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Warning: General Audience |
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Lawford’s Duty
A Passage to India: Memories, Impressions, Reflexions.
Lawford’s Duty. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.
Durford, Hampshire, England. 26th July 1798.
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PARAGRAPH ONE
William’s nerves were now so stretched that, bizarrely, he could actually hear the frantic music of his own anxiety. It was grown so great that it were as if all his veins, all his sinews, all the tendons of his body, were being pulled unbearably taut and were shrieking like the rigging of a ship carrying too much canvas in a savage Atlantic gale. Oh, how he remembered the terrifying abortive voyage to the West Indies which the 33rd, along with twenty-four other regiments of foot, had attempted to make in ’95! It had seen many of the transports eventually wrecked on the southern coast of England, the ferocious tempest having driven them relentlessly back eastwards. The ship in which William had been part of the human cargo, along with about a quarter of the Battalion, had run aground on Chesil Beach in Dorset in November, hardly any distance at all from where they had begun the journey at Southampton. There had been another attempt to send the force westward in December – but not the 33rd, for too many ships had been lost in the first effort, and there had not been the vessels to spare to carry them. The Havercakes (what remained of them) had been sent to over-winter at Lymington in the New Forest instead, and to recruit (to make good the gaps in the ranks which had come about through so many having been lost in the wrecks - more than two hundred men of the 33rd had drowned - a quarter of their strength - but better to drown swiftly and cleanly, William had thought at the time, when he had been convinced that this was to have been his fate, than to die more slowly and horribly of the Yellow Jack in the West Indies, the doom of so many sent to that posting), the original plan being to attempt once again to send them to the Caribbean in the following Spring. That had never happened. The situation regarding the war had changed, with the French now turning their eyes towards India with the objective of disrupting British trade: so the 33rd had been sent to Calcutta instead.
But now, the stress, the fear, the desperation involved in this impending interview seemed to William to be even greater than all that he had endured three years earlier when he had been sure that he and all his comrades had been doomed to be swallowed up in the turbulent green-white depths of the surging Atlantic Ocean. The long antagonism between himself and the two men – one the Viscount Petersfield, who had with extreme reluctance allowed William the use of his family’s name for the preceding two decades, and who had permitted him to grow up beneath his roof throughout that time (metaphorically at least: for eight of those years William had been largely absent, first at school, and then in the Army until ill-health had seen him back at Durford for eighteen months of convalescence), and the other his eldest brother – disdain and contempt and scorn on their side – fear and dread and loathing on his - in whose presence he now must stand! – had come to this point, this concentrated exquisitely focused point of piercing pain, acute as if his heart had been in the process of being skewered upon the needle-like extremity of a lancer’s blade. Charles, as heir, had already wielded so much power over him throughout his life. William could not bear to imagine how much worse, inevitably, it would be once Charles came into his inheritance. As for Lord Petersfield – for years now William had never dared to refer to him as anything other than ‘the Viscount’. And always he had addressed him as ‘Sir’. Not ‘Papa’. Never ‘Papa’, since the age of four when he had innocently done so one day and had, before the entire household, been brutally taught to know his place.
William’s present particular misery was of course the culmination of the last four appalling weeks of humiliation and suffering which he had been made to undergo by Charles, but these familiar physical symptoms, he knew, had a much longer history. That high-pitched singing in his ears like the wind in over-burdened shrouds was the whistling and humming of his blood as it had been driven at too high a pressure around his body by his labouring heart, whose every thump and skip he could feel in his breast and in his throat as that organ jumped and juddered within him; for his body wanted either to flee or to fight, yet he could do neither, and so he must go on standing there, even though he felt as if, to extend the nautical simile, his main-mast had been about to be carried away by the board. Even at times when there had been no immediate reason to fear, no outrageous offence he had been able to call to mind, William had always felt severely intimidated by the presence of Viscount (and, it went without saying, by that of Charles) in situations such as this, where they had always had the weather-gauge. They had shared an identical withering, shrivelling way of regarding him. They had never even had to raise their voices in order to reduce him at once, metaphorically at least, to a desiccated shrunken pathetic pile of nothing. In that moment William felt as if he might faint unless he held himself as stiffly as possible, so he stood, rigid, his hands clenched, white in the face and trying to suppress the all-over shuddering, which had, as always, begun at the core of his body, and was now barely held in check by his wavering will. Sooner or later, he knew, he would begin to shake perceptibly, as had always happened whenever he had found himself in confrontation with the Viscount or with Charles. How smug and self-satisfied both of them had always appeared as soon as ever they had seen him begin to tremble! William knew, with increasing urgency, that he needed to get this over, to get out of the room before that could happen - before he shamed himself one final time in the presence of his brother and the man whom the world had for one-and-twenty years, with a knowing and cynical smile of collusion upon its smirking face, called his father. But escape was impossible: William could not simply turn about and leave. He had to stay upon their pleasure because they had, he knew, quite deliberately decided to make him wait until they had calculated that he had altogether lost the last fragile shred of his composure – so that they could annihilate him one last time. He would not be allowed to depart before that had happened. He knew only too well now that Charles had guessed that he might try to bolt to freedom, simply to disappear - to vanish, his signature act of disobedience from his earliest childhood. Certainly Charles would have stationed a couple of burly outdoor servants at the door of the lobby, at the top of the steps which led down to the drive, so that he would be physically prevented from leaving if he attempted to avoid this interview, circumvent the reckoning. There would doubtless be another brace of them guarding the tradesmen’s door at the rear. Only one thing could have made this worse, William had thought, as he had apprehensively contemplated this morning’s work during the preceding night, lying sleepless in his bed, trying to second-guess how it would go whilst he listened to the soft downpouring of the rain as the wind had driven it against the window-panes – if he had been wearing his Regimentals. So, anticipating what could well happen, he had decided upon rising that day that he would face Charles and the Viscount in civilian clothes - wearing a plain coat of sober dark blue woollen cloth showing the wear of three or four years, an unremarkable waistcoat, a shirt and a neck-cloth which had both seen better days, pantaloons of an indifferent fit (he had lost weight in the last four weeks anyway), and black half-boots which he had had since his time at school, and which could have done with some close attention with polish and a brush - all as if he had been preparing to ride to Midhurst on a day of poor weather to perform a dull errand for Lady Petersfield, and not about to take ship for India and the King’s 33rd. He had resolved that he would not give them the satisfaction of sneering at Lieutenant Lawford in his smart scarlet coat, whose complexion had been like a bowl of curds and whey, and he shivering like the cowardly degenerate he knew they had both believed him to be.
This was the first occasion upon which William had encountered the Viscount in a month, during which period he had been under what had been tantamount to house-arrest, imprisoned in his own chamber and subjected to abominable treatment by Charles and a so-called doctor whom the Viscount had summoned from a recently-established London prison (1) where they were said to subject the inmates to experimental medical and surgical treatment, using all the latest and most novel methods. The story, created for general consumption both at large in the world and amongst the people of Durford (although those who lived and worked there had known the truth, of course – save for the Viscountess, who had for the last twenty years been actively quarantined from knowing the truth about anything of any great import - ) had been that whilst William had been out riding with Charles a month earlier he had sustained a concussion when he had been thrown from his horse, and had been having to rest in conditions of perfect solitude and quiet in order to be fit enough to embark in July to re-join his regiment, which was in India - which was why he was now leaving Durford, to go to Portsmouth, to go aboard the Néreide frigate, captured from the French at an engagement off the Scilly Isles seven months since, a vessel with lovely lines, and a great sailer now that she was properly manned by British tars - the Royal Navy vessel which would carry him there, influence having been brought to bear to find him passage. He had been supposed to go out five months before, from Gravesend, aboard the Indiaman Emily in the Company convoy, but a few weeks after Christmas his health had again begun to give cause for concern, and so there had had to be an up-ending of arrangements, which had caused the Viscount no end of trouble as he had had to negotiate with his contacts at the Admiralty to find William alternative passage – and then – as if all that had not been enough – this. Had William been well enough to sail in the Emily in February then this would not have happened.
William’s horse Audax had reared, Charles had said, startled by an adder; Audax had thrown him, then had fallen awkwardly and broken a leg, and Charles had had to shoot the beast in the woods where he had fallen, in order to put him out of his misery. All had agreed that it had been such a pity about Audax, a fine hunter, who moreover, it was said, had cost the Earl a little north of one hundred guineas when he had presented the bay gelding to William on his thirteenth birthday. The Viscountess had believed what she had been told, of course, and had included this shocking news in her next letters to her two other sons. Francis, who now had a living over by Winchester, had at once kindly offered to come and visit William to cheer and console him, but had instead received a letter from Charles full of obscure hints and dark admonitions, warning him off. Henry, from his chambers off Chancery Lane in London, had similarly written, and had been similarly rebuffed.
Anyway, so that had been the story. A sad accident.
Four Weeks Earlier.
What had really happened, however, was this. Towards the end of the afternoon of the day following the disaster, Charles, carrying a case which William had known held a brace of pistols, had appeared at his door.
“A duel?” William had asked, nervously, saying the first thing which had occurred to his shrinking mind, his eyes having widened in fear as soon as he had caught sight of the finely-crafted mahogany box with its inlay of ebony which Charles had been holding tucked beneath his arm. At once, however, he had realised the idiocy of the remark.
“Do not be ridiculous.”
William had swallowed, not quite audibly, with relief. Prematurely, as it had turned out. After one, two heartbeats he had steeled himself to ask the urgent question which had been pressing upon him for almost a day now.
“What has become of Mark Lucas?” he had asked, his voice as steady as he could make it. But Charles, brushing aside his question, had ordered him,
“Come. Ride with me. You will carry this.” Charles had thrust the box of pistols at him. Without a word, ever the subordinate younger brother, William had obediently taken it.
William had at once been convinced that Charles, not considering him worthy of the supposed dignity and honour which in those days had informed the conventions of duelling, had now meant to compel him to go with him to some lonely place and there simply to shoot him out of hand like a worthless dog, taking care to make it look like an accident, of course. Throughout his life he had many times had cause to fear that Charles not only could do that, if he wished, but one day would. The habit of fear of and deference to Charles formed over many years of ill-treatment at his hands had overridden all sense of self-preservation on that day, however, and so he had meekly gone with his brother to what he had fully expected to be his execution. No doubt Charles had taken care that both pistols should be loaded to be sure of successfully and swiftly completing the task.
“What has become of Mark Lucas?” William had asked him again, nervously, after some minutes of riding at Charles’s side in silence. If he had been doomed to die in any case, this persistent questioning could not have made the situation any worse, surely. But again, Charles had not answered him; neither had he said one word more to him in the half-hour or so it had taken them to reach the thickly wooded place, perhaps a mile and a half from the House, where Charles had halted in that same small clearing, beneath that same tree where William had been bound and abandoned in the growing winter darkness so many years earlier. This time, however, neither Francis nor Henry had been on hand to come to his rescue.
“Get down,” Charles had said grimly, dismounting as he spoke. Juno, his mare, had at once retreated from him a few paces, snorting and shaking her head. Audax had whinnied to her, as if questioning. She had whinnied in reply. She had sounded distressed. Audax had snorted, too, then, and had begun to prance a little, also clearly agitated now. William had tried to soothe him, patting his neck and speaking low and soft into his ear.
“What has become of Mark Lucas?” William had said, again, then, his voice wavering. Charles’s curt orders and grim demeanour had been so very frightening! All his instincts had been telling him to turn Audax about and dash to safety, but – but!
“I said, get down.”
William, obedient to Charles as he had ever been - in most things, anyway - had slid down from the saddle promptly then, even though he had been certain now that he had known what was coming. Oh, why had he not just turned Audax and spurred away from that sinister place deep in the woods? He had asked himself that so many times since that afternoon that he had lost count! But the truth had been that he had very vividly imagined a ball in the back, the coward’s death-wound; he had remembered too the pain of the carbine ball in his thigh at Boxtel, and the dreadful ordeal when Surgeon Micklewhite had botched its removal - and then he had been afraid to the point where he could no longer think rationally – and in the end, the ingrained habit of subservience to Charles had been simply too strong in him.
William had been by now in a state approaching panic. It had been all he could do to prevent his bladder from emptying itself – it would not, of course, have been the first time Charles had succeeded in making him piss himself - but he had been all at once bloody well determined that he was not going to die in sodden breeches! He had seen men mortally sick in Flanders, who had lost hands and feet to the cold, who had had the gangrene and had been cut about by the surgeons – many, too, sick with dysentery, with marsh fever - who had yet managed to die without weeping, or pissing or soiling themselves - and if they, so-called common soldiers without benefit of education or instruction in manners or philosophy or even in the basic tenets of what had supposedly been their religion, could leave the world with dignified resignation, notwithstanding their sorrow for themselves and for the loved ones they would see no more, and also notwithstanding their bodily mortal agony, then so must he. Besides, he would not give Charles the satisfaction, not now. But William had felt nonetheless that, now it had come to it, he could not simply die in submissive silence. It had been his duty at least to make an appeal – not to Charles’s better nature, because he had known very well for many years now that his brother had not possessed such an attribute – and not to try to save himself, either, really – but because he had supposed that it had been his Christian duty – if he might still think of himself as a Christian, when his late actions had doubtless removed him very far from the mercy of God - to make the effort to prevent Charles from becoming a murderer, if he could.
“Charles, don’t – “
“Kneel,” Charles had said, in a voice of ice.
“If you wish. But tell me, I pray - before you do this - what has become of Mark Lucas?“
“I told you to kneel. I know you can do that. I’ve seen you kneeling often enough in church, you damned creeping hypocrite, and for all I know you probably did it well enough on those occasions when you were pleasuring the gardener’s boy on a dung-heap behind the bloody hen-house, or whichever charming spot you’d chosen that evening for your assignation, so do it now.”
“But what has become of him?“
“Just kneel, damn you!” Charles had barked, boxing William hard across the back of his head.
So, a little dizzily, he had knelt upon the floor of the green glade, which had been eerie enough notwithstanding the dappled sunlight, on account of its former association with winter twilight and abandonment, wondering vaguely what it was that Charles had had in mind just then. But that really did not matter now. Then something so trivial occurred to him that it might have made him laugh in other circumstances; for even as William had been thinking to himself, ‘Charles is going to shoot me; I am about to die,’ there had been a small part of his mind which had begun to fret about the inevitability of ruinous grass-stains on his breeches, which had been almost new, and how unlikely it was that Williams’s Kerseymere and Woollen Cloth Powder (two shillings a box, from Mr T Williams of 41 Pall-mall) would ever get them out, notwithstanding the extravagant claims made for its universal efficaciousness in the advertisements which he had sometimes seen in the Morning Post.
Then there had come the sound of a soft click as, so William had supposed, Charles had opened the pistol-case. He had not turned to look, but his surmise had swiftly proved correct, for shortly afterwards Charles had stuck the barrel of one of the pistols beneath William’s chin and jerked it up.
“Head up. Head up, I said! And keep your back straight. You aren’t a fucking peasant, slumping there on the ground like a sack of meal! Haha, you just like fucking peasants.”
“For God’s sake, Charles! We didn’t – not that - I swear - !“
“What? If you didn’t fuck Lucas when you had the chance then the greater fool you, for you won’t get another. Or did you let him fuck you? Was that it? Head up, I said!”
Charles had forced his chin higher. William’s neck had begun to hurt, although that had been the least of his problems.
“Charles, don’t do this!” William had said urgently then. He had had only the haziest of notions of what Charles had meant by his coarse reference to Mark. He had not recognised in those words anything which he and Mark had ever done together. Just then, however, he had called to mind a memory, a very distant one, of once seeing a bull in a field with a herd of cows, a long time ago – that very same bull in that very same field into which Charles had once flung him in the course of a country walk – and then Charles had laughed at his distress as Henry and Francis, acting on Charles’s order, had held the gate shut to prevent his escape until the very last moment as the bull, catching sight of him at last, had been begun bellowing in rage, about to commence its charge. In his six-years-old innocence he had wondered aloud whether the bull had been trying to persuade the cows to play at leap-frog with him. Charles had laughed and called him a simpleton and then had spelled out to him what the bull had been about. William had recalled that, in his childish naivety, his imagination had recoiled from the idea. Then he addressed his present situation once again.
“Think of what might happen to you, should you be detected! The gallows!”
“Let me understand. You are pleading to be spared so that I shall not be hanged for your murder? Your hypocrisy is breathtaking!”
“Charles, I am obliged – it is my duty to attempt to prevent you from becoming a murderer!“
“At least they would give me a silken halter if I asked them, like Earl Ferrers.”
“But - the crowd calling out their vulgar insults! Think of Amelia! Of our mother! Of – of – the shame of it - !“
“Be quiet!” Charles had snapped viciously, again cuffing him hard across the back of his head. “I shan’t be found out - I’ll make damn sure of that. And how dare you lecture me about shame! Neither do I wish ever again to hear you begging for mercy. That is what you are doing, William. You do not care about me, or about my wife, or our mother, or shame, or anything else. It is you who are shameless. You are simply afraid to die, because you are a snivelling coward, like your father the Marquess of Ardara. Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, on the other hand, was not afraid to die! He put on a fine show for the entertainment of the mob! He died a fucking hero of his class, in fact. He cut the pattern of how an aristocrat should die - with panache, with élan - with style! Ferrers would have dominated the proceedings even at the guillotine, had he been a Frenchman! (2) Or is it that you think you will be missed, perhaps? No-one will miss you, William. Not I. Not Henry – although it’s just possible that Francis might, I suppose. He’s soft enough. But not Mama, for you have been her undoing. Not even Jessica, I should not wonder. She will most probably be relieved when she hears that you are no more! Think of this as me doing a valuable service to your betrothed, saving her from having to serve as your alibi for the next fifty years. She could always marry Francis, anyway. At least he’s closer to inheriting than you ever would have been. The Viscount certainly will not regret the loss of you.”
“Does the – the Viscount know of this, then – ? Did he decide that this is the way to – to end things?“
“I said be quiet!” Charles had snarled. “Say nothing of him! You’re Mama’s fourth son, William: her grief and her bane. There never would have been any point to you, even had you the right to call the Viscount ‘Papa’. Well, now you are on your knees I suppose you might as well say a prayer.”
“A prayer?”
“I believe that it is the customary way in which to proceed upon these occasions. Had you been about to die upon the public scaffold you would have been permitted the comfort of the ministrations of a clergyman of the Church of England by law established, but in our state of privacy and seclusion I am afraid that you only have me on hand to perform the office of a priest, before I cast aside the chaplain and turn executioner. Might I suggest the General Confession? The one from the Holy Communion is suitably lugubrious and sufficiently comprehensive to cover even your sordid if somewhat pathetic collection of half-hearted sins. ‘Make your humble confession to Almighty God, meekly kneeling upon your knees.’ Well, you look meek enough, I suppose. You will repeat after me,” Charles had said, stalking around behind him now, ‘Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men – ‘“
It had been all William could do to repeat the phrases, even familiar as they had been to him by long use.
“’We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed’ - speak up, William, I can barely hear you – ‘By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us’. Good God alive, William, you are not going to cry, are you? That would be so unlike you, ha! I suppose you are not about to piss yourself, either?”
“Where is Mark Lucas?” The desperate question had escaped from him almost like a sob. “What have you done with him? I must know, before, before - ”
“You saw what I did with him, William,” Charles had said, with exaggerated patience. “I gave him a thrashing last night. I beat him bloody.”
“You had not the right to treat him so! This isn’t the damned Middle Ages! He is not a serf, and you do not own him! But - where is he now, today?”
“I was lenient!” Charles had said, ignoring William’s further question. “As for his not being a serf, you have me there; still, perhaps I might have dealt with him as sometimes I have dealt with errant n-----s in Bimshire.” (3)
Charles had then withdrawn the pistol and had produced from his pocket a small implement. Its finely-carved handle of bone – whose bone? William had later wondered, his thoughts bordering upon delirium during the long ordeal which had followed upon this one - had been the mount for a blade, cruelly keen, hooked. William had stared at it in bewilderment, instinct warning him that for his peace of mind – as if that mattered now - it were better not to ask its purpose.
“You know what this is? You gawp, William, like a dumb rustic idiot. Like that fool Tom Griffiths, perhaps. Ha! His face last night! It was a picture the moment I mentioned India!”
William had maintained his silence.
“You do not ask its purpose?”
Silence, still. Impatient, Charles had performed a crude pantomime, and William had understood then well enough.
“This was in my pocket last night.”
William’s eyes had widened further in fear and horror. Charles had allowed him just sufficient time to imagine the humiliation, the terror, the agony (surely far worse torment than having a carbine-ball dug out of one’s thigh by a drunken surgeon); for a few long moments Charles had left him to assume the very worst. Then he had gone on,
“I confess, it would have been sweet, to take the manhood of that impudent peasant for what he had presumed to do – the insult he had dared to offer this family. But that would have scotched the plan I had for him. He had to be fit, you see, and whole.”
“Where is he?”
Charles had sighed theatrically. “William, you grow tiresome. What if I were to demonstrate the use of this delightful thing on you now instead?”
“Just damn well shoot me! Jesus!” William had exclaimed, his face now as white as paper.
“He’s hardly going to help you. But no. I shan’t do that. I agree with you that this is far more pertinent,” Charles had said, pocketing the knife and casually swinging the pistol by its trigger-guard. “Although perhaps I should have gelded you years ago, for all the use you’d have been in the marriage-bed,” he had gone on musingly. “But no. If you had been found without your goods and gear on your wedding-night old Josiah Hayles would not have been a happy ironmonger. Even the Viscount might have asked some inconvenient questions. But let us return to the General Confession.”
Charles had held the pistol now so that the barrel had been hovering at William’s temple, a little in advance of his right ear. He had cocked it. Again, William had almost wet himself in terror when he had heard the heavy, menacing click, and, oh, no, now his treacherous bowels had begun to elbow their way into the proceedings! He had closed his eyes, clenched every sphincter he possessed, and choked back a sob. He really had been going to die, then. So he must do his best to show that he had been capable of displaying at least a modicum of courage. He must not die utterly craven and in the ignominy of having lost control of his body, and so confirm Charles in his opinion of him, already so low that for almost all of William’s life it had been subterranean.
“’We do earnestly repent’ - and you do repent, don’t you, Billy Buttons (4), you cringing little woodlouse - you are so very penitent? You had bloody better be – ‘And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable,’” Charles had gone on, and then suddenly William had felt the steel barrel of the pistol cold upon him again as Charles had pressed it hard into his temple - so hard that it had hurt. “’Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life’ – I expect you’re hoping that last petition will still apply to you, aren’t you, William? It will. For all of, oh, let’s say – ten seconds, perhaps? ‘To the honour and glory of thy Name. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’”
Throughout all of this sacrilegious burlesque William had been doing his very best not to weep, but now, at last, he had been beginning to lose the struggle.
“Say Amen, damn you, you contemptible degenerate!”
“Amen,” William had whispered. His shoulders had been wanting to heave. He had fought the impulse with all the strength which he had been able to muster.
“So God can hear it!”
“Amen!” William had said, aloud, the pent tears now threatening to flow in earnest; so he had bitten down upon his lip until the blood had run. It had hurt, but what had that mattered, when in a few very short moments, he had been certain, must come the pain which would end all pain forever.
Several seconds had then passed. They might as well have been hours. William’s heart had been pounding now. He had begun to shake uncontrollably. He had been certain, utterly convinced, that he had been about to die. The ball must come soon, then in the interval between one heartbeat and the next he would be in effect a corpse, his brains, grey and pink and white and glistening in the sunlight, spattered across the glade and already attracting the homage of a squadron of flies - his bright scarlet blood pumping from his dying body onto the green, green grass - the fountain slowing to a viscous shining trickle in the little time it would take for his heart to stumble and falter to a halt - after which he would know nothing until Gabriel sounded Reveille on the morning of Judgement Day. He had seen just such a sight in Flanders – a Lieutenant of the 42nd, in his twenties, fair-haired, blue-eyed and handsome (at least, he had been, before the musket-blast at almost point-blank range had blown away half his head) - and now it was his turn. Just before William had closed his eyes he had noticed how motes had danced like fairies in the afternoon sunbeams which had come slanting through the branches of the summer canopy. He had smelled the scent of last autumn’s leaves, wet from recent rain, where they had fallen on the sod and still had not completely rotted. He had heard the piping of a lone robin somewhere in the undergrowth. It had been as if he had apprehended these things for the first time, with all the keenness which came from the knowledge that it would be the last.
‘O Lord God, he had prayed, silently, then. I have sinned. I am sorry. I am sorry. Forgive me now, for Christ’s sake, who died for us men, and for our salvation. And look kindly upon Mark, wherever he is, I pray and beseech Thee, for it was all my fault, my fault, my own grievous fault – and Charles – I swear I do not wish him ill, for Amelia - Amelia - ‘
“Charles, just do it!” he had exclaimed. “Please! End it!”
“I say, William, do calm down! Getting a little hysterical there, I think.”
“What? What?”
The next thing was that, unexpectedly, astonishingly, Charles had suddenly moved away from him. The pistol had no longer been pressed to his temple.
“Charles – what is happening?”
After a little had come the startled chugging alarm call of a blackbird at a horse’s sudden snort of surprise, and the sound of rustling in the grass, and another snort, closer this time, together with a faint silvery jingling, and Charles’s sotto voce words meant to calm the beast, which suggested to William that his brother had stepped in front of him, now leading Juno by the bridle. Was he going to mount and ride away and leave him there? O Lord Jesus, please let Charles just go away now and leave me alone! But –
“Watch,” Charles had said to him then. “Open your eyes, you unnatural filth, and watch!”
So William had opened his eyes, and had seen that it was Audax whose bridle it was that Charles had held, and not that of Charles’s own mare. Then he had watched, as ordered, quite unable to do otherwise, whilst Charles had put a bullet into the skull of the horse, between and a little above his mild intelligent brown eyes - just as on the previous evening he had been made to watch, pinioned and helpless, as Charles had thrashed Mark with the riding-crop until the young gardener’s back had been a sheet of blood.
The sound of the shot had echoed and echoed amongst the trees encompassing the glade until it had seemed to come from all directions at once. A murder of startled crows had launched itself from the green-golden woodland canopy with a great noise of cawing. Juno had whinnied in terror and stamped her feet and rolled her eyes, showing the whites, and Charles had sworn at her, calling her a cowardly bitch. Meanwhile Audax had dropped like a stone, the only sound he had made that of his body striking the springing vivid green turf with a great thump, blood spurting from the surprisingly small wound in his head. William had gasped with horror and shock (the grief would swiftly follow) and had fallen forward onto his hands, his face almost upon the sward.
“What, not afraid of a bit of blood, William?”
“Audax! You just fucking killed my horse, you – you – damned cur! What did he ever do to you?”
“Yes, I am sorry for that, but it was necessary. We needed to create a plausible and consistent narrative. You could not have taken him with you to India anyway. I shall send someone with a cart,” Charles had said airily, nodding in the direction of poor Audax, whose body, although he was dead, lay twitching upon the grass. “He will have stopped thrashing about by the time they get here.” The modern medical men, the Victor Frankensteins in training (although the world had not yet heard that name), could have explained why - residual random electrical impulses, they would have said, demonstrating in their lecture theatres upon fresh corpses with the Galvanic battery, and so on; but to William it had merely seemed incomprehensible, weird and terrifying. Audax was obviously dead but yet he was still somehow alive? He had struggled to make sense of it all.
“Thank you,” William had responded faintly, automatically, the cogs of his mind still whirling without purchase, for something fundamental to the regular functioning of the mechanism of his mind had broken at the sight of beloved Audax, who had been made to suffer the penalty for William’s transgression, lying lifeless in the glade.
“For the cart, or for not shooting you, as you richly deserve?”
William had said nothing in reply. He had been unable to comprehend the question.
“Pah!” Charles had exclaimed contemptuously. Then he had gone to mount Juno, who had whinnied again in panic, and had tried to back away from him.
“Come here, you silly ---- !” Charles had snapped at her, employing an obscene term and roughly grabbing her by the bridle. He had cuffed her brutally about the head before heaving himself into the saddle, beating her into submission.
“I’ll see you again later, little brother,” he had promised William, smiling grimly. Then he had turned his mare, savagely pulling her head around, and had at last ridden away.
As soon as Charles had been out of sight William had raced for the cover of the trees, frantically scrabbling at the buttons upon the waist-band of his breeches as he ran, and casting off his coat. Nature had taken its course, explosively, mercifully a split-second after he had managed to lower his breeches and find a place to squat. Thank God for dock-leaves, he had thought, as if that had not been the least of his troubles as he had crouched amongst the undergrowth with his shirt hitched up above his hips and his breeches about his ankles, hanging on precariously meanwhile with both hands to a bunch of slender hazel-twigs above his head which had been just low enough to grasp. His breeches were ruined, he had noticed as he had crouched suspended there, stained green with moss and grass and brown with leaf-mulch and black with soil and mould. The laundry-women who visited the house once a fortnight would never get that out - not with soap or lye or any amount of scrubbing; but at least it was only the tones of wholesome nature, and not - oh, and there was some scarlet which would soon dry to brown. Audax’s blood, driven by his great horse’s heart, had spurted about ten feet into the air for a few moments, and an eddying breeze had evidently caught some of it and had sent it in William’s direction. After perhaps two or three minutes of dangling there, to be sure that there would be no further spasms, William had hauled himself to his feet and grabbed handfuls of leaves with which to perform the necessary office, then had rubbed his hands again and again on the wet grass, which was all he could do, in the circumstances. Then, having made himself at least in somewise decent again, buttoning his breeches and retrieving his coat, he had returned to the glade, where he had knelt once more, weeping now for Audax, cursing the flies which had already been descending upon the horse’s body, and trying to beat them off with his hands.
For what had felt like a very long time William had continued to keep his vigil, kneeling by the dead beast, feeling as guilty as if he had murdered him himself: Audax, the fine bay gelding, a fleet and fearless hunter, and a loyal friend. He had taken Audax with him when he had gone away to school at the age of twelve! The horse had been such a great comfort to him there, always whinnying gently in greeting when he had gone to visit him in the stables, always glad to take whatever he had had to offer – an apple, a carrot, sometimes a lump of sugar from the family’s Barbados plantation – that had been before he had thought much about that subject. William had even persuaded himself that Audax had looked upon him with a warm light of understanding and sympathy in his eyes, at times when it had seemed to him that no-one – no-one else at all – not even Robert Ovalton – had done so.
William had gone on kneeling there in the glade – his breeches had been ruined, past all saving, so it had not mattered now - watching the horse’s blood pooling in a slight declivity in the ground until eventually it had ceased to flow. He had been too shocked and shaken to do anything else. Then, inevitably, more flies had come. At first William had gone on angrily trying to shoo them away, but it had been a hot day at the end of June, and they had persisted, and in the end he had realised the folly of his trying to resist the inevitable. Audax had been truly dead, and death attracted flies, and the poor dear horse had already begun to rot in the heat of the afternoon, notwithstanding the dappled shade of the clearing, and had therefore inevitably been fated to become a breeding-ground for maggots. One day, William had thought then, that could be his fate – to die on some parched furnace-hot battle-field in India, far from England’s umbrous cool green woodlands, and become food for the children of flies.
He had hoped that the cart which Charles had promised would come soon. Time had passed. William had not been sure of it, but he thought he might have passed into a kind of trance - he might even have fainted - a delayed consequence of his ordeal. At least, when he had next been aware, he had been lying on his back upon the grass. For a moment William had thought himself upon the bluff above the river on the bluebell hanger almost two months since. Then with a sob he had remembered. He could see, by the way that the sunlight had now been slanting through the green leaves of the woodland’s mature summer canopy, that it was now a good deal later in the afternoon. Then, as he had been agonising as to what to do, for no cart had yet arrived – he had to return to the house, there was nowhere else for him to go, but at the same time he had not been able to bear the thought of it – he had heard sounds in the wood behind him. Looking about he had at last seen a cart approaching along the track, Edwards upon the bench driving two of the work-horses, three other men riding in the vehicle behind him. They were the three whom Charles had ordered to assist him on the previous evening – Ned Weston, Jem Trenchard - and Tom Griffiths. It had been Tom who had restrained William, with violent force which had left his upper arms covered in unsightly bruises (as if that had mattered now!), clearly relishing his role in the miserable business, whilst Ned and Jem, with profoundly unhappy faces, had held Mark fast as Charles had thrashed him. Thinking that he could not possibly face them, William had sprung up at once like a deer and had fled into deeper cover. Only when, peering through foliage, he had seen that they had loaded Audax’s poor corpse onto the cart and had set off back towards the house - and, after a quarter of an hour or so, he had been quite sure that they had left the wood - had he begun to venture back by another path - but as if he had read his mind, Charles, still mounted on Juno, who had been shifting miserably from foot to foot and tossing her head in agitation, notwithstanding her master’s angry blows and exclamations, had been waiting for him on the track.
“You took your time,” he said, by way of greeting, offering William another mirthless grin. William had stopped dead, and had been about to turn around and run back the way he had come when Charles had laughed harshly. “Come here!” he had ordered him: so, inevitably, William, obedient as ever, unwillingly yet unable to prevent himself, had gone to his brother.
“What do you want with me now?” he had demanded of Charles.
“That was ill-spoken. Graceless, William, so unlike you. You are always so charming, so polite, so enchanting. When soft-speaking to gardeners’ boys, no doubt.”
“I asked you, what do you want?”
“To walk with you back to the house, of course,” Charles had said, dismounting. Juno, restless and still clearly disturbed by what she had witnessed earlier that afternoon, had uttered an unhappy whinny and had tried again to pull away from him, but, as before, he had grasped her firmly by the bridle.
“Why?”
“You’ve just had an accident. A fall from the saddle. You are slightly concussed. Audax unfortunately broke his leg as he too fell – he was surprised by an adder - how does that sound? plausible? I think so – yes, that will do - and had to be shot, and naturally you are very sorry for that, for you loved him dearly. I should be a poor sort of brother to leave you to walk home unaccompanied in these circumstances.”
William had closed his eyes and clenched his hands at those cruel and taunting words; but all he had said was,
“What has become of Mark Lucas?”
“You will oblige me by never again referring to that person so long as you remain at Durford,” Charles had said, advancing upon him.
“What has become of Mark Lucas? What have you done with him?”
“I warned you.” Charles had struck William hard in the face, opening again the cut which his signet-ring had scored in his cheek the previous night, and knocking him down. William had been quick to get back up on his feet again, suddenly seized with the conviction that Charles would have kicked him in the stones next, had he not. Bleeding and staggering, he had turned to walk away: but Charles had caught him, seizing him roughly by the arm, his fingers digging painfully into the already bruised flesh, so that William had been unable to prevent himself from crying out. But nonetheless he had persisted.
“I want to know, what has become of Mark Lucas!” he had demanded. “Tell me!”
Another blow. This time William kept his footing, barely.
“William, you must understand that you cannot be permitted to run on in this distracted way. Why, you are shaking! You are clearly unwell. In fact, I think I was correct in my judgement that you might be more than just a little – unsettled – in your mind – and have been so for some time, even. It is as well that I returned to find you, is it not? You really had better walk with me now. Arrangements are already in hand for you to receive the best of care, beginning tomorrow, all being well - in accordance with the most modern and enlightened practices. The Viscount has sent for the celebrated Dr Nathaniel Madderley, Joseph Merceron’s protégé, the visiting physician who attends the inmates of Coldbath Fields Prison in London, amongst whom are many who might be best described as moral idiots – those who are not Jacobins, at any rate.”
So William had walked with him. Charles had whistled Non più andrai (5) on the way back to the House.
The Present: 26th July 1798.
“Good day to you, sir,” said the Viscount, at length.
William acknowledged the cold courtesy with another somewhat uncertain bow. His recent experiences had for the time being obliterated what little self- and social confidence he might ever have possessed, and at that moment his rattled brain simply would not permit him to remember how he should conduct himself in a situation such as this.
“You will speak when you are spoken to, sir. You will not have forgotten that lesson from the nursery?”
“I – I am sorry. Good day – my - my lord.”
No; that was not right. The Viscount was staring at him now as if he was the most contemptible thing which he had ever seen come crawling from beneath a rock.
“My lord?” Petersfield was equally affronted and astonished. He had never wished to be burdened with William’s upbringing, but having reluctantly agreed to take responsibility for him, he had as a bare minimum at least hoped to succeed in raising him so that the manners proper to an English gentleman might become second nature to him – not for William’s sake, but to avoid unnecessary shame to the family. Never in his life before had William addressed him as ‘my lord’! “You are not a tradesman, or a parson, sir, neither are you a shop-keeper - still less a servant - although if I am honest I confess I do not rightly know what you are to me at this moment. Before the world, at least, you are my youngest son, although you are but Ardara’s whelp - Fitz-Simons’s bastard - the ill-gotten pup of a broken-down and landless Irish marquess.”
“And a dead one, at that,” put in Charles, gloatingly. The Viscount glanced at his heir with what, William thought, and somewhat to his surprise, looked very much like dislike and disapproval. Petersfield huffed pointedly. Silence of perhaps a quarter of a minute’s duration then ensued.
“You will have noted that in advance of this interview I allowed you a generous interval for reflection and self-examination,” the Viscount said, eventually. “It was my intention that you should chuse to spend the time in contemplation upon your recent poor decisions regarding how you regulate your life.”
“Yes, sir. I thank you, sir. I have reflected much this last half hour, and more, and also throughout these last days – weeks.”
The Viscount stared at him. William dropped his gaze and looked at his feet.
“You will do me the courtesy, sir, of looking me in the eye. I am not currently seated upon the Magistrates’ Bench and you are not before me as a thief or a poacher or a smuggler. And, in despite of all, I am not inclined to send you to await the next Assizes in Winchester. Whatever you might imagine regarding my personal feelings towards you, I should take no pleasure in seeing you hanged. Although had you been the son of John Smith the Butcher, say, or Thomas Jones the Apothecary, I should have had no hesitation in sending you to the Assizes at Winchester for hanging upon the first convenient occasion.”
His intestines in knots, William now tried to look at the Viscount, but he found himself, for that moment at least, physically unable to do as he had been commanded. Instead, to his shame, and without having consciously willed to do so, he covered his face with his hands and sobbed, once, twice. The Viscount sighed.
“Charles, what in God’s name have you been doing to him these last four weeks?” he said, addressing his heir.
“Teaching him a lesson, sir.”
“In what, pray?”
“In contrition. In obedience. In humility.”
“What else have you been doing? He resembles nothing so much as a beaten dog!”
“Dr Madderley and I have been endeavouring to drive the madness out of him, sir. I think we have at last succeeded.”
“Succeeded? Are you sure you have not driven him farther into idiocy instead? Hayles seemed to think he was already an half-wit, once upon a time, I recollect - that is no reason for you to look so, sir,” said the Viscount, turning and speaking sharply to William, having from the tail of his eye caught him flinching at that. “Word once reached me that Hayles was used to say that at least he would have comely grandsons and pretty granddaughters, even if he would have to endure an imbecile for a son-in-law. That was a compliment – I daresay the only kind of compliment you will ever be able to look for. If nothing else, you have the looks of your worthless progenitor. Or at least, you had, before this latest regrettable epoch. Charles, I would he were not so thin and haggard in appearance. I fear that you encouraged Dr Madderley to go beyond that which was necessary. He cannot make his farewells before the Viscountess in this condition.”
“Hayles!” Charles sneered, ignoring the point concerning the Viscountess. “The Honourable Member for the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers!”
“Do recollect, Charles, William is still contracted to wed the Hayles girl. One day she will be your sister - unless the Tippoo Sultan should make short work of your brother here, of course. And remember also, this family has every reason to be thankful for Sir Josiah and his allegedly filthy lucre.”
“Puffed-up bloody tradesman,” was all Charles had to say to that.
“Your grandfather the Earl is shortly to recommend Sir Josiah Hayles, the Honourable Member for Stockbridge, to His Majesty for appointment to the Privy Council.”
“Stockbridge. A rotten borough! What does that signify? He represents probably three farmers, their sheep, a few pigs and a pack of savage dogs!”
“It signifies that Hayles has the patronage of a Peer of the Realm, Charles,” the Viscount said, with weary patience. “Your grandfather. On account of the betrothal of William and Miss Jessica Hayles. Please try to remember this ancient arrangement. It is most important to the continuing prosperity of our family.”
With a great effort of will, meanwhile, William finally made himself look directly at the Viscount.
“You will be aware that I have with some not inconsiderable difficulty found you passage to Madras in His Majesty’s Ship, the frigate Néreide,” the Viscount said, addressing him.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said William, having regained his composure.
“Withhold your thanks for the time being. It will be no pleasure-cruise. Captain Watkins agreed to have you aboard his vessel on condition that you place yourself, for the duration of the voyage, under his command as a member of the ship’s company, not as a passenger. You will parade daily with the Marines, and otherwise undertake such duties as Captain Watkins and his Lieutenants see fit to give you. You will have the notional rating of Midshipman whilst you perform these other duties, and you will mess with the Midshipmen.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When you arrive at Madras you will make contact with Colonel McCandless at the earliest opportunity and thank him once again for his generosity in providing the funds, firstly for your Ensign’s commission and now the additional sum for purchasing up to Lieutenant. I am aware that you have had your Lieutenancy for two years now, but intervening circumstances have made it impossible for you to thank Colonel McCandless in person. You will lose no time in attempting to do so once you are established at Fort St George, although I allow that necessity may place difficulties in the way of your seeing him, for some time. I hear things which suggest that the time for taking on the Tippoo Sultan decisively might well be fast approaching.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Viscount had grimly maintained the pretence throughout the years that McCandless had offered to purchase William’s Ensigncy and then his Lieutenancy out of fraternal attachment to his mother. The truth of the matter was that the Viscount had flatly refused to pay for William’s commission himself, even as Ensign, on account of William’s doubtful paternity (doubtful? It might have been a matter for doubt at first, but by now that Ardara had been his father had long been a racing certainty) and that was the stark truth of it. Hector McCandless’s generosity (6) had been his token of a stubborn insistence upon his sister’s fundamental good character in the teeth of his brother-in-law’s implacable suspicions and indeed all evidence to the contrary. As often, however, in cases like this, successful maintenance of the public fiction that William was Petersfield’s fourth son had all been down to timing. Viscount Petersfield had performed the calculations, which had suggested to him at first that William might indeed have been his son, born at eight months, for had he been born at full term then he would have been conceived whilst the Viscount had still been at sea on the voyage home from Barbados, at a time when the Viscountess Petersfield - (who, when he had come to think of it, had been so unusually pleased to see him upon his return) had been at Bath with her sister-in-law, in the Easter week of 1776. Initially he had acquiesced in the eight months’ infant explanation, not wishing to think otherwise. But he had soon learned, by means of an anonymous letter, that his wife had been seen being regularly squired about the town by the indecently handsome, unprincipled and, crucially, impecunious Marquess of Ardara, a man with the face and figure of an angel and the mores of a tom-cat. That grand-sounding title, as the ladies had said behind their fans wherever they had gathered to exchange news and gossip in the West Country playground that April, had been an Hibernian honour only, a title of the pinchbeck peerage of Ireland, little more than a double-gilt potato. The Marquess himself had been, notoriously, broke - forced to make his living playing (and some had said cheating) at cards and in who knew what other disreputable ways. However, Gerald Fitz-Simons had not looked Irish, which had been in his favour, the gossiping ladies had agreed. His Anglo-Norman legacy had been very apparent: he had been tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed; his features had demonstrated fashionable Classical perfection; he had been of a deceptively youthful appearance which had belied his five-and-thirty-years; he had been witty, and engaging, and amusing; his voice had been singularly attractive, being light and musical, with just enough of the brogue in it to be fascinating - charming, indeed, quite disarming – in fact, he had been known for possessing a silver tongue ever ready and apt to speak pretty and apparently spontaneous compliments to lonely and disappointed married ladies.
The Honourable the Viscount Petersfield had, however, chosen to swallow his pride and to pretend (at least in public) that he believed in William’s prematurity, for he had already formed a notion of how the child might be made to earn his keep in due course, and a good job had been made of stifling the scandal, notwithstanding the story of the eight month’s child-bed - a flimsy tale so commonplace amongst the aristocratic sinners of those days before Evangelicalism had smothered most forms of behavioural dissent that society had long since learned to give a collective cynical roll its eyes every time it heard it, whomsoever it concerned – better, on balance, the Viscount had thought, later, to have said nothing on that score, perhaps, but it was too late now. There were still some old dowagers who liked to whisper of the scandal after one too many glasses of punch, at balls and at receptions, even twenty-one years later.
“Also you will thank him for recommending you to Colonel Wesley, or Wellesley, as the upstart’s brother (7) is now calling himself, who expressed himself pleased to learn of your return to the Thirty-Third as a Lieutenant; although I must say that I am glad that in the circumstances I am not Wesley, to be thus burdened with a liability such as yourself. A full year and a half’s recuperation at home after allegedly suffering from a brace of conditions to which an enervated girl would be ashamed of admitting would not recommend itself to me, were I in his place.”
“Bear it, bear it,” William was telling himself meanwhile. “You have borne all that other for the last month. Charles tried to drive you mad on the pretence of making you sane, but he failed. Only another few minutes and you will never have to see either of these ogres again. Possibly.” William thought of shipwreck, and pirates, and, ever looming at the margins of his thoughts, the French. He thought of fever and the bloody flux. He thought of all he had heard and read of the Tippoo Sultan, and the French-trained armies of the Tiger King and his allies, with their fierce tulwars and lances and rockets and barbarously-decorated artillery pieces. “Probably.”
“Yes, sir.”
“At least your departure has been generally expected for some time now, which is a mercy. We shall not have to invent some story for consumption in Hampshire to account for your going from home.”
Consumption. William had wondered whether the Viscount Petersfield had deliberately chosen that word for its hurtful ambiguity, in light of his previous remark.
“No, sir.”
“Your future conduct will be exemplary.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You do understand what the Viscount means by that?” said Charles.
“Yes, thank you, Charles,” William said, his voice almost cracking as he spoke. Those last words of his, he knew, were shaming. Thanking Charles. For nothing They reminded him of the gratitude he had felt towards Charles just days earlier when Charles, satisfied, had finally decided that he would stop the beatings, the ice-baths, the denial of food, the days on end of suffering both mental and physical; and, before that, after what had happened in the glade in Durford Wood, his gratitude when Charles had said that he would send a cart to retrieve the corpse of William’s poor slaughtered horse. Gratitude! When he should have felt nothing but anger, revulsion and hatred for what Charles had done to him and to Mark and to Audax! He had bowed to coercion and to the methods of the oppressor, the tyrant and the torturer. How could he now go and be a soldier again when he had been weighed in the balance and been found so thoroughly, utterly wanting in fortitude, courage and resolve?
There was, of course, one extremely important reason, to which has previously been alluded, why the Viscount Petersfield had long sought to maintain the public fiction that he sincerely believed that William was his son, and that had nothing to do with his wife’s honour and everything to do with cash.
“And you will recall your betrothal.”
“Yes, sir. You mentioned it but a short while ago.”
“So you will do nothing further which might cause Sir Josiah Hayles to doubt your commitment to the match.”
William closed his eyes momentarily as involuntary memory overwhelmed him -
The Past: December 1784
He remembered a day - in the Christmas holidays, the year when he had been seven, about to be eight. There had been no lessons in the schoolroom with Miss Turnbull that fortnight, because she had been allowed to travel into Kent to visit her Aunt Louisa, who had brought her up, and who had now been said to be in her last illness. He had been making his way as stealthily as he knew how along the Long Gallery, his goal the passage which led to the attic stair, with a favourite book – he thought it might have been Gulliver’s Travels. Suddenly he had heard sixteen-year-old Charles somewhere not too far away, impatiently calling “Hey! Hey! Billy Buttons! (8) Where the devil has he got to this time, the wretched animal?”; so throwing circumspection to the winds, William had simply run for it, barely checking in surprise as he swerved to avoid a stranger he had not recognised, then taking a hard left turn into the passage; opening the door he had slipped inside into the darkness, and had closed the door again behind him as quietly as he could manage in a hurry - sanctuary gained! He had still been able to hear Charles calling for him. He had stood with his ear to the rough unfinished stairs-side wooden panels, wondering how he had been at fault this time. He had been about to mount the stairs – with any luck he would reach the attic and succeed in gaining to the heart of a pile of lumber before Charles could come in hot pursuit - then he had heard Charles calling again; but this time he had not been calling William’s name, but that of one of his brothers.
“Francis!” he had heard Charles shouting in his loud imperious way, off somewhere in the distance. “Francis! You creeping-Jesus Bible-beholden God-botherer, where are you? Ho, there, Francis!”
“Yes, Charles?” Francis had responded wearily, entirely used to this kind of abuse. He had sounded, William had thought, as if he had been much further away, on the great stairs, perhaps.
“D’ye know where William can have got to?”
“I daresay he heard you bawling for him and that as a consequence he is latibulating.”
“I asked you where he might be, not what he is doing, which, as you have just now said, is clearly hiding, as usual – like a dumb beast in its den!”
“It is Christmas, Charles – why do not you leave him be for once? What can you possibly want with him now? Surely ‘tis pity to be always casting cold water upon a drown’d mouse.”
William had heard Francis’s voice coming closer. It was plain to him that Francis had climbed the stairs to the first floor and had now gained the gallery.
“I do not want anything with the snivelling little woodlouse! It is Father. He wants him in his study – now.”
Papa! In the darkness of his hiding-place William’s heart had at once begun to thud wildly in his narrow little chest. The Viscount had never wanted him! What had this portended?
“Lord, what can he have done?” Francis had said. Both voices were nearer now. William had gauged Charles and Francis both to be in the middle of the Long Gallery.
“He has not done anything, so far as I am aware. But that fat plebeian iron-master from the Meon (9) is back again.”
“Who, Josiah Hayles?”
“The very one. It is all of ten leagues from here to Tichbourne so that must mean that he is serious in his intentions. And Father wants William at once. Oh, you must have some idea of where he’s buggered off to this time, Francis! – the irksome ill-conditioned little scrub has been told to stop this – hiding - nonsense over and over - the disobedient provoking little bastard!”
“You had better hope Josiah Hayles did not hear you call him that, Charles. William is our brother, notwithstanding, and you insult him. And you show too much contempt for the Hayles fellow simply because he is Trade, and New Money. He is not nearly so great a boor, for example, as Sir Walpole Crawley, (10) whom with his vulgarian wife the Viscount was obliged to invite to dinner only a month since. If he heard you, that would likely mean the end of Father’s scheme.”
“I shall call him what the Devil I like, you sanctimonious prig! You already talk like a bloody parson – did you know that? And it ain’t a scheme, it’s a bloody good idea. The Viscount was saddled with raising Ardara’s useless brat, so he might as well turn him to a profit, make him pay his way.”
“William is far too young – “
“Do not you see, jingle-brains? It has to be now – he is growing far too like – another two, three years and it will be as plain as the nose on his face!”
“It is deception!”
“As you just now reminded me, William is our brother, is he not? although it grieves me to admit it.”
“You know what I meant – it is called to have one’s cake and eat it too. That is what Father seeks to do, with this – this – “
But Charles had not had the patience to wait until Francis had hit upon the elusive words with which he had sought to convey precisely what he felt about the callous mercenary disposal of his youngest brother.
“I saw you talking to Billy Buttons outside the breakfast-room not ten minutes ago,” he cut in. You must have some idea of where he went!”
“Perhaps Henry might know.”
“Henry! He will say both Yea and Nay, as he always does! If you sound like a prating curate in embryo, Henry is already the equivocating lawyer to the life! Why, he has already taken himself off so that he does not have to participate in this tedious discussion! I just saw him oiling his way downstairs, making for the door!”
“If Henry and I are already somewhat practised in the ways of our vocations, Charles, then it is a pity that you have not studied to conform you conduct more closely to that which befits a Peer of the Realm, which is what you shall be, one day.”
“I am certain that you know where William is,” Charles had said, trundling over Francis’s rebuke like a human lawn-roller. “Tell me! I will not have him sneaking about the house like this – never knowing where he is – where he might suddenly spring out upon us at unawares like a – like a damned Yankee rebel in the woods!”
“I have never known William to spring out upon anyone, Charles; but if Uncle Hector has the right of it, the general officers of our British army could profit a great deal if they would but learn from the example of those damned Yankee rebels in the woods.” (11)
“Uncle Hector!” was all Charles had had to say to that.
Francis had given a heartfelt sigh then, as if wishing to give the impression that he had yielded at last, he said,
“Wiliam said to me he was for the schoolroom to practice his new piece upon the fortepiano there. He said he intends to have learned it by heart against Miss Turnbull’s return in the New Year. It is an advanced Invention of Herr Sebastian Bach. It is to be a surprise for her, he said, as she did not know that he has been preparing it in secret with the help of Mr Tolfree from Church.”
William had said no such thing – at least, he had not said anything of the kind to Francis on that particular morning. He had said just that two days earlier, however, so Francis had reasoned with himself that what he had just told Charles had not been an untruth – not in literal fact, anyway. (He had learned to make accommodations with the truth, such as that, over the years when it had come to the business of having to co-exist with Charles – they all had, he and Henry and William.) Francis had in fact possessed a good idea of William’s current whereabouts but he had not been disposed to betray him. If William had to be found, and it seemed that he had, then he, Francis, would be the one to find him and coax him gently from his sanctuary. He would not have Charles dragging him forth with a cry of triumph as if the shy and timid boy had been a housebreaker’s snudge discovered by a thief-taker.
“Miss Turnbull,” Charles had sneered. “A boy of his age should not still be tied to the petticoat-strings of a silly woman. It lessens his consequence as the man he will shortly become that he is still being taught by a governess! It’s more than high time Papa sent her packing. And that confounded nursemaid, too - all that damn nonsense she talks – d’ye remember? – ghosts, fairies, ‘Elm he do grieve‘ – walking trees, I ask you! I think I shall tell Papa that he should send her home to Somerset directly!“ Charles had been working himself into a fine high dudgeon by this time.
“Nell is a steady girl,” Francis had said, soothingly, wisely deeming that it would be better not to observe to Charles that he had no business presuming to tell the Viscount to do anything, even if he was the Heir. “I know Ellen used to tell us stories sometimes, in the evenings, before bed-time, but it was just to amuse us. I do not think that she believed in them herself. She is far too sensible! She told them well, though. I liked to hear her tales - “
“Pshaw! None but very weak people like to hear of such absurdities, far less believe in them. Filling his head with childish fancies!” Charles had ploughed on. “William should have left all that behind him long ago. And he should be attending lessons with Mr Whitstable by now.”
“He’s still a little young for a tutor,” Francis had said, mildly, choosing to ignore the insult. “That is what Mama says.”
“Mama! If Mama had had her way, William would still be wearing a satin frock and have his hair hanging in ringlets, looking as he does in that damned painting on the stairs! Damned women!” Charles had snorted his derision for the entire sex and had at once stamped off in the direction of the great stairs to seek William in the schoolroom, as Francis had hoped that he would. Once Charles was out of sight, with modest quiet steps Francis had slipped into the side-passage and approached the door to the back-stair. Hesitantly he had knocked upon it.
“William,” he had called, softly. No answer. “William, it is I, Francis. All is well. You may come out. Charles is gone.”
Silence.
“William!”
“…what is it?” William had said, at last, in a very small and hesitant voice muffled by the intervening boards of the door.
“You must come at once, William. I am sorry. The Viscount wants you. I fear it is important.” Slowly, reluctantly, then, William had opened the door. He had peered out gingerly. Francis had thought that he looked like nothing so much as a mouse obliged by necessity to leave its hole, yet mortally afraid lest the cat had still been about. He had smiled at him – an affectionate but worried smile.
“…Have I done something to offend Pa - the - Viscount?” (other than merely to exist!) “ - is he angry with me?”
“No; he is not angry at all. On the contrary, I judged him to be in a rare good temper this morning at breakfast! But he wants you at once. William - I believe – at least, I guess – that it is about something of significance – that it concerns a matter which will affect your future life. Do not worry; it is nothing unpleasant, I am sure. It is just – somewhat important.”
Silence intervened for some moments; then –
“I’m scared, Francis!” William had confided through the door.
“Of what? Of Father? You still fear that he is angry with you?”
“It is not to do with, with - him. When I was coming here – I was running - just before I heard Charles shouting – I saw a man – a strange man – in the Long Gallery!” (12)
“Strange? How so?” “He – looked odd. Thin, and pale, and – and - like smoke, or, or mist, and I thought I could almost see through him! He was all grey, like he was not really there.”
“Then most probably he was not. Now, William - ”
“But he was! He saw me, I could tell. And just these two minutes gone by, before you came, I heard him calling, ‘Boy, ho, boy!’ after me, as I ran, but he sounded as if he were calling from a cave deep underground, or from very far away.”
“Oh, William, how you do go on! You probably saw Maddox in the shadows or, or another of the footmen. And Charles had been roaring after you these many minutes.”
“And he had but one arm!” William had persisted, ignoring that last remark.
Francis had balked at that, and had hesitated before he had spoken again. “Nonsense!” he had said, after a little. “There is no-one of that description at Durford. You saw someone standing in the shadows, with his arm held behind him, that is all.”
“And he was strangely dressed, like, like a foreigner or something.”
“William,” Francis had said now in his best matter-of-fact voice, “You must not continue in this. You are too ready to imagine things. You always have been. You are almost eight years old. You should think more about what is real and, and actual – especially now. It is a dark winter’s day, and you were alarmed. You saw one of the servants, and in poor light you took him for a stranger, that is all. Now, you must come out. I shall come with you to the door of the Viscount’s study, if you like – but I shan’t be able to stay. He has a visitor, a Mr Josiah Hayles, who is very desirous to make your acquaintance.”
Now William’s mind threw up a memory from twelve years before – the 10th of January 1786 - here, in this very room, five-year-old Jessica and her parents, Mr and Mrs Josiah Hayles, as they had been at the time (the knighthood and then the baronetcy had come later, as a result of what had happened that afternoon in the smaller drawing room of the house at Durford Park). It had been his ninth birthday, a few days more than a year after the Viscount had summoned him to his study on that morning in the Christmas holidays. After their first stilted greeting – both of them dressed after the same fashion as their parents, but in miniature – (he had had a fine new suit of clothes for his birthday, just like the clothes Papa wore, and Charles – the coat of dark-blue broadcloth with a little silver lace at the button-holes and upon the collar and cuffs; the knee-breeches of blue broadcloth to match; a fine shirt of white linen, ruffled at the throat and the wrists; a starched white neck-cloth, on this occasion elaborately tied by the Viscount’s valet; a waist-coat of glossy pale yellow silk embroidered with sprays of sky-blue forget-me-nots; white silken stockings; shoes of black leather with bright silver buckles – he had even had his own brand-new seal, an elegant piece in silver-gilt, which he had worn suspended proudly from his waist-coat fob upon a ribbon of blue watered silk, and which he would use on his letters the next time he wrote to the Countess, and to Grandmama McCandless! He had been glad that he had not been made to wear a wig; at the age of nine he had still kept his golden hair, which had not faded as so often happens as childhood begins to draw towards its end: he had liked to see it in the mirror, and compare it favourably with his baby-locks in the big painting on the stair-case.
William’s stylish, fashionable and gentlemanlike appearance in the glass once he had been got ready that morning had at least been some consolation in the teeth of the ordeal which he had known he would have to endure later that day. The sight of himself had in fact pleased him greatly. I wish Nell could see me, for I am not a nasty water-rat now, he had told his reflection. He had known that he had been done with all of that when the Viscount’s own valet, who had been sent by Mama to dress him for the occasion – no mere maid would have done today! – there was distinction! - had told him, with genuine admiration, that he looked like a proper little lord, although of course William had also known that he had been nothing of the sort; he had been learning his place in the hierarchy to a nicety for as long as he had been learning his ABC and sums and amo, amas, and Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, and Our Father and Glory Be, and he had known perfectly well that he was only an Honourable.
When the time had come for him and Jessica to meet, he had bowed, the little girl had curtseyed, just as they had both been taught – and then the children had been allowed to converse. William had attentively offered Jessica warm milk and lemon cake and had asked her what she liked to do best. Playing with her dolls’ house, she had told him, and its six-inch high denizens. She had liked to make Lady Charlotte order dinner from Hephzibah, the doll who was the cook – requesting quails stuffed with sultanas and raisins followed by fantastic kickshaws of oranges and cardamoms, allspice and sugared almonds – and to send Jemima to the village to buy barley-sugar and marzipan – and to take to task Wilkins, the doll who was Lady Charlotte’s maid, for making a birds’ nest of her hair and mislaying her silver thimble. Quite clearly, Jessica had been going to grow into a holy terror to any servants they might employ in the future. (13)
“I shall ask Mama to show you her dolls’ house, when next you come to visit,” he had said. “It is a very fine example of the craft. It is very tall, taller than – than the Viscount. You will have to stand upon a chair to see into its topmost rooms. I shall hold the chair for you, if you will allow it. Mama was given it when she was a girl of your age. She had it brought here on a boat all the way from Scotland when she and Papa came down to Hampshire after Uncle George died.”
“On a boat?”
“From Oban – Oban is a port in the north-west of Scotland; it is fifty miles from Spean Bridge, where Mama lived when she was a girl. It was brought to Portsmouth, here in Hampshire, by sea - and thence by carriage to Durford. It is in the Long Gallery. It is deemed too fine for the nursery; and besides, there are no girls here who otherwise might wish to study it.”
“Study it? Might not they merely play with it?”
“Perhaps to play is to study,” William had said, considering the point. “I have somewhere read that to work is to pray, after all.”
A worried frown had appeared momentarily upon William’s already-anxious nine-year-old countenance. He had been fascinated by this object, the dolls’ house, when he had been still a small boy, barely into breeches. He could have studied it silently for hours, mounted upon a chair to see into its upper chambers (for it was indeed taller than the Viscount) if only he had been left in peace to do so. Of course, Charles’ inevitable scorn had put a stop to that, once he had found discovered William’s interest in it. After that, Francis had taken to playing with him in the nursery, with the fine set of lead soldiers which had once been their grandfather’s, and then the Viscount’s. Half of them had been British and the other half French, dressed in their painstakingly-detailed painted uniforms, which the soldiers of both countries had worn eighty years ago. They had been variously between five-and-a-half and six inches high and each had had his own carefully-modelled and tinted features. He and Francis had had names for all of the British ones. The French commander they had called Colonel Le Comte de Souffle-d’Ail. (14) He had enjoyed their games with the soldiers, although it had rankled with him that he had had to be the Duc de Tallard or the Marquis de Blanzac, whilst Francis had always been Marlborough or Prince Eugene. Sometimes William had played alone with them, however, and then the soldiers, the Redcoats anyway, had been his Regiment – The Earl of Winchester’s Volunteers, he had called them, otherwise known as the Lemonade Boys, owing to the pale yellow facings and turn-backs of their coats - and he had been their Colonel, and he had taken great satisfaction in parading them and granting them make and mend days if they had put on a particularly good martial display; and, for the officers amongst them, permission to go to balls and routs and pic-nics. But now, at nine years old and almost a man grown, they said, he was too old to play with toys, for here he was, having to be civil to the little girl he had, just over a year since, been told that he would one day be obliged to wed.
“What do you like to do, William?” Jessica had asked him just then.
“I like to read and to draw, and to play the fortepiano in the schoolroom. If I become sufficiently proficient, Miss Turnbull says I might then be permitted to play upon that instrument.” He had indicated with a nod of his head the still-new modern Broadwood pianoforte, a large and grand one (unlike the small square instrument in the schoolroom) where it was visible in the lesser drawing-room beyond the open folding doors which communicated with the larger, more formal chamber in which the adult party was seated. This splendid instrument had only two or three years since been purchased to replace the Shudi harpsichord which had formerly stood in that spot in the drawing-room. “Come and see,” he had said, leading Jessica into the adjoining room. William loved the instrument and was almost as vicariously proud of it as if he had built it himself. “Your governess is teaching you to play, of course, Miss Jessica?” In answer, Jessica had pulled a face. “You do not like to play?” he had asked her, incredulous.
“I hate scales!”
“They are dull,” he had conceded. “But if you persevere with scales and other exercises, then by and by you will find it infinitely more easy and far more convenient to play the pieces which you prefer – the ones which give you the greatest delight.”
She had looked at him, unconvinced.
“If your governess says that you must practise scales and other exercises, and learn studies, in order to become proficient, then you must practise and learn them, Miss Jessica.”
“Very well. To please you, I shall.”
“I had rather it were to please your governess and yourself, and others - for it will make you into a better performer, and at last truly proficient, and so then you will become a favourite at parties and gatherings of friends, whether they wish to dance informally, or merely to beguile themselves with hearing pleasant music.” He had, of course, been repeating a lesson which Miss Turnbull had frequently rehearsed to him, albeit a lesson of which he had already learned the value. A short silence had ensued whilst Jessica had absorbed the import of these words.
“What else do you like, William?” she had asked him, at last. There had been a lengthy silence as he had considered.
“Cats,” he had said, eventually. “I like cats.”
“Cats kill birds and mice.”
“Yes. It is a pity about the birds; but it is the duty of cats to kill the mice, which otherwise would get into the granaries and larders and spoil our food. On the whole, however, I like cats very much.”
“Why?”
“They are pretty and graceful,” he had said, puzzled, “and in their play they are very amusing.” (Was this not self-evident?)
“Thomas Tomkins isn’t pretty! He’s built like a barrel of salt-pork, Robbins says – he was a sailor but he had to leave the sea after his foot was crushed when they were re-stowing the hold after a storm off the Cape, the one at the end of the world, so he knows of which he speaks - and Thomas Tomkins is a brute! Robbins says he is the most goddam fucking bugger of a mangey swab of a cat what ever drew breath in a Christian country.”
At this, in the greater drawing-room beyond the folding doors a sudden silence had fallen.
Jessica had gone on meanwhile, “He’s twice the size of a normal cat. He has an eye like this – “ (Jessica had put a finger beneath her left eye and pulled it downwards so that the orb had been exposed and glaring) - “ and half of one ear is missing - and he has a horrid scar down his face from when he got into a battle with a huge rat - and he swaggers about like a corsair chieftain, if cats could be corsairs! Even the dogs are afraid of him! Well, at least the silly little yapping ones, like that pug your Mama dotes upon. He lives in the stables and he eats kittens for breakfast – even his own!”
“…usually cats are pretty,” William had persisted, disquieted, once the adult conversation had tentatively resumed. “And they are pleasant to stroke, for their fur is very soft. And their purring is most agreeable to the ear and consoling to the spirit.”
Jessica had conceded, then, that cats, on the whole, were adorable. Did he like dogs?
“I find that they are very often too like people,” William had said, after some thought. “They are frequently loud and lacking in discipline, I mean, proper discipline, that which comes from within, and not merely that which is imposed from without by harsh words, and kicking and beating - and they snap and show their teeth and make one start. I… I confess that I am rather afraid of them. The larger ones.”
“But not of dogs like that?” Jessica had said, rather scornfully indicating the spoiled pug Mr Johnson, (15) who had been sprawling asleep like a Pasha upon a divan on the sofa next to the slumbering Viscountess, snoring whilst wantonly presenting his genitalia for the general admiration of the company. “Thomas Tomkins would make short work of him!”
“No; not like him.”
Then, changing the subject, Jessica had suddenly asked him,
“What will you be when you are a man, William?”
An older William might have said ‘Relieved’ in answer to that; but his younger self had replied, “Pa - Papa says that I am to be an officer in His Majesty’s Thirty-Third Regiment of Foot, and fight the French.”
At that, Jessica’s Mama had cocked an ear to their conversation. A regiment of foot? She had not caught which one. In her head she ran through what she knew of the local regiments and decided that William was bound for the Sixty-Seventh, then, probably: the South Hampshires. That was odd. She remembered something one of her friends had said only the other day, that the 67th was currently in the West Indies (16). The Fever Islands! What if they stayed there indefinitely, as the regimental postings abroad often turned out to be lengthy? That was no good! She should have thought the Guards, rather, one of the smart and fashionable regiments? Or some kind of mounted body? Mrs Hayles had not known much about the Army – in fact, she had spent her girlhood positively trying to ignore it when the Regiment had been in town. She had been told by her Mama in no uncertain terms to stay out of the way of the Redcoat subalterns, handsome devils all (even a plain young man could give the impression of appearing handsome if he sported a scarlet coat and a crimson sash and a little silver lace, and a silver-gilt gorget which reflected the sunlight and the candle-light so prettily, after all – it was all in the bearing, and in the confidence that such a splendid outfit could impart even to a very ordinary fellow who would never have been looked at twice had he been wearing civilian clothes) who had hung about by the poultry cross on Market Days on the qui vive for silly young maids like Maria and her friends (the flightier ones of whom had played up to them, and had had their hearts, and sometimes other things, broke, in consequence) but she had an idea that the really smart young men who joined the Army as officers preferred to look properly dashing on horseback, if their families could afford it. Why send the boy to serve in a dull affair like the infantry? An Ensign in a Regiment of Foot was practically destined to be killed in his first significant engagement with the enemy anyway – everyone knew that Ensigns, the Army’s apprentice boy-officers, were its sacrificial lambs, even more so than common soldiers, because their symbols of authority and their duty of bearing the Regiment’s precious, almost sacred, Colours made them targets – even if William had not been posted to the West Indies and the Yellow Fever had not got him first – and so many young men from Hampshire had recently been carried off by that cruel disease, in that hateful Caribbean posting.
“Miss Fletcher says that France is a beautiful country and that the people there are witty and charming, and that the French ladies are the most beautiful, elegant, fashionable, amusing and accomplished of any in the world. Why does your Papa wish you to fight the French?”
William had been momentarily stumped by that. He had never really thought about it. The English had always fought the French, had they not, for above seven hundred years now? It was simply the natural way of things! Then he had thought of a reply.
“Why, Miss Jessica, we English are always having to fight the French, for - for they do persist so. We used to own France, until some bad foolish king lost it five hundred years ago.”
“Why did we own France?”
“In the first instance it is more true to say that France owned us. William of Normandy and his men took England in the year one thousand and sixty-six, because he believed that the Saxon King Harold had betrayed him upon the death of King Edward Confessor. William believed that Edward had promised him the throne of England, and that Harold Godwinson was an usurper, so he invaded England and took the Crown. But then over many years a succession of Kings of England lost more and more of France. Then five hundred years later great King Henry tried very hard to get those lost lands back – that is two hundred and fifty years ago now - but even he never could do it.”
“But why could not King Henry get France back, if he was so great?”
“Why – why – “ Here William had been thwarted. Imagination had come to his rescue, however. “On account of his having green sleeves, I suppose. Green is always unlucky, Nell used to tell us. If you wear a green gown or green coat out of doors it attracts mischievous elves, who wish us harm.”
“What stuff, William! Nonsense! Who was Nell?”
William had blushed at that.
“I suppose it is nonsense. Nell was our nurse. She told us such stories. I liked to hear them. But now the French have put on airs, and think to rule all Europe.”
Jessica had digested this.
“And you must help to stop them?”
“Indeed I must. It will be my duty, as an Englishman.”
“But why cannot the French just have Europe? They have plans and projects for improvement, Horatio my brother tells me, and the old rulers seem to have had none. Just more of what has always been, although what has always been has done no good and much harm, Papa says.”
He had been almost stumped at that.
“Because – because – I suppose – that would be against the natural order of things. Against – against God’s will.”
“I don’t remember anything from the Bible against the French.”
“I’m sure there is! In Revelation! The Rector says the Beast is coming, and that he will be a Frenchman. He has made a great study and calculation.”
(Sometimes, William had thought later, it helped to pay attention in Church and listen to the sermon.)
“When shall we be wed, Miss Jessica, do you think?” William had said then.
“When you are a Colonel, William, then I will marry you,” Jessica had said, after some thought.
“Lieutenant-Colonel, at the least, I hope,” William had said, to that. “I think if you wait for me to become a full Colonel we might never marry.”
“I think you ought to rein in your ambition further, Jessica, dear,” William’s Mama had put in, mildly, at that point, “or you might find yourself having to wait a very long time indeed.”
That was when Jessica had decided that, very well, she would marry William once he was a Major. He had tried to beat her down to Captain, but she had been most determined: already a young lady of some social ambition. Jessica had returned to sit by her own Mama on the sofa, but not before she had whispered to him, astonishingly,
“I saw an elf once, William. Last midsummer. It was almost dark. Or perhaps it was a fairy, because it had wings. It was the size of a moth. It was flying in the air along by the hawthorn-hedge at the bottom of the orchard, by the lane, all white and glowing. A little person, with wings like a butterfly’s.”
He had turned to gape at her, captivated – that had been exactly the kind of thing which had been most likely to seize and hold his attention forever – how could she possibly have known that? but she had already turned back to her Mama.
“I like William,” she had said, just then, in a mind-made-up voice audible to all the room. “He’s nice, much nicer than Portia. He’s kind. He makes me laugh. When we are married, he can be my sister instead of her.” (17)
It had been a bleakly cold and dark afternoon in the second week of January in 1786. The wind, still strong after the recent storm, had been blowing the snow into drifts in the Park and on the roads all day. The drawing-room, away from the fire burning brightly in the hearth, had been chilly, particularly near the great tall windows, where the malevolently importunate eddies of the easterly gale had been prying and scrabbling to force an entrance; and at Jessica’s assessment of him it had felt to William as if the chill had deepened; but now he had sought out an upright chair against the wall far from the warmth and light of the fire and the candles. He had also removed himself as far from Viscountess Petersfield as he could contrive to go (the Viscount had not been present; he had been for some months then taking care of business in Barbados - again; just how much had that business really needed his personal attention, for God’s sake? William had often wondered since, just as he had gone on wondering how many mulatto half-brothers and sisters, and latterly nephews and nieces, that Henry and Francis might have acquired, thanks to the heroically procreative activities of the Viscount and Charles; and he himself would have been a half-uncle to that latter category too, he had supposed). He had been sternly informed by Charles of the purpose of the visit earlier in the day, and of how he must not behave in any way which could conceivably give offence (Charles had outlined, with icy clarity of detail, the course of action he would take should he learn that William had come the moping mum-chance, who was, famously, hanged for saying nothing, as William usually did in company); but he had obscurely suspected that somehow he had, without meaning to, given offence; and so he had remained rigidly still and had said not another word, except for the barest minimum of stammered courtesies, throughout the remainder of the hour it had taken to go through the rest of the excruciatingly dreary tea-time ritual. It was what he had frequently done when he had been obliged to be in this room when Charles was present, even when other members of the family were also there, after all. When he did this, Charles had scornfully called it playing dead. As the guests had been leaving, he had stood by the wall with bowed head, and had overheard Jessica’s father say to Jessica’s mother, in what he had probably intended to be a whisper,
“Maria, do you not think the boy might be an idiot after all? He’s hardly improved at all over the last year. Still practically tongue-tied - and spiritless! Pretty little fellow, though, I’ll give him that; at least Jessica will have a set of handsome children.”
“Hush, Joe!” she had whispered back, shocked, assuming that her husband had not been entirely focused upon the encounter; he had, after all, seemed worried and preoccupied since the news had reached them on the previous afternoon that the Indiaman Halsewell had been broken into pieces on the rocky shore of the Isle of Purbeck in the blizzard four days earlier. A great deal had been riding on that voyage, she had known (18). “He is merely quiet and subdued. I imagine he was informed of the arrangement. A child might take such news in one of two ways. Either he might be struck by the gravity and seriousness of it, and comport himself accordingly; or else it might float entirely over his head. I imagine the former to have been the case with William. He strikes me as uncommonly intelligent and sensitive.”
“So not an idiot, then?”
Maria Hayles had given William a rueful glance on her way from the room.
No, she had thought. Unhappy, certainly. Unhappy and above all else, afraid.
“Not an idiot,” Maria had said, firmly.
“I think William is very pretty,” Jessica had said just then, her voice diminishing as they had taken their leave, yet loud enough still to be audible in the drawing-room. “He’s like a doll.”
“Jessica!” Maria had hissed.
“I was paying a compliment, Mama. I like dolls.”
Back in the greater drawing-room meanwhile, Lady Petersfield had drawn a gilded vial from her reticule and had added three blissful drops to her fourth cup of tea.
Later, in the privacy of their carriage, Maria had voiced her disquiet.
“I do not like their disparity in years,” she had said. “William is almost twice Jessica’s age.”
“It might seem like a large difference now, Maria,” Josiah had reassured his wife. “But as time passes it will become less. When William is fifteen, Jessica will be ten. When he is twenty, she will be fifteen, and so on. When he is five-and-twenty it will hardly signify; and once he has his Majority, say at twenty-eight or so, it will not matter at all.”
Maria had grudgingly accepted this. Then another objection occurred, as she expressed puzzlement about the commission in a Regiment of Foot.
“There’s an uncle, the Viscountess’s brother, a Colonel with the East India Company, younger brother of some Scotch baron or other.”
“Scotch, you say?”
“Scotch, yes. Somewhat on the careful side, the Scotch. I daresay that’s why they’ve chosen a Regiment of the Line for William, and not some flash mounted outfit. Anyway, this uncle says he’ll put up the cash,” Josiah Hayles had said, as if that explained everything, and obviously relishing his casual reference to the Viscountess; although now Maria had been even more greatly puzzled. The boy’s uncle to pay for the commission? “Good God! The camber of this drive is far too steep for the horses in this weather. Feel that, m’dear? We might as well be cantering over the Thames at a frost-fair! And I dread to think of the state of the road, after an afternoon such as we’ve had - if we finally reach it in one piece! Thank Heaven we are putting up at the Crown in Petersfield tonight. I should not relish the thought of the journey home to Liphook in the dark. Well, I’m not sorry young William won’t be inheriting Durford. This drive is not at all suitable! I wonder that the Viscount has not had it improved these last several years.”
“I understand that the Viscount has hardly been in England ‘these last several years,’” Maria had said in a tone bordering upon the tart.
“These have been troubled times, what with the French, and the rebellions on the plantations. No doubt he has had much to occupy him in the West Indies.”
“Much and more, if what I have heard be even half the truth.”
Jessica’s nurse, the shawl-wrapped form of the already sleeping child clasped firmly in her arms to cushion her from the shocks as they had slid from side to side of the drive, had pursed her lips disapprovingly, confident that in the dim light of the lantern which swayed from its hook set into the roof of the conveyance the moue would pass unnoticed, and prayed that the carriage would not be overset.
End-Notes
1. Coldbath Fields, aka the Clerkenwell House of Correction or the ‘Steel’ (from Bastille), a notorious prison for anti-government political prisoners held without trial at this period. Joseph Merceron was an East End gang boss at the time, based in Bethnal Green, and also a magistrate and he had great influence over the proceedings at the gaol. It was rumoured that he allowed rogue physicians to carry out experiments on inmates for profit.
2. Charles is not referring to the Viscount. Laurence Shirley, fourth Earl Ferrers, was the last English peer to be executed, in 1760. He had murdered his steward.
3. I apologise for using the offensive N-word, but it is the word which someone as beastly as Charles would have used at the time. ‘Bimshire’ was a jocular name for Barbados, used by the British planters.
4. A dialect term for a woodlouse, Oniscus asellus, a nick-name widespread throughout southern England.
5. From Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. The aria mocks Cherubino, the amorous page-boy who is being sent away to join the army for the sin of flirting with the Countess of Almaviva. If William had been capable of thinking rationally that afternoon, he would of course have realised that Charles had never had any intention of shooting him, because of William’s long, long betrothal to Jessica Hayles. His death outside of military service would have invalidated the contract and his family would have been obliged to repay the dowry, which might well have been ruinous. But, crucially, at that point he had not been capable of thinking rationally.
6. Colonel Hector McCandless of the East India Company was known for his good works. On learning of the hardship faced by the tenants on his family’s estate in Lochaber as a result of the notorious Highland Clearances, for example, he provided work for the destitute former farmers in the form of the construction of a replica of the gates of the city of Negapatam in the Indian province of Tamil Nadoo (captured by the EIC in 1781, an event which helped prepare the gound for subsequent increasing British dominance in India) on a hillside overlooking Loch Lochy – typical of McCandless in both its generosity and its eccentricity. (This monument still stands, although it is situated at Alness, Easter Ross, overlooking the Cromarty Firth, and the real-life benefactor was General Sir Hector Munro, active in the army of the East India Company in the 1760s.)
7. Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, Governor-General of India.
8. A southern English term for a woodlouse, and in this case, an unkind play on William’s name.
9. The Meon valley in Hampshire was a site of iron-ore smelting from Roman times.
10. Vanity Fair. William Makepeace Thackeray. Published in serial form in a magazine 1847-48.
11. Which of course it did, resulting in the establishment of the Experimental Corps of Riflemen under Colonel Coote Manningham in 1800. In 1803 the Corps became the 95th Regiment of Foot.
12. At a distance of more than forty years into the future, middle-aged Lawford sees a vision of a young boy running through the Long Gallery (see his Testimony, where he recalls this episode from when, as a boy of seven years upon the same occasion, he had run past a shadowy one-armed man whose existence everyone had then emphatically denied). He had a near-death experience at Ciudad Rodrigo which left him afterwards prone to random moments of clairvoyance (probably an amplification of a Scottish heritage of the gift of Second Sight, suggesting that the Trousers of Time is a two-way urban ring-road).
13. The elaborate dolls’ houses of the period were sophisticated teaching aids – not purely playthings - designed to instruct girls, specifically girls of noble birth, in how to run households and manage servants. Harriet McCandless’s dolls’ house had been just such an artefact. There is a large exquisitely detailed dolls’ house of the period exhibited at Uppark, Hampshire, to this day. Jessica’s probably more modest dolls’ house had most likely been given to her as a present within the preceding twelve months following the opening of negotiations between Hayles and Viscount Petersfield concerning her betrothal to William.
14. ’Colonel Count Garlick-Breath’ according to their schoolboy French.
15. Tom Johnson (c.1750-1797) was a famous bare-knuckle pugilist of the time. Lady Lawford evidently had been persuaded that her pug bore a certain resemblance to the engravings in the newspapers.
16. The 67th was in the West Indies from 1785 until returning home in 1794. At the time of the tea-party the regiment was in Antigua. It then returned to the West Indies in 1795, returning to England in 1801, its numbers greatly reduced by the Yellow Fever endemic to those islands.
17. It appears that Jessica, at the age of five, had intuited something about William’s nature which it would take him another decade even to begin to understand.
18 .Halsewell sailed from Gravesend on the Thames for Madras on 1 January 1786. An unusually violent winter storm, with snow, impeded her progress and on 6th of January she was dashed to pieces upon rocks, having got no further than Swanage on the coast of Dorset. There was great loss of life. She had been carrying mainly leather goods and ironware. Josiah Hayles had paid a good deal of money to dispatch many crates of samples of his manufactured iron goods to India aboard the vessel, hoping to procure lucrative contracts to supply a wide range of customers, the Bengali notables as much as the quartermasters of the army of the East India Company. The wreck cost him a good deal in lost investment and also in anxiety for the future, as he had set much store by the idea of exporting his goods to the Indian market, especially as he just contracted to pay the Lawfords a very large sum of money, £40,000 [worth approximately £5.2m in 2025], Jessica’s portion, to secure William as a husband for the girl in return for the promise of a knighthood and a seat in Parliament, a place on the Privy Council in due course, and, it was to be hoped, in the end a Peerage; this money, prudently invested, would at the normal rate of interest of about four percent, have brought the couple an annual income in the region of £1,500, a sum more than sufficient to enable a younger son to live like a gentleman, with an unpretentious rented house and park in the country, a well-turned-out wife, a respectable number of servants both indoor and outdoor, a carriage and horses to draw it, and at least two horses for riding. William would in addition have had the modest income from his military employment as well as the interest from the eventual legacies of his mother and his Uncle Hector (if prudently invested) as soon as these things could be decently managed. They would of course have had the complimentary use of Lawford House in Mayfair when they were in London.
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