Theirs Was The Kingdom (10 page)

2

The vault-like stillness, the enduring silence of the house, and the terrible sense of timelessness it brought was not fully apparent to her until the January frosts had stopped the hunting and she lost contact with everyone she knew save Lester and his sharp-featured old father, and even their company was hard to come by, particularly when Lester’s crony, Ralph Ponsonby, was about the place.

Nobody save the old man ever addressed her unless she began the conversation and when she did they seemed to listen with ill-concealed impatience, so that they could get back to their racing gossip, or exchange one of their mysterious male jokes that made no kind of sense to her.

She and Lester were never alone, not for a single moment, for he had a room of his own along the corridor and had used it every night, even his wedding night, when he had shipped so much wine at dinner, and during the billiards match he played with Ponsonby later, that the head stableman had to be summoned to put him to bed.

The old man had stayed on, playing interminable games of patience on a board that rested on his knees, and in his gruff way had been considerate towards her, suggesting that she had a brandy and some of his shelled nuts before retiring to the great, dilapidated bedroom they had given her, where her trousseau was still waiting to be unpacked. She had no maid to help her. Women, if any were allowed above stairs, never seemed to come to this part of the house and that in itself was strange, for who made and aired the beds, and carried coals and hot water upstairs?

The bleakness and anonymity of the house had pressed hard upon her that first night and even now she had not adjusted to it. She never ceased to compare its austerity to the warmth and cosiness of Tryst, with its gleaming surfaces and smell of age, its continuity that did not run contrary to the vitality of newcomers like the Swanns but somehow enfolded them and coached them in its ways, graciousness, and durability. Courtlands was old, though not so old as Tryst, but its smell of the past contained elements at odds with these things. It had never, it seemed, been loved and cared for, and in the lower rooms old dust had gathered in the fabric so that instead of pleasant smells, like lavender and resin that pervaded Tryst, there was a whiff of mildew and damp rot. There was no kind of scheme inherent in the fittings and furnishings, for here and there pieces had been sold off to pay racing debts and their removal had never been camouflaged, as where the wallpaper that had once backed a picture or a Welsh dresser remained its original colour, in contrast to grimed sections that had been exposed since they were pasted there a generation ago. The gardens were neglected, too, for the entire household revolved around the stables, the only part of the mansion in good heart.

Loneliness, and a kind of dragging apathy, engulfed her from the first moment of coming here. The servants were mostly broken-down old horsemasters and ostlers, who seemed to regard the living quarters as a camp, and a temporary camp at that. But it was not the outward aspect of the place that troubled her so much as her isolation, a nineteen-year-old girl set down among so many ageing men, who paid her scant deference and seemed in fact to regard her as one of the young master’s doxies temporarily lodged in the house, and likely, at any moment, to move on bag and baggage to make way for a replacement.

She was not much given to self-pity and throughout those first few months had made a great effort to adjust to the translation from a background of cushioned comfort and hilarity, to one of near squalor and overall drabness, her happy childhood buttressing her against despair. But for all that, week by week, she sensed she was losing ground. Even Lester, who, now that he was her husband paid her no attention at all, admired her horsemanship and was amiable enough when they were mounted, but once the horses had been off-saddled and rubbed down he drifted off somewhere; either to supervise the training of one or other of his entries in the big steeplechase events, or to play billiards, or to drink and consort with his inseparable companion Ponsonby, a young man concerning whom she could discover nothing, beyond the fact that his stepfather had owned a horse that won the Derby and had once trained Lord Rosebery’s racehorses, but who seemed now to have latched himself on to the Moncton-Prices.

She had recognised Ponsonby as the major impediment to the marriage on that first, disconsolate night. It was Ponsonby, she was certain, who had talked Lester out of their honeymoon trip to Biarritz, now postponed indefinitely, for the flat season would open in a month or so and it was well known that the Moncton-Prices had entered their colt, Figaro, in the Epsom classic. She could forgo a cross-Channel trip in winter, but it was humiliating to hover on the extreme edge of this tight family circle waiting and waiting for Lester to use her as she had been led to believe all young men used their brides, particularly in the early days of marriage.

She was by no means entirely ignorant of men and men’s ways, having been raised in the company of two lively brothers not much younger than herself, and had thus come into contact with any number of their high-spirited friends at garden-parties, birthday gatherings, and Christmas celebrations at Tryst. At least a dozen of these young sparks had embraced her in odd corners of the house, and two or three of them had tried to adventure a little further but had been rebuffed, for Stella Swann had never, since putting up her hair more than five years ago, failed to put a realistic price upon herself as the eldest daughter of a man whose name was a household word; and she thought herself as fetching as any of the models used by Mr. Millais or Mr. Burne-Jones, or even Mr. Rossetti in their annual Academy exhibits.

Sometimes, once she had passed her fifteenth birthday and was beginning to think of herself as eligible, she would compare herself with one or other of the willowy heroines in these highly publicised paintings, telling herself that most of them, notwithstanding abundant tresses and large, soulful eyes, looked anaemic, whereas she, for her part, had just as much hair, a much healthier complexion, and curves in all the right places, so that it did not surprise her in the least that she was very popular in the ballroom, and much sought after at soirees and garden fetes organised by people like old Mrs. Halberton, the social lioness of the district.

She knew that she was not in the least clever like her courtesy-sister, Deborah, whom she had always admired and continued to admire, even though Deborah now showed unmistakable signs of turning into a blue-stocking. But men were supposed not to love clever women, so with her looks and her figure, to say nothing of her skill in the hunting field, she did not think she would have the least difficulty in catching a young man who would adore her and pay her far more attention than her jovial money-grubbing father paid his wife, who nonetheless continued to look at him (on those occasions when he was there to be looked at) like a spaniel bitch hoping to be taken rabbiting on the downs.

One man did look at her in that way. Poor, lumpish Denzil Fawcett, the farmer’s son over at Dewponds, who had rescued her after a tumble in a soggy ditch the far side of Cudham one autumn morning, carried her all the way home, and then succeeded in making a great nuisance of himself when his sheep’s eyes informed her brothers and sisters that she had made a conquest. But poor Denzil, who was really rather like Jan Ridd in Mr. Blackmore’s highly recommended but tedious novel, did not qualify as a beau in the way Alexander’s friend Bellchamber did; for Bellchamber’s père owned a scent factory, whereas Roger Stanton, one of the subalterns of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, who had brought her grandfather home after the Waterloo dinner, had an uncle in the House of Lords. She was rather sorry now that she had not encouraged Roger and used him a foil against Lester when the latter began to pay regular visits to Tryst, but he had arrived rather late on the scene, when she was more or less committed, and the prospect of being Lady Moncton-Price had put everything else out of her head.

Well, it was now far too late to ponder strategy, and it was up to her, she supposed, to overcome what she could only assume to be Lester’s shyness in regards to his role as a husband. She had always assumed, up to that time, that conquest was the male’s prerogative, and that a woman’s duty was to remain mysterious and elusive, even after she was “claimed,” as they said. But where was the profit in being elusive when nobody came looking? Shyness on the part of one’s husband sometimes seemed to amount to a kind of panic, as when she had gone to the door and called him by name on the fifth night of her marriage, and asked his assistance in freeing the top hook of her corsets that had become entangled in a loose thread of the brace.

Even now she did not know what to make of his attitude on that occasion. He had appeared almost instantaneously, looking very red about the face, and had remained standing just inside the door, a door he seemed reluctant to close, while she had recrossed the room to stand before the spotted mirror of her dressing table in a half-shed corset, voluminous white drawers and a rucked-up chemise she had been pulling over her head when the hook had caught on the thread.

Attempting to make allowances for his obvious embarrassment, she had said, over her shoulder, “Please, Lester… the top hook, it’s caught…” and had waited, almost willing him to make a joke about it—as Phoebe Fraser or one of her sisters would have done—and then, who knew, to embrace her from behind and lower his lips to her shoulder, so that she would at least
feel
married, even if what he did afterwards was frightening or a little painful, as her mother had hinted during that one rather embarrassing conversation they had had a day or two before the wedding.

But when she felt no touch and heard no movement she turned to see that the door was shut, and that he was on the far side of it and scuttling along the corridor to his own quarters, and she had felt so rejected that she tore the corset free, burst into tears, and sat half-undressed on the lumpy, uncomfortable bed. She admitted to herself then that he was as much a stranger as he had been when Mrs. Halberton had introduced him to her at the fete organised in aid of Polynesian lepers, although what a man like Lester could have been doing there was more than she could say.

After that things had drifted from bad to worse. Ponsonby, whose very presence she came to detest, was hardly ever absent from the house—a tall, foppish, ever-smiling young man about Lester’s age, with a very fresh complexion and mocking greenish eyes that played over her with a kind of contemptuous amusement, as though she had been an awkward puppy continually falling over its own blundering feet. Every night about ten ennui would drive her upstairs to bed and she would lie awake, listening to the rustlings in the house and the owls hooting in the limes about the lodge gates; around midnight or later, she would hear Lester’s boots clump past the door to his room down the corridor and once or twice, when they had been drinking too much, the honking laughter of Ralph Ponsonby.

Once or twice she half made up her mind to go to him and force him to discuss this curious and altogether unprecedented situation, but she never quite summoned enough courage, knowing that another rebuff on his part would drive them even farther apart, or that he might read into her approach experience with men she did not possess. Then again, when the cheerless Christmas had passed, she toyed with the notion of seeking Sir Gilbert’s advice, but soon realised that it would prove impossible to bring herself to the point of asking the leathery old man what a bride was expected to do in these circumstances.

When the old Colonel died, and they had travelled over to Tryst for the funeral, she almost brought herself to the point of raising the matter with her mother, who did give her some kind of opening just before they parted after the funeral tea. It was not fear or embarrassment that checked her but pride, so that she went home without, she hoped, having betrayed the fact that marriage to Lester Moncton-Price was a permanent twilight of expectancy, a waiting around for something ill-defined, nebulous, depressing, and utterly baffling in every single respect.

3

The climax came one blustery night in late February, about a month after the Colonel’s funeral, when the four of them—herself, the old man, Lester, and, of course, Ralph Ponsonby—had dined together and later adjourned to the only room in the house with the least pretensions of comfort: the big drawing room with heavily brocaded curtains and a great open hearth before which Sir Gilbert sat with his board on his bony knees and the little stacks of miniature playing cards that he used for his nonstop games of patience.

Lester and Ponsonby lounged in some thirty minutes later, their faces flushed with the port and brandy they had been guzzling, but soon they excused themselves and went off into the billiards room, where she could hear the monotonous snick of balls whilst she pretended to be engrossed in Surtees’s
Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities
, one of the few readable books in the musty library at Courtlands.

About ten she said goodnight to Sir Gilbert and went to bed, taking her time about undressing and dawdling in front of the small coal fire, one of the few luxuries she had secured for herself; she was sitting here, her toes on the fender, when she heard a prolonged rustle that seemed to come from behind the wainscoting, left of the fireplace, the side nearest the corridor where it turned a right angle to the stairhead.

She had heard pattering noises there before but had assumed it was caused by mice, and there were wainscot mice even at Tryst. This sound, however, was caused by something bulkier than a mouse, and she at once thought of rats and moved in stockinged feet a few steps closer to the wall angle, at the same time grasping the heavy brass-handled poker. Rats were unpleasant bedroom companions, but she did not fear them any more than she feared mice. She had often joined Alex and George in a rat-hunt in the stabling area at Tryst, and had even killed one on occasion. She meant to kill this one if she could. It would give her something to do as well as something to talk about in the morning.