He said, as they began to eat, “How often do you make lonely hauls like this, and how far afield do you go? They said at Whitby that this was an emergency on account of an accident.”
“I made that the excuse,” she said, with a smile, “for I had a fancy to see the North Riding in late spring again. It seems a lifetime since I was up here,” and then, more seriously, “It's my country and I love it. We come from here originally, a village near Middleham. Father shifted to Doncaster when Mother died, but I grew up around here. You couldn’t lose me in this part of Yorkshire. You can keep West Riding, the manufactories are fast spoiling it.”
“They’re spoiling most places,” he said, suddenly remembering what had brought him here. “That's partly why I sought you out, Edith. I needed someone to talk things over with. Have you the patience to listen?”
“What kind of things?” she said, and when he hesitated, “Oh, I’ve heard talk, for you don’t only run a carrier service, you live in a grapevine.”
“What exactly did you hear?”
“That you were thinking of selling out and finding an easier way of making a living. Is it true?”
He knew the answer was important to her and said at once, “No, it isn’t. It's true I’ve not been near the yard for a month, and I suppose that's why rumours are flying, but I never thought of selling out, not seriously. I’ve got a lot of satisfaction out of what we’ve built here in the last few years: until a month ago, that is.”
“Is what happened to do with your wife?”
He noticed that she was looking at him steadily and that her eyes, the colour of the sea a long way from land, seemed to be assessing his state of mind with a kind of doubtful objectivity, as though she had certain notions about how he regarded her, and was examining their portent in her shrewd, uncluttered brain.
“Not specially,” he said, “although Henrietta is involved. You’d best hear it from the beginning and form your own judgements. I came a long way to pick your brains as the one person in the network I could depend upon to give unbiased advice.”
He told her then, holding nothing back, how his pride and self-sufficiency had been shattered by a black bundle in his hearth, with its mouth full of soot. He told her how the death of Luke Dobbs had become inseparably linked in his mind with the pressures bearing on every British man, woman, and child who lacked the means, the will, or the education to escape the cogs of the complicated machine fed with Christian ethics, and how, to his mind, the fabric of a traditional set of values had been discarded, and the rough pastoral justice Englishmen had been at such pains to win was being set aside, in favour of a code based upon money and a man's ability to make it anyway he liked.
“Something's gone wrong somewhere,” he said, “and for the life of me I can’t say what or where. In my father's day they hanged children for stealing five shillings, and the old and sick were at the mercy of circumstance, but charity was there, and a sense of responsibility among the so-called quality. Today charity, real charity that is, is as clammy as a frog's belly, and the only responsibility merchants accept is to make enough money to ape the squires of a century ago. That child Dobbs was a foundling and his fate isn’t in the least uncommon. The same kind of thing happens in the cotton belt, in all your Yorkshire wool towns, in the Potteries, and even among rural communities that used to take a pride in sharing one another's troubles. I’ve seen it all travelling around and it's gone sour on me. That child's death was no more than a match to a bonfire, a bonfire of a number of experiences—my father-in-law killing another child in haste to save his mill; the murder of those miners at Llangatwg when it took no more than Lovell's brains to save others by the skin of their teeth; those urchins Keate rescued from the dock-side, no more than a sprinkling of the thousands one sees in London streets every day. Damn it, a man ought to be aware of what's happening, and then do something to make others aware of it! Suppose…”
She had been listening intently but now, interrupting him, she said, “You mean on the lines of Shaftesbury's campaigns? Getting elected to Parliament? Making windy speeches?”
“Not necessarily.”
“You could buy a newspaper. That would give you a platform to launch a crank's crusade.”
“Does a social conscience make a man a crank to your way of thinking?”
“No,” she said, equably, “far from it. I used the word because that's how the majority of people, occupied with the business of filling their bellies and keeping a roof over their heads, see a man of means who takes up a cause.”
“Is Shaftesbury a crank? He's devoted his entire life to checking the exploitation of five-year-olds by bastards like that sweep.”
She smiled, not cynically exactly but with resignation. “Shaftesbury is a kind of saint. You aren’t, and never could be.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said, disappointed at the line she was taking, “but the self-disgust I’ve felt at being on the wrong side is real enough.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that. Knowing you I wouldn’t have expected anything else, Adam.”
He said, thoughtfully, “I’m damned if I’d mind being thought a crank if I was listened to by a vocal section of the public. As a matter of fact, it did occur to me to turn over the business to Avery, and stand as a radical for one of the London boroughs.”
“That wouldn’t help at all,” she said. “In the first place, to win a seat at all would cost you far more than you could afford. In the second place, not being the holy sort, you’d lose your sense of purpose and throw away the chance you already possess of making your point.”
“What chance is that?”
She looked at him severely. “Why, this service, lad! This thing you’ve conjured out of nothing!”
Suddenly she began to speak with emphasis and conviction, addressing him as though he had been a stupid child, stuck on a slateful of sums and getting a string of wrong answers. “Do you discount your influence on the commercial ethics of the country at this very moment? Do you think you can employ three hundred men, including Keate's vanboys, without setting an example, good or bad, to others? Good God, man, didn’t it ever occur to you that you’re unique in the trade, that men like my father look up to you, and work over the odds for you, without looking for another sixpence in the wage packets every Saturday?”
“No,” he said, sincerely, “I didn’t know that. I thought myself a businessman, competing with other businessmen and much the same as them except that I’m more open to new ideas than they are.”
“That's precisely what I’m saying,” she said, “for there isn’t a man working for the network, from the Border down to the Wedge, who hasn’t directly benefited from these ‘new ideas,’ as you put it. Oh, I don’t mean your routes and schedules, and all the mere mechanics of the service. I’m talking about your approach to the people who work for you, and that's original in all conscience! Ask Catesby! Ask Lovell, over in Wales! Ask any of the waggoners in the Crescents how they would feel if you dropped the reins. They believe in you as I do and take a pride in their work—or most of them do—because they know that you know they exist, and are more than a pair of hands standing beside a machine in one of those damned factories. You’re known as a good gaffer everywhere your waggons roll, and here you are proposing to go join a debating society, or turn evangelist and snuffle round with a hymnbook and blankets for the poor! That isn’t a man's work, of the kind you’ve been doing this five years. With some of them it's no more than a means of catching Peter's eye at the Gate. Your ideas are your own, and they’re based on a sound set of rules. This mood, brought about by that boy who died in your chimney, doesn’t surprise me. It's what I would have looked for in a man of your parts, but for God's sake don’t let compassion make a fool of you. That would be a score for all the mastersweeps and millowners and sweatshop bullies who get the last ounce out of their people and take out their insurance in church every Sunday.”
It was as though he had suddenly ceased to breathe
stale, unprofitable air. He understood then that his instinct had not been at fault in going to such pains to seek her out and also that, whatever he did from here on, would be done with the assurance that had been a feature in the early days, when he had taken conscious pleasure in backing his own judgement. He got up and went down to the water's edge, watching the strong current break on the stones and eddy, like his gloomy thoughts, into the pools under the cutaway. The sun danced on ten thousand ripples and bubbles and peace lurked under every wavering shadow.
He heard her stowing the gear in the tool-box and the greys being snapped back into harness. Then she was standing beside the fire, covering the embers with earth, and he crossed to her and said, briefly, “That was worth the journey, Edith. Thank you, my dear,” and taking her hand raised it and kissed it, so that she looked quite bewildered for a moment before withdrawing it, saying, “That's a nice gesture, Adam, but it isn’t necessary. You would have arrived at the same conclusions yourself if you hadn’t been in your usual tearing hurry. You’ll ride alongside as far as Richmond?”
“I’ll ride beside you,” he said, and unhaltering the chestnut, hitched her and scrambled over the tailboard and through the curtains to the box. They rode the two miles into town in silence.
2
When she had shed her load, and met him by appointment outside the livery stable he said, “I’ll be crossing the Pennines into the Polygon, for I might as well go back to work from here. Where will you turn off?” She told him at the turnpike above Ripon, for she had calls to make on the way down. He said, in a way that forestalled discussion, “I’ll travel that far with you, and turn in the mare at Ripon. Then I’ll go down the Great Northern and find a connection with the North Western. I can sleep the night under the waggon, it's dry and I’m well enough used to it.”
Whatever she might have thought of this proposal she kept to herself and it was not until they were out on the open moor again, crossing a tract of wild, unsettled moorland cut about by innumerable streams, that she emerged from her shell again, pointing with the whip to a square outcrop of stone on their right, all that was left, she told him, of Middleham Castle, once the seat of the great Neville family. “Full of ghosts, is Wensleydale, and one of them royal.”
“Who was that?” he asked, sensing that the spell of this countryside, with its open sky, chattering rivers, and vast, elemental loneliness, was in her bones. She replied, lightly, “Ah, now, there's a tomfool question from a man who has earned the Queen's shilling. The last king we had. The last real king, that is. Richard, the one libelled by that liar Shakespeare, and others who shall be nameless. King Dick spent the happiest days of his life hereabouts and fell in love for good measure.”
“He was a blackhearted scoundrel, none the less, on a par with my father-in-law and the sweep Millward, wasn’t he?”
“Stuff and nonsense,” she said, “you’ve swallowed all that stinking fish they left lying about. I don’t know as he murdered his nephews, but I do know he loved England and died for it. Which is more than can be said of any of the misers and weaklings who succeeded him.”
Her jocular assessment of history interested him. He saw it as another facet of her character and now that he thought about it it was not so unlikely that she should reveal herself as a champion of Crouchback. He remembered that the man had been respected up here, and his habit of driving himself and his adherents was in keeping with her own drive and self-sufficiency. “Tell me more about him,” he said.
She told him then of Richard of York's associations with the area, how, as a sickly boy, he had been sent up here to train in the profession of arms, and had made himself not only the equal but the superior of all the other lads farmed out to learn their trade under the warlike Nevilles.
“He was nine when he arrived at Middleham, and thirteen when he left,” she said, “but he was a man for all that.” She gave him a steady, sidelong glance. “Your kind of man I like to think.”
“You said he fell in love. It must have been calf love?”
“Why? Children grew up earlier in those days. The more privileged they were the less they were coddled. That younger Neville girl, Anne, had a tiresome time of it. She was chased from pillar to post, in and out of sanctuary, and then disguised as a kitchenmaid when he eventually found her and married her.”
“Aye,” he said, indulgently, “I remember. She was a widow too, for he killed her husband at Tewkesbury, didn’t he?”
“Oh, he might have, in battle,” she said, carelessly, “but it was only a marriage arranged by the French woman. Margaret. Anne had no say in it.”
“Did she have in choosing her second husband?”
“No, but I like to think she preferred him to the son of an idiot. They both spent the happiest years of their life up here, and came back as soon as they could. I don’t fancy a man like that would stifle his nephews with a bolster. It's not in character, somehow.”
“That's Yorkist prejudice,” he said, jokingly, but she flashed back, “Oh, no it isn’t! The Yorkist kings were always prepared to fight for their crown, like the Stuarts. That German line we’ve been saddled with since are a poor lot. Look at our present Majesty, making a cult out of mourning.”
“If you had lost your man I daresay we should find you in mourning!”
She gave him another of her keen glances. “It so happened I did,” she said.
It was absurd, he told himself, but he experienced a pang of jealousy. It had never once occurred to him that she had been deeply attached to anyone. She always gave him the impression that she despised most men, and would be unlikely to surrender to one incapable of dominating her. “But maybe he did,” he thought, admitting to a positive curiosity about her past, “Maybe he was some surly, six-foot Yorkshire lad, who walloped her regularly, and this forthrightness of hers is a northcountry version of Victoria's lamentations.” “Well,” he said, as she readdressed herself to the team, “you can’t leave it there. I’ll be making guesses for the rest of my life.”
She said, noncommittally, “Matt was a sailor, mate and part-owner of a brig. A lad to be reckoned with was Matt Hornby. We were to be married the day he was home from a coaling run up to Leith. But his brig was lost off Holy Isle and he drowned, along with the rest of them.”
“How old were you then?”
“Rising twenty.”
“What was he like, Edith?’’`
“Like you in build. Big, strongly made and with ideas of his own.”
She seemed unwilling to vouchsafe more information and as they went creaking over the moor he thought about Matt Hornby, picturing him stumping ashore in jersey and sea boots, and sweeping her off her feet as she ran to greet him. It seemed an improbable picture. The only aspect of it that struck him as plausible was her silent battle to come to terms with the wreck of her hopes, and without knowing why this brought her closer. He said, suddenly, “They know where I am back in London and I got the impression they gossip about us. Will that annoy your father if he gets to hear of it?”
“Father and I go our own way,” she said, with a shrug, and then, “This marriage of yours; it seems a rum thing to fight about, a dead chimney sweep. Or maybe you didn’t tell me the full facts.”
“Now what the devil am I to make of that?”
“Whatever you like. I can give you the kind of advice you came looking for because I know what is important to you. But I’m not qualified to judge you as a husband, and I’ve never set eyes on your wife.”
“Then why confuse the two issues?”
“It isn’t me that's confusing them. Wasn’t that one reason you came looking for me?”
He said, thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t care to have to hide things from you, Edith. What do you want to know, exactly?”
“As much as you care to tell me.”
He told her than of the circumstances in which he and Henrietta had met and married, of the successful and unsuccessful aspects of the match, and the difficulty he had reconciling his dome
stic life with the demands of his business. He tried to do Henrietta justice, and made no attempt to excuse his own shortcomings, but admitted he was close to abandoning hope of finding in Henrietta the kind of maturity he had hoped for when she settled down and became the mother of two children. “I was thinking during the ride over here that this is more my fault than hers,” he concluded, “that I’ve spoiled her.”
“Aye, I’d already decided that,” she said, “but it was none of my business. They say she costs you upwards of four hundred a year in ribbons and bonnets, but having started on that tack you’ll have to abide by it, unless you want a scold on your hands.”
“And I daresay you think I’m begging further trouble settling her in a place the size of Tryst?” he said, but she replied, surprisingly, “No, I don’t. I should want that if I was in her place. It's fitting you should live in style, fitting for both of you,” and when he asked why she said that, having launched something new in the way of an enterprise, he was a natural inheritor of the kind of home the adventurers in the past had made for themselves out of the proceeds of piracies. “There are two changes I’d make if I was in your shoes,” she went on, “and the most obvious is to own your own acres. People like the Nevilles and Conyers have had their day. This one belongs to people like you, able to make their own way in the world. Most of the men who succeed in business build themselves a town house within a carriage drive of their counting houses, but that isn’t for you. Having found yourself a home why pay rent for it? No Yorkshireman would invest hard-earned brass in property he couldn’t lay title to.”
God is an Englishman Page 44
