God Is an Englishman (17 page)

His guess concerning the reception she was likely to get from the Col onel was accurate enough. The moment the old man’s eye rested on her Adam saw him glance up at the oval portrait of the woman over the open hearth. The facial similarity was quite remarkable, and it occurred to him then that this might have played a part in his deci sion to bring her along against the dictates of common sense. They had the same lively, greenish eyes, the same broad cheekbones and slightly pendulous cheeks curving to a small, obstinate chin, the same pert nose, offset by a generous mouth. Even their hairstyles, separ ated by close on half a century, had similarities. His mother had worn a straight fringe and curl clusters bunched over the ears, and although Henrietta’s hair was in disarray (despite frantic attempts to tidy it during an interval in the summerhouse while he GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 82

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announced her) it seemed to him that it had the same coppery sheen where it swept down on either side of the wide parting to ringlets bunched on the temples.

The old man, advancing stiffly, exclaimed, in wonder, “My poor child…” and seemed, in that instant, to shed forty years, so that Adam saw him briefly as he must have appeared to little Monique d’Auberon in the spring of 1813, when a torrent of victorious young Englishmen had poured through the passes of the Pyrenees to fight their first battle on French soil and break all the hearts in Haute-Garonne. The encounter touched him. It was well worth the tempest of Aunt Charlotte’s wrath and the flailing she gave him with her tongue.

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Four

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It had required an effort to nerve himself to admit that he had not arrived alone and that in the summerhouse, desperately attempting to make herself presentable, was a girl of eighteen who had fled a respectable home and been escorted over a hundred miles of track and fellside by a soldier, returning from places where this kind of conduct would arouse no special comment. That was how Char lotte Swann saw it, once he had admitted the facts, and that was how she expressed it, in terms that made his ears burn. Not that his con duct surprised her, for he was a man and she regarded all men as irresponsible fools unlikely to advance far beyond the mental age of a child.

She was a formidable-looking woman distinguished by Swann height, hawk nose, and thinly compressed lips. She was not only tall but impressively upholstered, and when she was roused, as now, she could summon the voice of a rough-riding sergeant drilling a squad ron of recruits.

“In the
summerhouse!
You hid the little goose in the summerhouse?
Unfed?

Unwatered?
And wearing the rags she travelled here on the rump of that jaded brute you stabled so conscientiously?” She flung round on the Colonel. “You know I’ve always thought you a fool, Edward, but you and that foreign gel you married succeeded in breeding a bigger one, and there he stands, with his silly mouth agape. He’s taken close on a month to get here when he might have made the journey in thirty-six hours, at a fraction of the expense and with out abduct-ing a young woman en route!”

“Dammit, Aunt Charlotte, I haven’t laid a finger on the girl. All I did was to help her on her way.”

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of a man with no more sense of fitness than a Turk! Didn’t
that
ever occur to you? Didn’t it strike you that the only course open to you was to take her to those relatives of hers at Garston?” and before either Adam or his father could comment she had sailed out of the house and down between beds of lupins, sun flowers, and delphiniums to the shed facing the ruffled surface of the lake.

The Colonel said, ruefully, “She’s right, boy. You do seem to have got yourself into a rare scrape,” but then, with a humorous lift of his shaggy, white brows, “Is she pretty? But that’s a damfool ques tion. She must be, or a Swann wouldn’t have carried her this far.”

Adam said bluntly, “Nobody could convey that young woman a single yard against her will, and Aunt Charlotte will find that out soon enough. I daresay you’ll think her pretty enough for to my mind she’s rather like mother, facially at all events. She’s more buxom and round about three inches broader in the beam I’d say, but that stood her in good stead. A hundred mile trek on the rump of that mare must have been punishing…”

He broke off, hearing voices on the garden path and said, hastily, “Let’s leave them to sort themselves out after the introductions. I’ve a great deal to tell you about past and future, and something to add that won’t please you, I daresay, but I’ve made my decision and here it is. I’ve resigned from Company service and dropped the idea of buying my way into a regular regiment. I’m done with soldiering,” and he paused, expecting the old man to look outraged, or at least unbelieving, for he recalled that the old fellow was proud of the family’s military tradition. All he did, however, was shrug his shoulders.

“You’re over thirty, I can’t dictate to you. Had a notion you wouldn’t renew your contract after you wrote to me about that shambles at Cawnpore.” His light blue eyes narrowed and he looked, for a moment, older than his years. “We heard about that here, of course. I remember having the same revulsion after the sack of Badajoz, and again after San Sebastian, where my own regiment ran amok.

Sickened me at the time. Never wanted to see another shot fired. But I forgot it as soon as we found ourselves billeted among civilised folk. I daresay you’ll have second thoughts, and a long fur lough is what you need now. Stay here for a spell.

It’s the best kind of country for idling, and that mare you arrived on must be a corker if you’ve ridden her three hundred odd miles and two up over the final stages. Do a bit of fishing in the lake while she’s out to grass.” Adam said, regretfully, “I’ve got other plans, sir, and the means of putting them into effect if I’m lucky. I intend starting up in business as soon as I’ve seen that girl settled. I haven’t told Aunt Charlotte the full facts. There was another GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 85

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reason for getting her clear of the dis trict. Her father is a bully and a scoundrel. I wouldn’t make him custodian to a sick cat after what I saw him do in the filthy little town he rules like an oriental despot. The truth is there’s no knowing what might become of her if she was sent back before things quietened down. All I want is for Aunt Charlotte to care for her until I can get legal advice on that and a number of other matters. Will you do that for me, take her on trust for the time being?” But before the old man could assent, Henrietta came creeping in on the heels of Aunt Charlotte, whose indignation appeared to have been stoked up by the girl’s appearance. She presented her rather as though she was a barrister submitting irrefutable proof of male idiocy to a court of adjudicators.

“Look
at her, Edward! Just
look
at her! Half-naked and she hasn’t been near soap and hot water for a week!” She whirled on the grin ning Adam. “How
dare
you treat a decent young woman as though she was a drab in one of your infamous garrison towns…” but here the drooping Henrietta perked up and protested,

“Oh, please, Miss Swann! Adam was very kind and considerate…” and Adam had the satisfaction of seeing some of his aunt’s asperity diverted else where for she snapped, “Hold your tongue and listen to me! I’m not interested in the reasons that prompted you to run away from home and attach yourself to this freebooting nephew of mine, but from now on you’ll do what
I
say, and my first instructions are that you shall take a hot bath, eat a Christian meal at a table, and go to bed while we decide what’s to be done with you. In the morning you will sit down and write a letter to your father at my dictation, and after that, when every stitch you are wearing has been laundered and aired, we shall see, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Henrietta, so dutifully that Adam laughed as he watched his aunt half-propel her out of the room and into the hall where their steps went clattering up the stairs towards Aunt Char lotte’s quarters, presumably with the intention of finding something to wear whilst the washtub was being prepared.

He saw very little of her throughout the next few days, and when he inquired cautiously of his aunt what had become of her, Charlotte answered that she was recuperating from the exertions of her journey, and that this was hardly to be wondered at after the way she had been treated, first by her father, then by an even bigger fool masquer ading as a White Knight. Somehow she managed to imply that he had hauled the girl from bed and dragged her across two counties in order to be ravished and that in some way his father was an abettor.

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(but failed) to hold a whispered conversation with him whilst Aunt Charlotte’s back was turned. She seemed so chastened as to be a different person from the little devil who had talked him into bringing her here, and he wondered whether her subjection was due to fear of being returned home, a resolution to keep the promise made to him that she would abide by his aunt’s decision, or domination by his aunt’s forthright personality.

Perhaps it was a combination of all three. When they met during meals, he confined himself to general conversation. Even had he wanted private conversation with her, however, this would have been difficult, for Aunt Charlotte was clearly compensating for four days and four nights unchaperoned association with him and kept the girl close to her whenever Adam was about the house.

Partly because of this, and partly because he had privately decided to make an effort to get to know his father rather better, Adam spent most of his time riding or walking along the margins of the lake in the Colonel’s com pany. He found the effort rewarding.

They had never been close. During his childhood, and throughout the early part of his boyhood, the Colonel had been serving in dis tant parts of the Crown dominions, and they had met infrequently on furlough. After that Adam had been away at school, and later, when he entered the Company’s service as a cadet, they were separated by hundreds of miles, even when his father was home-based.

He had thought of him, in the years after he had sailed for India, as a with drawn, rather disappointed man, whose youth had been sacrificed to the long, dragging war in the Peninsula followed by the now almost legendary Waterloo campaign, where two fingers of his right hand had been severed by a French cuirassier. After that, he supposed, his father’s life had been blighted by the death of the little French girl whom he married in the first year of the peace. He soon discovered, however, that the old man had mellowed over the last few years and was no more than politely interested in the professional side of Adam’s life, declaring that his own martial experience was now as dated as Agincourt. Since retirement he had developed a variety of unlikely interests, chief among them landscape gardening and paint ing watercolours, and sometimes he would set his easel at Friar’s Crag, or under the falls at Lodore, trying to capture the shifting shadows on the fells, or changing sky patterns over the broad ex panse of the lake. He said, when Adam caught him at work one morning, “If I had my time over again, boy, I’d learn to paint pro perly and count the world well lost. I’ve derived more satisfaction out of this than anything else I’ve ever done, except maybe to raise prize vegetables, or plant those borders in the garden. I’m no damned good, mind you. Any fool GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 87

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could tell you that but I don’t have to sell ’em. Just look at those shadows creeping across the underside of Falcon Crag, and that sun throwing diamonds about in the spray where that water comes over that drop. Marvellous, all of it! Something else painting did for me. Taught me to make use of my left hand, and that was something the regiment never did. Went through the last twenty years of my service holding a sabre like a damned crochet-hook in what Johnny left of this one,” and he held up his maimed hand, now crippled with arthritis as well as minus an index and middle finger.

The old man’s allusion to diamonds gave Adam’s conscience a twinge, and he toyed with the notion of explaining how he came by the necklace but decided against it. He now thought himself a fool to have confided in the girl, and he was by no means sure whether the old man would accept his theory that the necklace qualified as prize-money. He did not want his entire future imperilled by a prize-court that might order its restoration now that the Mutiny was over.

Instead he said, “Do you ever look back on your life as wasted, sir? The way I’ve come to look on mine so far?” and the Colonel said gruffly that he was damned if he did, for his years in the Peninsula had been shared with innumerable jolly companions and that it had “been a pleasure to beat the dust out of Johnny Frenchman’s hairy knap sacks all the way from Lisbon to Toulouse.” From his next remark, however, Adam gathered that they might not be so far apart after all, for he went on to say, “That war of mine was cleanly fought. I never hated the French. They were damned good soldiers most of the time and could cover the ground faster than we could and on shorter rations. Apart from that we were better led, which is more than one can say of you fellows in the Crimea. The Duke had brains and I don’t need to tell you that’s rare in high command.” He laid down his brush and arched his eyebrows in a way that warned Adam he was about to ask a direct question. “Just what kind of business are you hankering after? Anything to do with horses?”