The Launching of Roger Brook (8 page)

To the north, farther up the slope, lay the gardens and backs of the largest houses of the old town, in which some activity was always to be seen; to the west lay open, wooded country and to the east, beyond the double row of limes that formed the drive up to the house, lay the little harbour. But the most engaging prospect was to the south. There, through low-lying meadows and mud-flats, where in spring innumerable gulls’ eggs were to be had for the collecting, the river Lym wound its way to the Solent. Across the three-mile-wide stretch of open water rose the island, sometimes so sharply visible that one felt one had only to reach out to touch it with the hand and the jetties of Yarmouth were easily discernible to the naked eye, at others with its heights shrouded in mist, so that only its tree-clad foreshore was visible and it took on the appearance of some mysterious jungle coast in a tropical sea.

This morning there was a faint haze which gave promise of another glorious day. Roger could see Hurst Castle on the low-lying spit that jutted out from the mainland, but he could only just discern Worsley’s Tower, opposite it on the island. There, the Solent was at its narrowest and for over a thousand years it had been the ill-omened road to the invasion of England. Vespasian had made the crossing in his galleys before capturing Lymington and launching his Roman legions on their conquest of Britain. Right up to Queen Elizabeth’s time the French had frequently held the vulnerable island for months at a stretch, and from it despatched forays that had pillaged and burnt the coast towns as far west as Devon.

It was for that reason that Baldwin de Redvers, second
Earl of Devon and feudal lord of Lymington, finding this little outpost of his vast domains too expensive to defend, had granted the town its freedom in the year 1150, thus making it one of the first free Boroughs in all England. But for the past two centuries, despite frequent periods of acute alarm, the Burgesses had remained safe behind the shield of the Royal Navy; and day in day out all through the year the vista was now a never-failing reminder that the power of Britain was based upon the sea. Brigs and brigantines, frigates, sloops and great three-deckers were ever to be seen as they tacked and veered on their way to protect our commerce in distant seas, or bringing the wealth that was the envy of the world to England’s shores.

But today, Roger had no eyes for the barque that was beating to seaward against the gentle sou’-westerly wind. Plunged in misery, his lively imagination was already conjuring up the dreaded interview with his father that was to come. That he was in for a licking, and a hard one, he had no doubt at all. It would be worse too than the spontaneous beating with a bamboo that he had escaped the previous night, since, now that he was on the way to being fully grown, his father would take a whip to him and not spare his blows. That was a foregone and nerve-shaking conclusion, but what was to befall after the licking had been administered? Should he humbly retract or risk further punishment by sticking to his guns?

He felt terribly alone and wished desperately that he had someone with whom he could talk over his wretched plight. It was useless to go to his mother for, much as she loved and would be sorry for him, she adored his father to distraction and considered that his every decision was for the best. Jack Bond of Buckland, Roger’s best friend, had not yet returned from Eton, and Dick Eddie of Priestlands was, so he had learned the day before, down with the smallpox. He knew a number of other boys in the neighbourhood but did not fed that any of them were intimate enough friends to fill his present need.

It was then that Georgina Thursby crossed his mind. It would never have occurred to him to go to any ordinary girl for sympathy and support in such a crisis, but Georgina was very far from being an ordinary girl. The Thursbys played no part in local society, for a very good reason, and Roger was the only neighbour who ever visited their house. He
had first met Georgina out riding alone in the forest, some two years previously; in itself a most unusual thing for a young girl to be allowed to do, but the Thursbys were a law unto themselves. Roger had struck up an acquaintance with her which had soon ripened into a warm friendship. She was, he knew, a bare-faced coquette, vain, self-willed and tempestuous, but Colonel Thursby had no other children and the solitary existence that she led, uncontrolled by any women, had made her boyish in her outlook, forthright in her opinions and courageous in her acts.

The more Roger thought of Georgina the more certain he felt that she would understand and with her quick mind even, perhaps, find some way out for him. His father had named no hour for the dreaded interview and was still abed. There was nothing to prevent his leaving the house and he was not even called on to let the servants know where he had gone. To ride over to the Thursbys now would at least be a respite from the ordeal of meeting his parents at a silent and sultry breakfast table. Turning, he made his way cautiously downstairs and out to the stables, saddled his mare himself and trotting up the lane to the town took the road to Highcliffe.

A seven-mile ride brought him to his destination. The name applied not to a village but the district in which lay the castle where Lord Bute, the King’s ex-tutor and minister, was spending his declining years, and a number of scattered houses. Highcliffe Manor, in which the Thursbys lived, was a comfortable cream-brick mansion with large double mullioned windows looking out on to a well-kept lawn and gardens. The house itself did not stand on high ground but its location could be fixed for many miles in any direction, owing to what was locally regarded as an eccentric foible of the Colonel’s. He was much interested in all new inventions and to test the strength of iron bars, as opposed to wooden beams, as a framework for building had, a few years earlier, erected in that medium a tower a hundred and fifty feet in height, at no great distance from his house. There, tall, thin and square, it reared up from a naked field but it now provided a fine landmark for ships out at sea and the whole surrounding countryside.

As Roger entered the hall Colonel Thursby was just coming downstairs to breakfast, and he at once invited the visitor to join them. The Colonel was a thin-faced, studious-looking
man in the middle fifties. He did not look in the least like a soldier and, in fact, had only been one in his youth because a wealthy father had bought him a Lt.-Colonelcy. On his father’s death he had promptly sold it and spent several years in travelling, visiting even such distant places as Turkey and Russia. On his return he had fallen violently in love with a beautiful girl who was then the toast of the county and, to the delight of all their acquaintances, married her. But their happiness had been short-lived. One night an overturned candle had set the curtains of the poor girl’s bed alight and she had been burned to death before anyone could come to her assistance.

For some months the Colonel had shut himself up, refusing all consolation. Then scandalous rumours had begun to circulate. It was said that he had a gipsy girl living in the house. With the easy morality of the times none of his neighbours would have condemned him for endeavouring to console himself with a pretty mistress, though it was thought in ill taste to keep the woman in the home to which he had only eighteen months before brought his young bride; but when a few months later he openly announced that he had married the gipsy, the depths of their disapproval were beyond plumbing.

Henceforth the Colonel was ostracised by all who had known him, and to complete his apparent discomfiture, his gipsy wife had died in bringing a daughter into the world. Actually he was little affected by the county’s condemnation, since he was richer than most of his neighbours, spent much of his time in London and—as he had never been a sporting man—when at his country home was perfectly content to amuse himself pottering in his well-stocked garden or browsing among his fine collection of books.

If anyone had suffered it was his daughter, since, even when she reached her teens, he had made no attempt to reopen social relations with his neighbours on her account and, although many of them were sorry for the motherless girl, they felt that it was not for them to take the first step.

Yet Georgina would not have had matters otherwise. She was shrewd enough to know that had local society been open to her she would have had to accept the authority of a governess, and been expected to conform to the simpering manners and unexciting lady-like pursuits of her contemporaries. Her father was wealthy, generous and a man of taste.
He ordered her clothes in London, so that her wardrobe put those of the local belles to shame, and had provided her with an education far above that of the average girl of her age by the simple process of long intimate talks and encouraging her to read widely, no book in his library being barred to her.

The Colonel had scarcely given orders for Roger’s mare to be taken round to the stables when there came a cry of delight from behind them. Turning, he saw Georgina, as fresh and pretty as a red rose with the morning dew still on it, come running down the staircase and with his three-cornered hat still in his hand he made her a most gallant leg.

She was now seventeen, over a year older than Roger, and well developed for her age. It is doubtful if, when they first met, she would have bothered with him but for her instinctive urge to captivate every male she set her black eyes upon, and the fact that he filled the need she unconsciously felt for a companion who could share her youthful enthusiasms. She had inherited the dark, lush beauty, big dewy eyes and full ripe mouth of her gipsy mother; had a splendid figure and a graceful freedom of carriage born of unrestrained activity in the open air. She rode like a female centaur, swam like a dryad and could climb trees with the agility of a monkey.

Roger was not in love with her but the feelings she aroused in him were as near love as he had so far got. He admired her dark beauty and at times was conscious of an uneasy feeling when he touched her; but she was too abrupt in her changes of mood and too dominating a personality to fit into his vague imaginings, which centred round a dreamy, fair-haired, blue-eyed creature reclining indolently on a settee. His attachment to her was much more in the nature of an honest comradeship, yet flavoured with a romantic desire to be her champion against the slight that he felt her neighbours had put upon her.

Georgina fully reciprocated the comradeship and accepted his awkward attempts at chivalry with secret mirth. She was, however, fully conscious that he was an embryo man and, for lack of more mature material to practise on, took delight in trying out his reactions to her latest toilettes and, on rare occasions, seeking to see how near she could get to rousing his apparently dormant passions.

Those passions were actually by no means so dormant as she supposed. Roger had little left to learn theoretically about the tender passion and had so far refrained from its practice only on account of a certain fastidiousness. In those days of easy morals no one thought the worse of a youngster for giving free rein to his budding desires, providing he did not attempt his friends’ sisters, and there were few country girls who did not consider it an honour to be seduced by a son of the quality. Roger knew half a dozen boys of his own age at Sherborne who had found willing initiators into the mysteries in their mothers’ maids, and one much-admired young coxcomb who had even successfully invaded the bed of his married cousin.

But Roger, having toyed with the idea of both Polly and Nell during his last holidays, had decided to wait until he came across a young girl of less buxom charms and one who would prove more mentally exciting. As far as Georgina was concerned he knew that to think of her in that way was to play with fire, and, since he placed her automatically in the same category as he would have one of his friends’ sisters, he rarely allowed himself to do so.

Yet now, as they all went into the dining-room, he could not help remarking how much more beautiful she seemed to have become since he had last seen her, and the laughter in her wicked dark eyes gave him a sudden half-guilty thrill.

The dining-room was furnished with the new tulip-wood which was just then coming into fashion and the two sideboards were laden, one with half a dozen hot dishes, the other with a cold ham, pig’s face and crystal bowls of peaches, nectaries, apricots and grapes from Colonel Thursby’s glass-houses.

The Colonel and Roger helped themselves lavishly, but after surveying the tempting array uncertainly for a moment, Georgina declared with a pout: ‘The very sight of food so early in the day gives me the vapours. Twill be as much as I can do to face a bowl of bread and milk.’

Roger looked at her in astonishment, but the Colonel gave him a sly wink. ‘See, Roger, what a London season has done for your old play-fellow. Had we had notice of your coming, I vow she would have had her hair dressed a foot high and used a sack of flour upon it; ’tis only overnight that she has lost that fine appetite of hers.’

Then he turned to his daughter and gave her a friendly
slap on the behind. ‘Don’t be a fool, girl, or you’ll be famished by mid-morning. Pretend to live on air when you’re in London, if you will, but spare us these conceits here in the country.’

Georgina suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Oh, well, give me some salmon pasty then, and an egg; but no bacon; the fat makes me queasy, and that’s the truth.’

Roger had been so occupied with his own concerns that he had temporarily forgotten that Georgina must have only just returned from her first London season, and so now should be definitely regarded as grown up. With a smile he asked her how she had enjoyed herself.

‘’Twas a riot,’ she declared, enthusiastically. ‘Balls, routs and conversaziones tumbled a-top of each other with a swiftness you’d scarce credit possible. For all of ten weeks I was never up before mid-day or abed before two in the morning.’

‘I wonder you didn’t die of your exertions, but I must say you look none the worse for it,’ remarked her father. ‘’Tis your poor aunt that I was sorry for, though. I wouldn’t have had the chaperoning of you for a mint of money.’