Theirs Was The Kingdom Read Online Free PDF

It was still as slender as the day she married, eighteen inches or a little less, and that after five months as a bride! She noticed something else, too, and it seemed to her even more significant. Man and wife were sharing a hymnbook but their fingers were not touching. They were singing listlessly, without physical awareness of one another, and Lester’s face wore its customary expression, the carefully measured arrogance of the privileged and well-britched. The family look, Henrietta told herself, was already beginning to transfer itself to Stella, for she too looked impassive. Impassive and a little wan.
    The appraisal had the power to depress Henrietta so that she at once sought to restore her spirits by transferring her glance to the rest of her flock, deliberately repressing thoughts of the Colonel, whose presence at Tryst all these years had been a benediction. There was surely no profit in mourning such a gentle, whimsical creature, for as long as she lived she would never forget him, and whenever she remembered him it would be with gratitude. But he had been old and feeble whereas her brood, ranged on either side of her, were young and full of promise. Without the necessity to follow the close print of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” she let her discreet glances range left and right whilst she continued to sing lustily, first in the direction of that ebullient rascal George, who was looking as merry as a cricket, notwithstanding the solemnity of the occasion, then towards Giles, who she felt sure would miss the old man more than any of them, then to the three post-crisis arrivals. Joanna, almost twelve; Hugo, ten; and Helen rising eight, and finally to the tall, dark, self-contained man who had sired them so absentmindedly, with more than half his mind on his waggon routes over the Pennines, and the rate of haulage from Grimsby quays to the fish-markets of cities southwest of the Humber.
    She contemplated them all severally and collectively, her heart swelling with pride, as it always did when she saw them assembled together. George who, as Adam always declared, had been born laughing; Giles, the solemn, gentle one, who sometimes seemed so much older and wiser than any of them; Joanna and Helen, as pert and pretty as a pair of wedding posies; and Hugo, who shared her passion for soldiers, and was obviously enjoying every moment of this colourful occasion. As splendid and individualistic a bunch as you could find singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in any pew in the land. The eldest married and off her hands; the next, Alex, at this very moment calling the Zulus to account for daring to reject the benefits of absorption into the Empire, and the long tail of the procession right under her hand. Seven in all—no—whatever was she thinking of?— eight , counting the one-year-old surprise packet at home with Phoebe Fraser, the nursery governess. And all in twenty-one years.
    Did she want to add to the tally? Was it even likely, with herself entered upon her thirty-ninth year, and Adam coming up to his fifty-third birthday? She didn’t know and she didn’t care. For herself she was as strong as a horse, and for a matriarch approaching her forties still in possession of a surprisingly good figure—the legacy, she assumed, of her father’s splendid health and any number of Irish peasants on her mother’s side.
    At times like these she sometimes caught herself feeling as smug as the ageing Victoria, seen in garlanded magazine illustrations, palisaded by a tribe of royal descendants; but it was not, she reminded herself just in time, a day for smugness. They were here to say a final goodbye to the Colonel, and she would have to master the impulse to blubber at the graveside when those six dragoons lowered him into Kentish soil. She knew, of course, that women were expected to blubber at funerals, but it was a concession she was not prepared to make, not even for decency’s sake. All her life, even before Adam