Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  There they were then, almost a dozen of them, absorbed in the bridal group or wedged hugger-mugger into the front pew, for this time there was no protocol to observe on behalf of the military.

  A Swann rally and a Swann occasion. A whole boiling of them arrayed in their Sunday best. Adam Swann (whose jaw, the wits would tell you, had set a thousand waggons rolling); his handsome, unapologetic wife; Lieutenant Alexander Swann, in scarlet bumfreezer and braid; and all the lesser Swanns, from Giles down to pageboy Edward, rising four. As impressive a spread as you would be likely to find anywhere in Kent on a fine April morning, with a brisk southeasterly herding a flock of laggard clouds across the Sussex border.

  Two only were absent. George, learning coach-building (why coach-building, when his father was said to buy waggons by the gross?) and away in foreign parts, and baby Margaret at home in the nursery. But all the others made such a fine showing that everyone was prepared to forget that this was Stella Swann's second time round in thirty-two months, fast going by anyone's reckoning for a filly who came of age that very day.

  The villagers turned as upon a single spinal cord when Mr. Gibbs, the organist, received his signal and began to play, and in she marched with her blushes (if she had any left after all those months as Denzil Fawcett's journeyman) concealed under a veil that was, they supposed, a compromise between virginity and widowhood. They were not exactly clear what had happened, but whatever it was it must have been blessed and it must have been legal or she wouldn’t have been here at all, and looking so pleased with herself. Down the aisle she swept on her father's arm, while Denzil, poor wight, was the only one present unable to turn his head and mark her bearing on account of a three-inch collar, which had his neck in a splint and obliged him to continue to stare fixedly at the altar candlesticks and listen to heartbeats that seemed to him loud enough to drown the organ.

  It was all very pastoral and cosy, all very much in keeping with the end of a sharp spell of frost that had stopped hunting but enabled amateur skaters to acquire a spread of bruised buttocks and scabbed kneecaps on the river below the islet. Twyforde Green, settling back, could gaze its fill, familiar, of course, with the two younger bridesmaids, Joanna and Helen, in their blue satin frocks, their Kate Greenaway bonnets, elbow-length mittens, and posies of hot-house anemones, but wondering at the rows of strange attentive faces in pews further back, representing, so they were told, Swann hirelings from all over England. It occurred to the more prescient then that this was not so much a wedding as a Swann muster, a carriers’ convention that stamped Adam Swann's seal upon the locality. However, nobody guessed that this public unfurling of the Swann banner was a deliberate act, the outcome of a compromise between man and wife when the latter informed the former that his daughter's hibernation was over, and that he was likely, God willing, to prove the grandfather of a string of Kentish yeomen once the new thatch had weathered over at Dewponds Farm.

  Adam remembered it, however, smiling one of his sardonic grins as he stood beside his daughter, and it occurred to him again that Henrietta did well to indulge a passion for soldiers, for she was temperamentally equipped to conjure with tactics and stratagems. Little by little, he told himself, the balance of power was shifting at Tryst, but then, he had never subscribed to the Victorian cult of the patriarch. Patriarchs sported beards whereas he remained obstinately cleanshaven. Besides, this was her victory. The match, it seemed, had been engineered by her. But that, he would say, had not been the beginning of it, recalling now the part that lumping great bridegroom had played in the first act of the tragic farce. Since then, he imagined, it must have been a devious story, and very much a woman's story, concerning which he had no real curiosity. He was content to accept their presence here as a traditional happy ending, although it did occur to him that he and others might have been spared a pack of trouble if that stupid girl of his had made a grab at her rustic years ago, before leading everybody such a cheerless, cross-country dance.

  He glanced sideways over his daughter's shoulder and what he saw reassured him. Denzil Fawcett was undeniably a chawbacon by a city man's standards, but it needed little imagination to identify his unique qualifications for groom at this particular ceremony. He was not even listening to the words that invested him with the Swann-on-Wheels insignia but was gazing at the bride as if vouchsafed a vision of Thetis, the silver-footed sea-goddess. And there was relevance here unless his classical memory was at fault. Thetis had been condemned to marry a mortal and this mortal, judged by his expression of stupefied reverence, had no quarrel with the judgement of Zeus.

  He would have liked very much to have looked over his shoulder at Henrietta, if only to assure himself that the smug expression he had noticed when she set out for the church was still there, but he did not dare. He had been enjoined, given the special circumstances surrounding this remarkable event, to be on his very best behaviour and on no account to let his attention stray, as he usually did when he accompanied the family to church.

  The expression was there: the look of a merchant who, against all probability, had recouped heavy losses by investing in a venture that promised a steady trickle over the years. For she did not care a curse what the croquet-lawn gossips said (and she knew them well enough to realise they were saying a great deal) for this was not a match in the conventional sense of the word. It was more of an adjustment from a state of bankruptcy to the status quo, and what woman in her senses would not prefer a rustic son-in-law to a daughter mumbling prayers behind a convent wall? God knows, she had reason enough to congratulate herself. The game had been as good as lost when she took it in hand, but here they all were, confronted with a healthy, beaming bridegroom and an almost embarrassingly felicitous bride, and all in a matter of eight months. And no one save Giles was a penny the wiser concerning the horrible scare that had set it in train.

  She looked across at Giles, noting that he was absorbing every word of the ceremony, and it occurred to her that he would be likely to see this not as the direct result of his troubled confession but as a triumph of true love. For Giles, alone among them, was a romantic.

  It was a pity, she reflected, that Alexander was not, remembering his bleak stare when told the news. He was bearing up, however, and this no doubt was due as much to his kind heart as to her cautionary lecture, for he had said, on being asked for loyalty, “Very well. I suppose a fellow can’t really be held responsible for the chaps his sister takes up with, and from what you say there's no denying the gel went through a beastly time while I was away.” The transposition of the word “girl” to “gel” did not pass unnoticed. That would be Sandhurst rubbing off on him, she supposed, but he had clearly taken her point. A beastly time, forsooth! Thank God he was unlikely to discover just how beastly; and she assumed, her eye reverting to the groom, that poor Denzil was likely to remain equally ignorant if Stella had her wits about her. And even that, when you came to think of it, was something to be grateful for. She wasn’t coming to him secondhand but as a bride should, and it might not have been so had Stella shown less fleetness of foot the night the Conyer oak came down in the paddock.

  Henrietta usually enjoyed a wedding, but this one gave her more than the customary flutter. It produced a warm, pleasurable glow under her heart, and this on account of its shape and lightness, for surely, all things being equal, nothing frightening would ever happen to Stella again. Denzil Fawcett would make sure of that and watching them, in the act of giving and receiving the ring, she did what she always did at a wedding, that is to say, compared the immediate prospects of the bride with her own experience at eighteen. There was a difference, of course. One only had to glance at the boy to know he was also virgin, so that at least they would start level. He was sure to be gentle too, and far more patient than most men, having already waited so long and so hopelessly. Well, the very best of luck to them, tonight and every night. All in all, mother and daughter had every right to exult. One had exchanged a bad husband for a good. The other had completed a smart
exercise in salvage.

  2

  The precise significance of his substitution of Swann's viceroys for bonafide wedding guests had escaped her until the return from church. The entire muster, suitably awed she noted, reassembled in the hall before passing, two by two, into the drawing room where bride and groom stood beside the table supporting the three-tiered cake that was crowned—God forgive him—with a sugar-icing Swann waggon instead of the usual assortment of cherubs and angels. Then she understood that it was not, as she had imagined, a piece of buffoonery and that like her, he did not see this wedding as a conventional match. It was not and could not be, with the best will in the world. For him it had another and distinct function that was characteristic of him and had impelled him to make it a private family occasion; his family, not Stella's or Denzil's. It was at once a sneer and a challenge, underlining his creed that commercial undertakings, in this day and age, had far more relevance than dynastic alliances of one kind or another, and here was his fanfare played in public and be damned to what the local quality thought about it.

  Henrietta stood slightly apart, observing the guests’ advance and remembering to smile, but her smiles were really for Adam. Most fathers would exhibit paternal pride in a pretty daughter on an occasion like this, but his was reserved for the guests. She noticed something else that escaped the bridal pair. As the guests advanced for the presentation, they made no more than token obeisances to the sweating groom and the composed and radiant bride. Their fealty was for Adam, standing there on his gammy leg, dispensing a mixture of patronage and geniality, so that she thought, as she kissed Edith Wickstead and shook hands with Edith's Tom, “There's really no curing the man! And no making a real father out of him either! Here we are, celebrating the miraculous reprieve of our eldest daughter from a nunnery, and what will he and this mob of freebooters talk about the moment the toasts are behind us, and poor Denzil has retired to Dewponds with his glittering prize? Not the wedding, certainly. More likely the cost of a haul of bacon from a Wiltshire curing factory to the nearest siding, or the wastage of horseflesh on roads half-ruined by the spring thaw!”

  It was Edith, who knew him almost as well as she did, who put this into words when she whispered, slyly, “Don’t mind him, Henrietta. Or us either, for that matter! We wish her well because of him, don’t you see?”

  And she did see, and had to laugh in spite of it all, reasoning that there were many more than nine to his family.

  3

  To Edith Wickstead who, as Edith Wadsworth was the only woman present to have held an independent command in the regions, it was like visiting her home town after an absence of half a lifetime.

  Moving among the clamorous males and their fashion-conscious wives from every corner of the Swann empire, the past came alive to her in a way that it never had after she had turned her back on the Crescents and become, at thirty plus, a wife and mother, as well as tutor to the husband who succeeded her.

  For Edith, nibbling wedding cake and isolating the burr of a dozen provincial accents, the enterprise was invested with a kind of magic, conjuring up, at one and the same moment, fanfares of trumpets and the laughter of circus clowns. For they were all, she told herself, compounds of swashbuckler and mountebank, pedlar and packman, freebooting mercenary and commercial pace-setter, and there was both poetry and logic in this. Adam Swann, who had been and still was all of these things, had fashioned each of them in his own image, singling them out one by one as his dreams expanded, imbuing them with his distinctive sense of vocation, almost as though he had been recruiting missionaries to go out into the highways and byways and proclaim the gospel of first-come-first-served on the assurance that God (whom he probably saw as an English wholesaler) would help those who helped themselves.

  Every face and every voice recalled some milestone on the road they had travelled together, and many of those present had travelled it all the way in his company and hers. The Welsh lilt of Bryn Lovell, introducing his half-caste wife to Henrietta, recalled how Lovell had achieved fame for Swann-on-Wheels and himself by stepping forward like a Pied Piper and plucking fifty-seven entombed miners from a flooded pit. The buzz-saw vowels of Hamlet Ratcliffe, introducing his wife, Augusta, called to mind the story of Hamlet's recapture of a toothless lion allegedly terrorising a Devon plateau, to the glory of Swann-on-Wheels and himself. Everyone here had a story to swap or a reminiscence to contribute, so that it seemed to her that each volley of small talk began with the words, “Do you mind the time…” or “That was around the time…” or simply, “Time was…” an inevitable preamble for a jeremiad denouncing the present in favour of the past.

  John Catesby, who always reminded her of the phrase “Such men are dangerous.” had mellowed more than most, for there he was engaged in amiable discussion with that old rascal Sam Rawlinson, the bride's grandfather, on the rival merits of Georgian and Egyptian cotton. She had no trouble at all remembering a time when Catesby would have gladly hung Sam from a Salford lamppost, whereas Sam, for his part, would have had Catesby transported as an industrial wrecker. Their fusion, she supposed, was another achievement of Adam's. He had never had much difficulty in persuading lions to consort with lambs, given, of course, that the consorting occurred in a waggon that bore the Swann insignia.

  It was possible, standing here in this room, to pinpoint a dozen examples of this rare talent of his for deputising and this, she supposed, was a trick that all successful men had in common. Over by the window was “Young” Rookwood, of Southern Square, talking to Godsall, of the Kentish Triangle. Both were relaxed and each was using the other's Christian name without affectation. Who would believe, at this range, that Rookwood had begun life as a Thameside waif, whereas Godsall, at the same age, had been a lieutenant in one of the oldest regiments in the British army?

  The same, in a sense, was true of Morris, the manager of Southern Pickings, and Jake Higson, another of Keate's vanboys, for when Morris had joined them, an acknowledged expert on high-grade porcelain, he had thought himself a cut above men like Higson, Rookwood, and Ratcliffe. He had soon learned otherwise. Beneath the banner of Adam Swann every regional manager was equal, irrespective of birth, background, and even annual turnover. And so they would remain, until the day it came to his notice (as everything did sooner or later) that one or other of them had run out of steam.

  She carried her cake and glass of champagne out into the hall, finding an unoccupied bench near the foot of the staircase and sitting there contentedly enough, basking in satisfied memories. She remembered the day she had first crossed this threshold, a woman without hope, for Adam Swann, whom she had once loved (and still did in a way) was said to be dying, and the future of everyone in that throng across the hall was at stake.

  That was the day she had first met Henrietta and discovered, to her dismay, that she was not the spoiled doll of her imagining but a woman with wits and courage equal to the best of them and superior to most. It seemed to her, looking back, that she had taken a prodigious gamble to have admitted, there and then, that she was Swann's woman. Soul certainly, aye, and body too if it could have been accomplished with dignity. But Henrietta had not been outraged, or even astonished. It must have seemed to her then (it probably still did) that every woman in the world could be forgiven for falling in love with Adam. Looking back on that extraordinary interview, Edith saw it as the real turning point in her own life, for she had no alternative then but to stop dreaming and begin the laborious process of rebuilding her life.

  It was odd how Swann touched and changed the lives of so many others, and she wondered whether he impinged to this extent on his children. It seemed unlikely. Why else would he have allowed Stella to run herself into such a corner?

  A step on the stairs made her glance up and see Henrietta in her blue and silver finery, looking as if she too would appreciate a momentary withdrawal from the babel. She said, descending the last few stairs to the hall, “Come into the sewing room, Edith, and take a dish of tea while Stella ch
anges. I really don’t know why people make such a fuss about champagne. My throat is parched with the stuff and tea is what I need. Besides, I’ve never thanked you properly for all you did for Stella that time.”

  Edith said, as they shut the door behind them, “It didn’t seem to do any good at the time. Stella left much as she arrived, walking in her sleep.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Henrietta, merrily, “but she's wide awake now I assure you. I expected a little panic now the public part of it is behind her, but there she is, getting her things together as offhandedly as a French maid. It's Denzil who has his heart in his mouth.”

  “How did it happen, Henrietta? If you don’t mind telling me.”

  “I don’t mind telling you anything. They say two women can’t enjoy real friendship, of the kind men boast about, but that's only bluff on their part. Underneath they’ve got far more capacity for rivalry than women. Especially women who have faced trouble together, as you and I have. How did it happen? By a mixture of luck and guile, I suppose,” and she told Edith the story of the last few months. “Do you think I did right? To settle for what most folk would regard as a poor second-best?”

  “Most folk haven’t your ability to cut the cackle and concentrate on essentials,” Edith said, and meant it. That farmboy might be all he looked, a ponderously put-together peasant, but he was clearly what Stella Swann needed at this juncture: someone who worshipped her. Henrietta must have appreciated this, notwithstanding her well-known determination to put down social roots.

  “How did Adam take it?”

  “How I intended he should. In matters of this kind he gives me my head. And why not? It's the least he can do, seeing that the family he's concerned with is in there, converting this wedding into a board meeting. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”