Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

I’m the man (thud!) who came from Scotland Shooting (thud!) peas up a nanny-goat’s bottom (thud!) I’m the man who (thud!) came from Scotland Shooting —

With that, she burst incontinently into the silent drawing room, and from the momentary alarmed look on her face, all was clear to Burnes. The footman had failed to find Bella. She had leapt downstairs to the accompaniment of the childhood favourite, believing herself to be alone in the house. Burnes, however, was equal to the situation.

‘On the contrary,’ he said with his best Montrose brogue, ‘I’m the man who came from Scotland.’

After that, they were, so to speak, on all fours with each other, and the casual observer of Mr Burnes’s near-daily calls in Hanover Square might well have been surprised to see the great explorer demonstrating the distinction between the Afghan turban and that of the faithless Sikhs, with the doubtful aid of the drawing room curtains, while the accomplished, beautiful and respectable Bella Garraway lay supine with laughter on the sofa.

‘Truly, I like him.’ That was all she said to her family, and it was her useful formula. She resisted all suggestions that he should come to dinner, and was not pressed. Colonel Garraway’s state made the hosting of a dinner a problematic proposal, and, for her part, Bella could only contemplate the idea of observing Burnes across a plate of soup with a tremor of amusement, when he had spent the previous afternoon teaching her to imitate the precise noise a Bactrian camel makes before spitting.

Only sometimes he fell silent in her company, seemed sadly lost in thought as his eyes fixed on the wallpaper, and she knew quite well what he was thinking, what in all honesty he felt he should now say. If, however, he did come to the point of looking at her and saying, ‘Bella, I am poor,’ she knew, for once, what she would say in return; she would say, quite simply, ‘Burnes, I am rich,’ and there would be an end on it. Or a beginning; one of the two. But of course he never did say it, having no tongue with which to say such a thing. The truth, unspoken, hung like a curtain between them, and it was, it seemed, only Bella who understood that if he chose, he could take that curtain and wind it, absurdly, about his head, and reduce her, as always, to the point of laughter.

‘Truly, I like him,’ she said, and truly, she did.

‘Must you go?’ she said. It was late in the afternoon in Hanover Square, and Burnes was standing to leave.

‘I must, Bella,’ he said, but he was smiling, and she knew it meant nothing, and let him go. She shut her eyes, and hugged herself, and smiled, and stayed where she was. She stayed where he had left her, just for a moment, trembling, taut, unseen, like a harp string when the door has been closed on an empty room. She stayed there with her eyes closed until she heard the door to the house close behind him. She opened her eyes on the empty room, and moved swiftly to the window – to the side of the window, where she would be in shadow, and watched him trot down the steps to the house. She saw how gracefully he moved. He must, she thought, be a fine dancer. And then, with an erotic force which made her blush for the weakness of her first thought, she realized from the grace of his few quick movements down the steps in Hanover Square, what he must be good at. What he must be best at. He, surely, was a horseman of superlative accomplishment.

Burnes stopped on the last of the steps, and seemed to realize something. He stood, and began to cast a glance back at the solidly-shut door of the Garraways’ house. He hovered there for a moment, while Bella watched, puzzled, and then thrust his hands into his coat-tails, and strode off with a pretence of purpose.

When Bella turned round, Emily was in the room. Instead of removing the tea-things, she was hovering over the sofa.

‘The gentleman—’ she said, almost nervously.

‘Yes, Emily?’ Bella said, turning back to the sight, once so ordinary, of Hanover Square without an Alexander Burnes in it. ‘Yes, what is it?’

‘The gentleman forgot his gloves, miss,’ Emily said. She was holding up a pair of pale blue gloves. That was what it had been; Burnes had left his gloves there, and only realized once he had left the house. Casting a glance back at the door of the Garraways’ house, he had found that too difficult a challenge; the man who had confronted the Amirs of Bokhara now, apparently, had found some timidity in him which made him shrink from returning to claim his gloves.

‘That won’t – no—’ Bella said, almost snatching the gloves back from Emily. ‘—no, they are my father’s gloves, not Mr Burnes’s. Give them to me – I was on the point of taking them up to him. I need to talk with my father, in any case.’

Emily was clearly doubtful. ‘I think he’s asleep presently, miss,’ she said. ‘I can take them up later with the six o’clock tray.’

Like an invalid, Colonel Garraway had a tray at set times; his six o’clock tray bore what had proved the efficacious restorative of half a pint of dry sherry and some ship’s biscuits. Bella was firm, not permitting herself to wonder what Emily and the massively multiplying dependants below stairs would be saying in half an hour about her theft of Burnes’s pale blue gloves. Bella, suddenly, simply didn’t care. ‘I’ll take them up now,’ she said, almost furiously, and, walking across the room and snatching the gloves up, almost ran up the stairs with them.

It was only when she was in her room, the door safely shut behind her, that Bella could think of what she had done, and why she had done it. She stood, holding his gloves, and it seemed to her that somewhere, deep in the house, carpets were being beaten; a great regular dull thud, making the walls vibrate and the windows ring. She listened, and it was no noise, but only her heart, the betrayer, rousing the house to her strange desire. She held the gloves to her, and the sound would not stop. The Garraways were so respectable they would never surprise anyone, never disappoint or astonish anyone with their perfect breeding. Now something had come to astonish, to overthrow, to bowl over a Garraway, and she listened to her beating heart with an emotion not far from bewilderment.

In her room, in her bureau, in the third drawer from the top, Bella kept a box of tokens. Tokens of her past life, which no one had seen, or would see. It was this she now reached for, in which she placed Burnes’s purloined gloves. A clockwork toy, twenty years old, no longer working; who, now, could say what that meant to Bella? Or a playbill, smudged with a masculine thumb, eloquent only to its collector, and to us, who observe her at this most private juncture, quite silent? A handkerchief, embroidered by hand – not very well, as if by a child, and marked with a D – we would venture so far as to guess that this belonged, once, to Bella’s mother, whose name in this house is so sadly neglected, that it is the handkerchief clutched by her mother as she died. Precious things; most precious things. It was here she placed Burnes’s gloves, not quite knowing why, but hearing some imperative voice, which she obeyed.

Burnes’s book, that summer, was read everywhere. The King did not read it, true. But yet even he had granted the author an audience, had graciously accepted a copy, and had listened, nodding from time to time, while Lady Porchester took it upon herself to describe Burnes’s adventures at length to Queen Adelaide. So – since he had never been known to take down any book but the Navy Regulations – even he could, loosely, be said to have read it. All London read it. The hostesses and their daughters read it to each other in the course of their long afternoons. In the city, the busy traders took time from making money to wonder at Burnes’s daring, the odd folk he had met, whose existence had never, until that year, been remotely suspected by people whose cellars were filled with the substantial tributes of the far-flung world. Boys at Westminster read it surreptitiously, their eyes shining, and that year, half the poems written for the Prize turned out to be Afghan pastorals, in which a shepherd of the neighbourhood of Herat, longing for his lost herd of fat-tailed sheep ( Pothon platykerkous oies ), came upon a dusky shepherdess. Most people who read Burnes’s famous account of his famous travels saw romance in it, and were satisfied to hear of another man’s colourful adventures and miserable minor discomforts. Bella, for instance, like a thousand other very similar young ladies between the Park and the Palace, enjoyed it as she might have enjoyed a fancy-dress ball. All these young ladies wondered only at the soft, rather irresolute man who hovered so in drawing rooms, at his having carried out such a mission. The young ladies, like Bella, looked at his white freckled skin and his thin floppy hair, the lightest possible shade of ginger, and wondered.