The Mayor of Troy | Page 5

aware of this, having heard it so often remarked upon
by persons acquainted with his Royal Highness as well as by others
who had never set eyes on him. In short, our excellent Major may have
dallied in his time with the darts of love; there is no evidence that he
ever took a wound.
Within a year after his return he bought back the ancestral home of the
Hymens, a fine house dating from the reign of Queen Anne. (His
great-grandfather had built it on the site of a humbler abode, on the eve
of the South Sea collapse.) It stood at the foot of Custom House Hill
and looked down the length of Fore Street--a perspective view of which
the Major never wearied--no, not even on hot afternoons when the
population took its siesta within doors and, in the words of Cai
Tamblyn, "you might shot a cannon down the streets of Troy, and no
person would be shoot." This Cai (or Caius) Tamblyn, an eccentric
little man of uncertain age, with a black servant Scipio, who wore a
livery of green and scarlet and slept under the stairs, made up the
Major's male retinue. Between them they carried his sedan chair; and
because Cai (who walked in front) measured but an inch above five feet,
whereas Scipio stood six feet three in his socks, the Major had a seat
contrived with a sharp backward slope, and two wooden buffers against
which he thrust his feet when going down-hill. Besides these, whom he
was wont to call, somewhat illogically, his two factotums, his
household comprised Miss Marty and a girl Lavinia who, as Miss
Marty put it, did odds and ends. Miss Marty was a poor relation, a third
or fourth cousin on the maternal side, whom the Major had discovered
somewhere on the other side of the Duchy, and promoted. Socially she
did not count. She asked no more than to be allowed to feed and array
the Major, and gaze after him as he walked down the street.
And what a progress it was!
Again I can see him as he made ready for it, standing in his doorway at
the head of a flight of steps, which led down from it to the small
wrought-iron gate opening on the street. The house has since been
converted into bank premises and its threshold lowered for the

convenience of customers. Gone are the plants--the myrtle on the right
of the porch, the jasmine on the left--with the balusters over which they
rambled, and the steps which the balusters protected--ah, how
eloquently the Major's sword clanked upon these as he descended! But
the high-pitched roof remains, with its three dormer windows still
leaning awry, and the plaster porch where a grotesque, half-human face
grins at you from the middle of a fluted sea-shell. Standing before it
with half-closed eyes, I behold the steps again, and our great man at the
head of them receiving his hat from the obsequious Scipio, drawing on
his gloves, looping his malacca cane to his wrist by its tasselled cord of
silk. The descent might be military or might be civil: he was always
Olympian.
"The handsome he is!" Miss Marty would sigh, gazing after him.
"A fine figure of a man, our Major!" commented Butcher Oke,
following him from the shop-door with a long stare, after the day's joint
had been discussed and chosen.
The children, to whom he was ever affable, stopped their play to take
and return his smile. Some even grinned and saluted. They reserved
their awe for Scipio. Indeed, there is a legend that when Scipio made
his first appearance in Fore Street--he being so tall and the roadway so
narrow--he left in his wake two rows of supine children who, parting
before him, had gradually tilted back as their gaze climbed up his
magnificent and liveried person until the sight of his ebon face toppled
them over, flat.
Miss Jex, the postmistress, would hand him his letters or his copy of
the Sherborne Mercury with a troubled blush. No exception surely
could be taken if she, a Government official, chose to hang a coloured
engraving of the Prince Regent on the wall behind her counter. And
yet--the resemblance! She had heard of irregular alliances, Court
scandals; she had even looked out "Morganatic" in the dictionary,
blushing for the deed while pretending to herself (fie, Miss Jex!) that
"Moravian" was the word she sought.
In Admirals' Row--its real name was Admiral's Row, and had been

given to it in 1758, after the capture of Louisbourg and in honour of
Admiral Boscawen; but we in Troy preferred to write the apostrophe
after the 's'--Miss Sally Tregentil would overpeer her blind and draw
back in a flutter lest the Major had observed