Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Sam Potter heard the news from Aaron Stokes gathering reeds for thatching and Sam threw down his axe and ran at once to his cottage to tell Joannie. Sam was delighted. Ever since he had become a father himself he wished all men to be blessed with children, and neither had he forgotten young Squire’s generosity and lack of condescension when he had called at the cottage on the day little Pauline was born. He got out the crown piece Paul had given him on that occasion and swung it from the string to which it had been attached through a hole, drilled in Queen Victoria’s diadem. Joannie, a practical soul, said it was fortunate Pauline’s arrival had preceded the Squire’s marriage for had it not the christening gift might have been bestowed on one of his own children but Sam laughed at this, pointing out that young Squire possessed more crown pieces than he could spend in a lifetime, and that when an heir did make its appearance there would be junketings on an unprecedented scale and free beer for everyone in the Valley. He then replaced the medallion in its box on the mantelshelf, gave a gleeful imitation of his child’s gurgle and returned to work in the wood.

  Mrs Handcock, who surely should have been one of the first to hear, was in fact, one of the last, learning it from the lips of her own husband, Horace, when he was lying flat on his back in their double bed and she was struggling to free herself of her vast, whalebone corset. The act of undressing always occupied Mrs Handcock upwards of half-an-hour and during this period it was Horace’s custom to comment on life and the British Empire, with occasional snippets of local gossip gleaned from heaven knew where. His awareness of all that happened, or was about to happen, in the Valley was a source of reverent astonishment to his wife, and contributed in no small measure to her respect for him. He looked small and insignificant when he was in bed, with nothing but his bald head and side-whiskers showing above the coverlet but it was at these times that he was inclined to be more than usually oracular, staring up at the ceiling and giving her full benefit of his wisdom and logic. She still had nine hooks to free when he said, as casually as if he had been discussing compost, ‘You’ll have heard, no doubt, that Squire’ll be marrying Bruce Lovell’s girl before the daffodils be out?’ and she gave two yelps, one of surprise, and the other as her fingers slipped and she nipped a fold of flesh. He turned his mild gaze on her; ‘You mean you haven’t heard? You’ve been on top of un and baint put two and two together?’

  ‘I’ve heard no such thing,’ she said indignantly, ‘but I should ha’ said if ’er was marrying anyone it would ha’ been the Derwent maid!’

  ‘Then youm behindhand, considerably so,’ he told her. ‘Squire’ll wed the Lovell maid before you’ve time to bake a cake, and that’s a fact, so you may as well make up your mind to it!’ He did not need to look at her to know that his news had shocked her or that already, as she stood half-undressed, wrestling with her corset, she was boiling with uncertainty and resentment. This was understandable, he thought, for she was only a woman and therefore a fool, quite incapable of reasoning. Moreover, it pleased him that he had been the first to bring her the news for he was probably the only man in the world who could stem her panic.

  ‘Now dornee get in one of your ole tizzies, midear,’ he said, mildly, ‘for there baint a need! Taken all round tiz well for us tiz the Lovell maid an’ not the Derwent maid, because the Lovell maid, being a lady born, will be less likely to chase ’ee round than a varmer’s daughter brought up to work with her hands! Let your mind dwell on that for a spell and mebbe you’ll zee the zense in it!’

  ‘But it won’t be the same, Horace,’ she wailed, tearing at the last obstinate hook, ‘I’ve done for ’un ever zince he set foot in the Valley, and he’s no more’n a baby to be taking a wife an unsetting things like this!’ and she hurled the corset from her and burst into tears.

  ‘Babies grow up, and gets interested in young wimmin,’ said Horace, unmoved, ‘so thank your lucky stars he’s found someone who knows the plaace and not cottoned on one o’ them townees who would have brought her own housekeeper, along with her trousseau! Now put on your nightgown before you gets your death o’ cold woman, and take it from me we’m lucky it’s turned out as it has. The Lovell maid won’t be one to count the linen, nor look too closely at the tradesmen’s bills, I can tell ’ee that! You’ve had the ordering of the plaace all this time and you’ll have it yet, zo blow the bliddy candle out and go to sleep!’

  As always she was able to retreat under the mantle of his profundity and before she slept the worst of her alarms were stilled. She had been very happy mothering Paul, and before Paul, the widower, Rudd, and before Rudd the tetchy Sir George on the rare occasions he was in residence but Horace was right, of course. A mistress had to appear sooner or later, and it might, as he said, have been worse, for at least Grace Lovell, a lady born, would be likely to leave the ordering of the house to servants. Then another, happier thought comforted her. There would soon be children about the house and she would like that very much and she smiled to herself in the darkness, listening to Horace’s heavy breathing as she recalled the width of the Lovell maid’s hips, in an attempt to estimate her child-bearing capacity.

  The news reached Meg Potter when she was gathering herbs for her winter rheumatism cure. The Bagman, who had informed Martha Pitts, told her and passed on his way, leaving her to look for further enlightenment in the cards. Meg carried her cards everywhere, using them as a sailor uses a compass, or a stranger a signpost at crossroads. She now spread them on a beech stump, cutting, shuffling and recutting and three times out of five the face card that turned up was the Queen of Spades, Lady of Sorrow. This puzzled her, for she had gone to her cards on the day Paul Craddock first rode into the Dell and what they had told her had been very encouraging but today the turn up alternated between the Lady of Sorrow and the Knave of Diamonds, whom she recognised as her son Smut and no matter how often she reshuffled the result was the same. At last she gave it up, accepting the inevitable with the stoicism she brought to every turning-point in her life. There would be trouble in the Valley and soon it would involve the Lovell maid and Smut, in the proportion of about five to two. She went back to her herb collecting, wishing it could have been otherwise.

  Meg Potter had her cards and everyone else in the Valley had self-interest to guide them but John Rudd, the only one among them to hear the news direct from Paul, had no guide beyond a persistent niggle under his strapped-up ribs and the niggle told him approximately the same story as the cards told Meg. He could not have said why this should be so. He was a man who usually rationalised his prejudices and he reminded himself that, whereas everybody knew Bruce Lovell was a bad hat, nobody knew much about his daughter, except that her mother had drowned herself in a reservoir in India, years ago. He listened, sucking on his pipe, to Paul’s account of all that had taken place in the Valley during this absence, and could find it in him to admire the boy for his stand against Arabella Codsall and Lord Gilroy, but when Paul asked him outright what, if anything, he had against Grace Lovell he had had to choose between his niggle and his affection. He could not admit to a young man in love that he suspected a streak of madness in his darling’s veins or that for a woman to drown herself on account of a Lovell implied a fatal lack of balance on the female side. He had nothing but rumour and conjecture to reinforce his arguments, nothing more than a vague impression that Grace Lovell was bad luck. And now, as he stood leaning on the fence rails of the paddock watching the moon rise over the Bluff, he knew that he had deceived himself when he had assumed that Craddock’s arrival here, and the enthusiasm he brought with him, meant a permanent anchorage for himself. There could never be a safe anchorage with a Lovell in the Big House. As the soft, white light touched the shallows at the ford, John Rudd said to himself, impatiently, ‘Now who the hell am I to pour cold water on the boy? What gives me the right to advise him on a matter like this? He’s in love with a pretty face and a pretty figure and if he brings the same enthusiasm to his marriage as he’s brought to the Valle
y I daresay he’ll prove me a superstitious old fool!’ And hoisting himself from the rail he knocked out his pipe and went across to the lodge to bed.

  Chapter Nine

  I

  A marriage between strangers is an uncharted journey; Will Codsall knew his Elinor and Walt Pascoe his Pansy, before marrying them. Within certain limits, they knew what they could expect of them as cooks, housekeepers and bedfellows, and their brides were equally well primed, so that such surprises as they encountered had no power to astound them as Paul Craddock was astounded and delighted by Grace Lovell.

  The 8 a.m. ceremony at Paxtonbury Parish Church was so short and simple that Paul had some difficulty in realising that he was indeed married when they said goodbye to Celia and John Rudd after breakfast at The Mitre. There was no one else present to shake by the hand or kiss; no rice, no confetti, no jokes, no old shoes tied under the carriage that took them to the junction and thence, by the Cornish express, to London, where they stayed one night before travelling to Dover and catching the cross-Channel packet for Boulogne.

  Paul had asked her where she would like to spend the honeymoon and she had told him Paris, a city she had never visited although she was a seasoned Continental traveller and had stayed in several Belgian spas, sailed down the Rhine on a paddle steamer and spent several weeks beside the Swiss lakes. That was the first of his surprises but there were many more and they continued to explode at regular intervals, like the green and crimson rockets on the night of the soirée.

  He discovered, for instance, that she could speak fluent French, whereas he was obliged to grope for half-forgotten phrases from school text-books, and perhaps, if he had not been so much in love, her accomplishment would have dismayed him a little. As it was he listened with awe as she exchanged banter with porters, ticket collectors and the concierge at the sedate hotel which she had found for him off the Avenue des Capucines. Another source of amazement was her apparent familiarity with Parisian history. She took him to all kinds of out-of-the-way places connected with characters he had met in fiction or in encyclopaedias, and talked freely of people like Madame Roland, Catherine de Medici and Marguerite of Navarre. She hustled him off to an obscure little museum to show him the proclamation Robespierre had been signing when the Thermidorians burst in and put a term to the Terror. She told him whimsical ghost stories as they walked the gravelled paths of the Petit Trianon and was even able to identify many of Napoleon’s marshals from busts that seemed to him identical as they looked down from niches in the old Palais Royale. She seemed to enjoy guiding him as though he had been an adolescent son instead of her husband, so that, during their sightseeing tours he trailed dutifully behind her feeling no shame on this account but rather a surge of pride that sometimes made him almost drunk with exhilaration. To give expression to his pride he spent freely, buying her a present every day. Sometimes it was a confection that caught his eye in a milliner’s window, sometimes a dress that she declared, laughing, she could never wear within fifty miles of the Sorrel Valley, and sometimes a mere trifle like a book, trinket or even a posy of spring flowers. So it happened that by day the initiative was hers but when they were alone in their first-storey room above the rattle of the traffic she deliberately abdicated and became a bride again who, while not in any way shy or withdrawn, allowed the initiative to pass back to him. Yet here again she had the power to surprise him, for he had not yet forgotten her kiss and the promise that accompanied it on the day she had helped to rout Cribb and although he meant to implement his pledge never to hustle her this soon proved beyond his power. He had, on embarking on this adventure, been only too aware of his inexperience but in some indefinable way she gave him a measure of confidence so that, to some extent, neither one of them suffered the disenchantment that might have attended the essays of two people who had grown to maturity in an age when discussion of sex was taboo. It did cross his mind during that first week, however, that her intellectual curiosity might have led her to seek and find some printed source of enlightenment, for she seemed to know very well how best to accommodate him and it was only in retrospect that he wondered whether she had acquired this awareness in the arms of the roystering Ralph Lovell, reputedly an expert wencher. When he falteringly touched on the subject, however, she answered him with her usual frankness, saying that Ralph had certainly done his best to anticipate marriage but that she had had no difficulty in thwarting him for, like all the Lovells, he was an arch snob and drew a nice distinction between women of her class and village girls like the Potters. On this he let the matter drop, not liking to contemplate just how many liberties had been extended to Ralph or to any other man. He was far too grateful for the patience and generosity she was prepared to extend to him and came to accept her accessibility as a physical manifestation of her exceptional candour. This was impressed upon him one afternoon about a week after their marriage when he had occasion to go into the bathroom of the little suite for his razor. The door was ajar and he called, ‘Can I come in?’ and she said, laughing, ‘Why not? You’re my husband, aren’t you?’ and he went in to find her naked, with her tumble of blue-black hair reaching to her shapely buttocks as she stood before a mirror using her brush with long, sweeping strokes. She did not seem in any way embarrassed and went on brushing while he stared at her in wonder. He had never seen her more than half undressed and had thought of her as a rather sturdy little person, with muscles moulded by plenty of exercise but now he could marvel at the classic proportion of her limbs which, against all probability, contrived to give an impression of strength as well as infinite grace and softness. Nor, until this moment, had he appreciated the luxuriance of her hair that trapped the afternoon light in its bluish depths, or of the slenderness of her waist and the neatness of her feet. He said, gently, ‘But you’re quite perfect, Grace! As perfect as a woman could be!’ and she replied, in the assured tone of a wife of years rather than days, ‘It’s nice to be told so!’ and went on with her brushing.

  Her manner of answering reminded him poignantly that, for all her recent submissiveness, she had never admitted to loving him but had only contracted to try and it seemed to him very strange that a beautiful young woman could stand before him stark naked and yet continue to hold on to her spiritual independence. He said, ‘I’ll make you happy, Grace. That means more to me than anything.’

  She was rather too quick, he thought, with her reply, for suddenly she stopped her brushing and said, ‘More than the estate? More than that Valley of yours?’

  ‘Whatever we do in the Valley we’ll do together,’ he said, without finding her question irrelevant and forgetting his razor he swept her off her feet and carried her back to the bedroom.

  So the days and nights passed, with the leadership shared equally but one day she gave him a brief inkling of what seemed to him her contempt for the dominion of men.

  She had taken him, guide-book in hand, to a little lodging house on the Left Bank, telling him that it was here that the girl assassin, Charlotte Corday, had stayed on the night she came to Paris to kill Marat. She seemed to have a very high regard for Charlotte Corday and to know facts concerning her that were not printed in the guide-book. She told him of the girl’s indignation at the way the revolution had degenerated into an orgy of cruelty and bloodshed, and of Charlotte’s determination to kill the man whom she identified as the chief author of the Terror, describing, with a certain relish, how she had bought the butcher’s knife that she used on her victim. Paul said, jokingly, ‘She must have been a cold-blooded little devil!’ but Grace snapped, ‘Cold-blooded? No, she wasn’t that! Fearless and resolute, if you like, but not cold-blooded! The cold-blooded stayed home and talked of achieving something. She went out and did it, while all the men of her party were content to posture on the rostrum!’, and as she said this he thought for a moment of Celia’s warning concerning Grace’s flirtation with the suffragists and wondered if she identified Charlotte Corday with the Pankhursts. She had never discussed mo
dern politics with him and once or twice when he had mentioned Grenfell and his Liberals, she steered the conversation back to less controversial subjects but that same evening she opened the door on another unfamiliar world, conjuring two tickets for the ballet from a fellow guest at the hotel, and taking him, protesting complete ignorance, to the Opera, where Giselle was being presented by the Imperial Russian Ballet.

  Until then he had always thought of ballet as no more than an eccentric form of dancing, but he tried to look as though he was prepared to enjoy it for her sake. It was not until he had stolen several glances at her during the performance that the magic began to work upon his prejudice and make his ignorance seem boorish. When the interval arrived he readily admitted this and was rewarded by a flash of enthusiasm in her eyes and an impulsive grasp of her hand as she said, ‘I was afraid you’d be bored and make nothing of it! This is an essential part of life, Paul! It makes up for so much ugliness, cruelty and stupidity! Will you promise me something? If the Ballet comes to London in the autumn may we travel up and stay for it? Will we get a chance to see something outside the Sorrel Valley every so often? Often enough to stop us growing cabbages for heads?’

  He would have promised her the moon at that moment and replied, ‘Why, certainly, darling, you can go to London any time you wish!’ and then, recalling her enigmatic remark in the bathroom, ‘Is that what frightens you about Shallowford? The thought of being buried alive, and growing dull, like one of the farmer’s daughters?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really, but you must have hated the city very much to have gone there in the first place. They say you only visited Paxtonbury once, until we were married there!’