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Lawford’s Reunion
A Passage to India: Memories, Impressions, Reflexions.
Lawford’s Reunion. 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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