Abigail (8 page)

“For the
servants
?”
Winifred asked Caroline.

Caroline smiled. “Of course, that was how I felt. I thought it absurd. But darling Caspar”—she smiled indulgently at him—“came at me with pencil and paper and proved that the time they didn’t spend carrying their own hot water and slops they could spend in serving us.”

“No sense in paying servants to wait upon themselves,” Caspar said.

“Have all
our
rooms got hot water, too?” Abigail asked excitedly.

“Certainly not!” Caroline said. But Caspar smiled at her as if her scorn were only half the tale. “People would think,” she went on, “that we could not afford the servants to bring hot water in the proper way.”

Still Caspar smiled.

“What is it, Steamer?” Winifred asked.

“When I was in America,” he said, “I remember a bath with a little charcoal stove at one end. You could fill it with water, light the stove, and in forty-five minutes it was piping hot. You could sit in it up to your neck.”

“Ooh!” Abigail luxuriated in the very thought of it.

“See!” Caspar waved at her as if she proved a point. “The voice of tomorrow. I’m convinced that within twenty years even the English may begin to feel that a bath should consist of more than four jugs of tepid water lugged along half a mile of frigid corridor by a frail domestic with the rheumaticks.”

“Therefore?”

“Therefore I have laid down over a mile of piping in the fabric of this house, ready to carry cold water and steam-heated hot water to its every corner. And waste pipes to carry off the slops.”

“Your dear brother cannot distinguish between what is practical and what is sensible,” Caroline said. There was an edge of asperity in her voice, as if she had heard the argument once too often.

They began to walk back to the main wing.

“But does it all just come bubbling up out of the bedroom floor?” Abigail asked. “Like a hot spring?”

“No. The bath is fixed. That means it needs a room of its own. A bath room.”

“Do I have such a room?” Abigail was excited again.

“Of course not,” Caroline said crossly. “No one does.”

“Except the chef, the butler, and the nurseries.”

“I mean
people
don’t,” Caroline corrected, as if Caspar’s qualification had been ultra-pedantic. “But the result is that we are left with fourteen small, windowless rooms with empty pipes beneath their boards, waiting for this bath-time revolution Caspar is so confident of. I shall tell people they may put their servants to sleep there if they want them nearby.”

“I’ve cooled toward the idea already,” Abigail said. “The whole fun of taking a bath is stepping out in front of the fire and watching the towel steam as it toasts. And being inside it.”

The sybaritic qualities of this vision, however innocent, embarrassed the other three.

“Well, Steamer,” Winifred said quickly. “You have copper bars waiting for the electric revolution, and iron pipes waiting for the revolution in bathing. What other wonders are yet slumbering around us, ready to spring from their concealment as science dictates, and”—she nodded at Caroline—“as Society permits?”

Caspar drew breath to answer but Caroline cut in: “Oh, do not be surprised to find contraptions of feathers and sealing wax among the rafters—ready against the day when all houses fly!”

***

Later Caspar offered to take his sisters for a brief drive around the park before the daylight fled. Winifred, who had letters and speeches to write, papers to mark, timetables to prepare, and professional jealousies to settle, declined; but Abigail was delighted to accept. Wrapped for Siberia, they sat in the governess cart and trotted at a brisk clip down into the valley and up the other side.

“Poor Linny,” Caspar said, feeling that some explanation of her acerbity was due. “These last three years can’t have been easy. To live in a crumbling old place like Falcon Wood, knowing that so much needed doing to it—and knowing also how wasteful that would be. And to see nothing but the hugger-mugger of a building site here. To have to entertain and make her mark on the county in the old place—all the time knowing what a splash she could be making if only this place had been ready. It must have been very hard.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have lived so close.”

“From her point of view, that’s true. But since I could devote only two days a week to the building, if we had taken a house elsewhere, I’d never have seen her. Work! It’s our curse.”

“You are happy, aren’t you, Steamer?”

“Indeed!” He laughed. “Why d’you ask?”

“When you mentioned America I nearly dropped. I never heard you…I thought you’d obliterated that memory.”

“America.” His voice was curiously flat, neither questioning nor musing.

“D’you ever think of
her
?”

He stared at his sister a long time. “Of course,” he said at last. “Every day.”

“Oh, Steamer. I’m so sorry.”

He smiled. “Every day I imagine her trying to manage Falconwood. And how she’d fail. And how miserable that failure would make her. And how superbly Linny copes with it all. You know we shall be sleeping forty-six, apart from ourselves, on Boxing Day? And the ball is for over five hundred. Poor Laney could never have managed anything on that scale. She’s better off in New York. She is a queen there, just as Linny is here.”

“Even so…”

“Even so! Even so!” he mocked. “You Stevenson women will never understand. I think you and Winnie would actually prefer me to die of a broken heart. Well, I’m sorry but I shan’t oblige. When I took on the responsibility for the firm, it automatically became necessary for me to marry someone like Linny. I’m lucky enough to love her, too. So spare me your easeful deaths, if you please.”

She smiled and hugged his arm, not quite believing him but content to let matters rest.

“Also,” Caspar went on, “I’d be grateful if you’d do all you can—you and Winnie—to help her make a success of this first big occasion. You are both very self-assured young ladies and very at ease with people. You could do a great deal, you know—more perhaps than even you think.”

“Of course!” Abigail almost shouted the assurance. Her brother seemed so vulnerable in his appeal, she would have done anything to restore his usual ebullience.

“I know we Stevensons are supposed to be the new arrivals and the Sherringhams are the old guard, but in some curious way Linny craves to be accepted by
us.
And especially by you and Winnie.”

Abigail was astounded at this news; the thought had never occurred to her. Linny was such a patrician sort of person most of the time.

“I’d be more than grateful, Abbie,” Caspar said.

The sun, hugely red yet heatless, flattened as it sank toward the mists above the skyline. The valley was already dark. The frozen lakes along its bottom gleamed like vast, dull stones. As the cart followed the winding driveway up the far side, it seemed they climbed into a second dawning.

Abigail deliberately did not look at Falconwood until the cart drew up near a small pavilion and Caspar said, “Now.”

They had timed it perfectly. The sun laid a majestic fire across the red brick of the house. It caught each projection and moulding and lined it with gold. The still untarnished copper spire on the clock tower burned against the violet of advancing night. The orange glow of gaslights flickered through the black windows. And in front of the house gleamed the pale marble of the terrace and steps, colder than the frosted lawns or the ice-sheeted waters.

It was so exactly what Caspar had wanted that she laughed. She wanted to stand up and jump and clap her hands, like a child. “Oh, Steamer!” she said rapturously. “Just think, if God had been as rich as us, He could have done the whole world like that!”

When the blasphemy of her words—an utterly unintended blasphemy—struck her, she turned to him and gripped his arm. “I mean…”

But Caspar was already laughing hugely—a laughter that seemed to carry more relief than humour. “Oh,” he said as he grew calm again, “I told the mater not to worry. Wait till I tell her this!”

“No. Please! I didn’t mean it in that way.”

He looked at her, disbelieving, then a little worried. “Really?”

She thought back. Had she meant it? Had some part of her, just behind her immediate thoughts, actually meant it? She smiled. “Perhaps just a little bit,” she said. “I meant to be funny—say something absurd. But not blasphemous.”

Life was getting so complicated lately. Until very recently she would never have questioned what lay beyond her immediate consciousness; that would have seemed a kind of blasphemy.

Then, for the first time in two years, she felt an urge to be writing. Her long-abandoned children’s tale surfaced in her mind just as, in childhood days, thoughts of iced orangeade and pantomimes had surfaced.
Pop!

Caspar, grinning again, stretched an arm about her and squeezed. “Let’s go home,” he said.

She looked back at Falconwood, knowing that however many times she would see it in years to come, from whatever angles and in whatever moods, it would never again look as lovely as it did now, newborn and waiting to begin its life.

On their way down into the dark of the vale he turned to her. “That—what you said. I wouldn’t repeat it to Linny. She is very conventional that way.”

As they breasted the farther slope and emerged again into the last of the twilight he stopped and headed the pony across the drive so that they could look once more at the valley. As night slipped up from the east the brightest stars were already twinkling out of the purple. The colours of the park and woodland had sunk to the darkest resonance of their daylight splendour—a dull mightiness of jostling patchwork at the very limits of vision. Somewhere far off a vixen yapped, a sharp, plaintive call that seemed to double the intensity of the frost.

Caspar clucked the pony into movement once again. “What a difference a few dozen degrees make,” he said. “Last July I was standing here wondering how to endure the heat—and the insects. And now!”

Abigail smiled. “Think of Boy in India.” Boy—whose real name was John—was their eldest brother.

“I suppose so. Funny thing about those insects. Mostly little midges. They were thick enough, you know, to form actual clouds. It was like a mist. A drifting mist in quite a stiff, steady breeze. There must have been hundreds of millions of them to make clouds like that. And that was just the output of this one valley. Think of all the valleys, all the land, in England. And they’re quite at the mercy of the breeze, you know. A lot of them, millions and millions, just get carried out to sea and die.”

As his words formed an image in her mind’s eye a sharp sadness caught her up. The waste of it all…the sheer profligacy! She remembered something one of the learned men in her mother’s salon had said to her: “If you think in mere numbers, then the most typical living thing is a creature actually in its death throes or within moments of them.” In a curious way he had intended it as a sign of hope. “To survive one day in the kingdom of plants and animals,” he had concluded, “is a small miracle. And a great mercy to us.” When she thought of those millions of insects being wafted to their collective death from this one valley—this one lovely peaceful haven—it was hard to find comfort in her own survival.

“D’you think they chatter to each other as they go, Steamer?” she asked. “About life? And God? And happiness?”

He laughed. “What strange ideas you do get!”

As they clattered over the new cobbles of the stable yard he remembered something. “Whom has Winnie invited down, d’you know? She wasn’t sure last week.”

“A man called Laon, I think. Percy Laon. Or is it Peter?”

“Does he do anything?”

“Everyone Winnie knows
does
something. She wouldn’t tolerate an idler. I think he’s something to do with ladies’ magazines.”

“A scribbler?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a queer name, Laon. Sounds foreign.”

“Tut tut!” Abigail mocked as she skipped ahead of him toward the house.

They were late. Tea was already served, and their parents, John and Nora—looking very much the Earl and Countess amid the gothic splendour of the morning room—were thawing gratefully by the fire.

“I haven’t shown them around,” Caroline said quickly to Caspar, as soon as the welcomes were over. She turned to Nora. “It would be more than my life is worth.”

Nora laughed. “He was like that with all his toys. Anyway, I’m sure John already knows every stone.”

Abigail sat on John’s lap and began to tell him how superb the house had looked from across the valley. Caspar asked where all the children were—though the only children left in the family were his youngest sister and brother: Rosalind, who would be sixteen come March, and Sefton, now getting on for eight. Mather, now seventeen, and Hester, almost twenty, were of the grownups. (At least until the more formal, post-Christmas festivities began.)

“In your nurseries, I hope,” his mother told him. “And having the time of their lives, I expect.”

“By the way,” John said, “marvellous news. Young John may be coming. I had a telegram from the India Office just this morning.”

Everyone was delighted at the news. Abigail glanced at Winifred; usually the word “telegram” brought on an attack of classical Greek and a lecture on the preferability of “telegrapheme.” But not today, it seemed.

“I say, Winnie,” Caspar called to her. “Who’s this Laon person you’re bringing?”

“Oh, a friend. A guardian of one of my girls, in fact. But a friend as well.”

“Abbie says he’s a scribbler.”

“I did not,” Abigail began, looking at Caroline in alarm.

“He is a publisher,” Winifred said evenly, knowing how Caspar loved to provoke an overreaction. “He publishes
My Lady’s Companion
,
The Drawing Room
,
At Home
,
and…I don’t know…several other ladies’ journals.”

Caroline relaxed again. “He sounds most interesting,” she said.

“Funny name though,” Caspar persisted. “Is he foreign?”

“His father was. A Dutchman called Porzelijn. But Mr. Laon has anglicized it to Percy Laon.”