Until the Colours Fade Page 15

  Sick at heart to be leaving his companion behind, Tom also felt overwhelming relief as he left the covered way and headed for the river in the failing light. Knowing that he might easily have been scarred and mutilated for life, he felt thankful to have escaped with nothing more serious than a bad winding and a painfully aching head. Worse than the shock and the bruises, was his bitter resentment of the cowardly unfairness of the attack and a corrosive disgust, not for the men themselves, but for their paymaster who dealt out arbitrary violence from a safe distance, through an untraceable chain of intermediaries. That he and Crawford had been the recipients had been incidental, since their personal involvement had probably not been known. But that made nothing better; it was still less excusable to make men suffer without as much as knowing their names.

  As Tom sank down shivering in the long wet grass by the river to rest his shaking legs, he felt defiled. He had sought adventure and action, the opiates with which Crawford had lured him, and instead he had found clumsy brutality, terror, and the blind rage, in which any act of cruelty could be contemplated and committed. Worst of all, Tom knew that although Magnus had been trying to protect him when he had been clubbed down, his former admiration for him had gone. For all his courage and style, he had been outwitted as easily as a child; and I with him, and because of him, thought Tom. And this hurt him most of all: that he had made him a hero, and now could not gracefully accept his fallibility, because he too was demeaned by it.

  Tired, cold and very weak, Tom got up and followed the tow-path towards the dark warehouses. In the chill clammy air, the nameless desolation of the deserted wharves and the grey twilight hinterland of waste ground seemed for that moment to have entered and engulfed his soul.

  10

  George Braithwaite did not learn what had happened to Magnus Crawford until two days after Nomination Day; and the news shocked and troubled him. He had recently heard that Magnus had saved the Independent; if he had also attempted some more direct form of political interference in the election, George knew that his father might well have been tempted to discourage him. No gentleman would have chosen to go to the part of town where Crawford had been attacked, unless keeping a secret appointment. But though George had mentioned the assault to his father, he had learned nothing from him. After their argument about the strike, Joseph Braithwaite had kept his own counsel.

  George was acutely aware that if Catherine Crawford entertained even a fraction of his suspicions, his chances of acceptance would be remote indeed. He had not intended to see her until after the election, but, realising that it would be remarked upon if he did not call to inquire about Magnus’s health, he steeled himself for a meeting.

  Driving through the winter woods on the way to Leaholme Hall in his glistening black and yellow Stanhope phaeton, George took none of his usual pleasure in the gleaming coats of his perfectly matched pair of blood horses. Dressed, soberly for him, in a dark brown Newmarket coat, fawn cashmere waistcoat and white drill trousers, he stared fixedly at the coachman’s back, wishing that he had not foolishly refused to have the hood put up. The rains of the previous week had given way to another spell of intensely cold weather, which seemed to promise heavier snow than the few flurries earlier in the month. As the coach sped on, other thoughts perplexed George. Three days before Nomination Day, Strickland had completed his father’s portrait and had left the house the same day; and this, in spite of the fact that he had been asked to stay on to paint George’s mother. To refuse this work, when he had failed to secure a commission from Lady Goodchild, seemed wilfully contrary behaviour. Strangest of all, Strickland was evidently still in Rigton Bridge. Only that morning, George had been told by his valet that he had seen the artist going into the Green Dragon the day before. The only explanation which seemed to account for the man’s obtuseness was that he had heard something discreditable about his patron.

  As the phaeton came to a halt in the sweep in front of the tower entrance to Leaholme Hall, George threw open the carriage door, without waiting for the groom to jump down, and strode across the gravel, adjusting his stock as he went. In fact he might as well have waited, for he was soon informed that Captain Crawford was in town, Miss Crawford riding, and Mr Crawford too ill to receive anybody.

  He was shown to a narrow low-ceilinged sitting room with oak-panelled walls, and the small mullioned windows, which, in George’s view, would have been better replaced with large modern ones. Sitting down by the log fire, he heard a clock strike in another room. A paper was offered him but, feeling too nervous to read, he gazed abstractedly into the flames of the fire, thinking of Catherine. Having been friendly with prize-fighters, gamblers and young men of means dedicated to sensual amusement with transitory partners, George’s views about marriage had become by contrast increasingly exalted and pure; and Catherine Crawford, with her grace and reticence, was the only woman he had ever met, who matched his picture of the ideal wife who would redeem him from his former dissoluteness: a woman as different as he could imagine from the actresses and whores who to date had been his only close contact with the female sex. On the rare occasions when he had dared think of a possible marriage night with her, the idea had struck him as almost blasphemous. If they married, he supposed she would put up with his demands to beget children, but matters of that sort would hardly please her. Goodchild might pursue doctors’ wives to regain lost passions, but George was resolved to master his own baser instincts if his dearest wish were ever to be granted.

  When Catherine entered, he rose at once, encouraged to see that she had come straight to him, before changing out of her riding habit. Her plumed hat, and close-fitting jacket with its ermine collar and cuffs, suited her, he thought, to perfection. The shadow cast by the brim of her hat and her position in front of the window meant that he could not see her face.

  ‘I came to ask after your brother,’ he began hesitantly.

  ‘To do what?’ she whispered.

  ‘I heard that he was hurt. I would have come sooner, if….’ He broke off as she came towards him, for now, for the first time, he was able to see her expression.

  ‘You dare pretend you do not know how he came by his injuries?’

  ‘On my honour, no.’

  ‘Then ask your father on his honour.’

  She tore off her hat and he noticed her pallor and the dark shadows beneath her vivid blue eyes. One side of her hair had come unpinned, and the falling tresses of silvery hair brushing her cheek, far from seeming undignified to George, lent her distracted face a tragic grandeur.

  ‘I did ask him. He told me he knew nothing.’

  He looked at her helplessly as she flicked some hair from her face; her disbelief and derision obvious.

  ‘How very surprising.’

  ‘You must hear me, Catherine,’ he replied in a choking voice. ‘I tried to persuade my father to end the strike. Perhaps that’s very surprising too.’ His cheeks were burning with humiliation. ‘Your brother told me your only interest in me was mercenary.’ He was angry, but so distraught that he feared breaking down. He looked up from the carpet. ‘Did I say one word to you against him for that lie? Are my father’s doings any fault of mine?’ Afraid that he had sounded self-pitying and querulous, he waited without hope for her to speak.

  ‘No fault at all if you make them public.’

  ‘I say, Miss Crawford, that’s asking a bit you know.’

  He saw her clasping her hands together, as if close to screaming at him.

  ‘If you’d seen his face as I did, when they brought him home,’ she said hoarsely, ‘you might consider the suggestion less fantastic.’

  ‘Damn it,’ he blurted out, ‘there’s no proof against him one way or the other. If there was, I’d make him sorry for it. I would truly.’

  He expected more anger, but instead, she sat down facing him, a slight smile playing on her lips.

  ‘You make your father sorry?’ She let a hand fall limply from the carved arm of her chair and shook her head. ‘I�
�m sorry if you knew nothing … perhaps you didn’t. But ignorance isn’t enough. Magnus had no difficulty finding out your father’s game, and tried to spoil it for him. Conscience, you see, does not make cowards of us all.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Miss Crawford.’

  ‘It’s the truth though.’ She got up and hid her face in her hands for a moment, then turned to him with sudden exasperation. ‘I know you can’t betray your father, but that’s what makes it all hopeless. You’re not a bad man; it isn’t that. I’d never have thought of marrying you if I’d thought that. You’re weak but that’s no sin…. It’s just that it’s impossible now. We both know that and there’s nothing more to be said.’

  ‘I’m no coward,’ he stammered, dazed by the rapid flow of her words.

  She swept up her hat impatiently and turned to leave.

  ‘Only you know what you are, Mr Braithwaite. Your conscience is, I hope, your own.’

  Seeing her walk to the door, he could not help protesting.

  ‘It’s not right, Miss Crawford. I don’t even like my father; not at all. I didn’t choose him, you know.’

  Catherine glanced back at him for a moment from the doorway and said gently:

  ‘If I’m hard, George, you’ll find me easier to forget.’

  ‘I won’t at all,’ he objected; but she left the room without answering and he doubted whether she had heard.

  On the way home, at a sharp bend, Braithwaite’s coachman nearly knocked down a woman carrying a baby on her back, but George was no more aware of this, than he was of the farm labourers digging up turnips in the fields, or the last russet leaves clinging to the trees. Instead he thought of what he might have said but hadn’t. Can I be blamed if your brother gets himself beaten about and robbed? The man’s old enough to look after himself, I daresay. D’you think my father bothers himself with penniless colonial soldiers with a taste for back-street politics? Strangely these imagined remarks comforted rather than depressed him. Even the contemplation of what might have been was better than facing the reality of what had actually occurred.

  *

  The three weeks since his brother’s return had been particularly joyless ones for Charles Crawford. Whenever he was ashore, without immediate prospects of a naval command, he felt lifeless and depressed, but this normal condition had been much aggravated by Helen Goodchild’s long silence, unbroken since his visit to Hanley Park on the day of the hunt. Charles’s disappointment was the greater for the strength of his earlier conviction that his words had struck home. He had often thought of calling on her again, but because Helen had made it so clear that she would write if she wanted his help, his pride had prevented him. Besides any woman faced with such a decision would need weeks rather than days to make up her mind. At times he wondered whether she might have acted on her own account, and this led him to entertain a faint hope that, if it were so, and she managed to wring concessions from Goodchild, as a result of his advice, he might yet be rewarded by her – if not with affection, at least with a closer friendship. But the occasions on which he felt much confidence of this were very few.

  The reason why Charles had been out, when George Braithwaite had called on Catherine, had been a visit to Rigton Bridge, where he had spent a frustrating and entirely fruitless afternoon trying to discover the identity of the man responsible for the attack on his brother. But nothing he had been told by the police commissioner or the chief magistrate had been of the remotest use.

  That evening, during the course of a hitherto silent dinner, Catherine remarked that George Braithwaite had come to Leaholme Hall during the afternoon.

  ‘Most thoughtful of him,’ commented Charles, laying down his knife and fork. ‘He must have plenty to occupy him with the election so close.’

  Seeing his sister’s hands apparently tremble as she raised her glass, Charles wondered whether a draught had deceived him by making the candles flicker. Catherine took a sip of hock and said in a flat unemotional voice:

  ‘I refused him, Charles.’

  ‘What?’ he gasped, almost choking on a mouthful of mutton.

  ‘His father is to blame for the attack on Magnus.’

  Dumbfounded, Charles raised a clenched fist to his brow.

  ‘Impossible,’ he exploded at last. ‘The men in custody were offered their freedom if they named their paymaster. They refused.’ He threw down his napkin and stared at her triumphantly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Fear?’

  ‘Fear be damned. They didn’t know his name; that’s why. Even if they had, he’d still have been some sort of go-between.’

  ‘Magnus is certain,’ she whispered.

  Charles pushed back his chair furiously.

  ‘Anyone who stoops to gutter politics can be certain of nothing. If he was so sure, why didn’t he tell me?’

  ‘If I believe it,’ she asked wearily, ‘does anything else matter?’

  He looked at her despairingly across the polished table.

  ‘You lose a husband worth ten thousand a year and calmly ask if anything matters … Dear God, Catherine … Throw that chance away because of some inane unfounded suspicion of your brother’s.’

  Though he had eaten little, Charles pushed away his plate and left the room. He had viewed his sister’s probable marriage to George as not only providential for her, but also as a considerable asset to him. Since George had intimated that he had no love for politics, it had brightened Charles’s gloomy horizon to hope that, when Joseph finally gave up the seat in the Commons which he would shortly win, this plum would drop into his lap as Braithwaite’s only son’s brother-in-law. Since three-quarters of the officers on the Navy List were at present ashore on half-pay, Charles had not ruled out the possibility that he would have to spend many years to come in the vicinity of Rigton Bridge. With Joseph’s friendship these years were likely to be considerably more profitable than without it. A few county families might still look upon them as parvenus, but they would soon learn to put self-interest before snobbery. The thought that Magnus had very likely put an end to all this, made Charles feel faint with anger. Soon he was stumbling up the stairs in the near-darkness, heading for his brother’s room. If Magnus was sufficiently recovered to turn Catherine against the Braithwaites, he would be well enough to listen to another point of view.

  *

  The bedroom was lit only by a single candle, but even by this dim light, Charles could see Magnus’s blackened and swollen mouth, his stitched-up chin and heavily bandaged forehead and jaw. He crossed to the bed and pulled up a chair, deliberately waking his brother in the process.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude,’ he murmured. ‘I have been doing my best to discover the identity of the instigator of….’

  ‘Don’t, Charles. I told you I didn’t want to trouble you.’

  ‘You would have troubled me less, had you confided as much in me as you did in your sister. Has she told you what she did this afternoon?’

  ‘She has.’

  Charles was not happy to be on the verge of screaming at a sick man, though he had seen too many men die of fever off Zanzibar to be maudlin over comparatively trivial ailments.

  ‘I know Catherine takes a different view of the matter,’ he began, making a conscious effort to control the pitch of his voice, ‘but if what she tells me is true, you’ve made an idiot of yourself … as though a paltry radical paper and a few meetings in the back-parlours of pot-houses could do Braithwaite more harm than a child’s pebbles rattling his windows. For God’s sake, man, is this the sort of thing for gentlemen? People aren’t forced to take bribes, you know; they do because they want to. If you think you’re going to change human nature, you’ll have a sad awakening.’

  Magnus closed his eyes and sighed.

  ‘Tip a stone from your shoe; the world’s no better, but your foot’s more comfortable. My aims were modest.’

  ‘To ruin the best chance of marriage Catherine’s ever going to get?’

  ‘I didn’t want her to marry him, but I
didn’t hit myself on the head to stop her.’

  Disconcerted by the tone of this answer, Charles said sharply:

  ‘But you’ll still associate yourself with a rag like the Independent. Don’t you care anything for father? For years he’s taken no sides in this town and his impartiality has gained him the respect of all.’

  ‘And the love of none,’ replied Magnus under his breath.

  ‘That’s a damned lie,’ hissed Charles.

  In spite of the pain it caused him, Magnus could not help smiling.

  ‘I was forgetting you, Charles, I apologise.’ He rolled over onto his side gingerly, so that he could see Charles better. ‘Do you actually suppose that because father subscribes to low church missions, while he pays for the restoration of a rood screen, that either the dissenter or the Anglican thinks any better of him for his gifts to the other?’

  Now that they were on the timeless ground of their age-old animosity about their spotless father, Magnus almost felt another person; the boy he had once been.

  ‘Does his career mean nothing to you?’

  ‘A great deal, Charles. It killed our mother.’

  ‘I saw him weep,’ whispered Charles in a shaking voice.

  ‘You saw me do the same. His career killed her. He should have wept,’ Magnus returned quietly. ‘If you think events in this town are likely to influence their lordships at the Admiralty, I suggest you’re mistaken.’