The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Why not tell us about Sir George Beador instead," John said quietly.

  Hudson smiled, taking this as a concession of his point. From another inside pocket he drew a single folded quarto sheet. He was on the point of opening it when he paused and looked up, first at John, then at Nora. "Is it your impression," he asked, "that Beador has mortgaged Maran Hill?"

  "He as good as said so," John answered. "I know he's mortgaged Framwell, his place in Durham."

  "Interesting." Hudson opened the paper. "I've had my best ferret on this. A man called Croucher. I'd say if he can't find it, it doesn't exist. And he can find no such mortgage on Maran Hill."

  Nora was at once alert. If Maran Hill was still free of charge, and if its value was enough to cover the debt, Beador might be one of those problems that turned into blessings.

  "Oh, that's hopeful surely," John said.

  Hudson, with compassion, merely handed over the paper he had opened. John began to study it.

  "Aloud," Nora said.

  John, who had already seen enough to raise his eyebrows and sink his guts, sighed and read: "Pilbrow's Atmospheric Railway and Canal Propulsion Company, forty shares; London and Dublin Direct, thirty-five; Railway Guarantee Company, ten; Great Welch Junction Railway, also ten; Railway Banking Company, fifteen—or is it thirteen?—no, fifteen; Atmospheric Rapid Mail Conveyance Co., twenty; Prosser's Patent Wooden Railway Guidewheel Co., forty-three—no!" He let the paper fall. "I can't continue."

  Nora, calm—indeed, frigid—took the paper up and scanned it rapidly. "Everything except Cooke's National Extravaganza," she said.

  "One or two will pay," Hudson offered, as a bystander might offer cheer in a condemned cell. "But it will stand him a good eighteen thousand, in my view."

  John took the paper back. They watched him read it with more composure. "I could turn a profit on these," he said carefully.

  Nora drew in breath to speak but it was Hudson who voiced the thought. "All three of us could. But we'd look to Sir George and the rest of the Foolish Tribe to furnish us those profits. Is that"—he darted Nora a swift, amused glance—"what honest Yorkshire folk the likes of us were put upon this world to achieve?"

  "But he's a partner," John protested.

  "Then he has an odd way of expressing his idea of a partner's obligation. Half those were subscribed since December last." Hudson looked from John to Nora; neither replied. "Mrs. Stevenson?" he prompted.

  Nora, looking steadily at John, laid a finger on the paper and said: "It's the nearest I've seen to an autographed death warrant."

  John winced at her hardness but offered no argument. Instead he sat up, thanked Hudson handsomely and briskly for his help, and suggested they go in to dinner. The subject was not raised again until after they had retired to bed.

  John's lovemaking was brusque and perfunctory, as unrewarding to himself as to her. His warmest act was to kiss her, with a gentleness that was in itself an apology, before he composed himself to sleep.

  "Nay," she fretted. "Don't brood now."

  He sighed. "'Death warrant,'" he quoted. "Is it really that simple to you?"

  "There's only one reprieve I can see," she said.

  "What's that?"

  "If Sir George furnishes us a list identical to the one Hudson brought."

  John gave a neutral grunt. "It would solve the moral problem."

  "But the money problem. No."

  She felt John shake his head. "It's not really a money problem. It's a man problem, a problem of George Beador."

  There was a long, thoughtful silence before Nora said: "What would you say Maran Hill is worth?"

  "Every bit of twenty-five thousand; he'd be well covered if eighteen's the limit of his debt."

  "Aye," Nora said. "It's not a bad house. And not a bad situation."

  She felt John rocking with silent laughter. "Have ye counted the windows?" he asked at length.

  "They'll abolish window tax this year. Or next."

  "But have ye counted?"

  "Eighty-four," she said.

  He stopped laughing and sat upright. "You are in earnest!"

  "I don't know," she said truthfully. "But it's a thought."

  "A big thought. It would take a lot of thinking."

  "It's plain to me we're going to need a house in the south. If you start in Germany, Italy, Spain—never mind France. Living in Thorpe adds two days to every voyage.

  "Aye," he said. "That's true, right enough."

  He was not going to discuss it further, his tone implied. He sucked a tooth and scratched in his sidewhiskers. "It's strange," he said. "How little freedom we really have!"

  "Why d'you say that?"

  "If we take a house in the south, it'll not be that we wish to live there or that it suits our station or that we find it congenial—but that our business demands it."

  "Surely a very good reason." She tugged his sleeve. "Hold me. Lie down and hold me. It frightens me when you talk as if it was all turning to dust and ashes. Why do you so often sneer when you say 'business'?"

  He lay down and pulled her firmly to him. "It's not in me," he said. "The discontent is not in me. It's in the work. We're big enough now to take on any line, any length, over any terrain; but what's left? Cornwall…Wales…the Scotch Highlands…"

  "London–York direct," Nora added.

  "If Hudson doesn't squash it. It's not much when it's shared out. The average length of lines recently authorized is about ten miles. It's all little feeder and junction lines."

  "They pay as well per mile."

  "I learned my trade on the London–Birmingham…Liverpool…Preston… Manchester. All trunk lines. And where am I applying it? On the Piddlehinton– Sopping Wetbury single branch! Where's the glory in that?"

  "Oh, I see. It's glory we take to the bank, is it?"

  He squeezed her shoulders gently, giving them a little shake as he spoke. "You're right, love. Of course you're right. There's no glory in making a loss, however noble the venture. But why not both, eh? Why not? And the time to start thinking is now. We must think to the Empire: to India, Canada, Australia, and to Europe. They'll all come to us now. Brassey told me the Belgian company couldn't raise the capital until they had guaranteed an English engineer and an English contractor."

  Nora relaxed and hugged him, reassured. "We'll amaze them all. Or you will," she said.

  "I can do naught without thee."

  "And if the profit on the Piddlehinton–Soaking Wetmarsh helps us strike farther afield, we'll build a hundred single branches."

  He laughed then. "Aye. Seen in that light, it's endurable. Tolerable."

  Much later she said: "I wonder if Beador will turn out honest."

  John was so close to sleep that all he did was to grunt.

  Before she too fell deep into slumber, Nora had rearranged the shrouded ballroom at Maran Hill many times.

  One half of her—the cautious half—wanted to be rid of Sir George Beador and all the uncertainty he represented. The other half—the huntress—wanted to part him gently and cleanly from Maran Hill; and Hudson's news seemed to offer a way of doing exactly that.

  Chapter 8

  The snows of 1845 were the worst anyone could remember. For ten weeks the temperature did not once rise to a thaw. The poor got out-relief cutting timber, clearing snow—even along lanes that none wanted clear—and building needless walls and extensions to kennels and stables; even so, the times dealt hard with them. Eight cords of oak and elm went to keep Thorpe Old Manor warm, and there was no nonsense about cold nurseries; tepid baths were allowed.

  John built a snowman, but he rolled the head too long on one axis so that, by chance, it turned into an amazingly lifelike bear. It squatted on its haunches and fixed the house with a daylong, nightlong stare. Winifred scratched a peephole in Jack Frost's patterns on her window and watched to see if Bruin moved at night, as Mrs. Jordan said he did. But there he stood, blue in the glacial moonlight, frozen in the frozen garden; Mrs. Jordan said it
was cruel to torment the creature so, for he'd not stretch if he knew folk were looking.

  Each day they trotted the horses and the pony, sometimes in the paddock, sometimes up on the highway. On one of her rides, Winifred found a broken tin whistle sticking out of a snowdrift. Cox and Todd made a second effigy of snow, to play tin-whistle music to the bear in his loneliness. One night the breeze lay in just the right direction to moan through the pipes as through an aeolian harp. Winifred awoke briefly, heard it, and went smiling back to sleep; magic was abroad.

  Next morning she opened her eyes to an indoor fairyland, for overnight the nursery had been transformed into an ice grotto. Folds of ice festooned the wall and long stalactites hung from the ceiling—milky green and grey and white and blue, all scintillating in the early sun. Her first thought was that she had been bewitched and transported to the Halls of the Ice Faeries. She lay rigid, taking stock and fearing that every movement of her eyes would bring the hordes of her captors around her. But as one and then another familiar nursery feature claimed her attention, she realized she was still at home—though a very changed and beautiful home.

  Whoever had done it had worked a miracle. The little framed picture of a girl on a pony stared out through a wavy inch of ice upon the wall. The washstand was bound in gnarled roots of ice that grew in columns up the corner. She woke up Young John and together they danced and clapped hands and laughed at the wonder of it all.

  Then Cox came in and said "Dear God!" And shortly after, their mother appeared and wrung her hands and said that the cistern had cracked. "Just when your father's away too." After breakfast, Willet and the new stable lad, Myles, apprenticed from the orphanage, spent the morning with spades, trowels, hammers, chisels, and crowbars demolishing fairyland and throwing the shards out the window.

  The plumber came and said the cistern hadn't cracked, one side of it had merely been pried slightly apart. He showed Nora how the lead in the screw sockets had shrunk and split and allowed the ice to thrust one side of the cistern away—the screws pulling out of the lead and coming away with the side as it went. He said he could melt fresh lead into the sockets but it might only happen again. The sockets ought to have been skewed, not straight.

  That evening, John came back wearied by a three-day journey from Havre, through a black-and-white world all the way home. He wanted only to thaw out, eat, love, and sleep. But when he heard why the children were sleeping in the rose bedroom, the problem intrigued him, and after dinner he made Nora take him up to the attic and show him the cistern as the plumber had explained it.

  "He's right about one thing: The sockets should've been skewed. But since they weren't, we'll drill diagonal holes, blind, upward and downward from the socket. Make a bird's-foot socket. That's what we are going to do."

  Nora took the lantern from him. "We," she said, backing down the stairs, "are going to bed. And we are going to leave plumbers' troubles to plumbers because engineering contractors have troubles enough of their own."

  "Oh?" He followed her.

  "Sometimes I think you're still a ganger at heart, you know," she said. "You'd rather drill that slate than—"

  "What troubles?"

  "Income tax, for one. Our return is near due."

  "Is it bad?"

  "A few pence short of ninety pounds!"

  John winced.

  "You shouldn't pull faces," Nora said. "Lady Henshaw, God rest her, always used to say you could tell people of quality from parvenus by their willingness to pay taxes; only parvenus grumble."

  He ducked the beam at the foot of the attic steps. "That's because the quality have had time enough to reach certain accommodations with the Revenue."

  "We've not done too badly on that score, ourselves."

  They went downstairs again to the winter parlour. On the way they passed Mrs. Jarrett, taking a glass of port to her room. "I've poured you a glass each," she said, "and locked the tantalus. Will you have the key?"

  John said that one glass would do for them, and they bade her good night.

  "There's still no letter from Beador," Nora said.

  "I've been to see him," John told her, and then shook his head at the hope that came into her eyes. "Our problem there has simply moved one station down the line."

  "How?"

  He handed her port over and sipped his own, relishing it on his tongue. "Let's see the tax return first. I suppose, as usual, you've left me nothing to do but to sign."

  Smugly, she put the forms in front of him. "The solicitors have seen it. The chief clerk has seen the relevant parts. Chambers has seen it."

  The summary, after the usual preambles and cautions, read:

  Before John could speak she passed him a bill of exchange drawn up by Charles Stoddart, her lawyer, for £52-10-0. "My contribution," she said. "Schedules A and B are mine."

  He made an appreciative face. "Doing well," he said. But because he was used to once-for-all profits of thirty to forty per cent, he failed, once again, to realize quite how well; for Nora's contribution represented a steady gross income of more than £2,200, year-in, year-out.

  She turned down the corners of her mouth and smiled—courageously, she hoped. "Not as well as I'd hoped. But"—she sighed—"well enough. Yes, well enough. Better"—and you would have thought the comparison had just occurred to her—"than Chambers and our trust, anyway."

  He patted the small of her back. "Ye never give up," he said.

  "Never," she agreed. "Anyway. The tax on Schedules C and D represents the two thousand-odd guineas we drew to live on. You moved £45,000 to France, which has to be spent by the end of June, or we'll face some inquiry on the residue."

  "No trouble," he said.

  She let a small silence grow before she spoke again. "What about Beador, then?" she asked. "By the way, we've heard from the Reverend Prendergast. He politely declines to help."

  He finished his port and tossed the last drop at the fire; it landed on an unburned log and evaporated without catching fire. Glumly he turned to her. "Prendergast is in for a bishopric, so he may be having serious attacks of virtue. As to Sir George, I never met a man more difficult to assess. At one point I really caught myself wondering if he's got all his buttons."

  "Oh, he's sane. Did he give us this wretched list?"

  John went across to his travelling case and returned with a sheet of paper, which he passed to Nora.

  "No tearstains," she said as soon as she looked at it. Then, after closer study: "Mr. Hudson did well; there's only two here he missed—Marine Glue Co. and The Patriot Association. What's that?"

  "Beador can't remember."

  "Can't remember? Where did he buy them?"

  John made a hopeless gesture. "In Bartholomew Lane and Capel Court!"

  "From alley men!" Nora was scandalized.

  "They were 'so cheap,' he said!"

  "Well, at least he can tear those up and burn them. Where did the rest come from?"

  "He either wrote away or got them through his bank—through the Stock Exchange."

  "So he'll have to pay deposit and calls on them all."

  "Or sell out quickly and leave the country."

  "John, we cannot let such a man get his feet in our trough."

  "He bought them all within the space of one week. He says he has no notion what possessed him, except that he felt utterly convinced of his rightness and virtue. He had a vision of saving his estates and founding a new fortune."

  "A brainstorm."

  "Now, of course, he's sick with worry. He wants us to buy the foundry land. I told him it's not worth two thousand. No help at all."

  "But a partnership would be far too risky."

  "He feels he's let us down. His sister, his tenants, his staff—everyone. He's lacerating himself now."

  "I wish to God we'd never heard of George Beador. Did you commit us to help?"

  "No. Of course not. I said we'd have a think and see if any sort of rescue were possible. But I doubt it will be."

  I
t was the note of pessimism for which Nora had been waiting. "Very difficult," she agreed. "I see only one possible answer." It caught his interest. "Instead of a partnership, let us form a company under this new, simplified Board of Trade system."