Castle Orchard (19 page)

On Wednesday morning she got out of bed having slept, out of sheer exhaustion, rather better than usual, and sat down at the dressing table. She was shocked by her own appearance. Annie came up with a jug of water and she said to her, ‘I look a hundred years old, Annie.’

‘Nonsense, ma’am, you’re just a little weary with the worry of it. You have all them lovely curls, and your green eyes what smile so sweetly and laugh of themselves.’

‘You flatter me, Annie,’ she said, amused. ‘My sister Louisa was the pretty one.’

‘Your sister, Mrs Westcott, she is what everyone thinks of as a beauty, but you ain’t so usual and that’s what I like.’

Mrs Arthur went down to the kitchen. She had already discussed the dinner with Cook, who now said, for the seventh time, ‘It is a very trying thing to be considering dinners for a gentleman whose tastes we don’t know. We don’t even know if he will want dinner – and where is it to be served? Not with you and the children. That wouldn’t be seemly. I try to get something out of that Dan, but one may as well talk to a post. “Master Dan,” says I, “what does your master like?” And I speak ever so slow and loud and careful. It could lead to a misunderstanding.’

‘We will be in the cottage.’

‘You can’t go in that cottage. It’s not fit.’

She and Cook went through the store cupboard together and made a list of essential items that were running low. They looked in the larder. Without the home farm they would have been in a dismal plight.

Mrs Arthur went into breakfast. Phil and Emmy were in their places, Phil gently kicking his heels against his chair and Emmy with a doll beside her to whom she was offering scraps of toast and jam. It was a rag doll Mrs Arthur had made herself, large, starey-eyed, but much loved.

As she sat down at the table she found a letter from Captain Allington.

So, he intended to live at the lodge. Her relief was enormous. She had assumed he had intended to put in a lodge-keeper. That very day she had planned to get a little furniture into the cottage. Should she be so beholden to him? Should she move anyway? Having read the letter once, she read it again and then folded it up and tucked it under the edge of her saucer. Really, she would have to read it yet again in a minute, but she decided she must move to that cottage whatever her circumstances. She thought she heard the front door open and shut. A moment later, Annie ran into the room.

She said, breathless, ‘What shall we do? Captain Allington is here, and it not Sunday yet.’ Overcome, she retreated, leaving Captain Allington standing in the doorway, his hat under his arm. Mrs Arthur noticed the elegant cut of his dark coat and the dandy brightness of his yellow waistcoat.

He said, ‘No, it isn’t Sunday. Did Dan say I was coming on Sunday? I left on Sunday. That’s what he will have meant.’

Mrs Arthur got up from her chair.

He then said, ‘I’m afraid I have taken you by surprise.’

‘It is for you to come and go as you like,’ she replied. ‘Phil, shake hands with Captain Allington, and draw up a chair for him. Emmy, run to the kitchen and tell Cook we need another place and more breakfast on the table. I’m assuming you have had no breakfast.’ She thought, I must pretend he is just any ordinary visitor. We must be polite.

Captain Allington shook Phil’s hand and accepted his offering of the chair. He said, ‘Yes, I have taken you by surprise.’

‘There is a cottage empty. I intended to move there before Sunday.’

‘Certainly not.’ He spoke sharply.

‘We could go to the lodge. I have just got your letter.’

‘No. Pride and I shall live in the lodge. That’s why I’ve had the builders in.’

‘Then we must go to the cottage.’

Emmy returned carrying a basket of bread rolls. She put them down in front of him and said, ‘We had no man at breakfast before.’

Annie followed her with a tray, nervous and upset. She bobbed a curtsey and hastily put the breakfast down.

Emmy, the only one to be not in the least embarrassed, said, ‘He can’t have coffee. It brings on one of his heads. Tea is all right.’ She looked carefully at Allington to see how many heads he might have, before adding, ‘Mr Pride said it, when you were here before.’

‘Well, Miss Emily, what an excellent memory you have,’ Allington said.

‘Yes, I do. I remember all my lessons.’ She enjoined her doll to eat up and leave nothing on the plate.

Allington then said, briskly, even coldly, ‘As for the lodge and the cottage, as I take it they both belong to me, it is surely I that may decide who is to live in them.’

Mrs Arthur poured the tea. She refrained from looking at him. What he said, so bluntly, was true. The cottage was not hers in which to move. How was it she had not thought of that? Why had she not gone to Westcott Park? She had placed herself at the mercy of a man of whom she knew nothing, a virtual stranger, with the gambling habits of her late husband. Surely anything would have been preferable? When she did look at him, she thought he smiled, but of this, she was uncertain.

Phil was watching Captain Allington with round eyes. He was nervous and anxious. He thought his mother was being given a scolding for wanting to live in the cottage.

Allington said to him, ‘Do you look after your mother?’

Phil shook his head.

‘When I was a little boy I was very managing and I looked after my mother. I would say, “Now, Mother, where are your gloves? They are on the dresser. They’ve got a hole. I’ll fetch your others from upstairs. We’ll be late for church. Come along. You’re never ready, but we’ll be all right, darling, don’t worry, hurry with me and I’ll get you there before Parson”’. He paused and then asked, ‘Are you like that with your mother?’

Phil said, in a tiny whisper, ‘I try to look after my mother.’ He hung his head, ashamed and confused, for he wanted to look after his mother.

Allington, still looking at Phil, continued, ‘As you can imagine, I soon got to think it was I that gave the orders.’

Mrs Arthur tried to see him as a little boy of Phil’s age, but nothing like Phil, a shock of dark hair, dark eyes and, even less like Phil, strong. She understood he had, like Phil, been alone with his mother. She said, ‘But I find my gloves for myself.’

‘I dare say the better way round,’ Allington replied. He had eaten a little, she thought out of politeness, and now he stood up.

Mrs Arthur said, ‘Is it your wish I should show you over the house?’

‘I expect I shall stumble over the different bits of the house as I go along. Don’t trouble yourself. Do as you always do.’

Allington spent that day riding round the estate. In the lodge he had laid out every map he could find, to the agitation of Pride, who liked things tidy. Pride had made the lodge comfortable. It was a single-storey building with few rooms, the main one of which now contained a simple bed, a washstand, a chest of drawers, a chair and a table upon which, useful for holding a map flat, was the glass jar containing the sixpences. It had a fireplace and in the little room to the back there was another, in which there were various cooking arrangements. Allington came in late but his dinner was ready. Pride had come to a good understanding with Cook, supplies to be shared between what was now two households.

After he had finished a simple but perfectly adequate meal, Allington sat down by the fire and took a book from his pocket, one he had chosen at random from the morning room, where he now had his desk. He held it near to the candlelight and found it to be the poetry of Robert Burns. He grunted with disapproval at his own choice.

He contemplated the indignities of irrational passion. Ten years previously, and he thought it a long ten years, he had lain in a foreign bed in a foreign house, close to death, and filled his fancy with a pretty, lively girl to whom he never spoke a single word, with whom he thought he could have had no common language.

Was not the colour red a little gaudy? He thought his long past, flaxen-haired love nothing like a red rose. Where was she now? He hoped she was surrounded by flaxen-haired children and with a sensible Flemish husband, a respectable burgomeister.

His mind slipped back to his childhood at St Jude, where the high grey walls of the garden nurtured nectarines. He was not allowed them, but when the gardeners’ backs were turned he would scrabble up the walls and run along the top, helping himself to anything he found to be ripe – apples, cherries, figs, peaches, nuts and nectarines. A nectarine on a warm wall was almost too beautiful to be picked, wholesome yet delicate, pale yet flushed with warm colour. Was he not in a peculiar state of mind owing to what could only be described as the love affair he had had that day with Castle Orchard? His heart had warmed to every little copse and meadow, to the woods and fields, to undulating curves and hills, to sturdy barns, white tracks, whole farms and much of a village. There were long stretches of river that were also his, and he remembered those rivers in Spain; remembered himself, young and fit, lean from a combination of exercise and frequent starvation, but in a joyous state of exhilaration and contentment with his uniform faded to rust, patched from top to bottom.

If he had kept his health he would have wanted Castle Orchard and much else besides, but now he thought the estate exactly fitted his needs. His tenants might view him with suspicion and astonishment, he who had won them in a game, but it was of no account, for had he not been able to gain the respect of the roughest soldier? The respect and, he supposed, a grudging affection, for there had always been hands to help him when he was struck with a bout of fever. Some officers were truly loved. He doubted himself in this category.

To love, he thought, one must give oneself away, open locked doors. Had he not addressed the insubstantial little boy who so closely resembled Johnny Arthur, on the subject of care for a mother?

When he finally went to bed, fortified with a glass of hot milk proffered by Pride to make him sleep, which at another time he would probably have declined, his dreams of Castle Orchard were entangled with Mrs Arthur, as though one could not be separated from the other.

Mr Stewart Conway left it a few days before paying a call at Castle Orchard. Mrs Arthur received him in the drawing room but she said, ‘I don’t know that I should, because it isn’t my house. Should I receive calls?’

‘Annie showed me in just as usual.’

‘She wouldn’t have known what else to do.’

Mrs Arthur rang the bell and Annie returned.

‘Annie, is Captain Allington in the house?’

‘Yes, ma’am, in the morning room.’

‘Please knock on the door and inform him Mr Conway has called.’

Annie went away on this mission.

Mr Conway said, ‘I had hoped he would be out. I don’t wish to know him but I suppose, as a neighbour, it can’t be avoided. Your situation is impossible. It will cause a scandal.’

‘So it may, but it’s very proper.’ Mrs Arthur gave a prim smile especially for his benefit.

‘The sooner it’s resolved the better,’ Mr Conway continued. ‘May I know, as I stand your friend, whether or not you have received further information from the lawyer?’

As he was speaking, Allington entered the room. Mrs Arthur thought, despite his lameness, he could move swiftly and silently. He must have heard all of Mr Conway’s last sentence.

The two men gave each other the briefest of bows that accorded with politeness. They presented a curious contrast to one another, Captain Allington at his least forthcoming and Mr Conway confused.

Allington said, ‘And are we to offer Mr Conway any refreshment?’

‘It is for you to do,’ Mrs Arthur replied.

‘In theory it is for me to do, but in practice it is for you to do. However, it is my belief the inestimable Annie, out of habit, will bring whatever she can find in the kitchen she thinks suitable or Pride will furnish her with the bottle of Madeira I brought from London with me.’

‘Yes, that is how it will be.’

Captain Allington now turned his attention to Mr Conway. He said, ‘You are the brother of the rector?’

‘That is correct,’ Mr Conway replied.

‘And you keep the school?’

‘Yes. We have thirty boys and five of those belong to my brother and myself. We prepare them for entrance to Eton or Winchester. Occasionally one goes to Harrow.’ Mr Conway spoke more than he wished, being ill at ease.

Annie brought in a tray with two glasses, the Madeira and a plate of biscuits.

Mr Conway, with an instinctive wish to show upon what a familiar footing he was with Castle Orchard, said, ‘How are you, Annie?’

Annie bobbed a curtsey and replied, ‘Very well, thank you, sir.’

‘But you have brought only two glasses,’ he said, smiling.

‘Master doesn’t take no wine, sir, but Mr Pride says he will eat the biscuits.’ Annie looked shyly at Allington and bobbed him a curtsey too.