Post of Honour (2 page)

II

O
ld Willoughby died in the new year, the direct result according to his boy Francis, of travelling to Whinmouth in foul weather to conduct a service and riding home the same night. It was partially true, inasmuch as he died only a week later of pneumonia but Willoughby was nearly seventy and had never enjoyed the robust health of the other tenants although, for some years now—ever since his Road-to-Damascus conversion at a Methodist camp-meeting—he had driven himself hard, sometimes making a journey of forty miles to witness The Truth. At his funeral in the tiny Nonconformist burial ground adjoining the Methodist Chapel in Coombe Bay Paul noticed that the Valley was as well represented as it had been at old Tamer’s funeral, when the whole countryside had turned out to pay tribute to such an unlikely hero. The centuries-old feud between church and chapelgoers was finally buried with Willoughby, for Parson Horsey attended, standing a little apart from the dry-eyed Elinor Codsall and her hulking husband Will, who looked clownish in his blue serge suit. Paul said to Francis Willoughby, as they walked back to the lych-gate, ‘He was a good man, Francis, and I shall never forget how well he behaved on the night of the wreck. He didn’t have an enemy in the Valley, did he?’, and Francis said no, not now that Parson Bull had gone but that the old man had been inclined to let Deepdene take second place to his preaching and the place was now in bad heart.

‘You’ll be carrying on, I hope,’ Paul said and Francis replied that it depended on how much money his father had left for there was very little profit in poultry now that Elinor had gone and for some time the farm had been badly understocked. ‘I always wanted him to go in for beef,’ he added, ‘but he never would, for he couldn’t stomach the idea of fattening animals for the slaughter-house. He ought to have been a vet instead of a farmer, he was clever with a sick beast.’

Paul said, ‘Look here, Frank, if you think you can make a success of beef go ahead and chance your luck! I’ll ask Honeyman to see what he can do to give you a start and you know that I’m all for specialisation. It’s certainly worked over at Four Winds, and at your sister’s little place. You don’t have to show a profit for a year or two for I shouldn’t press you,’ and Francis, a young man of few words where his father had had so many murmured his thanks but little else, so Paul sought out Elinor who agreed that it was a sound notion and told Francis so on the spot.

The upshot of the conversation was that Francis Willoughby sold his poultry to his sister, his pigs to Henry Pitts and thereafter concentrated on beef cattle and Paul noticed that he seemed to flower within weeks of his father’s death, as though, for the first time in his life, he could farm instead of deputising for a man who preferred the pulpit to the strawyard. He had always been a very reserved young man, small and neat like Elinor but lacking the stamina she had shown from the day Will Codsall carried her as a bride to the half-ruined holding at Periwinkle. Paul first noticed the dramatic change in Francis while crossing a Deepdene meadow on his way home from the last meet of the season. He saw him driving a bunch of steers into a kale field and at first he thought the lad must be having trouble for he darted this way and that, waving his jacket and uttering sharp, staccato shouts but after watching a moment he realised that Francis was only amusing himself by pretending to be a matador so he rode on without advertising himself, realising that the new master of Deepdene would be very embarrassed if he thought his charade was overlooked. He thought, ‘Well, that’s another little problem sorted out but it’s a pity the old man had to die first! That’s the way it seems to be, however; Martin Codsall goes crazy and Eveleigh steps in to make a go of Four Winds; Tamer Potter gets drowned and his two daughters take up with a tireless clodhopper who succeeds in revitalising the Dell; and now Frank Willoughby plays at bullfighting in his own meadow and that within a month of his father being laid in the earth!’, and he rode on down to the Ford musing and feeling that, although the Valley seemed always to stand still, this was really a delusion and that its blood was circulating all the time as new approaches were made to old problems and new hands laid on old tools.

III

I
key Palfrey passed out of Woolwich with creditable marks in the late summer of 1912 and came home on furlough for a month before joining his battery in India. Claire thought he had changed a good deal during the last two or three years and Paul admitted that he had, at least outwardly, for he was now a shade short of six feet and had also filled out, losing the lean, rakish build of his cross-country days. Yet to Paul he was still the Ikey Palfrey plucked from the scrapyard ten years ago, a waif with an impudent way of looking seniors in the eye as if, whilst prepared to be lectured now and again, he reserved the right to treat scoldings as so much pi-jaw without much significance.

Claire had never felt wholly at ease with Ikey and, without in the least knowing why, went out of her way to maintain the slightly impersonal relationship that grew up between them. In the early days of her marriage, when Ikey was only a boy and away at school most of the time, it had been easy to patronise him but later on, when he was about eighteen, she began to suspect that, more often than not, and in the kindest possible way, he was laughing at her and this led her to discard patronage in favour of propitiation, although she could think of no reason at all why she should adopt such an attitude. It might, she sometimes thought, have something to do with that curious letter he had written her all those years ago, the one urging her to visit the injured Squire after he had called out for her in a fever. She had never mentioned this letter to anyone, not even to Paul, yet here again she could find no adequate reason for keeping it a secret, for she had never once doubted its substance. Ikey was always very polite to her and she did not think it likely that he still regarded himself as the agent who brought man and wife together, reasoning that he had probably forgotten the letter by now and yet, every now and again when their eyes met over the table, or she found herself alone with him, his knowing air put her at a disadvantage. He still addressed her as ‘Ma’am’, as though she was a queen to whom he owed an indirect allegiance, and this slightly uncomfortable relationship had not been eased by a recent exchange over Simon, occurring soon after her discussion with Grace concerning the boy.

Claire took her duties as stepmother very seriously and had gone out of her way to avoid discriminating between Simon and her own children, often to the latters’ disadvantage. Simon was a difficult child to know and inclined to walk alone but she had persisted and was confident that he had a genuine affection for her. She had thought a good deal before taking Grace’s advice, and discussing with Ikey the possibility of telling Simon some form of disguised truth about his mother. She would have preferred to leave things as they were and let him grow up thinking of himself as her child but she remembered that the Valley relished scandal of every kind and with Simon approaching his eighth birthday it was likely that he would soon learn the truth from an outside source which it was surely her duty to anticipate. So, in the end, she told Ikey the gist of her conversation with Grace in the hotel bedroom after the suffragette scuffle and as always he listened gravely and politely to what she had to say. When, however, she told him that Grace had advised her to employ him as her agent, he smiled his rather irritating smile and said, ‘I’m afraid it’s too late, Ma’am. Simon already knows all there is to know.’ She said, shocked by this news, ‘He does? Who told him?’ and without a blush he admitted having told Simon himself more than a year ago, after the child had made an appeal to him for information on the subject.

At first she was furiously angry but then common sense warned her that she was being unjust and that Simon must have got an inkling from one of the tenants or estate workers before approaching Ikey in the first place. She said crisply, ‘He
came
to you? After hearing gossip from somebody else?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ he replied calmly, ‘I didn’t ask him.’

‘Why didn’t you ask him?’

He lifted his shoulders, refusing to be rattled. ‘I don’t know, perhaps because it seemed to me to be prying. He had probably been eavesdropping and heard something he wasn’t meant to hear. He asked me about his mother so I told him.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been wiser to have sent him to me or his father?’

‘I don’t think so, Ma’am. If he had wanted that he would have gone to you or Squire instead of me.’

She bit her lip and at that moment she could cheerfully have boxed his ears but behind her resentment she could not help admiring his grasp of essentials. She said rather sharply, ‘Well, how did he take it? Was it a shock to him?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it was a shock. I cushioned it as well as I could, and I got the impression he had always known there was a difference between him and the twins and Mary. How can we be sure he didn’t get a hint years ago, a chance remark made by any one of us when we thought him too young to notice?’

She considered this and the pause gave her a chance to master her temper and make an honest effort to put herself in Ikey’s place. After all, he was quite possibly right, for adults often make this mistake and in any case it was done now and her relationship with Simon had improved rather than deteriorated in the last year. She said with a shrug, ‘Well, I’m glad it’s over and done with but I shall have to tell Squire what happened and I daresay he’ll want to hear more details.’

Ikey nodded, absently she thought and said, ‘I did what I thought best at the time, I’m sorry if I put my foot in it. It seemed to me that, by making an issue of it Simon might have been more confused than he was. That was why I made light of it, Mrs Craddock.’

Devil take the boy, she thought, he’s infallible! It occurred to her then how odd it was that Grace should have singled out Ikey for a mission already accomplished and with this thought came another, more disquieting one for it seemed to her that Ikey’s loyalty was to Grace rather than to her and it distressed her to think this for until then it had always seemed that all trace of Grace Lovell had been banished from the house whereas it was now evident that something of Grace lingered. The uncertainty caused by this reflection must have shown in her face for, with his strange faculty for reading thoughts, he said, gently, ‘I wouldn’t worry about it any more, Ma’am. Simon looks on you as his mother and why shouldn’t he? You haven’t failed him in that respect and I’m sure you never will.’

Suddenly, and shamefully, she wanted to cry and he must have seen this too, for he turned away and lounged off, hands deep in his pockets while she stood there feeling more unsure of herself than at any time since her return to the Valley. But she was Edward Derwent’s daughter and had emotional reserves at her disposal, so presently she blew her nose, threw up her head and marched off along the terrace to the rose garden where she remained until she had regained control of herself.

She found a way of telling Paul without making an issue of it, throwing the information into a general conversation about her talk with Grace at the hotel and saying, with a casualness that deceived him, ‘Grace wondered if Simon knew I was his stepmother; I told her that Ikey had explained it to him long ago,’ and all Paul replied was, ‘Ikey did? Well, good for him! It was something I should have put off indefinitely.’

And that, so far as Claire was concerned, would have been that had not a new development involving Ikey and Simon taken place during Ikey’s embarkation leave, a year later. This time Claire found herself in uneasy alliance with Ikey, siding with him at the risk of engaging in her first serious quarrel with the man she adored.

It happened at lunchtime, on a day towards the end of October after Paul and Simon had come in from a morning’s cubbing in the woods. Paul seemed very put out about something and Simon, after kicking off his little boots and throwing down his hard hat and riding switch, disappeared upstairs, remaining there in spite of being called for lunch. The twins and Mary were in the nursery and the only other person at table was Ikey, who had seemed very preoccupied this leave, a circumstance Claire attributed to the imminence of his first tour overseas. Claire said, as Mrs Handcock appeared with the vegetables, ‘I’ll see to that! Go up and get Simon, I’ve already called him three times!’ but Paul said, unexpectedly, ‘Leave him to work out his sulks!’ and Mrs Handcock departed, buttoning her lip as she always did when there was an atmosphere at table.

‘Did anything happen this morning?’ Claire asked and Paul grunted that sometimes he couldn’t get to the bottom of ‘that boy’, and that it was time Simon went to school to get sense knocked into him.

Ikey perked up at this, winking at Claire who at once demanded to know what had happened. It was something very trivial, he told her—Gilbert Eveleigh, as whipper-in, had posted Simon on his pony in the north run while most of the others stood back from the covert. The boy had been told to holler back as soon as the fox in the thick undergrowth crossed the ride towards a known earth north of the mere. The fox went in that direction—Gilbert and others would swear to that—but no holler came from Simon, and when they had all dashed round to his side of the wood he was seen walking his pony down a ride nearly a mile from the spot where he had been stationed. The fox got clean away and when Paul demanded to know whether Simon had seen it he admitted that he had but had turned away rather than holler.

‘Why ever did he do that?’ asked Claire much surprised, and Paul said that on the way home Simon had told him he did not want to go hunting again and that he thought hunting ‘wasn’t really a gentleman’s sport!’

This was too much for Ikey who let out a loud guffaw and even Claire smiled but Paul, whose sense of humour was unpredictable, said, ‘What’s funny about it? I felt a damned ass I can tell you! And as for him feeling squeamish about hunting we don’t want the boy to develop into a milksop, do we?’

‘He’ll not do that,’ Ikey said and with so much emphasis that Claire saw he no longer treated the incident as a joke. ‘If the kid really feels that way,’ he went on, ‘then jolly good luck to him! He’s probably right anyway!’