Usually the despatches arrived singly but one raw evening in November of that year he found four such letters on his desk, three with broken seals, proclaiming that Henrietta had passed a pleasant (and almost surely an idle) forenoon, and one more bearing a Brussels postmark that was sealed and marked “personal.” He recognised the handwriting as that of Deborah Avery.
He scooped them up, crossed to the open fireplace, kicked a smouldering log into flame, lit one of his Burmese cheroots, and made a random grab at the sheaf, coming up with the envelope postmarked “Cairo” and addressed in Alexander's schoolboyish block capitals.
The first paragraph told him the boy had been in action again, at a place called Tel-el-Kebir in the Nile Delta, and the realisation of this stirred in Adam a near-extinct ember of his military past. He had never fought in Africa, had no more than glimpsed the Continent as a troopship passenger en route for India, but he had taken note of newspaper reports concerning Sir Garnet Wolseley's expedition to bring Ahmed Arabi's firebrands into line with Imperial policy in that part of the world. The tone of the letter was jubilant. Official despatches, it seemed, had not exaggerated the importance of the victory out there. Egypt had passed into the sphere of British influence. Cairo was occupied. The Arabi revolt was crushed. And all in less than a month from the day of disembarkation.
Alexander's regiment, Adam learned, had played a vital part in the one decisive engagement, and Alexander himself had taken part in the night march across the desert and the dawn attack on a strongly fortified position. He had come off unscathed, thank God, although regimental casualties had been high. What elated him, however, was not the victory itself so much as the fact that the infantry had stolen a march over the cavalrymen, leaving them nothing to do in the way of pursuit.
Adam found he could still smile at this, one of those gambits as old as war—the rivalry between mounted men and the footsloggers—and the footnote told him something he was anxious to know. Alexander had lived down his initial disappointment, very bitter at the time, caused by his failure to get a place in the dragoon guards or the lancers. It told him something else; to some extent the boy had vindicated himself in his own eyes and exorcised, possibly for good, the secret shame of having shown a clean pair of heels at Isandlwana.
He read George's letter next, posted in Munich three days earlier, which hinted that George might soon be on the move again, this time across the frontier into Austria, where he hoped to make contact with the Viennese waggon-maker, whose products had prompted Adam to send him abroad eighteen months ago. The letter puzzled him a little. It had, he would say, a rather wistful note, as though the boy was finding it difficult to up stumps and turn his back on Munich, and mentally he compared it with the racy letters George had written since his arrival in Bavaria. There was camouflage here. He had never had a doubt but that George found Munich very much to his taste and could hazard a guess why. There was a woman in it somewhere.
Giles's letter absorbed Adam more deeply than those of his brothers. It was not about Giles, as he had learned to expect from a boy compulsively attracted to lame ducks, but young Hugo, for whom Giles seemed to have formed a particularly close attachment now that Stella was off his conscience. Hugo's athletic prowess was developing rapidly and clearly the boys had been conferring on where it could lead, for here was Giles, confound him, soliciting parental sanctions of a fourteen-year-old's determination to make a career of athletics, with the ultimate idea, if you please, of adding it to the Swann assets!
Always open to a new idea, Adam toyed with this one, projecting his mind forward to coffee-house conversations six, seven, and eight years from now, and to sportswriters’ comments of the kind that were beginning to appear on the back pages of all the national journals, even such journals as Stead's crusading rag, the Pall Mall Gazette.
Adam had been an early convert to the cash value of publicity. The triple exploits of Hamlet Ratcliffe, lion-catcher; Bryn Lovell, rescuer of entombed miners; and Tim Blubb, executioner of marauding Fenians, had convinced him long ago that a man's success in business did not necessarily rest upon the excellence of his service. Something else was needed in these days of cut-throat competition—a flair for keeping the name of one's firm in the national consciousness so that coffee-house gossips, and even croquet-lawn tittle-tattlers, came to associate name and product with high adventure and romance, of the kind people looked for in war correspondents’ despatches. And here, in his hand, was proof that Giles understood and appreciated as much at the age of seventeen!
It gave Giles, if not Hugo, a new dimension in Adam's eyes. If a boy could come up with a suggestion as sophisticated as that before he left school, what might be his potential at the age of thirty? What a hopelessly unmanageable team they were to drive! A man could plan a business down to the last detail, but how, in the name of God, did he go about organising a string of youngsters with the blood of Irish peasants, Anglo-Saxon mercenaries, and Lancastrian factory-hands in their veins? He gave it up and opened Deborah Avery's letter.
There was the greatest difficulty in reading between the lines here. Deborah Avery had inherited her father's trick of hoarding secret thoughts, so that her letter told him very little concerning her approach to the chancy work she was about. They had done this. They intended doing that. They had gone here. They hoped to go there. The Belgian police were outwardly cooperative. The police were secretly hostile, so that he formed the opinion that she was laughing at him a little, just enough to convey to him that she was old enough, and certainly intelligent enough, to take good care of herself and he would be well advised to stop assuming she would be drugged, whisked into a pander's cab, and sold to a Turkish satyr in Asia Minor. Yet the fears were real enough. He loved her and his sense of responsibility concerning her was that much keener because he was all she had in the way of a refuge. He thought, sourly, “Damn that rascal, Avery, for saddling me with a responsibility of this kind at my time of life! It was well enough when she was a child, and a biddable one at that, but she's now thinking of me as a man set in a money-making mould and only marginally interested in anything outside the countinghouse; and she's wrong at that! The trouble with people like her and Stead, and that sainted Mrs. Butler, is that they deal in abstracts, like their nightshirted Jehovah. They’d do better to take an objective look at humanity and see things for what they are: neither good nor bad but a matter of maintaining the struggle from nursery to funeral parlour. And yet, if anything happened to her I’d never forgive myself for sanctioning the silly caper in the first place.”
He stuffed the letter in his desk drawer but the self-questioning it had provoked remained with him for the rest of the evening, so that he contributed little to Henrietta's supper chatter, concerning the avalanche of news from the family outposts. He said, in response to her query as to what he thought of the day's mail, “No more than I always think. They’re young bears, as the saying goes, with all their troubles before them. There's hope, though. Alex is settling in, I’d say, and even George seems to be maturing a little.”
“And Giles's silly notion concerning Hugo?”
He said, to her surprise, “It isn’t so silly. The idea behind it is sound enough.”
He was slow to rise to the bait, and when, baulked by his taciturnity, she asked a direct question concerning Deborah, he replied, guardedly, “She's working on a social survey for that Holy Joe, Stead.”
“In Brussels? Not alone, I hope?”
“Certainly not. Don’t you know missionaries hunt for lost souls shoulder to shoulder, like a shooting party on a grouse moor?”
He left it at that, not relishing the prospect of spending half the night reassuring her that Debbie was in no kind of danger but he should have known better. She had been living with him and his concerns a very long time, and could read his prejudices and apprehensions as easily as Tybalt, the clerk. He was a long time getting off to sleep and this, if nothing else, confirmed her in her private opinion that he still worried about Ave
ry's child. “It's like him,” she told herself, as soon as he began to snore. “I might have known Debbie would bother him more than the prospect of Alex getting a bullet, or George getting himself into another scrape, or Giles trying to get our sanction for Hugo's idleness…”
She told herself then that she had been a fool not to steam Deborah's letter open and reseal it. He had always thought of Avery's child as the most vulnerable of the flock. The others were Swanns and capable, in his mind, of making their own way in the world. And yet he was wrong, for Debbie had something better than brains to sustain her. She had her deeply rooted faith in God, and that was something neither she nor Adam had been able to instil into the others, despite regular churchgoing and any amount of encouragement from Phoebe Fraser. As for herself, she believed God was around somewhere, but he had always taken second place to Adam. Whenever they sang “Rock of Ages” at morning service, it was not God in His heaven she visualised but Adam Swann, riding out of the morning mists on Seddon Moor when she was a slip of a girl.
For all his doubts, Adam's reading between the lines had been reasonably accurate in every case. Deborah Avery, her mission all but complete, was cock-a-hoop over the pile of damning evidence they had accumulated without directing attention to themselves, whereas her feelings for her co-worker, Ned Gordon, were approaching those of a hero-worshipper. She was beginning to see him as a Launcelot of the Bordellos, a man of endless resource and matchless courage, prepared to risk life, limb, and reputation in order to lay hands on a witness they could smuggle back across the Channel and use to confound the bigots in Westminster, who had declared over and over again that girls found in Continental brothels would have got there without the help of agents working on commission in London.
As for George, Adam was nearer the mark than he suspected. George was now entering upon the most bewildering period of his life, alternatively uplifted and downcast, in the way of all young men who fancy themselves enslaved. He sometimes half-believed Rosa Ledermann when she told him it was preposterous to imagine himself in love with a woman old enough to be his mother, but he wanted time to satisfy himself on this account. He still found it puzzling when she welcomed him into her bed after the merest pretence at reluctance, and then spent the precious moments urging him to move on to Vienna where, she assured him, he would forget her and Munich in less than a week.
Giles, preoccupied with someone else's problems, was the only one among them who received a return-of-post reply to his letter. His father promised to call upon the headmaster the next time he was in the Western Wedge, and hear at first hand why Hugo seemed unable to hoist himself out of a class where his age was more than a year above the average. As to the boy's athletic prowess, that was another thing Adam preferred to judge for himself. It might well be that Giles was as prejudiced in favour of Hugo's promise as he was in respect of Mr. Gladstone's oratory.
2
He had no idea what the quarrel was about, or how they came to be here, twelve thousand strong, crossing the desert to bring a dissident chieftain to battle and replace him with someone who would welcome inclusion in what the newspapers called “the British sphere of influence.” He was not in the least clear what a “sphere of influence” was. To Alexander Swann this was a personal adventure, offering him an opportunity to reassess himself as man and professional soldier.
The African adventure was a long way behind him now, but similarities between the two campaigns returned to him after the sun had gone down and the advance continued by starlight.
Then, as now, they had marched seeking a confrontation, supremely confident in their strength, firepower, discipline, and overall superiority. But in an hour they had been reduced to a fleeing mob. Was there any guarantee that the same thing would not happen again here in more open ground, with savages herding them back to their ships and every man among them concerned with saving his miserable hide? He wondered, uncomfortably, if his Rorke's Drift dedication would survive that kind of test and whether, after a rout, he would be sought among the heroes or the terrified fugitives on the path to the Blood River. There was no way of knowing short of ordeal by fire and that, so they said, was awaiting them out there under the stars, at a place marked on his field map as Tel-el-Kebir, and ringed in red pencil “Arabi's entrenchment. Sixty Krupp guns? Strength est. 25,000.”
The march from base to Nine Gun Hill and onward, under cloak of darkness, towards the Arabi camp, offered him an unlooked-for opportunity to rummage among his hopes and fears in this land that he had once thought of as a place of mystery and awesome antiquity but was now seen as a grey, featureless desert, populated by swarms of gigantic flies, scuttling scorpions and droves of beggars and, as the Delta advance got under way, clouds of hostile Bedouin horsemen who went through an impressive display far out on the flanks of the column but dispersed at the gallop after a few long-range shots had been fired in their direction.
At Nine Gun Hill the column halted for a double rum ration and orders were passed, mouth to mouth, down a chain of command that was thus seen to exist, even in this velvet blackness and upswirl of dust. No firearm to be loaded; bayonets to remain unfixed until the order to charge; no pipes; no conversing; no hurry. Just a creeping advance across the sand towards an entrenchment lit by the North Star, that was said to be the compass of a naval lieutenant almost as young as himself and introduced to him, at the last halt, as Lieutenant Rawson. They were about to move off when a shape appeared out of the gloom and he heard his name called, twice and rather testily, so that he recognised the voice as that of his Colonel, Sir Archibald Allison.
“Swann? Lieutenant Swann?” He answered up promptly, “Here, sir, next to the guide!” Sir Archibald said, more genially, “Are you the young shaver Hargreaves was telling me about? Present at Rorke's Drift?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Serving under who? Eh? Eh?”
“I was with the N.N.C.”
“The what, boy?”
“The… er… Natal Native Contingent, sir.”
“Good God!” the Colonel said, and it struck Alexander that he almost certainly thought of the N.N.C. as a mob of locally recruited headhunters. He went on, however, with the air of conferring a great favour, “Well, you’re damned lucky, boy! Special assignment from the C-in-C. One subaltern to march with the guide—told me to find someone who had smelled powder. Well, then, listen hard. Elbow to elbow with Lieutenant Rawson here. Pair of you a hundred paces ahead and not a squeak from either of you until you’re challenged, or run up against the first enemy ditch. Any questions?”
“Do I fire or holler back, sir?”
“You holler back. Top of your lungs, boy, then go forward without waiting for the rest of us. You, too, Rawson, providing you’re not leading the whole damned column on a wild goose chase. You sure you can keep direction by the stars?”
“By one star, sir. The North Star.”
“Aye, and suppose it clouds over?”
“It won’t cloud, sir. Not until peep o’ dawn.”
“I’ll hold you to that, by God. Let us down and the Navy and Sir Garnet’ll fall out and you’ll find yourself in a rare scrape, young feller-me-lad. Well, well, off you go. We’ll give you a clear minute by my watch. Your nearest contact will be Sergeant Mackenzie, who’ll follow on within hail. Good luck. You, too, Swann.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Rawson brought his chin down and there was light enough to see that he had been staring up at his star, so that Alex wondered how the devil he could tell one from the other. He would dearly liked to have asked him, but sensed that the young man, outwardly so debonair, needed all the concentration he could bring to his task of steering an army across a desert to a fixed point somewhere out ahead and bringing it there not a moment too late or too soon.
From where they marched—some eighty yards ahead of Sergeant Mackenzie and the vanguard—the small, inconsequential sounds of the advance reached them as a long uninterrupted sigh, punctuated by the half-heard scrape of a
hobnailed boot on a sliver of shale, or the occasional rasp of a buckle on a rifle butt; tiny, insignificant sounds, that could not have been identified in a less rarefied silence, so that he thought, “It's too much to hope that so many can move so far without an accident of one kind or another—a stumble, a curse, a cough, a sneeze… something over and above the rustle of twenty thousand boots planted on twenty thousand patches of sand. His confidence ebbed and flowed, his body a paper bag filled by a boy's breath—squashed, emptied, refilled again, waiting to be popped. Rawson continued to advance very steadily, lifting and placing each foot with care, but not as any man would cross broken ground in the dark, for every now and again he lifted his nose high, as though smelling the way, and whenever he did this Alex, glancing sideways, saw starlight reflected in his upturned eye. A man consulting his compass and on the correct interpretation the fate of every man present.
The experience was surely unique, more singular in every way than its forerunner thousands of miles south of this sandy wilderness, and as they groped their way forward, moving at no more than two miles an hour, he found that its very singularity enabled him to temper his fear.
The sentry's challenge, reaching him as a string of yammering, incomprehensible sounds, acted like a lit fuse on an arc of combustibles to the rear and flanks, so that the sustained murmur that had orchestrated the night-long march became a gust and then, erupting as a long roll of thunder, snapped the tension like a severed hawser and brought him, on the instant, a sensation of ecstatic release. The roaring tempest of sound boosted him forward into a matching tempest as the darkness about him was lit by myriad yellow flashes; for a few seconds it seemed that he and Rawson were lifted by two giant waves of sound before they could add their trifling quota to the uproar and begin to run, aware of a sharp rise in the ground that ended in a hillock of tightly packed sand.
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 35
