The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Where, Nora thought with sour satisfaction, were the triumphant brayings of 1845? Then the railways were ushering in the New Jerusalem and every other child would be born a millionaire! If there was a law of money to match the law of gravity, it was that any person or any group who tried to snatch a disproportionate share of the available wealth impoverished everyone, including themselves. People never learned that lesson.

  She and Chambers did all they could. They realized the fifty thousand Hudson had promised on the 250 Great North of England shares he had given to John to keep the York–Scarborough line cheap. She wondered how much of the money came out of Hudson's own pocket.

  "He'll not last long now," Nora said. Once, she had made that prediction with relish; but now, as the inevitable day drew on, she began to feel almost sorry for the "king." It was not a nickname one heard so often now.

  They sold most of the shares John had bought over the years. They called in loans the firm had made, often giving a good discount for cash. They brought the stocks of the Stevenstown mill down to the danger point, where they would have been unable to fulfil any quick order, even of medium size. And Chambers busied himself around the City as never before, tapping all possible sources of loan. She even got her lawyer, Charles Stoddart, to prepare a complete schedule of all her properties and their values.

  There was no point keeping Chambers in the dark this time. This was no short-term crisis, compounded by the firm's own private difficulties; it was a universal slide toward ruin. No one was safe. Only those who worked as closely and as frankly as possible with their bankers stood a chance.

  Even so, this squeezing of the sponge yielded much less cash than either she or John had expected.

  "It's a good thing you're ready to build at Camden Town," he said with a relieved grin. "Seventeen hundred houses at twenty pounds profit. A good thirty thousand there. And in cash."

  His face fell when he saw her response. "Oh, no," she said firmly. "That's going out to tender."

  Then he grinned again and nudged her. "Clever! Of course it's got to look aboveboard."

  "It will be aboveboard, John," she said, feeling sick within. "Cubitt, Fox, Brassey, Jackson—they'll all be invited. They'll bring their bids. And they'll all be present when opened. And the winning tender will be declared then. And only then."

  He was too angry to speak to her. But as he strode from the room—and for a moment she feared he was going to smash his way out through the door—he said to a portrait of his horse Hermes, "Someone had better think again and think harder."

  She thought hard all right, for the rest of that day. She took out Prometheus, a large black stallion she had hunted most of that season, and went through their own rides and the park and then on through Panshanger to Hertingfordbury before she felt equal to asking herself why she was being so insistent. Then she came back and, though John was still in the house, she wrote him a letter.

  Dear Husband,

  Your wife (your still- and ever-loving wife) is sad to report that she finds herself poacher-turned-gamekeeper. You remember that Chambers recently advised you deliberately to fall down on the Austrian and the Italian railroads? When you rejected that advice you did so partly for good business reasons but mostly for your own pride in your reputation and because it is not in you to do a thing badly. I hope you may come to understand that I have identical reasons for my decision touching the building of the Camden Town houses.

  It is true, that our business started on a forgery, and that forgery was compounded by a blackmail. It is true, we have often fished downwind of the law. Many of the contracts we have won have depended on our unfair advantage, of knowing the tenders others were going to make. Without bribery, we would quickly come to ruin. Knowing and accepting all this foregoing, it is doubly hard to explain my sudden scruple.

  Truly if the money were mine, I would do as you suggest. But it is not. Absolute discretion is not the same as ownership. This is a contract for 1,710 houses. Between now and 1870, we shall let contracts go for nigh 35,000 more. If I cannot show now that all who tender may expect honesty and fair dealing, I am asking to be robbed. Not myself, for I have said I would take that risk, if the money was mine, but those who have trusted me.

  I would be asking for them to be robbed. I cannot do it.

  As witness of my good faith, when I say if it were mine, it were yours, I append a list of the properties I have bought freehold and leased at profit over nine years. You have given me 37,000l in that time. The land it has bought is now largely developed and is worth some 220,000l, and brings a rental after all proper deductions and expenses of 12,475l. Chambers is confident of raising 150,000l on these estates at six per cent, which in today's City is most fair.

  All these I unreservedly place at your disposal.

  Nora.

  Of course she did not expect him to take this rhetorical gesture literally.

  He did not come to her that night, and next morning there was a note before her place at breakfast. It read: "Thank you. Will you please be good enough to let Chambers have the title deeds. He is to discharge any debt upon them."

  She read these terse commands several times through before she could bring herself to believe them. The threat to sell instead of simply to mortgage could not be made more plain. He meanwhile had gone to North Wales, where the Britannia Bridge was now well advanced.

  She had expected him to go onward to Ireland, where Flynn had now pushed the Cork line almost as far as Mallow, thirty miles beyond Limerick Junction and only another twenty or so from the terminus. So she was more than surprised, when she delivered the deeds to Chambers later that week, to hear that John was with him. She went into Nathaniel's office and put the deeds on his desk.

  "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," she said to John.

  He treated it as a great joke. She could not tell from his mood whether he was now reconciled to her decision or not. Of course he would not behave in public other than as he had always behaved.

  "I've just been telling Stevenson that with any luck we shan't need to touch these properties," Chambers said.

  "Aye. I've been getting the riot act on bidding for too much long-term work."

  "I don't know why he lost his interest in sewerage systems," Chambers told her. "That's the sort of contract the firm ought to be going after."

  "It's not we who've lost interest; it's the municipalities," John grumbled.

  "Aye," Nora agreed. "Just let there be a bad cholera epidemic this summer and the interest will come—if you'll pardon the expression—flooding back."

  "You've a ready wit today," John said.

  "Thank you. You're remarkably cheerful yourself."

  The flat normality of their talk was turning brittle.

  "I spent the morning at Euston. The Great Hall opening is definitely set for May the seventeenth. And they've promised to pay the entire sum in cash or draft, but no shares."

  "Oh!" Nora wanted to dance on the desk. Her properties were safe!

  "Aye. I threatened to demolish the roof if they tried paying in shares. That may have had something to do with it."

  It'll save whatever's left between us, Nora thought.

  But later she was less sure. John was not exactly cold with her, but he was punctiliously correct—almost a parody of a husband. She began to long for a blistering argument to clear the air. She thought she'd have it when it turned out that Cubitt's had tendered for just over £146 a house at Camden Town—a mere ten shillings below Stevenson's tender. But John took the news in grim silence, saying only that Cubitt would "do her well."

  Even when he was warm with her and allowed something of his former tenderness to show, it was as if he were making a special effort—almost as if he were trying to remember how such feelings and behaviour had once come to him quite spontaneously. There was nothing she could do. The harder she tried to provoke him to anger, the more apparently forgiving and gentle he became. Even worse, there was nothing she could have done different
ly. It was not as if she had behaved foolishly or wrongly, so that she might now beg his forgiveness. She would do it all again—withhold the Wolff fund and let the houses go to honest tender. It was so unreasonable of him not to understand that. The more she thought about his unreasonableness, the angrier she grew with him—and the less chance did he give her to vent that anger.

  Then one day, she overheard Flynn and John talking idly about this and that in a neighbouring room. She was paying only scant attention to what they were saying, until she heard the name Bochnia mentioned, followed by a shocked silence. It was actually the silence that focussed her hearing on their talk. Then she distinctly heard Flynn whisper "Sorry!" before their casual chatter resumed.

  "Bochnia" rang a bell, but she had to search through several recent railway papers before she came upon it: Annaburg-Bochnia, proposed railway, first 100 miles, tenders invited. Payment likely in stock.

  There it was then. A hundred miles in Saxony, conveniently close to the Dresden–Prague line. John hadn't been able to resist it. But he knew they could not take on more work for credit. What could he be thinking of?

  There was only one thing, she realized with a sinking heart: her property. How foolish she had been to value it for him! A quarter of a million pounds. Already she knew they would have to mortgage some of it—perhaps most of it—over the coming months, just to meet their present commitments. But if he really was going to build this Annaburg-Bochnia line, they would have no alternative but to sell it. Sell her property! She began to tremble with fury, until she realized that all this was mere supposition. In fairness, she'd have to find out if there was any truth behind it.

  She tackled him directly they were in the carriage and on their way home.

  "Aye," he said evenly. "We put in a bid for eighty miles. It's not accepted yet, of course."

  "We?" she asked.

  "Flynn and my good self. I don't know." He sighed. "Sometimes I think you and I ought to get out of this business. Leave it to men of vision like Flynn. He's the only man left who can still think grand—only one I know, anyway."

  "Am I to know the details?" she had to ask.

  "If you wish." He yawned. "As a matter of fact, we put in two bids. Eight hundred thousand if they pay in stock; a hundred thousand less for cash—in round figures. And the actual cost—which you were no doubt going to ask next—will be just over five hundred thousand, not a word to a soul."

  She kept calm, knowing he was trying hard to provoke her to anger. "Where do we find half a million?"

  "Well, of course, we don't have to find it all at once. Some of the earlier lines will be finished soon and we can sell off the stock. Gensedorf-Pesth in Hungaria will finish before we're halfway. That's a sure hundred thousand for a starter. And there's others. We'll manage."

  "And completion? I mean on the Annaburg-Bochnia?"

  "Eighteen months."

  "Then I can tell you, John, we shall fall short by at least two hundred thousand."

  She saw the lower part of his face jerk into and out of the light of a gas lamp as they passed. He was grinning as he said, "We shall manage. Never fear. We can sell our property if necessary."

  Her mouth went dry. He meant it. He might be grinning, but he meant it. "It's mine," she said. "You gave me that money 'to do what I like with' you said. It's me who's turned it into—"

  "You've done what you liked with it," he interrupted. "And no doubt you've had great fun. But playtime is over, Nora. We need it now."

  "We? Is that Flynn and good self again?"

  "No, no!" He was testy. "I was teasing then. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have teased. But I'm serious now. We're not a property firm, love. We're railroad builders. We need that money."

  "But it's mine!" She still could not believe it.

  "Ours, dear. Look, I know how you must feel. Very disappointed. It's only natural. But try and look on the bright side. We lose two—twenty thousand now—or rather, we take it out of property and put it where it belongs—and when the line's finished we get back a clear three hundred thousand. You must see the sense of it. You above all must see that."

  It was unarguable—once you accepted his notion that she had merely been "playing" with the money, "having great fun," as he put it. But she knew that she could never face the sale, however compelling his arguments. She still had hopes of reviving their marriage once they had weathered this present crisis. But if she had to face the sale of her properties for the second time in a few years, all such hopes would vanish.

  Yet she knew too, just from the reasoned way John was speaking, that he would never understand her feeling. They would live out their lives yoked together in a hatred he would not understand and she could not control.

  There had to be some other way. "Leave it with me, love," she said brightly. "We'll mortgage the land by all means. But it may not come to a sale. We must try to find the rest some other way."

  "Oh? How?" He sounded as if he were smiling.

  "I don't know. We'll find it somehow."

  "See?" he said, settling back to doze the rest of the journey away. "It just needed a little encouragement. I'm sure you'll do it."

  That Thursday, he left for Berlin to hear about the Annaburg–Bochnia contract. Twenty minutes after seeing him off at London Bridge station she was with Chambers in his renaissance-princely office in Dowgate.

  "You look awful," he said.

  She smiled wanly. "I hope it's your afternoon for truth on all fronts, Nathan."

  He became wary at once.

  "Did Stevenson tell you why he's gone to Berlin?" she asked.

  "The Dresden–Prague line?"

  "And the other? Did he tell you about that? The Annaburg–Bochnia line?"

  Chambers froze where he sat. "No," he said. "You tell me."

  So she told him—exactly what had passed between herself and John that night in the carriage. It left him looking very unhappy. "If he insists on selling your property, Nora, nothing can prevent him, you know."

  "Balls," she said flatly. It shocked him. Wearily, she closed her eyes. "Listen. Nathan. The time is approaching when you must decide where your real loyalty is. To John Stevenson? Or to the firm that bears his name—the firm that puts the meat under your gravy?"

  "Or to you?"

  She laughed coldly. "Oh, no. I have no illusions about that. But I tell you this: If he sells my property, I will finish forever with the firm of Stevenson's."

  He laughed. "You can't be serious!" She said nothing. "Stevenson's without you? Why, it's…" He could find no word strong enough. Then he looked into her eyes and saw she meant it.

  "I'd have the trust fund," she said quietly. "And my share of the Wolff fund is already beyond his grasp. I'm younger than he is. I shall outlast him. I can wait."

  When Chambers breathed out he seemed to shrivel. "How can you talk like that? You would finish him. Just for a bit of money!"

  "It's not a bit of money," she said fiercely. "It's a bit of me! You don't understand it, either of you. All this praise you lavish on me—it's meaningless. It's empty. You understand nothing about me."

  "I understand you to say you'd wreck your own marriage for the sake of a bit of property."

  "Not I. He. He would do that. In any case, he would never believe my departure would finish the firm. He thinks you'll always bail him out. He thinks you've got so much tied up in the firm that you couldn't possibly afford to let him go under."

  That made Chambers's eyebrows shoot up. "Little he knows of banking then."

  "Yet you would be a heavy loser if he did crash."

  "I'd survive."

  "But the loss would be immense—especially the loss of future business."

  Reluctantly, he accepted the truth of that. It was all she had been waiting for. She smiled at last. "Fortunately, I have thought of a way around the problem. It will not be necessary to put the properties on the market."

  "Ah!" His relief showed how great his misgiving had been, despite his bravado. But she j
udged that he had not been worried enough to fall in at once with her plan, so all she said was: "I'll tell you if it ever becomes necessary."

  He shrugged, disappointed.

  "Don't you think he's changed a lot lately?" she asked.

  Chambers seemed to weigh her up before he answered. "Has it ever occurred to you that he may be tiring of being a contractor?"

  "Never!"

  "Perhaps he goes for these bigger and bigger contracts as a way of keeping the glory alive? I only say perhaps."