The Unknown Ajax Read online

  ‘When did he die, Mama?’

  ‘Now that I can tell you, for it was the very year I was married, and had just come back from my honeymoon to live here. It was in 1793. He was killed, poor man. I can’t remember the name of the place, but I do know it was in Holland. I daresay we were engaged in a war there, for he was a military man. And I shouldn’t be at all astonished, Anthea, if that is what makes your grandfather so determined Richmond shan’t enter the army. I don’t mean Hugh’s being killed, but if he had not been a military man he would never have been stationed in Yorkshire, and, of course, if he had not been stationed there he would never have met that female, let alone have become so disastrously entangled. I believe she was a very low, vulgar creature, and lived in Huddersfield. I must own that it is not at all what one would wish for one’s son.’

  ‘No, indeed!’ Anthea agreed. ‘What in the world can have possessed him to do such a thing? And he a Darracott!’

  ‘Exactly so, my love! The most imprudent thing, for he cannot have supposed that your grandfather would forgive such a shocking misalliance! When one thinks how he holds up his nose at quite respectable persons, and never visits the Metropolis because he says it has grown to be full of mushrooms, and once-a-week beaux – ! I must say, I never knew anyone who set himself on such a high form. And then to have his son marrying a weaver’s daughter! Well!’

  ‘And to be obliged in the end to receive her son as his heir!’ said Anthea. ‘No wonder he has been like a bear at a stake all these months! Did he know, when my uncle and Oliver were drowned, how it was? Was that what made him so out of reason cross? Why has he waited so long before breaking it to us? Why– Oh, how provoking it is to think he won’t tell us, and we dare not ask him!’

  ‘Perhaps he will tell Richmond,’ suggested Mrs Darracott hopefully.

  ‘No,’ Anthea said, with a decided shake of her head. ‘Richmond won’t ask him. Richmond never asks him questions he doesn’t wish to answer, any more than he argues with him, or runs counter to him.’

  ‘Dear Richmond!’ sighed Mrs Darracott fondly. ‘I am sure he must be the best-natured boy in the world!’

  ‘Certainly the best-natured grandson,’ said Anthea, a trifle dryly.

  ‘Indeed he is!’ agreed her mother. ‘Sometimes I quite marvel at him, you know, for young men are not in general so tractable and good-humoured. And it is not that he lacks spirit!’

  ‘No,’ said Anthea. ‘He doesn’t lack spirit.’

  ‘The thing is,’ pursued Mrs Darracott, ‘that he has the sweetest disposition imaginable! Only think how good he is to your grandfather, sitting with him every evening, and playing chess, which must be the dullest thing in the world! I wonder, too, how many boys who had set their hearts on a pair of colours would have behaved as beautifully as he did, when your grandfather forbade him to think of such a thing? I don’t scruple to own to you, my love, that I was in a quake for days, dreading, you know, that he might do something foolish and hot-headed. After all, he is a Darracott, and even your uncle Matthew was excessively wild when he was a young man.’ She sighed. ‘Poor boy! It was a sad blow to him, wasn’t it? It quite wrung my heart to see him so restless, and out of spirits, but thank heaven that is all over now, for I couldn’t have borne it if your grandfather had agreed to let him join! I daresay it was just a boyish fancy – but Richmond has such good sense!’

  Anthea looked up, as though she would have spoken; but she apparently thought better of the impulse, and closed her lips again.

  ‘Depend upon it,’ said Mrs Darracott comfortably, ‘he will never think of it again, once he has gone to Oxford. Oh dear, how we shall miss him! I don’t know what I shall do!’

  The crease which had appeared between Anthea’s brows deepened. She said, after a moment’s hesitation: ‘Richmond has no turn for scholarship, Mama. He has failed once, and for my part I think he will fail again, because he doesn’t wish to succeed. And here we are in September, so that he will be more than nineteen by the time he does go to Oxford – if he goes – and he will have spent another year here, with nothing to do but to –’

  ‘Nothing of the sort!’ interrupted Mrs Darracott, bristling in defence of her idol. ‘He will be studying!’

  ‘Oh!’ said Anthea, in a colourless voice. She glanced uncertainly at her mother, again hesitated, and then said: ‘Shall I ring for some working-candles, Mama?’

  Mrs Darracott, who was engaged in darning, with exquisite stitches, the torn needlepoint lace flounce to a petticoat, agreed to this; and in a very short space of time both ladies were deedily employed: the elder with her needle, the younger with some cardboard, out of which she was making a reticule, in the shape of an Etruscan vase. This was in accordance with the latest mode; and, if The Mirror of Fashion were to be believed, any ingenious lady could achieve the desired result without the smallest difficulty. ‘Which confirms me in the melancholy suspicion that I am quite lacking in ingenuity, besides having ten thumbs,’ remarked Anthea, laying it aside as Chollacombe brought the tea-tray into the room.

  ‘I think it will look very elegant when you have painted it, my love,’ said Mrs Darracott consolingly. She looked up, and saw that Richmond had followed the butler into the room, and her face instantly became wreathed in smiles. ‘Oh, Richmond! You have come to take tea with us! How charming this is!’ A thought occurred to her; her expression underwent a ludicrous change; she said apprehensively: ‘Does your grandfather mean to join us, dearest?’

  He shook his head, but there was a gleam of mischief in his eyes, which did not escape his sister. His mother, less observant, said in a relieved tone: ‘To be sure, he rarely does so, does he? Thank you, Chollacombe: nothing more! Now, sit down, Richmond, and tell us!’

  ‘What, about the weaver’s son? Oh, I can’t! Grandpapa snapped my nose off, so we played backgammon, and I won, and then he said I might take myself off, because he wants to talk to you, Mama!’

  ‘You are a detestable boy!’ remarked Anthea. ‘Mama, take care! you will spill that! Depend upon it, he only means to throw a great many orders at your head about the manner in which we are to entertain the heir.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Mrs Darracott, recovering her complexion. ‘Of course! I wonder if I should go to him immediately, or whether –’

  ‘No, you will first drink your tea, Mama,’ said Anthea firmly. ‘Did he tell you nothing about our unknown cousin, Richmond?’

  ‘Well, only that he’s a military man, and was in France, with the Army of Occupation, when my uncle Granville was drowned, and that he has written that he will visit us the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘That must have been the letter James brought from the receiving-office, then!’ exclaimed Mrs Darracott. ‘Well, at least he can write! Poor young man! I can’t but pity him, though I perfectly appreciate how provoking it is for us all that he should have been born. Still, even your grandfather can’t blame him for that!’

  ‘For shame, Mama! You are under-rating my grandfather in the most disrespectful way! Of course he can!’

  Mrs Darracott could not help laughing at this, but she shook her head at her too-lively daughter as well, saying that she ought not to speak so saucily of her grandfather. After that she finished drinking her tea, begged Richmond not to go to bed before she returned from the ordeal before her, and went away to the library.

  Anthea got up to fill her cup again. She glanced down at Richmond, sunk into a deep chair and smothering a yawn. ‘You look to be three parts asleep. Are you?’

  ‘No – yes – I don’t know! I had one of my bad nights, that’s all. Don’t cosset me – and, for God’s sake, don’t say anything to Mama!’

  ‘What a fortunate thing that you’ve warned me!’ said Anthea, sitting down in her mother’s vacated chair. ‘I was just about to run after Mama, before procuring a composer for you.’

  He grinned at her. ‘Pitching it too rum!’ he murmured.
‘I wonder what Grandpapa does want to say to Mama?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I hope he may say it with civility! How could you stand there, and let him speak to her as he did at dinner, Richmond?’

  ‘Well, I can’t stop him! What’s more, I’ve more sense than to rip up at him as you did! It only puts Mama into a quake, when she thinks he may fly into a passion with you or me: you should know that!’

  ‘He doesn’t like one the less for squaring up to him,’ she said. ‘I will allow him that virtue: I don’t know that he has any other.’

  ‘He may not like you less, but you’re a female: the cases are different.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He liked Papa far more than he liked Uncle Granville or Uncle Matthew, but I can’t tell you how often they were at outs. I daresay you might not remember, but –’

  ‘Oh, don’t I just!’ he interrupted. ‘Grandpapa abusing Papa like a pickpocket, Papa as mad as Bedlam, the pair of them brangling and brawling to be heard all over the house – ! Not remember? I don’t remember anything half as well! Too well to court the same Turkish treatment that Papa got: you may be sure of that!’

  She looked curiously at him. ‘But you’re not afraid of him, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not afraid of him, but I detest the sort of riot and rumpus he kicks up when he’s in a rage. Besides, it doesn’t answer: you’ll get nothing out of Grandpapa if you come to cuffs with him. I’ll swear he gives me more than ever he gave Papa!’

  She reflected that this was true. Lord Darracott, who grudged every groat he was obliged to spend on anything but his own pleasure, pandered to his favourite grandson’s every extravagant whim. If coaxing did not move him, it was seldom that Richmond failed to bring him round his thumb by falling into a fit of despondency. That was how Richmond had come by the beautiful, headstrong colt he had himself broken and trained. He had coaxed in vain. ‘Do you think I’ll help you to break your neck, boy?’ had demanded his lordship. Richmond had not persisted, and even so clearsighted a critic as his elder sister had been unable to accuse him of sulkiness. He was as docile as ever, as attentive to his grandfather, and quite uncomplaining. But he made it very evident that his spirits were wholly cast down; and within a week his dejection, besides throwing Mrs Darracott into high fidgets, had won the colt for him. Anything, said Lord Darracott, was better than to have the boy so languid and listless.

  It had been to cajole him out of silent despair at being told that under no circumstances would my lord buy him a pair of colours that his yacht had been bestowed on him. Suddenly Anthea wondered if the possession of a sailing vessel had been what he had all the time desired. She turned her eyes towards him, and said abruptly: ‘Do you still wish for a military career, Richmond?’

  He had picked up one of the weekly journals from the table at his elbow, and was glancing through it, but he looked up quickly at that, his expressive eyes kindling. ‘I don’t care for anything else!’

  ‘Then –’

  ‘You needn’t go on! Why don’t I persist? Why don’t I do this – or that – or the other? Because I know when my grandfather can’t be persuaded by anything I could do or say! That’s why! I’m under age – and if you are thinking that I might run off and take the King’s shilling, it’s the sort of hubble-bubble notion a female would get into her head! That’s not how I wish to join! I – oh, stop talking about it! I won’t talk about it! It’s over and done with! I daresay I shouldn’t have liked it, after all!’

  He turned back to his journal, hunching an impatient shoulder, and Anthea said no more, knowing that it would be useless. She was deeply troubled, however, and not for the first time. He was spoilt, and wilful, but she loved him, and was wise enough to realize that his faults sprang from his upbringing, and were to be laid at Lord Darracott’s door.

  He had been a sickly, undersized baby, succumbing to every childish ailment: not at all the sort of grandson that might have been expected to occupy Lord Darracott’s heart. His lordship, indeed, had paid scant heed to him until it was forcibly borne in upon him that the frail scrap whom he despised was possessed of a demon of intrepidity. But from the day when a terrified groom had carried into the house a baby who screamed: ‘Put me down, put me down! I can ride him! I can!’ and had learned from this trembling individual that his tiny grandson had (by means unknown and unsuspected) got upon the back of one of his own hunters and put this great, rawboned creature at the gate that led out of the stableyard, he had adored Richmond. There had been no bones broken, but the child had been stunned by the inevitable fall, and shockingly bruised. ‘Let me go!’ he had commanded imperiously. ‘I will ride him. I will, I will, I will!’

  Nothing could have made a greater hit with my lord. Himself a man of iron nerve, he was at once surprised and exultant to discover in the weakling of the family a fearlessness that matched his own. There was no more talk of puling brats or miserable squeeze-crabs: thenceforward little Richmond figured in his grandfather’s conversation as a right one, game as a pebble; and my lord, who had suffered scarcely a day’s illness in his life, very soon became more morbidly anxious about the state of his darling’s health than was Richmond’s fond mama. Poor Mrs Darracott, labouring for six years under the stigma of being a doting idiot who cosseted her whelp to death, suddenly, and to her considerable bewilderment, underwent a transformation, changing, almost overnight, into an unnatural parent to whose callous neglect every one of her son’s ailments could be attributed. She bore the slur with fortitude, too thankful for my lord’s change of heart to resent the injustice to herself. She had dreaded the day when she would be forced to send her delicate son to Eton, but when that day dawned it had been my lord, not she, who had decreed that Richmond must be educated at home. At the time, Anthea, four years older than her brother, had been as glad as she that Richmond was not to be subjected to the rigours of boarding-school; it was not until several years had passed that she realized, looking back, that by the time he was eleven Richmond had largely outgrown his delicacy of constitution. Today, a little more than eighteen years old, he was certainly a thin youth, but he seemed to have no other weakness than a tendency towards insomnia. As a child, the slightest stir in his room had jerked him wide-awake, and this idiosyncrasy had remained with him, causing him to choose for his own a bedchamber as far removed from the main body of the house as was possible; to bolt his door; and to forbid his solicitous family to come near him once he had retired for the night. None of them ever did so, but it was only Anthea who suspected that the prohibition sprang from a strong dislike of being teased by offers of hot bricks, drops of laudanum, supporting broths, or saline draughts, rather than from an inability to drop off to sleep again once he had been roused. No one, she thought (but privately), who suffered from disturbed nights could be quite as energetic as Richmond.

  He was certainly looking heavy-eyed this evening, yawning from time to time, as he flicked over the pages of the journal; but as he had begun to bring his hunters into condition, and had spent the morning at trotting exercise, following this up by soundly beating his sister in several games of battledore-and-shuttlecock, before going off to shoot rabbits in a turnip-field, it would have been surprising had he not looked weary at the end of the day.

  He glanced up presently from the journal, as a thought occurred to him, and said, with a gleam of decidedly impish amusement: ‘I wouldn’t be in that fellow’s shoes for a fortune, would you?’

  ‘Our unknown cousin? No, indeed I wouldn’t! If he’s not up to the rig, Grandpapa will behave abominably, and we shall all be put to the blush. What do you think he will be like, Richmond? It seems to me that if he’s a military man he can’t be very vulgar. Unless – Good God, he isn’t just a common soldier, is he?’

  ‘Rifleman. No, of course he – Lord, I never thought of that!’ said Richmond, in an awed tone. He grinned appreciatively. ‘Well, if that is the way of it it will mean the devil to pay, won’t it? I wonder
if my uncle knows what Grandpapa has in store, or whether – Vincent, too! I’ll tell you what, Anthea, I don’t give a fig for Uncle Matthew, but I think it’s a curst shame that Vincent should be cut out by this mushroom!’

  She did not answer, for at that moment Mrs Darracott came back into the room.

  Two

  It was instantly apparent to her children that Mrs Darracott had not been summoned by her father-in-law to discuss such trivialities as the arrangements to be made for the reception of his heir. She was looking slightly dazed; but when Anthea asked her if my lord had been unkind, she replied in a flustered way: ‘No, no! Nothing like that! Well, that is to say – Except for – Not that I regarded it, for it was nothing out of the ordinary, and I hope I know better than to take a pet over a trifle. I must own, too, that I can’t be astonished at his being vexed to death over this business. It is excessively awkward! However, he doesn’t lay the blame at my door: you mustn’t think that!’

  ‘I should think not indeed!’ exclaimed Anthea, between amusement and indignation. ‘How could he possibly do so?’

  ‘No, very true, my love!’ agreed Mrs Darracott. ‘I thought that myself, but it did put me on the fidgets when Richmond said he wanted to see me, because, in general, you know, things I never even heard about turn out to be my fault. However, as I say, it wasn’t so today. Now, where did I put my thimble? I must finish darning that shocking rent before your aunt arrives tomorrow.’

  ‘No, that you shan’t!’ declared Anthea, removing the workbox out of her mother’s reach. ‘You are big with news, Mama!’

  ‘I am sure I haven’t the least guess why you should think so. And you shouldn’t say things like that! It is most improper!’

  ‘But not by half as improper as to try to bamboozle your children! Now, Mama, you know you can’t do it! What has Grandpapa disclosed to you? Instantly tell us!’