by Maggie Joel
‘You pre-judge me just as you seem to think I have prejudged this case.’
‘Then I trust I shall be proved wrong.’
‘And I trust I shall be proved right. The implications for this railway if I am not are … awkward.’
Standish had caught them up and had evidently heard Sinclair’s earlier statement.
‘The company can hardly be held responsible for a frost, surely?’ he remarked and he gave the same quick smile.
CHAPTER SIX
London
LIEUTENANT FORBES HAD COME TO dinner. He was sitting opposite Uncle Austin at the table in his uniform, all gold epaulettes and shining gold buttons and gold braid at his cuffs and collar. Odd that his tunic was scarlet rather than the usual dark blue of the 8th Hussars, and he was not wearing his sword at his side, so far as Austin could make out. This was strange but not half as strange as the fact that the very last time Austin had seen him, Lieutenant Forbes had been cut in half by a Cossack sabre at Balaklava in ’54.
And now he had come to dinner. And so far as Austin could tell, he was miraculously in one piece again. Was it a trick? No one around the table seemed in the least bit surprised by the lieutenant’s sudden and unexplained return to health. Indeed, to life.
But then none of the people around the table (who they were, he was not quite sure) had witnessed the lieutenant’s grisly death. Or had they? One couldn’t be sure of that either.
No, they were children, mostly. And the grave young gentleman at the head of the table whom he ran into from time to time, and the enigmatic but very captivating lady whom he had an idea was married to the grave gentleman and was perhaps his own niece, for he felt certain he had known this lady when she was a child and it was unsettling now to see her thus grown up.
‘How did you do it, eh? How did you do it, Forbes?’ he asked, leaning over the table at the chap, needing to understand.
Lieutenant Forbes leant back in his chair warily as though alarmed at being addressed and instead of answering he looked at the other people around the table.
‘I am sorry, Roger. You remember he gets a little confused?’ said the enigmatic lady. She turned to Austin with a smile. ‘Uncle, this is Roger Brightside. Travers and Meredith’s son. You remember? He’s a lieutenant and he’s just been assigned to the 58th. He’s about to join his new regiment. They are to sail to the Transvaal in a few days.’
Austin nodded enthusiastically and had no idea what the woman was talking about.
Lieutenant Forbes, meanwhile, was smiling grimly at him. ‘Major Randle, sir, I hope you are keeping well?’ he said and Austin was bewildered. Was the fellow a ghost? An apparition?
‘That Cossack,’ he reminded the lieutenant. ‘Big Russian fellow with a shashka—big sabre-thing with a damned sharp edge. Fellow came out of nowhere. You didn’t stand a chance. How’d you do it, eh? Saw you cut clean in two—left to right. Only your legs left standing.’
‘Uncle, please.’
‘You saw someone cut in two?’ said one of the children, the boy sitting to his left, the child’s eyes boggling with delighted horror.
‘Jack, please do not encourage him. I’m sorry Brightside, my wife’s uncle has a colourful and somewhat … selective memory. When does your ship sail?’
‘In two days’ time, sir, the thirteenth. We sail from Portsmouth to the Cape then round to Durban. Should take around three weeks, I understand. I should be joining my regiment around the New Year. And that fellow Kruger will be routed before the end of the month, I shouldn’t wonder. I only hope they hold off till I get out there.’
The fellow was cocky. Lieutenant Forbes had never been cocky before, but then he had cheated death, he could afford to adopt a bit of a swagger. It was unnerving, though, no doubt about it. One moment the fellow was dead, the next he was sitting down to dinner.
But some very strange things had happened recently, Austin remembered, and for a moment his eyes filled with tears.
Cousin Roger was wearing the uniform of the 58th: a scarlet tunic and blue trousers with red piping, a spotless white belt across his chest and highly polished knee-high black boots. His tunic buttons bore the Latin inscription Montis Insignia Calpe (which was something to do with Gibraltar) and on his cap badge insignia was a Sphinx to honour the regiment’s 1801 Egypt campaign. His uniform was, therefore, as different to that of a cavalry officer at the Crimea as it was possible for a uniform to be.
Jack, carefully studying his cousin across the table, was not aware of this, not having reached the Crimean War yet in his Boys’ Compendium. He did know that, in his uniform, his cousin cut a very dashing figure indeed and that people, especially the young ladies, tended to notice him. Not Dinah, of course, she had barely given him a second glance but that was just Dinah.
‘And how are things in the Transvaal?’ inquired his mother, as though she was inquiring after the health of Roger’s parents.
‘Well, in a nutshell, Aunt, this fellow, Kruger, has declared the Transvaal independent of British rule. So General Colley, who is governor of the region, has responded by assembling a column of troops. I understand the general now has around a thousand men at his disposal—including a naval detachment—and is poised to advance whereas Kruger has perhaps a few hundred Boers at most. Colley is in a pretty unassailable position, one would think.’
Jack nodded eagerly. He knew much of this already, of course—after all, one read The Times—not that it had ever been a topic for discussion at the dinner table before.
‘My regiment—the 58th—is already there. It is simply a matter of my joining them before the thing kicks off.’ He aimed this last remark at Dinah as though she had some special interest in the affair but Dinah was playing with her napkin ring.
‘And this region, the Transvaal,’ said Mr Jarmyn. ‘It is strategically important? It is rich in natural resources? It is part of a trading route?’
Roger nodded. ‘Presumably, sir.’
Mr Jarmyn nodded with a small sigh. He had returned from the crash site of the wrecked train the evening before after four days in the North and it seemed to Jack his father was more taken up with trains than war.
‘What will it be like when you get there? What will you have to do?’ asked Gus doubtfully and Jack turned to his brother.
‘Don’t you know anything?’ he retorted scornfully. ‘Cousin Roger is an officer in the British Army! What do you think he will be doing?’
Instead of looking embarrassed Gus turned to him patiently. ‘Which means what, exactly?’
‘Soldiering, of course.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘Of course I do. It means foraging and drilling and inspecting kit and keeping your uniform in order and looking after your men and keeping your rifle clean, and …’ He looked towards his cousin.
‘Quite right, Jack,’ confirmed his cousin. ‘You know a lot about it. Are you going to be in the army yourself?’
‘Jack will be going to Oxford, like his brothers,’ said his father.
This was met by a short silence during which Cousin Roger concentrated on his Windsor soup and Jack glared furiously at his own plate and felt something burning inside him. Their cousin had come to dinner and yet they were expected, he and Gus, to sit still and say nothing, to hold no opinion, to not actually exist.
And Jack remembered that his sister had lain mortally injured and in terrible pain in an upstairs room for ten days before she had died and that he and Gus had not been allowed to see her. He blamed his father for that too.
‘Where the Devil is everyone?’ said Mr Jarmyn, irritably. There was no sign of any of the servants and he reached over and pulled the bell rope but after a minute still no one had come.
‘Dinah.’
‘Of course, Father,’ and Dinah got up so speedily one wondered if she hadn’t been sitting there waiting for the excuse.
‘I certainly hope to go up to Oxford,’ announced Gus into the silence.
Dinah was glad to have left
the dinner table. The room, despite the bone-jarring cold, was stifling. She did not at once go in search of Mrs Logan but stood, lost in her own thoughts, in the hallway.
They had played together as children, she and Roger. He was Bill’s age and she a year younger but as small children they had always got on better than she and Rhoda or he and Bill, dressing up in old clothes and acting out little stories—Roger had enjoyed the silly fairytales of youth as much as she, when Bill had scoffed and Rhoda had felt left out and run off in tears to be consoled by her nurse. Silly, childish games that had ended abruptly when Roger’s father had been given what would prove to be the last of many ministries and the family had leased out their Great Portland Street house and relocated to the North. When the ministry had inevitably failed and the family returned Rhoda had seemed barely changed—an unfortunate flat ‘a’ in her speech the only outward sign of her time in the North. But Roger was on the cusp of manhood in his final year of schooling and ready to embark—quite against his father’s wishes—on a career in the military. Dinah had, she remembered, been unprepared for this change in him.
But she must find Mrs Logan. Dinah hurried downstairs.
Things were not going to plan in the kitchen. Dinah stood in the doorway as a great burst of steam blasted from the range, and emerging from the steam as would an apparition from the underworld Cook appeared, her face streaming moisture and glowing redly, her sleeves rolled up and her vast forearms wielding a massive cauldron. As the steam thinned Dinah saw Mrs Logan bending over the new maid (a girl with the unlikely name of Hermione) whom, it appeared, was in some distress.
‘Is everything all right, Mrs Varley?’ Dinah asked, though it clearly was not.
‘Ha!’ replied Cook, shaking her head.
Mrs Logan looked up and smiled wearily.
‘We have experienced a small domestic accident, Miss Jarmyn. Nothing life-threatening.’ She frowned then, as though she had said something she wished she hadn’t and Dinah thought, Yes, Mrs Logan is good in a crisis. She excelled at accidents. Small or otherwise.
‘Folk in the kitchen when they shouldn’t be, gettin’ in the way when they have no business to be in the way,’ muttered Cook, slamming the huge cauldron down onto the stove top and reaching for her pipe to take a consoling puff, and Dinah wondered if Cook was referring to her or the new maid. The look that Cook now aimed at the new maid seemed to settle the point.
The maid, Hermione, sobbed quietly and Mrs Logan patiently dabbed something onto her forearm.
‘Is the girl burnt?’ said Dinah. The words had a queer sound to her ears.
‘A scald. Just a scald from the steam. Not a burn,’ said Mrs Logan firmly. ‘We will be up directly, Miss Jarmyn. Please tell Mr Jarmyn all is well and we will be up directly.’
Mrs Logan wanted her gone and Dinah was glad to go. She wished she had not come down. She went back up the stairs and paused for a moment outside the dining room. She could hear Roger’s voice on the other side of the door.
That last term of the boys’ schooling, when Bill had been furiously working for his final exams and Roger had given up any pretence of taking exams and had already joined the militia as a cadet, he had been a regular visitor at Cadogan Mews, biding his time till he was free of school and could join the regiment full-time. One afternoon in late May something quite extraordinary had happened and, as with most extraordinary things, it had begun quite innocently.
He had lost a button from his tunic. It was a solid brass button from his uniform jacket and, though he was only a cadet, it was the genuine thing. It even had the words Montis Insignia Calpe inscribed on it, which Roger said was the motto of Gibraltar, awarded to the regiment for some very important action during some important campaign. He had been very put out at the button’s loss.
They had only gone out into the garden in the first place because the delphiniums and hydrangeas had begun to bud and the sun had risen early if sluggishly and had endured throughout the day, though veiled by a sickly yellowish cloud of London smoke. It was a day for being out in the garden. They had sat in the lowest boughs of the ancient sycamore that had stood since childhood days, their heads in the past, their talk of the future. And Roger had lost a button from his tunic. Together they had scoured the undergrowth to locate it.
Roger had despaired: ‘I cannot return minus a button!’
But Dinah was all practical advice: ‘You must say you were set upon by a gang of desperate ruffians and in the ensuing melee it was lost.’
Roger had given up the hunt and now stood and regarded his cousin. ‘That’s your suggestion?’
Dinah had nodded. It was a good suggestion. She was quite proud of it. Yet she could not tell from Roger’s expression if it were the silliest suggestion in the world or the most extraordinary.
As it turned out it was not the suggestion nor the loss of the button that was extraordinary. It was what had happened next: Roger, her cousin, her playmate, had taken her in his arms and kissed her.
If the birds had stopped their song and the breeze had turned to snow and all the buds on the delphiniums and hydrangeas had sprung at once into bloom she would have been less surprised. Indeed it was quite possible that all these things and more had happened, Dinah could not say for sure.
Her surprise, great as it was, was then utterly eclipsed: ‘Dinah,’ he had entreated, clasping both her hands in his. ‘I want us to marry, I cannot imagine being with any other girl. There is no girl in England who is like you and I cannot bear for some other chap to win your hand. Dinah, say you feel the same way. Say you will marry me!’
There was no other girl in England like her! The very ground at her feet had trembled and the sun, which had been sluggish all day, dazzled her.
That was six months ago. Dinah stood now outside the dining room door, waiting to go in, and when she did go in she formed her mouth into a smile that was not really there.
‘What sort of gun do you have?’ Jack was asking and Dinah sat down and nodded to her father, who had raised an inquiring eyebrow at her.
‘Well, nowadays your average British infantryman uses a single-shot breech loading rifle. It has a sword bayonet that fixes on the end for close combat,’ said Roger.
He paused, his eyes sliding uneasily to Uncle Austin who had fallen into a thoughtful silence but whose vivid contribution to the conversation a few minutes earlier was still fresh in everyone’s minds.
‘Not that close combat is common any more in modern warfare,’ Roger went on. ‘Cavalry charges and hand-to-hand is all very well for old-fashioned campaigns but it is all artillery and marksmanship these days.’
‘Cousin Roger came top of his class at marksmanship, didn’t you, Cousin Roger?’ said Jack, practically bursting with pride at this family achievement.
‘Second, actually,’ Roger corrected. ‘But I came top at swordsmanship. And I was commended for my horsemanship.’
‘How clever!’ said Mrs Jarmyn, obligingly. ‘Though if there are to be no cavalry charges or hand-to-hand this may not prove very useful?’
‘An officer of the British Army must be conversant with all aspects of warfare,’ Roger explained. ‘But these things are one thing in basic training. It is how a fellow acquits himself in the field of battle that counts.’
The door opened and the new maid edged tentatively into the dining room, her arm bandaged, and balancing a serving dish which she awkwardly moved to her other hand. She made her way over to Mrs Jarmyn, who caught the girl’s eye and gave a brief shake of her head and the girl, mortified, scuttled to the other end of the table to serve the master first. The dish emitted a savoury, slightly fishy aroma, and Dinah realised she wasn’t very hungry.
‘I am sure you will be a credit to yourself and your parents, Roger,’ said Mrs Jarmyn. ‘I know that Travers, in particular, is very proud of your achievements.’
As Uncle Travers had always anticipated Roger following him into the clergy and, upon Roger’s entry into the military, had expressed his b
itter disappointment to them all at this very table not eight months earlier, her mother’s statement fell a little flat.
Perhaps Roger felt it too, as his reply was almost a challenge.
‘I shall be the best soldier I can be. Soldiering is the most honourable profession there is for a gentleman.’
And though he did not look at her as he said this, Dinah knew it was aimed at her. It was all aimed at her.
But Dinah was watching her uncle, formerly Major Randle of the 8th Hussars, as he rocked back and forth, silently weeping.
‘Will you hail a cab?’ Mr Jarmyn inquired, shaking Roger’s hand as he stood in the Jarmyns’ front doorway at the end of the evening.
But Roger eschewed a hansom. Certainly it was a cold night but it would be worse in the Transvaal. He would not take a cab.
‘It will be summer though, won’t it, in the Transvaal?’ Dinah said as he departed, perhaps the first thing she had said to him all night, and her father laughed and patted her shoulder, the idea of his daughter sitting poring over a globe and understanding the hemispheres and longitude and latitude clearly amusing him.
So Roger set off on foot, westwards towards Great Portland Street, and yes, technically Dinah was right. It would be summer in the Transvaal but it was very much winter here and he turned up the collar of his greatcoat. He turned into Cadogan Square, pausing on the corner to look back at the mews. He was to depart in two days’ time so this may very well be the last time he would see any of his cousins before he sailed. Had they realised that? Jack had realised it. Uncle Austin didn’t realise very much at all. Uncle Lucas had been unimpressed, he could tell that. And his Aunt Aurora had seemed preoccupied. What about Dinah? Had it meant anything at all to her?
If it had, she had been as cool as you like about it! That was Dinah, wasn’t it? Cool as you like. Always had been. Not like Rhoda, fainting and screaming and carrying on like a girl. Dinah was all composure—and that was just what a chap wanted in a girl, wasn’t it, composure?