The House of Hardie Read online

  ANNE MELVILLE

  The House of Hardie

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part One

  An Oxford Romance

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Two

  A Proposal of Marriage

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  The Great Adventure

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  1874

  ‘Boy!’

  Gordon Hardie hauled himself to his feet and staggered towards the cabin, clutching at every handhold as he went. His erratic course was caused partly by the rolling of the ship but even more by his own weakness. He had not eaten – had not wanted to eat – for three days of sickness and misery. The books which tempted him to run away to sea had described marvellous adventures in exotic places but had omitted to mention the spitefulness of the sea itself.

  ‘Boy!’ The naturalist’s voice was fiercer this time, reflecting his impatience. Fortunately for Gordon, even the great Sir Desmond Langton had succumbed to seasickness in the Bay of Biscay, requiring no meals and very little service from his cabin boy. But to judge by the bellowing of his voice as he repeated the summons for a third time, he had found his sea legs now. Gordon presented himself groggily at the cabin door.

  Ten minutes later, Sir Desmond appeared to be approaching the end of his tirade. ‘A pigsty!’ he shouted. ‘Can you give me a single reason why I shouldn’t order the mate to give you a whipping that you’ll never forget?’

  Gordon licked his dry lips and pressed them together to prevent them from quivering. With his hands behind his back he grasped the frame of the door lest hunger and fear should combine to make him collapse. Sir Desmond, who had been pacing up and down the cabin, turned to stare at him when his question elicited no answer. White-faced, Gordon stared back.

  ‘Hm,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘Been ill, have you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m very sorry, sir. I’ll try to do better.’

  ‘See you do, then. I want this cabin shipshape by noon. To start with, clean my boots so that I can step along to the captain.’

  ‘Right away, sir.’ Gordon set to work with as much energy as he could summon, breathing and brushing and buffing. Aware that he was being watched, he kept his eyes down. But his master’s silence made him uneasy. Slowly he raised his head.

  ‘When did you last clean a pair of boots?’ demanded Sir Desmond.

  ‘They’re very damp, sir.’

  ‘Answer my question.’ But the answer must have been obvious, because he gave an exaggerated sigh and sat down. ‘Leave that alone and look at me,’ he commanded. ‘Now then. When that boy of mine broke his leg in Southampton and you appeared at the last minute like a gift from the gods, you told me that you were sixteen years old but small for your age. For good measure, you added that you were an orphan. You said that for two years you’d been employed at an inn, doing general work around the place. All lies, I take it, and more fool me to be taken in by it, just because you looked willing and not completely stupid.’

  ‘I am willing, sir.’

  ‘That’s not enough. You need competence as well. Now then, let’s start again. How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ mumbled Gordon.

  ‘Speak up. Orphaned?’

  Gordon shook his head.

  ‘Family know where you are?’

  ‘I wrote from Southampton with the name of the ship. I said I’d be away for three years and they weren’t to worry.’

  ‘Fat lot of comfort that will be to your weeping mother. Why did you want to run away from home?’

  ‘I’m not running away from anything. I’m running to something.’ With this positive statement Gordon straightened his back and raised his head. It was time to put behind him the misery of the past few days. He had been homesick as well as seasick, but that was something he had no intention of admitting. On the day he signed up for this voyage to the South Seas he had put his childhood behind him, and from now on he must behave like a man.

  ‘Running to what?’ asked Sir Desmond. ‘Not just to life as a cabin boy, I take it.’

  ‘I want to be an explorer.’

  Gordon had never said that to anyone before. At home, in Oxford, it was taken for granted that he would one day own and manage the family business. Had he ever hinted that he had other ambitions, he would have been regarded as both foolish and disloyal. He could never have hoped for permission to take even a short period off for adventure.

  For as long as he could remember he had been a wanderer. His very first memory was of the day when – only just able to walk – he had tottered away from his nursemaid as she sat mending his clothes in the shade; across the lawn, through the rose garden, around the shrubbery and to within a foot or two of the River Cherwell, which bounded the grounds. Snatched to safety by a gardener, he had been puzzled by his mother’s extravagant hugging and the tears of his nursemaid, whom he never after that day saw again. Even at that early age he had formed the impression that when he wanted to stretch the boundaries of his small world and explore some new territory, it was better not to let anyone find out. But Sir Desmond Langton was himself an explorer. He, surely, would understand.

  Certainly by now the anger had faded from the botanist’s expression, but he looked curious rather than sympathetic. ‘What put that idea into your mind?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted … I read a book, years ago. About Marco Polo.’ For months as a seven-year-old Gordon had repeated silently to himself the phrase ‘The Great Silk Road’, thinking the words to be the very stuff of romance. ‘It made me want to go to China.’

  Sir Desmond exploded into what was more of a hoot than an ordinary laugh. ‘China! You don’t imagine that the Periwinkle’s going anywhere near China!’

  ‘No. The South Seas. I know that. That’s exciting enough to start with, while I’m learning to explore.’

  ‘You don’t learn to explore, boy. You explore in order to learn.’

  Gordon puzzled over this and failed to understand.

  ‘Put those boots aside and sit down,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘Let me tell you about my first expedition. Ever heard of an illness called malaria?’

  Gordon shook his head.

  ‘Unpleasant disease. Hits you in steamy, tropical kinds of places. Not in England. But our soldiers in India and Africa, they get it. Die of it. There’s a medicine which cures malaria, called quinine. It’s not new. We’ve known about it in Europe for a couple of hundred years or more, and the natives who first discovered it, in Peru, may have been u
sing it for centuries. It’s made out of the bark of a tree called the cinchona. No secret about that, either. The people in Peru have been quite happy to grow the trees and powder the bark and sell it to anyone with the money to buy it. But they weren’t going to let anyone else get into the market by establishing a cinchona forest anywhere else in the world. You following me so far?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I went out there twenty-odd years ago, with a companion. To explore, you might say, in Peru and Ecuador. But not simply for the sake of exploring. We had a target – to find the cinchonas and collect seeds. Not just a pocketful. We brought out a hundred thousand in the end. Now, lad, I’ll tell you. Every moment of that exploration was hell. We had to travel by river. Whirlpools, rapids, jagged rocks. Every time we camped at night, the mosquitoes covered us like a blanket. Snakes all over the place, as well. When the natives found out what we were after, they refused us porters; and when we pressed on, they tried to kill us. If we’d been merely exploring, we’d have given in within a month. But we knew what we were looking for, and that made all the difference.’

  Gordon’s black eyes were wide open with interest. ‘Did the seeds grow?’

  ‘Five years ago I was invited to visit India. The Nilgiri Hills, in the south. They showed me a forest of cinchonas, producing their own seeds to grow more trees still. Hundreds of lives being saved every year in the Indian Army. Thousands, perhaps. Now then, the point about all this. My companion and I, we were trained as botanists. Knew the likeliest place to find the forests we wanted – right soil, right rainfall, right altitude. We knew how to recognize the trees out of hundreds of others, and when to collect the seeds and how to store and germinate them. And at the same time we could keep our eyes open for new plants.’

  ‘What do you mean by a new plant, sir?’

  ‘A plant that’s unknown in England, but might be worth bringing back to try out. Got a garden at home, have you?’

  ‘Yes. My mother knows quite a lot about flowers, I think.’ Gordon had never taken any great interest in the garden. The hard digging was the work of the gardener and his boy, while the planning of the beds and the cutting and arranging of flowers was women’s work. Or so he had always assumed.

  ‘Narcissus, lilac, gladiolus, primrose – any of that kind of thing?’ The botanist did not wait for an answer, probably guessing that Gordon did not know. ‘You might think that common things like that have always grown in England. Not a bit of it. Man called Tradescant found them more than two hundred and fifty years ago – some in Russia, some in Algeria, some in the West Indies. Brought them to England and settled them in.’ He paused, laughing at himself. ‘Going on a bit, aren’t I? Point is this. Explorers need reasons for exploring. Some of them make maps – chart coastlines, trace rivers back to their sources. Your friend Marco Polo was looking for trade. There are as many reasons as there are men – but there ought to be something.’

  Sir Desmond Langton was, to guess from his appearance, almost fifty years old. Perhaps he had forgotten how it felt simply to see a place for the first time, to arrive somewhere new. What he had said was interesting, but somehow missed the point. When, making enquiries at Southampton, Gordon had first heard that the Periwinkle was about to leave on a voyage to the South Seas, his whole body had swelled with excitement and hope and determination, adding conviction to his lies and making no exaggeration of his enthusiasm necessary.

  It seemed that Sir Desmond remembered the lies at the same moment as Gordon: he sighed to himself as he considered what to do. ‘Well. Take my compliments to Captain Blake and ask if he can spare his boy for an hour to show you what you ought to know already. Cabin shipshape by noon, or you walk the plank.’

  Gordon stood up, staggering slightly as the Periwinkle rolled. ‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry to have been a disappointment to you, sir.’

  ‘My fault for failing to notice that you spoke like a schoolboy and not like a bootboy. But there’s no turning back. I can’t pick another boy out of the ocean, so you’ll have to forget those dreams of exploration and learn to use a swab. If you’re not an orphan, what does your father do?’

  It was the question which Gordon had feared and was reluctant to answer. Gordon was not ashamed that his father was in trade – but it meant that the name of John Hardie, vintner, was well-known amongst the members of a higher social class than his own. He lived and worked in Oxford, supplying college High Tables as well as those many undergraduates who devoted their university years more sedulously to pleasure than to study. In addition, he owned an establishment in Pall Mall, London – a property surrounded by the clubs of the gentlemen who patronized him. All his customers were wealthy: it was likely that Sir Desmond Langton himself was one of them. Gordon tried to think of a way in which to answer without revealing too much.

  ‘No more lies from now on,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘Your father?’

  ‘A wine merchant, sir.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oxford.’

  ‘A wine merchant in Oxford.’ Sir Desmond thought for a moment and then hooted with laughter for a second time that morning. ‘Gordon Hardie. You’re telling me that you’re John Hardie’s son? The heir to The House of Hardie!’

  Gordon’s pale face flushed. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous. Yet it was true. The family business, founded in 1710, had been handed down from father to son through seven generations. One day Gordon would be expected to take his place behind the green bow windows in the High, condemned to a life of orders and accounts, its dullness only occasionally disturbed by visits to the French châteaux from which he would buy his wines.

  ‘No need to fret,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘It will be five months before we reach the islands, and I can’t return you any more than I can replace you. So, Mr Gordon Hardie, of The House of Hardie, will you do me the inestimable favour of swabbing this floor.’ His voice rose to the roar with which he had summoned Gordon half an hour earlier. ‘NOW!’

  Chapter Two

  1877

  ‘Your own mother won’t recognize you,’ said Sir Desmond Langton.

  Gordon Hardie, standing beside his master at the rail of the Periwinkle, grinned his agreement. No one who had seen the slightly-built and white-faced fourteen-year-old sailing out of Southampton thirty-three months earlier would have guessed this healthy young man to be the same person. Sun and wind had tanned his skin; he had grown tall with the passage of time and strong through the performance of his duties.

  As his body matured, his face also had been transformed. His black, wavy hair, neatly trimmed when he left home, fell almost to his shoulders. Thick eyebrows added an impression of power to a strong, high forehead, whilst the neat nose of his childhood seemed to have taken on a life of its own as it developed. It was not only large but aquiline, giving him in profile an eager, questing look. During four months of their two-year stay in the Pacific, Sir Desmond had been immobilized by a crushed foot. Gordon, acting as the botanist’s legs, had at each landfall listened while the naturalist described what he hoped to find, and then literally followed his nose. It had led him, according to the nature of each island, along beaches and up rivers and through virgin forests, probing ahead of him as though it could sniff out seeds and flowers and berries which its owner had never before seen.

  Gordon himself could not have described his own new face, for he had never seen himself in profile, but he could hardly be unaware of the changes in his body. Even at the end of the five-month voyage back to England in the confined spaces of a sailing ship he knew himself to be fit, able to face any challenge and undertake any task.

  Much of his confidence came from the certainty that he had found his vocation. The boyhood reading which enticed him away from the comforts of home and the love of his family had proved to be not too far from the truth. Like some of his heroes he had had to stand his ground under attack from angry islanders and to pump and bale for seven hours without pause when the Periwinkle holed herself on a coral reef. In a narrow canoe
that was little more than a hollowed tree trunk he had found himself approaching white water which proved to be not rapids but a waterfall, and to this day he could not tell how he had survived. More dangerous, although less dramatic, had been the fever induced by a plant whose tiny barbs had infected his blood; on that occasion it was Sir Desmond who probably saved his life by making an infusion from some of his precious plants.

  None of these adventures and near-disasters had diminished his enthusiasm for the life of an explorer. He had, however, come to realize the truth of his employer’s first lecture to the useless fourteen-year-old who was his cabin boy. Gordon too understood now that any search should have a purpose: there must be something to be found.

  Sir Desmond had not only taught him that lesson but had provided the goal. Gordon had been engaged as a personal servant, not as a member of the ship’s crew, and so all his time was at his employer’s disposal. No doubt it was the prospect of tedium on the long journey out which prompted the naturalist to become a tutor as well as a master. Drawing on the ship’s stores for examples, he had taught Gordon how to dissect a botanical specimen and how to describe it scientifically and to categorize it according to the Linnaean classifications. He lectured him on the composition of soils and the properties of light and water. He lent him books to read and a candle by which to read them; and on the following day interrogated the boy on what he had discovered.

  Perhaps in the beginning Gordon’s eagerness to learn had something to do with the unromantic nature of the tasks for which he had primarily been employed. But he was still expected to scrub and polish and slop out and darn and carry meals and messages, so that the diligence with which he applied himself to his new studies must soon have been fostered by a dislike of idleness and a genuine fascination with what he was learning.

  On the voyage home, which was just ending, there had been no pretence that he was merely a cabin boy. Sir Desmond, declaring that he deserved a reward for two years of vigorous and dangerous field work, promoted him to the post of scientific assistant. There was much to do, for thousands of specimens had been collected. Some had to be kept alive, whilst many were to be carefully dried for preservation. Seeds must be sorted and packaged and labelled, and all must be painstakingly catalogued. It was, after all, just as well that Sir Desmond had employed a schoolboy and not a bootboy: for hours at a time Gordon sat at the cabin table, pausing in the task of taking dictation only during some unusually severe battering of the ship.