The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (15 page)

He jumped up at once and said with an impersonal kindness which many a girl in the six parishes would have recognised as ominous: 'So it is, and we have to get you home. I'll carry the flowers.'

So it ended, as oddly as it had begun. And perhaps the strangest thing about it was the memory which it left. It was natural that Damask should remember. But Danny? Danny, who grew into just such a stout, red-faced, top-booted, sporting farmer of the period as was to be immortalised as 'John Bull'--why should he remember and feel something stirring deep in his bulk when such a day visited the earth again, and sometimes shove aside, with an impatient gesture, the jar of bluebells which one of his daughters had set on the dinner-table, and distort the simple facts of what he remembered until it seemed as though he had been cheated? Why should he? Only the gods, the ones in the thicket and the One who tweaked the leash of a conscience, could answer that.

Danny was not at chapel, and he did not come to take Damask home on her June Saturday; but that was understandable. The hay harvest was in full swing, and from the moment when the morning dew had dried off until darkness fell men were busy. On that June Saturday Damask made the beef-pudding and a quantity of gooseberry jam; and Mrs Greenway, encouraged by the reception of the feather-stitching, embarked upon some real embroidery--true-lovers' knots and little posies. She also asked whether Damask had thought any more about the golden-brown lindsey, and Damask said she had had her quarter's money and had asked Miss Lee, the governess at Muchanger, to buy the stuff for her when she took Miss Amelia to the dentist in Colchester.

Damask was radiant that day; radiant with virtue, radiant with hope, for Danny had asked her to marry him. Once more she had proved the truth of the Bible. 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto thee.'

Richard Shelmadine had collected the quarter's salary due to him when he returned to Fort St George; and as a ship was ready to sail within two days, and there was nothing upon which to waste money during the voyage, he arrived in England with money in his pocket. Not being the man to take thought for the morrow, he picked out the most comfortable-looking hackney carriage, had his baggage loaded, helped in Linda, who was wan and frail from the last bout of sea-sickness, and said to the driver: 'Mrs Everton's; Soho square.'

Linda so far forgot her policy of non-interference as to say: 'We owed Angelina money when we left. She won't have forgotten.'

'Nor have I, my pretty one. It is not customary among gentlemen to regard a debt as a reason for patronising a rival establishment.'

The smooth snub was his instant retaliation to the criticism implied by her reminder, but it went almost unnoticed. The day was long past when reference to her middle-class origin could plant a barb.

'I thought Angelina had no rivals,' Linda said, and was rewarded by a glint of amusement.

'A true word,' Richard said.

Angelina Everton, born plain Aggie Stubbs, had spent the first thirty years of her life pitting her moderate good looks, her lively wits and her indomitable spirit against the world, which had received her unwillingly and promised her nothing but poverty, degradation and disease. She had served ale in a pot-house, exposed her limbs and sung vulgar songs on the stage, had been one of the gossamer-veiled 'virgins' in Mr Scudamore's shortlived infamous Temple of Diana--all before she was seventeen years of age. She left the Temple to become mistress to a foolish, wealthy young man who kept her just long enough to set her foot on the bottom of the ladder which led to the bedchamber of the Duke of Brittlesford, who, like the psalmist David, had 'waxed cold' with age and asked little but kindliness and comfort from his bedfellow. He had always promised Angelina that he would provide for her, she need never wrestle with the world again; but he failed in his promise, and when he died he left Angelina, then aged forty-two, nothing that he knew of. She had helped herself to the deeds of the house in Soho Square and coarsely invited the outraged family to take what action they liked to recover them. She had saved and swindled small amounts over the twelve years and had two thousand pounds laid by; she had jewellery worth perhaps a thousand more. She could have lived in modest comfort for the rest of her days; but modest comfort was not what she desired. Her tastes were extravagant, she craved excitement.

So she turned the house in Soho Square into...what, exactly? It depended upon what you were looking for. There was a great drawing-room whose four tall windows looked out upon an 'Italian' garden of reassuring primness and formality, and there, under the glittering chandeliers, ladies and gentlemen of the most unimpeachable character could gather to hear the best musicians and singers in London. Mrs Everton's fortnightly musical gatherings were something not to be missed by anyone who wished to be regarded as the possessor of taste. At other times the chandeliers scattered their prismatic lights upon livelier, but still formal, assemblies where the conversation and the presence of the literary celebrities and the even more renowned literary-minded great were the attraction. But Mrs Everton also catered for lighter tastes, I still well on the respectable side. She sponsored a number of fortune-tellers, giving preference to those of foreign origin; and lectures on every subject of fashionable interest had been given from the little platform of her 'Forest Room'--so called from the two or three dozen exotic plants, survivors of several thousands, which grew and hung and trailed against its panelled walls.

It was a large house, however; and the wide hall where the primmest matron in London might be seen drinking coffee or chocolate or sipping a glass of Madeira, the great drawing-room and the Forest Room--only entered by invitation or ticket--were far from comprising the whole. A few people--all men of liberal mind and catholic tastes --knew as much of it as was open to the public; but on the whole those who visited Angelina's ground-floor rooms were strangers to those above stairs, while those who visited the upper floor were seldom to be seen at the concerts and lectures below. On the first floor there were three public rooms: two devoted to gaming and one where food was served--excellent food, served grudgingly, purely for the convenience of patrons who could only spare a little time between games. Nobody ever went to Angelina's in order simply to eat. 'I do not run a chop-house," she said. And although behind the three public rooms there were a number of very comfortably appointed sleeping chambers, nobody could go there and hire a room; they were for the convenience of gentlemen who, playing deep, and drinking deep as they played were too late, or too early, to go home to their own beds.

But there was another staircase, another floor; a honeycomb of small, luxurious cells; each, one might say, occupied by a queen bee, about whom the male drones clustered. And now and then, as from humbler hives, one of the queen bees took wing, flew some distance and settled, the acknowledged ruler of some great house as Angelina had been in her day; and now and then, as in humbler hives, a male drone died, untimely. The clusterings, the flights and the deaths were all hushed away; everything concerning that topmost floor was hushed, discreet, secret. Just occasionally scandal broke loose; but Angelina had many friends. Quite a number of her queen bees had outflown her and attained what she had missed, married status; they, and those who had been content with less, were always ready to weigh in with the favourable word. After all, but for Angelina where would they have been?

Mr and Mrs Shelmadine were on their way to Angelina's. They would arrive, their luggage would be taken to some hidden place; Linda would go and sit in what Angelina called her 'Pretty Parlour' and Richard would climb the stairs towards the gaming-room. Habituees would say, 'Ha, Shelmadine, we've missed you', and would hardly know whether he had been away five days or five months or five years; and he would settle down and lose everything he had, and that would entitle him to one of the bedrooms at the back of the house, the charge for which, unless enough loose change remained in his pockets when he left the tables, would be docketed against him. Linda, in the Pretty Parlour, would be served with tea; would look through the current periodicals on the gatelegged table and wait...and wait. And there would be--one must admit and be philosophical about it--one night in a comfortable bed. It was folly to look beyond that.

'Mr Shelmadine, sir! Welcome back, sir, Madam, your servant!' The big Negro doorman, one of the features of Angelina's, whose greeting was--once you understood things--an exact barometer of your standing and credit in the house, was considering the unpaid debt, now five years old, surprisingly warm in his welcome.

'Miz' Everton, sir, sez whenever you come back, do it be in the middle of the night, she is to be told, sir. And you is to wait in the Pretty Parlour.'

It sounded as though Angelina did not intend to allow Richard on the gaming floor until that debt was paid.

One midget page--deliberately gin-dwarfed--led the way to the parlour; another vanished through the door which led to Angelina's own sacrosanct part of the house. It was the dead hour of the day, three o'clock in the afternoon, and the hall and parlour were alike empty. Linda sat down thankfully in the comfortable chair and began to glance through the new papers; Richard walked about, cracking his fingers and cursing in a mumbling undertone. They were not alone long; the door was flung open and there was Angelina with her inscrutable thickly painted mask of a face, the piled-up mass of dead white hair, the eyes as cold and black as flint. She never smiled, never frowned--perhaps on account of the false, china surface of her face; and even when she spoke she moved her lips as little as possible. Yet it was her mouth which indicated her mood. When she was angry her lips, scarlet paint and all, disappeared; when she was pleased they swelled, two sated leeches, the lower one more prominent than the other. She was pleased now. She stood in the doorway and dropped a mocking little curtsey towards Richard and at the same time shot a flinty glance at Linda. 'Welcome home, Sir Richard,' she said.

It was July. The hay from the common pasture had been cut and scrupulously divided among those who had rights to it, and the cows, with the calves born to them this season, were turned out to graze upon the tussocks which the scythes had left and the young grass springing up anew. In the Layer Field a glint of gold was spreading through the green of the corn; in Old Tom an embroidery of poppies and scabious and knapweed and thistles gave evidence that though he had lain fallow he had not been idle this season. The new Squire was up at the Manor and had already made two rounds of his estate, accompanied not by Lawyer Turnbull or Sir Edward Follesmark, who had attended to things during the interval, but by Mr Montague of Greston.

That was significant. To Steve Fuller, Bert Crabtree and one or two others who had for years hankered after enclosure, it was the star rising in the east, promising the imminence of the millennium. To a number of others, especially the freeholders on the Waste, it was a very ominous sign. Greston had boasted the biggest commonland in the East of England, its cottagers had been the envy of every village in Suffolk and Essex. Then Greston had been enclosed and all the Greston Common had come under the plough--Mr Montague's plough. And, as Sir Charles had so often said, forty decent families, hitherto self-supporting after their fashion, had been thrown upon the parish. If the new Squire meditated enclosing and took Mr Montague and Greston as his pattern, it was an ill look-out for those who lived in the cottages on the Waste. Matt Juby's old cow might cough day and night, but she kept the family in milk. Shad Jarvey's donkey might be of an incredible age, but, given time and enough stick, he could perform a number of profitable errands in the course of a year. If this new Squire, with his yellow-bilious face, went hobnobbing with Mr Montague, things would go ill for people like Amos Greenway, Shad Jarvey, Matt Juby--and Matt Ashpole.

Matt Ashpole owned a gun. It was old and demanded skill of its user, for it threw high and slightly to the left. Moreover, Matt was not legally entitled to own it at all (he did not hold a freehold of £100 a year or a leasehold of 150, pounds he was not the son or heir-apparent of an esquire or person of greater degree) and every time he fired-- aiming low and slightly to the right--he was committing a felony. Still, he had kept his gun, and more than once, when the larder was empty, he had used it, both in Layer Wood and in the coppice which lay between Bridge Farm and Wood Farm.

One evening towards the end of July he took out his gun, cleaned it carefully and loaded it, carried it to the place where the Waste ended with the Dyke and hid it there, under the gorse bushes, with a bit of sailcloth to protect it from any rain or dew which might fall. He'd had, in the past week, a little talk with his daughter, Sally; and he had seen the new Squire out with Mr Montague. And he had made his plan. Every evening, regular as sunset, Danny Fuller went down to the pasture to make sure that, whatever might have happened to other beasts, those belonging to the Fullers were on their feet and feeding well. Matt stood on the wooden bridge this evening, and when Danny came and jumped the little ditch between the pasture and the Lower Road he turned and hailed him cheerily.

'I got something up at my place that you'd like to see, and I'd like you to hev a look at.' he said. 'Got a minnit to spare?'

'What is it, Matt?'

'Something I picked up real cheap and want to get off me place. No room for it.' Matt said mysteriously. 'All right then, if you must know, thass a horse; lovely blood mare. But she was lame, see, hoppy-go-bob, off to the knacker's. I doctored her up and she's a clinker. Fred Clopton, he want her; but you know me, Danny, I don't favour Fred Clopton--all airs and graces these days. I'd ruther you had her.'

'I doubt if I could afford it, Matt.' 'Dirt cheap. Five pound.'

'Well ...' That might be managed. He knew now that he would never marry. He just wasn't made to stick to one girl long enough. And that reminded him. 'I don't much fancy coming up to your place, Matt. You know how it is.'