World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  a hundred. And that's guineas." He patted the horse's neck. "Ah—that's a grand craythurr! So he is."

  "Name?" Nora asked.

  "Millwood," Lady Henshaw told her. "After the place we got him. Try him, go on."

  "I'm not clad properly…" Nora began before the look in Lady Henshaw's eye withered her to silence. "Without a saddle?" she asked, not seeking to delay, for she desperately wanted to mount him. Lady Henshaw nodded toward McGinty, who stood with his hands ready cupped to help her up. He was strong, too; she barely got her weight above the ankle in his hands before he hoisted her easily into the air and, in perfect time with her movement, lowered her on to Millwood's back. Trembling with elation, she crooked her right leg up over Millwood's withers and pressed the other against his side, smoothing down her petticoats in the same movement.

  "Have ye sat a horse before?" Lady Henshaw asked.

  Nora was at first too shy and too delighted to answer; she merely shook her head and smiled. Then, feeling that was a little discourteous, she said, barely audibly: "Once, when I was ten."

  "Looks born to it, wouldn't ye say?" Lady Henshaw asked the groom.

  "Born to it is it! Sure if ye didn't know better ye'd swear she grew from out the fella's back."

  "Sit up straighter. Even straighter. Take up the traces."

  "There's no bit."

  "He'll not run off with ye."

  Nora took up the traces, holding them awkwardly. McGinty reached a hand under Millwood's jaw and grasped the bridle. The horse started to walk at the click of his tongue. And around the yard they went; around once, twice…five times in all, with Lady Henshaw shouting the occasional instruction.

  To the end of her days, Nora was never to forget that first moment when she sat on the back of that magnificent beast and looked down, down, down at a world unbelievably more remote than she had ever imagined it would be, and felt such monstrous power rippling so quietly beneath her. How could people ever bear to get down off a horse again and walk! Disappointment must have shown in every line of her face when McGinty's soft "Hooo!" brought Millwood to rest again.

  "Wait there!" Lady Henshaw said and went quickly indoors. Experimentally Nora dug her left heel into Millwood's flank and made, as best she could, the click of the tongue she had heard from McGinty. The horse began again to walk. McGinty grinned and shook his head. "Aren't ye the one!" he said.

  After only two more circuits Lady Henshaw reappeared. Behind her was Madoc, holding a basket, its contents wrapped in a once-white cloth.

  "Stay on!" she called. "You can ride down as far as the gate. We'll all accompany you."

  The two deranged dogs slunk out between Madoc's legs, their heads hanging lopsided, their tails drooping.

  McGinty led Millwood out of the yard, with Lady Henshaw walking on the other side and Madoc a little way behind. In turning to see how close Madoc was, Nora noticed that one of the dogs had vomited a small ocean of tar, which the other was listlessly lapping up.

  If the ride around the yard had been paradise, the walk down the carriage drive, her head on a level with the skeleton boughs of the avenue, was its seventh heaven. And when they reached the gate and McGinty cupped a hand again for her to step down by, she was almost ready to cry. She took Lady Henshaw's hand and curtseyed, stammering out her thanks in confusion.

  "Madoc's goin' with you to carry the basket. You'll find some papers in it for you look at and…tell me your opinion. And some goatsmeat. The next best thing to venison, don't ye know."

  Nora repeated her thanks.

  "Until next Sunday then, Mrs. Working-Lady," Henshaw said, and watched with knowing amusement as the chagrin spread across Nora's face.

  "Well," Nora said. "I believe…I really do believe I might…" And her eyes kept straying toward Millwood.

  "Tuesday, then?" Lady Henshaw said, her tongue lingering on her lip. "Just after ten? Stay for luncheon?"

  And Nora could only nod, she was so happy. She watched the horse until it was out of sight. She looked around for some sign of a goat or a lunatic dog but saw none.

  "How normal it all appears," she said as she set off with Madoc. He grunted.

  "If 'normal' is to signify the saving of money and a refusal to suffer fools and the will to live free of social constraint, then that is the most 'normal' house in England," he said dourly.

  Chapter 37

  By the end of January—or, to be precise, at ten minutes before eight o'clock on the evening of Saturday 25th, when the shop was about to close after its fourth week of successful trading—Nora knew that whatever she was intended for in this life it was not retailing. The succession of rush, idleness, rush, idleness, all quite outside her control, irked her. The reappearance of the same faces, the endless repetition of the same remarks about the weather, the working, the quality of the goods she sold, the small-minded cunning they employed to try and get credit from her, the grumbles, the ailments, the catch phrases, the scurrilous jokes, the subjects for gossip, the lies…she felt tied to a vast merry-goround, slowly passing and repassing the same stalls and sideshows. By the eighth circuit it had ventured beyond mere boredom and pioneered a special purgatory of its own.

  The problems, too, were of the irksome rather than the challenging kind. The women from Walsden were very inadequate assistants. They gave wrong measure repeatedly—not maliciously, not even carelessly, but out of simple ignorance and inability to learn. Nora was astonished that it was she more often than the customer, who noticed the underweight. Sometimes she tried shortchanging them, always saying "no, no, wait a minute; stupid me!" and counting it out properly before they could protest. But it was almost always clear that they would have accepted her first count—at least until they got home.

  She was not, in Madoc's phrase, one to suffer fools. And by that evening, she understood more about retailers—and felt much less contempt and much more admiration for those she had met and been so scathing about to John—than she would have believed possible.

  So Paul Wardroper, though he did not know it, chose a highly favourable moment to come into Stevenson's Shop and offer his services to her. He was, he explained, a flannel weaver of Rochdale; but times were hard and the mills were taking even the last bits of the trade from the handlooms. Some years ago he and a few others, attempting to cut their costs, had tried to form an equitable or co-operative shop after Mr. Owen's model…

  Nora wrote Owen, Co-something? shop among the notes she had been making concerning Lady Henshaw's romance, which she had been reading in idle moments during the day.

  The idea of the shop, Wardroper explained, had been to buy at wholesale rates and sell at the smallest profit conducive to maintaining the establishment. But it had failed, just as all the earlier ventures had failed. And the reason for their failure—or so he, Paul Wardroper, was convinced—was that they had not followed commercial lines. Nora, who had been about to yawn, to thank him for his little history lesson, and to lock up for the night, suddenly pricked up her ears.

  "In what way?" she asked.

  "We let sentiment rule commercial judgement, d'ye see, ma'am. We sold only among ourselves. Now it's my belief such a shop must work like any other shop. It must sell to any comer and at a proper commercial rate for its neighbourhood. The profit must be returned later to its subscribers, after allowing for reserves and other expenses."

  "And what has this to do with me?" Nora asked.

  "A number of us are eager to try the experiment again, to start an equitable shop on commercial lines in Rochdale. Yet we have no experience. When I heard of your store here, it seems much like the one we have in mind. And, as no shopkeeper hereabouts is likely to give me experience, and believing you and the nearby shopkeepers to have no love going begging between you…" He smiled, not needing to finish.

  Nora nodded. "Come and speak to my husband," she said. "Have you supped?"

  "No…nor breakfasted."

  "Sup with us."

  Later, she and John agreed that it was
not his expressions of intent nor his promise of performance that swayed them but their own independent judgement of him as trustworthy, serious, and intelligent. A jewel compared with the assistants they now had from Walsden. Wardroper, his wife, and their eldest boy would work for a pound a week between them, keeping the shop open five days a week and cleaning out and moving fresh stores on the sixth. They would begin next week in place of the present staff. Nora would still do the purchasing in Manchester and up the Vale.

  "He'll be a valuable man, maybe," John said when Wardroper had left. "In months ahead, as Charley Eade gets less useful to us, you could send this fellow in to buy on the same terms and with the same bonus but without the guarantee to fall back on."

  "Aye," Nora said, doubtfully. "I'd still have to go in every week or every other week to see he wasn't cutting price by cutting quality. But it would mean I'd not be chained to it."

  She did not say what a weight it would lift from her soul. She had resigned herself to running the shop to the end of this contract—or at least until they had enough profit to get out from under Prendergast (still, mercifully, too ill to pose any immediate threat). But the prospect had seemed leaden indeed, even with young Tommy's bright chatter and cheerful flood of ideas to enliven the days.

  As the time of his father's release loomed near, he grew increasingly excited. In those early days, back in November and December, he had seemed outwardly unconcerned. When people had tried to provoke him to sadness, so that they could parade their sympathy, he, by contrast, had seemed eager to make light of it. But now that Leap Year Day—the day of Thomas Metcalfe's return—was wearing on, no one could doubt how deeply Tommy must have been feeling all that time. He made a calendar to hang on the wall, with flowers and stars around the 29th of February; and each day was crossed off in a happy little ritual as soon as Nora opened the door to him in the morning. Also, she discovered he had been writing brief notes to his father each day and storing them against his return. She found a small sheaf of them rolled up in the drawer of the high desk where he sat beside her and did the bonus book. They were all in order by date, beginning the second of January; each had just a few lines, saying things like "today I jumped the cluff" or "today I made out 11 pound bonus for Mrs. Stevinson, she givs lots of monney away" or "today I played 3 blind mice all through."

  But whatever the message for each particular day might be there was one he repeated at the end of every note. It read, quite simply: "I love you, daddy, and miss you and pray for you and want you home once more, Your respectful loving son, Tommy."

  For Nora there was an especial sadness that grew in pace with Tommy's excitement. She knew well that Tom Metcalfe would flit from this district. John said he might have learned a lot of sense at hard labour; but Nora, while not doubting that chance, knew, also, that the humiliation had been too great to permit the man to stay. Metcalfe had stood his trial with the steadfast gleam of impending martyrdom in his eye; at no time had it burned brighter than when he had been led from the court to the back stair and the road to jail. Whatever sense he might learn, it would not stretch to the abandonment of the struggle he had then begun. There was no doubt in her mind that he would go; and that his going would take Tommy out of her life.

  Often in those early days of February, as Tommy prattled on of the mammoth celebration he was planning for his father's homecoming, she forced herself to imagine the shop, and Rough Stones, and the visits to Manchester, without him, without his shrill little voice, without the constant litter of his quaint childish drawings, without his warm, sticky fingers twined in hers. It was going to be a drear world for a while, and more than once she had to blink away the tears that grew against her will. She pressed her fingers gently on the child then forming in her belly, hoping to feel a movement there. And she prayed that, boy or girl, it might be as bright and as cheering a little soul as Tommy had become to her.

  By way of preparation for the wrench to come, she began in the middle of the month to cut herself off from some of the pleasures they had enjoyed together. She knew it puzzled and hurt him when, every time he suggested they should go and spit raw potato for his chickens, she would say "Not today, Tommy, I'm a little too busy just now." She would see his face drop and she would almost relent as he walked off crestfallen. But, as is the way with children, he was skipping again by the time he reached the turnpike; and he would spit for his flock with all his usual gusto. He might miss her for a while but it would soon pass. And as for her—well, she'd just have to busy herself. Work was sovereign.

  The Tuesday of the week before Metcalfe's release, Nora had spent the morning at Lady Henshaw's. By now she had a proper riding habit and McGinty was beginning to talk of going out on the highway with her.

  Her eyes lit up when he raised the subject again that lunchtime. "Oh could we?" she asked. "There's a young friend of mine, the son of a neighbour, only a little boy, who doesn't believe I ride a horse at all. If we just went up as far as the Oval Shaft, I could show him. Shall I ask her ladyship? Oh please say yes, dear McGinty!"

  Moments later, with McGinty on the sorrel mare behind her, she was trotting sedately out of the gates of Henshaw Park and onto the turnpike, feeling and looking every inch the grand young lady. It was a blustery day with broken clouds scudding low across the sky and sending their shadows rippling up the valley and over the flanks of the hills faster than a horse could gallop. Her veil streamed out before her as she raised her chin and urged Millwood south toward the spot where Tommy usually sat and played his tin whistle to the chickens or spat potato for them to scrabble after.

  She saw him at once, sitting cross-legged on the milestone, the hearse feathers, now gray and broken, bobbing in his cap as he nodded his head in time to whatever tune he was playing. It was some little while, however, before he saw her, so that she was less than a furlong away when he stopped, turned full face to her, and waved. She waved back.

  Impulsively, he leaped down from his perch and began to dance on the spot in time with his tune. Still she could not hear it because of the direction of the wind. Then, impatient of her coming, he skipped into the roadway, and began leaping and prancing, still playing an unheard melody, toward her. The chickens, Hannibal, Biddy, and all the rest of 'his' flock, seeing their daily dole of potato vanish down the road, set off in pursuit, so that he seemed like some infant Pan, charming the birds with his pipes. Nora laughed to see how joyously he danced to meet her.

  But her laughter was short-lived, for only an instant later she was shouting to him in alarm: "Get off the road!" Behind him the coach had turned the corner at Stone House, going its usual reckless pace, and was now bearing remorselessly down the hill toward him. And though the coachman had seen the lad and was tearing the mouths out of his team and kindling the brake, it was clear that only Tommy's own presence of mind could save him.

  But the wind carried away every vestige of sound that might serve to warn him; and his own laughter and reckless movement was enough to drown whatever remnant fought through to him in the teeth of that blustery gale.

  Nora screamed again—it was almost continuous with her first agonized call— "Get off! Get off!" And she waved her hand as if to rake him to the verge. But he could not make out her words, and the streaming of her veil cut across his view of her face; and so he danced blithely on, with four terrified horses, two tons of coach, and a panic-stricken coachman only seconds from him.

  She spurred Millwood forward, knowing it was hopeless to try to reach him, yet hoping something in her movement would alert the boy. And at that instant he must at last have heard the thunder at his heels for he turned to face it.

  "Tommeeeeeee!" She heard her shriek split the air right across the valley. She heard it mingle with the shrilling of the horses as they reared almost broadside in their attempt to avoid him. But he stood transfixed before that monstrous onslaught. Her last memory of Tommy was to see him standing there, elbows bent high in that posture she had come to know so well, with a white cackle of c
hickens shimmering in feathery alarm around him, just before he fell spinning beneath that heaving wall of horseflesh, iron, and wood. "Tomeeeeee…!" The shriek rang on and on and on.

  She lay on the ground. But was it not Tommy that lay on the ground? Confusion. Millwood was trotting homeward. McGinty, dismounted, stood ready to catch him. Her shriek or her violent spurring must have made him rear.

  She was running. Habit hitched up around her knees. "Tommeeeeee!" Again her scream rose above the wind, above the wheeling horses, the creaking, groaning coach. People ran from the hovels.

  But she was first. Let it be a miracle! Make a miracle! O, make a miracle! she pleaded with every jolt of her feet. The Tommy-like bundle in the road lay still as still. Her mind's eye restaged that final moment when the wall of flesh and coach burst over him. He could be just knocked down. Under the belly. Between the hooves. Amid the coach wheels. Oh let him just be unconscious. A miracle! A miracle! A miracle!

  With bursting lungs and red mists seeping upward into her vision she dropped to her knees beside the little boy. He lay face down. Limp. He looked unmarked, yet he did not breathe. And when she made to turn him over, as gently as could be, she knew there was no hope; his upper and lower parts moved almost independently of one another. One eyelid, obeying some final, random message from his dying brain, trembled…trembled…and was still.