"Come," he said, rising and gesturing them toward the door. "A dozen good lamb chops are spoiling while we dawdle."
"We're back in harness then, I take it?" John asked, always one to get absolute confirmation and commitment.
"What you have done, Mr. Stevenson, is not very elegant by City standards; but, as it was successful, I can't really fault it. What's the other saying—In for a penny in for a pound?" Chambers came between them while he spoke. And, with daring intimacy, he took John's left and Nora's right arms in his hands.
"Oh!" Nora said playfully. "I'm sure in these exalted circles it's not pennies and pounds but something like: 'In for two thousand six hundred and seventyfive pounds, in for ten thousand'!"
And then she had to bite her lip to stop herself from laughing, for Nathaniel Chambers had grasped the soft flesh on the back of her arm, above her elbow, and had gently pinched it. She glanced quickly at him but his amused, superior face stared fixedly ahead.
No qualms remained then about the possibility, nor indeed about the quality, of future cooperation between themselves and him.
He took them to a chop house in Fleet Street where she devoured four, and they six, very succulent and tenderly grilled lamb chops, washed down with two bottles of claret, and topped with some deliciously cooling water ice. "These new table-d'oat and ah-lah-cart houses in the West End are all very well in their way," Chambers said. "But for my money, the City chop house beats all. No one in all the world eats so well as the Englishman in his chop house." They did not dispute him.
But if he had planned for a meal of light conversation during which he might hope to pump information from his two new clients up from the country, it was a hope forlorn. It was they who pumped him; and there was no subtlety about it either. By the time they stood up again—heavily and unsteadily—the pair of them knew a great deal more about forming companies, floating shares, calling up capital, issuing scrip, writing debentures…and about stocks, shares, securities, margins, options, endorsements—in short, more about the prominent landmarks of their new country of residence—than they had dreamed there was to know. Chambers left them in Fleet Street as he had another client to see and they had nothing to do—until seven that evening when he would call to take them to the theatre at Sadlers Wells. Their address at The Tabard amused him; he had never actually been south of the river.
"There is something of Thornton in him!" John said after Chambers had gone.
But Nora would not agree. "He has, in refined form, everything that in Thornton will remain forever coarse."
"He flirted with you, all right!"
Nora looked sharply at him: "And that's all he'll ever do." She meant it both as an assessment of Chambers and as a promise; but she also made it clear she resented even the thought that the promise was necessary.
"What was in the letters?" he asked. He did not look at her but gazed straight up Ludgate Hill at St. Paul's, black on the skyline. Everything was black with soot.
"Oh," she said brightly. "This is that street you said once had a covered market down the middle." He took her arm and led her across Ludgate bridge. "You're right," she said. "They are digging up the drain." He squeezed her arm and smiled, still not looking at her.
"All right!" she said, wanting to be aggressive and getting no cause for it from him. "You did something underhand and it worked. That's all I've done. And it also worked."
He looked at her, conceded the point with a nod of his head, and looked ahead again, waiting for more.
"And it's a good thing I did," she said. "And that I kept it from you. Because if you'd had the information you'd have had to use it differently. You'd have had to challenge him." She held her head up proudly. "I think it's very good the way it's all worked out."
"You didn't challenge him? That wasn't what you'd call a challenge?"
"A feminine challenge. Not a masculine one. It's different."
"As I'm not to know the substance of the challenge—only its apparent gender," he said, "I can offer no further opinion."
She laughed at that. "Very well," she said, and, as near word for word as she could remember, she recited the contents of the two letters.
By the time she finished, they had arrived at the top of the hill, immediately outside St. Paul's. He stopped dead and stared at her, waiting for more. "Well?" he said at last.
"That's all."
He reached out a hand to steady himself. "All?"
"Yes."
"But suppose he had challenged you? One—prove those letters were addressed to Nathaniel Chambers. Two—who is 'Adam'? Three—who is the youthful embezzler? Four—who is 'T,' the writer of the letter? Five—exactly what accounts were tampered with? Six—who is 'Tempest'? A nickname? They're all so damned discreet, it might well be. Seven—who is the woman?"
She looked blankly at him, trying desperately to think of one thing, one solitary fact, she could lay at Chambers's door. And there wasn't one.
She punched him playfully in the chest: "You'd have done just the same as I did," she said, blithely going back on her previous line of argument. "You'd have hinted you knew it all. Relied on his guilty conscience or sense of selfinterest to do the rest. You'd have done that."
"Of course I would, you daft pennyworth!" he said. "But I'd have known. I'd have known I held a hand full of rubbish. You thought you had all trumps."
"Good thing too," she chuckled. "That's the difference between us. If I'd known that, I could never have done it."
He had to laugh, though at heart he was far from amused. "Listen," he said when she was collected again. "A pact. No more deception like this. Leave it to me where it concerns us both. Is that agreed?"
She pouted but she had to acknowledge the sense of it. When she next looked at him he was staring up, with a mask of savage glee, at the clock on St. Paul's.
"What now?" she asked.
"Twenty to three. I'd almost forgotten. Our Church-o-England is about to enter The Gryphon in Littleborough, where it's still half past two, in the fond hopes of wrapping his sticky claws around the rest of his thousand pounds."
"What have you gone and done?" she asked, knowing from his smile that he had not told all.
"I've left him a little parcel. And inside it he's going to find a card with a golden guinea stuck to it and the legend: Silence is golden."
They fell upon one another in helpless laughter; in any other city but this their behaviour would have gathered a small crowd.
"He'll have an apoplexy!" she said when they were almost calm again.
"I hope so. We'll force this to an issue now." He became serious. "Eay—I hadn't realized until this day what a shadow that man has cast over this past winter. I feel like a clock with a new spring."
But as sobriety returned to her she wondered whether he had been quite wise to go so far to provoke and antagonize the reverend doctor. John always said that the stakes were highest where the rewards were greatest; but somehow that didn't seem to cover the case when you deliberately raised the odds against yourself. She wondered whether her ancient fear—that John's hatred would blind him to their best interests—had not now come to pass. Only his great enthusiasm—a clock with a new spring, as he said—sustained her through the rest of that long walk home.
Two hours later, after visiting St. Paul's and the Monument, they arrived exhausted at The Tabard. There, feeling it a very sinful thing to do, they went to bed and slept for two hours, until Sarah came with hot water to awaken them. Nora wondered then whether to give her the two Dickens novels she had just bought, but decided to leave them, as a sort of gratuity, until their departure.
The performance at Sadlers Wells was a serio-romantic lyric drama called The Island, its plot founded on the story of the mutiny on the Bounty. Its hard-working cast was headed by Mr.T.P. Cooke, doyen of theatrical sailors, Chambers said, and still remembered for his amazing debut, in this very theatre in 1832, in Black-Eyed Susan. Tonight's drama was amazing for its use of ropes over pulleys to li
ft unwanted scenes and properties off the stage and hold them poised above it out of view. There was a real ship, which floated on real water, and burned in real flames. And there were, somewhat incongruously, donkey races—with real donkeys running around the auditorium on a special raised track—to enliven the tedium of life on the tropic isle. The men (of the island and the audience) enjoyed the dusky maidens in grass skirts. Nora wept at the tragic death of Fletcher Christian. And they all had a splendid evening.
During the performance, she slipped Chambers his two intercepted letters. And when it was over, on their way to supper in one of the sumptuous private rooms at The Albion off Drury Lane, Chambers produced an envelope, unsealed. "By the way, Stevenson," he said. "Your letter." And no further reference was made to any of their affairs for the rest of the evening. It was past midnight before they arrived back at The Tabard. And despite their earlier sleep, and despite the howls from the madhouse over the way, they fell at once into the heaviest slumber.
They awoke at nine the following morning, feeling the day already half over. "We'll never be gentlefolk!" John said. "Early rising is in our bones by now." They breakfasted light and hastened over by coach through Lambeth to Westminster to keep their eleven-o'clock appointment with Fielden.
The actual buildings were—as John had said—a disappointment. The last remnants of the old Commons and the old Lords were just visible at foundation and cellar level. And the Cotton Garden, which had promised the best view of the river, was partly taken over by the barn-like structure of the present Lords and Commons, the rest being filled with scaffolding, stone, dry aggregate, and all the usual builder's bric-a-brac. They could hardly speak to one another over the ringing of masons' chisels and the unending rip-rip of the saws.
"House of Lords is going to be here," Fielden shouted before he led them through the back door into Westminster Hall, the only large building to escape the fire.
Here, although the activity was more moderate, the noise was hardly abated; it needed only one plank to drop, one man to laugh, one steel chisel to ring—and the echoes resounded a long dying among the ancient rafters of the hammerbeam roof.
"That looks very old," John said.
Fielden laughed. "Twenty years at least," he answered. "It goes all the way back to George the Fourth." Then, seeing their disappointment, he went on. "No, you're right, really. The building goes all the way back to…William Rufus, I think, or one of the Henrys. But the roof and the outside wall were restored about eighteen-twenty. I remember they broke up twenty ships at Portsmouth to get enough timber, so I should think most of those beams were done then."
"What's it used for, or was it used for—when they haven't got all these builders in?" Nora asked.
"Take your choice, ma'am," Fielden replied. "Everything under the sun. In the very early days, they used to have jousting in here when it was raining outside. Queen Elizabeth had a bedroom off there—this was a royal palace then—she used it as a breakfast room. It's always been a court, of course. A court of justice. They used to pillory people outside in Palace Yard, chop their ears off, brand them, or take off their heads or hands. Titus Oates was tried here. And Cromwell's head. They put that up on the gable with Ireton's and Bradshaw's. That"—he pointed to the southwest angle of the Hall—"was where the High Court of Chancery used to sit. There"—to the southeast angle—"was the King's Bench—Queen's Bench I suppose we call it now." Then to the north door on the west side—"That was the Court of Common Pleas, and alongside it was the Court of Exchequer. Four High Courts, sitting simultaneously in this one room! And in between them were market stalls selling books, haberdashery, ribbons, bonnets! So a day like this"—he had to raise his voice over the builders' hubbub—"I suppose you could call this a quiet time for this old hall!" On his way out he added: "They used to have a cryer going around inside. They called him 'The Lord of the Twice-Impossible' for his charge was to keep silence among lawyers and women!"
Fielden's offer of work was almost laughable: a short length of retaining wall and the outer shell of a new gas-making plant—work for a man and his dog. "It's little enough, I know," Fielden said. "But while you have the men in Todmorden, and as long as you're moving bricks up the canal…"
"He thought he'd get it right cheap on that account," John said to Nora later. "Well he's due for a shock there. We're not going to start doing business that way or we'll go down in history as the best-loved bankrupts in Yorkshire."
Still, their lunch with Fielden had been, in its way, very rewarding. He had talked of most of the important families and new people between Bradford and Manchester and had given John two valuable hints: one was to join the Freemasons as soon as he was well established as a contractor; the other was to avoid open or strong connection with either political party. "And I say this," he added, "as one who hopes greatly for your support of the Liberals one day. But ye'd not thank me now if your too-early support cost you friends and business. So my advice to you—stay neutral. Let them come to you."
"In the years to come," John said, "we may look back upon that advice as the best thing to come out of this very useful visit."
They arrived back at Rough Stones to find a note from Sir Sidney Rowbottam asking John to be so good as to attend at the Company's offices on the afternoon of Wednesday 20th. No subject was mentioned but there was no possible doubt that this was anything other than Prendergast's work. He must at last have carried out his threat.
John's heart sank as he read the letter for the second and then the third time. To Nora he was off-handedly optimistic, but she knew him well enough to sense the worry that simmered beneath this thin wall of confidence.
Prendergast had talked of going to Sir Sidney with his "discovery." John took that to mean he would tell the chairman that this disturbing little inconsistency had come to light…wrong date…sure Stevenson was above board…probably some very simple explanation…but ought not to leave matters unresolved.
That would have suited John very well. If it came out that way, it could all be explained; it would arise and be disposed of naturally—thanks to the letters he had brought back from Chambers.
But what now? After his stupid and needless provocation of Prendergast, might not anger compel the priest to go far beyond the limits where natural caution would normally have stayed him? Sick at his own blunder, he had to confess he could find no convincing reason that it would not.
The nightmares did not help either. For four nights running, he ran at top speed and zero velocity across a frictionless plane on the far side of which Dicky Redmayne and his mob were burning the box in which lay Chambers's allimportant letters. Twice on the Tuesday night he had to get up and reassure himself that it had indeed been only a dream.
Wednesday morning came, and with it the news that he had been awarded both canal contracts. It did little to raise his spirits; indeed, he now fell victim to a further kind of guilt, tinged this time with awakened self-interest. And he began to wonder whether his eagerness to take revenge upon Prendergast might not be harming his firm. For suppose the priest really was desperate for cash? Suppose he went bankrupt—or merely had to pull in his horns and live an altogether more modest life? Neither change would be of much service to the firm of Stevenson in the years of promise that were now opening up before them.
When he put these particular doubts to Nora, she admitted she had been thinking along just those lines herself. Reluctantly, she reversed all she had said and felt these last seven months and told him: "Pay him the rest of his thousand. Tell him exactly why you're doing it. Explain what he may hope for in the future if he joins our side." And then she smiled. "If anyone can make him a friend, even after this, it's you."
"Friend!" He was astonished.
"Ally then," she said impatiently. "You can do it."
Just before lunch they had a further surprise when Sir Sidney himself came post-haste up the turnpike from Manchester, halted at the foot of Rough Stones lane, and asked for John to be brought to him.
>
Sir Sidney was angry—partly with Stevenson for being such a bloody fool, partly with Prendergast for stirring up mud that had settled so firmly and for so long, but mostly with himself for having been manoeuvred into this ridiculous situation. Here he was, the chairman of a railway with massive outgoings and only a piddling income until this tunnel at Summit joined the two counties, about to confront and perhaps ruin the one man whose genius ensured its due completion. It was too bad of Prendergast. Should have sent him off with a flea in his ear. Stevenson could have forged the Queen's signature and the Great Seal for all it mattered now.
As he waited, he watched the work then in process at Deanroyd and south toward the Scout. Strange how even at a glance you could tell a good working from a bad one. Something in the way the men moved—purposefully—and the way materials were piled in good order…even the noises from a good working were in some indefinable way different. He shuddered to imagine how it might be in the hands of any one of a dozen other contractors. No—to dismiss Stevenson now, and for a crime that had no victim, was quite unthinkable. The Board—or at least its chairman—would have to swallow all notions of honour and concoct some explanation to satisfy Prendergast and to save this contract for Stevenson.
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