The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (31 page)

Henry laughed. ‘Dear, dear Helen Frances, I hardly think that his wife considered what I was doing a terrible thing. She couldn't get enough of it. But I was telling you about the “wrong” I had suffered at the hands of her husband. If you want to be a woman of the world, Helen Frances, I'm afraid that you'll have to accept what goes on in it.'

‘What could he possibly have done to you to merit such revenge?'

‘I suppose he annoyed me,' said Henry, quietly.

‘Annoyed you? Is that all?'

‘Sometimes that's enough. You see, I was young in those days. I'd just joined the Regiment, fresh from Eton and Sandhurst. Full of martial ardour, eager for glory and renown. The good earl, my commanding officer, accused me of cheating at cards at my first mess dinner. Of course, it's a game they play with all the new officers. Each regiment has its own rite of passage. Put the raw young lieutenant in an impossible situation, test his mettle, laugh about it afterwards. The problem was that I was drunk, and—well, I didn't see the joke. I didn't like it when I was held down in my chair and the extra aces were pulled out of my pocket where they had been planted. I showed my outrage and that, of course, fuelled the humour. Upshot was I punched his lordship in the eye. And then he didn't see the joke. For a month I was on punishment drill, essentially demoted to the ranks.'

‘But that's so cruel,' said Helen Frances.

‘Is it?' asked Henry. ‘Can't have lieutenants punching colonels. What would become of the Empire? I suppose, as a gentleman, I might have resigned my commission, but I was damned if I'd let them have that satisfaction. So I said nothing, put up with the punishment. That earned me some respect from my brother officers. No ranker was better turned out on parade. It would all have blown over—but I'm not, unfortunately, the sort of man to let things blow over. Not that easily. It so happened that the Duke of Connaught, the honorary colonel of our Regiment, was inspecting us that month. Grand day. Great ceremony. Great crowds at Horse Guards. Our colonel, the glorious earl, of course rode beside him. Very resplendent. Unfortunately his horse started crapping the moment it left the barracks and didn't stop until everything was over. I'd dosed its feed, you see. Very embarrassing. Made him a laughingstock in the penny press, and Connaught was not amused in the slightest.'

Helen Frances giggled despite herself. ‘Is that why you had to join the Engineers?' she asked.

‘Oh, no,' said Henry. ‘There was nothing to pin it on me. But the colonel knew. And then it was war, though nobody said anything. I won't bore you with the intricacies. He'd have got me transferred eventually, but I made sure he couldn't.'

‘How did you do that?' asked Helen Frances.

‘By seducing his wife, my dear,' he replied.

‘What?'

‘Well, he really would have been a laughingstock if he played the jealous husband, wouldn't he? Not much he could do.' He laughed bitterly. ‘In those elevated circles it's not being a cuckold that is shameful but showing you care about it. You may not credit it, but the safest place I could possibly be was in his wife's bed.
C'est trop drôle, n'est-ce pas?
Of course I was foolish to underestimate him. I told you I was young. The daughter wasn't in the original plan, you see. Anyway, I was punished for my temerity. Exiled from the realm. Am I being too blunt for you, by the way? Isn't this what you wanted to hear?'

‘You're not the cynical character you make yourself out to be. I don't believe it. Why are you telling me all this?' Her lip was trembling and there was moistness in her eye.

They had reached an irrigation ditch, which separated two fields. With a violent movement, she kicked her horse headlong over the lip, and lurched haphazardly down and up the steep banks, as if trying to create a distance from the conversation that was disturbing her.

Henry looked thoughtfully after her, before expertly manoeuvring his own horse obliquely down the bank and up the slope on a gentler gradient. ‘Oh, I could have lied to you,' he said, when he came up to her. She had cantered a few hundred yards onwards, and had now stopped, waiting for him. ‘Invented something bland and romantic. Perhaps I could have told you how I had been cheated of my inheritance by a black-hearted relation so my only recourse was to hide in the colonies to escape my debts, nursing my revenge until I could return and claim my estate—isn't that the sort of thing that happens to young heroes in all the respectable novels? But life's not like that. And you're not one to believe it is either, Helen Frances, are you? You're like me deep down, though you don't know it yet. You're no sentimentalist. You see the world for what it is. And you're hungry. Again like me. Hungry for experience.'

Helen Frances shook her head, but did not move. It was as if his speech had hypnotised her and her horse to the spot.

‘Oh, I seduced the mother, all right. It wasn't as if I was sampling anything my brother officers, and I daresay the odd strapping corporal, hadn't sampled already—you haven't the faintest idea of what these Society women are like, have you? Nothing like a discreet affair with a younger man to put rose into a fading bloom—not that she was a fading bloom; she was magnificent in her way—but I was not discreet. I made sure I wasn't discreet. I wanted her husband and all the rest of Mayfair to know about it. Had to get my own back somehow. And I was toast of the season, at least in the smart clubs, and there was damn-all his lordship, the old goat, could do about it. You see, Helen Frances, sinning, as I think you probably still call it in your quaint convent vocabulary, is what gentlemen and married ladies tend to do with each other when they get the chance. We change bedrooms at house parties like swapping punts on the river, and go shooting with the cuckolded husbands next morning all smiles. It's what's known as being fashionable.'

‘And his daughter?' she asked shrilly. ‘You said you ravished his daughter? Did you?'

Henry looked as if he would deliver some new epigram, then he sighed. The irony dropped from his voice.

‘No, Helen Frances. I ravished nobody. If anything it was the opposite. Caroline ravished me. Heart and soul. I never knew any creature so beautiful, or so vicious. It was at Leylands, and she caught me as I came out of her mother's room on a summer morning, dawn light shining through the curtains, and birds singing outside, and she was standing in her nightdress in the corridor, smiling at me like a wicked angel. I was hers from that moment, and she knew I was. She just smiled knowingly at me and slipped back into her bedroom, leaving the door ajar—and I followed her.'

*   *   *

Lao Zhao, reining in his mule a respectful distance away, looked curiously at the two motionless riders, rigid in their saddles, oblivious of their mounts grazing in the stubble, talking, talking, talking as usual—but this time they were being remarkably serious about it, he thought. He had never seen his master so tense, or the woman so pale and rapt in concentration.

*   *   *

‘Of course, she'd planned it,' said Henry, after a long, wistful pause. ‘She was pregnant already, though you wouldn't have known it, with her elfin body and a waist you could put your hand round. She ignored me at breakfast next day—oh, she was haughty—and that fired me all the more. All that week I lived only for the early mornings when I could be alone with her. I spent the days in a dream of her hair, her looks, her touch, her smell. Even when I was making love to her mother I only had thoughts for her—yes, she told me I had to continue my affair with her mother, I suppose it amused her, she told me it excited her. But every morning I dreaded that her door would be closed; and my heart would sing when I turned the handle, and there she would be with that wide, welcoming smile in the middle of a pool of chestnut hair on the pillow, and the thin white arms stretching out, as the sparrows and finches sang outside the window. Oh, the beauty of those mornings…'

‘You talk as if you were in love.'

‘I was in love. That was all part of their plan.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘On the fifth morning she waited until I was gathering my clothes again from the chair beside her bed; I was about to slip out as quietly as I had come in. And then she screamed. High-pitched, on and on, like some wounded animal. I can hear it now. Horrible. And I watched stunned as she scratched at her breasts and thighs and banged her face against the bedpost till it bruised. In his nightgown her father came charging in, brandishing a walking stick, more like a cudgel. He'd obviously had it prepared. It must have given him some satisfaction to be able to beat me with impunity before the other house guests arrived, woken by the noise. Of course, it was all very evident to everyone what had happened, the way the father and daughter had planned it to look. The ruined girl sobbing among the rumpled sheets, the ravisher caught after the act.

‘There was no scandal. I was offered the chance of marrying her, a bit perfunctorily: my family name was good enough for them and they would have preferred the bastard legitimate if they could, though of course I was told I could never stay in the same house as Caroline and we would be divorced as soon as it was appropriate. Well, my pride raged at being used, and I refused. So I was quietly cashiered, disgraced as only the English know how, so a man's ruin never ripples the surface of Society, but everyone knows, and every door is barred. I was lucky that my father could get me a position in the Engineers, but even India was considered too close by some for the likes of me. I misled you about how welcome I was at the Viceroy's parties at Simla. My reputation accompanied me wherever I went. Mustn't moan. I was fortunate to be allowed my freedom. After all, I was now a ravisher, and that's life or a rope if convicted.'

Henry paused, then clicked his tongue, propelling his horse onward at a slow walk. Helen Frances kept pace. ‘What happened to the baby?' she asked softly.

‘Caroline disappeared to some spa town and after the delivery put the infant out to farm. No slur on her reputation, not that many knew anything about it, but those who did considered her to be the poor innocent victim of a philanderer who had also debauched her mother. There was every sympathy for her and eventually she was married off to some old peer.

‘Who was the original father, whom presumably this whole charade was designed to protect? I don't know for sure, but Caroline had spent the best part of the season at Kensington Palace and Windsor, and Bertie was then at his most goatish. Everyone knows he has his mistresses and some know he's fathered the odd bastard—and that's all right, because his mistresses have either been actresses and chorus girls who don't matter, or married women with compliant, ambitious husbands. Having a love child with the young, unmarried daughter of a peer would have been quite another thing. Our upper-class young ladies are supposed to be virgins till they've been to the altar, don't you know, not that many of them are. You're beginning to understand now, I take it, the mores of our polite society? Play by the rules, and you can rut to your heart's content, and Society will load you with laurels and rewards. Damnation to you if you don't.

‘His lordship the colonel did well enough, honoured in the New Year List, promoted to major-general by the spring, his reward for first pimping his daughter and then for conducting a tidy piece of housekeeping afterwards. No doubt her ladyship rapidly found some other buck to console her. And I daresay the wayward daughter, now she has her precious respectability back, is cutting a path through the Hussars in London as her mother did before her. Meanwhile I was exiled to the colonies. Why? For being indiscreet. You see, I never should have boasted in the clubs about the old girl, her mother. Laid myself open, hadn't I? Bad form.

‘And there it is, Helen Frances. The whole edifying story. You asked. I answered. I suppose I should be ashamed of the follies of my youth. I'm not. But if you never want to speak to me again, I quite understand. Do you want me to take you back home now?'

‘No. But I'm confused,' said Helen Frances, shaking her head. ‘You're not a vicious man. I know it. And I can't bring myself to hate you. But I hate it that you've told me this.'

‘You asked me.'

‘I know I did. But—but you just talk about these things as if they're … normal. How can you?'

‘Oh,' he smiled, ‘you think I should be ashamed? I should be all remorseful because I've slept with various women out of wedlock? Or never admitted it to you? Lied to you? But I don't think that there is anything unnatural or shameful about a man and a woman wishing to enjoy the act of love,' said Henry, quietly. ‘It's what young bodies are made to do. It's Society that tries to make us feel guilty. That's the devil of it. Whether it's stultifying middle-class morality, or the hypocrisy of the upper classes, the most natural thing in the world becomes a crime. Eastern societies don't tolerate that nonsense. There's evil in this world, of course there is. Evil is hurting others—but there's nothing evil in the love of a man and a woman, and the act that's the fulfilment of it.'

‘In marriage,' said Helen Frances, eyes on her horse's mane.

‘In or out,' said Henry. ‘Love's love. You find it where you can.'

‘I'm in love with Tom,' said Helen Frances, lifting her eyes pleadingly towards him.

‘So you say. All right. You're in love with Tom. How much in love are you? Have you slept with him?'

‘What?'

‘I asked, have you slept with him? You said you're in love with Tom.'

‘How can you ask me that? You know I haven't. How dare you?'

Henry held her gaze. Finally he shrugged. ‘I'm going to the river, and I'm going to have a swim. I feel hot.'

‘How dare you ask me that?' she cried. ‘What sort of man are you? What sort of girl do you think I am?'