World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Still the bloodlust was not sated. Always the next kill would be better, would have some especial quality to make it the kill of kills, to make the day live in memory for ever. Such a joyous time effaced this whole last dreadful year. She would endure it all again if another such were promised at its end.

  But by midafternoon, the supply of victims had dwindled to a trickle. First ten then twenty minutes would pass before a new shout went up and a new kill was made. And more and more it happened over in some other part of the warren. She became acutely aware that she had not slept the night before. Mentally she remained alert, but her physical strength, already depleted by undernourishment, began to flag.

  While waiting for new rabbits to bolt from ferret or plough, she found her mind returning again and again to John's contract. The permutations of the work had absorbed her utterly—or, rather, she had absorbed them. So that she now had an intuitive grasp of its total pattern—something greater than the sum of all its parts. Within that pattern, her mind began to practise a minor series of rearrangements, one following another. The way numbers could fall into patterns had often fascinated her; but this was something more than that. It was real. These were actual quantities and proportions that she ordered and reordered. The result was not meaninglessly beautiful, like arrangements of glass beads; it had the beauty of purpose, like a design for a weave. She wanted to be there when Lord John put it all to work. The one question that had not bothered her at all that day was whether he would get the contract or no. She knew he would.

  Perhaps he would take her tonight. And then perhaps they would live tally a while. Then perhaps he would marry her, if she were very useful to him, and if she got with child that looked like going to term. Playing patterns with the contract was one thing, but when it came to her own life, the past had taught her to work from one perhaps to the next.

  At last the warren lay utterly wasted. Evening was at hand. The men let her keep two dozen rabbits—practically all she had killed. She hung them on a pole, a dozen at each end, and yoked them over her shoulders. There'd be time to stew them well, with plenty of herbs to damp their wildness, before the navvies came down from the tunnel. She was almost in sight of the shanty when she saw John striding out toward her. He ran when he saw her. She shrugged off the yoke, dropping it in a ditch, and ran to meet him.

  He almost stopped himself from hugging her when he saw how smeared she was with the blood; but, with a who-may-care shrug, he wrapped his huge arms about her and lifted her off the ground.

  "Eay! Lass!" he said as he spun her round. At last he put her down. "I thowt tha'd sleep today."

  "Sleep? Me! 'Ow could I? Knowing what it meant?"

  "After all tha work last neet?"

  "Nay. I could never sleep. I bin that pressed wi' worry all day. I went up to't warren they broke apart. Tha never saw that many conies! I got two dozen back there. We s'll eat ussens sick toneet!" She paused. "Well, tell us then."

  He did not answer. He looked at her in a kind of wonder, as if he had forgotten and was suddenly rediscovering her. At last he spoke. "I 'ope I may always remember thee like this, Nora, my…most precious. Dusty. Loppered wi' blood. Bare o' feet." He took her head between his great hands. "There's grand changes under way an' they'll sweep up thee an' me an' carry us I know not where. I 'ope thou might never lose this…sunshine i' thy spirit."

  His words brought her into a calm. She felt no need to say anything and spoke only because his eyes still searched her face for some answer. "I don't know what to say. Tha'rt soft!"

  He looked away, in something close to shame. "Nay Nora. 'Ard. Too 'ard I fear. A seet too 'ard."

  "Did we get it?"

  His eyes turned upon her again. "Before I tell thee, I want thee to answer me one question. I must know before I tell thee."

  "Ask on." Her mind, in preparation, restocked itself with the quantities she had worked last night and played with for much of the day.

  "Willt thou take me to wed?"

  Of all that he might have asked, that was the least expected. She became aware that she was smiling vacantly.

  "Shall us not live tally a while?"

  "What?"

  "Tha'st not tried me. I may be barren."

  "I want thee," he said. "To wife. Not a brood mare. Will't tha?"

  Trembling, feeling the blood drain from her face, she said more faintly than she intended: "Aye then. I'll take thee."

  He kissed her with a devotion that quickly turned sensual as she grew warm.

  "Now I can tell thee," he said when they broke at last. "We're on fortune's highway, Nora, thee an' me. We're beset wi' enemies and ringed about wi' dangers—but we're agate! And the Lord shall deliver us. See yon mountain?"

  He turned her to face the brow of Summit, to the dark tunnel in the sunstruck rock.

  "Aye," she said.

  "T'ole we punch through there may take cotton to wool an' wool to cotton. But it'll lead thee an me to a land of milk an' 'oney. Milk an' 'oney, love!"

  Dumbly, tears brimming in her eyes and making the world swim, she fell to the earth and pulled him onto her. And there, hastily and without finesse, they obliterated the world that was soon to claim their every thought and action and dream.

  It was several minutes before Nora realized consciously that her question "S'll I 'ave a wage or a cut o't profits?" was answered. And it was several more minutes before John Stevenson realized consciously that in marrying Nora, he was removing the only legal witness to his part in the two forgeries, for wife cannot bear witness against husband. Such thoughts did not in any way diminish or even stain their love. It is just that they were that kind of people.

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  The day of her wedding—as Arabella later confided in girlish overstatement to her journal—had turned into one prolonged disaster. At the time she was so cowed by the sheer awfulness of everything that she had noted only its more obvious and, as she later realized, more trivial causes. Her grandmother had asked for gin and had told several stories of doubtful refinement—stories at which only the eldest Mr. Thornton had laughed. He, to be sure, was a longhaired, elderly reprobate (and much too free with his hands). The behaviour of both of them, she noted firmly, "can only serve to remind us of the great moral progress we have recently made—as well," she added, in case the lesson might later elude her, "as well as of the ever-present dangers of backsliding."

  Other solecisms of that day provided no such moral texts to excuse their inclusion in her record, and she set them down from sheer habit of honesty, still transfigured with the shame of it. Her mother, for instance, had asked for sherry, though it was plainly a stand-up breakfast. And her sister had taken off her gloves—on the grounds that the day was too hot to require them! The fact that many of the ladies had come without gloves at all, even ladies of quality, was no mitigation. In less than an hour, there had been half a dozen such incidents, each making her wish the earth would gulp her down.

  She knew, too, that hers was not the only journal in which the simple, honest gaucherie of her family would be set down in all its shaming detail. Letty, dear Walter's cousin, had seen and heard it all. And with unconcealed relish, too. "Her hot little tongue will cook a fine fat dish of chitbits to regale the countryside for months, I make no doubt," Arabella wrote. Absurdly (though the urge lay too deep within for her to see its absurdity), she felt that the mere spelling out of Letty's probable gossip in this way would blunt the cutting edge of its malice.

  Still, as she realized the moment she had finished writing, these details, even

  taken together, could not account, not by half, for the profound unease of that day. There had been…something else. Some fleeting thought had crossed her mind at an unguarded moment. But when? As they had cut the cake? Or when she had looked around the crowded ballroom and had been unable to find Walter—in that panic-filled moment before she at last saw him out on the lawns with his uncle, the elder Mr. Thornton? No, it had been on some less o
bvious occasion—a moment when the now-elusive thought had been too incongruous and disturbing to pursue. She had thrust it from her, forced herself on to other paths. And now the abandoned thought lurked in some almost-discovered recess of her mind, challenging her to go in and fetch it out.

  It had been an angry thought, she knew that much.

  At least Walter, dear good kind Walter, had not noticed these blunders, she wrote. Then, deciding that this intended praise made him seem unobservant—as boorish in a different way as her own people—she added that he probably had noticed, but, being so kind and charitable, had forgot them in the same moment. It really was amazing that someone as good and dear as Walter could (God forgive her for judging) come from so unpleasant a family. True, he was only a first cousin of theirs, an orphan brought up by their charity…

  Idly, her pen at rest across the corner of her journal, she wondered what the Thorntons really thought of Walter's marriage to her. For most of the three years of their engagement, she had felt repeated hints of scorn, a well hidden conviction that Walter was marrying beneath him.

  And that memory was the key which released her angry, unremembered, unforgotten thought: The truth was they didn't care! That was it! Walter could have married one of the sluts out in the back scullery for all the dent it would have made in the pride of his uncles and aunts and cousins. That was the truth she had learned on that frightful day as she had watched them, chatting and guzzling with such aloof assurance, patronizing her family, going perfunctorily through the motions of marrying off their poor orphan nephew and cousin.

  At once the anger she had repressed that day reclaimed her. How dare they! They, mere jumped-up shopkeepers and tradesmen—and her father one of the most respected clergymen in Hertfordshire—and her mother the daughter of a bishop. It was insufferable. Walter was worth more than all of them together. His departure impoverished that grand house up on the hill, for all the wealth of the Thorntons who remained.

  She turned back through the closely written pages, seeking comfort, and read for the fortieth time the words in which she had recorded the day's greatest moment:

  "I spoke my vows in a clear, modest voice, almost as if I were speaking to dear father (who, after all was only three feet away, and who, I am bound to say, was somewhat histrionic, as when he preached so finely at St Albans). Walter, with more sense of what was suited to our tiny church, spoke in a quiet, manly way with only the faintest tremor. And as the ring slid over my finger, it seemed that the many, many happy hours of devotion I have passed within those sanctified walls were as a preparation for this one instant of supreme and holy joy.

  "I tried to pray that I would always be worthy of this new sacrament. I even had the thought that if I could complete the prayer before the ring came to rest, it would be most certainly answered. And I achieved this impossible feat in the most astonishing way. No words came into my mind. It was rather as if the whole of my body and soul became a prayer. I have often felt Christ enter me, but only passively, as a vessel. At that moment, I underwent the complementary process. I was an offering, a self-offering, made truly vital for the first time in my life by that completely unexpected sense of dedication. A fearful joy filled me until I felt sure I had stretched to bursting. It seemed that I had already endured this ecstasy for an eternity.

  "I was amazed then to see that the ring was still sliding down my finger. I grasped Walter's arm for support and he, smiling, returned a gentle squeeze of reassurance. My father, mistaking the sacred for the profane (a hazard, he has often said, of every clergyman's life), lowered a cautionary eyebrow at me."

  She stopped there, regretting the honesty that forbade her to thresh and winnow this little part of history and remake her supreme moment into one that was quite, quite perfect. Even so, the memory of it had dispelled her anger at the behaviour of her in-laws during that wretched breakfast.

  The disaster, she decided as she closed her journal, had, after all, been mitigated. But she shuddered at the thought of having to record the vile, horrid things which had happened that night—last night, already an unreal age away. And she looked unhappily out through the salt-stained windows at a rainsodden Blackpool beach. Somewhere out there, dear Walter was walking alone. Why did he not come back to her?

  Chapter 12

  If Walter had noticed any of the undercurrents at his wedding, he gave no sign of it as he moved easily from one group of guests to another. A long and bitter childhood in that house had taught him well the arts of concealment. But lately he had used his independence to repay some of the ancient hurts he had suf fered, and been forced to suffer, by his wealthy cousins—especially from young Claude, or Claude George Thornton III as the family bible would record him. For railroad engineers were men of a new and exciting age. Theirs was a field where young men could quickly make their mark. And so Walter had an easy magnetism among people whose conversation rarely strayed beyond hunting, horses, the management of game coverts, the price of corn, and thirdhand gossip about the strange goings-on at Court. Despite their pretensions, the Thorntons of the second generation were only occasional (and obsequious) visitors at the great houses of Hertfordshire. Perhaps, now that Letty was engaged to one of the Desborough boys, the third generation might acquire the necessary veneer and so take the final step into acceptability—if their extravagance did not first bankrupt the family.

  In such company Walter found it easy to claim attention with his tales of the romance of engineering on the line. One favourite was the story of how he and Mr. Gooch had surveyed the route of the Manchester-Leeds from Miles Platting to Normanton—wild transpennine country that grew wilder and more alien with every repetition.

  "We finished the survey with only hours to spare," he said, nearing the end of the tale. "That was a tense night, I may tell you! If we had failed, you know, we should have lost the Act of Parliament and someone else would have built the line."

  There was a shaking of heads and a sucking of teeth as his hearers mentally put the loss into terms of hard cash.

  "So there we were, with three storm lanterns and a truckle table, taking our last levels beside the summit lock of the Rochdale Canal. After midnight. Imagine the fever! A chaise and two horses champing to be off. And two changes posted on the route. My didn't they fly! They say the ink was still wet on the paper when it reached the Preston magistrates!"

  The attentive little knot around him erupted into laughter. "Still wet!" one said. "Very likely!" said another, more literal soul.

  "And what questions we had to ask!" Walter continued, seeing that he had them. "And the replies! We had to establish title as well as the physical survey, you see. I remember one place…" He chuckled. "This'll show you the sort of people—the sort of creatures—up there. We go to a rough row of cottages— rougher than anything in the village here. Knock on the first door. Great carthorse of a woman appears. 'Aaa?' 'Pray, who is the occupier of this house?' 'Why me 'usban' to be sure.' 'And what is your husband's name?' 'Nay. I canna tell tha that. A goes by the name o' Bill o' Jack's.' 'But surely you must know your husband's name—his surname?' 'Nay, that I doan't.' 'But I must have it to write down here.' 'Then tha mun ask at Tom's o' Dick's—a lives a bit higher yonder."'

  Walter's attempt at the Lancashire dialect was as lamentable as any southerner's, but it raised a hearty laugh in that southern company.

  "What did you do then, Walter?" Dr. Paine, now his father-in-law, asked when the laughter had died. "What did you put?"

  "Believe me, sir, that survey has gone up to Westminster with several dozen Toms o' Jack's and Bills o' Dick's scrawled across it!"

  The laughter redoubled at that.

  Then, sensing that they had had enough of levity, he went on in a more serious tone: "Mr. Gooch has calculated that if the railroad already existed, the five weeks' travelling we undertook in surveying its route would have taken, all in all, a mere four days."

  Heads nodded sagely at this intelligence. The railways were, indeed, a wonderful t
hing, especially as they had not yet threatened this part of Hertfordshire.

  "And never forget—one-eighth of the entire population of England lives within seven miles of the completed line! It cannot fail."

  Claude George III, who had stood sullen and irresolute at the fringe of the company throughout Walter's story, torn between the urge to walk ostentatiously away and the itch to stay and throw in a sarcastic comment if the occasion offered, Claude George III now spoke.

  "You fill me with envy, Walter." His voice was almost a sneer. "Shipping is so slow and dull after the excitements of the railroad."

  "Oh!" Walter was all solicitude. "Poor cousin Claude!" He pronounced it as close to Clod as he dared. "Why not exchange with me? My life and prospects for yours."

  Claude George III's features twisted in a salacious grin. "Now on the day you take such a tasty little morsel to wed, that is…a tantalizing suggestion!"