A Future Arrived Read online

  There was a rumbling sound above them as a hundred chairs were pushed back from a hundred desks, and then the muted thunder of a hundred pairs of feet racing along the corridors toward the main stairs.

  “Lunch,” Charles said. “Why don’t you join me and then we can telephone Mother.”

  The earl shook his head. “I want to ride over to Tipley’s Green. I’ll take lunch with Braxton-Gill, but thank you all the same.”

  “A drink before you go, then. You look pale.”

  “Do I? Well, it’s been a bit of a shock, you know. I’ll miss dropping in on the old fellow for tea and a game of draughts. He always looked forward to it. A brandy. Just a smahan to keep the blood moving.”

  The four children who had been running about, tossing things, and bolting over the wall were standing in front of Launcelot and stroking his nose in unison. He was about to tell them sternly to keep away, but thought better of it. They appeared to be awed and gentle and the horse certainly was content enough. They moved away as he approached and untied the animal from the railing.

  “Is that your horse?” one of the boys asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “My horse.”

  “Your very own?” asked the girl.

  “My very own.”

  “I had a pony when I lived with Father. I named her Angelica. Don’t you think that’s a nice name?”

  “I bet you didn’t,” one of the boys said. “I think you made that up.”

  The girl’s face turned crimson. “And I think you’re horrid.”

  “Now, now,” he said as he swung up into the saddle. “No bickering. Lunch is being served. You’d best go in before they run out.”

  They followed his suggestion and raced one another to the door. He tapped his heels against Launcelot’s flanks and trotted down the long, curved drive.

  He slowed the horse to a walk when he reached the road and allowed him to amble along. Odd sort of place, he thought. Those children. Muddy and tattered from running about in the fields and brambles. As dirty as urchins in the streets of Stepney or Canning Town, and just as liable to be the children of dukes as the offspring of dustmen. The famous—or infamous—Burgate House School. And Charlie was head of it. Difficult to believe.

  “You mark my words, m’lord, young Lord Amberley will be prime minister one day.”

  He remembered Coatsworth saying that as clearly as if it had been yesterday. Charles down from Eton for the holidays and discussing British blundering in the struggle against the Boers. Charles no more than nine years old. Coatsworth had been impressed, if wrongly prophetic. Still, the lad was functioning. The war had almost, but not quite, destroyed him. Headmaster of Burgate House. He had found a niche in life and more power to him. Hardly a lad, of course. Nearing forty.

  A cloud crossed the sun and a splattering of rain hit the road and slapped against the black branches of the bordering oaks. He glanced at the sky, but the rain would pass in a minute or two. A fresh wind, blowing toward the west. Clouds scudding across the hills. Sunshine and drifting shadow on the fields.

  “And do you agree, Coatsworth?”

  “I do indeed, Master Charles. We seem to make a habit of bungling about in wars. I was twelve when my father went off to the Crimea, servant to Colonel Wilkinson of the Twenty-third Foot. My father never came back—dead at Inkerman. Oh, I agree with you heartily.”

  A conversation overheard in a corridor over thirty years ago, and yet he could hear those two voices as though the wind had borne them across the meadows with the rain. Odd. Very odd indeed. He felt light-headed and there was a peculiar buzzing in his ears. Tipley’s Green was only three miles away, but it seemed suddenly to be infinitely farther than that and impossible to reach. He turned the horse around in the middle of the narrow road to head back toward Abingdon.

  The bright green Talbot two-seater rounded the bend at high speed, the driver seeing horse and rider directly in front of him and hitting the brakes and twisting the wheel at the same time. The low-slung, powerful car went into a tire-smoking, screeching slide that missed Lord Stanmore and Launcelot by no more than a foot and spun to a halt thirty yards down the road and facing the way it had just come. The driver, white-faced with fear and anger, half rose in his seat and waved a fist in the air with the rapidity of a piston.

  “Damn you, sir! Could have been killed! Keep—bloody horse—out of—bloody—road!”

  And then he was gunning the car to a throaty roar, shifting gears in a fury, backing up and spinning around and thundering off down the road to leave Lord Stanmore shaken and perplexed.

  “Sorry,” he said, watching the car fade rapidly to a dot of green, water from the rain-slick asphalt sprayed to mist by the tires. Launcelot was in terror and only the earl’s instinctive skills of a lifetime of horsemanship kept the stallion from bolting. He calmed down the animal, his hands aching from keeping the reins taut as wire.

  “Good fellow … good chap.” He patted the neck vigorously and then dismounted and led him to the side of the road, where the animal stood trembling and sweating in a shallow ditch. “Good old boy … good old boy … there, there …” He patted and stroked the quivering, foam-sheened hide as the rain became heavier, slapping into the dead leaves that choked the ditch, only to move on as suddenly as it had come. Watery sunlight filtered down through the gaunt limbs of the oak trees.

  “Let’s go home, boy … let’s go home.”

  He had one foot in the stirrup when the pain struck, a crushing pain in the center of his chest that radiated quickly to his left armpit and down the arm to his wrist. The pain drove the breath from his body and for a moment he felt paralyzed. Terror swept him and he fought it back, hands clenched in Launcelot’s thick mane. He must get onto the horse or he would die in the ditch. Die by the side of the road … and he was damned if he would. Determination replaced fear and he managed to claw his way onto the saddle. The pain was so intense now that he could do nothing but slump forward against the powerful neck, clinging desperately to it as Launcelot stepped nimbly out of the ditch and began to canter toward stable and home.

  1

  MARTIN RILKE AWOKE a few minutes before the alarm clock would have shattered sleep and nerves. Reaching out from under the covers he groped for the clock on the nightstand and depressed the alarm button. He fought the urge to sink back into the bliss of morning slumber and sat up with a groan. Six thirty. He wasn’t used to getting up so early, but he had promised Albert he would take him to King’s Cross. The 8:05 train to Peterborough. Plenty of time. He swung his legs out of bed and winced at the cold creeping along the floor. For Let. Fully furnished. Elegant small house in Knightsbridge with fine view of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. There had been no mention of drafts in the advertisement. He stood up with a sharp intake of breath as though plunging into a cold pool. His heavy wool bathrobe was draped over a chair and he padded across to put it on. His carpet slippers were nowhere to be seen. Under the bed probably, but he didn’t feel like groping for them.

  A pale yellow light filtered through drawn curtains and he walked over to the windows in his bare feet and pulled the cord. A clear sky again, thank God. Perhaps winter was over at last. He stood for a moment gazing out across Kensington Road at the park. A thin, patchy mist drifted through the trees and clung to the ground. Emerging from it in blocks of dark gray came ordered ranks of horsemen, row after row at the trot along Carriage Road; the Horse Guards on an early morning exercise. It was the kind of enchanting sight that made London worth living in. Martin watched until the cavalcade passed Rutland Gate and then he turned away and hurried into the bathroom to bathe and shave.

  He was thirty-nine, a man of medium height and stocky build. His body, viewed naked in the full-length mirror streaked with steam, was compact and sturdy, the chest large and the stomach reasonably flat. Rilke males were inclined to stoutness and Martin fought the proclivity by watching his diet and playing furious games of squash three afternoons a week at a club in St. James’s Street. H
e gave his middle an approving slap and then stepped across to the washbasin. He sharpened and honed a Rolls razor in its silver-plated box and then whipped lather in a bowl with a badger-hair brush. The face in the mirror was youthful and unlined with a thin, high-bridged nose, wide mouth, and pale blue eyes. The hair, parted in the center, was thick and flaxen. It was a face that women thought of as “nice looking” rather than handsome.

  Martin paid no attention to his face other than to shave it and pat his cheeks with cologne. When he went back into the bedroom, Mary, the young Welsh maid, had lit the fire in the grate—the coals spreading a meager warmth into the room. He thought of his apartment in New York, the good old Yankee know-how of double-glazed windows and central heating. A lot to be said for it, but he had never seen cavalry riding through the morning mist on West 64th Street.

  He looked into the spare bedroom before going downstairs. The bed was made and his brother-in-law’s small suitcase was packed and strapped and set on the floor. Albert, he assumed, was used to getting up at ungodly hours.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  Albert Edward Thaxton stepped out of the dining room into the hall as Martin was coming down the stairs. He was a tall, dark-haired boy of sixteen dressed in gray flannels and a school blazer.

  “Good morning, Albert,” Martin said cheerfully. “Sleep well?”

  The boy smiled, a smile that was so reminiscent of his sister’s that Martin could not witness it without feeling a tug of the heart.

  “Oh, yes, sir. They don’t have beds like that at Morborne.”

  “Hard, angry little cots, eh?”

  “Well, not quite that bad, but jolly close to it.”

  “Have your breakfast yet?”

  “Rashers and eggs, fried bread and tomatoes. Super grub.”

  Martin glanced at his wristwatch. “I’ll just have some toast and coffee and then we’ll grab a taxi and get you to the station.”

  “May I sit with you and read the newspaper, sir?”

  “Of course. And please stop calling me sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was pointless, Martin supposed. English boardingschool courtesy, drilled into the young like a multiplication table. He was a fine boy and he certainly could not fault him for being polite. Ivy would have been proud. She had only seen him when he was a babe in arms and now he was nearly six feet tall, captain of his school’s cricket team—of the “eleven” as he called it—and had just completed the interviews and tests that would ensure him a scholarship at Oxford.

  Mrs. Bromley, his cook-housekeeper, brought coffee, toast, and the newspapers. He gave Albert the sporting section of the Daily Post which he scanned eagerly.

  “Oh, blast!”

  “Anything the matter, Albert?”

  “Rangers, sir. They lost to United … three to two. That’s knocked them out of cup play.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” He had no interest in English soccer—or any other English sport for that matter. He sipped his coffee and read the leaders. The London Naval Conference winding down with a few concessions being made. Some limits on submarines and new battleship construction. Tonnage and gun calibers. All meaningless. Ramsay MacDonald to pay a visit to slump-devastated Yorkshire—to do no more, he felt certain, than show his handsome, kindly face to the unemployed. He put the paper aside and opened the Paris edition of the New York Tribune—which he received every morning, if a day late. He searched for the baseball scores.

  “Bob Giffrow retired. Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “A friend of yours, sir?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He was a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs for eighteen seasons.”

  That thought made him wince and feel old. He had seen the man’s debut … Cubs versus Giants … the spring of 1912. Now he was stepping from the mound, his wicked, twisting “slew bobber” to confound batters no more. The Cubs still had Hack Wilson, who could slam them out of the park. And they had taken the pennant last year even if they had lost to Philadelphia in the series. But it had been Giffrow who had gotten them there, pitching with pain, his mighty arm like a gnarled and twisted oak. The great “Dutchman” walking away forever into the long shadows of a Chicago summer day. It didn’t seem possible. He folded the newspaper with a sigh and shoved it behind the coffee pot.

  “Now there’s a game for you.”

  “What game is that, sir?”

  “Baseball.”

  “Rather like our rounders, I believe.”

  “No, Albert,” he said patiently, “it isn’t anything at all like rounders.”

  “It’s played with a round bat and a ball, sir.”

  “The similarity ends there. Believe me.” Not that he could explain the difference. How could he describe to the uninitiated the poetry of Jimmie Foxx? Tinker to Evers to Chance? Rogers Hornsby batting .424 for the 1924 season? The Babe … Lefty Grove … Walter “Big Train” Johnson … Ty Cobb sliding into second with his spikes glinting through the dust as deadly as a tiger’s fangs? Impossible. “I’ll take you to a baseball game one day.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “Why, in the States of course. Next summer when you leave school.”

  “To America, sir? Do you mean it?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Oh, I say, how super!”

  “It’ll be a good experience for you before you go on to Oxford.”

  Albert’s ecstatic expression paled. “I’m trying not to think about Oxford actually.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “The scholarship and all that.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s more than a year away. Plenty of time to get used to the idea.” He looked at his watch. “Better get your bag while I whistle down a taxi.”

  Albert said nothing in the taxi until they rounded Hyde Park Corner and headed toward Oxford Street.

  “My going to university means a great deal to Ned. That’s natural, I suppose. I mean to say, he wants the best for his baby brother … all the things he didn’t have.”

  “He wants what’s best for you,” Martin said. “As do I.”

  “Balliol will be horribly expensive even with the scholarship, and you’ve given so much already.”

  “I can afford it.”

  “Perhaps. I’m rather wondering if I can.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “What I mean is … well, some of the chaps at school look at things the way I do. This slump. Your American stock-market crash. A worldwide financial collapse. Did you know that thirty percent of the men in Birmingham are unemployed?”

  “I’m aware of it,” he said dryly.

  “Yes, of course. I mean, after all, as a journalist …”

  “What are you trying to say, Albert?”

  “That I don’t want to study for a First in Greats. It seems so … pointless and esoteric somehow. Fiddling while Rome burns. Nothing practical. I could earn a degree and then do nothing more with it than teach Greek or Latin at some place like Morborne. I want more out of life than that.” He turned on the seat to face Martin. “I’d like to live the way you do. Travel about the world … witness and write about important happenings. I speak French … my German’s coming along nicely … I seem to have a good ear for languages. I know I can write. I’m always top boy in school at composition.”

  Martin smiled ruefully. “A newspaper man. Heaven help you.”

  “It’s made you rich and famous—although it’s not money I’m thinking about. It’s doing something worthwhile … something important.”

  “I would say you’ve given a good deal of thought to this.”

  “Yes, I have. I could go to the University of London … and I could get a job. Copyboy or something like that … on the Daily Post, say. Mr. Golden would hire me if you asked him. Don’t you think?”

  “Jacob would hire you if you asked him. He was very fond of Ivy. Best man at our wedding.”

  “Work … take a few classes … share digs with a couple of chaps. I
could do it on my own.”

  “I’m sure you could, at that.” He gave Albert’s knee a pat. “But let’s not discuss it now. You still have a year to go at Morborne. If you feel the same way then …”

  “Oh, I will, sir … I know I will.”

  “… I’ll talk to Jacob. I’m sure he can do better for you than a copyboy job. Perhaps a cub reporter … on sports. You probably know more about cricket and soccer than any kid alive.”

  It was the decision Ivy would have made, he thought as he watched Albert hurry down the platform toward his train. It was uncanny how much he resembled his sister. Not just in looks, the black hair and almost violet eyes, but in his zest for life. Ivy’s education had been limited, but she had read everything she could get her hands on. Geography had been her passion. She had wanted to visit every dot on the globe. There were so many exotic lands and yet she was to see only France and a tiny, shell-torn strip of Flanders before she died.

  The taxi had waited for him, meter ticking, the driver reading a paper and ignoring swarms of commuters anxious to hop in the back and be taken to their offices. Martin ran a gauntlet of dark-clothed men bearing tightly furled umbrellas and clenched briefcases, turned a deaf ear to pleas to share the ride and climbed into the cab. The driver folded his newspaper and placed it behind the meter.

  “Where to, guv’nor?”

  “Forty-seven Russell Street.”

  He sat back and lit a cigar as the taxi clattered away from the station and along Euston Road. Turning down Gower Street he could see the soot-grimed buildings of London University looming over the tree-shaded streets and squares of Bloomsbury. A fine, no-nonsense school. If Albert was sincere about wanting to become a journalist he could not choose a better place to learn. But it was not Balliol, with all the prestige an Oxford education implied. His not going up to Oxford would disappoint his brother. No doubt of that. Ned Thaxton, fifteen years older than Albert, had set his heart on it. Ned had been bright enough as a boy to have won a scholarship—had he been kept in school long enough to try for one. The poverty of his family had ruled against that. He had left school at fourteen to work in a Norwich shoe factory as an oiler of stitching machines. A self-taught man, studying at night, he had become at eighteen a junior clerk in a solicitor’s office. Eventually, with Martin’s financial help, he had become a lawyer and was now a partner in a Birmingham firm.