Theirs Was The Kingdom (101 page)

She had to smile at that and to cover up said, “What makes you fight shy of hard work, Mr. Coles? You don’t strike me as lazy. A lazy man wouldn’t get up at crack of dawn to train horses, would he?”

“He might, if horses were the only thing he knew about. I’m not bright, like Rowley, and I draw the line at devoting my life to marketing pills and potions. Whatever I do will be done in the open air. Maybe this will make up my mind for me, and I’ll stay in Ireland and take up training seriously.”

His talk of horses touched a chord in her memory. Adam had said something like that when she first met him—“Horses are the only thing I know about,” and this, together with his reference to Ireland, gave her yet another idea. It seemed an outrageous one in the circumstances, and too vague to mention to him now, but she meant to think about it as soon as they were clear away.

“How will you explain things to your parents?” she asked, and he replied, gaily, “I’ll leave them to draw conclusions, Mrs. Swann. They like Jo and that’s a good start.”

There seemed no more to say. It was lonely up here but at any moment somebody might chance along and it would never do for them to be seen together, so she said, extending her hand, “Well, good luck, lad. I’ll get in touch with you somehow. Maybe to your advantage, but I can’t go into that until I see how Mr. Swann takes it.”

“You’ll tell him then?”

“As to why you’ve run off? No, I won’t. I’m not that much of a fool. I’m going to be as outraged as everyone else this time tomorrow.”

“What will you say. I mean, what
can
you say?”

“I’ll think of something. When occasion demands, I’m the best liar in Kent. You have to be when you’re saddled with a family of my size.”

He helped her mount, swinging her up as if she had weighed a pound or two instead of almost nine stones, and she thought, sensing his vigour, “I can find excuses for Jo now that I know the boy… in one way at least she’s her mother’s daughter.”

He called, when she was ten yards off, “Don’t fret, Mrs. Swann! I’ll take very good care of her!” and she lifted her hand in acknowledgement

“He will too,” she told herself aloud. “He mightn’t be clever, but to my way of thinking Jo got a far better bargain than her sister.”

She had resolved to stay awake and listen for signs of departure, sharing to some extent the excitement and relief that would surely be Joanna’s when she slipped out of the house and went to him down by the spinney at the foot of the drive. The loss of one night’s rest, however, claimed its toll. Long before one o’clock she was asleep, remaining so until eight when she woke up with a start and hurried along to Joanna’s room to collect the note she had dictated.

She had all she could do to subdue a giggle or two when she read it, reflecting that here was an eloping couple unique in the history of runaway matches. But then it occurred to her that perhaps she was taking too much for granted. It might well be that many anxious mammas had written the part for their erring daughters and no one a penny the wiser. All the note said was
“Have run away to marry Clint Coles. Please don’t worry. Very happy. Joanna.”
It wouldn’t fool most fathers, but it would fool Adam, she was sure of that. Meantime she rehearsed an explanation concerning Jo’s absence at the breakfast table that would likely satisfy Phoebe Fraser and the younger children. Jo had been called for late last night to stand in as bridesmaid for Sophie Turnbull’s wedding in Maidstone, Sophie’s sister having gone down with measles. Sophie was a niece of Godsall’s, who was getting married shortly, so that everyone accepted the story at face value, although Phoebe sulked because she hadn’t been invited to help Joanna pack.

About eleven she told the stable lad to harness the trap for her drive over to Addington, to confer with the Coles, and this was a mission she did not relish. Rowley’s parents, whom she had met briefly at the wedding in September, had struck her as fussers, who were likely to ask a lot of awkward questions.

She need not have bothered. A red-eyed Mrs. Coles practically dragged her over the threshold, jabbering something about a letter Clint had left. Then Mr. Coles and his two plain daughters appeared, and she was given the letter, together with a glass of sherry but she found it difficult to read for Mrs. Coles kept repeating, over and over again, “Such a
silly
thing to do! Why couldn’t they have waited? Why couldn’t we
share
in their happiness…?”

Mr. Coles, thank God, was more discerning, and Henrietta was in no doubt at all but that he suspected the truth and was determined not to admit it, even to himself. He kept patting his wife’s shoulders, saying, “There now, don’t carry on so, my love. Mrs. Swann is the injured party and see how calmly she’s taken it.” And then, to Henrietta, “What
can
I say, Mrs. Swann? The boy’s a fool and that’s a fact! Your husband will have every right to be extremely angry about this as soon as he hears about it.”

“I don’t think he will be,” Henrietta said, feeling rather sorry for him. “After all, he married me very much against my father’s wishes, and we’re already relations of a kind. What little Mr. Swann and I have seen of Clint, we like.”

It wasn’t true, of course. Adam, as she well knew, would have difficulty in recalling the boy’s name, but what was one more white lie among so many? She went on, “Would you mind if I borrowed Clinton’s letter and read it in private, before I showed it to Mr. Swann? It will embarrass all of us if I read it here, in front of you.” Both Mr. and Mrs. Coles agreed, so eagerly that it was obvious they couldn’t get her out of the house quickly enough and looked to her to break the news to Adam in their absence.

The two girls followed her out to the trap and she realised then that the furore at Addington Manor was largely counterfeit. Amelia, the younger daughter, whispered, “Don’t mind mother, Mrs. Swann. She was delighted when Rowley married Helen and she’ll be just as pleased about this, once she’s got over the shock.”

Halfway home, in a cutaway on the edge of the Downs, she pulled in to read Clint’s letter. The handwriting was sprawling, more that of a schoolboy than a man who could hoist a woman into the saddle with one hand, but the artful composition confirmed her in her opinion that Clint Coles was not as stupid as he looked.

“My Dearest Mother and Father,” it began dutifully, “When you read this I shall be a long way off, having persuaded Joanna Swann to elope with me. We hope to be married almost at once and I owe you an explanation of what you will be sure to think of as unkind and unfilial behaviour on my part. The fact is, as I am sure you will have guessed, Joanna and I are very much in love, but both of us shirked a wedding that would have entailed, besides a lot of fuss, a long and tedious wait. That is one reason but it isn’t the real one. You remember I agreed that when I married and settled down I would make Father happy by taking charge of the firm? Well, I’ve given thought to this a great deal lately, and come to the conclusion, however much disappointment it might cause him, that I couldn’t honour the bargain and spend the rest of my life in the city. So this seemed to me the only thing to do—that is, marry Jo and make a place for ourselves, somewhere fresh, perhaps in one of the Colonies, where I can stand on my own feet and stop being a charge on your purse. The sensible thing to have done, of course, would have been to try first as a single man, but that would have meant years of separation that neither one of us cared to face. Please tell Jo’s parents not to worry. I’ll look after her in every way, and I hope both you and they will forgive us in time. Your loving son, Clint.”

She folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, thinking, “He knows about people as well as horses, the young rogue. I hope she can manage him, for I’m sure I couldn’t.” And then, seeing the road was deserted, she had the laugh that had been bottled up for long enough.

5

She had enjoyed, she would have said, more than her share of luck but more awaited her. Adam, informed of the situation, was inclined to dismiss it as an elaborate prank that hardly merited a serious thought, much less the loss of a night’s sleep. “The more you clear a path for these youngsters the more determined they are to strew boulders along their route,” he grunted, when Henrietta showed him Jo’s note and Clint’s letter. “A yokel and a scullery-maid would have shown more sense. And more dignity too, I wouldn’t wonder! Why the devil couldn’t he come up here and ask for the girl in a civilised manner? Does he take me for an ogre? And that’s not the truth of the matter either,” he rumbled on, giving Henrietta a bad moment. “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the idea originated with her, not him. She probably saw herself as the wilting heroine in one of those trashy novelettes you fed her!”

“I fed her no such thing,” Henrietta protested, with genuine indignation. “You weaned me off those books before she was born! To tell you the truth, I don’t think either she or Helen ever read anything heavier than a
Bentley’s Magazine
serial in the whole of their lives.”

“Well, there’s a bonus in it for me, I suppose,” he continued, preparatory to dismissing the subject, “it’ll save me the outlay on another wedding. Do you have any idea where he might have taken her?”

“None at all,” she lied cheerfully, “and neither have the Coles. I shall know when they’re man and wife, however.”

“I wouldn’t wager on that,” he said, beginning to enjoy his displeasure, a habit that had been growing on him since the Rycroft debacle and George’s abdication.

“If she can slip off like that she’ll take her time writing, you can be sure of that. Let me see that correspondence again. No, no, not that silly note of hers, the letter the young idiot left on
his
mantelshelf!”

She gave him Clinton’s letter and watched him knit his brows over it. “Funny thing,” he grunted, laying it down, “I wouldn’t have thought a young chap with his seat on a horse would let himself be talked into a frolic like this by a chit of a girl, with her head full of hogwash. But there it is, you never can tell what a man will do when a saucy little baggage bewitches him. He had a rare future as a steeplechaser. I saw that when I watched him win the Sidney Cup, over at Tonbridge last spring. It’ll be goodbye to his hopes in that direction.”

On the whole she was relieved he took this line, preferring to see the escapade as something Joanna had engineered, probably with the object of getting him away from a rival or rivals. It was further proof of Edith Wickstead’s dictum that, while he was admittedly an excellent judge of man’s potential, he had never learned anything important about a woman’s. She was careful to say nothing to disillusion him but listened patiently to his grumbles concerning his inability to find a reliable substitute for O’Dowd at the Dublin depot. This was her extra piece of good fortune as it happened, for it fitted into a plan that had been maturing ever since she met young Coles up on the Downs. When the first letter arrived bearing a Cork postmark, informing them that the runaway couple had been married by special licence in Belfast and were honeymooning in Kerry, she took her courage in both hands and confronted him. “If you haven’t filled that Dublin post yet why don’t you keep it in the family by offering it to Clinton?”

He stared at her as if she had said something very stupid, but she had been prepared for this and went on, before he could explode, “Well,
why not
? I mean, he’s young and strong, wants an open-air life, and has good commercial connections. And you’ve admitted yourself he’s a first-class horseman. He’s also your son-in-law, like it or not. From the little I remember of him I think you’d get along with one another.”

“Do you imagine I pick my depot managers on the strength of their steeplechase performances? Good God, woman, they don’t act as outriders on the waggons. A man handling that job in a place like Ireland needs nerve, cool judgement, imagination.”

“Well, as to that,” she countered, “I would have said he’s shown proof of all three. Nerve to ride his fences straight. Judgement to pick one of our girls, instead of getting hooked by one of those ninnies they’ve introduced into the house from time to time. And imagination enough to turn his back on a readymade pill business where he couldn’t hope to be anything more than a figurehead!”

She saw at once that her broadside had taken effect, raking his prejudices and all but demolishing his private conviction that Clint Coles was a weakling manipulated by a woman. That was another rewarding aspect of Adam Swann. Presented with a line of reasoning that ran directly contrary to his own, he was never too proud or too obstinate to change his mind on the spot. He said, slowly, “There might well be some sense in that, Hetty. I confess I hadn’t looked at it in that light. I’m sometimes inclined to forget that you ran the business for a year that time I was laid up. It must have taught you something about people’s potential.”

“Bringing up your tiresome family has taught me that,” she said, briefly, “so pooh to your patronage, Adam Swann! I know my sons and daughters well enough to be certain the silliest of them wouldn’t hitch themselves to an idiot!”

“Stella did,” he reminded her, but she was ready for this, too. “Stella had the good sense and courage to backtrack and try again, so don’t quote her at me. It’s my belief Joanna knew precisely what she was doing and meant to get the boy by hook or by crook. You owe it to her to go over and decide about him for yourself, before you hold this against both of them for the rest of their lives!”