‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘If I were a man in your place I should find it very degrading!’
‘Well, I don’t,’ he said, ‘and I think I’ve got a good enough reason. After all, you came close to being the wife of the Squire so why should canvassing his successor seem so outrageous?’
She was smiling now and obviously had herself well in hand.
‘You’re a very extraordinary person, Mr Craddock! You appear straightforward, sometimes almost naïve, but you aren’t really! In fact, you’re a far more complicated person than you pretend to be!’
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘that being so or not I’m still sufficiently broad-minded not to resent local people like your stepmother trying their damnedest to marry me off! I suppose she regards it as her duty, like any other mamma, but I wouldn’t like her to fall into the error of imagining I’m a substitute for a person like Ralph Lovell. I know absolutely nothing about the life or the needs of the people about here. I took this place on an impulse so, without beating about the bush, I’ll ask you on impulse to think seriously of your stepmother’s intentions! I don’t find them presumptuous or even embarrassing. As a matter of fact I find them very exhilarating!’
He heard her catch her breath and the fact that she did not whip round on him, as he half-expected her to, gave him a moment to control the tension building inside him. Seeing that she made no kind of reply he went on, ‘I can say this not only because you obviously prefer candour but because I think I know rather more about you than you imagine, and I didn’t learn it all from Valley gossip!’
She was standing with her back to him, her hands resting on the balustrade, seemingly neither astonished nor embarrassed by what he had said but considering it in a mood that was at once defensive and offensive.
‘Whatever you know can’t be much more than guesswork,’ she replied, at length. ‘People usually make guesses about me—it’s all they can do. I’m an exceptionally private person!’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you are but you can’t hide everything. You can’t hide the fact that you find your present life pointless and the future very uncertain. I have a special qualification for recognising that much about you!’
‘And what qualification would that be?’
He hesitated. He was now so deeply committed that prudence, politeness even, seemed a worthless currency between them. ‘All my life I’ve been a very lonely person. I suppose I should have remained one if I hadn’t taken the plunge last June and staked everything I had on this place. Well, it was a gamble but it seems to me to have an even chance of coming off. Ever since my first evening here I’ve wanted very badly to talk to you like this but it didn’t seem possible without going through the rigmarole of calling and leaving cards. The point is, we’ve been lucky and found a short cut, so why don’t we use it? It isn’t reasonable to expect you to back your instinct as heavily as I’m prepared to back mine but you could tell me now if you are prepared to consider marriage.’
Suddenly he ran out of words, or words that did not sound fatuous. She faced him then, and he would not have been surprised if she had laughed in his face but she was not even smiling but looking at him with a kind of wonder.
‘My father lives by and for gambling,’ she said, ‘but he would never gamble on odds of this kind. What makes you want to take such a chance with your life?’
What indeed, he thought, regarding the loveliness of her skin and then, as though it was transparent, he could see her vulnerability and it stirred in him the same kind of compassion as that roused by the sight of the urchin Ikey in the boneyard but far deeper, and far more compelling. Yet all he said was, ‘You have a special kind of beauty for me but it’s not simply that. I honestly think I could make you happy. After all, you would have married Ralph Lovell without love, on his side or yours!’
‘Neither one of us had anything to lose. Why should you risk your happiness, or whatever you think you might achieve, for someone who is—well, bad luck to everyone?’
‘That’s nonsense,’ he said calmly, ‘a person’s luck is usually regulated by the amount of confidence they have in themselves.’
‘I doubt it,’ she said, ‘but even if it is so I’ve never had a very high opinion of myself, Paul. That doesn’t mean, however, that I haven’t been flattered by your proposal—if it is a proposal,’ and suddenly she smiled her small, secret smile.
‘It’s a proposal,’ he said stubbornly. ‘All I’m asking is that you should think about it whilst you’re away in London.’
‘I shall certainly do that,’ she said, emphatically, and then again, ‘Yes, I shall certainly do that! There’ll be very little else to think about.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘Some time before Christmas. Celia likes my father to hunt in December. He’d sooner back horses than ride them but Celia calls the tune in our ménage.’
There seemed very little more to be said so he took her arm and led her back to the pool of light outside the main entrance.
‘Then we’d best go in now,’ he said, ‘or Mrs Lovell will be wondering what I’ve done with you.’
‘She could compose herself, whatever it was,’ Grace said lightly, and stopping at the porch, asked, ‘You said—“a special kind of beauty”?’
‘Yes; for me.’
She considered this gravely as though conceding that he might have a point. ‘And you never proposed to anyone before?’
‘No,’ he said, laughing, ‘never, I’m afraid.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It was all very nicely managed,’ and as though rewarding an industrious little boy she placed her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes and kissed his cheek, softly and swiftly. It was more of a salute than a kiss, something about halfway between mistletoe mischief and a benediction.
White light from beyond Coombe Bluff came stealing across the stubble field moving steadily west and north, as though unsure of what it might find in the paddocks separated by the line of chestnuts in the drive. It touched the charred stubs of Roman candles and the rocket sticks, still sagging beside the bamboos alongside the box hedge and then moved along the façade of the house. Everyone had gone. The ruts in the forecourt gravel were the only evidence that, an hour or so earlier, the diehards had wheeled and stamped here and shouted their hoarse good-byes. Only one guest remained, Gregory, the Derwent foreman, who was sound asleep in the outhouse, beside Tamer Potter’s empty beer cask. Ikey, and the gardener’s boy Gappy Saunders, were snoring in their loft over the stable and even Walt Pascoe, now officially affianced to Pansy Potter, was walking home along the river road, congratulating himself on the final solution of his dilemma, for Pansy’s final words to him, as they parted at the foot of the Dell ascent, had been, ‘I’ll make ’ee comfortable, Walt! You can depend on it, midear!’, which seemed to him as honest a pledge as had ever been made in the Valley.
The Derwents were asleep, all four of them, even Claire, worn out with weeping, and so were all the Willoughbys, with Elinor satisfied with Will’s declaration, ‘Us’ll see Squire about that freehold zoon us have slept on it!’ Arabella Codsall had grumbled herself and Martin to sleep and Martha Pitts, who had returned home to the Hermitage after the fireworks, was already stirring in her sleep, as her fierce Plymouth Rock cockerel greeted dawn from the sty wall. Only one person was wide awake in the Valley and the wooded slopes enclosing it and he stood in the recessed window of the big Shallowford bedroom, in his shirt and dress trousers, looking south over the winding road that led across the ford to the Codsall fields, and the slender spire of Coombe Bay parish church. He was not thinking of the soirée as a whole but of its penultimate moment, when the Lovell gig had swept round the curve of the drive and Grace Lovell had looked back, lifting her hand as the fussy little equipage passed behind the line of chestnuts. There had been finality in the gesture, as though she had closed the first chapter of their association at the moment
of parting, but he was not uneasy, just tremulous and expectant. There would be other chapters, many of them, and all, he reasoned, would have more conclusive endings.
The white light became whiter and stronger over the Coombe, until the grey line of Shallowford Woods turned to green and russet where autumn was already thinning the oaks beyond Hazel Potter’s squirrel tree. Somewhere out there a single blackbird piped up and the Channel breeze, an unfailing escort for dawn in the Valley, came soughing over the stubble and shook down a dozen leaves from the red creeper underneath the window. Their soft undersides, Paul thought, were like the texture of her skin where it was taut under her small, pointed chin. It was a pleasant thought on which to draw the curtain. Before the breeze had lifted the last of the leaves from verge to terrace he too was asleep.
Chapter Seven
I
Looking back on the half year between his arrival at Sorrel Halt and his first Christmas at Shallowford, Paul came to view it as his probationary period, a first term at prep school. It had the same doubts and uncertainties, the same discoveries and testing strain on patience, fortitude and nerve. The coronation supper-dance was the climax but until then, until the moment of Grace Lovell’s wave from the disappearing gig, he had been tutored every step of the way. Throughout the early weeks Rudd had been there to hold his hand and when Rudd went away there had been Claire Derwent making light of his cares of office. It was when the tumult of the soirée was done and rhythm was restored to the big house that he was aware of the loneliness of power, for Rudd wrote saying he had slipped down a companion ladder attending a sherry party aboard a frigate and had cracked two ribs, an injury likely to immobilise him for another month, and Claire Derwent had disappeared from his life abruptly and completely. He sent Ikey over to High Coombe with a second message (the first having gone unanswered) and learned that she had left home a day or so after the ball and was likely to be away some time. The note returned by Rose was non-committal. It did not say where she had gone, or why, and its vagueness sent Paul grumbling to Mrs Handcock, complaining that the hunting season was upon them and that he had looked forward to some good sport with Gilroy’s Teazel and Sorrel Vale pack of hounds but everybody seemed to have decamped, Rudd to Portsmouth, Grace Lovell to London and Claire Derwent, who should have known better, to heaven knew where. Mrs Handcock was sympathetic. ‘Ah, theym a rare trapsey ole lot, Mr Craddock,’ she told him. ‘It warn’t zo in my young days. Us never stirred from the Vale, except mebbe to go once a year to Paxtonbury Market Fair or on a Sunday School treat, to Whinmouth. Now everyone rushes upalong and downalong to no purpose and if you ask me it all started wi’ they pedally machines.’ Mrs Handcock abominated the bicycle, refusing even to call it by its proper name for to her it signified the new era of restlessness in the Valley, promising an outcrop of reprehensible habits among the workshy, whom she said were multiplying with every local marriage. ‘No good’ll come of ’em, mark my words, sir!’ she would say, standing before him with hands on her enormous hips and sweat glistening on her forehead (for she was cook, as well as housekeeper, at Shallowford). ‘No good’ll be gleaned from they whizzing gurt things! A man’s got two legs, baint ’ee, an’ when theym too tired to carry un he’s got four, waiting for un in the stable! Zo where be the reason fer a blight o’ pedally machines about the plaace? Theym bad enough fer the men but the maids have taaken to riding ’em, showin’ all they’ve got! I’d zee my daughter dade bevore I allowed her to zit ’er rump on one!’
This was a safe threat for, although Mrs Handcock had been married for many years to the squat, bow-legged gardener, Horace, they were childless and she found consolation in a grotesquely exaggerated respect for her spouse, to whom she ascribed mysterious oracular powers. Most of her opinions stemmed from Horace, who rarely declaimed in public but hoarded his gems until he could bestow them upon Mrs Handcock, in the privacy of the housekeeper’s two rooms in the east wing. Paul alleviated his loneliness during the autumn days encouraging Mrs Handcock to recount some of her husband’s gloomier prophecies and was thus regaled with all manner of terrifying forecasts upon subjects as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm’s navy, submarine warfare, the future of the House of Lords, Irish Home Rule, women’s suffrage and, of course, the main threat to the social system, the pedally machine. He grew very fond of the stout, talkative old body and she spoiled him outrageously, the more so as Rudd, whom she revered almost as much as her husband, had been obliged to abandon him after such a brief apprenticeship.
During these days Paul began to take a more personal interest in his protégé, Ikey Palfrey, for he was impressed by the boy’s willingness and also by his considerable powers of mimicry, and cockney sense of humour. Sometimes, when he was waiting for Snowdrop in the yard, he would encourage Ikey to vary his Devon and London dockside repertoire with caricatures of Lord Gilroy, or Parson Bull, and even the solemn Chivers, who condemned ribaldry at the expense of the gentry. It struck him that Ikey Palfrey possessed unsuspected gifts of observation, and Paul wondered if the boy was not wasted in a provincial squire’s stable, and would benefit from such education as the Vale could provide. Accordingly, a week or so after the ball, he sent him to Mary Willoughby’s school and the result was a permanent alteration in Ikey’s routine. In the mornings he rode the house cob over to Deepdene, and in the afternoons and evenings resumed his work in the tack-room. Paul thought that Chivers, the groom, would disapprove but Ikey’s charm had already enlisted the goodwill of his superior and when, as upon hunting days, there was much to do, Chivers would rise an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later, in order to make sure that Ikey did not miss his schooling.
Ikey himself accepted the change reluctantly, considering himself finished with droning schoolmasters, free with the cane and the casual cuff, and now regarded himself as a wage-earning adult but after a day or so under the mild Mary Willoughby he reversed this opinion and thereafter he went willingly, enjoying the morning canter over Coombe Bluff, and along the edge of Shallowford Woods. Mary instilled into him an interest in lyrical poetry, in geography and in military history and loaned him books to take home and read in the light of a lantern in his hayloft. At first they were adventure books by authors like Ballantyne, Marryat and Henty but after she had loaned him The Count of Monte Cristo he became a very earnest reader and went on to tackle Dickens, Defoe and Scott, so that he could often be seen, to the astonishment of his loft-mate, Gappy Saunders, oiling saddles and polishing bits, with a book propped up in front of him on the tack-room table.
Until the third week in November, when hunting was in full swing, life was uneventful on the estate but towards the end of the month there was a flare-up in the smouldering Codsall-Willoughby feud, which erupted with unpleasant suddenness one, dismal morning when the Valley was draped in mist, and the ford ran high with the rush of streams draining into it from Blackberry Moor, Coombe Bluff and Priory Wood.
Paul was at work on his draft plan for the rebuilding of the Priory homestead, hoping to have the work in hand by the time Rudd came home, when Mrs Handcock ushered a shuffling Will Codsall into the office, introducing him with a sense of outrage for she had told him Squire was busy but he had demanded his rights as a tenant. The young man was dripping wet, having walked over from Deepdene Farm without a coat and his heavy hobnailed boots left a trail of mud on the way through the kitchen and hall to the office. Paul saw that he was agitated and told Mrs Handcock to bring in a towel, a dry jacket and a mug of cocoa, and the housekeeper retired, muttering ‘Youm var too zoft with ’em!’ but towel, jacket and cocoa soon arrived and when Will had drunk his cocoa and changed his coat he told Paul the reason for his urgency.
‘Me’n Elinor Willoughby are getting wed come Saturday, but tiz like there’ll be a rare ole bust-up at chapel,’ he said. ‘I reckon Mother’ll show up, shouting her objections, and Mr Willoughby, who’ll be marryin’ us, is in two minds whether to’ go through with it! Elinor, she’s back at Deepdene, crying her eyes
out, and me, well I reckon I bin druv too far and that’s a fact, Squire!’
He then recounted the story of his mother’s implacable opposition to the marriage, leading up to his dramatic exit from Four Winds, after smashing Arabella’s cuckoo clock. To Paul, who had managed to steer clear of Arabella Codsall except for his first visit to Four Winds, it seemed no more than a storm in a teacup and after pointing out that until Will was twenty-one his mother had a legal right to oppose the marriage, he asked if the couple could postpone the wedding until he was of age.
‘Ah, that’s what I reckoned on doing,’ Will said glumly, ‘’til I had more’n I could stomach an’ run out on her! But now us is in a right fix, for Deepdene won’t keep another mouth through winter and I reckon on havin’ to go abroad to find work. I can’t take my Elinor along, unless us is man an’ wife, an’ ’er won’t hear of me going backalong until I got me foot in a door somewhere!’
Paul had lived long enough in the Valley to differentiate between literal and local meanings of the word ‘abroad’. To Will Codsall ‘abroad’ meant anywhere outside a thirty-mile radius of Shallowford and to Elinor ‘backalong’ was as final and desperate a removal as emigration overseas. Paul glanced at the plan of the Priory freehold lying on his desk and a solution at once suggested itself.
‘Suppose I put you in the Priory freehold, Will?’ he said. ‘Do you think you could make a go of it? It’s no more than sixty acres, hardly enough to support a mixed farm like your father’s, or even the Willoughby’s but it would give you independence and I daresay you and Elinor could improve it.’
The young man’s eyes shone. ‘Well, sir, I had it in mind to come asking for that,’ he said, joyfully, ‘but us heard you meant to lump it in with the Pitts’ holding, at Hermitage.’
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 21
