He seemed reluctant to withdraw from her and she did not hurry him, even though she was aware that all her artfully arranged hairpins had fallen away and lost themselves in the fronds under her shoulders, and that her carefully ironed sprigged muslin was a soiled, rucked-up ruin, in which she dare not show herself outside. She lay very still, savouring her triumph, and waiting for him to acknowledge it and presently he did, taking her hot face between his palms as he said, “It's all behind us now, Henrietta, that make-do marriage, the pair of us leading almost separate lives, the way we’ve been doing all these years. I can’t say how or why precisely, but something happened, something we were hoping for and searching for. You can’t order these things. Between two people they happen or they don’t.”
“I’ve felt it happening all the time you were gone,” she admitted. “I suppose that's what led me to get to you before you were swamped in affection.”
“It isn’t my imagination then? Suddenly we’re so much more necessary to one another, in every sense?”
She said, after a moment, “You wanted me to grow up and I did, in many ways. But then…” She had no facility with words and stopped. “You explain it. You must know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean. That we lost something we had in good measure from the beginning but now we’ve found it again. That's what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
“I never stopped loving you and wanting you this way. Not for a moment. Not even that time we quarrelled.”
“I know that. I’ve always known it. It was my turn to make a move.” He kissed her mouth very gently and she heaved herself half-upright, finding a backrest against a sapling built into the structure of the hide. She noticed something else as she did this. Modesty, of the kind she had always acknowledged the moment he was spent, had abdicated, at least for as long as they remained alone in here contemplating their achievement. She made no move to rearrange her dress and petticoat, but pillowed his head on her bare thighs, stroking his hair, absently, and noticing the spreading patches of grey above the ears and the deep, brown patina of the skin enclosing his high cheekbones and jaw like a sheath. Desire still flickered in her, so that she thought, irritably, “Bother the children! Bother everyone waiting for him up there! I’d like to stay here loving him all night and all tomorrow,” and looking down at the underside of her dress, decorated with dozens of tiny leaf-skeletons, she felt an irrational impatience, not only with conventions but with clothes, especially the kind of clothes that made occasions like this so rare. She would have liked to have shrugged herself out of the straining bodice and leaned forward so that his lips could caress her breasts but then, remembering Stella's excitement when she read aloud that part of his letter announcing his return, and the proposed expedition to Folkestone to fetch Deborah, she felt greedy and selfish and said, regretfully, “We’ll have to go, dearest. If we stay one or other of them is sure to come down and see the gig and they’ll start beating the woods for you.”
“Before that happens, and before I forget,” he said, “the next time I go you pack a bag too. This place is big enough to take care of itself for a spell and I’m not getting any younger. Why the devil should I save you for the odd moments I can spare from that octopus out there?”
She did not remember him ever saying anything that enriched her half as much. He had often praised her physically, both calmly and in the turmoil of a tumble such as they had engaged in a moment since, but this was something altogether different. For the first time he was admitting her to full partnership, to permanent association, and she said, fervently, “I should love that, Adam. It's something I’ve always wanted, more than anything; except to give you sons.”
“It's settled then. From now on we’ll travel in convoy, and there's a great deal out there that I should enjoy showing you.” He sat up and helped her straighten her wrinkled stockings and find one of her errant shoes, and suddenly she was fully aware of how she must look and lifted despairing hands to her hair.
“How on earth can I show myself? One glance and everyone up there will realise…” but he only laughed, hauled her to her feet, and said, “I’ve thought of that. Go back through the copse and across the kitchen garden, behind the greenhouse. If I time it well they’ll all flock to the front of the house as you slip in the back. Even Dawson and Stillman will come round to the stableyard to see to the cob and carry the luggage in.”
She was only partially reassured. “My hair, Adam…it's awful, and I haven’t even a mirror. I could tie it up but if I use a garter my stockings…” but at this he laughed again, saying, “Turn around,” and took off his cravat, looping it round her tresses and tying it in a bow.
“You’re quite dreadful,” she said, “but you do seem to think of everything. You’d imagine we behaved like this everyday.”
“Perhaps we will,” he said, and they went out into the blinding sunlight where he showed her how to cross to the little wood above the mill, speeding her on her way with a smack on her bracken-strewn bottom. She shot across the road into the trees like a fugitive and he thought, “She's been running from something or somebody ever since I found her on that moor but now she's home, and so, by God, am I.” He went back over the bank and retrieved the cob and gig, swinging into the box and beginning the steep ascent of the drive.
Two
1
AS ALWAYS, IN SUMMER, BIRDSONG IN THE WISTERIA AWAKENED THEM BEFORE there was any necessity to stir and for a few minutes he lay still, with her head pillowed in the hollow of his shoulder. He said, as though resuming a conversation interrupted by no more than a moment's contemplation, “What I was saying…a chance for you to see the network first-hand. Why put it off? Why don’t we take advantage of Deborah's stay? The children will be wholly taken up with her for a spell, and you’ve never seen the westcountry, have you?”
No, she said happily, she never had, and it was a part of the country she had a rare fancy to see, especially Dartmoor.
“Why Dartmoor?”
“I read a book a long time ago about a girl who lived in a great house down there and fell in love with one of her father's grooms and ran away with him. Not as we did, for this was planned in advance, and they went all the way to Gretna Green but before they got there he was arrested for abduction and thrown into Newgate. It came right in the end, of course. He was only pretending to be a groom. He was really a French nobleman's son, spying for Napoleon.”
“Good God!” he said, chuckling, “the awful trash you read! Don’t you ever tackle anything heavier than that?”
“No,” she said, unrepentantly, “for I’m not at all good at concentrating. There's always so much to do.”
“Well, listen,” he said, “when the nights draw in I’ll read some of my favourites aloud to you after the children have gone to bed. George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte—they’re to your taste I’d imagine, and my old friend Dickens, the best of the lot. Suppose I did? Would you have the patience to listen?”
“Indeed I would. I should like that. It's twenty years since anyone read to me, but how can you think of going off like that when you’ve only just got back? Won’t the children resent it?”
“Not in the least. I run a poor second to Deborah Avery when she's available. I’ll tell you what I have in mind. We’ll catch the boat-train back today. Four hours on that beach is as much as your complexion will stand in this weather and you can start packing right away. We could get off tomorrow, or the day after. We’ll spend a week at Exeter, going somewhere fresh every day in one of old Ratcliffe's brakes.”
“Ex-et-er,” she said rolling the name on her tongue. “It's a lovely word, I’ve always thought.”
“The Western Wedge is a lovely area. The scenery is superb, and Ratcliffe has made a great start with the excursion trade down there. Later on, around September, I’ll show you Wales, and when I go up to the Border Triangle in the autumn you shall come too.”
She contemplated his offer in the way she had sometimes contem
plated that ring he had given her on the road to Ambleside, something immensely flattering and extremely personal, something that emphasised the certainty of the gains she had made after so many years. Here he was proposing a second honeymoon, as though to compensate for the lack of one when he brought her south and turned his back on her to devote all his energy into launching the service. It was, she supposed, to be expected that their relationship should ripen as time went on, and the house and children drew them closer together, but it occurred to her that his mood was linked in some way to a sense of personal achievement that he had brought home with him after an extended tour of his empire. Something told her, however, that the main impetus was hers, and that it had to do, at root, with his essential physical need of her so that once again she saw him as a reincarnated Conyer, keeping a tryst with that Cecil girl, almost as though something of the satisfaction those two Elizabethans had found in one another was still stirring in the stones and timbers and coverts of this sundrenched corner of Kent. It was an extravagant fancy but it pleased her, emerging as a wordless, self-congratulatory paean, as she went about the business of dressing and braiding her hair, smiling into the mirror when she came across an odd wisp of bracken that had survived last night's brushing.
She assumed, of course, that her triumph was essentially private, but it was not as private as that. He was aware of it and accepted it, though it continued to puzzle him, for he began to see it as a transition from a merely physical affection, tempered with tolerance on his part, into a comradeship that was unique in their relationship. It was there in the rather smug, possessive glances he intercepted, and later in her brisk air of authority as she presided over the hasty breakfast and issued her orders to children and staff, but, above all, it was apparent in the clothes she selected for the jaunt, as though, instead of dressing for a beach picnic, she was on her way to a viceroy's garden-party. He was not alone in noticing this, for little Stella, her attention almost wholly occupied with the excursion, remarked on her mother's ensemble as soon as they settled themselves in the gig for the journey to the branch line, saying as she fingered the creases of her mother's silk parasol, “You look…different, Mummy!” and he saw Henrietta colour and caught the sparkle in her eye as she replied, “It just happens to be new, dear, and Folkestone is very fashionable, I’m told.”
It was half an hour later, when they were aboard the train, and Henrietta was explaining the nature of an oast-house to Alexander, that he had leisure to observe how very “different” she did look in her inappropriately named “country toilet” consisting of a tight-fitting paletot worn over a white muslin blouse, and long trained skirt in dove grey silk, buttoned gloves, and a saucily angled crinoline hat, adorned with what they were calling “follow-me-lad” ribbons, so that he thought, “It's astonishing, the confidence she's acquired. Maybe I underestimated her all these years, maybe I should have pitchforked her into the network from the beginning,” and he recalled the remark of Edith Wadsworth when they parted at Peterborough a few days before, something about him having a feminine intuition that failed him in feminine society. The recollection made him smile for this, he thought, was one victory he couldn’t go crowing about to Edith.
He put them off at a section of beach above the bathing machines, promising to be back with Deborah within the hour, and the cab took him through the town to the western residential section, where the unkempt drive led up to the featureless house he had first seen under snow on the day he introduced himself to Avery's byblow. It was only eighteen months ago, but it seemed much longer, perhaps because the child had made such a comfortable place for herself in his heart and had been integrated so effortlessly into his domestic background. He contemplated her as he stood listening to the echoes of the convent bell, a still, knowing, composed little presence, with a great reservoir of affection that was at the disposal of every living creature that crossed her path and dead creatures too, for he recalled watching her conduct a burial service over a kitten that Dawson, the gardener, had inadvertently trodden upon in the vinery. Genes made no kind of sense, he told himself, for who could have imagined a child like this resulting from a casual collision between a sophisticated rake like Avery and that tittupy woman he had set himself to seduce all those years ago? Then the door opened and the Mother Superior was standing there, a little thinner and more fragile he would say, with bright colour spots on her cheekbones that he had not marked when they first met. She said, ushering him into the vestibule, “I’m glad you could come personally, Mr. Swann. Deborah is packed and Sister Sophie will bring her down in a moment. But first we could confer for a moment, yes?”
He noticed a certain hesitancy about her and it disturbed him. “Is anything wrong? Deborah is well?”
“Never better,” the Frenchwoman replied, with a smile, “but please to be seated, Mr. Swann. I had it in mind to write but then, when you said you would be calling, I changed my mind. It is presumptuous to talk of such matters but more so, I feel, to commit them to paper.”
He waited for she was not the kind of woman one prompted. The morning, so bright at its outset, clouded a little, and it occurred to him that she had received news that Avery was dead, or instructions to remove Deborah from her charge and his. The second possibility alarmed him more than the first, for he had made up his mind that Josh Avery did not deserve Deborah, or anyone as rewarding as Deborah. She said, pensively, “You are corresponding with Mr. Avery?”
“Not a word,” he admitted, “and I can’t say that it surprises me. Have you heard from him lately?”
“Not directly. Money drafts have arrived through an agent in Vienna. He's a strange man, Mr. Swann.”
“Stranger than you imagine,” said Adam, feeling relieved, “but if it concerns the child I should be glad to help in any way I can.”
She looked down at the worn linoleum. Her skin was like waxed paper stretched on a skull and the two crimson spots glowed like small beacons divided by the high ridge of her nose. “It concerns all of us here,” she said, “but essentially me, Mr. Swann. I have not long to live, they tell me. No, please! No condolences.” She smiled and he thought he had never seen a sweeter or a wiser smile. “I am much older than you suppose, and I have known the truth for some time now. The fact is, the establishment here cannot continue without me and the sisters must necessarily disperse. That part is arranged and need not concern you. As regards Deborah, I could arrange something satisfactory, for our Order has reopened several establishments on the Continent. Things are more settled there than they were after the troubles of forty-eight. There is, however, the matter of guardianship, and the child's best interests should be considered.”
He said, with diffidence, “What are her best interests? In your view, Reverend Mother?”
The answering smile was frank and even tinged with mischief. “Ah, Mr. Swann, what kind of interests are we discussing? Spiritual or material?”
“Do they run contrary?”
“Technically they do. You are not of our Church, Mr. Swann.”
“Isn’t that for the child to decide? She's old enough, and very mature for her age.”
“You do me an injustice in assuming I haven’t consulted her, Mr. Swann. That would be very bigoted on my part. You have given her love, you, your wife, and children.”
“She's easy to love,” he said, “but I think I understand your position. You would only part with her on an undertaking that I brought her up in her own faith?”
“You make it easy for me, Mr. Swann. Would that be possible? If she made a permanent home with you?”
“I see no reason why not. There would be difficulties, I suppose, but they would be practical ones—access to a priest, regular attendance at Mass, that kind of thing. Is there a legal aspect?”
“None that I know of since Mr. Avery seems to have surrendered his responsibilities. That letter he wrote would satisfy any lawyer and as to the quarterly drafts, I could arrange for these to be redirected to you.”
“The
money isn’t important. Apart from her faith I should bring her up as one of my own family, and I can speak for my wife as well as myself. We already think of her as one of us. Will you make the necessary arrangements or shall I?”
“It can be done from this end. We have a legal adviser who will be disposing of the property and other matters.”
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