God Is an Englishman (54 page)

“Adam, darling, I do love you! You’re so
different,
so—so
unstuffy,
if you see what I mean! Times like this, when we can talk and shut everyone else out, I think myself the luckiest woman alive!”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” he said, “for maybe you are.” He swung his long legs from the bed, sniffing the morning air with ob vious relish. “Suppose we go GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 284

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down, saddle up, and ride over the heath? It’s a rare day for a gallop, and nobody will be stirring yet. Would you like that, Mrs. Swann?”

“Yes,” she said, eagerly, “I’d like that better than anything,” and skipped out of bed a child again, forgetting that she had awakened in such a self-questioning mood, or that he had said very little to resolve the terrible restlessness she felt all the time he was absent. Their marriage was like that, she supposed, a kind of rollicking, tomboyish game they had learned to play with each other, and from which, a little unreasonably to her way of thinking, he could with draw at will, leaving her to play by herself. And yet, when he was there, and her cheeks were tingling with the scratches inflicted by his bristles, nothing but a deep feeling of thankfulness for his being found its way into a brain that she sometimes thought must be as imma ture as he had always declared it to be. But she didn’t care, not in his presence, and certainly not on a morning like this. She went singing to the clothes closet and yanked out her riding habit, the waisted vel vet jacket with big buttons, tight sleeves and wide revers, and the voluminous blue skirt that hitched up at the right to give freedom to a leg hooked over the saddle-horn. He had not yet seen her in this outfit and while he was in his dressing-room, splashing himself, she perched the little hat with its curled ostrich feather on her head, lift ing her nightgown to her thighs and prancing back and forth in front of the mirror. He heard her giggling and called, “Hurry now, before Stella catches us and begs to come along.”

2

Sometimes her trivial conversations and pouting complaints planted a seed in his mind that would enlarge itself and emerge as an idea that he thought of as his own. It was so in this case for, a day or so later, when he announced that he would be gone for a few days, he suddenly suggested she might occupy herself by arranging a supper dance on the occasion of her approaching birthday.

It was unusual for him to suggest anything of this kind. Such enter taining as she did was of her own or Ellen’s ordering, and he very seldom brought guests to the house, telling her that the people with whom he did business were dull dogs outside their counting houses, and he had no mind to inflict them on her. There were several fami lies, however, whom they had met at church, and who had paid calls in his absence, and until then she had always assumed he would dismiss them one and all as “twitterers,” a favourite word of his for the kind of people who left cards, went in for charity fetes, and made a solemn round of “At Homes.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 285

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She had made some kind of place for herself in this parochial society but had never aspired to giving anything as grand as a supper-dance that would require, she supposed, a great deal of organising, and the hiring of musicians. She saw his suggestion, however, as a challenge and decided to meet it, saying, “I’d like that, Adam, but on two conditions. One is that you’ll promise faithfully not to make a fool of me by staying away, the other that I have new hangings for the double room, for the fire smokes horribly and the furnishings are quite black. It needs a new carpet but we won’t want a carpet for dancing and I can get someone to wax the floor.”

“Well, that’s your concern,” he said, carelessly, already in a hustling mood. “Buy what you need, so long as it isn’t too fancy, and I promise to be home for your birthday. I’m only going as far as Crescent South and looking in on The Bonus on the way down.”

She went about the preparations with the greatest enthusiasm, send ing out fourteen invitations to families who she knew had sons and daughters who would enliven the occasion, for so far nearly all her visitors had been couples of another generation. The response startled her. Everyone accepted, and the final tally was thirty, of whom nearly half were people of her own age, or younger.

Under Ellen’s eye she pretended to supervise the cleaning and clearance of the big double room west of the porch, where there would be ample space for the polka and even, at a pinch, a set of lancers. Above it, the minstrel gallery added by the Conyer who had com posed his own madrigals, was cleared out to make room for two fiddlers and flautist, promised by the rector, Mr. Bascomb, who earned an invitation on that account. The floor coverings were re moved, an accumulation of dust banished, and the maids told off to beeswax the pine floor, after which Henrietta drove into Croydon to spend a pleasant day selecting brocade in a shade of sunflower yellow for the new curtains, and a length of green, bobble-fringed silk for a mantelshelf drape that Ellen arranged in carefully regimented folds.

All other work about the house was scamped, and the staff re sponded nobly to her appeals, so that the days flew and every morn ing she awakened with a renewed flutter of excitement and sense of having overlooked any number of essentials. Among them, not rec ollected until forty-eight hours before he was due to return, was the rogue chimney, for when Ellen lit a trial fire in the grate dense clouds of smoke threatened to leave a layer of soot over the new curtains and asphyxiate the guests into the bargain if a fire was lit on the night.

Ellen dried her tears by promising to get hold of Millward, the sweep, within GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 286

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the hour, explaining that at this season of the year a fire was essential, and that the chimney needed a thorough scraping. To her certain knowledge, she added, it had not been swept in seven years.

Millward appeared that same afternoon, and Henrietta thought she had never made the acquaintance of a dirtier or more brutalised man, not even among the town rowdies of Seddon Moss. It was diffi cult to judge his age under so much grime, and he might have been anything from forty to sixty. As well as masking his features and coating all other exposed areas of his body, soot had apparently taken residence in his windpipe. Every time he inhaled he whistled and his slurred speech emerged as a sustained hiss that was sometimes diffi cult to interpret. He took a close look at the chimney with which, he said, he was familiar, having climbed it himself when he was an apprentice during the tenancy of the last Conyer occupant.

“Rare blessing you sent for me an’ no other,” he wheezed. “I know that chimbley of old, and she’s a reg’lar tartar, M’m. She goes up a matter o’ twenty feet, turns sharp left level wi’ the first floor, goes on another ten feet, and comes aht under the woods where the stack ketches the downdraught when the wind’s in the west. She’ll smoke then, no matter what, but not nearly ser bad, not when I done wi’ her. But that level stretch is fair choked, and’ll need to be dug out be the sackfull. After that I dunno, tho’ we’d best cross our fingers fer a shift in the wind, in which case she’ll burn sweet an’ free.” There seemed nothing to do but pray for a change of wind and commission Mr. Millward to get about his business with despatch, but once she had given the order she realised there was more to sweep ing a chimney than that, for Ellen said that every item of furniture would have to be covered with dust sheets, and Millward said he would have to go back to the town for his two apprentices, Jake and Luke, the liveliest lads in the trade, who could scale any chimney, including the episcopal ones at the Archbishop’s Palace, where boys had been known to stay lost for days before being hauled out through the roof or broken out through a bedchamber wall.

Henrietta was vaguely familiar with the trade, having seen the flues cleaned by grimy urchins at Scab’s Castle, but she had not realised until then that the architects of old houses had gone to such extraordinary lengths to dispose of smoke, designing exits that were as intricate as a maze. She packed Millward off and set the girls to work hanging dustsheets over the windows, untacking the carefully arranged mantelshelf drape, and covering furniture too heavy to be carried into the hall.

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Millward appeared with his apprentices very early the next morn ing, and Henrietta, roused by the clatter, jumped from bed and dressed herself hurriedly, for she did not trust Millward to have a care for her furniture, taking him to be a man likely to put clean chimneys before disordered rooms and ruined furnishings.

She bolted her breakfast and was on the scene before eight, when the sweep and his team had been at work for more than two hours. The quantity of soot that came down appalled her. She would never have believed that so much could accumulate in one chimney, but she noticed that Millward himself, for all his knowledgeable airs, took no part in the actual work, but stood about drinking Ellen’s home-brewed beer and paying lugubrious compliments to the maids, who seemed to regard him as a fruity character who might, if flattered, attend their weddings and ensure marital bliss with a tra ditional sweep’s kiss.

Henrietta was less impressed by him. She said, anxiously, “How long do you think you will be? I’ve got a supper-dance here the day after tomorrow and this room will have to be scoured when you’ve carted all that mess away.” Millward said that it didn’t do to hurry these things and that his gloomy prophecies had been proved correct. The horizontal section of the flue was packed with soot and young Luke was now half way along it, passing his bags back to Jake, the senior apprentice, who was stationed at the top of the main shaft.

Presently Jake emerged, a bag slung round his neck, and Hen rietta gave a yelp of horror. He was like nothing human and did not even resemble a monster. The only feature that reconciled him to the human species was his bloodshot eyes that rolled upward as he said, addressing the sweep, “Bin waitin’ ’arf-hour an’ Luke ain’t passed no more back. You reckon he’s stuck?”

“How do I know, you idle little bastard,” the sweep said, aiming a blow at him that Jake expertly dodged, “get on up agin and find out. Holler for ’im, and make sure I ’ear you do it!” and then, as Jake re-entered the chimney, Millward remembered that he was in the presence of the lady of the house and wheezed,

“Beg pardon M’m, but you’ve got to chivvy ’em all the time. They’ll work, but on’y if they’re kept to it. I’ve known boys sit in one o’ those chimbleys ’till you lit a fire under ’em!”

Perhaps because she had gobbled her breakfast, or because the sight of Jake was difficult to put out of mind, Henrietta felt sick and retired to her sewing-room to wait. She was still there, sipping a cup of tea Ellen had brought her, when she heard a frightful uproar from the direction of the double room, followed by a series of indetermin ate thuds that seemed to come from above her head. She ran into the hall and across to the big room to find both Jake and his master hauling GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 288

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on a length of rope that went straight up the chimney. Man and boy, she noticed, seemed very excited, and Ellen was on the verge of hysterics, wringing her hands, moaning, and chewing her lips. She cried out, as Henrietta appeared, “Don’t stay, M’m, there’s trouble, bad trouble! That boy’s stuck fast…” but at that moment Jake shouted, “He’s coming! Watch out, missus!” and dropped his hold on the rope to run under the canopy of the fireplace that was blotted out by a flurry of soot, reducing visibility in the room to inches.

Her first thought was that her wonderful supper-dance was ruined. They could never make the room spick and span again in the time left to them and she could have shrieked with vexation, but then, as the cloud of soot began to disperse, dismay was succeeded by horror, for the thing that shot out of the chimney and sent Jake staggering was a boy, a human being, with arms, legs and a great sooty blob for a head, and from where she stood, over by the window, he looked as though he might well be dead.

Ellen let out a shriek and the master sweep began to prance and curse as Jake fell on his knees beside his fellow apprentice, and began a rhythmic cradling movement that amounted to a sustained rock ing on his part, but after a minute or so he looked up at Millward and said chokingly, “E’s gorne, Mr. Millward! We was too late! I carn’t do nothing’, nothin’!” and at once began to blubber.

The master sweep dragged him aside and lifted the inert child by his ankles, shaking him as though he had been a sack, but then Henrietta, rooted to the spot and speechless with terror, saw that the boy’s ankles had a rope knotted to them, and that this was the rope Millward and Jake had been hauling on when she came in.

The realisation that the apprentice had been pulled from the level flue like a cork from a bottle, and had then fallen something like twenty feet down the vertical flue, struck her as the most dreadful experience she had ever contemplated and instinctively, as she par tially regained her faculties and ran forward to assist the sweep in his frantic attempt to resuscitate the boy, she realised how Adam would react to such an occurrence, for he had never forgotten that boy Tim Garvin who was ridden down and bludgeoned the night of the riot. She screamed,
“Stop it!
Stop that, you dreadful man! Ellen, fetch your husband, get a doctor…get water…
do
something, except shake him like that,” and then, as though he too had entered the room via the chimney, Adam was standing there in his riding clothes, crop in one hand, gauntlets in the other with his hat with the silver buckle still on his head. It was like a scene re-created out of a terrible nightmare and, unable to adjust to it, her knees buckled and she fainted.