‘You won’t stay and have tea with us?’
His face fell again when I refused, like a child denied a small treat. I strode to the front door and opened it for myself, resisting, only just, the temptation to slam it behind me. Walking fast down the drive, hat in hand, I wondered where we went from here. The only prospect seemed to be bringing the lawyers in. We could prove the picture was a recent copy. Oliver Venn wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell if it came to court so would obviously have to hand over the original. The trouble and expense involved would be bad enough, but even worse would be the near certainty of the story getting out. Suffragettes involved in a legal struggle with the family of one of their most venerable supporters, cause of war a nude painting, would be a gift to our opponents that it would take years to live down. Venn might be counting on that, sure we wouldn’t risk it. Well, he was wrong. I felt I’d been made a fool of and had a personal stake in it. If I had anything to do with it we’d fight all the way for what was ours, ridicule or not.
* * *
There was just one other problem. Before we could discuss the next stage, I had to go back to London and report my failure to Emmeline. Not something to be done in a hurry. Even thinking about it slowed my pace from striding to walking, from walking to ambling. Out on the road between the cornfields, with stooks standing left and right, bullrushes in the ditch and irritating swarms of black harvest flies in the air, I stopped walking altogether. It was too feeble, unthinkable, to trail back tamely to London without another try. On the other hand, a second interview with Oliver Venn would be a waste of breath. So the only hope for diplomacy was to try to influence him through the two nephews. Both were left-leaning in their politics – Daniel very much so by the sound of it – and should be well disposed towards us. Adam had struck me as an intelligent man and Daniel probably wasn’t stupid. The obvious thing was to talk privately to one or both of them, explain our dilemma and get them to persuade their uncle to see reason. I simply had to find somewhere to stay overnight and find an opportunity to talk to them.
At that point I noticed – or perhaps part of my mind had noticed already – that I’d come to a halt just above the turning the Scipians had taken on the way to their camp. Back in London I’d been unenthusiastic about joining them but now it seemed providential. I could do my duty by sounding out the Scipian position on women’s suffrage, talk to the nephews and go back to London on Sunday night or Monday with a report of work well in hand on both tasks, rather than failure on one. On the downside, it meant at least one night in a communal dormitory, hours of political discussion and catering just one stage up from a soup kitchen, but we all have to make sacrifices. I opened the farm gate and followed the scuffed cart track across a field and round the edge of a copse to another field, this one dotted with faded tents, camp-fires and puzzled cows.
* * *
The men’s dormitory was the old schoolhouse at the far end of the field by a road, the women’s dormitory an old dairy about two hundred yards away along the road, both buildings Venn property. A young Lancashire woman, small and fierce, was in charge of accommodation and took an immediate dislike to my costume – second-best navy blue because of calling on Oliver Venn – and my accent. When I explained that I was a visiting delegate from the Women’s Social and Political Union the welcome didn’t get any warmer.
‘You can’t separate the question of women’s suffrage from universal suffrage.’
‘We don’t. May I stay for the night?’
‘It’s just middle-class divisionism to work for the women’s vote until all working men have got the vote without property qualification.’
‘We want all men to have the vote too. What’s divisive about that? So may I stay?’
‘Did you book?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a member?’
‘No.’
‘Did you bring your own blanket?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘That’ll be five shillings non-members’ rate for meals and accommodation, plus sixpence for hire of blanket. They’ve just started the debate on wage differentials over in the big tent. The one next to it is Midlands miners. Working party on trade union legislation by the elm tree.’
I paid up. There was still a smell of cheese lurking about the dairy and the beds were a ramshackle assortment of garden benches, old doors propped up on bricks, even a couple of abandoned chapel pews with folded blankets. I reserved a bedspace in the far corner by leaving my hat on it then went dutifully out to spread the word, pausing on the way to beg a mug of tea from a cheerful group of anarchists who’d managed to bring a fire and a kettle into partnership.
* * *
By mid-afternoon I hadn’t made many converts but there hadn’t been much hostility either. Nobody was actually opposed to us, but all the different groups that made up the Scipians had their own agendas and urgencies. Variously, votes for women would have to wait until they’d achieved a national minimum wage, or a majority of working men’s representatives in Parliament or total overthrow of the capitalist system and a workers’ republic. I’d done enough to report back conscientiously that the Scipians were a likeable, even admirable, crowd but not much use to us at present. I saw Max Blume coming out of the Midlands miners’ tent and went over to him.
‘I thought you weren’t going to join us,’ he said.
‘Changed my mind. It’s a long way back to London.’
He gave me one of his looks. I asked him if he’d point out Daniel Venn when he arrived.
‘He’s here already.’
‘Where?’
‘Over with the bells and bouncers.’
He nodded towards a big elm tree. A group of people had gathered under it and I recognised some as the London girls. Even from a distance they seemed a less earnest group than the rest of the Scipians. Laughter and a few notes squeezed out of a concertina drifted over to us.
‘Which one’s Daniel Venn?’
‘Smallish, dark-haired, pleased with himself. Anyway, you’ll tell him by the voice.’
Max was right. You could hear it from yards away, the voice of a university man, sounding as if it should go with long afternoons on cricket pitches rather than gambols in socialist camps. None of the group seemed to resent it, though. They were trying out a dance in a tentative, walking-through way, with Daniel in charge. He was thin and active-looking, early twenties, a little below average height with dark curling hair ending just above the collar of his cream flannel shirt. His eyes were bright and there was a crackling feel of energy about him. He wore a red and white spotted neckcloth instead of a tie, a moleskin waistcoat, and dark trousers that looked as if he might have slept under hedges in them. I waited for a break in the conversation and introduced myself to him.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if I might have a word about your uncle, Oliver Venn.’
He looked alarmed. ‘Is something wrong with Uncle Olly?’
‘No. I saw him this morning and he seemed quite well. It’s a business matter.’
He heaved a deep sigh and pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘I’m no good on the business side. It’s Adam who handles that.’
Judging from the question about his uncle, he hadn’t been up to the house yet. It seemed odd to me, with his fiancée waiting for him, but that wasn’t my affair.
‘It’s not complicated. Perhaps if you’d let me put the problem to you, you could discuss it with your brother.’
‘Problems.’ Another deep sigh, as if he were unfairly loaded with them. And yet there was an air of openness and generosity about him. He wasn’t good at turning people away.
‘Tell you what, Miss Bray, I was thinking of taking a walk to the workshop to talk over something with my sister-in-law. If you’d care to hang on for a minute, we can stroll together.’
I thanked him. He went to a place in the shade of the hedge where a long bundle was lying, wrapped in a grey blanket, and knelt down beside it. At first I took it f
or a pack until I saw a long trail of red hair coming out of the top of the blanket. He got up, said something to one of the girls, who nodded, then came back to me.
‘She’ll sleep all right until we get back,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long journey for her.’
Which was all the explanation I got.
Chapter Four
HE LED THE WAY PAST THE old school towards the church and cluster of houses that made up the village, walking fast and easily. I fell into step behind him and explained the problem of the picture. His first reaction was open and hearty laughter.
‘Well, the old scoundrel. I do believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard about Uncle Olly’
‘You can hardly expect us to see the joke.’
‘I suppose not, but you must admit it’s ripe. Then putting the blame on Christie’s. You have to hand it to the old chap.’
‘You can hand him anything you like as long as he hands over the picture to us. If he doesn’t, this could end up in the law courts.’
That stopped him laughing at least. ‘If you do that the lawyers will only get it all, and the scandal rags will have a field day’
‘Precisely. So what can we do to avoid it? I thought you and your brother might have a serious talk with him and suggest that if he really can’t bear to part with the picture, we’d accept a cash equivalent.’
He whistled. ‘Not sure about that. I think cash may be a bit tight with Uncle Olly at the moment.’
‘It’s a bit tight with us all the time. It’s not as if we want it for our own selfish purposes. You must know how expensive political campaigning is.’
‘Money, money, money’ His voice was bitter, no laughter in it now. ‘What a hideous system this is, when you’re not supposed to paint pictures or make music or be kind to people or fall in love or do anything human without thinking about money’
‘I’d like a better system as much as you would, but it doesn’t come by just wishing.’
I thought I’d got his measure: spoilt young man mistaking his own itch of discontent for revolutionary fervour. But perhaps I’d misjudged him, for now he apologised.
‘Yes, I suppose we’ll have to try to get Uncle Olly to see reason. Trouble is, Adam and I aren’t on the best of terms at the moment. I might ask Carol’s advice. She’s usually the one who sorts things out. I’m relying on that in any case.’
He went quiet, as if there were other things on his mind. We passed a couple of farms and came to the main part of the village. It seemed mostly to consist of one wide main street with a public house called the Crown at one end and a horse trough and pump in the middle, opposite a general store and post office in a cottage so lopsided that the thatch almost touched the ground on one side. A church was set back on a little hillock with a graveyard round it, and a school and schoolyard stood on more level ground on the other side. We walked past them and almost out of the far side of the village. At a forge on the right a big shire horse was standing patiently while the smith heated a shoe. Opposite was a rectangular stone building that looked like a barn recently altered for other purposes with a big window let into one side on the ground floor, a smaller window above. A yard on the far side was piled with stacks of timber. On our side was a door with a porch and a neatly lettered sign: ‘Visitors Welcome’. A gentle humming noise came from inside.
Daniel opened the door and we stepped into a room of normal height at the front but the full height of the original barn at the back, stretching up to shadowy beams where sparrows twittered. The humming came from a pole lathe with a man standing at it, operating a treadle and holding a chisel to a revolving cylinder of wood. Behind him, fading into the shadows, were more pieces of furniture like those up at the Venns’ house but in various stages of being made – bedheads propped against walls, chests without lids, chairs without seats. There were three people in the room.
The man who’d been working at the lathe stopped and straightened up as we came in. He was in his thirties, big and square-shouldered. His eyes were blue, face strong in the jaw and broad in the forehead, hands brown and workmanlike with some lines of old scars. A good-looking man who seemed mercifully unaware of the fact, shy even. ‘Hello, Mr Sutton,’ Daniel said. The man took his hand and said it was good to see him again, in a deep voice with a West Country accent. A woman was kneeling by the big window with another woman standing beside her holding a baby. When we came in they’d both been staring at a big wooden cabinet and the kneeling woman had her back to us. She turned when she heard Daniel’s voice and got up in one easy movement, smiling.
‘Daniel, we expected you yesterday.’
She was in her early thirties, stylish in an unconventional way: dark crinkly hair pinned up with a tortoiseshell comb, a few tendrils hanging down to frame an intelligent oval face with dark eyes that had a slight upward slant to them like a cat’s, a straight nose and lips as finely shaped as on a classical statue, but with a satirical twist. Her dress was damson-coloured, softly draped from a high bodice with a few spirals of wood shavings clinging to it. She reminded me of the woman in the William Morris tapestry, only less yearning and more active. Her voice was deep-toned and attractive. When Daniel introduced us the hand she held out to me was slim but had a firm grip. I was surprised that she seemed to take my presence for granted until Daniel said, ‘I’m afraid she’s not a customer, Carol. There’s a little problem. Tell you in a minute.’ A moment’s disappointment showed in Carol’s dark eyes, but she recovered well.
‘When wasn’t there a little problem? Have you been up to see Felicia yet?’
Daniel shook his head and turned to say hello to the baby, giving it his finger to grip. The woman holding it – mother, presumably – smiled but seemed a little nervous of our invasion, although she’d looked quite at ease with Carol Venn. She had a round face, a mass of red-brown hair, and wary grey eyes.
‘You should have, Daniel. She’s waiting for you.’
‘She won’t mind.’
Daniel pulled his finger gently away from the baby, took Carol by the arm and guided her towards the shadowy back of the room. ‘You’ll excuse us for a minute, Miss Bray. Get Mr Sutton to show you the pole lathe. He’s an artist.’
The big man went back to the treadle. Behind him the long pole that powered the lathe rose and dipped to the rhythm of his foot and the machine hummed. He was making a chair leg, pale shavings curling away from his chisel blade like apple peelings. The woman with the baby watched him, smiling. The air was full with the sweet smell of wood. Above the noise of the lathe I could hear the murmur of Daniel and Carol’s conversation, but not what they said. Once she gave a sharp little laugh. Mr Sutton finished his chair leg, took it out of the lathe and fitted in another cylinder of wood. Daniel and Carol came back.
‘Carol’s going to ask Adam about it,’ Daniel said. ‘You’re staying at the camp until tomorrow, aren’t you? I’ll let you know what he says.’
I think that was probably my signal to go. He’d mentioned that he had something else to discuss with Carol and I supposed it was family business. But she had other ideas, perhaps reluctant to give up the idea of me as a customer. If she’d seen my home or my bank balance she’d have known better.
‘Do look round while you’re here, Miss Bray. We encourage people to come in and see things being made.’
She led me round the big room, talking lovingly about different kinds of wood, glowing red cherry wood, dark burr yew with its grain patterned like clouds in a stormy sky, coro-mandel, rosewood, ebony. I asked her if she designed the furniture herself.
‘I’m not trained as a designer. I have ideas and do sketches and Mr Sutton makes them work. He’s a kind of genius. Would you believe that before we rescued him he was working in a factory at Swindon fitting out railway carriages? Isn’t that terrible? Like making a thoroughbred pull a milk cart!’ She put a hand lightly on my arm to stop me by a chest of drawers painted in a wild rose pattern. ‘That’s mine. I do the painting, though wood’s so beautifu
l it sometimes seems a crime to paint it at all.’
‘Do you and Mr Sutton do all this on your own?’
‘There’s another craftsman and two apprentices from the village, but we give them Saturday afternoons off. In time, we hope to be employing a lot more people from round here – maybe encourage them to set up their own workshops all over the village. The point is to show what can be done by craftsmen working with love, not having to think of profits all the time.’
I noticed a small oval mirror in a carved stand on top of the chest of drawers, of an unusual design. The mirror was cradled by two beautifully worked female hands in some glowing golden wood.
‘Your hands?’ I said.
I’d noticed that hers were particularly fine and slim. She laughed and blushed a little.
‘You’re observant, aren’t you? Yes, we can’t run to professional models.’
But in spite of the casual tone I could see it pleased her. She stared into the mirror and the reflection of her face was clasped between her golden carved hands. The sound of the lathe faltered and when I turned Mr Sutton was watching her, a little smile on his face like a man trying to contain his pride. Not surprising because the mirror stand was a masterpiece. While we’d been walking round, Daniel had followed us, looking fidgety and trying to get Carol on her own again. We almost completed our circuit and came up to the big cabinet she’d been examining when we came in. It seemed out of place. The rest of the furniture in the workshop had a light and airy feel about it. This thing was massive, made in dark bog oak and corrugated with carvings.
‘This isn’t one of ours. It’s Jacobean. It belongs to a friend of mine who wants it restored. It’s not the kind of work we normally do but it’s an interesting piece.’
The front of the cabinet was divided into eight panels, four on each door, with what looked like scenes from a play or story carved on them. The top left hand one showed a man riding away on a horse and a lady waving him goodbye from a tower. Below that was a window in a house with what looked like some demon or hobgoblin creeping through it. The carving was rough but spirited, showing the creature with unnaturally long fingers and a grisly grin. The next panel had the hobgoblin standing full length with a girl who might be a serving wench, each on one side of a cradle. The hobgoblin figure was carrying a short sword and the wench a bowl. The bottom panel on that side and the top one on the other had been damaged so it was hard to make out what was happening but the next one showed the wench and the hobgoblin with a lady. He had his long fingers in her hair and her body was tilted backwards, mouth open in a little dark ‘O’. The last two panels showed the wench burning in a tire and the hobgoblin creature hanging from a gallows, eyes popping and tongue lolling all the way down to its splayed knees. I asked what the story was.
Blood on the Wood Page 4
