Anything one said to Monty, however, wouldn't be repeated. The circumspection so necessary in his professional life had spilled over into his private concerns; he was as trustworthy as the Bank of England. He had come to politics fairly late, after failing to live up to what had once promised to be a brilliantly successful career at the Bar. He had not attained the very highest office in his parliamentary career either, which he might well have done had he not preferred to work behind the scenes and influence policy and events from the sidelines. Having been at Balliol with Asquith, when Asquith became Prime Minister a year ago he had been appointed a junior minister at the Foreign Office. Since then he had come to be regarded as something of an expert in the continuing turbulent affairs of the Balkans and the Ottoman empire. He was regarded as very sound. Yet there was that astonishing anti-feminist speech, not only considered rash and ill-advised in some quarters, but out of character. It had made a few people look at him twice.
“Louisa?” repeated Sebastian, not without a trace of bitterness, “I'm afraid she's not interested in me. Only one thing really concerns Louisa â her future career as a doctor.”
“Then you'd do well to keep it that way, dear boy. Wouldn't
do, you know. Wouldn't do at all.” He regarded Sebastian over the edge of his glass. “Nevertheless, you should be thinking about getting married.”
“From a confirmed bachelor, that's pretty rich â if I might be so bold.”
“But I am not the heir to Belmonde.”
Sebastian had always been curious as to why Monty had remained unmarried, but his personal life was not open to discussion. A suave and subtle man, it was often remarked that Montague Chetwynd was a dark horse. He was liked by almost everyone, attractive to women, at ease with men. His name had been linked several times with various eligible â and sometimes not so eligible â women. A prudent marriage could have done much to further his career. But he'd remained single, the despair of many a mama with marriageable daughters on the look out for a catch. And one somehow couldn't imagine Monty encumbered with a wife and children, thought Sebastian.
“I met Violet Clerihugh and her mother when I was in San Remo,” he remarked a moment or two later, taking up a billiard cue and chalking the end. “Pretty young woman.”
Violet was one of those girls to whom Sebastian had been introduced by Sylvia, who lost no opportunity of contriving an introduction to some girl or other whom she thought of as a suitable â and sufficiently rich â future chatelaine of Belmonde. “When are you going to find yourself a suitable wife?” she demanded constantly. “It's not a question of inclination, you know â you have a duty, now that Harry â now that Harry's no longer here.” Which was one reason why he had taken to keeping out of his sister's way as much as possible.
But Violet was pretty; more than that, she was an only daughter, who would bring wealth to her marriage. She was downy as a peach, short and plump, but she knew how to dress well, and he'd come to see she was not as empty-headed (nor as docile) as she liked to appear. One hot afternoon last summer, when a group of young men and girls had been fooling about as they punted on the Thames near Richmond, she'd pretended to fall in at the edge. It had â Sebastian had seen quite clearly â been no accident. The water was shallow and she'd only got her feet a
little wet; he knew she'd only done it to attract attention to herself, as silly girls will, but he'd rushed to her rescue, and she'd allowed him to remove her shoes and rub her feet dry with a cloth from the picnic hamper (through her silk stockings, of course) while watching him steadily through a pair of large brown eyes. Being married to Violet would probably not be the milk-and-water affair one might imagine. For a moment there, looking at the carnation flush on her cheeks, the soft gold of her hair, holding her pretty foot in his hand, he had felt an electric charge pass between them and had very nearly proposed to her there and then, but had drawn back in time, without knowing why himself.
Violet, however, remained hopeful. He knew for a fact that she had since refused at least one offer, one which would have ultimately resulted in her becoming a duchess.
“You could do worse,” remarked Monty.
Sebastian shrugged, taking up his cue.
“Just remember,” went on his uncle, smiling but giving Sebastian the full benefit of his curiously penetrating look, “when we're talking of Belmonde, personal wishes don't enter into this at all. Neither yours, nor mine, nor anyone's.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “Come, then, if we're to have a game. It's been a long day and I for one am more than ready for bed.”
Â
âBread-and-butter before cake,' was one of the many aphorisms of his old nanny which had lodged permanently in Sebastian's consciousness â and which he still sometimes felt a compulsion to obey. Accordingly, after breakfast on the day following his late night session in the smoking room with Monty, his uncle's strictures on his obligations still ringing in his ears, he dutifully spent part of the morning in the business room with his father, in consequence of which, after an hour had passed, both were feeling the strain. Sir Henry, smoking ferociously, and with his mind for some reason untypically unfocused, had been even more intractable than usual and at last, relieved by having done his duty, mightily in need of fresh air to cool his temper, Sebastian took himself and the dogs out for some mind-clearing exercise.
The church bells were ringing across the fields. Lady Emily
would have been driven to church in the stately Daimler, as she always was on Sundays, perhaps accompanied by his mother, and the Cashmores, no doubt. His father went only when it was his turn to read the lesson. Today Sebastian did not feel at all in the right frame of mind for divine service, either â mainly because he hadn't yet mentioned the purpose of his visit: neither to his mother, nor to his father. The time with Sir Henry certainly hadn' t been propitious this morning â but still, he was infuriated with himself for his lack of moral fibre in failing to take the bull by the horns.
A tentative sun gave promise that today might eventually turn out to be an improvement on the previous day, though moisture still dripped from the tree branches, heavy in the full leaf of late summer, and the formal bedding that blazed around the house, already tired with the end of the season, had a bedraggled and beaten look from the recent heavy rains. As he strode along the wide, paved paths running between dark yew hedges, Sebastian wondered sardonically what new thing might have arrived in the garden to surprise him.
Several years ago Adele, unbeknownst to Sir Henry, had ordered in at great expense a dozen classical statues to line the path that ran in a descending prospect from the terrace outside the drawing room, with the purpose, she said, of leading the eye down to the focal point of the lake. Sebastian would not easily forget the ensuing uproar.
“But the gardens are so dull, Henry,” she'd remonstrated, watching him from under her lids. “Surely you don't begrudge a few guineas to make them a little more attractive?”
“A few guineas! Dull? How can you possibly say that? My father had them redone at unbelievable expense when I was a boy.”
“Yes, darling, I know. All that Victorian shrubbery. Too, too dreary.”
Enraged, Henry had stumped off. Had he suspected she might be laughing at him? It was possible, but at last, after months of wrangling, he'd conceded the point to the extent of promising that he would see what he could do. Or perhaps he'd only agreed in case Adele should ever take it upon herself to do such a thing
again. After which, never one to do things by halves, he had astonished everyone by getting caught up in the project himself: not only did he commission the parterre in front of the house that Sebastian found so particularly nasty, but on every visit to Belmonde, there were all manner of unexpected â mostly not altogether felicitous â pieces of statuary, obelisks, follies and goodness knows what else to be found popping up in unexpected places. What Sir Henry had initially reluctantly agreed to in order to please his wife had grown into a dotty obsession of his own. A fountain and a lily pond with a grotesque grouping of mythological figures in the centre now graced the lower terrace, and a monstrous folly had been constructed from what remained of the stone walls that had once been part of the original abbey. Better than either were the replanted rose gardens, with a cascade behind them that tumbled from the rocky upper reaches of the grounds outside the garden proper. But also, alas, a laburnum walk (which led nowhere) had appeared on one of the lawns. Sebastian doubted whether much of this was what his mother had had in mind.
Nothing new appeared this time, however, at which to marvel or grimace. He strode through to the copse which marked the end of the formal gardens, leaving behind the nine marble Greek Muses Henry had unhappily grouped beneath old Sir George's two hundred foot Wellingtonia. The tree had become the roosting place for generations of pigeons, and the statues had consequently acquired a patina not originally intended, and were not now a pretty sight, his mother's
bête noire.
Belmonde was set on a southward-facing hill that sloped up gradually from the river towards the house, and then more steeply behind it; beyond the trees and behind the house rose a series of thickly wooded hills. Sebastian whistled up the frisky young springer spaniel, Dizzy, and the more sedate Sophie, a curly-coated black retriever bitch, and went through a ruined, ivy-clad arch that was a remnant of the old cloisters and was indeed the only part of the abbey left standing, then he took a familiar pathway, steep and rocky, his still angry strides leading him to his objective, a bosky, rowan-shaded clearing halfway up the hill.
Entering the clearing, there appeared before him a small, silent pool surrounded by huge outcrops of red rocks and clumps of ferns, fed by a spring which never dried up, where the sun rarely reached. At the back of the pool was a big, upended sandstone slab with a hole which the water had worn through the soft stone, around which a head surrounded by leaves had been carved, the hole serving as the mouth. This was not a carving done at his father's behest, but by some much older, unknown directive â¦it was an object of speculation, said to have existed long before the arrival of the monks at Belmonde, a strange, pagan symbol to be found in the grounds of an abbey. There was a similar head carved on the lintel of the Green Man in the village. In the way the open mouth curved, as if in a laugh, in the pointed ears, the curling hair, Sebastian was always, irresistibly, reminded of Harry.
Leaving the dogs to a seventh heaven of hopeful rabbiting, and turning his back on the pool, he sat on the grass looking over the view, which from here extended well beyond the Abbey grounds and over the fields. The Bonhommes, a small religious order, had chosen well when, in the fourteenth century, they had picked the site where their little community could settle, and where it had quietly flourished for two hundred years until Henry the Eighth's troopers had arrived, sacked the abbey and dispersed its holy inhabitants to find shelter and sustenance wherever they could. And there it had lain in ruins until the first Chetwynd, an enterprising wool merchant, had purchased the land from Queen Elizabeth and built a modest manor house with the scattered stones, thereby beginning two hundred years of habitation by the same family. On the whole the Chetwynds had been fair-minded, responsible landlords and employers, and the tenor of life had remained peaceful and undisturbed. Somehow, the goodness of the Bonhommes seemed to have filtered down the centuries so that it lay like a benevolence over the estate, running through it like a length of silk.
Sebastian, the last of the line, loved Belmonde deeply, but he had long come to realise that theirs was increasingly regarded as a life of privilege, and the radical in him wasn't sure whether such privilege was right, or whether, in the long run, it could last.
More than that, he was terrified, not of possessing, but of becoming possessed by Belmonde, as it possessed his father. Trying to come to terms with the mixture of emotions his inheritance always aroused in him â his family and his love for the place, the spell it exerted, his obligations against his inclinations â Sebastian could only pray he would one day be worthy to face up to it. But, like St Augustine, not yet.
Certainly not now.
Very recently, a young man he'd been at school with had, in Sebastian's rooms, come across one of his sketchbooks, leafed through it with interest and asked casually why he'd never thought of becoming an architect.
“What?”
And there it was, flashed upon his consciousness in an instant like a lightning bolt, seared upon his soul for ever â the realisation that this was always where his life had been leading. Since childhood he'd carried a sketchbook with him wherever he went. Natural scenes didn't leave him cold: the loved, familiar view of the gardens now spread below him where he sat, the abbey ruins, the silver snake of the Severn winding on the flat plain below, the series of hills on the other side rising to a melting blue on the horizon, the church steeple and the roofs of the village just visible through the trees could hardly do that. But it had always been buildings that caught his imagination more. Fascinated by the way they were constructed, his sketchbooks became filled with details of the line of a roof, the ornamentation of a corbel, the proportions of a house. Even as a child in church on Sundays in the shelter of the big family box pew he would furtively draw and try to understand the construction of the springing vaulting of the stone roof or the exact proportions of the pillars which supported it â that is, when he wasn't wickedly caricaturing the droning parson, or Miss Phillimore, the organist, nodding on her bench.