Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [516]
“Shockley,” he said, “will give us a song.”
Adam blushed furiously. His mind went blank.
“Quite right,” someone cried. “Sing, Shockley.” And again – was it his imagination? – he thought he detected contempt in the voice.
He could think of nothing. There was a look of arrogance on Wilson’s face now.
“You must sing for your supper,” he announced, flatly, and when he still hesitated: “Sing, damn you.”
“He can’t sing,” the man opposite called, “let’s play cards.”
There was a general chorus of agreement. Wilson ceased to look at him and turned his attention to the girl.
The table broke up in a desultory fashion. Several men disappeared, presumably with the girls. A few gathered in little groups at each end of the table where they contrived to drink together. The rest moved to where card tables were being set up.
He was left alone.
It was a blow to find that Wilson despised him for being poor. He supposed he could not blame him.
But yet something inside him rebelled. He was a gentleman from Sarum, whatever these strangers might think of him. A descendant of Cavaliers. He had a little money too, after Plassey. He would be nobody’s dependant.
Wilson was sitting at one of the table ends. Adam ignored him. He went to the card tables instead, and quietly watched. After a while, when someone left a game and he was asked if he cared for whist, he nodded. He knew how to play. And when one of the men looked doubtful and asked him if he was sure he cared to lose, he gave him a calm look and remarked casually:
“I haven’t spent my Plassey money yet.”
The man shrugged and said no more.
The next morning, when Adam Shockley did his reckoning in the cold light of day, he found that he had lost just four hundred and twenty pounds. With the thirty he had spent since Plassey, he had forty pounds left.
He was resigned. A gentleman must pay his gambling debts.
“But I need a new campaign,” he muttered.
It was unfortunate then, that shortly afterwards, the 39th were ordered back to Ireland.
They took a tiger with them as a mascot, and saw the great comet predicted by Halley on the way.
1767
Lieutenant Shockley looked at Madame Leroux, and then he stared thoughtfully out to sea at the dot on the horizon he knew must be the English packet. If the news the ship brought was good, he would marry her, no matter what the opposition in the regiment.
She did not know it. He had allowed her to prepare to leave.
In the year 1767, Lieutenant Adam Shockley, no longer of the 39th, but of the 62nd Foot, was a good-looking, broad-chested man of thirty-two whose fair hair was thinning. His face was bronzed and weatherbeaten. He was respected as a sound, even-tempered officer to whom many of the younger fellows came for advice.
For four years now, he had been on the sultry island of Dominica in that part of the West Indies then called the Charibees.
And for almost a year, he had enjoyed the company of Madame Leroux.
She was a strange woman; her husband, who had been killed at sea by a privateer, was a French merchant and, insofar as she was anything, she was French herself. Her age, Shockley supposed, must be between twenty-five and thirty. Still more indeterminate was her race. Her skin was pale, her hair almost white and formed naturally into short, frizzy curls. The rumour was that she had negro blood. There was a languid, sensuous quality about her: she was a being apart. Though the French had lost the island to the British, she had not troubled to speak more than rudimentary English and she generally treated the new occupants with silent disdain.
“It’s not my business where you go, Shockley,” the major had said to him one day, “but Madame Leroux is not popular with us, you know.”
Adam did not care. During the warm nights he had known a sexual passion richer than anything he had experienced before, and by day even with his own mediocre French, he had come to love her gentle, mocking humour.
And what else was