God Is an Englishman (35 page)

“Why, damme, zir,” the man said, equably, “I’ve seen it happen in half the time.

She’s a bonnie girl, or so Ellen says. And so’s your daughter, zir.”

“Daughter?”

“Didden the Missus tell ’ee?”

“No,” said Adam, and suddenly he wanted to laugh, wondering what GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 181

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Henrietta thought about it, and if she would care a row of beans now that it was over. He knew how he felt, mildly proud and foolishly elated, and then he told himself it was damnable to gloat after those awful yells of hers, and wondered what he would say to her when they let him into a room full of a stranger’s shrouded chattels.

The miller said, as though this was a matter solely for women’s jurisdiction,

“Missus tells me you’ll be staying overnight at the mill while she bides up yer. Will you come on down with me, and let me drink your health and the babby’s?”

“I’d consider it a pleasure to drink yours and your wife’s,” Adam said, “for I’m hanged if I know how I could have managed without you. This place, ‘Tryst’ you called it, I can’t help feeling we’re taking a gross liberty making free with it. Are you the caretaker?”

“Aye, for as long as there’s no tenant,” the miller said, “but they Collinwoods won’t be back. The last of this branch of the family died two months since, Sir Mark Collinwood ’ee was, you might have heard of him. In Parlyment for a spell, then made a rare name for himself building East Indiamen on the Medway. He never owned this place, o’ course, it’s been in the Conyer family for time out of mind.”

“Will it be going back to them now? I shall have to notify them if my wife stays here until she’s well enough to be driven home.”

“God bless you, zir,” said Michelmore, with a smile, “there’s no call to worry on that account. They’ve got four thousand acres in one place or another, and they’ll let this place again soon as it suits ’em. When the agent comes I’ll tell how it all come about and that’ll be that. Mr. Phillips is a reasonable man, and any Christian would have been obliged to see you out of your difficulty. The Conyers are my landlords, and Mr. Phillips will be calling on account o’ the flood damage I suffered when the leat broke.”

They went down the drive and Adam looked back, seeing the house squatting between the two dark spurs of woodland, moonlight casting long shadows across the pantiled roof. It looked, he thought, like a self-indulgent old man, snuggling under the blankets, with the silvered chimney-pots showing as a few tufts of hair above the counterpane.

The miller produced a cask of home-brewed beer and solemnly pledged

“the little maid’s health and happiness,” and then fetched a saddle of mutton and pickles, and Adam was surprised to discover that he had an appetite. While he was eating he mentioned Collinwood of the 15th Hussars, whom he had known in the Crimea, and Michelmore said that would be Mad Jack, one of the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 182

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Collinwood cousins, who had often visited here as a boy. “He were nigh drowned in my leat,” he added. “I were never surprised to learn he come through the war unharmed,” and this encouraged Adam to admit that he too was at Balaclava, and had afterwards served in the Mutiny. The miller was greatly impressed but then, like Henrietta, deflated by Adam’s confession that he had left the army to become a haulier.

He showed Henrietta’s automatic respect for uniformed men, and the same prejudice against a gentleman going into trade. “Be there any future in wheeled traffic nowadays, zir?” he asked doubtfully. “They railways be everywhere, baint they?” and Adam said, “Half of them will be bankrupt five years from now, and those that aren’t will have been absorbed into a few big lines. There’s a fortune wait ing for someone who establishes a fast and reliable service, and I’ve taken it into my head to be that man,” but the miller remained un convinced and there was no doubt in Adam’s mind that he had lost caste in his eyes. It was odd how every craftsman, artisan, and soil-tiller in the country continued to regard money-making as a degrad ing occupation for a man qualified to serve in the armed forces, and he wondered if this stemmed from the inarticulate pride that the lowest-paid labourer in the land was beginning to feel in the hap hazard acquisition of a vast overseas Empire. Milieu had little to do with it. Their feelings were shared by Henrietta and by Roberts, away on the North West Frontier, and even, to some extent, by unimaginative men like Keate and Tybalt. Only a few eccentrics seemed to have come to terms with the England that had emerged from the establishment of a communications system that consoli dated the unique achievements of the inventors and engineers.

Then the Scots doctor appeared, announcing that his patient was sleeping and was not to be disturbed until morning, that Mrs. Michelmore would feed her and watch over her, that the child was “bonnie and round about seven pounds” and that he would send his groom back with the carriage horse before breakfast.

He then de parted, without stating his fee, promising to call again tomorrow, depending upon his commitments.

It was then past ten o’clock and Adam wondered briefly what he should do about notifying his household staff, and the Bermondsey yard, that he was stranded in the depth of the Kentish countryside, but in the absence of any means to send a message he turned in, sleeping in the room over the mill-wheel where Michelmore had raised his large family, long since dispersed. Just before he slept he wondered at the improbability of it all, his first child, a daughter, making her debut as casually as a gipsy’s child born under the hedge. There was, he thought, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 183

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something looming about it and whatever it was had to do with that sprawling house crouching under the lee of the woods. The significance of it eluded him and so he dis missed it, rolling in his blankets and sleeping the sleep of a trooper who has stumbled on a comfortable billet after a gruelling day in the saddle.

The settled, timeless atmosphere of the place grew upon her, help ing her compose her mind and relax her body. They had moved her into a more comfortable bed in a room above the one where the child had been delivered, and at first she did not question the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, for somehow they were not strange at all, but comfortable, comforting, and reassuring.

It was obviously a remote, very “countrified” house, enjoying a close communion with everything she thought of as traditional and pastoral. From the great bed, with its luxurious bolsters and lavender-scented sheets, she could see an oblong of sky scored by the spreading branches of old trees, and trailers of wisteria that had crept over the window sill. From first light until dusk the birds whistled and quarrelled under the eaves, and when Mrs. Michelmore, a staunch advocate of fresh air, opened the casement the scent of wild flowers came from the coppice beyond the lawn.

She needed a period of repose, not only to banish the rapidly re ceding memory of the pain she had endured but also to adjust to the disappointment of having produced a daughter, but this proved easier than she had anticipated, for Adam, cockahoop over the accuracy of his prophecy, was more than satisfied with the mite whose brick-red face and clownish tuft of hair had startled her when Mrs.

Michelmore had introduced them. She had fed the child, find ing the experience interesting if uncomfortable, but as time went on she was able to adjust to this too and concentrate her thoughts, idle, far-ranging thoughts centred on the place she was in, and how she came to be there. Soon a kind of pattern began to emerge from the freakish incident, and with this came a curiously compelling sense of belonging, so that she began to think of the house as a home in the sense she had never thought of Scab’s Castle, the Shirley lodge, or even that sanctuary house on the shores of Derwentwater.

The current of life, having once decided to wash her from the Cheshire plain, had now assumed dramatic control of her destiny and was sweeping her along at a tremendous pace, first away out of Sam’s reach and into the arms of a great, hulking husband, then down the full length of England to the capital, and finally here, into a stranger’s cosy, well-appointed home and into motherhood. Who could say where it would take her next?

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She discovered other things lying here, luxuriating and husband ing her strength, among them an objectivity towards the man who had been responsible for all these adventures. Right up until the moment he had driven her out on what was to be a mere evening jaunt in a carriage, he had been her master, but now, unaccountably, she had been promoted, or had promoted herself, to a position of near equality, so that when he came in and stood beside the bed look ing awkward and bashful, she could laugh inwardly at him, as he had so often laughed openly at her. And with this came a conviction that men were monstrously conceited bluffers, assuming a superiority that was quite spurious, and trading on it, even the most amiable of them like Adam Swann, for when their conceits were stripped away they were really little more than gawky boys, with nothing much to say for themselves. They stood around coughing and patting and twisting their mouths into counterfeit smiles and then, like over grown children dismissed to play, scampered about their own con cerns. She supposed now that they had always been rather like this and it had been the way of the world from the time when a woman lay on skins in a cave, the man made his insignificant contribution to the complicated process of reproduction, after which he scampered away to hunt bears in the undemanding company of other men.

She had never had these kinds of thoughts before and discovered they had the power to inflate her ego to a point she would have thought very presumptuous less than a week ago. She was able to think through the entire process of reproduction, from the moment of being clutched and crushed and gasped over, to the moment when she heard the first squawk of the child who now lay at her breast and seemed, in its single-minded absorption, to underwrite the im portance of women and the comparative irrelevance of men. For the very milk that the child sucked down did not have to be tapped or even paid for by a man. It was there for the asking, for all who had need of it.

When she felt stronger and able to take a less detached interest in things, she asked Mrs. Michelmore to tell her about the house and the people who had lived in it and discovered, to her surprise, that the miller’s wife had a romantic streak in an otherwise practical nature, for she gaily recounted the story of the man who had built it centuries ago, another miller called Conyer, who had owned the most prosperous mill for miles around at a village two or three miles upstream, in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Miles Conyer, the first of his line, had fallen in love with a certain Marion Cecil, whose father was the gentleman owning Cecil Court, a great house on the Westerham road beyond Twyforde Green. There was no hope, however, that Miles’ suit would be welcomed by Marion’s family, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 185

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for they were known to have enriched themselves by the acquisition of church lands and were a forceful, thrustful family, but Miles, it appeared, was a man with Adam’s belief in his own infallibility. Far from despairing, he set himself to convince Marion Cecil that he was worth waiting for. He sold his mill, invested the proceeds in a well-found privateer, and embarked on a series of rewarding raids along the Netherlands coastline, and then down as far as Cape St. Vincent, where his vessel picked up a lame duck of the Indies Treasure Fleet. In three years he was one of the richest men in Kent. He did not, however, risk his own skin in any more ventures, preferring the counting-house to the gun-deck. During the time he was amassing his fortune he maintained regular trysts with Marion on the very site of the house he subsequently built, and that was how it had acquired its name, the Cecils subsequently welcoming him into the family as a man likely to enlist friends in their intrigues at the court of the first Stuart.

Henrietta, intrigued by the story, learned no more than the bare bones from the miller’s wife, who had completely abandoned her husband in order to act as nurse and cook. She filled in the details during a courtesy visit by Mr. Phillips, Conyer’s agent, who had already been seen by Adam, currently rushing between Tryst, his Shirley home, and the Thameside yard in an attempt to keep to the target date for the expansion and Phillips, a gentle, elderly bache lor, seemed captivated by his chance tenant, calling a second time and bringing her a nosegay of spring flowers, together with a silver rattle for the child. It was Mr. Phillips who took tea with her on the first afternoon she was downstairs, and he acted as her guide around the house and the fifty acres enclosed by the long wall under which Dancer had bolted.

Everything Henrietta saw enchanted her; the broad, curving stair case, with its balustrade made from the timbers of Miles Conyer’s first privateer, the minstrel gallery over the hall where, so Phillips said, Conyer’s son entertained guests with his own madrigals (one of which had survived down to this day), the long, wainscotted pass age leading to a chamber Phillips called the “Muniment Room,” whatever that meant, the portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Conyers by Lely and Kneller, as predatory-looking a bunch as one could find today up in the Lancashire cotton belt, the Dutch garden where tulips and weeds fought one another for living-space, the great rhododendron banks climbing behind each wing into the woods crowding the slope and forming a convenient windbreak to the north-east.