Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

*

  Standing in the crowd opposite the church, George Braithwaite was perplexed to see little evidence of grief around him. Even in the worst of the Chartist troubles the shooting of a peer or magistrate would have been deemed an appalling outrage, but here, although some people were clearly shocked, a sizeable minority had evidently come only to see the soldiers and the multitude of carriages blocking the main street. The shops and inns being shut as a mark of respect, many people had brought food and drink with them in case, should the proceedings be drawn-out, they might miss any part of them. For those less provident, piemen and hot-potato sellers were at hand.

  George listened to the tolling of a single muffled bell. On the opposite side of the street a troop of the 17th Lancers was drawn up behind a coffin draped in the Union Jack and resting on a gun-carriage. Thinking of the magnificent uniformed horseman riding across the churchyard on polling day, George felt a numbing sadness. Goodchild had taken his father’s money, while despising him, but George could not find it in him to remember him with bitterness. His weaknesses had redeemed him. He had not been invited to the funeral, but George had still decided to pay his respects, as much as a farewell to his own old life as a tribute to the dead man. His hopes of marrying Catherine gone, and his relations with his father no longer cordial, George had made up his mind to leave the town as soon as he could buy into a suitable infantry regiment – after the terrible scene in Horsefair, he no longer had any desire to be a cavalry officer.

  Bare-headed among the villagers, George watched the family carriages stop outside the lych-gate. The crowd had become silent, and apart from the occasional pawing of hoofs and the funeral bell, the loudest noise was made by the road-sweeper’s shovel as he passed behind the soldiers’ horses disposing of the dung. At a command from an officer, whom George recognised as Goodchild’s adjutant, Ferris, six troopers heaved the lead-lined oak coffin from its platform and carried it through the lych-gate towards the church, led by a subaltern with his black plumed shako under his arm. As the procession of mourners moved towards the arch, George heard the Rector of Flixton’s sharp nasal voice rise above the murmurs of the crowd:

  ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live….’

  George turned away and walked pensively towards his phaeton. Titled, handsome, rich, at least to start with, married to an acknowledged beauty … and yet unhappy. George derived no consolation from this reflection. If Goodchild had failed to gain even a part of what he had desired, how much more unlikely that those less favoured would do so either.

  *

  After the first part of the service, Helen saw the coffin taken from the church and placed in an ornately carved hearse, surmounted by trembling black plumes and drawn by four black horses with feathers at their heads. While a coronet was being fixed in place on the black velvet pall, substituted for the Union Jack, a woman broke away from the crowd and before anybody could stop her, had kissed the side of the coffin. She turned to go but was grasped firmly by a coachman. A buzz of excitement and laughter rose from the crowd. Out of the corner of her eye, Helen was appalled to see Dr Carstairs coming towards them.

  ‘Let her go,’ she cried with an urgency and authority that impelled obedience. Released, the woman stared at Helen from behind her veil, and her tear-stained cheeks and anguished sleepless eyes cut Helen to the heart with their hatred and reproach, which said more clearly than words: ‘What did you ever care for him?’ A moment later, Carstairs, giving no sign that he recognised Helen, led his wife away. The incident was over in a few seconds, but after it Helen felt a tight choking feeling in her chest and her head swam as if she were about to faint; Captain Ferris took her arm and helped her into her carriage. Against the white facings of his uniform his face glowed scarlet. Although neither he nor Helen said anything, both were perfectly aware that the other knew the strange woman’s identity and her former relationship to the dead man.

  While the hired undertaker’s ‘mutes’, with their long mourning coats and black staves, lined up on each side of the hearse, Helen sat alone behind the drawn blinds of her carriage and wept. The endless condolences she had received from Harry’s relatives and their compliments about her courage had sickened her before, but now the thought of their repetition was unendurable, and her crape flounces and heavy black bombasine dress seemed even more hypocritical than she had previously thought them. She imagined herself throwing open the carriage door and screaming hysterically that she did not care and had wanted to leave him; that she could not go on acting out a bereavement she did not feel because her husband had loved and been loved, and she had neither been the donor nor the recipient of that love. What right had she to pretend grief, when another woman was consumed with real sorrow? It took ten minutes to assemble the cortège, and during that time she recovered sufficiently to submit to what was expected of her. When Humphrey got in beside her, she was quite calm again.

  *

  In spite of what many people considered a forbidding manner, Sir James Crawford was not without a wry sense of humour; and it had always amused him that Goodchild’s grandfather’s vanity had so far surpassed his dread of dying that he had built his final resting place on a prominent rise, so that its copper dome and tall pillars could be seen across the lake from every window on the south side of the house – the eye being drawn to it inexorably by an ornamental bridge and a commemorative obelisk on the far side of the water. Sir James was soon to see that aesthetic considerations had so outweighed practical ones, that a well-made road had never been built; and this omission made access to the mausoleum a difficult matter, especially when several days of heavy rain had followed a thaw, as was the present case. Although the ditchers had worked hard to drain and sand the track, the hearse still became bogged down near the obelisk, and again on the final slope up to the mausoleum.

  Before their destination had been reached, Sir James and Charles, like many of the mourners, had been forced to leave their carriages and walk. By then the black silk stockings of the undertaker’s men were splattered with mud and their case-hardened professional gravity had been replaced by surly and discontented looks.

  Sir James had reached Leaholme Hall only two days before the funeral and had been stunned to learn about Goodchild’s death, but some of the sting had been removed by Charles’s remarks about the late peer’s failings as a husband. Sir James had been very fond of Helen as a girl and young woman. Her father had been a close friend of his, until his death at the battle of Navarino, an action in which Crawford had also fought. It had been ironic, given his disapproval of the young Lord Goodchild, so recently come into his title, that Helen had first met her future husband while staying with her godfather at Leaholme Hall.

  Built to defy time, in just under a century the stonework of the mausoleum had been so eroded by wind and rain that it already had a crumbling and leprous air. Tall iron railings stopped cows getting in from the neighbouring fields, and a low wall and paved surround kept the grass and nettles at bay. The building was circular and on two levels: a chapel above, the burial vault below. Descending into the damp chilling darkness of the vault, with its man-sized niches – enough to contain generations of Goodchilds – Sir James shivered. The place looked like a giant’s uncared-for wine-cellar. Only some half-dozen of the holes had been bricked up. There was no piped gas, and what light there was came from flaming torches in wall-brackets.

  The comicality of the bogged-down carriages and the strangeness of the vault had to some extent saved Sir James from dwelling upon the family’s loss, but when he saw Humphrey’s grimly pursed lips, trembling with the effort of repressing tears, Crawford was agonised – and not only by this present image of grief. Through his mind passed another procession: the dead he had known and loved, his wife among them. Remembering her, he had to struggle not to shed tears of his own. The fatherless boy also made him think of his own children, alone in England, their mother dead, and he as usual serv
ing abroad. And had duty and ambition finally justified that sacrifice? Rear-Admiral of the Blue at fifty-four and no prospect of further advancement – his life a brief foot-note in naval history. He glanced at Charles, whose calm face reassured him; yet, recalling Magnus’s rebelliousness and Catherine’s present unmarried state, he could not escape a shaming feeling of remorse for having thought so much of his career. If Charles married, he would advise him, whenever ashore, to devote as much time as he could to his children; in his case the opportunity had passed almost, it seemed, before he had known it was there.

  As the bearers approached the niche appointed to receive Harry’s corpse, Helen managed to dispel her fears for the future. The red glow of the torches, the lingering shadows and echoing footsteps in the macabre ‘gothic’ atmosphere of the vault – itself so much a creation of the previous century rather than their own – made it seem the perfect setting for Harry’s funeral. Like this building, he too had been an anachronism, belonging more to the age of pig-tails and Hessian boots, sedan chairs and prize fights than to the more staid and pious 1850s. She remembered him telling her with pride how he had once got up on the box and driven the Brighton stage-coach to London the entire fifty-two miles. And now, with the railways supreme, the last three or four stage-coaches in the country would soon be gone. It was not sentimentality or nostalgia that moved her, but the thought that if she had not married Harry, she would have liked him. She would have enjoyed his stories of Crockford’s and relished their humour, if she had not been involved with his debts; so too with many of his other activities. She glanced at the niche next to her husband’s, and knew that, unless she married again, the day would come when she would lie there, divided from him in death, as in life, by a wall. A moment later she was surprised to find herself silently crying.

  Charles Crawford could not see Helen’s face through her veil, but he noticed her shoulders moving slightly, and smiled inwardly, impressed at the way she was acting out the part of grief-stricken and disconsolate widow. The idea that her sorrow might be genuine did not cross his mind; but her hypocrisy did not disturb him; being a convinced conformist, he liked to see the proper moods and feelings conscientiously displayed on the right occasions; that Helen could summon up grief to order, seemed to him praiseworthy rather than reprehensible.

  Since Goodchild’s death, Charles had found it impossible to suppress a stirring of new hope. He alone, of all the people in the vault, would know about her true feelings for her late husband. His very presence at this private burial was surely a clear indication that later she would once again confide in him. Because of the press of mourning relatives at Hanley Park, Charles had delayed calling on her as deliberate policy. But now he regretted this. Two days after Goodchild’s death an unwelcome communication had arrived from the Admiralty requiring him to appear as a witness at a dock-yard inquiry into the loss of Euryalus, his last ship, which had sunk, not under his command, but later during sea trials, following her conversion to steam. He could not very well go to Hanley Park in the week after the funeral, and therefore could not expect to see her before the New Year, since the inquiry would be sure to last until the middle of December, by which time Helen would have left to spend Christmas with relatives.

  As the priest said: ‘We therefore commit his body to the grave,’ the bearers removed the pall and coronet and slid the coffin forward; the wood grating unpleasantly on the rough stone. Charles saw Helen handed a silver trowel, not, he thought irreverently, unlike a cheese scoop in shape. It was evidently filled with earth or ashes. At the words: ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ she tipped the trowel’s contents onto the lid of the coffin with a hollow pattering sound. Charles gazed at her and felt his heart beat faster. When the New Year came he would renew his quest in earnest. His enforced absence might even prove to his advantage, since she would not be able to accuse him of unseemly haste. This time, he thought, nothing will deter me. Nothing, he murmured under his breath as she passed him a few feet away.

  Five minutes later the mourners emerged thankfully in the open air, coughing with the smoke of the torches, which had also served to make their eyes water befittingly. Being downhill, the journey back to the house was accomplished without difficulty, at an almost unseemly speed.

  17

  On the morning after Lord Goodchild’s funeral, Magnus Crawford threw open the shutters of his room at the Bull Hotel and looked down into the stable-yard. In the distance he could hear the notes of a key-bugle and then the approaching clatter of a post-chaise on the uneven paving. The activity of the posting-house pleased and consoled him. People coming and going, children throwing stones into the horse-trough, the post-boys getting ready fresh pairs of horses, ostlers and waiters running out to attend to new arrivals – everyday life continuing as though the election had never taken place. In this atmosphere of bustling normality, Magnus had been able to think of the future without so many regrets for the past.

  For three days after the election he had been laid up as a result of his unwise exertions on polling day. Too weak and ill to face the coach journey back to Leaholme Hall, he had stayed on at the Bull, assuring Catherine and Charles that he was being well looked-after and would return home by the end of the week. But before that, he heard that his father had returned, and knowing very well the account Charles would probably have given of his recent doings, Magnus had decided to delay confronting his father until his plans for the future were more fully formed.

  Since he had gone down from Oxford without taking a degree, the recognised professions were closed to him; nor did he have any wish to return to the army or the colonial service. Short of becoming a drudging business clerk, journalism seemed not just the best, but probably the only possible occupation for him. In Ceylon he had opened his campaign against the governor with a series of anonymous letters to the Colombo Gazette from ‘A Serving Officer’, and had written additional eye-witness accounts of courts martial and executions: one of which had aroused particular revulsion. The officer in charge, to amuse the firing squad, as Magnus had put it, had placed the condemned men on top of wine casks, so they could be knocked down by the bullets like rag-dolls in a fairground shooting-gallery. Magnus had suggested that, if the Foreign Secretary was prepared, when it suited him, to send the fleet to Piraeus to protect the commercial interests of a Spanish Jew living in Athens, simply because the man had been born in Gibraltar and was therefore entitled to a British subject’s rights of protection, the British Government should have been more attentive to the rights of native British subjects in Ceylon. Whether well-written or not, the effect of these articles and letters had been considerable. Magnus’s recent dealings with the Rigton Independent, although not journalistic, had nevertheless made him aware that, if during the past weeks he had had access to the columns of a national daily newspaper, he could have done far more to influence the course of the election than could ever have been achieved by direct action. With the predicted abolition of the newspaper tax, cheaper papers would be certain to increase the power of the press. These reflections had made Magnus feel less fatalistic than he had done immediately after his humiliation. Uncertain whether he would succeed, he knew at least how he intended to begin. He would try to interest the monthlies in a series of descriptive pieces, which would make an asset of his status as a gentleman and former officer. No gentleman, as far as he knew, had ever worked as a railway navvy or stayed in slum lodging houses and then written about the experience from a gentleman’s point of view; surprise, genteel disapproval and comparisons with his own way of life, all serving to underline the upper classes’ woeful ignorance of the conditions in which the mass of people lived and worked. If these articles aroused the interest he hoped they would, Magnus believed that he would in time be offered more influential employment from the editors of daily papers.

  During his days of recovery and reflection at the Bull, Magnus had also been forced to acknowledge how much he had come to value Tom Strickland’s company. When
he had been in too much pain to return to Leaholme Hall, he had been surprised and touched that Strickland had been concerned enough about his condition to remain in Rigton Bridge beyond the date he had previously set for his departure. Apart from his kindness, many other qualities attracted him to Tom: astuteness, a total inability and disinclination to conceal his changes of mood, times of irrepressible enthusiasm, often followed by periods of intense thoughtfulness, and above all a feeling that, like him, Strickland was prepared consciously to take great risks in the pursuit of an illusive goal. Magnus could not fathom precisely what he himself needed to do, but he knew that he could never accept the clearly defined aims of Charles or his father – their lives marked out with a map’s precision. With Tom, the lines were blurred and hard to read; like a pattern which could only be understood when completed; a life so open to change and incident, that nothing could finally be certain until the years had rolled back the entire design. Not having come from a background which demanded blind conformity to paternal expectation and social appearances, Strickland seemed free in a way which Magnus envied. Life in the army, the navy and the government service evidently meant no more to him than the habits of eskimoes and probably seemed no more important. Apart from liking him, Magnus’s sense that Tom possessed the key to another world made him determined not to lose his new friend when they went their ways from Rigton Bridge.

  *

  Unlike the Swan and the Green Dragon, the Bull had entirely retained its original character as a small posting-inn. The tavern parlour still had a sanded floor, and old men sat there at oak tables smoking clay pipes, on some evenings singing together. While potage à la bisque, turbot au gratin and cotelettes of this and that could be swilled down with St Emilion at the Swan, the Bull’s landlord stolidly kept to his beef-steaks and pints of port.