The Passing Bells (2 page)

The contrast between the two suites symbolized the difference between men and women, as the earl saw it. His rooms were paneled with dark oak, Spartanly furnished, and devoid of frivolous ornamentation. A large, untidy bookcase contained books on country life and hunting, a novel or two by Hardy, Shakespeare's plays in five volumes, and a Bible given to him by the local vicar on the day he had left home for the first time to go to school at Winchester. Between the slim stacks of books stood hunting cups and other trophies of horsemanship. The sword that his grandfather had carried, but never used, at Waterloo rested in its scabbard above the brick fireplace, and a large telescope, the gift of an admiral uncle, was fixed to a tripod in front of one of the mullioned windows. Study, bedroom, and dressing room had survived intact his transition from young manhood to middle age.

The rooms of Hanna Rilke Greville, Countess Stanmore, had been decorated by a man who had been under the spell of the Belle Epoque: rooms of deep-pile carpets, embossed wallpapers in shades of lemon and milky green, gilt-framed paintings, mirrors, and rococo furniture. Silk drapes diffused the light, bathing the rooms with a softly feminine glow. The rooms of a warm and sensuous woman. In all the years of their lovemaking, she had never come to his rooms, only he to hers.

She was still asleep, her long blonde hair tied in two thick coils that lay across the pillow like strands of spun gold. The earl did not intrude on his wife's slumber. It was his ritual to simply stand for a moment at one end of the large bedroom and look at her. He then closed the door quietly and retreated into his own room, slapped his boot top with the crop, and strode briskly toward the hall.

“Good morning, your lordship.” Four of the upstairs maids stood on the landing and whispered their greeting in unison. They curtsied as they did so, their heavily starched uniforms making a pleasant rustling sound.

“Good morning . . . good morning,” Lord Stanmore said, barely glancing at them as he descended the broad staircase.

He left the house through the glass-domed conservatory, with its riot of potted palms and hanging baskets of ferns, and then went out across the shadowed west terrace, where two gardener's helpers were sweeping the flagstones with brooms made of twigs. The men paused in their work long enough to touch their caps in respect, and he acknowledged their gesture by a slight nod of his head. Steps of weathered granite curved down to the Italian garden, where four men were busily trimming the topiary work. An ornamental iron gate purchased long ago from the estate of the duke of Fiori in Urbino led into the rose garden, with its central fountain of Carrara marble tumbling green water over carvings of Neptune and Europa. Beyond the brick wall that enclosed the rose garden, several long, low greenhouses marked the edge of the vast kitchen gardens and their neat rows of vegetables and well-spaded earth. A tree-shaded gravel path wound past the gardeners' cottages, the compost pits, and the storage sheds to the stable area, separated from the domain of the gardeners by a high stone wall. There was a scattering of musket and pistol balls embedded in the chinks between the stone blocks, mementos of a brisk fight between Prince Rupert's horse and a company of Roundhead infantry in 1642. As a child, the earl had dug for them with a pocketknife, but had recovered nothing but rusty flakes of iron and thin curlings of lead. A solid wood gate painted a dark green pierced the wall and gave access to the paddock and stables beyond.

This was his world, and the earl was intensely proud of it. The new wood buildings with their slate roofs were painted in his colors—buff with accents of dull orange. They were the finest stables in England, and the twenty-five hunters and jumpers housed in them were the best horses that could be bought, bartered, or begged. His favorite of them all, a seven-year-old chestnut gelding, was being walked in the paddock by a groom while a stocky, bandy-legged man wearing tweeds and brown leather gaiters eyed the horse with a critical and practiced eye.

“Good morning, Banks,” Lord Stanmore called out cheerily. “Have a saddle on him, I see.”

George Banks, trainer and vet, jocularly referred to as Master of the Earl's Horse, removed a knobby briar pipe from between his teeth and tapped out the ash against his palm.

“Fit as a fiddle, sir, and strainin' at the bit as you can see. I'd venture to say that old Jupiter's as good as new.”

The earl peered intently at the horse's left front leg as the groom walked it toward him.

“Not favoring the leg at all.”

“No, sir,” said Banks. “It's the hot packs what done the job good and proper.”

“Let's just hope he won't be jump-shy after this.”

“Well, sir, we'll never know that till the old boy takes a fence, but he's had his knocks before this.”

“Quite so, Banks, though not as severely.” The earl patted the horse fondly on the neck and then ran his hand along its smoothly curried withers. “Good Jupiter. Good old boy.”

“Full of mustard.”

“Quite so.”

“He watched Tinker go and they're proper stablemates. I reckon he's eager to be catching up with him.”

“Tinker? Who on earth . . . ?”

“Why, the captain, sir,” Banks said, refilling his pipe from a yellow oilskin pouch. “Captain Wood-Lacy. Came down from London last night, sir. Got in a bit late and didn't want to disturb the household, so he bunked in with me. He was up with the lark and eager for a ride.”

The earl swung up into Jupiter's saddle.

“Damn. Wish I'd known. Which direction did he take?”

“Toward Burgate and Swan Copse,” the groom said. “But he weren't spurrin', m'lord. Just ridin' easy.”

“Thank you, Smithy. Perhaps I can catch up with him.”

He tapped the big gelding with his heels, and the horse responded eagerly, breaking into a canter down the hard-packed sandy path. He had to hold him from bursting into a flat-out gallop as they swept past the stables and the feed barns. The path curved to the right toward the Abingdon road and was bordered on the left by a five-foot fence.

“Take it, Jupiter.” He tugged the left rein, and the horse veered sharply off the path and soared over the fence with feet to spare. He could hear Banks and the groom give a cheer, but he did not glance back. 

Captain Fenton Wood-Lacy, Coldstream Guards, rode slowly and morosely through the dappled shadows of a beech wood. He was a tall square-shouldered man of twenty-five with dark deep-set eyes, a prominent high-bridged nose, and thin lips. It was a face with a look of studied arrogance about it and a hint of cruelty, like the face of a falcon. It was a face that, when angered, could reduce incompetent subalterns to twitching terror. But that was his parade-ground face, acquired with his commission. With friends, women, small children, and the meek and humble of the earth, the face underwent an almost magical transformation. The hard line of the mouth softened, and the eyes lost their beady coldness and became warm with humor and compassion. At the moment, the eyes were leaden and the face troubled. A passing stranger seeing this man seated on a magnificent bay, dressed in fine London-cut riding clothes, and wearing a bowler of impeccable fit and style would have taken him for a rich squire. In actuality, he carried in his pocket a letter from Cox's Bank informing him in a respectful but terse manner that his account was seriously overdrawn. The matter of his unpaid bills at the Marlborough Club had been brought to his attention the day before by the club secretary.

“I should not enjoy mentioning this matter to your colonel, but you are so deeply in arrears that unless . . .”

“Oh, go to the devil,” he muttered without passion.

A ring-necked pheasant broke cover and whirled away toward the open fields beyond the wood. Fenton raised his riding crop and traced the bird's erratic flight with the tip, leading it just the proper distance to have assured a clean kill with a shotgun.

“Pity,” he murmured. The pheasant went to ground, and he lowered the crop and slapped it in a desultory fashion against his leg. The beauty of the morning, with the sun filtering through the leafy beech trees and the golden haze lying over the hedgerowed fields, mocked his mood. Something had to be done, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out what it could be. A hundred pounds would clear his present debts—and he could probably borrow that amount easily enough from Lord Anthony, as he had done in the past—but a hundred quid wouldn't solve the mathematical inevitability of his problems, merely delay it for a few months. His share of his late father's estate came to an inflexible six hundred pounds a year. That and his captain's pay were not enough to maintain himself in the Coldstream, a regiment—like others in the Foot Guards—that prided itself on the tone of its officers. All Guards officers must join the Guards' Club, but it was almost mandatory that, as a captain, he join the Marlborough as well. An unmarried officer in a less socially eminent regiment might live in quarters at the barracks, but an officer in the Guards was expected to maintain, at his own expense naturally, suitable lodgings in Knightsbridge or Belgravia—the higher the rank the better the address. His promotion to captain had merely hastened his ruin. And on top of all the other expenditures, there was the matter of clothing. Only mufti could be worn when off duty, except for certain social functions, and mufti of the most stylish and expensive cut. His tailor's bill had been outrageous, and only a lucky spell at cards had permitted him to pay it. That luck had not continued long enough for him to settle matters with Cox's Bank and the Marlborough Club.

“Dash it to hell,” he whispered to the trees. He gave his mount a gentle tap, and the graceful animal trotted briskly on, threading its way through the wood and out into a meadow thick with cornflower and buttercup. There Fenton reined in and sat stolidly in the saddle, gazing ahead. Far off across the rolling meadows, partially obscured by the willows of Swan Copse, rose the Gothic façade of Burgate House. There was a permanent solution to his monetary problems in that place, but at a cost that he had so far been reluctant to accept. He was still reluctant, but he couldn't see that he had much choice. Archie Foxe lived in Burgate House with his daughter, Lydia. Archie Foxe of the bluff and hearty East End manner and the dropped aitches. The Foxe of Foxe's Fancy Tinned Goods and the ubiquitous White Manor Tea Shops. Archie's offer of a place in the firm was genuine and of long standing. One thousand pounds a year to start. Not a trifling sum, that. He slipped a silver cigarette case out of his jacket and lit a cork-tipped Woodbine. It would mean chucking in his commission, but there wasn't much of a future in the army anyway. His promotion to a captaincy at twenty-five had been the blindest of luck, one of those once-in-every-century reorganizations of a battalion. It would be ten to fifteen years before they raised him to major.

He blew a thin stream of smoke to the wind and watched the distant house through narrowed eyes, like a scout surveying the movements of the enemy. It was a hideous building, built by a duke in Queen Anne's time. The duke's only son had been killed, and the man had instructed his architects to alter the design of the place so as to create a monument to the boy's memory. They had outdone themselves by erecting a structure that looked more like a cathedral than a house. No one had ever been happy living there, except Archie. Archie Foxe loved the place. “Like livin' in Westminster Abbey,” Archie said.

“Oh, damn.” The captain sighed. His personal Rubicon lay in front of him. A thousand quid a year. And Lydia? The answer to that little question eluded him the way a will-o'-the-wisp eludes a man's grasp. Lydia Foxe would make up her own mind about that. She was beautiful, twenty-one years of age, and the daughter of the world's most indulgent father. There were no restrictions placed upon her. She could flit over to Paris for a month or dash up to London for a weekend without fear of censure from Archie. It had been her suggestion in the first place that he turn in his commission and join “Daddy's shop,” as she so quaintly understated the firm of Foxe, Ltd. That idea had been given to him when she had helped pick out the proper furnishings for his flat on Lower Belgrave Street, her taste far exceeding his budget. “You're a man who should live among beautiful things,” she had said. “You're quite wasted in the army.” Well, he could have told her the same thing, but then didn't Archie see his role in the firm as a sort of military one? The stalwart ex-Guardsman, Archie's adjutant, reviewing battalions of apple-cheeked, nubile White Manor Tea Shop girls in their sky-blue dresses, starched white aprons, and perky white caps? Of course he did. “Fenton,” he had said, “Fenton, lad, Lydia tells me you might be chuckin' the army. Blimey, I could use your sort. 'Ow does a thousand quid per annum strike you?”

Very well indeed, thank you very much. And yet . . . and yet . . .

“Oh, damn,” he whispered fervently, tossing his cigarette into a weed-choked drainage ditch. It just wasn't as simple as that. Six years with the colors. D Company's captain, First Battalion. A man's regiment became something a little sacred, whether one wanted to be seduced by the tradition or not. It was like a marriage . . . for better or worse . . . till death do us part. There were times when he despised the uselessness of his profession in an age when war was a virtual impossibility. And yet when the regimental band struck up the march from
Figaro
and the long scarlet-and-blue-clad column swung up Birdcage Walk from Wellington Barracks, with the wind whipping the King's colors and the fifes shrilling, he felt an almost indescribable sense of pride. That was merely being boyish and he knew it. Echoes from childhood when he had sat spellbound in front of Uncle Julian, back home after fighting the Pathans on the Northwest Frontier or the cruel dervishes in the Sudan, Uncle Julian of the 24th Foot, the Warwickshires, with his VC pinned to his tunic, spinning his stories of bravery and battle and stalwart men.