He had been listening to her like a schoolboy having a lesson explained to him, and it seemed to her that she was making very little impression upon him. She was wrong, however, as she so often was about his power to reason. It was so easy to mistake his ponderous deliberation for stupidity, the way some of the wedding guests had done. He was very far from stupid. All he needed was time to mull over everything he saw and heard and sensed, and then evaluate it, in the way he would consider the potential of a stubble field, a cart horse, or a crossbred cow.
He proved as much by saying, “I can’t understand it right off. Or not like that. It's too much in one helping, I reckon. But I’ll get around to understanding in time, though I don’t see myself as ever thinking of it as anything but the best slice of luck anyone like me could expect. Why wouldn’t I do that, seeing I never give a thought to another maid from the time I was fourteen? I reckon we all have our fancies, and like to think on how it would be if they come true. But you know all along they are fancies, and in my case, making you Mrs. Fawcett and bringing you here to bide as my wife, well, it's like one of them miracles you hear about in the Bible. You read ’em but you can’t really believe ’em!”
He paused and frowned, as though the effort of putting such complex thoughts into words taxed him to the limit of his capacity; but then, quite suddenly, his expression cleared and he beamed down at her, almost indulgently. “However that may be, there's things a grown man don’t have to think on and one of them is how it feels and what it does to have his arms round someone as pretty as you, the way I did back in February, the day we hung that door over there. And that goes back longer than I can tell you, to the day you rode up bold as brass under Shortwood, and put your arms round my neck and kissed me, just that once. I daresay you’ve forgotten that, but I never did and in a way it kept me hoping. Not much mind, but enough. Enough to make any other maid not worth a look.”
He had surprised her a little. It was common knowledge at Tryst that he had always mooned after her, but she had taken it for granted that, notwithstanding this, he had done his share of larking with village girls and the young women about his father's farm.
“You mean there never was any other girl? Not even at harvest supper or the goose fair when you were growing up?”
“Never the one. Oh, they tormented me about it times enough, mother and the girls that is, but there it was. It always seemed to me a man ought to know what he wants, even if what he wants is away out o’ reach, and likely to stay so. Then you come up across that field in the rain and wind, and I took you back here, and since then I was content to wait around, never dreaming it would come to this, mind you, but just to be on hand in case you were in trouble again, for it seemed likely you would be soon as they got word where you was. I’ll add something to that, too. I’d have wrung that Moncton-Price's neck like a fowl's if he’d shown up. Do you believe that?”
“I believe it,” she said. The admission enlarged him, for she now saw him not so much as an infatuated swain, waiting hopefully in the wings for a word or a glance, but as a positive champion of the kind she had read about in Ivanhoe, and this invested him with an aura of romance very much at odds with his manner and appearance.
She was beginning to wonder, however, how this conversation could be turned to advantage, thinking that it had begun and developed promisingly enough, but still seemed to skirt the edges of the central dilemma. But then, in a barnstorming rush, most of her doubts were resolved, for suddenly he moved round the end of the table so that they faced one another. She saw that all traces of the bemused look he had worn throughout the day had vanished, and that he was regarding her objectively for the first time in the association, as though he had been selecting a partner for a dance and had finally made up his mind.
He said, fervently, “By God, but you’re a fine woman, Stella Fawcett! You been worth waiting for and that's a fact!” And he made a bearlike grab at her, crushing her to him until it seemed to her that all her ribs would crack like a row of trodden sticks, and there was nothing particularly sacramental about the way he kissed her, either. It crossed her mind then, as she struggled to catch her breath, that she must have been a regular ninny to sit here wondering how to coax him and encourage him to accord her her rightful place in his life. She had very little share in his dispositions then or a moment later, when he plumped her down, exclaiming jubilantly, “Wait on, don’t stir! Something I’d clean forgotten…” and he strode back into the dairy, re-emerging almost at once with a bottle of champagne, one of eight dozen her father and brothers had opened for the guests as they were presented after the wedding. She remembered then a remark her mother had made the night before her marriage to Lester, something about father filling her so full of claret the night she was married that she might have been walking on cushions. It enabled her to guess at the source of the bottle and she exclaimed, “Mama slipped that into your bag, didn’t she?” And he chuckled, the first real chuckle she had ever drawn from him, and nodded as he placed the bottle between his knees and drew the cork.
There were glasses to hand, two of a set Giles had given them for a wedding present, and as he poured he said, “Never tasted the stuff before today. My old Dad used to say it were no diff ’rent from cider, but he must have tried the wrong sort. A glass o’ this is headier than a pint o’ scrumpy on an empty stomach.”
“Did you try it up at the house?”
“Aye, I did. One more’n I would ha’ got up and made a speech. It gives a man a diff ’rent look on things, as though, well, as though he was up a tree and looking down on the fields after an April shower. You’ll take some, won’t you, me love?”
“Half a glass, no more.”
“Well, I don’t reckon it's a proper drink for a woman. But I’d wager you all used to drink it wi’ your dinner up at the Big House.”
“You’d lose your wager,” she said, letting a drop lay on her tongue and trying to decide if his rather poetic simile had substance. “ We were never allowed anything but claret and only a thimbleful of that if Phoebe Fraser was around. Well, here's luck to us, Denzil!” and deciding she liked it she raised her glass and emptied it at a draught. She heard him say, “Go along up then, my love. I’ll run the tap on these things and put the bar across…” just as if he had addressed her in those identical terms every night of her life, and a comforting sense of familiarity bore her up like a cloud, so that she floated up the stairs and surveyed the half-furnished bedroom with heady proprietorship.
The bed was a gift from his family and the blankets and sheets were from Tryst. Two wool rugs were from Phoebe Fraser and the red velvet curtains she had made herself. A terror of fire was still with them, reinforced perhaps by the ineradicable smell of charred beams and thatch, so that the light up here was confined to a couple of small, hooded candles in pretty fluted sticks, a gift from Deborah Avery.
Presently, humming to herself, she tumbled out of her clothes and put on her nightgown, removing all the pins and ribbons from her hair so that it fell not far short of her waist. Then he was there, moving about the room with the same ponderous certainty he displayed when heaving a roofing beam into position or stripping the harness from Henrietta's cob, or saddling the mare for her ride home in the twilight of a winter's afternoon.
Sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, she watched everything he did, wordlessly but attentively seeing him strip down to his cotton drawers that gave him the look of the eighteenth-century prizefighter in a print that hung for years in her father's study—Mendoza or one of his opponents. He had the same build, solid and muscular but taut, and he was a great deal more graceful than he appeared in his rough working clothes and great clod-hopping boots. He moved like a boxer too, placing his weight on the ball of the foot, so that whereas she had always thought of him as an ox or a bull, she now identified the source of those calculated movements he made when he was reaching down for a bundle of reeds from his perch on a gable-end, or when, with a kind of effortless precision, he lifted
the twenty-rung ladder and planted it against a wall.
She said, suddenly, “You said I was beautiful but I’m not, Denzil, or no more so than most women my age. But you’re beautiful. Like no one else in the world,” and he first looked absolutely astonished and then blushed to the roots of his straw-coloured hair, saying, in an aggrieved tone, “Good Lord, love, you can’t say that of a man…”
But she replied, obstinately, “I say it, and most women would agree with me if they could see you now.”
He stood still then, stripped of his equanimity, something of the old baffled bewilderment lurking in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. But then, magically, the incongruity of her compliment must have fused with the champagne, so that he smiled, a little sheepishly, and said, “Now there's a turnip-head you’ve married! That bag o’ mine is still in the waggonette, wi’ all that new stuff Mother would have me go out and buy. I’ll slip my breeches on an’ fetch it, for my nightshirt's in it.”
But she exclaimed, impatiently, “Oh, to the devil with the nightshirt, Denzil Fawcett! You suit me well enough as you are, and it's very snug in here, seeing your mother had the goodness to air the bed with her own bottles. Blow out the candles and put your arms around me, for I’m beginning to see what you mean about doubting this is as real as we want it to be!”
He did as she directed but slowly, having snuffed the candles and pulled the curtain aside to take a final sniff of the night air through the half-raised window. Then he padded back to the bed and very carefully climbed into it. For a moment she could have cried out against his maddening deliberation, but then his hand touched her hair, caressing it lightly, and she could hear his breathing as his hand passed over her shoulder and lightly cupped her breast in a way that made her shiver. It was too dark to see his face but she realised somehow that he had misread the tremor for he said, “Don’t you be afraid of me, my love! Not now, not ever! We’re right for each other, and this was meant to be, I reckon. Maybe I knew that, back o’ my mind, but couldn’t face up to it until we closed that door behind us an hour since.” And then, after a brief pause, “Not until now, I reckon.”
“Nobody would ever be afraid of you, Denzil,” and she made her point by reaching up, plucking the ribbons of her nightgown loose, and guiding his hand to her bare breast. He said, mildly, “It don’t have to be so, my dear, not until you’ve got used to me being here. We waited a long time and a day or so…”
“I don’t want to wait, Denzil. I love you and need you, even more than you need me.”
He hurt her a little but not so much as she had anticipated and not, she was sure, enough to make him conscious of the fact. She was proud then that no other man had laid a hand on her. There would be, she supposed, all kinds of difficulties ahead, but at least one thing was certain. Neither of them, so long as they both lived, could ever be lonely again.
Two
1
THAT WAS A TIME WHEN IT SEEMED TO ADAM, IN HIS BELFRY OVERLOOKING THE wide curve of the Thames, that his sons and daughters were reproducing the rootlessness of long-dead Swanns and wandering the face of the world in search of pay, promotion, and pickings.
For himself, he was done with foreign travel. He did not regard a round-the-network jaunt as anything more adventurous than a brisk reconnaissance, designed to keep his viceroys up to their work, but he had not crossed the Channel now for close on twenty years. Why should he, when he thought of Britain, and particularly England, as the pivot of the world, and of Englishmen as the chosen pace-setters in planetary affairs? Some of his friends and many of his business associates thought him a Chauvinist, with his roots too deeply embedded in an industrial past, but they were mistaken in one respect. He could extract everything he needed from the many newspapers, periodicals, and bluebooks he devoured, and his memory, far from failing him as he entered his mid-fifties, seemed instead to improve and operate like a well-devised filing system, selecting all that was likely to be useful, discarding everything else as fashionable chaff.
By August 1882, two of his sons were lost to him, or so it seemed. Alexander, gazetted to a Highland Regiment, was stationed in Malta, and daily expecting a move further east with Sir Garnet Wolseley's Nile expeditionary force. George, supposedly prowling the Continent to widen his technological education, had drifted through France and Germany and finally down the Danube to a waggon yard south of Vienna, whence he wrote at rare intervals. This gave Adam the impression that George found the raggle-taggle empire of the Habsburgs very much to his taste but was learning, so far as his father could determine, little that would contribute to the future prosperity of a British transport undertaking.
For the time being, however, he bore with him, reasoning that George was a lively, likeable, adaptable fellow, who might as well sow his wild oats at a safe distance before settling to the collar in a slum overlooking a river with far fewer distractions than the Danube.
Both Giles and Hugo, the one sixteen, and the latter fourteen, were still at school in Devon, but both, during the Easter break, had paid their first visit to foreign parts, forming part of an athletic team that travelled to Milan to compete in some kind of schoolboy jamboree concerned with track events. Adam let them go, thinking the experience might teach them something, but taking no pride in their selection as athletes. The fashionable cult of games-worship made small appeal to a man born within a dozen years of Waterloo, and sometimes, in one of his tetchy moods, he would point to it as a sign of national decadence, telling Tybalt that obsession with gladiators was an indication that the British would ultimately go the way of Rome. He was out of step here. Even sober men of business were beginning to talk of cricketers like that chap Grace as if they added more lustre to the country than merchant princes. The emphasis placed on games and pastimes in the new gentlemen's schools had, in Adam's view, already reached the point of absurdity. They were even telling one another that Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton when his own father, who had actually fought in the battle, had never played an organised game in his life. It went along, Adam assumed, with the cock-a-hoop mood of a tribe that, in his lifetime, had launched a revolution far more germinal than that street riot the French were still talking about, but had yet to learn, it seemed, which side their industrial bread was buttered. For real education—technological education, that is—was at a discount. A man who could hit a boundary and kick a ball the length of a pitch was esteemed far above one who invented a safety device to save miners’ lives, or patented a machine that would double the output of a rolling mill. Meanwhile, the drift from the land was accelerating every year. Dedicated farmers like his son-in-law, young Fawcett, told him it was becoming increasingly difficult to tempt lads leaving the new state schools into agriculture, notwithstanding the fact that British farmers were far and away the most progressive in the world. More and more factories were springing up from the southern rim of Rookwood's beat, where it touched the Channel, to the northern limits of Jake Higson's territory beyond the Tay. While Adam did not quarrel with this, he could see no sense whatever in the wild scramble among their owners and sponsors to turn themselves into country squires before they were forty, or in their eagerness to launch sons in professions that were rapidly becoming outdated, like those of the army and the church. A man's life was where he made his money and there, in Adam Swann's view, he should remain, hard at work until they carried him away in a box. It continued to irritate him when coffee-house acquaintances, all men of substance, declared his an old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud outlook.
Equally irritating, to Adam's way of thinking, was the proliferation of public busybodies, those men and women who spent their lives poking their long noses into everybody else's concerns, launching one crusade after another. Few of their doctrines were based on the principle of twenty shillings in the pound, of the kind practical reformers like John Catesby had put forward when building the Trades Union Congress.
But here again Adam Swann was at odds with most of his contemporaries, for h
e had always held that a country's prosperity depended on a friendly alliance between master and man. It maddened him to see a prosperous merchant, known to work his hands like field slaves, contribute a large sum of money towards the cause of Temperance, or a new church, or some other shortcut to Paradise, when they were ready to see their foundries close, or their ships left unladen, before they could be talked into paying their furnacemen or dockers an extra penny an hour.
The besetting sin of the nation, as he saw it, was hypocrisy, sometimes so blatant that it could be mistaken for insanity. In the old days, when he had been founding the network, men like Shaftesbury and others had battled ceaselessly against exploitation of the underprivileged, but the generation that followed them seemed to think that the existence of extreme poverty and affluence side by side in the same society was ordained by their night-shirted God. They were busy fashioning a new feudalism to replace the old.
Even this made sense to those with tougher hides and tougher bowels than he possessed, but how the devil did one explain the earnest preoccupation of commercial bandits with missionary and religious tract societies, with teetotalism, with campaigns to stop the honest prostitute from making a living at street corners and on the promenades of the music halls? Everybody wanted to be something as well as a merchant: a sociologist, an amateur priest, a public benefactor, or an educationalist. He was sometimes amazed at their collective conceits and inconsistencies. He knew men who had amassed fortunes in their twenties and thirties but at fifty had not yet discovered that it demanded fourteen hours a day to make a success of one job, much less three. He knew a shipper in Liverpool, whose boast it was that he employed only teenage boys and shambling old men—the one because he could sack them the day they finished their apprenticeship, the other because he could pay them starvation wages—yet this same man, when he died, left a fortune to found a library, and a further sum to pay for a golden angel on his grave. God, in His mercy, saw to it that the angel took flight within weeks, but Liverpudlians still regarded the shipper as a public benefactor. He knew a haberdasher in Rye Lane, who sacked his girl assistants if he caught them sitting down, who sent them to bed in dismal top-floor barracks on tepid cocoa and a slice of bread and dripping. Yet on Sundays this same rascal compelled them, one and all, to attend a chapel where he had just paid out a hundred pounds for new hassocks and hymn books!
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 30