Theirs Was The Kingdom (4 page)

He remembered then that she too had been very close to the old man before she realised she was pretty and had a flair for fine clothes and twittery small talk, so that she learned to think of herself as the most eligible filly in the county. Well, that was all behind her now, he supposed, taking some satisfaction in the fact that she had turned instinctively to him for comfort, instead of drooping on the arm of that sulky-mouthed husband she had cornered. He experienced a fleeting, insignificant qualm as he looked over her shoulder at Lester Moncton-Price, noting an impassivity amounting almost to boredom in the young coxcomb’s expressionless eyes, and the immobility of the fleshy red lips—woman’s lips, he thought of them—but then Henrietta was patting her, and George was piloting mother and sister to the path leading to the lych-gate, and he heard Henrietta say, in a tightly controlled voice, “He wouldn’t want you to feel sad, Stella… I confess I don’t, although I thought I should. He had a good life, and a very happy one with us. Thanks to Papa…”

It was generous of her to say that, he thought, especially when it was she rather than he who had done the fussing over the last few years. Then he understood her line of reasoning. Comfort and security, of the kind the old man had relished, would have been denied him in his old age had his only son lacked the initiative to slough off that fusty Swann military tradition and concentrate on the business of making money. He studied her approvingly then as they settled themselves in the carriage for the two mile journey back to Tryst. There was an overall word for her and it eluded him for the moment, as a familiar place-name would sometimes escape him when he was working out a waggon route in his belfry overlooking the Thames.
Staunch
, was it?
Stalwart? Intransigent, Tempered, Resolute?
He ran it down as they left the last of the cottages behind—
“Indomitable.”
She met every new circumstance indomitably, and it had been this rather than her looks and figure that had singled her out from the very beginning of their association. Ordinarily, he had very little patience with the kind of woman they had been breeding over here while he was campaigning across the seas in youth and early manhood. But Henrietta was singular, had always been singular.

He thought, as the carriage ran under the edge of the silent woods and over the hump of Twyforde Bridge, “She always thought of herself as lucky, but I’m luckier. Suppose I’d latched on to a pretty little girl like Stella, instead of to the offshoot of a man with vigour and enterprise in his bones, like that rascally old father of hers? Odds on I should be a widower by now, what with all these children. Suppose I had left her to dry out in the sun on that moor the night the little devil ran away from home in a thunderstorm? Where would I have chanced on a woman capable of showing the fortitude and resource she demonstrated thirteen years ago, when I lost my leg, and she found herself saddled with a leaderless business, a sprawling great house, a young family, and a fourth child in her belly? I’ll stake every penny I possess that there isn’t another Henrietta between the Channel and the Pentland Firth, and be damned if I don’t tell her so before we douse the lamp tonight.”

4

He did, in so many words. In his own deliberately possessive way, the way he invariably went about the business of promoting their moments of intimacy. And she, for her part, made no more than a token show of being shocked. After sharing his bed for twenty years she could read his intentions like nursery print.

Through the half-open door of his dressing room she could hear the steady rasp of his razor as he sheared his strong, bluish bristles, and she wondered, smiling at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror, if he was aware that she always recognised an after-supper shave as a preliminary to tossing her about on that great four-poster they had inherited from the Elizabethan occupiers of the house. She went on combing her hair, rehearsing a formal protest that she knew would not have the least effect on him, but in a way she misjudged him. He was much gentler than usual, at least in his initial approach.

He came stumping out of his room and moved across protesting floorboards to stand behind her, and the ungainliness of the movement told her he had already loosened the master strap of the harness that held his artificial leg to the knotted, bluish stump she had insisted on inspecting the first night he was restored to her after that long, dismal interval that followed the Staplehurst railway crash. The wound had no power to shock and dismay her then, and in the thirteen years that had passed since his discharge from the Swiss convalescent hospital she had come to equate the mutilation with the glory that had attached itself to him at the time. She never saw him as a cripple, or thought of him as even marginally handicapped. The leg was just a specifically fashioned boot he lugged around, not out of necessity, but on account of a caprice that matched all his other caprices, singlemindedness, sustained personal initiative, iron nerve, and a surprising tenderness at moments like this.

He took the brush from her hand and rested half his weight on her shoulder, studying their faces in the mirror, and they remained a moment like this, cheeks touching, and the scent of his shaving soap in her nostrils. He said, quietly, “Tell you something, Hetty. I was damned proud of you today,” and when, mildly surprised, she asked why, he replied, “I expected a scene and there wasn’t one. The old man would have hated a graveside sniffle on your part. Were you thinking that?”

No, she said, she hadn’t even felt like sniffling, or not once they were clear of the church, where she had had time to marshal her thoughts and remind herself of the old man’s pitiful helplessness since June. How could anyone who loved him want that prolonged indefinitely?

“Young Stella came near to making a scene,” he said, absently.

“Stella has her problems. But I daresay you realised that today.”

“Yes, but they aren’t insurmountable,” he said. “She’ll handle them, given time.” And then, almost irritably, “Neither you nor I would have had a moment’s peace if we had insisted on second thoughts and held out for a long formal engagement. She’s not got your strength of mind but she can be damned obstinate.”

It was true, of course, but there was rather more to it than that and she was resolved to pursue the subject, but not now. There were more immediate matters on hand. She had not been a wife to him all these years without learning to recognise priorities, and said, with a shrug, “If she wants advice I hope she’ll have the sense to ask for it,” and was surprised when he laughed and demanded, in that shameless way of his, whether Stella had been given any in advance.

“Far more than anyone gave me.”

“Aye,” he said, goodhumouredly, “I’ll warrant that’s so. And more than most brides get this side of the Channel. Let it ride then. These things have a way of working themselves out.”

She knew from his tone that he was not disposed to stand there half the night speculating on his daughter’s problems. At times like this, when the great house was still, and they were alone together in a room lit by the single dressing-table lamp and the flicker of the coals in the high grate that had replaced the great open hearth, she was able to isolate herself from the complexities of family life and revert to the mood of their earliest days together, before they had assumed such a packload of responsibilities. As always his heavy masculinity enfolded her like a many-caped mantle, so that she would have liked very much to have flattered him by a show of impatience, but his weight pinned her to the stool and she could do no more than take his hands, pressing the palms to her breasts. It was enough. He tweaked the ribbon bow of her nightdress and bared one shoulder, kissing it lightly, almost perfunctorily; but when she responded to his kisses with an involuntary flutter, of the kind she experienced on every single occasion he had laid hands on her over the last twenty years, he became his usual purposeful self, as decisive about love as he was about trade and barter down at the yard. Without more ado he slipped the nightdress from both her shoulders and cupped her breasts in his hands, lifting their fullness to his lips so that his posture increased his weight and she cried out, laughingly, that this was more than she could bear and he should show a little patience, tonight, of all nights.

It was a familiar pattern, a game they had played longer than she cared to remember now that the streaks of grey in his hair were past ignoring. He said, lifting her bodily from the stool so that her nightdress slipped to her thighs, “When I show patience this side of the bedroom door, my dear, you can begin wondering what I’m about in the regions. You’re not always on hand, remember. Damn it, we’ve not gone the rounds together since the Colonel took to his bed.”

She remembered then, as he carried her across to the four-poster, recalling a moment in their marriage that had been etched in tragedy, for it had occurred no more than a few hours before the incident that cost him his leg and come close to costing her sanity. It was the day Giles had been conceived during an absurd, bucolic tumble down in a pheasant hide at the foot of the drive, whither she had hurried in the hope of intercepting him on his return from one of his free-ranging visits to his widely scattered depots. In one way it seemed a lifetime away, but in another only the day before yesterday. The years had done nothing at all, thank God, to moderate the extreme pleasure she derived from his physical dominance that invariably laced their moments of intimacy with good humour and a sense of renewal, converting their concourse into a kind of frolic that slowed the march of the years. Reminded of this, she felt impatient with her doubts about Stella’s happiness, Giles’s cough, and George’s restlessness, and the pettifogging demands of the younger children. They were nothing and he was everything. She did not put them out of mind exactly—she particularly wanted to discuss with him the possibility of getting Alex into a good regiment—but, as always when they were alone and he was in one of his possessive moods, she could stack them like a jumble of parcels waiting to be posted. Her arms went round his neck so eagerly that she forgot about his leg, an essential preliminary to any embrace of this kind and her impatience must have pleased him, for he said, chuckling, “Wait, the lamp…” and left her for a moment, not merely to extinguish the light but also to avail himself of the opportunity to turn his back on her while he unbuckled the side-straps of his leg. It was his one concession to modesty, or possibly an intensely felt masculine pride. In thirteen years he had never learned that the act of removing that ungainly contraption was incapable of invoking the smallest stirring of revulsion in her.

He was beside her in a matter of seconds, pulling her half-shed nightgown clear of her legs, so that she lay naked on the quilt, revelling in the warmth of the room, congratulating herself on her foresight in instructing the maid to build a good fire up here as soon as they returned from the funeral. He took his place beside her but propped on an elbow so that he could watch the firelight play on her body. This was an important part of the pattern of their ritual on these occasions, and had been ever since he had succeeded in exorcising the last of her conceits concerning personal privacy within a marriage to a man of his temperament. Tonight, however, he seemed in less hurry than usual, as he lay looking down at her, with that half-smile of his tinged with gentle mockery, one hand engaged with her hair still half-imprisoned in the ribbons she had been removing when he came in, the other playfully gyrating her nightdress, as though it was a flag he had captured in a skirmish. His playfulness, at such odds with the solemnity of the day, infected her, and she said, with a giggle, “That reminds me of Arabella Stokes.”

“That old trout over at Tithebarrow? Why?”

“She isn’t as prim as she looks. Or behaves, when you men are guzzling your port. The last time we were there to dinner she made everybody blush. Everybody but me, that is, for I’ve forgotten how, married to you.”

She had caught his interest in a way she seldom succeeded in doing by daylight, when, as like as not, his mind was engaged with his work, or one of the dozens of newspapers he brought home to study.

“You only listen to me when I’m undressed,” she said, pretending to pout. “I’ll tell you some other time.”

“You’ll tell me now,” he said, tossing aside the nightdress and throwing his arm about her waist. “What the devil has this nightdress to do with that wizened old woman at Tithebarrow?”

“It was Arabella’s nightdress I was thinking of. She’s a bawdy old gossip and was telling me and the other wives about old Mr. Stokes’s demands, when they were first married. About a hundred years ago.”

“It must have been. Well?”

“Whenever he wanted to make love to her he would turn facing her and say, ‘Lift your linen, Arabella.’ Just like that. Nothing more. And always on a Saturday.”

The laugh it drew from him surprised her. It was really a very small joke and had elicited no more than giggles from herself and Mrs. Stokes’s toothy niece at the time, but he seemed to find it very rich indeed. More than a minute passed before he could say, “Always on Saturday? How was that possible?”

“If it wasn’t she had to say so, and then he’d grumble and go to sleep without another word. Oh, it’s funny enough, I suppose, especially knowing her, but I remember thinking how awful it would be to be married to a man like that and from what I gather there are plenty about, even now.”

“Far more than there were in Arabella’s young days,” he said, “for cant of that kind is a national disease. It was one of the first things that struck me when I came back from the East. The really damnable thing is the double standard. More than half those Holy Joes keep a buxom little doxy tucked away in a love nest within a cab ride of their counting houses.”