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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
It was William’s last morning at home for he could not know how long, and yet he had been left to stand, fretting, upon the large and very fine oriental rug – or carpet, he supposed, in truth – approximately in the middle of it – for some time now - quite disregarded. He had presented himself in the greater drawing-room at a half before nine o’clock, as the Viscount (via an intermediary, Collins, the second footman) had ordered him. Whilst William awaited the arrival of this august person, who had now suffered him to idle in increasing discomfort for more than twenty minutes (William had arrived as the great clock in the echoing marble lobby downstairs had been chiming the half, and it had gone on to chime the three-quarters a fairly lengthy interval ago) he rapidly found himself ceasing to care about the likely course of this interview – the answer to the question of how it would go had only ever had one possible answer in any case, and that, he knew, had been ‘badly’ – and was now wishing that the ordeal could simply be over. Soon he no longer cared at all concerning what the Viscount might have to say to him. He was still not strong following his recent ordeal, and all he wanted was for the formal exchange of the necessary words of reproof and farewell to take place in short order so that he could leave, get away - far away - and begin to try to put all of it behind him – if that would ever actually prove possible. However, it was clear that there was to be no early escape. He had been left, quite deliberately, William was sure, to be slowly eaten up by anxiety as he was being made to wait – and wait.
The carpet upon which he stood, William thought, casting about for something to which he could make fast his thoughts, so that he would not begin to panic, and all of the carefully-marshalled points in his defence to the charges with which the Viscount might accuse him at this meeting begin to cast loose and drift irrecoverably away – the carpet would do well enough as an anchor for his uncomfortable cogitations. It had been a belated wedding present to Major the Honourable and Mrs Charles Lawford, as they had then been (1), from Uncle Hector: a gift sent all the way from India in a passage which had lasted for many months, in the capacious hold of a bulbous-sided Indiaman. India, for so long in William’s imagination that half-mythical, half-real and wholly mysterious land, whither he was now bound, where was his Uncle Hector, whose enchanting tales of that great and infinitely varied country (no, country was too inadequate a word – India was, Uncle Hector had once told him, in truth a vast sub-continent all to itself) recounted in treasured letters, read and re-read until they had been in danger of falling apart along the worn creased lines where they had been precisely folded (some of them actually had fallen apart, and had been carefully and delicately stitched back together by the Viscountess), addressed to Harriet and to her sons, his nephews. The impressions which they had conveyed of riches and wonders almost beyond imagination had been reinforced by the contents of astonishing boxes full of extraordinary, intriguing, beguiling and beautiful things which had arrived from time to time by carrier (and in one memorable visit when Uncle Hector had come home on leave, in person, when William had been twelve years old) had fascinated him for most of his remembered life.
Colonel Hector McCandless was the brother of William’s mother, Harriet Lawford née McCandless - the Right Honourable the Viscountess Petersfield; that very Hector McCandless of the Army of the East India Company, who had been a hero of the Battle of Buxar, fought more than thirty years since - the action which, even more decisively than Plassey, had, finally and emphatically, won huge tracts of India for the merchants of the Company and enormous profits for its stock-holders. After that, all had gone splendidly for John Company and those invested in it - until, of course, had arisen Fateh Ali, the Tippoo Sultan, heir of his father, the implacably British-hating Hayder Ali, bolstered by his new Revolutionary French allies. Uncle Hector had been mere Major McCandless in those days, William remembered. His Colonelcy had been a relatively recent development, promotion coming late and grudging in the Sepoy army of the allegedly Honourable East India Company, and dependent upon the principle of dead men’s boots.
In Uncle Hector’s latest letter, however, received last Christmas, he had mentioned that he had been about to be seconded to serve on the staff of General Harris of the King’s Army in some capacity, concerning the nature of which he had been uncharacteristically vague. As he continued to wait, William turned over in his mind what that might be, for Uncle Hector, usually so frank and open with his opinions and accounts of his activities, in accordance with his honest Presbyterian principles, had been, for the first time that William could remember, mysterious and obfuscatory and had not provided any details. William thought about Uncle Hector’s home leave in 1789, almost a decade since, which had coincided with the first alarming happenings in France. Something, a thought, the quickening of realisation, perhaps, just then began to kindle in his mind; but the ever-rising anxiety and agitation induced by his long, long wait for this dreaded but necessary interview rapidly snuffed it out.
The fine carpet, wrought of many brightly-coloured silks, glowed meanwhile as if with an inner light in the high-summer morning sunshine which fell with July brilliancy through the tall narrow south-facing windows of this, the principal public reception chamber of the great house. It had rained in the night. The rain had ceased to fall at a little after four o’clock, just as the sun had been beginning to climb above the rim of the world (2), and the warmth of the great golden orb, as it had risen higher in the sky, had quickly conjured the fallen water into a light mist which had then been woven by the light airs of the new day into a filmy veil, fine as the best Bengal muslins, partially obscuring the view of the farther parkland. Now, even whilst William continued to stand there as the mechanism of the clock in the lobby drove the hands upon its face relentlessly onward, its loud ponderous ticking beating the time to their ceaseless round-dance, that veil was dissipating. As the minutes passed, soon he found that he was able to see through the window the Park and the Wood beyond with near-perfect clarity.
The Wood beyond. William shivered at the memory.
The silence meanwhile continued, profound and protracted, save for the quiet rapid worried-sounding crepitation of the carriage-clock upon the mantelpiece. William turned his gaze away from the dark distant green mass of the trees - oak and elm for the most part, and ash and pine - good timber, valuable. He wondered vaguely how many thousands of guineas he had been looking at, in terms of what the Government might be prepared to pay to purchase the very necessary lumber which could be turned into ships to save England from the threat of invasion by the French. Then he imagined all those beautiful noble trees, several of them truly ancient, cut down – trees which in many instances had stood in Durford Wood since the time of Elizabeth - or even, in the case of certain of the oaks, that of the first King Edward; the thought of that might have rent his heart and provoked him to tears scalding enough to blind his eyes, had not those organs already been rendered desiccated and almost beyond being able to register feeling by all that had happened in the course of these last four terrible weeks.
To help pass the time (for his nerves were edging towards a condition not far short of desperation) William now concentrated his attention upon the shadows of the windows’ stanchions, watching as they tracked, very slowly yet still quite perceptibly, across the beautiful carpet with its intricate patterns, their transit bringing about subtle variations in colour and texture as he gazed. The world is turning, William thought, seeking to distract himself now with fatuous observations and the recitation of facts dredged up from memories of his years of schoolroom rote-learning. At the latitude at which lies England it spins at more than six hundred miles in every hour, we are told. At the Equator it spins at one thousand miles every hour. The Néreide frigate will of course cross the Equator twice, on her way down to the Cape and then again, back up to Madras. I wonder that the immense speed of the Earth’s rotation at the Equator does not provoke the seas there to such mountainous violence that all ships should surely founder. Yet only some founder whilst most others do not. ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters, these men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’ So sang King David of the Hebrews. They are in the hand of God. Some He suffers to be destroyed, some He spares, and men, we are told, are not to know the reason, nor to take issue. Uncle George’s vessel was swallowed whole by a great wave almost thirty years since. He was the Heir, with fine prospects, much courted for his friendship and his patronage, Mama said, on a time. But now his brother Charles, who became the Viscount upon that calamity, will inherit the Earldom instead. The wheel of Fortune turns. Perhaps God was offended on account of the Negroes stolen by the traders and sold out of Africa, who are made to work our sugar fields in Barbados, and that is why the ship was lost? My brother Francis once said that he feared that it might be so, for our family is assuredly caught up in that great evil of stolen men and women. Some say that those people do not count as human beings made in the image of God, so the Trade is legitimate commerce, but Francis says that is a lie. He is a clergyman. He must therefore be a good man, of necessity. So he speaks the truth. Our family is in collusion with evil and has grown rich upon the backs of those Africans, our brother men, who are made to suffer in order that we might be wealthy. I do not know what I might do about it. I have no power within this family. And I am not good. I wish I were, but I am not, so much has become plain to me in recent months. Francis also has strong opinions concerning what our merchant countrymen do in India. I hope I shall learn the truth once I have arrived there. If I arrive there. Perhaps on this coming voyage I shall prove to be like Jonah, and Néreide will be caused to founder on account of my own great sin? I pray not. I pray the good sailors will be spared, at least, even if I must be put over the side to drown.
It then occurred to William that there must be a place upon the earth where the world did not appear to spin at all, or, if it did, but very slowly. It must be upon the same principle as wheeling a Battalion, as Uncle Hector once told me. Like pivoting upon one of the flanking Companies of the Line, as Dundas writes.
Once upon a time, compelled to sit in this room with members of his family through countless tedious and unconvivial evenings, William had been used to escape, to lose himself in contemplation of the maze of intertwined curlicues of the design of the carpet, seeing patterns, imagining pictures - whole stories composing themselves, taking shape in his head as if by a strange subconscious alchemy, almost without any effort on his part. This had been a source of wonder and delight to him as he had silently spun tales to himself whilst (as his eldest brother Charles had regularly accused him of doing) appearing to stare vacantly into space. He had most likely been inspired by the Arabian Nights, a book with which he had once been in the habit of beguiling the dragging hours during many a dreary chill dark wet day in the Easter and summer and Christmas holidays from school, in the years after his lessons with Miss Turnbull, or latterly with Mr Whitstable, had ceased – if he had been able to secure for himself an hour of peace and solitude - which Charles, of course, had been determined he never should have, if he could help it.
William had also loved to read of the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe. These persons he had once believed to have really existed. Tales of fantastical journeys to faraway places - sojournings amongst exotic peoples whose philosophies, aspirations and desires, existing of and for themselves - anything of that sort had fascinated him. But this had infuriated Charles, who had had no time for tales, and whose only use for exotic peoples had been that they should labour without wages in the Barbadian sugar-fields which had belonged to the Lawford family for more than a hundred years now, in order to generate wealth for the facilitation of his irresponsible pursuit of bawdy pleasures and coarse amusements.
Many things about William had infuriated Charles, including his attachment to their governess. William had wept when Miss Turnbull had been sent away following his promotion to lessons with Mr Whitstable, the tutor, alongside Francis – Charles and Henry had been away at school by that stage, but an account of his desolation had nonetheless reached them. Charles had also despised William’s love of sketching and painting and playing the fortepiano, and his regrettable tendency to want to engage the servants in conversation, as if he had thought them his equals - not that they had talked back to him, for they had feared the consequences, both for themselves and for Mr William.
Charles had also scorned him for his fondness for animals. William had loved cats in particular, tribes of which had occupied the kitchen, sculleries, stables and other outbuildings, ever vigilant for and diligent in the disposal of mice and rats. One day, when he had been about five years old, Charles, who had been searching for him (for William’s exasperating habit of disappearing had begun almost as soon as he had been breeched and had come down from the nursery) had found him in a store-shed, happily chatting to a mother and her new kindle in the nest which she had made amidst bundles of old papers, speaking fond endearments to the lively unruly kittens, all of whom had been plaguing their dam in one way or another, in one breath, and then reproving them in tones of mock severity for vexing their Mama so in the next - and then again had come the sweet endearments.
“For God’s sake!” Charles had said, infuriated, and had in short order taken the kittens and drowned them in a water-butt in the stable yard to teach William, so he had said, not to be so soft in the head as to talk to animals, who were without reason and were not possessed of souls - unlike Charles, obviously - whilst William had watched helplessly, sobbing the while, in great agony of spirit.
But it had been William’s habit of reading for pleasure which had offended Charles the most. If he had had cause to suspect that William, whom he had scornfully called Backstairs Billy on account of his trick of constantly vanishing, as if he had haunted the damned place like a ghost, had hidden himself away somewhere with a book, the three of them - Charles, and Henry and Francis (3) under his command (Henry and Francis had not been enthusiastic in their persecution of William, but they had obeyed Charles because he was the eldest of the four of them and would one day be the Viscount and then the Earl in his turn, and the head of the Family, and a Power in the Land; and so, he had told them, obedience to his demands had been their duty) would enact their version of the Wild Hunt, and they would run whooping around the house and had almost always succeed in flushing out William from the refuge which he had chosen on that occasion. It had made little difference where he had hidden himself; they had always found him, sooner or later, and Charles would first triumph over him and then, sometimes, but especially if the weather were foul, order him to fetch his outdoor things and come along with them for a brisk walk in the country round. Charles had been used to say to Mama that this would be good for William – it would shore up his indifferent health and help to toughen him, and it had been convenient for her to regard him as a most attentive and considerate brother, for then she did not have to think about the matter too analytically; no matter how many times the boys went out in good, bad or middling weather, however, it had never seemed either to cure what her husband had called William’s detestable mopeishness or to make him more hardy or strong or more resistant to illness. Often it had merely served to make him catch cold, which had frequently resulted in an oppression of his lungs (he had been born untimely, an eight months infant, he had often been told - with emphasis - and was therefore susceptible) (4), which had led to his being confined to bed for days on end, and thereby generally served to increase his misery.
Sometimes, looking out at a threatening sky and anticipating that this had been about to happen, William had taken his chosen book and a candle, tinder and flint, and had gone to hide in one of the many rooms of the large house - it might have been under a dust-sheeted piece of furniture in some shuttered guest chamber, or in a window-seat behind a drawn curtain (the library had had the perfect window-seat but he had never hidden himself there; it would have made things too easy for his pursuers) - or deep within a pile of discarded objects in one of the many attics. Often it would be in one of the narrow pitch-dark passageways which ran behind the wainscoting of the public thoroughfares on every floor, or on one of three back staircases (which were usually deserted between the hours of ten o’clock in the morning and half-past five o’clock in the afternoon once the servants had completed their early offices and had not yet begun upon their later ones), desperate not to be found.
William had first discovered these secret ways by accident, one dark autumn afternoon when Nell had been leading him through the Long Gallery. He must have been four years old, William thought, when he remembered this, for he had certainly been breeched - but he could not have been much older than that. Speech had come slowly to him, he being alone in the nursery and with no other children with whom to converse, his brothers being so far his senior. It had taken him time to learn to form his words, and in addition he had stammered over the ones he had managed to acquire (the Viscount had been used to say he was an idiot, Charles had told him later, for Charles and Henry and Francis had all been chattering away like sparrows by the time they had been no older than two or two and a half); he had been at the stage when although his thoughts had now formed themselves with perfect clarity and coherence in his young mind he had still had difficulty in articulating them, especially when he had become excited or afraid, so, having seen Charles coming towards them, and forming the distinct thought ‘Charles – I must not be caught here by Charles, for he will likely pinch me’ - he had said nothing to Nell but had simply run away into the shadows of a passage leading from the north side of the Gallery, meaning only to hide there. At the end of the passage, however, he had seen a door, which to him in his alarm had seemed like a gift, so he had gone through it - and had soon been swallowed up in the darkness of the secret ways.
About half an hour later he had been found, lost and crying in the shadows, by one of the housemaids who had been on her way upstairs with the first of the cans of hot water which the family had needed for their daily bathing. Putting down the can and taking William by the hand she had led him back to the familiar daylit world of the family’s apartments. Nell, shocked – she had not noticed his flight until Mister Charles (aged almost thirteen years and so already a man in his own eyes), rudely upbraiding her for carelessness of her charge, had called her a stupid neglectful wench for having not noticed William’s silent fugue - had warned him never to run away like that again, for next time he might become truly lost and then never be found until he was what she had termed a skellington, nothing but brittle yellowed bones, hung with rags and cob-webs and with beetles in his brain-pan. She had then told him a terrible story from long ago, about a young bride, new-come to her husband’s castle, who on her wedding-night had run off to play hide-and-seek, never to be seen again until years later when her remains had come to light at last in a self-locked trunk in a distant attic in the topmost turret of a crumbing tower, where no-one had thought to go for a hundred years - the once-lovely bride reduced to a nest of bones inhabited by spiders and shrouded in the mouldered remnants of her wedding-dress.
Nell had not had much patience with her sole charge. She had not disliked William and had not been unkind to him, as a rule, but she had resented being held back, stuck fast in the nursery where there had been no-one with whom she might gossip, when she had hoped to have been on her way to glory long ere this, learning to wait upon my lady in her chamber. William’s unexpected advent not long after Francis had, thank the Lord! finally been breeched and sent along the passage from the nursery to the schoolroom had set back her plans for her career by a considerable degree. She would have been lying to herself had she claimed that she had taken no satisfaction in the child’s expression of terror as she had recounted her grim tale, finding in it some redress for Charles’s stinging verbal chastisement.
As for William, once he had been over the fright and the scolding, and had thought about his adventure, lying in his bed in the nursery that night – the night-light burning comfortingly in its bracket upon the wall - he had begun to see in those intramural passages a potential means of escape from Charles’ future persecution. After that, whenever he could, he had made a study of the hidden paths and staircases behind the wainscotting; they were to become his familiar and well-used network of emergency exits from unpleasant situations over many subsequent years. But once it had become known that that was what he did, whenever he vanished (apparently inexplicably, as far as the adults were concerned) Charles in his turn had studied these routes, and then when occasion had arisen had made a cruel sport of hunting him down and had almost always succeeded in first running him to earth and then gloatingly haling him forth, laughing, ridiculing him, playing his favourite game of Let’s Make William Cry.
Viscountess Petersfield had also deplored William’s evident desire to be always an invisible fugitive within the house. For one thing, it had infuriated the Viscount, on those occasions when he had been in the country (it had seldom needed much to render him infuriated), who would vent his frustration upon her, as if it were her fault. She had found the situation baffling.
“Why is the boy always vanishing into thin air?” he would demand of her.
“How should I know?” she would counter.
“Because you’re his bloody mother and you’re supposed to know where your son is, that’s why, you silly mare!” Then in her turn –
“Why in the world,” she was forever demanding of William, “are you constantly secreting yourself in these dismal regions of the house where only the servants are supposed to tread? And running after the maids and the footmen at every opportunity, as if you imagine that you might converse with them upon the same terms as you might with your friends? Your conduct vexes the Viscount so!”
At first William had never thought to be puzzled as to why she only ever referred to her husband as the Viscount when she was addressing him, and never as Papa. But he had never dared to tell her that the first charge laid against him arose repeatedly because of his fear of Charles, and she had either never guessed the reason, or, more probably, had not wished to think very deeply about it, because Charles was the Heir. He had already become Lord Otterbourne (6) on his tenth birthday (and when in a particularly tyrannical mood would insist upon his brothers addressing him as such) and had been altogether a boy after the Viscount’s own hard heart, whereas William had not even been the Spare of the Spare (Francis had had that dubious honour) and the Viscount had had no time for him at all. The second charge, of course, had been occasioned on account of William’s longing for company more congenial than that of his relatives. So instead of seeking to discover what had lain at the root of William’s unsettling behaviour, the Viscountess, perceiving that what had facilitated his constant hiding away in the secret dark interstices of the house had been the availability of sources of light, had instructed the housekeeper, a youngish widow called Mrs Milland, to tell the servants that Mr William was no longer to be allowed access to candles or tinder, because for one thing there was such a very great danger of fire if the boy were allowed to get his hands on them. Nevertheless, the housemaids and even the footmen, knowing very well how that parcel of gelid-blooded stone-hearted waxworks upstairs behaved towards the unfortunate, unhappy, unwanted so-called eight-months-child, now contrived to leave lighted safety-lanthorns in the passages – in passive defiance of the Viscountess’s orders relayed through Mrs Milland, who of course knew of this, but who took no measures to counteract it.
Sometimes, for the sake of variety, Charles would play an enhanced version of Let’s Make William Cry, called Let’s Make William Piss His Breeches. If Charles had had the time and had been feeling inventive it would sometimes determine as follows: out in the rain with his three elder brothers it would not be long before William would find himself pushed into a ditch half-filled with muddy freezing water, or tossed into a field with a bull in it whilst the three of them held the gate shut, laughing at his panicked attempts to escape before the slow-witted but evil-tempered animal noticed him – or, at least, Charles had laughed, whilst Henry had looked glum and sheepish and Francis had appeared frankly unhappy. William had hated the mud and the dung and all the rest of it – particularly the grave-dirt (this additional refinement being on the occasion when Charles had made him squeeze through a gap in the side of a broken box-tomb in Durford churchyard - the home, he had gleefully informed the terrified child, of a cannibal ghoul); he had hated to come home dirty and wet and dishevelled and smelling of cow-pats, to be scolded by Nell as if it had been his fault, and to be sent to bed early without his supper, without a story, without a goodnight kiss from Mama, because he was a nasty little draggle-tailed water-rat who had no business going down to the drawing-room with his brothers after the grown-ups had dined: his brothers were nice, good, clean, boys, who kept themselves tidy and decent, as befitted the sons of a Viscount who would one day be an Earl, the eldest of whom would one day inherit and sit in the House of Lords as had his father before him – why could not William remember that he too was an Honourable and therefore a little lord, at least, of sorts, like Charles and Henry and Francis? and no, she would not search in his closet that night for the ghoul he feared had crept from its lair and followed him home from Church on Sunday evening last. In fact, Nell hoped the ghoul would eat him - to serve him right and to teach him a lesson!
One day, Charles had taken him to the kennels where the gamekeepers’ dogs were kept - then opened the doors of the cage. Their slavering mouths and huge yellow teeth like spears as they had leaped and belled and barked around them had frightened William almost witless. He had seen and heard them again all through the hours of darkness as he had lain in his bed that night, too afraid to sleep. Charles had taken him to the kennels again the next day, and occasionally thereafter. William began to awaken in the dark of the night sweating with fear after nightmares of the kennels.
Almost always, when William had been compelled to be in the company of Charles for any length of time, there had been some unpleasant and frightening incident of that sort. He had come to understand, even when he had still been quite a young child, that it had been Charles’s way of telling him, I could kill you if I wanted to - and it would look like an accident.
This was why William had been so ready to believe in the reality of what had seemed to be about to happen to him in the clearing in Durford Wood on that June afternoon in 1798 – four weeks before he had found himself standing in this strained and hideously pregnant silence upon the beautiful finely-wrought silken rug, that product of many cultures a thousand years and more older than that of England, about to engage in what would prove the most unpleasant conversation of his life to date – if the Viscount would only do him the courtesy of showing himself.
Charles had had a certain way with him. Sometimes, and this was, William had eventually understood, merely to confuse and wrong-foot him, he would be brotherly, even pleasant, in his manner towards his youngest brother. He would invite him for a walk, perhaps, and nothing horrid at all would happen. Charles would, it might be, show him something interesting, such as a badgers’ sett, or a place on the river-bank where they might see otter kits at play. He might teach him a useful thing, such as how to set a snare for a rabbit, and how to prepare it for eating, and gather kindling, and cook it on a fire started with flint and tinder. Sometimes Charles had even jested with him, and had told him amusing stories, and little William had listened eagerly, laughing, the belief, so obviously, pathetically, shining in his eyes, that Charles, the favoured son, had finally deigned to be well-disposed towards him, after all. But then the next time he had encountered Charles, his brother had begun his persecution of him anew, leaving him as if adrift on a tossing sea of confusion and anxiety and self-doubt all over again.
As the years had passed, William had found, it was this – the fact that, for a period in his childhood, Charles had deliberately never let him know where he stood with him – which had been the most terrifying thing about him. William had in the end begun to wish that Charles would just be vile to him always, so that he at least could have certainty; and eventually Charles had seen that William had grasped the theory behind his mode of going on, and could no longer be hoodwinked and manipulated into tormenting himself with hope; so in the end he had left off his intermittent pretention of affection entirely, and thus William had got his wish at last.
Francis and Henry, William knew, would not have behaved in the way in which they had, had it not been for Charles’ bullying and coercive manner towards them, but that had not entirely exonerated them. It had only been when matters had at length begun to take a very serious turn indeed that they had ultimately rebelled and had finally refused to have any further part in Charles’ campaign of persecution against their youngest brother.
Meanwhile, until that happened, William’s suffering had continued. Once in the summer holidays, because he had learned early on, and with good reason, never to go alone to the lake with Charles, Francis and Henry had been detailed to lure him away from his book on the pretext of a pleasant trip to visit Mama’s Hermit, who had lived in the recently-constructed and fashionably artificially distressed grotto on the island which stood in the midst of the lake, and enjoy a pic-nic lunch. There had of course been no pic-nic - and no Hermit neither, for Job Cartwright, the indigent nonagenarian former mole-catcher and the second lucky office-holder to be dragooned into playing the role after his predecessor had done a precipitous but ultimately unsuccessful bunk, and but recently employed, had incontinently died less than twenty-four hours earlier (a thing of which Charles had probably been aware). The three of them – Henry, Francis and William - had discovered Job’s corpse lying there in the grotto, stark and cold. Nevertheless Henry and Francis, fearing Charles’s wrath, had obeyed orders and had marooned William there with the dead man and had rowed back to the shore, meaning to raise the alarm and to send a couple of estate hands to retrieve both Job and their terrified little brother (the sight of his small white face, wet with tears and frantic with fear as they had pulled away without him beneath a lowering sky, had haunted Francis’s thoughts for several nights thereafter, and deservedly so, as he had later confessed); but then there had been a rain-storm with thunder and lightning, directly overhead, great jagged spears of white fire stabbing down upon the ground, and it had been too dangerous to go out upon the water until the storm had abated towards the evening. William had had to take refuge in the grotto, which, in addition to containing the stark form of the lifeless Job Cartwright, had also (Charles had improbably claimed) been haunted by a water-monster, from the Scottish tale about the exiled Irish saint, Columba, who might as well have been a wizard, and the kelpie of the river Ness, which flowed eastwards out of the Great Glen, which might as well have been a demon, with which Uncle Hector, a master story-teller, had frightened them at the feast of All Hallows in ’89, just before he had set off by the swift partly overland route back to India – cowering and terrified as the lightning had flashed over the lake and the thunder had not just rolled, but had rolled what had sounded like a succession of sixes (7), it had been so loud, directly overhead.
Towards evening Francis had asked one of the outdoor servants, Ned Weston, to row out with him and fetch back William (together with the lifeless clay of what had been Job Cartwright) before Mama had noticed the child’s absence and he and Henry had found themselves in trouble. Ned, outraged, had not been able to contain himself and had taken the liberty of telling Francis exactly what he thought of their shameful proceedings – (“What!” he had roared, furious, “You left Mr William alone with old Job’s dead corse – in the middle of the lake - in a thunderstorm fit to wake the dead! Shame on the pair of you! If you was mine, neither of you would be able to sit down for a week!”) as the price of rescuing William and saving their skins. Francis, at least, had had the decency to hang his head at this and be properly ashamed. “Poor little bastard,” Ned could have been heard muttering under his breath as he had stomped back to his cottage on the Estate once the rescue mission had been concluded. “Poor little ill-gotten bastard. Would I could have him come to live with me and Bess. Poor woman’d be thrilled to have a child to love, and he’d learn a decent trade, and be happy.”
Still, Durford Abbey (that was still its name in the land deeds; most people had long since just taken to calling it Durford Park, however, conflating house and grounds for the sake of convenience) might have lost another Hermit but it had gained a vacancy, and Ned Weston’s superannuated father Jed had been pleased to step into the position: grey-bearded, grey-robed, and with an impressively demented line in End-of-the-Ages prophecy which had had the neighbouring gentry queuing up for invitations to Viscount Petersfield’s summer boating parties - for the eighteenth century was drawing towards its close, and in another hundred years would dawn the century the end of which would usher in the Third Millennium. There had been nervous talk amongst the servants, many of whom had been of the Enthusiastic persuasion, of the imminent Arising of the Beast; ladies then had often paid more attention than perhaps they ought to have done to the gossip of their serving-maids.
In the same year, late one wet December afternoon, as the daylight had been beginning to fail at around half-past two of the clock, Charles had had Francis and Henry tie William to a tree in a small clearing deep in Durford Wood. Francis and Henry, who by then had almost entirely come around to William’s jaundiced view of Charles, i.e. that he was an odious bully, a tyrant and an out-and-out Turk whose cruelty was of a magnitude which would have put to shame that of the Great Khan, the Grand Sultan or even Tamerlane himself, had not wanted to carry out his order; but Charles, who had had early in his life evinced a particular inherited talent for coercion and blackmail, had made them do it anyway, for he had had the goods on both of them (he had recently caught thirteen-year-old Francis smoking one of Papa’s purloined best cigars in the shrubbery one evening after dinner, and not long after that he had surprised fourteen-year-old Henry in the stables, in the act of kissing the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Viscount’s head groom, who had been enthusiastically kissing him back). Then the three of them had gone away and left William there, weeping and alone, in the wet cold gathering darkness. That damnable island all over again. After about an hour had elapsed, Francis, bearing a lantern and a blanket, had returned and released him and had apologised, and had informed William that he and Henry had been holding a Council of Resistance, and that they had decided that they would never again allow Charles to force them to ill-treat him, however much he threatened them – that was a promise - and he had been as good as his word. Back at the house Henry had at once defaulted to the sheepish expression and glum demeanour which were customary with him whenever he had regretted having again allowed himself to be made an accessory and accomplice to Charles in the game of Let’s Make William Cry, and had muttered that he was sorry and that he too promised that that had been the last time. But even although Henry and Francis from this time forward had no longer allowed Charles to force them to ill-treat William, they had still hung back from banding together to put an end to Charles’s behaviour, for, as they had long been aware, he was the Heir and would one day be the Earl, and a powerful figure not just in the Family, but in the Kingdom. So they had not ratted on him – an omission which they would come to regret most bitterly before many more years had passed. Charles meanwhile had just laughed at William’s wet and woebegone appearance and his chattering teeth. Even when, two days later, William had been put to bed with an influenza which had at first threatened to give cause for real alarm, he had not seen fit to apologize.
As the years had passed, Charles had continued with his intermittent campaign of terror whenever he had been home from school. William came to his twelfth birthday in the January of 1789 and it was at about this time that the night terrors had begun. He would wake up in the dark, crying out and sobbing, yet knowing nothing about it at the time and having no memory of it the following morning when questioned by his anxious Mama, who had been alerted to his behaviour by frightened servants. So Viscountess Petersfield had instituted a regimen of a cup of warm, sweetened, but slightly odd-tasting milk at bedtime. William had not minded. He had been grateful that Mama had begun to notice him again. The nocturnal disturbances had ceased. But during the day he had drifted about the house now, silent and white as a ghost, not playing the fortepiano, not drawing, not even reading. Mr Whitstable had begun to express his concern at William’s uncharacteristic lack of interest in his lessons, his sudden seeming inability to apply himself. In addition, William had begun to go missing on an almost daily basis. Twice Francis had found him standing silent and still on the landing-stage on the lake, seemingly staring at nothing and only belatedly looking up when, on the second occasion, he had hailed him with an anxious,
“William, what is it upon which you contemplate?”, but receiving no intelligible answer.
Then one terrible day in April, a few days before Easter, on a morning of blue sky and bright sunshine and greening nature, when William had gone missing yet again, and Charles had gone gleefully to hunt him out, yelling for Backstairs Billy to show himself, Francis, having suffered a sudden frightening sense of foreboding, and having asked Henry urgently to accompany him, had gone as if by some guiding instinct to the western attic, for a sensation seeming to warn him of approaching disaster had been creeping upon him since breakfast. As they had closed in upon their quarry they had caught the faint sounds of scales being banged out carelessly upon an out-of-tune keyboard instrument.
“He’s there,” Henry had said, as they had clumped noisily up the uncarpeted stair; “He’s all right; you’ve just been making a fuss about nothing, as usual – “ but by the time they had gained the attic the scales had ceased and they had been greeted by the sight of an empty room and an abandoned clavichord and a dormer casement with its two panels flung wide. “Oh, God,” Henry had muttered then, “I’m sorry; I take that back – “ and in that instant the same ghastly thought had occurred to Francis.
“He must be out on the leads. No haste, no sudden movement; quietly!” Francis had said; and proceeding as smoothly and as silently as possible they had clambered out onto the roof - and there William had been, standing on the parapet having sprung upon it just a second earlier; he had turned toward them at the sound of their footsteps upon the roof behind him, a lost and slightly puzzled expression on his small white-as-paper face, no trace of recognition in his vacant and apparently unseeing eyes. Then he had turned away, his head raised as if he had been gazing out across the parkland, one foot already in the act of stepping off the roof into the broad blue air.
Terror can paralyse but can also impart superhuman clarity of thought to the brain and lend wings to the feet; in a trice Francis had leapt forward, had caught his younger brother by the arm so that William now stood upon the brink, upon one foot, swaying dangerously, certainly, but secured; and then Henry had been there too, his arms winding about William’s waist, pulling him backwards, snatching him to safety.
This, then, had been a crisis, impossible to ignore or brush aside. William had been put to bed, where, having already been stupefied with laudanum for weeks, it had emerged, he had lain out of his wits whilst the Viscountess, jolted by events from her customary lethargy for once, had penned a panic-stricken note to her brother, who by some fortunate chance had happened to arrive in London on urgent business concerning the late events in France, with all that they implied for the situation in India (8). Uncle Hector, pickled in spin-drift from the two sea-voyages which he had undergone during the express passage back from India, and sun-cured from the overland desert journey from Suez to Alexandria in the interval between them, had come at once upon receiving his sister’s letter. Harriet had recounted to him the story of the brotherly skylarking on the roof, as it had been told to her by Henry – Francis unwilling and in any case constitutionally unable to invent the necessary plausible lies - and the near-disaster which had been only narrowly averted when by a miracle, so it had seemed, they had been able to grasp William and haul him to safety in the split-second of grace which had been granted to them.
Then Henry and Francis, approaching Hector together, had told him privately of what had really happened – had been happening for years – Charles’s chronic vicious persecution of William since his youngest brother had first come down from the nursery on his fourth birthday, as if his intention all along really had been to drive him to this extremity; the Viscount’s tacit collusion; Mama’s vaporous ineffectual attempts at intervention and her customary liquid solution to solid difficulties.
“The boy is coming with me to Spean Bridge,” McCandless had declared at the conclusion of their account, grimly angry, once the true circumstances had been explained to him; “to his grandmother’s house: tomorrow. And give me that cursed bottle – !“ The Viscount had been absent in Barbados (where he had been for some weeks since he had learned of his brother-in-law’s impending arrival in Britain on extended furlough from India) and so no-one had dared to contradict McCandless, the avenging Celtic fury: Uncle Hector had taken the bottle containing William’s medicine and had flung it far into the lake (he had been weeks in the company of Bedouin and Lascars and had in consequence become quite out of the habit of expressing himself in the cool and measured manner which, owing to his sober Scottish upbringing, had formerly been his signature: his rage towards his sister had been terrifying to witness when he had learned that she had been dosing the boy with laudanum without reference to a physician, and her muddled explanation, that she had not wanted word of William’s indisposition to reach any ears beyond the boundaries of the Park for fear of endangering the arrangement which had existed between the Lawford family and that of Miss Jessica Hayles for the last three years, had done nothing to allay his wrath - if anything, it had made it burn the hotter; for this had been the first he had heard of such an heinous conspiracy, as he had termed it then, against two innocent children). The next day William, pale and silent and as cold as if near-dead, and still half-unconscious, swaddled in blankets and shawls, had gone away with him in the carriage on the first stage of the journey to Scotland.
William had had no memory of what must have been the long, long journey to the Highlands and only the haziest of recollections of the early weeks at Spean Bridge. Afterwards he remembered a large cool north-facing room in what upon later exploration had turned out to be a rambling fifteenth-century house, all vaulted stone ceilings and immensely thick iron-studded oaken doors, the casements dressed with heavy velvet draft-deterring curtains which at first had been kept closed; a high, vast white-mantled bed; a large looking-glass framed in some dark wood hanging upon the wall. If he turned his head to the right he could see his own reflection in the glass: his small, pale face, ghostly in the gloom as he had lain in the bed beneath a crisp white counterpane, desolate and wretched as if he were a castaway marooned upon an ice-floe in some dismal tale of supernatural horror.
After perhaps a week the maid would draw the curtains when she came in the morning and he had become aware of tall green hillsides of weird perspective which he could see through the ancient distorting glass of the window, and, farther off, true mountains, some still with smudges of white, like spilled icing-sugar, which he had realised with a sudden shock of surprise must be patches of the last of the snows of winter, upon their summits, although it was by now July. He could see stretches of shining water, too – a river – a glistening succession of lakes (lochs, the maid had corrected him, shyly, when he had exclaimed at the sight the first time that the curtains had been drawn back). On the morning when the maid had opened the casement and he had breathed for the first time the true cool northern air, refreshing and restorative like chilled white wine but without the fuddling effect – the antidote to that odd-tasting warm milk drink which Mama had been giving him every night for weeks back at Durford - it had been like a revelation. After that he had slowly begun to return to himself.
One day Uncle Hector had come to his room.
“Time to be up and dressed, William,” he had said, kindly but firmly. “Your McCandless cousins are come to meet you – Aunt Marjory’s and Uncle Angus’s brood.” (Uncle Angus had been Uncle Hector’s elder brother, the one who had inherited the baronial title, the lands and a mediaeval castle, small but perfectly formed and still quite impressive: William had been currently a guest in the Dower House situated in its grounds, the home of his grandmother, the widowed Baroness McCandless.) William had not wanted to, but somehow aware that Uncle Hector had been watching him very keenly, and having received the impression that his future had in likelihood depended upon how he had now conducted himself, he had done as bid, had allowed the maid to make him presentable, had gone down to the drawing-room with his Uncle, and had made himself stand steadily, notwithstanding his great fear and apprehension, to meet his Scottish cousins, certain that they would dislike and despise him: Alexander, Roderick, David, Isabel, Margaret and Maria.
At first William had wanted nothing more than to turn and flee; but conscious of Uncle Hector’s eye upon him he had stood his ground – more than that, he had even advanced a little to meet them. (“Good lad, good lad,” Hector had said, in a low voice, his hand upon William’s shoulder, but to reassure him rather than to compel him forward; afterwards he had said to him, “I’d feared you might not stand, but you did; good lad.”) He had expected his cousins to be at least cold and haughty if not outright unpleasant to him, but to his astonishment they had been friendly, kind and welcoming. He had not understood how this could be. (Uncle Hector had of course warned them, had he but known it – “You’re about to meet your cousin William – he’s fae England but he cannae help that– he’s been shilpit and he’s come here tae get well – he’s fair blate and skeich, and he’s had a nervous complaint, so be good to him! Nae yawing now - haud yer wheesht, and no sudden movements.”)
The next day Alexander, about the same age as Charles, had invited William to come riding with him and the two other boys, and so he had gone with them, inevitably remembering similar outings in the company of Charles, Henry and Francis and therefore thoroughly expecting the worst; but all that had happened was that they had gone out on horseback and had had a pleasant day in the hills amongst the woods and the waters, and had regaled themselves with a very enjoyable pic-nic in a charming flowery dell (spring came late to Lochaber) when the sun had shown that the time had come for their mid-day refreshment. William had retired to bed that evening feeling almost happy. Then that night as he had lain unable to sleep – sleep had still come hard to him without the medicine which Mama had been giving him - the thought had occurred to William that the purpose of his cousins’ friendly behaviour had merely been to lull him so that he would suspect nothing when they decided to strike on the next occasion they succeeded in getting him away from the house. But days had passed, and all that happened was that Sandy, Roddy and Davey had continued friendly and had shown him the best views for sketching and the best places for bathing (he had been astonished at the invigorating sensation of swimming in the pools of the clear icy upland streams, so much to be preferred to the silty, turbid, tepid, weed-margined lake at Durford! and not find himself being ducked until he had thought that he had been about to drown!) and fishing. One day they took him to see a high waterfall, in appearance like a fine lace curtain fluttering upon the mountainside. He had not imagined that such a sight could exist in Britain at all. Slowly, slowly, William had learned to trust them, learned to like them, and – marvellous to say! as far as he could tell, they had come to like him.
However, what William had liked better, when the weather was inclement (as it often had been, so far north and not far at all from the North Atlantic coast) was to spend the days with Isabel, Margaret and Maria, playing duets upon the fortepiano and discussing the favourite books which they had had in common. William had quickly formed a particular attachment to Isabel, five years older than himself and almost a woman grown, and in appearance and disposition not unlike Jane Turnbull. But what he had liked best, when he could do so without appearing contrary, disagreeable or strange, was to play upon the instrument in the schoolroom alone, and to read and to dream by himself. Uncle Hector, Uncle Angus and Aunt Marjory had watched him, had talked together concerning him, and had wondered.
William, meanwhile, had wondered greatly at himself, and the way everyone around had looked at him and spoke to him. It had been, he had thought, as if he was being seen and heard, not as a nullity, as the Viscount had always appeared to regard him, or as a nuisance or an embarrassment, as Mama had often seemed to view him, or as a butt for Charles’s cruelty and unkind humour, but, for the first time in his life, as a child who mattered, with feelings, needs and wants which deserved to be met. William had been astonished. As the weeks had passed, and as he had begun to adjust to this new way of being, he had begun to dare to assert himself - to declare preferences - to tell others of his thoughts and to express his happiness or confess to the sadness which until recently had been his dominant emotion throughout his life – although, by the time he had been in Scotland for two months, he had woken up one morning conscious of an unaccustomed sensation, as if some very familiar thing had gone from his life, quietly decamping overnight as he had slept - and to his great surprise as he had descended to breakfast he had realised what it was: he no longer felt sad at all! He very much liked his Aunt Marjory and his Uncle Angus and his cousins and was now greatly enjoying being amongst them.
But inevitably the time had come when William must return to Hampshire. He had regretted very much having to leave Spean Bridge, but at least he had been able to face the prospect of meeting new people at his public school with greater confidence now - although he had far rather gone to join Alexander, Roderick and David at their academy in Edinburgh and had begged Uncle Hector to write to the Viscount to ask his permission to allow this to happen. Hector had duly written to the Viscount, who had now been in London – permission denied. William’s heart had sunk when Uncle Hector had told him of the Viscount’s reply to his recent letter.
“But are ye no’ missing yer mither and faether by now?” Hector had said, in an attempt to cheer him, and to remind him of his filial duty. William had only replied, rather too coolly, perhaps, that missing Mama and Papa had been a sacrifice which he had been prepared to make if he could only have gone to school with his cousins. Hector had written again, but the Viscount had remained adamant, and so Eton it had been.
Alexander, Roderick, David, Isabel, Margaret and Maria had discussed their English cousin amongst themselves for a little, as William had made ready for his departure. They had decided that they liked him, and were sorry he lived so far away – not far short of six hundred miles - as it had seemed unlikely that he would visit them again, or at least not soon. The girls had deemed him a pretty, agreeable, obliging and engaging child. He had been their pet. The boys, on the other hand, had allowed that he was pleasant and amenable but doubted that there was much to him. He had seemed to them to lack spirit and drive, and his character had been at best an enigma to them. He had not been frank and open and direct in his dealings, like the Scottish cousins with whose company they were more familiar. He had seemed reserved, hesitant, unwilling to reveal much of himself in conversation, although, they had granted, perhaps that had been just an English peculiarity in him, and in any case he had improved in this regard by the time the period of his visit had been drawing to its close. But if he had been a horse or a dog, they said, they would never have bred from him. There had been too much about him which had remained unknowable.
“He reminds me of Robbie, that mongrel Sandy had once,” David had said to Uncle Hector, in the course of the de-briefing.
“The one he persuaded your Da’ to buy from that brute John M’Gregor in the village? That must have been the most expensive tike whatever begged a bone this end o’ the Great Glen! A sentimental man, your Da’, although a kindly one.”
“Aye. The poor wee beggar had been kept chained in the yard wi’ nae shelter, starved and beat. When Sandy brought him here, for weeks all he’d do was cower in the corner, shiverin’ an’ greetin’. He wouldn’t even eat at first, as if he was afraid he’d be punished for tekin’ what was offered tae him! He was nearly the most expensive dead tike whatever begged a bone this end o’ the Great Glen! And if anyone went near him he’d run and hide under the nearest mickle article o’ furniture. But in the end he began to understand that we only meant to be kind tae him, and he learned tae trust us. William is like that. I mean, he didn’t cry or run and hide, but…”
McCandless had long seethed with inner rage at the thought that Harriet’s son had been reduced to the condition of an ill-used pup because of the cruelty of Charles and the former complicity of Francis and Henry and the at-best indifference of the Viscount. He had noted too, with disquiet, the perpetual state of extreme vigilance in which William had held himself, even though that had not been so marked of late - casting constant anxious glances around the room as if seeking to identify the nearest emergency exit, starting at any unexpected sound or movement, reacting with brittle, almost angry defensiveness if approached unexpectedly, appearing as if at any moment he would entirely lose his composure and bolt for the door – more than once he had said to himself, I’ve seen veteran soldiers in this very same sad state - it’s as if the boy has been in combat all his life, already seen too many battles – what will he do once he’s in the Army? – and David had now, with disconcerting clarity, seen this same thing in him. David would make a fine minister, and, God willing, missionary to the benighted East, one day, McCandless had thought; for David was bound for the University in Edinburgh, and the Kirk after that. And what of Harriet herself? Hector had now long been sorry for the outburst of rage with which he had cowed his sister when he had found her out in her unsupervised dosing of William with laudanum. He had feared that she had had too much of that kind of thing in her life since she had married Charles Lawford, and furthermore he now feared that she had been in need of rescue every bit as much as had William. He had briefly pictured himself swooping down upon Durford and bearing her away with him back to India. She might have died there – gently-born European ladies generally did – but whilst it lasted, it would still have been a better life than the one she had endured since the day she had married that cold-blooded granite-hearted bastard of an English so-called nobleman (and he was all too aware that he bore the blame for that union – but what else had he been supposed to do to avoid the disaster which would have been consequent upon her not marrying Lawford?) he was sure –
“I know what you mean, Davey,” he had said, with a sigh. “Let us hope he’ll be all right now.”
McCandless had escorted William almost all of his way home. Their course had lain in stages, first by road from Spean Bridge to Oban, where they had boarded a packet bound for Glasgow. Then they had taken a larger coaster destined for London, after calling first at Liverpool and then to several points south and then to Portsmouth, where they were to disembark. They were then to take the coach to Petersfield, where the carriage would be waiting to convey William to Durford (McCandless having written to Harriet to advise her of the date and hour of their expected arrival). McCandless himself would continue to London by coach to conclude his business in Leadenhall Street (9) (and also, discreetly, at Horse Guards) before, after some months of continued leave, husbanding his physical and mental resources before taking passage to Alexandria, and across the desert in the company of his trusted Bedouins, to the Red Sea and thence to India again.
William had clearly recalled this return journey, which had taken more than a fortnight. He had long remembered, with acute and vivid recall, Uncle Hector standing on the deck of the Oban packet anxiously scanning the Irish Sea for strange sails: only ten years before, his uncle had told him, no fewer than seven slavers from North Africa had been spotted in these waters (10). Not that he had deliberately set out to alarm him.
“We do it to them, and they do it to us. Natural justice, one might say, although it should be said that they started it. African slavers have been raiding our south-western and western coasts for hundreds of years. Yet two wrongs do not make a right. But you must understand, William,” Hector had told him, “that the world is a perilous place, even if it might not seem so from the perspective of the comfortable drawing-room of a fine house in Hampshire. Even if your brother Charles is there,” he had added, with a smile and a wink.
William’s heart had sunk at that however. For more than three months he had almost succeeded in blotting the fact of the existence of Charles out of his consciousness. “You are about to go to school,” Hector had been continuing meanwhile. “You will be thirteen years old in less than half a year. Three or four years after that you will go to His Majesty’s Thirty-Third Regiment of Foot, if we adhere to the plan agreed between your parents and myself when you were very young.”
“And me. Nobody asked my opinion, of course, sir, but the plan was not disagreeable, when it was at length told to me. I wish to do it.”
“You are still resolved upon that?”
“Of course. Why should you think otherwise, sir? I wish to serve our King, and to help to keep our country free and prosperous, and to preserve Europe from confusion, tyranny and disorder – for that will be the fate of Europe, the Rector says, should the late preposterous upending in France continue to be allowed to pass without challenge. It was a good thing, he said, at first, that the terrible prison, the Bastille, should be thrown down, and the absolute monarchy ended – France might now be free to model itself after our constitutional pattern, he said – but there are those who say it is unlikely that that will come to pass, as there are now too many hot-heads preaching all manner of dangerous nonsense.”
“That remains to be seen,” Hector had said, maintaining a calm demeanour, although William, young as he had been, had nevertheless sensed his anxiety very well. “You seem to me to be very fond of your books and your music, your drawing and your painting, is all. It occurs to me, William, that perhaps you might be better suited to a life more like that to which Henry is destined as he leaves Oxford and goes soon to study the Law at the Inns of Court in London, one day to be called to the Bar?”
“The Viscount made Charles study at Lincoln’s Inn for a year after he left the University, sir, so that he would know a little of the law pertaining to land and to coal and to canals and so on, for when he inherits. Charles detested it for he had not the head for it. He preferred to waste his time in London in dissipation and riot. I do not think that I should fare better. Not in dissipation and riot. I do not wish to participate in those things. I meant in study. I have looked into books of the Law and I found that the Law is surpassing dull. I think I had better leave the Law to Henry.”
“Well, then, what about the life of a clergyman, like that for which Francis will shortly be preparing at the University? Should you not prefer the peaceful benevolent life of a clergyman in a country village, being a shepherd and a counsellor to your fellow-man? In my mind I see you well set-up in a handsome country rectory with a pretty garden, in Hampshire, perhaps. I am sure your grandfather could supply you with a very respectable living there – or in Staffordshire, it might be. I know that he has the patronage of many livings, situated in the wide-spread ancestral lands of the Lawford family.”
Uncle Hector had looked at him expectantly.
“I do not think that I could be a clergyman, sir,” William had said to that, a slight frown upon his small innocent face. “I once heard Mr Freeman, the Viscount’s man of law, remark to the Viscount, when they were parting from one another in the lobby following an interview upon a certain morning, that it is not good policy to permit brothers to pursue careers in the same line of endeavour. That was when it had not been finally decided that Francis should be a parson. There had been talk of him going to the Law as well, following Henry’s example. They hinder one another’s advancement, Mr Freeman said, because of the likelihood of causing conflicting interests to arise between those who are best placed to promote them, and this often exhausts the patience of patronage. Besides, sir, I do not think that I am a good enough person to be a clergyman”.
“Why is that, William?”
“The Viscount says that I am mopeish, which would not recommend me to any parish, and also that I am inclined to day-dream when I should be attending to Mr Whitstable’s lessons. A priest should be always alert for his Master’s word, day and night, like Samuel in the Temple. I should be ashamed to prove myself like to one of the foolish virgins in the Gospel, my lamp unlit when the Bridegroom comes.”
“Well then. Perhaps I could write to your father and ask him if he would like me to approach one of the Directors of the Company, arrange for a writership - for you to go out to Calcutta, say, or Madras, or Bombay when you are sixteen or seventeen years old? There are two paths you might follow as a Company writer, William, the Judiciary and the Revenue. I think perhaps you would be better suited to the Judiciary, as I have seen that you do love to sit and study. You would have to learn the languages of the peoples, and their laws, both of the Hindoos and of the Mahometans. You would be almost certain to rise and make, not a fortune, such a thing is a rarity these days, because of the reforms, the very necessary reforms, I should say; but if you are diligent and careful, patient and prudent, in due course you should make enough money to amass a modest competency upon which to retire to England, at any rate, although many Company officials choose to remain in India and never return home, because the living there is so much cheaper. The days when there were great fortunes to be made in India are in the past, now, I deem, because the British Parliament is insisting on the suppression of abuses – and very properly, too - but still, many a bright young fellow might still find a route to success in life through service to the Company. And you would quickly come to love the land and its people, I deem, for you have a sensitivity to grace and beauty.”
“Robert Clive loved neither,” William had said, with a dubious frown. “He went to India solely to rob and to plunder, Francis told me once, to get money to buy his way into power in England.”
“That is hardly a surprise when it is known that the Company’s first investors in the time of Elizabeth were terrible men, adventurers who had once been pirates in the Caribbean.”
“Francis told me that Clive was the richest man in Europe.”
“Indeed, and dead by his own hand before he was fifty. You are no Clive. More of a Warren Hastings, perhaps. You are intelligent, William, gentle, thoughtful and conscientious.”
“Grandpapa attended the trial of Hastings in Westminster Hall last year! Well, the first week of it, anyway. Is not Hastings a very wicked man? The Viscount says that he is.”
“He is not, William. Evil men have invented calumnies against him and seek to blame him for the iniquitous practices that have long gone on in the name of the Company, which Hastings has in fact done his best to end, or at least to mitigate. The Lord will see that he is vindicated in due course, I am certain of it. Meanwhile the business of the Company goes on whether or no Hastings is there to oversee it.”
“It is Cornwallis now, wielding power in Calcutta? That General who lost the American colonies?”
“That is indeed the case. And he is determined not to make the same mistake with India! See, you have demonstrated that you have already taken an interest in the affairs of the Company, William! You could do worse than to join me in its service, I am certain.”
“I should have liked that, and I thank you, sir, but yet I should not wish to court the contempt of Charles and – and – the – of Papa, for first setting my hand to the plough and then turning back - as if they do not despise me enough already!”
Uncle Hector had been silent for a little as he considered.
“You must be aware, it is not an easy life in the Army, William,” he had said. “You might have seen garrison troops in Winchester who appear to be having a soft time of it - officers lounging and laughing, and flirting with forward young women in the market-place. But not so long ago we were at war with the rebellious American colonies, and also with the French, with whom the English, not Scotland, mark you, until the sorry surrender of the Year Seven at least, on account of that parcel of rogues who sold us out on account of the failure of the Darien scheme (11), but the English, have been repeatedly at war throughout many centuries. Granted, there has been an uneasy peace between Britain and France for seven years - but now the French have revolted, as you have just now been reminding me – partly because of the last war with Britain, which left the treasury bankrupt and the country and its people in poverty - and overthrown their old order. They still have their King, but the signs are not encouraging – their noblemen are already fleeing France, fearing for their lives; Louis might well have appeared in public wearing the cockade of the Jacobins as if to show he is in agreement with the changes, but the word is that it would not take much for him to find that he is in grave danger, if the wrong faction should gain ascendancy. If they kill him – pray God they do not, but nothing like this has happened in the recent history of Europe since our own King Charles was foully murdered by rebellious upstarts one hundred and forty years ago, so who can say what might take place in France? – if they kill Louis, as well they could, the other nations of our continent, including our own, will not abide to stand by and see it done without punishing the perpetrators for the heinous act – to kill the Lord’s Anointed – it is not to be born! Also, the threat to our own way of life would be too terrible. And even if the Jacobins do not kill Louis I fear there will indeed still be war soon enough - a war which might well engulf all of Europe – and the world, for the principal players have their representatives scattered throughout all continents save those in the far south – the Terra Australis and the lands of perpetual ice – and it would therefore probably be many years in the winning. If you take a commission in the Army, William, you are very likely to find yourself swept up in great and terrible events which could well be the death of you, and of many of your generation. You must understand that.”
“But that is what being a soldier is, sir, is it not?” William had replied, subdued by his uncle’s grave and heavy words, yet resolute. “To fight for King George and for England – and for Scotland, too, of course - and to die for them, if Providence deems it must be so?”
“Indeed it is. William – you do not hold any foolish idea that such an undertaking would be in any way glorious? Boys are apt to be dazzled by the scarlet coats and the glittering bayonets and halberds, and rapt away by the stirring music of fife and drum, and the sight of the shining silken Colours, and moreover all the fine and splendid show of the mounted regiments, I know – “
“But I am to be an officer of a plain Regiment of the Line, sir; a poor foot-soldier; and glory, an it exists, is not to be found amongst those dusty pedestrian Battalions. There is but duty, and blood, blisters, hunger, heat, cold, thirst, sickness, and death - or maiming - which is worse than death.”
McCandless had then regarded him in silence for some time.
“You speak of duty,” he said, at last.
“Yes, sir. I wish to do my duty.”
Whence, Hector had thought, had this boy, whom he had, clearly mistakenly, until this moment at least, thought so soft and girlish, suddenly acquired such clarity and realism as seemed far beyond his years?
“There is a word for that amongst the peoples of the coast-lands of the Carnatic, William. They say kartavya. It is an important ideal for them.”
“Then they are good people, sir.”
“You wish to do your duty. That is admirable. Remember that, William, when next you see Charles, mind!” Hector had said, eventually, with a grave kind of smile. “Imagine that he is a French Grenadier - and he will not daunt you!”
“I sometimes think I had rather face a whole company of French Grenadiers, sir, than Charles.”
Eventually Henry had earnestly begged his pardon for all of this, after about another fifteen years had elapsed, once he was Earl of Winchester (12). Charles (who by that time had in 1809 died heirless of an apoplexy in bed - after years of the dropsy and the ulcers which plagued the white planters of Barbados - with his favourite mulatto concubine at Lawford Hall, a short ride from Bridgetown, having laughed continuously, like Chrysippus, for several hours before his brain had exploded – his enigmatic last words had apparently been “Pointless little Irish bastard!” having only that morning read in a two-months-old copy of the Times that William had been placed in command of the South Essex, that upstart bunch of East Anglian yokels who had lost the King’s colours on their first excursion against the French - the laughing-stock regiment - notwithstanding one of their officers, some common ragamuffin up from the ranks on detached duty from the 95th, had, along with his bog-Irish Sergeant, won an Eagle at Talavera) never had, not for that or for any of the rest of it. He had always won at his favourite game of ‘Let’s Make William Cry And/Or Piss His Breeches’, and, back in the present, he probably would on this occasion too.
There was a reason for all of this – why Charles had always treated him so badly and why everything that had happened to William throughout his life to date had followed on from that – which should by now have begun to become apparent even to the most casual reader. It had usually been glossed over; hushed up, even, and for a time had almost seemed to go away; but it had always been there, simmering just below the surface like an unpleasant piece of offal that had somehow found its way into the casserole – the chicken’s head in the coq au vin of family life. Today, however, had been destined to be one of those days when it finally floated, in all its hideous glory, viscously to the surface.
The Present: 26th of July, 1798
William was, it has now been well-established, standing on the oriental carpet in the greater drawing-room, indifferent now to its glowing colours and fine craftsmanship and to any fascinating tales its elaborately convoluted patterns might once have suggested to him. Through the window he could have seen Durford’s widely admired parkland, so artfully shaped by the skill first of Lancelot Brown and more recently of Humphrey Repton that it appeared to show the results of the handiwork of transcendent nature, directly inspired by the divine, rather than that of cunning and calculating man, aspiring to imitate the effects of that inspiration, as the sun rose higher in the sky – no longer veiled now as the last lingering shimmer of diaphanous mist following the precipitation of the night had now been burned entirely away by the sun’s heat; but he had not the heart to look at it. The parkland no longer held any charm for him now that his latest memory of it was of having been strong-armed through it by Charles, as though he had been under arrest, as in a manner of speaking he had been, on the way back to the house from the distant woodland, which was itself now become a place of blood and horror in his imagination. Durford, house and park and lake and woodland and all, was no longer his home, if it had ever been his home rather than just the place where he had been compelled to reside, for want of anywhere else, with a generally indifferent set of people - and one actively hostile - most of whom (Francis excepted) had never liked him or had any use for him - save one particular use as bait to snare an industrialist’s fortune - but who, unfortunately, had happened to be his family. It was also, overwhelmingly now, the scene of his latest and cruellest injury and humiliation at the hands of his eldest brother, and on the morning of the 26th of July 1798, all William wanted to do was to leave it behind him forever.
The clock in the lobby now prepared itself to chime the full four quarters. Strange and alarmingly strenuous and eldritch sounds emanated from it as it drew itself up and gathered its powers to strike the hour. These antique effortful mechanical strivings had always been a cause of alarm to William, even at the best of times (the clock had been crafted in 1671, the very year in which his eponymous ancestor had first sailed to Barbados to establish a tobacco plantation) – and now, in addition, he heard purposeful steps, like the footfalls of Doom, it seemed to him, approaching down the length of the Long Gallery. At the first deep ponderous stroke of the clock, Charles Lawford, the Right Honourable the Viscount Petersfield, entered the room accompanied by his eldest son and heir, also Charles.
William shuddered, and wilted internally, but nonetheless outwardly drew himself up.
“Sir,” he said, with a formal bow to the Viscount. He did not look at his brother.
End-Notes
1.The union of the McCandlesses of Kilmonivaig House at Spean Bridge in the Scottish Highlands, and the Lawfords of Cannock Hall, Staffordshire and Durford Park, Hampshire, in England, which, every so often and for various reasons, had been raising eyebrows in society since it had first been contracted towards the close of the seventh decade of the old century, had come about in the following wise. Charles Lawford, at the time of this account now the Viscount Petersfield, had not been born the heir to his father, the Earl of Winchester. Charles had been the second son. He had had an elder brother, George, Viscount Petersfield (who had been named in honour of the King, doubtless in the hope of currying favour at Court), who had died, unmarried and without an heir of his body, drowned at sea when the ship in which he had been sailing as a passenger to England from the West Indies had been caught in a hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic, and, owing to poor seamanship (according to witnesses on board a Spanish merchantman two miles or so to leeward) had broached-to and its mizzen and mainmast, bearing too much sail, had gone by the board; the ship had foundered, and had been lost with all its company. (A little more than twenty years later a pretender emerged in London, claiming to be George, fabricating an improbable story about how he had survived the shipwreck, and then, like Odysseus, spent years struggling to win back to his home and his rightful inheritance. There had been just sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that his claim had had merit, and so it had gone to law, and the legal bother had lasted for decades, a thorn in the flesh of the Lawford family until the imposter finally died in 1807.) George and Charles had also had a younger brother, Henry, said to have died ‘of his teeth’ in 1764.
Meanwhile Charles (a man of questionable character and poor reputation, it had turned out) had, at the age of eight-and-twenty, been a Captain serving in the 19th Regiment of Foot, which in 1765 had for some time now been posted to garrison duty in Scotland. It was at a ball held in the garrison town of Fort William upon Loch Linnhe, held in Eastertide to celebrate King George’s return to health following the first bout of the illness which would eventually cause the Prince of Wales to be declared Regent almost half a century later, that fate had had it that Captain Lawford had first been introduced to Miss Harriet McCandless, aged not quite seventeen, daughter of the late Alexander, Baron McCandless of Kilmonivaig - a pretty, naïve girl from nearby Spean Bridge; but it was not until they had chanced to meet again the following year in Edinburgh, where Harriet had been allowed to go for the Season under the so-called protective aegis of family friends the MacPhersons of Oban (Charles Lawford having been sent meanwhile on secondment to the garrison at the great Castle high on its cold volcanic plug) that the damage had been done. They had met several times at balls and routs, at concerts and recitals and assemblies, just as people in England had been accustomed to do at Bath, at Cheltenham, and at Brighton.
Unfortunately the MacPhersons had been casual in their custodianship of Harriet, granting her too great a freedom concerning where she went, the amusements in which she indulged, and most pertinently of all, with whom she consorted. Charles had taken advantage of this and, as he had been wont to do with young ladies, had quickly grown over-familiar with her. His subsequent behaviour had been such that her reputation had soon been in peril of being irreparably damaged and her honour fatally compromised, for, it had soon turned out, Charles had persuaded the foolish girl to grant him the last favours upon a false promise of marriage. Hector (yet to travel to India) had received a letter from an associate of his in Edinburgh containing intelligence which had alarmed him greatly, so he had travelled to that city at once in order to confront her. Immediately he had observed his sister’s evident agitation of mind; the tear-stained appearance of her features had confirmed him in his impression that something was very wrong, and so he had insisted that she tell him what was the matter. At first Harriet would say nothing, and had merely wept and blushed and hidden her face in her hands, but Hector had insisted, and so she had finally confessed. She had had her suspicions, she had told him – there had been signs – intimations – and in the end there could be no mistake! It was certain!
It so happened that Hector had been able to exert a hold upon Charles, being a good friend of Lawford’s commanding officer. Using this advantage, Hector had insisted that Charles marry his sister. Lawford had at first resisted, so there had been the inducement of an undertaking by Hector to discharge Lawford’s considerable gambling debts (the Earl having refused to honour them, as he had long since become tired of doing so). No doubt the likelihood of exposure in relation to his numerous other historic offences against honour, decency and the female sex had also worked its effect upon Charles, as had the ultimate threat of an invitation from McCandless to a dawn meeting with sabres by Salisbury Crags, the beetling cliffs upon the northern face of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh’s other spent volcano, the louring twin of the grim Castle Rock, if Lawford had not agreed to an expedited union with Harriet (speed now being of the essence before the rumours could begin, should an indiscreet maid disclose that she had recently been required to begin the process of letting out Harriet’s dresses by the first discreet increments).
The hastily-arranged ceremony took place hugger-mugger in an Episcopalian chapel discreetly hidden in Carubbers Close, an obscure alley off the north side of the High Street close to St Giles’s, witnessed only by McCandless, and Lawford’s commanding officer, who acted as groomsman. As the heir, George, had at that time still been alive, Charles Senior, Earl of Winchester, had not raised too strident an objection to the match, notwithstanding that the Baron Kilmonivaig’s status had been very far beneath his own (had Charles Junior already been due to inherit at that point, matters might have turned out very differently).
As a gesture of goodwill towards the McCandlesses the Earl purchased a majority for Charles in the 29th Regiment of Foot, which was at that time garrisoning Edinburgh Castle, so that Harriet would not suffer the indignity of being condescended to in society as the wife of a mere Captain. Upon the birth of his first grandson, also Charles, which occurred at Spean Bridge away from the cynical gaze of Edinburgh society (the news of the birth, which had taken place at such an impossibly short interval following the wedding ceremony that the McCandlesses had not even attempted the usual explanation of an eight-month infant, was kept private for some weeks) the Earl provided his son with a generous settlement as another sop to the McCandlesses, those unlooked-for and unwanted relatives whom he regarded as little better than northern barbarians, so that he could maintain his wife and child in the comfort and dignity due to their station to which even his Major’s pay could barely have stretched.
However, it goes without saying that from the outset the union had not been a happy one. Matters had then gone from bad to worse when, following the loss and presumed death of George at sea in 1768, just as Charles had been contemplating another transfer, this time into the Royal Scots Greys, a cavalry regiment with greater social cachet, he had become the new Viscount. He had at once resigned his commission and removed with his wife, who had again been anticipating a joyful addition, and already with two young sons under the age of three, from their smart, comfortable and convenient modern town house in Dundas Square, as elegant as anything to be seen in Bath or Mayfair (into which they had but recently moved from a cramped ancient timber-framed tenement with an overhanging upper storey in a dark moss-grown close which had seldom seen sunlight, lying as it did in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat aforementioned, off the north side of the Canongate, to the very much older and grander Durford Park near Petersfield in Hampshire, there to take up a position in English society far more exalted than that which they had lately quitted in Scotland. The new-minted Viscountess had passed almost all of the voyage from Leith to Portsmouth prostrated in her cabin, and her nerves had never quite recovered from the shock of the sudden removal from the society of her friends and family and the abrupt translation from comfortable obscurity in Edinburgh to great prominence and consequence in Hampshire and London (Spean Bridge lay situate all of five hundred miles from Petersfield, and Edinburgh but little closer); neither had the marriage.
2. This was over a century before the introduction of daylight-saving.
3. Francis played the bass viol (the forerunner of the violincello) and was particularly fond of the works of Marin Marais, notwithstanding that both his instrument and the compositions of his favoured composer firmly belonged in the seventeenth century. Francis (who had experienced a species of Wesleyan awakening in his early ‘teens, although he seldom spoke of it – this in part was the reason why he had eventually formed a resolve to defy Charles and to cease to aid him in his persecution of William) thought and meditated and prayed through the medium of his music. Where other clergymen of his generation would read and think and write alone in their studies for hours, for days on end in fact, in pursuit of the perfectly-formed sentences which would in total amount to the perfectly-formed sermon (to which, in the event, almost nobody listened, most preferring to daydream through such orations, or at best sleep), Francis would think about fossils, surviving evidence from the days before the days of any creature one might read of in the Bible, and play Marais and Sebastian Bach and improvise upon his viol. He was even known to play the instrument in church rather than to preach, from time to time, in the belief that the sweet notes which flowed, unforeseen, from the serendipitous actions of his fingers upon string and fingerboard and bow were the language of Heaven, a manifestation of the Pentecostal tongues of which St Luke had written in the Acts of the Apostles; and it was therefore for those who might interpret them who could; which on occasion greatly exercised a succession of Archdeacons of Winchester (Matthew Woodford and Thomas de Grey – by the time Augustus Legge was appointed in 1814 Francis had become a residentiary Canon and therefore beyond reach of the ire of any Churchwarden ever after, although Bishop North presented him with the occasional difficulty) when the Churchwardens complained, as they did, from time to time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Francis and William were, for a time in their youth, close companions, notwithstanding the six-year gap in age between them, largely because of their shared passion for music. It could be said that they actually conversed by means of music: for neither had ever been able to converse with words of the things which troubled them in the life of their family.
4. A favourite lie of the time to explain the advent of an unexpected and untimely child. Few but the most gullible ever believed it, but it helped to maintain the social decencies.
5. When the current Earl had still been the Viscount some thirty years previously, dinner had taken place no later than two o’clock in the winter and five o’clock in the summer – his Lordship being of a sober disposition and not wishing to make an ostentatious display by extravagant use of beeswax candles, and his guests largely being of the unadventurous sort who disliked travelling home in the dark. His son however had no objections to advertising the family’s growing prosperity, which had waxed as the result of the burgeoning trade in West Indian sugar. (Dinner on the fateful June evening in 1798 had been arranged to take place later than usual because all of the guests, being family members, had been due to stay the night; so travelling home in the dark had not been an issue.)
6. Baron Otterbourne was a minor title of Charles’s grandfather the Earl, which Charles, as heir, was permitted to use as a courtesy, just as Charles Lawford, his father, was permitted to use the title Viscount Petersfield, which also belonged to the Earl.
7. Sir Terry Pratchett must be acknowledged as the originator of this witticism.
8. Hector McCandless, being of intrepid and enterprising character and able to speak Pashtun, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Kanarese, Bengali and several other Indian languages tolerably well, preferred to take the overland route between Suez and Alexandria when travelling back and forth between England and India. This saved a very large amount of time, shortening the journey by months, and also provided him with additional opportunities for intelligence-gathering. In addition it supplied him with the many anecdotes concerning Bedouins, ghouls, djinns, camels, scorpions and other phenomena of the desert, such as the mirage, with which he entertained his nephews and nieces on his rare visits to Durford and Spean Bridge. (There was of course no direct shipping route through the Isthmus of Suez until 1869.)
9. Location of the unprepossessing London headquarters of The Honourable East India Company.
10. Anne Perry, wife of James Perry, editor of the Morning Chronicle, was captured by Barbary pirates when the vessel on which she had been travelling back to England from Portugal (where she had been spending time for the good of her health) was taken, in 1814. She was carried off to Algiers, where, not surprisingly, her health declined again. She was released, but died in Bordeaux on her way home in February 1815. Barbary pirates continued to be a menace to British travellers into a relatively late period, even if they no longer raided the coastal communities of Britain and Ireland directly.
11. The Darien Scheme. The necessary reason for the Union between Scotland and England in 1707. English gold had been desperately needed to bail out the scunnered Scottish investors. Burns’s poem ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’ is inspired by it, the rogues being the Scottish speculators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme ‘Parcel of Rogues’ by Steeleye Span: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTrn_wRfG0w&list=RDtTrn_wRfG0w&start_radio=1
12. For the purposes of fiction, Lawford is a member of the family of the Earl of Winchester (fourth creation; Queen Anne, 1704; there having been three previous real-world creations). In real-world terms there is a Marquess of Winchester (created King Edward VI, 1551). The current Marquess apparently lives in South Africa. Lawford’s supposed father was Viscount Petersfield as long as his grandfather the Earl was alive. He did not live long after inheriting the Earldom.
Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation (Robert Burns)
Farewell to all our Scottish fame Farewell our ancient glory, Farewell even to our Scottish name* Sae fam'd in martial story. Now Sark runs over the Solway sands And Tweed runs to the ocean** To mark where England's province stands: Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
What force or guile could not subdue Through many warlike ages Is wrought now by a coward few For hireling traitor's wages. The English steel we could disdain Secure in valour's station, But English gold has been our bane: Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
I would, or I had seen the day That treason thus could sell us My auld grey head had lain in clay Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace! But pith and power, till my last hour I'll make this declaration - We were bought and sold for English gold: Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
*For a time following the putting-down of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 Scotland was insultingly (if accurately, from a geographical point of view) known as ‘North Britain’.
** The German Ocean, the old name for the North Sea. This was changed at the outbreak of World War 1 for patriotic reasons.
It is worth reading up on the ‘Darien Scheme’ (see Note 11). The reason why Scotland and England were united in 1707 is little known or understood today in either country, let alone in the rest of the world.
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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.
The Present: at Sea – 29th July 1798.
/
PARAGRAPH ONE
After having dismissed the parade of forty or so Marines (which he had been told that he must take, at almost no notice, that morning in the absence of their own Captain due to his being unwell (what had become of their Lieutenant, also nowhere to be seen, he had had no idea – perhaps he had been similarly indisposed, as the two had been most enthusiastically regaling themselves with Captain Watkins’s claret and brandy at dinner the night before, he had noticed), William stood for a while at the rail, watching as the small boat bearing the post away to Portsmouth tossed up and down on the beryl-green white-flecked sea, the surface of which had had a considerable chop to it that day on account of a brisk and somewhat unseasonal north-easterly breeze blowing down the Channel from the German Ocean. That same breeze would soon bear Néreide off on her long, long voyage as soon as all four anchors had been raised and catted (he thought that was the correct term) and the great sails, as big as anything he had seen before in his life, had been unloosed from the yards; not all of them of course, but enough canvas was about to be set to get the ship briskly under way – he had forgotten just how large were the main-sails of a ship the size of a frigate, or indeed of one of the Royal Navy’s Seventy-Fours. He remembered that he had once read that the sails of a Seventy-Four, if spread out on land, would easily cover an acre. As William glanced across the water at the other vessels gathered at the Spithead anchorage he saw that the people of some of them were engaged in identical preparations, ready to take advantage of the wind, and to catch the tide which would lift them clear of sand-banks and other submerged hazards, such as what still remained of the Royal George, which even after sixteen years remained a danger to shipping. William watched in wonder and even in fear for the seamen as they footed their precarious rounds (precarious it appeared to him, at least - the landsman - so quick and agile, graceful and assured in the ballroom - a pretty puppet, he had overheard a young lady call him once, dismissively, when her older companion had pointed him out to her for special mention on account of his accomplished dancing (and other things - the usual gossip which his every appearance in society had seemed to provoke when he had been just emerging into adult life) but feeling a vicarious terror now as he observed the pigtailed men of Néreide, smaller than mice from his perspective eighty or ninety feet below, so far above the deck, appearing to dance upon the foot-ropes as, in response to a shouted order from the Lieutenant of the watch, they now rapidly went about the business of letting loose the sails. Some of the men even walked fearlessly without support upon the yards, which were lashed to the masts only as securely as a seaman’s skills with ropes and knots could make them, although the principal ones had the additional support of chains. William watched in awe as the massive wings of all the departing sea-birds, the vast arrays of sail-cloth, canvas and hemp, spread with sudden great rapidity as in each departing vessel they were let go almost at the same moment, as if they were alive and eager to be filled with air, ardent to catch the breath of the Holy Ghost as He had once brooded upon the face of the waters, in the Beginning. He marvelled at the sight as the sails were tumbled down from the yards of Néreide and those of the other ships, and were swiftly and expertly sheeted home by the great hosts of bold and nimble sailors who raced up and down the shrouds and skipped to and fro upon the ratlines. From William’s point of view the men of this small temporary flotilla appeared a little like swarms of human flies struggling in webs of sheets and slings and halyards, for his untrained eye was bewildered by what to him seemed the chaotic cat’s cradles of rigging. Reason told him, however, that that could not be the case - that there was no chaos here, but perfect nautical order, to those with the knowledge and the experienced eye to see it. He hoped that in the days and weeks to come the workings of the vessel would begin to make sense to him, but just now he found it all, although awe-inspiring, nonetheless utterly overwhelming and confusing. William continued to watch in admiration as the men of Néreide, their tasks aloft for the time being completed, now descended rapidly to the deck. Some of them even slid with carefree insouciance down the back-stays, traversing fathoms in two or three heartbeats, nimble and spry as sea-monkeys, smooth and uninterrupted in their passage as beads upon an abacus, he thought – if one had placed the abacus upon its side, of course. But perhaps what surprised William the most about this phase of the voyage was that everything, the scores of tasks, the numerous steps of procedure, had been accomplished so quickly, in perfect order and with minimal intervention by the Lieutenant of the watch after his initial command. He thought of the transports which should have taken the 33rd to the West Indies, and the Princess Charlotte, and the other Indiamen of that transport convoy, and recalled that the seamen in those vessels had taken much longer to carry out their tasks when they had had need to adjust the sails or raise or lower any additional spars higher than the top-mast; but of course those merchant vessels had been manned by crews not nearly so teeming as those of the ships of the Royal Navy, in which speed and alacrity in carrying out orders promptly, so allowing the ship to manoeuvre rapidly, of course made all the difference in battle.
The joyful savage noise which the spread of all that weather-worn greyish canvas made as the lively airs filled it - the snap and the whiplike crack of it as the sails of Néreide and the other departing ships bellied tautly in the wind - like washing-day ashore, thought William, only a hundred times louder - was like nothing he had ever heard before. He then noticed and listened to the singing notes in the rigging as Néreide and the other vessels drew away from the shelter of the land. The song rose with the rising of the wind, and he was a little shocked to find that his heart rose with it, for it was but a day since he had left Durford in utter misery and disgrace; he could not help it; for it was music, the music of the ships; the divine wind had breathed life into them and he was finding it exhilarating. Néreide’s speed increased steadily and the chrysoberyl water running down her flanks now turned white, foaming like champagne.
After a little, a sailor stationed in the main-chains with the lead called out so many knots. William did not know what that meant, but he deduced from the satisfied looks of the Lieutenant of the watch that it was perhaps a little more than was to be expected. His spirit, which had for so long been crushed, stamped upon and broken so badly that in these last days he had begun to think that it had been beyond healing, began against all his expectations to be revived and uplifted, as if upon the wings of an exalted sea-bird: Néreide, the beautiful sea-hawk, aboard which he was now one of its active and useful people, flexed her mighty pinions and truly began to fly.
No-one had called William yet, so he was still standing and watching some time later as Néreide rounded the southern tip of the Isle of Wight. He could not help but strain his vision and his imagination northwards beyond the Island, back towards the Solent and to Southampton Water where the clear bright thigh-high chalk-streams, crystalline water flowing over clean white pebbles, green weed like naiads’ tresses hiding sudden pools deep enough for swimming - Test and Itchen, sister rivers - ran to debouche into the sea-inlet; and to Winchester twenty miles inland northward again near which dear Francis had his living, and where beloved Mark suffered and endured at the depot with the other recruits new to the 67th, no doubt most of them still confused as to what manner of place it was in which they now found themselves, and how in the world they had come to be there, now that they were sober, in a situation so alien from everything they might ever have known.
Just then a high boyish voice called to William, startling him from his reverie; turning he saw that he was addressed by a well-made youth of thirteen or perhaps fourteen years, who wore the uniform of a Midshipman. The boy had a cheerful, competent and confident air about him which served to put William at his ease, or else he might not have taken so kindly to having been hailed in such a familiar way by what had at first seemed to him to be a lad of no more consequence than a schoolboy of the third form. He recalled how the Viscount had once told him that he had had his Ensigncy at the age of thirteen, when he had been sent out to join his regiment which had then, in 1750, been garrisoning Gibraltar. The Army no longer admitted such young boys into the fellowship of its junior officers, but the Navy, in some ways (but not all) the more conservative of the two services, had still done so.
“Mr Lawford, you are to present yourself in the gunroom right away,” the boy told him.
William looked at him in dismay, as ever assuming that he must somehow have done amiss and was to be rebuked for some unwitting misdemeanour, but the boy went on, “Mr Ackroyd, second Lieutenant, has orders for you. And might I suggest you take off your hat before you go in,” he added, as William, in his haste to do the correct thing and make a good impression, had darted at once towards the companion-way which led below with his bicorne still firmly jammed upon his head, he having rammed it down with unusual forcefulness that morning in an effort to prevent its being snatched away by the wind.
Aboard His Majesty’s Ship Néreide. At Sea. Sunday the 29thJuly, 1798.
Dearest –
William paused, the quill hovering above the paper before him. He moved his hand aside lest a drop of ink should fall and blot the page before he had even begun to write the body of the letter. Should he address his fiancée as ‘Miss Hayles’ or ‘Jessica’? He supposed that after their final meeting before his departure – shortly before the calamity, he recollected, and an involuntary shudder went through him at that – when they had walked, for the first time unchaparoned - there had been a thing! unprecedented! because he had been about to go off on a lengthy sea-voyage with all its attendant perils, to a war from which he might not, perhaps, return - in the garden of her parents’ house for a good half an hour, conversing shyly (the shyness had been entirely on his part) of the future which would lie before them upon what was to be hoped would be his eventual return to England, it would appear odd if he addressed her now as ‘Miss Hayles’. ‘Jessica’ it would have to be. William sighed deeply.
Dearest Jessica,
William paused again, looking at what he had written, wishing that he could properly understand what it was that he was feeling. Whatever it was, it was very complicated and it was causing his heart to beat quite irregularly and his breath to come in short uncomfortable gasps, because although on the one hand he did like Jessica a great deal, as a friend of many years’ standing, and he had even loved her as a sister for a long time now, she having taken the place of Jane Turnbull and even of Cousin Isabel in his affections, on the other hand, because of his recent experiences he was very certain in his own mind that he did not want to marry her. Yet marry her he must. With another heartfelt sigh he set to on the body of the letter.
I hope you have seen by now the relevant Parts of the Letter which I had copied to my Mother, Lady Petersfield, dated three Days back as from Spithead. I am sorry that I did not write to you then. I was surrounded on all Sides by most pressing Matters, as one is when about to undertake a momentous and protracted Voyage, as you can no doubt imagine. However, at last I have some Leisure in which to write uninterrupted by necessary Annoyances - at least for a little, at any rate, for this is to be no Pleasure-Cruise and there is always some Duty to which I am being called on account of my scarlet Coat, and moreover my interesting provisional doubled Status as Midshipman as well as honorary Lieutenant of Marines. (You see, I am made to become a kind of amphibious Hybrid Thing for the Duration of this Voyage.) This Morning, for an Example, I was call’d upon to oversee the Parading of what amounts to an Half-Company of Marines which Néreide carries amongst its People, because their Captain, a James Webster, was indisposed. Dinner in the Captain’s Dining-Parlour last Night was indeed a merry Affair, and Captain W. did become somewhat elevated in Consequence of Captain Watkins’s generous Hospitality. I suspected that much the same fate must have befallen his Lieutenant, because he was nowhere in Evidence either when I turned them out at Nine o’Clock this Morning, or rather, at two Bells of the Fore-Noon Watch – the Passage of the Hours at Sea is reckoned by a System necessitating the striking of the Ship’s Bell a certain Number of Times every thirty Minutes, reckoned from Noon, once the Fact of its having occurred has been agreed upon by the Ship’s Officers, they having taken the Readings from what is termed their bringing down of the Sun with their Sextants, which is puzzling at first to Landsmen used to the polite Chiming of the Time-Piece upon the Mantle in the Drawing-Room, but I daresay I shall grow used to it).
It goes without saying that I much regret our having been parted, for the Time being, on Account of the irksome but necessary Wars which our Country is currently prosecuting in Europe (at any rate, which our golden ‘Cavalry of St. George’ is currently prosecuting there on our behalf) and in the Mediterranean Sea, and in India. I am more sorry than I can say, dearest Girl, that Circumstances constrain me to behave towards you in this Way. Do not think of yourself as abandoned, however, for we have known from our earliest Association that my Lot should be to serve in King George’s Army wherever in the World I should be required to do so, with all the Dangers and Uncertainties attendant upon that Duty. Be comforted at least to know that we have a fine General in the Honourable Arthur Wesley, (1) of whose East Indian Endeavours I am sure the People in England will soon learn great Report. From his Conduct in Flanders I formed the highest Opinion of his Character and Abilities and have full Confidence that he will lead us to Success in our current Task, which is to put the Tippoo Sultan in his Place once and for all! Once we have dealt with the serpentine Sultan and all the rascally Rajahs &c, &c, who are but Clients of the perfidious French, War in the East shall surely be at an End and we shall return to England as soon as might be, Britain’s Position of pre-eminence in Trade and in Arms in the World confirm’d beyond all Doubt, and then have only the French and the Spanish with whom to deal, in Europe. Oh, and not to forget the Dutch. And possibly the Irish, once again. Upon Reflexion, it does in Fact seem that we rather have our Work cut out for us, as the popular Saying has it. All the more reason then for Wesley to put paid to Tippoo in short Order and then bring us back Home to deal with the rest of it, do not you think?
William read through what he had just written. He was not at all sure of that sentence about Britain’s pre-eminence in trade and in arms. It was barely seventeen years since King George’s army had been trounced by the upstart Americans at Yorktown, with the assistance of the blockading bastard French. He clearly recalled how sharply he had felt the sting of that shocking national humiliation, even at the age of four, when he had first overheard his older brothers discussing it amongst themselves. It had seemed to all of them almost like a personal insult. Thinking of it later, once he had been old enough to understand the implications of that defeat, he had become doubly determined to join the 33rd as soon as ever he had been able, telling himself that, should he one day have the chance to go to America and give George Washington and his Continental Army Roland for Oliver, then he jolly well would - although he was not sure that the Americans might not trounce them again if the ministers of the British Government were ever foolish enough to give them the opportunity. William duly scored out and in Arms. It was in any case hubristic. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, William knew, had always punished hubris every bit as ruthlessly as had the Gods of the Greeks and the Romans, Jehovah’s quarrelsome near-neighbours in the lands about the Mediterranean Sea.
William then considered the self-conscious whimsy of the serpentine Sultan and the rascally Rajahs. At the time he had been writing that passage he had considered extending his flight of alliterative fancy to include naughty Nizams, but he had had the sense to stay his hand. That would have been taking the conceit too far. (The only Nizam of which he had ever heard, Ali Khan of Hyderabad, had been about to change sides and become an ally of the British in any case, but William would have had no inkling of that until Néreide arrived at Madras after long months of voyaging.) Now he wished he had not written that sentence at all. Upon consideration it struck him as painfully arch and out of keeping with the tone of the rest of his letter, as if he had suddenly forgotten that Jessica had grown up and that he had not been writing to the little girl he had once entertained to afternoon tea all of twelve and a half years ago. She’s sixteen, you silly ass, not six, William said to himself reprovingly, then. Would Jessica really feel condescended to? he asked himself anxiously. Oh, very definitely, he replied. But she would probably have several years yet to get over her chagrin before she saw him again, so he decided to let it stand. Besides, William recoiled from the thought of Jessica receiving a letter all lines and blots. She would think him barely literate! Instead he made a small sketch of his own face, about the size of his thumb-nail, wearing an ironic expression, in the margin of the page, to demonstrate that he had been aware that he was being ridiculous, before continuing. (2)
As you know, for four Weeks before my Departure it was uncertain whether I should be able to travel at all, in the Aftermath of the Accident which I suffer’d whilst riding with Charles in Durford Wood, when my Horse, startled by a Snake, reared and fell and broke his Leg and had to be destroyed, and I suffer’d a Concussion on Account of his throwing me. I know you will be griev’d to learn of the Death of Audax, for I recall that he was pleased to accept a Carrot or an Apple or other Treat from your trusted Hand on at least two or three Occasions; but I can assure you that I am now restor’d, and quite well again.
As you will have seen from the Head of this Letter, I am at Sea on board His Majesty’s Ship Néreide, a Frigate named, as I am sure you must have recognised, for the Sea-Nymphs. Thetis, the Mother of Achilles, was such a Sea-Goddess, or so the Greeks believ’d. Néreide is a very fine Vessel, fourteen Years old, a razee’d former Third-Rate Sixty-Four, now with forty-four Guns - which I am told is a goodly Number for a Frigate - and so judged Fifth-Rate. She is one hundred and sixty Feet from Stem to Stern, forty-four Feet five Inches wide at the Beam and one hundred and thirty-one Feet ten and three-quarter Inches tall from her Keel to what I believe is called her Main-Truck. I know all this, as this morning I was taken under the Wing of Mr Midshipman Henry Bellingham, a lively young Gentleman of about thirteen or fourteen Years (at least, so I judg’d him to be; I did not ask him his Age as it struck me that it would have been an Affront to his Dignity – I wish’d I had been half as sensible and in Command of myself, at thirteen, as he; for at that Age, when I went to School, I recall that I was still quite a Child, whereas this fine Fellow presents as a Man grown, or pretty near, such is his Manner and Address!) who shew’d me all about the Ship (in which, as he does also in his Captain, Frederick Watkins, of whom Sir Josiah might have read in the News-Papers concerning the Part he had in the Victory at Camperdown under Admiral Duncan, the eleventh Day of October last) he takes a most touching and proper Pride. Mr Bellingham has said that as soon as I have found what he called my ‘Sea-Legs’ he will take me to the Top of the Main-Mast by way of what these bold Tars call the Futtock-Shrouds (when I was first informed that that was their Name I thought they sought to make Sport of me, for it did sound so like one of those Tales saucy Sailors love to tell to the Marines, who are considered lubberly Fellows who know nothing of the Sea), and make a proper Mid out of me! I do hope he chuses a Day of caIm Sea and small Wind for this Endeavour, however, or I fear you might never lay Eyes upon me again!
My dear One, I wish you could have been present to witness the Scene at Spithead when we set our Sails on Friday Morning last. Some hold it is bad Luck to begin a Sea-Voyage on a Friday. Mr Bellingham told me that some of the Seamen had been muttering about it, Sailors being a Breed of Men much given to Superstition, since the days of Jonah. However, so far we have been attended by fair Weather and steady Breezes. It would have lifted your steadfast English Heart, Jessica, to see us, one Vessel amongst several, as we spread our vast Wings to the Wind once the Signal had been given. I had never before seen a Sight so sublime nor so splendid, neither so apt to stir the finest Patriotic Emotions, unless it were the Vista of Portsmouth seen from the Summit of Portsdown Hill late in the Afternoon of Thursday, three Hours or so before I went aboard the Frigate. The Princess Charlotte, the Transport in which I made my first abortive Voyage to India two Years ago, did not match it (notwithstanding she was a handsome new-made Vessel) and those wretched barely-seaworthy Tubs in which Horse Guards tried to drown us all on the Way to the West Indies in ‘95, even less.
So Néreide is bound for Madras, to which I have been told by Captain Watkins that we should not now expect to come before Christmas (he having received sealed Orders which he had been cautioned he might not open until we were well out into the Channel at a certain precise Co-Ordinate which he determined by Study of his Charts and use of his Instruments, which I cannot remember, as I have not the Head for these Things – I should never have made a Sea-Officer, so much is certain – they are altogether a superior Breed of Men), as we must tarry at Cape Town to make Rendezvous with a Person, currently a Passenger in another Vessel, for what Purpose I deemed it not my Place to ask of him (you must understand that a Post-Captain in the Navy is of much greater Consequence than a Captain in the Army; Captain Watkins, as Commander of a Frigate is, I guess, about the Equivalent of a Lieutenant-Colonel on Land, or at the least somewhere between a Major and Lieutenant-Colonel, as the Crew of a Frigate such as Néreide numbers about three hundred Souls, that is, a little less than a Half-Battalion) but I suspect it has to do with Matters of what some are now calling Intelligence. Of course, it could be that that mysterious Individual will already have arrived and be awaiting us there, in which Case we shall probably stand on without more Ado once Captain Watkins has receiv’d what ever Information the Person is able to provide to him, after taking on Water and so on, of course, and arrive at Madras in a faster Time than is currently anticipated. I shall be very happy to be at last re-joining my Regiment, which has now been in India for some eighteen Months in Anticipation perhaps of a coming Struggle between the Armies of King George and those of France (if our Navy cannot scotch their Designs in Egypt and a French army is transported to Mangalore, the main western port of Mysore) (4) and of that devious Despot Tippoo, the Client Toady of the French; that is, the Tiger King, whose real Name and Style is Fateh Ali Sahab Tippoo, a Mahommetan who rules over Hindoos (which seems to me to be a queer State of Affairs) and who is, so I have learn’d, a great Admirer of all Things French, to the extent of having styl’d himself, for a time at least, Citizen Tippoo – how I did laugh when I heard that at Dinner last night! Does not he realise, I wonder, that those Firebrands of the Revolution whom he harbours in his Court would as soon see him depos’d from his Estate and his Head remov’d and his Religion dismantl’d every Bit as much as they had wanted that very Thing for noble King Louis and his poor Queen, who was so brave and steadfast when she followed him to meet her fate! I am in possession of several Books which treat of these Indian Matters, in the Study of which I plan to spend what Time I might on this Passage (when I have the Leisure and am not being requir’d to drill the Marines or command a Gun-Crew at the set Practise-Times) so that I might be easily in Command of all relevant Information upon my Arrival.
How do you though? There has been too much about me so far in this Letter. I am asham’d. I should very much like to read all your News when you write in Reply. How do your honourable Father and esteemed Mother since your removal to Sutton Scotney? How does your Friend Miss J.A. at Steventon go on with her Writing? (Please, I beg, do not let her put me into one of her excoriating Sketches! I could see that she was itching to do so on that last Occasion when you brought her with you to see me when I was still in poor Health and in a peevish and self-absorb’d Temper, for which I am most heartily sorry.) It is some Time since you were School-Mates in Reading, I know, but I trust that you will have kept up Correspondence and still meet at whiles since those Berkshire days. What are the innocent Doings of the Village? Is Miss Alresford still its most formidable Gossip? With which young Lady has Mr Swaffham fallen in Love since last you inform’d me of his surprising amatory Adventures? His Inconstancy ill-becomes a Man of his Calling. One does not know what Curates are coming to in these disordered Days. Does Sir Rodney Ironside continue a Martyr to the Gout? I hope he has at last agreed to hold a Harvest Supper and Ball for the Tenants and the Villagers. It ill-becomes a Gentleman in his Position to begrudge such a pleasant Treat to his Neighbours, even if he might not take his Place in the Line of Couples, or drink Punch, himself. I really should like to read of these Things, dear Jessica, for it does my Heart good to be appris’d of Matters unrelated to War abroad and Rebellion at Home and in Ireland, for that is all so very tedious and wearisome!
I must now conclude this Letter. Please direct your Reply to the 33rd at Fort St. George, Madras. If you write at once upon Receipt I should find your Reply awaiting me upon my Arrival in India, I am guessing at Christmas-Time, either shortly before or afterwards. Also, please remember to inscribe a Number or Date upon the Envelope of any Letter you direct to me so that I might read your Missives in their correct Order, or know if I have missed one. This is on Advice given to me by the excellent Mr Bellingham. Oh, and Mr Bellingham has also said that it is wise, if you are able, to send more than one Copy of your Letters, to improve the Chances of my receiving them, for if one should go astray then I might still receive its Copy. I should be grateful if you would pass on these Pieces of Advice to the Viscountess (and also to those of your Acquaintance who correspond with Friends engaged Abroad), as I have already seal’d and consign’d my Letter to Mama, and do not expect that I shall have Occasion to write to her again until I arrive at Madras.
William read through what he had written. On the whole, he was now satisfied, but he nonetheless had a nagging feeling that there was something awry. It was the tone, he decided. It was all wrong. It was all too cool, too forced, too bloodless, too artificial certainly – but there was something else. It was too – too what? Then it came to him. It was too un-lover-like. He was supposed to be an eager young bridegroom-in-waiting, sorry to be parted from his betrothed, ardently yearning for their reunion and their blissful wedding-night. Then there came a sudden thought which had at first seemed an inspiration. He wrote further, rapidly:
Whilst I am in India, Jessica, I mean to buy Silks and fine Muslins for your Trousseau, and Rubies and Emeralds, Pearls and Peacock-Feathers, for your Adornment! And I shall strive most diligently to gain Rank so that we might be married as soon as ever is possible upon my Return to England. This will all take some Time, of course, but, Heaven being my Helper, the Years will pass quickly as if by some kindly Conjurer’s Trick or by the Illusion of some well-dispos’d Magician, so that when I return it will seem as if I had barely left your Side. In my Dreams I walk with you nightly in your Mother’s Flower-Garden in Sutton Scotney, as we did in Truth but a little more than one Month ago. I sigh before your Likeness every Evening ere I retire.
O God! Inspiration? Desperation was more like it. That last sentence was not just over-egging the pudding – it was a tissue of blatant lies. Jessica’s portrait was stowed in the hold with the rest of William’s belongings which he had known he was not going to need until he arrived at Madras. The only likeness over which he sighed before retiring at night was Mark’s - the fine miniature which he had made himself and which he kept in the locket hung about his neck and hidden beneath his shirt, and which he took off never. He felt ashamed and wondered whether he should make a fresh copy of that page with all the insincere nonsense removed. Not only was it not true, he knew that Jessica was no fool and would at once detect the note of falsehood which sounded throughout all of that paragraph, not just in the piffle about her portrait. He imagined her laughing over it with Jane, her alarmingly perspicacious would-be author friend, whom he now pictured incorporating it into one of her stories – not for nothing had he begged Jessica to ask her to show restraint! - and filed forever, perhaps, in her imagination under ‘Dissembling Young Officer of a Regiment of Foot, Type 3’. However, aware that he had not the time to make a new version of that page, William decided that he would just have to let it stand. Fighting down the rising self-disgust, he continued:
And now, Jessica, I really must cease for Lack of Time – we shall arrive off Ushant tomorrow, where, so I am told, we are expected to make an important Rendezvous; so this Letter must go into the Bag of Post tonight and thus be ready to return to England with that good Frigate Indomitable (3), Captain Frederick Hardinge commanding, of whom no Doubt your Father will also have read much in the Newspapers following the Battle of the Raz de Sein last April, when he and his people distinguished themselves under the Leadership of Admiral Bridport.
In the Mean-Time, I remain –
Your devoted –
WAHL
Oh! What a masterpiece of deceit and hypocrisy! He sanded the pages. Once the ink was dry William folded them carefully and sealed the letter with a wafer. Now for the next.
Aboard His Majesty’s Ship the Néreide frigate. At Sea. Sunday the 29thJuly, 1798.
My dear Francis
William sat and stared at those three words. What on earth could he write to Francis? Doubtless Charles would have informed him, with hateful glee and spiteful satisfaction, of what had happened on the night of Mama’s birthday, knowing of the great affection in which Francis had formerly held their youngest brother, in defiance of Charles. Did Francis despise him now, too? He could not bear the thought of that. But Francis was a clergyman. William supposed that it was his duty to condemn him for what he had done. Francis was under the discipline of his Bishop and the whole hierarchy of the Church of England, of which the King was the capstone of the pyramid, just as William was currently under that of Captain Watkins and the Admiralty, to exchange both for the authority of Colonel Wellesley and Horse Guards once he was ashore at Madras. And the King was at the top of those hierarchies too. Francis could not step out of line. If it had been within his power to be transported to the threshold of the Rectory at Langbourne Worthy at that very moment and beg an interview, William thought it quite likely that Francis would have refused to admit him (‘Dear William, I thought you knew me!’ Francis had exclaimed, distressed, when William had confessed this to him, some years later). William had not known that Francis had tried to visit him, when he had been a prisoner in his bed-chamber throughout those four terrible weeks, but had been deterred by Charles and had even been turned away by him when he had at last arrived in the black and white marble lobby of the house at Durford Park, having decided to ride over anyway to try to discover what had been going on, for his suspicions had not only been aroused by what he had been reading in confused and increasingly distressed letters from Mama and curt cold notes from Charles – but mainly the deafening silence from William – they had become rampant. Charles’s excuse had been that Dr Fazz had insisted on complete rest and quiet to ensure the invalid’s recovery in time for his departure to India. Puzzled and concerned, Francis had at first thought to defy him and attempt to rush the stairs and hope he made it to William’s room before Charles tackled him and brought him down – but in the end he had not been able to bear the idea of a fracas which could well have caused a scandal, and, worse, brought about distress to their mother; and so he had ridden away, defeated, albeit full of disquiet, and fearful for his younger brother, for he had not – had never - trusted Charles to act for William’s good.
In the end William crushed the sheet of paper into a ball, went up on deck and threw it over the side. The wrong side. The wind blew it back at him.
“You want leeward, Lawford,” said Henry Bellingham, who happened to be passing, cheerfully. William looked at him in puzzlement.
“That way,” said the boy patiently, pointing. “The direction the wind is blowing towards. It’s called leeward. The direction the wind is coming from is called windward.”
“Ah. Thank you, Mr Bellingham.”
“Bellingham will do. Even Henry! Never easy, are they?”
“What, all these nautical terms?”
“Well, those, neither; but I was meaning letters to sweethearts, especially those one is trying to drop, haha!” said Henry, all of fourteen years old (he had recently had a birthday) and plainly already going on four-and-twenty.
As things turned out, they had a moderately trouble-free passage for the first part of the way, although one day an insolent Frenchman did dart out from hiding from behind a small islet as they had been sailing (at a cautious distance) along the coast of Brittany not far from Brest; the Frenchie had offered impudent threats with its small guns, the shot of which did not fall even within two cable-lengths of Néreide.
“I don’t suppose we’re in any real danger, are we?” William asked of a stolid-looking seaman who was squatting on the deck nearby doing some arcane thing with a coil of rope (he could not make out what). The man had looked surprised to be addressed at all, and certainly astonished to have been spoken to in such an amiable manner by a gentleman, but he had answered him - quite civilly, for a busy sailor being quizzed by an ignorant lubberly Lobster.
“No, sir, it’s just for form’s sake,” he said, making to turn back to his task; but William persisted in his friendly questioning.
“What kind of ship is that?” William said, indicating the Frenchman.
The man grinned at him now in mild derision.
“That ain’t no ship, sir; that there’s a sloop.”
William looked at him, plainly puzzled.
“Number of masts is one tell-tale sign, sir; a ship has to have at least three – most of the time, anyway - and that there only has two - sloops and brigs and barquentines though, sometimes they has three masts – it’s what the learned coves call complicated - I’m straying into the lore now – never you mind about it, sir - there are other signs, but a Lobster – sorry, sir, a Redcoat - needn’t bother his head about such things – the Frenchies’ ships being all corked up in Brest by the Blockade, see, by our frigates and our great ships o’ the line. Long and short, sir, or rule of thumb if you prefer, ‘ships’ is just bigger, with lots of guns and three masts and at least two decks. Usually. Most other vessels, not ‘ships’. Remember that and you won’t go far wrong”.
“Oh!”
William was suddenly reminded that he had read that vessels could even change designation according to how their rigging and sails were configured, but he thought that he had better not ask about that. That, he intuited, was definitely what the man would have called ‘straying into the lore’. Besides, the sailor’s demeanour seemed to be indicating that he was keen to get back to his task. But anyway –
“You said that the exchange of fire between that – sloop – and our boat was just for form’s sake?”
The sailor exhaled heavily.
“This here Frenchie, sir, see, it’s like he’s dropping his breeches and showing us his backside, that’s all; so we’re obliged to moon back at him, so to speak. So’s not to lose face. According to the rules of the game we have to bare our bum too, savvy?”
William thought about that, at first puzzled. Oh, yes. French. Vous savez? That was ironic.
“Ah.”
“Got to keep ‘em in their place, the bloody Frogs! Oh, another thing you probably do need to know, sir – never call a frigate a boat. A boat is a thing with oars like what is hanging from that there davit over yonder. You arrived aboard in one, probably, unless you swam out from Gosport.”
“Yes. Indeed,” said William, glancing towards where the man was gesturing, and reddening. “I understand. Sorry. Thank you.”
William walked smartly away along the deck as if he had an important duty to which to attend (currently he had not) with what he hoped was a nonchalant air. The man shook his head and pulled a resigned face as he went back to his work.
Meanwhile Néreide quickly saw off the Frenchman with what looked like very little expenditure of effort. There was much shouting and banging of small guns which generated clouds of foul-smelling smoke; by lucky chance a few splinters were even seen to fly from the Frenchman’s rails, and a small hole the size of a plum-pudding appeared in Néreide’s mizzen top-sail, which was repaired in the course of the following morning, but no-one (so far as William could tell) was very much hurt beyond a few bruises aboard Néreide as it had manoeuvred rapidly and some of the people had lost their footing or had fallen from the shrouds or down the companion-ways as a consequence, and, he assumed, some shed blood owing to flying splinters aboard the Frenchman. William, sketch-book and pencil in hand (how he wished he had had a telescope, the better for observing what had been passing between the two – not ships – the frigate, which, all right, was a ship, probably, anyway, and the other one, the Crapaud sloop, which was not; but he supposed it would have been deemed presumptuous in him as a mere Lieutenant, and a Lieutenant in the Army at that – to aspire to ownership of such a glorious thing) watched the whole affair with great interest: he had not bargained for witnessing a naval skirmish, at least not so early in the voyage, and he wondered what a full-blown battle at sea might be like - although he hoped he would not have to find out at first hand, for the noise and the smoke of even such a small affair as this bad-tempered spat between Néreide and a vessel hardly larger than a fishing-smack had left him feeling considerably rattled.
There were two other Redcoat officers who had taken passage on Néreide, but not of the 33rd, for which William was grateful. Time enough for making a bad impression once he arrived in Madras, he thought, gloomily. They took part in the gunnery drills, as he did, but seemed to have no other duties. They never appeared on parade with the Marines. William suspected that the Viscount had instructed that he be given a harder time than was normal for outward-bound Lobsters in vessels of the Royal Navy, although oddly he did not mind. He was glad of the occupation. It helped to keep his mind off Mark, and the whole ghastly situation which had centred upon that disaster.
At first William kept himself to himself most of the time when he was not on duty, latibulating (as Francis would have called it) in the tiny hutch-like cabin, except for his meals, when he would mess with the other Mids, unless it was one of the occasions on which Captain Watkins invited him to dine, on account of his being the Earl of Winchester’s grandson - no doubt because Watkins had not wished tales of discourtesy to be circulated at home, to the detriment of his career. Two or three of the Midshipmen were about his own age, young men who had either passed their Lieutenant’s examination but had not yet been awarded a commission (he thought of Miss Turnbull’s brother Matt, and hoped that he had eventually been made and not left disappointed for years on end, as often happened if one lacked connections and patronage), or those who were studying to try for it. On the whole they were a good crowd and after an initial uncertain period they had grown to accept him, even like him, and he them.
Captain Watkins invited William to dinner in his dining-parlour regularly, throughout the voyage. A proper Captain was Watkins, a Post-Captain in all his bullioned glory, as William had informed Jessica. If he were ever to be given the captaincy of a ship of the line, a Seventy-Four, he would be in truth the equivalent of a full Colonel on land. It was clear to William, however, that Watkins had no real interest in cultivating the acquaintanceship of a Lieutenant in a mere Regiment of Foot, a rank which, he had soon learned, definitely did imply something rather less exalted in the Army than what it did in the Navy; and neither had anyone else. He was just there at the Captain’s table so that there would not be an empty seat, and he knew it – and so did everyone else.
William made some short excursions onto the deck for purposes of sketching the on-board activity and the weathered characterful faces of the ship’s people. Most of the seamen, the ones who did not give him the impression that they were from London or Devon anyway, spoke with broad Hampshire accents, just a little different from the dialect spoken by the servants at Durford, but it was close enough to remind him of Mark, and it was a form of torture for him to have to listen to it; so in the end, when he had no other pressing engagements, he took to spending more and more of his free time alone in the tiny cabin. The sailors’ good-humoured if occasionally profane banter was less audible there.
William grew used to the rhythm of life on board a ship: the changes of the watch; the clattering of the seamen’s feet on the tough pine boards of the decks as they ran to and from their stations (5); the ringing of the ship’s bell every half-hour (he had quickly learned to tell the time by this novel method); the regular gunnery drills (which he actually found very interesting and profitable). He spent a good deal of time, of course, with the unit of Marines which was part of the ship’s company. Their Captain, Webster, turned out to be a lazy and bibulous lump who was only too pleased to delegate the quotidian routine duties to a deputy who had turned out to be far more competent than his own Lieutenant, and William was happy to substitute for him as it had been so long since he had been with his Regiment that he had been greatly fearing that he had got quite out of the way of being an officer.
William read a great deal. He was fortunate in that he possessed a middling-sized but eclectic travelling library, which had been purchased for his first abortive India voyage: Virgil and Homer (of course); Tacitus, Livy, Thucydides, Polybius and all the usual suspects, principally, on the art of politics and warfare - and a fat lot of use all that would be against the Tippoo Sultan, let alone the French or for that matter the Mahrattas, he could not help but think, now it came to it. India was an entirely different kettle of fish from all of that, which he would have realised had he been thinking straight before he had come away from England this second time. There was Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke; Dean Swift, Defoe and so on - the favourites of his boyhood. There was Thomas Reide’s (6) recently-published Treatise on the Duties of Infantry Officers and the Present System of British Military Discipline. With an Appendix, and Charles James’s The Regimental Companion of course. William thought that he could have done with those two before he had gone to Flanders. There was a Kanarese grammar and a book of maps of India; there were books about India, which after a short while he turned to instead of the stern old Greeks and Romans and their boring-on about the Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars and bloody old Hannibal and Caesar and Scipio Africanus – these volumes on India he found far more interesting and pertinent. He read about the life and teachings of the Buddha. He read about the Hindoo religion. He found that he quite approved of both of those spiritual pathways. They had, he thought, a great deal to recommend them; and then he wondered if he would ever dare to share his insights with that stern old Presbyterian, his Uncle McCandless. He read about the Islamic conquerors from Central Asia and from Persia. One of his books was lavishly illustrated with engravings of what purported to be temple carvings. These religious pictures he found to be an education in themselves. If the Christian artists of bygone times had been obsessed with the inventive representation of hideous forms of martyr-making torture, the Hindoo artists had evidently been much taken with depicting imaginative methods of sexual congress, and he knew which he preferred. He read about the extensive trade between India and the Roman Empire in the years immediately preceding and following the birth of Christ, about which he had had no previous idea.
But it was his favourites from of old which remained his preferred reading, so often he resorted to Dean Swift and the satirical adventures of Lemuel Gulliver (skipping the reference to the Cape of Good Hope; the strength of the sensations of anguish and mortification at the memory of succumbing to sickness, and agony of mind on account of Wilfred Halston, during that previous failed voyage to India, and of having to be put ashore there ignominiously bound to a litter, which had come upon him when his eye had lighted upon that name in the opening lines of A Voyage to Brobdingnag upon this reading, had astonished him) who had repeatedly found himself marooned in strange lands amongst stranger folk. He had Moll Flanders too, but he did not have Robinson Crusoe with him on this voyage; a ferocious baboon had stolen his copy when he had been at Cape Town almost two years before - he had let the hideous creature snatch it from him and take it away without demur, as it had looked perfectly capable of ripping off his arm had he resisted - and he had since neglected to purchase another.
Then there was the Bible which his mother had given him, via Charles, in the days before he had sailed (they had not told her about his disgrace - they had probably decided that she would have been incapable of processing the information). Every time William looked at it, it was as if a red-hot flail had fallen upon his soul; each time he made himself, out of filial piety, read a few verses, he would hear them in his mind’s ear as if read aloud in the lugubrious tones redolent of Uncle Hector’s grave Scottish Kirk, and he could not bear to think about Uncle Hector, who had always been so good to him, as far as he had been able, for the most part from half a world away, doing his best to make good the deficiencies of William’s neglectful so-called father, saving him when the waters had all but gone over William’s head when, at the age of twelve, he had been a lost boy ready to perish. What would Uncle Hector think of him now, if he had known that he had gone away from Durford in disgrace for the sin of loving Mark? Mark, who was paying the true price for William’s transgression, and most likely blaming him for his plight - Mark, whom he missed most desperately, for whom his soul yearned and his body ached, day and night! In the solitude of his borrowed cabin William repeatedly, almost obsessively, mulled over all he had heard about the harsh lives of the enlisted men, and about the West Indies, and the Yellow Fever; and these cogitations filled him with guilt, fear, apprehension and dismay.
The Bay of Biscay was horrible. An unseasonal gale hit them, and for almost a week William was continually and violently ill and could barely leave his cot in order to stagger to the lidded bucket in the corner of the cabin, which was only about four feet away. He wondered how he had ever found Robinson Crusoe’s account of the storm which had blown up as soon as his ship had passed out of the Humber remotely entertaining; Crusoe had testified that he had been ‘most inexpressibly sick in body and terrify’d in [his] mind,’ and now he knew exactly how that had felt. He had thought he had known what sea-sickness was during that horrible abortive voyage to the West Indies in ’95, but it had been nothing like this, even though the attempt had led to shipwreck off Chesil Beach in Dorset. That was another work which William knew he would never be able to open again without certain sensations of horror (the literary baboon was welcome to it!), along with Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, which he had once found irresistibly romantic - until life had imitated art and he had been made to learn the bitterest of lessons about love (8).
Finally, after several days of this, as the wind had begun to abate, William, dehydrated and emaciated, found at last that he was able to haul himself up the companion-way and onto the weather-deck and watch as the north-western coast of Spain slowly arose from the Atlantic and became distinct to view off their larboard bow (‘larboard’ was one of several nautical words which Bellingham had taught him since his coming aboard Néreide, and he had already made a mental note to use all of them the next time he wrote to Jessica – she would think he was becoming quite the jolly Tar himself - ! oh, haha.). And they still had the rest of the Iberian Peninsula and the whole of Africa to circumnavigate before they could even begin to think about India. No wonder, he thought, people insufficiently employed with quotidian duties often went mad and killed themselves on long sea voyages.
“I am very glad that the storm has passed at last,” William observed to Henry Bellingham, whom he happened to pass as he gingerly made a circuit of the deck for the good of his health, having quit his cot at last and got himself properly dressed for the first time in days. Bellingham had only just then descended from somewhere dizzyingly high, plummeting down the back-stay of the mizzen-mast, having won a race against one of the more cautious of his fellow-mids, who was still several fathoms above the planks of the deck, which in this wooden world constituted their terra firma, dangling backwards from what William could still scarcely believe were called the futtock shrouds; Bellingham was laughing with pleasure at his sky-larking exploits, his cheeks pink and glowing with youth and health.
“Storm?” he said. “Oh, no, William; that was no storm!”
“Not a storm?”
“It was just a healthy blow! Great fun, by God! Most salubrious and bracing, I say!” Henry had gone on. Then suddenly he had been all concern and consternation now, peering at him. “D’ye think you might need to see the surgeon, William? You look very green about the gills, I trow!”
One night about six weeks into the voyage, when he could not sleep, and the damned ship’s bell had seemed to be ringing every five minutes, William found himself wondering, in the distraught and frankly somewhat unhinged way which tends to come upon the desperate wakeful in the middle hours of darkness, whether he should write to Mark in Jamaica. If he sent a letter from St Helena or the Cape, by the time it reached the garrison at Kingston Mark would probably have arrived with the latest relief draft. Mark, obviously, could read. As a gardener at a great house he had had to learn, given the astonishing advances made in the subject of botany in recent times. For decades now new plants in ever-increasing numbers had been arriving from all around the globe in the wake of the expanding British presence throughout the world, and more and more books both practical and learned upon the subject were being published now, every year. The Viscount had told Mark’s at first sceptical father that he must send the boy to the Rector to be taught his letters, and sufficient Latin to serve botanical purposes, and so he had. Matthew Lucas, at first reluctantly obedient (it did not do, he had said to his wife, for such folk as they to. get above themselves, going in for book-learning; he doubted that any good would come of it, and feared much harm from it should Mark have his head turned and start to think himself too fine to work in the gardens any longer) had soon become proud of his son’s attainments, not even objecting when Mark had begun to teach his sister and his mother in turn to read and to write, and to learn the scientific names of the common plants, the herbs and the flowers and the shrubs, in their own small garden which had surrounded their tied cottage on the Estate.
Yes, he must write to Mark, put it all into words: his love, his remorse, his guilt, his misery, his desperate hope that Mark would somehow rise above all the evil which had befallen him and make good in his new life, and find happiness again in service of his King, and - above all - forgive him! William’s heart and his brain alike were on fire now, to say nothing of other parts of his anatomy. William was alone in the cabin, safe and private. He rose from his cot, groped for his tinder-box, struck a flint and eventually succeeded in igniting the charred linen, which had become damp from a fog which had persisted for several days but had thankfully eventually dissipated, and had then lit the candle in his lantern - but in that very moment remembering that that action was forbidden to anyone who was not one of the ship’s commissioned officers, he pinched it out again at once. Instead, taking paper and pencil, William now crept from the cabin onto the deck, where, in the faint light of the waning gibbous moon as it set, (7) he began the draft of a letter. But as the light diminished, so reason waxed, and he saw clearly now that of course it was not worth the risk either to Mark or to himself to send such a letter. Then it further occurred to him, with a horrid sense of shock - what if Mark had come to hate him? He imagined that he might well have done so, had he been in Mark’s shoes - boots, rather - and probably rather ill-fitting ones at that. William thought about what he had written (it was now too dark to read the letter) – madness, utter madness! What had he been thinking! Besides, not all of the guilt belonged to him - did it? Mark, whatever his initial intentions, had made the first approach, had he not, when William had still been convalescent, asleep and vulnerable in the garden? The rose - that bittersweet gift! William had the desiccated flower in his baggage, buried down deep in the hold! When he had packed it weeks before, pressed between folds of tissue paper, amongst the extra linen in his trunk, it had yet retained some of its fragrance – unfading rose of Eden (8) – now, at that thought, it was as if someone were twisting a knife in his heart. With an exclamation as at actual physical pain, William screwed the sheet of paper into a ball and went and tossed it over the side – the right side (although it was actually the left side), this time, the leeward side. There would be no letter to Mark.
Another idea of how to attempt to make amends, worthier, more practical, then came to William. Mrs Lucas had been deprived of her home, and of the support of her son. William would find out how much money a widow of lowly station would need upon which she might live in modest comfort in England, and then he would write to his banker and order a regular anonymous gift to be sent to Mrs Lucas. No - better - a modest but still generous lump sum, with instructions to invest it in the four percents, which could be passed off as a legacy from some previously unknown cousin, an East India Company official in Calcutta, perhaps, a functionary humble enough not to arouse suspicion – not even a writer, just a junior clerk – a sum sufficient, even, for Martha to give up her position in service, if she wished – female domestic servants after all cleared only about £5 a year, for God’s sake! although all their needs were found by their employers, of course, board, lodging, clothing, laundry - and live at home again, to take care of her aging parent. Two thousand, no, two thousand five hundred, should do it – it would yield a hundred pounds or so a year. Two women of low degree living together barely needed more than that in order to get by with all appearance of respectability - they would not entertain, they would attend no amusements, they would need no servant, no carriage, no horse – but they would be able to afford a decent lodging, and be properly clothed, and have sufficient plain food to eat, and not have to skimp on coals for the fire in the winter. William had his grandmother Kilmonivaig’s legacy from which he could provide this capital. He could not be more generous – that would excite suspicion. Besides, when Martha married, hopefully to a fellow with prospects, that would further ameliorate the situation regarding the old lady. But how to find Mrs Lucas? He could write to the Rector, he supposed. But the Rector, a pompous tedious irritant to his inferiors though obsequious to his betters, would inevitably tell the Viscount. There was Mark’s Uncle John, his mother’s brother, in Gosport, but his surname was of course not Lucas, and there were probably a great many men called John in Gosport. Well, he would have to write to Francis, then, and ask him to make enquiries amongst his charitably-inclined associates. Oh, but then he would have to make up an elaborate story of some kind, for why else would he be interested in the fate of an obscure widow from the Estate? Or he could tell Francis the truth – his truth, not Charles’s - which was nonetheless still impossible. William felt that he could not have born it if ever dear Francis had turned from him in righteous disgust. A further thought came to him. Did not lawyers employ private investigators when they needed to locate a missing heir? He would arrange for his banker to instruct a lawyer in Petersfield. Mrs Lucas would be traced.
It was now just over a year and three-quarters, William reflected, on a sleepless night in September, somewhere off the Cape Verde Islands. Twenty-one months since he had arrived home in Hampshire around Christmas time in ’96, having been away since Easter-tide, and having failed to reach India - home to recuperate before once again attempting to join General Harris’s army. Twenty-one months of ill-health, unhappiness and uncertainty about whether he would ever be able to return to his career. And out of all of that time, there had been two months of burgeoning happiness, seven weeks of secret joy, a few – a very few - stolen hours of utter bliss which he could probably count on three-fifths of the fingers of one hand – and a month of unspeakable pain and humiliation to pay him out for his having dared to seek for love where love had been forbidden.
The Past: 1795
William had been dreading it, the ignominious return home. It had been at the barracks at Warley, shortly after their arrival in England from Flanders in ‘95 where the nervous problem had initially manifested itself, after all, thanks to Fitzroy’s indiscreet blabbing and rumour-mongering; he had not even recovered from that when the strange symptoms and fever and fatigue and the swellings beneath his jaw to either side had begun, which he had at first done his best to ignore, telling himself that it was all one with whatever was wrong with how he felt in his mind, which was probably a moral failing, and that he just had to buck up and make himself go on and get through it, and stop being so bloody damn weak! William had managed to hide all of this during the period when they had been trying to reach the West Indies (it had gone unnoticed by his superiors, probably because of the dangers which had soon manifested and then had quickly escalated into insuperable difficulties - the dreadful weather which had been attendant upon the voyage, and which had threatened the Battalion’s very survival, not the least of them). Once the 33rd had embarked for India, however, it had become increasingly clear that William had not been up to his duties – that he had in fact been sufficiently ill to be excused them entirely, although he had not asked to be. St Helena had barely been behind them when William had been informed by Major Shee one morning that he was to be taken off the Princess Charlotte as soon as they reached Cape Town. William had been trying not to think about this possibility, although he had known secretly, deep down, that this had been likely to happen. Nonetheless, it had come as a body-blow to be told so bluntly that he was a liability and was therefore to be put over the side like a barrel of salt-beef deemed by the Purser to have gone bad beyond redemption. After a period in the fever hospital at the Cape, William had found himself sent on board the first inward-bound Royal Naval vessel with capacity which had happened to stand in. He had spent most of that voyage below decks in the sick-berth.
William had been sure that being once again at Durford – a place of precious few happy memories for him - would make his condition worse rather than better; to his surprise, however, it had proved to be not nearly so bad now that Charles had married and had moved to a house owned by the family of his awful venal wife Amelia at Mortimer Common in Berkshire, which was far enough away to render unlikely a casual unannounced visit by the pair. That looming threat removed, William had even begun to like his family’s secondary seat. Strange to think that, William reflected as he lay upon his cot in the cabin one night, now that he had become estranged, probably permanently, from Durford and its people. But no use repining over that. It had all been his fault, he had decided now: all of it down to his reckless selfish thoughtless delinquency. Had he really thought that there would be no consequences to his actions? But things that had seemed trifles, at school - dalliances, adventures, mere first essays in the ars amoris – almost nothing - in the bosom of that bloody awful family of glacial-blooded undead ghouls those things had been serious matters and they had had devastating outcomes and had earned heavy penalties.
But – no - he had conceded, upon reflection - he was not being quite fair. Not all the family. Henry was all right, really, and Francis had been very good to him; and Mama might have been a quite different sort of person had she not been married to the Viscount, from what he had seen on the occasion when Uncle Hector had come on a surprise visit, having travelled to Alexandria from Suez by an overland desert route in the company of the Bedouin and then found passage in a fast Royal Navy frigate. Then she had been restored to something like the lively, gay and laughing young girl she clearly once had been – the girl who had, fatefully, captured the attention of Captain the Honourable Charles Lawford of His Majesty’s 19th Regiment of Foot at a ball at Fort William one evening in 1765 - her features animated and her voice ringing with the notes of the Highlands as her Scottish accent, long repressed, had briefly re-asserted itself.) Yes: it had been all his fault, William berated himself, all his doing - although clearly it had not, common sense had tried to tell him. The rose, he reminded himself, then: the rose. Mark had given him the rose. Reason had told him, even at the time, that that was not a thing which could have happened casually. Mark had known what he had been about. But taking all the blame to himself contrarily helped William to feel better about what had happened, because that meant that Mark was an innocent victim and thus worthy of his continuing worship (notwithstanding what Mark had latterly confessed to William concerning his relations with Tom Griffiths). Mark could therefore have had no true idea of what had been on William’s mind as he had sought him out, if not every day at least very frequently, in the greenhouses and in the kitchen garden, by the herbiary or as he had been coddling the gourds in the cucumber frame – or at least, so William had thought - and, at first, neither had William – thus went the story which he had spun himself as their affair had gone on, inventing it piece-meal as events had spiralled towards disaster, making adjustments to accommodate every new scrap of information which Mark had fed to him and which he had discovered for himself. Mark – indeed, both of them had been innocent, the tale had gone – until suddenly they were not.
William had at first only been conscious of a tremendous sense of peace and serenity and great happiness in Mark’s presence, and Mark, a cheerful young man with a village sweetheart called Keziah, had been (apparently, anyway) naively pleased to find that Mister William was demonstrating such a laudable interest in botany and domestic horticulture. But William accused himself bitterly now as he lay upon his cot in the darkness whilst the ship yawed (he thought that was how he had heard the sailors refer to the motion) and pitched and rolled – comprehensively gyrated, at any rate - fore and aft and side to side in the heavy seas off Africa. Mark, he thought, now probably believed that he had allowed himself to be gulled into becoming the plaything of a young coxcomb made heartless and selfish by his family’s wealth and privilege, no better than Charles, that notorious seducer (that was putting it delicately) of housemaids - but that had not been William’s motive - no, that had not at all been the case! He was not like Charles! The attachment had been genuine, at least so far as William had been concerned - and Mark had after all met him more than halfway, had he not? had demonstrated that he had truly cared for William, in return? Why, Mark might could even be said to have begun it! For of course, perhaps eight months before they had even spoken upon that fateful day when Collins had brought William to the kitchen garden, there had been the incident of the rose. It always came back to the rose. What had Mark expected him to make of it but that it had been intended as a suitor’s gift? But if this were the case then it made a nonsense of William’s recent self-flagellating decision that he had been entirely to blame, in order to exonerate Mark, to make him out to be innocent and thus to keep him on his pedestal, a worthy object of his perpetual sorrowful devotion. The argument had gone around and around in William’s mind for a long time now. It was if he were unable to step off a treadmill to which he had been perpetually condemned, a captive in some terrible mental house of correction, for whose sentence there had been set no term. Yet all the same... In some moods he understood quite clearly that Mark must bear some of the responsibility whilst in others he could not bear to believe that – no, not of his muse, his angelic talisman!
Sometimes William would find himself in the impossible position of being in both moods at once, oscillating to and fro between them like the pendulum of a clock. He did not want to believe it, because believing himself to bear all the guilt for what had happened was, perversely, strangely comforting as it meant that he could preserve Mark’s image unsullied in his memory… Then, he wanted to believe it, because then he was not such an entirely bad person in his own estimation. Thus William’s self-contradictory thoughts continued to spin in circles concerning the origins and fateful trajectory of his first love affair (first proper one, at any event; there had been two or three boys at school, but those short-lived heart-fluttering encounters had never amounted to anything; later, in the case of Wilfred Halston, that first time William had been in the 33rd, it had started and finished in William’s head – kindly Captain Hughes had guessed, he had later found out, but Halston never had - even so, the way that had ended had been agonizing and had seriously harmed his health). He wished that the whole business of finding that one had feelings for people had not been so wretchedly fraught with pain and confusion!
If that were not enough, the dreadful memory of how his affair with Mark had ended returned time and time again to torment him should he chance to be lying awake in the darkness of the tiny cabin. O God! Charles had had to burst in on them, hadn’t he – inevitably, it had been Charles! Of course, it had had to be him, because that was how it had always been in his life! Had it been Henry, he would most probably just have put on his disapproving face and told them that it would be for the best if they never did that again, and then he would have told William to button his breeches and come in to dinner at once, and that he would say nothing. Had it been Francis, Francis would have been shocked, of course, but he would not have raised the hue and cry and brought disaster down upon them – he would simply, William was sure, have suggested a civilized way of calling the necessary halt to matters – and then told him to button his breeches and come in to dinner at once, having washed his hands first. But it had been Charles, of course, because that was how the Universe was ordered, and he had caught them in the seed-store, a shed behind the hothouse, where for a short time throughout that early summer they had been in the fitful habit – no, not really a habit – they had never been able to find sufficient opportunity to make it a habit - perhaps there had been three occasions? four at the most? - of meeting clandestinely because it was out of the way, windowless, clean and dry, with a lockable door; and a pile of new hessian sacks in the corner had served them well enough as a makeshift couch where they had that summer sometimes lain together, embracing and kissing and touching merely, always ultimately frustrated because time had never been on their side; but this time, this one time, things had been different, and the nightingale had been singing so sweetly, just as it had done on the bluebell hangar in the month of May gone by, and in the hot lavender- and rose-scented dimness of the bedroom of Mark’s mother’s cottage a little more than three weeks before the catastrophe. Charles had come seeking him because it had been the 26th of June, and it was the Viscountess’s birthday dinner – special, this year, because it had been held to celebrate the completion of her fiftieth circuit about the sun - and the time to dress had come, and William had been nowhere to be found in the house, because, his mind full of Mark and Mark’s dishabillé beauty, luminous in the small light of a barely-open lantern, he had been drunk with desire and languorous with love and with longing and, careless of all else, he had simply lost track of the time - and, fatefully, had also temporarily forgotten that Charles and Amelia had been visiting, on account of Mama’s significant birthday, and the wretched dinner. Preoccupied with each other as William and Mark had been, neither of them had heard the sound of someone stealthily trying the handle of the locked door. Without prior warning, then, they had suddenly heard Charles outside yelling for a couple of nearby outdoor servants – Ned Weston and Jem Trenchard - to bring lanterns - and they had come running, and the next thing that had happened was that Charles had been shouting at the two men, ordering them to break in the door. There had been a brief assault, the door had been shouldered inwards and Charles and Griffiths had irrupted into the shed whilst Weston and Trenchard, who had remained without, had peered in fearfully through the broken boards of the shattered door, which had now swung, sagging, from one hinge.
Mark and William had had time, barely, whilst all this commotion had been going on, to scramble to their feet and at least attempt to make themselves as decent as they could, William dragging his shirt over his head and trying to button his breeches with hands which had suddenly begun to shake too violently to obey the frantic confused orders of his panicking brain. Mark meanwhile had managed his breeches but had not had time to pull on his shirt; he had stood, appalled, dumbstruck, at first immobile, staring aghast as Charles and Griffiths had advanced upon them, the hapless pair of condemned lovers. Instinctively then William had clasped his arms about Mark, as if he had thought to shield him by doing so. Mark had done the same. The nightingale had sung for the last time. William had turned away from their approaching Nemesis, as if by not looking at Charles he could make him vanish – it had been, he had often thought afterwards, with shame, an act on the level of a young child’s belief that if it put its hands over its eyes so it could not see the frightening monster, then the frightening monster could not see it. And so they had stood, waiting silent as their doom had approached, each with his arms about the other. In vain, though, had William sought to protect Mark: Griffiths had at once seized Mark by his queue of fiery hair, and, with an inarticulate cry of rage, had dragged him violently from the embrace of his lover, whilst Mark had cried aloud in pain and shock.
“Not him, Griffiths,” Charles had snapped, probably well aware that Griffiths had himself long desired to lay lascivious hands upon the young man. He had ordered him to restrain William instead, and the other two to seize hold of Lucas, already conveniently shirtless, and pinion him fast whilst he thrashed him with the crop with which he had furnished himself, having taken a diversion to the stables as he had set out upon his search, as if he had known exactly what he had been going to find. William had struggled and protested, of course, but Griffiths had held him, clutched him brutally fast, his work-hardened fingers and dirty torn nails digging with punishing cruelty into his upper arms, hurting him as if he had meant it, and Charles had simply turned to him briefly and struck him hard across the face, forehand and backhand, four times, until William’s head had rung, and blood had flowed down his cheek from a cut which Charles’s signet ring, his symbol of authority as the heir, had made; and had then thumped him in the belly for good measure, so that William’s instinct had been to double over to protect himself from further assault, only he had not been able to, because Griffiths’s grip had been a vice, and then Charles had thumped him again for good measure – all this enough to bruise and bloody and wind him into submission – exclaiming, “What are you grinning at, man?” at Griffiths, meanwhile, before turning back to flogging Lucas – a task at which he was well-practiced, given his experience with Lucas’s unpaid transatlantic colleagues in the Barbados branch of the Lawford family business.
Eventually, when Charles had tired himself he had stood back and surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction: Mark Lucas - gentle, kindly, tender-hearted unworldly Mark, who had never knowingly hurt any creature in his life, not so much as a snail or a caterpillar or even an aphid he might have chanced to find attacking one of his precious plants - sobbing pitifully, sagging to his knees, his back a raw and bloody mess. Weston and Trenchard had let him go; he had slumped to the floor of the shed, on his hands and knees now, humiliated upon the wooden boards.
“Stop your snivelling, you blackguardly wretch!” Charles had snapped at his victim. “Doubtless there’ll be plenty more of that where you’re going, so you’d better get used to it! Weston, Trenchard, I did not say that you could release him! Get him up!”
“Come on, Mark,” Trenchard had said, in a low voice, taking him quite gently by one arm as Weston took him by the other. “Best get up now. We’ll see you home when this is over.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Charles had snarled at him. “He’s never going home.”
“What do you mean!” William had exclaimed, at that.
“What I said. He’s not going home. He’s finished here.” “You bastard!” William had been too overwrought then to take in the import of his brother’s words, although throughout the hours of the subsequent night a dreadful suspicion and fear had begun to grow in him at the recollection. William, who almost never in his life before had dared to defy Charles, save over the matter of his use of the back-stairs, now channelled a rage similar in kind to that which he had been uneasily aware the enlisted men of the 33rd had sometimes harboured towards their officers, especially after what had happened in Flanders, and on the abortive voyage to the West Indies in the autumn of ’95 when so many of them had been senselessly drowned. He had tried again to escape from Griffiths’s grip; desperate to get to Mark he had struggled and spat and sworn like a maddened cat. He would have raked Charles’s face with his nails if he could; clawed at his eyes. But Griffiths had shifted his hold, twisted William’s arm, made him gasp at the pain of the near-dislocation - forced him to his knees.
“How about I put out his shoulder, Mister Charles?” he had said, twisting further, making him cry out at the sudden sharp agony.
“No, Griffiths; don’t do that. He needs to be properly hale and hearty. He’s sailing for India in a month.”
“India?” Griffiths had blurted then, as if astonished.
“He’s going back to his Regiment. You’d forgotten? Perhaps you hadn’t heard. No need to make a face like that, Griffiths; you’ve done sterling service tonight.”
“You bastard! You – you fucking bastard!” William, power of speech now regained, had been shouting at Charles again, with variations, meanwhile.
“Is that the thanks I get for sparing you? Perhaps I should let Griffiths dislocate your shoulder, after all. I should so like to hear you scream properly – that girlish wail you lately emitted was very half-hearted indeed - and I hear that the pain is even worse when it’s put back in. You might even faint. And by the by, I must add, your calling me that is rather rich, coming from you.” Charles had hit him hard in the face once again. Turning to Weston and Trenchard, who still held Mark, he said, “Take him away. Lock him in the ice-house and set a guard. Better give him his shirt and stockings. Did he have a neck-cloth? Oh, there it is. Lying there, with his coat. And don’t forget his shoes. He’s a way to walk tomorrow, and I don’t want him dying of cold in the night. I shall deal with him properly in the morning. As for you, sir – Griffiths, give him here – you will come with me.“
“Mark!”
“Sir!”
“Silence!”
Seizing hold of William, Charles had then dragged his brother back to the house, swearing at him foully when William’s still-unbuttoned breeches had fallen down and hobbled him and they had had to come to a halt so William could set himself in order. Charles had then strong-armed him around to the rear of the house, marched him through the service passages and then half-pushed, half-dragged him up one flight of back-stairs to the first floor. As they had approached the door of the dining-room where a party of people had been waiting for some time now with increasing impatience for their entrées Charles had threatened him in a low voice.
“Not one word out of you! Call out and I swear I’ll do to you what you just saw me do to Lucas.”
Then he had dragged him up another flight, the great stairs this time, and along the second-floor gallery, being the shortest way to William’s chamber, and, kicking open the door of the room, had thrust him roughly inside.
“You will stay here tonight. You will not dare to set foot beyond this door between now and the day you depart this house four weeks hence unless I or the Viscount order it, or grant you leave. If you should try to show your face downstairs this evening then it will be the worse for Lucas. By God, I’m going to have some rare sport with the two of you tomorrow. Singly. Do not hope to see him then. You and he shall never meet again – I’ll make damn sure of that!”
“How are you going to stop us?” William had demanded belligerently, with a desperate futile bravado. “I’m of age, and so is he – “
“There is no ‘of age’ for sodomites! William, dear William, I do not think that you yet fully understand the position – you have not grasped the gravity of your situation.”
“My situation? I, the, the – “
“The grandson of an Earl? And Lucas, a - peasant? Is that what you are thinking is the sum of your difficulties?”
“I know Grandpapa is an Earl, and Mark is a gardener – but I do not care for that!”
“William, are you a complete idiot? Do not you understand that this is not about disparity in status? Do not you see that the pair of you have committed a foul crime? You and Lucas are felons. You know what penalty the law exacts from men such as you, although I daresay that the Viscount would make sure you got off. Not because he has any regard for you – he has little – and when he learns of this episode he will have none - but because he has regard for his family’s name, a venerable name, which he has permitted you to bear for the last one-and-twenty years, hoping that one day you would show that you had earned the privilege. Little chance of that, now. But as for Lucas - as I said, I shall make certain that you never see him in this world again. You might conceivably meet again in Hell, but perhaps you would need to ask Francis to advise you upon that possibility.”
William had been rendered speechless. The morality of what he and Mark had been doing had not occurred to him - or at least, it had, but as it had become increasingly clear to him in those early days what it was that he had been feeling for Mark he had pushed it to the periphery of his consideration. The result of that had been that he had now for some time simply refused to contemplate it. He and Mark had met clandestinely, certainly, but he had constructed a narrative to allay his conscience, to the effect that this had been because of their huge inequality of status – he, the Honourable William Lawford, whom the world allowed to be the grandson of a peer of the Realm; Mark a gardener on the estate of the Earl’s heir. If it had crossed William’s mind that the real transgression, as Convention, the Law and the Church would see it, lay in the fact that he had fallen in love with a young man and that he had lain with him (or at least had aspired to) as men, according to Convention, the Law and the Church, were only supposed to lie with women, he had resolutely refused to examine it.
William had hesitated before replying now as certain frightening possibilities had suddenly occurred to him.
“What do you mean to do with him?”
The fight had gone out of him. He had sounded fearful, defeated, now – suppliant, almost. Charles had smiled nastily, well-satisfied.
“I should hate to spoil the surprise. Now, stop your snivelling, shut your mouth, sit down in that chair and do not you dare to leave this room until I return upon the morrow. Do not you even think of creeping out. I shall be setting a guard. Meanwhile I shall invent a story to explain your absence from Mama’s dinner.”
Charles had then gone back downstairs to enjoy the feast, as composed and calm as if he had just returned from a stroll in the garden. William, allegedly suddenly stricken with a debilitating fit of the megrim, had been obliged to keep to his room, partly because a brace of servants, given licence to employ further violence should it be necessary, had been detailed to ensure that he remained there, and partly because he had greatly dreaded to provoke further severe consequences for Mark if he disobeyed; but notwithstanding, next day, in the morning, shortly before eight o’clock, Lucas, shuddering from the chill, had been haled forth from the ice-house. After he had been made to walk the stiffness out of his legs three times around the vegetable garden he had been marched with a discreetly armed escort into Petersfield, where Charles had earlier ascertained that a recruiting party from the 67th Regiment of Foot, the South Hampshires, had that day, market day, been scheduled to be about its activities.
The Present: Aboard HMS Néreide, August 1798.
Well, nothing like that was ever going to happen again, William had quite decided. He would conquer this immature tendency he had previously identified in himself, even before his affair with Mark had been launched upon its doomed trajectory with the gift of a rose, to fall in love with someone simply because they had shown him a little kindness, a little proper attention (not mere flattery because of his status), had encouraged him to believe that he had value for who, rather than simply for what, he was. That had been what had done the damage with Lieutenant Wilfred Halston of the 33rd, and before him with Robert Ovalton at Eton, and William knew that he would not have fallen nearly so fast or so hard for Mark Lucas, notwithstanding Mark’s exceptional physical beauty and his sweet and gracious nature, had not the young man been so courteous and so kind to him after he had endured more than a year of sickness and lonely isolation and intermittent persecution by Charles (the professional attentions of Francis notwithstanding) at Durford. He would be keeping himself pure from now on, he told himself, bitterly, for Jessica, come what might. William thought of that miniature portrait in his luggage somewhere in the hold, not in the sea-chest in his cabin where it should have been (and that should have been warning enough to him that his heart simply was not in accordance with his head in this matter, or her image would have found its way amongst the items which comprised his more immediately necessary dunnage, surely). From now on he would do as he had pretended that he had in his letter, and look at it every night before he retired. He would seek an interview with Captain Watkins tomorrow and ask if he might go down to the hold and search his luggage so that he might fetch it up. It was not right that he had stowed it with the rest of the belongings which he had not been going to need on this voyage, which seemed set to be interminable. (8) Five bloody months of it! Six or even more if they were unlucky with the Cape Town rendezvous, or the weather, or the Dutch - or the French.
As the voyage had gone on (and on) there were times when William thought he was going to go mad with the boredom, the sheer tedium of ship-board life - when he was not required to perform any duty - periods punctuated only by meat days and banyan days and what they could fish out of the sea in between, and bells, bells, bloody bells - ! - it was at those times, without employment and suffering from terrible ennui that he could not help but think about Mark (notwithstanding that he now dutifully, in thought if not in actual deed, prostrated himself before Jessica’s portrait every evening) and, unable to help himself, he would glance through his portfolio – ‘Oh that those lips had language!’ (10) would be the inevitable thought - and look at the lock of hair which he had begged of Mark, once the embarkation for India had been a little more than a month away and reality had begun to bite (he had continued to wear it, concealed in the plain silver locket which had also contained a miniature portrait of Mark, which he had made, which hung about his neck, hidden beneath his shirt and neck-cloth; he had first worn this trinket on the morning of his departure from Durford, having until then kept it secretly beneath a loose floorboard in his dressing-room, for Charles would certainly have destroyed it had he found it); and then, inevitably, he thought he would go out of his mind with longing for Mark, and with sorrow and loneliness. The lock of hair, the miniature portrait, a handful of sketches and one fully-realised likeness, was all that he had now of Mark.
By the time he arrived at Madras, had William but known it, that slight twist of red-golden loveliness, the small image in the locket, his sketches and watercolours – that slender handful of cherished relics - would be all that there was of Mark remaining anywhere under the sun.
William had thought the Bay of Biscay was bad? It was now three days past the kalends of October and they had come to the Cape of Good Hope – naturally, this did nothing to improve his mood: he could not help but remember how on the break in the outward voyage to Calcutta in ‘96 he had been ignominiously bound to a stretcher like a papoose and swayed down into the same small boat which had conveyed Colonel Wellesley across to Princess Charlotte from HMS Fox , the fast frigate which had brought him speeding to catch them two months after they had set out on their lumbering way from Southampton, and then taken him, William, ashore – he vividly remembered the cry of an able seaman – “Handsomely! Handsomely now!” - as the clumsy hands had allowed the stretcher to bump against the bulbous sides of the Indiaman – God, he hoped Wellesley had not witnessed that mortifying episode – no, he persuaded himself, Wellesley would have withdrawn at once into the Captain’s commandeered day-cabin in order to confer with his officers and appraise them of the latest word from Horse Guards and the Government – he would not have concerned himself with the fate of a sickly Lieutenant who was being sent back to England to die, as everyone had seemed to think then, had he not died before they could even get him into another inward-bound ship. Now, in ’98, William had for some time just been lying in his cot daily begging God to grant him a swift death. Eventually the ship’s surgeon, to his horror, had prescribed laudanum, and he had been too weak to resist. In his resultant half-dreaming state, in which he would not have been surprised had Henry Bellingham burst into his cabin and announced that the Flying Dutchman had just been spotted hull-up two points off the larboard bow, the nausea and wracking dry-heaving had been stilled, but now it was as if he had been back in his chamber at Durford Park in his first weeks of convalescence – a seemingly endless cycle of boredom, depression and soul-crushing loneliness.
As October advanced the weather improved somewhat. William reflected one day that back at home in Hampshire the leaves of the trees in the Home Park would be turning to the colour of Mark’s hair, and at that thought the fingers of his right hand went almost of themselves to grasp the locket which hung hidden about his neck. The autumn days in England would be crisp and blue and fair. He wished, intensely but briefly, that he had been at home in Hampshire, riding Audax, flying over stiles and gates and hedges, and racing across fields - the two of them, boy and horse, had loved to run and ride so. He wondered how Audax was, and whether he was getting his proper exercise. And Mark…? And then he remembered miserably that Mark was probably in Jamaica by now, and that Audax was dead.
The Past: Durford Park, Spring 1797.
William had been tormented by agony of mind and sickness of body in those early days of his convalescence. Sometimes he had lain in bed. Sometimes he had been allowed to sit up, wrapped in a silken banyan of iridescent peacock blues and greens – Uncle Hector had in ’89 brought home from India a bolt of the cloth, and there had been more than enough for a gown for Harriet and, latterly, a dressing-robe and a matching turban for his nephew. A soft warm woollen blanket had covered his knees as he had sat in an armchair by the window of his chamber, mostly too melancholy and too lethargic to engage in any occupation. Not reading. Not even engaging in his other favourite pastimes of drawing and music. The mere thought of going down to the drawing-room and making the effort to sit up to the instrument had been in itself exhausting. William had however been rather gratified with his exotic if languid appearance, glimpsed in his looking-glass, when so attired. One morning, feeling unexpectedly less fatigued than he had for some time, William had hunted out his drawing things and had made a series of sketchily-adumbrated self-portraits in chalks and charcoal and in water-colours. He had been moderately pleased with them, and had given them all the humorously self-deprecating title The Pasha of Petersfield, numbered from one to five. One or two of them he had worked up into fully realised self-portraits. Then he had taken to watching the birds, for Jeremy Collins, the second footman, having had a kind inspiration, had placed a sort of platform mounted on a pole outside the window of the sunny morning-room, where on fine days William, if he had felt up to going downstairs, had liked to sit in the quiet hours before noon. Collins had once done the same at his family’s cottage, he had told William, to cheer and divert an invalid younger sister. On this platform, or table, Collins had placed items which the smaller song-birds had found enticing – seeds, berries, bread-crumbs, bacon-rind – and William had found that watching the endearing creatures feeding there had helped to pass the time pleasantly. His portfolio had duly expanded. He had noted that squirrels and other small rodents had soon got into the habit of waiting on the ground beneath the table in the expectation of largesse. One day he had seen a squirrel surprised by a rat as it had scavenged for seed. It had barely saved itself, and had run off in a panic. When the squirrel returned a day or so later, William noted that it now spent as much time on the qui vive for the rat as before it had spent scavenging for fallen seed. On a further occasion, William had been pleased to see that the creature had at last thought to bring a companion, and that the two had now taken turns, watching and scavenging, almost in the style of a pair of Light Company skirmishers. They had had more sense than he and Mark had demonstrated. A human rat had come for them when they had thought themselves safe, and they had been trapped and taken, and there had been no escape, and no second chance for happiness.
Néreide ran on and on before the wind, with the white water foaming and laughing along her flanks. William had noticed that the frigate rode higher in the water and flew on with greater speed, now that, half the voyage behind them, the contents of the hold had been significantly depleted. The lower portion of the hull, sheathed in bright copper which had become dulled and befouled with weed in the course of the passage, gleamed once again red-golden in the sunlight when the ship was borne high upon the waves, now that Néreide had had her underside scraped clean and scoured until it shone, at the Cape. Whenever he observed this, William was reminded of the sunlight on Mark’s hair, and his hand would go by unconscious habit to his throat, where the locket and its contents lay concealed – his precious fetish.
The Past: Durford – 1797.
About once a week Doctor Fazackerley (cupping, bleeding, leeches – unusually for a physician Dr Fazz would do those things himself rather than employ an assistant, and these ministrations had always left William feeling spent and weak and worse than tired) had come to see him, and would take his pulse, feel beneath his jaw for swelling and press an ear to his chest and his back (11). Once, William had overheard part of an exchange between the physician and his mother in the passage outside his chamber – Dr Fazz had had suspicions concerning William’s heart – was there any history in the family…? (12) (he had not heard Mama’s reply for the two had been walking away towards the great stairs), which had come as something of an unwelcome surprise, as he had always supposed that it was his lungs which had long threatened to become a problem. Fazackerley had invariably looked grave during these visits, which William had interpreted as evidence that perhaps he had indeed been so ill that he might die. No matter if he had, he had thought, on bad days. Few, he had supposed, would miss him. Of his relatives, Francis and Uncle Hector would, probably, regret his passing. Henry, perhaps. Mama? She had had Mr Johnson (her pug) and her laudanum habit and her three other sons, the ones who were neither an embarrassment nor an eternal reproach. Outside the family, Jessica might be sorry, although that idea had seemed odd to him, for there had never been an attachment between them, although they got on well enough – really no feeling save a vague benevolence, as between two condemned people doomed to share an unhappy fate and who therefore understood one another, like soldiers standing side by side in their ranks watching a monstrous French column marching slowly towards them whilst the menacing pas-de-charge boomed like thunder in its depths, threatening annihilation. When, in Flanders, he had tried to think of Jessica, William had not been able to recall her appearance at all, which had been disturbing; so before he had sailed for Calcutta in ’96 he had asked her for a portrait - another portrait (the first having been swallowed up by the cold grey waters of the Channel when he had lost his baggage in the wreck off Chesil Beach in the autumn of ’95). Strangely, the prospect of death, in itself, William had not found daunting. The world would go on, and the grass of daily concerns and affairs would quickly grow and cover the small place in it which he had occupied, and no-one would be any the worse for that. He had found comfort in that idea. What had given him cause for real regret at the time, however, had been the thought that he must surely die a maid. That had seemed sad to William: he had seen blood and agony and sickness, death and horror – forty-two British casualties thrown over the side of a transport into the Weser at Bremen, once – he had counted - and not even all of them dead, either - and plague in Flanders; but if what Doctor Fazackerley seemed to think was true, he would never live to know a beloved, or see the face of another – (he had often tried to picture the face of that other, but the features he had sometimes succeeded in summoning before his mind’s eye had never been those of his betrothed; they had not even been those of one of her sex) transformed into the Lineaments of Gratified Desire (13) on his account. But he had concluded, sadly, that in the greater scheme of things, that was really of no importance at all, either.
Although now, as William lay in his cot in the tiny cabin aboard Néreide, once again unable to sleep and reflecting upon all that had happened in those last months which he had spent at home in England, everything was changed. He had known a beloved. He had known joy and delight and even ecstasy. And, oh, God! How he wished, as his imagination strained forward, attempting to gauge the extent of the arid empty colourless loveless future which awaited him - half a century or even more of it, if he was spared - that he had not!
The Past: Spring 1797.
One rare pleasant day in May in the otherwise generally wet and cold spring of 1797, when William had been sitting in the sunshine in the rose garden at Durford with a book (the first of the roses had only a day or two earlier begun to bloom), Captain Hughes had called unexpectedly to see him. First had come the sound of boots smartly crunching along the gravel path, which had caught William’s attention, inducing alarm – only one category of person walked like that, and at once he had been all anxiety – sure enough, a figure in the scarlet coat and cocked hat of an officer of King George’s Army had abruptly appeared around a corner. Dismayed, wondering what on earth this meant, William’s hand had flown to his breast, an habitual gesture whenever his heart had begun to pound. But then –
“Captain Hughes!” he had exclaimed in surprise and pleasure, now, half-rising and disarranging his rug and his cushions as he did so. “What do you here?”
“Don’t get up, William!” Hughes had cried whilst still at a distance, smiling and waving him back down. “I’ve been in Hampshire for a family wedding - in Haslemere - it would have been most remiss of me had I not come to see how you did! I wrote to your mother to ask if a visit might be permitted. I’d rather dreaded the response, but the Viscountess replied that you seemed somewhat improved of late - I should not have troubled you otherwise. I must say, that’s a very fine dressing-robe you’re wearing!”
“Thank you, sir. My Uncle McCandless brought back the silk from India on his visit in Eighty-Nine, for to be made into a gown for Mama.”
“Ah, the East India Company major,” Hughes had said, non-committally.
“Commended for his conduct when Hyder Ali marched on Madras and there was only a skeleton garrison, sir. And Colonel now.”
“Madras was in Sixty-Nine. Getting on for thirty years ago. The wheels of John Company grind slow and exceeding small, eh?”
“Yes, well. He bought rather a lot of silk as he had not known how fashions might be changing at home. He had been away for many years. It had been still all sack-backs and wide skirts and the Robe Française when he joined the Company as a young man. Mama had meant to keep the remnant of the bolt to be a contribution to Jessica’s trousseau – “
“Jessica?” Hughes had said with an interrogative smile, raising his eyebrows as he did so.
“Miss Hayles: my fiancée,” William had said, blushing.
“Ah. Oh, yes.”
“But she thought, if I had to waste months languishing on a bed of pain, I might as well look as splendid as a Sultan whilst I did so; so she gave it to me instead, and had her dress-maker make it up into a banyan. (14) There was enough for a turban, even. I wear that in cold weather.”
“Good for you, William! Got to keep up the morale, eh? What’s the book?” Hughes had said, changing the subject (such talk of fashion embarrassed him; it did not become a man to speak of such things to a greater extent than was strictly necessary, in his opinion) indicating the volume on William’s knee.
“Pope’s Homer, sir. I thought it might help to inculcate a more – martial - state of mind in me. Have a stiffening effect. Buck me up. I’ve been an invalid too long. It’s habit-forming.”
“I’m surprised you ain’t reading it in the Greek!” Hughes had said heartily, glad to have diverted William from the topic of silk banyans, turbans and Oriental luxury. “I recall you were considered something of a scholar! At least, so I was told when you joined my Company.”
“Hardly that, sir. I was considered good enough at the classics at school, but not really outstanding. University would have been wasted on me. If people said complimentary things about my affinity for Latin and Greek that was probably only out of kindness, because I was not held out to be much good at anything else, at that time, sir, apart from music, and nobody cared about that. I was grateful for the chance to transfer to your company once we were back in England, when Colonel Wesley was rebuilding the flanking companies. Although I wish the vacancy had not come about on account of all the fever-deaths amongst the Light-Bobs in the West Indies in Ninety-Four.”
“Hm,” Hughes had said, and William had been surprised to see what appeared to be a guilty look pass across the Captain’s face. He had not known it, but Hughes had been thinking of Flanders, of how Lawford’s Captain at the time, Jarrold of the fourth Company, had later confided in him that he had on one occasion been tempted to put young Lawford’s name forward for duty in the Colour Party, the thought having occurred to him that it might be better, perhaps, to allow the callow timid boy to die with honour that day rather than limp on for years, persisting at an inglorious military career which had never been going to go anywhere to speak of; for so far the Honourable William had failed to show much promise, in spite of (because of?) his impressive-seeming aristocratic credentials. Better to have another dead young Ensign, Jarrold had thought then, and Hughes had reluctantly agreed with his reasoning, metaphorically shrouded in the Regimental Colours and buried with the fulsome (15) praises of his relieved comrades resounding in his eternally insensible ears (Hughes had thought this not unkindly, as it happened, although he had not been able to speak for Jarrold) than to have him surviving, inevitably to become a mediocre Lieutenant, as the years had passed, stumbling ignominiously through his twenties, an embarrassment in the Mess and a potential liability in the field when, it went without saying, eventually he had become a Captain, provided he had not been killed first, as dangerously incompetent officers often were – not necessarily by the enemy, but by their own men, under cover of the smoke of battle, for the sake of self-preservation. But as things had turned out, not long after their return from Flanders, the allegedly useless Lawford had somehow got a transfer into the Light Company – he had had the build for it, Major Shee had reckoned - had looked as if he could be nimble and quick - and hadn’t he been the Ensign who had been shot and almost killed whilst valiantly hanging on to the Regimental Colour that time in some God-forsaken quagmire of a field somewhere near a village called Schyndel as they had marched and fought their way back to Bremen for evacuation to England? The Light-Bobs had lost their Ensign at about the same time in their own theatre of operations, and his replacement, and his, too, in quick succession, and it never did any harm to flatter a peer of the Realm by singling out even a junior scion for honour; so Ensign Lawford, one pace forward, march. He had begun to show some real improvement, too, probably the result of an increase in confidence on account of this new trust placed in him - until he had been struck down by sickness of body, and, so Hughes had suspected with many misgivings, also of mind, for William, he had feared, had fallen prey to that modern scourge, sensibility, which had more typically afflicted young women of the leisured sort who had had nothing better to do than to read novels and cultivate their feelings. Looking at him now, pale and languid, ennui incarnate, wrapped in his silken gown and propped in his chair with cushions and with a rug on his knees like a confirmed hypochondriac, Hughes had thought. William had not given the impression that he would be restored to a more robust frame of mind appropriate to his status as a Lieutenant of His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot at any time soon, notwithstanding that the surest cure for that nonsense was for him somehow to be made to face his future and resume his duties. There had to come a radical intervention of fate in this business, Hughes was certain, or William could well become fatally trapped in this vicious spiral of decadence and decline.
“I haven’t looked at any Greek in a long time,” William had been going on obliviously, meanwhile. “Too much mental effort. Perhaps I ought. I fear I have become somewhat lazy, in mind as well as in body, since all this – “ (vaguely indicating himself) “ - began.”
“How’s the leg these days? No worse for having had a French ball gouged out of it three years ago by that old sot Micklewhite, I hope?”
“I hardly notice it now, sir, except in wet weather, and then only if the wind is in the north-west. It’s really very kind of you to come. Shall I call for some refreshment?”
“That would be most welcome!” Hughes had looked around, as if expecting to see a servant hovering somewhere nearby. He had come from a relatively humble background himself (his father had been a country lawyer in north Wales) and had formed an idea from what he had overheard at balls and parties and in the Mess that in grand houses such as Durford Park servants swarmed as thick as motes in every corner, perpetually at the ready to satisfy their employers’ smallest whims. He had evidently been impressed by the appearance of house and grounds. “Your father has a very fine establishment here.”
“He has, sir,” William had agreed, hoping that his discomfort at Hughes’s reference to his father had not somehow manifested itself in his tone as he had taken a small brass bell from a table beside his chair and had rung it – in a rather diffident way, Hughes had thought, as if half-afraid that no-one would take any notice. Hm. That did not bode well for his future as an officer. One had to have inner confidence that one’s orders would be carried out, and with dispatch, or the likelihood was that they would not be.
“It would be a shame if anything happened to it, eh?”
“Sir? Oh, such as the French? Yes, they could well happen to it, if things go on as they are. I confess, thoughts of invasion have occupied me a great deal since I came home in the winter and learned that Mr Pitt had mentioned the possibility in Parliament.”
“Shock to the system when those Frog buggers landed at Fishguard in February, eh? Worse than when Hoche tried to sneak into Ireland by the back door last Christmas, in Bantry Bay, in the hope of stirring up those United Irishmen!”
“Indeed it was. Mama fell into such a fright when the news came, the Viscount being from home, as if she thought the French would be landing at Portsmouth at any moment, and marching up the road to Petersfield, to set up a guillotine in the Market Square, before coming here to steal the paintings off the walls, and those statues we have in the lobby that the Earl brought back from his Grand Tour in Thirty-One, as this Bonaparte fellow has been doing in Italy - stealing the Pope’s pictures and statues and sending them back to Paris, if you please! Whoever heard the like! At any rate, I thought Mama was going to have an outright hysterical fit! And then, not long after that, she did have an hysterical fit, when there was a run on the banks because everyone had still been mortally afraid that the French were coming.”
“She need not have worried – those Frenchies were so quickly seen off by that doughty band of Welsh women – in their scarlet cloaks up on the cliffs the French took them at first for Redcoats, and were therefore inclined to give up almost before they had begun! The actions of those ladies, with their hay-forks and their sharp tongues, when I read about them, made me feel very proud indeed to be their compatriot, I can tell you. But as I was saying, the establishment here at Durford is admirable – handsome house, fine park, excellent stands of timber I could see in the distance just now - well-laid-out gardens. But it won’t be yours, eh, William?”
“No, sir.”
“Three elder brothers, I understand. Back of the queue for everything?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“No ermine or coronet or seat in the Lords, no large amounts of cash, no fat rent-roll, no grand house, no wide dirty acres for you,” Hughes had said, smiling in humorous sympathy, for he, too, another younger son, had been in the same uncomfortable situation before kindly Aunt and Uncle Jenkins, who had not been blessed with children of their own, had paid for his commission and pledged to make him their heir, Uncle Jenkins having made his fortune in the immemorial industry of slate extraction in remote Gwynedd. Much as Hughes had loved Uncle Elwin and Aunt Arianwen, though, thoughts of all that cash shining like a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow had never been far from his mind since the hour in which they had first informed him of their generous intentions. Gentlemen of uncertain fortune, the nation’s younger sons, in his view, had a duty to cultivate fellow-feeling, even though they often found themselves in rivalry with one another for the same small pool of desirable careers in which to make their names and, hopefully, their fortunes, and rich heiresses to marry.
“No, indeed, sir.”
“No West Indian sugar-fields, either, I suppose.”
“No, sir; although I cannot say that grieves me, notwithstanding I have long enjoyed the benefit of that second source of the income which my family enjoys, and source too of my allowance. But I do not mind my situation, and besides, it is the same for Henry and for Francis. They are thrown upon their own resources and have besides each been educated accordingly in order to prepare them for entry into a profession - Henry into the Law, from which in due course he might proceed into Parliament, and gain a position within Government, and Francis into the Church. Also, Henry has fair prospects of inheriting a fortune of his own from certain of our relations, eventually, and there is an excellent living retained for Francis, once he is ordained, in the gift of the Earl of Winchester, where his stall is currently being kept warm for him by the son of an Oxford friend of our Rector here at Durford.”
“He’ll be out on his ear before the Bishop’s hands are off Francis’s head, I don’t doubt.”
“He will be offered a comfortable living elsewhere, although it might be in Staffordshire. Fortunately my family has the advowson of several prime livings. Not another with an income half so good, but at least respectable. The young man will be able to marry and have a family, and live tolerably comfortably, I am sure. The Earl is an honourable man.”
So are they all, all honourable men, had been Hughes’s private thought, although he had kept it to himself. He had, after all, not come to speak at Caesar’s funeral.
“You going to ring that bell again, William?” Hughes had said then. “Your man is certainly taking his time!”
“It is all right. It usually takes a few minutes for the word to be passed, when one is out of doors.”
“If only there were a fair and equitable distribution amongst us younger sons of rich elderly maiden aunts and well-set-up country livings, eh? Haha! So, how are you, then?” Hughes had gone on, grave now, looking at him closely. “Tell,” he had said, seeing William hesitate.
“As you see, sir.”
“Oh, do call me Owen! You’re not a schoolboy.”
William had smiled nervously in response to that.
“I fear I am becoming somewhat of a valetudinarian – “
“I am sure your mother and your physician are right to remain concerned for you. But as I said, Lady Petersfield seems certain that you have improved.”
“The doctor comes and makes serious faces. But I do feel a little better,” William had said, a note of yearning in his voice, Hughes thought, as if he longed to convince himself as much as anyone else. “At least on days like this.”
“I’m glad to hear it!” said Hughes, bursting at once into enthusiastic quotation, prompted most likely by William’s earlier remark:
“’See the Wretch, that long has tost
On the thorny bed of Pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again –‘ (15)
That right, William?”
“You are fond of the works of Gray, sir?”
“I regard him as an honorary Welshman on account of his having his fiery Bard literally tell that villain King Edward his fortune! Although I should not call you a ‘wretch’, of course. I’m glad to hear that there is an improvement, if such there is, in truth.”
“I wish I could go back to the Battalion,” William had said to that, with a sigh. “That is all I want.”
“It’s rather too early to think of that, William, I fear. With a complaint like yours, rushing things could be dangerous. Bring about a relapse.”
“I know. But as you observed... back of the queue for everything. I need to go back – my commission is all I have, of my own, apart from my half-pay and my allowance, and a small legacy from Grandmama McCandless; for the income from Miss Hayles’s fortune is re-invested and is not to be touched until we are married. Otherwise I am dependent upon my family’s charity.”
Hughes drew in his breath and for a little could not look William in the eye. There had been gossip concerning William’s status within the Lawford family for years, of course, and some of it had concerned an arranged marriage, first contracted during his childhood, its realisation looming somewhere in his future, to be accompanied by a large dowry derived from what in the newspapers they were now calling Industry. In theory at least William would one day have his bride’s fortune with which to set up himself and his young wife in style. However, Hughes had recently been hearing persistent rumours that the Viscount had by means of legal chicanery appropriated that long ago, and that a significant portion of it had gone to discharge the gambling debts of Charles, his heir, and the rest to fill the hole which had been left in the family finances by mismanagement and unwise speculation, but he had not quite believed even Petersfield, for all the rumours which still circulated concerning his dishonesty and notorious misdoings when he had still been Captain Lawford of the 19th Regiment of Foot all of thirty years before, to have been capable of that. (17)
Meanwhile a footman had finally materialised, silently, at William’s side. Hughes had wondered about the system here worked, and had speculated that perhaps a nearby but invisible gardener had heard the bell and had notified a co-worker in his vicinity, and so on, and so on, until the footman had finally been located in a remote region of the house, and now here he was at long last. They really should adopt a system of drum-beats or trumpet-calls in these grand houses, Hughes had thought. It was how the Army went about it on the parade-ground and the field of battle. It would save a great deal of time not to have servants running about all over the house searching for errant flunkeys, and increase productivity too. It would be how he would do it were he ever to find himself in possession of a grand establishment such as this. Which he would not, unless one day he had the great good fortune to bag himself a rich heiress. Even Uncle Elwin’s and Aunt Arianwen’s fortune would not run to anything half so splendid as Durford Park.
“Wine, Owen? Or there’s some very good lemonade, if you had rather.”
William had remembered that he had heard that Hughes was part of some Methodist connexion, which had for a time rendered him an object of some suspicion in the Mess, until the others had got used to the idea of it and had ceased to be afraid that Hughes was going to preach at them or try to prevent them from indulging in their simple pleasures of drinking, whoring and gambling. As William had been aware that he had sometimes been an object of suspicion himself, although for somewhat different reasons, he had felt that this was grounds for fellow-feeling. He really had been very glad as well as grateful that kind Captain Hughes had come to see him. Owen was an ally.
“Lemonade, then, thank you.”
“A jug of lemonade, please, Collins, and two glasses. And some lemon cake to compliment it, if there is any.”
“I regret there is no lemon cake, sir. It is the war. I have already made enquiries in anticipation and I am sorry to say that there were insufficient lemons to be had at market this week, and the tree in the hot-house has shown little sign of bearing this year, notwithstanding the intemperate amount of coddling it receives. All the lemons Cook was able to procure went into the lemonade. Those that did not go to the laundry, in any case.”
“The laundry?”
“I understand that the maids extract the juice of lemons which they utilise in the process of the removal of stains from the table-linen, sir,” Collins had gone on, in response to the look of puzzlement which he had just then discerned upon William’s face.
“That strikes me as a remarkable extravagance,” William had observed, rather crossly.
“As to that, sir, I might not express an opinion, except to say that the juice of the lemons does result in a remarkably pure whiteness in the linen. Regarding the lack of lemon cake, I have been informed that there is available an excellent seed cake as an alternative, however.”
“That will do well enough,” William had said, in a conciliatory tone, now embarrassed and sorry for his sudden petulance.
Collins had nodded and had moved noiselessly away.
“An interesting insight into the domestic economy of the laundry-maids,” Hughes had remarked. “It’s not often one is vouchsafed an unsolicited glimpse of what goes on out of sight of master and mistress.”
“Collins is more forthcoming than most, sir. He knows that I am interested in the lives of the servants. No, really, I am. They do so much for us, often above and beyond what they are contracted to do, I think, and are on the whole such honest, loyal and excellent people. They remind me of the good Sergeants and Corporals whom I have been privileged to know in the Battalion, and also of the decent women who follow the drum. Mama and, and, the, and, Papa think I am foolish for thinking so highly of them: but I do. Since I have been at home again, Collins has proved to be the source of much enlightening and often surprising information concerning their activities.”
“Perhaps one day you could write a book, eh, William! Servants: a Field Guide for the Landed Gentry. Illustrated and annotated.”
William had laughed politely in acknowledgement of Owens’s luke-warm attempt at humour.
“Whilst I certainly need to make my way, sir, er, Owen,” he had continued, “I do not believe that it will be as an author. I have to be a soldier! I did not go to the University like my brothers, so there is no other profession open to me, for I am too old now for the Navy, and for the East India Company. I must have a career in the Army. But look at me - !” William had again indicated his invalid appearance.
“So you must,” Hughes had said, slowly, his brow furrowing. He had known there was a phrase descriptive of when consumptive invalids – whatever was wrong with William he did not rightly understand, but in his mind all superficially similar indispositions of that kind he lumped together under the descriptive ‘consumption’ - indulged in this kind of delusionally optimistic talk. Spes, spes something. Phthisica. For Heaven’s sake, the boy looked like his shoes were already crunching up the gravel of Death’s carriage-drive, even if he was not quite yet at Old Bones’s door. “William, you do recall that the Havercakes have lately arrived in India? Good times! Thank God for that Dorset shipwreck or doubtless we’d have all died of Yellow Jack in Jamaica and never had the remotest sniff of exotic bibi!” Are you sure you’re a Methodist, sir? had been William’s silent thought, at that. I’d have asked Collins for wine, otherwise. “Rather the Bengal Belly in Calcutta than that, don’t you think?” William had rewarded this sally with a tepid smile. “I should have gone with them if It hadn’t been for the damn fever I picked up in Flanders, same time as you did, although I’m not sure it’s the same complaint. Didn’t have the tumps either side of my neck like you had, for one thing. Taken all my time to get over it, but I dare to venture that I finally feel like my old self again.”
“Congratulations, sir. Yes... That’s the main reason I wish – I wish I was not still like this. I so wish I could go with you. It would be a jolly passage, I am sure.”
“Out of the question, I’m afraid.” Hughes sighed. “Believe me, William, I also wish you could come with me when I sail out to join them next month, provided this nonsense at Spithead is over by then.”
“Oh, that’s something else which is currently preying upon Mama’s nerves. She’s afraid the mutineers at Spithead and the Nore will turn Jacobin and set off a general revolution throughout the country. Sometimes when I read the newspaper it seems to me as if it would not take much to bring that about. I daresay that will all blow over, though. Lord, how I indeed wish that I could go with you!”
“I’d enjoy your company on such a long tedious passage. You are missed in the Battalion, William,” Hughes said, mentally crossing his fingers. “Now I understand they’ve given me someone called Hicks in your place, and the word is he’s a sneaking little weasel of a fellow - and an Harrovian, for God’s sake! He’d already ingratiated himself with Lieutenant Morris before I was sent off on sick-leave. Like calls to like, I suppose. Oh. And... how’s the other trouble?”
The other trouble.
William had blushed quite fiercely at that.
“I – I – am endeavouring to discipline myself, sir.”
Hughes had regarded him closely again. He had known about what he had preferred to think of as William’s hero-worship of Wilfred Halston. He had seen how the promising Lieutenant’s sudden death had affected the young Ensign, but had been troubled and puzzled by the depth and duration of William’s grief. They had all been shocked and saddened by what had happened, of course, fine young man, Halston, a credit to his father and to the Havercakes; but that was the nature of soldiering – one made close friends with one’s colleagues, trained with them, drilled, marched, fought with them; shared living space with them, ate and drank, conversed with them, laughed at their jests as they laughed at one’s own - and then often, sometimes it seemed more often than not, those friends died: occasionally in battle, killed outright, or shortly afterwards from their wounds, but more often, in Hughes’s experience, they died of disease, or of the effects of exposure – thirst, heat, cold – or of exhaustion - or even for no clearly apparent reason at all, like Halston. It was sad – one would have to be a heartless monster not to be affected - but one had to learn to get over the loss of one’s friends and comrades, and pick oneself up and carry on, or how could one continue to be a soldier? It had been William’s particularly intense sorrow, resulting in a profound and enduring condition of melancholy which nothing had seemed able to assuage, even for a little, which had first caused Hughes to worry about the boy’s state of mind even before he had succumbed to the bodily indisposition.
“I wrote to Halston’s father, naturally. He’s a parson, of course you knew that, rector of a parish near Leeds. His wife died some years ago. Wilfred was his last surviving child. The seventh of nine, if I recall correctly.”
William had absorbed that.
“How…?”
“He received the news with exemplary Christian fortitude – as we all should aspire to do when such sad misfortune strikes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In his letter in reply to mine, he confessed to something which I found very strange. He said that he had already received a strong impression that Wilfred had met his death, at the very hour upon the very day when it had occurred. He had been in his study, he said, at his desk, writing a sermon for the coming Sunday when his theological Muse had suddenly deserted him. He had then looked through the window into his garden, as, he said, he often did when seeking inspiration, and it had seemed to him that all at once he had seen Wilfred, dressed in his Regimentals, walking up the pathway towards the Rectory. He got up at once and went to the door. But when he opened it, he said, there was no-one there. So when my letter arrived a day or so later, he had already guessed the sad news it would prove to convey.”
William had looked at Hughes in silence. All at once he had shivered violently.
“Cold, William? Would you prefer to go within doors? Do not let me keep you out here if you are uncomfortable.”
“I am all right, sir. I was contemplating upon Lieutenant Halston’s father, and his premonition, if that was what it was. Over many years he had lost his wife and all his other sons and daughters. Perhaps somewhere in his mind he had been expecting to hear that news regarding his only surviving child for a long time. Perhaps he was even relieved to hear at last that Wilfred had finally gone to join his mother and his brothers and sisters in blessedness, and that he, his father, was now no longer compelled to live in perpetual dread. It might even be that Wilfred had recently mentioned to Parson Halston in a letter that he had been feeling a little fatigued, a little weak, under the weather, and thus it was not unexpected - for I assumed, from the few words Lieutenant Halston ever let fall about the tragic events which had taken place over many years at the Parsonage, that all of them had apparently been struck down by the same mysterious thing concerning the functioning of the heart, and that therefore any hint that he had begun to feel the familiar warnings in his own body would have helped to prepare his father for the worst.”
“It could be as you say. Do you know - I asked Wilfred once about his father, why he was called Canon Halston when he was a parish parson and didn’t live in a Cathedral close,” Hughes had said then, abandoning solemnity for his former more natural light conversational tone. “Wilfred said it was because he was only a minor canon. ‘Just a six-pounder, sir,’ he said. Haha! I thought it very droll indeed.”
“That was Lieutenant Halston entirely, sir,” William had said, with a small smile.
“And there was another occasion, in the mess, he told a story about a jack-ass of an officer he had known once, when he was an Ensign, in the, the – “
“The Sixty-Fifth, sir.”
“That’s right; and one night they were in the Mess, and this fellow, a jumped-up Jack Pudding of a major, who had a terrible rude and hectoring way of speaking to the orderlies and soldier-servants, he calls the orderly over, decent man, Sergeant, wounded at Bunker Hill! with a wooden leg, called Wiggins – and that was a fine jest in itself, now I come to think on it! A wooden leg called Wiggins, bless my soul! and the major says, ‘I say, Wiggins,’ he says, ‘what the Devil is this fly doing in my wine?’ and Wiggins peers into his glass, and after some reflection, he says, ‘Swimming, sir, like a regular bleeding little Leander holding out for his Hero!’ If you ask me, Wilfred embroidered that a little, but it was very funny indeed, the way he told it.”
“He had a very keen and lively wit, indeed – Owen - but unlike some, he did not use it to make fun of others. He put it to use for good. Some of them – Fitzroy, for example – he was fast and clever, but he only ever used his quick wits to make mock of others. Of me, usually. But Lieutenant Halston never made me the butt of his jests. Instead, he always thought of something to say to cheer me and make me laugh, should he perceive that I was in low spirits.”
Collins had shortly returned with the refreshments. The conversation had turned to other topics: Battalion gossip, the news of the day. Company, sunshine, the scent of the early roses, lemonade and seed cake and a little laughter, all had served to lift William’s mood, and he had been happy; and, for an hour or so, he had felt better.
William had grown to love the rose garden that spring and summer, and the gardeners had become used to seeing him there. If they had cause to come close to where he sat he would try to acknowledge their presence with a smile, but, abashed, they would seldom meet his eye. One of them, a small and slight young man, had had red hair which, when the sun had caught it, had seemed almost golden, he had noticed, one afternoon. A distant memory had stirred within him, but he had not been able to grasp it, and had had to let it slip away. Since Hughes’s visit his confirmed habit had become to settle himself half-recumbent upon cushions, in a reclining chair which had been carried there from the house by a brace of footmen in advance of his arrival, for an hour or two on most days when the weather permitted. As spring had unfolded into summer, William had found that he had often been able to dispense with the rug. Sometimes he would even fall asleep for a short while, on rare days of steady warm sunshine.
One hot afternoon, a Thursday about half-way through July, a little more than a year before his embarkation for India, when William had been sitting with a book in his favourite spot, two of the gardeners had arrived to undertake the daily summer task of dead-heading the roses. One of them had been dark-haired, stocky, of medium height, rather unremarkable. The other had been the one William had noticed before: the small slight one with the red-golden queue, the sight of whom had on an earlier occasion begun to provoke some elusive memory in him which he had almost grasped before ennui and drowsiness had caused him to lose hold of it. (O! The pleasures of vicissitude!) After a little, William had begun to nod over his book and had then fallen into a light slumber, and had just begun to dream a pleasant dream of green, and ruddy gold, as of evening sunlight dappling through summer leaves, when he had been awoken suddenly by a sensation as of some small and almost weightless thing being laid lightly upon his bosom. There had been a slight sound, he had thought, perhaps a brief rustle of foliage; and the softest of sweet-scented airs, a zephyr caressing his cheek, as if someone had come very close to him in passing. He had looked around. The red-haired gardener had vanished. The other, the dark one, meanwhile, had paused in his work and was staring at him, unsmiling, with an expression of such hostility upon his face that, disconcerted, and reminded uncomfortably of a confrontation he had once had with two renegade Redcoats in a church in Saxony on the way to Bremen which had not ended well for him, William had dropped his glance downwards – to see that a slight, little thing - a single perfect crimson rose, still half in bud – had indeed been left lying upon his breast. Just then a breeze had stirred the leaves of the shading trees, and a slim shaft of golden sunlight had fallen full upon the flower, illuminating it, transforming its hue to blood-red – and now, William had thought, he appeared as if he had been shot through the heart whilst he had been reclining, dreaming, in the rose-garden.
That had been altogether an odd day, the one which William had later come to think of as the day of the Rosa Mystica. The Earl and Countess, down from London (for the Earl had been in residence at Lawford House in Mayfair for the sittings of the Lords, the House having now recently risen for the summer) had been visiting. That evening, he remembered, there had been some kind of unfortunate commotion amongst the outdoor servants – from what he could overhear, two of the gardeners had been involved in a quarrel which by the sound of it had come close to ending in blows. The Viscount had been embarrassed before his parents, who had witnessed the altercation whilst walking in the flower-alley before dinner. William would have enquired further, except that the Viscount had clearly been in no mood to answer any questions of his, so he had let it go.
The Gardener
Proud Marjory* stands in her bower door Straight as the willow wand And by and comes a gardener lad With a red rose in his hand And by and comes a gardener lad With a red rose in his hand
It's you shall have my rose, fair maid If you give your flower to me From among the flowers in my garden I'll shape a gown for thee From among the flowers in my garden I'll shape a gown for thee
A lily white shall be your smock Becomes your body best The gillyflower to be your quill And a primrose at your breast The gillyflower to be your quill And a primrose at your breast
Your gown shall be the scented thyme Your petticoat chamomile Your apron of the salads neat That taste both sweet and fine Your apron of the salads neat That taste both sweet and fine
Since you have shaped a gown for me Among the summer flowers It's I'll pay you back again Amidst the winter showers It's I'll repay you back again Amidst the winter showers
New-fallen snow shall be your shirt And lie your body next And the mirk-black rain shall be your coat And a wind gale at your breast The mirk-black rain shall be your coat And a wind gale at your breast
The steed that you shall ride upon Shall be the weather grey And when you come into my sight’ I'll wish you were away And when you come into my sight I'll wish you were away.
*The name in the song is actually ‘Maisrie’. Presumably this is a variant of ‘Maisie’, a pet name for ‘Margaret’, but it does so look like a typo. In some versions the more formal ‘Margaret’ is given, but ‘Marjory’ is closer in sound to ‘Maisrie’.
Notes
1.The Hon. Arthur Wesley first adopted the spelling ‘Wellesley’ in May 1798, but William would probably have been unaware of that at this point. He was not ‘Sir Arthur’ until 1804.
2. William Lawford, inventor of the Emoji? Why not.
3. Indomitable as a name for a Royal Navy ship was not used until World War II, when it was given to an aircraft carrier. Frederick Hardinge is fictitious.
4. Three days later Nelson’s British fleet effectively annihilated its French counterpart at Aboukir Bay. News of that victory, which the British commemorate as the Battle of the Nile, together with its implications for what William would find to be the situation in India when he eventually arrived there, would not reach the people of the Néreide frigate until Captain Watkins caused her to stand in at Cape Town some weeks later, where she had been preceded by a fast schooner, as it was imperative that all British ships in passage to Bombay, Madras and Calcutta should be aware of the change in the fortunes of the Jacobin cause in India.
5. Most of the time the sailors wore shoes except when they were scouring and dousing the deck at first light: the taught tarred ratlines would have lacerated the skin of their feet had they climbed the rigging barefoot.
6. Thomas Reide Esq, Captain in the Loyal Essex Regiment of Fencible Infantry. 1798. Sold by J. Walter, at Charing Cross, and T. Egerton, near Whitehall.
7. This puts it at about 1st or 2nd September.
8. Alexander Pope. Eloisa to Abelard. 1717.
9. “An Eastern voyage, either home or out, is dull and monotonous enough, even with an agreeable party.” Ch. XXV. Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp, late a Lieut. In His Majesty’s 87th Regiment. 1829/1890.
10. William Cowper. On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture out of Norfolk. 1790.
11. The stethoscope had yet to be invented.
12. As it was to turn out, there was a family history, but it was not that of the Lawfords.
13. William Blake.
14. A rare example of maternal thoughtfulness in the Viscountess.
15. Extravagant, flattering and insincere. It has in recent times come to mean the entire opposite.
16. Thomas Gray. Ode on the Pleasure arising from Vicissitude. c. 1754-55.
17.Yet, he had been. Henry, on acceding to the Earldom in 1809 (‘the Year of the Three Earls’ as it became known in Lawford family lore) had been appalled when he had been informed by his lawyers of the fate of Jessica’s dowry. To his credit, recognising his moral duty, he had without hesitation committed himself to making over an annual sum of £1,500, representing the interest upon the £40,000 (had it been invested properly, and not squandered to discharge Charles’s gambling debts and to fill yawning gaps which had then existed elsewhere in the family finances) as income to William and Jessica for the terms of their lives. Fortunately, the Lawford fortune had recently received a boost on account of canny Josiah Hayles’s expertise and business acumen when it had come to the mining of coal and the smelting of iron-ore on their landholdings in Staffordshire and Shropshire, and so this outlay hardly proved a strain upon the purse of the new Earl. In addition, when Henry did at length in 1811 inherit a substantial estate from a bachelor great-uncle which generated an annual income of £1,200 he made the income over to William and Jessica as additional compensation for what they would have had, had the £40,000 been invested and accruing interest since the time of the original agreement. So William’s annual income by the time he returned from the Peninsula severely wounded in 1812 was £2,500. In addition he would have had his half-pay as a Lieutenant-Colonel of a Regiment of Foot, worth a little more than £100 per annum, for as long as he remained on the Army list. There was also the income from his share of his mother’s estate, worth perhaps £200 per annum, so in total William had an annual income of about £3,000, more than sufficient to maintain his position in society and to cover his needs and those of his wife and daughter. This enabled him to pay his secretary Stephen Murdogh a generous salary ensuring that even after William’s death, which occurred in 1830, Stephen would be left well-enough provided for from his savings and investments to be able to maintain his position as a gentleman living a life of quiet retirement away from London. Francis, unmarried and almost certain to remain so, had a substantial income from his good living at Langbourne Worthy, so, Henry reasoned, did not need financial help from him.
General note: several sources state that the 33rd, as part of a force of 18,000 men, underwent two unsuccessful attempts to reach the West Indies in the September and December of 1795, still pursuing the cause of taking control of the French sugar islands, even asserting that perhaps between a quarter and third of the regiment was lost in the course of these voyages. However, Brereton & Savory in ‘The History of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment’ (The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment: 1993) assert that only the first attempt involved the 33rd, that of September, which had actually been delayed until November because of bad weather, and that owing to the loss of many transports on that occasion there was not the capacity to carry the 33rd westward a second time; they went to Lymington in the New Forest in Hampshire instead, where they passed the winter, whilst the remaining regiments of the original force were sent west, an attempt which once again ended in disaster. I have preferred to follow the Regiment’s own official history in this matter but the discrepancies in the accounts do seem puzzling nonetheless.
HMS Néreide was originally a French frigate. She was captured off the Scilly Isles in 1797. Frederick Watkins was given command. She did not take part in the Battle of Camperdown.
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