Theirs Was The Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

found her, whisked her on to the rump of his mare, and carried her off like a freebooter’s prize, she had taken pleasure in standing on her own two feet and looking the world in the face with a judicious mixture of pride and impudence. The approach had served her well and was, she knew, wholly approved by Adam, himself as proud as Lucifer and as daring, in his quiet, deliberate way, as Mr. Stanley in search of Dr. Livingstone. Besides, nobody would be watching her at the graveside. Their eyes would be for the panoply out there among the leaning tombstones of so many homespun Kentishmen… She hoped the snow would hold off a little longer. Not merely for the sake of so many bareheaded mourners, but also for the sake of Giles’s cough and her own devastating bonnet, arched high over the forehead and crowned with three cunningly wrought cloverleaf bows. Even two yards of crepe could add elegance to a bonnet if it was artfully trimmed, and why not? The old man had always had an eye for a well-turned-out woman.
    The hymn came to an end and she gave Adam a nudge, lest he should disgrace them all by nodding off again during the final prayer. Then, as the dragoons clumped forward to lift the coffin, she straightened her long, black gloves, tucked her arm through Adam’s, and took her appointed place immediately behind the pallbearers.
    3
    His drowsiness left him as they moved into the open. There had been a light fall of snow during the service and the path beside the yews lay white as a freshly laundered sheet until it was soiled and scuffed under the bearers’ jackboots. The coffin, he thought, looked ludicrously light, not much heavier, he would judge, than that fancy casket the Ranee’s steward had carried on his saddle bow during the ambush at Jhansi. He thought about the casket as his senses absorbed the timelessness and essential Englishness of the scene: a starveling crow lumbering out of a bare-branched elm, the nostril-stinging crispness of the winter’s day, the long, winding procession with the big blob of scarlet at its head, the fruity tones of the chaplain, intoning English cadences. It wasn’t really a solemn occasion. No more than the passage of a tired old man moving his last few yards over powdered snow in a box like the one that had held the nucleus of Swann fortunes, a thirty-stone ruby necklace that had provided the capital for the first fleet of Swann waggons.
    He wondered why he should think of that at this moment, and then he knew, for as they approached the junction in the paths the slim figure of Deborah Avery slipped from behind a yew to take her proscribed place in the string of immediate mourners. Behind the youngest, bonafide Swann as befitted an adopted daughter, but ahead of the staff and the old man’s intimates, for in everyone’s mind Deborah ranked as family. He smiled at her and she smiled back, probably the only person here who shared his doubts concerning immortality, and that despite her youthful sojourn among all those French nuns, while her father, his former partner Josh, was racketting about in the company of whores and blackguards of one sort or another. They had formed an understanding, he and Deborah, soon after she had returned from that fancy school of hers in Cheltenham, pledging herself to a life of thankless social work in the stewpots of the wealthiest civilisation in the world. He tolerated her obsession with the unwashed and underprivileged, whereas she, for her part, accepted his dedication to commerce to the exclusion of all other claims on his conscience. He liked Deborah. She had brains and charm and was a credit to him and to that rascally father of hers who hadn’t been seen or heard of in years.
    Beyond the row of elms, no more than a few short miles across the Kentish ploughland and coppice, stood Charles Darwin’s many-windowed house at Down. Deborah would probably see Darwin as a pioneer in the nonstop war on cant, the man who had made nonsense of Genesis