Castle Orchard (11 page)

He had said, ‘I was locked in the tower.’

His mother replied, ‘Not locked, Phil.’

‘No, not locked,’ he had answered, feeling confused because, truthfully, he had not been locked in all the time. It was best to give no explanations for lateness.

There was a drawer in the table in the Philosopher’s Tower containing paper and pencil, left there by his mother for writing down thoughts, but Phil never found he had any. He wondered if he should bring a real pen and ink. His Aunt Louisa had sent him some steel nibs, but his mother said they would rust, being too modern and the Tower not respecting them as it should. Once, not long ago, he had thought of something he might write. It was probably not of sufficient importance but he had written it all the same, despite his poor, wobbly writing spoiling the snowy whiteness of the paper, because it was important to him, and his mother had said that was what counted. He could not understand why nobody was on his side, why he always had to be the French and the explanation was no explanation at all, so he had written:
Robert says I have to be the French unless I can tell Jacky from James. Well, I can’t tell Jacky from James. They are just little twins and are really the same person or nearly.

He had signed it
Philip Osipher.

Now Phil reached the gate that led through the tall hedge into the Castle Orchard garden. He glanced behind him. There was not a Conway boy in sight. He started to run.

Captain Allington did not have great faith in ever receiving the property of Castle Orchard, and certainly Arthur’s lawyer fought a rearguard action against such a flouting of ordinary practice. He saw no necessity for Arthur to part with the property, but Arthur did not go back on his word: the written agreement stood. Much of September passed before the necessary documents were prepared and Allington required to sign them.

The day before this occasion he dined at home. Pride cooked him a simple meal. The evenings had drawn in but he ate at the table by the window in the last of the light. Soon the lamps would be lit and Pride would bring him a candle. He was half-expecting to see, in the street below, Arthur make a bid for freedom, taking the deeds with him. All he could see, however, leaning on a gaslamp, was the mildly sinister figure whose task it was on behalf of Howard and Gibbs to see Arthur did no such thing.

Allington’s mind unaccountably went back to Wordsworth. He supposed if nothing made the heart lift, not even the rainbow, ‘Then may I die’ was most appropriate. What made his own heart leap up? The sight of the sea, a skylark, the passage of a greyhound, the shining rump and bright eye of a good horse, and the sweet peace of green fields, a peace that he needed. His acquisition of an estate in Wiltshire with a romantic name, without, in a direct way, paying for it, did not make his heart leap up for it was too improbable. He considered Arthur and remembered the countless occasions he had agreed at Arthur’s instigation to some challenge or another, at anything from chess to childish card games, exercises for the memory, curious choices to play against a man who was known not to forget things, and at which Allington won, in theory, large sums of money.

The following morning, the lawyer called on Arthur with the deeds in his hands and Arthur instructed his servant to ask Captain Allington to join them.

‘My personal affairs are nothing to Captain Allington,’ he said to the lawyer. ‘He is here to sign the documents and nothing else. Pray mention nothing, absolutely nothing. I want no breach of confidence.’

‘I shall be glad, sir, to wash my hands of the whole affair. I shall find it very difficult not to speak out. The whole thing is deeply shocking. Whatever next? Does your conscience never prick you? This Captain Allington can hardly be a respectable person. He will, I suppose, lose the property as quickly as he has gained it. What, may I ask, do you intend to—’

He was cut off by Allington entering the room.

Arthur said, ‘No, don’t ask me. Well, Allington, Jonas here is put out by the business and supposes you will lose Castle Orchard as soon as you gain it.’

‘He may suppose as he likes,’ Allington replied.

‘This property has been in the Arthur family two hundred years,’ the lawyer said. ‘However unprofessional it may be, I must protest. Mr Arthur’s late father, God rest his soul, for it surely wouldn’t rest if he knew a quarter, built the Philosopher’s Tower. What would he say to this transaction? He was himself a very astute gentleman. What, now, will be the position of his son?’

Allington thought Arthur’s only position was one in the King’s Bench or worse, but he did not say so. He merely said he hoped the documents were in order. After examining the deeds for some time and the accompanying map, he checked his name and added his signature. The document included a clause stating he forgave Arthur the money owed him and he would undertake to destroy all the IOUs dated from 1817 and up to the present month of September 1825.

Arthur reminded them the matter was not to become public knowledge until after Michaelmas. ‘I hope, I repeat, I may rely on your discretion,’ he said to the lawyer.

‘My clients can always rely on my discretion,’ Jonas replied.

‘Arthur is, perhaps, no longer your client,’ Allington pointed out. ‘Send me your bill. I shall pay it after Michaelmas.’

The lawyer, looking from Arthur to Allington, thought the latter the more likely of the two to pay him. He agreed to send him the bill and took an unhappy departure.

Arthur now stood at a mirror, rearranging his neckcloth and trying the effect of various pins. He said, ‘You think of everything, Allington. It would give me great satisfaction to see those IOUs burned.’

Allington had the IOUs in a box. He lit the coals in the grate himself.

‘Do you wish to look at them?’ he asked.

‘I suppose I should satisfy myself it really is the IOUs you are burning.’

‘You should. These ashes will make a great deal of mess.’

‘Never mind that.’

As Allington fed the papers on to the fire he said, ‘You will write to inform your people at Castle Orchard of the change of circumstances?’

‘Oh course, but not until after Michaelmas. I don’t keep more people there than needed to keep the rats at bay.’

‘You have an agent?’

‘Yes, but he is not solely my agent. I share him. I had best write down his name and address. How glad I shall be, never to clap eyes on him again. Ah, the rustic horror of a country estate.’

Arthur suddenly let out a peal of laughter and Allington thought how little he trusted him.

‘Of course, at Michaelmas I could go down there with you,’ Allington said.

‘I should dislike that very much,’ Arthur replied. ‘Think how they will be all a-staring and talking of my father and his grave and how one turns in the other. No, no, but I promise everyone shall know who needs to. You may not care for the place, in which case you can sell it and get something else. Do you like to fish?’

For a moment Allington did not reply; his mind had gone to the rivers in Spain, the Ebro, the Bidassoa, the Aqueda, all teaming with fish. As Arthur seemed to wait for him to speak he said, ‘Yes, I can fish.’

Arthur said, ‘Oh, a horrid, dull thing, fishing. My father would have me stand there hour upon hour.’

Allington, ignoring him, said, ‘It is my intention to pay a few of your lesser creditors.’

‘Very good of you, but for what?’ Arthur asked.

Captain Allington shrugged. ‘It is what I have decided to do if you will give me their bills – your tailor and all those sorts of people. No, not your tailor, the bill would be too much.’

Arthur went to his desk, which was so full of bills they cascaded to the floor as he drew back the front. He said, ‘Take your pick.’

Captain Allington sat at the desk and started to set the papers in order. Though he was quick and methodical, the business took an hour and a half. Much of the time Arthur watched him, a look of credulous fascination on his face. He began to think how he envied Captain Allington his figure.

He said, ‘Who is your tailor?’

Allington answered without looking up at him, for he was busy, ‘Pride. He was a tailor before he enlisted.’

‘Why, that’s devilish convenient.’

Allington made no reply, as if this detail of his private life was more than sufficient to impart, but Arthur, not liking to be so quiet, announced, ‘What I like about you, Captain Allington, is your silence.’

It was the first time he thought he liked anything about Allington and he only liked it upon this occasion. ‘Anyone else would be saying how can you owe a thousand pounds to your tailor and five hundred pounds to a coach-builder when you no longer drive any sort of coach, et cetera, et cetera, so tiresome.’

‘What I would like about you, Arthur, would be your silence,’ Allington replied.

Arthur spread out cards on a little table, still keeping an eye on Allington, and proceeded to amuse himself with a game of Patience. After a while he said, ‘If I get this game out, Allington, will you let me have your grey horse? It has such an elegant tail. I wonder why it’s the custom to dock the tail of a horse and why yours isn’t docked. I’ll make it the fashion that horses must wear hairpieces. May I have it?’

‘No.’

‘But it is certain I can’t get the game out.’

Captain Allington did not trouble to reply. Eventually he shuffled together a wedge of bills and said, ‘I will pay these.’

‘I am sure they will thank you. Those sort of people don’t always expect to be paid. It is enough that a man of my position patronises them.’

‘Someone must pay a tailor or he will go out of business.’

‘Someone always does, but Allington, don’t pay all those bills at once. It will look odd.’

Allington paused in the doorway. He saw that the cabinet in which Arthur kept his collection of snuffboxes was half-empty and supposed that he must be taking them away in his pockets, a few at a time, and be hiding them somewhere. If he should leave Half Moon Street with a portmanteau, it would cause suspicion. He would be followed down to Castle Orchard to make sure he intended no escape. At some juncture he must catch his creditors unawares and get the steam packet from Dover to Calais, complete with the Michaelmas rents and his collection of snuffboxes, for they were valuable, one a present from the King. He might subsist for a short while in reasonable comfort.

Returning to his own room Allington sat down at the table and unfolded the map of Castle Orchard. He started to allow himself, for the first time, to believe in his ownership of this estate, complete with its farms and cottages, its house, its woods, its stables and gardens. Though his more practical side acknowledged that the whole place might be a ruin, for he did not believe what Arthur said and a place could go back a great deal in three years, if it was a ruin he was perfectly prepared to spend the rest of his life putting it back into shape.

As he studied the map, the strident sounds of London – the horses, the street vendors, the barrel organ – faded from him: Castle Orchard was enwrapped in the deepest mystery. The map told him of farms and boundaries, of the position of woods and the acreage of fields, but it did not tell him of its essence as a place. It had all the charm of Xanadu’s stately pleasure-dome.

He went to his bookcase and withdrew the relevant volume of Coleridge’s poems. His mind ran on gardens bright with sinuous rills and sunny spots of greenery.

As September drew on, nothing tangible altered in the house in Half Moon Street, for what altered was intangible, the unease and the tension as the month crept towards its end and Michaelmas. All unaware, the girls who worked on the ground floor, employed by the wife of the landlord as makers of gowns for the fashionable, continued their sewing and continued to take sly peeps at the exits and entrances of the two gentlemen lodgers who lived up the stairs, bachelors, and therefore objects of conjecture.

Mr Arthur was not above putting his head round the door and making a joke or two, but Captain Allington never did this, and it was difficult to think of a means of catching his attention without also catching the attention of their mistress. Captain Allington’s severity filled the young seamstresses with a pleasing alarm, certain it sprang from a broken heart.

As Allington paid off Arthur’s lesser creditors, the number of debt collectors besieging the landing grew less and dwindled almost to nothing. All that was left were the ever-watching, ever-waiting employees of the moneylenders, and they were often content to wait in the street. (Arthur had been known to climb out of a window.)

Arthur said, to anyone who cared to listen to him, ‘You can see how I’m getting my affairs in order. I hardly owe any money. Sometime after Michaelmas I shall receive a legacy from my late aunt. I am turning over a new leaf.’

Off he would go in all his finery, swinging a cane, dangling his quizzing glass, ruffling his curls, but always in the direction of St James’ where the draw of the gaming table beckoned him no less; what he gambled with or how a mystery, unless courtesy of his friends. He was full of talk and laughter on the subject of a reformed life and the economies he was to make. The only economy he was seen to make was the taking of the Exeter mail down to Salisbury, instead of hiring a post chaise, upon the 26 September.

To the surprise of some, he returned, the same conveyance depositing him back in London on 1 October. He appeared to carry on much the same as usual, apart from declaring the experiment to be a failure, the air within the Exeter mailcoach proving foetid, the company not choice and the seats hard and dirty. He did not think he could be expected to repeat the experience at Christmas – but where would Johnny Arthur
be
at Christmas?

He called on Captain Allington.

‘I find you very odd, Allington, you have so little curiosity,’ he said.

‘You do?’ Allington replied. He watched Arthur peering about at the austerity of his rooms. He had wrapped the portrait up again. Should he wish to hang it, it was too big to fit conveniently in the available space.