London - Edward Rutherfurd [542]
“I have the book you wanted, Colonel Meredith,” the assistant said.
It was unfair. How could a man of her own age look so devastatingly handsome? His hair, clipped rather short, was still auburn; the greying temples only improved him. The lines around his eyes were those of a man who, she imagined, had seen much of the world in all kinds of weather. His body looked lean and hard. There was a hint that when the circumstances demanded it he could be dangerous. With his long silky moustache he was every inch a distinguished colonel; yet there was something else, a gentleness and an intelligence that suggested he was more than a military man.
“Mrs Bull? Is it Mrs Bull?” he enquired, as he came over to her. Mary Anne tried to nod but to her horror succeeded only in blushing. “I don’t suppose you could possibly remember me.”
“But, yes!” She found her voice, realized that Violet was coming over. “You were going to India. To shoot tigers.” What sort of nonsense was she babbling?
“You are quite unchanged.” He really seemed to mean it.
“I? Oh! Hardly. My daughter Violet. Colonel Meredith. Did you shoot any?”
“Tigers?” He smiled, then looked at them both. “Many.”
It seemed Colonel Meredith had only been back in England a few months. Thirty years of travel had taken him to many lands. The staff at Hatchards knew him because very shortly a book of his own was to come out: Love Poems, translated from the Persian. He had a house in west London, large enough to keep his collections. He had never married. But perhaps, next Wednesday, she would like to come to tea?
“Oh, yes!” she said to her own and her daughter’s astonishment. “Yes!”
As the dinner hour grew ever later, the Victorian English had taken up the Oriental custom of afternoon tea. It was simple, ensured a brief visit, and could be offered with propriety by ladies and by bachelor gentlemen.
The next Wednesday, a little after four o’clock, Mary Anne Bull, accompanied by Violet, arrived at Colonel Meredith’s house in Holland Park. Mary Anne had wondered whether she ought to go, but told herself it would have been rude to change her mind; so she had taken Violet, somewhat under protest, to act, as she put it, “as my chaperone”.
There were in London two particular suburbs where gentlemen of ample means and artistic tastes were apt to live. One, lying just above Regent’s Park, on land that had once belonged to the old crusading order of the Knights of St John, was St John’s Wood. The other was Holland Park. Passing along the southern edge of Hyde Park, past the little palace of Kensington where Queen Victoria had been brought up, one soon came to it. The focus was the fine old mansion and park owned by the Lords Holland. Around this, in pleasant tree-lined streets, were handsome houses where a gentleman might live quietly yet be only a ten-minute carriage drive from Mayfair.
Even for Holland Park, however, Colonel Meredith’s house was striking. It stood in Melbury Road and, set in a garden with clipped trees, it looked not so much like a house as a miniature castle. In one corner was a circular tower with a turret. The windows were large, with leaded panes, and the entrance porch was massively heavy. There was something rather magical about it. But what really astonished the visitors was that, instead of the usual butler, the door was opened by a tall and magnificently turbaned Sikh who silently ushered them into the colonel’s library.
On the walls were conventional pictures of his ancestors; in front of the fire, a leather-padded fender on which one could sit, and two wing chairs. But there English tradition ended. Over the fire hung a pair of ivory tusks; on the tables were ivory caskets, Chinese lacquer boxes, a wooden Buddha. By a desk, an elephant’s foot made a waste-paper basket. In one corner was a rack of Indian daggers and a silver ankus, the gift of a friendly maharajah; in another hung some lovely Persian miniatures. Near the fire were a pair of