It was unusually warm and close next morning. Ned kicked off the covers to lie naked, listening to the echoes of his father’s shot-gun knocking over rabbits in the wood, thinking of the other time he’d lain in bed like this, and of how different things might be if he had left Llewellen’s calling card in the pocket of his Norfolk jacket. His fantasy back then was of a faceless golden Venus – a dream with no reality outside his own imagination, and not all what he had found in Simmie. Or needed for that matter. What he needed was to give, not just to take; he knew that now – to love and to be loved. And now it was as if the chain of circumstances which had begun in the saloon bar of The Lord John Russell with a calling card, had always been intended to lead him to Llewellen’s daughter.
He slid off the bed and walked to the open window. Down on the croquet lawn the grass was cauled with gossamer which caught the sun in thousands of bright points of white and emerald light. The downs were pale and indistinct, the trees dark in their summer foliage, the barley bowed to its own weight. Even the birds seemed subdued and replete. Next week the harvest teams would be out swishing through the oatfields. Then all too soon the Sheep Fair would be on them; then ploughing and the first mists of the autumn.
As Ned stood with crossed arms to contemplate the changes he felt in himself and the season, a figure moved out from the shadow of the house and onto the wet grass. It was Meriel – hatless, coatless, slashing at the daisies with Gran’s favourite walking stick. Ned stepped back hastily to grab his dressing gown and smooth his hair, before returning to the window, still daringly under-dressed.
‘Hello there,’ he called down hoarsely. ‘I say, you’re up early.’
She looked up without surprise and smiled at his smile. Enchantingly. ‘You don’t call this early, do you? You’re disgustingly late, that’s all – and I thought you farmers were all supposed to be up with the lark!’
‘Ssh – you’ll wake up Gran, and then there’ll be the devil to pay. Will you wait there if I’m down in two minutes?’
Chortling like a fool, he broke all records for dressing and peeing, wondering as he did so how he could ever have felt nervous of that slender, smiling girl outside. It was summer, it was Sunday and the sun was shining; and here she was to share it all with him! He’d take her first to see the milking, he decided, and then to watch Bat move the folds; and afterwards they’d have a cuppa in the kitchen with old Cook – and hearing Meriel enthuse about the place at lunch, and seeing her adore it all as he did, Grannie would be forced to see that she was wrong about her, and had been from the start.
‘My God, you look as if you got dressed in a hurricane – here, let me put you to rights.’ She yanked up his tie for him and even reached to brush his hair back from his forehead. ‘You know you’d look a good deal better with a centre-parting like Da’s. You’ll have to try it sometime.’
Ned glanced up at the house. ‘There’ll be an awful row if they find out that we’re here alone at this hour of the morning,’ he told her, grinning.
She laughed. ‘Why, whatever do they think you’d do to me if I gave you the chance?’ A question he’d undoubtedly have found embarrassing – before she demonstrated at the London ball how free from subterfuge she really was, and how courageous; her bravery the thing he loved about her most
At the bottom of the path behind the house that led down to the dairy, they met the milking herd returning to the fields, with Dan Goodworth bringing up the rear, whistling Annie Laurie and lobbing pebbles at the laggards.
‘Morning, Danny. I was just bringing Miss Llewellen down to watch them milked, but I see that you’re all done.’
‘Yup, milk’s down this mornin’, Mus Ned. We’re short o’ grass, an’ what there is be mouse-eared stuff.’ He gave Ned a broad, friendly smile and winked at Meriel as he passed her. ‘Mornin’ Miss. Good sort’a day fer the race, d’ye reckon?’
‘Good morning, Mr Goodworth – and what race might that be, may I ask?’
‘Why bless yer, Miss, the ’uman race fer sure.’ Dan chuckled in the face of Meriel’s annoyance and flung another pebble at the cows. Nor had she fared much better with the shepherd. Old Bat stood patiently with hat in his hand to listen to her extol the virtues of Australian Merino sheep, and then returned his headgear with a nod to Ned.
‘Baggered if there wus ever a wooman ’oo knowed the first thing ’bout sheep,’ he concluded. ‘Heear! Dang ye, come in Lass!’ And off he went behind his ewes with the same unhurried stride as the cowman.
Even Cook was too preoccupied with breakfast to give the girl more than a fraction of her attention. ‘Pleased ter meet yer, Miss, I’m sure,’ she said while she shaped another fishcake for the pan. ‘Now Master Edwin, go along with ye ’afore yer Grannie sounds the bell.’
‘Wun’t be druv’; that’s what they always said of Sussex folk, and Ned supposed he couldn’t force them to be as welcoming to Meriel as he would have liked. But they would come around to her in time, he knew they would, and she would love them too when she knew them all better.
It was sweet, she thought, the way that he kept pushing forward for approval everything and everyone that he’d grown up with. But she wished he wouldn’t. It cramped her style to feel him watching her for her reactions – around the farm and through the morning service in the church, and then again all through his father’s discourse over luncheon on the disappearance of Great Bustards from the downs. When all she really wanted was to get him on his own again, without the Mater or his doglike sister trailing after them.
Her chance came after lunch, when the older ladies toddled upstairs for their afternoon ‘peace hour’, as Mrs Ashby called it, and Ned’s father retired to the library with the Sunday Times. A quiet little game of mah jong or a jigsaw puzzle was suggested for the younger folk; and it was only necessary for Meriel to whisper in Helen’s ear that she’d prefer to ride, to secure some time alone with Helen’s brother while the simple creature went off to find the groom and help him saddle up.
‘Come on lazybones,’ she told him. ‘Let’s go up to that summer-house place on the hill you said you wanted me to see, and we can take the dog.’
The sun barely filtered through the shrubberies that fringed the Bury wood. It struck red here and there on last year’s fallen leaves, or pink like flesh on the smooth shaft of a beech tree. A blackbird sounded its harsh warning through the silence; and when a pigeon clattered suddenly out of the branches overhead, Meriel reached to grasp Ned’s hand.
‘Isn’t it just topping,’ he said happily – although looking, not at her she noticed, but back through the sloping wood. ‘You should see it at bluebell time, down there where the oaks are. I promise you it would take your breath away.’
‘And you should see me in my birthday suit!’ Meriel was losing patience. ‘Then perhaps you would forget about the wretched bluebells, and do something about me.’
‘We’re almost at the top now, Miss Llewellen.’
‘Call me Meriel, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Well then, Miss Meriel.’ He smiled self-consciously. ‘What I should like you to do now is to close your eyes, and keep them closed until I say. You have to be in just the right place, do you see, to get the full effect.’
He pulled her up onto the level and turned her slowly to face south. With eyes tight shut, she felt his body guiding hers with one hand on her shoulder and the other at her waist. ‘And in a second when I look,’ she thought, ‘he’ll spin me round and kiss me!’
‘All right, you can open your eyes now.’ His voice was low and vibrant with excitement. ‘But just feel it for a moment. Don’t try to speak.’
‘That’s good,’ thought Meriel, who’d seen enough of chalky landscapes, thank you very much, and had nothing but her sense of disappointment to express.
‘Yes it’s gorgeous! Beautiful!’ She did her best to sound enthusiastic, staring dutifully until her eyes began to water. ‘So here’s the summer-house then?’
‘The Bury-house,’ he corrected her, as if it mattered two hoots what the thing was called.
‘It’s like a Roman temple,’ said Meriel, who wasn’t strong on architecture. ‘And anyway I think it’s lovely, so romantic up here on its little hill!’
‘Grannie’s had all the pillars replaced at one time or another and it’s painted every other year. But actually they think the mound’s quite ancient – maybe even part of an old hill fort. There’s a local legend about a golden calf being buried somewhere in these hills, and our foreman, Caldwell, says it’s under here for sure.’
‘You should dig it up then. Da would do it for you, it’s just up his street.’
‘You can’t, that’s part of the legend; if you dig for the gold, it disappears. They used to come up from the village though, in the old days. Gran remembers it from when she was a girl. Every Easter Sunday the unmarried village girls would come up here to ‘watch the sunrise dodging Satan’, so they said. They had to all hold hands, dance round the mound and sing a song to guarantee them lusty husbands. Or at least that’s what they thought.’
‘What was the song? Do you know it?’
The thing was absolutely perfect. Meriel was thrilled.
‘Well yes, but…’
‘Sing it then!’ She pointed at him like a queen with the mottled pink and white sceptre of a foxglove that she’d just dragged up by the roots from beside the Bury-house steps. ‘Oh come on, please!’
He looked suddenly immensely serious, poor thing. She saw his Adam’s apple first bob up then bob down again. Ned swallowed twice, then finally began to sing. ‘Hey diddle derry, dance round the Bury,’ he intoned hoarsely, staring at the view: ‘Hey diddle derry-da-nce to the man.’
‘Bravo! Love it!’ She pranced off immediately around the mound, waving the foxglove and chanting the rhyme at the top of her own voice: ‘Hey diddle derry, dance round the Bury! Hey diddle derry-dance to the man!’
‘Miss Llewellen, hush! They’ll hear you from the house.’ But he was laughing too. ‘In fact we do still have a sort of ritual in the family that’s involved with this place. We Ashbys are all meant to come up to the Bury-house to propose, you see. They say that Grannie nearly gave my grandfather a heart attack by forcing him to make the climb.’
‘Really?’
Having come to an abrupt standstill, she started up the steps. ‘Let’s go inside then. And for the last time will you please stop calling me Miss Llewellen!’ She was already sitting on the wooden bench and practically jiggling with impatience. ‘It’s going to happen, I really think it’s going to happen,’ Meriel told herself with a new sense of wonder. ‘Come on, come on man, JUST PROPOSE!’
But by the time he’d whistled to the dog, and pointed to a ship at sea, and admired the view for quite the fourteenth time, she knew she’d have to prompt him.
‘We had a cable from Da last week,’ she said with sudden inspiration. ‘He says that the Colombian Government have given him a six-year extension of the lease on this new mercury mine – and when Mother goes out to join him, he’s asked me to go as well to see her safe.’ She paused to give Ned time to settle down beside her on the bench. ‘There’s no question of my sister going obviously – not now that she’s officially engaged to Reggie Baxter. Heavens, they will be man and wife this time next year!’
There, she’d said it, dropped the bombshell! Now it was up to him. ‘Well then, what do you think? Shall I go or not?’ And now that he had turned to give her full attention – so earnest and so handsome – it was all that Meriel could manage not to damn well kiss it out of him!
‘Say it, say it, can’t you?’ She’d already stripped the foxglove of its flowers in her exasperation. But before he could say anything, Ned’s expression changed. His eyes flicked past her to the entrance of the Bury-house – and Meriel turned to see the wretched Helen, of all people, panting up towards them through the wood.
‘There you are, I’ve been looking for you two everywhere,’ she cried. ‘The horses are all ready for you. Aren’t you coming then?’
In the end the Llewellens had to hire a private carrier to convey their seven trunks from Pimlico to Waterloo; not to mention innumerable cases, hat boxes, parcels and packages of every description. Just as before, the family followed in four-wheelers – except that this time they were met by Simmie at the barrier, with a glum-looking Ned beside her.
In the four months since her abortive weekend in Sussex, Meriel had not only reconciled herself to Ned’s failure to propose, but by some back-handed reasoning of her own, convinced herself that it was for the best. Da’s letters had revealed Colombia to her in vivid primary colours; and since she’d no intention of giving up on Ned, she saw the adventure as a new means to a worthy end. She’d go then, she decided – then write at length to the old stick-in-the-mud to describe herself hacking her way through jungles, fording piranha-infested rivers, shielding the poor, helpless Mater from every danger. And then he’d have to realise what an addlepate he’d been to let her go. He’d have to write back on his knees to beg her to return – and marry him of course! Besides, she couldn’t help recalling that he’d still another boring year of university to get through; while as an alternative to twiddling her thumbs in London while she waited, the journey to Da’s mine out in Colombia sounded quite fantastic. Two weeks on a passenger steamer, nine hours on mountain railways, seven days in a river paddleboat and six on horseback, and finally three days on mules straight up into the Andes. The thing was irresistible quite obviously!
‘The Mater couldn’t hope to make it anyway without me,’ she assured herself, and that had clinched it.
It was only when she came to say goodbye to Ned on the deck of the Royal Mail Steam Packet, that Meriel experienced her first qualm. And when she saw him standing below her on the quay with Vicky and the others, with Simmie in tears clinging to his arm, for two pins she’d have called the whole thing off. She’d planned her goodbye kiss in Aunt Alice’s spare bedroom mirror; a softly lingering caress to remember her by for a year. But when at last he’d put his arms around her – when at last she felt Ned’s lips on hers, she had clung fiercely to him like a little bear, unwilling ever to let go.
But Meriel had never been much good at understanding what was going on beneath the surface of her mind – especially when something new demanded its attention. So by the time they reached Barbados, the physical impressions of Ned’s arms and lips had faded beside images of palm trees and multicoloured shanty towns, and natives dressed in spotless white; and the worst of Meriel’s misgivings about leaving him were swallowed up in the sheer excitement of the journey.
Reality of a kind returned with the Steam Packet’s arrival at the Colombian port of Cartagena – with all the serious business of packing up their things and getting the Mater up on deck while they waited for the customs house to open.
‘Do you know, I think that I’m beginning to feel better,’ Harriet conceded, now that the ship was safely anchored. ‘How do you think I look, dear?’
‘You look at death’s door, Mother, and hardly a day under eighty-five.’ Meriel was in no mood to humour her after the disgraceful way the Mater had behaved on board; forcing everyone to fetch and carry for her. Too exhausted to come ashore in Barbados or Bridgetown or Port of Colombia Too sick to lift a finger – but not too sick, her daughter noticed, to consume quantities of champagne and candied cherries and wafer biscuits spread with caviare!
‘And now Mother, if you feel strong enough to carry your own valise, I think we should disembark before the captain takes us on to Panama.’
It wasn’t going to be easy, this commission of Da’s to transport a woman of the Mater’s bulk and temperament six hundred miles into the uncivilised interior of Equatorial America. But if anyone could do it she could, Meriel told herself. ‘And the sooner we get on with it, the better.’
From the deck of the Steam Packet, Cartagena looked like something out of the Arabian Nights; a white, walled city with a great cathedral dome rising from a phalanx of green palm trees. ‘The Pearl of the Indies’, they called it. One of the male passengers told Meriel that it had once been the principal Caribbean stronghold of the conquistadores; the harbour from which the Spanish sailed with all the gold and precious stones they’d plundered from the Incas. Drake had invaded it for Queen Elizabeth, the buccaneer Henry Morgan a century later – and now Meriel Llewellen, armed with a smattering of Spanish phrases and six pages of closely written instructions from her father.
From the rackety little wharf tram, she and the Mater took a coché to the Hôtel Americano inside the walls of the old city. Da’s instructions on the subject had been graphic, and Meriel had known to look for, ‘a lightweight American buggy drawn by a pair of ratlike ponies, and driven by a negro in a sombrero with a speculative look in his eye’.
‘Oh no, Meriel, I can’t be expected to travel in a contraption like that, not over these roads,’ the Mater had objected.
‘Get in, Mother, or walk, it’s entirely up to you.’
It had been her first trial of strength. In view of what lay ahead of them, she could not afford to lose – and in the event, the skill with which the black cochero negotiated the appalling road had pleasantly surprised them both. Inside the old city it was suffocatingly hot. The narrow canyons of its streets were redolent with cigar smoke and roasting coffee intermingled with cooking smells, and with the stench of putrefaction from the gutters. Overhead, the flaking walls of the houses met in a chaotic interlace of jutting pantiles and balconies, gutter spouts, birdcages, and shutters painted scarlet, turquoise and canary yellow. Out on the balconies and in the doorways, and on the corners of the streets, men in sombreros waved and grinned and shouted after the two Englishwomen as they passed.
The Hôtel Americano was a typically colonial building built of whitewashed wood around a central patio, with inside it the severest possible economy of furniture, of doors, and of dividing walls.
‘It’s a stable! Your father’s sent us to a filthy stable after all that we’ve endured to get here!’ Harriet had virtually dragged her daughter into their bedroom in her haste to catalogue its shortcomings.
‘No door! There is no door, I never heard of such a thing! Brick floors, iron beds, barely a stick of furniture… and Meriel, I ask you, an Irish manageress!!’
‘It isn’t filthy, Mother. If you bothered to look around you before condemning everything in sight, you’d see that it’s quite clean. The driver told me that it’s easily the best hotel in Cartagena – and we can always tack a sheet up if you’re so worried about doors.’
She was too hot and tired herself to be bothered with the Mater’s histrionics. ‘Mrs Walters is a decent sort, in my opinion,’ she said firmly, ‘and you’d be well advised to be civil to her while we’re here. She’ll be sending over tea in just a minute. And after that she has agreed to lend me the hotel coché, to go and see customs people about our luggage.’
‘But the driver’s black. Surely you can’t be contemplating driving out alone with a black man?’ Harriet was aghast.
Meriel laughed. ‘His name’s Antonio, Mother. Mrs Walters says he’s perfectly trustworthy – and if the worst comes to the worst, I still have my revolver.’
Although luckily, Antonio hadn’t needed shooting. On the contrary, he’d proved extremely useful in explaining to the customs men the purpose of the drilling equipment they’d brought with them – in making it quite clear to them that a British woman never offers bribes, and in conscientiously translating Meriel’s final ultimatum: ‘The Señorita wishes to make it clear that she will require your intestines for securing her stockings if her freight is not cleared in two days’.
Afterwards she’d made him drive the coché down onto the beach, and to wait there beneath the palm trees while the Royal Mail Packet steamed away. Antonio pulled his sombrero down over his eyes, affecting sleep. But for the best part of an hour Meriel sat upright on the seat behind him, shaded by the large green holland parasol she had bought in Trinidad, to watch the ship until it was no more than a small speck on the horizon.
She wasn’t at all sure that she couldn’t feel a little lump or something in her throat at the breaking of this final link with England. She tried to picture Ashby’s face in this outlandish location; his eyes, his dear blue eyes – and mouth. How was his mouth? She knew it, naturally, she must do – knew that it was wide and strong, but couldn’t see it. All she could recapture of him was the photograph which she herself had taken on the steps of Simmie’s house in Harpur Street, and now carried with her in her bag. Strangely enough, she found she could remember Da’s face perfectly; the way his eyebrows lifted, the way he showed his teeth when smiling. But not Ned’s face. Ned Ashby had become a photograph – the young man she’d captured with her camera in his off-the-ankle tennis flannels and reefer jacket – a splendid icon in a silver frame, as handsome and as two-dimensional as the Carstairs of her girlhood dreams. And now almost as remote.