Abigail (10 page)

She wanted to go on being angry; it was still a luxury she found it hard to deny herself. But the ghost of a smile about his lips prodded her the wrong way at just the wrong moment. Trying not to smile in response, she said, “I think it is your third finger that is causing me the greatest pain.” Her voice still carried a shiver.

He opened his hand but left its palm deliberately on her arm, as if to say, “I may grab you again at any moment.” There was something electrifying in his touch.

“I shall not run,” she said, wondering why she said it so calmly and what this odd rapport was that now seemed to exist between them. It alarmed her. “I thought you were going to strike me,” she said.

“I?”

“Yes, it is amazing how total strangers assume a godlike right to strike anyone they imagine to be hysterical.”

“I detect the voice of experience,” he said, ignoring this frank attempt to put a distance between them. And to underline the point he grasped her arm again, but this time with a friendly strength. In that way he steered her along the paved walks of the winter garden with Winifred hurrying along beside them, and began talking in the most avuncular tone. “You’re quite right to despise your work. It’s full of faults. Parts of it are ridiculously childish. Every page is marred in some way. It’s a veritable primer of infelicitous writing and want of subtlety.”

Abigail felt hollow, as if Laon had taken a knife too sharp to feel and had eviscerated her.

Winifred was outraged. “P.P.!” she cried.

But one look from him quelled her. He let a small silence grow to the limit of tolerability. Then, just as Abigail realized she had not breathed since he began his attack, he continued. “And yet I tell you that despite all those faults (and don’t let what I am now going to say minimize them), yet despite those faults I found a quality of quite magical delight that carried me triumphantly through all my annoyance at your shallowness and ineptitude. You have, in short, the only quality that really matters: I could not put your story down. You are, I regret to say, every bit as bad as Dickens.”

Abigail, at the edge of hysteria, now began to laugh. “But…” she stammered, “the story is not even a quarter written.”

“On the contrary, I think it is within one chapter of its conclusion. I do not believe it should be a long book.”

“Mr. Laon wants to publish it,” Winifred blurted out.

“Not as it is,” Laon said hastily. “But as it will be.”

Abigail felt the cold on her cheeks and fingers as the blood drained from them. Until now she had imagined, insofar as she had thought at all, that Laon and Winnie were offering her a very generalized encouragement—an extended pat on the head and a “good girl.” The notion that Laon was talking professionally and seriously had not even nudged the outermost edge of her consciousness. She halted in her tracks. “Publish?” she asked. “Oh, no.”

Laon shrugged. “It would be a great loss if you did not agree. I truly believe that, with the right sort of editorial help, your story could mark a new beginning in this one small corner of English literature. I have certainly never read anything quite like it.”

Abigail burst into tears and ran blindly for the door that led back into the winter drawing room. This time Laon made no move to prevent her.

“What a mess we made of that,” Winifred said bleakly.

But he was all smiles. “Not a bit! True—it’s not how I would have planned it, but I couldn’t have planned it better.”

“How can you say that?”

He looked at her in amusement. “You forget. Almost all my contributors are females. I probably have more experience of lady writers than any man in England. We’ll publish your sister’s book before another Christmas is upon us.”

Winifred shook her head sadly. “How little you know her.”

But Laon was not to be shaken. “In this respect,” he said, “I believe I already know her a great deal better than you.”

The assertion filled Winifred with sadness, as if something had been stolen from her and she could not say what.

***

Abigail did not appear at teatime, but by half past seven, when everyone assembled for a glass of sherry or a “cocktail” (a custom Caspar had brought back from New York), she was there, talking to Laon, bright as ever, just as if no word of any kind had passed between them.

“Tell me, Mr. Laon,” she asked at one point. “When you anglicized your name, why did you not choose ‘Lane’? It is certainly more English than Laon.”

“Ah, Lady Abigail, but by then I was already certain I was to be a publisher. ‘Lane’ would not have sounded at all right.”

“Why not?” Nora asked.

“Too rural, Countess,” Laon said. “Too back-streety, don’t you know. Not dignified enough for a publisher. Lane. It doesn’t sound right.”

Caroline thought it ridiculous to hear a tradesman giving himself such airs; she had a hard time of it to keep a solemn face.

“But Laon sounds foreign,” Caspar objected. “If you’ll pardon me.”

“Not at all.” Laon smiled. “It is deliberate, don’t you see? The ladies like it—the readers, I mean. They see:
The Drawing Room
,
which sounds dependable and comfortable and very English. And then they see this foreign-sounding fellow as publisher and it adds a little dash of spice. Just the right combination.”

“Did you really think all that out first?” Nora asked, full of admiration.

“It’s very important,” Laon said. “Every word on the page has an effect. If I were to publish an
Iron & Steel Journal
,
say, I’d call myself P.P. Stevenson without hesitation.” He bowed toward John, who smiled and bowed back.

Abigail picked up the game at once. “Or the
Fishmonger’s Telegraph
,
published by P.P. Walton,” she said.

Then everyone laughed and joined in—
The India Teamerchant’s Gazette
,
by P.P. Clive…
The Public Schools Cane Finishers’ Times
by P.P. Arnold…
The Slave Trader and Mart
by P.P. Livingstone, and so on.

The game died as casually as it had started.

“Well,” Nora said over the last of their laughter, “I’m sure it makes you a very clever young man to think of such details.”

“Oh, but he’s even cleverer than that,” Abigail said brightly. “Didn’t you know? He’s going to publish my children’s story and make my fortune!”

Boy arrived on Boxing Day morning just when everyone had given him up. He found the house deserted, of course, for the one hunt of the year that no one missed was the Boxing Day meet; even the most indifferent horseman would feel obliged to turn out on Boxing Day—especially in the northern Cotswolds, where the least enthusiastic had a choice of three hunts, and the really keen man could take his pick of no fewer than seven. It was said of one sportsman that he came to Cheltenham—only a dozen miles away—with a stud of ten horses and a wife, and that he left it with ten children and his stud down to one. “But the devil of a rider still!”

Boy wasted no time before he changed into hunting clothes. With the Puckeridge and Lord Middleton’s he hunted in pink, but here, having no idea which hunt his people would be out with nor what their sensibilities might be, he thought it wiser to hunt in black. The stable lad who prepared his horse told him the others were probably with the North Cotswold, “over Beverstone”—no more than a couple of hills away to the east.

No fresh snow had fallen and there was scarcely a breath of wind. The still air was keen enough with the cold, needing no breeze to sharpen it. Even the brilliant sun, warm where it touched his black clothing and boots, could not soften, much less melt, the powdered snow. He crunched his way at an easy trot to Beverstone, where two drovers told him they’d seen the hunt making south for Tetbury.

Beverstone—indeed the whole, rolling landscape, with its distant prospect of the Midlands plains—was so exactly like the traditional picture of the romantic England, dead and gone, that, when it failed to stir him, Boy could only wonder whether something had gone amiss within. He looked around at the warm and weathered old stone of the houses, with their roofs of thatch and brick-red tile, at the church and the castle ruins, all so perfectly balanced amid the leafless trees, at the remote and secret upland country stretching all around; and he told himself—he had to tell himself—that this was the England he had longed for on those long and wearying marches through the lofty Hindu Kush. But the response within him was merely conventional. More than half of him was already homesick for the Northwest Frontier. Where was the thrill of chasing a fox through coppice and dells that you have both known from childhood up, compared with the thrill of hunting tribesmen through mountain passes they know better than their teeth and you knew not at all—where at any moment the roles could be reversed and you would become the hunted! There in the dry, sterile, frozen air of the Cotswolds he began to long for the very smell of India.

The hunt was not hard to follow through the snow; he found them checked at a large wooded covert south of Tetbury.

“Hello, Stevenson. How’s India?” It was a voice from the past, but it spoke as casually as if they had parted only last night instead of four years ago.

“Hello, Moncur. I’ve known it as cold as this. Have you found?”

He and Moncur had been at school and then at Cambridge together. Moncur was now a Grenadier subaltern.

“No scent today. Who are you with these days?”

“No one. Temporarily unattached. Been given a commission to form my own irregulars. Stevenson’s Horse.”

“Pathans?”

“Mmm. Deuced good horsemen. And soldiers. Goin’ to be a high old time.”

The laconic phrases and offhand tone masked the sudden sharp wrench he felt merely in talking of it. The rest of his leave, he could see, was going to become a test of his endurance. He was going to have to fight his impatience every hour until he once more boarded the train at Suez and made the last brief overland journey to Indian waters.

“By the way”—Moncur extended his whip vaguely in the direction of another young man—“this is Locke. You don’t know it but he’s…”

“I know Locke,” Boy cut in. “Played in the scrum, one match, when I captained Cambridge against the other place in sixty-two. How d’ye do?”

Locke smiled and bowed.

“Yes, but now he’s…” Moncur pressed.

“I know. Captain,” Boy said. “Beat Oxford twice last half.” He turned to Moncur. “Occasionally, you know, we find old copies of
The Times
washed up on the beach near Bombay.”

The three of them laughed; Locke handed round cigars.

“Seen my people?” Boy asked.

“The Master asked them to hold up the far side,” Locke said. “I’ll ride you round there. We’re a bit supernumerary here.”

“If I don’t see you again today,” Moncur said as Boy and Locke walked off, “we’ll meet tonight at this ball Steamer’s giving.”

For a field or two Locke spoke excitedly of the great progress of rugby football at the universities. Almost all the dons were now decent enough to give any undergraduate permission to go to Oxford when the game was away. In Boy’s day one Cambridge team had arrived so understrength it actually had a majority of borrowed Oxford men to play it to victory.

Then Locke’s conversation began to flag and Boy became aware that something was troubling the fellow. He asked what it was.

At first Locke would not admit he had anything on his mind. But when Boy appeared to accept this assertion and tried to talk of other things, Locke suddenly burst out: “Look, Stevenson. This is none of my business, and you’d have every right to send me off with a flea in my ear, but I’d feel rotten if anything happened to your sister and I’d said nothing.”

“Which sister?” Boy asked quickly.

“Lady Winifred. D’you know this…”

Boy smiled. “She’s well able to take care of herself, have no fear. I’m sorry—what were you going to ask?”

“D’you know this P.P. Laon fellow she’s invited down?”

“The name rings just the faintest bell.”

“He came up the year you left. Trinity.”

“I didn’t know many Trinity men,” Boy confessed.

“No loss in this case, believe you me.”

They broke off to take a fence; they kept well down from the covert, so as not to interfere with the draw.

“You’d better tell me,” Boy said as they began a diagonal climb across some stubble.

“A fellow feels dashed awkward,though,” Locke said. “I’m invited to the ball tonight and I’m desperately keen to come, you know. But I hardly can if I’ve maligned one of your brother’s guests—especially to you.”

“Don’t malign him then,” Boy said, dismissing the scruple. “Simply state the facts of the case, without varnish. If the inference is clear to be drawn, I’ll draw it. Never fear.”

Locke considered this and then laughed. “Jove, Stevenson. I’ll wager you make a capital adjutant! Very well, I’ll tell you. It was like this. P.P. Laon never had more than a hundred and fifty a year. Two hundred at most. Yet he was in all the high-spending clubs going. Pony and trap…faultless dress…you know the sort.”

“How did he do it?”

“Oh, he never made a secret of it. He made a book—quite openly. But always paid a point under the odds.”

Boy was shocked. “But why did anyone bet with him?”

Locke snorted. “You know undergraduates! It doesn’t matter to them if they’re paid at fives or sixes. The fact was, Laon always paid and was always to be found.”

“Which is more than you could say of the average bookmaker.”

“Exactly. Worth droppin’ a point, d’ye see.”

“Well—if he was open about it, that was quite honourable, surely?”

“You listen. He also ran a ‘hell’ every night. He got Breuvet’s to send in a magnificent dinner for eight or ten, and anyone was welcome on the understanding they played ‘bank’ after.”

“Bank?”

“It’s more or less
trente-et-quarante
, but he didn’t play the après rule as at Monte Carlo.”

“Don’t mean much to me, I’m afraid.”

“Well—the way he played it, the odds greatly favoured the bank. And, of course, our friend Laon was always bank.”

“Did they play high?”

“I once saw a fellow put a thousand guineas on the turn of a single card!”

Boy whistled.

“Well, one night I asked Laon if I could share the bank, and he agreed. Fifty apiece. But as luck would have it, fortune chose to desert to the players. In less than an hour, the bank was broke. Laon and I then agreed to give the bank a chance and we told the others they could go on punting against an unlimited bank and we’d pay out in IOUs redeemable next day. Well, luck was dead against us and we broke up owing about fourteen hundred—seven hundred apiece. You may imagine how I slept that night! In fact I was still in evening clothes when I went round to Laon’s at breakfast. And there he was, bathed, shaved, and cheerful, eating like a king, with
The Pink ’Un
propped against the marmalade jar. ‘My dear chap,’ he said. ‘You look awful. Have a brandy and soda. What’s the trouble?’”

“Well, I told him I hadn’t seven hundred in ready—though naturally my guvnor would stump up in the end. But he might have to sell stock and goodness knew how long he’d take. Old Laon smiled and unlocked his dispatch box and took out a bill stamp he just happened to have there. ‘How much time d’you want?’ he asked. ‘Three months? Six?’

“Of course, I was over the moon with delight! He demanded no interest or anything. So I signed the acceptance for seven hundred at three months.”

“That was pretty decent of him,” Boy said.

“So I thought. Until that afternoon when he had to weigh in with the money. The chaps came round and he said, ‘See here, you fellows—we all rather lost our heads last night. You played on to do us a good turn but the luck ran the other way. However, I’m not going to oil out of the debt. I’m not even asking for favours. But fourteen hundred’s a lot of scratch—especially since Locke couldn’t find his all at once and I’ve had to take a three-month bill from him. All I have in ready cash is eight hundred. So I thought I’d ask you chaps which you’d prefer—eight hundred now, in full settlement, or a bill for seven hundred at three months’ date and another for seven hundred at six months?’”

Locke gave a hollow laugh. “Ask any undergraduate if he’d prefer a hundred now or three hundred in six months! Of course they accepted with delight. ‘Devilish straight of you, Laon, old chap,’ they said. And I was left as the villain who’d put him in such difficulty. Which was why, he explained to me later, he kept my bill and held my guvnor to the full seven hundred.”

“I see,” Boy said. Privately he considered that Locke had acted as dishonourably as Laon in betting beyond his capacity; at least Laon had had enough in ready cash to cover his share. The whole tale was one of dishonour masking dishonour. Still, it was good of Locke to put himself in this bad light in order to warn Boy of the danger his sister might run in associating with Laon.

“Those are the facts, Stevenson. Make what you will of ’em. I know they do me little credit but at least I’ve never gambled again. So some good came out of it. There are your people now. I’ll leave you.”

“Boy!” Abigail’s shriek of delight cut through the crisp, cold air. She left her station and came galloping downhill, taking the hedge in one flying stride.

“Go back,” he shouted and spurred toward her. “Mother will be furious,” he said as they drew level.

She held out both hands and they gripped each other warmly, if a little awkwardly, over the inevitable gap between two mounted riders. “It’s worth it,” she said. “How lovely to see you. We’d given you up. Everyone was so disappointed. How long shall you stay? And how is India?”

“And you’re letting Steamer down.”

She grinned wickedly. “I have already done so,” she said. “The appallingly Honourable Mark Caithes was complaining loudly about the social quality of the Hunt these days. And I told him—equally loudly—that it was jolly unreasonable to expect
everyone
to be a tailor.”

Boy, with theatrical despair, raked the heavens with his eyes; but the jibe was so apt (for it was rumoured that Caithes had tried to get his tailor elected to the Hunt in exchange for the man’s wiping out a large debt) that he could not help smiling too.

Satisfied, Abigail turned her horse and trotted with Boy back to her station. “Anyway,” she said, “today’s a waste of a good hunt. Even if they find, they’ll lose the line in half a mile.” Suddenly she grew eager again. “I say, Boy, isn’t it marvellous! Winnie’s brought down ever such a nice person called P.P. Laon and he’s going to publish my story.”

“How splendid,” Boy said. But he was suddenly a great deal more worried than he had been earlier, when he imagined that only Winifred was involved.

They took the jump side by side.