Theirs Was The Kingdom (13 page)

His pepper and salt eyebrows rose an inch as he said, “She arrived home safely? I’m glad to hear of it. I wasn’t deeply concerned, except for her foolhardiness. A lass who can sit a horse as she can would be likely to know every gatepost between here and Twyforde Green, by dark or daylight. Did she explain her extraordinary conduct?”

She could have fallen on him then with her umbrella. In a way he was already putting the onus of this ridiculous situation upon her. She had expected extreme truculence, icy politeness, violent abuse even, but not a mixture of irony and forbearance from a man who, twelve hours before, had plotted to deflower his own daughter-in-law. For a split second, no more, she questioned the truth of Stella’s rambling story, but then her mind cleared and she realised he had had plenty of time to rehearse his approach and had probably coached his son into the bargain. She said, flatly, “Of course you’ll deny everything. You would have to. Anybody would, unless he was mad as well as unspeakably vile! Ring for somebody to get me those things…”

But he interrupted her, saying, very reasonably, “Come, don’t be in such a hurry, Mrs. Swann. I haven’t the least idea what your daughter told you concerning that silly escapade of hers and you don’t have to confide in me unless you wish. All I’m concerned with is that she should return here before tittle-tattle gets about. That won’t serve your family or mine, Mrs. Swann. You surely agree with me as to that.”

She realised then that her position was not quite as strong as she had assumed it to be. The bare bones of Stella’s story concerning both him and his son were barely credible to anybody who had had a Christian upbringing and had been raised, moreover, in the south country, where life was softer and more civilised than in her native north. On the other hand, there seemed no other course but to lay down her entire hand and let him make what he could of it.

She said, clasping her hands on her lap, as though to prevent them doing violence on him, “See here, Sir Gilbert, there isn’t going to be a scandal if I can help it, but that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to expose my daughter to the risks any decent girl would run in your house and company. As to getting her back here, you can put that out of mind. Before we let that happen my husband would fight you and yours through every court in the land, and I dare say we should come out of it with less mud on our backs than you or your precious son. She’s
never
coming back, you understand?
Never.
I haven’t digested everything she told me, for much of it seems to me as dirty a story as one would be likely to hear outside of a brothel. But I’ve heard sufficient, and
believe
sufficient, to understand this marriage never was a marriage, and the law has a way of meeting that contingency. Or so my attorney assures me!”

She was relieved to note, in the blankness of the expression his seamed old face at once assumed, that she had rattled him, and went on, more confidently, “You see, Sir Gilbert, you’ve taken altogether too much for granted about us—my husband and me, that is. He’s well known and well respected in the city, whereas I’m not the ninny most women of my kind are, or like to pretend they are. I was brought up in a mill town thirty years ago, when things were far rougher than they are today. Neither am I the kind of person to be imposed upon, for ever since I married Mr. Swann he’s encouraged me to look things in the face and call a spade a spade when necessary. That girl of mine isn’t going to drag out her life tied to a man who isn’t fit to be anybody’s husband. Neither is she going to be at your disposal as a brood mare. You talk of scandal. Well, nobody wants it, and everyone in our position hopes to avoid it, but there are limits to the price one is prepared to pay for hushing things up. Your price is far too high. You follow me so far, I hope?”

“Perfectly,” he said, and although she could not have sworn it, there was respect in his voice. “There is one aspect, however, that you appear to have overlooked. Would anyone believe a story like that without proof?”

“The latter part of it? Perhaps not, for it’s hard to believe any man who sits on a magisterial bench would seduce his nineteen-year-old daughter-in-law. They would have to believe, however, that my daughter was still a virgin and that after more than six months as your son’s wife. That would go some way, I think, towards getting her an annulment.”

He seemed to consider this a long time. Sitting there, with the sour whiff of damp rot in her nose, Henrietta began to wilt a little, but she hoped she did not betray it and waited patiently until he said, reaching over her shoulder for the bell cord, “You’re a remarkable woman, Mrs. Swann. Quite remarkable, if I may say so. Very well, I won’t fight, providing the case is handled with discretion and that can be done with your husband’s kind of money. Just keep my name out of it, that’s all I ask. For if you don’t I’ll hit back at you somehow, you can depend upon it. It’s bad enough being saddled with a son like mine, without having to pull his damned chestnuts out of the fire in public. I’ll send the rest of her things over by carrier, unless your husband would prefer fetching them in one of his… er… carts!”

He could not have said anything more calculated to make her master her nervousness, or add fuel to her extreme indignation. A tradesman’s daughter herself, she had always taken pride in the name of the man she had married, a name, she calculated, that was not only more honourable than his, but went back a good deal further into the social roots of the nation. She stood up, meeting his bland stare unflinchingly, and said, “I don’t think you’re in any kind of position to insult us, Sir Gilbert. My husband’s in trade now but neither one of us has to apologise for that. Our money comes to us honestly, hauling goods about the country. Your kind live off the poor, generation by generation, without putting a penny piece back into the country. How did you come by this house, I wonder? Not by hard work, certainly. More probably by shipping negroes to the plantations. Or by taking the winning side in some quarrel between two sets of thoroughgoing rascals centuries ago! Maybe that’s why you think you can treat everybody but your own kind as if they were animals. Maybe that’s why you produce children who can’t even reproduce themselves, something any peasant in the land can do without much difficulty. I’ll tell you something else while I’m here. I never did like the idea of having grandchildren derived from your kind of stock and opposed it from the start. Well now, praise God, it can’t happen, and I’d see my daughter dead before I gave you a chance to alter that. Either you get those things or I walk through this ratty old house and help myself. And if you or any of those broken-down old wretches of yours try and stop me I’ll bring charges against you for common assault. And don’t think I couldn’t either. There’s a young man awaiting me outside who could break everyone’s head in this place and would take pleasure in doing it at a word from me.”

His expression had not changed, or not much. He was still looking at her, now with a curious intentness, his bloodless lips creased in a half-smile. Then, quite suddenly, his frame lost its rigidity and he looked, she thought, incredibly old and tired, as though all his years of dissipation had caught up with him in a single moment, causing him to lose interest in the game he had been playing with her up to that moment. He approached the bell rope with queer, shuffling steps and tugged it half a dozen times. She heard a cracked bell echo somewhere in the house as he went towards the door and threw it open.

“Danvers will get your daughter’s trunk,” he said, as the old man came hobbling to answer the summons. “You there—” he addressed the old ruin as though he were a dog “—take Sopworth up to Madam’s room and tell her to pack what she finds in a bag and bring it out to the forecourt.” Danvers nodded and disappeared again, and for a moment Henrietta thought Sir Gilbert would follow; Henrietta took a step towards the main door but Sir Gilbert hurried past her to open it, holding up his free hand in an arresting motion, so that she paused near the threshold.

“I said it once and I’ll say it again,” he said, getting hold of himself, so that his bearing was now that of a stiff, rather courteous old man, showing a guest to her carriage. “You’re a remarkable woman, Mrs. Swann, and a credit to that husband of yours. You’re right about one thing but wrong about another. We did make a fortune in the slave trade, but there was a time when my side of the family was capable of breeding women with your kind of sparkle. We lost the knack, somehow, inbreeding with the wrong sort. You’d show more care with horse-flesh, unless you wanted a string that looked well in the paddock but couldn’t last the distance, or fell at the first fence. For all that I meant what I said about hitting back at you if you cause a stir. I’ve got my pride, too, or what’s left of it,” and he nodded briefly and turned away, leaving her to descend the steps and cross the forecourt to the trap. A few minutes later the old servitor Danvers came out carrying a pigskin holdall and Stella’s reticule, that he placed in the back, whereupon Henrietta said, “That’s all, Denzil. Drive me home, please,” and was ashamed to realise that she was trembling so violently that he must have noticed her extreme agitation, although he had the sense not to comment on it.

They were more than a mile away, descending the dip to the watersplash, before she spoke again, saying, between her teeth, “Don’t lose touch with me, Denzil. And don’t continue to think of yourself as something beneath my daughter’s notice. You aren’t and won’t ever be. It’s all a question of time, you see. Families like ours and his go up and come down, sometimes in a generation. Maybe your turn is out ahead.”

2

The two letters were lying on a silver tray on the side table when she let herself in. A bulky package, with coarse, travel-stained wrappings, and a smaller, thinner letter, sealed with a thumb print impressed on red wax. She knew at once that the fat letter was from Alex and her heart, which seemed almost to have stopped beating after the terrible pounding it had taken during the day, gave a great, joyful leap as she shut the door on the darkness and carried the letter into her sewing room, without bothering to ring for the tea she so badly needed.

Her hands shook so much that she had the greatest difficulty in removing the complicated wrappings, but she got them off at last and found a much-folded newspaper, printed in coarse, heavy type, and inside its folds a five-page letter from Alexander, headed, “January 29th, Durban.”

She turned up the lamp and let her eyes run swiftly over the lines of sloping, boyish handwriting, absorbing the general drift of the letter before going back to the start and reading each successive sentence, word by word.

Its gusto, lightly camouflaged under a deliberately laconic style, took her breath away, so that for a moment she completely forgot where she was and joined him in his stupendous adventure thousands of miles away, spurring with him down the hillside with twenty thousand savages at her heels, swept along in the flight of a disintegrating army and then riding pillion with him on that hell-for-leather gallop for the river. Some of the episodes he recounted seemed familiar—that bit about the two young officers who had saved the colours for instance—and she had to think a moment before remembering that there had been a piece describing this single cheerful aspect of the lost field in the
Pall Mall Gazette
only a few days ago. The realisation that her flesh and blood had actually witnessed it acted upon her like a powerful stimulant, and she read on to learn how he had found his way along the river to a place called Rorke’s Drift, a name that already wore the halo of battles like Blenheim and Waterloo, so that the awful disaster preceding it was automatically downgraded to the status of a skirmish. Then, with rapt attention, she read of his part in that battle and how, when the Zulus had been driven off, he had gone down to the charred building to meet its defenders, including the famous Lieutenants, Chard and Bromhead, and how Lord Chelmsford’s relieving force had appeared that same day and Alex, along with other survivors, had been sent back to the coast to form the nucleus of a new army for the protection of the colony.

He was likely to remain there, it seemed, until reinforcements arrived and the Zulus were called to account, and learning this she felt relieved. It must mean that he would be denied any more bloodcurdling adventures, at least for the time being. Then she readdressed herself to the lengthy postscript, written, it seemed, just before he got the letter aboard a fast packet boat for England. It puzzled her at first, for it did not seem to have been written by the boy she remembered, a lad who had never had the capacity to look inward like his father or young Giles, and yet was able to tell her precisely how he regarded his miraculous escape. He had added, in pencil, “I don’t mind admitting there were times when I thought myself an idiot to have let myself be drawn into a thing like this, especially when I was hiding among the rocks and watching the battle for the mission house. But things looked different in the morning, with the Zulus all gone, and that splendid chap Chard counting the dead and rebuilding the barricades in case Lord Chelmsford didn’t show up. He didn’t seem to think he had done anything very remarkable, fighting off that horde with less than a hundred men at his back, but everyone here regards him as a real hero, and so do I, for he’s helped me make up my mind on one thing. I mean to go through with it. I can’t imagine settling to anything less after this and wondered if you could estimate my chances of getting into a decent regiment, where chaps don’t run away like my lot did, and like I did until I saw what could be done with a few trained men and a chap like Chard to lead them. In short, sir, it’s the Queen’s shilling for me from here on, but I shall, of course, have to see this through to the end until Cetywayo’s kraal goes up in smoke, and those beefy lads of his dip their plumes to us. You can write care of ‘Post Restante, Durban,’ and letters will find me, but now, as you can imagine after such a drubbing, we shall be at sixes and sevens until reinforcements arrive. Your loving son, Alexander.”