Tide of War (3 page)

It was one of the finest manors in the county but far too much of a mish-mash to be called grand. And Nathan loved it. Loved coming back to it from his travels. Loved its tall beckoning chimneys and its fungus walls and its rust-coloured roof and its whims and follies and the play of light on the warm brick and the sharp-edged flint and the way it seemed to settle into the hillside as if its myriad parts had rolled down there and subsided with a sigh, fitting their inelegant limbs and awkward angles into the folds of a worn and comfortable sofa.

They drove into the stable yard. Two great hounds loping out to meet them: Hector and Agamemnon, known as Heck and Gammon. And a small yapping terrier with an eye patch called Pirate. After giving them their due attention they left the pony with one of the stable boys and made their way up through the garden carrying their now noisome buckets and in through the scullery door to the kitchens. Here was the cook Mrs. Madley, whom everyone called Maddie or Ma, just settling down by the range with her pipe and a mug of ale while the kitchen maids scoured the pans from dinner. She had fixed them a substantial picnic before they left and grumbled now that she supposed they would be after the leftovers from dinner and
were out of luck for “there ben't none,” but when Nathan stated his intention of boiling up a pan of water for the prawns she levered herself out of her chair and insisted on doing it herself for all that they were a plague to her and a curse on her old age.

Maddie was an odd shape for a cook: tall and gaunt with sharp angular features flinty as the house walls and a tongue that could strike sparks but she had a soft heart and a great fondness for Nathan, treating him with the same rough affection and scandalised censure as did all the older servants, as if he was the same small savage that had arrived from the Americas twenty years ago. So she made them scrub their grubby hands at the kitchen sink and sat them at the kitchen table with a mug of ale for Nathan and of lemonade for Alex whom she referred to privately—as much as there was such a thing as privacy at Windover House—as the Frenchie.

Nathan was more at home in the kitchen than in any other part of the house. Indeed he had practically been raised here, playing with his toys on the stone floor when it was too cold or wet to play outside, manoeuvring his leaden armies and wheeling his wooden horses into the heart of Maddie's Troy, eating scraps and leftovers at the kitchen table (for he kept no regular mealtimes) and in later years warming himself by the kitchen fire when he came home soaked from woods, shore or riverbank where he had been up to mischief with the local banditry.

“Why thankee kindly, Ma,” he said as she set bowls of steaming prawns and samphire before them with a loaf of fresh-baked bread and a dish of melted butter. “Here is a rare treat, eh Alex? And a sight better than they looked in the pool.”

They ate in a convivial silence, snapping off heads and eating the rest whole with great hunks of bread to make up for the deficiency in bulk and Nathan was about to pour himself another mug of ale when the morose figure of Gilbert Gabriel appeared at the kitchen door.

Gabriel was Nathan's steward when he was at sea but he had served Nathan's father in a similar capacity for many years before and Nathan still thought of him as his father's man. Certainly whenever
they were at Windover House he reverted to this role and treated Nathan more as a junior officer in the admiral's service rather than a commander in his own right. He had been a highwayman in his younger days—Nathan's father had saved him from the gallows—and there was in his steely countenance, his abrupt appearances and his cursory address a strong suggestion of this former occupation, as if he had just ridden out from behind a bush and demanded money with menaces. Nathan's crew had called him the Angel Gabriel, almost certainly in a spirit of irony. But he was devoted to Nathan's father and possibly even to Nathan, though it was hard to believe it at times.

“The admiral's compliments,” he now intoned in the voice that had once stopped the Royal Mail, “and would be pleased to see the commander in his study whenever he is at leisure.”

“My duty to the admiral,” Nathan responded formally, “and will be with him shortly.”

Though Windover House could not be managed with the same brisk efficiency as a man of war, it did its best to maintain the naval tradition—in so far as it was possible while remaining firmly grounded in the South Downs.

“Whenever he is at leisure” meant upon the instant, but not necessarily at the double. So Nathan finished his beer, packed Alex off to his tutor, and made his leisurely way to his father's study in the Tudor wing, wondering a little at the nature of the summons for he met his father often enough at mealtimes for the exchange of whatever information was considered necessary for their continuing amiable relations. He was inclined to think it concerned Alex and was braced for a debate in which the subjects of Papists, discipline and the Protestant religion would be fully aired.

In the event, this would have been a relief compared to the subject that was uppermost in his father's mind.

“Ah, Nathaniel. Good day?” Sir Michael turned from the apparent contemplation of a row of books upon his shelves, though they had been there to Nathan's knowledge for some twenty years without
evoking his father's even passing interest He was clearly nervous. But why?

“Excellent, thank you, sir. We caught twenty-six prawn.”

Cursing this betrayal of his own nervousness and the occasional tendency to behave in his father's presence as if he were five years old and not twenty-five.

“Really? And you took the boy?” Raising his bushy brows a trifle as if exposing him to unnecessary danger.

“I did.” Restraining an impulse to add that he seemed ready for it.

“Very good, very good.” He waved Nathan to a chair and eased himself into the one opposite from whence they continued to manoeuvre their conversation as clumsily as two rudderless hulks in a flat calm.

Father and son were rarely relaxed in each other's presence. They shared little in common beyond a career in the navy, though that was enough to unite the majority of those in His Majesty's Service. Nathan's father was a burly, handsome, ruddy-faced country gentleman of fifty-six years with a commanding presence and a decisive manner. Nathan was darker, slimmer and taller and said to take after his mother in both appearance and character, an opinion which he found alarming. Possibly it alarmed his father, also. Sir Michael had enjoyed a distinguished career and retired from the sea with the rank of rear-admiral, having served his King and country for forty-four years and through two major wars. Surprisingly, instead of retiring to his country estate and indulging in the leisurely pursuits of other country gentlemen, he had become actively involved in its management, joining with several like-minded neighbours in the development of a new breed of sheep, the Southdown, which was considered superior to anything else in that line of creation.

Of late, as Nathan knew, there had been problems. His father had invested heavily in the breed, and in other improvements to the farm, and the returns were not as great as he had hoped. The traditional overseas markets for English wool had suffered from the war and prices had dropped considerably. From the way the conversation
was going, Nathan feared the worst. Their debts had been called in, the estate was to be sold, penury beckoned. At length, however, Sir Michael came to the point.

“Well then, the fact is that I have something I wanted to tell you. Yes. Something, well, I expect you will think it extraordinary. Well, not to beat about the bush, what would you say if I told you I was considering the prospect … well, had committed myself to the prospect … of matrimony?”

“Matrimony?” Nathan repeated, startled, and indeed, as perplexed as his ward had been by such wonders as Toadflax and Old Man's Mustard and such other curiosities as they had encountered on the road from Cuckmere.

“Marriage,” his father translated for him, helpfully.
“My
marriage.”

“But …” Nathan struggled for a way of putting it more diplomatically and found none. “But, Father, you are already married. To my mother.”

Sir Michael frowned. A frost formed in the small space between them.

“I am not yet so addled in my wits as to forget that circumstance.”

The word “unfortunate” though missing from the body of this sentence was there in spirit.

“However, I believe you are not unaware of the situation between your mother and myself,” he added wearily.

Nathan's father and mother had not seen eye to eye for many years, nor indeed shared the same house together. Not since Sir Michael's decision to retire from the Navy and devote himself to sheep.

“You know I cannot be doing with sheep,” Lady Catherine had informed Nathan subsequently, the nearest he had ever come to receiving an explanation of the rift from either parent. But although sheep undoubtedly played their part in the breakdown of their marriage, the real reason was politics.

Nathan's father and mother had met in New York when it was still a British colony. He was a young naval officer, she the daughter of wealthy merchants—the descendants of French Huguenots. This
proved no impediment to their romance, however, and the young naval officer found himself married into one of the wealthiest families in the colony. Nathan was born in New York and spent the first five years of his life there but throughout this period tensions were rising between the American colonists and their British governors and his mother showed a disturbing tendency to side with the former. Such was her enthusiasm for these miscreants that her husband elected to remove her and their young son to the mother country where she might learn to keep her opinions to herself, or have none, like all good Englishwomen.

Although his wife submitted to his plans, being secretly desirous of living in London, as soon as she arrived there she began to associate with even worse villains than those in the colonies: among the regular visitors to her home in St. James's were Mr. Fox and Mr. Wilkes and other dangerous radicals, men who supported the rebel cause in America even while her husband was engaged in its suppression.

Captain Peake, as he now was, served with the British fleet that descended upon New York in the summer of 1776 and landed a large army of Redcoats and German mercenaries on the island of Manhattan. Two of Kitty's brothers fought against them and one, the youngest, died on the Heights of Harlem.

The marriage endured but the wounds did not heal. Nathan's father remained in the Americas for the duration of the war while his mother gave comfort to the King's enemies in London. Meanwhile, Nathan ran wild on the family estate in Sussex, his mother's only stricture to his tutors being to ensure that he continued to improve his French.

When the war ended, Nathan's father and mother found it at least as hard to be reconciled as Britain and her former colonies, now the United States of America. Indeed, Nathan's mother made her own declaration of independence. Henceforth she would remain in London and her husband, when he was not at sea, would make his home in Sussex.

Nathan was not unduly troubled by this arrangement. It was not
uncommon among couples of a certain class and even those who shared the same roof were often as divided. He loved both his parents and declined to take sides in their conflicts—though if he stayed for much above an hour in the company of either one he was very much inclined to see the point of view of the other.

But he had not considered the possibility of either parent seeking to remarry. And indeed there were considerable obstacles to such a course.

“But that would mean divorce,” Nathan pointed out.

“So I am led to believe,” agreed his father, “if I am to avoid the charge of bigamy. Or turn Mohammedan.”

“I am sorry, Father, but you have quite taken me aback.”

“I am advised that I must bring a case before the ecclesiastical courts. And as a man cannot be divorced for adultery, according to canon law, I fear the blame must be placed at your mother's door.”

“You would accuse my mother of adultery?”

There would be no shortage of candidates. But this was scarcely the point.

“It is very regrettable,” his father agreed. “But I see no alternative at present. And, well, I doubt it would ruin her reputation.”

“But—it will be a great scandal.”

“Will it? I wonder.” An uneasy silence. Each lost in thought. It was Sir Michael who broke it, smiling a little. “You have not asked me who it is I wish to marry.”

This seemed a minor consideration. “Forgive me, Father, it is not for lack of interest.”

“Her name is Frances Wyndham. I believe you have met. She has hunted here once or twice.”

“Fanny Wyndham! My God!”

“Is that so shocking? You have gone quite pale.”

This was perfectly possible for Fanny Wyndham was indeed known to him. A boisterous girl, rather too horsy to be considered handsome but with a fine seat. And an outstanding bosom. Once, while the rest of the hunt was otherwise engaged, they had enjoyed
what was described in hunting terms as a “tussle” in Windover Wood. The memory of it brought the colour rushing back to Nathan's face.

Fanny was the eldest child of George Wyndham, Earl of Egremont, one of the greatest landowners in Sussex, indeed in all England. Though his estate at Petworth was on the far side of the county he often visited with the Gages at Firle or with Mr. Ellman of Glynde who shared his enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. And Nathan's father, he now recalled, had often visited Petworth, ostensibly to discuss the perfection of the Southdown sheep.

“Maternal loyalties aside, you have some objection to the lady?”

The “tussle” in Windover Wood could not be raised as a legitimate concern—but there were others.

“She is very young,” Nathan pointed out.