The Sleeping Sword (33 page)

‘I beg your pardon,' he said coldly, and although I had probably given him the excuse he needed, I had salvaged some minute part of my self-esteem.

It was not merely Sally but her mother who haunted me, and I was grateful to Liam Adair for including in his paper an article on the brutalizing effects of poverty and constant childbearing, describing as if it had happened to himself, my interview with that apathetic and defeated mother of seventeen.

‘You did well by me there, Grace,' he told me, ‘for she'd never have talked so freely to a man. Why don't you pay the
Star
a visit one of these days and see how it's done?'

And perhaps my own need for diversion and my even more pressing need to divert Venetia inclined me to accept.

‘What does it matter?' she still sometimes enquired, but increasingly her phrase would be ‘I don't care whether it matters or not', or even more positively than that, ‘I don't give a damn. Yes—I mean a
damn
'. And no doubt it was to provoke Gideon, to see how far she could go, that, on her way back from Galton with Gervase a week or so later, she stopped on the outskirts of town to attend—of all things—a cock-fight.

It had been very nearly criminal of Gervase to take her there. I knew it and could not defend him, for, impropriety apart, she had been in real danger among such rough company. I was shocked and furious, yet just the same profoundly grateful that he was not in the house the following evening when Gideon strode into the drawing-room and spat out the one word ‘Why?'

I had never seen him so angry, had never felt such a boiling of wrath in any man, but Venetia, instead of shrivelling in the heat of it, jumped to her feet and flew at once to the attack.

‘To see how men pass their time—to see what pleases them.'

‘Have you any idea who saw you there?'

‘Oh I don't care about that, although I know
you
care. And whoever saw me must have been there himself, so what does it signify? If
he
could be there, why shouldn't I? Have you never been there yourself, Gideon?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Oh yes, I've been cock-fighting many a time, Venetia, with the whores and the thieves—the rabble—yes.'

‘And did you enjoy it, Gideon?'

‘I may have done—once. What's more to the point is did you enjoy it, Venetia?'

‘I hated it,' she shrieked at him, her control snapping. ‘It was cruel and degrading and disgusting. I loathed it and I loathed
them
for enjoying it—even Gervase. It was foul. But don't take that to mean I won't go again—or that I won't do something else men do, just to find out why they do it, and why they tell me I must not. That is—if I feel inclined. You follow your inclinations, don't you, Gideon, so why should I not follow mine?'

If she had planned to take his breath away I think she had succeeded, for he seemed momentarily unable to speak, an incoherence which, had he not quickly mastered it, would probably have led him to strike her. And watching as she swayed a little towards him, her pointed face trying hard to be insolent, I saw that she wanted him to strike her and thought—perhaps—that it might be a good thing if he did. But what he gave her was not the hot flaring of anger which must have contained some spice of emotion, but his silence, his back turned towards her in a gesture of cool and fastidious dismissal. A bitter thing for them both.

We visited Liam Adair the morning after, Venetia and I, my coachman showing serious displeasure when I gave him the address of the
Star
, not, I imagine, out of any consideration for me but because it was not a neighbourhood in which he cared to venture his horses. And so from the start it was an adventure, the broad paved thoroughfares we knew giving way first to warehouses and old, half-used mills sagging listlessly by the canal bank, and then to the dingy row of lodging-houses, ale houses and cheap shops that was Gower Street.

The lower windows of the
Star
were still boarded over following Liam's dispute with the baking trade, there being no sense, he thought, in replacing the glass when he would surely offend somebody else ere long, and had we not glimpsed his printing presses on our way upstairs I suppose we could have been in the office of some small and slightly shady lawyer, a vast quantity of papers, documents, odds and ends, covering the surface of two battered desks, spilling from half-open drawers and spread in haphazard piles all over the floor; an air of comfortable confusion, a smell of cigar smoke, beer from the pot-house next door, dung from the street, and gas.

‘How very thrilling!' said Venetia, meaning it, needing quite badly to be thrilled, so that I glanced sharply at Liam, who had once been in love with her and who would surely not be unmoved today by her straight, fine-boned little body in its sheath of amber silk, her upturned face vivid with curiosity. Liam would have married her in place of Gideon. I wished he had. But her father had chosen otherwise, and catching my eye—reading my thought—Liam nodded to me as if in agreement, then shrugged and smiled.

‘Aye, so thrilling in fact that when the landlord comes knocking at the door I'm obliged to pass the hat round to pay the rent.'

‘Oh Liam, I fear you'll never get rich.'

‘Why should he wish to?' enquired a voice from the corner of the room, a head which had been bent—decidedly ‘at work'—since the moment of our arrival looking up now to reveal a dark, by no means handsome face, thin and intense, and at first acquaintance without humour.

‘Why not?' Venetia said, startled, having taken the man for a clerk, a menial, and being clearly taken off guard to hear an accent as pure and privileged as Gideon's.

‘Because we are not in the business of getting rich, Mrs. Chard. We are in the business of giving information or education or such assistance as we can—of giving. Naturally there is no money in that.'

‘Lord!' she said, rippling—as I had not seen her do for a long time—with laughter. ‘And just who are you? A saint?

‘He's Robin Ashby,' Liam said easily. ‘My assistant—my conscience. He doesn't believe in money.'

He stood up, revealing an angular, slightly awkward body, and we shook hands, telling each other we were ‘delighted'although he was clearly not pleased at this interruption to his work.

‘I was at school with your husband, Mrs. Chard,' he said coldly. ‘No, he will not remember me, although I believe he is acquainted with my cousin, Lord Macclesworth.'

‘Good heavens!' said Venetia, as we drove home, having spent the rest of our visit dutifully examining Liam's presses. ‘Lord Macclesworth's cousin, and did you see his threadbare coat and the state of his shirt collar? And his bones all sticking through as if he had not eaten for a week? He may not believe in money, but Liam should still pay him.'

‘He is probably the kind who gives it all away.'

‘Yes,' she said, still laughing. ‘And he is as ugly as a monkey too, poor thing.'

Gideon, when applied to at dinner that evening, did not at first recall the name. ‘Ashby? Don't ask me—Yes, just a minute, there
was
an Ashby—the
Wiltshire
Ashbys. Good family, but if he's the one I'm thinking of, I can't recommend him. He was expelled from school, and it strikes me they locked him up later on for debt or libel or breach of the peace, or some damned political thing. No, I'm not keen to renew acquaintance. Nor, I imagine, is he.'

We of course returned to the
Star
, my own interest claimed by the greater reality I found there than in Miss Mandelbaum's genteel petitions for the voting rights of middle-class spinsters; Venetia because she had discovered a new game in the baiting of Robin Ashby, a game she did not always play with kindness and did not always win.

Dressed in her elaborate and costly best, a diamond on her hand, emeralds swinging in her ears, a feathered and beribboned hat perching among her curls, she amused herself by flaunting a deliberate and quite false extravagance.

‘Come now, Robin Ashby, since you don't believe in money, what else is there to believe in?'

‘Freedom, Mrs. Chard.'

‘Nonsense. No one is free.
You
are not free.'

‘As free as possible. I own nothing. I have a coat and a change of linen, a few other necessaries which will easily fit into a small bag. Nothing detains me—anywhere.'

‘Yes, and that sounds very grand, but you are one of the
Wiltshire
Ashbys—Mr. Ashby—my husband has told me so. It is easy to preach poverty when you have all that prestige and wealth behind you.'

‘I have no expectations from the Ashbys, Mrs. Chard. I long since cut myself adrift from all that.'

‘You can't be sure. Supposing they called your bluff and left you a fortune?'

‘Then I should make the best possible use of it.'

‘You mean you'd give it away?'

He nodded and, suddenly disgusted with him, she rapped her parasol smartly against his desk.

‘What nonsense! What you really mean is that you don't want the responsibility. Is it true you were in prison once?'

‘Yes,' he said as calmly as if she had asked him the time of day.

‘And I suppose you are proud of it?'

‘No.'

‘Well then, I expect you enjoyed it—because you thought it made a martyr of you.'

‘There was nothing about it to enjoy.'

It had, of course, been a political matter, an inflammatory speech which had caused a riot in a cathedral town, six months of acute discomfort for Robin Ashby, who had suffered not only from degradation but from attacks of bronchitis and a severe fever which had nearly killed him.

‘Serves him right,' said Venetia when Liam explained this to us. ‘Insufferable creature that he is. Lord! Why do I talk to him?'

But talk to him she did, of freedom which she insisted to be impossible, of equality of opportunity which aroused her derision, of social justice which she declared to be a fool's dream, all these discussions taking place beneath the watchful eyes of Liam Adair and myself, who could see no threat in this shabby revolutionary, our idea of a crusader—and we both knew Venetia was ready for a crusade—being someone tall and bold and handsome like Liam himself.

‘What an idiot he is—what a child!'

But when I decided to give a ball at the start of the winter and wondered if Robin Ashby should be invited, she flew at me in a quick burst of temper, caused not by her unreadiness to see him at Tarn Edge but by the embarrassment my invitation might cause him.

‘Grace, have you no tact? You must know that he can have no evening clothes.'

‘Well, he is a Wiltshire Ashby and will know where such things may be obtained.'

‘
Grace
, he is not striking attitudes, you know. He means what he says. And why should we ask him to waste his time borrowing evening clothes, which would not fit, I daresay?'

But nevertheless he was an acquaintance, and a gentleman. He should, I decided, be given the opportunity to refuse. But the next time we visited the
Star
, Venetia, marching ahead of me, walked straight up to him and burst out: ‘Grace is having the dithers because she wants to invite you to her dance.'

‘And you do not.'

‘No. I don't.'

For a fleeting moment there was something beneath the studious intensity of his face, his habitual concentration on the task in hand, which could have been hurt.

‘Well then, since you do not wish to see me in your home, Mrs. Chard, there is no more to be said.'

‘Yes,' she told him, her face, drained of its mischievous sparkle, looking very small beneath her dashing, high-brimmed hat. ‘You would not like my home, Robin Ashby. I think you would find it rather a poor place.'

I had chosen to give a ball for no better reason than that the ballroom at Tarn Edge had not been used for its proper purpose for years. The time seemed opportune, for Blanche, who had produced her second son the year before with the same gracious ease as his brother, was at Listonby for the season, the Goldsmiths were once again in our area, staying with cousins in Manchester who would be delighted to cross the Pennines. And since the Goldsmiths
were
coming, since the affair was not to be confined to our local industrialists and our local squires, it crossed Gideon's mind that a certain Monsieur Fauconnier of Lyons and a Mr. Ricardo of New York were both in London with their wives and might appreciate an opportunity to travel north.

‘In fact,' he said, coming into my breakfast parlour one morning and handing me a list of names and precise directions as to where their owners might be located, ‘you might care to consider these. Merely suggestions, of course, but if one is to give a ball one may as well make the most of it.'

And I understood at a glance that his ‘suggestions'would involve me, not merely in a larger and more formal dance than I had intended, but in a considerable house-party, since the Fauconniers and the Ricardos, the Goldsmiths, the Brisbane Matthewsons and the Auckland Faringdons, could not be asked to stay at the Station Hotel.

There would be bedrooms which had not been used for years not merely to be ‘got ready'but to be made inviting, accommodation for foreign maidservants and foreign manners, trains to be met, gallons of hot water available at any hour of the day, the transformation of my home, for a day or so, into a luxurious, well-managed hotel.

It was a feat which Aunt Caroline had regularly performed for twenty-five years at Listonby, which she continued to perform at South Erin and at her elegant house in Mayfair. For me it was a challenge flung down by Gideon, and for his own good purposes, to which I eagerly responded, planning the whole affair, as Venetia said, like a military operation, immersing myself for days on end in railway timetables, dinner menus, breakfast menus, place settings, supplying Mrs. Winch with lists of everything I expected to find in each guest-bedroom when I came to inspect, lists of the dinner services I wished to be used, of the lace and damask table-linen I wished to be got ready, lists of who must be sent to meet which train and of the type of refreshment I wished to find awaiting each guest on arrival.