Improbably, and in a way that robbed her of all initiative, he smiled. He had a very nice smile, as infectious as George's, and as wry as Adam's when he was enjoying a joke against himself.
“I’d rather take it as read, Mrs. Swann. We’ll elope. In the traditional manner. Tonight, if that isn’t rushing things too much. Was that what you had in mind?”
“Yes, it was,” she said, somewhat taken aback. “As I see it, there's a great deal to recommend it and I should know. I eloped with Mr. Swann before you were born. Did Joanna tell you that?”
“No,” he said, “but I’m not the least bit surprised to hear it, Mrs. Swann. What time shall we say?”
“Around one a.m. would be best. Don’t come up to the house, wait down by the spinney.” Then, curiously, “Where will you head for? Gretna Green, as couples in your situation usually do?”
“They don’t any more. Irregular marriages there were stopped by Act of Parliament about the time you ran away with Mr. Swann. Romance is becoming unfashionable, Mrs. Swann. Lovers have to hang around up there for three weeks, and it's no kind of weather for the Border. You see that I must have given some thought to the matter.”
She had to smile at that and to cover up said, “What makes you fight shy of hard work, Mr. Coles? You don’t strike me as lazy. A lazy man wouldn’t get up at crack of dawn to train horses, would he?”
“He might, if horses were the only thing he knew about. I’m not bright, like Rowley, and I draw the line at devoting my life to marketing pills and potions. Whatever I do will be done in the open air. Maybe this will make up my mind for me, and I’ll stay in Ireland and take up training seriously.”
His talk of horses touched a chord in her memory. Adam had said something like that when she first met him—“Horses are the only thing I know about,” and this, together with his reference to Ireland, gave her yet another idea. It seemed an outrageous one in the circumstances, and too vague to mention to him now, but she meant to think about it as soon as they were clear away.
“How will you explain things to your parents?” she asked, and he replied, gaily, “I’ll leave them to draw conclusions, Mrs. Swann. They like Jo and that's a good start.”
There seemed no more to say. It was lonely up here but at any moment somebody might chance along and it would never do for them to be seen together, so she said, extending her hand, “Well, good luck, lad. I’ll get in touch with you somehow. Maybe to your advantage, but I can’t go into that until I see how Mr. Swann takes it.”
“You’ll tell him then?”
“As to why you’ve run off? No, I won’t. I’m not that much of a fool. I’m going to be as outraged as everyone else this time tomorrow.”
“What will you say. I mean, what can you say?”
“I’ll think of something. When occasion demands, I’m the best liar in Kent. You have to be when you’re saddled with a family of my size.”
He helped her mount, swinging her up as if she had weighed a pound or two instead of almost nine stones, and she thought, sensing his vigour, “I can find excuses for Jo now that I know the boy… in one way at least she's her mother's daughter.”
He called, when she was ten yards off, “Don’t fret, Mrs. Swann! I’ll take very good care of her!” and she lifted her hand in acknowledgement
“He will too,” she told herself aloud. “He mightn’t be clever, but to my way of thinking Jo got a far better bargain than her sister.”
She had resolved to stay awake and listen for signs of departure, sharing to some extent the excitement and relief that would surely be Joanna's when she slipped out of the house and went to him down by the spinney at the foot of the drive. The loss of one night's rest, however, claimed its toll. Long before one o’clock she was asleep, remaining so until eight when she woke up with a start and hurried along to Joanna's room to collect the note she had dictated.
She had all she could do to subdue a giggle or two when she read it, reflecting that here was an eloping couple unique in the history of runaway matches. But then it occurred to her that perhaps she was taking too much for granted. It might well be that many anxious mammas had written the part for their erring daughters and no one a penny the wiser. All the note said was “Have run away to marry Clint Coles. Please don’t worry. Very happy. Joanna.” It wouldn’t fool most fathers, but it would fool Adam, she was sure of that. Meantime she rehearsed an explanation concerning Jo's absence at the breakfast table that would likely satisfy Phoebe Fraser and the younger children. Jo had been called for late last night to stand in as bridesmaid for Sophie Turnbull's wedding in Maidstone, Sophie's sister having gone down with measles. Sophie was a niece of Godsall's, who was getting married shortly, so that everyone accepted the story at face value, although Phoebe sulked because she hadn’t been invited to help Joanna pack.
About eleven she told the stable lad to harness the trap for her drive over to Addington, to confer with the Coles, and this was a mission she did not relish. Rowley's parents, whom she had met briefly at the wedding in September, had struck her as fussers, who were likely to ask a lot of awkward questions.
She need not have bothered. A red-eyed Mrs. Coles practically dragged her over the threshold, jabbering something about a letter Clint had left. Then Mr. Coles and his two plain daughters appeared, and she was given the letter, together with a glass of sherry but she found it difficult to read for Mrs. Coles kept repeating, over and over again, “Such a silly thing to do! Why couldn’t they have waited? Why couldn’t we share in their happiness…?”
Mr. Coles, thank God, was more discerning, and Henrietta was in no doubt at all but that he suspected the truth and was determined not to admit it, even to himself. He kept patting his wife's shoulders, saying, “There now, don’t carry on so, my love. Mrs. Swann is the injured party and see how calmly she's taken it.” And then, to Henrietta, “What can I say, Mrs. Swann? The boy's a fool and that's a fact! Your husband will have every right to be extremely angry about this as soon as he hears about it.”
“I don’t think he will be,” Henrietta said, feeling rather sorry for him. “After all, he married me very much against my father's wishes, and we’re already relations of a kind. What little Mr. Swann and I have seen of Clint, we like.”
It wasn’t true, of course. Adam, as she well knew, would have difficulty in recalling the boy's name, but what was one more white lie among so many? She went on, “Would you mind if I borrowed Clinton's letter and read it in private, before I showed it to Mr. Swann? It will embarrass all of us if I read it here, in front of you.” Both Mr. and Mrs. Coles agreed, so eagerly that it was obvious they couldn’t get her out of the house quickly enough and looked to her to break the news to Adam in their absence.
The two girls followed her out to the trap and she realised then that the furore at Addington Manor was largely counterfeit. Amelia, the younger daughter, whispered, “Don’t mind mother, Mrs. Swann. She was delighted when Rowley married Helen and she’ll be just as pleased about this, once she's got over the shock.”
Halfway home, in a cutaway on the edge of the Downs, she pulled in to read Clint's letter. The handwriting was sprawling, more that of a schoolboy than a man who could hoist a woman into the saddle with one hand, but the artful composition confirmed her in her opinion that Clint Coles was not as stupid as he looked.
“My Dearest Mother and Father,” it began dutifully, “When you read this I shall be a long way off, having persuaded Joanna Swann to elope with me. We hope to be married almost at once and I owe you an explanation of what you will be sure to think of as unkind and unfilial behaviour on my part. The fact is, as I am sure you will have guessed, Joanna and I are very much in love, but both of us shirked a wedding that would have entailed, besides a lot of fuss, a long and tedious wait. That is one reason but it isn’t the real one. You remember I agreed that when I married and settled down I would make Father happy by taking charge of the firm? Well, I’ve given thought to this a great deal lately, and come to the conclusion, however much
disappointment it might cause him, that I couldn’t honour the bargain and spend the rest of my life in the city. So this seemed to me the only thing to do—that is, marry Jo and make a place for ourselves, somewhere fresh, perhaps in one of the Colonies, where I can stand on my own feet and stop being a charge on your purse. The sensible thing to have done, of course, would have been to try first as a single man, but that would have meant years of separation that neither one of us cared to face. Please tell Jo's parents not to worry. I’ll look after her in every way, and I hope both you and they will forgive us in time. Your loving son, Clint.”
She folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, thinking, “He knows about people as well as horses, the young rogue. I hope she can manage him, for I’m sure I couldn’t.” And then, seeing the road was deserted, she had the laugh that had been bottled up for long enough.
5
She had enjoyed, she would have said, more than her share of luck but more awaited her. Adam, informed of the situation, was inclined to dismiss it as an elaborate prank that hardly merited a serious thought, much less the loss of a night's sleep. “The more you clear a path for these youngsters the more determined they are to strew boulders along their route,” he grunted, when Henrietta showed him Jo's note and Clint's letter. “A yokel and a scullery-maid would have shown more sense. And more dignity too, I wouldn’t wonder! Why the devil couldn’t he come up here and ask for the girl in a civilised manner? Does he take me for an ogre? And that's not the truth of the matter either,” he rumbled on, giving Henrietta a bad moment. “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the idea originated with her, not him. She probably saw herself as the wilting heroine in one of those trashy novelettes you fed her!”
“I fed her no such thing,” Henrietta protested, with genuine indignation. “You weaned me off those books before she was born! To tell you the truth, I don’t think either she or Helen ever read anything heavier than a Bentley's Magazine serial in the whole of their lives.”
“Well, there's a bonus in it for me, I suppose,” he continued, preparatory to dismissing the subject, “it’ll save me the outlay on another wedding. Do you have any idea where he might have taken her?”
“None at all,” she lied cheerfully, “and neither have the Coles. I shall know when they’re man and wife, however.”
“I wouldn’t wager on that,” he said, beginning to enjoy his displeasure, a habit that had been growing on him since the Rycroft debacle and George's abdication.
“If she can slip off like that she’ll take her time writing, you can be sure of that. Let me see that correspondence again. No, no, not that silly note of hers, the letter the young idiot left on his mantelshelf!”
She gave him Clinton's letter and watched him knit his brows over it. “Funny thing,” he grunted, laying it down, “I wouldn’t have thought a young chap with his seat on a horse would let himself be talked into a frolic like this by a chit of a girl, with her head full of hogwash. But there it is, you never can tell what a man will do when a saucy little baggage bewitches him. He had a rare future as a steeplechaser. I saw that when I watched him win the Sidney Cup, over at Tonbridge last spring. It’ll be goodbye to his hopes in that direction.”
On the whole she was relieved he took this line, preferring to see the escapade as something Joanna had engineered, probably with the object of getting him away from a rival or rivals. It was further proof of Edith Wickstead's dictum that, while he was admittedly an excellent judge of man's potential, he had never learned anything important about a woman's. She was careful to say nothing to disillusion him but listened patiently to his grumbles concerning his inability to find a reliable substitute for O’Dowd at the Dublin depot. This was her extra piece of good fortune as it happened, for it fitted into a plan that had been maturing ever since she met young Coles up on the Downs. When the first letter arrived bearing a Cork postmark, informing them that the runaway couple had been married by special licence in Belfast and were honeymooning in Kerry, she took her courage in both hands and confronted him. “If you haven’t filled that Dublin post yet why don’t you keep it in the family by offering it to Clinton?”
He stared at her as if she had said something very stupid, but she had been prepared for this and went on, before he could explode, “Well, why not? I mean, he's young and strong, wants an open-air life, and has good commercial connections. And you’ve admitted yourself he's a first-class horseman. He's also your son-in-law, like it or not. From the little I remember of him I think you’d get along with one another.”
“Do you imagine I pick my depot managers on the strength of their steeplechase performances? Good God, woman, they don’t act as outriders on the waggons. A man handling that job in a place like Ireland needs nerve, cool judgement, imagination.”
“Well, as to that,” she countered, “I would have said he's shown proof of all three. Nerve to ride his fences straight. Judgement to pick one of our girls, instead of getting hooked by one of those ninnies they’ve introduced into the house from time to time. And imagination enough to turn his back on a readymade pill business where he couldn’t hope to be anything more than a figurehead!”
She saw at once that her broadside had taken effect, raking his prejudices and all but demolishing his private conviction that Clint Coles was a weakling manipulated by a woman. That was another rewarding aspect of Adam Swann. Presented with a line of reasoning that ran directly contrary to his own, he was never too proud or too obstinate to change his mind on the spot. He said, slowly, “There might well be some sense in that, Hetty. I confess I hadn’t looked at it in that light. I’m sometimes inclined to forget that you ran the business for a year that time I was laid up. It must have taught you something about people's potential.”
“Bringing up your tiresome family has taught me that,” she said, briefly, “so pooh to your patronage, Adam Swann! I know my sons and daughters well enough to be certain the silliest of them wouldn’t hitch themselves to an idiot!”
“Stella did,” he reminded her, but she was ready for this, too. “Stella had the good sense and courage to backtrack and try again, so don’t quote her at me. It's my belief Joanna knew precisely what she was doing and meant to get the boy by hook or by crook. You owe it to her to go over and decide about him for yourself, before you hold this against both of them for the rest of their lives!”
“That's something I should have to think about,” he said, but he didn’t think long. Forty-eight hours later he was on his way to Fishguard to catch the Irish packet. One week later he was home again, with young Coles established in Dublin as viceroy-elect of the Irish bridgehead.
His mood was in great contrast to that of his previous homecoming, admitting that her instinct had served her well and that young “Jack-o’-Lantern” (he had coined this name for his new son-in-law on the homeward crossing) was a lively young spark who might inject some much-needed ginger into the Irish beat. “Don’t mind saying I took to the lad,” he said, “once he’d made me a handsome apology. Did you know he has a lot of influential acquaintances over there?”
“Most horsey men have,” she said, trying to conceal elation that came bubbling out of her like a pudding on the boil.
“Well, it decided me,” he said. “He's no great shakes at paperwork, and never will be, but clerks are two a penny. What I was looking for in Dublin was someone who could match the Irish at blarney. He's on six months’ trial at all events. Flat rate, plus commission.”
It was typical of him, she thought, to let business prospects completely cloud the family issue, so that finally she had to make a point of asking him if he had seen Joanna during his visit. He seemed surprised at the question. “Seen her? Good God, of course I saw her! What kind of father do you think I am? Young Jack-o’-Lantern brought her to breakfast at the Gresham before I showed him over our yard.”
“Well, how was she, for heaven's sake?”
“Oh, bonnie,” he said vaguely. “Stars in her eyes, and not much to say for he
rself. Seems to be putting on weight.”
She had to beat a precipitate retreat on that, spluttering something about having forgotten to give Phoebe the shopping list, but once the door was closed on him she took refuge in the darkest corner of the hall, where the gallery overhung a passage they used as a broom store. Once here she hugged herself, shaking with laughter that was prompted less by his innocent remark than the congenital blindness of all males, particularly those who, immersed in large concerns, prided themselves on their perspicacity.
Eight
1
GILES HAD NEVER REALLY ABANDONED HOPE OF A RE-ENCOUNTER. TO SOME extent that hope ordered his approach to his comings and goings about the network, in that he was aware, at the deepest level of consciousness, of a never-ending search that would set him studying the faces of pedestrians as his cab ran alongside crowded pavements. Or while his train stood at a terminus ready to leave a platform. Or when, on foot, he picked his way through the streets of provincial cities between the southern limits of Rookwood's beat in the south, and the northern outposts of Higson's territory in Perthshire.
Sometimes, catching a fleeting glimpse of a tip-tilted nose, or a shaft of lamp-light alighting on a woman's neck or shoulders, his heart would miss a beat. But then, when he had taken a closer look, he would see that he was mistaken, or that his imagination was playing tricks with him, or that some conjunction of light and shadow had made a fool of him yet again.
His work, as the firm's provident society superintendent, plus complaints investigator (Adam had decided he was by far the best man to make the initial approaches in both fields) took him into every region at all seasons of the year. He seemed always to be travelling—rushing through the darkness, rattling over the skein of lines at the approach to some murky wilderness of brick, slate, and stone, breathing the stale air of a growler or hansom in a traffic jam between station and depot, or between depot and customer. Only occasionally could he escape into open country to renew his old friendship with Gray, Clare, Blake, and Wordsworth. When he did, it was like returning home after a period of exile and seeing a landscape through the eyes of a man revisiting scenes of childhood.
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 85