The Old Order (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 7)

by Andrew Wareham

  “I shall be sailing early next week, Mr James. A ticket bought from Liverpool on the biggest passenger carrier Captain Hood could find – him saying that a gentleman coming ashore from the best berths is far less to be questioned than a poor chap from the orlop deck, whatever that may be.”

  “So, it’s off on the Mail coach within a day or two, Murphy.”

  “Tomorrow, Mr James, which brings me to a middling ticklish sort of question, sir. You will be needing to clear the house of female embarrassments, as it were, will you not, sir.”

  “Sophia! Yes, of course, I must pay her off and soon.”

  “Well… the thing is, Mr James, she’s a handsome lass, and it would look far less suspicious for me to be an accompanied man when I stood on shore in New York. Such being the case, sir, I have ventured to suggest to her that she might fancy trying her fortunes in the New World, if you are agreeable to her going with me.”

  “You are a rogue and a villain, Murphy!” James laughed helplessly. “And, yes, it were far better that she should be away from London where she might be known and could possibly talk carelessly. I have put five hundred aside for her, from the gambling money, I would add – I like to think that is well spent at last! Enjoy yourself – she is a good girl! When you return to England make sure to see me and tell me all that happened. You will always be welcome in this house, and at the front door, sir!”

  Murphy was relieved – many a master might have looked askance at him, have wondered whether he had perhaps been sharing Sophia’s favours. He had, of course, but only occasionally, when Mr James had been at Lutterworth and they had both been bored and needing to find something to do; it was not as if she had been hopping from one bed to another on the same evening.

  He packed his bag and said farewell to the house, and to his master. He had had a good few years and now it was best for him and the young gentleman both that he should move on.

  Tom sat at his desk in the library at Thingdon Hall, a pile of unopened letters to his left, three laid flat on the right, a heap on the floor to his side. He had advertised for a ‘modern-thinking gentleman, well-versed in agriculture and able to keep his accounts and write reports’; he needed a bailiff and agent to take Quillerson’s place, had delayed for nearly two years in the hope that the estate would throw up a naturally talented young man, one of their own, but none had appeared.

  Now he had more than three hundred responses to his public announcement in the Northamptonshire press. To his surprise, replies had come from all over the country, not just from the local area. He presumed that there was some connection between the local papers so that items of interest to all were disseminated throughout the land. Simple courtesy demanded that he should read every letter and have a reply made to each; he had hired a young man who had just left the Grammar School in Kettering to act as assistant to the bailiff and secretary to the estate – not a particularly bright youth but with a clear, well-formed hand, an ideal copyist.

  “Another fifty refusals, Mr Daish, write them the standard letter if you would be so good. There are five as well scribed in so poor a hand that I cannot decipher them – when the fifty are done then I would be obliged if you would spend a few minutes endeavouring to succeed where I have failed. If you cannot read them then burn them, do not waste more of our time.”

  Daish trotted off to his little office, picked up his steel-nib pen and settled to his labours, very satisfied to be earning his eighty pounds a year with prospects, within reason close to home so that he could visit on a Sunday but just far enough away to need to live in at the Hall, dining at the top table immediately below the butler and housekeeper and valet’s places. He would be able to save at least one half of his wages and within five years he would move into one of the cottages behind the Hall where the married retainers dwelt, comfortable with a wife and then a family about him. Working clean, as well! Never a blister on his hands or a smear of mud on his clothes! He had never had many friends at school, but if he had had they would envy him, he was sure of that!

  Three minutes to read and assess each letter, on average - some were dealt with in seconds, others required careful thought - his third day of toil coming to an end, a grand total of five candidates to bring to interview.

  Curates, ushers, half-pay officers, attorneys and even a single doctor; young men, mature fathers, one ancient of sixty; two young women, one writing a very persuasive letter, but quite ineligible of course. Farmers’ sons and townies; English, Welsh, Scots and Irish and even one Frenchman, son of émigré parents to be strictly correct. All of them claiming to be forward-thinking and dedicated to the march of Science in Agriculture.

  Making a first sort had been easier than Tom had expected – he simply discarded those whose handwriting was very poor or who could not spell with a reasonable degree of conventional accuracy. Two hundred had disappeared immediately, no doubt including some able men, but if they could not be bothered to learn to write clearly then they were probably idlers, certainly lacked mental discipline.

  For the rest, some obviously did not understand agriculture as it was practised today and others were a little too advanced for Tom’s taste, announcing their desire to apply the wonders of steam to the agrarian existence. It seemed to Tom that the steam-plough was not yet a practical device and he would rather that his bailiff was not devoting his energies to such a machine.

  Eight wrote well and sensibly, but three of them were curates holding for urban rectors, not themselves in daily contact with the countryside.

  He had Daish send invitations to interview to three young officers, men in their early thirties, all of them captains before the age of twenty-five and with experience in war. All had been foot – he wanted no cavalrymen about him. The other two were suffering as ushers, younger sons of small squires who had been able to sit their terms but had found nothing after university and had had to take positions in the new schools that were growing fast on the outskirts of the industrial areas, catering to the sons of the mill-owners.

  Tom wondered if he should not beg Robert’s presence for the interviews; if he appointed a young man with thirty or more years of service in him then his heir would see more of the gentleman than he would. He decided not, Robert was not of an agrarian persuasion, would probably be content to accept his judgement. As a compromise he wrote a letter to Robert, telling him that he was to appoint a successor to Quillerson and giving him the dates when he intended to meet the candidates and offering the opportunity to be present.

  The five young men came as requested on successive days, putting up at the Hall overnight, dining separately in a small side room; it would have been inappropriate for a bailiff to sit at Tom’s table and yet they were gentlemen, could not be expected to eat with the servants.

  They were very much alike, all born to the upper middle order of folk, their parents younger sons who had espoused a profession or small landholders on a very bare thousand a year. All had been to school rather than tutored at home, three boarding, two day-pupils; all shared the new Hanoverian King’s English mode of speech; each was within reason self-reliant, making his own way in the world.

  At the end of the week Tom chose a Northamptonshire man, not because he was significantly better than the others but because he knew local conditions. He had been a soldier and came from Loddington, a tiny village close to Rothwell and Kettering, and had heard of all that had happened in Burton and knew of events since. It would be easier to work with a man who knew what was not being said out loud.

  A letter was sent to Captain Thame, begging him to present himself at the Hall at his early convenience, whilst four more were sent to the unfortunates, each containing a bank note for twenty pounds to defray the charges they had been put to. It was expensive, but it all helped build a reputation – any of these men might end up on a large estate in England and they should be able to give a good report on the masters of Thingdon if the matter ever arose.

  Tom was pleased at the prospect of passing over
the mound of paperwork that had come his way since the passing of Quillerson. He found that he lacked some of his old appetite for work, he fancied a quieter existence.

  “Just the Quillerson family to tidy up, my dear, and then all will be back to normal.”

  Frances raised an eyebrow.

  “John Quillerson has been unable to return from the States, as you know. His brother Michael is coming to an end to his days at the Grammar School, and he has two sisters older than him and one younger. They are my responsibility now.”

  Quillerson had worked loyally for him, had died putting his body in the way of the assassin’s bullet. The obligation was total.

  “I know a little of the girls, Thomas. The eldest has an admirer from Finedon, the new doctor, in fact.”

  The new doctor was a man well into his thirties who had put his plate up in the village in the previous decade. He would remain ‘new’ for at least another twenty years, but his children might be accepted as locals.

  “Are they to wed?”

  “Probably, it seems very likely. There has been a delay for the period of mourning and then time to set her mother up in the new home.”

  The Quillersons had had to move, the bailiff’s house on the Home Farm having to be made available for the incomer. Tom had bought a very large house in the village, conveniently close to the church, and had installed the family there in the last three months.

  “What of her dowry?”

  “More of a bottom drawer than a true portion, Thomas. Clothing, linens for a house, tablecloths and such, all of the things that a girl with nimble fingers will have sewn up over her growing years. A rich wedding gift from us will be very welcome, of course; there is a three acre paddock next to the doctor’s house, a pair of old donkeys out to graze its only occupants. I am assured that it could be purchased.”

  “That can be done. What of the second girl?”

  “She seems content to keep house for her mother, and the third is too young to be a concern yet. Do you know anything of the boy?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “I will have a word with the Reverend, Thomas. I shall be in his company tomorrow morning. Poor Law, again!”

  Young Mr Quillerson had ambitions in the professional line; he wanted to become a lawyer, an attorney, not in the ordinary way of setting up in a town but working for one of the big new businesses in the industrial areas. The new firms all needed to buy land, to enter into contracts, to employ workers and managers of all sorts – they needed legal advice on a daily basis, much better to be provided by their own loyal people.

  First he must qualify, and that could be done only by being articled with a professional man. Articles had to be bought and the clerk then had to live through his years of unpaid servitude. His father had been sympathetic to the idea, but his mother simply lacked the money.

  “A very sensible ambition, Frances. I wonder where he came across it. Would he be better served sitting at the feet of a busy London man?”

  Enquiry suggested that he would be far more thoroughly prepared for a life in the law if he learnt the trade in an office at the heart of things in London.

  “A letter to Mr Michael will suffice. If he cannot find a place in his own office he will be able to settle him with a colleague. We will make the purchase and find the young man a properly supervised boarding-house to live in, together with a small stipend. There will be no sense in giving him money enough to roister on, because that it is almost certainly just what he would do.”

  “Another near riot over the weekend, my lord.”

  Morton shook his head as he busied himself with the breakfast coffee pot. He was getting old, Tom realised, much too close to seventy to continue in harness.

  “Where this time, Morton?”

  “Outside the George in Burton, my lord. A group of young men from Finedon, and several old enough to know better, chose to have a Saturday night drink there. Wholly intentional, my lord! They knew it would result in a fight with the Burton men, and some of them had come equipped with brass knucks it would seem. Lost teeth and broken jaws; ribs and arm bones as well. The Burton men are swearing vengeance, or so I am told.”

  It was the eighth gang fight since Tom had been shot, the old animosities brought to a head. Church and chapel in both villages had begged for peace, and had been ignored; the manors had threatened the full force of the law, and had discovered, again, that the law lacked any power of enforcement. The only further action to be taken was to beg for a militia battalion to camp in the fields between the two communities, an extreme measure that would be very unpopular, would sour the villagers for years. The County militia were never used in their own home areas, so any battalion would be made up of foreigners, from the North Country most likely, Yorkshiremen or even more polar folks.

  “Were we to hire another six or eight constables for the twelvemonth, Morton, would it make any difference?”

  “None, my lord. They would merely arrest every Burton man they came across, swearing him to have been poaching or house-breaking or to have assaulted a local girl - or small boy more likely, to make the offence greater.”

  Tom gave up; eventually the grievances would become less, would die away with time. Until then, they must live with the situation. He turned his mind to the much more difficult problem of Morton.

  “How long have you been at the Hall, Morton?”

  “Fifty-five years, my lord, since I came as pantry boy, aged twelve, my lord.”

  Tom said nothing.

  “Yes, my lord. It speaks for itself, does it not? It is time to find my successor, I believe, my lord.”

  “It is, Morton, probably past time. You took a holiday four years ago, Morton, to visit with a sister, I believe, in the town of Cromer on the Norfolk coast.”

  “I did, my lord. She had been recently widowed and I had not seen her for twenty and more years. She died the following year, my last relative.”

  That was no solution.

  “Would you like a cottage here on the estate, Morton?”

  “I would prefer not, my lord, though you have my thanks for the offer. You have paid me generously for many years now, my lord, and have met my tailor’s bill as well. As a result, I have spent almost nothing and have saved a reasonable sum. I intend, my lord, to buy a small place up on the Norfolk coast, where I was born, near Fakenham, there to live quietly and enjoy the sea air.”

  “Make your arrangements, Morton, and when you get to Fakenham discover the name of a local attorney for me, so that I can pay your pension safely through his hands.”

  Morton made his thanks. He would write a letter that day, he could discover a name through the gazetteer for the county.

  Frances confirmed that the other indoor manservant, Victor, was not suitable to step up to Morton’s position. He had been no more than a footman for thirty years, was quite incapable of being any greater than that; he could carry luggage and open the doors and wait at table and run little errands, but he could not take charge of house and staff and manage the whole establishment.

  “We must contact an agency and find a man wanting to step up in his world, Thomas. We can write a letter and ask for a man to be sent to us on approval or go to Town and make a choice of the available people ourselves.”

  She clearly favoured the second course.

  “Horses for the morning, my dear?”

  “An excellent suggestion, Thomas.”

  The agency would have a choice of gentlemen for them, given just a few days, perhaps Monday next. Frances could think of a number of things to fill in the time profitably – there were bookshops to patronise, acquaintances to visit, a debate or two in the Lords that might be of interest.

  “There is some discussion of the conditions of employment in the mills, Thomas, which might benefit from your knowledge.”

  He attended and listened to a round condemnation of the abuse of child workers in the cotton mills. He stood and quietly stated that he believed the situation to be very muc
h as the first speaker had said in many mills, but not all. Some employers were men of conscience, and they could provide a model for any law that might be proposed. For himself, he believed in laissez-faire, after all, it had made him a fortune; he paused for the chuckle, then added that such being the case, then any law must affect all or none. If employers were to have a free rein, then so must employees – the men must be allowed to form unions and to join together in strikes if they wished. If employers were to be free to set wages, then men must be free to refuse them.

  The cries of outrage rose as he had expected; it seemed that sauce for the goose was not for the gander despite the old saying.

  Tom quietly left the Chamber, he had had his fun and had no desire to engage in argument with the self-righteous, of whom there were no few present.

  He met Viscount Hawker as he walked out into the stinking air of Westminster.

  “Thames is ripe today, my lord! How are you?”

  “Well indeed, my lord! How long I would remain in that case breathing this air, I do not know!”

  “I did not know you were in Town, my lord, or I should have called on you. There is a bit of business I am involved in and need some advice on. I can’t think of a better man to give it.”

  “We are here for a few more days yet. Dine with me, tomorrow say?”

  “My son as well, if it is convenient. Lady Hawker is off in Scotland for some strange reason, looking at mountains, I believe – quite the thing to do, one gathers.”

  Lady and lord were rarely seen in company, nor had been for twenty years and more, but they seemed to get by on that basis, far easier than all the nastiness of divorce.

  Lord Hawker was a few years older than Tom and had married young; his son was a man in his forties and not wearing well. Mr Hawker was thinning on top and thickening at the middle yet still dressed in the height of fashion, his coat wasp-waisted and shoulders high-peaked, waistcoat elegantly brocaded, pantaloons skin-tight in palest primrose, half-boots gold-tasselled, cravat monstrously high to his chin. The aging Tulip of Fashion was always a sad sight, Tom reflected, especially when he showed no sign of being able to see all that his mirror showed.