Theirs Was The Kingdom (51 page)

“I’m only vaguely aware what that letter contains,” he said, “but I’ve no doubt at all that you’ll find it useful as a disinfectant.”

Stead slit the envelope very methodically, the way he did with most things Adam noticed, and then settled himself to study the contents of two sheets of closely written writing inside. His expression did not change, but Adam noticed the slim fingers tightened their grip on the pages. Stead said, without curiosity, “Where did this come from, Mr. Swann? I’m sorry, but I must know that if I am to use it.”

“From Deborah Avery’s father. It seems he read your account of what happened when she was in Brussels. I think he sees it as his way of hitting back.”

“He’s obviously a man of parts,” said Stead, and now Adam noticed that he was excited and doubtless itching to put pen to paper. “I must say I’m uncommonly obliged to you. You would vouch for the authenticity of this?”

“I haven’t seen it and I would prefer not to. Deborah went over there with a list of business contacts I gave her. However, if it’s any help, I’ll say this. The man who sent you that information is exceptionally well-informed, particularly as regards organised vice. He has carried out investigations for me in the past, in commercial fields that is, and I’ve never found him wrong in the smallest particular.”

“I see,” said Stead, thoughtfully. “Well, I’ve been taking chances all my life and I’ll take one as regards this. I assume you would prefer Miss Avery to remain in ignorance as to the source?”

“I’m sure my former partner would. Otherwise he would have given it to her himself.”

Adam stood up, reaching for his hat and gloves. “I won’t detain you any longer, Mr. Stead. And as to Deborah, with reservations I’m prepared to leave her in your charge. We’ve all got something to contribute. How we do it is up to the individual.”

“Mr. Swann…”

“Well?”

“Essentially you’re with us. Why not admit it, man?”

“Concerning the traffic in domestics, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, things of that kind? I’m more with you than against you. But that doesn’t make me a crusader. I’m an apostle of a different creed.”

“What creed, Mr. Swann?”

“A man does what he can on his own patch, preferably a patch he’s cleared for himself. But he stops short of trying to reform mankind as a whole. As to where we’re going as a nation, I can only guess at that.”

“Could you define that guess, in general terms?”

“Yes, I could do that,” said Adam, genially. “It’s my belief we’re going to go on inflating the red, white and blue balloon for a long time. And then, one day, there’ll be an almighty big bang. But when that happens I’ll be gone, Mr. Stead. And so, most probably, will you.”

They shook hands across the desk and Adam went out into the teeming street. On the whole he was pleased with the encounter. It was not often, he thought, that a city gent left the presence of W. T. Stead with honours even.

One

1

I
T WAS GETTING ON FOR THIRTY YEARS SINCE HE HAD THOUGHT IN MILITARY terms, but devolution enabled him to see the network in the context of a never-ending campaign fought on a score of fronts.

The territories west to the Cornish peninsula and the Dublin Pale and north to the Grampians were his furthermost outposts, with settled country between them and his base of operations beside the Thames. The long lines of communication spread like a giant web across every shire in the four nations, wherever his polyglot army laid siege to factory, mine, warehouse, foundry, quarry, kiln, and emporium.

The shift of power made itself felt almost at once. Invested with the status of partners, men like Catesby and Bryn Lovell began to make vital local decisions without so much as formal recourse to Headquarters, and even relative juniors, like Markby of Crescent North, enjoyed flexing their muscles in the stream of reports that flowed south and east to where Tybalt and his clerks struggled to adjust to the fact that the latest conference had converted every regional capital into a miniature headquarters, with its own policy and its own overlord.

But if he saw himself as an ageing strategist so, in a different sense, did Henrietta, also engaged in a nonstop campaign and with outposts that were more remote than his. Headquarters, for her, was Tryst, where her reserves were mustered in the four younger children, temporarily held in check by her sergeant-major, the redoubtable Phoebe Fraser. But unlike Adam she had no well-established communications system, so that she was obliged to rely for up-to-date information on scrappy, infrequent letters and, in the last resort, guesses based on what she remembered of the quality of her troops plus occasional contemplation of the enormous family photograph album she kept handy on a shelf under her sewing table.

Of the nine of them, four were still under her hand. She could catch fleeting glimpses of the two elder girls, Joanna and Helen, as they scampered about the paddocks and stableyard on their forays into the Kentish countryside, and when they were about the house she could usually hear them, together with young Edward, who was learning to hold his own with them. Baby Margaret, a quiet, contemplative little thing, reminded her a little of Deborah when she was a child, but there was nothing contemplative about Joanna and Helen, who were both emerging from the hoydenish stage and developing into as pert and pretty a pair as one was likely to find, squabbling over trinkets or teasing one another over some fancied beau, or trying on dresses that gave them excuses to admire themselves in a mirror. Henrietta remembered doing this herself when she was shedding puppy fat and becoming aware of sly glances at dancing classes or garden-fetes, and would sometimes compare her own lonely girlhood with their gloriously untrammelled life in this great, whispering house that had adapted itself to successive generations of children growing up in conditions of warmth and security. Nobody had ever lived here who was not buttressed by money and social position, and Joanna and Helen would take these things for granted. They had never had to fight for them as she had when she made her grab at Adam Swann’s coattails on that Cheshire moor so long ago.

Well, let them enjoy it while they could. Soon enough, she supposed, both would be spoken for and whisked away and then there would be only two where there had been nine; and she would begin worrying about them at a distance as she worried, in varying degrees, about the four absent boys.

Alex, of course, claimed pride of place in her conjectures, for he was off and away again, this time to the cataracts of the Nile in the wake of that saintly General Gordon, the one the newspapers had so much to say about lately. It was weeks now since they had heard from him but she did not worry overmuch, despite scrappy reports of incomprehensible squabbles at places with incomprehensible names. A boy who could survive that awful shambles in Zululand could survive anything and at least, through her insistence, he was now a real soldier and an Imperial investment, and not a kind of hybrid likely to be considered expendable by fierce-looking generals like Garnet Wolseley and Roberts, or even saintly-looking ones like Gordon.

George was primarily his father’s worry. Home at Christmas after nearly two years’ absence, George had struck her as being a very suave and mature young man, able to talk fluently in French and German and obviously, if Adam was to be believed, benefiting from his Continental apprenticeship, although she could not imagine what he learned in foreign parts that he could not learn better over here where it was universally admitted that everything of the slightest use to anybody, be they black, white, yellow, or coffee coloured, was invented, perfected, patented, manufactured, and exported for profit.

As for Giles and Hugo, down at that remote school of theirs that she had heard so much about but never visited, they were off her hands too for the most of the year. She sometimes forgot them for days at a stretch until she suddenly saw them looking at her out of the stiff pages of the photograph album, two children, caught at various stages between nudity on a rug and self conscious circumspection in a studio portrait, outwardly and inwardly dissimilar in every way and yet, seen together, obvious brothers. They too, in a sense, were marking time like Joanna and Helen, and she had not yet made up her mind how and when to apply pressure to them, in the way she had applied it to Alex. Hugo, she sometimes thought, would make a perfectly splendid Life Guard, and put his four pretty sisters to shame in crested helmet and breastplate, but Giles was obviously not cut out for soldiering or business and it seemed unfair to expect Adam to be content with one son out of five. Perhaps she would have to wait a year or two and see how Edward shaped before heading Hugo into the army and Giles, as his brain clearly merited, into one or other of the learned professions.

There remained Stella, near enough to be regarded as a kind of family adjutant but a somewhat disinterested one these days, for Stella already had two fat babies of her own and was inclined to give precedence to her affairs and Denzil’s. Henrietta sometimes saw her as a friendly neutral who had made a separate peace and decided to put on flesh and complacency in that four-hundred acre farm of hers over the hill.

Such a lot of flesh and so much complacency, Henrietta told herself, without being able to resign herself to either, for the girl she visited once a week did not seem to need her now; and Henrietta liked to be needed, so that her resentment, ranging about for a focus, settled on her daughter’s weight, increasing shapelessness, and—she had to say it if only to herself—the happy-go-lucky sluttishness that pervaded in the big kitchen at Dewponds whenever a well-turned-out Henrietta popped in for a gossip.

If Henrietta Swann could have been said to have had an overriding preoccupation these days it was probably centred in the deteriorating figure of her eldest child. To a woman of her experience and disposition it was courting an unnecessary risk to let oneself go in that way and, by implication, to take a man, even such a moonstruck man as Denzil Fawcett, for granted.

For her part—and she made no secret of it when dispensing motherly advice— she had gone to tremendous pains to keep herself trim and elegant down the years. A man coming home from a toilsome day’s work needed a mistress as well as a wife, but when (tactfully for her) she brought the conversation round to this delicate point during one of her duty visits to Dewponds, Stella laughed aloud and then compounded the ridicule by saying, through her laughter, “Corsets? And a Sunday-go-to-meeting getup at this time of day? Good gracious, mother, however do you suppose I could pull my weight dressed in the kind of clothes I wore as a girl? And as for my figure, I’ll tell you something that might amuse you. Denzil was deeply concerned with the way I looked when we married. He kept telling me I needed fattening up, and urging me to take second helpings of pudding, especially when I was carrying Robert. You’ll never believe it, but I’ve put on nearly two stone since then!”

Henrietta did believe it but thought it nothing to boast about, and it pained her a little that a son-in-law should presume to regard one of her daughters as a heifer who needed fattening. “Well, it’s none of my business,” she murmured, “but just look at me, after nine children! I’m small-boned, I admit, but do you want to grow like the side of one of his barns? You, who once had the neatest waist in the county!”

“I did indeed,” said Stella, smiling, “and what did it get me?”

There was clearly no kind of answer to this, so Henrietta let the subject drop, hoping, perhaps, that Stella would tell her more about the miracle of her rehabilitation after Dewponds had burned down and she had helped Denzil to rebuild it. She never did, however, and Henrietta, reasoning that Stella would see her life as beginning with her second marriage, was thrown back upon guesswork, based largely on the exchange of glances between husband and wife whenever he came clumping into the kitchen in huge, mud-encrusted boots and Stella hastened to serve him and his men the kind of meal that a feudal baron might have given hungry retainers after a battle. And this communal eating at Dewponds, where master, mistress, and hired hands lived as a family, was something else Henrietta worried about.

At local social gatherings, at homes, croquet tournaments, and the like, she found herself very much on the defensive concerning her daughter’s remarriage and did not need to be reminded that it was still the subject of tittle-tattle about here. She sometimes wondered if Stella was aware of this and, if she was, whether it bothered her at all. But she need not have worried. If Stella Fawcett did reflect upon the world she had abandoned—a succession of soirees, hunter trials, hunt balls, and croquet parties—she would have almost certainly considered it well lost. As for the gossips, she had no time for them these days, for she was on the trot sixteen hours a day and revelled in all the demands made upon her. In private as well as public for, in this respect, had Henrietta but known it, she was very much her mother’s daughter. If possible, indeed, she was more smug than Henrietta had ever been, even when Adam returned home to find his wife not only in charge of his business but also the mother of a child he had not known existed.

The relationship that had matured between man and wife since they had set up house in the rebuilt farmhouse afforded Stella the greatest satisfaction as well as the greatest possible pride. It was something, she reasoned, they had built together on sure foundations, and now that Denzil was back on his feet, and had a little more time and energy for more playful aspects of their association, she sometimes counted herself the luckiest woman in Kent. For who could have hoped to have salvaged so much from the wreck of her life at the time of her flight from the Moncton-Prices? As for Denzil’s continuing adoration, she had no doubts at all regarding this. The plain fact was he worshipped her, had never really come to terms with his capture of her and probably never would, so that Stella, on the rare occasions she had a moment or two for reflection, contemplated this rather than her figure; and she decided that it had nothing whatever to do with the Swanns’ local ascendancy and money but concerned herself alone. Of this she had evidence every time they pulled the curtains after a long day’s grind in field, pasture, and kitchen.

It was as though, every so often, he would look across at her to reassess the plenitude of his good fortune, so that there were times when she imagined he was almost grateful to Lester Moncton-Price for rejecting her. Whenever Denzil came to her as a lover, he did it with the same masculine gentleness he had shown on the very first occasion. It was even difficult, under these circumstances, to initiate a renewed approach on his part, for she became pregnant within a couple of months of their spring wedding and the moment he learned of it he began to treat her as though she was made of spun glass. There were limits to complacency, however. She had no wish to be elevated to a pedestal that put her clear out of touch and in the end she was obliged to tell him so.

In the event, however, even this excess of gallantry proved an investment, for it helped, if obliquely, to moderate his shyness and introduce a gleam or two of humour into their relationship, so that he would sometimes tease her about her swelling figure when they were preparing for bed and the pride he took in it was really quite comic. Or would have been if she hadn’t found it so touching.

It was also enriching, she discovered, to be worshipped in this fashion and it sobered her sometimes to look back to a time when she had found his adoration ridiculous and embarrassing once it had become a family joke. Now she was ready to take shameless advantage of it, especially when she wanted her own way about something for the house.

There were tender moments, however, plenty of them as their first harvest was gathered in, and the raw buildings began to assume a permanent, weatherbeaten look. Sometimes, in the early autumn, after the livestock that claimed so much of his time had been tended and his men and boys had trudged off home, they would sit for an hour or so beside the blazing apple logs that he had sawn from windblown trees down by the river, saying little but savouring a sense of permanence that neither could have put into words. It was then, after he had stirred himself to throw another log on, that he would sit on his hams regarding her with a proprietary air, or rest his back against her knees where she could run her fingers through his hair, talking idly of this and that, with the placidity of a couple who had been married years instead of months. Only occasionally did his steady adoration find expression in words, as when he said, taking her in his arms one gusty October night, “Most farmers’d look for a son first off, I reckon, but I’d as lief it was a maid, my beauty. For then there’ll be a matched pair of ’ee around the house and that’ll suit me fine, d’ye hear?”