A Radical Arrangement

by Ashford, Jane

  Margaret was shaking her head. “He only wanted to marry me because of my father’s political connections, so he could not be expected to withstand such a blow.” Her voice was extraordinarily calm; she heard it as if it were a stranger’s. “I see that now. I didn’t then.”

  Silence fell and lengthened between them. Margaret went back to putting things in the basket, unable to raise her eyes. Keighley was again silently cursing his stupidity, with an intensity that might have been directed at another as well. Both were visibly relieved when Jemmy bounded over the brow of the hill and said, “What, going already? We have hours of daylight left.”

  “Nonetheless, I think we should get back,” replied Keighley in a tone so harsh that the boy stared.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Everything is ready,” added Margaret in a high, unnatural voice.

  “Yes, miss,” said Jemmy, shouldering the basket quickly. Though not an unusually sensitive lad, even he could feel the constraint in the air. He turned and started down the hill again.

  “You go ahead,” said Margaret hurriedly. “I’ll be along in a moment.”

  Sir Justin started to answer her, then closed his mouth and turned away.

  Twelve

  Margaret and Sir Justin avoided each other the following day. He was still cursing himself, and she was sorely puzzled. All her worries and doubts had come flooding back during their final conversation on the island, and she was now more confused than ever about her feelings and situation. The sail home had been uncomfortably silent, leaving her ample time to wonder what had changed since the morning. She had felt both unaccountably elated and nervously unhappy, and she could see no reason for either emotion.

  Yet despite this unease, it seemed a decided thing that Keighley would show Margaret what he called the true condition of the poor. Each might now have wished to postpone or even forget this promise, but neither said so. To speak of the growing constraint between them seemed impossible to Margaret and foolish to Keighley. Thus, the idea was pursued and plans made for the next day but one. Sir Justin talked to the Applebys and other villagers, and determined where to go. Margaret, when informed that all was set and asked if she remained willing, merely nodded and turned away.

  They set out the following morning in the Applebys’ gig. Keighley was feeling well enough to drive it, though Jem accompanied them in case he should tire, privately thinking their expedition crackbrained. The sun had disappeared behind a screen of racing clouds today, and though it did not seem likely to rain, the atmosphere was wholly different from that on their picnic. The shifting light gave the sea an odd, metallic sheen and turned vegetation somber and dull. They drove in silence along the seawall and around to the road south of the village. Margaret was relieved to see their direction; she had feared that they might travel the route she and Keighley had taken from Devon. “Where are we going?” she asked as Sir Justin turned the gig.

  “A little inland,” he replied. “To some farms.”

  “How do you know where to go?”

  “From our hosts and other villagers. The poor are usually well-known in their neighborhood.”

  “But rare,” suggested Margaret, “if we have to drive so far to find them.”

  “I could have shown you examples close to the inn. Not everyone in the village is as prosperous as the Applebys. But I thought it might be awkward. And I wanted you to see a more representative family. The rural poor on the land, or more often not on it because there is no work, are worst off today. Factory laborers endure dreadful conditions, but they are far fewer in numbers.”

  Curiosity overcame Margaret’s uneasiness. “How do you know? How did you find out these things?”

  He smiled wryly. “I did not close my eyes to them, in the first place. Any landowner can see hardship if he really looks instead of blinding himself to the truth. And then I talked to a great many people, from all classes, and read what I could find on the subject.”

  “You truly believe that poverty is widespread?” she responded, frowning.

  “It is not a matter of belief. It is fact. I am not talking about my opinions when I speak of the poor, but of real people and existing conditions.”

  He sounded so certain that she was shaken. She had heard over and over in her father’s house that the radicals exaggerated and distorted reality, that most Englishmen were comfortable and happy, in their varying degrees. But Keighley seemed confident that he could show her the opposite. Could there be some deception involved? But how? And why? She shifted in her seat. Everything was so different now; she was so changed that she was almost prepared to find she had been deceived all her life. Abruptly she felt a wave of fear about the future. She had pushed such concerns from her mind for weeks, but now the time was coming when they must be faced. She shivered and wondered what in the world she would do.

  “What is it?” asked Keighley. “Are you cold?” He was frowning down at her, for though overcast, the August day was sultry.

  “No, no,” said Margaret quickly.

  He continued to look at her for a moment, then added, “We are nearly there, I think, aren’t we, Jem?” The boy signified that they were. “Have you changed your mind? Do you wish to go back?”

  “Not at all.” Margaret straightened. He would not fob her off so easily.

  He nodded and turned his attention back to the horse. In a short while they left the road for a rutted lane and soon reached a small stone cottage. Keighley pulled up and helped Margaret down. “This is the home of the Jones family,” he told her. “Mr. Jones, his wife, and the elder children work in the fields, so they will not be here.”

  “But should we…”

  Sir Justin was not listening to her. He had walked to the cottage door and knocked. After a prolonged interval the door opened slowly, and a small girl peered around its panels. “Good day,” said Keighley, offering her a sovereign.

  The child, who could not have been more than six, stared at the coin with awe. She did not reach for it.

  “This is for you,” urged Sir Justin. “The lady is thirsty. May we have a drink of water?”

  The girl gazed up at him, her round eyes painfully large in a pinched face. “Thirsty?” she repeated in a thick dialect.

  “Yes. May we have a little water?” He again extended the coin to her.

  Slowly her hand came around the door. Keighley handed her the sovereign as Margaret thought that she had never seen so thin an arm. The child held the money reverently in a cupped palm, then, with a furtive glance at them, swiftly bit it to see if it was real. Discovering real gold, she was struck dumb.

  “May we have a glass of water?” said Sir Justin again.

  The little girl edged backward, opening the door as she went. With an unobtrusive signal, Keighley indicated that Margaret should approach, and they entered the low doorway together.

  The room was dim, and at first Margaret could see nothing. But as her eyes adjusted she realized that the floor was packed earth and the walls whitewashed stone, blackened by smoke and grime. There was a fireplace on the back wall but no fire. A long table stood before it and, with three broken-down chairs, constituted the furniture in the visible part of the house. A dingy curtain closed off about a third of the space, and Margaret supposed that was the bedroom. Under her gaze the curtain seemed to shiver, then pulled back to reveal a tiny, half-clad boy and, behind him, a large bed containing three even smaller children. These gazed with wide-eyed fright over the top of one thin blanket.

  “What you want?” asked the little boy with a piteous attempt at ferocity.

  “Shh, Dan’l,” said the girl who had greeted them. She had gone to the table and now returned with a tin dipper of water.

  Keighley took it and turned to Margaret, shutting off the children with his broad back. “Pretend to drink,” he murmured. “Do not touch it with your lips.”

  Confuse
d, she did so, and he handed the dipper back. The girl eyed it, then turned to put it back.

  “Thank you,” said Keighley. “Your mother and father are in the fields, I suppose?”

  Both children gazed at him with stony suspicion.

  “And your older brothers and sisters? How many of them?”

  They made no answer.

  With a shrug, he turned away. “They will not talk to us alone. We had best be going on.”

  Biting her lower lip, Margaret gazed about her. Could many people live this way, crowded together with not one beautiful thing in their house? Fumbling in her reticule, she found another sovereign. “Here,” she stammered, pressing it on the boy clutching the curtain.

  He glared.

  “Take it.”

  Grudgingly he allowed her to give him the coin.

  “Come,” said Keighley gently. He put a hand under her elbow and led her out of the cottage. The door shut firmly behind them.

  “That is a relatively prosperous laborer’s household,” he added when they were under way once more. “Both parents have work, along with some older children. How many? Do you know, Jem?”

  He shrugged. “Three or four.”

  “Ah. So, you see, the family has quite a large income, with so many earning. Many live on much less, and when there is no work to be had, they starve.”

  “Less,” murmured Margaret, horrified. “But they have nothing.”

  “On the contrary, they have a dry cottage, some furniture and clothing, and a supply of fuel. Did you notice the shed? They are comparatively well-off. We are going to see a family that is considerably less so.”

  “B-but the children…they were so thin, and frightened of us.”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you call them well-off?”

  “I said ‘comparatively.’”

  “And why were they not out playing or…or something?”

  “I daresay they are told to stay inside, and they probably do not get enough food to make them energetic.”

  “How can you speak so coldly?” cried Margaret, appalled at his matter-of-factness. “Those were little children.”

  “I know they were,” he replied quietly. “If you had seen as many worse cases as I, you would speak as I do. But my tone does not mean I accept such things as right.”

  She gazed up at him, half incredulous, half pleading. “There cannot be many so…”

  “Millions.”

  She shook her head, as if to rid it of the vision.

  “I am sorry to distress you, but for every wealthy child who has all the luxuries and an abundance of spirits, there are twenty of those we just saw, or worse. Most commonly worse. In the cities they can steal, but even that does not get them enough to eat.”

  “I cannot believe it. I…I won’t.”

  Keighley did not reply. He knew that tone too well. It meant that she was beginning, in fact, to believe, and hated the process. He felt suddenly sad. Perhaps he had been wrong to bring her. Did she really need to know the truth? The knowledge was painful, and he hated to see her suffer. But another part of him stubbornly insisted that she must. It was somehow important that she be able to judge the right of this question, important to him. With an impatient flick of the reins, he banished this dangerous train of thought. “We are going next to the house of an unemployed laborer,” he said rather harshly. “There you will see real hardship.”

  In the next hour, Margaret was shocked as she had never been in her life. Words that she had glibly used or heard unfeeling—poverty, hunger, bitterness—became hauntingly real, and she knew she would never be rid of the scenes she had witnessed as Keighley talked to three out-of-work laborers and their wives. She herself had not the knowledge or the courage to say much, but she listened and looked and engraved the exchanges on her memory. Even later, when they were driving back toward the Red Lion, she could still see it all, particularly the eyes of the men as they talked about trying to get work. They had burned with a daunting combination of iron will, hope, and anger that had made Margaret feel insignificant and worthless. And all of them had agreed with Keighley’s opinion that their plight was widespread. Each knew many others in his own situation.

  She felt beaten by their emotions and drained of her own. As they went slowly home she could not speak. She knew that if she tried, she would cry, and she did not want to give Keighley that satisfaction. No doubt he was gloating beside her—she dared not look up—at the triumph of his point of view over hers.

  Margaret could not know that he had seen this happen over and over, beginning with himself and continuing with various friends and political allies to whom he had shown the same things. He knew precisely what she was feeling, and pitied her sincerely. He also knew better than to speak.

  Despite her turmoil, Margaret found the journey back short. It seemed only a moment before Jem was jumping down and going to the horse’s head to lead him back into his stable. Keighley handed her down from the gig and offered his arm. She bent her head under her bonnet brim and took it, wanting only to escape to her own room and recover.

  “Are you all right?” he asked as they walked.

  Margaret nodded silently.

  “I doubt it. You know…”

  “You were right, you were right,” cried the girl. “There, I have admitted it, and you needn’t tell me so in your odiously superior way. I cannot help it that I was never told…never shown…” She broke off abruptly, swallowing tears that she would not let him see.

  “Of course you were not. And I was certainly not going to taunt you with it. What do you think me? I have experienced exactly what you are feeling now. My father took me on just such a tour when I was ten years old. And I have since exposed others. I know how hard it is.”

  Margaret looked up. “Ten?”

  He smiled wryly. “Indeed. It was just before I went to school. He determined that I should see something of the real world around me before I was ‘spoiled’ by Eton. He had not wanted me to go to school at all, but Mama insisted. I was deeply shocked. I don’t believe I said a word during the first two weeks of term. My housemaster was about to write my parents when I finally opened my mouth, and then he wrote because what came out was rank, radical heresy. Of course Papa’s reply shocked him nearly as much.”

  Margaret smiled slightly.

  “It is hard to accept. It will take time. You should not expect to feel just as usual after this morning.”

  This brought back her tremulousness. “It was the children I couldn’t bear.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “They looked so hopeless.” To her chagrin, Margaret started to cry.

  Keighley stopped, and she pulled her arm from his. She was angry at herself for breaking down, but she could not seem to stop. She groped for a handkerchief in her reticule and applied it to her streaming eyes. If only he would just go on and leave her.

  This actually occurred to him, but he rejected the idea as callous. It was because of him that she was crying; he could not simply abandon her. But what ought he to do? He had dealt with numerous sobbing females in his life, but never in these circumstances. The usual solution—to offer a supporting shoulder—was unsuitable for a variety of reasons. He had never before taken a young girl on a tour such as today’s, and he vowed never to do so again.

  From behind her handkerchief Margaret sobbed, “Leave me alone. Go away.” But her voice was too muffled to be intelligible. When he did not go, she looked up, her eyes brimming and reproachful, and met his.

  This was too much. Without further thought, he put his arms around her and pulled her against his chest, one hand in her blond curls. “Go on and cry,” he said. “It helps.”

  Margaret was at first so startled that she nearly stopped crying. It was so odd to find her cheek resting on his lapel and her shivering frame enclosed in strong arms. She
felt him stroke her hair, and suddenly it seemed that there was even more to cry about than she had imagined. She abandoned herself wholly to tears.

  It was some time before this emotional storm passed. Margaret sobbed, and Sir Justin held her firmly. At last she began gradually to regain control, and both of them came to their senses abruptly a moment later. Margaret stiffened and sniffed desperately. Keighley immediately dropped his arms and stepped back in dismay, wishing savagely that he had obeyed his baser impulses and left her.

  Seeing his face, Margaret gulped back another sob. “I…I’m sorry,” she said foolishly.

  “On the contrary. It is I who must beg your pardon,” was the stiff reply. “Your distress led me to overstep the bounds of propriety, and I hope you will believe that compassion was my only motive.”

  This phrasing was so unlike him that Margaret could only swallow again and nod.

  “It might be best if I left you now. Unless I can be of some help?”

  She shook her head vehemently, desperate to be alone with her chaotic thoughts.

  He bowed slightly and turned away. Margaret watched him stride along the street and around the corner, then turned her attention to composing herself enough to reach her bedchamber unremarked.

  Thirteen

  A frosty atmosphere descended upon the Red Lion and did not lift through two long days. Keighley, pronounced much improved, was allowed to go out alone for the first time, so now it was he who walked along the shore and Margaret who stayed in her room. She ventured out only for meals, and even then said and ate little. Some of the rosy color she had gained faded, and her shoulders showed the beginning of their old droop.

  These outward signs were merely suggestive of her inner turmoil, which was far more intense. During the long, quiet hours in her room Margaret endlessly reviewed the events that had brought her here and the actions she had taken. She could not see what she could have done differently, but she wished with all her heart that things had not gone as they had. For Margaret had never been so uneasy and unhappy in her life. Something had happened to her in the last week, something she did not at all understand, and it now seemed to her that the future offered nothing but dreary routine and loneliness.