Theirs Was The Kingdom (35 page)

“You mean there never was any other girl? Not even at harvest supper or the goose fair when you were growing up?”

“Never the one. Oh, they tormented me about it times enough, mother and the girls that is, but there it was. It always seemed to me a man ought to
know
what he wants, even if what he wants is away out o’ reach, and likely to stay so. Then you come up across that field in the rain and wind, and I took you back here, and since then I was content to wait around, never dreaming it would come to this, mind you, but just to be on hand in case you were in trouble again, for it seemed likely you would be soon as they got word where you was. I’ll add something to that, too. I’d have wrung that Moncton-Price’s neck like a fowl’s if he’d shown up. Do you believe that?”

“I believe it,” she said. The admission enlarged him, for she now saw him not so much as an infatuated swain, waiting hopefully in the wings for a word or a glance, but as a positive champion of the kind she had read about in
Ivanhoe
, and this invested him with an aura of romance very much at odds with his manner and appearance.

She was beginning to wonder, however, how this conversation could be turned to advantage, thinking that it had begun and developed promisingly enough, but still seemed to skirt the edges of the central dilemma. But then, in a barnstorming rush, most of her doubts were resolved, for suddenly he moved round the end of the table so that they faced one another. She saw that all traces of the bemused look he had worn throughout the day had vanished, and that he was regarding her objectively for the first time in the association, as though he had been selecting a partner for a dance and had finally made up his mind.

He said, fervently, “By God, but you’re a fine woman, Stella Fawcett! You been worth waiting for and that’s a fact!” And he made a bearlike grab at her, crushing her to him until it seemed to her that all her ribs would crack like a row of trodden sticks, and there was nothing particularly sacramental about the way he kissed her, either. It crossed her mind then, as she struggled to catch her breath, that she must have been a regular ninny to sit here wondering how to coax him and encourage him to accord her her rightful place in his life. She had very little share in his dispositions then or a moment later, when he plumped her down, exclaiming jubilantly, “Wait on, don’t stir! Something I’d clean forgotten…” and he strode back into the dairy, re-emerging almost at once with a bottle of champagne, one of eight dozen her father and brothers had opened for the guests as they were presented after the wedding. She remembered then a remark her mother had made the night before her marriage to Lester, something about father filling her so full of claret the night she was married that she might have been walking on cushions. It enabled her to guess at the source of the bottle and she exclaimed, “Mama slipped that into your bag, didn’t she?” And he chuckled, the first real chuckle she had ever drawn from him, and nodded as he placed the bottle between his knees and drew the cork.

There were glasses to hand, two of a set Giles had given them for a wedding present, and as he poured he said, “Never tasted the stuff before today. My old Dad used to say it were no diff ’rent from cider, but he must have tried the wrong sort. A glass o’ this is headier than a pint o’ scrumpy on an empty stomach.”

“Did you try it up at the house?”

“Aye, I did. One more’n I would ha’ got up and made a speech. It gives a man a diff ’rent look on things, as though, well, as though he was up a tree and looking down on the fields after an April shower. You’ll take some, won’t you, me love?”

“Half a glass, no more.”

“Well, I don’t reckon it’s a proper drink for a woman. But I’d wager you all used to drink it wi’ your dinner up at the Big House.”

“You’d lose your wager,” she said, letting a drop lay on her tongue and trying to decide if his rather poetic simile had substance. “ We were never allowed anything but claret and only a thimbleful of that if Phoebe Fraser was around. Well, here’s luck to us, Denzil!” and deciding she liked it she raised her glass and emptied it at a draught. She heard him say, “Go along up then, my love. I’ll run the tap on these things and put the bar across…” just as if he had addressed her in those identical terms every night of her life, and a comforting sense of familiarity bore her up like a cloud, so that she floated up the stairs and surveyed the half-furnished bedroom with heady proprietorship.

The bed was a gift from his family and the blankets and sheets were from Tryst. Two wool rugs were from Phoebe Fraser and the red velvet curtains she had made herself. A terror of fire was still with them, reinforced perhaps by the ineradicable smell of charred beams and thatch, so that the light up here was confined to a couple of small, hooded candles in pretty fluted sticks, a gift from Deborah Avery.

Presently, humming to herself, she tumbled out of her clothes and put on her nightgown, removing all the pins and ribbons from her hair so that it fell not far short of her waist. Then he was there, moving about the room with the same ponderous certainty he displayed when heaving a roofing beam into position or stripping the harness from Henrietta’s cob, or saddling the mare for her ride home in the twilight of a winter’s afternoon.

Sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, she watched everything he did, wordlessly but attentively seeing him strip down to his cotton drawers that gave him the look of the eighteenth-century prizefighter in a print that hung for years in her father’s study—Mendoza or one of his opponents. He had the same build, solid and muscular but taut, and he was a great deal more graceful than he appeared in his rough working clothes and great clod-hopping boots. He moved like a boxer too, placing his weight on the ball of the foot, so that whereas she had always thought of him as an ox or a bull, she now identified the source of those calculated movements he made when he was reaching down for a bundle of reeds from his perch on a gable-end, or when, with a kind of effortless precision, he lifted the twenty-rung ladder and planted it against a wall.

She said, suddenly, “You said I was beautiful but I’m not, Denzil, or no more so than most women my age. But you’re beautiful. Like no one else in the world,” and he first looked absolutely astonished and then blushed to the roots of his straw-coloured hair, saying, in an aggrieved tone, “Good Lord, love, you can’t say
that
of a man…”

But she replied, obstinately, “
I
say it, and most women would agree with me if they could see you now.”

He stood still then, stripped of his equanimity, something of the old baffled bewilderment lurking in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. But then, magically, the incongruity of her compliment must have fused with the champagne, so that he smiled, a little sheepishly, and said, “Now there’s a turnip-head you’ve married! That bag o’ mine is still in the waggonette, wi’ all that new stuff Mother would have me go out and buy. I’ll slip my breeches on an’ fetch it, for my nightshirt’s in it.”

But she exclaimed, impatiently, “Oh, to the devil with the nightshirt, Denzil Fawcett! You suit me well enough as you are, and it’s very snug in here, seeing your mother had the goodness to air the bed with her own bottles. Blow out the candles and put your arms around me, for I’m beginning to see what you mean about doubting this is as real as we want it to be!”

He did as she directed but slowly, having snuffed the candles and pulled the curtain aside to take a final sniff of the night air through the half-raised window. Then he padded back to the bed and very carefully climbed into it. For a moment she could have cried out against his maddening deliberation, but then his hand touched her hair, caressing it lightly, and she could hear his breathing as his hand passed over her shoulder and lightly cupped her breast in a way that made her shiver. It was too dark to see his face but she realised somehow that he had misread the tremor for he said, “Don’t you be afraid of me, my love! Not now, not ever! We’re right for each other, and this was meant to be, I reckon. Maybe I knew that, back o’ my mind, but couldn’t face up to it until we closed that door behind us an hour since.” And then, after a brief pause, “Not until now, I reckon.”

“Nobody would ever be afraid of you, Denzil,” and she made her point by reaching up, plucking the ribbons of her nightgown loose, and guiding his hand to her bare breast. He said, mildly, “It don’t have to be so, my dear, not until you’ve got used to me being here. We waited a long time and a day or so…”

“I don’t want to wait, Denzil. I love you and need you, even more than you need me.”

He hurt her a little but not so much as she had anticipated and not, she was sure, enough to make him conscious of the fact. She was proud then that no other man had laid a hand on her. There would be, she supposed, all kinds of difficulties ahead, but at least one thing was certain. Neither of them, so long as they both lived, could ever be lonely again.

Two

1

T
HAT WAS A TIME WHEN IT SEEMED TO ADAM, IN HIS BELFRY OVERLOOKING THE wide curve of the Thames, that his sons and daughters were reproducing the rootlessness of long-dead Swanns and wandering the face of the world in search of pay, promotion, and pickings.

For himself, he was done with foreign travel. He did not regard a round-the-network jaunt as anything more adventurous than a brisk reconnaissance, designed to keep his viceroys up to their work, but he had not crossed the Channel now for close on twenty years. Why should he, when he thought of Britain, and particularly England, as the pivot of the world, and of Englishmen as the chosen pace-setters in planetary affairs? Some of his friends and many of his business associates thought him a Chauvinist, with his roots too deeply embedded in an industrial past, but they were mistaken in one respect. He could extract everything he needed from the many newspapers, periodicals, and bluebooks he devoured, and his memory, far from failing him as he entered his mid-fifties, seemed instead to improve and operate like a well-devised filing system, selecting all that was likely to be useful, discarding everything else as fashionable chaff.

By August 1882, two of his sons were lost to him, or so it seemed. Alexander, gazetted to a Highland Regiment, was stationed in Malta, and daily expecting a move further east with Sir Garnet Wolseley’s Nile expeditionary force. George, supposedly prowling the Continent to widen his technological education, had drifted through France and Germany and finally down the Danube to a waggon yard south of Vienna, whence he wrote at rare intervals. This gave Adam the impression that George found the raggle-taggle empire of the Habsburgs very much to his taste but was learning, so far as his father could determine, little that would contribute to the future prosperity of a British transport undertaking.

For the time being, however, he bore with him, reasoning that George was a lively, likeable, adaptable fellow, who might as well sow his wild oats at a safe distance before settling to the collar in a slum overlooking a river with far fewer distractions than the Danube.

Both Giles and Hugo, the one sixteen, and the latter fourteen, were still at school in Devon, but both, during the Easter break, had paid their first visit to foreign parts, forming part of an athletic team that travelled to Milan to compete in some kind of schoolboy jamboree concerned with track events. Adam let them go, thinking the experience might teach them something, but taking no pride in their selection as athletes. The fashionable cult of games-worship made small appeal to a man born within a dozen years of Waterloo, and sometimes, in one of his tetchy moods, he would point to it as a sign of national decadence, telling Tybalt that obsession with gladiators was an indication that the British would ultimately go the way of Rome. He was out of step here. Even sober men of business were beginning to talk of cricketers like that chap Grace as if they added more lustre to the country than merchant princes. The emphasis placed on games and pastimes in the new gentlemen’s schools had, in Adam’s view, already reached the point of absurdity. They were even telling one another that Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton when his own father, who had actually fought in the battle, had never played an organised game in his life. It went along, Adam assumed, with the cock-a-hoop mood of a tribe that, in his lifetime, had launched a revolution far more germinal than that street riot the French were still talking about, but had yet to learn, it seemed, which side their industrial bread was buttered. For real education—technological education, that is—was at a discount. A man who could hit a boundary and kick a ball the length of a pitch was esteemed far above one who invented a safety device to save miners’ lives, or patented a machine that would double the output of a rolling mill. Meanwhile, the drift from the land was accelerating every year. Dedicated farmers like his son-in-law, young Fawcett, told him it was becoming increasingly difficult to tempt lads leaving the new state schools into agriculture, notwithstanding the fact that British farmers were far and away the most progressive in the world. More and more factories were springing up from the southern rim of Rookwood’s beat, where it touched the Channel, to the northern limits of Jake Higson’s territory beyond the Tay. While Adam did not quarrel with this, he could see no sense whatever in the wild scramble among their owners and sponsors to turn themselves into country squires before they were forty, or in their eagerness to launch sons in professions that were rapidly becoming outdated, like those of the army and the church. A man’s life was where he made his money and there, in Adam Swann’s view, he should remain, hard at work until they carried him away in a box. It continued to irritate him when coffee-house acquaintances, all men of substance, declared his an old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud outlook.

Equally irritating, to Adam’s way of thinking, was the proliferation of public busybodies, those men and women who spent their lives poking their long noses into everybody else’s concerns, launching one crusade after another. Few of their doctrines were based on the principle of twenty shillings in the pound, of the kind practical reformers like John Catesby had put forward when building the Trades Union Congress.

But here again Adam Swann was at odds with most of his contemporaries, for he had always held that a country’s prosperity depended on a friendly alliance between master and man. It maddened him to see a prosperous merchant, known to work his hands like field slaves, contribute a large sum of money towards the cause of Temperance, or a new church, or some other shortcut to Paradise, when they were ready to see their foundries close, or their ships left unladen, before they could be talked into paying their furnacemen or dockers an extra penny an hour.

The besetting sin of the nation, as he saw it, was hypocrisy, sometimes so blatant that it could be mistaken for insanity. In the old days, when he had been founding the network, men like Shaftesbury and others had battled ceaselessly against exploitation of the underprivileged, but the generation that followed them seemed to think that the existence of extreme poverty and affluence side by side in the same society was ordained by their night-shirted God. They were busy fashioning a new feudalism to replace the old.

Even this made sense to those with tougher hides and tougher bowels than he possessed, but how the devil did one explain the earnest preoccupation of commercial bandits with missionary and religious tract societies, with teetotalism, with campaigns to stop the honest prostitute from making a living at street corners and on the promenades of the music halls? Everybody wanted to be something as well as a merchant: a sociologist, an amateur priest, a public benefactor, or an educationalist. He was sometimes amazed at their collective conceits and inconsistencies. He knew men who had amassed fortunes in their twenties and thirties but at fifty had not yet discovered that it demanded fourteen hours a day to make a success of one job, much less three. He knew a shipper in Liverpool, whose boast it was that he employed only teenage boys and shambling old men—the one because he could sack them the day they finished their apprenticeship, the other because he could pay them starvation wages—yet this same man, when he died, left a fortune to found a library, and a further sum to pay for a golden angel on his grave. God, in His mercy, saw to it that the angel took flight within weeks, but Liverpudlians still regarded the shipper as a public benefactor. He knew a haberdasher in Rye Lane, who sacked his girl assistants if he caught them sitting down, who sent them to bed in dismal top-floor barracks on tepid cocoa and a slice of bread and dripping. Yet on Sundays this same rascal compelled them, one and all, to attend a chapel where he had just paid out a hundred pounds for new hassocks and hymn books!

Where would self-deception on this scale lead the nation? Men like these were not qualified to inherit the revolution of Brunel, Watt, and Stephenson. Historians were already comparing the British Empire with Rome but it had taken Rome five centuries to reach the ramp of complacency that launched it into oblivion. To his way of thinking this kind of leadership would achieve the same result in Britain in forty years.

He did not know the answers to these questions. He did not really seek to know them. He could applaud the severely practical rescue work of men like his waggonmaster Keate, or the efforts of a man like Barnardo to find refuges for children who slept out in winter, but this passionate involvement with other people’s souls baffled him, as did the fashionable vanities of everyone he met who pocketed more than a sovereign on a Saturday.

He did not, by any means, dismiss the shortcomings of his own family as regards planlessness, or preoccupation with what he thought of as fads.

Alexander, something of a coxcomb after his spell at a military academy, was already costing him more in the way of a quarterly allowance than he earned as a lieutenant in the field. George, who seemed in no hurry to return home and hitch himself to a waggon wheel, had not earned his beer and baccy money since leaving school. Hugo, at fourteen, seemed to think that fleetness of foot was all that was needed to justify one’s attendance at school, as though his ambition was to qualify as the fastest pickpocket operating between Aldgate Pump and the Law Courts. Giles, although intelligent and well-read, was no more than a dreamer, who had yet to make up his mind how, if ever, he would put dreams to work on something more practical than Gladstone’s diatribes concerning Armenians in Asia Minor, a place that was not even under the flag. Stella, to some extent, had made amends, and sometimes he saw her as the pick of the litter. At least she was proving a good wife to that husband of hers and had recently presented him with a nine-pound boy, the first Swann grandchild, and secretly his grandfather’s pride and joy, although he grumbled at Henrietta’s inclination to spoil the child and denied her claim that little Robert favoured the Rawlinsons rather than the Swanns.

As to the younger girls, Joanna and Helen, all they seemed to think about was horses, dancing lessons, and piano-tinkling, Phoebe Fraser having reported that neither showed any aptitude for cooking or needlework. How had it come about that an industrious father and an eye-to-the-main-chance mother had produced such a feckless tribe? He asked this question of her more than once but she seemed to find it no more than amusing, telling him, when she had had her laugh, that he was getting stale and frayed down there at the stinking yard of his, and failed to make allowance for youthful high spirits. And after that, half-seriously, she added a rider. “Give them time,” she said, “and they’ll do you proud, every man jack of them! And the girls too, I wouldn’t wonder. How old were you before you made a serious decision? I can tell you exactly. Thirty-one, whereas Stella, your eldest, is still only twenty-three!”

There was, he had to admit, something in what she said. He had made a very late start but was none the worse for it. It was unfair, however, to compare him with a generation that had begun life with so many advantages. At eighteen, like it or not, he had been pitch-forked into the army, and it sometimes seemed to him that he would have been well-advised to repeat the process with his sons, whilst making sure that his daughters equipped themselves for something a little more useful than a steeplechase or a set of lancers.

2

He was in such a mood as this one airless summer morning when Tybalt appeared telling him that his adopted daughter, Deborah Avery, wanted an audience. The prospect of seeing Deborah, and fighting one of their time-honoured, amiable duels concerning the ultimate meaning of the universe, promised a welcome diversion from desk work, so he told Tybalt to send the lady up and be sure to bring counting-house coffee at eleven sharp.

Deborah appeared a moment later, a graceful, slender woman of twenty-eight but looking, he decided, much younger despite her dowdy clothes, perhaps on account of small bones and a healthy complexion. He did wish she would spend her allowance on boots that made the best of pretty ankles, instead of squandering it on drunks or fallen women or whatever flotsam she collected these days.

The relationship between them had always been that of two people who agreed to differ, but it still pained him to see a handsome, intelligent woman like Josh Avery’s girl spend herself on an assortment of waifs and strays, most of whom, to his mind, were professional beggars.

There had been some silly talk, Adam remembered, of Deborah taking the veil when she was about seventeen, but he had come down very heavily against that. Instead, he had seen to it that the girl received the very best education that was available to her—a spell at Cheltenham, and afterwards as one of the first girl undergraduates at Girton College—so that he could now regard her as the one really educated woman of his acquaintance. Nothing could shake his belief that one day, given the right opening, she would surprise not only the Swanns but also her generation.