‘What about noblesse oblige?’
‘The noblesse,’ she said tartly, ‘might, like my poor Philibert, feel obliged to kill if insulted but never to give up money. They need to have it so as to serve their ideals.’
‘What drew him to the Congo? Adventure?’
‘I told you. He killed someone in a duel and was advised to make himself scarce.’
A duel! Lord! Should Adam learn to shoot? He asked: ‘But why there especially?’
‘Romance. King Leopold’s speeches. Philibert has a bit by heart about how “the universe lies before us, steam and electricity have abolished distance; all the unclaimed lands on the surface of the globe are ours for the taking.” That thrills him – or did.’
‘But isn’t it an invitation to steal other people’s land? We Irish are touchy about that. It was done to us.’
‘It’s not the same, though, is it? Africans don’t use land any more than animals living in a forest develop or claim it. So how can we say it’s theirs?’
‘Is that his argument?’
‘Yes.’
Cherishing his contempt for her dashing, bone-headed husband, Adam said no more.
But, while handing out blame, he couldn’t absolve himself. What about his promise to Guy? Might some noble callousness make that easier to keep?
***
Racing in the wind, a cloud passes overhead, the sun’s dazzle returns, and perspiration shines on Kate’s forehead. She rubs it with the back of her hand. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ She gleams as if suppressing a laugh. ‘About your papa giving me lessons.’ Then, after an artful pause: ‘What if he were courting me? How would you feel about that? Seriously, would you like me as a stepmother? I’d promise not to be a wicked one.’
‘As a ...’ Telling himself to stop parroting her words, he says with dignity, ‘I don’t think you should be making jokes about things like that.’
‘I’m not. I wouldn’t. Look, I know he’s twice my age, but you see I’ve always wanted to marry someone older. I want to be cherished.’ She is grave and seems – foolishly? – to swell with hope. ‘I never have been, you see. Cherished! And I know I’m not beautiful, so a younger man would never ...’
‘Stop! You mustn’t talk like this. Not to me. Not about my father.’
‘Nor,’ he could have added, ‘about yourself.’ He feels as if he has opened a privy door at the wrong moment. Has she no instinct for self-protection? She seems not to have. How, he wonders, can anyone like that survive? Could living with French nuns have turned her into a misfit? Maybe she was sent to them because of being a misfit?
Or maybe English people, being cocks of their walk, don’t need – or think they don’t need – caution? Maybe she fits among them? Not here. He likes her, though. Her forthrightness excites him. Nobody he has met till now ever exposed their private selves like this.
‘But Adam, I don’t want to do things behind your back! I want things to be above board if I’m to join your family.’
‘How could you join it? Is that what you were after last year? Why you came looking for me?’
She is shocked. ‘What do you mean? Last year we were children. We were closer in age to each other than to anyone else in our party. That’s why you helped me place a bet. Don’t you remember? I didn’t even know your papa then. But some months ago in London, he approached my mama with a view to ...’
Adam covers his ears.
‘No? All right. I’ll let him tell you. All I need to know is whether you would object.’
‘You’re cracked!’
‘Look, I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have spoken.’
But of course he can’t leave it there. ‘You,’ he guesses suddenly, ‘must be the one who upset my mother and ...’ He trails off, unwilling to fit the bad jigsaw bits together: his father’s absences, the cousins’ sniggering. She couldn’t have caused all that. Could she? Might she? His world has begun to wobble.
But now – another surprise! – it is she who seems shaken. She stares at him. ‘Your mother? She’s dead surely? Isn’t your papa a widower?’
‘My mother is not dead. My mother is Ellen Gould. You’ve met her.’
Her hand flies to her mouth. ‘Ellen Gould? The housekeeper?’
‘She is not a housekeeper. She’s my mother.’
‘She is? But then what can your father have been thinking of? I don’t see how both my mama and I could have misunderstood him.’
‘No?’ Adam is shaken.
‘Not really. No.’ Her voice trembles.
Noting the tremble, Adam takes heart. ‘Perhaps,’ he argues defiantly, ‘he was joking and you didn’t realize. People here joke a lot! And flirt. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a game. You’ll have heard of Irish charm? Blarney? We call it plámás. It’s a sort of practical joke to lead people up the garden path! We like things to be double-edged and to get people eating out of our hands while, inwardly, we’re laughing.’
With laborious patience he lays out a view of things that calms his fright and aims to baffle off unwelcome news. And as he elaborates his argument he starts to believe it. Clearly, he decides with satisfaction, it is she who has got the wrong end of the stick. Famously, the gullible English often do. Sobersides! Simple Simons! He watches her ponder. She is brave, he thinks, in spite of himself, as she turns away then, abruptly resolute, back. Plucky! His papa must have thought of her as a child and teased her the way you do a pert little Miss. Maybe he’d been a bit thick-skinned? Teasing – Adam has seen this happen – can go too far.
‘Adam!’ Her face is on fire. ‘I must – I have to ask you: are they married? Your father and mother? Is she his wife?’
Is she his ...? Is his mother married? ‘Of course she is!’ But even as he speaks, doubt ruffles his certitudes. He gets to his feet. ‘I think we should stop talking about this.’ He feels an answering flush blaze up his own cheeks. ‘I have to go. Maybe we’ll see each other at the hunt.’ This is not meant to be taken seriously. He hopes never to see her again. And waits for her to remove herself from his mackintosh.
But she stays sitting on it. ‘I’m sorry.’ She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’ And watches him with the same – he guesses it to be the same – offensive pity with which he watches his cousins. Seeing her come to a conclusion, he half reaches it himself: for what if his mother were not his father’s wife? That would explain everything! All the jigsaw spats and hints and innuendos! What are the odds? Fifty-fifty?
No, it’s worse! In a reluctant bit of his brain, he has sometimes, hazily, half guessed this without accepting it, yet braced himself for the day he might have to. An eldest son’s first duty – this dogma, having been obliquely conveyed, feels hard to refute – is to preserve and hold onto his estate. A natural law? And is Adam such a son? Or not? His father is and so may feel obliged to marry money, even if this entails taking a wide-eyed, helpless, puffy-faced, sixteen-year-old heiress into his bed and betraying his true family.
‘I didn’t,’ Kate pleads, ‘plan any of this when I came to look for you today. All I wanted was to get things straight. You see I didn’t just chance by. I knew you’d be riding here. One of the grooms gave me directions. I guessed things were being arranged behind your back and thought I should find out how you would feel if – but it may not matter now.’
‘If what?’
‘I think it doesn’t matter.’
‘Goodbye then.’ He has to get away.
Later, reviewing her image in his mind’s eye, he will notice that she was crying. Later still, it will strike him that she was the first person he ever met who had the nerve to go straight for the truth – and that he thought her mad.
Now, though, they get back on their mounts and head in different directions. To his surprise, his cousins’ farmhouse feels like a haven.
***
Sauvigny did not give much credit to the unsigned letter from the lunatic asylum.
Yet he could not dismiss it,
for it revealed malevolence, and he hated to think of his niece being surrounded by that. Wondering whether to warn her, he considered posting it on to her, then rejected the notion. He thought next of sending it to the Irishman, but decided that people working in asylums were unlikely to need cautioning. They must be used to malevolence and lies! To whose malevolence did the letter testify? To the lunatic writer’s? To those of whichever near-lunatic had smuggled it out? In doubt as to whether he could have conjured the thing from his own raging imagination, he forced himself to reread it to make sure that he had not. That done, he folded it into his waistcoat pocket where a probing fingernail could, at any moment, check its small, arid, monitory crackle.
It was a season of rumours and alarms.
His cousin had advised him against going to the Congo, and Sauvigny had listened closely to his dissuasions then refuted them in his head. The worse the place was, the plainer it became that he must go there to confront the demons which had been playing grandmother’s steps with him since he was seventeen. They were drawing closer. But if evil in the Upper Congo was as impudently visible as was claimed, he could find solace by going there to do what he had been trained to do: fight.
His readiness to do this was connected with a very particular demon! ‘Call it by its name, Hubert,’ he admonished himself. ‘Your ruling passion is a carnal one for Danièle. Once distance has helped control it, you must set about finding the hare-brained Philibert, and make him see that it is his duty to come home. No sane man leaves a pretty young wife alone for the better part of two years.’
Sauvigny did not want to leave her alone either. But he distrusted his inclinations. The demons! In his mind they were an army of ant-sized parasites whose uniform he sometimes imagined as red like the Garibaldini’s shirts and sometimes black like the coats of Republican deputies. Laying siege to the seat of his emotions, they might yet adopt it as their grand quartier général. They would run his mind.
When he stared at a flame, then closed his eyes, the colours he saw were theirs. Flight was the way to defeat them. He must go to the Congo.
A more immediate reason for going was an all-too-plausible rumour about Belcastel.
The ex-Zouaves had now migrated back to their far-flung lairs and niches. Before dispersing, they had pooled their news. Many had female relatives who were senior members of religious Orders or were married to leading members of opposing parties and nations. Several knew secrets or shreds of secrets and, as a result, patchwork accounts of Father de Latour’s activities had reached Sauvigny. Some of these were made up of echoes bounced back from distant missions and embassies; others came from Republican clubs in Paris and clerical coteries in Rome. Belcastel’s name kept cropping up. Converging, the scraps pointed to an unequivocal conclusion. Monseigneur de Belcastel had joined the opposition.
Though Sauvigny would once have blamed his friend bitterly, he didn’t now. For the charges the monsignor might make were hard to refute. Far from ensuring good order, French monarchism had subverted it, and the twitching agonies of its last adherents called for a coup de grâce. One read of oriental widows choosing to be burned on their husbands’ pyres and of vassals killing themselves so as to join dead overlords. Christian loyalty was less extreme. Living on after the disappearance of our lovers and leaders we clearly had no choice but to adapt. And the line between doing that and turning one’s coat was hard to draw. Inside Sauvigny’s head, something had begun to turn.
News of his former mistress’s death had rattled him.
If kings with divine right had so manifestly failed, might not the Kingdom which theirs prefigured be failing too? The notion was both satisfyingly sour – the priests’ day of reckoning would avenge their betrayal of the Zouaves – and frightening since, if there were no absolutes, how did one live? With what right, for instance, had Sauvigny, who had killed for love of the pope, spurned the woman in Rome who had killed for love of him? And why, come to that, should he not try to seduce Danièle? They were fond of each other and he guessed that, if ardently pressed, she was unlikely to spurn him.
Unless the lunatic letter was telling the truth?
But there was no space in his mind for such a likelihood.
He had been having intoxicating dreams. He found he could entice them by thinking of her before he fell asleep. Her image blended with that of the Roman woman to whom he had been cruelly harsh. In the dreams he tried, remorsefully, to comfort her and once or twice found, with shocked pleasure, that he was embracing his naked niece.
He had thought, while drifting into sleep, of how her skin glowed like the inside of an oyster shell; of the shadow pool in each cheek; of the blue veins in the crook of each arm and of parts of her body which he had never seen. The veins were the colour of wind flowers. She was as delicate as that.
Several times he had woken up in states of vivid excitement. Had he brought them on? Connived or merely consented to them? How culpable was he? He wouldn’t consult a priest since in his mind the clergy were to blame for the whole phenomenon. Once the armouring of certainty thawed, their rules were worthless.
Mostly he deplored this licentiousness and regretted the days when he had liked and respected himself. Now he didn’t.
The thing to do was leave. Cut all ties. Do what good one could elsewhere. But first he meant to make peace with his old associate. There was a danger that Latour – a gossip and intriguer – might report some explosive comments which Sauvigny had made to his face on learning of his and Belcastel’s latest project. Sauvigny now regretted these, since, if they were repeated to Belcastel – whose conscience was a good deal tenderer than Latour’s – he would be painfully flayed by remorse. Poor, delicate-minded old B! ‘I must reassure him,’ Sauvigny decided, ‘grant him my absolution, set his mind at rest. And I’ll take the opportunity, while I’m at the maison de santé, to say a few wise words to Danièle.’ Maybe, he thought in a flush of optimism, he might persuade her to leave France for Belgium, a less frivolous and happier country whose Catholics had known how to keep the population on their side and hold on to power. If she was so eager to be a nurse in a madhouse, why not go to the one set up to humour the troubled brain of its only inmate, the deposed Empress Charlotte of Mexico? Surely there must be a dearth of attendants capable of pretending the place was a royal court? There Danièle would be with her own kind, and King Leopold, as Charlotte’s brother, could arrange the thing in a trice. Such a move would be honourable and edifying. After all, many well-born saints had in the past chosen to nurse lepers. Madness could well be the new leprosy. Danièle might have received a higher call.
Sauvigny planned to make this point forcefully when he saw his niece.
Meanwhile, he had to argue no less forcefully with the doubts that crept into his mind each time he thought of the lunatic’s letter in his waistcoat pocket.
Shortly before he boarded the train for Paris, a friend showed him a more cheerful and very different sort of letter. This one was from a prelate who had travelled to Rome to find out how those who mattered there felt about the pope’s policies towards France.
Many cardinals, claimed this prelate, think as we do and are horrified. Their outspokenness is surprising. There is a boldness in the air just now which is both very Italian and typical of the end of a regime. Leo XIII is healthy but bloodless. One thinks of a lamp running out of oil ... The real disaster is ‘the African’ (Cardinal L.). Some Romans claim he has hypnotized the pope. What would people say, after all, if the next pope were to force Catholics to become royalists? Anyway, good lord, what business is it of any pope’s to dictate our politics?
As Sauvigny sat in the train, these questions thumped through his head. One shake of the kaleidoscope could change everything: the death of an old man. Pope Leo was eighty-two. Maybe, after all, Sauvigny should open his heart to Belcastel who, in many ways, must be in the same boat as himself? The tide, he could remind him, might be about to turn.
***
The bog must have eyes, ears
and feelers, not to mention mouths, for the cousins already knew about Adam’s meeting Kate! How? Through whom? A talking sheep? Adam was almost certain that nobody had seen them together. Never mind! Never mind how people knew things. The point was that he needed to know them too.
‘Yer ma wouldn’t like ya hobnobbing with her!’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t pretend, Adam. You must know yer da means to marry her. He’s set on doing it, and yer ma’s desperate. She’s got herself pregnant a second time so as to try to force his hand. Get the priests on her side. The English girl’s a Catholic, you see, so they might be able to stop the marriage. Father Tobin’s been trying to do that, but it’ll take more than him. He’s not in with the powers that be.’
‘So they’re not married? My parents.’
‘Ellen and yer da? Jesus, Adam, are ye that green? Hey, listen to this, lads: Adam here didn’t know he was born on the wrong side of the blanket.’
‘Ah, will yiz shut yer gobs and leave the poor bugger alone!’
Amazingly, the cousins were sorry for him. Unmanned by this, Adam had to bite his tongue to keep from crying, and, just as he heard them say that blood was thicker than water, tasted his own.
‘Don’t take it so hard.’ Owen-or-Dinny punched him lightly in the chest. Now that Adam had been taken down, not one but several pegs, they were rallying to him who was, they reminded him, ‘one of ourselves’.
God forbid, he raged haughtily. But need overrode pride and, listening to their jabber with a new attentiveness, he began to get some things clear. One was that Owen-or-Dinny had not two names, but three. He was Owen-Dinny-Dan, meaning Owen son of Dinny, son of Dan, because what was the use of calling yourself Owen Gould if half the neighbourhood had the very same name?
‘Sure we all come wan way or another from the wrong side of the blanket,’ said Owen, making no bones about this. And went on to explain that ‘that had been goin’ on a long time.’
Adam Gould Page 21