by Phillip Rock
In all likelihood, there would just be the two of them, rattling around in a house larger than most hotels. The thought was worrying to Hanna, if not dismaying, but they would work out problems when they reached them. The most important thing to him was that Abingdon Pryory would exist again as a functioning, lived-in house. Lights would glow through its windows and smoke rise from its chimneys. There would be horses in the stables and hounds in the kennels. He would be resurrecting a manner of living that most people thought had become as dead as the dodo bird. Turning back time with money and a good contractor.
The Grevilles’ London house was in Chester Mews, overlooking Regent’s Park. It was of moderate size, requiring no more than ten servants, and had been built in 1790 for the mistress of a royal duke. Their previous London residence, a thirty-bedroom mansion in Park Lane, had been donated to the government during the war for use as a military hospital. It was still being used for that purpose, a burn clinic, and still filled with the charred victims of German flamenwerfers and other random horrors of the Great War.
He drove with Banes to the garage and entered at the rear of the house, through the garden gate, so as not to track dried mud or brick dust across the polished floors of the entrance hall. It was 4:30, a rainless day for a change, and the sun was still warm. The nanny that Hanna had hired for Alexandra’s baby was seated on an iron bench, reading a book, her free hand resting lightly on the handle of the pram. She looked up as she heard his footsteps on the brick path and put the book aside.
“Good afternoon, your lordship.”
“Good afternoon.” He had forgotten the woman’s name. “Pleasant weather.”
“Oh, it’s ever so nice. Quite balmy, in fact.”
“Yes.” He paused for a second by the carriage and looked somberly at the baby. Chubby little fellow. Pink-faced and reddish-haired. A Scot’s face—but then, his father had been Scottish. The baby stared up at him with equal gravity. “Must be time for his tea.”
“Oh, he’s had his tea, he has. Cup of milk and half a cream bun.” She gave the pram a gentle shake. “Tell His Lordship how you enjoyed it, that’s the love.”
“I’ve never heard him speak,” he said, stepping back. “Surely—”
“Not in words, m’lord, not just yet, but he does chat away to his Mary, don’t you, Colin love?”
Ten-month-old Colin Mackendric gave his grandfather a dour look and then closed his eyes.
Lord Stanmore had decidedly mixed feelings about the boy. He liked children. The happiest moments of his life had been when his own were growing up and Abingdon Pryory had swarmed with their friends. His attitude toward children was in marked contrast to that of his father, who had not only detested them but the entire process of their creation as well. His own childhood had been so barren of love that he had gone out of his way to indulge his sons and daughter when they had been young: their nurseries bulging with playthings, and a special stable built to house their ponies. His natural inclination was to do the same for his first grandchild, but Colin Mackendric had been, as far as he was concerned, born under a cloud. The Honorable Alexandra Greville, with headstrong foolishness, had fallen in love with an army surgeon who was not only a good deal older than she but already married. They had met in France during the war, where she had served as a nursing sister. No amount of reasoning or pleading had been able to prevent her from running off to Canada with him after the armistice. In all fairness to Colonel Mackendric, he had not been a bounder and had never ceased in his efforts to get a divorce. It had finally been granted and they had married—one month before young Colin’s birth in Toronto. Four months after that, Mackendric had died of a heart attack while performing surgery at a veterans’ hospital, and Alexandra had come home to England with the baby. One tiny tragedy in an era of catastrophes.
He entered the house through tall French doors that led to his study, a sanctuary filled with his books and a vast accumulation of hunting and riding cups and trophies. He poured a stiff whiskey and sipped at it. Seeing the child had only added to his depression. His chilliness toward both Alexandra and her son was too apparent, and Hanna had criticized him for it. He could understand her reasons up to a point, but dash it all, he was what he was. His strict schooling at Winchester had taught him firm values and beliefs and had given him an intuitive feel for the rightness of things, Living with a man out of wedlock and then giving birth to a child who was mere days from bastardy hardly fitted the Wykehamist ideal of womanhood—even if that particular woman was one’s own daughter. Parenthood was not a valid reason for the suspension of judgment. She had been wrong, morally and socially wrong. He could not stone her for it, but neither could he forgive.
“Tony! You’re back.”
Hanna was seated at her dressing table wearing a green silk kimono, her arms raised behind her head as she struggled to fasten a strand of pearls. The sight of her drove a good deal of the darkness from the earl’s thoughts. Stepping up behind her, he fastened the gold clasp and then bent to kiss her softly on the nape of the neck.
Hanna Rilke Greville, Countess Stanmore, was fifty-two and looked forty. The startling beauty of her youth had not changed radically with middle age. Her figure had thickened, as plumpness was a trait of the Rilkes, but the soft curve of her neck, the high cheekbones and oval face, the startling blue eyes, and her thick yellow hair were the same as when she had taken London by storm in the long-ago summer of 1888—the most talked-about debutante of that glittering social season.
She had come to England with her father as a first stop on a grand tour of Europe. Adolph Rilke, who had never learned to speak English properly, told reporters in his thick German-Chicago accent that he intended to see that his daughter had “der tea at Vinsor taken mit der queen.” Press wags had a good deal of fun with Adolph Rilke and with what they dubbed “the beer king’s daughter,” but the ill-concealed contempt that society columnists felt toward American millionaires and their social pretensions turned to abashment when father and daughter did indeed go to Windsor Castle for tea with Queen Victoria. The press had overlooked the fact that the Rilkes of Chicago and Milwaukee were the American branch of the von Rilkes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and that Hanna Rilke was a cousin to Princess Mary of Teck. Overnight she became a prime catch for any social event, most of which she mildly scandalized with her Yankee candor. There were those who thought her brash and those who found her refreshing. Among the latter had been young Anthony Greville, earl of Stanmore, whose late father had cast a chilling shadow of profligacy and deceit. The charming truths of Hanna Rilke had been like a blaze of light to him, a wondrous zephyr of fresh air. He had, in a moment of impulsiveness following a particularly enjoyable supper party in Belgravia, asked her to marry him. It was an impulse that he had never found cause to regret.
“You look very lovely tonight, Hanna.”
“Thank you, dear. I thought you might have stayed at the Pryory until tomorrow.”
“Not necessary. Tomkins is going great guns for a change. The south wing is completed and the scaffolding comes down in a day or two. Really marvelous progress. I can see no reason why we shouldn’t be moving in by the end of August.”
“That’s nice.” Her voice was flat. Bending forward, she opened a pot of lip rouge. “I invited Fenton and Winifred for dinner.”
“Did you? Well then, I’d better bathe and dress. I reek like a navvy.” He kissed her neck again, failing to see in the mirror the unhappiness in her eyes.
His own suite was down the hall—bedroom, dressing room, and bath—rooms that were almost Spartan compared to his wife’s. Eagles, his valet for many years, had seen him arrive and anticipated his requirements. The bath was drawn and clothes for the evening laid out.
He stretched out in the steamy water with a sigh of gratitude. And then he heard it, pounding irritatingly through the wall, intruding on his privacy, that damned jazz music.
“Eagles!”
The valet popped his large, balding head around the parti
ally open door. “Yes, m’lord.”
“That blasted caterwauling!”
“A Victrola record, m’lord.”
“I know what it is, man. Go tell Master William from me to turn the bloody thing off!
“Very good, sir.”
Eagles left his master’s suite and walked sedately down the hall to William Greville’s room. He gave a perfunctory knock on the door and then opened it and stepped inside. The earl’s youngest son lounged on the bed in a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and waving his hand in time to the music on the Victrola. Eagles walked slowly across the room, waited until the final blaring note had sounded, then lifted the needle arm.
“King Kornet and the Kansas City Kings. I never heard that number before.”
“It’s new. Chap I know brought it back from the States.” William leaned across the bed and snuffed out his cigarette in a nearly overflowing ashtray on the nightstand. “It’s called ‘Storyville Stomp.’ Bix Fletcher’s on trombone instead of Eddy Williams. Makes for a hotter sound, don’t you think?”
“Well, it made His Lordship hot enough.”
“Christ.” William sat up and ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “I didn’t know he was back.”
“Got in half an hour ago. He’s in the bath, and the sound annoyed him—to put it mildly.”
“You can tell his nibs the concert’s over.”
The valet started for the door, then paused and looked back. “Have you been to that new club in Tottenham Court Road, the Dixie?”
“No. How is it?”
“Bit of all right. Darky band from New Orleans. Leader plays piano like a bloody madman—and stands up to do it.”
“I’ll drop in for a look.”
After Eagles had left the room, William sat up with a groan and swung his long legs off the bed, wincing at the sudden stab of pain in his right knee. His kneecap had been shattered by a bullet in 1917, and although a series of operations by two of the finest orthopedic surgeons in England and America had done wonders, he was still unable to bend the leg properly and the knee ached like a rotting tooth in cold or damp weather. He had learned to live with it. A cane would help, one of the doctors had advised him, but he despised the use of a cane as only a tall, strong, twenty-three-year-old man could despise such a symbol of infirmity.
Eagles served as his valet as well, but since William didn’t care a fig for clothes, there wasn’t much for the man to do except cluck his tongue whenever he opened the wardrobe and surveyed the motley collection of sagging tweeds and well-worn flannels that hung there. It had been Eagles, a onetime bandsman in the Rifle Brigade, who had introduced him to American jazz.
William selected a pair of gray flannel trousers and a dark blue blazer, frayed at the elbows. He dressed hastily, lit a cigarette, left his room, and walked down the hall to his sister’s suite at the rear of the house. The door to her bedroom was ajar and he poked his head in. No one was there, but he could hear voices from the adjoining room, what would have been the sitting room had it not been turned into a nursery.
“Hello,” he called out loudly. “May I come in, or is babykins doing something nasty?”
“He’s just getting a wash.”
He sauntered through the bedroom and leaned in the open doorway of the nursery. His sister stood by a window holding her naked son in her arms while the nursemaid patted his back with a towel.
“Madonna and child,” William said. “By Caravaggio.”
It was an aesthetically pleasing sight. The blond and exquisitely beautiful Alexandra, the pink and ivory baby, the nursemaid in her crisp white cap and apron, a mellow glow of sun through the curtains. Yes, he thought, pure Renaissance Italian.
Alexandra was two years older than he. They had never been particularly close as children and there had been times, when she was growing up and had been mad for boys and parties, that he hadn’t liked her at all. He loved her now. She was the one person he could talk to, the only person who understood him.
“You know the rule, Willie,” she said. “No smoking in the nursery.”
“Sorry.” He stepped over to an open bedroom window, crushed out his cigarette on the sill, and flipped it down into the garden below. “Father’s back.”
“I know,” she said, handing the baby to the nurse. “Mary told me.”
“Which should put a damper on the evening. I was going to play my records for Fenton.”
She came into the bedroom and closed the nursery door behind her.
“You can still play them. And teach Winnie and me a few new steps. Have you heard of the Charleston?”
“Can’t say that I have, but there are all sorts of new dances. As for playing any records tonight, fat chance of that. The gaffer’s on a tear. Sent Eagles hopping over to tell me my Victrola was ruining his tranquillity or something.” He flopped onto her bed, hands folded behind his head. “Getting back to a more pleasant subject, don’t be surprised if there’s a new dance craze sweeping London by now. I went to a club last night in Sloane Square and this little flapper I was with seduced me into dancing with her. Well, as you know, I can teach but can’t do, so there I was galumphing around the floor with my leg as stiff as a post. I must have looked like a lame crane. People watching me thought I was doing something terribly clever, and before you know it everyone in the place was dancing with one locked knee!”
Alexandra laughed and sat beside him, one hand resting on his bad leg. “You seem to be walking better lately. Have you been sticking to the exercises I taught you?”
“Yes, sister. I’ve been very diligent, but it hurts like bloody blazes when I do them.”
“It’s supposed to hurt. Take aspirin.”
“Take aspirin! Christ, that’s what comes from living with a doctor!” He could see her tense and he sat up and placed an arm around her shoulders. “You know what I meant, Alex.”
She turned her head and kissed his hand. “You’re a lovely man, Willie.”
“No,” he said, touching her hair. “You’re the lovely one in this family. If I’m ever asked to vote for a saint, I’ll cast it for you.”
“Oh, come now!”
“I’m serious. Only a saint would put up with the way Father treats you.”
“That’s enough, Willie,” she said firmly. “Papa has been—well, Papa. What on earth did you expect him to do, dance a jig in the streets?”
He sat up and took a tin of Woodbines from his jacket. “No, but neither should he place you in virtual Coventry. His discourses seem limited to ‘Kindly pass the salt,’ or ‘It looks like rain.’ I’m sure the two of you could jump into deeper conversational waters if he’d only bend his blasted Victorian codes a bit.”
“Papa is a Victorian. Try to understand him.”
He stuck a cigarette between his lips and searched his pockets for a match. “I don’t understand you. If I were twenty-five and had come into my share of the trust, I’d be out of here like a shot.”
She took his hand into her own. “Please, Willie, don’t make it any more difficult for me than it is. Everything will work out for the best, you’ll see. It just takes time. And I can’t bear seeing you moping about and feuding with Papa over petty things. There are enough young men drifting about in a fog these days without your joining their ranks.”
“I’m not drifting.”
“Of course you are. You drink too much, smoke too much, have too many girls, and just go through the motions of reading for the bar.”
He put the matches back in his pocket and plucked the unlit cigarette from his mouth. “I’m considering chucking that in, but, for God’s sake, don’t tell his nibs. I’m just not cut out to be a barrister. Don’t have the brains for it. I’m not Charles. If Charles had wanted to be a lawyer, he would have ended up Lord Chief Justice in no time flat. Father expects me to take over Charlie’s life and I can’t do it, Alex.”
“Of course you can’t.”
“But the bloody rub is I feel an obligation to do something worthw
hile with my life to compensate for the waste of Charlie’s. Something—oh, I don’t know—grand.”
She gave his hand a squeeze. “What is it that you want?”
His smile was wan. “Promise you won’t laugh.”
“I promise, Willie.”
“I’d like to marry a simple, happy girl and live in a warm country—Australia, perhaps. Queensland. Raise—oh, I don’t know—sheep or horses. I love animals, good soil, dirt on my hands. Trying to understand things like socage in fief, barratry and torts is just not my cup of tea.”
“It’s your life,” she said quietly. “And you only get one.”
HER THOUGHTS DRIFTED as she lay in the bath, idly soaping her breasts, a small tactile pleasure that always made her think of Robbie, his gentle hands on her body, his lips. Her loneliness was an ache—real, physical, as painful sometimes as her brother’s splintered knee.
One life.
She had known Robbie would die. There had never been a morning when she hadn’t wondered if she would see him that night. When the telephone had rung she had known he was dead, not needing the stumbling, hesitant words on the other end of the line to confirm it. She had watched him grow gaunt and hollow-eyed, driving himself with an inner fury he had never talked about, not even to her when she lay beside him in bed. A penny for your thoughts. But he had never told her. Not that it was necessary. She knew his rage at the war, a war that had been over for nearly three years but still filled his days with the mutilated victims of Vimy Ridge, Festubert, Ypres. The legless, armless, faceless survivors of that useless slaughter. He had bled with each case—and there had been cases without end. He could never, in good conscience, allow himself to relax until the last mangled creature from Armageddon had left his care. A dedication so close to zealotry that it had destroyed him in the end. Colonel Robin Mackendric, killed by the Great War just as surely as if he had been blown up by a shell.