Theirs Was The Kingdom (20 page)

“Yes, I would, sir,” Giles said, a little alarmed to discover his mother had read more into his duty letters than he had put there. It wouldn’t do, he reflected, to let anyone know that he was scared of returning to Mellingham without George, or that he had made no real friend in the Lower School. Indeed, he sometimes felt as much of a misfit among all those empire builders as old Prodder himself.

They turned away then, cantering up to the downs, Giles riding a length or so behind his father and marvelling at his firm seat, despite a left leg that was metal and cork from the knee down. He had always respected his father without, however, getting to know him in the way the younger children did and, to a degree, Alex and George as they grew up. He had always seen himself as a kind of halfway-house between the three older children and the four younger ones, still in the nursery. Yet sometimes he felt almost as old as his father, and a great deal older than his mother, who was inclined to coddle him and yet accord him an adult status that she did not display towards Stella, Alex, or George.

He said, when they reined in to give the horses a breather, “Will
George
be going into the business, sir?” and his father said he would, for his academic progress had been unspectacular and he was far too independent to make a success of soldiering. “I’m sending him on a tour of the network,” he added, “with a month’s stay in each region. That’s the only way to learn my business. From stables, invoice trays, and warehouse upwards. If he shapes well I’ll fit him in at the yard in a year or so.” He gave Giles a sidelong glance. “I don’t suppose you’ve got the least idea what you’d like to do when you leave school?” and half-expected Giles would say he wanted to be a poet.

Instead, to Adam’s secret bewilderment, he said, thoughtfully, “Do you happen to know about Peterloo, sir?”

“Peterloo? You mean Waterloo, don’t you?”

“No, sir, Peterloo. Shelley wrote a poem about it. It was a massacre in Manchester, I think.”

“Indeed it was, but not such a massacre as all that. It was more of a riot. The yeomanry and hussars cleared the streets, and knocked over some people attending a meeting. The Chartists made a great fuss about it but you’ll forgive someone like me, who was at Cawnpore and Sebastopol, for not regarding it as a milestone.”

“What was the meeting about, sir?”

“Overdue Parliamentary reforms, I think. But what the devil has that to do with thoughts you might have on a career? You don’t fancy yourself as a street orator, do you? You’ve always had less to say than any of ’em to my way of thinking.”

“I suppose it’s to do with the
difference
, sir.”

“Difference between what?”

“The kind of lives people lead, the rich and poor. It’s hard to explain, sir, but… well, there was that old couple over at Twyforde Green last Christmas. It seemed so wrong, putting them out of their cottage, and not letting them stay together. I wanted to ask you about it at the time but you weren’t there when I got home. And after that it was Christmas, with so much going on, and then the Colonel died so I couldn’t ask him.”

“Ask me now then.”

“They were a very old couple called Farthing. Someone said Mr. Farthing couldn’t work any more on account of arthritis, and his cottage was wanted for a younger man coming in. So it was the workhouse and workhouses don’t cater for married people, so one went to Tonbridge and the other to Sevenoaks.”

Suddenly Adam recalled the case, one of many hereabouts he supposed, privately thanking his stars he didn’t own any tied cottages. It shocked him a little that Giles should have witnessed the eviction, and even more that he should have brooded over it. He said, “Damn it, you sound just like our Deborah! She’s bitten with the reforming bug they tell me, and whilst I wouldn’t have you think I’m not in favour of a square deal for the less fortunate, I’m bound to tell you there’s no livelihood in fighting campaigns on their behalf.”

“No, I suppose not,” Giles said, but added, improbably, “Phoebe Fraser says you’re a good man to work for, sir. That you pay good wages and give people the chance to get ahead if they want to.”

“Phoebe Fraser is prejudiced,” he said, with a grin. “Her father happens to have won the Swann accolade for turnover last year. However, I’ll let you into a secret. When I started the network, back in ’58, I made up my mind that the only way to muster a reliable work force is to pay a fair rate, and promote every man who shows initiative. I’ve lived by that rule ever since and it’s paid me handsomely.”

“How many men do you employ, sir?”

“Nearly two thousand. Why?”

“Well, sir, what I mean is… I don’t want to sound impertinent but… there are thirty millions living here, and I’ve read that half that number don’t have enough to eat, and have to live in awful places like those houses near your yard. Would you say that was true, sir?”

“Yes, it’s quite true. But deduct the percentage that will never make much of their lives, no matter what kind of start or helping hand they get.” He paused, wondering how to expound the popular doctrine of self-help without seeming pompous. “What a man makes of his time here is largely his concern, son. My waggonmaster Keate sends me a stream of street arabs he finds sleeping out on the wharves and under arches. He’s done it for years. Well, two of them have got ahead famously. One, name of Rookwood, is manager of my Southern Square. Of the rest, about half moved up so far and then stuck and the other half dropped straight back to the gutter. That’s my notion of charity. Give a man a push and let him forge ahead or run clean out of steam, whichever he chooses.” He glanced at Giles trying to decide whether or not he had made any impression. When the boy made no reply he said, “Have you a fancy to be a parson?” and at once saw Giles colour, not with embarrassment but more, he would say, from the effort of concentration.

“No, sir, I don’t think so. Most parsons—well—they seem to do what most poets do. Preach, and leave the rest to the congregation. Your idea sounds a lot better than that, sir.”

“Well, I’m obliged to you,” Adam said, turning his head to hide one of his tight grins.

They moved off then and went jogging down the dust road that ran under the hedge bounding the estate from the north. On their left was a larch coppice, relieved by a few Scots firs, and where the leaves were sparse Adam could just see the ruin of a pheasant hide some ten yards back from the road. A queer thought occurred to him as they passed it and swung in the main gate. That hide was the place where this solemn, rather likeable boy had been conceived one hot June afternoon some thirteen years ago. It seemed a curious yield to an unconventional tumble on a pile of bracken. And yet, now that he came to think about it, there was a kind of design about it, for his presence as an embryo had played a vital part in helping Henrietta ride out that frightful period that began the very next day, with the crash at Staplehurst. Perhaps this had something to do with the boy’s addiction to poetry, his serious approach to life, his concern for the world’s troubles. It was possible, he mused, to guess the course of all the other children, but no one could predict much about Giles save that he would suffer, and learn something important on that account. Adam thought, “Henrietta already senses something about the boy. That’s why she talked me into changing his school…” and it occurred to him then that Giles was the most interesting of his brood. Perhaps, who knew, he would prove the most rewarding.

He said, urging the mare into a trot as they tackled the drive, “Well now, after all that I could do with bacon and eggs. How about you?” and Giles said, with a smile, “I can almost smell them from here!”

And they rode into the stable yard, a little closer, to Adam’s way of thinking, than they had set out an hour before.

2

The morning ride had immediate consequences. Giles took up the option of changing schools that same day, after leafing through the prospectus of a foundation called West Buckland, pictured in the illustration as a rather gaunt, neo-Gothic building, standing on the crest of a long ridge and looking, he thought, a little incongruous in its rural setting. It seemed an unpretentious place, nothing like as splendid as the Mellingham foundation, and had apparently developed from a school set up in a North Devon farmhouse by a local parson called Brereton, himself a pupil of the famous Arnold of Rugby. Had Giles known it, the prospectus had caught Adam’s eye on account of its modesty. It did not pretend to compete with the well-to-do schools that were springing up all over the country, to cater for businessmen whose sons were still not welcome at top-flight schools, but seemed to aim at providing a sound education within the limits of a far smaller income than he possessed. He had glanced at many school prospectuses in his time (he had hauled building materials for many new schools) but this was the only one entirely innocent of attempting to promote in pupils a sense of privilege, that seemed the badge of the newly-rich who patronised these places.

A day or so after Giles had made his decision, Adam drove him and his mother into London to stay overnight and do some shopping on his behalf and hers in and around Oxford Street. An hour or so of this, however, was as much as Adam could stand, and by mid-afternoon he announced that he would rejoin them for high tea at the Norfolk Street hotel and proposed taking himself off in a hansom. Henrietta then remembered she had a fitting at a costumier’s in Haymarket and said, “Take the boy off my hands, then. It’ll embarrass him to sit about in one of those places. Drop him off at the hotel on your way down to the City.”

They hailed a cab and went on down towards Trafalgar Square where Giles said suddenly, “I’ve never seen the Houses of Parliament, sir. Could we go there tomorrow?”

“You can go there now if you’ve a mind to,” Adam told him. “I’ll drop you off at the corner of Whitehall and it’s not ten minutes’ walk. Here’s half a crown. Walk around a bit on your own, and get a cab to run you back to the hotel at around five. You’re not scared of getting lost, are you?”

“No, sir,” said Giles, seriously, “I’ve got a map. I bought it at the station for twopence and I’ve already ringed the hotel,” and he produced a folded street map and held it up for Adam to see, a circumstance that Adam welcomed, for it concealed the smile Giles’s solemnity encouraged.

“That’s capital,” he said, and watched Giles step down and merge into the crowd outside the National Gallery, thinking, “Damned if I get the hang of him, somehow. He’s more like a little old man than a boy. A gentlemanly old man, with the innocence of a six-year-old…” But then, because he was on home ground, he dismissed his family in favour of a complicated contract Tybalt had sent to the hotel by messenger that morning.

Giles set off in high spirits, never having previously been given the freedom of London. He was tempted to look in at the National Gallery but decided instead to cross the Square and walk on down past the Horse Guards Parade to Inigo Jones’ banqueting hall where, he recalled, King Charles had been beheaded one bitterly cold January morning in 1649.

He found the plaque marking the spot and studied it with interest, wondering if it was true that Charles (whom he always considered a dignified and rather ill-used monarch) really had worn two vests that day, in case he shivered and gave witnesses the impression that he was afraid to die. It was not difficult, providing one could ignore the steady stream of landaus, four-wheelers, hansoms, and gaily-painted tradesmen’s vans, to imagine this same street thronged with buff-coated soldiers and thousands of Londoners, each straining to catch a glimpse of the tremendous drama being enacted up there. As he had admitted to Prodder, he had not yet embarked upon the Stuarts, but the story of King versus Parliament was well-known to him, for it was graphically illustrated in one of Alexander’s books, so that he was able to put himself in Charles’s place as he stepped from the window to play the leading role in the tragedy. Beheading, he thought, must be a clumsy, bludgeoning kind of death, but somehow, he could not have said why, far more dignified than hanging. Today, of course, they were more civilised about these things. Not so long ago, or so the old Colonel had told him, the brother of the reigning Emperor of Austro-Hungary had been executed by his Mexican subjects, but he had been tidily shot. Giles decided that if called upon to die, he would prefer this method, for at least it enabled a man to face death unbound and stand erect while he was about it.

Pondering these matters academically, he drifted into Parliament Square where he overheard a red-bearded policeman tell a group of sightseers that the House was not in session but they were permitted to enter so long as they did not venture beyond the door of the Commons. Giles tagged along behind the group, getting the benefit of a rather hectoring guide who joined them a few steps beyond, learning that the hall they were in was called St. Stephen’s Hall. The present debating chamber was designed along the same lines as the church that had stood there and that this was why, on entering the House, members were required to bow towards the Speaker’s Chair where the altar had stood.

It was while he was standing there, gazing reverently at the tiers of benches and the wide strip of carpet that separated them, that he noticed a young man who had disobeyed the policeman’s instructions and actually crossed the threshold. He was obviously not a member of the guide’s group, for they had disappeared. He remained standing there, a slim, rather good-looking young man aged about eighteen, wearing what struck Giles as homespun clothes that marked him down as a countryman. His expression, Giles thought, was absorbed, but slightly contemptuous, as though he rather doubted what he saw and would presently go away to tell the first person he met that the chamber ran a poor third to the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey.