Circles of Time (6 page)

“That's nice.” Her voice was flat. Bending forward, she opened a pot of lip rouge. “I invited Fenton and Winifred for dinner.”

“Did you? Well then, I'd better bathe and dress. I reek like a navvy.” He kissed her neck again, failing to see in the mirror the unhappiness in her eyes.

His own suite was down the hall—bedroom, dressing room, and bath—rooms that were almost Spartan compared to his wife's. Eagles, his valet for many years, had seen him arrive and anticipated his requirements. The bath was drawn and clothes for the evening laid out.

He stretched out in the steamy water with a sigh of gratitude. And then he heard it, pounding irritatingly through the wall, intruding on his privacy, that damned jazz music.

“Eagles!”

The valet popped his large, balding head around the partially open door. “Yes, m'lord.”

“That blasted caterwauling!”

“A Victrola record, m'lord.”

“I know what it is, man. Go tell Master William from me to turn the bloody thing off!

“Very good, sir.”

Eagles left his master's suite and walked sedately down the hall to William Greville's room. He gave a perfunctory knock on the door and then opened it and stepped inside. The earl's youngest son lounged on the bed in a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and waving his hand in time to the music on the Victrola. Eagles walked slowly across the room, waited until the final blaring note had sounded, then lifted the needle arm.

“King Kornet and the Kansas City Kings. I never heard that number before.”

“It's new. Chap I know brought it back from the States.” William leaned across the bed and snuffed out his cigarette in a nearly overflowing ashtray on the nightstand. “It's called ‘Storyville Stomp.' Bix Fletcher's on trombone instead of Eddy Williams. Makes for a hotter sound, don't you think?”

“Well, it made His Lordship hot enough.”

“Christ.” William sat up and ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “I didn't know he was back.”

“Got in half an hour ago. He's in the bath, and the sound annoyed him—to put it mildly.”

“You can tell his nibs the concert's over.”

The valet started for the door, then paused and looked back. “Have you been to that new club in Tottenham Court Road, the Dixie?”

“No. How is it?”

“Bit of all right. Darky band from New Orleans. Leader plays piano like a bloody madman—and stands up to do it.”

“I'll drop in for a look.”

After Eagles had left the room, William sat up with a groan and swung his long legs off the bed, wincing at the sudden stab of pain in his right knee. His kneecap had been shattered by a bullet in 1917, and although a series of operations by two of the finest orthopedic surgeons in England and America had done wonders, he was still unable to bend the leg properly and the knee ached like a rotting tooth in cold or damp weather. He had learned to live with it.
A cane would help
, one of the doctors had advised him, but he despised the use of a cane as only a tall, strong, twenty-three-year-old man could despise such a symbol of infirmity.

Eagles served as his valet as well, but since William didn't care a fig for clothes, there wasn't much for the man to do except cluck his tongue whenever he opened the wardrobe and surveyed the motley collection of sagging tweeds and well-worn flannels that hung there. It had been Eagles, a onetime bandsman in the Rifle Brigade, who had introduced him to American jazz.

William selected a pair of gray flannel trousers and a dark blue blazer, frayed at the elbows. He dressed hastily, lit a cigarette, left his room, and walked down the hall to his sister's suite at the rear of the house. The door to her bedroom was ajar and he poked his head in. No one was there, but he could hear voices from the adjoining room, what would have been the sitting room had it not been turned into a nursery.

“Hello,” he called out loudly. “May I come in, or is babykins doing something nasty?”

“He's just getting a wash.”

He sauntered through the bedroom and leaned in the open doorway of the nursery. His sister stood by a window holding her naked son in her arms while the nursemaid patted his back with a towel.

“Madonna and child,” William said. “By Caravaggio.”

It was an aesthetically pleasing sight. The blond and exquisitely beautiful Alexandra, the pink and ivory baby, the nursemaid in her crisp white cap and apron, a mellow glow of sun through the curtains. Yes, he thought, pure Renaissance Italian.

Alexandra was two years older than he. They had never been particularly close as children and there had been times, when she was growing up and had been mad for boys and parties, that he hadn't liked her at all. He loved her now. She was the one person he could talk to, the only person who understood him.

“You know the rule, Willie,” she said. “No smoking in the nursery.”

“Sorry.” He stepped over to an open bedroom window, crushed out his cigarette on the sill, and flipped it down into the garden below. “Father's back.”

“I know,” she said, handing the baby to the nurse. “Mary told me.”

“Which should put a damper on the evening. I was going to play my records for Fenton.”

She came into the bedroom and closed the nursery door behind her.

“You can still play them. And teach Winnie and me a few new steps. Have you heard of the Charleston?”

“Can't say that I have, but there are all sorts of new dances. As for playing any records tonight, fat chance of that. The gaffer's on a tear. Sent Eagles hopping over to tell me my Victrola was ruining his tranquillity or something.” He flopped onto her bed, hands folded behind his head. “Getting back to a more pleasant subject, don't be surprised if there's a new dance craze sweeping London by now. I went to a club last night in Sloane Square and this little flapper I was with seduced me into dancing with her. Well, as you know, I can teach but can't do, so there I was galumphing around the floor with my leg as stiff as a post. I must have looked like a lame crane. People watching me thought I was doing something terribly clever, and before you know it everyone in the place was dancing with one locked knee!”

Alexandra laughed and sat beside him, one hand resting on his bad leg. “You seem to be walking better lately. Have you been sticking to the exercises I taught you?”

“Yes,
sister.
I've been very diligent, but it hurts like bloody blazes when I do them.”

“It's supposed to hurt. Take aspirin.”

“Take aspirin! Christ, that's what comes from living with a doctor!” He could see her tense and he sat up and placed an arm around her shoulders. “You know what I meant, Alex.”

She turned her head and kissed his hand. “You're a lovely man, Willie.”

“No,” he said, touching her hair. “You're the lovely one in this family. If I'm ever asked to vote for a saint, I'll cast it for you.”

“Oh, come now!”

“I'm serious. Only a saint would put up with the way Father treats you.”

“That's enough, Willie,” she said firmly. “Papa has been—well,
Papa.
What on earth did you expect him to do, dance a jig in the streets?”

He sat up and took a tin of Woodbines from his jacket. “No, but neither should he place you in virtual Coventry. His discourses seem limited to ‘Kindly pass the salt,' or ‘It looks like rain.' I'm sure the two of you could jump into deeper conversational waters if he'd only bend his blasted Victorian codes a bit.”

“Papa
is
a Victorian. Try to understand him.”

He stuck a cigarette between his lips and searched his pockets for a match. “I don't understand
you.
If I were twenty-five and had come into my share of the trust, I'd be out of here like a shot.”

She took his hand into her own. “Please, Willie, don't make it any more difficult for me than it is. Everything will work out for the best, you'll see. It just takes time. And I can't bear seeing you moping about and feuding with Papa over petty things. There are enough young men drifting about in a fog these days without your joining their ranks.”

“I'm not drifting.”

“Of course you are. You drink too much, smoke too much, have too many girls, and just go through the motions of reading for the bar.”

He put the matches back in his pocket and plucked the unlit cigarette from his mouth. “I'm considering chucking that in, but, for God's sake, don't tell his nibs. I'm just not cut out to be a barrister. Don't have the brains for it. I'm not Charles. If Charles had wanted to be a lawyer, he would have ended up Lord Chief Justice in no time flat. Father expects me to take over Charlie's life and I can't do it, Alex.”

“Of course you can't.”

“But the bloody rub is I feel an obligation to do
something
worthwhile with my life to compensate for the waste of Charlie's. Something—oh, I don't know—
grand.
”

She gave his hand a squeeze. “What is it that
you
want?”

His smile was wan. “Promise you won't laugh.”

“I promise, Willie.”

“I'd like to marry a simple, happy girl and live in a warm country—Australia, perhaps. Queensland. Raise—oh, I don't know—sheep or horses. I love animals, good soil, dirt on my hands. Trying to understand things like socage in fief, barratry and torts is just not my cup of tea.”

“It's your life,” she said quietly. “And you only get one.”

H
ER THOUGHTS DRIFTED
as she lay in the bath, idly soaping her breasts, a small tactile pleasure that always made her think of Robbie, his gentle hands on her body, his lips. Her loneliness was an ache—real, physical, as painful sometimes as her brother's splintered knee.

One life.

She had known Robbie would die. There had never been a morning when she hadn't wondered if she would see him that night. When the telephone had rung she had known he was dead, not needing the stumbling, hesitant words on the other end of the line to confirm it. She had watched him grow gaunt and hollow-eyed, driving himself with an inner fury he had never talked about, not even to her when she lay beside him in bed. A penny for your thoughts. But he had never told her. Not that it was necessary. She knew his rage at the war, a war that had been over for nearly three years but still filled his days with the mutilated victims of Vimy Ridge, Festubert, Ypres. The legless, armless, faceless survivors of that useless slaughter. He had bled with each case—and there had been cases without end. He could never, in good conscience, allow himself to relax until the last mangled creature from Armageddon had left his care. A dedication so close to zealotry that it had destroyed him in the end. Colonel Robin Mackendric, killed by the Great War just as surely as if he had been blown up by a shell.

“Robbie.” She whispered his name, then rested her head against the hard porcelain pillow of the tub and closed her eyes. Oh, God, if only he were with her now, holding her tightly in a silky, liquid embrace … stroking her … loving her … ending the pain....

L
IEUTENANT
C
OLONEL
F
ENTON
Wood-Lacy, his mind on a hundred other matters, missed the turn into Chester Mews and had to turn the car around.

“Bugger all,” he muttered.

“No need to swear,” his wife said. Lady Winifred, only daughter of Lord Sutton, Marquess of Dexford, was used to rough language. Her father in his youth had served briefly with a regiment of hussars during the Zulu war and boasted of his salty “trooper's tongue.” Being married to a professional soldier for five years, she had heard her full share of barracks talk, but she was five months pregnant, her nerves on edge, and little things irritated her.

“Sorry,” he muttered; then, “Damn and blast …” as the front wheels of the Sunbeam bounced against the curb and he had to back up in the narrow street.

She gave him a disapproving look but said nothing. His nerves were as raw as her own and she felt a wave of sympathy for him—and love. “You can swear if it helps.”

“It just blows off steam.” He smiled at her in the darkness. “Don't worry. It'll all come out in the wash. Tomorrow will tell.”

She caught a glimpse of his face in the glow of a streetlamp. The smile was gone as suddenly as it had appeared, replaced by a taut-mouthed grimness. He had long, sharp features, the nose prominent and the lips thin. A handsome yet forbidding profile that had earned him the sobriquet of “Hawk” in the army. It was an appropriate name for he looked like a cruel and predatory bird, but it was merely a mask, a parade-ground face.

“I wonder if it was wise to accept Hanna's invitation,” she said. “If Anthony's there, we're in for one of
those
evenings again. I don't think I can bear it. I'm as edgy as a cat.”

“If the old boy's there, he's there,” Fenton muttered as he put the car in forward gear and completed his turn without mishap. “Grin and bear it, as the Yanks say.”