3 Great Historical Novels (91 page)

Rotten Row was not the morass of deliquescing mud Minnie had somehow expected, but a handsome, broad, sanded thoroughfare, like an avenued racecourse, along the Knightsbridge side of Hyde Park. There had been a violent gale the night before and any last leaves had finally left the trees.

Arthur went riding in a top hat, which Minnie found rather strange. At home people used horses for getting about rather than for showing off their best clothes. They just wore flat caps to keep their heads warm or wide brimmed hats to keep the sun off. But Arthur looked good, she granted, in a top hat: the formality suited him, for on occasion he could look too boyish, spontaneous and floppy-haired for his own good. This afternoon he certainly looked like a man. For the first time she was slightly in awe of him, and when he laid an elegant grey-gloved hand on her arm and smiled, she felt gratified and flattered. Last time she’d been with him there had been engine oil beneath his nails: there probably still was, but what you didn’t see you needn’t dwell on.

Her father’s broad, reddened hands were often ingrained with dirt, no matter how her mother nagged him and oiled them. He was a cattleman and proud of it, wealthy beyond his own belief, but changed in any way because of it? No sir, not at all. Or so he presented himself. He shook hands with
presidents, but wouldn’t think of wearing gloves to do so. Her mother’s hands too were broad and big, and these days puffy as well: she thanked her own good fortune that this particular inheritance had passed her by, so that the hand that now Arthur pressed to his lips in greeting, was small, long-fingered and in all manner elegant. Minnie did not wear gloves – how could you get the feel of reins, let alone your mount, through gloves? Arthur’s were grey suede, fashionable no doubt, but would be the devil to keep clean.

Minnie felt of a sudden at a loss to know what to say to him. She had no brothers, her father was mostly too busy to be anything but remote, and she had been well chaperoned, until her sudden wild flight with Stanton. His discourse could be strange and sometimes irrational, but certainly did not amount to small talk. And in this country, she had quickly learned, polite small talk was valued. Few addressed subjects head on, from the weather to fashion, to the difference between country and town, or one country and another. Only yesterday conversation with Arthur had flowed so well: today, as it became self conscious, it faltered.

‘If you don’t know what to say to a man,’ Tessa had told Minnie often enough, ‘ask him a question. Then they can feel less of an eejit than you because they know the answer. Just don’t ask him something he doesn’t know. He’ll hate you for it.’ Minnie took the risk.

‘Why is it called Rotten Row,’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

Arthur raised his eyebrows and complained that she was a stranger from a strange land – which in this country seemed something of an insult – and she replied that from where she sat in her saddle his land was a lot stranger than hers. It’s just older, he said, a lot older. Rotten Row had been named Route
du Roi two hundred years ago when William of Orange had it cleared and lit as a safe route for him to get to Whitehall, and vulgar tongues had reduced it to a crude phonetic parody in the intervening years.

‘That was back when your land was still inhabited only by buffaloes and Red Indians,’ he remarked, and she didn’t bother to deny it, wondering why he seemed so set on condescending to her about her supposedly ‘colonial’ character. She had an intuition that perhaps something had happened since she last saw him to change his mind about her desirability. What, though? Or perhaps he was just tired.

Arthur was in truth feeling a little exhausted. He had been staying up late in the garage seeing to the Jehu’s new condenser, which was to his own design. This had involved borrowing a set of blacksmith’s tools from the stables – forge, anvil, grinding machine, drills, ratchets, files and so on. He had only stopped for outings to Flora, sometimes accompanied by Redbreast, sometimes not. Today he was still slightly dazed by last night’s encounter, but on the other hand invigorated by a world full of new possibilities, new excitements. Marriage to Minnie was still desirable, but only if it did not mean giving up Flora. His bride, for her part, would have to come to accept the unspoken mores and imperatives of the well-born English. He would behave honourably towards Minnie, of course he would; she would provide the Hedleighs not just with a new heir to carry on their name and create a new Dilberne, and fresh generations of children out of new breeding stock, but the life of his senses would remain his own. Intimacy with Minnie would be to do with the procreation of children, as the Church decreed, and a higher and better thing set apart.

Arthur could see that he should perhaps bring the subject up – as the Prince of Wales, to all accounts, had brought it up
with Princess Alexandra before their marriage – out of simple respect for Minnie’s intelligence, but now was hardly the time. He had too recently been in Flora’s bed to think clearly, let alone to work out how best to introduce the subject tactfully. Perhaps a mention of the Princess’s acceptance, indeed friendship, with some of her husband’s mistresses, would work well? He had an idea that the Americans, for all their apparent frankness and vulgarity, were more Mrs Grundyish, more prone to moral disapproval, than was reasonable. But there was plenty of time before he had to deal with that.

He gasped a little as the silk of his shirt caught his shoulders where Flora’s nails had torn the skin. The pain was pleasure as well. These were worlds far beyond Minnie’s comprehension. He thought perhaps he could go back and see Flora in the evening. On the other hand a short sleep would be extremely restorative.

‘You must understand that you are perfectly at liberty to change your mind about our getting married,’ she was saying. ‘I found our conversation the other day most exhilarating, and very un-American, and I will never forget it, but we may not have been in our right minds.’

He liked the way she spoke to him in this direct manner. He said he was as sane today as he had been two weeks ago, or was ever likely to be, and they would carry on the courtship as planned, and then announce it in a month or two. And he was pleased when she dimpled and looked happy. Flora had all kind of expressions, but a straightforward look of happiness did not seem to be amongst them. When you offered her money the look of lasciviousness would increase and the aggrieved air decrease, and her limbs arrange themselves perhaps in a more accessible way, but it was not happiness for its own sake.

Minnie was looking very neat and chaste, he thought, in her perky little bowler, and perfectly suitable for a Dilberne wife. He would have to settle down one day and good wife material was hard to come by. She seemed efficient, competent and clear-headed, qualities which were necessary for her part in running the estate. He was rather vague as to what his mother actually contributed to the running of the estate, other than she paid visits to villagers, kept an eye on the sick and afflicted, and had started a school. Another reason, he suspected, why Isobel preferred life in Belgrave Square to that at Dilberne Court. Country life could be quite tedious for a woman, especially if she were not keen on horses, as his mother was not, and did not hunt. He was glad to see that Minnie was good on a horse. He had arranged a quiet mount for her.

As for Minnie, she realized that away from the constraints of everyday life, it seemed a girl could develop a great recklessness. What was she doing? This was not how most respectable courtships proceeded, slowly and cautiously. But she certainly did not want to go back to Chicago where Stanton lived with his wife, and she, Minnie, was an object of scandal. Even her new art teacher at the Chicago Institute, who had encouraged her, and talked so much of free love and the life force, had begun to look her up and down in a most speculative way, and wanted to paint her in the nude, so she had felt obliged to stop attending. She might as well have had a scarlet letter ‘A’ painted on her forehead.

The art schools in London actually encouraged women to paint and make it their profession; best to choose this perfectly amiable young man, whom she really rather liked, and her mother approved, and her father would if her mother told him to, and be done with it. She would end up with a title and no doubt a big wedding, even if not in Westminster Abbey – where
she’d heard only royalty could marry – and have better-trained servants than they ever had in Chicago, and the fashions in London were so much better than at home. And the food over here – the Brown’s breakfast was a joy, and the dinner at Pagani’s had a
finesse
she’d never encountered anywhere: even in the new Silversmith’s in Chicago the steaks were thick and bloody and the size of a plate, with sauerkraut on the side. And here in England there was culture. Everything had its history; even a riding track called Rotten Row was once a king’s back yard. Her children would be part of all this, not of the mean, lace-curtain culture of the Irish in America. And she could study at the Royal Academy, or at the Slade. The Dilbernes would hardly object to that. And Paris would not be so far away.

Arthur’s mount was a very elegant, nervy racehorse with a Russian name which his father didn’t know he had borrowed. Arthur’s father had been at the House of Lords deciding the fate of the nation, so apparently had not been around to ask. Otherwise of course Arthur would have sought permission.

It was decidedly a cut above all the other mounts on the Row this afternoon, they ranging from the scraggy and starving to the fat and waddling, it not apparently being ‘the season’.

‘Pater’s been at the House a great deal this season.’

Pater
. The upper classes all knew Latin as much as English, especially the men. And ‘season’ was a word that came up a lot.

‘What season?’ asked Minnie. ‘I thought that was for the debutantes, when they are presented to the Queen. The one I just missed. There was a lovely sketch in the
Graphic
. So much flowing white silk, so many diamonds. It was one of the reasons I wanted to come, even though they said all the most marriageable bachelors had been snapped up.’

‘The shooting season, silly,’ said Arthur, and pointed out that most of the guns were currently in the country shooting
birds, and most of the smart people were out of town. By rights he too should be in Hampshire at this time of year, but he had more than enough to occupy him in town at the moment. What was occupying him, she wondered? It was not as if he seemed to ‘do’ anything. In America men had jobs. They thought it was normal to work and earn. Here it seemed enough to be ‘a gentleman’.

But Minnie hoped he was referring to her, and the suspicion that he wasn’t caused a sudden unexpected pain in her heart, which unsettled her. If she was to marry this young man, she had thought yesterday, it would be simply as a sort of refined trade – coldly: his title and way of life in return for her money – the idea that she might suffer emotionally, as she had when she parted with Stanton the artist quite frightened her. But it was rather too late to worry. She
wanted
to marry him, stranger in a strange land though she realized she was.

She was being foolish, no doubt about it. She had stayed awake all the precious night in a romantic haze, dreaming about living in a stately home with the Earl of Dilberne, one day to be the Countess, and in the dream coolness had ended up as passionate love. The detail of their lovemaking, visualized when half asleep, was much like the lovemaking she had engaged in with Stanton Turlock. Indeed, in her half sleep he and Arthur merged into one. She’d sat up in bed, wide awake and shocked at herself.

She could see her mother’s point: if girls remained virgins their judgement would stay unclouded as to whom, and when they should marry. Of course it was a serious decision. Your husband decided your social milieu, your income and your friends, not to mention your children, so you had better get it right. No use envisaging divorce. To get divorced in the States you could at least claim mental cruelty: not here. Here if you
weren’t a good wife in the eyes of the law not even his adultery would get you out of it – and here if you left him he kept the children. Perhaps she would never ever be able to see things clearly again.

If just wondering what he did when he was not with her caused her pain she was a pretty contemptible case. If thinking about him made her think of Stanton naked in bed with her, her cause was lost. In her dream there were all kinds of things a man and woman could get to do with each other, if only you found a man prepared to experiment. But how, if you did not sleep with him in advance would you know what it was like? The cult of virginity was a nonsense. Again, she shocked herself. This young man with the floppy hair and the top hat could not possibly be, as it were, approached before marriage. ‘Bad girl, bad girl,’ she found herself saying to herself under her breath, in much the same way as she said to her little dog back home, ‘Good boy, good boy’. If so many people in Chicago saw her as a bad girl and she didn’t much care, it suggested they were right. That was what she was. Not that ‘badness’ was anything which necessarily barred you from joining the English aristocracy so far as Minnie could see.

All the same they wouldn’t want their noses rubbed in it. She hoped gossip from Chicago didn’t follow her. Her father had paid enough to try and ensure it didn’t. Yet Grace seemed in her attitude to know something: did ‘bad-girl-ness’ show in the face? Could it so?

Minnie was seated side-saddle, in her skirts, in obedience to Grace and on a rather placid, slow beast with too thin a neck, and going at a gentle trot. Arthur bobbed up and down beside her on Agripin, a handsome bay. He told her all about the horse’s ancestry and that his father had won him from the Prince of Wales in a wager, as if she should be impressed.
Minnie was used to riding a Morgan, and bareback if necessary. It was not so great a skill. If you could stay on an unbroken ranch horse for half a minute you could do pretty much anything on a horse. Here on Rotten Row she and Arthur rode sedately together. Conversation remained a little stiff. Dull, dull, dull.