Until the Colours Fade by Tim Jeal

little to do with his despondent mood; the roots of that lay in the host of memories summoned up by the creeper-covered walls of his childhood home.
    Even as children Magnus and Charles had been markedly different ; Magnus devoted to his mother and sister; Charles, four years his senior, concerned only with an assiduous emulation of their father. When Charles had gone to sea as a boy of thirteen, Magnus had remained at home, rarely seeing his brother for more than a month or two every three years. The navy had also separated Magnus from his father who, like Charles, had disapproved of his remaining at home; but Magnus’s mother had encouraged him to do so and had employed a succession of tutors rather than have him sent away to school.
    Magnus had been sixteen when his father took command of the blockading squadron engaged in suppressing the West African Slave Trade. His mother, in spite of her younger son’s pleas, had gone out to join her husband. Six months later Magnus had opened his father’s letter telling him that she had died of fever. The dangers of the African coastal towns had been well-known, and Magnus had never forgiven his father for allowing her to go. At Oxford, the following year, Magnus had embarked on what an outsider might have thought a frenzied course of self-destruction , but which was in truth aimed at his father. Sir James had considered him a coddled and over-sensitive youth, and now Magnus set about showing him something different.
    More innocent, because of his sheltered upbringing, than most of his contemporaries, Magnus had at first been forced to assume a cynical air of sophistication to avoid being hurt and ridiculed; but, before long, the pose seemed to have become the reality. Working not at all, drinking to excess, and gambling with a recklessness unusual even among the richest aristocratic set, Magnus had gone down with no degree and debts of over two thousand pounds. His father had settled them on condition that his son took a post in the colonial service. The best Indian regiments being considered too expensive, he had been bought a commission in the Ceylon Rifles. He had served with distinction and had satisfied his conscience by testifying against the Governor of the colony at a Commons Select Committee Inquiry into the recent disturbances there. Now, seven years after he had sailed from Southampton, he was returning home with little more than the sum raised by the sale of his commission – returning to live at his father’s expense while Sir James’s term as Admiral on the North American Station lasted. His future seemed uncertain and ominously empty.
    On learning from the butler that Captain Crawford was not at home, and that Miss Catherine had been riding earlier in the afternoon, but might by now be back at the stables, Magnus immediately made his way there. She was not in the yard, so he walked on towards the thick hawthorn hedge enclosing the two paddocks. He opened the gate of the smaller one but did not at first see his sister. In the centre of the field, a groom was ringing a colt. A bolster had been strapped to the animal’s back to get him used to carrying weight, and he was lunging and dancing round at the end of a long halter, vainly striving to dislodge the unfamiliar object. As Magnus glanced to his right, he saw Catherine watching the proceedings from the gate leading into the adjacentpaddock. He shouted to her and then started running across the rough grass.
    They embraced on meeting, and Magnus, finding himself close to tears, could not imagine how he had felt such gloom approaching the house. In a neat black riding habit and soft dove-grey hat with a feathered plume, Catherine stood before him, and suddenly his time away seemed a brief interval of weeks not years. She smiled at him, cheeks flushed with excitement, and took both his hands in hers. The same vivid blue eyes, the same silvery blond hair dressed in ringlets, the same Catherine after seven years. The