Theirs Was The Kingdom by R.F. Delderfield Page A
Authors: R.F. Delderfield
Tags: Historical
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there in such a prodigious hurry it recoiled, not knowing how to circumvent the obstacle, roaring all the way round the house and finally doubling back on the triangular cleft in which Tryst stood under the tall, wooded spur. And here, wretchedly indecisive, it would eddy about restlessly and menacingly, as though searching out an unsuspecting victim, finding none and hurling itself at the chimneys or mounting a fresh assault on the bluff.
She heard the grandfather clock on the landing strike two and then the half-hour, after which she abandoned all attempts to sleep and sat up, slipping into the quilted bedgown Adam had brought her from Paisley and lighting the bedtable lamp that needed trimming and smelled abominably but offered some kind of anchorage in this tempest of sound. Then, soothed to some extent by the familiarity of the room, she set about marshalling the identifiable sources of her unease, arranging them in order of precedence as she had once approached the complexities of his leaderless waggon service during the sombre winter of ’65 and ’66.
The most obvious of them, of course, was concerned with Alex, who might or might not have been involved in that shameful battle at a place with an unpronounceable name, “ I-say” or “E-saw” something, a word that ended, she recalled, in a whistling syllable, like “woona” or “wanna.” There had been a great deal about it in the papers more than a fortnight ago and even Adam, whose involvement with Imperial affairs was always superficial, had seemed disturbed, muttering that Chelmsford, the general the papers seemed to hold responsible, was no better than the old fossils who had bungled the Crimean campaign and the events that resulted in the Sepoy Mutiny. “The chap they need out there is Roberts,” he told her, grumpily, but she remembered then that the Indian general had been a classmate and war comrade of his before he left the army, and therefore assumed this to be prejudice on his part. It did seem, however, that something was amiss in Zululand, where a few thousand savages were said to have won a decisive victory over half as many Europeans. She had been an attentive reader of war despatches since girlhood and could never recall this happening before. It was always the other way round. As to Alex, Adam had assured her she had no need to worry on his score. Had he been killed or even wounded, they would have been informed before casualty lists were telegraphed to the War Office and printed in The Times. There was provision for this kind of thing nowadays, he told her, far more than had existed in his day, when upwards of a year could elapse before people at home were notified that a son or a husband had died in some footling skirmish in a jungle or river bottom. He despatched a wire to his Capetown agents, however, and asked them to make enquiries concerning volunteer officers of the Natal Native Contingents, and after that, or so it seemed to her, Adam had forgotten Alex in the flurry that attended the opening of his Irish branch, a circumstance that whisked him away to Dublin more than a week ago.
She continued to dream about Alex, however, seeing him dishevelled and distraught, as he poked aimlessly about a great, treeless plain, and whenever she came downstairs after one of these unsettling dreams she would enquire sharply if there had been any post other than business mail and would be glum and tetchy when Stillman, the Colonel’s old batman who did duty for butler at Tryst, said there was not.
Thus, getting on for three weeks after the news of Lord Chelmsford’s defeat (the newspapers referred to it as “poor Durnford’s disaster”) her eldest son qualified as the first of her worries, but those of the eldest daughter were also clamouring for priority, particularly since she had talked with her at the Colonel’s funeral tea.
Clearly all was not well over at Courtlands. Any mother with half an eye could see that, but it was quite
She heard the grandfather clock on the landing strike two and then the half-hour, after which she abandoned all attempts to sleep and sat up, slipping into the quilted bedgown Adam had brought her from Paisley and lighting the bedtable lamp that needed trimming and smelled abominably but offered some kind of anchorage in this tempest of sound. Then, soothed to some extent by the familiarity of the room, she set about marshalling the identifiable sources of her unease, arranging them in order of precedence as she had once approached the complexities of his leaderless waggon service during the sombre winter of ’65 and ’66.
The most obvious of them, of course, was concerned with Alex, who might or might not have been involved in that shameful battle at a place with an unpronounceable name, “ I-say” or “E-saw” something, a word that ended, she recalled, in a whistling syllable, like “woona” or “wanna.” There had been a great deal about it in the papers more than a fortnight ago and even Adam, whose involvement with Imperial affairs was always superficial, had seemed disturbed, muttering that Chelmsford, the general the papers seemed to hold responsible, was no better than the old fossils who had bungled the Crimean campaign and the events that resulted in the Sepoy Mutiny. “The chap they need out there is Roberts,” he told her, grumpily, but she remembered then that the Indian general had been a classmate and war comrade of his before he left the army, and therefore assumed this to be prejudice on his part. It did seem, however, that something was amiss in Zululand, where a few thousand savages were said to have won a decisive victory over half as many Europeans. She had been an attentive reader of war despatches since girlhood and could never recall this happening before. It was always the other way round. As to Alex, Adam had assured her she had no need to worry on his score. Had he been killed or even wounded, they would have been informed before casualty lists were telegraphed to the War Office and printed in The Times. There was provision for this kind of thing nowadays, he told her, far more than had existed in his day, when upwards of a year could elapse before people at home were notified that a son or a husband had died in some footling skirmish in a jungle or river bottom. He despatched a wire to his Capetown agents, however, and asked them to make enquiries concerning volunteer officers of the Natal Native Contingents, and after that, or so it seemed to her, Adam had forgotten Alex in the flurry that attended the opening of his Irish branch, a circumstance that whisked him away to Dublin more than a week ago.
She continued to dream about Alex, however, seeing him dishevelled and distraught, as he poked aimlessly about a great, treeless plain, and whenever she came downstairs after one of these unsettling dreams she would enquire sharply if there had been any post other than business mail and would be glum and tetchy when Stillman, the Colonel’s old batman who did duty for butler at Tryst, said there was not.
Thus, getting on for three weeks after the news of Lord Chelmsford’s defeat (the newspapers referred to it as “poor Durnford’s disaster”) her eldest son qualified as the first of her worries, but those of the eldest daughter were also clamouring for priority, particularly since she had talked with her at the Colonel’s funeral tea.
Clearly all was not well over at Courtlands. Any mother with half an eye could see that, but it was quite
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