His tone was jocular, so that she knew he was patronising her again and this put her on her mettle. She said, unexpectedly, “You’ve got an easy name to say and an easy one to remember. Swann. Everyone likes swans. No one takes a swan for granted. People stop whatever they’re doing and say ‘Look! A swan!’”
For the very first time in their acquaintance he looked at her as though she was an adult.
“Have you thought of something already?”
“You’ll only laugh at it.”
“Try me!” and he sounded serious.
She said, blushing, “The name is what people will remember. You could use it as…well…as a trademark. A swan on wheels.”
She said it very diffidently and was therefore quite unprepared for his exuberant and immediate reaction. In a bound he had cleared the camp fire, thrown his arms about her and kissed her on both cheeks. Then he held her off at arm's length, eyes alight with excitement, jaw out-thrust, looking very boyish and ardent.
“By God, that's capital! That's precisely the kind of inspiration I’ve been looking for ever since that stationmaster put the idea into my head! A Swann! A Swann on Wheels! Wait—” and he lunged over to where his saddle rested on a bough and picked up a square leather satchel of the kind she had seen strapped to the swordbelts of the cavalry officers who attended the Victory Ball. Then he was back again, and taking a notebook from the pouch found a blank page and began to draw, his pencil flying over the paper with such precision that she found herself thinking, “He can draw pictures faster than a drawing master and more lifelike ones I wouldn’t wonder,” and was so interested that she quite forgot the burning spots on her cheeks where he had planted his kisses.
He said, handing the book to her, “Is that what you had in mind?”
It was far more precise than anything she had had in mind. He had sketched an arrogant-looking swan in full sail down a river and superimposed on the facing wing was a large wheel, like the wheel of a gun carriage with each spoke outlined.
“Why, Adam, that's marvellous! Where did you learn to draw like that?”
“To the devil with the drawing, I can do better than that on a drawing board. What colour should it be? And what about background?”
“Well, all the swans I’ve ever seen are white,” she said, “and on the side of a van it would show up best on black canvas, wouldn’t it?”
She thought then that he was going to embrace her again, and so he might have done if she hadn’t raised the notebook in defence. As it was, he snatched it back, crying, “Better and better!” and fell to shading in the background until the swan on wheels stood out in sharp relief and the broad-bladed spokes had each a name—”London,” “Birmingham,” “Manchester,” and “Leeds.” It was such a distinctive trademark that she began to feel smug about having invented it. “Why, I can see it,” she told him, “stencilled on the hood of a waggon. You’re quite right, Adam. It is something people will remember. It has a kind of—well—difference about it, like the lion and the unicorn.”
“Henrietta,” he said, “you’re your father's daughter in spite of yourself, and I’m going to keep in close touch with you when I set up for I might need that head of yours.” Then, his smile giving way to a contemplative expression, “You mentioned capital just now. Can you keep a secret? From everyone?”
She assured him that she could. In fact she knew she wasn’t at all good at keeping secrets, especially important ones, but she would have promised him anything at that moment. He replaced the notebook in the pouch (telling her in passing that it was called a sabretache) and probed in its depths for what looked like a small sachet of sailcloth, double-stitched along the folds. He took his claspknife, cut the thread, and drew out the most breathtaking string of jewels she had ever seen or expected to see, a necklace composed exclusively of rubies, a handful of rubies, some as large as a small egg, down to several the size of peas. Each jewel was cut so that it trapped the slanting rays of the setting sun filtering through the leaves above their heads.
“Why, Adam,” she said, ecstatically, “it's lovely, the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen! Could I…hold it?”
“You can wear it but only for a moment, and if that sounds ungracious it's because the necklace represents all the hope I have of hitching the swan to a dray.” And then came a moment she was to remember all her life. He moved behind her, held the necklace before her eyes, and snapped the filigree catch into its socket Her fingertips came up to caress the largest jewel, the ruby hanging at the full extent of the loop, while he sat back on his heels and said, “I daresay it looks better on you than it did on the scraggy neck of that damned Ranee. Do you know anything about the value of jewels?”
“Nothing at all, but I’m sure these are the kind the Queen might wear, aren’t they?”
“I hope so,” he said, lightly, “but if they are I shall have to sell them at about a tenth of their real value, and think myself lucky into the bargain.”
“You mean you stole them?”
She said it as though she was not much concerned if he had robbed a coach to get them.
“Would it matter to you if I had?”
She considered this. “No,” she said, stubbornly, “after what you’ve done for me it wouldn’t matter a bit. I’d still be grateful and glad you rode up to that hut when you did.”
“Then set your mind at rest. I didn’t steal them, at least, not in the sense you mean. I stuck my nose in them when I was unhorsed during a brush at a place called Jhansi,” and he told her briefly about the encounter with the horseman carrying the casket.
“You think of them as belonging to you, then?”
“Why not? I could have left them lying where they were, in which case a medical orderly or a burial party would have pocketed them. I could have handed them into the paymaster, when they would have been impounded, locked up in a safe somewhere, and then found their way to the Company directors. Neither course recommended itself to me at the time and it doesn’t now. I risked my life a thousand times to protect the John Company's investments and came out of it with three hundred pounds after seven years of far rougher living than we’re experiencing now.”
“What will you do with it? I mean, how will you turn it into money?”
“Old soldiers have ways and means,” he said, evasively, “but now I’m going to put it to bed again. If you wear it a moment longer you won’t care to part with it.”
She reached behind her and unfastened the clasp. It was only when she was returning it to him, and he was carefully retying the severed threads of the canvas wrapping, that she understood the stupendous compliment he had paid her by trusting her with such a secret and this was ample compensation for parting with such a prize. She said, shyly, “Why did you tell me, Adam?”
“Why not? I don’t care to be under an obligation to anyone, and your idea of the swan on wheels was worth money to me. It's as hard to put a value on that as on the rubies, but we’ll see. And now, Henrietta, it's high time you tucked yourself up in that tent. We’ve a long ride ahead of us tomorrow. If the weather holds we might get beyond Kendal and then we’re almost home.”
The mention of his home reawakened her anxiety for the future so that she said, her lip trembling, “What's to become of me, Adam?”
He looked at her then with tolerance and sympathy devoid of patronage.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve been in far worse scrapes and come out of them. Aunt Charlotte will think of something. She's had a great deal of experience with flighty young women.”
His tone was casual but when she had crawled into the little tent and he had laced the entrance, extinguished the fire, and rolled himself in his cloak, he remembered that involuntary quiver of the lip. He lay looking up at the stars for a long time, contemplating the chain of circumstances that had saddled him with such an unlikely companion near the end of his journey. He had ceased to think of her as a nuisance, a truant child, even the self-willed daughter of a man who could bludgeo
n a terrified boy to death. He saw her now as a new factor in a vastly complicated puzzle he had set himself to solve the moment he regained consciousness after the brush at Jhansi. Somehow, like it or not, she was closely involved with him, not so much as a woman but as a comrade, and this, for some reason he did not fully understand, pleased and comforted him. His relationship with women had been those of all professional wanderers. From time to time he had hired the services of a garrison moll, or one or other of the nautch girls introduced into overseas stations and tolerated by the authorities. They had brought him physical relief but little pleasure, certainly none in retrospect. Only one did he recall with any tenderness, a fifteen-year-old Circassian, who must have been little more than a child when her parents sold her to the trade in Scutari. Her trained stealth, and her pathetic eagerness to please, had touched him, so that he had given her enough money to buy the clothes and gewgaws that would enable her to hoist herself several rungs up the ladder of her profession. Henrietta Rawlinson had no kind of kinship with girls like that and almost as little with the sisters and nieces of serving officers, who came out husband-hunting on the autumn bride-boat, as the pagoda-shakers had learned to regard it. She seemed, in fact, to have no destiny beyond latching on to him, and making his complicated life more complicated on the strength of a town riot and a chance encounter on a deserted moor. He already accepted this and perhaps it had a bearing on the confidence he had reposed in her by showing her the necklace. She was like a stray mongrel, looking to him for scraps and a dry place to sleep. Socially, the association was preposterous and yet, in another way, it had about it an element of inevitability crystallised in that remarkable idea she had produced so effortlessly. Swann. Swann. A Swann-on-Wheels. It was apt yet outrageously simple, knitting together all the loose threads that had emerged from Aaron Walker's advice, giving it shape, substance, and purpose. Close by an owl hooted and the north-westerly breeze came soughing in from the Firth, rustling the leaves overhead and causing the near extinct embers of the camp fire to glow like the rubies. He fell asleep, still wondering about her.
His guess concerning the reception she was likely to get from the Colonel was accurate enough. The moment the old man's eye rested on her Adam saw him glance up at the oval portrait of the woman over the open hearth. The facial similarity was quite remarkable, and it occurred to him then that this might have played a part in his decision to bring her along against the dictates of common sense. They had the same lively, greenish eyes, the same broad cheekbones and slightly pendulous cheeks curving to a small, obstinate chin, the same pert nose, offset by a generous mouth. Even their hairstyles, separated by close on half a century, had similarities. His mother had worn a straight fringe and curl clusters bunched over the ears, and although Henrietta's hair was in disarray (despite frantic attempts to tidy it during an interval in the summerhouse while he announced her) it seemed to him that it had the same coppery sheen where it swept down on either side of the wide parting to ringlets bunched on the temples.
The old man, advancing stiffly, exclaimed, in wonder, “My poor child…” and seemed, in that instant, to shed forty years, so that Adam saw him briefly as he must have appeared to little Monique d’Auberon in the spring of 1813, when a torrent of victorious young Englishmen had poured through the passes of the Pyrenees to fight their first battle on French soil and break all the hearts in Haute-Garonne. The encounter touched him. It was well worth the tempest of Aunt Charlotte's wrath and the flailing she gave him with her tongue.
Four
1
IT HAD REQUIRED AN EFFORT TO NERVE HIMSELF TO ADMIT THAT HE HAD NOT arrived alone and that in the summerhouse, desperately attempting to make herself presentable, was a girl of eighteen who had fled a respectable home and been escorted over a hundred miles of track and fellside by a soldier, returning from places where this kind of conduct would arouse no special comment. That was how Charlotte Swann saw it, once he had admitted the facts, and that was how she expressed it, in terms that made his ears burn. Not that his conduct surprised her, for he was a man and she regarded all men as irresponsible fools unlikely to advance far beyond the mental age of a child.
She was a formidable-looking woman distinguished by Swann height, hawk nose, and thinly compressed lips. She was not only tall but impressively upholstered, and when she was roused, as now, she could summon the voice of a rough-riding sergeant drilling a squadron of recruits.
“In the summerhouse! You hid the little goose in the summerhouse? Unfed? Unwatered? And wearing the rags she travelled here on the rump of that jaded brute you stabled so conscientiously?” She flung round on the Colonel. “You know I’ve always thought you a fool, Edward, but you and that foreign gel you married succeeded in breeding a bigger one, and there he stands, with his silly mouth agape. He's taken close on a month to get here when he might have made the journey in thirty-six hours, at a fraction of the expense and without abducting a young woman en route!”
“Dammit, Aunt Charlotte, I haven’t laid a finger on the girl. All I did was to help her on her way.”
“She's ruined just the same,” boomed his aunt, “as any young woman would be who had travelled unchaperoned four days and four nights in the company of a man with no more sense of fitness than a Turk! Didn’t that ever occur to you? Didn’t it strike you that the only course open to you was to take her to those relatives of hers at Garston?” and before either Adam or his father could comment she had sailed out of the house and down between beds of lupins, sunflowers, and delphiniums to the shed facing the ruffled surface of the lake. The Colonel said, ruefully, “She's right, boy. You do seem to have got yourself into a rare scrape,” but then, with a humorous lift of his shaggy, white brows, “Is she pretty? But that's a damfool question. She must be, or a Swann wouldn’t have carried her this far.”
Adam said bluntly, “Nobody could convey that young woman a single yard against her will, and Aunt Charlotte will find that out soon enough. I daresay you’ll think her pretty enough for to my mind she's rather like mother, facially at all events. She's more buxom and round about three inches broader in the beam I’d say, but that stood her in good stead. A hundred mile trek on the rump of that mare must have been punishing…”
He broke off, hearing voices on the garden path and said, hastily, “Let's leave them to sort themselves out after the introductions. I’ve a great deal to tell you about past and future, and something to add that won’t please you, I daresay, but I’ve made my decision and here it is. I’ve resigned from Company service and dropped the idea of buying my way into a regular regiment. I’m done with soldiering,” and he paused, expecting the old man to look outraged, or at least unbelieving, for he recalled that the old fellow was proud of the family's military tradition. All he did, however, was shrug his shoulders.
“You’re over thirty, I can’t dictate to you. Had a notion you wouldn’t renew your contract after you wrote to me about that shambles at Cawnpore.” His light blue eyes narrowed and he looked, for a moment, older than his years. “We heard about that here, of course. I remember having the same revulsion after the sack of Badajoz, and again after San Sebastian, where my own regiment ran amok. Sickened me at the time. Never wanted to see another shot fired. But I forgot it as soon as we found ourselves billeted among civilised folk. I daresay you’ll have second thoughts, and a long furlough is what you need now. Stay here for a spell. It's the best kind of country for idling, and that mare you arrived on must be a corker if you’ve ridden her three hundred odd miles and two up over the final stages. Do a bit of fishing in the lake while she's out to grass.”
Adam said, regretfully, “I’ve got other plans, sir, and the means of putting them into effect if I’m lucky. I intend starting up in business as soon as I’ve seen that girl settled. I haven’t told Aunt Charlotte the full facts. There was another reason for getting her clear of the district. Her father is a bully and a scoundrel. I wouldn’t make him custodian to a sick cat after what I saw him do in the filthy li
ttle town he rules like an oriental despot. The truth is there's no knowing what might become of her if she was sent back before things quietened down. All I want is for Aunt Charlotte to care for her until I can get legal advice on that and a number of other matters. Will you do that for me, take her on trust for the time being?” But before the old man could assent, Henrietta came creeping in on the heels of Aunt Charlotte, whose indignation appeared to have been stoked up by the girl's appearance. She presented her rather as though she was a barrister submitting irrefutable proof of male idiocy to a court of adjudicators.
“Look at her, Edward! Just look at her! Half-naked and she hasn’t been near soap and hot water for a week!” She whirled on the grinning Adam. “How dare you treat a decent young woman as though she was a drab in one of your infamous garrison towns…” but here the drooping Henrietta perked up and protested, “Oh, please, Miss Swann! Adam was very kind and considerate…” and Adam had the satisfaction of seeing some of his aunt's asperity diverted elsewhere for she snapped, “Hold your tongue and listen to me! I’m not interested in the reasons that prompted you to run away from home and attach yourself to this freebooting nephew of mine, but from now on you’ll do what I say, and my first instructions are that you shall take a hot bath, eat a Christian meal at a table, and go to bed while we decide what's to be done with you. In the morning you will sit down and write a letter to your father at my dictation, and after that, when every stitch you are wearing has been laundered and aired, we shall see, you hear me?”
God is an Englishman Page 12
