Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [565]
“I have seen the bishop,” she said quietly.
He started violently in his chair.
“You have spoken to him, you mean, Mrs Porteus.”
She nodded.
“Without my permission? Without consulting me?”
“Yes.”
He put his spectacles on again and peered at her. Was such a thing possible?
“You need not concern yourself on his account,” she went on. “The bishop is quite of my opinion. He thinks Ralph should return.”
“But I, Mrs Porteus,” he replied with asperity, “may think otherwise.”
“I hope you will reconsider, then. For if you do not, then I shall leave this house and ask my sister-in-law to take me in at New Street.”
He could not believe his ears. Yet he could see she was serious.
“But . . . my position.”
“Your position, Canon, would only be improved in every way by my brother’s return. I will even,” she added drily, “say you are forgiving and generous. That might secure us another prebend.”
He looked at her cautiously.
“I find your conduct towards me has greatly changed, Mrs Porteus.”
She understood him.
“If you show leniency towards Ralph, Canon, my conduct will always henceforward be as you would wish – as it has been until now,” she said.
“I will consider the matter carefully.”
“Thank you.”
She closed the door quietly as she left. Suddenly she felt very tired. She wondered, idly, if Ralph was worth it.
Another small interview took place in Mr Porteus’s drawing-room a week later. It was between Agnes and Doctor Barnikel. This time it was she who took his hand.
“I am aware, doctor, that you have an attachment to me.”
He did not blush. He bowed his head in silent acknowledgement.
“And before my husband returns,” she went on gently, “I wish you to know that, had circumstances been otherwise,” she gave him an affectionate smile, “had I not been married already, that attachment would have been returned.”
“You honour me.” His voice was husky.
“Thank you, doctor, for always behaving to me not only with such kindness, but with such propriety.”
He was about to speak, when there was a noise at the door.
“Ah.” She smiled. “And now here come the children.”
1830
It was Agnes who made the bargain, and Ralph who honoured it.
“You may think what you like about reform; but I will not go through such trouble again, nor must your children. You must promise me to be patient.”
On his return from exile, Ralph had promised.
“But I never thought,” he said ruefully, “that there’d be no reforms in England for twenty years.”
The first quarter of the nineteenth century was a strange and unhappy period. Afterwards, men liked to remember it for Wellington’s great victories over the French, for the colourful extravagance of the Regency and reign of George IV; for its poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and strange, saturnine Byron, for its novelists: Jane Austen and Walter Scott. But these were the rays of sunlight in a world that was mainly dark.
Ralph had promised. He returned to his work at the school, and gradually, as the months passed, a stiff but polite relationship between him and his brother-in-law was established. They could even disagree.
And there was much to disagree about.
From the battle of Trafalgar, the defeat of Napoleon had taken a decade. At first it had seemed that, like another Caesar, he would rule all Europe.
“He has made a pact with the Czar of Russia,” Barnikel said: “he will rule all Europe and the Czar will rule all the east, including India. Surely now you agree he is a tyrant.”
“I agree that England must oppose him,” Ralph said. “But it is also true that he brings civil and religious freedoms to the countries he conquers when before some of them knew only despotic kings.”
He never allowed himself to say such things to Porteus however.
For years England stood alone: only her navy saved her. Then, slowly the tide began to turn as Arthur Wellesley won the title Wellington by pushing the French out of Portugal and Spain, and Napoleon made the fatal mistake of invading Russia. When he was finally