So it was still Holsworthy Barracks, a hotbed of intrigue and animosity and shifting allegiances between the officers: too many men with not enough to do except resent how their lives were slipping away. Backbiting, rumour, insults and ill will everywhere.
Through the other servants Anne often heard of the gossip before I did, and I learned that if I feigned disbelief she would be piqued to tell me more. At the start she was fearful and wide-eyed at what she heard, but after a few weeks she had seen enough dramas ebb and flow to enjoy them as if they were a play, put on by the officers for the entertainment of their servants.
I pretended more indifference than I felt, for I knew most of her stories were likely to be true. Knew, too, that Mr Macarthur had a finger in every one of those nasty little pies. He was frequently the one to compose some outraged letter full of legal Latin on behalf of an aggrieved fellow officer. What he liked best of all were the times when he could come up with some ingenious interpretation to turn an unassailable argument on its head. Oh, how he loved a loophole!
He took a special pleasure in what he called the long game. A quick victory was no victory at all. It took a special kind of cleverness—exactly his own kind of cleverness, as a matter of fact—to set up some movement seemingly harmless, then another equally innocent, and set them to grinding together so that the victim was eaten alive without quite knowing what had happened.
I heard Mr Macarthur boast one night that he had never yet failed in ruining a man who had become obnoxious to him. The laugh he gave, having delivered himself of this, was a bray of triumph.
The well-placed invention was his best weapon, all the more effective for the fact that it always had a fleck or two of the truth that gave a texture of plausibility to the whole. I felt for his enemies, helpless before his slanders. The victim might at last get wind of what was being said about him, but by then the story would have streamed out into the world. Protest as he might, that first story would always be the one believed.
Mr Macarthur could never be caught out. Mrs Borthwick one day was interested in the date of our marriage, and exactly when the baby was due. That pair of dates put side by side might have made for an awkwardness, but he had a gentleman’s answer, so smooth as to erase doubt.
– Oh, we were eager, he said, and chuckled indulgently. It was accepted that we had an informal understanding—we stood godparents to a friend’s child, you know. And, well, our fondness for each other got the better of us. Did it not, my dear?
– Indeed, I said, and tried to smile. Indeed it did, sir.
There was that fleck of truth. Yes, I was godmother to Elizabeth Kingdon. The fiction—that he was therefore her godfather—followed seamlessly, a reasonable enough assumption. Who would ever bother to check? Even if some searcher of the future went looking for proof, he or she would find no piece of paper to confirm or deny it. Only this one, where I am writing the truth for you to know.
DUELS
Always, every week it seemed, there was the grand drama of a duel. If any of the officers’ pistols had hit their marks, His Majesty’s forces would have been sadly depleted. But strangely, no one, to my knowledge, ever came to actual grief in any of the duels.
Mrs Borthwick, whose George had evidently fought a duel or two, explained that the job of the seconds was to see to it that no one was killed. Together, watching each other, they loaded both pistols in exactly the same way, so that they misfired or fired wide. Their duty was to see fairness prevail, not to oversee death. It was enough, in the dawn of the duelling day, for a satisfying report to fill the ground and startle the birds out of the trees, and for a satisfying cloud of smoke to drift away across the grass. The noise and the smoke and the smell, and the important bustling about of everyone, the seconds with their measuring tape, the surgeon with his bag—all that satisfied pride and assuaged insult. No wound was necessary, certainly no corpse.
Like the other officers, Mr Macarthur was never without outrage at some grievance or insult, and blazed up at the smallest infringement of what he saw as his entitlement. There was a complicated set of boundaries that put a gentleman apart from others, and Mr Macarthur patrolled them with an eye and ear for the slightest deviation.
He stormed into our quarters one afternoon, his neck flushed in angry blotches, the muscle in his jaw shifting under the skin like a hidden creature bulging and flattening.
– I will demand satisfaction, he cried, and went to the shelf where his duelling pistols lay in their wine-coloured velvet.
I knew now that a duel did not necessarily mean death. Still, I hated the look of the pistols, feared the idea of a hot ball of lead hurtling itself towards the helpless flesh of a human being.
– But Mr Macarthur, what is at stake here? What did he do, exactly? Surely there will be no need for pistols!
It transpired that Mr Macarthur had agreed to act as second for Lieutenant Selby in his duel against Lieutenant Bannerman. But when everyone had arrived at the ground, it was discovered that Lieutenant Bannerman’s second was a person called Baker, and Baker was not a gentleman.
– I told Bannerman, I will not be insulted, Mr Macarthur said. What was the fool thinking, to pair me with such a fellow as this Baker?
– But sir, can that possibly be worth dying for?
Dying! That roused my husband.
– My dear, he said, you insult me to imagine I would be the one dying. That is the least likely outcome in the world!
– I am sure you are a good shot, sir, I answered, enraged by his smugness. But this Bannerman may be a better one! Do you wish to leave me a widow?
– Oh, my dear wife, he said. Never fear! It so happens that my pistols have certain idiosyncrasies, and can only be safely loaded by someone familiar with them. Namely, myself.
His eyes shone with satisfaction.
– My dear, he crowed, it would become you to have more faith in your husband!
I was filled with weariness. Mr Macarthur would always have some trick up his sleeve—with his trusting opponents on the duelling ground, with his wife—to make sure he came out on top.
– Oh, then, so much for the man of honour, I said.
I wanted to hurt him, thought that might hit home. But he did not seem to hear me, and left the room with the case of pistols in his hand.
I came to see that the particular grievance was of no importance. His status as a gentleman—yes, that was important to him. Of that he was so unsure that he needed to test it continually, to the death if necessary. I had heard a whisper that, before his entry into Fish’s regiment, he had been apprenticed to a corset maker. The barracks were full of nasty rumours and I did not quite believe this one. Still, it stuck in my mind. If true, it would explain that desperate need.
But his anxiety ran deeper than snobbery. He went seeking insult because it was only in opposition to another that he could have faith in who he was. He needed to pin his conviction of his value on that flimsy idea of honour because he knew of nowhere else to pin it.
And I? Where did I pin my sense of worth? I could not say, yet I recognised an obstinate nub of something in myself that gave me the right to be the person I was. In the eyes of the world I had so little, and yet in that conviction of my own worth I had more than my husband, for all his cunning.
A SAD CASE
He had been sent away to school at seven, he told me. I had heard enough from Bridie’s brothers to guess how the strong held sway in those institutions, made the lives of the weak a misery. A boy would quickly learn how to become one of the bullies.