Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 2

  Henrietta, for instance. Here she was, her plump, pert, pretty self, and yet it wasn’t her at all, or not as he had come to know her since the day he rode over the moor and hoisted her on to the rump of his fagged out mare. The camera had reproduced her fussy get up in the greatest detail, but where was her sparkle? And underneath all those yards of draperies where were the factors that had kept him faithful to her all these years?

  It was the same, to a degree, with the children, although here he was less dogmatic, for he was always ready to admit that he did not know them and was never likely to know them. There was his first born, Stella, named for a star he once saw over that well at Cawnpore in ’57; his eldest son, Alexander, proud as a peacock in his first hunting topper and obviously impatient to stride out of the picture and throw his leg across that mettlesome young gelding the old Colonel had bought the boy on his seventeenth birthday. There was young Giles, standing slightly apart and looking his usual solemn self, as though, instead of the prospect of a day in the saddle, he was going in search of martyrdom. And finally, there was that merry rascal George, the only one likely to follow him into the hurly-burly of the city with any prospect of relish.

  What the devil did he know about any of them? How and when should he have learned? This room, these maps, had sucked him dry over the years. Nine-tenths of his time and nervous energy had been expended here, calculating the profit on a haul of slate from Llanberis to Swansea, or a thousand gallons of milk from Wiltshire farms to city dairymen. Playing one lieutenant off against another. Scratching round for new capital to replace worn-out teams and vehicles. Exploiting a new idea that would tap a fresh source of profit. His family had been an afterthought, a spare-time hobby, like chess or croquet, and inevitably, as the years hurried by, Henrietta had usurped his place as master of Tryst, reducing him, little by little, to the role of a privileged lodger, or a favourite uncle whose prerogative was to spoil rather than guide the thrusters who kept his home in a permanent uproar.

  With a final glimpse at the river, he turned away, replacing the heavy silver frame on the desk and wondering, incuriously, if increasing age and girth would encourage him to live on his fat, to turn his back on this stinking, clamorous stew and spend more of his time at home enjoying the fruits of all this toil and turmoil. He doubted it. If an artificial leg had not slowed him down, would age and the indifference to money that marched with age? In all the time he had been here money had not troubled him much. His sense of drive derived from other things—a consciousness of contributing, of playing a part in the burgeoning of the nation, in a search for perfection within the limits of the profession he had chosen and the path he had marked out for himself when he was fighting other people's battles on the other side of the world. Everyone worth his salt cut his own swathe. The only useful thing you could do for fellow travellers was to encourage them to stand on their own feet and find their own way through the jungle. The names on that presentation frigate proved that if nothing else. Each of them owed his opportunity to Swann-on-Wheels so that his real family was listed there and would doubtless remain his sole concern until they carried him away in a box and his son George, or someone else, took his place at that desk.

  The thought made him grin as he lifted his coffee from the stove and sniffed its fragrance. Whoever it was would not waste much time vacating this slum and seeking more comfortable quarters. North of the river perhaps, within easier reach of the big railway termini and the new trunk roads they were laying down. Or a few miles south, in one of the semi-rural suburbs, where a man could breathe clean air. The enterprise would surely recast itself in the decades ahead. New and faster methods of transport would be devised. Railways would improve and so would roads, even country roads, whereas manufactories, now concentrated in the North and Midlands, would lap into the southern shires, proliferating like flies as more and more markets were opened up overseas by the imperialists and the missionaries.

  He thought about the Empire for a moment. Where its frontiers would be drawn and which tribe, if any, would overhaul it and challenge its supremacy by the time the old queen died and that plump, racketty Edward mounted her throne. The gloomy Germans, possibly, who had given the yammering French such a thrashing a few years ago. Or the Yankees, who were not likely to stay minding their own business. How much longer had he got to watch the merry-go-round? Ten years? Twenty? Perhaps even a few more, for somehow, after so many adventures, he felt marked down for old age. More than that, he could not see himself retiring while there was breath in his body.

  He was sifting through the morning mail when Tybalt, his head clerk, poked a bald pate into the tower, holding a buff telegram as though it was liable to bite. He was familiar with Tybalt's ranges of expression. The one he wore now was almost surely associated with bad news of one sort or another. He said, irritably, “Well, come in man and give it to me. Don’t stand there looking so damned apologetic. Which of ’em is in trouble this time?” and Tybalt replied, morosely, “It's personal, sir. From Tryst, prepaid. The boy's waiting for an answer.”

  He took the telegram and opened it, recalling as he did that he had told Henrietta he was likely to move north to confer with her father Sam and Catesby of the Polygon before he came home for the Christmas break. The telegram said: Colonel much worse. Doctor Birtles says matter of days. Think you should come. Love, Hetty. He said, with a grunt, “It's the old Colonel. Wire Catesby and my father-in-law, and tell them to hold over that mill business for a week or two. It's not all that urgent. I’ll have to go home and wait. There's nothing else to keep me. I’ve worked out the bonuses and the annual summaries are in draft. You’d best have them copied and circularised,” and he rose, swinging his tin leg in a wide arc to clear the end of the desk.

  Tybalt said, with a rich gravity that suited him far better than elation, “I’m very sorry, Mr. Swann. He was a dear old gentleman. I got to know him very well when I was down there a great deal at the time of your accident. You’ll miss him very much, I’m sure.”

  “He's had damned good innings,” Adam said, unsentimentally. “If he lives on into February he’ll be eighty-nine; but I hope, for his sake, that he doesn’t. However, I should want to be there. Tybalt murmured, “Of course,” gathered up a sheaf of papers, and left, as though he disapproved of his employer's cavalier reception of such grave news.

  Adam followed him down, his nostrils tingling in keen morning air only marginally tainted by the whiff of the soap factory. He crossed the yard and lifted his hand in greeting to the giant waggonmaster, Keate, who was conferring with the master smith. The place would have to get along without him for a spell but it might be some time before he was back. Old men who had suffered two strokes sometimes took their time dying. And then, as he passed through the gates and hailed a four-wheeler, to take him to London Bridge Station, he had another thought. It was how this side of the bridge must have looked when his father was born in 1789, a decade or so before the sprawl of factories had penetrated beyond Rotherhithe and long before the docks were built, a time when every vessel that entered the river rounded North Foreland under press of sail. The interval between then and now appeared to him then as a millennium rather than the better part of a century, and his mind leaped forward another span of years, so that he tried to picture what it would be like when he, in his turn, lay dying. Unrecognisable again he wouldn’t wonder, with that new bridge they were always talking about down the river a reach or so, and God alone knew how many tunnels burrowing under the slime of the Thames. Places and people had that much in common. They sprang up, preened themselves in the vigour of youth and the fancied permanence of maturity and then, almost overnight if one reckoned in terms of history, either crumbled or took on an entirely new form. Nothing lasted all that long and it therefore followed that the world would always belong to the young. To lively sparks like his son Alex, to his daughter Stella who would soon, he supposed, come to him with talk of grandchildren, to George who would inherit his packload sooner or later, an
d to young Giles with his serious eyes, eyes that would never make much of a balance sheet but would always look sympathetically on the derelicts that, even at this early hour, were scavenging among the rubbish tips outside the biscuit factory.

  One

  1

  THE OLD COLONEL DIED AT FIVE MINUTES TO THREE, ON THE MORNING OF January the nineteenth, 1879.

  His son, Adam, who had been taking a turn at sitting up with him for almost a week now, did not witness the death. He was dozing in the armchair beside the leaping coal fire and the cessation of the long, rasping breaths alerted him in the way a sudden change in sound pattern had broken his bivouac sleep in his campaigning days. He rose without haste, massaging his thigh where the support straps of his artificial leg had chafed during the long vigil, lifting the old man's hand and waiting, aware of the contrast between the stillness of the room and the tumult outside, where the wind soughed in the stripped branches of the avenue beeches, as though the Colonel's spirit had taken flight among them, rejoicing in release from the withered old carcase on the bed.

  After a few moments he released the hand, closed the eyes, and gently pressed the jaws, remembering, as he did this, that he had performed the same office for a score of men young enough to have been the old man's great-grandsons. But that was long ago, at Balaclava, Inkermann, Cawnpore, and Lucknow, places and occasions rarely remembered in the last two decades.

  Even now he felt more relief than regret. The dear old chap, who looked so small under the blankets, had been dead to him, and to everyone else at Tryst, since the night in June last year when those lively young sparks of the Sixteenth had brought him home after his collapse at his final Waterloo anniversary dinner in Apsley House. They were hardly more than boys, the aides of paunchy, mottled, bewhiskered old veterans attending the dinner as guests, but they had handled the old man with reverence and this, Adam supposed, was understandable. To them he would be a museum piece for only that week; The Times had reminded them that the Colonel had served under Old Beaky, the Iron Duke, twenty-eight years dead, and was, moreover, the only man sitting around that table who had helped to drive Ney's storming party down the steep escarpment at Busaco, in September 1810. He had thus attended more than fifty Waterloo dinners and was a legend in his own right.

  Adam paused a moment, wondering whether to summon the male nurse they had engaged and then wake Henrietta and tell her the news, but he decided against it. It was not a moment for family clamour. He preferred, for the time, to marshal his own thoughts and walked stiffly to the window, lowering the sash an inch or two to freshen the air of the sick room, letting his mind explore his relationship with the old man, a very unusual one, he would say, especially over the last twenty years, when it had been that of a father and son in reverse. But it had suited them both since the latter had turned his back on the Swann military tradition and gone into trade.

  The old man had been very happy down here, pottering about in the sun and the wind, spoiling and being spoiled by a flock of grandchildren, by Henrietta and all the servants, who thought of him as a family heirloom embodying the prestige of an era that seemed to Adam as distant as Agincourt. Born soon after the storming of the Bastille, he had taken the field at eighteen and spent the next seven years riding and fighting for his life in Portugal, Spain, Haute Garonne, and Flanders, hectored by men whose names would forever be associated with the Iron Duke—“Farmer” Hill, Tommy Picton, Sir Joseph Cotton, red-headed Crauford, darling of the Light Brigade, and a hundred others. A splendid company, no doubt, but as irrelevant as mediaeval pikemen in an age of breechloading rifles, the Gatling, and four-funnelled ironclads capable of projecting twelve-inch shells.

  He retraced his steps to the bed, still flexing the muscles above the joint in the leg and staggering a little on that account. The coals in the grate shifted, the pendulum of the small French clock spun under its glass dome, and outside the wind gusted breathlessly across the bleak winter landscape. He looked down at the rigid, angular features, trying to see the old man as he had been all those years ago, a pink-cheeked, curly-haired lad, with brown, laughing eyes, cantering through the passes of the Pyrenees in pursuit of that wily old rascal Soult, beating the dust from Johnny Frenchman's knapsack all the way from Torres Vedras to Toulouse. Four years it had taken them, six if you counted the two abortive campaigns, but the Colonel had found his pot of gold in the first French town they had captured. Not loot or promotion, but a pretty brunette, dispensing cakes in a pastry cook's kitchen, one of the French mademoiselles who welcomed the English dragoons as liberators. And that was odd in itself, for pot-bellied Bonaparte was now even more of a legend than his rival, the Duke, and was regarded by many as a martyr to British bureaucracy after he had died on an Atlantic rock, denied the title of Emperor. But time had put that right. Adam himself had seen Napoleon's splendid tomb at Les Invalides.

  The train of thought led him, logically enough, to Waterloo, and his glance moved from his father's face to his right hand, marking the bluish stumps of the two truncated fingers, the result of a wild slash by a French cuirassier who had died a moment later, struck through the throat by his nimble little opponent. After that nothing very much, or nothing to fill the history books. Service on a few fever-infested islands; half-pay retirement; a young wife to mourn and a troublesome son to rear; tranquil years in late middle age beside Derwentwater with his crotchety old sister, Aunt Charlotte. And, in the long evening of his life, twenty years in the Kent countryside, reproduced in a hundred of his laboured watercolours, three of which hung in this room, conflicting oddly with other trophies that hung there: the sabre, the dragoon's helmet in need of a polish, a posed photograph of a Waterloo dinner, and the telescope through which the old man had once watched Marshal Soult ordering his outposts across the Bidassoa.

  Well, as he had indicated to Tybalt when the telegram arrived, the old chap could count himself lucky. How many of his contemporaries had lived to see a granddaughter in her bridal veil? How many had been given the chance to grow old gracefully in pleasant, comfortable surroundings, with a dozen women to wait on him and a tribe of children to listen to his stories? Not one in twenty, Adam would say, with bitter personal experience of war wastage. Possibly not one in a hundred when you thought of the slaughter at places like Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca, and Waterloo, or the ransom of a thousand wet nights in Spanish bivouacs and long stretches of service in murderous tropical climates.

  He squeezed the maimed hand, tucked it under the bedclothes, and drew the sheet over the face. “I hope to God I’m half as lucky,” he said aloud and stumped from the room, seeking his own quarters.

  2

  Henrietta wept when he told her, and thirteen-year-old Giles, who had been a close confidant of the old man, turned pale but said nothing, slipping away to commune with himself in the winter woods while they discussed funeral arrangements. Stella, eldest of the brood, would not know until they sent word to Courtlands, her new home across the county border, whereas Alex, the eldest boy, would be unlikely to learn of his grandfather's death for weeks, for God only knew where he was at the moment, with his unit poised to cross the Tugela and slaughter Zulus. The younger children, taking their cue from George, now sixteen, assumed lugubriously pious expressions that failed to conceal their secret relish at being the centre of attention at a military funeral. Adam noticed their sternly repressed exuberance and smiled grimly. It was the prerogative of the very young to feel smug in the certainty of immortality, but he had looked for tears from Henrietta. She had never made the least secret of her belief that, but for the good offices of the old man, she would have been denied the splendid fulfilment of the last twenty years. Adam, left to himself, she said, would have handed her back to her father after her flight from home in a thunderstorm, despite the truculent showing he made at the confrontation when Sam Rawlinson had appeared with a writ. He had not been in love with her then and had no thought for anything but his improbable dream of a nationwide waggon service. But th
e old man had enlisted with her the moment Adam ushered her over the doorstep, a scared, bedraggled fugitive in a tattered, cageless crinoline, and in the end Sam had taken himself off grumbling and swearing, cutting her out of his will and leaving the reluctant White Knight no alternative but to marry her and found a family here in Kent. There was more than that to their relationship, as Adam well knew, although he had never exhumed that ridiculous involvement with that popinjay Miles Manaton, who had come so close to raping her on the islet in the river that ran within sight of Tryst. Luckily for everyone the Colonel had been on hand that day, had mounted her on his skewbald, packed her off home, and briefed her on a story to explain her disarray and hysteria. And afterwards, intercepting Adam at the yard, he had spoken up for her so that the whole stupid affair had passed effortlessly into limbo. Adam, remembering all this when he saw the glitter of tears in Henrietta's eye as she bent over the bed and kissed the old man's brow, thought: “She's regretting him a damned sight more than she would her own father. Now why should a woman with her lust for life carry a grudge down the years, for it's clear she's never really forgiven Sam for trying to barter her for a piece of wasteland adjoining the old devil's mill in that foul little town where I found her.” He said nothing, however, except a word or two of perfunctory comfort about the old man's death in life since his stroke and perhaps she shared his relief. What man in his senses wanted to survive as a hulk?