Recollection of this quite blunted the edge of her delight in an overnight shopping expedition to buy her trousseau in Carlisle, but on the day following she accepted the Colonel's invitation to accompany him on a sketching expedition to Friar's Crag. It was here, sitting on a log beside the gentle old man, that she was at least able to learn what marriage might have to offer under ideal conditions, that is, between two people who were attracted to one another. She got no more than a few useful hints it is true, for the old man spoke solely out of a sense of duty. But his very reticence and good humour helped to allay the worst of her fears, even if it did next-to-nothing to dispel her doubts, particularly the doubt that had run her most promising conversations with Sarah Hebditch into a series of cul-de-sacs.
He said, by way of a preamble, “Charlotte tells me your mother died the day you were born. Is that so, m’dear?” and she said it was, adding helpfully that she had approached Aunt Charlotte for the purpose of discussing the kind of things mothers would be likely to discuss on the approach of a daughter's wedding. It was, as it happened, a felicitous approach, for it at once broke down the barrier of reserve between them and even made him chuckle. He said, laying down his brush, “That was a sensible thing to do, m’dear. Many gels wouldn’t have had the brains or the spirit!” and he basked for the moment in the lively recollection of his sister's red face when she had implored his assistance. It was the first time in his experience that she had ever confessed to helplessness.
“Well,” he said, with no more than a trace of diffidence, “suppose we clear the ground. How much do you know? Gel of your age and liveliness must know something.” She told him what she knew and without much embarrassment, for he listened politely and encouraged her with a smiling nod or two when she recounted the predicament of Agnes the kitchenmaid, and how that had been put right by Mrs. Worrell, the housekeeper. It was only when she went on to relay Sarah's dolorous story, of the bride who was shocked into madness, that he said, with a snort, “Dam’ lot o’ nonsense! Never heard such balderdash! Don’t believe a word of it and you mustn’t either, you hear?” His emphatic reaction, however, made clarification more necessary than ever. She said, desperately, “But why should anybody invent a story like that, Colonel? And why is everyone so secretive about babies and how women have them?” and he replied, with a vigorous shake of the head, “Damned if I know now that you speak of it. Wasn’t always so. When I was your age people didn’t hush it up the way they do now. Perfectly natural process. Man fancies a woman, marries her, and they have children…” but then his basic honesty compelled him to admit that he wasn’t getting anywhere and he said, a little grumpily, “I don’t know why I should be expected to tell you things a girl ought to know at your age. That's something for the man you’re about to marry I should say, but I’ll tell you this, if it’ll do anything to settle your mind. There's deficiencies in that boy of mine: He's impulsive, harebrained, and never did take kindly to discipline, but he's good-hearted, and not a man to ride roughshod over a woman. More the opposite, I’d say, if you handle him right.” He gave her a keen glance and when she still appeared troubled he took her hand in his maimed one and went on, “I’ll add something to that, Henrietta, and you can credit it to my Monique, twenty-five years dead and no more than a memory to me, but a very pleasant one when I look at you. A wife's first duty as I see it is to put a sparkle in a man's eye, and everything follows from that, with a lot less fuss than many folk, including preachers, moralists, and dry old sticks like Aunt Charlotte, would have you believe! Now my eyes tell me you’re head over heels in love with that lad of mine. That's a fact, isn’t it?”
“Oh, indeed it is,” said Henrietta, without a blush, “but I’m not in the least sure he's in love with me.”
“Nonsense,” said the old man, “he more or less abducted you and proposed marriage to you, didn’t he?”
“I think,” said Henrietta, “that that was due to his kind-heartedness.”
The Colonel thought a moment. It seemed to him that there was a good deal of truth in this, and his instinct warned him that it was no time to fob her off with flattery. He said, at length, “See here, he must have taken a rare fancy to you, for he's turned thirty and never yet given a thought to settling down. Be that as it may, a girl like you shouldn’t have much trouble heaping fuel on the fire, if you follow me.”
She did, more or less, remembering fleetingly how his hands had played over her when he had crushed her in that initial embrace and with this came a recollection that the sensation produced in her by his kisses had been the precise opposite to that induced by the clammy touch of Makepeace Goldthorpe. She would have liked very much to have improved the occasion by appealing to the old man for more specific instructions, but she hesitated to trespass on his patience. She said, carefully, “There's a word in the Bible that one of my governesses said was meant to describe marriage. But, like everyone else, she wouldn’t explain properly, or maybe she didn’t understand herself. It was ‘knew.’ It said Adam ‘knew his wife.’ Is that what you mean, that when you love somebody you know them, every part of them?” and was surprised to see him regarding her with beaming approval. “Upon my soul,” he said, “you’ve got more damn sense in that pretty head of yours than any of the flibbertigibbets I’ve seen about since I went on half-pay! Gaudy creatures, most of ’em, whispering and giggling together, and twirling their parasols like catherine-wheels every time a man tips his hat to them. You’ve got sense. That's precisely what I’m getting at, and the word was written down at a time when English men and women weren’t so damned concerned with airs and graces, or giving fancy names to everything, even things about the house. A woman knows a man and a man knows a woman once they’re alone, with one another's arms about them, and the satisfaction that comes of it is the middle and both ends of choosing a partner and raising a family.” He looked at her keenly again, “You mean to have a family, I hope?”
“Why, naturally,” said Henrietta, feeling more composed than at any time since she had adjusted to the reality of Adam's act of liberation in the library, “and I’ll tell you a secret. If I can help it, Colonel, they’ll be soldiers like you and Adam were, or at least soldiers’ wives, for I wouldn’t care to see my sons spend their lives money-grubbing the way Sam Rawlinson and all his cronies do. I should want to be proud of them when I was your age.”
“Amen to that!” said the old man, “and I hope I’m spared to see ’em all in uniform!”
That same night, after she had undressed and was about to slip her nightgown over her head, her instinct prompted her to do something it had never occurred to her to do before, to stand naked in front of the mirror and assess herself as an agent for, as the Colonel had expressed it, “putting a sparkle in a man's eye.” Mystified as she still was about the ultimate expressions of affection between a husband and wife, she yet sensed she had made definite progress towards exposing the most jealously guarded secret of the mystique, and the very act of standing there by candlelight, trying to imagine how he would be likely to regard her in the unlikely event of him ever seeing her without clothes, introduced a glow to all areas of her body, that seemed to emanate from a sharp but by no means unpleasant pricking sensation under the heart. She even noticed, or thought she noticed, subtle physical changes in her appearance. Her colour was high and there was no necessity to bite her lips to increase their redness, a practice she had indulged in more than once before the mirror in the ladies’ room at the Assembly Rooms during a soiree. She saw herself now as the equivalent of one of those daring reproductions of a Grecian statue, glimpsed in the catalogue of the Great Exhibition her father had left lying about the house, and the thought returned to her that she equated more with the classical conception of a perfect form than with the kind of girl men were supposed to prefer, willowy wasp-waisted women, who threatened to keel over in a gust of wind. Despite this, however, she decided she liked what she saw. Her skin was very white, and entirely without blemishes if one overlooked
the incongruous triangle of hair where her thighs met, and according to Mrs. Worrell (whom she had consulted in alarm when it first began to appear), every adult in the world was afflicted by that. Her shoulders sloped away in the classical manner, her breasts were firm and nicely rounded, her stomach flat, and her legs shapely, with slim ankles and long feet that matched hands of which she had always been proud. She reached up, untied the ribbon that bound her hair and watched her copper ringlets cascade over her shoulders. The movement, that produced a ripple of shadow, excited her so that she whirled round to see the effect at the back. Released from her stays, her waist now appeared to her at least two inches thicker than it should have been, and drew attention to the pronounced chubbiness of her bottom. She said, aloud, “I’ll just have to refuse second helpings,” and skittishly she girdled herself with her ribbon, frowning when the loop seemed almost wide enough to wriggle through. Then for no reason at all, she felt ashamed of gazing at herself without clothes in such an immodest manner, and bundled herself into her nightgown, blew out the candle, and scrambled into bed, wondering what had prompted her to do such a thing and deciding it must have something to do with all those doubts and uncertainties, partially stilled by the old man's patient and patently honest advice. Her mind returned to those whispered confidences she had exchanged with Sarah Hebditch on the subject of men as they were reputed to behave once they had you alone in a bedroom like this, and the glow she had carried upstairs began to subside, making room for doubts. The debris of hints over the years began to form a pattern in her mind, and although it was blurred and indistinct it was yet definite enough to frighten. And then, like the comforting wink of a light in the dark, she remembered what the Colonel had said about his son's kind-heartedness, of which she had so much proof since he had first ridden over the fold in the moor. Whatever awaited her was unlikely to prove hurtful and shameful. He might scold her, and treat her condescendingly, he might even bully her as he had been inclined to do on their way over the fells. But he was incapable of being cruel and dominating in the way she sensed Makepeace would have been. On this thought, greatly comforted, she slept.
THE CYGNET YEARS:
1858–1861
One
1
JOSH AVERY WAS HIS QUARRY, FOR JOSH WAS THE ONLY MAN OF HIS AC QUAINTANCE who had been shrewd enough, or ruthless enough, to show a profit on the years he had devoted to the service of the East India Company; a cool, cynical rascal, who had not only seduced his colonel's wife, and thus precipitated a resounding regimental scandal, but had, it was rumoured, done it on the proceeds of a substantial bribe given him by the Nizam for unofficial military support in a palace plot. This, however, had never been proved and Avery forestalled an inquiry by resigning his commission and going off home, the simpering colonel's wife in tow. Rumours reaching the garrison towns since insisted that the Nizam's bribe had consisted of a handful of diamonds and that Avery had put his capital to very good account.
Adam remembered him vividly. No one who ever got to know Joshua Avery really well subsequently forgot him. Adam had seen him, but privately, as a kind of pocket Talleyrand, using his musical, low-pitched voice to beguile not merely silly, bored women, like Kitty Sullivan, but bankers and others who should have known better, bazaar merchants, martinet-visionaries like Roberts, and even men who were seeking the Imperial Holy Grail and hoping to bring it home to Windsor on their retirement. A slightly built man, with greenish eyes set in an almost triangular face, hard cheekbones, a pallor that had defied any number of tropical summers, and a small, thin-lipped mouth from which no ill-considered word had ever made its escape.
Avery had written offering him luncheon at a raffish eating-house off Drury Lane, where he had booked an alcove, curtained off from the gilded dining-hall, a place full of diners who were, so far as Adam could discern, either actors, or courtesans, together with a sprinkling of city merchants, who somehow contrived to wear a wolfish air of brigandage in a way that made piracy a semi-respectable calling.
After so many years away from the capital, Adam found himself fascinated by the London scene as it moved at a gallop towards the end of a dynamic decade. Disproportionate changes appeared to have taken place during the seven years he had been overseas, and he sensed that this had a bearing on the proliferation of the railways. The London he recalled as a youth had been a sprawling, half-rural community, with its grass roots still embedded in the era of Brummel, Fox, Pitt, and to a degree, in that of Johnson and Hogarth, but that was past. It was now a frenetic, impersonal city, erupting before the eye with an extraordinary variety of enterprises, and the emphasis on money and conformity rather than on style. One had only to walk down the Strand and poke about in the labyrinth of streets linking that thoroughfare with the Thames, to note the sharp contrasts between those who were emerging as the new masters, those who served them, and a majority that had been left far behind in the race.
There had always been the London poor, thousands of mutilated beggars and barefoot urchins, the streetwalker, the huckster, and the artisan only one rung above this flotsam. Removed from this swarm there had been the town dandy, and the man of means, spanking along in an eye-catching phaeton, or picking his way along the crowded pavements in an ensemble that would keep any one of the derelicts fed and housed for a twelvemonth. But now the traditional contrasts were muted as society fragmented into a hundred rather than a dozen segments. The fop, and the man of fashion, were still to be seen, but soberly dressed businessmen predominated and these, Adam noticed, occupied a series of social plateaux, all the way down the scale from the steeple-hatted city gent, puffing his cheroot while he struck his bargains, to the hurrying clerk in threadbare worsted, who was probably feeding a family on what his employer paid a head waiter for a single meal.
Money, and the hundred-thousand ventures chasing money, was in the soot-encrusted air, and above the never-ending clatter of grinding wheels and scurrying feet one could almost listen to the comfortable rustle of bankers’ drafts and the steady chink-chink of small change. Everywhere ratty old buildings of the last century were being torn down and replaced by warehouses and tall, narrow-fronted dwellings with four storeys and a basement area. The new, stylishly painted shops were beset by customers, the pavements were thronged, and the traffic jams in streets that had been designed to carry market-carts and a carriage or two, reminded Adam of the clubbed approaches to a bridge in the path of an advancing army. Contemplating it all he thought, “I’m only just in time it seems. If I had left it much longer the door would have been slammed in my face,” and he turned in at the eating-house, giving Avery's name and noting the servility it earned him.
Avery arrived late, passing between any number of jovial, back-slapping friends in their patent boots, tight, strap-over trousers, blue frock coats with gilt buttons the size of catherine-wheels, and canary yellow waistcoats slung with the inevitable cross-cable chain and fobs. Watching him, and recalling the hardbitten Avery of bygone days, Adam wondered whether he had committed too much of his own story on paper, but once they were settled over their porter he was soon reassured, for Avery drew the alcove curtains, leaned forward, and became, for a moment, the old campaigner, saying: “I wouldn’t have wagered a shilling you had the wits to take a leaf out of my book. Swann. You brought the loot with you, I hope?” and when Adam looked hesitant, “Oh, easy man, I never come in here unless I’m doing business. Every lackey is in somebody's pay, but I know each of them and each of them knows me,” whereupon Adam dipped into his pocket and dangled the necklace just beyond Avery's reach.
He saw Avery's eyes light up for a second and then they were hooded. “You’d trust a man of my reputation with something as genuine as that? Well, I find that flattering, but don’t expect me to return the compliment.”
Adam said, with a shrug, “What choice do I have? I’m not such a fool as to sniff my way about London, hawking it to the highest bidder, whereas we all know where you went to butter your bread. The only difference betwe
en us is that I faced odds of fifty to one to get this. All you did was to involve two or three hundred other poor devils in somebody else's quarrel, stand back, and get paid for the lot of them.”
It had never been possible to snub Avery. He said, quietly, “Let me handle it, fondle it,” and Adam passed the necklace across reluctantly. Everyone in the Company's service knew about Josh Avery's lust for stones.
“Before I value it what is it you’re seeking, Swann? A cash transaction? An advance at around ten per cent? Or a straight sale on commission?”
“That would depend on you. I need as much capital as that will produce. I’ll pay commission, of course, and a heavy commission at that, for it can’t be helped. Are you equipped to value it?”
Avery took out a glass and screwed it firmly into his eye. Then, having come prepared, he ran the necklace stone by stone along a metal gauge of the kind Adam had seen the goldsmiths use in the bazaars. Perhaps a minute passed before he said, “I’ll not attempt a bluff, Swann. It's worth ten times what you’d get for it, and around five times as much as I could squeeze out of it the way I shall have to go about it.”
God is an Englishman Page 15
