A Footman for the Peacock Read online

  3

  It is a tendency of human nature to measure the history of any large house by the yardstick of the family in present occupation. About the atmosphere of Delaye, therefore, the world at large thought nothing in particular, for the current family is never the interesting one to its contemporaries. But, as no house which has stood for four hundred years (and portions of it for five hundred) can have completely evaded the incident, the scandal, whiff of picturesque or skeleton in the cupboard, so Delaye can look back upon a time that was not solely a matter of tweeds, tithes, cold mutton, mutilated conversation, clean living, sobriety and the monotone that is security.

  Nothing very spectacular had happened at Delaye, even in a past which offered more scope for assorted violence. There were no eminent bloodstains on the floor, no immured nun, no headless horseman driving oscillating family coach up the avenue at nightfall; there was in the Delaye archives, no absolutely historic parchment, no counterpart of the Luck of Eden Hall, or fairy banner of the Macleods of Dunvegan, no Airlie Drummer or Glamis monster. But every period had produced its contribution the atmosphere of which no humdrum twentieth century can ever quite disperse.

  The Lacquer Room, antechamber to the drawing-room, had known the flap of cards and scent of frothing chocolate, the promised elopement with one fearful eye upon the door, the slipped billet and the swoon. The drawing-room air had rustled with acid criticism, behind the fans of painted chickenskin, of that cat, Sarah Churchill and her influence at Kensington Palace with Her Majesty. A mended rent in a dining-room curtain bore witness to the carving-knife a Georgian Roundelay had cast in a fury at the toughness of his venison, as did a broken banister-rod (never replaced) in the servants’ quarters to the rage of an eighteenth-century father on discovering that a flunkey had connived at the admittance to his daughter’s apartments of a rascally but charming ineligible. In the testers of which, century after century, the family had found itself too inert or unwilling to be rid, and whose valances were so difficult to reach for dusting purposes, had slept and borne and died not only generations of the house’s rightful family, but names which would be instantly recognized by the more erudite historian, if not by the world at large, whose memory sticks at outstanding celebrity. In the Tapestry Room had lain for two nights that gentleman who had so mistakenly been funny in Parliament about an entertainment tax upon the playhouses of London and the mistresses of a monarch who could be funnier than anybody when he so chose, while a court poet to a Tudor king had taken his ease in the pleasure grounds, and there, by rumour, committed to his tablets that lyric entitled ‘I Attempt From My True Love To Fly’.

  In the linen room, now a slipway between bath and secondary staircase, the pious Roger Ascham, much troubled in his mind, had fled the religious turmoil of the city to ponder his Bible and search within its pages for riposte and refutation that he might strengthen a beloved pupil in imminent peril of a nine-days throne — not that the Lady Jane Dudley, God wot, lacked ability to defend herself before the chosen Catholic interrogators and their smooth, crafty verbal traps. . . .

  4

  Upon the window-pane of a servant’s bedroom was spiderishly scratched the words

  Heryn I dye

  Thomas Picocke. 1792

  The pathetic statement excited little comment among the Roundelays. It was left to the visitor to exclaim and conjecture, with wild, leaping surmise which took no account of probability and period, and ranged in speculation from a last message of the Princes in the Tower to a nothing dashed off in an idle moment by Guido Fawkes, gentleman, of Northamptonshire.

  It was always Sir Edmund Roundelay who, smiling, would gently pull the rein of his guests’ careering fancies.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t lay claim to anything so interesting. These Upper rooms, of course (except for the butler’s pantry and bedroom in the basement), were always the servants’ quarters.’ In that one sentence he indicated clearly that typographic suitability had triumphed, as it doubtless always must, over the romantic.

  ‘But — the diamond! Messages were always scratched with a diamond!’

  ‘Apparently not, in this case. The diamond leaves a clear, incisive cut. This signature and message, or whatever you like to call it, is thickened, blurred —’

  ‘But it must have been somebody important, or interesting, you know —’

  ‘Why? The instinct to achieve a species of visual immortality is still abundantly prevalent in the modern tripper who treats us to the atrocious spectacle of his obscure initials and amatory intentions upon any likely surface.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘There are vandals in every epoch, and no doubt John Doe of Clapham Junction may, a hundred years hence, also be subject of respectful surmise.’ And then, if further pressed, the master of Delaye would gently spring his mine and shatter the pretty fancy and the dramatic dream. Oh yes, there had been a Thomas Peacock; he was an outside servant — that settle by the second kitchen fireplace was no doubt his bed at night. His place in the domestic hierarchy was a low one. He was, in point of fact, a running footman, his duty to footslog over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar, herald and warning to the approaching town or hamlet or to any pedestrian that the coach of his master was imminent, and that a way for it must instantly be cleared. Hardly human, the running footman was more in the nature of a social gesture to the world at large, an earnest of the importance of the family he served, a panting caste-mark. Without change of linen at the end of a heating run in all weathers, including winter’s snows, the running footman must wait for hours in the kitchen, steaming in front of the open hearth, before word was brought him via a chain of house servants, that his family abovestairs had concluded its visit. He then took staff and nerved himself for the return footslogging. Oh yes, these fellows, poor devils, died off like flies of consumption — the local graveyard were known to be peppered with them. Pay? Oh, five pounds a year, livery and all found. And, oh yes, it might interest Sir Edmund’s visitors to know that the staff borne by these footmen possessed a metal cap at the tip in which was placed one hard-boiled egg to sustain them during the runs.

  And at this point, Sir Edmund was always willing to show the household accounts books. Dating from the reign of Henry the Seventh and housed in the whitewashed cellars: quaint, dream-like entries of a casual day which combined the fantastically lavish with a medieval cheeseparing, seasoning the entries with a spice (spices amany) of the need or ingredient both unexpected, incalculable, or obsolete to the twentieth-century eye.

  On the yellowed pages from the years 1790-1792, the name of Thomas Peacock intermittently appeared. Here, indicated the unerring finger of Sir Edmund, who soberly loved every entry and in the summer would sometimes spend an hour in a thick and ancient leather shooting jacket in the cellars, privily enchanting himself with the huge books, were the humble sums expended upon the running footman. A new livery, a shirt, the re-tipping in ‘metall’ of his stave: businesslike items, the bare-bones essentials of his occupation, with never an alleviating indulgence. . . .

  ‘And even the hardboiled eggs,’ Sir Edmund would sometimes add, handsomely mixing his metaphors, ‘were only a means towards keeping his nose to the grindstone.’

  He would often say, as the visitors dispersed, or were assisted, up the cracked and rather dangerous cellar steps, with an enforced courtesy and arming of the ladies which smacked more of the heyday of Beau Nash than of the heartless present century, ‘So you see, there’s really no secret mystery about this Peacock follow, and precious little romance.’

  Sir Edmund was a Shakespearean browser, but apparently he had not yet awoke to the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in the Roundelay philosophy.

  5

  The Roundelays were of Norman-French descent from that Rohan de l’Oeux who accompanied William the Conqueror to England. As with all subsequent Roundelays, the founder of the family was neither spectacular nor scallywag, but, as far as was publicly possibl
e in the eleventh century, an accommodating law-abider who concurred in the right places with authority. He was, without achieving any fame in the process, inevitably advanced by the Norman William, a patronage and recognition that included land in Normanshire as recompense for his abandoned estates in France, a tenure which encroached upon the border of Brittany. In the pleasant land of Britain, he had built himself the small fortress dwelling of de l’Oeux, here married suitably and produced his family, here crashed the stillness of primeval forest after the wild boar, with its large, facetious face and calculating eye.

  A family tree interests few. Inevitably, Delaye was partly ruined, partly restored and wholly burnt down over the centuries, coming at last to stability, presenting the front that it does to-day at the accession of James the First, whose reign was to leave little mark upon the house save for the apeing of sundry Scottish embellishments of which the Turret Room was a typical example.

  The Roundelays themselves tended, in their matrimonial arrangements, towards the clannish. Cousins married cousins. It was very seldom that the name suffered obscurity through entanglements too alien, although there had been a bad period during which, through the death of an heir and the wedding of his sister who produced daughters only, and who, if they bore sons, lost them by battle, flood and field, Delaye had actually been possessed for two reigns by masters whose right to occupation was through that enfeebled and shameful cause, the distaff side. But just as in even the Lancers, partners, on the whole, do find each other at the finale of that confusing dance, so the Roundelays would ultimately sweep together and mate sooner or later via many a narrow squeak, family conclave and scene.

  The foreign alliances were, of course, regrettable. The Roundelays all agreed about that, answering, when it was pointed out to them that the original founder of the name was a foreigner himself, that that wasn’t the same thing. They did not know very clearly what they meant, but they felt it with fervour. The enquirer, thinking it over, came to the conclusion that the solution lay in the fact that, whereas a Norman-French background, remote enough, was a recognized social asset, a concrete French woman of any considerably later date in your very drawing-room was suspect and eccentric: something you explained carelessly and smiling as brightly as possible, over the tea-table.

  The Roundelays, in common with the bulk of England, were unable to think of William the Conqueror as anything but an English king who uttered the language as she is spoke. He was William-the-Conqueror-1066-1087, and the probability that his brother (if he had one) addressed him as Guillaume was too far back to be taken seriously.

  There had been a French Roundelay, a chatelaine culled from a Grand Tour of the late seventeen-hundreds, but Delaye had been too much for her, the meals and chitchat too heavy, and, proceding by stages to the environs of Paris on a visit to her relations, she had been slain untimely by a misunderstanding in the salon of the Château at the hands of a renegade gardener in a tricolour cockade, whose mind, if any, and ironically enough, was confused by her surname which she never could, or would, to pronounce in the English manner.

  Delaye itself was large enough to absorb the few traces that the unhappy lady had left behind her, and which were represented by a tambour frame and a frivolous bed in a lumber room, a scattering of gilt chairs which were uncomfortable, and skidded, some enamel-and-pearl comfit boxes that the occasional tables in the drawing-room swallowed whole, a marble temple in the Versailles taste in the grounds which succeeding generations of Roundelays frequently spoke of doing something about and making something of, and in which, on wet days, the current peacock sheltered and looked critical and malevolent through the pillars, and a half-finished sunk and paved garden that you catch your heels in to this day, and the completion of which is now beyond the pocket of the present owner, and likely to remain so.

  There had also been that deplorable specimen, the dashing bride, who not only insisted upon a Continental honeymoon (marriage, it was felt, ought to have been fast enough for any virgin) but who brought her complaisant husband well-nigh to the Jews through her passion for that fatal association of ideas-jewellery. In the very nick of time she was curbed of this taste removed from temptation and installed at Delaye, where, between them, she and Stacey Roundelay variously expressed their ill-humour and relief by the production of a series of daughters, who were nostalgically christened Amethyst, Crystal, Emerald, Jacinth and Sapphire. The possible names of Diamond and Pearl were mutually abandoned on the ground that the abbreviation of the former was undignified and the latter theatrical. Of these, only Crystal and Emerald had succeeded in being found by husbands, and Miss Emmy became lady to Bertram Cloudesley (spoken Clousy) of Cloudesley Hall in the adjoining county, only to lose both husband and status at the end of the Boer War, and to decline, at the age of forty-four, into dowagership through the marriage of her son, Marcus. Miss Chrissy, making a match of considerably less lustre, though still suitable, was translated to London, where she was safely delivered of one child, Maxwell, and where, the initial novelty and excitement passing off, she had ample leisure to pine for country life, air and routine — a psychologic condition which, with wives, it is customary to ignore as a piece of ungrateful rebellion in poor taste. She relapsed, finally, into a belief that we are one of the Lost Tribes. Her argumentative tedium, her friends agreed, was only to be equalled by the Golf Bore, the Card Maniac and the Roman Catholic convert. Hasty agreement with her view was no safeguard whatsoever: incredulity fatal, while indifference brought down upon your head a shower of booklets.

  With the remaining daughters, Amethyst, Jacinth and Sapphire, of the once dashing Mrs. Roundelay, the realization of spinsterhood came slowly, taking the assorted form, from their thirtieth year (or just before all hope was extinct) of sport welfare and culture.

  Miss Amy became the tennis star of the county, in long piqué skirts, black ribbed stockings and a small sailor hat, which was all very nice and brought her name forward, as Mrs. Roundelay confided to intimates, but which was also heating (men didn’t like flushed faces which were not the direct or indirect result of their own words or actions) and which, of course, led nowhere since a girl of her class mustn’t become too conspicuous even if it is only on a grass court.

  Miss Jessie’s furtive dismays at her single state were drowned in charitable soup: as her expectations of marriage and motherhood receded, the old and infirm of the village of Delaye became more drastically visited, read to and cheered with every year that passed, and by the time all hope was abandoned few cottages were safe from her. The plight of Jessie was far more acute and remarkable than it would be to-day, where post-1918 daughters assume in advance that all men are liars, frequently confuse the issues and queer the more paying pitch by week-ends unblessed by any church and conducted on a fifty-fifty basis, and are practically forced into careers, however much, in reversal of the old order, they would prefer to be at home doing the flowers and walking the dog in peace and content. But in Jessie Roundelay’s day, to arrange the flowers for too long was an unmistakable sign that you yourself were going to become another bloom of the Wall family. And even if the Jessies of the period liked the pretty employment they got no credit for it. There are spinsters-by-instinct in every epoch, a fact which is consistently denied, and although Jessie was of their number, a circumstance of which she was unaware, public opinion was against her, downing her with its condolence. All girls wanted to be married. Whether they possessed one single qualification for that difficult and manysided relationship: if they were culinarily, temperamentally or even physically fit to undertake the job was a point left, as it is to this day, entirely to chance. Men, on their side, chose their horses and dogs far more carefully than their wives and with greater intelligence. A horse was a serious matter, its wants and ailments known and listed. And yet, with that engrained ability to muddle through to victory which is the feature of the British army and the British marriage alike, and that is arrived at by a combination of procrastination, good nature, good luck, r
ough humour, fair dealing and more good luck, the Roundelay marriages held. There had been no family divorce for over two centuries, though it was felt that poor Marguerite, had she not been murdered in France, might possibly have been a very near thing. The French, you know . . . toojoors femm varry, the male Roundelays would sometimes say over the walnuts and port.

  Miss Sapphy’s outlet of culture was perhaps the hardest to come by. Tennis was unmistakably ‘in’, though poor Amy couldn’t hope to play it for ever. Good works, on the other hand, though boring, thankless and smelly, went on for ever, but Jessie had long cornered that meagre market. As you couldn’t get your body off on men, you tried your mind on them. The job was laborious, and, as with the professional entertainer, precarious. Few people (even women) wanted ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘The Blue Danube’ sung or played to them until at earliest, after tea, and once the men diners had been shown your hand-painted tambourines, poker-worked boxes and water-colours of local views, that ended the current output, and it took at least six weeks more to assemble a new form of artistic detainer, a hiatus in which you read up the news in the morning paper, a process which brought rewards incommensurate with the mental effort.

  There were occasional visits to Chrissy, in Kensington, where culture, thanks in a measure to W. S. Gilbert, could raise its head and was at no time dealt such staggering blows as it was in the country, but the advantages of Kensington were, Sapphire Roundelay was to find, largely cancelled out by the Lost Tribes, who kept the drawing-room ominously empty on Sunday afternoons, a time long recognized as being dedicated to the following-up process by ballroom partners, and where intentions could be assumed without committal on either side, the glittering English tea-table of that period serving the dual purpose of charming the male prospector with the sight of dainty hand poised (the sugarbowl), and chaperoning the possible familiarity through barricade (the spirit-kettle). The household was not even relieved by the presence of Sapphire’s nephew, Maxwell. Chrissy Dunston as a matrimonial agency was a hopeless proposition, her sister soon discovered. The men might arrive with flowers, but they left with pamphlets, and quite soon they ceased to arrive at all, and there was not a sandbin or even basement area within a two-mile radius, from Campden Hill to Queens Gate, from High Street to Brompton Square, which did not contain at least one Tribal tract, and some of them two. And Sapphire would return in a four-wheeler, making the six-mile journey from the market-town of Norminster which was, at that date, the nearest point to the village of Delaye, and be driven up the avenue, and passed by poor Jessie on her tricycle, bound for the village, and leaving in her wake splotches of soup and nodules of half-set jelly upon the gravel.