Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 13

  They were more than a mile away, descending the dip to the watersplash, before she spoke again, saying, between her teeth, “Don’t lose touch with me, Denzil. And don’t continue to think of yourself as something beneath my daughter's notice. You aren’t and won’t ever be. It's all a question of time, you see. Families like ours and his go up and come down, sometimes in a generation. Maybe your turn is out ahead.”

  2

  The two letters were lying on a silver tray on the side table when she let herself in. A bulky package, with coarse, travel-stained wrappings, and a smaller, thinner letter, sealed with a thumb print impressed on red wax. She knew at once that the fat letter was from Alex and her heart, which seemed almost to have stopped beating after the terrible pounding it had taken during the day, gave a great, joyful leap as she shut the door on the darkness and carried the letter into her sewing room, without bothering to ring for the tea she so badly needed.

  Her hands shook so much that she had the greatest difficulty in removing the complicated wrappings, but she got them off at last and found a much-folded newspaper, printed in coarse, heavy type, and inside its folds a five-page letter from Alexander, headed, “January 29th, Durban.”

  She turned up the lamp and let her eyes run swiftly over the lines of sloping, boyish handwriting, absorbing the general drift of the letter before going back to the start and reading each successive sentence, word by word.

  Its gusto, lightly camouflaged under a deliberately laconic style, took her breath away, so that for a moment she completely forgot where she was and joined him in his stupendous adventure thousands of miles away, spurring with him down the hillside with twenty thousand savages at her heels, swept along in the flight of a disintegrating army and then riding pillion with him on that hell-for-leather gallop for the river. Some of the episodes he recounted seemed familiar—that bit about the two young officers who had saved the colours for instance—and she had to think a moment before remembering that there had been a piece describing this single cheerful aspect of the lost field in the Pall Mall Gazette only a few days ago. The realisation that her flesh and blood had actually witnessed it acted upon her like a powerful stimulant, and she read on to learn how he had found his way along the river to a place called Rorke's Drift, a name that already wore the halo of battles like Blenheim and Waterloo, so that the awful disaster preceding it was automatically downgraded to the status of a skirmish. Then, with rapt attention, she read of his part in that battle and how, when the Zulus had been driven off, he had gone down to the charred building to meet its defenders, including the famous Lieutenants, Chard and Bromhead, and how Lord Chelmsford's relieving force had appeared that same day and Alex, along with other survivors, had been sent back to the coast to form the nucleus of a new army for the protection of the colony.

  He was likely to remain there, it seemed, until reinforcements arrived and the Zulus were called to account, and learning this she felt relieved. It must mean that he would be denied any more bloodcurdling adventures, at least for the time being. Then she readdressed herself to the lengthy postscript, written, it seemed, just before he got the letter aboard a fast packet boat for England. It puzzled her at first, for it did not seem to have been written by the boy she remembered, a lad who had never had the capacity to look inward like his father or young Giles, and yet was able to tell her precisely how he regarded his miraculous escape. He had added, in pencil, “I don’t mind admitting there were times when I thought myself an idiot to have let myself be drawn into a thing like this, especially when I was hiding among the rocks and watching the battle for the mission house. But things looked different in the morning, with the Zulus all gone, and that splendid chap Chard counting the dead and rebuilding the barricades in case Lord Chelmsford didn’t show up. He didn’t seem to think he had done anything very remarkable, fighting off that horde with less than a hundred men at his back, but everyone here regards him as a real hero, and so do I, for he's helped me make up my mind on one thing. I mean to go through with it. I can’t imagine settling to anything less after this and wondered if you could estimate my chances of getting into a decent regiment, where chaps don’t run away like my lot did, and like I did until I saw what could be done with a few trained men and a chap like Chard to lead them. In short, sir, it's the Queen's shilling for me from here on, but I shall, of course, have to see this through to the end until Cetywayo's kraal goes up in smoke, and those beefy lads of his dip their plumes to us. You can write care of ‘Post Restante, Durban,’ and letters will find me, but now, as you can imagine after such a drubbing, we shall be at sixes and sevens until reinforcements arrive. Your loving son, Alexander.”

  There was, of course, the inevitable P.P.S. It read: “The newspaper enclosing this letter is a Durban account of both affairs, garbled but true in substance. Post it on to old George and get him to hand it on to Jumbo Bellchamber as a change from cramming for F.O. exams, poor beggar.”

  She knew him well enough to read more into the letter than he had intended. He had been scared, very badly scared, but the events of the day had predisposed her in favour of people scouting around for enough courage to keep them at their posts; and anyway, being Alex, he was over it now and looking ahead to the next fence. She smiled the secret smile reserved for all male vanities and opened the slim letter, overlooked in her brush with the Zulus, seeing that it was only the usual Sunday-duty-scrawl from Giles who, as the younger of the Swanns at Mellingham, was now saddled with the job of writing the compulsory bulletin to his parents.

  They had told her that new boys’ duty letters were censored by the house-captain or a junior master, presumably to prevent the spread of despondency, common among first and second termers. The final paragraph of this one indicated that Giles had taken artful precautions against the censors. After half a sheet of well-spaced gossip concerning games and health, he had written; “I am looking forward to the Easter break, Mamma, but it will be strange to be home with grandfather not there.” Then followed the piece in code, concerning matters he would not want generally known; “I miss you all very much on Sundays, when we aren’t kept so busy with prep, games, and fagging. And that reminds me to tell you I am not fagging for George's friend, Smithers, as I had expected this term. Another new boy called Burke (I think I told you about him) very much wanted me to exchange and I did because his fag-master, Gifford, left last half. I now fag for Quentin, a cricket-colour who has promised to coach me at wicket-keeping when summer half comes round. That's all the news. Your very loving son, Giles.”

  In their first, hard-driven years away from home both Alexander and George had sprinkled their duty letters with comments on schoolfellows whose names meant nothing to her, but these names did. They also made his letter more revealing, and infinitely more poignant than Alexander's dramatic dispatch. She remembered Smithers as one of George's closest friends and on this account unlikely to use Giles harshly. She remembered too that Burke had been a very timid boy, scared half out of his wits during his first term. It was demonstrably clear what had happened. Giles, a candidate for martyrdom if ever there was one, had moved over on Burke's behalf, and prevailed upon his elder brother to keep an eye on the poor little toad.

  The letter made her reflect, for a moment, on the tyranny of men's schools that all males, Giles included, were at such pains to defend. It also reminded her of her resolve to talk Adam into making that change she had been contemplating before Stella's trouble had driven everything else out of her head. She wondered how many years would have to pass before she could resign her position as caretaker of the family, reckoning it at about fifteen, the period that would elapse before baby Edward was as old as George; but then, recollecting Stella's troubles, she did her sum again, concluding that her stewardship was more likely to last a lifetime. One or other of them would always stand in need of her, whether or not they were prepared to admit it. In most marriages, she supposed, the protective role would be that of father and husband. In others it would be shared. In
her case it was an exclusively maternal responsibility, for Adam's real children, although sporting the Swann insignia everywhere they went, did not reside at Tryst but were scattered all over the islands. She was considering whether she resented this or whether, deep down, she enjoyed the responsibility, when Phoebe Fraser, the Scots governess, appeared with tea and crumpets, listening gravely to the account of Alexander's adventures. She did not pry, thank God, into what her mistress had been about all day. There had been times when Henrietta (who liked a gossip when Adam was away) had resented Phoebe's Lowland dourness, but today she welcomed it. Phoebe, a strict Calvinist, would be unlikely to take an objective view of Stella's flight unless, of course, the reasons were explained to her. And there could be no question of that.

  Phoebe said, unsentimentally, “Well, it's a relief to learn the laddie is sound in wind and limb after all we’ve read about in the papers,” and then, dismissing the Zulu war as an irrelevancy, “The younger bairns will soon be awa’ to their beds. Will you go up and bid them goodnight?”

  No, Henrietta said, she would not, for she had had a very exacting day and was quite tired out. In her absence, however, Phoebe could read them their brother's letter, for that would give them plenty to talk about among themselves. Phoebe took the letter and went, leaving her mistress to luxuriate before the sewing-room fire and dispose of four butter-soaked muffins before recollecting one small duty remained before she could put her feet up, read a chapter of Silas Marner, and make an early night of it.

  She went over to her little bureau, took a sheet of notepaper, and wrote to Adam's head clerk, Tybalt, the only man in the world who could be relied upon to know where her husband was at any given moment. She wrote,

  “Dear Mr. Tybalt, You would oblige me by sending this telegram to Mr. Swann at once. Certain urgent matters require his attention in Kent. Thanking you, Henrietta Swann.” Then, before sealing it, she took a plain sheet of paper and wrote, “Come home wherever you are stop Alex safe stop Other matters requiring urgent attention stop Love Henrietta.”

  She smiled as she licked the envelope. It occurred to her that she had just struck two telling blows against the towering edifice of male complacency. Tybalt would lay awake half the night wondering what could possibly have gone adrift in the Kentish Triangle, and why Godsall, the manager there, had consulted Mrs. Swann instead of himself. Adam, the moment the telegram reached him, would be obliged to occupy the journey homewards making even wilder guesses at the nature of the domestic crisis.

  There was no malice in Henrietta Swann, but there was still, for all her thirty-eight years, a great deal of mischief and it crossed her mind as she gave Stillman, the handyman, the letter to post, that she had earned this little indulgence in the twelve hours that had elapsed since Denzil Fawcett had appeared at the kitchen door.

  Five

  1

  NO PROSPEROUS FARMER, RIDING HIS ACRES TOWARDS HARVEST TIME AND contemplating his million stalks of wheat and barley, could have derived more satisfaction from the survey than Adam Swann, making one of his periodical tours of what he sometimes called his “snug parcels of British commerce.”

  It was always a critical, self-congratulatory progress, as though he had been a master painter of vast, historical canvasses standing off a yard or two, adding a touch here, erasing a smudge there. Whilst there were times when a close inspection vexed him, these moments of irritation were soon engulfed in a tide of complacency as he reminded himself that the entire enterprise had been conjured out of a single will in what was (if one thought in terms of history) no more than a moment of time.

  Here, in the far-flung outposts of his personal empire, was all the evidence of his initiative and imagination, his flair for picking subordinates who shared (or so he would remind himself) his breadth of vision and power to adapt, methods and systems he devised and they put into effect. The mere contemplation of his handiwork, as he moved from one corner of the land to another, increased his sense of identification with the ethos of Britain.

  In this sense, if in no other, he was a Chauvinist. Music-hall patriotism made no appeal to him. He had no particular respect for the flag as a flag, or for the ageing queen and her tribe of royal descendants and puppet rulers now girdling the globe. He was not stirred, as were his contemporaries, by the multiplicity of the red sploshes on maps unrolled in Imperial schoolrooms, or by the saga of half-forgotten clashes between armed men that was (he could never say why) the thread on which Imperial history was strung. He saw those battles and campaigns for what they were, unimportant in themselves unless trade fell in behind the flag and pushed the popinjays aside to make way for the men with steel rails, loading bays, quays, cranes, acres of docks, and warehouses without number, to serve the potential yield of an island, a peninsula, a delta, or a subcontinent overrun by professional brigands that most people still thought of as soldiers.

  When this happened (and often, if his interpretation of Imperial despatches was correct, it did not) two prizes were there for the taking. A source of raw materials, and a ready-made market for manufactured goods. People were mistaken in imagining that soldiers were the pioneers of this endless game of catch-as-catch-can. The real founders of the enterprise never left these shores and fought all their battles right here in mines, factories, and foundries, in the makeshift workshops of men like Watt, Crompton, Stephenson, Brunel, Faraday, and others, most of them long dead, some who had died in want and obscurity. But Swann knew them and Swann acknowledged them—that small, self-dedicated band of adventurers, whose faith in themselves had transformed a nation of rustics into an army of expert usurers in a little over two generations, had made their clamour heard across the world, drowning all the Te Deums of all the victories on all the fields of honour, cutting a swathe a hundred miles wide in every direction, beginning right under his nose on the banks of the Thames and ending, who knew where? In Cathay? In Batavia? In Siberia or Timbuctu, with riches undreamed of for every man-jack under the flag? In satiety and decline after the manner of Rome? Or in stalemate as other tribes bestirred themselves and demanded their share? It was a conundrum he was happy to leave to the social prophets and statisticians. For himself it was not the goal that absorbed him but the challenge it had offered in his early thirties and would continue to offer until the day he died.

  Where the brown, flotsam-fouled flood of the Thames split on the arches of London Bridge above Swann's convent belfry, the barges, wherries, and lighters were boosted downstream as fast as a man could run over level ground. But when they drew abreast of him the current slowed, so that the river traffic faltered for a few seconds, giving a trained observer time to make a guess at the substance and value of the argosies. Then, as though recollecting the City's maxim that time was money, the water cavalcade swept on, booming downstream to its rendezvous with ocean-going steamers, clippers, and coasters that would swallow its cargoes and spew them out into marketplaces at the ends of the earth. For this was the rhythm of the century, replacing the timeless, agricultural year, already, to Swann and his peers, as archaic as the sundial and the Julian calendar.

  He would observe this flow for a spell, but then, usually in spring and autumn, a restless mood would possess him, and he would button his topcoat and sally out into his regions. Armed with his daybook and his campaign travelling kit, he lunged off in one direction or another, so that the network hummed with messages that the Gaffer was on the rampage, the sluggards had better watch out, and the young and thrustful could start thinking about promotion.

  The latest expedition had taken him as far as Dublin, but he did not make much of his immediate prospects in Ireland. The Irish, to his way of thinking, were a noisy, rollicking lot, lighthearted enough in their overall concept of life, yet haunted by a sense of grievance that would not be exorcised by the Home Rule they were screaming for in Westminster. He had served alongside too many Irishmen in India and the Crimea to be deceived by men like Parnell and Redmond and the fiery speeches they were so fond of making to any
one who would listen. They were not equipped to mount a long, carefully planned campaign for freedom or for anything else. They enjoyed the fight for its own sake and the devil take tomorrow, so that it followed that the growth of his Dublin branch was likely to be slower and less certain than that of territories he had opened up in England over the past twenty years, or, more particularly, those areas Fraser had recently exploited among the businesslike Scots. He spent no more than five days in Ireland, going down to Cork and then up to Galway, admiring the country but chewing his lips over the likelihood of profits to be made by expanding the odd outpost in these areas. As like as not, his waggons would be waylaid and pilfered, or borrowed to transport guns and proclamations for the revolution they were always talking about, and he congratulated himself then in adhering to his principle of putting a native-born foreman in charge of localised territory. He told O’Dowd, his man in Dublin, “Continue to operate from here for the time being. Things are too unsettled in the west and south to encourage me to invest at the moment. It’ll mean longer hauls, of course, but I’ll give you all the waggons and teams you need. And I’ll make damned sure of their springing. Your roads are atrocious.”

  Then he left, catching the steamer to Liverpool and feeling that here, on one of the most prosperous beats of the network, he was on safer ground, for he had a first-class man in Catesby who, as a child of eight, had stood to a loom for fourteen hours a day, and subsequently served time in gaol for his part in a riot.