“Mordieu,” I murmured, “it’s an ugly story you tell me. We all imagine our own troubles are the worst . . . until we hear another’s.”
“I wish nothing to do with him, or his tainted name. So, with my mother’s blessing, here at Louis-le-Grand, and probably elsewhere, I am and shall be merely Charles Darnay, son of nobody in particular.”
“I won’t tell a soul. Word of honour.”
He smiled and clasped my hand. “Thank you, Carton.”
“Sydney,” I corrected him.
“Sydney. That’s not a very common name, is it? In England?”
“No,” I agreed, refilling our glasses once again, relieved to have changed the subject of our conversation. “It’s more common as a surname, I expect.”
“Sir Philip Sydney,” said Darnay, nodding, “he was a poet, was he not?”
“Yes. But I was named for his descendant. Algernon Sydney.”
“Algernon Sydney?”
“A comrade of Cromwell’s—”
“Ah, your Civil Wars.”
“—who fought against the King, even though he was himself an Earl’s son,” I told him. “He was a great man. Long after the Restoration, he spoke out against the King and was at last condemned and put to death, because the King feared him. He died for the cause of Liberty.”
“A great man indeed,” murmured Darnay.
“My father has always held with the rights of Parliament, and the people, above the rule of Aristocracy. He named my brother after Cromwell, and me after Sydney.”
“Did you know,” said Darnay suddenly, “that there is news from America of a riot in Boston, in the British colonies, some months since? They are calling it a massacre, it’s said. It’s rumoured that dozens of folk, perhaps hundreds, were killed by British troops.”
“What of it?”
“What of it? You, who a moment ago spoke of the cause of Liberty, can ask that? Carton, their taxes lay too heavy a burthen upon them. Once again an oppressed people are speaking out against unjust rule.”
“Very well; but nothing that you or I can do will make a whit of difference,” said I.
“It’s the fruit of the modern Philosophy, Carton! A hundred years ago such a thing couldn’t have happened. But to-day . . . to-day change is everywhere—change and reform. Soon folk like my uncle will have to answer for their outrages. Ere you and I have passed our prime, we’ll be dwelling in a new world.”
“And you are going to take part in this great endeavour, are you?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps I shall. You needn’t smile. When one sees the Injustice carried on here in France, the Nobility’s detestable privileges—yes, and in England, too—”
“Not so inequitably, and not by me.”
“Seeing a wrong done, and doing nothing to correct it, is near as bad as committing a wrong oneself. You will be a Barrister one day; why not defend the victims of Injustice? Think on it. You can’t sit idly by forever, Carton.”
“I’ll think on it,” said I, smiling, and drank down my glass.
My Parisian idyll came to an abrupt close when I had scarce turned twenty. “We have received a letter from your father in England,” said Father Bérard to me, after having called me into his study. “He tells us that you are to return home immediately, and permanently.”
“Return home?” I stammered. “For what reason?”
“He does not say. He merely includes a draught on the bank of Tellson et Fils to pay for your passage to England. We shall miss you, Carton.”
Mystified, and monstrous disappointed, I ordered my servant to pack my belongings, bade adieu to Célie (my pretty shop-girl) with a handsome present, and at last went in search of Darnay. “I don’t know why I’m to go home now,” I complained, after divulging my ill news in a secluded corner of the library. “I was to stop on in Paris. I was to go on to the University here, as my mother wished. I’d rather be here, where my friends are.”
“I’ll miss you,” said Darnay. “This place will be empty without you. But you know that. Do you think you will ever return?”
“How should I know? I don’t know, even, why my father has called me back. But perhaps you could come to England. Some day.”
“Perhaps. If circumstances don’t keep me in France.”
“What circumstances?”
“Property I may inherit, if my uncle has no more children, which seems likely.”
“Property?” said I. “You never before mentioned property. Where is it?”
“A country estate east of Paris. Nothing remarkable about it. But it may be mine, some day, and then I shall have obligations, particularly to put right what my uncle and his family have made wrong.”
“Always so grave and responsible!” said I, laughing despite my gloomy temper. “You make me almost delighted that I shan’t inherit my father’s estate. Charles, take care you don’t grow old too soon.”
“And you, take care that you don’t linger in your youth too long,”
returned Darnay, gently, as we embraced. “We will see each other
again, Sydney; I am sure of it.”
I ached for Paris, and my student’s life, and my friend, from the moment the diligence passed the customs-barriers and set out upon the Calais road. My unwilling steps led me back to Staffordshire by way of packet-boat and public coach, at last to find Bridge House silent, its dozens of windows black-draped as they had been at my mother’s death years since. My father met me in the doorway, unsmiling. “You’ll be asking why I sent for you, I suppose,” said he. “Look about you, then. Your brother’s dead, God rest him.”
“Oliver?” I whispered. “Dead?” The very idea was impossible. Though we had shared few interests as we grew older, I had ever adored my sturdy, staunch, genial, hard-riding elder brother.
“Aye, Oliver. ’Twas the Typhoid. Swept through the village, it did, and carried him off, the poor lad.” He stared at me, stout callused fists on thick-set hips, assessing me. My father, tho’ he aspired to the landed Gentry, and across the years had purchased many hundred acres and built a fine new country seat well away from the belching, sooty smoke-stacks at the kilns, was in truth a self-made man of humble origin; he had risen, by virtue of a shrewd and inventive mind and much hard work, from potter’s apprentice to master-potter to owner of a famous manufactory of fine porcelain.
“Well, boy, you’ll have to do, won’t you?” said he at last, in a grudging tone (I really cannot think of a word that would better describe his manner). “No more of your Frenchy nonsense for you. You’re my only heir now save Bella, worse luck, so you’d better come inside with your traps, hadn’t you? To-morrow you go to the Pottery, boy, and you set about learning the business of China-ware.”
I was returned to Staffordshire to a role for which I had no inclination. I imagine the world, or at least the County, thought me a spoilt and ungrateful young puppy. Yet I would have exchanged the greater part of the wealth around me for my father’s good opinion. In trade as in school-work, nothing I did pleased him, and I cannot in any event claim that overseeing the kilns and selling biscuit-ware to the Gentry was to my taste, though to be sure the prospect of inheriting the estate was a pleasant one.
Had I inherited all, sold the manufactory, and put the money from the sale into improving and increasing the land, I dare say I might have made a creditable landlord, content to be a scholarly country squireen. For at twenty I spent my idle hours reading Horace, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, or scribbling love-poems never sent. My head was crammed full of rebellious notions and literary pretensions and my father’s clear opinion, that I had no taste or talent for Commerce, was soon confirmed.
Let it suffice to say that we did not get on, my father and I. “Begod,” he would exclaim, when exercised with my want of commercial aptitude, “with all I’ve spent educating you, why can’t you have half as much sense as my brother’s boy?” (My uncle Daniel’s son Elijah, by then an industrious young man of thirty, was already chief clerk at the manufactory and was expected to go far.)
And, of course, there was Sarah.
I see her still sometimes, the phantom of a golden-haired girl that bubbles up unbidden from the depths of my cess-pit memory. Sometimes, despite all my efforts to forget, I remember her, Sarah with her blue eyes and her dazzling smile, her slender figure, her laughter, her facility for making the shabbiest of twice-turned, twenty-year-old gowns seem the most elegant of London or Paris fashions. I do not think of her often, not after so many years have passed. But like it or not, she is a part of my history, and I find I cannot pretend that she never was there.
Shortly after my reluctant return to Staffordshire, I must confess that despite my plaints to Darnay I forgot Paris entirely, for I had discovered Sarah Kenyon. Perhaps I was merely in love with love, a callow boy adoring a childhood sweetheart now the prettiest creature in the County, yet not daring to speak to her of his passion. Despite all the wealth about me I was but a parvenu tradesman’s son, and she the daughter of a Baronet whose family had dwelt at Fairfax Hall since the days of Queen Elizabeth. But the knowledge that a quarter-hour’s canter would bring me to her doorstep compensated me for all I had left behind me in Paris, and all I was obliged to tolerate at home.
It was not so many months after my return to England that Sarah began to cast her gaze my way. It was a fine bright morning in early Summer, I remember, a day fragrant with wild-flowers. Sarah awaited me on a bench along the drive as was our custom, idly dangling her straw hat by its ribbons as her mare cropped the grass behind her.
“Cui flavam religas comam, simplex munditiis?” I enquired, approaching her.
She turned, laughing. “You and your Latin! What dreadful things are you saying to me?”
“I merely asked you: For whom are you dressing your golden tresses, simply but with such style?”
“Why, for you, of course. Sydney, what do you think? Papa is going to send me to London to stop a month or more with my Aunt Graham and my cousins.”
“To catch yourself a husband, you mean.” The Kenyons were not rich and Sarah was hard-pressed to find a young man of good breeding and respectable fortune when she had no fortune of her own.
“Will you miss me?” she enquired, dimpling.
“You know I shall.”
“I’ll miss you, in dirty old London.”
“Nonsense,” said I, “you’ll have a splendid time.”
“You don’t know my Aunt Graham! She is the stiffest old stick-in-the-mud that ever was.”
I offered her my hand, laughing. “Come. It’s cooler
in the garden.” Arm in arm, we strolled along the flagged path that
led around Bridge House’s graceful east wing.
“Sydney,” she began, “only last night my father spoke very well of
you.”
“Did he?” At the time I did not recognise Sarah’s tentative overture for what it was, a veiled hint that the son of a wealthy tradesman might, despite his birth, be a suitable husband for a Baronet’s daughter.
“He said—he didn’t mean it to be slighting, so you mustn’t receive it so—he said that you are as much a gentleman as any young man in the County who possesses a considerably longer pedigree.”
My father interrupted us, his deep voice booming through the garden, to find some fault with the accounts that he had set me to tending. “Begod, I should have sent you to Cambridge with proper Englishmen, or kept you close by to learn your business,” he concluded, withdrawing his head from the window. “Ciphering’s your business now, boy, never forget it! I’ll not have the money I’ve spent on your high-nosed Frenchy education frittered away in rhymes and such rubbish.”
“Lord above,” I sighed, as he slammed shut the window behind us. “When will he realise I’m a man grown, and not a schoolboy?” I looked at Sarah, my spirits rising once more. “What do you say we escape for a while, ere he chains me to a desk and sets me to calculating next year’s price per cart-load for Dutch clay.”
Laughing like conspirators, we ran to the stables. Ten minutes later we were galloping through the rich red earth of the hay-fields and toward the wood that separated Carton land and Kenyon land. “I wonder who is more the Autocrat,” I shouted, above pounding hooves and jingling harness, “your father or mine?”
“O, yours, to be sure!” cried Sarah. “Papa has never succeeded in making me do any thing I didn’t wish to do myself!”
I suppose, as I gaze back across a score of years, that Sarah cannot be blamed entirely for being what she was. The Kenyons were our nearest neighbours, long-established county Gentry who had failed to move with the times; as enterprising, ambitious folk like my father climbed the ladder of success, they slowly slipped down it. The Kenyon family seat, Fairfax Hall, was a rambling Tudor manor-house in want of repair, and a handful of impoverished crofters and cowherds were the estate’s sole tenants. Sarah, old Sir Mallory’s only child, was expected to make the best marriage possible in order to prevent her family from sliding ever deeper into genteel poverty. Could the Kenyons shut their eyes to my common origins, I, as the young, handsome, agreeable, and eminently eligible heir of the richest man within twenty miles, was without doubt first prize in the matrimonial stakes.
Sarah returned empty-handed from her month’s sojourn in London. I took a guilty pleasure in the fact and welcomed her home with rather more enthusiasm than was suitable. How could she not have seized upon the opportunity offered her?
The Summer days rolled by, lush and golden as the ripening corn. I stole hours, then days to saddle my sleek chestnut gelding and go riding through the meadows and woodlands, to my father’s exasperation. What he did not know, for I sensed he had little use for such a fragile, ethereal creature as she (that thin-blooded porcelain doll, he styled her), was that I spent those stolen hours and days with Sarah.
I have not yet forgotten those drowsy sweet mornings and afternoons we squandered, walking hand in hand amongst the daisies and the dancing white butterflies, or conversing together beneath a shady tree as I lay with my head pillowed upon my arms, gazing up at her. I found her a sympathetic audience when I chafed beneath my father’s merciless fault-finding, for I will not deny I was poor at figures and loathed the negotiations necessary to Commerce more even than I loathed ciphering. My destiny, I imagined, was as a man of letters: Poet, Playwright, Essayist, Historian, it did not matter. “And if ever I should breathe a word of that to my father,” I told Sarah one warm bright day in early September as our horses ambled through the wood, “I should never hear the last of it.”
“Why so?”
“Because his precious China-ware, his d—ned manufactory is all in this life that matters to him!”
“Are you not a trifle unjust to him? He is your father.”
“Sarah, in frankness, he doesn’t like me. We are poles apart. He wishes to mould me into a man of Business, and that I shall never be.” We rode on in silence for a while longer, skirting the fields at the borders of Fairfax land, and followed the path once more into the forest, toward the neighbouring village of King’s Berwyck and its ruined mediæval fortress.
“Ought we ride all the way to the Castle?” enquired Sarah, at length. Its still, sun-washed courtyard was a favourite spot for picnics. “You know we shan’t have time to ride thither, and return, ere supper-time.”
“Let’s stop here, then, in the clearing.” I scrambled from my mount and offered my hand to help her down from her side-saddle. In dismounting, she slipped and would have fallen had I not caught her. She remained a moment in my arms, clinging to me as she caught her breath. We were face to face, closer than ever we had been. An electric thrill coursed through me as her slender body pressed against my own.
“Well,” she exclaimed (an instant too late), with a strained laugh, “I very nearly fell on my face, didn’t I?”
I handed her down onto a fallen log. Fetching the old blanket I carried strapped to my saddle for such occasions, I spread it over the thin long grass that grew in the glade and threw myself down upon it, gazing up at her. After a moment, unpinning her riding-hat and tossing it aside, she slipped from the log to sit opposite me on the blanket. Above us, the sunlight filtered in a green haze through the trees, dappling the sparse grass with patches of brilliant gold.
“What a lovely spot. Listen to the birds. There—wasn’t that a thrush?”
I gazed at her, drinking in the sapphire splendour of her eyes, a tight little knot of desire twisting in the pit of my stomach—and elsewhere. “It’s not as lovely as you are.”
She laughed softly, colouring, and looked away. “You are a flatterer, Sydney.”
“You are the most beautiful thing I ever have seen,” said I.
“Don’t tease me so—”
“Sarah—” The memory of her body pressed against mine was too much for me. I scrambled up and knelt beside her, taking her hand. “I—I love you.” At last I had blurted it out, that foolish little phrase that changed everything.
“Do you?” she whispered, her eyes wide and lustrous. “O Sydney, I’ve loved you for ages, since we were children I think. I’ve gone about all this year past thinking of nothing but you. When I was in London I thought I’d die of missing you.”
I touched her cheek and drew her nearer me. Our lips brushed, met, became one for a long moment. I found myself framing her face with my hands, kissing her over and over again.
“Sarah, I—O God, I love you—you know that, don’t you? Never anybody else. Always you.” Scarce knowing what I did, I reached a hand toward her bodice, toward the laces that held it snugly closed. She did not resist me and suddenly I was touching her beautiful breasts, stroking them, kissing them, until I thought I might go mad with desire. At last, gathering to me the shreds of my prudence, I tore myself away from her. “No—I shan’t do this. God knows I desire you, more than I’ve desired any woman—but it’s not right. You’re a lady.”
“But I will,” said she. “I will lie with you. I—I wish to.”
“Sarah—have you—have you ever before—”
“No! What do you take me for?”
“Then it’s not right. Your reputation—”
“I don’t care. I love you.” She cupped her palm about my cheek and suddenly kissed my lips, demurely at first, then with more license and passion, and I responded as any man would. “O Sydney,” she gasped, between kisses, “I shall never love anybody but you . . .”
“And I you,” said I, nuzzling at her neck.
“I have always known that, I think, since we were small, and we all played battledore and shuttlecock together in Mother’s garden. Do you remember?”
“I’ve never forgotten a moment of the time I have spent with you.” I bent over her hands, brushing my lips across them, tracing the length of each slender finger; then, with kisses, following the curve of her arm upward to her breasts once again. I ached to touch her, to possess her, to feel her small soft body moving beneath my own. At last my hand found its way beneath her skirts and she said not a word in protest, only whimpered as I kissed her breasts, her throat, her quivering mouth.
“I can’t bear this a moment longer,” I panted, after we had spent some time more in frantic kisses and caresses. “I shall go mad. I shall tear off your clothes in a moment, if we don’t stop this.”
“Why stop?” she whispered. “Don’t you imagine I might go mad, too?”
“It’s not right. It’s impossible. I should have to make promises to you to make it right, and your father would never suffer me to wed you—”
“But Sydney,” she cried, “he would! He thinks very highly of you. Don’t you remember?”
“No matter that your father is a Baronet and mine—well!”
“Plenty of respectable folk are in trade these days! We must move with the times. My father’d not object, I know it.”
I stared at her, seeing the world, glittering like a jewel, reflected in her eyes. “And . . . would you?”
“Would I what, Sydney?”
“Would you . . . wed me?”
“O yes,” she breathed. “Yes. Yes.”
Then we both, I think, went mad at the same instant, flinging
off all restraints. She was indeed a maiden, yet a moment later she
clung to me like a wanton, writhing beneath me and gasping her ardour.
I had some experience in such matters, having learnt finesse from
Célie, my willing Parisian shop-girl, but Sarah’s slim young body
was far sweeter than ever any jaded mistress’s could be. At last
we lay breathless together as the shadows lengthened, smiling at each other,
saying not a word as we dreamt of the radiant future stretching before
us.
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