Theirs Was The Kingdom (67 page)

It seemed, Giles thought, an odd thing to say to a stranger but then, Giles thought, they were a very odd pair, exceptionally sure of themselves and buttressed, no doubt, by enormous wealth. He was still reflecting on this when he heard Sir Clive say, “I’ll find some more suitable clothes for you. Marcus Slessor, the flour man, was here with his son a month ago and I had some jodhpurs measured for the lad. A hacking jacket too, I seem to recall, and he was about your size. I do know they left a good deal of luggage that hasn’t been sent on yet, for want of a forwarding address.” He nodded and glided out, moving, Giles thought, like a woman wearing slippers a size too small for her.

3

Then began, for Giles, the most absorbing and exciting month of his life up to that time, when all day and every day was spent in the bewitching company of Romayne Rycroft, and part of the evenings with Sir Clive who possessed a billiards table and played an excellent game. Surprisingly he also played the piano, “A trick I picked up years ago to encourage relaxation,” he explained, almost apologetically. After a day or so it seemed to Giles that he had been up here for years, had known Romayne since she was a child, and had himself been raised in this ruggedly beautiful part of the country, where everyone spoke Welsh and life moved as slowly and predictably as it did on the Exmoor plateau.

It did not take him long to persuade himself that he was hopelessly in love with Romayne, who seemed in some way to personify the landscape, with its untamed beauty and swiftly changing moods, sometimes buoyant, sometimes subdued, but always holding off slightly as though it saw him as yet another English predator threatening Welsh independence.

At first he was confused and disturbed by her sudden plunges from reckless gaiety into what he could only regard as nursery petulance, but he soon adjusted to it, and learned the trick of teasing her out of what she called a “fan-tod,” a prickliness that appeared out of nowhere and encouraged her to take offence (manifestly counterfeit) at some trivial disappointment or something he said or did. But mostly she was gay and vivid, and always she was restless, whirling him north or south or across to the coast on horseback or on foot, or in the Rycroft waggonette, once as far as Llangefni in Anglesey, where Maggie, the housekeeper, had relatives she liked to visit. They explored the Portmeirion peninsula, with its tidal estuary, and what Romayne described as its “Arthurian woods.” They visited the local castles, Harlech, Caernarvon, Conway, and Beaumaris, and sometimes accomplished round trips of thirty miles a day, climbing some of the easier mountains, or tracing the sources of rivers that rushed between the folds of the lower hills.

For the truth was in her dashing company, he forgot the initial purpose of his journey, and the social curiosity that had brought him thus far and this did not surprise him. Who, he asked himself, could brood on the wretched condition of the miners and the lives of the poor, when the June sun reflected the glitter of a pretty girl’s eyelashes, as well as the waterbreaks in the mountain rivers and the specks of quartz in the surface of rocks, where every cleft held a solitary harebell with petals as blue as her eyes?

He would gaze at her sometimes when she was in one of her momentarily abstracted moods, when she seemed not to be aware of anything at all as they rode and walked up a hill-track, or threw themselves down on a crest to eat a packed lunch prepared by Maggie, a woman dedicated to the task of doubling his weight despite all this exercise.

She was, he decided, the most graceful and desirable creature in all creation, and he would say nothing to bring her back but poke among his memories of paintings by the masters, or the fashionable Academicians, for her equivalent, finding none save, perhaps, a hint or two in models of the kind the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood favoured, girls touched by some brooding melancholy. But then, in a flash, she would make the comparison ridiculous by suddenly coming out of herself and darting an impish glance at him, as though willing him to pay her one of his grave compliments (many of them borrowed from Waller, Marvel, and Herrick), or perhaps take her in his arms and kiss that sulky mouth, the key to all her swiftly changing moods.

He kissed her often but always lightly, as though he might be called upon to defend the impulse as an expression of high spirits, and it was not until word came from the unseen but omnipresent Prickle that she was to return to London to prepare for her season that he decided they must arrive at some understanding before they parted, for he was convinced, to his own gloomy satisfaction, that he could not continue to exist without hope of seeing her again in the near future.

It was time, he thought, to make some tentative arrangement to meet in London, possibly in a month or two, when she was settled there and was approaching the tail end of the round of balls and fetes the diligent Miss Thorne was preparing for her, as the prerogative of all socially-ambitious young ladies with fathers able to afford a conventional launching.

Adam, he recalled, had little patience with this rigmarole. Stella, his sister, had not had a season, and neither Joanna nor Helen looked for one, but he supposed it was obligatory for the only daughter of a man as rich as Sir Clive, and even Romayne seemed to regard it as an inescapable part of growing up, like wearing a corset.

He had a horrid fear, however, that she might meet someone far more eligible than he at one or other of these functions—the son of an earl, maybe, or even a duke, or at least someone whose family background was more splendid than his. It therefore seemed imperative that he should stake some sort of claim here and now, while he had the chance. Yet it was not easy for a bookish person like him, with no previous experience of being in love, or ever having contemplated love other than in the abstract, to say how he felt about her and how important she had become to him.

He thought about it a long time, until the days seemed to be flying by, but then, providentially, she herself brought it up, saying, as if it was a perfectly natural extension of their relationship, “You’ll come back here, Giles? When I’ve done with London, I mean. The autumn up here is the best of all time. The streams fill up then and go rushing down like cataracts, and the air is so clear and sparkling that you can see the mountain tops for days at a time.”

He said, suddenly alarmed, “Come back
here
? Why, no, that isn’t possible, Romayne. I shall have to work, and spend most of the time in town. I thought you understood that. I’m sure your father does, even if he agreed to me coming back.”

He was surprised then, and embarrassed too, by the blankness of the gaze she directed on him, saying, “If Papa approves? Do you imagine I haven’t discussed it with him? Take it from me, you have his blessing to squire me indefinitely. For always, maybe!”

“For always…?” But he realised then that she was only teasing him, as she so often did, and said, “Let’s be sensible about this and arrange something practical. For a start, tell me when you would like me to call on you in London, for I don’t want to feel embarrassed, and I don’t want to embarrass anyone else, particularly after all the kindness and hospitality you and your father have shown me up here,” but then he saw that she was looking at him with exasperated amazement.

“
Embarrass
anybody? What
can
you mean by that? Why should you embarrass anyone by calling on us? Sometimes I just don’t understand you, Giles Swann. Why are you so… so
humble
about who you are and what you are? My father thinks you’re one of the cleverest young men he’s ever met and me, well, I should have thought it would have been obvious by now that I’m much fonder of you than anybody in the world. Including Prune!”

Her injection of Prune, her sleek and impossibly foolish black Labrador, into the tail of this astounding declaration was a kind of lifeline. Somehow it lowered it to the level of comprehension, as well as inviting laughter. He was not completely taken in by her implication that she was in love with him. She was the kind of person very likely to say this on impulse and forget it an hour later, or qualify it in some way. What did astonish him, however, was that Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn, who he had decided was one of the most important magnates in the country, should regard him, even momentarily, as a potential son-in-law, and for the moment he preferred to test this apparent evidence of progress.

He said, “Listen Romayne, you’re very much given to making facts fit private wishes. I’ve noticed that and well… I love you for it because it’s an essential part of you. But it won’t do at all at this stage to pretend that your father who, so far as I can make out, is almost a millionaire, could regard me as anything more than a half-grown schoolboy, with his way to make in the world. We get along very well. I don’t deny that, and I won’t deny that I like him… well, I admire him anyway. He’s achieved so much, without anyone pushing him from behind, and that’s rare nowadays. But that doesn’t mean he would encourage me to stay on here if he thought I was serious about you, and not just fooling around, if you see what I mean!”

“Oh, I see what you mean well enough,” she said, gaily now, “and although it was very cleverly put—the way you always manage to put things—it isn’t very flattering to me, is it? Not when you take the wrappings off and examine it closely.”

“Just what can you mean by that?”

She said, smiling her rather absent-minded smile, “Well, all this hedging and dodging the real issue, like Prune chasing a rabbit he knows he can’t catch. Why don’t you speak plainly, and say exactly what you do have in mind? About me, of course,” she added, as though he might likely miss the essential point.

He took a deep breath, the kind all lovers seemed required to take in poems by Herrick and company.

“Very well then, since you demand it, I will. I love you, Romayne. I can’t think of anything more exciting than the prospect of marrying you. Now then, how do you suppose your father would react if he heard me say that?”

“He’d be very relieved, I should say.”

He gasped, too surprised to exclaim, so that she went on, easily, “As a matter of fact, he’s already hinted at it. ‘Sooner have that young Swann feller around than any of the chinless fortune-hunters Miss Thorne is likely to steer your way’. He said just that only the other day, after you had beaten him in that boring argument you had about the importance of Austria-Hungary as a what-do-you-call-it?”

“A political counterweight?”

“Something like that. I don’t understand the half of what you two say to one another, but it seems to impress him. How much you’ve got upstairs, I mean.”

He remembered the discussion very well. He had politely challenged Sir Clive’s claim that the sooner the Habsburg empire broke up the better it would be for the peace of Europe. He had argued that if this did happen Prussia was likely to become a serious menace, and in the end Sir Clive had half agreed with him. It did not seem a relevant argument concerning his daughter’s choice of a husband, however, so he said, “That’s all very well, but let’s be clear about this, Romayne. I haven’t any great expectations. My father is well-established, of course, but in one field, not twenty like your father. And in any case, you’re an only child and I’m the third eldest son, and my brother George is already earmarked for the chairmanship of the company. I’m no more than a kind of hanger-on.”

“You won’t always be,” she said, “and in any case, it doesn’t make a ha’porth of difference, to Papa or to me. For one thing, we’ve got all the money we’re likely to need. For another, I’d want you if you worked on a farm, or in a factory. You don’t plan these things, the way Prickle seems to imagine. They just happen, as they did to us. We’re right for one another. I knew that the moment you pulled me out of that river and I kissed you on the way home, and only a day or so later I told Maggie I’d never marry anyone else.”

It made his head spin to hear her talk like this. It was not a particularly bright day. The skies were grey and low over the mountains, but suddenly the world was basking in sunshine and his future lay ahead of him like the path to the Celestial Mountains that the pilgrims sought in
Pilgrim’s Progress.
He said, breathlessly, “Well then… let me say this… there’s nothing I want more than to marry you, Romayne. Nothing at all, just as soon as I can stand on my own feet. But that will take years. You must understand that.”

“ Years?”

She made it sound as if he had proposed something preposterous, but he held to his point.

“Yes, years. Do you suppose I’d marry you and live on your father’s money? I couldn’t do that, not even for you. I’ve got plans. They aren’t very well defined, and they probably aren’t his kind of plans, but I mean to… well
… to be
somebody, to make some kind of mark before I’m middle-aged, and as set in my ways as my father, or yours.”

To some extent he seemed to have satisfied her, for she said, carelessly, “Oh,
that
? Well, that’s easy enough. You could take over one or other of his businesses. Or if you didn’t like being beholden to Papa you could go into Parliament. Yes…” her imagination took fire, “that would be splendid! I mean, you already
talk
like a Member of Parliament! You’d be famous in no time at all. You might even be Prime Minister while you were still young, like Pitt,” but at that he was obliged to laugh.

“There’s a lot more to getting a seat in Parliament than that. This conversation is getting far too hypothetical for my liking. Now just listen to me, Romayne, and please don’t interrupt with suggestions. I don’t want you sounding your father on this. It isn’t fair to him or us, because I only left school a few months ago. We’re only eighteen, after all, and even the nobility don’t get married until they’re of age…” But suddenly he broke off and laughed at himself and her, possibly at the artless way they were discussing the subject, as though it was no more momentous than tomorrow’s visit to Caernarvon. He went on, “Let’s take first things first. When do people start leaving London again? After the season, I mean. For I know it isn’t much use my calling round at Eaton Place until then…” But she wasn’t looking at him, and the big, childish mouth was already formed in a prodigious pout, so that he moved closer to her, put his arm round her, and kissed her cheek, saying, “Don’t you
see
, Romayne, darling? You’ll be caught up in a whirl of social “musts” the minute you get within nagging range of that governess. Unless we make a plan now I can’t guarantee the certainty of seeing you. Are you listening? Or don’t you care to be tied down?” and he gave her a little shake that was really no more than a disguised caress.