Coronach, page 29
“We have nothing to say to one another, sir.”
“If you so choose. But if you would do me the honour of accepting my apology, we might yet enjoy ourselves.”
My eyes went beyond him. He must have read my mind.
“Georgie’s taking him in to supper, and you know he’s such a gentleman he won’t refuse her. So it’s me or some boozy old magistrate, and I give you my word I’ll behave.”
He kept it, and proved a diverting companion although his wit and his language were vicious. The cornet of dragoons came up and was introduced as the Honourable Perce, and sent off with a cool, “Go away now like a good boy and see what Georgie’s doing. Tell her I said she was to mind her manners and keep her hands out of strange men’s britches.” Then he apologized gracefully, and went on to another subject.
Some time later he took a twist of paper from his pocket and sprinkled the contents into his wine. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face.
“Help me outside, will you? I’ll swoon like a lovesick maid in another minute otherwise.”
We left the light and the noise and the heavy smells of the ballroom, and when he found a stone seat and drew me down beside him I did not resist.
His mouth was hard and experienced and mine was innocent. His fingers, as knowing and intimate as the mouth, were exploring me with great assurance.
“Let me go. I’m cold.”
“God’s life, you’re no colder than I am, and if you are I’ll warm you.”
He kissed me again, murmuring his hard language of endearment and promises; his tongue probed, and he assaulted my breasts with such expertise that his own success must have astonished him. Sexuality in all its violence and power overwhelmed me: I was drowning in it, and I was not so naïve that I did not recognize the full extent of his arousal.
I ran, knowing he could not follow, toward the noise, toward protection, and it was not until later that I discovered I had lost my fan with the last bonds of innocence.
By midnight a sense of profound isolation had overcome Mordaunt. Having drunk more than he remembered, he watched the degrees of intoxication around him, the gross behaviour, the lascivious fondling, the uninhibited dancing, with an ineffable conviction that he was too old and too jaded for this, the self-indulgent frivolity of a society from which he had been absent too many years. Nor did he belong in the company of soldiers: he had spoken to none of those present, and if his rank was known to them they did not approach him. His war was not their war: his had been rendered meaningless by this new shifting of allies and partitioning of territories, and although less than a generation separated them he felt, as he had among younger men in Flanders, isolated and estranged.
And yet, the bonds were powerful. The fraternity of the army, the uniform’s brotherhood, the habit of service and of command, the love of comrades, the strictures of duty, the exercise of insensate courage: the memories of a life which had taken a youth and forged and broken a man, giving a lifetime’s legacy of atheism, cynicism and bereavement, illness of body and disquiet of mind... a life brutal beyond description, and yet so terrible in its compulsion that even now he knew he had never left it. He had been born a soldier’s son, of a lineage of soldiers, and had he fathered sons he would have given them to the army as inevitably as his father had given him. He watched the uniforms, and the compulsion to submit to the habit of duty and service was as overwhelming as any sexual desire: it led unavoidably to his other obsession, and the fear tormented him that the war would end, and remove the only avenue of escape that he could imagine.
Some one spoke to him. He turned and saw that it was an officer, a captain by his shoulder knot. The uniform facings and lapels were deep yellow, bound with a silver lace in which diagonal stripes had been worked: only three regiments had ever been distinguished by that shade of yellow, and the silver lace had been plain when he had worn it.
He said, “I do not know your regiment, sir,” although the sense of inevitability remained, and he knew the answer before the other spoke.
“The Fifteenth foot, sir. Captain Lascelles.”
“Mordaunt.” They shook hands without warmth. “I was a captain in the Fifteenth. It was my second regiment.”
He had no desire to establish the relationship this man apparently wanted, to enumerate the regiments, or the campaigns, or the commissions; his past was private, and he had no intention of illuminating it for another’s entertainment.
“Do you hunt, ah, Mordaunt?”
“No. I am the neighbour one always feels obliged to invite.”
There was another awkward silence. He wished he were drunk enough to behave abominably and so free himself of this unwanted interrogation.
“What do you make of this peace, Mordaunt?”
“There’s nothing in it. Pitt’s a mad dog— all he wants is war with Spain and another laurel for his crown.”
“You think Spain will come in, then?”
“I am certain of it.”
“Well, I daresay we can give them hot stuff too, as the song says.”
His eyes returned to the dancers and the luminous, opal silk.
“We have given them nothing else for the past twenty years. I don’t wonder the fields of Europe give such a bounty of wild flowers— they’ve been fertilised enough with the blood of my generation.”
He had had too much to drink and now he knew it, but he could not stop, and he no longer cared.
“And then when the smoke clears, we will all sit down peaceably and divide Europe like a chequerboard— a bloodied chequerboard— and all our blood and sacrifice will have been in vain. Until the next time.”
“Do you not think France is finished, sir?”
“France is a many-headed Hydra. She will never die.”
He watched the dancers then in a stony silence until the other man muttered his apologies and withdrew; a passing footman proffered glasses and he took one and drained it without noticing what it was. The dancers and the music he loved blurred and became a half-remembered tableau of names and faces from the past: the bored, complaisant women of the Belgian aristocracy in a hot salon in Brussels, in an officers’ mess in Ghent. The lost faces... the four card players on the day he had returned from England, congratulating him on his marriage, the men he had seen die piecemeal, whose corpses he had held, whose blood had soaked his clothing, whose eyeless faces he had tried to cover, whose youthful bodies, obscene with gangrene, had become so intolerable that other men dying nearby had demanded they be removed... men he had loved, and had betrayed by living when they died. He closed his eyes, and the memories overcame him, and in the midst of the dance the girl eluded the hands of a drunken magistrate into whose care he had commended her, and he dared not look at her, lest in her face he see the anguish and distress of one similarly betrayed.
When the woman laid her hand with familiarity on his sleeve he opened his eyes. She was offering herself, for their mutual enjoyment, with such blatant invitation that the temptations of an honest whore seemed infinitely preferable to the sickness of his thoughts.
“My dear Mordaunt, I am faint with hunger, and I shall not sup with any one but you.”
He said, “My daughter....”
“I have asked Valentine to take care of your pretty child.”
This, too, was inevitable.
“I am your servant,” he said.
“She’s a fucksome piece. I like the way she walks.”
“Who, Georgie?”
“No, the chit. The mad major’s little bunter.”
“She’s not a bad little thing. Comes up all in a pretty colour if you talk bawdy. But touch her— my dears, you would not have believed it.”
A brief, murmured interlude, punctuated by applause, then some one’s wistful voice.
“I can’t think of anything sweeter than a virgin’s blush.”
“I can. A virgin’s cunt.”
“Ecod, man, watch your language. You ain’t in town now, you know.”
Silence for a time from behind the white-painted door, and an acrid scent. Their voices were languid, as if they had been drinking, and were more than half drugged on the narcotic smoke and their own fantasies.
“Christ, I’m sick of virgins. They never know a damned thing and they always weep after, as if you’d ravished them into it, when you know they wanted it all the time.”
“I wish they’d ravish Pitt into peace and free me of this deuced army. I haven’t been so bored since Oxford, and I’m a damned sight poorer.”
A desultory shuffle. Some one swore obscenely. The other voice murmured on.
“Your virgin is a curious creature, gentlemen. Think on your finest filly. You’d not ruin her with rough handling, would you? No more so with your virgin. If you ride her rough she’ll throw you the next time you try to mount. You must bring ʼem to it slowly, on a leading rein, with kisses and promises. Now, your virgin heiress is a different matter altogether... to be approached with exquisite caution. Out of this nettle, danger, and so forth. The flower of that maidenhead is gilded, my dears. ʼTwill die if rudely plucked.”
“If you want the chit, Val, why don’t you just take her? You know we’d all come in on it for the sport.”
“Your idea of sport, Perce, is putting your cock where it ain’t wanted, and you’ll die with a foot of cold steel in your guts for it yet.”
“You ain’t frightened of him, surely, Val?”
“Yes, by hell, I am. I wouldn’t cross him for a thousand pound, and neither will any of you if you have any sense. Now pay up, my dear. My temper’s a little short tonight, with one thing and another.”
“Bad blood in that family, mad and bad.”
“Scandal?”
“In spades, dear boy.”
The door closed, and the gallery was silent.
I had come upstairs and passed the painted door; I knew he had my fan, and I had almost been brave enough to confront him when he had commenced his catalogue of his activities. I could not have been more violated and ashamed if he had succeeded, and had I been able to find Mordaunt perhaps I would have told him, with what consequences I can only speculate. But he appeared to have deserted me.
I walked around the gallery, sick at heart. A man in dark clothing was coming toward me; the candles had guttered down to their sockets and I thought he was one of Valentine Harrington’s companions until I recognized him.
“Doctor Thackeray.”
He looked clean, austere, and uncompromisingly sober. A strained and bony face, dark hair, dark eyes: once the difference in our ages had seemed incalculable. Now I saw a man no more than thirty, and thought how young he must have been when he had attended me in my childhood.
He did not remember me.
“Do you not know me? I live at Evesham.”
He came into the light where I stood, near the head of the stairs.
“You are quite transformed,” he said.
His presence comforted me; perhaps he knew. He put down his bag and looked over the balustrade. Whatever he thought of the saturnalia below, he retained his professional discretion.
“Is the Major well?”
“He seems so, thank you.”
“And your mother?”
“She lives in London.”
“I know. You went to her, did you not?”
“I didn’t care for it.”
The smile came and went, so quickly that it might have been a grimace.
“So much the Major’s child,” he said. “I wonder that he brought you here tonight. I thought he despised people like this.”
“If you know him, you know that he does.”
“Perhaps that was why. So that you would learn to despise them, too.”
“I have.”
“In one sense, I am happy to hear it. In another, not.”
“What do you mean?”
“This, unfortunately, is the world to which you were born, and one cannot escape one’s destiny.”
He was harder than I remembered, more abrupt, more cynical. Maybe the barren years in a bleak northern practise had done this; he was not a Durham man. Maybe it was some ironic social consciousness, when his voice and manner were those of a gentleman, and those he attended, although gentlemen in name, were sprawled insensible like louts in a gutter.
He said, “I must go. I can do nothing further here,” and so Mordaunt found us.
“I trust I find you well, sir?”
“Is that a professional question?”
“Merely courtesy, on this occasion.” But his eyes were keen.
“Old injuries, Doctor. Too old to be of interest, and irreversible, I assure you.”
There was tension and animosity between them, and I did not know why. Thackeray took his leave and descended to the littered hall.
“You make yourself invisible at will, it seems.”
“I came here looking for you.” It was a lie, but I could not tell him the truth; his mood was volatile.
“Then we were both distracted.” Then, “I saw his patient earlier. Seaton Harrington.” And, when he saw that I did not know the name, “Your absent host. Or did you not think to enquire?”
“Is he ill?”
“He is dying. He has a cancer of the stomach and his pain is intolerable. When her ladyship can’t bear the noise she sends for faithful Thackeray. He brings him opium.”
“How did you see him?”
“I had occasion to ask his wife. I knew him as a boy.”
“And she dances while he’s dying?”
“She has her weeds to hand.” It was the biting, sarcastic mood I could not endure: I wondered how much he had drunk, and why he had abandoned me; when her attempts at seduction had become this bizarre valediction. “He has perhaps a week to live. Then our gallant captain becomes Sir Valentine. God knows he will never be saint.”
The contempt with which he said it suggested that if I wanted pity I would not find it here. I had, after all, been warned.
“Miss Mordaunt.”
My saint was standing on the stairs, leaning on his malacca stick. His eyes were reddened but his dress was impeccable, and he held my fan.
“You left this in the garden. I had it at cards with me an hour past. It brought me luck.”
I said numbly, “I am very glad.”
“It is a charming thing. I knew you would be sorry to think you had lost it.”
Movement beside me.
“I’ll take that, Harrington.”
He said, with equal coldness, “Your pardon, Major, but it is not your fan.” He came down the stairs very slowly and conveyed my hand, without kissing it, to his lips. “Adieu, dear heart.”
I said nothing, nor did Mordaunt speak until we had reached Evesham. A thrush was singing, the air was cold: the early dawn of spring leavened the darkness. I held the fan and stared at the fields, shivering in my silk; how radiant with pleasure I had been when I had dressed. Now I was going home like a dying moth, crushed and colourless.
He said, “It appears that you made conquests wherever you went. Up in the gallery with the leech, out with the pimp in the garden.... May I ask what so occupied you that you misplaced your fan? You seemed to prize it highly when I gave it to you.”
“He told me he was going to faint. We went out to take the air.”
He said, “You silly child,” with such contempt that tears came to my eyes, and I wept quietly in the dimness until the door was opened and the step let down. I stood on the wet gravel, holding the skirts of a gown I would never wear again, hiding my face from the grooms.
“Are you coming, Papa?”
He had walked away and was standing with his back to me, staring over the park, or perhaps at nothing: perhaps his own recollections of the night possessed him, or the memory of his own behaviour, which was not above reproach.
“Papa?”
He turned, and the grey light fell across his face, enigmatic, impenetrable.
He said, “Go to bed. I cannot talk to you,” and I went in. He did not follow me.
Two days later Valentine Harrington sent me a white rosebud from his hothouse, and a fan of peacock feathers. I kept the rose as it would soon be gone, leaving no reminder, and returned the fan. Within the week I was sent a bouquet of Rosa Mundi, accompanied by a message: O cruel beauty, like the rose, sharper than the thorn.... These, too, I returned.
He became a nuisance. He loitered outside the gates on horseback, alone or in the company of his confederate, the Honourable Perce, and when Vennor warned him against trespassing he replied insolently that he had as much right as any man to use the public highway. He accosted me twice, once near the village, once on the edge of the moor where apparently he knew I rode. On both occasions I was with a groom and Harrington was alone; on both occasions his behaviour, although eccentric, was irreproachable. The third time he and the Honourable Perce were found in the home park, within the gates of Evesham. Both were drunk, and what had appeared a series of troublesome coincidences now seemed sinister. I told Vennor, that saddened man, whose eldest daughter, had she lived, would have been my age. He said succinctly, “If ye doan’t tell t’ Major, ah will.”
I did not tell him. There were too many aspects of that night I could not forgive, and something in my own behaviour seemed to have offended him so deeply that he seldom spoke to me. We existed in this stalemate until Harrington’s father died. I did not attend the funeral, and to my relief the new baronet observed a period of mourning before continuing his harassment of me.
