"What a pleasant way to give out Christmas boxes," Sarah said.
Sarah had previously suggested that they should try the effect of Queen Caroline's "Christmas trees"—young fir trees set in tubs and put upon the table or in a window seat and then decked with penny candles. They spent the evening trying them in different places and ended with one in the hall and one in the window seat in the winter parlour. John twisted soft iron wire around some thick dowelling, whittled to a taper, to make candleholders.
The trees looked very pretty when they finished. Then they went upstairs and filled the children's stockings with apples and nuts and sugar pigs with string tails made by Mrs. Jordan. For Winifred there were some hair-ribbons too, and a book of tales by Maria Edgeworth; for Young John, a half-dozen new brass buttons and a coloured alphabet book. For Caspar there were crayons wrapped in a roll of drawing paper.
At six next morning they heard the treasure being discovered. At a quarter past six Young John came in, bearing a candle and his alphabet book. He poked his father's eyelids open. "Happy Christmas," John said to him in a voice like a death rattle. Nora, without apparently waking or stirring, said, "Who lit your candle?"
"Winny."
"That's naughty. Happy Christmas. And don't call her Winny."
"I can read," Young John said. He put down the candle and began to turn the pages of the book. "I can read that. And that, and that…"
At the fifteenth, John, his eyes still shut, said, "What's that one then."
"That's the letter orange. And that's the letter pudding. And that's the letter queen. And that's the letter, um…colours."
John opened an eye quickly. "Rainbow."
"Yes, rainbow colours."
Winifred, not to be excluded, began a processional reading from the door: "But his father caught hold of him by the arm. 'I will whip you now,' said he. So Robert was whipped, till he cried so loud with the pain that the whole neighbourhood could hear him." She read with bright-eyed relish. "'There,' said his father, 'now go without supper. See how liars are served.'" She closed the book and clutched it to her. "Aren't they glorious tales, Mummy?"
The bed shook with John's silent laughter.
"Happy Christmas, popsie," Nora said wearily.
"And that's the second letter horse. A different horse. A stripey horse. And that's what I can read."
When the last mince pie had gone and the last slice of plum pudding had been washed down with the last drop of Madeira, the children were sent up to recapture the sleep of which Father Christmas's bounty had robbed them.
The postman came just as the grownups were moving into the parlour. He rode back up the drive one shilling heavier and two letters lighter.
"For you"—John handed it to Nora—"from Arabella Thornton."
"I thought so," Nora said. "She never forgets Christmas." And she explained to Sarah how they and the Thorntons had been married in the same month in
1839 and had all four spent that Christmas together.
"The GS&W, Dublin, wants us to begin next week," John said, folding his letter. "Flynn can start without me. I'll go over in the spring."
Nora read rapidly through Arabella's, throwing out her own summaries: "They have a new cook…very good…The road dug up again, drains very bad…Bristol has plans for roads and great civic works which we should interest ourselves in…Scandal at Bedminster parish—but we read all that in the papers… Terrible water shortage all year, a real scandal, and new waterworks urgently needed…Walter offered a tempting salary in the South Wales Union Railway but doesn't think it can ever become profitable…Children all well—oh! and she's to have another next June…hopes for another girl as three boys are quite enough for the moment. They must be—five and a half, and four, and just turned three."
"Quite enough for the moment!" Sarah echoed.
"Hello!" John, rooting around near the tree on the window seat, picked up a small package. "For me!"
"I thought that was a good place for them. Let Sarah have hers first."
"Oh!" Sarah said, as if she had never suspected it.
Their present to her was a tortoiseshell brush and comb and mirror, each with her initials engraved on a silver cartouche let into the shell. She was enchanted with the set and thanked them half a dozen times. Then she shyly produced, from behind the sofa, something like a tray wrapped in paper. When they opened it, they found an embroidered firescreen in a mahogany frame with the feet left loose and unglued. "If they'd been on, it would have spoiled the mystery," Sarah explained.
Nora looked closely at the pattern. "You really do the most beautiful needlework, Sarah. But I say—isn't this the embroidery Rodie was doing?"
Sarah was delighted she had recognized it. "The same picture. I saw her doing it and took a copy."
"But it's perfect!"
"I don't suppose it is. But I thought you could look at it here, by your fire, and think of Rodie at La Gracieuse, with hers. You see?"
That pleased them even more.
Nora's present from John was a lovely, dainty little diamond brooch. Its beauty awed her so that her thanks were quiet and almost reverent. "I'll wear it now," she said. "No one can object, surely."
"I should think not," Sarah agreed. "It's the very opposite of showy. It's exquisite. Now yours, John."
"Do you know what it is?" he asked, taking out a pocket knife.
"Don't cut it!" Nora called. "Look, it pulls undone. Your extravagance!"
He laughed. "Here's me, who condemns miles of rope, each year, most of it probably sound, and now I'm saving string!"
"Open it!" Sarah almost screamed.
It was a hunting watch—one of the new ones with a metal cover over the glass.
"What a splendid idea," he said. "Why didn't anyone think of that before?"
"Push that little thing that sticks out," Nora said.
The watch chimed three for the hour and then three for three-quarters. "That means it's between quarter to and four o'clock," she explained. "It'll do it again, as often as you want."
He pressed and it chimed again. He was about to put it in his pocket when Nora said, "Open the back."
There he found the greatest novelty of all: a twenty-eight-day dial that showed the phases of the moon—at least, it had been the moon when Nora bought the watch but she had got a miniaturist to overpaint it with an enamel portrait of herself.
"I shall take it out and kiss it hourly," John said. "And every time I condemn some rope. And if folk ask me why, I shall just say, 'Oh, that's my wife—she's a lunar-tick!'"
He and Sarah fell about laughing, especially when Nora said she thought it clever rather than funny.
Later, when they were in their bedroom, preparing for Evensong, John pulled out a long legal envelope from his travelling writing case and said: "Here is my real present to you. I didn't think it appropriate in front of Sarah."
She took it cautiously. "It won't bite," he said.
The enfacement read Power of Attorney: Stevenson to Nora Stevenson, 3 December 1845.
"Won't bite!" she said. "It could send me to jail. I see now why you were so evasive when I said I hadn't power of attorney." She looked at the document again. How happy it would have made her at any other time. "Here's a pig's pizzle," she said, using a favourite phrase of his. "What ever possessed you?"
"It was prepared in much happier times," he explained. "You know how lawyers can drag things out into the years. I wanted to give you power to deal with…"
He could not go on. She realized with shock that he was trying to fight back tears.
"John!" she said gently. "It doesn't matter now."
"…to deal with…your property." He choked on the words, fell to his knees in front of her, and threw his arms about her waist. "Oh Nora, love! What have I done to you?"
She held his head tight but it was an automatic response; she was too astonished to do anything else. Suddenly she realized she had loved these last few months. Not all of it, of course. Seeing her pr
operties go, and then signing away all their money—that had been terrible. But everything else had been alive and splendid in a way it had not been for years. She and John had been together again, as they had in their very first year. The excitement had all come back. Even this new threat of jail was part of it.
And precisely what distressed her about John's outburst was that it once more put that distance between them; it made them opposites—sinner and sinned against, penitent and confessor, worm and angel.
She pulled his shirt away at the back of his neck and dropped the document down inside. "Never mind what you've done, love. You're not getting me in jail with you—who'd arrange the escape? No—you take this to France tomorrow. Lose it for a while."
She held him until his dignity returned and then she broke free.
To get the paper out he had to stand again. "You're better when you're tall," she told him.
He grinned. "You won't let me do an easy penance then," he said.
"Such rubbish!"
He put the document in his writing case, buried among other assorted papers. "Funny thing," he told her. "It was Chambers's idea, really—giving you power of attorney."
"But he's always hated me having properties, independently."
"I said: funny thing."
Chapter 24
Nora endured one day at Thorpe after John had left; then she decided that to be without him but surrounded by the children, the house, the land—by all they stood to lose and all that would make the loss hurt most—would he intolerable. She would go hunting.
Better still, she would go to Maran Hill, where, squired by Sir George Beador, she would hunt with the Puckeridge under their master, Lord Wyatt. Now they had less than nothing to lose, she felt an ancient pugnacity stirring within her. She had not felt it since her days of poverty, when she had faced the world alone; it was something different from the polished ruthlessness that money had brought; it was brighter-eyed, more truculent.
At the last moment she decided to take Sarah along too. It was a decision that almost completed their ruin.
An avenue of limes, dead straight and exactly half a statute mile in length, ran from the gates to the big house at Maran Hill. On either side there was open parkland grazed by a herd of red deer—or, now that it was December and the males were apart, two herds. Gideon's wood and Red wood, two large game coverts, blocked the view to the north of the park; they almost joined with Home wood, a coppice to the immediate north of the house.
But on the south side, looking down and across one of the loveliest valleys in the county, all the views were open. There was no covert there larger than an acre or two and they had been placed as much for their scenic effect as for their game-preserving role. None of their trees had been coppiced, so that knolls of tall beeches and huge, spreading oaks delayed the eye as it swept over rolling pastures and ploughed fields. The winter sun reached through the bare branches of the limes, making bars of startling light and shade that flickered in the carriage like a pyrotechnic display.
Sarah, who had leaned out of the window to see the house, sat down again, smiling and blinking at the water drawn into her eyes by the cold and the wind. "What a beautiful house!" she said.
"How would you like to live in such a place?" Nora asked.
"Oh, I'd prefer a town house. There's the same amount of work and you have more interest for your time off."
Nora laughed. "Silly Milly! I meant as mistress, not as maidservant."
"Oh." Sarah looked out at the park, assessing it now with different eyes.
Nora watched her fondly. "You'll never get used to it, will you? To being independent."
"Not to that degree." She pointed at the park to stress the word.
"You could rent a place like this, on a maintaining lease, for less than two hundred pounds a year."
"Nora! It's unthinkable."
Every now and then Nora took such opportunities to remind Sarah of her fortune; she tried not to think of it as a kind of hudsoning.
Shallowness had saved Beador—that very shallowness which had enabled him to engage in such monstrous debts when he had nothing to meet them but his partner's money. His character was as bankrupt as his purse; he had nothing with which to meet his debt of obligation to John and Nora. And, as in business he knew no way of earning by his own labour, so in his relationship with them he knew no means of restoring himself by his own effort.
True, at the start he had been filled with remorse. A broken man, pale and much given to outbursts of weeping, a man trembling on the threshold of self-murder. But it was the remorse of youth—intense, yet so shallow its depth is plumbed at a glance. By the time of Nora's visit he was his old, uncaring self again. It made Nora (who, at 26, was actually his junior by a year) feel vastly older.
For it was she who told herself that nothing was to be gained at this moment by recrimination, that Sir George's land and influence at Stockton were still big assets (though nowhere near worth the price at which they had been bought), and that a moping Sir George—a sackcloth-and-ashes flagellant—could be all it needed to bring the whole structure of confidence tumbling down.
Coldly she watched him pour out his careless charm, telling herself to be thankful he could sustain no deeper soul. Inwardly she longed for some sparkling revenge.
"Pretty woman, your friend," Sir George said, as they rode out into the cold.
"It is her nature," Nora agreed.
"Looks as if she might harbour quite a temper there."
"I wouldn't say that. She certainly has a mind of her own."
He said no more until after the hunt.
There had been a sharp frost overnight and the ground was frozen hard. A poor day for scent. They drew three coverts blank, found at a fourth, but lost the line in less than a mile.
"They'd need one nostril up the fox's arse today," Nora heard a farmer say to the first whipper-in, not knowing she was the other side of the hedge.
She was disappointed. Beador had lent her a magnificent five-year-old mealy bay gelding, called Fontana. She was certain that if only they could get away, he'd go superbly over this country.
Lord Wyatt, the Master, seemed to take every check and every lost line as a personal affront. He was a choleric, self-important little man. The cold wind and his own anger turned parts of his face as scarlet as the hunting "pink" he wore. At one point he grew so angry he failed to blow any kind of a note on his horn; he dashed it to the ground in a fury of petulance.
Nora took care to stay on the fringe of the field. She did not think he noticed her.
When the hounds checked for the fourth time and could not find again, no matter how the huntsman held them round, Nora and Sir George withdrew.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's more what you'd expect of Durham country than Hertfordshire."
"I'm sorry not to have made better use of Fontana here," she answered.
He brightened. "Care for a bit of a swish?" he asked.
She smiled then, for an idea had just occurred to her. "Yes," she said. "Take me through Wyatt's place at Panshanger."
Beador tried to dissuade her but she insisted.
He led her at a good trot through the country lanes, by Bramfield and Tattle Hill, through Thieves Lane to Hertingfordbury. There they turned west, into the grounds of Panshanger, which stretched up the Maran valley for about three miles. It was park and pheasant covert and partridge manor all the way.
"Ready?" he called. "Hold tight."
She increased her grip.
"Now!"
The horses had been waiting for it. They went at once from walk to gallop. Nora felt the blood begin to race. Beador knew the ground well, for he led the way unhesitatingly through a maze of rides, some broad and straight, some narrow and zigzag. A brilliant sun shone through the trees. The frosted leaves crackled underhoof. And from somewhere came drifting the lazy smell of woodsmoke. All the fears and stresses of these last weeks deserted her on that gallop.
Here and there the w
ay opened into glades, in one of which the woodmen had left the trunk of a once-mighty beech. To her astonishment, Nora saw Beador's horse fly at it as if to clear it in one bound—which was impossible, surely. Then she began to feel anxious, for she could sense that Fontana was getting set to make the same impossible leap. In fact, she was on the point of reining in when she saw that Beador had come to rest on the top of the trunk; he stood there, poised like a trick rider in a circus.
Very well, she thought, suddenly daring. On you go! And she touched Fontana forward.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 25
