Theirs Was The Kingdom (29 page)

People enquired about it, naturally, but Henrietta had anticipated that and fobbed them off with a volley of incomprehensible medical terms, all rehearsed in private and all aimed, as a matter of course, at the groom, so that local nosey-parkers went away with a vague impression poor Lester was a chronic invalid and the victim of a nameless disease or possible diseases.

Taken all round, therefore, she had been gratified by the smallness of the stir in the locality but Stella’s low state of mind remained unaltered. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to her mother that the girl’s experience could hardly have had a more lowering effect on her had the matter been fully aired in all the newspapers and picked over at every fete and soiree from here to Maidstone. She would go nowhere and take no interest in anything. Indeed, she rarely spoke unless spoken to so that sometimes it seemed to Henrietta that she had not yet emerged from the trance-like state in which she had found her the morning Denzil Fawcett came tapping on the kitchen door.

The doctors were no help at all. Privately they assured her there was nothing much amiss with the girl and prescribed iron tonics, exercise, good food, and the company of people her own age. They did not tell her how this could be achieved so long as the girl flatly refused to reintegrate herself into the life of the county and spent her days mooning about like a wraith, listlessly helping Phoebe Fraser in the care and education of her younger brothers and sisters. When she was not in demand in the nursery, she would efface herself, riding alone across the downs or taking a solitary walk along the banks of the river in a direction she was unlikely to meet neighbours or villagers.

Adam, confound him, did not seem to see anything sinister in this prolonged withdrawal, and sometimes appeared to approve of it. “Damn it, woman,” he told her irritably when she returned yet again to the subject, “she’s had a bad shock and a frightful disappointment. Naturally she doesn’t want to discuss it with every old trout who attends those gabby functions of yours! And that’s what she’d be obliged to do if she made herself available. We were lucky to get off as cheaply as we did, implying that young waster sought annulment on medical grounds. I daresay the gossips find plenty in that to keep them happy. Believe me, in six months it’ll all be forgotten, in favour of some other scandal, so my advice is to leave well alone, and let her ride it out as best she can.”

It was thoroughly typical, Henrietta told herself, of masculine logic in matters of this kind. How could any male appreciate the need of a personal triumph of some kind, something to offset the dreadful humiliation of being bandied about between two men, one who had bought her for the price of a dowry, the other who heaped one outrage on another by doing his best to use her as a brood mare? For Henrietta, although she had no difficulty in viewing the dismal business through a woman’s eyes, had no idea how to set about restoring pride and self-respect to someone from whom it had been gouged with a butcher’s knife, and a blunt knife at that. That, she reasoned, was a task for someone with more knowledge of the world than she possessed, someone trained in finding their way among the shoals and reefs of the human soul and that, she supposed, implied a priest of some kind. Neither did this line of reasoning help, all priests being male.

The problem of rehabilitating her eldest daughter, and launching her on a second trip to the matrimonial market, occupied Henrietta Swann’s thoughts right through the winter of 1879 and 1880, and into the succeeding spring and summer, until they were approaching the first anniversary of the annulment. By then she had begun to think about it almost exclusively, to the neglect of plans concerning her other reapers. And as the weeks passed she became more and more edgy with everyone about her, including Stella, for it maddened her that the girl’s apathy remained, that she still drew back from any attempt to be reabsorbed into the happy-go-lucky scene of which she had been a part before Lester Moncton-Price had appeared as suitor.

The weather was hot and sultry for mid-September and the impending return of Giles to school had the effect of increasing her preoccupation, for Giles, throughout the holidays, had devoted a great deal of time to Stella, even accompanying her on disconsolate wanderings about the local countryside. If she had communicated anything of importance to him, however, Giles kept it to himself. Indeed, Henrietta got the impression that Stella’s gloom was rubbing off on the boy, who became increasingly preoccupied as the summer holiday drew to its close. “Drat that boy,” she told herself one day, as she saw them pacing the forecourt together, “it looks as if I shall soon have a pair of professional mutes about the place! This house used to quake with laughter…” and she thought how cheerfully she would have gone about the task of tying a stone to Lester’s neck and heaving him into the river for playing such havoc with her peace of mind.

It was about then that she decided to attack, descending on Giles as he was packing his school trunk, determined, if necessary, to shake information from him as she had once upended him and relieved him of a halfpenny he had swallowed. It was not a task she found congenial. He had studiously avoided her during the last few days, as if half-suspecting a grilling, and it was humiliating to have to beg help in a situation of this kind from a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, but there seemed no alternative. Something told her that what she was seeking, what could help her formulate a practical plan concerning Stella’s future, was a clue, or a hint of a clue, as to whether or not Stella herself was pondering what life still had to offer her. This, she reasoned, would at least give her a lever to open a discussion that would not be terminated (as all previous conversations had been) by disconsolate negatives and, if pressed, a storm of tears. There was no time to beat about the bush. Staking everything on a single direct question, she said, “You’ll be off tomorrow, about your own affairs. Before you go I just
have
to know something and I don’t care how many promises you’ve made that girl since you’ve been hobnobbing with her. Has Stella discussed her recent trouble with you? For if she has, then you’ll oblige me by repeating exactly what was said, for the fact is I’m very concerned about her and she refuses to confide in any one of us. There now, it’s out! Have you anything to say to me? Anything at all?” When he betrayed himself by looking away, she had the greatest difficulty in preventing herself from boxing his ears. But then she noticed something that deflected her mind from Stella for a moment. He had suddenly turned pale and his hands, clutching a neatly laundered football jersey, were shaking, so that Henrietta at once regretted her sharp tone and took the jersey, placing it in the trunk and saying, gently, “There, now, Giles, I don’t mean to bully you. I came to you because… well… there was no one else to go to. I want so much to help Stella but apart from yourself she goes out of her way to avoid us all, almost as though we wanted to pry.”

He said, rising from his knees, “Wait,” and crossed to the door, looking out across the landing to the stairhead before closing the door and rejoining her.

“It means breaking my word of honour,” he said, at last, “but the fact is I think she’s wrong. Wrong not to tell you, that is, before she finally makes up her mind. Would you promise to say you stumbled across it some other way? Or maybe just
guessed
it? She trusted me, you see.”

“I promise, of course I promise!” She would have promised him anything, so alarmed was she by his expression and the implication that Stella was on the verge of making another disastrous decision. “There, I’ve promised. Before she makes up her mind about
what
?”

“About becoming a nun.”

He said it without emphasis, as though he had been relaying some trivial piece of family memoranda—the time Stella would be home from a party, or where he had left his cricket bat, or how many kittens the cat had had in the cistern loft. She wondered whether he could be aware of the impact his words made upon her and heard herself echoing his words of doom in the voice of a terrified child, utterly rejecting their fearful portent.

“Becoming a
nun
? A
nun
, you said?”

“That’s what she’s thinking about. She’s almost decided. She’s made up her mind to go to Father Gregory, over at Copley Priory.”

The pieces of the puzzle representing Stella’s enigma began to fall into place and each seemed to press cruelly on her chest, so that she seemed to stagger under their weight. He was beside her then, his face full of solicitude, but, behind solicitude, a harassed expression she remembered seeing on his face when he was going through that difficult period at his first school. She knew all about Father Gregory and where Stella had conceived the notion of entering a convent. As a child she had been very devoted to Deborah Avery, Joshua Avery’s daughter, who had been absorbed into the family after her father fled abroad and whom they all regarded as sister. Deborah, herself a Roman Catholic, had been brought up in a Folkestone convent, and there had even been talk of her taking the veil when she was passing through a religious phase about the time she was sixteen or seventeen. But Adam, thank God, had talked her out of that, and entered her at that smart ladies’ college over at Cheltenham. Once there, Deborah had been absorbed in a variety of interests, some of which seemed very eccentric to Henrietta. But whatever they were they all fell short of turning one’s back on life and burying oneself behind the grey walls of a place Henrietta could only think of as a prison.

It would not have caused her so much concern had Stella been younger, at a time of life when growing girls were struck with all kinds of fancy notions. Or, for that matter, had she not undergone such a shattering experience at that ratty old barn of a place across the county border. As it was, with the girl turned twenty, and isolated by her own wretchedness, a need to make a final break with life seemed not only logical but understandable.

She subsided slowly on Giles’s bagged-out basket chair, hands on lap, staring across at him with a kind of desperate appeal. She said, at last, “Why… why did she confide in
you
? Why not
me
?” And he replied, “She knew very well you would stop her seeing Father Gregory, or even discussing it with him. But she had to talk to someone.”

“What did you say to her?”

“That she couldn’t do it without consulting you. She wouldn’t be allowed to anyway, until she’s twenty-one, would she?”

“What’s that to do with it? She’ll be twenty-one in April. Did she… did she tell you
why
, exactly? Did she tell you anything about… about what happened to her with those awful people?”

“Not really. Except that she was dreadfully unhappy there. But I can guess, I think.”

She looked at him very sharply, impressed yet again by his maturity, his prescience, by everything about him that made him seem so adult when each of the others, even someone like Alex, who had fought for his life on a battlefield, seemed a child by comparison.

“I don’t think you could guess, Giles.”

“Yes, I could. It’s the kind of thing you would expect from people like that. What I mean is they
think
differently from people of our kind. They see everybody who isn’t born into their set as… well… as peasants. People of that kind treat animals more kindly than human beings, particularly animals that have cost them a lot of money. It’s always been so.”

For some reason his positivity comforted her, bringing him appreciably closer, so that he was as deeply involved in the problem as herself.

She said, “Go on, Giles. Say just what you think about it. For
I
have to talk to someone too and it won’t help at all to talk to your father at this stage. He’ll only storm and rage, and that won’t do, will it?”

“No,” he said, very definitely, “it would make things worse.” Then, cautiously, “I did think of something. It might sound silly. You’ll think it’s silly, no doubt. But well… as I say… it occurred to me when she told me what happened to her that night. After she’d run off, I mean.”

“Well?”

“She ought to talk it over with someone outside the family, and I don’t mean a priest. Someone who… well… who remembers her as she was, before it happened, someone likely to understand…”

He stopped there but she knew at once of whom he was thinking. Denzil Fawcett not only remembered Stella as she was when she had dashed about the local coverts shouting and laughing and getting into mischief. He had also been deeply in love with her, was surely still in love with her, and suddenly she thought herself an absolute fool to have to be reminded of him by a child. For Giles had clearly grasped what she had failed to grasp. The need to find someone who could approach a thing like this objectively, someone who wasn’t prejudiced by family ties and family loyalties but represented a world utterly opposed to that of the Moncton-Prices who yet knew something of their background.

“You think that’s silly?”

“I don’t think it’s the least bit silly, Giles. I think it’s the only possible way of going about things, and one day you’ll realise just how much you’ve helped me to understand all kinds of things. In the meantime, thank you for helping me,” and to his surprise and, she suspected, his embarrassment, she embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, after which she marched down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out into the stableyard, calling imperiously to Stillman to harness up the gig and tell Phoebe Fraser she wouldn’t be present at nursery tea.