The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  Lack of money was her most immediate worry, and she was obliged to borrow from the missionary society – only, she assured the secretary, until her father could send a telegram to the Standard Bank. She received tea and sympathy from the missionaries, who offered to find Simon suitable employment at the Cape and promised Clara a bed in a ‘respectable’ lodging house. That same evening, they took her there.

  Now she could have a bath and read by gaslight in the evening rather than by the pale glow of a stinking oil lamp. For the first time in months, she was able look at herself in a cheval glass. A strange young woman stared back at her, with heavy-lidded eyes, untidily cropped hair, and skin as brown as polished wood. Her image began to waver as a familiar bout of sickness turned to whirling dizziness. ‘I won’t faint,’ she told herself, and fainted. As she came to, nausea overwhelmed her, and she vomited on the threadbare rug. She crawled on her hands and knees to the window, where the fresh air revived her. She must have cried out when she fell, because the owner of the boardinghouse came panting up the stairs to find out what was wrong.

  A little later, this elderly widow returned, accompanied by a doctor. Clara lay on the bed, and he took in at once how thin and weather-beaten she was.

  ‘Have you been eating properly?’ he inquired gently. She explained that she had been travelling for several months. He took her pulse and asked her to open her mouth. He was a young man, recently qualified, she guessed. She would have to make sure the missionaries paid him. After examining her tongue, he asked, ‘Do you have any other symptoms?’

  ‘Only nausea,’ she whispered.

  ‘Are you married or single?’

  ‘My husband is dead.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I must ask you a personal question, madam. Have your menses always been regular?’

  ‘Not since I came to Africa.’

  ‘Are you late at present?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s nothing new.’

  ‘With respect, I think it is. To be frank, madam, I’m all but certain you will have a child.’ A tremendous silence followed his words. Clara felt that she must argue – as if by accepting his diagnosis passively she would somehow make it true. Yet she could not articulate a single word. He said, ‘You must get plenty of rest and make sure you eat more than you’ve been accustomed to.’ He left her with a bottle of iron tonic, a bill for his professional fee, and a feeling that an earthquake had just engulfed her future.

  How could she lead a life of her own now? How become a teacher, or even a governess? And if earning her living was to be impossible, wouldn’t she always have to depend on her father’s money? In time, a second marriage might have brought her happiness. She was still young, and time was said to heal all wounds. But who would ever want to marry the mother of a dead man’s child? Robert’s chances of being the father seemed so much greater than Francis’s that she hardly considered the possibility that the child might be his. She was a pregnant widow, destined to look after an ageing father and bring up her child in his house.

  The following day, feeling stronger, she walked along pleasant streets of gabled colonial houses. The mission secretary had said he would purchase a steamer ticket for her, and without arrangements to make herself, she was free to spend her time as she wished. Clara liked the old Dutch town best, with its pavements shaded by ancient oaks. The houses were mainly stuccoed and whitewashed, and a few were built from a peculiar type of blue stone. She had heard somewhere that it had been hewn by prisoners from the quarries on Robben Island.

  She bought a newspaper near Government House and walked on, observing the passersby. The uniforms of the African servants and messengers were strikingly smart and clean. The grease-covered men and women of Mponda’s kraal receded further into memory. She turned a corner and entered a coffee house. After choosing an inconspicuous corner table, she began to glance through her paper.

  The stories were mostly about local politics or social events such as a meet of the Cape foxhounds or a reception given by the governor. She turned another page and read: CAVALRY OFFICER FACES BOARD OF INQUIRY. And there in front of her was a picture of Francis, with a sleeve of his full-dress coat pinned up to his chest. ‘Captain Vaughan, 9th Hussars, began his second day of evidence yesterday, before the military tribunal that is investigating the charge that he hazarded the lives of his men in Mashonaland in a negligent manner.’ Her eye raced down columns of print. Some words jumped out at her. ‘Captain Vaughan suffered the amputation of his right hand as a result of a wound inflicted during the campaign.’ She remembered the grimy sling he had been wearing when she had last spoken to him. With countless details to attend to, he had ignored the one matter most crucial to himself. She knew how much he had hoped that the campaign would win him promotion. Without an increased salary, he had expected his debts to force him out of the regiment. Even if he cleared his name, his career would be over. Such beautiful, gentle hands, she thought, and began to cry.

  Clara crossed the large rectangular parade ground opposite the Castle and approached the sentries outside. Since the proceedings were closed to the public, she waited on a bench under a tall plane tree. She did not know whether she would try to talk to Francis when he came out. But if she did, what could she say? I’m going to have a baby, but I think it’s Robert’s? The fact that she had made love with her husband more often than with him in the last month of Robert’s life could easily devalue Francis’s memory of the few nights they had managed to spend together.

  She still thought him wrong to have shot Mponda, but it appalled her to think of men sitting in judgement on him for that or any other alleged professional failing. Unless they had lived through the same terror, what could they know? She wanted Francis to be aware that she sympathized. That was all. Suddenly she was bewildered. Suppose he comes out and, seeing me, thinks I’ve come to enjoy his troubles. But a strange perversity made her stay where she was. She had to see him – not to talk to but simply to look at. Would he be very much aged by what had happened? Would his confidence have gone, along with his graceful way of moving?

  Half an hour later, when Captain Vaughan came out, accompanied by Mark Carew and several other officers and well-wishers, Clara was still sitting under her tree. She shrank behind her paper as he passed only yards away. His face was pale and his mouth bracketed with deep lines. She had never seen him in full-dress uniform and for a moment thought she was looking at a stranger. His sleeve was pinned up, as in the newspaper picture. When she heard his voice, it was exactly as she remembered it – warm, light-hearted, and with just a twist of irony. Her heart was beating at an impossible rate. She wanted to run after Francis; but his friends closed in and bore him away from her, their spurs ringing ever more faintly on the cobbles.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 27

  When Francis Vaughan returned to England after being acquitted by the disciplinary tribunal, he went to stay with his mother in Kent. She had moved from London to the country five years earlier to live more cheaply, so that additional funds would be available for her son and her daughter. In spite of such economies, she knew she could not hope to keep Francis in his regiment when it returned to the home country from Africa. His expenses would then exceed his salary by at least £400 per annum. At present, she rented a small house, little bigger than a cottage, in a sprawling village near Canterbury.

  Ever since his return, Francis had affected an optimism about his future that his mother found heartbreaking. His handicap ruled out further active service and would therefore deny him promotion to field rank. He spoke of continuing his career by becoming a general’s aide-de-camp or a home-based staff officer and increasing his income in this way. But he seemed blind to the competition he faced from ambitious able-bodied men.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Ma,’ Francis told her. ‘I’ll have no problem riding at inspections and ceremonial occasions.’

  His mother smiled reassuringly and said she was sure he would not, although that
was hardly the point, she felt. Even if he had not lost his right hand, the tribunal had damaged his reputation – acquittal or no acquittal. When she saw him practising for hours with his left hand to improve his handwriting, it was all she could do not to cry. He, who had drawn and painted so beautifully as a boy, would never open a sketchbook again. She admired Francis’s courage but feared it was an act put on to spare her feelings. In truth, she would have preferred him to admit the extent of the disaster. Then they could have wept together before sitting down to plan a different way of life. Snobbery against trade and commerce was diminishing all the time, and there was no doubt that the family needed money.

  When he ought to have been considering other options, Francis was pinning all his hopes on his former colonel, who was widely tipped as the new Inspector General of Cavalry. Although his mother begged her son to keep an open mind, Francis behaved as if Major General Hewart’s appointment was a foregone conclusion. His only worry was that the new Inspector General might not recommend him to the War Office as one of his ADCs.

  Each morning, Francis walked out into the village street, eager to meet the postman early on his rounds. His mother was sure that her son ought to leave the army, but whenever she caught sight of him striding past the lych-gate, she would pray that if his long-awaited letter did arrive, it would contain the news he longed to read.

  One sunny autumn morning, he went out in his usual leisurely fashion but returned in breathless haste. Normally, when opening letters, Francis would sit at a table and press down with the weight of his injured arm on the envelope while slicing through the flap with a paper knife. In the street, he would have had to resort to the undignified stratagem of tearing it open with his teeth. From her bedroom, his mother heard his rapid footsteps in the hall and the sound of the dining room door being slammed. She imagined him getting a knife and sitting down to open his precious letter with a trembling hand. Then she heard his cry of dismay.

  Major General Hewart had been passed over for the post of Inspector General and had instead been offered the job of General Officer commanding the North-West District of England. Francis’s dream of a billet in Whitehall, only doors away from the Adjutant General’s and the Commander-in-Chief’s offices, had become just that – a dream. He had told his mother, with a grin that had not concealed his seriousness, that when he was working only yards away from the Horse Guards, he would be in the perfect position to impress the most senior officers in the army. ‘My disability won’t be a bar to promotion then. You’ll see.’ Such thoughts could no longer be entertained. Hewart would end his career as a provincial GOC in the backwater of Chester, and his ADCs stood to gain little or nothing by their association with him.

  Later that morning, a telegraph boy leaned his bicycle against the garden gate and sauntered up the path between the overblown roses. Francis took the proffered flimsy pink paper.

  General Hewart wanted him to be his ADC in Chester. The boy tugged at the strap of his pillbox hat. ‘Is there any answer for the sender, sir?’

  Since no alternative occurred to him, Francis knew what had to be said. ‘“I accept. Vaughan.” That’s the answer.’

  When Francis went in and told his mother, she managed to hide her disappointment. It consoled her to think that this two-year appointment would bore Francis almost to death and persuade him that his future lay outside the army. To put pressure on him now would be unkind and pointless.

  *

  With the exception of ‘Caesar’s Tower’ and its adjacent buildings, Chester Castle had been largely demolished at the end of the eighteenth century, to be replaced by a barracks, the county hall, and the assize courts. In early October 1896, Francis took up residence in the old buildings by the round tower, where the GOC also had his office. General Hewart was a florid-faced man with a peppery manner but a sociable disposition. Because he was a lifelong bachelor and his habits were of great importance to him, Francis tried to interfere with them as little as possible. The general had always valued social occasions and particularly enjoyed meeting the grander landowners of the county and entertaining them in return.

  On the last Saturday in the month, General Hewart and his ADC set out from the castle in the official landau, bound for a weekend house party. As they clattered past the famous Chester Rows, with their black-and-white half-timbered shops and houses, Francis wondered whether their host and hostess would be as paralyzingly dull as Lord and Lady Farquhar had been ten days earlier. Their present destination was Holcroft Park, a large country house twenty-five miles to the southeast, owned by a Mr Charles Vyner.

  ‘Don’t be fooled because he’s only a commoner.’ The general chuckled. ‘His mother was Lord Sulgrave’s only child. The title’s gone, but the money certainly hasn’t. Young Vyner’s as rich as Croesus.’ Hewart moved confidingly closer on the landau’s opulently padded leather seat. ‘That’s not all, Vaughan. His wife’s an heiress too. Lord Desmond’s only girl.’

  Francis found it irksome to be expected to applaud the Vyners’ good fortune. ‘Does Mr Vyner find time to interest himself in the public good?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘I’m told his passion is his art collection.’

  ‘How lucky he has the means to indulge it,’ replied Francis, looking out at the warmly glowing fruits of the rowan and the hips of wild roses in the hedgerows.

  Francis had studied the map before leaving. What struck him as more noteworthy than anything else encountered on their journey was the dark pall in the late-afternoon sky, just to the south, as they approached Holcroft Park. For under that smoke must lie the town of Sarston, where Clara Haslam had grown up. Whether she had returned there or had remained in Africa, he had no idea. And it was certainly most unlikely that these young aristocrats would know anything about a manufacturer’s daughter. Until coming so close, Francis had told himself in vague terms that one day he would visit Sarston. His sudden agitation left him in no doubt that his return would now be sooner rather than later.

  Mr Vyner was a handsome young man, Francis decided, but in a refined and rather bloodless way. He presided at the head of his dining table with a look of scarcely concealed disdain when the less intellectual guests, such as the general, were speaking. An art critic, a picture dealer, and an archaeologist and his wife made up for the less cultivated country gentlemen and their ladies. Behind Mr Vyner, on the dining room wall, was an immense Rubens depicting Salome with John the Baptist’s head on a golden salver. Having seen so many dead men, and not long ago, Francis found the Baptist’s glazed eyes disconcerting.

  Earlier in the week, unknown to Francis, the general had written to their hostess, explaining that his ADC had lost a hand in the Mashonaland rebellion and requesting that any meat served to him should be cut up in advance. In fact, Lady Alice gave instructions that the job be done by a footman at the table. While this was happening, Vyner smiled at Francis. ‘No offence, you understand, but I’m morbidly intrigued to learn what happened to your hand afterwards.’

  ‘I was in no state to ask.’

  Vyner turned to the general. ‘Didn’t Lord Raglan give his arm a Christian burial?’

  ‘That was Lord Uxbridge,’ replied General Hewart, pleased to be deferred to. ‘And it was his leg.’

  During this exchange, Francis had been aware of Lady Alice Vyner’s eyes upon him. She was restless and discontented. Soon after his arrival at the house, Francis had caught sight of her in the spotless austerity of a fashionable grey riding habit, lecturing her husband. In the candlelight, she was all smiles and gleaming jewels.

  ‘Please forgive my husband’s peculiar sense of humour,’ she begged Francis, and turned to her other guests. ‘We’re lucky to have Captain Vaughan with us. A real live hero, I assure you. He captured a rebel chief single-handed in a cave. That’s how he came to be stabbed with a poisoned spear. I read all about it in the Morning Post.’

  ‘I had two troopers with me, Lady Alice,’ murmured Francis, surprised by the expression of intense interest w
ith which Charles Vyner suddenly regarded him.

  For the rest of dinner, the archaeologist’s young wife, who was sitting to Francis’s right, plied him with flattering questions. What was the meaning of the miniature decorations on his mess jacket? Did he make a habit of being heroic? And so on.

  Soon after the ladies had left the gentlemen, Mr Vyner came and sat next to Francis. He puffed on his cigar and said nothing for a while.

  Ever since Lady Alice had mentioned the Morning Post’s account of the incident that had cost the gallant captain so dear, Charles Vyner had been on edge. The same newspaper story had started with a description of the murder of Mr Robert Haslam. Vyner vividly remembered his shock and confusion on first learning that Clara’s husband was dead. Could it mean that she would be coming home to Sarston? Indeed, it had turned out to mean precisely that. And now Vyner found himself presented with an unexpected opportunity to gain information about Clara’s life in Africa.

  Many times since his own wedding, Charles had wondered whether he might have been happier with Clara. Would Alice ever have punished him as sublimely as Clara had that day in the art gallery? In no way. But with her realist’s nature, nor would Alice ever have been guilty of the high-minded idiocy that had led Clara to marry a missionary. Yet what scathing contempt for wealth Clara had shown with that act, what scorn for personal safety. She had appeared to marry goodness incarnate while actually embracing a life of recklessness and danger.