The Flood-Tide (4 page)

‘She saw it in unhappy circumstances,' Charles said. ‘With you beside her, and her daughters being honoured, she will see it differently.’

Allen smiled and let him have his way. There existed a great affection between the two men, despite their differences of character and opinion. They were distantly related - Allen's mother had been a Morland - and Allen had spent some years of his childhood in the household of Charles's grandmother, Annunciata. They had met for the first time in the exiled Court of James III in Rome, where Charles had served for many years until his brother's death had called him home to assume the title. Allen, serving the King of France, had sometimes been sent there as an envoy.

The servants came in, bringing Allen's supper, and Charles talked idly of this and that while Allen assuaged the first pangs of hunger. Then he said, 'I wonder what you would think to serving the King again in some diplomatic capacity? This American business, you know, will need some clever talkers. You met Franklin this morning, I believe?'

‘I did, and needed all my wits to conceal that I understood but one word in three of what was being said. What on earth is the Tea Act, and what has it to do with the East India Company? I have been abroad for three years, remember.'

‘Oh, it's a very good notion,' Charles said, looking as pleased as if he had thought of it. 'You remember how the Americans made such a fuss about import duties that North was forced to take them all off, except the tax on tea?'

‘Which he maintained as a symbol of our right to tax the colonies?'

‘Exactly. Lord knows, it's only a token tax - threepence in the pound, much less than
we
pay - and the late wars cost us dear in the defence of America. Why shouldn't they pay something towards their own defence?'

‘Because, my dear Charles,' Allen said drily, 'no-one likes to pay tax. It's against human nature.'

‘At all events, they don't pay it. There's so much Dutch tea smuggled in, that not one cup in a thousand drunk over there is made from taxed tea. And as for stopping the smuggling - as well try to nail the north wind to a tree. But to hear the colonists cry, you would think they were being thoroughly abused, robbed and enslaved. Hence the Tea Act.'

‘Yes?' Allen said encouragingly. Charles frowned, marshalling his thoughts. He was not a quick man, and found it hard to tell a story in order.

‘The East India Company - you know that it has been near bankruptcy?'

‘Yes, and there would be the Dark Gentleman to pay if it went under.'

‘So the Government has paid its debts, and the Tea Act allows the Company to ship tea directly to America, without passing it through London. That means no London duties, and no middleman's profit. Which means that even after paying the import tax in America, it will still cost about half the price of the smuggled tea. So the Company will make a profit, the colonists will have plenty of cheap tea, and they will pay the tax without complaint so we won't lose face by removing it. And the smuggling will stop for lack of business.'

‘It sounds like a wonderful scheme,' Allen said. 'I hope it works.'

‘But it must work,' Charles said indignantly. 'It is so reasonable.'

‘Yes, my dear Charles, but men aren't,' said Allen from the depths of experience.

There was silence for a while, while Allen finished his supper, then Charles said, 'So you will go home tomorrow? I shall miss you, but I suppose you must be eager to see your family.'

‘Do you only suppose it? Think how you would long to see your Ann and your little Horatio and Sophia.' The death of Charles's first wife, from whom his fortune derived, had left him so well placed that he had been able to marry an entirely portionless woman for love, by whom he had had two children. His son by his first marriage was away at Oxford.

‘Yes, but I should never go away from them in the first place. There are penalties, you see, to being clever. I stay safe at home, and have all the credit of being your brother-in-law. Family is a wonderful thing.'

‘Indeed. And talking of family,' Allen said, stretching his feet to the fire, 'I had meant to tell you that I visited your Aunt Aliena while I was in Paris. She sends her duty to you, and keeps remarkably well, considering her age, though her eyesight is worse. She cannot read now.'

‘She must be - oh, eighty-five or -six by now,' Charles said. 'Astonishing that she has lived so long. Do you realize that when she was born, King James II was still on the throne? How the world has changed in her lifetime!'

‘But you are a long-lived family. Your grandmother was nearing ninety when she died, and your father lived well into his seventies.'

‘Yes. Still, I don't suppose she can last much longer.'

‘I think she feels that herself. She wanted to know whether you will continue the pension after she is gone,' Allen said. Charles looked blank.

‘Should I? I don't know. I inherited the pension from my father and brother, and never much thought about it.'

‘Your father began it so as to support your aunt while she brought up the child!'

‘Yes, the mysterious child! He must be well grown by now,' Charles smiled.

‘He is twenty-seven,' Allen said. 'You could consider him independent. On the other hand, he has no other form of income, and family, as you have said, is a wonderful thing.'

‘Well, the amount is not much, and I have no wish to inflict hardship on him. Does his grandmother leave him anything?'

‘Aliena will leave him the house, which was bought outright for her in the beginning. They have moved, you know, from Clichy to the Rue de St Rustique, on the slopes of Montmartre, within sight and sound of the convent at the summit. She can hear their bells, and makes her devotions by their divisions. It comforts her a little, I think. It was hard for her to give up her orders. She goes up to the convent for Mass, and is a great favourite with the nuns. But she was always loved.' Charles looked at him curiously.

‘I know a little of the story, of course, that Aunt Aliena's daughter produced this child and died doing so, and that the child was carried away to be concealed in France, and Aunt Aliena left her convent to bring him up. But you were a party to it all, you must know a great deal more. Won't you satisfy my curiosity?’

Allen shook his head. 'It would do no one any good for the secret to be known. The arrangement was made so that young Henri could be brought up in obscurity and though I acknowledge that you have the best right to ask questions, I beg you will not.'

‘I knew you would refuse me,' Charles sighed. 'But I love you for it. Well, as to the pension, do you recommend that I continue it? You have seen him - what sort of a man has he made?'

‘He is very handsome, very charming, and popular. He is well liked at Court, speaks sensibly, has the entrée everywhere.' That was the truth; but Allen hesitated, wondering whether to add the rest, that he was a rake, and a gambler, and that the move to the smaller house had been made by Aliena in order to pay off his debts; and the further, unspoken truth, that he was breaking his grandmother's heart. In the end he said cautiously, 'It would ease your aunt's anxiety greatly to know that you would continue the pension to him after her death.’

That was enough for the good-hearted Charles. 'Then I shall do it. Will you write and tell her so? I should wish her to be happy, and after all, the young man is of our blood. One does what one can.'

‘Bless you, Charles,' Allen said.

CHAPTER TWO

 In the days of the first King Charles, an ambitious master of Morland Place sent one of his younger sons to the New World, to settle some land along the banks of the Chesapeake in Maryland. Enthusiasm was high in those days, and hopes higher, but the settlers knew too little about conditions in the New World, and as an investment it did not answer. No golden fortune came back across the Atlantic to enrich the master and extend his influence. The son and his wife almost perished from famine and hardship, and though they did survive, communication between York Plantation and Morland Place was thereafter slight.

Charles Morland found his way to York almost by accident. He had been ‘botanizing' in the West Indian islands, but as the summer drew to a close he began to think about getting home. He inquired about boats going northwards to New York, and was directed to the master of a Dutch privateer who was calling at Yorktown.

‘It's on the Chesapeake Bay,' he told Charles, 'and there's plenty of trade between there and New York. You'll get a ship easily.’

At Yorktown Charles grew interested in the new place and decided to stay for a week or so, and in conversation with the landlady of his lodging house he learned of the near proximity of York Plantation.

‘Charles Morland,' she said musingly. 'There was a Charles Morland visited there some years back.'

‘That would have been my father. I remember he wrote once to say he had stayed there.'

‘Well, you'll know all about the family, then,' she said disappointedly. Charles smiled and shook his head.

‘My father was so little at home that I can remember only two conversations with him in the whole of my life.’

The goodwife settled herself in gossiping mode, arms folded and feet spread.

‘Of course, it isn't Morland now, it's de Courcey, on account the Morlands only had daughters, and married into a French family - French and Papist, but you'll likely not mind that?’

Not knowing how
she
felt about such things, Charles confined his reply to a noncommittal grunt, which seemed to satisfy her.

‘Well, I don't mind it, for I'm broadminded. I get all sorts staying here, you wouldn't believe, and what I say is if they keep themselves to themselves and pay their bills, they can worship a block of wood if they like. The good Lord will sort them all out when the Great Day comes. But they're not well thought of in general, aren't Papists, even in Maryland, though Mr de Courcey is quite a gentleman, and to look at him, when he comes in to Yorktown every month, you'd never know any different.’

Charles wondered whether Papists were supposed to bear some brand or hideous deformity that marked them out as less than human. He made another encouraging murmur, and his landlady said, ‘I suppose you'll be wanting to pay your respects, now you're here?'

‘Well, I think I ought,' Charles said deprecatingly. ‘Family is family, you know, even if the connection is far back.'

‘Oh, they talk about the Morland connection; all the old families talk about England and where they came from. We know the whole story here. I can send a boy up the river with a letter if you want.’

Charles wrote, and the reply came inviting him most cordially to go and stay at York; and so having done a little shopping and attended to some business, Charles boarded the sailing boat that was sent for him, well primed by his hostess in the history of the family in its more sensational aspects.

Philippe de Courcey met the boat at the landing stage, from which well-tended green lawns ran up to the house.

The house was a pleasant surprise to Charles, for though not large, it was distinguished from its neighbours by being built of brick instead of wood. It presented a pleasant, symmetrical aspect, a long building of two storeys, with a white porch and stone chimneys at either end. White jasmine was scrambling energetically over the porch, and in beds all around the house were white rose bushes in full bloom.

‘Welcome, welcome, my dear Cousin Charles Morland,' de Courcey said, seizing Charles's hand in a friendly grip. Philippe was a tall, dark man, appearing taller by virtue of his great slenderness, and darker by his brown skin and blue beard-shadow, but his smile was open and friendly. ‘I hope you will not mind my calling you cousin. We think of ourselves as Morlands, you know, though we have lost the name.'

‘I am honoured, sir,' Charles said, following him along the broad path, while two Negro servants attended to the bags. ‘And delighted to exchange my lodgings for this beautiful house. You must be very proud of it.'

‘It is my second greatest joy,' he said. 'My grandfather, the first de Courcey to live here, built it. Brick, as you can imagine, was very expensive, stone even more so, and there was a great deal of jealousy amongst his neighbours, and some ill-natured inquiry as to where he got the money to afford it.' He smiled, a sudden white flashing in his dark face. ‘We in the family think we know where, but even we do not talk of it. These roses are our particular pride, sir. They are all descendants of the one bush that our ancestor Ambrose Morland brought with him from England in 1642.’

The lawns were as fine as any Charles had seen in England, and he said so, to gratify his host. The setting, too, was beautiful in the sort of artfully natural way that English lords paid Capability Brown large sums of money to achieve. But it was evident that Nature had provided it here for nothing: pretty little creeks, spanned by rustic bridges, knolls and gentle slopes, clumps of tall graceful trees here and there. The less attractive parts of the estate were set at a good distance from the house - the scrawny cattle, the farm buildings, the long-legged fowls and the tough little black pigs, the acres and acres of corn and tobacco, and the wooden dwellings of the slaves that tended them.

Philippe de Courcey was anxious to show Charles the house, of which he was justly proud, though the furnishing presented to Charles the curious appearance of having been assembled almost at random. Many of the pieces were useful but plain local work; others the massive, heavily-carved treasures of earlier ages; and here and there throughout them were scattered what might have been the remains of a pirate's hoard: delicate little French chairs, an English table with intricate inlay, Italian statuary and hangings, Spanish mirrors and boxes. In the chapel, de Courcey displayed the other great treasure of the house, an ivory and rosewood crucifix which had also been brought from England by the first Morland planter.