Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “You were all at the limit.”

  Walter nodded his agreement, eyes closed. He kept his eyes closed.

  “You must rest now, Mr. Thornton. I’ll look after John. You must still be all in.”

  He revived then, opening his eyes and smiling. “No,” he said with self-encouraging vigour, “not any longer. This storm gave us both rest. I think I’ll go out and walk a bit. Blow away the cobwebs.”

  She smiled tensely, trying to appear nonchalant, as though she believed him. Of course he would go directly to the nearest brothel.

  She knew him well enough to be sure of that. And he would go at once because to be alone with her embarrassed him—embarrassed them both. For more than fifteen years ago she and Walter had met by the wayside, about three hours before John had entered her life. She had been barefoot and penniless, and Walter had put a sovereign in her pocket, paying for a favour whose memory would forever make it impossible for either to be in the other’s company without that particular embarrassment.

  They both rose. She put a hand on his arm. “I doubt I can ever say how grateful I am to you,” she said. “And John, of course.”

  He grinned. “It was little enough. I couldn’t say which of you I did it for. I’d have done it for either.”

  It was the first moment of true warmth between them since their original meeting, so long ago. She was glad to have taken the plunge—and so, she could see, was Thornton; they had surmounted something, pulled down a bit of the old barrier.

  To be sure, she could not respect him any the more. How could you respect a man who went off whoring several times a week? Especially a man who let his wife devote herself to the rescue of fallen women!

  When Thornton had gone she asked the manager where John was. He looked surprised that she should inquire; it was the best room—the one they always had. She left instructions for Nanette to wait below, or in her own room, and not to bring up the bags until sent for; then she slipped quietly into their room.

  The curtains were drawn and it took some moments before her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. She stood still, feeling a small moment of panic—she could not hear John’s breathing. Then he stirred in his sleep and she was afraid she had woken him. Rather than risk that, she turned toward an alcove at the far end of the room, where one small uncurtained side window let in the only light the room possessed.

  She stood awhile, staring down at the cold, grey street. A fly drew up. Nanette got out. At that moment Thornton came out of the hotel and spoke to her. Had he been waiting? Nora drew back a little in case she should be accidentally caught watching them, but when they looked up, the window he pointed to was the curtained one away to her left, not hers.

  Why, when one saw Thornton talking to any female, did one imagine only a certain suggestive conversation taking place? Nanette liked Thornton, she could tell. Nora watched his greedy, glittering, foxy grin at work on her…could almost imagine his rich, gurgling, basso-profundo laugh…could see Nanette, being flattered, turning coquettish. At this safe distance Nora, too, could afford to admit that the man had attractions beyond the reach of moral sense.

  She remembered then that from this same window, after that Olympian meal, she had watched Tom and Sarah Cornelius walk hand-in-hand in the moonlight. She knew that Sarah had been Thornton’s mistress for a time after Tom had died. Now, watching him at work on Nanette, she understood exactly what had made Sarah succumb to him—but, after sixteen years of friendship with the Thornton family, she knew just what had ultimately repelled Sarah, too.

  “Nora? Eay, love!”

  She turned to see John struggling to get up. She ran to him to stop him from rising any further in the bed. In the flurry before he sank into her embrace she caught only the briefest glimpse of him, but it was enough to fill her with horror. She barely recognized him, his cheeks were so drawn, his eyes so hollow, his hair so thin—he gave the impression of toothless senility. Only his body belied that impression. His huge frame had not changed. The muscle he had acquired in his years of navvying was all still there; she clung to it, ran her fingers over it, dreading the moment when she would have to pull away from it and look him in the face again.

  “Bit of a shock, eh?” he said. His voice was firm, too; no weakness there.

  She gripped him tighter.

  “It’s been worse. For three weeks Thornton wouldn’t let me have a looking glass.” He chuckled.

  “Oh, John!” She kissed his neck, his ear, his hair, his cheekbone. At last she dared to look at him.

  Perhaps the preparation afforded by that first hectic glimpse of him now cushioned the shock, for he seemed less pitiable this time. He was—or had been—ill, very ill. No doubting it. But his smile was strong, his eyes clear.

  “We finished it,” he said. “Forty-two miles. We did seven miles in the first twelve days!”

  “I know. You wrote and told me. And it has been in all the papers.” She kissed him, his lips, his nose, his cheeks, while relief from all her suppressed fears welled up within her. He sank back on his pillows and closed his eyes.

  “How are the children?”

  “All well. Of course, this Christmas was not our brightest.”

  “And the boys? What about school?”

  She did not answer at once; the pause made him open his eyes again. “Trouble?” he asked. “You’re not still…”

  She smiled. “No. There was a little bit of bother but it’s all sorted out. Dr. Brockman and I are the firmest friends.”

  He lifted his head off the pillow. “You saw him? You went up there? Or did he…”

  “I went there.” She laid her hands on his shoulders, bearing him down. “You have a gift for finding people. Thornton once said to me—you remember the day we all went on that picnic, and you hired a starving lame fellow we met…”

  “Noah Rutt,” John said. “He works for us still.”

  “And I said it was foolish charity to employ rubbish like that, and Thornton told me that cripple’d turn out to be a second James Watt or something.”

  John began a diffident laugh.

  “Because,” she insisted, “you have a genius for picking people.”

  “Picked you,” he said, stroking her cheek. “Unless it was t’other way about.”

  “And you picked Brockman.”

  “D’you think he’s that good?”

  “If any man’s destined to make his mark on the school system in England, it’s him.”

  He closed his eyes again.

  “You sleep now,” she told him. “I’ll be here.”

  One eye opened. “I can’t manage much,” he said. “Ten minutes’ talk even and I’m exhausted.”

  “You’ll mend. You’ll soon be your old self.”

  As he sank into sleep he said, “You needn’t stay. I’ll sleep an hour or so. Don’t stay.”

  She waited half an hour, until she could see how untroubled his sleep was, and then she went out to see Nanette about unpacking their things. Good, she thought. I’ve told him now.

  ***

  But she had not told him. And over the days that followed, while they were together—first in their room, later in walks over the sands—the rest of the story trickled out. The more he heard the less pleased he grew.

  She should have left the assault on Caspar for him to deal with; that was his first complaint.

  “But I didn’t know when you would be back,” she said.

  The better his health grew, the more he tried to belittle his collapse. He now behaved as if the illness had been a private weakness—something to be ashamed of. It seemed necessary to his recovery now to make light of it—so she could not insist he would have been—indeed was still—too frail to deal with the Caspar business.

  “It can’t have been all that bad,” he said. “Boys are flogged at school all the time.”

 
“And you approve?”

  “It’s not a question of approval. Caspar is going into the army. I tell you a woman has no idea of the brutalities of a soldier’s life. It’s not a woman’s place to interfere in these things. A woman has no…”

  “I’m not ‘a woman,’” she flared at him. “I’m Caspar’s mother. And when you’re halfway around the world, I’m his father, too.”

  He looked at her coldly. “You will never be that. As I was saying: He will witness—he will even have to order—floggings of a brutality that…”

  “John!” she cried, desperate for him to understand. “The flesh on his bottom was cut bare and bleeding. There was no skin left! It was butcher’s meat.”

  “I’m sure you exaggerate…”

  “I do not!”

  “Will you let me finish just one sentence! He is going into the army. He must be tough. He must be tough in body, mind, and spirit. Tougher than you can possibly imagine. You talk about butcher’s meat! I saw men flogged in the Crimea with six ribs showing through—the flesh flogged off them crumb by crumb!”

  She winced and shut her eyes. He put an arm around her then. “I’m sorry, love,” he said, more gently. “It’s the only way to get you to see. The boys are in a man’s world, now. And you brought a woman’s view to it. In the long run, that won’t help Caspar—nor even in the short run, either.”

  “Suppose he doesn’t want to go in the army?” Nora asked.

  “Of course he will. And if I tell him that’s where he’ll go, he’ll go!”

  She smiled, but not at him. “You don’t know him at all, do you!” she said, half speaking to the four winds. “The last way to get Caspar to do anything is to command him.”

  “A soldier must get used to command. And he will be expected to go into the army—especially now that…” He bit off the sentence.

  “Especially now that what?”

  “Never mind. We’ve run this subject into the ground.”

  She knew then that he was concealing something from her. So she went right back, hoping to steer him to whatever it was. “Anyway,” she said, playing woman-having-last-word (which she knew would rile him), “the beating Caspar got was so bad that Brockman sacked this Cossack fellow.”

  “Tcha! He was probably leaving anyway. Brockman just gilded the truth a bit to pacify you.”

  She could not win. A dreadful foreboding began to fill her. There were times when John became very moody and depressed—“when you’re in a valley and see only your own feet,” was how he himself put it. When those moods were upon him, nothing could lighten them or make him take a cheerful view. She was terribly afraid that such a cloud was now descending on him; sometimes it could last for weeks. Later, when it was over, he could admit that his fears and angers had been groundless for the most part, but he could never see things so dispassionately at the time. When she reminded him of past occasions he would only say that this time it was different.

  She had tried every way to prevent these moods—ridicule, anger, laughter, indifference, tears—but nothing seemed to have any effect; they followed some course of their own, indifferent to every kind of persuasion. And she, being closest, always bore the worst of it, just as she had the best of him when he was in good cheer.

  “Funny he should take that attitude,” Walter said when she explained to him why John seemed out of sorts. “In the Crimea he was ready to fight a duel with a lieutenant of the Fourth Dragoon Guards who had one of our navvies flogged for insolence.”

  “A duel? I don’t believe it!”

  “He didn’t issue the challenge, of course. The officer did that. Stevenson took the lash out of the sergeant’s hand and wiped the blood on it over the officer’s buckskin. I’ve never seen Stevenson so angry.”

  “How did it begin?”

  So Walter told her. The officer had been out “hunting” a bobbery pack of mongrels he’d assembled from the strays of Balaclava port; it was one of those flamboyant jokes that Guards officers seemed to enjoy. One of his chases led over the line Stevenson’s was then laying and the navvies had refused to get out of his way. Their ganger had insulted the lieutenant, who had then sent for an armed flogging party and had actually administered twenty or so lashes before John had arrived and, single-handedly, routed the party. That was when the officer had sent John the challenge to a duel.

  “And he accepted?” Nora was still incredulous that John could have hazarded his life, his business, or even (to look only at the most immediate risk) the Crimean railway for something so addleheaded as this bit of foolery.

  Walter nodded. “He must have been tired beyond all sense.”

  “Did they actually fight?”

  “Er…military affairs intervened. Another Dragoon Guard had a word with someone on the staff, and the young hothead was sent up the line within the hour. Oh, they can move when they want to!”

  “But what could John have been thinking of! If he’d won, he could never have returned to England. And if he’d lost…!” She lifted her hands in despair. “Why didn’t you and Tucker stop him?”

  He merely looked at her with a knowing smile. “He just said how could he ever take charge of his men again once word got around that he’d refused a challenge. It was a matter of honour.”

  She almost wept. Men who’d worked for him—and with him—for sixteen years! Did he have to go fighting duels to retain their trust and loyalty?

  ***

  Walter left for England that afternoon, looking very much better.

  “Amazing what a few hours on the old fork’ll do for that fellow,” John said in a rare spell of good humour. He teased her then. “He was a bit warm to Nanette, eh? Ye don’t suppose…”

  Nora dismissed the very thought of it; not only did she trust Nanette, she also knew Thornton. “He may lack all scruple,” she said, “but that doesn’t stop him being a gentleman. He’d never touch a single girl—not a respectable one, anyway. Married women, widows, and tarts—that’s his strict three-course meal.”

  Later when they were out walking on the beach—or, rather, picking a careful way over its chalk and flint pebbles—his black mood descended again and he set about her once more for “interfering” at Fiennes.

  His attack was so unfair that she was goaded into saying, “Splendid words—from the man who risked making orphans of eight children and a widow of me, and all for a navvy old enough to fend for himself, I’d say!”

  She regretted it at once. Reasoned argument never even dented these moods of his. He was silent a time, then he said bitterly, “So you’ve told it all to Thornton!”

  “You know better than that,” she said. “You know me better.”

  “Do I?”

  She shook him urgently. “John! What’s the matter with you? Why be like this!”

  He looked at her coldly and then resumed his walk, leaving her to catch up.

  ***

  “We can go home, too,” he said the following day. “I’m well enough. I’m back to normal.”

  Glumly she had to agree that in one very negative sense he was “back to normal.” A few weeks earlier, when she had first arrived at Dieppe, he had still been much too feeble to sustain this brooding anger at such a pitch of intensity.

  He had enough social grace to feel embarrassed at his anger when Nanette was around; he covered it by pretending to fret at not being back in harness. Nora abetted this deceit by suggesting a further week or two’s convalescence with old friends of theirs, Monsieur and Madame Rodet, along the coast at Trouville.

  “Rodet would love to see you again,” she said. “And he knows everything that’s going on in French railways. You could catch up on all you’ve been missing.”

  To her surprise he seemed on the point of agreeing; so she added: “And I know I’d love to see Rodie again.”

  Rodie—Madame Rodet—was her greatest frien
d this side of the water. Either side, come to that. It would be marvellous to see her again.

  But no sooner had she said the words than he began to shake his head. “Too much work,” he said. “We can’t afford to fritter any more time on our own enjoyment. Besides, I want to see the boys before they go back to school.”

  She kicked herself for having brought her own pleasure into it.

  Chapter 11

  The children were delighted to have their father back again. Caspar’s stripes had almost healed; thin lines of dried scab, like old cat scratches, were all that remained—nothing to rouse anyone’s anger. And Caspar, of course, was now being very manly about it all, especially as they were due back at school the next day.

  “Not too bad, was it, eh?” John said, jovially.

  “Oh, it healed pretty well, sir,” Caspar answered, all nonchalant.

  “And you’re looking forward to the new term?”

  “I should just say so!”

  “Well listen, young man—you’ll be a soldier one day, and wounded soldiers don’t go tattling to the womenfolk at every little scratch. I thought you would be more manly. You’ve disappointed me.” Then, seeing how crestfallen Caspar became and not wanting to mar his return home for something that was, at bottom, Nora’s fault rather than Caspar’s, he nudged the boy in a more jocular mood and added, “Besides, you know what the ladies are—how they like to fuss. So promise you won’t distress your mother in future, eh?”

  And for Caspar, his wounds gone, it was an easy promise to make—and it felt like only a very minor betrayal of his mother, the sort you get in families every day.

  The schoolroom was closed for the occasion, of course, and there were rides around the park in the governess cart, and a short play by Winifred all about the return of a feudal knight to his castle; and then when the last muffin had followed the last pancake down red lane, the climax of the day: The Tale of the Crimea Railway, As Told by Its Builder.

  Children from any other family would have found it a weird story indeed—ranging from stirring military adventures, like the Battle of Balaclava and the bombardment of Sebastopol, down to the most arcane railway technicalities—gradients, curves, tracklaying details, and all. But these were Stevenson children. When their father said one in one-eighty they could see the slope; a two-hundred radius curve would get them leaning inward as, in their mind’s eye, they raced around it; say to them “two-inch and under” and they could hear the sound that particular grade of gravel made as it was tipped. Without these details a railway story—even one told by their father—would have sounded hollow, concocted.