Lady Rosalind Pembridge had invited Lady Lucy Hamilton to tea. She was very fond of Lady Lucy. Maybe she could get some information about how the friendship was progressing. Maybe she could set Lady Lucy’s mind at rest about the ridiculous habits of her brother. But she had even more important matters on her mind as she poured the tea and proffered some egg sandwiches.
‘I’m thinking of changing the curtains in here, Lady Lucy. Pembridge says I can spend a couple of hundred pounds or so. Patterned or plain, do you think?’
‘They’ve got some beautiful fabrics in Liberty’s just now,’ said Lady Lucy, aware that curtains can be a difficult and troublesome question.
‘I’ve got a man from Liberty’s coming round tomorrow morning,’ said Lady Rosalind. ‘He’s going to bring a whole book of things with him. He tried to interest me in some Japanese designs. He said they were the coming thing. Have you seen these Japanese designs, Lady Lucy?’
‘I have seen some of them. And they are very pretty. Very peaceful, I think. What does Lord Pembridge think about it all?’
‘Pembridge!’ Lady Rosalind laughed a sardonic laugh. ‘Pembridge wouldn’t notice if his curtains were made in Tokyo or Timbuctoo. He really wouldn’t.’ She shook her head sadly at the lack of interest of the other half of the human race in things of beauty. Her mind jumped sideways, to her brother. ‘Have you heard from Francis at all, Lady Lucy?’
‘I had a note from him. In fact I have had a couple of notes from him.’ Lady Lucy smiled a private smile to herself. ‘He’s somewhere in Norfolk. He didn’t tell me where. He said it had to do with his work and was very difficult.’
‘That’s so like him.’ Lady Rosalind poured some more tea. The lamps were being lit in the great square outside. ‘When we first lived in London years ago, before we were married,’ she looked as if it was hard to remember the time before she was married, ‘Francis used to take us to balls and things, the three of us girls. I suppose he was doing his duty. But even then you’d look round sometimes for a spare man, to fill in a gap on your card, or to take you in to supper, and Francis would have disappeared! Vanished into thin air! He always came back before the end of course to take us home. But it was so irritating. Eleanor, my youngest sister, once hit him over the head with her bag on the way home.’
‘Is he a good dancer? Francis, I mean. When he’s actually there.’ Lady Lucy had a sudden vision of herself and Francis floating round one of the great ballrooms of London, not talking, their eyes waltzing into the future.
‘Well, he is, since you mention it. He’s very good. But you’re never quite sure if his mind is with you. The feet are fine, the brain may have wandered off somewhere else.’
Lady Lucy smiled. She could see it all.
‘You might think,’ Lady Rosalind went on, warming to the character assassination of her brother, ‘it would have stopped once we were all married and he didn’t have to go to these balls and things. The disappearing Francis, that is. But no. It went on. It still does. Have you met his great friend Lord Rosebery?’
Lady Lucy said she had met him at her brother’s house years ago.
‘When Rosebery was Foreign Secretary, a couple of years back, he invited Francis to some very important dinner at the Foreign Office. Ambassadors, one or two other Foreign Secretaries, those kind of people. I think there was some big conference on in London. All goes well until the pudding. Francis sits in his seat, makes polite conversation, doesn’t spill anything on the floor. Then one of the waiters brings him a note with the creme brulee. Rosebery said it was a particularly fine creme brulee, much better than you get in Paris. Francis reads this note. And then he just disappears. He vanishes through the kitchens. The German Ambassador, Count Von somebody or other, finds himself talking to an empty chair. The wife of the French Foreign Secretary from the Quai d’Orsay is addressing her remarks to a crumpled napkin. There is a gap in the glittering party, as if a tooth has just fallen out. Francis has disappeared into the night. Even Rosebery was quite cross about that.’
Lady Lucy laughed. She felt Francis must have had a very good reason for disappearing. But she wasn’t sure she should say so.
There was a tentative knock at the door.
‘Who can that be at this hour?’ Lady Rosalind looked peeved. ‘Pembridge never comes back this early.’
The knocking continued.
‘Come in!’ called Lady Rosalind.
A nervous small boy poked a tousled head round the door. William Pembridge, eight years old, had been chosen by his brothers to lead this deputation to the terrifying world of the downstairs drawing-room.
‘William, what are you doing here?’ The voice was kind, but firm.
‘It’s the battle, Mama. We don’t know what happens next.’
‘Battle? What battle, William? Are you three fighting up there again?’
‘No, Mama, we’re not fighting.’ William looked weary, exhausted perhaps by his mission to the lower floors. ‘We don’t know what happens next. At Waterloo. On that big board game. The one Uncle Francis gave us, the one with the soldiers.’
‘Here we go again. Here we go again. Francis, Francis.’ Lady Rosalind sighed in exasperation, as if brothers were even more troublesome than sons. ‘Francis, Lady Lucy, very kindly bought the boys this big board thing for Christmas. It’s a huge model of the site of Waterloo with soldiers and toy farms and all sorts of things. The four of them used to play with it happily for hours up there. Four little boys together. Then Francis disappears in the middle of the early stages of the battle and rushes off with Lord Rosebery into the night. Now the boys are upset. What seems to be the trouble, William?’
‘We don’t know what happens now. After the farm at Hoggymut. Do you know, Mama?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, William. Of course I don’t. I don’t think your father knows either. You’ll just have to wait until Uncle Francis comes back.’
William looked very sad. He would have to report failure to his brothers. They were so looking forward to the next part of the battle. ‘But Uncle Francis may not come back for a bit. You said he’d disappeared.’
‘You know what your uncle is like as well as I do, William.’
‘Maybe I can help.’
William looked doubtfully at the slim elegant figure of Lady Lucy. Girls didn’t know about battles and important things like that.
‘You see, I know quite a lot about Waterloo. My grandfather fought there. He was with the cavalry. He used to tell us about it when we were little. And when we were bigger, come to that.’
‘The finest day of my life, the proudest moment of my whole career,’ the old General used to say in his last years, looking into the fire with his nearly blind eyes. ‘What a day! What a charge!’
‘Lady Lucy has far better things to do than go upstairs with you and play toy soldiers, William. Back you go upstairs. Off you go now.’
‘Please, Mama. Couldn’t Lady Lucy come up for a minute? It would make a big difference.’
‘Of course I’ll come up. I’d be delighted to help out, if I can.’ Lady Lucy assured Lady Rosalind that it was no trouble at all. As William opened the door of the drawing-room his two brothers nearly fell in. They had been listening at the keyhole.
‘I’m Patrick,’ said the middle brother. ‘I’m the drummer boy who leads the French Army when they charge.’
‘And I’m Alexander,’ said the smallest one. ‘I’ve got the bugle. I blow when the Duke of Wellington says so.’
They looked up at Lady Lucy with hope in their eyes.
‘Now then,’ said Lady Lucy, surveying the battlefield on the top floor. ‘The attack on the farm at Hougoumont has failed, I see.’
She explained about the British cavalry charge down the slope, the horses galloping ever faster, galloping to disaster as the French decimated them in the valley below. She wondered if any of these model horsemen had been based on her grandfather. She explained about the advance of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard up the slope, led by Marshal Ney, spurred on by the relentless beat of the drummer boys. She explained how the British waited for the enemy, lying behind the slope, waiting for a corps that had never been defeated in twenty years of warfare.