Man Of War

She looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I have known some who cannot abide Beethoven, yet call themselves musicians.’

He brightened. ‘I have heard Beethoven, and liked it very much.’

It was true. He had once attended a concert by the Grenadiers’ band, when they had played Wellington’s Victory, and the duke himself had conducted the encore. But he need not burden her with such a detail.

Kezia brightened, too. ‘Then I shall write to my aunt at once.’

They continued their stroll. The birdsong, so intense in the morning, was now diminished. A distant cuckoo called, but neither of them remarked on it.

‘I have found us a very pleasant house at the Cape, and but a short walk from the Somerviles.’

Kezia said nothing for the moment, and then: ‘How are the Somerviles?’

Hervey supposed the domestic details did not trouble her, that she trusted him to make what arrangements were necessary (she was, after all, in no position to make any herself). ‘They are very well. I think Emma especially is glad to be in those climes again – although it is not India, for sure. Somervile himself is rather vexed at finding the administration of the colony keeps him at Cape-town, but there is a good deal for him to do. And it is the most pleasing place, the country and the climate.’

Kezia stopped suddenly, and turned. ‘Matthew, I think I will return to the house. I would speak with Mrs Benn and the nurse before making ready for this evening. And I must practise a little more. We leave at six, you know.’

Hervey was a trifle disconcerted by the abrupt termination of their pleasant stroll, but he understood that Kezia had responsibilities in the absence of her parents. And, too, she had a very proper pride in her music, an admirable sense of obligation to those she would play for. ‘Of course, of course. Let us walk back together.’

Hervey found the prospect of the soirée increasingly unappealing as they drove through Knebworth park. Kezia had no doubt intended the opposite in her picture of the evening, but it sounded to him an affair in which he would find little diversion. Their reception at the house was certainly warm enough: Knebworth’s chatelaine was extravagantly welcoming (Fairbrother, he marked, seemed entirely at his ease), but his immediate impression of the company was of a ménage altogether too studied.

Knebworth was, like Sezincote, a perfectly ordinary English house which had been ‘decorated’ to appear other than it was. Unlike Sezincote, however, which had been turned into something that would have looked entirely natural on the banks of the Hooghly, Knebworth, with its Gothic windows, battlements and turrets, looked as if it had been transported from the Rhine. Kezia explained that Mrs Bulwer Lytton had inherited a dilapidated mansion from her father, and that, in the words he, Hervey, had used, ‘her taste and her means coincided’: she had pulled down three sides of a most uncouth and sombre quadrangle to make a more manageable house out of the fourth. ‘Old General Bulwer being now dead, too, Elizabeth is free at last of a most unhappy marriage,’ she added with some asperity. ‘She is finally able to pursue her true vocation, which is painting and poetry.’

It had not, therefore, been the most consoling of drives. And by the time Kezia had told him that their hostess’s father had brought her up on the principles of Rousseau, which had meant her curtsying to the gardener’s boy, he was in something of a mental lather. Especially since Kezia gave him to expect that there would be a good many more bluestockings than those of either sex with whom he might have easy conversation.

Mrs Bulwer Lytton greeted her guests in a voice so old-fashioned (though she was no great age) that Hervey did not quite know what startled him the more – that or her strangely medieval dress. She smiled and called him ‘darling boy’, then scowled and (none too teasing, he fancied) said, ‘but you are naught to try to take away this jewel from among us’, tapping Kezia’s arm with her fan.

Try? Despite his wonder at their hostess, it was all he could do to stop himself saying that he did not try: it was already accomplished. But a lifetime’s deference to age and rank stood in his way. ‘I am a fortunate man, ma’am,’ he replied, with an almost exaggerated bow. He hoped Kezia would play her part in this, but he saw that she had become preoccupied, rather in the manner he had observed that evening at Sezincote as the time for singing drew close. He must accustom himself to it, for composed though her manner invariably was, Hervey knew there was such a thing as artistic temperament – what was vulgarly called ‘nerves’.