The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

planning to alight on, but Mr Stokes is a very fair choice.’

      ‘Thank you. For Mr Stokes, I do not suppose you would wait at all; a mere drop of the card in the bowl, and off you would fly like an afrit riding the West Wind. Am I correct?’

      ‘Quite so.’

      ‘And yet you waited for me – how long I do not know – and you would, I believe, have waited a minute or two longer. How long the limit you had privately determined is for me to establish, and that, I presume, will inform me what value you place on the conversation of a silly little girl. I wonder with what ingenuity I can discover the true facts of the case.’

      ‘No ingenuity is required,’ Burnes said, laughing at Bella, scratching her head like a regular urchin. ‘I will tell you – I had decided to wait for fifteen minutes. In any case, I knew you had gone to your bookseller’s two hours before, since Emily was so kind as to tell me, and I knew a bookseller could not detain you much longer than that.’

      ‘Very well,’ Bella said. ‘Fifteen minutes. Now I call that a very valuable contribution to knowledge, though, like the higher mathematics, I hardly know as yet what use I shall put it to.’

      ‘I dread your uses, Bella,’ Burnes said, helping himself to tea and, greedily, to sugar. ‘But how long would you wait for me?’

      Bella was silenced, and Burnes, too, in a moment stopped laughing. There was no answer to that; in them both was the unspoken knowledge that the ‘six weeks’, so lightly spoken, so long ago, had shrunk now to one week, that then, he was gone, that after, there was nothing that either could see. In Burnes’s pained anxious face was some knowledge that he had not been fair to Bella, and it would have been better not to have come at all; in Bella’s face was nothing but a forgiveness for anything Burnes might do, be doing, have done. Bella’s forgiveness had no tense, had no aspect, and Burnes dropped his eyes from hers, from her sad, her shining eyes.

      ‘In the interests of coquetry,’ Bella said, collecting herself, ‘no woman would ever wait for a man as long as he would wait for her. If I were a flirt, five minutes; if I were a woman of normal self-regard …’

      But she saw in Burnes’s face that he had no heart any longer for their normal banter, that their conversation, like the afternoon, like their lives, had turned in an unexpected direction, and now there was no retrieving it.

      ‘Perhaps ten minutes?’ she said, and faltered, her eyes, now, big and swimming and full of ache. She looked at her lap.

      ‘Bella,’ Burnes said again. ‘How long would you wait for me?’

      She could not think, and she hardly trusted her voice to speak.

      ‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. He could not look at her, perhaps in shame, and he drew back a little in his chair.

      ‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘must be your brother.’

      For a second she did not know what he meant, and then she saw he was talking about the portrait above the chimney breast. He was right to move away from these dangerous and unstable territories. There could be nothing much gained by talking each other into ultimately painful declarations. She rallied herself.

      ‘Yes, indeed, Harry, my poor brother,’ she said briskly. ‘Not a good likeness, but – forgive me, I was about to say something uncharitable.’

      ‘I should forgive you,’ Burnes said, smiling.

      ‘Very well, then; I was about to say that few people would have wanted a good likeness of Harry in a drawing room. He was so very – so very …’

      ‘Do go on, Bella,’ Burnes said. ‘I think I understand.’

      ‘No,’ Bella said. ‘He was so very much not at home in a drawing room. He was not quite – not quite tamed, I think one might say. He had a knack, a habit, of arriving anywhere early, and then progressing swiftly to the furthest wall. And then he would stand there – I mean, at a rout, if there was any promise of a crowd, of fresh blood and new flesh.’

      ‘You make him sound quite the vampyr,’ Burnes said, looking at the faintly extraordinary portrait with the perfectly round head, the legs crossed at the knees and the hand resting, extravagantly, on a tiger.

      ‘Perhaps so,’ Bella said seriously. ‘If you had seen him against the wall, watching as people came in, assessing himself, preparing himself to spring on his victim – and yet, of course, he could be excellent company and he was my brother. He had to go to India – there was a between-maid, and then another, and debts, cards, and then – you know, Burnes, I feel it shows very bad judgement to attempt to elope with the mother of your principal creditor.’

      Burnes, despite himself, laughed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But yes, not a highly judicious act. May I ask—’

      ‘Really, Burnes, she is still with us. You could hardly expect me to say Emma Franklin, could you? It was decided, then – Harry decided, and we decided, and London gave a great sigh of relief – that he should go to India and make his fortune. Not an unfamiliar story, you must admit, though Harry’s petits péchés were somewhat more ambitious than the common run. Packed off – dead within months. You heard of him, I recall, in Calcutta.’

      ‘Hardly,’ Burnes said. He had forgotten, by now, how he came first to speak to Bella; it was so very many weeks ago. ‘As I remember, I heard of him first in London – I heard that you had a brother who went to India and died. Only that.’

      ‘Ah,’ she said, taken by surprise, and all at once, he recalled his ordinary lie, and crimsoned gorgeously from the neck upwards. She was amused. ‘A very ordinary death; we heard that it was cholera, and cholera does, you know, carry off very many new arrivals in India. A year or so later, the portrait arrived, brought by some fellow Company officer – wallah, he called himself. They’d all put up a subscription and paid for the portrait to be finished. I heard the true story from him. Another very ordinary death – another officer’s wife behaved like an ass, and they were surprised. Did you know duelling was so much the fashion in Calcutta? Pew’aps it ain’t, as Harry would have said – Harry would have driven almost anyone to defend his honour with pistols.’

      She had finished. He saw in her smile and anecdotal glitter how brave she was, and could be again. For herself, she saw only concern in a good man’s face.

      ‘You miss him, don’t you,’ he said finally. The room was dark, and quiet; she heard the heavy ticking of his watch in the empty house.

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. Now, don’t betray me—’

      ‘I would never betray you, Bella,’ he said, and it was as if there were no other sentence in the world, there to be spoken. She shook her head, not able to look at him, and he understood very well that she meant Nor I you. He took her hand, and she moved, suddenly, her body moving in response to his touch like iron to a magnet. ‘Come with me,’ he said, rising and advancing to the door. He paused there, and turned, and smiled at her, and, deprived of all will, she rose herself, and followed him.

      Out into the street they went, Bella entranced, without a wrap, without a bonnet, and they walked silently southwards through the London streets. No one saw them go; no one paid them any attention as they walked, and through London unfashionable and fashionable they went in silence. She followed him, and it was as if he were drawn by something; what it was, she could not guess, though she could feel that something was pulling him, and it was forty minutes before the streets opened and emptied and there they were, together, at the edge of the river.

      Watching the river: watching a perfect chaos of boatmen unloading their goods and passengers onto the wharves. So much to be seen. They stood in bewitched amusement and watched as one lady, stout as a grub in a tight coat, between little shrieks of alarm, allowed herself to be handed into the safe arms of her brass-buttoned husband, waiting with flushed embarrassment on the wharf. Bella and Burnes were interested and uncaring as if the brass-buttoned gentleman had been