Sweet Poison

by David Roberts

  There was also to be present Cecil Haycraft, Bishop of Worthing, one of the new breed of political bishops who could be seen at the head of protest marches as often as in his cathedral and who enjoyed the sound of his own voice. He made speeches at ‘peace rallies’ – he was a convinced pacifist – and was beginning to be a familiar voice on the wireless. Even the Duke had heard him though he rarely listened to the wireless except for news bulletins. Finally, a new man in the German embassy, Baron Helmut von Friedberg, who was said to have the ear of the recently appointed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, had promised to come. He was the Duke’s greatest ‘catch’ and Larmore, who had met Friedberg on several occasions, had used his influence to secure the German’s acceptance of the Duke’s invitation. Baron von Friedberg was the focus of the dinner and the Duke had high hopes that something useful might be achieved by having the man at his table.

  Edward’s use as a guest was not confined to his role as Hermione’s nursemaid. He had charm. He could, as the Duke put it to himself, ‘oil the wheels’, fill in any embarrassing pauses in the conversation. As the Duke had said to his wife at breakfast, ‘You know, Connie m’dear, that boy must have something. The women like him and yet the men seem not to resent him. In fact, I was talking to Carlisle at the club last week and he said he was one of the ablest men he knew and the bravest. Apparently, Carlisle told me, Ned pulled off an amazing rescue when he was climbing in the Alps last year but he never said a word to me about it. Did he to you?’

  ‘No,’ said the Duchess, smiling, ‘but then I would not have expected him to. Beneath all that – what shall we call it: braggadocio? – no, not braggadocio – let’s say persiflage, your little brother is one of the most modest men I know. He talks and talks, shows off like a peacock in front of the ladies, who love it of course, and yet, as you say, the men see immediately the . . . the iron in his soul. And don’t forget he is intelligent.’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s clever enough,’ said the Duke, massaging honey from Mersham’s own apiaries on to his toast. ‘He got a first at Cambridge and all that but what I can’t understand is he doesn’t do anything. He rackets around the world trying to break his neck, getting into every scrape, when he could be – well, when he could be in the House or something.’

  Connie laughed. ‘Can you see Ned surviving one hour in that place? Duffers or crooks – sometimes both – he once described Members of Parliament to me.’

  ‘I just hope he isn’t going to be late tonight, that’s all,’ said the Duke, accepting that he never would understand his brother’s lack of interest in what most of the world considered to be important. ‘He says he’s got to play in some cricket match or other on his way here. I gather that girl of Weaver’s – what’s her name?’

  ‘Hermione.’

  ‘I gather Hermione is worse than the yellow peril,’ he finished morosely, ‘and now that cub Lomax has cried off, I’m counting on him to take her off my hands. I don’t want anything to distract Weaver from getting to know Friedberg. I think he could really be important to us.’

  ‘When Lady Weaver asked me to invite Mr Lomax,’ said Connie, ‘she hinted he might make difficulties about coming. Reading between the lines, I guess that Hermione thinks she’s in love with him but he is playing hard to get.’

  The Duke sighed. ‘The young today! They aren’t like –’

  ‘Don’t start playing the old man, Gerald,’ said the Duchess sharply. ‘Our generation was just as wilful, especially when they had money like Hermione Weaver. But then the war came and –’

  ‘Perhaps we should just have been honest with Weaver and told him not to bring the gel because without her chap she’s going to be bored stiff,’ the Duke broke in.

  ‘Well, it’s too late now, but don’t worry, darling,’ said the Duchess comfortably, ‘Ned won’t let you down. He may cut it fine but he’s never late.’

  But for once this sensible woman was to be proved wrong.

  Edward looked at his watch again. It had taken him longer than he had expected to negotiate Reading. He considered stopping at a public house to telephone the castle and explain that he was going to be a little late, but that would only delay him still further. No, he would cut across country and make his gorgeous girl fly and be there at least in time for the fish.

  He had long ago mastered the spider’s web of minor roads, many of them little more than lanes, narrow enough to be sure but passable in a motor car with a little care and which cut half an hour off the journey to Mersham. For several miles he made good time and when he came up a steep slope on to the spine of the Downs, which run deep into Hampshire, he was beginning to feel that he would not be very late after all. The road marched straight ahead of him, whitened by chalk from where the tar had blistered and peeled. He blessed the old Roman road builders who had scorned to circumvent obstacles, preferring simply to pretend they did not exist. He pressed his foot hard on the accelerator pedal and the Lagonda leaped from thirty to forty until the needle on the speedometer wavered above the sixty mark.

  Edward experienced for the second time that day the joy of being beyond normal physical restraints. Just as when he felt rather than heard the delicious crack of leather on willow earlier that afternoon, he now felt the electrical charge which comes when nature recognizes a perfect match of mental control over physical power.

  Glancing in the mirror, he could see nothing behind him but a cloud of white dust which the Lagonda’s wheels were raising from the sun-dried, badly macadamized road. Then he looked ahead. Because of the dust he had put on his leather helmet and goggles and now he took one hand off the wheel to wipe them, for a second not quite believing what had suddenly come into view. The blanched streak of road ahead of him was no longer empty. Although the road had looked quite level, stretching into infinity, he now realized, fatally late in the day, that this had been an illusion. A shallow dip had effectively concealed a wagon piled high with hay, a tottering mountain moving slowly up the gradient towards him pulled by two horses straining against their harnesses. It filled the whole width of the road. The painter Constable, no doubt, would have said, ‘Ah, a haywain!’ and set up his easel and begun painting. Edward’s reaction was rather different. Slamming on the brakes he went into a skid which would have drawn an admiring gasp from an ice-skater. Struggling to control the car he swerved around the wagon before swaying elegantly into a deep dry ditch which ran beside the road. For one moment he was certain the car was going to turn over and crush him but with an angry crack it steadied itself before sinking on its haunches like a broken-down horse. It needed no mechanic to tell him that the axle had broken under the impact.

  For several moments Edward sat where he was, staring at his gloved hands which were still clenched around the steering wheel. Red drops which he knew must be blood began to stain his ulster. Gingerly, he prised off his goggles and helmet and touched his forehead. He cursed and took his hand away hurriedly. He must have cut his head on the edge of the windshield but he had no memory of doing so. An anxious-looking bewhiskered face appeared beside him.

  ‘You bain’t be dead then?’ the worried but rubicund face declared. ‘I’se feared you was a gonner, leastways you ought t’be.’

  ‘You are quite right,’ said Edward gallantly, ‘I ought to be dead. I was driving like a lunatic. I hope I did not scare you as much as I scared myself. The truth is, I had no idea there was that dip in the road. I thought I could see miles ahead.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the wagoner judiciously, ‘I reckons now there be so many o’ these here blooming automobiles, begging your pardon, sir, there ought to be a notice. But you’re bleeding, sir; are you hurt bad?’

  ‘No, no bones broken, I think.’ Edward tried to open the door but it was jammed, so slowly he raised himself out of the driver’s seat and clambered out, wincing and hoping he was right about not having broken any bones. He was bruised and he had done something to his knee which made it painful to walk, and no doubt in twenty-four hours he would feel stiff and
aching all over. His chest had collided with the steering wheel but fortunately the force of the impact had been cushioned by his heavy ulster. No, he could congratulate himself that his idiocy had not been the death of him. It was to be the first time that evening death had chosen to spare him.

  At Mersham Castle the Duke’s guests had already repaired to their rooms to rest and bathe before dressing for dinner. It was a pity that none of them was in a mood to appreciate the airy beauty of this magical castellated house. It had something of the feel of a Continental château or maybe an Austrian duke’s hunting lodge. Certainly, it was not quite English – light and airy where Norman castles had been dark and claustrophobic. It seemed to float in the evening light as serene as the swans drifting on the river which moated the castle walls. On an August evening as perfect as this one, it was more beautiful than any fairy-tale castle. Lord Tennyson, who knew Mersham well, had, it was said, recalled it in his Idylls of the King. No such place could be without a garden where lovers might walk arm in arm and declare to one another everlasting devotion and there were indeed lawns stretching down to the water, also a rather threadbare maze created only a century before in 1830, but the jewel in the crown was an Elizabethan knot garden of intricate design, in August blazing with colour and heady with the scent of roses. Beyond it there was a little woodland called The Pleasury.

  It was not love but death upon which General Sir Alistair Craig VC brooded as he stared at himself in the looking-glass; not his own death, though he knew that was crouching at his shoulder like a black cat, but the death of his beloved wife just a year before, friends dead in the war or after it, and the death of the child in his wife’s womb so many years ago, the son he was never to clasp in his arms. For some reason he could not begin to explain, he thought too of the funeral of his old and revered chief, Earl Haig, a just and upright man who had saved Britain and the Empire but whose reputation was already being savaged by men who called themselves historians but who, in the eyes of the old soldier, were little better than jackals and not good enough to wipe the Field Marshal’s boots. It had been all of seven years ago that he had processed through London with so many other generals, three princes and statesmen from all over the world. From St Columba’s Church, Pont Street, they marched bare-headed along the Mall and Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. Crowds lined the route in solemn silence. Many wore poppies, the symbol not just of those millions who had died on the field of battle but of the great work the Field Marshal had done in helping the wounded and dispossessed in the years after the war. It had been an event, a ceremony, which the General would never, nor ever want to, forget. It gave meaning to his own life that this great man, under whom he had served for three cruel years of war, should be so honoured. And now, was this honour to be stripped away like the gold leaf on a pharaoh’s coffin? Only last year at Oxford, in a debate in the Union, undergraduates had supported a motion that in no circumstances would they fight for king and country. The report in The Times had made his blood run cold when he read it. Pacifism was gnawing away at the nation’s manhood. It was a sickness. He, General Craig, had sent men to their deaths, many thousands of men. It had been his duty. Was it now to be said that, in obeying the orders of that great man now lying in honour in Dryburgh Abbey, he had not done well? Was he now to stand accused of . . . of murder? That was no reward for a life’s patriotic service.

  And what of tonight? Why had he come? Out of respect for the Duke, certainly; he did not altogether agree with the Duke on his attitude to their erstwhile enemy. The General believed, albeit with melancholy bordering on despair, that Britain was enjoying nothing more than a truce in her war with Prussian militarism. He could not believe that anything – talk, diplomacy, treaties, behind-the-scenes-negotiations – anything short of force – naked and brutal – would affect how Hitler behaved. Throughout history, despots had chosen foreign adventures as a way of uniting their people behind them. That way opposition to anything they chose to do could be construed as unpatriotic and be ruthlessly suppressed. The General considered it to be self-evident that the new German Chancellor, like the Kaiser before him, would use mindless xenophobia dressed as patriotism to distract the German people from troubles at home. In his view, the new Germany was worse than the old one – a shabby, disreputable alliance of big business and an army which had convinced itself it had not been defeated in battle but stabbed in the back by its own politicians. But tonight at the Duke’s dinner he would play his part in trying to alert his country to the peril he could see looming on the horizon. Maybe there was still something to be done, something only he could do.

  General Craig was a solitary man – all the more so since the death of his dear Dolly – and these sorts of social gatherings were even more of a trial to him now, without her, than they had been before. He had little hope of finding a kindred spirit at the Duke’s table. There was Larmore who had somehow blackmailed his way into an under-secretaryship at the Foreign Office and that appalling rogue Lord Weaver, the Canadian owner of the New Gazette. The General hated journalists, despised the whole pack of them, and he knew a good deal about Weaver through his friend Will Packer who had had business dealings with him back in New Brunswick where Weaver had made his first fortune. Packer had told him that Weaver had come to New Brunswick from Newfoundland, not yet a part of Canada and too impoverished to offer much scope to a man with ideas of making money. Corner Brook, where Weaver had been born, was at the time little more than a village but in New Brunswick, so Packer said, Weaver had spread his wings and turned a few tricks, some at Packer’s expense, which had left him very bitter. It made Craig gag to see how high the man had climbed and he was half inclined to spill a few skeletons out of the closet if Lord Weaver, as he now styled himself, refused to do the right thing by him. The General curled back his upper lip, revealing long yellow teeth. Fortunately, he was no longer gazing into the looking-glass or he might not have liked what he saw there.

  When he had arrived at the castle the Duke had told him that the Bishop of Worthing was already there, but after a strong whisky the General had gone to his room to change without seeing him or any of the other guests. He had never met the Bishop but he was well aware of who he was – a pacifist whose anti-war sermons in 1917 and 1918 had, in his view, gravely damaged the war effort. Worse even than the Bishop, the ‘guest of honour’ – if such a one could be so called – was to be some German diplomat. He smiled grimly to himself. He was to dine with his enemies; feasting with panthers – hadn’t someone thus described such gatherings? It made it worse not being in uniform. He only felt truly comfortable in uniform and among his own kind. In white tie and tails he was just another man to be judged by others on his social talents, in which he knew himself to be deficient: small talk, smiles and jokes. Dolly had often told him he was not a sociable animal but of course, to be fair, the Duke had not invited him to dinner to talk sweet nothings. He was a fighter, always a fighter, and he would hold his corner to the bitter end.

  He turned again to the looking-glass and began slowly, unwillingly, to tie his tie. His hands froze on the ribbon. The face in the mirror – was that really his? Why, he could see quite clearly the skull beneath the skin. His hands, flecked with yellow liver freckles, the confetti of old age, dropped from his neck and he looked as though at a stranger: the pale face, the cold sea-water-blue eyes, the sharp nose, the narrow upper lip he was happy to disguise beneath a little brown moustache cut to a bristle every morning for half a century. It was a grim face, he thought, and he wondered for a moment whether, had Dolly lived, it would have still looked so.

  His inspection was rudely interrupted by a bayonet stab of violent pain in the stomach. He held his hand to his side. The pain was sharper tonight, perhaps because of the stress he was under, but why prevaricate: in the last few months it was always sharper than it had been the day before. He checked he had with him the little silver snuff box in which he kept his pills. It was there. He contemplated taking one now but decided that that was
weakness. They had to be kept for when he was really in pain – later perhaps. He settled his shoulders and stiffened his back. His bearing said ‘soldier’ as clearly as if the word had been written on his forehead. Well now – he had better get on with it. He had his duty to do, perhaps for the last time, and he had always done his duty.

  ‘I’m not going down – I’m telling you, Mother: I just refuse.’ The girl recognized the unpleasant whine in her voice and tried to check herself but really, it was too bad. Her mother had persuaded her to come to Mersham Castle, to what she had known would be the dreariest of dinner-parties, by promising her that among the guests would be Charles Lomax, but she had now been told when it was too late to retreat that Lomax was not to be there after all.

  ‘Bah!’ said the girl, her narrow face, not unattractive when she smiled, now disfigured by disappointment. ‘I guess his cold won’t stop him taking Pamela Finch to Gaston’s tonight. What a sell! He swore I meant more to him than . . . Anyway, I need to . . .’

  ‘Now, honey,’ said her mother calmly, seated at the little dressing-table vigorously rubbing cream into her face and trying to convince herself the lines under her eyes were no more noticeable than they had been six months ago. ‘Maybe it’s all for the best. The Duke says his brother – Lord Edward Corinth I think they call him, though why he should have a different name from the Duke’s I will never understand – he’s going to be at dinner and from what I read in the illustrated papers he is everything a young man ought to be: rich, good-looking, and a duke’s brother is something after all.’

  ‘Oh, Mother – he’s just a younger son,’ the girl said, her voice whetted by scorn. ‘He’s not a duke and never will be. Anyway, I met him at Lady Carey’s and he was so stuck up – I quite hated him. He patronized me – treated me like a child. He dared to tell me I was going round with “wrong ’uns” as he quaintly put it and had the cheek to say if I wasn’t “deuced careful”’ – she mimicked his clipped accent – ‘I’d get myself into trouble.’