Until the Colours Fade (22 page)

Behind closed blinds in the first of the family carriages, Helen Goodchild gazed tenderly through her heavy mourning veil at Humphrey sitting beside her. The strain of behaving with the stoicism he thought expected of him showed in the concentrated frown on his unhappy face and in the way he sometimes bit his lower lip to keep back his tears. For Helen, her son’s black silk top hat – the first he had ever worn – and grown-up surtout stressed his vulnerability. Ahead lay the ordeal of the public funeral in Flixton parish church, and then the private ceremony at the family mausoleum. She touched his hand, but he looked away, as though afraid that any overt sign of affection might break down his frail defences.

Helen felt her own eyes filling, not on account of her dead
husband
, but with anguish over her boy’s future. Three days before, the family solicitor had come from London at her request. The state of Harry’s affairs revealed by him had been beyond her worst imaginings. Not only would Audley House have to be sold, as Goodchild had always claimed it must, but the sum raised would not fully cover another mortgage he had taken out on Hanley Park. Since Joseph Braithwaite’s loan had been secured against the London house, after its sale other security would have to be given; and, since Harry’s Irish estates were entailed and could not legally be encumbered until Humphrey’s majority, the only possible surety for Joseph would be Hanley Park itself. Until the loan was repaid, their fortunes would depend on Joseph Braithwaite’s whims. Only knowing this had Helen understood her husband’s determination not to displease the manufacturer. Her only chance of repaying him would be to borrow from another source and pay the necessary interest; but with current income falling considerably short of expenditure, there could only be one way of achieving this. Having so ardently desired her freedom, the realisation that she must marry again, and quickly too, if Humphrey’s inheritance was to be saved, had been a crushing blow, which had tested her courage to the utmost.

*

Standing in the crowd opposite the church, George
Braithwaite
was perplexed to see little evidence of grief around him. Even in the worst of the Chartist troubles the shooting of a peer or magistrate would have been deemed an appalling outrage, but here, although some people were clearly shocked, a sizeable
minority
had evidently come only to see the soldiers and the
multitude
of carriages blocking the main street. The shops and inns being shut as a mark of respect, many people had brought food and drink with them in case, should the proceedings be
drawn-out
, they might miss any part of them. For those less provident, piemen and hot-potato sellers were at hand.

George listened to the tolling of a single muffled bell. On the opposite side of the street a troop of the 17th Lancers was drawn up behind a coffin draped in the Union Jack and resting on a gun-carriage. Thinking of the magnificent uniformed horseman riding across the churchyard on polling day, George felt a
numbing
sadness. Goodchild had taken his father’s money, while
despising
him, but George could not find it in him to remember him with bitterness. His weaknesses had redeemed him. He had not been invited to the funeral, but George had still decided to pay his respects, as much as a farewell to his own old life as a tribute to the dead man. His hopes of marrying Catherine gone, and his relations with his father no longer cordial, George had made up his mind to leave the town as soon as he could buy into a suitable infantry regiment – after the terrible scene in Horsefair, he no longer had any desire to be a cavalry officer.

Bare-headed among the villagers, George watched the family carriages stop outside the lych-gate. The crowd had become silent, and apart from the occasional pawing of hoofs and the funeral bell, the loudest noise was made by the road-sweeper’s shovel as he passed behind the soldiers’ horses disposing of the dung. At a command from an officer, whom George recognised as Goodchild’s adjutant, Ferris, six troopers heaved the lead-lined oak coffin from its platform and carried it through the lych-gate towards the church, led by a subaltern with his black plumed shako under his arm. As the procession of mourners moved towards the arch, George heard the Rector of Flixton’s sharp nasal voice rise above the murmurs of the crowd:

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live….’

George turned away and walked pensively towards his
phaeton
. Titled, handsome, rich, at least to start with, married to an acknowledged beauty … and yet unhappy. George derived no consolation from this reflection. If Goodchild had failed to gain
even a part of what he had desired, how much more unlikely that those less favoured would do so either.

*

After the first part of the service, Helen saw the coffin taken from the church and placed in an ornately carved hearse,
surmounted
by trembling black plumes and drawn by four black horses with feathers at their heads. While a coronet was being fixed in place on the black velvet pall, substituted for the Union Jack, a woman broke away from the crowd and before anybody could stop her, had kissed the side of the coffin. She turned to go but was grasped firmly by a coachman. A buzz of excitement and laughter rose from the crowd. Out of the corner of her eye, Helen was appalled to see Dr Carstairs coming towards them.

‘Let her go,’ she cried with an urgency and authority that impelled obedience. Released, the woman stared at Helen from behind her veil, and her tear-stained cheeks and anguished
sleepless
eyes cut Helen to the heart with their hatred and reproach, which said more clearly than words: ‘What did
you
ever care for him?’ A moment later, Carstairs, giving no sign that he
recognised
Helen, led his wife away. The incident was over in a few seconds, but after it Helen felt a tight choking feeling in her chest and her head swam as if she were about to faint; Captain Ferris took her arm and helped her into her carriage. Against the white facings of his uniform his face glowed scarlet. Although neither he nor Helen said anything, both were perfectly aware that the other knew the strange woman’s identity and her former
relationship
to the dead man.

While the hired undertaker’s ‘mutes’, with their long
mourning
coats and black staves, lined up on each side of the hearse, Helen sat alone behind the drawn blinds of her carriage and wept. The endless condolences she had received from Harry’s relatives and their compliments about her courage had sickened her before, but now the thought of their repetition was
unendurable,
and her crape flounces and heavy black bombasine dress seemed even more hypocritical than she had previously thought them. She imagined herself throwing open the carriage door and screaming hysterically that she did not care and had wanted to leave him; that she could not go on acting out a bereavement she did not feel because her husband had loved and been loved, and she had neither been the donor nor the recipient of that love. What right had she to pretend grief, when another woman was consumed with real sorrow? It took ten minutes to assemble the
cortège, and during that time she recovered sufficiently to submit to what was expected of her. When Humphrey got in beside her, she was quite calm again.

*

In spite of what many people considered a forbidding manner, Sir James Crawford was not without a wry sense of humour; and it had always amused him that Goodchild’s grandfather’s vanity had so far surpassed his dread of dying that he had built his final resting place on a prominent rise, so that its copper dome and tall pillars could be seen across the lake from every window on the south side of the house – the eye being drawn to it inexorably by an ornamental bridge and a commemorative obelisk on the far side of the water. Sir James was soon to see that aesthetic
considerations
had so outweighed practical ones, that a well-made road had never been built; and this omission made access to the mausoleum a difficult matter, especially when several days of heavy rain had followed a thaw, as was the present case. Although the ditchers had worked hard to drain and sand the track, the hearse still became bogged down near the obelisk, and again on the final slope up to the mausoleum.

Before their destination had been reached, Sir James and Charles, like many of the mourners, had been forced to leave their carriages and walk. By then the black silk stockings of the undertaker’s men were splattered with mud and their
case-hardened
professional gravity had been replaced by surly and
discontented
looks.

Sir James had reached Leaholme Hall only two days before the funeral and had been stunned to learn about Goodchild’s death, but some of the sting had been removed by Charles’s remarks about the late peer’s failings as a husband. Sir James had been very fond of Helen as a girl and young woman. Her father had been a close friend of his, until his death at the battle of Navarino, an action in which Crawford had also fought. It had been ironic, given his disapproval of the young Lord
Goodchild
, so recently come into his title, that Helen had first met her future husband while staying with her godfather at Leaholme Hall.

Built to defy time, in just under a century the stonework of the mausoleum had been so eroded by wind and rain that it already had a crumbling and leprous air. Tall iron railings stopped cows getting in from the neighbouring fields, and a low wall and paved surround kept the grass and nettles at bay. The building was
circular
and on two levels: a chapel above, the burial vault below.
Descending into the damp chilling darkness of the vault, with its man-sized niches – enough to contain generations of Goodchilds – Sir James shivered. The place looked like a giant’s uncared-for wine-cellar. Only some half-dozen of the holes had been bricked up. There was no piped gas, and what light there was came from flaming torches in wall-brackets.

The comicality of the bogged-down carriages and the
strangeness
of the vault had to some extent saved Sir James from
dwelling
upon the family’s loss, but when he saw Humphrey’s grimly pursed lips, trembling with the effort of repressing tears,
Crawford
was agonised – and not only by this present image of grief. Through his mind passed another procession: the dead he had known and loved, his wife among them. Remembering her, he had to struggle not to shed tears of his own. The fatherless boy also made him think of his own children, alone in England, their mother dead, and he as usual serving abroad. And had duty and ambition finally justified that sacrifice? Rear-Admiral of the Blue at fifty-four and no prospect of further advancement – his life a brief foot-note in naval history. He glanced at Charles, whose calm face reassured him; yet, recalling Magnus’s
rebelliousness
and Catherine’s present unmarried state, he could not escape a shaming feeling of remorse for having thought so much of his career. If Charles married, he would advise him, whenever ashore, to devote as much time as he could to his children; in his case the opportunity had passed almost, it seemed, before he had known it was there.

As the bearers approached the niche appointed to receive Harry’s corpse, Helen managed to dispel her fears for the future. The red glow of the torches, the lingering shadows and echoing footsteps in the macabre ‘gothic’ atmosphere of the vault – itself so much a creation of the previous century rather than their own – made it seem the perfect setting for Harry’s funeral. Like this building, he too had been an anachronism, belonging more to the age of pig-tails and Hessian boots, sedan chairs and prize fights than to the more staid and pious 1850s. She remembered him telling her with pride how he had once got up on the box and driven the Brighton stage-coach to London the entire fifty-two miles. And now, with the railways supreme, the last three or four stage-coaches in the country would soon be gone. It was not
sentimentality
or nostalgia that moved her, but the thought that if she had not married Harry, she would have liked him. She would have enjoyed his stories of Crockford’s and relished their humour, if she had not been involved with his debts; so too with
many of his other activities. She glanced at the niche next to her husband’s, and knew that, unless she married again, the day would come when she would lie there, divided from him in death, as in life, by a wall. A moment later she was surprised to find
herself
silently crying.

Charles Crawford could not see Helen’s face through her veil, but he noticed her shoulders moving slightly, and smiled
inwardly
, impressed at the way she was acting out the part of
grief-stricken
and disconsolate widow. The idea that her sorrow might be genuine did not cross his mind; but her hypocrisy did not
disturb
him; being a convinced conformist, he liked to see the proper moods and feelings conscientiously displayed on the right occasions; that Helen could summon up grief to order, seemed to him praiseworthy rather than reprehensible.

Since Goodchild’s death, Charles had found it impossible to suppress a stirring of new hope. He alone, of all the people in the vault, would know about her true feelings for her late husband. His very presence at this private burial was surely a clear
indication
that later she would once again confide in him. Because of the press of mourning relatives at Hanley Park, Charles had delayed calling on her as deliberate policy. But now he regretted this. Two days after Goodchild’s death an unwelcome
communication
had arrived from the Admiralty requiring him to appear as a witness at a dock-yard inquiry into the loss of
Euryalus,
his last ship, which had sunk, not under his command, but later during sea trials, following her conversion to steam. He could not very well go to Hanley Park in the week after the funeral, and therefore could not expect to see her before the New Year, since the inquiry would be sure to last until the middle of December, by which time Helen would have left to spend Christmas with relatives.