The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  ‘The horses shouldn’t rest too much, or they will chill,’ Castle-ford said briskly. ‘Fine prospect, don’t you think?’

  ‘Very fine,’ Stokes said. ‘It will surely do the horses no harm to rest a moment or two longer. I was not thinking, I admit, of their welfare when I proposed a pause in our furious flight. You ride like a highwayman, Castleford.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Castleford said politely, not saying what he thought of Stokes’s riding. ‘You could see all the way to Leintwardine steeple if the weather were clearer. It promises to be set for fine, however.’

  Stokes bent down stiffly in his borrowed tight boots and breeches. ‘You know I am no countryman,’ he said, picking at a little purple flower. ‘What is this called, now?’

  ‘Ah,’ Castleford said, inspecting what looked to Stokes like a trefoil purple buttercup. ‘That, I think, is what the common people call Robin’s-root.’

  ‘And this?’ Stokes pointed at a clump of a vivid, yellow-spiked shrub.

  ‘My nurse used to call it maids’-bane,’ Castleford said. ‘Still does, I dare say – she lives on yet, brewing up roots in a damp old cottage in Maddendale. Maids’-bane – yes, I think so – if not that, then something very much like it. But I dare say you would prefer something in botanical dog Latin, in which case neither I nor my old nurse can help you. A pretty thing, though, don’t you think?’

  Stokes relapsed into silence, having no views on the subject; it was the sort of conversation for which he maintained a private word. He called it baggling, to himself, and he carried on these small inquiries about small dull things for the sake of conversation over dinner, out riding, whenever trapped with people he did not know well. All that baggling; it was better than talking, and Stokes was satisfied that in carrying it on, he was doing his duty, and when Stokes asked a dull fellow about the most desirable itinerary to follow around the northern Lakes, the name of a vulgar little flower, or encouraged a stupidly talkative duchess to recount the plot of some currently fashionable novel, he was satisfied that they were delighted with his company, and had no doubt that he had hidden his contempt for them beyond their powers of perception. He was quite satisfied with his baggling at this point, but there was none further to be had out of this untenanted landscape, unless he was to start asking Castleford what the common people around these parts called the grass, the earth, the sky.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Stokes said, in response to a raised eyebrow from Castleford, and with a tinge of envy watched the fellow swing himself easily onto his horse. It was one of those clear, bright, country mornings which anyone, even Stokes, could see could be made to sound idyllic, a perfect morning for riding over the bare bright hills. For Stokes, in his borrowed breeches, on his borrowed horse, painfully aware of his pinching tight boots, the idyll and the pleasure were there to be observed, and he could see that the landscape and the air were beautiful, in much the same way that he could see the joy and excitement in Castleford’s shining riding face. The pleasure was there, and Stokes could see it, a round golden thing, just out of his reach.

  ‘Castleford, my dear fellow,’ he said, squinting against the sun. ‘Let us confess that you are a more dashing horseman than I. Do not flatter me; let us see things as they truly are. If I keep up with you, then I ride in most abject terror of my life; if you ride at my pitiful pace, there can be no enjoyment in it for you, and your horse grows impatient. Let us ride at our own pace, and meet at Leintwardine steeple – Leintwardine, you said? – in an hour or so.’

  Castleford was clearly torn. ‘Very good of you, old man,’ he said finally from his height. ‘Awfully dull for you, though, to be deprived of company?’

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ Stokes said. ‘I am such a dull fellow in the saddle, I should get on better alone. And I perceive you long for a hard ride, and I am depriving you of your pleasure. Let me ride at my own pace, and we shall meet in an hour – an hour?’

  ‘Very good of you,’ Castleford said. ‘If you ride in the same direction, you will see Leintwardine steeple before long. Well, don’t let the grey rest too long, or she will stiffen up.’

  And Castleford was off, his coat-tails flapping, like a man with a coach to rob. Stokes watched him go, and presently mounted the mare and set off at a mild aching trot as his host receded into a furious buzzing atom, diving up and down over the little hills.

  Stokes was not a great countryman, and it was only his inability to think of any reason to refuse the invitation which had led him to come down with Castleford to his sister’s house. He had been there for four days, and thought he would shortly go mad with the dullness of these country days. There was no prospect of being left alone in the library, nor of having a moment alone with his papers to continue work on his book. At every dank corner of Mrs Doughty’s house lurked a lady, eager to waylay him with the same question, endlessly repeated. ‘I believe you write, Mr Stokes?’ Not at the moment, thanks to your solicitous attentions, Stokes felt like answering. But he had contrived to produce a series of polite responses for four days now, and patiently to meet the expansively-expressed regret of his fellow guests that they had not heard of him, or read any of his books (‘But, madam, I have written none,’ he had said); to hear the interesting information that his new friend, indeed, could not describe herself as a great reader with the appearance of equanimity. It was the realization, which always struck him at this point in his occasional forays into the country, that there was no escape from this crowd of inquisitors, that led him to accept Castleford’s invitation to ride. At the moment, in the middle of a cold morning, aching all over, the idea of sitting in a library and allowing himself to be insulted by the most ignorant and foolish of the denizens of the house seemed almost agreeable. The worst of the torments, of course, was the certainty of ignorance: the unpleasant sensation, as he looked now at the landscape, that he would not know whether he was looking at hops or barley or wheat, that he did not know the names of flowers, could not discourse knowledgeably on the merits of horses or distinguish breeds of sheep at a glance. It was not that he particularly wished to possess these apparently universal skills; but it was disagreeable to be reminded constantly of what in normal circumstances he would not think of, that in this world, he was considered almost abnormally lacking in the most commonplace knowledge. Behind all these thoughts, of course, there was the idea of returning to London, but, much as Stokes longed to return, he had made a pact with himself that he would stick it out, and what honour he possessed forbade him from reneging on that.

  The country had seemed quite bare of habitation, but as he rode over the next hill, something unexpected came into view, a mile or two to the west. It was what seemed to be a park, wooded, set low down in a dip; a curious place to build a house, and Stokes reflected that it must suffer greatly from the damp. It seemed quite out of place in this landscape; there was nothing to be seen in any other direction until you got to Leintwardine, and someone, once, had decided to wall a stretch of land about, to grow a picturesque wood and set a house at the centre of it. Stokes paused for a moment, looking at it. What it was, he had no idea; a still, undisturbed palace lay at the centre, he was sure, but nothing could be seen. He hesitated, thinking of Castleford riding at full tilt towards Leintwardine, but then, decisively, he wheeled the horse about, and turned towards the odd little park. To view a curious old house would be just the thing; to see something out of the ordinary, to have a tale to tell over the interminable dinner. Castleford would wait an hour or two, and he rode, not quite knowing what he should find there.

  2.

  Depending on how you counted, Queen’s Acre had between forty and seventy rooms. Some of the upper sixties, it is true, could not be entered, so full were they of the detritus of previous generations, and, whatever their size, were best regarded as lumber rooms. Fifty usable rooms, then. Bella lived in four. The rest of the rooms were shrouded in darkness, and nine-tenths of the house kept locked up against the unimaginable day of a ball, a great house par
ty, against the day when someone should come to call. It never happened, and Bella lived peacefully in her four rooms, going from her chamber to her drawing room to a little library. When the weather was fine, she walked in the park, but went no further than that. Whether there was anyone to call on, she hardly remembered; she had never been a great rider, and now, ‘with her years and size doubled’, it seemed an unlikely sort of idea. Bella and the seven steady old horses in the stables stayed inside, munching contentedly, not troubling each other’s placid lives. At first, two years before, she had lived here as her father had lived here, with the whole huge house kept open, the fourteen unused bedchambers aired and ready. But soon, she stopped moving far from her suite of rooms, lost interest in what might lie at the far ends of the house, and gave orders over the course of a few months for the house to be shut up, part by part; the Prince’s rooms, first (one distant Garraway had been proud of his friendship with a Prince of Wales, no one could ever agree which one). The chapel next, to the housekeeper’s mild disapproval. The white and gold music room (her grandfather’s wedding present to his new wife) was shut up, and the loose-strung harp muted in unseen dust. The library next, once Bella had had removed what she would ever need, the damp old nursery suites, the long gallery with its long-faced ancestors, and then the bedrooms, one by one, starting with the most distant, damp and unusable, and finally her father’s, and Harry’s old chambers. All shut up, forgotten, dreaming. The ballroom was closed last; for a long time, Bella liked to go down there and sit in the vast Adam acres. It held no memories for her, no romance; they had never held a ball there, and the grand dark room seemed to hold possibilities. The rest of the house was nothing if not historical; this, for a time, had felt more like a future. But in the end, she saw that she had no use for this either, and had it locked. The four rooms were all she needed, and she hung their Chinese-papered walls with paintings of green unpeopled landscapes.

  It was not a convenient house, nor a famous one, nor – in the eyes of most judges – a beautiful one. It was merely extremely old and untidy. It had been built, incomprehensibly, so low down in a hollow of the landscape that it would have been damp even without the inexplicable addition of a moat. A cold caught at Queen’s Acre proverbially lasted a week longer than one caught in the healthier air of Leintwardine. The only advantage it drew from its position was that it could not be seen until the rider was almost upon it, and the house slept undisturbed. Most of the house was of Queen Elizabeth’s time, with all the lightless boxy proportions and eccentric adornments that implies; there were parts of it somewhat older than that, and still less usable. Bella’s bold grandfather had attempted improvements, and the improved taste of his day had done its best to bring light and grace into the house, with a great deal of gilded plasterwork and airy windows which, however, still had to open on no very remarkable vista. It was elegant, but not noticeably successful; the awkward and untutored shapes of the rooms could not be altered, and the original grotesque dark picturesqueness had, Bella imagined, been sacrificed without gaining a great deal in return. Whether through motives of disappointment with his improvements, or for more bluntly pecuniary reasons, Bella’s grandfather had stopped short of his original grand plan, and the gardens remained in their preposterous symmetry, geometrical and ugly, admired by no one and loved only by Bella. Her father, the despair of the agent, had done nothing; the only sign that he had lived here were his additions to the library, and a box of grandiose plans to transform the house into a Gloucestershire version of the Regent’s Pavilion at Brighton, never fulfilled or seriously contemplated.

  No one came here. Every other house entertained a steady stream of supplicants; the itinerant and unhoused who roamed the country left Queen’s Acre alone. Anywhere else, men were always turning up at the kitchen door with their look of desperation and unnecessary trades. But no one appeared at Queen’s Acre, offering to mend the clocks, or sharpen the household knives. It was too far out of the way, and buried out of sight, and the only mendicants who found their way here were the most lost and despairing of their breed. The country neighbours knew of it, of course, but no one much had visited since the old Colonel’s father’s day. It was too inconvenient to reach, too uncomfortable, and its inhabitants led so very quiet a life that the gentry hereabouts assumed, correctly, that they had no taste for company. It slept on, without annoyance or disturbance, much as it had done for three centuries.

  Bella’s days were simple, and undisturbed, and the very few people who lived here existed in a small way. The household matters were few, now that the house was sealed up, and her needs were served by a staff of five. There were no decisions to be made, it seemed; or perhaps the housekeeper and the agent now did as the gardeners did, and made decisions as they thought best, and did not trouble her. It was all for the best, now. She, absorbed in her new life, assumed that her servants disapproved of her mildly, that they would rob her in small ways, but would organize the life of her little warren in a manner which left her in peace, and that would be best, all things considered. Her life had shrunk to what she deserved, and she was happy; she must, surely, be happy, since she never considered the matter, and if they did not even trouble to consult her over her dinner, she ate whatever the cook sent up placidly, like a child. She had lived like this for two years now, and there was no reason why she should ever live in any other way. There was no one to see her here, and she lay on the sofa and read novels quite early in the morning, with a diminishing sense of wrongdoing.

  A visitor at Queen’s Acre was a rare occurrence, and the housekeeper watched the approach of a solitary rider towards the house with considerable curiosity. From the upper window, Mrs Bruton could see that he sat awkwardly in the saddle, and bounced up and down like a townsman. Poor beast, she thought, thinking of the horse, and, gathering up her mending, went down to see what the man could want here. By the time she reached the little stone bridge over the moat, the man was dismounting and looking about disconsolately for a groom to take charge. He was in his middle years, pink and balding, and entirely unfamiliar to her; it was difficult to suppress a smile of amusement at his elaborate urban bow in her general direction.

  ‘A handsome house, madam,’ the fellow said. ‘If you would be so good – I have a great interest in these old houses – it would give me great pleasure to see over it. My name is Stokes, madam.’

  Mrs Bruton nodded, agreeably. She supposed that some letter had preceded the fellow; it was so difficult to know, and as far as she knew, it might be lying unattended to by the agent, on madam’s escritoire, or even dropped, unheeded, in the jar in the kitchen where the cook tended to put anything which the outside world supplied. Such a request had not been heard at Queen’s Acre for some years, and though the housekeepers of more celebrated houses might have had a practised routine for gentlemen touring the county, she was not quite certain what to show this visitor with his sour London face and – all too apparently – in someone else’s breeches. Still, she was fond of the old house, odd and ugly though it might seem, and much as she enjoyed complaining about all the twisting staircases and the terrible winter damp. It would do no harm to have a diversion from darning for an hour or so. She fished her immense bunch of keys from her wicker basket, and, goutily limping, led Stokes through the arch into the courtyard.

  The housekeeper seemed dirty and unfriendly to Stokes, in whose imagination all housekeepers of country houses were clean, practical and cheerful. If her appearance was disappointingly unrosy, and her apron not, as Stokes’s beliefs required, clean and crisp and white, she also proved disgracefully unwilling to enlarge garrulously on the family. In Stokes’s opinion, a housekeeper ought to be extraordinarily loyal, and to need no encouragement to chatter about the virtues and kindnesses of the young masters and mistresses of the house. In the novelist’s part of his mind, he was already wondering what place there might be at poor languishing Marplot Manor for a far more satisfactory example of the breed, and as they entered the house through
a narrow stone door, he was already constructing the beginnings of a little story wherein Lady Belinda’s old retainer might demonstrate a series of splendidly subordinate virtues. Life, he thought savagely, has far too few heroines, all in all, and was already cursing what promised to be another wasted hour, far from civilization.