His Father's Son

by Malcolm Macdonald

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

On a winter's morning in 1915, a baby boy is quietly brought down to a Cotswold gamekeeper's cottage. Fitzie is the love child of Miriam Lessore, the wayward daughter of the manor house. The father is rumoured to be the Prince of Wales - although one man knows different. Brought up as their own by Patrick and Martha Davy, the gamekeeper and his wife, the scandalous truth will never be known. Until Patrick returns from the war, his obedience to the old order gone, and ambitious now to become wealthy and independent. Until Martha joins Miriam in a business venture. Then, as the traditional divisions between squire and servant change, the pressures for the truth to be revealed become even more unbearable...

Release date: October 10, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 448

Sample

A RIME OF FROST lay thick on the puddles in Old Common Lane that February morning. The wheels of the carriage broke into it with a sound like gunfire. At least, that was the image it conjured in the mind of Patrick Davy as he waited for the carriage to pull up outside his cottage gate; gunfire was an easy image in many a mind in 1915. He heard the coachman cry Whoa! and glanced uncertainly at his wife, Martha. She just sat at the window, staring out with that inscrutable calm of hers, so endearing when they were apart and yet so maddening when he was face to face with it on an occasion like this. The ice on one of the puddles gave out a groan, like a distant cry from the damned, before it splintered. That would be the driver getting down to open the gate for the nurse.

Yes, there was the creak of its hinge; Martha wouldn’t let him oil it. And the nurse had iron studs in her boots; they made a contemptuous crunching on the gravel path.

“Aren’t you going?” he asked Martha.

“You go,” she said, turning to him and smiling. “He’s every bit as much yours, too, my dear.”

Patrick rose and went to the door, opening it just as the nurse arrived. He nodded to her. She looked at him strangely, surprised to find the man of the house involved in such a business as this. Then she handed him a tight-wrapped bundle; she had held it in her arms for the past half-hour, so her relief was enormous.

As it passed into his uncertain clutch, a mouth buried deep within its swaddling opened and a pair of month-old lungs bellowed lustily. Patrick looked sharply at the nurse and for a moment their eyes were locked; they knew this was a significant moment. That cry of rage and frustration – at that particular moment – had symbolic meaning for them all. But neither of them could think of the right words for it; in the end they just smiled at something they had recognized and then let it pass.

He hugged the bundle tighter and the howling stopped, just in time for Martha to take both the baby and the credit for pacifying him. The nurse turned and walked back to the carriage. Not a word had been spoken. The coachman dropped a little bag inside the gate and gave the Davys a cheerful nod, as between colleagues. They would not expect him to carry it to their door; and the baby, too, had just lost all claim to that sort of privilege – so, in a way, it was another symbolic act. Patrick went to retrieve it, and to close the latch properly.

Martha watched the carriage vanish in another fusillade of simulated gunfire, up the back lane to Old Norton. There was no crest on its door, but she needed none; she knew the lady who had borne this child very well indeed – and all her family. She’d made the Lessore beds, washed the Lessore dishes, peeled the Lessore vegetables, and thanked them prettily for her wages, almost as long as she could remember.

She carried the baby indoors and laid him down on a rug in front of the kitchen range. “All this-here tight old swaddling can’t be good for them,” she muttered. “I shan’t believe it.” As she unwound the bindings she reflected grimly that it would have been better for young Miss Miriam if she had been kept as tight-wrapped as this. She remembered the last time they had met – herself, Mrs Lessore, and the daughter – in the business room at Marton Abbey. Miriam, not yet showing her “interesting condition,” had just sat and stared out of the window, as if the arrangements being worked out between the other two had nothing whatever to do with her. Just at the end, though, she had turned and given Martha such a funny look: “I can’t think of a better mother than you, Mrs Davy.” That was all she had said – but the way she said it … very odd.

“Look at his little arms and legs, then,” she told Patrick. “All white like that. Starved of blood, they are.”

Patrick stared at that tiny little acorn and thought of his own, rampant and hot in the glade that evening … and her, Miss Miriam, throwing herself on him with a passion that left him drowned and beaten. How long before the same quickening began to spout from that improbable little button down there on that rug?

“On and on and on,” he murmured.

Martha looked up. “You’d best get out and see to your traps,” she said. She loved it when he came back to the cottage after a day in such cold as this, for then he truly relished her cooking – and her warmth in bed afterward.

As she began to rewrap the baby, making his binding much looser, Heather, their only child until now, came sleepily from her crib in the back room. Patrick squatted and hugged her into his arms – from which safe fortress she turned and stared down impassively at the little bundle of wants and imperatives that had just blown in to wreck their lives.

“What’s that?” she asked in disgust.

Patrick knew what she was looking at; who ever said little girls are all sweetness and innocence? He craned forward to see her expression; but she had none. She just went on staring down at it; who could ever tell what they were really thinking? Were they born with the knowledge that that funny little bud of gristle would one day grow into a mighty wrecker of girls’ bellies? Or was it just something different, something new?

That was the other wrecker of bellies – the thirst for something new. That’s all he had been to her, up there in the glade on that hot, hot evening last May – something new. He didn’t give himself airs in that department.

“Where’s it come from?” Heather asked.

“All the way from France,” he told her. “That’s where your old dad will be off to, soon enough.” He turned to his wife. “What are you going to call ’un?” he asked. “Poor little Fitzie.”

“You’re not to call him that!” she blazed.

“It’s what they call the chance-children of princes,” he replied mildly. “Fitzroy, Fitzwilliam …”

“I’ll think of a name, only it’s got to be right, see. I’ve got to look something up. But one thing I’ll tell you – I’ll not have him called Fitzie.” She rose and, hugging the nameless baby to her, crossed to the window. There she unbuttoned her blouse and offered him an ample breast.

“What are you at, woman?” her husband asked. He rose, swinging their daughter up in his embrace until her head was on a level with his.

Across the gulf between them Martha said, “I thought I felt a little milk there last night.” The baby sucked greedily. “Yessss!” she murmured ecstatically. “That’s it – go on – milk me, you milky little devil!”

Patrick was unable to speak against the sudden pressure of tears behind his eyelids. And Heather leaned her head into his big, strong shoulder, and stuck her thumb into her mouth, and stared at her mother and that strange new toy at her breast.

 

* * *

 

Miriam Lessore sat at her window in Marton Abbey and stared vacantly out over the frostbitten lawns. It was done at last. What a year that was!

Her father, the Colonel, always said that, when he sampled a good vintage: What a year that was!

A little smile played at the corner of her lips – he certainly wouldn’t say it about the summer of 1914, no matter if the vintage proved to be the best of the century. No, 1914 would always be the year when the Lessores had been brought down in shame and ignominy, when their daughter disgraced their ancient name. The irony was that the first of them – the one to whose loins they so proudly traced their lineage back in 1072, was a bastard of the Conqueror, who was, in turn, a bastard of the Norman duke. How often had her father boasted of it when he showed visitors round the gallery of ancestors … “Yes” – tap on the nose and a wry little grin – “there he is! Old William Lessore. Born the wrong side of the blanket, you know, like his pater before him – old Billy the Conk!”

Well, Miriam thought to herself, if she’d done nothing else, she’d saved countless future pilgrims to the Abbey that little joke. Poor Dad! He couldn’t help being such a crashing bore.

We treat our bastards differently now, she reflected sombrely. We don’t give them abbeys and estates any more, we give them away.

Her eyes walked the lawns where, one blistering hot evening in May, in this never-to-be-a-vintage year, she had wandered in distraction, knowing that her entire world had just been shattered. The heat was the culprit. But for the heat she would never have wandered into the old summerhouse, carrying a message from Windsor for the Prince; but for the heat Sidney would never have dared caress Margot like that; but for the heat Margot would never have undone so many buttons. Her mouth went dry now, even at the memory. Suppose they had seen her, just standing there gawping at them!

But for the heat she would have run away across the lawns, on and on in heedless fright until the woods had safely devoured her. Instead, her errand forgotten, she had walked in a daze; and her leaping, bursting heart, having no tired muscles into which to pour its excess, had instead claimed all her attention, demanding to know why it was so strangely stirred as she sauntered away over the lawns, down into the haha, and out across the stubbled hayfield to the woods.

It was the primal shock of the thing. All those sniggers after lights-out in the dorm, all those whispered confidences from giggling girls back after their Continental holidays – they were one way in which young girls prepared themselves for the event, but not for the shock that went with it. To imagine a young man’s hand upon a girl’s naked breast was one thing; but to see it actually happening, there, before your goggling eyes, was altogether something else. It was like a physical blow in the pit of her stomach.

And all during that violent-leisurely walk she had been forced to tell herself, again and again, that it really did happen. Not in some clandestinely borrowed book, not among people who ended up in the newspapers, but right here, among her own friends – the salt of the earth … people like Sidney Lang and Margot Drysdale. That was what changed it, for if them, then why not her? It suddenly put her among them. Her own breasts, which until now had been just awkward lumps stuck on the front of her – good handwarmers on a frosty night – were suddenly available, too, in that way.

And so she had stood in that little clearing in the woods, and eased her blouse out of her waistband and undone all its buttons and closed her eyes and tried out the idea on herself – never realizing how quietly a dashing, young gamekeeper could creep up on her.

“I want to make it so good for you, Miss Miriam.”

That was all he said, or needed to say.

And by heavens, she’d do it all again – even knowing what it had led to. She wouldn’t relinquish her claim to one second of the hour they had spent together that evening. Fate had intended it. Why else, the minute she emerged from the woods, had she practically bumped into the Prince and Colin Henderson and Arthur Pelham, walking back up the hayfield?

“Oh Sir! I’ve been searching everywhere for you …”

And all was explained – her long, unchaperoned absence, her dishevelled state – everything! That had to be Fate.

She stiffened, and returned to the present, to the frozen lawns and the ice-pictures on the windowpanes.

“What are you thinking, dear?” her mother asked nervously from somewhere behind her.

She said the first thing that came into her head: “I was wondering if, when Jack Frost shows people around his portrait gallery, does he ever mention which side of the blanket they were born?”

Her mother sighed and, coming close, put her arms around her, cocooning her, rocking her gently. “Poor darling! You’re not going to mope for ever, are you?”

“I’m not going to mope at all. My God! One month of mewling and puking was as much as I want in all my life!” In a quieter tone, almost as if speaking to herself, she added, “Which is just as well, perhaps.”

“Your father wonders if you mightn’t like to go back to France until the end of the summer? In the south, you know – well away from all this wretched fighting.”

Miriam did not respond. She herself had ideas of going to France – but very close to “all this wretched fighting.”

“Mmmm?” her mother prompted.

Miriam sighed. “I think I might go to London, actually. Stay with Margot. She’s organized the most splendid tea service at Victoria, for the troops, you know.”

“I know – and no chaperones,” Mrs Lessore said with a ritual sort of hand-wringing vexation in her tone.

Miriam gave a single hollow laugh. “Dear Mama! When this war’s over, you know, the word chaperone, just by itself, will be a side-splitting music-hall joke.”

The other let a silence grow before she said, “I don’t suppose you’ll ever tell us who the father really is?” By now she no longer waited for the girl’s affirmation. “Well, your Loyalty” – and she always gave the word Loyalty an extra-special emphasis – “does you great credit, my darling. The Colonel says if we make no fuss, take it on the chin, there could be a baronetcy in it for us, so I won’t press you on it.”

When she had gone, Miriam laid her forehead against the ice-crystalled glass and rolled it gently, this way and that, relishing the numbness it brought.

COOMBE NORTON WAS A village disguised as a town. It had held a weekly market since time immemorial – and certainly since 1218, when the custom was authorized by royal charter. To accommodate the cattle pens and pedlars’ stalls its main street was of a generous width, so that the houses, which in other villages would beetle over narrow lanes, stared grandly at each other across a distance of thirty or forty paces, every inch of it cobbled and paved. Since a market day affords an ideal opportunity to get a cart wheel mended, a tooth pulled, a wen lanced, or a troublesome neighbour sued, specialists in all these services, and more, had set up shop along that generous highway; their substantial houses added greatly to its generally rather townlike appearance.

However, that single wide street was virtually the entire village. At its lower, eastern end it formed a short-topped T, the left branch of which led into Old Common Lane. The right branch kept up its urban pretence for a brief space but then yielded to a mile or so of farmland before it arrived at Old Norton in the very foothills of the Cotswolds. At its other end, at the crest of a long, gentle slope, the one broad street was flanked by two imposing houses whose projection narrowed it to the more usual width for a country road. In this case, the road led to Bristol, twelve miles away as the crow flies and half a century distant by any reasonable measure of social progress.

Such was the earliest home of the still anonymous baby that Martha and Patrick Davy had adopted.

She did not rush to give him a name. She knew that at some time during the permitted two months in which a newborn child could stay legally nameless, an omen would be sent to her. Meanwhile Patrick had no name to call him but Fitzle. Martha objected, of course, but his answer was reasonable: “Give the boy a proper handle, woman, and I’ll gladly use it.”

Heather also called him Fitzie. She did it to provoke, for she resented his sudden commandeering of her mother’s time. Martha hid her annoyance, hoping that when her little brother was properly baptized they could all forget his nickname of shame. Unfortunately, a small part of Martha did not consider it a shame. She remembered the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Duke of Beaufort’s place at Badminton in May last year – exactly the right time if you reckoned it back; she remembered a certain strange pride in Mrs Lessore’s manner when they had been discussing the arrangements for the adoption … a certain hint that everyone connected with this affair was in some way honoured. And Martha could put two and two together as well as the next woman. She knew what she wanted to call the boy, for she had found her shortlist in the 1911 copy of Debrett that had been relegated to the outer office at Fawley’s the solicitors: Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Prince of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Saxony, Prince of Coburg and Gotha …; b. June 23rd, 1894. Two or three names from that would do nicely, she thought. Patrick, of course, chose his own name from the list. “Call him Fitzpatrick,” he said with that infectious laugh of his.

Although she had several times called on Mr Fawley to tell him of her decision, her courage had always failed her at the last moment. Suppose her suspicions were wrong? Suppose that girl Miriam had just spread her legs for any old hedge-trimmer! Not very likely … but still, stranger things had happened. No, she needed an omen to back her suspicion. If the good Lord sent her one before the two months were up, then she’d be much more sure of her ground.

But the two months had gone by, and still the heavens had not parted, no scrap of paper had fluttered through the open window, and countless prickings of the bible had yielded nothing but impossibilities like Perez-uzza or Obededom the Gittite. By now the name “Fitzie” had acquired a certain ring of inevitability. She began to panic.

One afternoon the following week she discovered she had no flour. That’s what worry did for you. It was a warm day for March, and the rain had gone over by mid-morning, so the roads were nearly dry again. She wrapped little Fitzie in his shawl and laid him in the old perambulator she had bought out of the money from Mrs Lessore. She felt quite grand to be pushing it up Old Common Lane to the main street, just like the high-quarter folk at the top end of the street and out along the vicarage lane; Patrick had given it a lick of paint, so it looked almost unused. It just needed a new spoke for one of the wheels and it would be perfect. She’d get that today, too. The only drawback was Heather, who, never having enjoyed such a luxury in her pre-walking days, now wished to make up for lost time. She grizzled, “Pleeeease please-please-please,” and “Why not?” at every other pace.

“There’s no room, you daftie,” Martha snapped. “If you sit on the poor little mite, you’ll smother him.”

All Heather said was, “I hate Fitzie!” And then it would begin again: “Please, please …”

Their way led past Maggie Coates’s. Maggie herself was out on her doorstep gossiping with Ruth Thomas; but the pair of them came swiftly up the path to stand by the gate when they saw her approaching. “Afternoon, Mrs Davy,” Maggie called.

“Good afternoon, Mrs Coates, Mrs Thomas. This weather’s turning fair at last.” She prepared to sail on by. Funny thing – they had been Maggie and Ruth and Martha when they had all been at board school together; but that wouldn’t be respectable enough now. Only the dirt-common people down Quarry Lane went on using their childhood names like that.

“Let’s hope our lads in Flanders are getting their share of it, too,” Ruth said. Both her husband and Gordon Coates were at the front.

Martha slowed but did not stop. “I don’t know what sort of a time they’ve been having. We’ve not heard from my brother for a month.” No harm in reminding them her family was doing its share, too. And next week, when Patrick went to enlist, they’d stop taunting her with their sacrifices.

Maggie Coates sniffed sarcastically. “And when you do get a letter, the censor’s gone and made a dog’s breakfast of it!” Then, as Martha insisted on edging past, she threw out her last conversational grappling iron: “Oh bless the little thing! You never saw him yet, did you, Mrs Thomas?”

“Only the once,” Ruth lied.

Martha gritted her teeth and pulled to a halt. Her feelings were mixed, however. She felt a great pride for her new, ready-made son. When she lifted him from the pram and held him up for admiration, it seemed to her that the nobility in him was so obvious … surely everyone must notice it?

“Those eyes,” Maggie said in seeming rapture. “There’s blue blood there, no doubt of it.”

Maggie had tried every trick she knew to wheedle some definite information out of Martha, but beyond the fact that she and Patrick had adopted the boy – which could hardly be denied – she gave not the slightest hint. No one else, except Patrick of course, even knew he was from the Lessores. One day, that bit of the secret would come out, to be sure; a servant would get drunk or be sacked and then it would spread. But by that time, lives would have mended and the nine-day-wonder of it would be long forgotten.

“Little Fitzie!” Maggie made baby noises at the child but kept a weather eye on his adoptive mother.

Martha only smiled. “I’d almost forgotten what distraction a babby is,” she said coolly. “I ran all out of flour. Imagine – not an ounce left in the house. I don’t know.”

These were words to ease the baby back into the pram but as she turned to it she saw Heather precariously balanced with one grubby leg over the rim. She gave her knee a stinging slap and cried, “Get your muddy boots off of that nice clean shawl!”

Heather howled all the way up the lane to the school at the corner. “If you aren’t quiet,” Martha told her, “I shall get Mr Watts to come out and whip you to rags and tatters.”

Mr Watts was actually rather a mild headmaster; it was Miss Deems that everyone feared. But to Heather, Mr Watts was ogre, giant, hobgoblin, and the Wicked Stepfather, all rolled in one. She fell silent and for a second or two remembered that very soon she would be going through those dreaded gates every morning and would then be forced to spend most of the day in the monster’s lair.

“That’s better,” Martha said gratefully.

Round the corner, into the main street at last, she stopped at Powell’s, the cycle shop, to get the new spoke. She was just coming out again when someone called her name. It was market day and the village was fairly crowded; she did not notice Mr Taylor, head clerk to Mr Fawley, the solicitor, until he was almost upon her. “I was just coming down to see you,” he said. “I’m sure you know why.”

“I do,” she sighed. “I’ll come in directly, I promise. I’m just going up to Mr Sweatman’s for a …”

“Directly isn’t good enough, I’m afraid. Mr Fawley sent me to tell you that unless we have your decision on the boy’s name by close of business today, he will simply have to make the choice for you. I’m sorry, Mrs Davy, but this afternoon really is your last chance to name him.”

She felt trapped. Would she, after all, have to fall back on an ordinary name? Did the very lack of an omen mean something? Was the good Lord telling her not to be so stupid – just give him any old name and be done with it? Still something checked her. “I’ll call by on my way back home,” she promised, but with lacklustre conviction.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated as she turned to go.

Heather had taken advantage of the distraction to climb up into the pram. “And I’m not mothering Fitzie,” she cried urgently, holding up an arm to ward off blows. “And my boots aren’t on the shawl.”

Martha laughed. “Oh, Heather, my lovely, what’s to be done with you? I don’t know.”

“My boots aren’t muddy, anyway,” the child added when she saw she had won.

“No, I don’t suppose they are – not now. You wiped them all nice and clean on that mattress, didn’t you! All right, you just sit up this end. I only hope it doesn’t tip, that’s all.” She resettled the baby, who did not even stir out of his sleep. “Aren’t you a marvel!” she told him.

“Am I a marble, too?” Heather asked as they set off again.

“Every inch of you.” Martha laughed and tousled her hair.

Heather jogged impatiently up and down. “Faster! Faster!” she urged her mother.

There were two shops that sold flour even before they reached the lane that led to the quarries; but Martha passed them by in favour of Sweatman’s. It was not that his flour was any better – indeed, it all came from the same mills out on the Bristol road – but Sweatman had a spare room in the back where he bought and sold second-hand furniture. Most of it was cottagey sort of stuff but some had seen better days. Martha loved to pop in there and browse, to run her hand over the polished surfaces, to smell the lingering scents with which people had laced their beeswax … in a word, to dream, for there was neither space nor call for any more furniture at home.

Old Mr Sweatman saw a kindred soul in her. He, too, loved old furniture; even the dents, the inkstains, the marks of time, delighted him. All those years of polishing and dusting and care – they added something to the wood that not even the finest craftsman could mimic. Like all shopkeepers, though, he had a streak of snobbery. He could never resist pointing out those pieces that had come from the great houses of the district. “Here’s an old dumb-waiter that was once in Doddington Hall,” he would tell Martha. And together they’d stand and admire its opulent lines, and try in vain to picture the scenes of unimaginable privilege it would reveal to the humbler world, could it but speak.

On this particular afternoon he greeted her as warmly as ever. “I have a splendid piece in the back, Mrs Davy. It’s just been delivered. One of the best pieces to come my way for years. Old Shaw, the antique dealer from Clifton, you know, he’s coming to see it.”

She left the pram under the archway that led to the furniture store. “Now you guard your brother against all harm,” she warned Heather. “If you don’t, I’ll twist your arms off.”

Heather laughed at the very idea; anyway, she’d soon grow new ones. Happy in her possession of the pram she stared past her mother, aslant the archway, to where, on the far side of the street, she could see the last of the cattle being loaded from the market pens. The men were already gathering the good straw to be reused next time. Soon they’d bring out the two hoses. She hoped her mother would come back in time to take her down for a ringside seat.

“How did you come by it?” Martha asked the shopkeeper as they went across a narrow little courtyard.

He laid a finger against his nose and then, with a showman’s flourish, directed her to the piece in question. It was, indeed, magnificent – a tall chest of drawers made in the style of a military locker, with brass corners and pivoted handles that hung flush with the fronts.

“Well!” she said in tones of awe as she ran her fingertips over the gleaming wood.

“Walnut on an oak carcase,” he told her. “I’ve just given her a polish.”

“It must be worth a tidy sum?”

“Yours for thirty pound, Mrs Davy,” he offered with a small, mock-solemn smile.

The best part of a year’s wages! Or exactly a year’s payment for the rearing of … Fitzie. She remembered her encounter with Mr Taylor and there was a leaden feeling in her stomach.

“It came to me from Marton Abbey – you know, the Lessores,” he said, casually watching for her response.

Not by a flicker of an eyelid did Martha reveal her surprise. “I don’t remember this,” she said, running her hands over it approvingly. “I should think I’ve polished and dusted every stick in that place.”

“’Course you have.” He tapped his forehead. “I’d forgotten that. But this came from her father’s house. He died, back end of last year. I don’t suppose they got room for it up the Abbey.”

“No, and that’s a fact!” Martha laughed – but the hair rose on her neck. Here at last was the omen! She felt sure of it. “Fancy selling a beautiful thing like that!” she said.

He grinned, almost as if he were suggesting something risque. “Try one of the drawers!”

The top one moved so easily it almost shot right out. Sweatman put forth his hand to stay it. He was surprised that Martha said nothing. He turned to her, only find that she was lost in perusal of an old newspaper that lined the drawer. It was The Times, he noticed – and, because history was in his blood, he even noticed the date: June 25th, 1894. Twenty-one years ago. He grinned. “Old newspapers, eh. They’re the scourge of my life.”

“What?” She returned to the here-and-now with difficulty. “Sorry, I mustn’t trespass on your time, must I. Yes, it is a lovely piece, Mr Sweatman. I’d love it. When I dig up the pot at the end of the rainbow …”

“I couldn’t promise to hold it for you that long,” he told her in mock solemnity. “As a matter of fact, I was referring to the old newspaper. The hours I’ve wasted on finds like that! Tell you what – why don’t you take it. If you can’t have the chest, at least you can have the old newspaper!”

He opened the drawers, one after another, and took out their linings; they were all from the same issue. “Interesting,” he commented. “You don’t often see that – all the same date.”

“It had to be,” Martha told him.

She scurried back outside, turned the pram about, and set off at once to cross the street to Fawley’s office, barely able to contain her excitement.

Heather was equally thrilled. The men on the far side of the street had rolled out the hoses and joined them to the iron thing they stuck down in a hole among the cobbles. And the fat man with the Kaiser moustaches, as her father called them, was just putting another bit of iron into the hole. When he turned it, the