by Phillip Rock
With the aid of her friends, a list had been drawn of bachelors—even widowers—any one of whom would make a suitable husband for Alexandra, and, of equal importance, a son-in-law acceptable to Anthony. The list had been culled, refined, and then narrowed to five names. All of the men on the list would be invited to Abingdon Pryory—not en masse, but separately, at one time or another—during the fortnight of house parties, dinners, and dances that Hanna was planning in celebration of the Christmas season and the new year. The most intriguing prospect, the man that Hanna had given the highest marks, had been invited to spend five days, to come down after Boxing Day and stay through until the new year—the festivities of New Year’s Eve being, to Hanna’s mind, the best possible time for romance to flourish.
Noel Edward Allenby Rothwell, Esq. Age thirty-five. Nephew of Sir George Barking. Partner in London brokerage house. Tall. Good-looking. Fine war record in navy. Never married. Handled investments successfully for both Mary and Adelaide—their highest marks.
Hanna, in the privacy of her sitting room, looked at what she had written about Noel Rothwell in her diary in September. She had learned a good deal more about the man since then, all of it encouraging. He was an active sportsman and a member of the Tatton Hounds, which hunted in Cheshire—that would please Anthony considerably. Yes, no doubt about it, Rothwell, Esq., was the main choice and she drew a firm line under his name for emphasis. He was as good as a member of the family—if Alexandra would only cooperate by falling in love with him.
THE THOUGHT OF flying to Russia in the dead of winter had not been in any way appealing to Martin, and fortunately the trip fell through. It had been Scott Kingsford’s notion that a wireless broadcast from Petrograd on New Year’s Day—with Martin interviewing Leon Trotsky—would be first-rate publicity not only for INA but for his rapidly expanding radio interests in the United States. Kingsford was buying radio stations in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit and had formed an organization, Consolidated Broadcasters Company, to manage them. The Trotsky interview was to have been sent through a complex system of relay stations, including two ships at sea in the Atlantic, and aired over CBC radio stations. An ambitious and expensive project that had to be canceled because of insurmountable technical problems and the growing uneasiness of the Russian Commissar for Propaganda as to just what Comrade Trotsky might say.
The on-again, off-again confusion of the project had caused Martin to miss Christmas at Abingdon, but he was now driving a hired car down for the New Year’s weekend, the back of the car piled with gifts bought hastily at Harrod’s. The weather reports told of heavy snow in Yorkshire and Scotland, but the skies were clear in Surrey. It was cold but windless and only a light frost covered the fields. As Martin drove through the village of Tipley’s Green, he could see pink-coated horsemen on a distant hill galloping hard toward Leith Woods and he could hear the faint baying of the hounds. He supposed that Anthony was in the group somewhere, riding hell-for-leather and risking a broken neck in the leafless tangle of the wood. He shook his head at the thought. Chasing a fox seemed a cruel and pointless thing to do for pleasure—but to each his own.
“I’m happy you were able to make it,” Alexandra said, kissing him on the cheek. She had seen him drive up and had come out of the house to meet him, two of the footmen trailing her. “What on earth have you got in the back?”
“A few little gifts—mostly for Colin.”
“Oh, Martin. He’s so little. He doesn’t need many toys. You look like you bought out the shop.”
“Well, this and that—a steam engine, cricket bat. I was going to buy him a hobby horse, but I had a feeling Aunt Hanna and Anthony would buy something like that.”
Alexandra was laughing. “A steam engine! You don’t know much about babies, do you?”
“Not a hell of a lot. Guess I should have told the clerk Colin’s age.”
“Yes, I think you jolly well should have.” She hugged him and they began to walk back to the house as the footmen unloaded the car. “But it was sweet of you. I’ll put the steam engine away for a few years.”
“How’s everything going?”
“Better,” she said with a wan smile. “Papa and I are no longer in warring camps. It’s not a truce, sort of a grudging acceptance. And I’ve seen him with Colin when he thought no one was watching. I’m sure he loves him, but heaven forbid he should unbend enough to tell me he does.”
“He will one day.”
“I hope it won’t be too late. Oh, one other thing is happening. Mama is playing cupid and not being exactly subtle about it. She invited a certain Noel Rothwell down for the week and contrives every possible opportunity for the two of us to be alone together.”
“Do you like him?”
She shrugged noncommittally. “He’s all right, I expect. Suave and handsome. All the social graces. Perhaps a bit too eager that I should become seriously interested in him.” She pointed up at the house, her hand encompassing the sheer magnificence of the facade. “This place works its effect. The manner of living here can intoxicate strangers. He’s out for a day’s hunting. Rides extremely well, according to Papa. I have the feeling he does everything well and knows it, too.” She paused before mounting the front steps. “Will I ever get Robbie out of my mind? Have you slept with a woman and not thought of Ivy?”
“Yes, but it took time.”
“Robbie would have wanted me to get married. He had a horror of mourning—of black cloth and widow’s weeds. He had such a respect for life and all the healthy functions of the human body. It’s just me, I suppose. Still clinging to him. Willie played some fox-trot records on the gramophone last night after dinner and Noel and I danced together. I liked it, being in a man’s arms—enjoyable. He sensed it, I’m sure, and later, when we were alone in the library, he kissed me, rather passionately. I went stiff as a board. Totally frigid. He must have thought he was kissing a block of marble.”
Martin put his arm around her and led her up the steps. “You’re not stone, Alex. You’re warm and real and very lovely. No wonder he kissed you with passion. So would any man. Robbie’s dead and it marks the end of something, but not the end of everything. You have a whole lifetime ahead of you. It would be terribly wrong to turn away from someone just because they might like to share that life with you.”
“I know,” she said softly. “It’s—difficult.”
“Sure it is.” He gave her hand a firm squeeze. “Toughest thing there is sometimes, just going on living. But it’s worth it, Alex. You’ll see.”
NOEL EDWARD ALLENBY Rothwell, Esq., scrutinized his naked image in the dresser mirror and found nothing wanting about it. A fine figure of a man, he thought objectively. There was nothing vain about him. He was quick to recognize both his faults and virtues with equal dispassion. He knew other men of his age who had allowed their bodies to go to seed. Too much drink and too much food, too little exercise—the good and decent habits of their youth all gone by the board. Fat. Sagging muscles and puffy jowls. Poor livers and malfunctioning ductless glands. He kept himself in shape by willpower and daily calisthenics, and at thirty-five had the physique of a twenty-year-old. When the pressures of his job in the city became too harrowing, he had the good sense to get away for a few days, to catch a train for Scotland for a bit of grouse shooting or salmon fishing; to drive to Norfolk and take his thirty-foot ketch for a sail; or ride with the Tatton Hounds.
He winced slightly at the very thought of riding and lifted his legs painfully to get into his white cotton drawers. He had never known a more furious horseman than Lord Stanmore. An absolute madman in the saddle: clearing impossible jumps, threading his horse through the woods with an abandon that seemed suicidal until one realized with what calculated skill he read the pattern of the trees. He had kept up with him, by God. Rode close behind and had been the second rider to catch up with the hounds and the kill—the others trailing in, exhausted and slightly befuddled by the pace. The earl had patted him on the back and cong
ratulated him for his horsemanship. But he was paying for it now. There wasn’t a bone nor muscle in his body that did not ache. Even putting on his patent-leather dress pumps made him wince.
He scrutinized the clothed image in the mirror and found nothing amiss. The starched white shirtfront was faultless, the black tie perfectly formed and centered, the dinner jacket—thanks to the valet the earl had sent up to see to his clothes—neatly pressed. He made a minor adjustment to an ebony cuff link and then left his room in the east wing of the house and walked slowly along the corridor toward the main stairway.
The house and its contents awed him. He was far from being a poor man and, as a stockbroker and investment counselor, had been in many impressive houses, but nothing had quite prepared him for the splendor of Abingdon Pryory. Where, after all, could one stroll down an ordinary corridor on the second floor of a house and find sketches by Constable and little watercolors by Turner dotted about the walls as though they were no more important than five-shilling prints? And in the main corridor, the Long Gallery with its many Palladian windows overlooking the courtyard, as many works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters as could be found in a first-rate museum.
He paused before leaving the gallery and descending the broad, curving stairs to the lower floor. He sat down carefully on a bench beneath one of the tall windows—a seventeenth-century Italian bench, he decided, judging by the delicate carved legs and the pattern of the needlework on the seat. The portrait of a man, obviously painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and just as obviously a Greville ancestor, stared at him haughtily from the opposite wall.
He took out a silver cigarette case and lit an Egyptian Deity with a small silver lighter.
They approved of him—both mother and father. There was no misinterpreting their signals of acceptance. As for their daughter … a stunner if there ever was one. Soft in his arms, sensual when they danced—and then cold as a mackerel when he had kissed her. Puzzling.
He blew a thin stream of smoke toward the Reynolds. Curious. A curious situation.
He had avoided marriage adroitly. He thought of it simply as a loss of personal freedom, the giving up of one’s right to come and go as one pleased, to dine where and when one wanted, to play cards at one’s club to all hours of the morning, or dash off to the Continent on impulse and enjoy a few days in Paris or Monte Carlo. A man with a wife was expected to forgo those singular pleasures and live contentedly within the restrictions custom imposed on the domesticated male. He had balked at those restrictions in the past, but to marry the only daughter of the Earl and Countess of Stanmore offered prospects of compensation too heady to be ignored.
He inhaled deeply and blew smoke through his nose. To be a member of this household, part of this beautiful house—all within grasp. He had only to find a way through that chill barrier the young widow threw up to protect herself from intimacy. Caution was the word. A slow and careful approach. It was rather like grouse shooting, he thought as he stood up and walked toward the stairs. If one was too impetuous and blundered through the bracken, the bird would be long flown.
Beautiful lady, there in the moonlight,
You made my heart stand still....
There were over a hundred guests for the New Year’s Eve party. An orchestra had been hired in London, and the seldom-used ballroom was festooned with ribbons and gaily colored balloons. A young man in a white dinner jacket sang to the dancers through a megaphone.
“Bloody soppy song,” William said. He stood by the refreshment table, sipping a drink and talking to Martin. “Mother should have let me choose the band.”
Martin smiled. “I think she was wise not to.”
“You may have a point.” He drained his glass and set it on the table.
“Care for another?”
“God, no, thanks all the same. One ginger beer is one too many.”
“Change of habits, Willie?”
“Well, not exactly from choice. The firm admonition of a London judge. I could disregard his warning to stay away from hard spirits, but that wouldn’t be playing the game, would it? So ginger beer it is—or soda water. Can’t say I mind, actually. I certainly feel better for it.”
“How’s Derbyshire?”
“Cold as charity. Always dreamed of a warm country, but it’s lovely in a wild sort of way, and there’s no better grass for horses.”
“You have your stables now?”
“Lord, no. It’ll be a year before everything’s done. But I’m in no hurry. I live in a sort of shack with a coal stove and a phonograph. It’s not quite as grand as the Pryory, but I’m content.” He looked at his watch. “Thirty minutes before the witching hour. Anyone in particular you want to kiss on the stroke of midnight?”
“No. As a matter of fact, there’s a woman I would like to avoid having to kiss.”
“Miss Templeton, you mean? Auntie Angela dug her up someplace. She’s a literary person. Writes sonnets or something about virtue. After you, is she?”
“She’s supposedly with someone, but she keeps zeroing in.”
“Let’s have a game of billiards. I don’t think I could bear hearing that poor sod croon ‘Auld Lang Syne’ through his blasted megaphone.”
Zam-bo-anga-anga
where the monkeys kiss,
Zam-bo-anga-anga boy
and monkey miss....
The older couples left the center of the floor as the band swung lustily into the latest craze tune from America and stood watching in amusement as the dancers gyrated and hopped.
Zam-bo-anga-anga …
Zam-bo-anga-anga-anga-anga!
“No more!” Alexandra laughed.
“I quite agree,” Noel shouted over the music. Taking her by the hand, he escorted her off the dance floor and through the crowd to the refreshment table. “Jumping about like an ape is hardly my forte.” He dabbed at his brow with a pocket handkerchief. “Although I must say you did it superbly. You have a marvelous sense of rhythm.”
“I love to dance, but Zam-bo-anga-anga is a wee bit exhausting.”
“They’ll be playing a waltz next—to get everyone on the floor in time for midnight.” He asked one of the barmen for two champagnes and handed Alexandra a glass. “I’m not very good at toasts. Let me just say that it’s a privilege to be having my last drink of nineteen twenty-one with someone as nice as you.”
“Thank you, Noel. That’s very sweet.”
“Not at all. It’s the truth. And I hope we’ll see each other again during the course of the new year.”
“I’m quite certain we shall.”
Their eyes held for a moment and then she raised her glass and drank. He couldn’t be sure what it was that he had seen in her eyes, but it wasn’t discouraging. He had seen a light there—an interest.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Will you join us by dancing to the lovely strains of ‘Charmaine’? It is five minutes to midnight. Five minutes until nineteen hundred and twenty-two!”
Alexandra set her glass on the table. “I love the waltz.”
“Yes,” he said, placing his glass next to hers. “So do I. It’s what I was taught in dancing school as a boy. That and the gavotte.”
They stepped smoothly into the flow of dancers, and then the lights in the room were dimmed by the servants and only the candles in the wall brackets glowed, light sparkling and shimmering from the dangling crystal reflectors behind them. Almost everyone was drawn into the gliding whirl of the dancers as they circled the shadowed room. The strains of the waltz ended, a drum rolled, and then the music … the man singing—
Should auld acquaintance be forgot …
Noel took Alexandra gently in his arms. “Happy New Year,” he said, bending to her, kissing her with an almost brotherly regard on the cheek. No stiffening rejection this time, he realized. Slow and easy—one tiny step at a time. That was the way to go about it. That was certainly the way.
MARTIN SAT IN bed, smoking a cigar and nursing a large whiskey and soda. His journal was on
the bedside table beside him, but he simply wasn’t in the mood to make an entry. God knows he had enough to write about if he cared to be reflective. New Year’s was a time for reflection anyway. That, plus being at Abingdon Pryory, was more than enough to set his thoughts racing backward in time. But he fought the urge. It would be too easy to slip into maudlin thoughts about Ivy.
He took a puff on his cigar and then a swallow of whiskey. There were more pertinent things to jot down if he cared to write. Major General Sir Bertram Dundas Sparrowfield, in spite of discreet pressure from friends who had sought to dissuade him, was pressing his libel case with renewed vigor—prompted, Martin knew for sure now, by two jingoist war correspondents whose reputations had suffered disastrously since the coming of peace. He almost felt sorry for poor old “Bird Drops,” puttering about in his Hampshire garden and being manipulated by two rogues who hoped to change the verdict of history by getting the general a favorable judgment in court. It was all so pointless anyway. All that had been accomplished so far was a growing awareness that a libel suit was pending, and the hardening of attitudes between the war damners and the war apologists. Sales of A Killing Ground had zoomed. Hatchard’s in Piccadilly couldn’t put it on the shelves fast enough. And that vast, arcane, ponderous, exasperating, and incredibly efficient machine known as the British judicial system had been dragging its collective feet for months, wary, if not outright horrified, by the idea of a cause célèbre thrust into their midst. They viewed Sparrowfield’s case the way they would have viewed a ticking bomb. But the ex-war correspondents urged and whispered and the old warrior pressed onward with the same verve that had carried his decimated force—in the face of harrowing Mauser fire—across the Tugela in the Boer War.
He drained half the glass and set it, with an audible sigh, on top of his journal. His thoughts drifted, the idle flow broken by a sharp knock on the door. Before he could say anything, the door opened and Anthony stepped into the room, grim-faced and pale, a dressing gown thrown across his shoulders.