He did not sleep. Her body had done nothing to release the tensions in him for they were not physical tensions and even had they been she, at the time, would have been an imperfect instrument for the purpose. Presently, into his mind, unbidden but persistent, the longing for an adult confidant returned, someone who could attempt to answer some of the questions he had been asking himself since he had stood looking down at the bundle of rags on the hearthrug, and he remembered Edith Wadsworth, whose commonsense he always appreciated when he went into the Crescents. The thought of her brought him a tincture of relief, and he wondered, vaguely, what she would make of it, whether she would be likely to think him the sentimental ass that Avery thought him, or the enigma he must seem to a man like Tybalt. He did not know but, as he lay there pondering, it seemed to him essential that he should find out, for here at least was something more positive than mooning about like a man with a permanent hangover.
At the first glimmer of light he slipped out of bed and along the corridor to the room where he had left his clothes. No one was astir when he went down the backstairs to the yard and saddled the bay mare he had hired at Croydon three weeks ago. When she was ready he led her through the arch and across the grass verge, the sound of her hooves muffled in dew-soaked grass. Beyond the first copper beeches he mounted and rode on down the long winding drive. The early morning air was rich with the scent of hawthorn and an enormous hare, alerted by the clink of iron on gravel, bounded from a tussock near the gate and went scudding across the road to the ash coppice opposite. The sense of oppression that had weighed so heavily upon him began to lift, slightly but appreciably. He filled his lungs and spurred the mare into a trot.
Three
1
HE HAD THE DEVIL'S OWN JOB TO FIND HER, AND BY THE TIME HE DID THE whole of his eastern system was aware that he was seeking her. This did not worry him at all, and he had, in fact, been slightly amused by young Rookwood's knowing look when he told him Miss Wadsworth was unlikely to be found at her base in the Crescent Central, having moved north a fortnight ago to relieve her father in the sector above.
“She might be at Whitby, sir,” he said, managing to convey the impression that he was aware of his employer's real reasons for going north, and that whatever business was transacted between them would be unlikely to involve the counting-house staff.
“How the devil do you keep track of all these local movements?” he asked, noting the youngster's perception, and Rookwood, maintaining his poker face, said that Mr. Tybalt had introduced a map system by which clerks were required to record information of this kind with flags, marked with the names of base managers.
“It saves a lot of crossed mail,” he added, and for the first time in a month Adam experienced a flicker of interest in the business, and asked Rookwood to show him the map. Studying the back of his head, as the boy rolled back the covers, Adam remembered that Rookwood was one of Keate's originals, an impudent, rollicking pink-faced urchin, who seemed always to be enjoying a secret joke of the kind he was relishing at this moment. Adam saw him then as a prototype of Dickens’ Artful Dodger, and his fellow-clerk, Willie Vetch, as Charley Bates. He said, briefly, “Right, Rookwood, tell Mr. Tybalt my whereabouts and that I wholly approve of this map. Can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it years ago.”
“Are you likely to be in the north long, sir?” Rookwood asked. “Mr. Tybalt is sure to want to know.”
“A week at least, but only a day in the Crescents. Tell him I shall probably move across to the Polygon to see Mr. Catesby, and then down to the Southern Square and home. I’ll keep in touch by telegram.” He paused and went on, “Tell him I’ll tackle the backlog the minute I return. That’ll cheer him up.”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, saluting, “he's…er…been rather low lately, sir, and so has Mr. Keate.”
He took a cab to Kings Cross, buying a ticket for York and musing, as he waited for the train to start, how much tittle-tattle must circulate in the yard concerning the confidence he reposed in Edith Wadsworth and whether, in fact, serious-minded men like Tybalt and Keate put Rookwood's construction on it. He thought not, for he was known to have his favourites among the managers, and had made no secret of the fact that he extended more trust in the Wadsworths, Catesby, and Bryn Lovell than in men like Fraser, in the Border Triangle, Abbott in the Square, or Ratcliffe in the West.
He felt more cheerful already and it occurred to him that he had been a fool to potter about at home all this time, as though his presence within range of that chimney could bring Luke Dobbs back to life. Contentedly, he watched the northern suburbs slide past, as the great Sturrock locomotive settled to the run and then, more relaxed than he had been for a long time, he slept, to be nudged awake by the guard at York. He made inquiries concerning the crosscountry journey to Whitby, eating lunch in the station restaurant whilst awaiting the York and Scarborough train, and learning that he would have to change to the Pickering-Whitby spur about halfway. The sun was setting as he leaned from the window and sniffed the sea but a disappointment awaited him here, for when he called in at the yard, and asked the depot-manager if Miss Wadsworth was about, he learned that she had taken an empty frigate to Yarm, and was then going on to Richmond, one of the drivers on the dairy run there having broken a leg and damaged his vehicle.
“I don’t think she’ll come back this way, sir,” the man added. “She said something about taking the repaired waggon back to Crescent Centre. It's one of theirs, you see, that was on loan to us up here.”
Adam considered. He was not tired, having slept at least five hours in the two trains, and it was a mild night, with a full moon rising over the bay. He said, “Is there a livery stable handy?” and the manager said there was, Baverstock's, in the adjoining street, where he could hire a hack and ride on a stage if he was so minded.
Even when he was on legitimate business Adam Swann travelled light and the luggage he carried could be accommodated in a saddlebag. He went down to Baverstock's and hired a piebald gelding, telling them who he was, and promising to leave the animal at Yarm or Richmond, depending upon where he overtook the waggon. Then filling his pocket flask with brandy, he set out, crossing a tract of unfamiliar country and heading due east over the old coach road to Guisborough, a stage of around fifteen miles.
He thought, as he jogged along, that many would regard this expedition the ultimate in idiocy, a man in his mid-thirties, with a wife, a young family, and a business employing three hundred waggons and as many men, riding through the night in pursuit of a girl before whom he proposed laying self-doubts concerning the death of a chimney sweep. And yet, in another way it did not seem in the least ridiculous but an instinctive groping for a friend, whose advice was likely to be unprejudiced. For years now, ever since he had become so absorbed in the enterprise, he had not felt the need for friendly counsel. Avery, when they first set up their partnership had admitted to such a need, but he had not used Adam's availability and they had never been more than business associates. The Colonel had always been at hand, with his quiet courtesy and restrained affection, but the Colonel's world was dead, and the old man had never adjusted to the new age and a fresh set of values. Henrietta, in this particular sense, had been a disappointment, for he still found it impossible to treat her as anything more than a mascot, with her stupid prejudice against his involvement in trade, and her obsession with the make-believe role of Lady of Tryst.
Out here, alone in the bright moonlight, with the whiff of the sea competing with the tang of heather, he was able, at long last, to separate Henrietta from the recent turmoil on his doorstep and modify his irritation concerning her. He saw now that he had behaved illogically and impulsively. He did not regret having compelled her to help him wash that corpse, for this had obliged her to face life as it was lived, and not as she liked to pretend in her story-stocked mind, but it was manifestly unjust to blame her for positive inadequacies. She had had no education and no upbringing, and if she was spoiled from the moment he had
married her then it was he who had done the spoiling. The fact was, he thought, he had come to regard her more as a mistress than a wife, and so long as he continued to do so she would remain one, able to beguile his idle hours, and relieve him of the necessity of hunting up a woman every so often, as men like Avery preferred to do, and in this role at least she had been an unexpected success. But this surely ran contrary to all a man should seek in a wife. He had demolished her false modesty and enabled her natural high spirits to find an outlet whenever he was on hand to summon them, but he had failed in encouraging her to mature, and this, he supposed, was the real cause of her blindness as regards what he thought of as essentials.
His thoughts passed from the particular to the general, and he began to thaw at the prospect of remounting the helter-skelter of competitive business that had now taken too firm a grip on his imagination to be discarded like a shirt. Moneymaking, and the risks attending were well enough, and most of his contemporaries seemed to find complete fulfilment in it, but something important was still missing, and if he was unable to say what it was perhaps a down-to-earth woman like Edith Wadsworth could tell him.
Guisborough was fast asleep when he rode in, but there was a light at the livery stable the Whitby manager had recommended, so he handed over the piebald and arranged to call for a replacement at seven. The ostler directed him to an inn where he ate bread and cheese and drank a pint of beer before seeking his bed.
Six hours later he was on his way again, following the deserted road almost due east to Marton before turning south-east across open country until he struck one of the great loops of the Tees, where birds sung in thickets beside the shallow, fast-running stream, and a clear sky promised another warm day. Soon he was jogging down the main street of Yarm, recalling that Blubb, driving the Thirsk “Telegraph,” had changed teams here during his fast night-runs to Stockton, and also that it was here, of all places, that his boyhood hero Stephenson had persuaded hard-fisted merchants to invest money in the Stockton-Darlington line, the Adam of every railroad in the world.
It was market-day in Yarm and the main street was thronged with carts and carters, but the elusive Edith Wadsworth was not among them, and a carrier's agent told him she had set out at first light with the original frigate and two dapple greys, leaving the waggon she had hauled from Whitby as a replacement. He thought, distractedly, “Damn the woman, it's almost as though she's evading me,” and left his second horse with the agent, choosing a frisky young chestnut that had been left with him overnight from a Richmond stable.
“You can turn her in when you catch up with Miss Wadsworth,” the agent said. “She’ll be nowt but a mile short o’ Richmond by then. Follow the byroad to Scorton Cross, then the line of the Swale that’ll be fordable anywhere in this dry spell. If you miss her she’ll be offloading at a mill called Forsythe's, under the castle walls.”
He set off in sweltering heat, glad to seek the shelter of the trees where they arched over the road. The mare, pestered by flies, threw her head about, but once they reached the Swale, and she had slaked her thirst, she kept up a steady trot until the fantastic pile of Richmond Castle showed above the line of the trees. It was here, dismounting to offsaddle for ten minutes while he washed in the river, that he heard through the closeset timber on his right, the thin sound of a reed pipe playing an air on a scale of five notes, and as an accompaniment the slow, gritty grind of waggon wheels descending a hill, with brake-shoes applied.
It seemed to him a very relevant sound in that setting, and although he would not have thought that a person of Edith Wadsworth's disposition would have lightened her journey with a tune on a hand-whittled reed, he knew, with a curious certainty, that it would be her waggon that came round the bend in the track. He hitched the chestnut to a tree and took his place beside a willow, chuckling in anticipation of the shock she would get when he hailed her, and when the waggon was still fifty yards off he had leisure to study her, sitting relaxed on the high seat, reins looped over her shoulder, skirt hitched to the knee, feet encased in a pair of clogs and the pipe at her lips, so that she looked more like an illustration in Piers Ploughman than the practical woman he had seen bullying waggoners in the Boston yard.
She was, he thought, an even bonnier girl than he remembered. Her skin was tanned by sun and wind and her arms, bare below the elbow, were a mass of freckles. Her thick chestnut hair, falling to her shoulders, was restrained by a single strand of green ribbon.
He called, “Hi, there! Would you like company as far as Richmond?” and she dropped the pipe and made a grab at the reins, bringing the dapple greys to a sharp halt and looking across at him with an expression that indicated surprise certainly, but not the degree of astonishment he would have expected. Then colour rushed to her cheeks and she seemed, for a moment, almost embarrassed. He saw her glance down at her threadbare skirt and clogs and then, with a toss of her head that set her curls jostling, her independence reasserted itself. “You? Playing highwayman right up here? Who on earth told you I was this far afield?”
“Oh, we keep an eye on you at H.Q.,” he said, “but I had a devil of a job to run you down. It's taken the services of three trains and three hired hacks, and I was in the saddle half the night. Have you got anything to eat in that waggon?”
“Of course I have,” she said, with a touch of her northcountry asperity, “you don’t imagine I’d haul a waggon across North Riding and over the Humber on an empty stomach, do you?”
“They have inns in most towns,” he said, unhitching the chestnut, and she replied, “Aye, they have, and all of them full of thieves and twice-warmed victuals. I cook for myself when I’m travelling. Will cheese and beer do, or will you be wanting a hot meal?”
He had intended tying the chestnut to the tailboard and jogging along beside her as far as Richmond but now he changed his mind, hobbling the mare after leading her over to a stretch of turf growing beside the Swale.
“If you can provide something more substantial then I could do justice to it,” he said, “and those greys of yours could do with a cooling off. Let's camp here, where there's shade and water.”
“You’re the gaffer,” she said gaily, and swung herself down, going to the tool-kit compartment and taking out a wicker basket.
“Light a fire,” she said, “but in that open patch. It's been dry hereabouts, and it won’t help our reputation to start a heath blaze.”
“I’ve got twelve years’ campaigning behind me,” he said, “so don’t address me as though I was a townsman,” and she replied, with a laugh, “I was quite forgetting. You think like a townsman, and I always picture you as one.”
It was extraordinary, he thought, how easily they adjusted to one another, and how little use she had for the flirtatious chitter-chatter that even working-class girls were beginning to cultivate, in imitation of the weekly magazine heroines. There was no restraint in her manner and no coyness either. He was just a man who paid her and her father for a job of work, and was therefore entitled to good service but no deference. In five minutes he had a fire going and in five more she had bread, bacon, and eggs sizzling in a frying pan she had produced from somewhere. A tin kettle was filled and edged on to the improvised grate, and while she was busy he led the waggon under the trees, unbuckling the harness and turning the greys out to graze alongside the mare. She had, in that hamper of hers, everything necessary for a picnic—tin plates, enamel mugs, tea, a screw of salt, a couple of two-pronged forks, and even a phial of olive oil. “Dripping melts on the road,” she said, “and the food tastes secondhand, no matter how hard you scour the pan. I like a fry-up now and again when I’m travelling, but more often I brew tea and live off bread and cheese.”
God is an Englishman Page 43
