by Anne Perry
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
She turned, startled out of her reverie. Her maid was standing looking at her with a surprised expression.
“Yes, Martha?”
“Please ma’am, there’s a Mrs. Chancellor ‘as called to see you. A Mrs. Linus Chancellor. She’s very …”
“Yes?”
“Oh, I think you’d better come, ma’am. Shall I say as you’ll receive her?”
Nobby contained her amusement, and not inconsiderable surprise. What on earth was Susannah Chancellor doing paying an afternoon call here? Nobby was hardly in her social or her political sphere.
“Certainly tell her so,” she replied. “And show her out onto the terrace.”
Martha bobbed something like half a curtsy and hurried with insufficient dignity back across the grass and up the steps to discharge her errand.
A moment later Susannah emerged from the French doors, by which time Nobby was coming up the shallow stone steps from the lawn, her skirt brushing against the urns with scarlet and vermilion nasturtiums spilling out of them, almost luminous in their brilliance.
Susannah was dressed very formally in white, trimmed with pale pink and a thread of carmine-shaded ribbon. White lace foamed at her throat and wrists and her parasol was trimmed with ribbon and a blush pink rose. She looked exquisite, and unhappy.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Chancellor,” Nobby said formally. This was an extremely formal time of the afternoon to call. “How very pleasant of you to come.”
“Good afternoon, Miss Gunne,” Susannah replied with less than her usual assurance. She looked beyond Nobby to the garden as if seeking someone else. “Have I interrupted you with … with other visitors?” She forced a smile.
“No, I am quite alone,” Nobby replied, wondering what so troubled the younger woman. “I was simply enjoying the perfect weather and thinking what a delight it is to have a garden.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” Susannah agreed, stepping farther across the terrace and starting down the steps to the lawn. “Yours is particularly beautiful. Would you think me discourteous to ask if you would show me ’round it? It is too much to take in at a glance. And it looks as if there is more of it yet, beyond that stone wall and the archway. Is that so?”
“Yes, I am very fortunate in its size,” Nobby agreed. “Of course I should be delighted to show you.” It was far too early to offer refreshment, and anyway that was not customary during the first hour of time appropriate for receiving. Although, of course, some fifteen minutes was all one stayed; it was also not done to walk around the garden, which would take half an hour at the very least.
Nobby was now quite concerned as to why Susannah had come. It was impossible to imagine it was a simple call for the usual social purposes. Leaving her card would have been quite adequate, in fact the proper thing, since they were not in any real sense acquainted.
They walked very gently, Susannah stopping every few yards to admire something or other. Often she appeared not to know its name, simply to like its color, form, or its position complementing something else. They passed the gardener weeding around the antirrhinums and pulling a few long spears of grass from the mass of the blue salvia.
“Of course, as close to Westminster as we live,” Susannah went on, “we do not have room for a garden such as this. It is one of the things I most miss. We do go down to the country when my husband can arrange it, but that is not so very often. His position is most demanding.”
“I can imagine that it would be,” Nobby murmured.
A brief smile touched Susannah’s face and immediately vanished again. A curious expression followed, a softness in her eyes, at once pleasure and pain, yet her lips were pulled tight with some underlying anxiety which would not let her relax. She said the words “my husband” with the pride of a woman in love. Yet her hands fiddled incessantly with the ribbons on her parasol, her fingers stiff, as if she did not care if she broke the threads.
There was nothing Nobby could do but wait.
Susannah turned and began walking towards the great cedar and the white garden seat under its shade. The grass was thin where the needles had shed on it until the ground became bare altogether near the trunk, the roots having taken all the nourishment from the earth.
“You must have seen a great many wonderful things, Miss Gunne.” Susannah did not look at her but through the stone archway beneath the roses. “Sometimes I envy you your travels. Then of course there are other times—most of them, I admit—when I am too fond of the comforts of England.” She looked at Nobby beside her. “Would it bore you to tell me something of your adventures?”
“Not at all, if that is really what you wish? But I assure you, you have no need of it in order to be polite.”
“Polite?” Susannah was surprised, this time stopping to face Nobby. “Is that what you think?”
“A great many have thought it was the proper thing to do,” Nobby replied with amusement and a flood of memory, much of it painful at the time, but merely absurd now.
“Oh, not at all,” Susannah assured her. They were still in the shade of the cedar, and considerably cooler. “I find Africa fascinating. My husband has a great deal to do with it, you know?”
“Yes, yes I know who he is.” Nobby was not sure what else to say. The more she knew of Linus Chancellor’s backing of Cecil Rhodes, the less happy she was about it. The whole question of the settlement of Zambezia had troubled her ever since she had met Peter Kreisler. The thought of him brought a smile to her lips, in spite of the questions and the anxiety.
Susannah caught the intonation; at least it seemed as if she did. She looked around quickly, and was about to say something, then changed her mind and turned back to the garden again. She had been there ten minutes already. For a strictly formal call, she should now be taking her leave.
“I suppose you know Africa quite well—the people, I mean?” she said thoughtfully.
“I am familiar with them in certain areas,” Nobby replied honestly. “But it is an inconceivably enormous country, in fact an entire continent of distances we Europeans can scarcely imagine. It would be ridiculous to say I know more than a fraction. Of course, if you are interested, there are people in London who know far more than I do and who have been there more recently. I believe you have already met Mr. Kreisler, for example?” She found herself oddly self-conscious as she spoke his name. That was foolish. She was not forcing him into the conversation, as a young woman does when in love, introducing a man’s name into every possible subject. This was most natural; in fact it would have been unnatural not to have spoken of him.
“Yes.” Susannah looked away from the arch and the roses and back down the lawn towards the house. “Yes, I have met him. A most interesting man, with vigorous views. What is your opinion of him, Miss Gunne?” She swiveled back again, her face earnest. “Do you mind my asking you? I don’t know who else’s opinion would be of the least worth, compared with yours.”
“I think perhaps you overrate me.” Nobby felt herself blushing, which made it even worse. “But of course what little I know you are most welcome to hear.”
Susannah seemed to be most relieved, as if this were the real purpose of her visit.
“Thank you. I feared for a moment you were going to decline.”
“What is it you are concerned about?” The conversation was becoming very stilted. Susannah was still highly nervous, and Nobby felt more and more self-conscious as time passed. The garden was so quiet behind the walls she could hear the wind in the tops of the trees like water breaking on a shore, gently as a tide on shingle. A bee drifted lazily from one open flower to another. The warmth of the afternoon was considerable, even under the shade of the cedar, and the air was heavy with the odor of crushed grass, damp leaves under the weight of foliage by the hedges, and the sweet pervasive blossom of lilacs and the may.
“His opinion of Mr. Rhodes is very poor,” Susannah said at last. “I am not entirely sure why. Do you think it may be personal?”
N
obby thought she heard a lift of hope in her voice. Since Linus Chancellor had vested so much confidence in him, that would not be surprising. But what had Kreisler said to her which had caused her to doubt, and come seeking Nobby’s opinion, and not her husband’s? That in itself was extraordinary. A woman automatically shared her husband’s status in life, his religious views, and if she had political opinions at all, they were also his.
“I am not sure whether he has even met Mr. Rhodes,” Nobby replied slowly, hiding her surprise and feeling for words to convey the facts she knew, without the coloring of her own mistrust of the motives for African settlement and the fears she had of the exploitation of its people. “Of course he, like me, is a little in love with the mystery of Africa as it is,” she went on with an apologetic smile. “We are apprehensive of change, in case something of that is lost. When you feel you were the first to see something, and you are excited and overwhelmed and deeply moved by it, you do feel as if no one else will treat it with the same reverence you do. And it causes one to fear, perhaps unjustly. Certainly Mr. Kreisler does not share Mr. Rhodes’s dreams of colonization and settlement.”
A smile flashed across Susannah’s face and vanished.
“That is something of an understatement, Miss Gunne. If what he says is true, he fears it will be the ruination of Zambezia. I have heard some of his arguments, and I wondered if you would share with me your view of them.”
“Oh …” Nobby was taken aback. It was too frank a question for her to answer without considerable thought, and a censorship of the emotions that came to her mind before she permitted them to anybody else, particularly Susannah Chancellor. There were many aspects to weigh. She must not, even accidentally, betray a confidence Kreisler might have placed in her by allowing her to share emotions and fears which he might not have been willing to show others. The boat trip down the Thames had been an unguarded afternoon, not intended to be repeated to anyone else. She certainly would have felt deeply let down had he spoken of it freely, describing her words or experiences to friends, whatever the cause.
It was not that she thought for a moment that he was ashamed of any of his views. On the contrary. But one does not repeat what a friend says in a moment of candor, or on an occasion which is held in trust.
And yet she was painfully aware of a vulnerability in the woman who stood beside her gazing at the massed bloom of the lupines in colors of pinks and apricots, purples, blues and creams. Their perfume was almost overwhelming. Susannah was full of doubts so deep she had been unable to endure them in silence. Were they born of fear for the husband she loved, for the money invested by her mother-in-law, or by something in her own conscience?
And for Nobby, above even those considerations, was honesty, being true to her own vision of Africa and what she knew of it so deeply it had been part of her fiber, interwoven with her understanding of all things. To betray that, even for the sake of pity, would be the ultimate destruction.
Susannah was waiting, watching her face.
“You are unwilling to answer?” she said slowly. “Does that mean you believe he is right, and my husband is wrong in backing Cecil Rhodes as he does? Or is it that you know something to Mr. Kreisler’s discredit, but you are unwilling to say it to another?”
“No,” Nobby said firmly. “Nothing at all. It simply means that the question is too serious to be answered without thought. It is not something I should say lightly. I believe Mr. Kreisler holds his opinions with great depth, and that he is well acquainted with the subject. He is afraid that the native kings have been duped—”
“I know they have,” Susannah interrupted. “Even Linus would not argue that. He says it is for a far greater good in the future, a decade from now. Africa will be settled, you know? It is impossible to turn back time and pretend that it has not been discovered. Europe knows there is gold there, and diamonds, and ivory. The question is simply who will do it. Will it be Britain, Belgium or Germany? Or far worse than that, possibly one of the Arab countries, who still practice slavery?”
“Then what is it in Mr. Kreisler’s view that disturbs you?” Nobby asked with cutting frankness. “Naturally we would wish it to be Britain, not only for our benefit, quite selfishly, but more altruistically, because we believe we will do it better, instill better values, more honorable forms of government in place of what is there now, and certainly better than the slavery you mentioned.”
Susannah stared at her, her eyes troubled.
“Mr. Kreisler says that we will make the Africans subject peoples in their own land. We have backed Mr. Rhodes and let him put in most of the money, and all of the effort and risk. If he succeeds, and he probably will, we shall have no control over him. We will have made him into an emperor in the middle of Africa, with our blessing. Can he be right? Does he really know so much and see so clearly?”
“I think so,” Nobby said with a sad smile. “I think you have put it rather well.”
“And perhaps those thoughts should frighten anyone.”
Susannah twisted the handle of her parasol around and around between her fingers.
“Actually it was Sir Arthur Desmond who put it like that. Did you know him? He died about two weeks ago. He was one of the nicest men I ever knew. He used to work in the Foreign Office.”
“No, I didn’t know him. I’m very sorry.”
Susannah stared at the lupines. A bumblebee drifted from one colored spire to another. The gardener passed across the far end of the lawn with a barrow full of weeds and disappeared towards the kitchen garden.
“It is absurd to mourn someone I only saw half a dozen times a year,” Susannah went on with a sigh. “But I’m afraid that I do. I have an awful sadness come over me when I think that I shall not see him again. He was one of those people who always left one feeling better.” She looked at Nobby to see if she understood. “It was not exactly a cheerfulness, more a sense that he was ultimately sane, in a world which is so often cheap in its values, shallow in its judgment, too quick to be crushed, laughs at all the wrong things, and is never quite optimistic enough.”
“He was obviously a most remarkable man,” Nobby said gently. “I am not surprised you grieve for him, even if you saw him seldom. It is not the time you spend with someone, it is what happens in that time. I have known people for years, and yet never met the real person inside, if there is one. Others I have spoken with for only an hour or two, and yet what was said had meaning and honesty that will last forever.” She had not consciously thought of anyone in particular when she began to speak, and yet it was Kreisler’s face in the sunlight on the river that filled her mind.
“It was … very sudden.” Susannah touched one of the early roses with her fingertips. “Things can change so quickly, can’t they….”
“Indeed.” The same thought was filling Nobby’s mind; not only circumstances but also emotions. Yesterday had been cloudless; now she was unable to prevent the flickers of doubt that entered her mind. Susannah was obviously deeply troubled, torn in her loyalties between her husband’s plans and the questions that Kreisler had raised in her. She did not want to think he was right, and yet the fear was in her face, the angle of her body, the hand tight on the parasol, holding it as if it were a weapon, not an ornament.
Exactly what had he said to her, and perhaps more urgently than that, why? He was not naive, to have spoken carelessly. He knew who she was, and he knew Linus Chancellor’s part in raising the additional financing and the government backing for Cecil Rhodes. He knew Susannah’s relationship to Francis Standish and her own inheritance in the banking business. She had to have been familiar with at least some of the details. Was he seeking information from her? Or was he planting in her mind the seeds of disinformation, lies and half truths for her to take back to Linus Chancellor and the Colonial Office, ultimately the Prime Minister himself? Kreisler was a German name. Perhaps for all his outward Englishness, it was not Britain’s interests in Africa he had at heart, but Germany’s?
Maybe h
e was using them both, Susannah and Nobby?
She was surprised how profoundly that thought hurt, like a gouging wound inside.
Susannah was watching her, her wide eyes full of uncertainty, and the beginnings of just as deep a pain. There was a spirit between them of perfect understanding. For an instant Nobby knew that Susannah also was facing a disillusion so bitter the fear of it filled her mind with darkness. Then as quickly it was gone again, and a new thought took its place. Surely Susannah could not also be in love with Peter Kreisler? Could she?
Also? What on earth was she saying to herself? She was attracted … that was all. She barely knew the man … memories in common, a dream that had found them both in youth, enough to take them separately upon the same great adventure into a dark continent in which they had found a light and a brilliance, a land to love, and had come home with its fever and magic forever within them. And now they both feared for it.
One afternoon on the river when understanding had been too complete to need words, only a few hours out of a lifetime—enough to call enchantment, not love. Love was less ephemeral, less full of magic.
“Miss Gunne?”
She jerked herself back to the garden and Susannah.
“Yes?”
“Do you think Mr. Rhodes is just using us? That he will build his own empire in Central Africa, turn Zambezia into Cecil Rhodes land, and then cock a snook at us all? He would have the wealth to do it. No one can imagine the gold and the diamonds there, quite apart from the land, the ivory, timber and whatever else there is. It is teeming with beasts, so they say, creatures of every kind imaginable.”
“I don’t know.” Nobby shivered involuntarily, as if the garden had suddenly become cold. “But it is certainly not impossible.” There was no other answer she could give. Susannah did not deserve a lie, nor would she be likely to believe one.
“You say that very carefully.” The ghost of a smile crossed Susannah’s face.
“It is a very large thought, and one too dangerous to treat with less than care. But if you look back even a little way through history, many of our greatest conquests, and most successful, have been largely at the hands of one man,” Nobby answered. “Clive in India is perhaps the best example.”