‘And no doubt they will.’ Hamish Campbell smiled at the young wife; the smile of a co-conspirator in youth. Judging by the softness of his whiskers, Lady Morgan’s companion couldn’t have been much older than Lavinia herself.
‘Your wife has strong opinions for her age.’ Lady Morgan turned to the Colonel.
James Huntington’s betrothal had been a source of surprise to many of his circle. There had always been a swirl of mystery and speculation around the Colonel and his perennial bachelorhood. There had been rumours of various liaisons over the years—including one with Lady Morgan—but those who called themselves friends (and there were not many) had concluded that Huntington had become too addicted to his private pleasures to marry. His sudden change of status was a cause of some irritation, disrupting as it did the delicately balanced equilibrium of those unspoken strictures by which the wealthy aristocracy lived. Not one of them approved of the Colonel’s unexpected union with one so apparently unsuitable in terms of class, and the concept of marrying for love w
as preposterous, dangerously modern and vaguely obscene.
Huntington’s young wife was annoyingly ‘earnest’, Lady Morgan observed, a characteristic she could only just tolerate in younger men, and then only when they were particularly beautiful or particularly wealthy. Furthermore, she subscribed to some bizarre political ideas. Obviously the Irish Question was one of them—rather peculiar considering the girl was a Protestant. What was her maiden name? Kane. Lady Morgan tried to recall the names of all the Irish aristocrats she knew, but Kane was not among them.
Plucking a gooseberry from the bowl of fruit on the table, she furtively studied the couple. Hamish Campbell, noting her scrutiny, smiled—a gesture Lady Morgan found irritatingly insincere. She glanced back across the table. The Colonel no longer appeared in a hurry to rescue his young wife from the political quagmire she seemed so determined to mire herself in; perhaps a certain heartlessness had replaced his original intrigue? Lady Morgan had herself fallen victim to his caprices in the past.
‘Are you not Church of Ireland, dear?’ she asked Lavinia patronisingly.
‘I am, but as a child I witnessed the horrors of the great Famine. Those people were human, not the sub-human caricatures portrayed in your English newspapers.’
‘James, darling, you must introduce your wife to the honourable Mr Hennessy,’ Lady Morgan declared. ‘You must know him from the Carlton Club? I hear he is doing some wonderful things for our Celtic friends.’
‘Indeed, I have met the gentleman in Dublin, but I fear my opinions were too Whiggish for his Tory tastes.’ Lavinia, her face now ablaze, was having trouble controlling the tremor in her voice.
‘My wife, the revolutionary. You see I married her for the idealistic fervour which has evaporated in myself.’ Nevertheless, the Colonel, pinching a piece of bread between his fingers, was secretly disturbed by Lavinia’s obstinate pursuit of the Irish Question. Lord, did the child not know when enough was enough?
‘Poppycock and tosh, James, you were never idealistic nor fervent—unless it came to war, a good claret or an adventure of a dubious nature,’ called out Charles Sutton, a gentleman of fifty and an associate of the Colonel’s since his days at Sandhurst Military Academy.
‘Not at all, sir! I have always been passionate about Nature and Science.’
Charles tapped his wine glass. ‘We can thank Darwin for the current national obsession with such matters, and perhaps the explosion of industry. Together they threaten to dissect Nature and give us an anatomy of Beauty that will exorcise all spiritual mystery and quite ruin my morning walks.’
‘Science does not destroy the spirit, Charles; in fact it reveals it. There is God in evolution, just as there is God in a snowflake. We have just given him Reason,’ the Colonel parried.
Hamish Campbell, Lady Morgan’s young companion, gestured to a footman who obliged him by pouring him another glass of claret. As the manservant poured, Hamish Campbell took the opportunity of the two military men’s banter to observe his host. James Huntington was one of those fleshy handsome men whose magnetism emanated from a sense of coiled power. In the Colonel’s case, it was neither wealth nor a commercial understanding but intellectual amplitude. The Colonel was an interesting mixture of both soldier and scholar, his appearance and manner showing the controlled habits of the military man, while his easy wit and natural intelligence gave him a cosmopolitan demeanour.
The Colonel’s ruby signet ring flashed in the candlelight as he lifted his wine glass, one eyebrow raised. He was the modern Renaissance man, the perfect embodiment of the Victorian intellectual. I shall endeavour to study him closely, Campbell vowed. James Huntington’s life was one the young Hamish Campbell badly desired, and was now intent on emulating.
Still burning at Lady Morgan’s patronising manner, Lavinia barely heard the conversation that was propelled across the table in short bursts, filling the room with laughter one moment, emptying it the next, the hidden meaning beneath the clipped English consonants as thick as the glutinous liquorice jelly she watched falling from her spoon. It made her yearn for more frank and open conversation, in which emotions and intuitions could be freely expressed.
She examined the countenances of the individuals before her, and couldn’t help wondering, as she observed Lady Morgan’s twitching mouth, why they couldn’t all just say what they mean? The pretence was so mannered that for a moment Lavinia imagined the guests had suddenly turned into figures from a commedia dell’arte. She was ill-equipped to navigate the artifice of these people; even her accent— which would have been considered English in the drawing rooms of Dublin—sounded hideously provincial. As she sat there contemplating the demure dress of the other women, she was suddenly horribly aware of the inappropriate elaborateness of her headdress.
‘I remember a time when you were a very vocal detractor of Mr Darwin, Colonel,’ the Punch cartoonist, ever the antagonist, interjected.
‘We are allowed to change our minds. I believe it was On the Origin of Species that converted this soul.’
‘But to suggest we are related to the gorilla?’ Lady Morgan shivered with disgust.
Lavinia leaned forward, seeing an opportunity open in the conversation.
‘There seems to be a patent logic to the notion that form is affected by environment. As a river shapes a rock, so animals must adapt over time to their environments. And we ourselves must have sprung from somewhere. We are, after all, inherent to the Natural world.’
Surprised by her eloquence, the other diners turned; at last they saw how this provincial young Irishwoman might have captivated the Colonel.
‘Does this mean, Mrs Huntington, that you are an atheist,’ Lady Morgan retorted. ‘For surely belief in Darwin must preclude a belief in God?’
The Colonel took Lavinia’s hand, the first gesture of affection he had made towards his wife during the three hours they had been dining. ‘Frances, you are wrong. My wife is a practising Christian. So there you are: it is possible to invest in both Science and the Spirit.’ He turned to Lavinia. ‘But be careful, my love, Frances has set a trap for you. One like the insect-eating plants of the Amazon, in which I, the fly, have been caught many a time.’
‘I am quite able to fend for myself, James. After all, have I not the naivety of youth on my side?’ Lavinia replied.
Inwardly wincing at the barb, Lady Morgan made a mental note never to take the girl’s ingenuousness for granted again. At forty-three, she was already depressed by the ever-increasing stratagem required to maintain the appearance of her own legendary beauty.
‘My dear, I simply cannot believe that God did not have a hand in the development of Man. After all, there is such an extraordinary leap of physical and emotional development between a man and an ape; it seems preposterous to think that they might have shared the same mother. And so I can only conclude there must have been divine intervention.’ Lady Morgan’s tone was finite, but Lavinia persisted.