The American Boy

by Andrew Taylor

  Then she took me by surprise, as so often: “I hope I may not be a cause of her behaviour.”

  “But how could that be?”

  “She dislikes me, I am afraid.” Mrs Frant raised a hand to prevent my interrupting. “You must have remarked it. At Grange Cottage, for example.”

  “Yes,” I said. “There was indeed a coldness.”

  “More than that.” She turned her face away. “In fact she hates me. There is no reason why you should not know the truth – you deserve to hear it after tonight. Long before my marriage to Mr Frant, or Mrs Johnson’s to her husband, there was an understanding between them.”

  “While Mr Frant was living at Monkshill?”

  “No – the family left Monkshill when Mr Frant was no older than Charlie. After that he lived chiefly in Ireland when he was not at school, until he started at Wavenhoe’s. But his mother was connected by marriage to the Ruispidges, and during his vacations he would sometimes stay at Clearland-court. Mrs Johnson grew up at Clearland, quite as one of the family. So they were thrown together a good deal.” She hesitated. “Neither she nor Mr Frant had a penny to their name. Otherwise they would certainly have married.” She paused again and then added sadly, “I – I have no reason to doubt my informant on that score.”

  I looked at her, and her large eyes shone with unshed tears. I suspected then that it had been Mr Frant himself who had told her, that he had taunted her with his prior attachment.

  “Who knows?” she murmured. “She may even hold me responsible for what happened to Mr Frant.”

  “But that would be nonsense, ma’am.”

  “One does not think clearly when one’s mind is in turmoil.” Her voice trembled. “His murder might well have shaken her reason. God knows, it was frightful enough in all conscience – and the uncertainty makes it worse, that and the fear that something even more terrible may yet – I myself have felt that –” She broke off and again turned her head away from me. In a moment she resumed in a calmer tone. “Tell me, did you ever feel that you were not entirely in possession of your senses?”

  “Yes.”

  A glowing coal fell from the grate to the hearth, sending up a shower of sparks. I bent to retrieve it with the tongs. Her question had thrown me into confusion. She and I were the same people we had been at the start of the evening. But something had changed, something invisible and profound, and I could only guess at its nature and its implications.

  I raised my head. “When I was wounded, it seemed to me I was wounded in mind as well as in body.”

  She nodded. “My father once remarked that in war a man sees such terrible sights that he may see them for ever.” We sat in silence for a moment. Then: “What happened?”

  “My body healed more quickly than my mind. For many months, nothing truly mattered very much, and I was angry. I was angry that I had been wounded, and that all those men had died, and that I had done nothing and yet I was still alive. I despised myself.” I hesitated and then added: “And there were dreams, every night there were dreams. Now I believe I was as much afraid as angry. Or perhaps anger and fear are different aspects of the same thing.” I thought briefly of Dansey with his Janus face. “But I must not weary you.”

  “When I first saw you, you looked ill. No, that is not quite the word: you looked as though there were a sheet of glass between you and the rest of the world. And if the glass broke, then so should you.”

  I said, picking my words one by one from the silence, “I fell so far into despair that one day I lost my senses. Only for a moment but it was enough. I threw a medal at an officer in the Park. His horse reared, and he fell. They arrested me. I was afraid they would shut me up for ever, or transport me. But I was fortunate: I came up before a humane magistrate, who decided that I was but a temporary lunatic whose madness would yield to a course of treatment.”

  “I am very often afraid,” Mrs Frant remarked. “If a woman has a child she must be afraid for him, if not for herself. And at present there is so very much to be afraid of.” She was quiet for a moment. Then she raised her head and went on in a sudden rush of words: “Why did you join the army, Mr Shield?”

  I looked down the years at my younger self and marvelled at its folly. “A girl jilted me, ma’am. I drowned my sorrows, and when I was drunk, I spoke intemperately to the girl’s father, who was also the master at the school where I was teaching. As a result, I lost my position. To show the world how little I cared, I took the King’s shilling – and regretted it as soon as I was sober again.”

  “I beg your pardon. You must think me impertinent. I should not have asked.”

  “It is of no consequence.”

  “Oh, but it is.”

  Her eyes stared into mine. I was alarmed by what she might see – such a degree of longing, such overwhelming desire. Simultaneously, I realised I was holding my breath, as if by not breathing I might prolong the moment indefinitely, as if I might stop time itself.

  Then came a great knocking on the street door, and the sound of voices and laughter outside. I let myself breathe once more, and went to sit at the table, returning to the newspaper I had abandoned, it seemed in another life. Mrs Frant did not speak.

  In a moment we heard footsteps in the passage and the sound of Mr Carswall’s voice raised in triumph: “And he did not know I had the last heart, the poor fool, he thought Lady Ruispidge had it. No, it was neatly done, by God, and after that trick, the rubber was ours.”

  The door flew open, colliding with the back of a chair. In an instant the quiet parlour had filled to overflowing with lights, noise, people. As well as Mr Carswall, there was Miss Carswall, Mrs Lee, Sir George and the Captain. Lady Ruispidge had retired for the night but her sons had insisted on escorting Mr Carswall’s party back to Fendall House.

  Mr Carswall was not drunk, merely boisterous. In Mrs Johnson’s absence, Lady Ruispidge had condescended to partner him and I believe he felt he had acquitted himself well, both at whist and in society in general. Mrs Lee and a clergyman had opposed them in the card room, and Mrs Lee did her best to appear complacent about the losses she had sustained.

  Miss Carswall, we soon learned, had danced almost every dance, many of them with Sir George, two with the Captain, and several with officers from the local militia. She looked very handsome, with her colour high and the excitement running through her like electricity. Sir George had taken her down to supper, and everyone had been most attentive.

  Sir George was quieter, but almost equally pleased with himself. His brother, on the other hand, was at pains to give the impression that he had been miserable for most of the time: first, contemplating how Mrs Frant was faring on her own, and later, when the news of Mrs Johnson’s indisposition had reached him, being sensible of Mrs Frant’s kindness to his unfortunate cousin. Indeed, to hear him speak, one would think that Mrs Frant, but for an accident of faith, were a prime candidate for canonisation. No one seemed unduly concerned about Mrs Johnson – Sir George remarked that hers was one of those unequal constitutions that alternate between spells of intense activity and periods of low spirits and general debility. He trusted that his cousin’s indisposition would not inconvenience us in any way. A good night’s sleep would soon set her right.

  “She certainly sleeps soundly,” cried Mr Carswall. “Why, I heard her snoring as we passed her door.”

  The hour was late – after one o’clock in the morning – and, having escorted the Carswalls back to their apartment and made civil inquiries after the well-being of Mrs Frant and Mrs Johnson, the Ruispidge brothers had no further excuse for remaining. Almost immediately after their departure, there occurred an ugly little scene which made me wonder whether Carswall were drunker than he appeared.

  Mrs Frant rose, saying she was fatigued and would retire. I was about to open the door for her when Carswall plunged across the room and forestalled me. As she passed him in the doorway, he laid a hand like a great paw on her arm and begged the favour of a goodnight kiss.

  “Af
ter all,” said he, “are we not cousins? Should not cousins love each other?” The intonation he gave the words made it quite clear what sort of love he had in mind.

  “Oh, Papa,” cried Miss Carswall. “Pray let Sophie pass; she is quite fagged.”

  The sound of his daughter’s voice rather than the words distracted him for an instant. Mrs Frant slipped into the passage. I heard her talking to Miss Carswall’s maid. Then came the sound of a door opening and closing.

  “Eh?” Mr Carswall said to no one in particular. “Fagged? Aye, no wonder – look at the time.” He thrust his fingers into his waistcoat pocket and in a moment was matching his actions to his words. Then he turned his back to us and went to stand at the window. “God damn it, it is still snowing.”

  He wished us a curt goodnight and stamped out of the room, jingling the change in his pocket. The rest of us followed almost at once. Miss Carswall lingered in the passage, however, adjusting the wick of her candle. Mrs Lee went on ahead and into her own chamber. Miss Carswall turned back to me.

  “I am sorry you was not at the ball,” she said. “It was but a country assembly, of course, full of tradesmen and farmers’ wives, but it was most agreeable for all that.” She lowered her voice. “And it would have been more agreeable, had you been there.”

  I bowed, looking at her; and I could not help admiring what I saw.

  Miss Carswall studied my face for an instant. Then she took up her candle and turned as if about to retire. But she checked herself. “Would you do something for me, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have a mind to perform an experiment. When you go to your room, will you stand at the window for a moment or two, and look out?”

  “If you wish. May I ask why?”

  “No, sir, you may not.” She devastated me with a smile. “That would be quite unscientific – it would ruin my experiment. We natural philosophers would pay any price to avoid that.”

  A moment later I was alone. I threaded my way through passages and up and down the stairs until I reached my room. The old building was full of noises, and I encountered several servants going about their business.

  At length I climbed the last flight of stairs to my door. My room felt almost as cold as the ice-house at Monkshill-park. My body was tired but my mind was restless, stirred by the events of the evening. I threw on my greatcoat and felt in my valise for a paper of cigars. I forced open one half of the casement window which had been wedged with newspaper. A moment later I was leaning on the sill and filling my lungs with sweet, soothing smoke.

  The roofs of the city were silver and white. Somewhere a church clock sounded the half-hour and was answered by others across the city, their bells muted by the covering of snow. My mind filled with a parade of images, its constituent parts as random as the flakes still falling from the sky.

  I saw Miss Carswall, of course, with that smile that promised so much, and Mrs Frant’s gravely beautiful face lit by a guttering candle flame and the glow of the parlour fire. I saw Mrs Johnson huddled on the pavement, and a man running across the road from her. I looked further back, to the man glimpsed at the window of Grange Cottage, to the dried, yellowing finger I had found in the satchel, to the mutilated corpse on the trestle at Wellington-terrace.

  Dansey, too, and Rowsell joined the parade, and I wondered idly at the reasons for the kindnesses they showed me. (One of the oddest things about affection is surely that in many cases its object so little deserves it.) I thought of the boys, Charlie and Edgar, so like each other in appearance with their high foreheads, their air of refinement, their vulnerability, but so different in their temperaments. I had met the American boy on my first visit to Stoke Newington, the day I had first seen Sophia Frant, and he seemed, albeit unconsciously, to have acted as the proximate cause of much that had happened. He had brought David Poe into my life, and without David Poe I would not have become entangled with the Carswalls and the Frants.

  I was also aware of an underlying layer of anxiety in my mind, which reminded me of something. After another half-inch of the cigar, I had fixed the memory like a butterfly with a pin: I had felt this way in the days before Waterloo: then, as now, there had been a sense of foreboding, of disaster drawing ineluctably closer. The difference was this: then I had known the nature of the impending catastrophe; now I did not.

  Ayez peur, I thought. Ayez peur. Perhaps the quack’s parrot was wiser than it knew.

  All at once, my mind was jolted away from these aimless but gloomy reflections. A long narrow triangle of yellow light appeared in the wall of the house’s modern wing beyond the shrubbery, almost opposite my window but several feet lower. The heavy curtains were moving. The triangle of light widened still further and a figure carrying a candle slipped through the gap into the narrow space between curtains and glass. The left hand cupped the flame and concealed its owner’s identity. All of a sudden, the window embrasure was neither one thing nor the other, as equivocal as a proscenium. It seemed to me as though I were in a box overlooking the pit of a darkened theatre.

  The curtains swung back behind the figure; the hand lifted, and I saw a woman standing there, as unfamiliar and as vividly unreal as an actress on a stage. She wore a dressing gown of patterned silk, and red-gold hair flowed to her shoulders. She set down the candle on the sill and took something made of silver from the pocket of the gown. She stood there, facing the window and staring straight at me, and began to brush her hair. Her movements were languorous as though she were stroking herself. The front of the gown fell open, and I saw the nightdress beneath, with its low-cut neck.

  I doubted that Miss Carswall could see me but I knew that the performance was for me, just as I knew that Mrs Frant, waking or sleeping, was in the room on the other side of the curtains. My mind filled with unchaste thoughts. They say that redheads are lubricious. Here, it seemed, was ample confirmation: Miss Carswall was revealing herself to me, and deriving pleasure from the knowledge that I was watching, and perhaps also from the fact that Sophie was a few yards away from her.

  The snow continued to drift down into the yard. My mouth was dry, my breathing shallow. I hardly noticed how cold I was becoming, or that my cigar had gone out. At last, Miss Carswall slipped the brush back into the pocket and stood for a moment, gazing out. Slowly she shook her head, and the movement made her hair ripple and sway above her shoulders. Her lips parted. She smoothed her nightdress against her body, against the swell of her bosom.

  She dropped me the ghost of a curtsey, picked up the candle and slipped through the gap in the curtains to the room beyond.

  53

  The snow had stopped by morning, and the sky was a hard, brilliant blue. Though the main thoroughfares of the city soon turned to chilly brown slush, most of the snow remained a pristine white, so bright it seemed to possess its own inner illumination. For an hour or two the world lost its familiarity.

  We ate our breakfast in the private parlour. There was, Mr Carswall announced, no question of returning to Monkshill-park today. John coachman believed the road would be perfectly safe, but John coachman was a fool. Miss Carswall was in complete agreement with her father, not least because she wished to make a number of purchases.

  “I daresay Sir George and the Captain will come and see how Mrs Johnson does,” she added with a little laugh. “And perhaps, if there is time, I might see the property Uncle Wavenhoe left me.”

  “Aye, why not?” said her father. “There is the inn, of course, and a small brewery adjacent, together with a row of cottages.”

  When Miss Carswall talked so blithely of her inheritance, I noticed that Mrs Frant stared at her plate, and her lips were compressed. It was unfeeling in her cousin to talk so: had it not been for that strange scene at Mr Wavenhoe’s deathbed, the legacy would have been Mrs Frant’s; though perhaps it might have been hers only to vanish in the collapse of Mr Frant’s fortunes.

  They had hardly cleared the table when there came a tap on the door and Sir George and Captain Rui
spidge were announced. They asked after their cousin.

  “She is still asleep,” said Miss Carswall. “My maid is watching over her. I looked in a moment ago. She woke in the night and was restless, and we gave her a dose of laudanum shortly before dawn.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder if she was afflicted with an inflammation of the brain,” Mr Carswall said. “It can strike with great suddenness.”

  The Ruispidge brothers said everything that was fitting about Mrs Frant’s and Miss Carswall’s kindness to their unfortunate cousin. Then they and the Carswalls were free to discuss the ball, and to agree how delightful it had been. Mr Carswall described several games of whist in perhaps excessive detail to an audience that dwindled to Mrs Lee dozing by the fire. Captain Ruispidge sat by Mrs Frant, and talked with her in a low voice. Sir George and Miss Carswall moved away from the group at the fire and sat beside a window. I overheard fragments of their conversation, which suggested that he was outlining to her his plans to endow a village school, to be run on strict religious principles. Miss Carswall listened to him with every appearance of delighted attention; she was not a woman who did things by halves.

  A little later, Mr Carswall was shocked to discover that Lady Ruispidge intended to drive back to Clearland-court with Mrs Johnson later in the day. “Quite apart from the inclement weather, my dear sir, what of Mrs Johnson’s health?”

  “She will be far better off at Clearland,” Sir George said. “Besides, we have trespassed on your kindness long enough.”

  Miss Carswall clasped her hands. “Will you and Captain Ruispidge return with her?”

  Sir George’s long, bony face re-arranged itself into a smile. “I think not. Indeed, my brother and I were hoping we might prevail on you and Mr Carswall – and Mrs Frant, of course, and Mrs Lee – to dine with us.”

  “We will be just ourselves, a family party,” the Captain put in, smiling winningly at Mrs Frant. “If you do us the honour of accepting, you need have no scruples about the propriety of it.”