Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 16

  “I think they have.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “ We solved ours by a mixture of patience and faith in each other. I’ve no doubt you and Henrietta can do the same.”

  “It sounds a pretty sordid story.”

  “About as sordid as I’ve ever heard. She’ll need all the help you and Henrietta can give her. If I were you I wouldn’t let yourself be influenced by sniggering tittle-tattle. That isn’t in the least important. It's the girl who matters right now.”

  She thought it wise not to press the point and extended her hand again. “I’ll go to her now and I’ll keep in close touch by letter. She's among friends, Adam.”

  “Yes,” he said, and then, with a touch of the old devil-may-care approach he had brought to so many crises in the past, “Take Tom into your confidence if it helps. I don’t mind him knowing. In view of what you’ve just told me, he's probably very familiar with people like the Moncton-Prices and their propensity to ride roughshod over people like us, who have had to fight every inch of the way.”

  He nodded then and turned away; she watched his tall frame thrusting itself along the platform, with that peculiar bobbing gait he had acquired along with his artificial leg, she was conscious of a great surge of tenderness for him, far more broadly based than the instinctive sympathy she felt for his wretched daughter. Stella's problem was personal and could be resolved, one way or the other, inside that arena of time that was the prerogative of the very young, but his involved not so much his family as the whole edifice of his life, erected after years of toil, thought, and risk. Perhaps it was foolish to assume that an enterprise as sound as his could be threatened by what most people would see as a purely domestic crisis, albeit a very unsavoury one, but she knew Adam Swann well enough to understand that for him commercial probity and domestic background were inseparable and she did not think the worse of him for viewing it in this light. His entire being was absorbed in what he had created over the years with his own hand and brain, and his first line of defence in a situation such as this was necessarily the health of the network rather than his daughter's personal happiness. She turned away and passed out into the street, hailing a cab to take her back to the yard where her trap was waiting. She felt older and sadder than when she had stood watching his train slide into the platform.

  4

  It was nearly midnight when he turned his gig into the avenue that led up to the house under the outcrop, just visible as a cluster of winking lights on the first crest.

  He had always seen the big, sprawling house as an unequivocal pledge of his powers to bluff and cozen, to scheme and hold on as though, in the first instance, it had been a citadel in enemy hands and he was the man charged with storming it and making it his, a vast, rambling, weather-beaten pile, set there three centuries ago by a man just such as he, who put an equally high price on himself. But tonight, in a curious way, the house seemed to mock him, as though those lights winking through interlacing branches were signalling a fresh challenge that had the power to frighten him a little, reminding him that challenges of this sort were for the young and hale, not for someone well advanced upon his fifties, with a truncated leg tormented by a March wind that probed among the raw nerves of the stump, much as it tormented the boughs overhead.

  He said aloud, giving vent to his exasperation, “God damn that stupid girl for landing me in a mess like this!” Then he remembered that he had always claimed to be the arbiter of his own destiny and that he was far more to blame than Stella for failing to reconnoitre the situation before permitting her to rush into an alliance with people he hardly knew and was not much disposed to know.

  Henrietta, as always, came down to the stableyard, having glimpsed the lights of his gig from the drawing-room windows. She called into the gloom, “Is that you, Adam…?” He called back, “Yes, it's me!” mumbling, “Who the devil would it likely be?” as Stillman emerged yawning to take charge of the gig, saying that the groom had waited up until eleven but had now gone to bed, assuming that he would stay overnight in London.

  There was restraint in their greeting but this, he told himself, was partly due to a feeling of extreme exhaustion that had overtaken him during the long, cold drive from Croydon. What he needed more than anything, more than rest even, was a stiff brandy and water, and she mixed him one while he was disposing of cape, hat, and gloves. When, gratefully, he was rolling the spirit on his tongue, she said without looking at him, “You got my wire at Peterborough? Tybalt wrote saying you were due there today. Did you… stop off and see Stella?”

  No, he told her, he hadn’t. Edith Wickstead had urged him to press on home and hear the story from her lips. “She has some woman's prejudice that it wasn’t her place to tell it,” he added. She replied, “Yes, that would be Edith's way. You think I did right to send the girl to her?”

  Her uncertainty touched him a little so that he set down his glass, crossed to the hearthrug, and put his arm across her shoulders. “Of course. I suppose you anticipated a descent by the Moncton-Prices. Have they been over here demanding her return?”

  “No,” she said, “but I’ve been to them.” And then, more assertively, “It's all more or less settled, providing you approve, of course.”

  He looked at her in astonishment. “Settled? How the devil do you mean, settled? She's still married to him, isn’t she? And there's the matter of the thousand a year I made over to them. Edith told me practically nothing. I’ll have to know precisely what led up to it and how that old roue Sir Gilbert views it.”

  She refilled his glass then and said, in an uncompromising tone, “Sit down, Adam. And just you let me have my say before you make one of your snap judgements. They serve well enough in your business, I daresay, but they won’t help one little bit here! That's why I asked Mr. Stock down.”

  “Stock, the lawyer? But good God, woman…”

  “He's here now but he had a dreadful cold, poor man, so I sent him to bed with a hot toddy when I guessed you were likely to be home tonight. You can talk to him in the morning, when you have both had a good night's rest. Now then, will you listen? Without interrupting?”

  He nodded, smiling in spite of himself. It always amused him to catch her in one of her bustling moods, when she tried so hard to treat him as one of the children.

  “Say your piece. I won’t interrupt, and I won’t make a snap judgement.”

  “Very well. In the first place Stella can’t possibly go back there. Nothing would make me agree to that, you understand? In the second place, and Stock can confirm this, it isn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, for we have very good grounds for a divorce.”

  The word scared him, as she knew it would. He frowned. “Great God! On what grounds?”

  “Stock had a lawyer's word for it. It was non-something or other!”

  “Non-consummation?”

  “That was it. She never has been a wife to that… that monster. What she must have gone through these last few months is more than I care to think about. I still can’t begin to understand why she didn’t come to me weeks ago, or at least say something that made sense when they were here at Father's funeral last January. It seems he's only half a man, and his father made no bones about it. But that's not the worst of it.”

  It didn’t surprise him all that much, remembering Lester's womanly mouth and that fastidious, catlike walk of his, but he growled, “What the devil could be worse than having that kind of thing dragged through the courts and printed in the newspapers?”

  “I’m not concerned with publicity and scandal. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’m thinking of something you couldn’t lay before any court.” She took a deep breath and looked directly at him. “That dreadful old man made a… well… a certain proposal. It was that that sent the girl flying into the dark like a mad thing. What might have happened to her, if she hadn’t been found and taken home by that Fawcett boy, just doesn’t bear thinking about. Denzil behaved splendidly but I’ll come to that.”r />
  He was puzzled now. “The old man made a proposal? What kind of proposal?”

  “He asked her to stay on and live out the lie for the rest of her life.”

  “Well, that's not surprising. He wouldn’t want a scandal any more than we do. Or not a scandal of that kind, reflecting on him and his.”

  It amazed her then that a man who had roamed half across the world, and fought in wars and rubbed shoulders with men of every kind, should need such an explicit statement. For a moment she thought of fobbing him off with a half-truth, but then she realised it could never be sustained, or not for long, between two people as close as they had been since they married more than twenty years before.

  She said, “You’ll have to know. Otherwise you’ll never understand. That scoundrel suggested he should… well… take the place of his wretched son. It seems he's anxious to get an heir…”

  She broke off, watching him closely, her eyes never leaving his, so that she was able to gauge the impact of her words, watch his senses recoil, and then, like a prizefighter absorbing the shock of a tremendous buffet, fight back to secure a firm grip on himself. He was a man, as she well knew, capable of exerting tremendous self-control and his training, as a soldier and a commercial freebooter, helped him now. Slowly he unclenched one fist and reached out for his brandy, lifting the glass and draining it at a gulp.

  He said, between clenched teeth, “So that was it. Edith hinted… she used the word ‘unsavoury’ …But it isn’t that, is it? It's an outrage!”

  It was time then to run in under his guard. “You promised to listen, you promised you wouldn’t interrupt…”

  She could hear the whistle of his breath. A vein in his temple pulsed and he seemed aware of it, reaching up and slowly massaging that side of his face where a crooked seam of flesh marked the passage of a splinter lodged there at the time of the Staplehurst crash. She had grown so accustomed to the scar that she rarely noticed it, but now, in the soft glow of the lamp, it looked livid and half-healed. He said, at length, “Go on. Finish it.”

  “Stella did the best she could under the circumstances. It was late at night and she was in her nightclothes. She got rid of him on some pretext, pulled on some clothes, and ran out through the French windows.”

  “Ran where, for God's sake?”

  “She was on her way here but luckily she met young Fawcett at Carter's Copse, out seeing to his lambs. He took her to the farm and Mrs. Fawcett fed her and put her to bed. Then he came straight here to fetch me.”

  “So as well as the Fawcetts the whole damned household knows what happened!”

  “No, we were very lucky. I came downstairs, after the paddock oak crashed down in the gale, and I was the only one about when Denzil arrived. I went with him as soon as it was light.”

  “What was she like, after an experience of that kind?”

  “Physically she was well enough. She slept through until afternoon and then I coaxed it out of her, bit by bit.”

  “She told you everything?”

  “Not quite everything, I imagine. But all that mattered. It seemed the right thing was to get her clear away from here, so I asked Denzil to take her to Edith's.”

  “But before that you went over to Courtlands?”

  “Denzil drove me there. I only saw the old man. I was glad of that. I don’t think I could have stood a meeting with his son.”

  “Well?”

  “I told him Stella was never going back and I took her clothes away there and then.”

  He stared at her, wondering anew at her hardihood and how, time and again, it continued to astonish him, as though she was some kind of phenomenon, a small, innocuous-looking mountain that continually erupted after one had come to terms with its quiescence and permanence. He remembered how she had taken his breath away when he returned here after a year's absence spent learning to walk again, to find her not only running his business as capably as he had run it but the mother of a child he had not even known existed. And now, while he had been gallivanting about his network, telling himself how clever he was, she had coped single-handedly with a situation that would have reduced most women he knew to hysterics. Pride in her submerged every other emotion in him, even the rage and disgust he felt for Moncton-Price and that son of his, and to some extent this moderated his self-reproach, for at least she, as his deputy, had done something positive to atone for his stupidity and indifference.

  He said, at last, “Did you accuse him to his face, on his own hearth?” “Yes, I did. It seemed to me the only way I could make him agree to a divorce.” “You’re telling me he actually admitted trying to seduce his own daughter-in-law?”

  “Not really, although he didn’t deny it.”

  With one part of his brain he continued to assess her strength and courage, but at a much deeper level he was already at work assembling the factors, risks, stresses, and counter-stresses of this extraordinary situation. The habit, formed over the years, of standing well clear of a crisis, and forcing himself to take an objective view of its complexities and likely developments, enabled him to do just this with something as personal as his daughter's involvement with a lecherous old ruin and a homosexual. Already, as she recounted her story word for word, he began to see the vague outlines of his strategy. Stock, the lawyer, was almost certainly correct in his surmise that his daughter could extricate herself from the mess on a plea of non-consummation, but to do this, he supposed, evidence of her virginity would have to be submitted to a court and any compromise they reached would be bound to depend on the cooperation of the Moncton-Prices, father and son. However one approached it there was certain to be publicity, and most of it would be highly sensational, of a kind likely to put a tremendous strain upon any family, especially one bearing a name as well-known as his. Yet there were elements in Henrietta's story that encouraged him to hope. Moncton-Price was not going to risk a public airing of his approach to Stella, however difficult that might prove to establish in a court of law. In the end, he imagined, it would come down to money, as most things did, so that he began to weigh the probable cost of a Moncton-Price stand-off in terms of hard cash. They were known to be in difficulties. Nothing short of near-bankruptcy would have persuaded a man like Lester Moncton-Price to marry in the first place, much less to marry into trade, and it occurred to him then that the wily old rascal who had promoted the match had had something like this in mind from the very beginning, banking, no doubt, on Stella's reluctance to become the storm centre of a case like that of Ruskin's wife, still the subject of bar-parlour jokes. He would probably be advised to leave the settlement undisturbed and although the prospect of this nettled him, he had never been a man to put money before peace of mind. If he got Stella clear of them the money could go hang.

  He was dragged from his reverie by awareness of a change in the tone of Henrietta's voice as she said, with a hint of reproach, “You haven’t asked about Alex.”

  “Edith told me he was safe.”

  “That's so, and no thanks to you, I might add.”

  He blinked at her. “You’re not holding me responsible for War Office blunders in Zululand, are you? I accept responsibility for Stella's marriage. I was a damned fool from start to finish.”

  She said, earnestly, “Just listen, Adam… no, perhaps now isn’t the time. You’re tired, and very much upset. But soon… well… we’ll have to have it out, and come to some kind of understanding.”

  He gathered from this that she did blame him for Stella's plight, as much as she blamed the Moncton-Prices possibly, but her broadening of the issue to include Alex puzzled him.

  “Listen here, Hetty,” he said, affably, “I’m completely at fault as regards the girl. I should have known it couldn’t possibly work and that something rotten would emerge from it. But she ought to have been warned to some extent. She has instinct, presumably, and we didn’t keep her blinkered, as most parents do in this so-called enlightened age. She's had far more freedom than most girls of her age. Damn it, I’d have
credited her with as much common sense as a milkmaid but I was wrong apparently.”

  “It isn’t just Stella,” she replied, stubbornly. “It's all of us. I thought… well… never mind now, we’ll discuss it tomorrow, once we’ve made up our minds how to go about getting Stella's freedom.”

  He poured himself another brandy, his third, and a small one for her. “We won’t,” he said, “we’ll get it over and done with now. I’ve had enough of drifting for one evening…”

  “That's the point,” she exclaimed, vehemently. “In matters of business, anything remotely connected with those waggons of yours, you never once followed a policy of drift! You made plans and stuck to them. Or you took expert advice from one person or another. Or you sat down and worked everything out, down to the last detail. But you’ve never paid your children the compliment you pay those teams, those routes, or even the men who look to you for a livelihood.”

  He heard her without irritation or displeasure. He was thinking again of the crisis in their own relationship, dating back to a time when he walked in here and found a dead chimney-sweep on his hearthrug. He countered, gravely, “I always paid you that compliment, Hetty.”

  “Yes,” she said, eagerly, “you did, Adam. And I’ve always loved you for it, but I’m not talking of me, but of your children, from Alex and Stella down to the little ones. You’ve left them to me, or to Phoebe Fraser, or to their schoolmasters, and that isn’t fair and it isn’t wise either so it has to change, don’t you see?”

  “Not really,” he said, with a touch of humour. “Why don’t you explain precisely what you’re driving at in your own words? And don’t say you can’t for I know very well that you can. I’ll listen, I promise you.”

  “Well, then,” she said, taking a deep breath, “there's Stella, of course. I was worried about her from the start, but I’m not excusing myself on that account, for I didn’t act on it, or try and talk you into acting. What surprised me at the time was you giving in to Stella so easily and I think I know now why you did. Years ago you never had much time for the airs most people in your position put on, grasping at every opportunity to climb the social ladder, and hoping everyone forgets just how they came by their money, but I can’t help thinking some nonsense of that kind played a part in letting Stella have her way and marry into that awful family. Am I right or wrong about that?”