Theirs Was The Kingdom (82 page)

But she replied, sharply, “Look at me! What else should I bother with? Fashions? Babies? Croquet-lawn tittle-tattle?”

He had a certainty then that he had been singled out and that concerning him she had something specific in mind; that his arrival here, in the middle of the night, was more than a stroke of luck on his part or hers. As he thought this, caution and curiosity fought a duel over her in a part of his brain too remote to be located. As the minutes ticked by curiosity won. He said, “What kind of specialisation were you thinking of, Miss Corcoran?”

She smiled, as though relieved at his capitulation. “You’re a crack shot,” she said. “Oh, don’t bother to be modest, for I know you are. With rifle and revolver. You’ve used a Gatling, too, and that’s something most junior officers haven’t done, save on the range. Well then, let’s move on. Have you heard about the Maxim? Or are they still discussing archery and pike drill when the port passes in the mess?”

“They don’t talk shop at all,” he said, smiling, “but I’ve heard all about the Maxim. It’s an improvement on the Gatling, isn’t it?”

“It will put the Gatling out of business. In a year or less every army in the West will be chasing them. I’m offering you a head-start, Captain Swann.”

His bewilderment increased. “But why? I mean, why me? And how does it come that someone like yourself should be in a position to offer me anything of the kind?”

“You’re the right age, you’re said to be lucky, you’re a crack shot, and if you are your father’s son you must have initiative in you somewhere. As to how I come to be drumming up support for the Maxim, that’s a family matter.”

“You’re saying the Colonel selected me?”

She laughed. She had, he decided, a very infectious laugh, much at odds with her forthright way of speaking. “The Colonel wouldn’t know a Maxim from an arquebus. No, no, it’s an offer from my mother’s side of the family, from my Uncle Hilary actually. The O’Neills are army, too, and Uncle Hilary served with the Federals in the Civil War in America. He stayed over there after the peace and began working with Maxim, and now he and the inventor are in London for a demonstration. It’s to take place at Wimbledon, about a month from now. Not long, but time enough for a likely lad to get the feel of the gun.”

He thought, “By God, I’ve never met anyone like her… there
isn’t
anyone like her… She could sell coal in hell…” but said, “Well, that explains a good deal. But if the inventor himself is here, and your Uncle Hilary has been working on the prototype, wouldn’t they be the obvious people to do the demonstrating?”

“No,” she said, “they certainly would not. For one thing, they’re both financially interested. For another they’re civilians, and this test is a preliminary army test, and an unofficial one at that. If someone like you, a serving officer in a line regiment with no previous training in gunnery, can put the gun through its paces, then it’s as good as sold to the British Army. Well, Mr. Swann?”

“I’d back myself to do it, Miss Corcoran. I’ve always been interested in fire-power, but I’m not on leave, and I’m still on regimental strength at Deal. You ought to know that junior officers can’t come and go, just like that.”

“Oh, that is no problem at all,” she said, cheerfully. “My father does what I say when he’s sober, and I mean to keep him sober for as long as it takes to attach you to the Wimbledon range as an infantry observer. What are strings, for if not to be pulled?”

She was, he decided, irresistible. There was something about her that put every other woman out of mind, that reduced handsome creatures like Miss Montcrieff and Cecilia to marionettes, and even hard-riding tomboys, like his younger sisters Joanna and Helen, to relative nonentities. “By George, you’re absolutely amazing, Miss Corcoran! I think you could do absolutely anything you had a mind to do, and get anything you were determined to get. If you really can arrange that posting I’m your man. Shall we shake hands on it?”

“Surely,” she said, and stood up, reaching across the table. But then, stood off and looked him up and down, “You know, they’re right about you, Captain Swann. You
are
lucky. You were born lucky. Why else should you have walked in here the way you did, saving me the trouble of winkling you out when every day counts? Come, I’ll show you to the door. You can get a cab at the Park rank, and as soon as you are transferred to Wimbledon I’ll be on hand to make the necessary introductions. Don’t bother to write to me. I’ll know when you’re expected.”

They were standing on the top step of the porch flight looking down on an empty street in the first flush of dawn when a final thought occurred to him. “Suppose my sailing date comes through? It may, any day now, and if it did I should have to go no matter how many strings were pulled at regimental level.” but she replied with a shrug, “Ships are sailing for India all the time, Captain Swann, and I keep careful eye on the Colonel’s correspondence. As a matter of fact, that was where I did my vetting. Goodnight to you, Captain.”

She extended her hand again, but this time he did not shake it. Responding to an impulse that had never before been experienced in the company of a woman, he raised it to his lips. In the glow of the porch gaslight he caught her looking at him with a curious intentness. Then the door was shut and she was gone, and he walked the few steps into Park Lane in search of a cab. He was surprised to find himself whistling.

3

The gun itself dominated his daytime thoughts. The tubby little contraption mounted on absurdly high wheels, its single barrel snouting through a steel shrapnel shield and its pungent whiff of cordite as the belts of cartridges slipped into the breech to the accompaniment of the long dry rattle. The rattle itself was arresting. It was as though the Maxim was chuckling over its appetite and could never stow too many brassy little fish in its maw, or be fed them at a rate too fast to be swallowed.

That was how he saw the Maxim gun from the first day. Not as a sophisticated piece of equipment but as something alive, with a deadliness that made one think of the rattlesnake and the cobra. It was no more than an assembly of nuts, bolts, and tubing, but one soon came to respect it as a piece of mechanism with the firepower of a battalion in ambush. For all that it was not a hard taskmaster. All it required was a steady hand, an unwinking eye, and belt after belt of cartridges that snaked between the wheels like the bandoliers of a dead giant.

Yet he grew to love the thing. Its feel, its absolute reliability, its awful concentration of power so that he thought, as he squatted astride the short trail, with his finger on the firing button, “With a weapon like this a man could have retaken Khartoum single-handed. With this, and a trooper to feed me ammunition, I could have stayed that rout under Isandlwana.” These were the thoughts that occupied him by day, when he was on the range, or down at the butts from the first light to dusk. But on Sundays and in the evening—quite magically, it seemed—she had the power to banish all thoughts of the bewhiskered Hiram S. Maxim and his deadly tool from his mind, leaving it free to explore hers as they wandered here and there about springtime London. They discussed everything from Swann enterprises to her childhood memories in sunbright garrison towns all over the world, from his adventures in the field to her curious obsession with the role of the army as the flag moved across embattled continents: To the greater glory of the Queen and her subjects he would have said a short while ago, but now was beginning to have different ideas, some of them approximating to his father’s. For Adam had always held that trade did not follow the flag as a matter of course. It merely packed a flag in its grips and kept it handy in case the field looked promising.

She was down at the range every day in time for luncheon, usually eaten in the company of Maxim, her long-faced Uncle Hilary (who reminded him of the Twyforde Green undertaker), and field officers from all branches of the service, who stood about watching him demolish targets at ranges from four hundred yards to over a mile and then went away shaking their heads as though they could not believe what they had seen. These men seemed not to think of him as one of themselves, a mere captain of infantry, but as a young stray whom Hiram Maxim and his lugubrious American salesmen had picked up somewhere and brought along to do their donkey work, and perhaps clear up after they had gone. But when he mentioned this to Lydia during a Sunday afternoon expedition on the river, she said, with one of her pettish shrugs, “Don’t let that concern you. Those old fools are in for a rare shock in a week or so, and so perhaps are you. But you’ll get no more than a hint out of me until I’m sure.”

It was about a week after this that he received notice of yet another visitor. Her Uncle Hilary, a man of few words, impassive save when the gun was not giving a hundred per cent satisfaction, appeared one morning looking fussed and abstracted, and his unease seemed to communicate itself to everyone else on the range. It was coming up to the luncheon break, however, before Maxim announced that His Royal Highness Prince Edward was expected, and might even deign to fire a few rounds, in which case Alex was to expend all but the last few cartridges of the belt in order to reduce the chances of jamming to a minimum.

Ordinarily, he supposed, Alex would have been awed by the occasion, but he was not, for he saw the gun as a great leveller. Behind it a keen-sighted crossing-sweeper, given a feel for the thing, could decimate all the royal houses of the world in a hundred and twenty seconds, so that when, around three, there was a stir behind him, and a portly, bearded figure looking like a prosperous rabbi emerged from a group to stand at his elbow, and Maxim ordered bursts at silhouettes over four hundred, eight hundred, and twelve hundred yards, Alex loosed off a thousand rounds with complete unconcern. Then, standing and acknowledging The Presence with a bow from the waist, he moved aside and allowed the Prince of Wales to take his place at the trail, guiding the gloved hand to the firing-button and joining in the polite applause when the gun chattered its final rounds. Either the gun was particularly well-sighted or His Royal Highness had a sportsman’s flair for firearms. The last silhouette went over and a gleam of satisfaction showed in the poached-egg eyes. “Remarkable, Mr. Maxim!” said the deep, fruity voice. “It seems that you have something reliable there. The point is, who else has? Or will have, eh?” It was a remark Alex was to recall in later years, when the Maxim was standard equipment for the British army and navy and had inspired Hilaire Belloc’s tag:

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.

Alex never did discover how Lydia Corcoran managed to delay his posting to India for three months, time enough to introduce several minor modifications to the gun, and get his name included in a dozen or more reports as the marksman (including a piece in
The Times
naming him as “the expert who had supervised the royal rattle at Wimbledon”) but by then he had come to terms with her inscrutability, and even more with the dynamism reposing in her small, insignificant presence. Their friendship, at first wholly centred on the new weapon, began to ripen in the warm spring weather, and he discovered in her an ability to hold his interest and enlarge his estimate of himself that had never occurred in the company of another, man or woman.

She was, he soon learned, an accomplished raconteur, with an endless repertoire of amusing anecdotes, all concerned with army life in the Colonies, and she had what he had always lacked—a memory for trivia that distinguished his father and had contributed, so it was said, to Swann’s success in business. In so many ways she reminded him of Adam, whom he had always revered without, somehow, being able to love, for his father never seemed to belong to any of them save, possibly, old George. And yet, in a curious way, Lydia
did
belong to him, almost exclusively one might have said, for she had no other intimates, male or female, so that he found the prospect of being parted from her increasingly depressing as the weeks went by.

Then, at last, his sailing date came through, and she gave him advance notice of it on a Sunday outing they made to Hampton Court gardens, adding that when the Maxim was officially adopted as an arm of the Services it was probable he would be recalled to Aldershot as an instructor. But that was unlikely to happen for a year or so. Government departments, she said, were notoriously lethargic and, in any case, time was required to put the gun into production.

The prospect of being separated from her was a sad blow to his confidence and he freely admitted as much, expecting one of her brisk interjections, but she said nothing, continuing to stare glumly at the sliding Thames, where it ran between two enormous beds of yellow tulips. It occurred to him then that she too was contemplating the flatness of the months ahead after an experience that he was beginning to see as half an adventure, half a conspiracy.

He said, at length, “If I do get back here, as you say, and don’t get overlooked, as I think more probable, will I see anything of you, Lydia?”

She replied, avoiding his eye, “That depends on you. I can make some of your decisions, but not that one.”

He said, gallantly, “Why, then, let me say this. I’ll never forget your kindness in arranging all this on my behalf, even if nothing at all comes of it. I’ll write to you, too. I’ll tell you everything that happens out there, and you must promise to keep me posted about information you squeeze out of your Uncle Hilary…” But then he stopped, struck by her listlessness, so uncharacteristic of all he knew of Lydia Corcoran. He said, lightly, “Come now, cheer up! If what you say is right I’ll soon be back, won’t I?”