Gossip about the new Mrs Brandon inevitably abounded, but even the most virulent of her detractors had to admit that she was exceptionally good to her stepson. She spent hours with young Henry Alexander, read to him, played with him, took him about with her and celebrated his seventh birthhday with a party that was talked about for years. When her own son was born the following year, both she and the General redoubled their attentions to Stavely’s heir. The day after Rom’s birth, there appeared in the stables a white pony for Henry that a prince of the blood would have been proud to own.
No, it was Rom himself who did the damage, who ate into poor Henry’s soul. A dark-skinned, quicksilver child with high cheekbones and the flared nostrils that are supposed to denote genius or temper (and generally both), he had inherited also the thick, ink-black hair which had been his mother’s in her girlhood and her passionate mouth. Had it not been for the General’s wide grey eyes looking out of the child’s intense, exotic face, the County would have been inclined to wonder.
For it was not only Rom’s appearance that was dramatic. The child, brought down by his nurse to the drawing-room at teatime, would throw his arms round his parents — round both of them — and speak to them of love. ‘I love you as much as the sun and the moon and the stars,’ the three-year-old Rom said to his mother in the presence of Mrs Farquharson, who had come about the Red Cross Fête; and Henry, a decent, well-brought-up British boy, had to stand by and endure the shame.
Again and again, Henry’s despised half-brother revealed his ‘foreignness’. Rom chattered in French as easily as in English; he asked — he actually asked — to play the violin, and though Henry knew that forestry was respectable and that his father’s plant-hunting trips were nothing to hide, to see Rom helping the gardeners to plant flowers was almost more than he could bear.
And then, just when Henry had consoled himself by utterly despising the outlandish half-brother who seemed to have no idea how to conduct himself, Rom would confound him by some spectacular act of courage, climbing fearlessly to the top of a tree so slender that even under Rom’s light weight it bent and swayed as if it must break. It was Rom, not Henry (though he too was present) who jumped into the river by the mill-race to try to rescue a little village girl who had played too near the water’s edge — and even then Rom couldn’t behave like other children, for when he would have been a hero he lay down in front of the church door refusing to go inside because ‘God shouldn’t have let Dorcas drown’. It was Rom who found the black dog, snarling and wild, with his leg in a trap and who risked rabies and heaven-knows-what to free him — and soon Henry, dutifully walking his hound puppies, had the mortification of hearing Rom’s wonder dog — with his intelligence and fidelity — spoken of wherever he went. It was Rom — not Henry, the eldest son, the heir — who smelled burning one wild night in October and led the white Arab — Henry’s own horse, rearing and terrified — to safety.
No wonder Henry hated his younger brother, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mrs Brandon’s efforts to shower her stepson with attentions began to border on the ludicrous; the General never betrayed by one flicker of his wise grey eyes that his younger son held his heart. Rom himself, at the beginning, looked up to Henry and longed for his companionship. It was useless. The jealousy that enslaved Henry was the stuff of myth and legend, and it grew stronger every year.
Then, when Rom was almost eleven, fate stepped in on Henry’s side. Mrs Brandon fell ill; leukaemia was diagnosed and six months later she was dead.
‘Hadn’t you better pull yourself together?’ said Henry (recalled from his last term at Eton for the funeral) to Rom, sobbing wildly in his mother’s empty room — and stepped back hastily, for he thought that Rom was about to spring at him and take him by the throat.
Instead Rom vanished with his dog, managing to go to ground in the Suffolk countryside as though it was indeed the Amazon in whose imagined jungles he had so often played.
When he came back he was different — quieter, less ‘excessive’. He had learned to consume his own smoke, but for the rest of his life he responded to loss not with grief but with a fierce and inward anger.
It was now that Henry was able to express a little of his hatred. The General, unable to bear Stavely without his wife, left for the Himalayas on an extended botanical expedition and Henry the heir — now home from school for good — began to issue orders that were obeyed. Rom’s dog was forbidden the house; his unsuitable friends — children of the village whose games he had led — were banished. Most of the servants were loyal to the younger child and Nannie, now retired and living in the Lodge, had never been able to conceal her love for the ‘little foreigner’, but there were others — notably Grunthorpe the first footman, whom Rom had surprised in the gunroom stealing boxes of cartridges to sell in the local town — who were only too glad to ingratiate themselves with the heir.
Henry’s triumph, however, was short-lived. The General returned; Rom was restored to his rightful place and presently he followed his brother to Eton, where he was safe from Henry’s tricks.
And then, in the year when Rom became eighteen, Isobel Hope and her widowed mother came to live in the village next to Stavely.
Isobel’s connections were aristocratic — her mother was the youngest daughter of the Earl of Lexbury; her father, who had died in the hunting field, had belonged to an ancient West Country family — but she was poor. As a small child Isobel had seen the great Lexbury estate go under the hammer, and her handsome father had lived on his Army pay and promises. Even before she met Henry, this lovely girl had decided that Stavely’s heir would make her a suitable husband.
She met him first at a ball in a neighbouring house, but standing beside Henry on the grand staircase, relaxed and at ease, was his younger brother… and that was that.
The love that blazed between Rom and Isobel was violent, passionate and total. They met to ride at dawn, Isobel eluding all attempts at chaperonage, and were together again by noon to play tennis, wander through the gardens or chase each other through the maze. To watch them together was almost to gasp at their happiness; no one who saw them that summer ever quite forgot them. ‘A striking couple’, ‘a handsome pair’, ‘meant for each other’ — none of the phrases that people used came anywhere near the image of those two: the slender girl with her shower of dark red hair, her deep blue eyes; the incorrigibly graceful, brilliant boy.
Rom had won a scholarship to Oxford, but he persuaded his father to let him stay at Stavely. He had inherited the General’s passion for trees and together they planned plantations, discussed rare hardwoods, spoke of a sawmill to supply the cabinet trade…
When Rom was nineteen he and Isobel became engaged. It was now that the General sent for them and told them of the will he proposed to make. Stavely was not entailed, but there was no question of disinheriting his eldest son. Henry would have Stavely Hall, its gardens and orchards, the Home Park… To Rom he would leave the two outlying farms — Millpond and The Grebe — the North Plantation and Paradise Farm itself.
Rom was overjoyed, for he had an intense and imaginative passion for land, and Isobel, though she still yearned for Stavely itself, was satisfied, for Paradise was a perfect Palladian house, pillared and porticoed, built by an earlier and wealthy Mrs Brandon who had not cared for her daughter-in-law Unless poor Henry married an outstanding woman — and this was not likely — Isobel knew she could soon make Paradise the social centre of the estate.