Circles of Time (5 page)

“A small enough price to pay for victory, eh, Lord Stanmore?” the brigadier had said with the cheerfulness of a man who had paid no price at all.

He felt a twinge of anger as the car headed down the mile-long drive toward the Abingdon road. Ahead were two stone pillars, a gap between them where twenty-foot-high ornamental iron gates had once stood. He had purchased the gates for his wife on their honeymoon in Italy, from the duke of Fiori's villa in Urbino—and a pretty penny they had cost, too! Now they were gone, turned into cannon or barbed wire.

They stopped at Abingdon village for petrol, and the earl gazed toward the Norman tower of the church. The war memorial that he had commissioned and paid for stood in a small square facing the church and could be seen from anywhere along the High Street. It was a simple monument, beautiful and dignified. An obelisk of Carrara marble inscribed with the names of the twenty-five men and two women from Abingdon who had been killed in the war. Some, to be sure, had not been natives of the village; several had simply been employed at the Pryory, or other large estates in the area. It had been the earl's contention that those people, granted that they had been born and raised elsewhere, should be included with Abingdon's glorious dead. The village council and the vicar had agreed.

The earl's first clear and lasting memory was of Abingdon—being taken to a funeral in the churchyard. A cold, wet day. The spaces between the gray headstones filled with black—black clothing and black umbrellas. He had been four years old. A winter afternoon in 1866. The day his grandfather, the seventh earl, had been buried in the family plot. Fifty-five years ago. The village had changed over the years, but never more so than during the past five or six.

As Banes pumped petrol into the car's tank, Lord Stanmore watched the activity in the High Street. Market day. So many people, and so few that he recognized. The village had expanded greatly during the war, almost a small town now. An aircraft factory had been built near Leith Common, seven miles north of Abingdon, in 1915. The factory, Blackworth Aeroplane & Motor Co., Ltd., had built aero engines and reconnaissance planes for the Royal Flying Corps. They had expanded greatly and were still very much in business—for which the earl was grateful, as he owned several hundred shares of its stock. Executives, engineers, foremen, and key workers had bought or built houses in or near Abingdon and had created a new prosperity for the village. This growth had not been entirely welcomed by the older inhabitants, who resented the influx of “foreigners.” The earl had mixed views on the subject. Thinking in practical terms, land values had increased substantially—and he owned a great deal of land. But growth had changed the look of the village and its atmosphere: Where once there had been only one pub, the Crown and Anchor, there were now three, one of them boasting that they served “cocktails in the American manner.” To the villagers who frequented the Crown and Anchor for their daily pint and a game of darts, such things as American cocktails verged on the heretical.

Yes, the village had changed. There were all kinds of new shops and even a cinema, its marquee jutting out over the pavement …

The vicar had complained vehemently about the cinema and had tried to block it from being built, but the council had voted against him. Had the earl been asked, he would have sided with the vicar.
Law of the Six-shooter
, indeed!

Beyond the village, the road meandered for seven miles through countryside so beautiful that merely looking at it brought a lump to the earl's throat. There was not a square foot of that land that he did not know, from the beech groves at Tipley's Green to the solitary oak on the crest of Burgate Hill. Not a field he had failed to ride across, not a hedge he had not jumped at one time or another. The Abingdon hunt had long been abandoned, but he would organize it again once he was back at the Pryory. Was there a finer sight in all the world than pink-coated huntsmen riding to hounds on a frosty December morning?

The narrow, twisting Abingdon road ended at Leith Common where it joined the highway from Guildford to London. The Blackworth factory could be seen, raw red brick buildings and iron-roofed sheds and hangars. There was an aerodome near the factory site, shared jointly by Blackworth and an RAF squadron. Low trees screened it from view, and as they turned onto the London road a lumbering biplane cleared the trees, banked sharply, and passed overhead with a stuttering roar.

“Brisfit,” the chauffeur said, leaning his head out of the window to stare upward.

Even a man like Banes who had never set eyes on an airplane before he was forty could now spot the difference between a Bristol fighter and a Sopwith Snipe.

“Kindly keep your eyes on the road.”

A minor reflection of the war's broadening aspects. Brisfits, American cocktails, and Tom Mix. The horizons had been expanded. In the earl's youth he had measured the universe by the distance of a day's canter. All gone now. Changed utterly. He sat back in a corner of the seat feeling tired and immeasurably depressed. It wasn't age; he was a tall, strong, vigorous man who genuinely surprised people when they learned he was nearing sixty. Not growing old. He could cope with that by simply ignoring it. It was change that depressed him, the terrible feeling that the earth was spinning away at an uncontrollable speed toward an unknown destination. He pitied the youth who would enter this new world. What landmarks would be left for them to hold on to? What solid, imperishable guidelines remained? An age turned topsy-turvy. Bleak and valueless.

Hanna, his wife, had questioned the wisdom of rebuilding the Pryory, and from a practical point of view she had been correct. The expense was enormous (though money was hardly a factor) and what they would do with the place once it was finished was uncertain. Live in it, of course, but there were really only the two of them now, and it would take at least twenty servants, counting gardeners and grooms, to maintain it even halfway properly. William might come down for the occasional weekend, but he had to stay in London and read for the bar. His daughter might stay for a while with her baby, but Alexandra was uncertain what to do with her life since returning from Canada. She had talked vaguely about going abroad.

In all likelihood, there would just be the two of them, rattling around in a house larger than most hotels. The thought was worrying to Hanna, if not dismaying, but they would work out problems when they reached them. The most important thing to him was that Abingdon Pryory would exist again as a functioning, lived-in house. Lights would glow through its windows and smoke rise from its chimneys. There would be horses in the stables and hounds in the kennels. He would be resurrecting a manner of living that most people thought had become as dead as the dodo bird. Turning back time with money and a good contractor.

The Grevilles' London house was in Chester Mews, overlooking Regent's Park. It was of moderate size, requiring no more than ten servants, and had been built in 1790 for the mistress of a royal duke. Their previous London residence, a thirty-bedroom mansion in Park Lane, had been donated to the government during the war for use as a military hospital. It was still being used for that purpose, a burn clinic, and still filled with the charred victims of German
flamenwerfers
and other random horrors of the Great War.

He drove with Banes to the garage and entered at the rear of the house, through the garden gate, so as not to track dried mud or brick dust across the polished floors of the entrance hall. It was 4:30, a rainless day for a change, and the sun was still warm. The nanny that Hanna had hired for Alexandra's baby was seated on an iron bench, reading a book, her free hand resting lightly on the handle of the pram. She looked up as she heard his footsteps on the brick path and put the book aside.

“Good afternoon, your lordship.”

“Good afternoon.” He had forgotten the woman's name. “Pleasant weather.”

“Oh, it's ever so nice. Quite balmy, in fact.”

“Yes.” He paused for a second by the carriage and looked somberly at the baby. Chubby little fellow. Pink-faced and reddish-haired. A Scot's face—but then, his father had been Scottish. The baby stared up at him with equal gravity. “Must be time for his tea.”

“Oh, he's had his tea, he has. Cup of milk and half a cream bun.” She gave the pram a gentle shake. “Tell His Lordship how you enjoyed it, that's the love.”

“I've never heard him speak,” he said, stepping back. “Surely—”

“Not in
words
, m'lord, not just yet, but he does chat away to his Mary, don't you, Colin love?”

Ten-month-old Colin Mackendric gave his grandfather a dour look and then closed his eyes.

Lord Stanmore had decidedly mixed feelings about the boy. He liked children. The happiest moments of his life had been when his own were growing up and Abingdon Pryory had swarmed with their friends. His attitude toward children was in marked contrast to that of his father, who had not only detested them but the entire process of their creation as well. His own childhood had been so barren of love that he had gone out of his way to indulge his sons and daughter when they had been young: their nurseries bulging with playthings, and a special stable built to house their ponies. His natural inclination was to do the same for his first grandchild, but Colin Mackendric had been, as far as he was concerned, born under a cloud. The Honorable Alexandra Greville, with headstrong foolishness, had fallen in love with an army surgeon who was not only a good deal older than she but already married. They had met in France during the war, where she had served as a nursing sister. No amount of reasoning or pleading had been able to prevent her from running off to Canada with him after the armistice. In all fairness to Colonel Mackendric, he had not been a bounder and had never ceased in his efforts to get a divorce. It had finally been granted and they had married—one month before young Colin's birth in Toronto. Four months after that, Mackendric had died of a heart attack while performing surgery at a veterans' hospital, and Alexandra had come home to England with the baby. One tiny tragedy in an era of catastrophes.

He entered the house through tall French doors that led to his study, a sanctuary filled with his books and a vast accumulation of hunting and riding cups and trophies. He poured a stiff whiskey and sipped at it. Seeing the child had only added to his depression. His chilliness toward both Alexandra and her son was too apparent, and Hanna had criticized him for it. He could understand her reasons up to a point, but dash it all, he was what he was. His strict schooling at Winchester had taught him firm values and beliefs and had given him an intuitive feel for the rightness of things, Living with a man out of wedlock and then giving birth to a child who was mere days from bastardy hardly fitted the Wykehamist ideal of womanhood—even if that particular woman was one's own daughter. Parenthood was not a valid reason for the suspension of judgment. She had been wrong, morally and socially wrong. He could not stone her for it, but neither could he forgive.

“Tony! You're back.”

Hanna was seated at her dressing table wearing a green silk kimono, her arms raised behind her head as she struggled to fasten a strand of pearls. The sight of her drove a good deal of the darkness from the earl's thoughts. Stepping up behind her, he fastened the gold clasp and then bent to kiss her softly on the nape of the neck.

Hanna Rilke Greville, Countess Stanmore, was fifty-two and looked forty. The startling beauty of her youth had not changed radically with middle age. Her figure had thickened, as plumpness was a trait of the Rilkes, but the soft curve of her neck, the high cheekbones and oval face, the startling blue eyes, and her thick yellow hair were the same as when she had taken London by storm in the long-ago summer of 1888—the most talked-about debutante of that glittering social season.

She had come to England with her father as a first stop on a grand tour of Europe. Adolph Rilke, who had never learned to speak English properly, told reporters in his thick German-Chicago accent that he intended to see that his daughter had “der tea at Vinsor taken mit der queen.” Press wags had a good deal of fun with Adolph Rilke and with what they dubbed “the beer king's daughter,” but the ill-concealed contempt that society columnists felt toward American millionaires and their social pretensions turned to abashment when father and daughter did indeed go to Windsor Castle for tea with Queen Victoria. The press had overlooked the fact that the Rilkes of Chicago and Milwaukee were the American branch of the von Rilkes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and that Hanna Rilke was a cousin to Princess Mary of Teck. Overnight she became a prime catch for any social event, most of which she mildly scandalized with her Yankee candor. There were those who thought her brash and those who found her refreshing. Among the latter had been young Anthony Greville, earl of Stanmore, whose late father had cast a chilling shadow of profligacy and deceit. The charming truths of Hanna Rilke had been like a blaze of light to him, a wondrous zephyr of fresh air. He had, in a moment of impulsiveness following a particularly enjoyable supper party in Belgravia, asked her to marry him. It was an impulse that he had never found cause to regret.

“You look very lovely tonight, Hanna.”

“Thank you, dear. I thought you might have stayed at the Pryory until tomorrow.”

“Not necessary. Tomkins is going great guns for a change. The south wing is completed and the scaffolding comes down in a day or two. Really marvelous progress. I can see no reason why we shouldn't be moving in by the end of August.”