The Rape of Venice (22 page)

‘Good,' Roger nodded. ‘That would be in the event of your death; of course. And now, should you part company for any
reason? Shall we say twenty-five thousand?'

‘But … but …' Winters stammered, ‘such a possibility is not normally envisaged in a marriage contract.'

‘Your experience appears to be limited, Sir,' Roger said stiffly. ‘In good families it is far from unusual. If I am to leave my niece in India, many thousand miles from home, the least I can do is to protect her against the possibility of your turning her out of house and home. I am her uncle, remember, and, whatever she may say, I will ask the Court in Cape Town to forbid her marriage on the grounds that she is not yet twenty-one unless you agree my very reasonable requirements.'

For a moment Winters hesitated, then he asked, ‘May I take it that if I do agree you will raise no further objection to the marriage?'

‘Yes,' Roger nodded rather grudgingly. ‘My niece has made it plain that it is her wish; and I've no desire to quarrel with her, or yourself. But I've a duty to fulfil. Do you agree my terms and I'll say no more.'

‘It is a bargain, then.' The merchant held out his hand and Roger took it. Each gave the other a formal smile, then they separated.

As Roger turned away he could not remember a time when he had felt so awful. It gave him no satisfaction at all to know that, though Winters had got the best of him overnight, he had been made to pay for it by mortgaging a large part of his fortune in the morning. Now, if Clarissa could put up with him until he died, she would come into a hundred thousand pounds. That was fair enough. But if she chose to leave him at any time, he would have to pay her twenty-five thousand. And she intended to refuse him his marital rights while deceiving him with someone else. He would find out, they would quarrel, she would leave, and he, poor wretch, would have to pay up.

Roger felt that if he had been a professional swindler and Clarissa his moll they could not have devised a better plan for robbing an honest man of his money. As she was unaware of the arrangements he had made on her behalf, she was not quite as guilty as himself; but nearly so, as she was entering on the marriage with the deliberate intent to cheat. Yet, since he no longer had any hope of preventing the marriage, he had felt impelled to do what he could while he could to insure her against the future which she refused to contemplate for herself.

Only one thought came to console him for the part he had played, and it lightened his shame a little. His object, at least in
part, had been to provide Clarissa with a lever that she could use should Winters prove obdurate when, in due course, she asked him to procure an annulment. But now he realised that that would work both ways. Unless she decided to take the money rather than secure her freedom to marry again, it put Winters in a position to bargain with her. He could refuse to apply to the Court for an annulment unless she was prepared to forgo the twenty-five thousand.

Still sick at heart, Roger sought out Mr. Musgrove, the dried up old stick of a lawyer who had been one of their companions throughout the voyage and asked him to draw up a marriage contract on the lines agreed.

That evening he again took Clarissa up on deck and, in the shadows, pleaded with her to exercise a woman's privilege of changing her mind. He told her plainly that, greatly as he longed to have her in his arms, he would not even so much as kiss her until she was established in Calcutta; and urged her once more to postpone her marriage until their arrival there.

Angrily she took him to task for adhering to the letter of their agreement rather than observing its spirit. Calmly he countered her attack by pointing out that she would no longer be free to come and go as she chose, but sharing a cabin with her husband, and that, in the close confines of a ship packed with several hundred passengers and crew, it would be imposible to carry on an intrigue for more than a week without it being discovered. He added that the scandal of a bride betraying her husband on her honeymoon would be bad enough, but she must remember that everyone still believed him to be her uncle, so if they were caught it would be regarded as incest, into the bargain; and that being a criminal offence, the Commander might order him to be put in irons for the rest of the voyage.

These arguments swiftly brought Clarissa to reason, but she would not alter her decision to be married in Cape Town, as that would the sooner give them a more open field to become lovers on reaching India.

The next day passed in a bustle of activity as everyone was excited at the prospect of being on land again after so many weeks at sea. Before they went down to dinner, the vague blur of Table Mountain had already been sighted on the horizon. By five o'clock it reared high above Table Bay, a blanket of white cloud standing out against the blue sky on its flat top. The
Minerva
dropped anchor in the roads just as darkness fell.

Until the previous year, the Cape had been a Dutch possession, the Netherlands East India Company having used it as a naval base since 1652. From 1685 they had colonised it, but very few Dutch families of good standing had been persuaded to go out; so the first colonists had mainly been ne'er-do-wells, and batches of poor orphan girls sent out by order of the Government. Among the first settlers, too, there had been 150 French Protestants, driven from France by the Edict of Nantes. They were greatly superior in culture to the Dutch, but their numbers were insufficient to raise to any marked extent the general level of poverty, idleness and illiteracy. So great was the latter that after the colony had been shamefully negected by its Home Government for a hundred years, the majority of its inhabitants could not speak their parent language, but were using a meagre
patois
, called Taal, which consisted of only a few hundred words.

After the conquest of Holland in 1795 by the French Republican armies, Admiral Elphinstone had taken over the Cape, which was now held by Britain in the name of their ally in exile, the Prince of Orange; but few British families had as yet settled there, and the little town was still a poor ramshackle place.

When they all went ashore the following morning, Clarissa was bitterly disappointed to find so few shops and in them such a limited choice of materials for her trousseau. But Roger bought for her everything suitable they could find, and the Governor, who had received them most cordially, later, procured half a dozen needlewomen who set to work on garments that she had to design for herself.

The Governor had sent messages to the Captains of all ships in the convoy inviting them to dine that afternoon, and to bring with them a few of their principal passengers. Captain Finch selected the Beaumonts, Roger, Clarissa and, on account of her engagement, Winters, whom he would not normally have included. This big party, including a dozen of the leading colonists whom the Governor had also asked, numbered nearly seventy people; so the meal provided was a cold buffet, but such a gathering provided a delightful change.

Among the colonists were a couple named Marais. Both were descended from old French families through Huguenot settlers who had come out to the Cape a hundred years earlier, and they owned one of the best estates in the Colony. Clarissa was introduced to them and when the topic of her marriage
came up, both the Governor and the Marais agreed that it was quite out of the question for her to be married from, or spend the first days of her honeymoon at, one of the inns in the town, as even the best of them was hopelessly primitive. Everyone was anxious to be helpful to such a lovely bride; so it was decided that she should be married from the Residence by the Governor's Chaplain, and that afterwards the newly-weds should occupy the guest wing of the Marais's comfortable home until the
Minerva
was ready to sail again.

Captain Finch had already given them to understand that watering and re-provisioning the ship would take about ten days, and Clarissa had secretly made up her mind to make her stay on land with her bridegroom as brief as possible; so, in spite of Sidney Winters's pressing, she insisted that her trousseau would not be finished for a week, and the day of the wedding was fixed accordingly. Clarissa then asked the Governor's pretty daughter to act as a second bridesmaid; after which the ladies withdrew to further elaborate plans for the wedding.

As the men circulated the wine, the talk turned as usual to affairs in Europe and the progress of the war. A frigate that had left Portsmouth ten days after the
Minerva
sailed had reached Cape Town two days earlier; so it was the Governor who gave them the latest news instead of receiving it.

In June, the armies of Generals Moreau and Jourdan had launched a new campaign against the Austrians and crossed the Rhine, threatening to overrun Swabia. In Italy their colleague, General Buonaparte, was laying siege to Mantua, but it was said that the Emperor Francis had mustered a great army of Austrians, Hungarians and Tyrolese to send to the relief of this all-important fortress.

Before Roger left England, he had heard only vague rumours of an abortive conspiracy in Paris led by a man named Babeuf; since then a fairly full account of it had come to hand. After the fall of Robespierre, a strong reaction against the extremists of the Revolution had set in. Only a handful of the most notorious had been sent to the guillotine; a few, such as Tallien and Fréron, who had taken an active part in pulling the ‘Incorruptible' down, had by so doing saved their own skins and positions as leaders; but all over France the smaller exterrorists had been deprived of their offices and were being proscribed and hunted by the people of the middle-classes who had suffered at their hands.

In Paris these blood-stained criminals congregated regularly
at the Pantheon Club to discuss measures for their mutual protection, and their numbers had been swollen to over four thousand by other ex-Jacobins being driven from the Provinces seeking refuge in the capital.

As Roger had known, since it was his business to do so, there existed a secret club within the club, which was known as the
Société des Egaux
. Among its most prominent members were ‘Gracchus' Babeuf, the editor of the
Tribune du Peuple
, Antonelle, an ex-juryman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Jean-Antoine Rossignol who, as a General of the Convention, had ordered whole villages in La Vende to be burnt with their inhabitants in them. These, and others of their kidney, had planned yet another revolution, in which the Directors and the
Corps Législatif
were to be murdered and a Government of Anarchists set up.

They had endeavoured to win over the six-thousand-strong Legion of Police which was stationed at Grenelle, and was also largely composed of exterrorists. In May, owing to its semi-mutinous condition, the Legion had been broken up and one of the agents employed to corrupt it informed Carnot of the conspiracy. The Directory had acted promptly and on the eve of the insurrection had arrested Babeuf and his friends; so temporarily, at least, the capital had been saved from further bloodshed, and the Whites were still in the ascendant.

While listening to the rather garbled account of this conspiracy, Roger felt as though he were being told of events in another world. He had known both Antonelle and Rossignol and, little more than six months ago, had been on intimate terms with Barras, Carnot, Dubois-Crancé and a dozen others of the ‘moderates' who had now taken over the leadership of the Revolution; but during the long voyage he had hardly given them a thought. General Buonaparte's Italian campaign and Mr. Pitt's idea of securing the Serene Republic as an ally had, too, soon lost interest for him, simply because he had no possible chance of learning how matters were progressing.

During the next few days the company made up excursions to see the sights in the vicinity, riding through wooded country in which there were many trees and plants strange to them, to the vineyards at Constantia and to False Bay, and making the ascent of Table Mountain in basket chairs borne by native bearers.

On September 14th Clarissa was duly married to Sidney Winters. Roger, with a reluctance which he found it difficult
to conceal, gave her away and, with a genuine good will inspired by secret pity, did his utmost now to show friendliness to the bridegroom. A guard of honour was formed by Clarissa's officer admirers, Roger paid for the reception at the Residence, to which all the
Minerva's
passengers were invited, and stood free beer to the troops and crew. Half the town also turned out, so as the newly-wed couple drove away they were cheered by over a thousand people, and by six o'clock in the evening the greater part of them, both inside as well as outside the Residence, were well on their way to getting drunk. Except for Roger, and a few more thoughtful people, like the Beaumonts, who feared that a union between parties so divergent in age and circumstances could bring no lasting happiness, the whole affair was a roaring success.

On the evening of the 16th the
Minerva
sailed again. That afternoon, on coming aboard, Clarissa had greeted everyone with a good display of cheerfulness, but her face was pale and behind her smile Roger saw signs of strain in her blue eyes. She went straight to the double cabin that she was now to share with Winters, and it was not until the ship had sailed that Roger managed to get her a little apart from the other passengers for a few moments.

As they stood side by side watching the little town beneath the great mountain gradually becoming more indistinct in the evening light, he asked in a low voice:

‘Is all well with you? For the past forty-eight hours I have been consumed with anxiety on your account. Though I could not stop you, short of making us both notorious for the rest of our lives by creating some frightful scene, I've cursed myself a thousand times for letting you carry out your plan.'

‘I hated every moment of it,' she replied in an equally low tone. ‘He is uncouth beyond anything I had imagined. But I have no right to complain. I brought it on myself.'