The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [124]
In 1899, in October, the High Commissioner in Cape Colony prepared to go to war with the Boers for the gold mines of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boers immediately invaded Natal and Cape Province, taking Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley. Prosper Cain did not think it would all be over by Christmas. He went to Purchase House, to talk to Benedict Fludd, having visited those sappers who were to embark for the battlefield, where they were training as bombardiers and explosives experts in the barracks at Lydd. They had invented an explosive, Lyddite, which was to be used in South Africa to blow bridges and destroy farmhouses.
Cain did not like the war. He was not sure it was a just war, and he was not sure it could be prosecuted successfully. He quoted Rudyard Kipling, with a sardonic smile, to Benedict Fludd.
Walk wide o’ the Widow at Windsor
For ’alf o’ Creation she owns:
We ’ave bought ’er the same with the sword an’ the flame
An’ we’ve salted it down with our bones.
(Poor beggars!—it’s blue with our bones!)
Fludd said “A Black Widow indeed.” He was paying little attention to the war, which he denounced as another evil in a Fallen World. Cain, with and without his children, visited Purchase House frequently between 1896 and 1899. There had been a time when, as a very young man, Cain had drunk with the pre-Raphaelite Bohemia to which Fludd briefly belonged, and had watched him disappear into the night—“in search of dissolution,” he always said, holding up a pale hand to prevent anyone accompanying him. There had been rumours that he took pleasure in danger. Often he disappeared, in black moods, for weeks together, and his friends and companions canvassed the possibility that he was dead in an alley, or flotsam in the black Thames. He came back from one of these absences accompanied by his own Stunner, Sarah-Jane, whom he named Seraphita, and married. Prosper, by then a young lieutenant, was at the wedding, and could still, with increasing difficulty, remember the radiant, blithely innocent face of the young bride, her hair full of flowers, her garments spattered with them, like Botticelli’s Flora. She had looked at Fludd with a slightly silly, but touching adoration, the lieutenant thought, not himself finding her desirable, for she lacked spice. He himself was twenty-three, then, in 1878, and he thought Seraphita was younger. He was in love, and married his elegant and secretive Italian Giulia later the same year, taking her briefly to Lucknow, which she hated, and back to London for Julian’s birth in 1880. When he next saw the Fludds, which was not until after Florence’s birth, and Giulia’s death, in 1883, Imogen was four, Geraint two and Pomona one year old. By then, Seraphita had taken on the blank, listless look she still had. The children were prettily dressed and slightly grubby. Fludd, he discovered, was absent for days and weeks together. He had been making pots in Whitechapel, and had set a house on fire with a kiln disaster, after which he simply walked into the night, and disappeared. It was not Seraphita who told this to Prosper Cain. She offered him tea made without boiling water, and with insufficient tealeaves, and stared slightly to the side of his head. Prosper Cain found some connoisseurs to buy some pots and commission some more, and when Fludd returned, employed him as a ceramics consultant at South Kensington.
He had been doubtful about the recent renewal of