Haggard (32 page)

Her head came up. 'What do you want to know, Haggard?' she snarled, her lip curling. 'Where she puts her finger?'

Haggard threw her hand away from him. She rubbed it for some seconds, while her colour slowly faded.

'What are you going to do?' she asked.

'Get up,' Haggard said.

She hesitated, then slowly rose.

'Now go upstairs,' he said.

'Brrr.' Alison Haggard gave an exaggerated shiver. This place is cold. Cold, cold, cold. Pretty, can't there be more wood on the fire?'

'Coal, madam. We use coal,' Pretty said, and signalled a footman to empty one of the hobs into the grate.

'Our own coal.' Haggard sat at the opposite end of the dining table, with Alice in the centre and to the left, facing the fire, and looking from one to the other of her parents.

He wondered why he wasted the effort to speak. For the past month, indeed, he wondered why he did anything at all.

But he loved Alison. There was the amazing consideration. Or perhaps not so amazing. She remained the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He did not love
her;
he loved her body, her face, her hair, her lips. Even her disdainful eyes and her flaring nostrils were things to be loved. He hated
her,
but he loved her body.

A fact of which she was well aware.

'Coal,' she sneered, drinking wine. 'What an occupation for a gentleman. Have those invitations gone out?'

Haggard nodded. For she was determined to entertain. He wondered how many replies they would get.

'Boring people,' Alison commented. 'I shall be bored out of my mind here. We must pay a visit to town, Mr. Haggard. Of course we must. You must take your seat in the House.'

'In good time,' Haggard said. He had made up his mind not to return to Parliament until Pitt begged him to. Nor did he have any desire to experience either the pity or the pretended concern of Brand and his friends. They considered to be blackballed from White's the greatest catastrophe that could happen to a man. Well, he didn't give a damn for their silly clubs. He had never belonged to a club in his life. But now he had an additional reason for remaining in Derleth. He had no intention of taking Alison back to within reach of her sister. But to tell her that would be to provoke a scene. Better to leave it, he thought, and wait on events.

'Oh, bah.' Alison turned to Alice. 'Have you heard, Charlie has gone to sea?'

There was no end to her cruelty. Tears immediately sprang to the girl's eyes.

'Oh, stuff and nonsense,' Alison declared, it will make a man of him. Indeed it will. Little crybaby. They'll tan his backside for him. They'll have him climbing to the masthead in January, with icicles hanging from his fingers. You won't know him when he comes back.'

'Stop it,' Alice screamed. 'Stop it. You're horrid. I hate you. I . . .'

'Mr. Haggard,' Alison said. 'Are you going to permit this child to speak to me like that? She should be whipped.'

'You'd best go to bed, Alice,' Haggard said. 'Charlie will be all right. I promise you that.'

Alice sniffed up the last of her sobs, pushed back her chair, left the room without a word.

'Your indulgence does you no credit and the girl no good at all,' Alison pointed out. 'If you do not wish to flog her, you should let me. Her rudeness is beyond belief. I have never heard of a child allowed to leave the room without saying good-night.'

'I would not let you touch Alice with a ten foot pole,' Haggard said.

Alison glared at him for some seconds, her eyes pin points of angry amber. Then she pushed back her own chair and got up. 'No doubt I also should be sent to bed. I will say good-night, Mr. Haggard.'

She swept across the floor, and one of the footmen hastily opened the door for her. But before she got there she checked, and frowned. One hand went up to her forehead, and she swayed.

Haggard leapt to his feet, but the footmen were there before him. They caught Alison as she fell, gently deposited her in the nearest chair.

'In the name of God.' Haggard stared at his wife, the suddenly pale cheeks, the gasps of breath. 'Fetch Mistress Wring, quickly.' He fanned her with his napkin, held a glass of wine to her lips. 'The floor moved,' she muttered. 'I swear it.' 'You all but fainted,' he said.

She pushed the wine away. 'Ugh. The smell nauseates me. Ugh.'

'Mr. Haggard?' Mistress Wring stood in the doorway. The mistress is ill,' Haggard said.

'No,' Alison said. 'I'm not ill.' She attempted to push herself up, sat down again, and suddenly vomited, over the front of her gown. 'Ugh. Oh, God. Ugh.'

'Wring,' Haggard shouted in alarm.

Patience Wring smiled. 'Not ill, Mr. Haggard.' She came across the room. 'If madam will permit me, I will help you to your room.' She raised her head. 'Tis but the morning sickness, Mr. Haggard. You are to be a father.'

There was a moment's silence in the room.

'A father,' Haggard said. 'Well great God above. There's a happy event.'

Alison raised her head; vomit still trailed from the comer of her mouth. 'Happy?' she asked. 'Happy?' she screamed,
‘I
don't want to be pregnant. I don't want to have a child. Oh, Christ in Heaven, I don't want to have a child.'

Haggard smiled at her. ' Tis the business of a wife, my darling. Patience, you'll assist Mistress Haggard to her bed.'

Because there of course was the answer to all of his problems. All of Alison's problems too, even if she refused to recognise them. Pregnancy was a wife's natural state, and he was eager for children, children who would love him and respect him, not those who would hate him and fear him.

While for him, as that slender body became distorted, and as her face fattened as well, it was possible to regard her with more detachment. She remained an utterly beautiful girl, but he saw less of the beauty and more of the girl. There was the main cause of their trouble. She was still only approaching nineteen. Had he been of the same age he would have been more willing to wean her away from her obsessions, from her unnatural love for her sister. But he was approaching forty, and not inclined towards patience and understanding. Yet am I understanding now, he thought with some pleasure. Once she is a mother, and again a mother, and again, and once she is past twenty and growing into a woman, why then she will be all I desire. He remembered how Emma had matured from a suspicious little girl into a loving, and loveable woman.

If only there was someone in whom he could confide, discuss his fears and his hopes. He had never known loneliness before. It occurred to him that he
had
been lonely, as a young man, after Susan's death. That indeed loneliness had accounted for a great deal of his misanthropy. How perceptive Adelaide Bolton had been, after all. But he had not recognised it then, with the shallowness of youth. And once Emma had appeared on the scene he had had no time to be lonely.

Emma! He wondered what she was doing now, if she lived or died. Certainly the tinker had not attempted to return to Derleth.

But that was no indication that Emma still lived with him. Undoubtedly she would have further descended the scale of human existence, was now probably an utter whore. Dear Emma. She had come into his life at a most opportune moment, and he had loved her. But she had been setting herself up as a wife, without any of the rights of one. They had parted at the best time. It was a pity it had been so bitter.

But oh, what a pleasure it would be to have her to confide in, just for a few hours. He was even tempted by Mary Prince, as, with Alison indisposed, he found himself able to humour the girl once again to her gratification. But Mary Prince could not possibly be a confidante. She was a servant. She had to be nothing more than an extension of his personality, there when he wished her to be, out of mind as much as sight when he wished her to be.

He wondered if Alison was also nothing more than an extension of his personality. But she was his only hope for the future. In time, when she grew older, she would be able to talk with him and understand him, and dissipate his misery.

There could be no one else. Roger and Charlie had vanished as if they had left the face of the earth, so far as he was concerned. He kept track of them, from Roger's colonel and Charlie's captain. Roger was in barracks with his battery in Kent, as the international situation deteriorated, and was making a fine soldier, so it was said. Charlie had already made one voyage to the West Indies and back, would no doubt be an admiral in due course. But while his ship had been paid off in Portsmouth, and he had been entitled to a month's shore leave, he had remained on board. 'Perhaps,' Captain Trowbridge had written, 'you would care to visit us here in harbour, Mr. Haggard.' What, crawl to his own son? Charlie would discover, eventually, where his bread was buttered.

But they would never be friends, any more than he could be friends with Alice, who existed in a tightly-knit dream, never smiling, never speaking except when spoken to, often weeping. Marriage was the only solution for her. The very moment she was sixteen, which, he reflected, was not too far distant.

Nor was it possible to be friends with any of his parliamentary acquaintances. Where had that dream dissipated? In the scene with the Prince which had resulted in the blackballing of White's? In his obvious contempt for them, or in their obvious dislike of him? It would be different, Brand said, when Alison was again out and able to play her part. 'You should take a town house for next season,' he said. 'Entertain. Show them that you are not such a bad fellow after all.' And had flushed as Haggard had stared at him. They don't understand foreigners,' he had mumbled, adding insult to injury.

They had listened to his speech against the abolition of the Slave Trade. He did not suppose he had ever spoken better or more forcefully, and Pitt had congratulated him afterwards. But he doubted he had convinced many of them. The Bill had been lost, to the discomfort of Wilberforce and his supporters such as Clarkson and Sharp, but it had been lost mainly because the growing excesses of the French democrats were offending all right-thinking opinion in Britain, not because John Haggard had persuaded them that slavery was less morally wrong than economically essential to the well-being of the sugar crop. Once again they did not understand, were too wrapped up in their own affairs to see any importance in the world beyond the white cliffs of Dover.

And having said his piece, he had not been required to speak again, had been returned to that outer darkness reserved for back-benchers. Well, bugger them, he had thought, and abandoned Parliament altogether. If Haggard was to be ostracised, then there was sufficient for him to do in and about Derleth. As indeed there was, to a man brought up to the intimate details of managing a sugar plantation.

He at last persuaded himself to descend the mine. If he no longer had any temptation to have coal dust on his penis—or if he
was
tempted he could exorcise it in the arms of Mary Prince—the economics of mining, the understanding that this wealth did not have to be planted, but was just there, had been there for thousands of years, and would be there for thousands more years, no matter how much of it he took, was remarkably comforting. Of course coal did not produce a tenth of the income of sugar. And he had to pay people to mine it for him. But inexhaustible wealth, even if in a low key, was fascinating.

As were the other occupations of his tenants. He became an active farmer, to his mind a far more rewarding pastime than senselessly chasing foxes round the countryside. Indeed he barred Derleth to both the neighbouring hunts, and made himself as unpopular with the local gentry as with their London betters. Instead, he developed a herd of milch cows on his own estate at the same time as he followed with interest the activities and prosperity of the seven other farms in the valley. Not a week passed but he made a tour of inspection, and was happy to assist with money whenever it was
needed. So
on all of Derleth was sporting the new red roofs and the clean white walls which had been his pride at Haggard's Penn. Here at the least he was needed and wanted. His villagers might have regarded him with suspicion at first. They might not have forgotten how he had taken Mary Prince from the mine . . . but then the widow Prince was one of the most prosperous in the entire village, as her store of golden guineas grew. They might not have forgotten how he had thrown his domestics out of doors on a winter's day, never to be heard of again—but they had been black people and not really important. They might not have forgotten how they had been encouraged to oppose him by Parson Litteridge—but neither had they forgotten how he had walked into the midst of them to seek out and defeat Jem Lacey, straight up and man to man. And they knew that in his capacity as magistrate his judgements were given without fear or favour, and strictly according to the rule of law. He had achieved the respect he wanted, at least in Derleth. As he had been respected by his slaves in Barbados. Which did not mean they would ever lift a finger to save him from drowning. But at least it gave him a feeling of belonging in his own valley, which he knew nowhere else in England.