why he had seemed so unsteady in the carriage that afternoon, for I had noticed no cane with him there.

I noticed, too, that he made little impression on others as he passed, that he was almost ignored. It was not that the guests were ill-bred enough to cut him, for he was the nephew of the hostess after all, but an atmosphere seemed to hang on him and infect the company so that he passed unseen by most and addressed by none.

I thought for a moment that he would pass me without acknowledgement and I felt for his solitude; he seemed to have noticed his isolation, as his face was set into a sulky scowl which, on a less attractive young man, would have seemed disfiguring, but with him, it merely dimmed his light a little. I stepped forward and held out my hand, blocking his path through to the window seat, happy to have an acquaintance, happy enough to put myself forward.

“Mr. Heyward. It has been a while since I have been here, but there have been some changes made, I think.”

He stopped and with practised grace swapped his cane to his other hand and shook mine with a warm, firm grip.

“And I don’t know if it is for the better,” he said. “Chaloner, isn’t it?” His voice was as warm as his hand and his eyes, dark but sparkling like torchlit caves, seemed to laugh, even if his face did not.

I asserted the truth of being whom I could not help but be.

“I have met your brothers,” he said, “they are both at my club. They have spoken of you.” Each sentence was punctuated with a small pause and he seemed to search my face with his eyes as if waiting for a reaction. I could think of little to say that would be of any merit to his ambiguity. “I have to be frank with you,” he continued in a confiding manner, smiling for the first time since our introduction, “that before I met you in the park, I had it in my mind to dislike you a very great deal.”