The Passing Bells (32 page)

It was raining again, an arctic drizzle from a black sullen sky. They drove to a house her father owned in Grosvenor Square, twenty rooms of Regency elegance, one of Archie's many London residences.

“Don't you feel cramped?” Charles asked, eyeing the domed ceiling in the foyer with its skylight of stained glass, the long marble corridors, doorways framed in the Ionic order.

“We do a great deal of entertaining lately,” she said, handing her coat to a maid. “This place is really more for Daddy's friends at the ministry than it is for us.”

“Archie in the government! I couldn't believe it when I saw the announcement in the
Times
.”

“Yes, on a war committee, and enjoying every minute of it. He and the minister are very much alike.”

“Langham, is it?”

“Yes. David Selkirk Langham . . . whirring like a dynamo . . . the Lancashire bantam cock . . . sharp of spur and tongue . . . soothing half of Parliament and irritating the rest.”

“What exactly is your father doing?”

“Applying the Foxe Ltd. method to the war effort. The three pillars of the company—advertising, efficiency, and quality. He started by criticizing the recruiting posters. Kitchener sticking his fat finger in one's face will be replaced by more subtle inducements. And then there's the problem of army rations . . . the system is quite inadequate for the million or so men Kitchener wants. Food distribution is Daddy's game, you know. The whole purpose of Langham's ministry is to get experts to handle the logistical problems of the war. He believes that war is far too complex a matter to be left to the military. He just recruited Lord whatever-his-name-is—you know, the London omnibus tycoon—to help solve the army's transportation problems.”

A fire burned in the drawing room, reflecting off highly polished wood, silver, and glass. It was an eighteenth-century room, large but warmly intimate. The maid drew the velvet drapes to shut out the bleakness of the afternoon while a butler in livery brought brandy in a cut-crystal decanter.

“And yourself?” Charles asked. “What are you doing to keep busy?”

“Oh, a rather ambiguous role in the war effort. I'm serving as Daddy's social secretary . . . Langham's too, in a way. I arrange small dinners here . . . dining room politics . . . Whig and Tory . . . capital and labor breaking bread and resolving to pull together for a change. I suppose it sounds rather silly and frivolous to you, but more things are accomplished over a good dinner and a fine port than one could possibly realize.”

“What do you think can be accomplished after a fine lunch and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé? Not to mention a rare old brandy.”

“That's really up to you, isn't it?” she said, sitting on a divan and patting the cushion beside her.

Charles waited until the maid and butler had left the room and then sat next to her.

“I know what I'd like to accomplish . . . and will.”

She looked at him intently and placed a cool hand against the side of his face.

“Please, Charles. Don't spoil a perfectly wonderful day by making promises that you're in no position to keep. It isn't fair to me . . . or you.”

He drained his brandy in one swallow and set the bulbous glass on a side table.

“That's all in the past, Lydia. I know it is . . . I can sense it. Don't you feel a great change in the air? A fresh wind? Oh, I don't know how to put it exactly. A paradox. I mean to say, I rather dread the thought of going to France and having shells tossed at my head, and yet I'm glad we're at war and happy to be a part of it. Something new and marvelously exciting is taking place in our lives. A clean start for a tired old world. The ranks are aware of it too—all those ex-clerks, delivery boys, apprentices. . . . They know that the war will change their lives utterly—break the molds, the ruts. That's why they're so cheerful and uncomplaining. Their uniforms, when they have them, are shoddy, the food is dull, the barracks damp and drafty . . . and yet they act like schoolboys on holiday.” He took hold of her hand and kissed the palm of it. “We'll be going across soon, at least that's the talk in the mess. . . . Drive the Boche to the Rhine this spring and summer. When I get back, I shall marry you . . . and if my father doesn't like it, he can lump it . . . and if he threatens to disavow me, I shall shame him in front of the peers. I shall go to the House of Lords and condemn him for his actions.”

“Oh, Charles!” she laughed, “that's nonsense.”

“I mean it,” he said fiercely. “I mean every word. Or, anyway, I'd threaten such action and he'd back down in a hurry. By God, it's young men who are fighting this war and it's young men who must benefit from the victory.
I
shall not back off on
my
rights.
That
I promise you, Lydia.”

He made an attempt to get down on one knee in front of her, but stumbled in doing so. The rich food of the Cafe Royal, the wine, the brandy, the glow of the fire, the fact that he had been up before dawn conspired to rob him of grace. His head spun and he sat at her feet and rested his brow against her knees.

“Lord,” he muttered. “I feel like I've been drugged.”

“Poor darling.” She bent forward and kissed the top of his head. “You must be exhausted. Would you like to take a nap?”

“Yes . . . I think so . . . for an hour or two.”

She stroked his hair, idly, unconsciously sensual. “We don't have to go to the theater. You can rest . . . and then we'll have supper here.”

“I have to be back by midnight.”

“I know. I arranged with Daddy to have Simmons drive you. The car will be here at ten-thirty. The night train is so horrid.”

He nested his head in her lap and sighed with contentment.

“Oh, Lydia . . . I feel such peace with you.”

“And I with you, my darling. But come on . . . don't go to sleep on the floor. You can stretch out in a perfectly luxurious bed.”

“I haven't been in a perfectly luxurious bed in months. I'll never get up again. No . . . I'll just take an hour on the couch.”

She helped him out of his jacket, laughing at the complexities of the Sam Browne belt, which resisted both their efforts to detach it. Finally, he was lying down, jacket and shoes off, head resting on a cushion. She covered him with a lap robe and kissed him on the brow.

“I feel such a fool,” he muttered drowsily. “With the prettiest girl in England and I . . . take a nap on her couch.”

She kissed him again. “I shan't breathe a word to your brother officers. It would ruin your reputation.”

He fell asleep almost instantly, and she stood for a moment looking down at him, so blissful in sleep, so boyishly vulnerable. She felt a purely maternal emotion and tucked the robe gently around him, brushed a lock of hair from his eyes, and tiptoed from the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

Would he do it? She thought about it, seated in the morning room, staring through the tall windows at the green oval of the square. How dark and forbidding the iron railings looked, how bleak the sodden, leafless trees. A man crossed the road toward South Audley Street, clutching a wind-whipped umbrella with both hands.
Would he?
She lit a cigarette and puffed on it, drawing the smoke into her mouth and then blowing it out again rapidly. Yes. She had the feeling that he would. That
this
time he would. It was the uniform, being part of something that his father was not part of.
In the war.
His father might be Lord Stanmore, ninth earl, but he was Charles Greville, second lieutenant, the Royal Windsor Fusiliers. The importance of their respective statures had flip-flopped, at least for the time being.

Oh, we do love the soldier boy,

The lads in khaki proud.

And Jolly Jack Tar and the bold marine,

Who guard the empire 'round.

A silly music-hall ditty, but one that captured the public mood. Nothing was too good for the men who served King and Country. She half-closed her eyes against the caustic smoke of the cigarette and envisioned Charles standing in the House of Lords, his right arm neatly bound in a sling, a bandage about his Shakespearean brow, pleading his case with passion.

“My father is an honorable man, but I am not without honor of my own, the honor of shedding my blood for England. . . . And to have the woman I love denied my father's blessing. . . . Shame, I say . . . shame.”

She almost laughed at the vision. It was so impossibly romantic, like a scene out of one of Alexandra's trashy novels.

There was a rumble of voices in the corridor, and then the door opened and her father stepped into the room, followed by a short, slender, dark-haired man of forty-five.

“Good weather for ducks,” Archie Foxe growled, peeling furlined leather gloves from his pudgy hands. “Is that Charles sleepin' in the drawing room?”

“Yes,” Lydia said, snuffing out her cigarette. Archie did not approve of women smoking.

“Anything the matter with the lad?”

“No, just tired.”

“The rigors of army life, eh?”

“Something like that,” she said.

“I have some telephone calls to make. Will you see to it that Mr. Langham gets a double brandy and soda to ward off the chill?”

“Of course. How are you, Mr. Langham?”

“Wet, Miss Foxe. Quite damp to the bone.”

He was not, of course, wet at all, having stepped from a limousine to the front door under a large umbrella. His dark wool overcoat with astrakhan collar was unblemished by rain. Archie Foxe went off down the corridor toward the stairs and his office-bedroom on the second floor, the minister's overcoat was taken by the butler, and a large brandy and soda brought in on a silver tray. David Selkirk Langham, neat as a pin in striped trousers and cutaway coat, walked slowly about the room, his dark, piercing eyes taking in every detail.

“Sumptuous. There is no finer combination than a great deal of money and faultless taste. Did you choose the furnishings?”

“Yes,” Lydia said.

“In all of your father's numerous abodes?”

She smiled faintly. “Those that I know of.”

“Ah, yes.” He chuckled. “I dare say the sly fox has his secret den or two.”

“Complete with vixen.”

“I detect a note of disapproval in your tone, Miss Foxe. One should not begrudge a man his amusements.”

There was something devilish about his face, Lydia decided. The Tory papers often caricatured him as the Prince of Darkness whispering into Asquith's ear, or Lloyd George's. He had a narrow spade-shaped face with a long, sharp nose, thin eyebrows like pencil lines, and a trim Vandyke beard. The devil's countenance, but there was no hint of evil about him, only a quality of restrained amusement, as though he were always on the verge of breaking into peals of mocking laughter. David Selkirk Langham, born in a Liverpool slum, self-educated solicitor, advocate for the Mersey dockworkers, Member of Parliament, cabinet minister. A married man with five children, but there had been salacious stories whispered about him since the day he had entered Parliament in 1908. Women, it was said, were hypnotized by his eyes and his air of blunt, forceful virility. Tory lies, her father had said, but she wasn't so sure. She had heard too many stories to dismiss every one of them as false, and she had merely to look into his eyes to read the challenge there.

“The young man on the couch . . . is that Charles Greville?”

“Yes.”

“The earl referred to me as a blackguard once during a speech in the House. Of course, there was nothing personal in the remark. He was merely angry at the way the election had turned out. Is the son as Tory as the father?”

“No. He has no political feelings one way or the other.”

Langham raised one eyebrow in a sharply quizzical arch. “Is that so? Doesn't he know it's politics that makes the world go round? That it's politics that has him in a uniform and politics that's likely to keep him in it for a long time?”

“He doesn't look upon the war quite that way.”

“Foolish of him. It pays to be realistic in this day and age. The way some of these soldier lads talk, you'd think they were going off in suits of armor for to fight the King of France. It's going to be a long war and a bitter one . . . a war of political ideologies, a war of—”

Her laugh interrupted him. “Mr. Langham, you're not in the Commons making a speech.”

He bowed slightly. “My apologies. It used to be my fame that I would make a speech on any street corner or in any public house for no better reason than to hear the sound of my own voice. Those are days long gone. There are more enjoyable things to talk about with a young, beautiful woman than the turmoil of European politics.”

“Such as?”

“Why, the pure pleasure of your company . . . as just one example.” He eyed her boldly, a smile lurking behind his dark eyes. He reminded her of a ferret toying with a rabbit. She could understand why many women would find him intriguing. There was nothing subtle or circumspect about him. Totally sure of himself and his power over the weaker sex. And he was such a little man. So trim and dapper one would have taken him for a tailor if he weren't so obviously a cabinet minister whose star was on the rise. She felt a vague excitement, a small knot of tension in the pit of her stomach. How many women, she wondered, had experienced that sense of excitement and succumbed to it? Her hand went idly to her throat and she looked away from him. Rain drummed against the windows.

“Where are you and Father off to this afternoon?”

Langham smiled at the huskiness of her voice and took a sip of his drink. “A meeting with the Prime Minister at number ten. Kitchener will be there to discuss this Dardanelles business.”

“What do you think about it?”