Ashenden (14 page)

Into what was becoming a long silence, he said, “I should like to exhibit the portrait at the Academy. With your permission, naturally.”

There was no response. He was beginning to worry when she turned to him, her eyes lit with laughter.

“You’ve given my husband such a big lance!”

“It is a mighty pole.”

“It’s an
enormous
pole. And it’s pointing at my head. As if he were about to knock it off.”

“There is a reason for that.”

“Oh? Do tell me.”

“It is to do with the composition. If you follow the line of the lance downwards—see here—and the upwards line of the stave Master George has over his shoulder—see there—they meet at the
center of the picture.” He smiled, in what he hoped was not too false or patronizing a manner. “Which is, of course, you.”

Well, the pole was something else. It had grown as he had painted it until it had assumed its monstrous proportions. What that lance said, what he intended it to say, was that the sitter had nothing to fear from the painter, but somehow he had managed, he saw now, to convey the reverse. He might as well have written “cuckold” on the shaft of the thing.

“I did not mean it to be so big.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry. He should be flattered.”

They drank a little, toasting the portrait. They drank a little more, toasting themselves. By then, they were in her bedroom, with its blood-red walls, and she was lying back on a divan, the silk folds of her dress silver in the candlelight, her breath rising and falling. In another woman, the pose would have been submission; with her it was capture.

“What are you thinking?” she said, holding his gaze.

He had never wanted her so badly. “I am thinking that this is how I should like to paint you.”

“Undo me,” she said.

*  *  *

David Maurice woke, his throat dry and his head thudding. The shortest night of the year and already the sky was thinning and graying into light. Beside him, Georgiana was abandoned in sleep, her bare limbs tumbled about in the summer bedclothes. He kissed her shoulder and she murmured and turned her head away into the pillow. Among the clothing strewn on the floor, the silvery silk, the underthings, were scraps of paper, and it came back to him in a little rush of memory that after their lovemaking he had drawn her. He reached over the side of the bed and picked up the pages. The sketches were quick and vivid, but he thought that his pencil did a better job when it was sober. On the back of one of the sketches he started to draw her again, voluptuous and lost in sleep, the little death.

It was then that he heard noises, although afterwards he was to wonder whether the noises had come first, whether they were what had woken him. At first the sound was indistinct and far off, some minor commotion, and he imagined that the household must be stirring, the maids already up and going about their work. Then it came closer and he recognized a voice. It was More’s.

*  *  *

More turned the handle and flung back the door. It was just as he had suspected. The grubby little Irish portrait painter in bed with his wife. The forked thing, the homunculus.

Fury seized him by the throat. “You!” The dirty tinker. He grabbed him, hurled him to the floor. Kicked him and kicked him again. “You! I’ll break every bone in your body, so help me God!”

“No!” said his wife, her eyes wide, her hair loose and tangled over her bare shoulders. “No!”

“Madam,” said More, lifting his hand to strike her, “how dare you shame me in this way!”

“I’ll come to court with you,” she was pleading. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

He hit her in the mouth.

*  *  *

Rose came to wake Mrs. Trimble when she heard the roaring and the screaming. By the time the housekeeper threw a shawl over her nightgown and went upstairs, it was over. They were all up by then.

Mrs. Trimble was known to be dependable in a crisis. She told Jane to sweep up the debris, sent Benson to her shrieking mistress, and dispatched Rose back to the nursery to calm the children.

She was heading for the pantry to fetch brandy when she found the visitor slumped halfway down the side stairs. One eye was swollen shut, his lip was split like a black fruit, and there was not a stitch on his back. In the kitchen she washed his cuts and helped him dress in the clothes she made James bring for her.

“I shall have you driven into the village. You must get yourself away as soon as you can.”

“I must save her.” His words were thick and his head was lolling.

“No one can save her now.” She took that lolling head in her hands. “Do you hear me? Get yourself away while you can.”

It was after he had gone that she discovered the dog dead on the loggia, its neck broken, its lively dark eyes dulled and glazed. Heaven help her, but she wept over that poor creature, who would never yap or make work for a housemaid again. She was wrapping Blanche in an old sheet, her tears dripping wet circles onto the worn linen, when More found her and dismissed her. She was to go directly, without a character, without pay.

T
he house slips through the fingers of the family who commissioned it, slips right away from them forever. Neglected for decades, on the brink of ruin and irreversible decline, it’s sold and, in the nick of time, saved.

Six years of industry and expense pour into the house. What’s unfinished is at last completed, what’s broken is mended, down to the last cracked glasshouse pane. The old makes way for the new: paint, paper, furnishings, cloth, carpet. No detail is left untouched or unconsidered. No corners are cut. Only the finest will do.

Everything is put in working order. Drains, cesspools, and ice well are all rebuilt; the roof is comprehensively repaired. Progress arrives. There’s running hot water, bells to summon staff in all the rooms, the conveniences of a new age. New gardens, new lodges, new gates, new cottages adorn the estate.

The house is full to the brim with life and activity. A large family, dozens of servants to look after them, animates its well-furnished rooms. A stream of visitors comes to admire and appreciate the richness of its appointments, the rare treasures hanging on its walls. For the first time in its history, the house serves the purpose for which it was built. After all these years, nothing’s lacking, nothing at all.

*  *  *

On a wet morning in late spring the three youngest Hendersons were playing, with some seriousness, their usual game. It was a game perhaps more suited to the outdoors but, like the best inventions, it was
capable of adaptation: if rain meant that furniture was forced to take the place of shrubbery, which itself stood for jungle, or staircases replaced trees as ships’ rigging, the children’s powers of invention were equal to the substitutions.

The game was “brigands.” When numbers allowed (visiting cousins, for example, or other children they were expected to play with), there were fierce sea battles; there might also be a mutiny that ended in walking the plank. Treasure was hunted with the aid of maps erratically spotted with sealing wax and aged by candle smoke. Today the boys were “stalking.”

To the uninitiated (and occasionally to participants), this variant of the game bore a resemblance to hide-and-seek. Yet there was a difference. To “stalk” you had to steal into a place—a room, a garden, a terrace—where unsuspecting others were gathered and inch around it undetected: not a single hiding place, then, but a succession of them, with the possibility of discovery at any moment. It was at times so exciting that you might almost stop breathing.

As a large family, the Hendersons naturally fell into ranks. Top rank, and so lofty as to be almost indistinguishable from parents, were the three eldest: Philip, who had recently returned from three years in America and was a complete stranger to John, the youngest, who didn’t remember him at all; Rowena, who was almost a second mother; and Albert, of whom they were a little wary, as he meant them to be. Middle rank were Caroline, who wouldn’t play with them anymore and cared only for what mirrors told her, and Wilfred, who was Wilfred. Reginald, Cedric, and John occupied the lowest rank, which gave them the freedom of outlaws.

“He is quite close,” whispered Reginald underneath the sofa. “He is within our sights. Muskets at the ready, men.” From his tunic belt he withdrew the musket he had earlier taken from the kindling basket.

“My muskirt is ready,” John said in his ordinary voice.

“Shh.”

“I have only my cutlass,” said Cedric. “But it is a trusty blade, sharpened fresh this morning.” His bandanna was slipping and he righted it as best he could.

They had slithered across the threshold of the little drawing room and were now peering through the fringing of the sofa’s upholstery at the legs of the room’s occupants. It was a low sofa and a tight fit, although very clean underneath.

“My muskirt is ready for blood,” said John.

“Shh.”

“Take your hand away. I
don’t
like it.”

“Shh.”

The feet of a maid passed by. A tray was set down. The feet padded off, muffled by carpet.

The house contained a great deal of furniture; there were many useful hiding places. On a signal from Reginald, the boys swarmed on their stomachs out from under the sofa, across a foot of Barbary Sea and behind a round table draped with a tapestry cloth that fell to the ground.

There was a tinkle of china and a murmur of voices in the room. “He raises the white flag,” said Reginald. “He knows himself surrounded.”

Cedric agreed that
he
was done for.

“My muskirt is ready,” said John, and they both clapped their hands over his mouth.

Across a hazardous strait they reached the lee of a fauteuil. Then a bold crouching dash across the foaming, churning waters and they sheltered behind its twin. They were quite near their quarry now and were experiencing that giddiness which felt, thought Cedric, like thousands of butterflies emerging from their cocoons in your stomach, their dry feathery wings tickling up your insides. (Cedric was a natural historian when he wasn’t a brigand.)

It was John, predictably, who allowed a few butterflies to escape.

“If you can’t keep quiet, you must go below to your bunk,” said Reginald in a hiss. “I say this to you as your captain.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said John, and a few more butterflies floated free.

*  *  *

In the little drawing room, the Hendersons, new owners of Ashenden Park and agents of its restoration, were taking a late breakfast.

The lateness of the meal was not indolence. It was design, a
scheduled point of contact in their busy days. Both had been up for hours.

Rain smacked against the windows. Such a cozy sound, thought Mrs. Henderson, applying herself to the egg in her eggcup.

Ada Henderson had a broad fair face and a figure to go with it. Only the set of her mouth and something sharp about her gaze hinted at the practical nature that had brought eight children into the world without losing a grip on one, and had supported her husband, James, in his commercial endeavors without his ever becoming unduly aware of the extent to which he relied upon her.

“I have had a letter from Mrs. Butterworth.”

“Have you?” said Mr. Henderson, lifting a napkin to his mouth. He was a square-built fellow with cropped gray hair that did what it pleased on the crown of his head, which was mostly spring up in various directions.

A little scuffle and skirmish in the room, and their eyes flicked away to note the stockinged legs of their youngest, John, poking out from behind a table draped with a tapestry cloth, then met again, amusement tightening the corners of their mouths.
That game again
was unspoken.

“And what has Mrs. Butterworth to say?” Mr. Henderson raised his voice.

“Mrs. Butterworth,” said Mrs. Henderson, also raising her voice to the required level of performance for their play-acting audience, “has most kindly accepted my invitation to spend a few days with us in a week’s time.” She referred to the letter that lay by her plate. “She will bring Florence and Bertram, although Mr. Butterworth respectfully declines on account of business.” The Butterworths had been their neighbors in Clapham before the Henderson fortune had been made and the family had moved to Harley Street.

“I see.” James Henderson forgot about the children under the sofas and behind the tables and laid his napkin, the white flag, beside his place rather too deliberately. “I was not aware you had invited the Butterworths to stay.”

“Oh, I have been meaning to invite them for some time. But now that we are truly settled and straight . . .” She was thinking of the interminable repairs, the plastering, paperhanging, the suites of furniture ordered and upholstered, the arrangement of pictures.

“This is a mistake.”

“The Butterworths are our oldest friends.”

“A mistake,” said her husband.

“We are not the sort of people, I should hope, who forget old friends. It has been ages—years!—since we were all together, and there is a limit,” she said, “how far friendship can be maintained by correspondence alone.”

“Have you thought this out, my dear?”

“There is nothing to think out. How could there be?” It occurred to her that they were quarreling. Many quarrels began “my dear.”

“Have you thought about the expense?”

“James!” She gestured at the room with all its new furnishings, and by extension the sweep of her arm took in the whole house and all its improvements and embellishments. “Surely we have no need to worry about that. After all we have spent on this place.” Her husband was a close man, some called him a very near man indeed, but she doubted that even he would tot up the cost of having dear friends visit for a few days.

“Not to us. To
them
.”

“But as our
guests
they need spend nothing.”

James Henderson regarded his fingers, which were short and stubby. “I am speaking of the expense of whatever they will have bought for the occasion. Which they will have bought for the sake of appearances.”