Victorian Dawn (A Poor Man at the Gate Series, Book 12)

by Andrew Wareham

  Verity debated again, came to the same conclusion.

  “Sir William is an outstandingly able man, my dear. He has an uneducated brain that could have been taken a long way had he been granted schooling, and he has made himself from, in effect, nothing. He was knighted by King George a while before you were born – Prinny, that is, not the old king – and has turned himself and his lady and his children into facsimiles of all that is best in gentlefolk. Have you heard of the navigators?”

  “The diggers of canals and the builders of the railways, Mama? They are very rough men, or so I am told… Are you to say that he was one of them?”

  “He was indeed! He and his navvy gang built the London yard and then he showed so clever that your father, Lord Andrews, made him the manager there – with some misgivings, I would add – and he progressed from success to success, and almost without a check. Now he is involved in sewerage projects and in the purchase and expansion of our own brickworks and the building of more steamships and who knows what besides. I would not be surprised if he added more than ten thousand pounds a year to the firm’s profits, possibly much more than that – and he is paid some of those profits himself, so he is becoming a rich man. He owns a small estate a few miles out of Town, and will quite possibly add another farm or two to it over the years. I must take you there of a morning – you would like to meet the lady who is his wife.”

  The Dowager was a little concerned that her daughter was too sheltered and had come to believe that birth and breeding was all when it came to human virtue; a conversation with Lady Rumpage would be good for her. It might well be wise to open her eyes to her own background, thinking on it.

  “You never knew your Papa, my dear, which was a pity, for he was a most remarkable gentleman. I have not met his like.”

  “Is that why you have remained a widow, Mama?”

  Verity had never posed that question, or any relating to it; the Dowager was taken by surprise.

  “I should imagine that it must be, my love. I have only in the whole of my life met the one man who could interest me, and stir my affections… I hope you may be as lucky as me to come across such a one, and not so unfortunate as to lose him too early. He was older than me, of course, and that is in no way important, you may find. He was known as the Iron Master, or so Society called him, which must tell you much.”

  Verity thought a few seconds, realising that the name was important.

  “He was a man of business, before he became a lord… No, the family still has the different firms, and they make us very wealthy, or so you have told me… so he became a lord because he was rich, Mama?”

  “In part. His first wife was a Masters, daughter to the Marquis of Grafham, and that helped no end to establish him – but making his millions from coal and iron helped no end! His great friend, Lord Star, came into his title in much the same way, except that he was a Cotton King.”

  “Both then were born commoners, Mama.”

  “They were. I would add that if you were to interrogate all of your acquaintance, and were to discover the whole truth of their ancestry, you would find few titles to be more than three generations old. We are all of us in England very new aristocrats; I believe that just eight of our noble families predate Charles II and the Restoration. We are not like Austria – our nobility is not ancient, and our country is alive and rich while theirs is dying fast. Observe Spain, for example, where their nobility is blue-blooded and their land is poverty-stricken!”

  “The two go together, you would say, Mama?”

  “Inevitably! The dead hand of the past creates a moribund land of the present. England is rich and powerful, and will remain so while it stays open to enterprise. Your father made himself from nothing – while men can do that then the country will profit.”

  Book Twelve: A Poor Man

  at the Gate Series

  Chapter Five

  “A letter from the Dowager, my lord. It is addressed to me, but is for your attention as well. She suggests that we might consider a family occasion for Christmas coming, ourselves and the Grafhams together it must be, for needing beds at Grafham Hall to accommodate the whole of our broods!”

  Robert gave the matter brief thought – he was not in the way of refusing the Dowager’s suggestions, they normally being uncommon sensible.

  “Does she give any particular reason why, ma’am?”

  Lady St Helens was fairly certain that the prime motive was to avoid the company of the Dowager’s tedious brother, otherwise inevitable at that time of year as mother and daughter were to overwinter in the West Country. She felt it might be tactless to offer that interpretation.

  “Perhaps she feels that the family is drifting apart to an extent, my lord.”

  “Well, that cannot be permitted, and she is a lady of rare perceptions after all. Will you write the invitations, ma’am, or should they come from my hand?”

  “Requests or commands, my lord? I shall send them, with a covering note to Joseph’s lady, she being a sensible young lady and well able to exercise her powers of persuasion. Little gain in my addressing Charlotte, of course! The Grafhams should be your task, my lord, face to face, I would imagine.”

  Robert agreed that he must; Thingdon Hall was too small to accommodate the whole family, slightly to his regret. He had considered an extension, the throwing out of one, perhaps two wings to the sides of the old manor house, had indeed commissioned a modern and increasingly famous architect to offer plans. The outrageous price demanded had caused him to change his mind – Portland Stone and Italian marble had been essential, it seemed; tiles must be bought from a special run at Coalport; internally, carpeting must be procured from Persia. The result would have been bills in the tens of thousands, Robert had feared.

  “I shall ride across today, ma’am.”

  The plans received an immediate check; the Grafhams were to spend the Festive Season in London in the company of Lord Rothwell.

  “A family party would be an excellent idea, however, Robert. Yourselves at Mount Street, of course; Sir Matthew and Lady Star to visit with James; Joseph and his family to stay with us all at Rothwell’s new London abode. Lady Massingham will never leave her seclusion, one gathers - I believe Rothwell has arranged rooms for her at Cheltenham Spa, and a lady to act as companion and to buy in her brandy – and the Massingham Town mansion is now his. There are bedrooms and to spare, it is an enormous place! Captain Hood will be invited to join us, in company with Margaret and the children, of course – such a bright pair of youngsters, those! The Dowager has her own Town house, and will no doubt wish to open it for the occasion. We could perhaps invite Lord Star as well?”

  Robert shook his head – the Star clan, or as many as were available in England at the time, gathered in Lancashire each year.

  It seemed good and Robert returned to Thingdon Hall with the plan.

  “Very sensible, my lord. We might give some thought to an entertainment while we were all in London. Not a ball, not at that time of year, but a large dinner and music to follow, perhaps. There may well be a maestro or two in town from Vienna or Paris who might be prevailed upon to perform, and there is always Herr Moscheles, who now seems a fixture in London. A note to Mr Michael will discover what is possible. It would serve as well to inform the knowing that your days of rural seclusion are at an end. No doubt James will be able to persuade some of his political acquaintance to attend.”

  Robert bowed to the inevitable – his lady would take charge of the business and his function would be limited to giving his agreement and the necessary drafts upon his bank. He realised then that she much approved of his return to the world of business and had been distressed by his apparent retirement from active life; ill-mannered of him, he discovered, never to have considered her feelings in the matter. He debated how best to apologise.

  “The man Conroy, my lady – you know that he almost caught me out with a rather ingenious scheme for a railway company? You brother Nathan tells me that he has been en
tangled in a scheme to extract gold in the Irish mountains. It seems that he has been shown a stream with gravel banks that contain flecks of the precious metal and has been persuaded that there is a great lode high on the mountainside from which the spring arises. He has committed himself heavily, with money that he does not seem actually to possess. The projectors are now simply biding their time, waiting the perfect moment to collapse all upon his head.”

  Miriam was puzzled – was there gold or was there not?

  “There is, but in tiny quantities spread through the screes that cover the hilltops. The rain washes it out and it concentrates in the watercourses. One man working a stream may extract a few ounces a year and make a respectable living for himself; fifty men in a mine will make almost nothing apiece. Mr Conroy, it seems, has entered into a grandiose undertaking with a steam engine and underground shafts, committing his signature with reckless abandon. Foolish man!”

  “What will happen? Why do the projectors wait?”

  “When the King dies Conroy will propose his plan that he should wed the widowed Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mama, and then stand in regency to the new monarch, she being weak-minded and under-educated. He is to demand an earldom, one is told, and a grant of two hundred thousand pounds in order to maintain his dignity. He has the expectation of taking the royal powers back from Parliament and becoming the ruler of Great Britain, in the same way that Godoy, the Prince of the Peace, was to the Spanish king of his day; no doubt his earldom would soon be changed to a duchy, or more likely a princedom!”

  “But he will in fact be disgraced as a bankrupt!”

  “Exactly so, my dear! All of his plans will come to naught! As they should, indeed! The sole concern is that he may have a bank in his pocket – he might have spoken to one of the old firms and made certain offers in exchange for financial guarantees.”

  “My father will have made quite certain that none of his close acquaintance will have truck with Mr Conroy; what of the Gentile bankers, Robert? Will not some of them be inclined to aid Mr Conroy so as to spite the Jews?”

  Robert shrugged his shoulders – he did not know for a certainty.

  “Unlikely, I believe, for money has no observable religion and all bankers have a distaste for the crudely dishonest. But an old-established country bank with solid reserves might take the chance in exchange for a putative patent of nobility: if a Mr Smith of, let us imagine, the Old Bank of Bristol, sees the prospect of becoming Baron Smith of Bristol, or even perhaps the Earl of Bristol, then he might be very tempted. But there is no word of such, and few secrets remain wholly unknown in our world.”

  She was satisfied.

  “Will he grace a debtor’s prison, do you think?”

  “No. Too big a risk, ma’am! He knows of any number of indiscretions committed by our eminent men, and would undoubtedly tell all to the newssheets if he were committed. He will be given a knighthood, possibly a baronetcy, and will be ordered simply to leave London and the public eye – but the whisper will be made as well that dead men tell no tales…”

  “So he will live in obscurity, harassed by bum-bailiffs threatening to take him up and cast him into debtor’s prison. Will such a man tolerate that existence?”

  Robert was not in the slightest concerned what the man might do.

  “He will live in, as you say, obscurity, or die in the limelight. Should he attempt to breach the conditions set upon him then his lifespan would be regrettably curtailed; that I do not for a moment doubt. Government in Britain tends to be libertarian, except when it is not; break the rules that have been universally agreed and the noose or the assassin’s bullet will be instantly resorted to. Mr Conroy has been close to the processes of government for many years; he must know that if he is seen to act outrageously then he will be instantly put down.”

  It was very strange to Miriam.

  “I shall make arrangements for the festivities, Robert. I understand that.”

  Joseph found the invitation to spend the Christmas in London very welcome; he needed to talk to Robert and to the Dowager, and would be willing to accept advice from any member of his family, in fact.

  The problem was the children; more precisely, their upbringing.

  They were not to go to school, that he was determined upon. They were of above average cleverness and would not fit in well at any of the great schools, except Winchester, perhaps, for being too brainy for their peers to tolerate. They had been brought up from the earliest age to value learning and hard work; they thought it natural to excel and Joseph could remember from his own shortened schooldays that nothing enraged the bullies more than ability and displayed merit. To make matters worse, they were of a scientific and mathematical bent and the schools offered nothing other than the Classics and the tedious imitation of Greek ‘style’.

  They had tutors and were advanced in their mathematics already, the two oldest especially so, but Joseph was now coming to fear that they were being made reclusive, happier with books than people. How were they best to meet with other youngsters, to learn to mix in society?

  Joseph rather feared that the sole answer was a landed estate where they could walk and ride and even shoot and inevitably come into contact with their neighbours of similar rank. They could at the moment ride job-horses from the local livery stables, but their company was hardly to be drawn from the upper ranks of the country. He did not want to see his offspring on close terms with the sons and daughters of the small businessmen of the town, the sort of people who might become their employees but hardly their equals.

  There was the problem as well that the bulk of the local population still remembered the disaster, the death of three score and more of men due to what could kindly be called carelessness; many stated it to have been negligence. It was fortunate that the dead had been navvies, men drawn from all over the country to work for the high wages of an exhausting and dangerous job; not being from local families there was far less concern at their demise. Even so, the occasional cry of ‘butcher’ was to be heard and that would eventually upset the children, unless, and possibly worse, they came simply to ignore it.

  He did not wish to purchase an estate and become caught up in the ancient world of agriculture, to become part of the Land. It would demand too much of his time and waste too much of his capital; he had better and more profitable demands upon him. He suspected that an answer might be to take the tenancy of an estate, and that was not impossible but was far better done on recommendation than by using the services of a lawyer. Lord Rothwell was a possible source of an answer – he now had the ordering of estates over much of the country, might well have an answer in his hands.

  Joseph also had the lesser problem of his eldest daughter’s future; as a child she was permitted to be a prodigy, to have an intellect and to use it, but as a young woman Society would be unforgiving of any tendency on her part to think and to do. A young miss was to be expert in flower-arranging and dancing; she was to play the pianoforte prettily and perhaps produce water-colours that showed some, but not too much, talent; she was not, however, to display mathematical skills, or to have an interest in the sciences. Joseph was sure that his Mary would be far too interested in her studies to become a social butterfly, which was not a disaster as far as he was concerned, but left the problem of how she would occupy herself. There was no university that would accept a woman student and the very thought of a female engineer in a business would give rise to howls of derisory laughter. She would not fit anywhere, he feared. The best possibility he could imagine saw her hidden away in a secret laboratory where she might work on the development of steam engines and such for the family firms, all to be unveiled as the work of her brothers or others of their employees; the worst was to envision her driven eccentric by the tedium of her existence.

  Joseph did not want advice, he discovered; he needed it.

  His wife, Mrs Andrews, was fully aware of the nature of his worries for the children and was, very quietly, pushing him in a proper d
irection. The suggestion of a tenancy had been hers, made idly and in passing when she had observed that there were some remarkably low types to be discovered frequenting the livery stables where she occasionally accompanied the children.

  “Do you know, Joseph, I actually heard one to turn around and say – I doubt I can imitate the young lady’s diction accurately – ‘ee, Mary, lass, art thee still to perch up on that fancy-dan side-saddle thing of thine?’ On observation, I discovered the child, not more than of ten years fortunately, to be straddling her pony! Appalling!”

  No young lady could ride other than side-saddle; that was a given.

  Joseph was both surprised and shocked that any parent could bring himself to tolerate such a horror; his girl must not be exposed to such company, he fully agreed. That meant to take her away, physically, from the propinquity of such people. He had been considering a letter to Robert, or to the lawyer, Mr Michael, when Lady St Helens’ invitation reached him. He agreed immediately that the whole family must meet in London.

  Lord Rothwell was very happy to be part of the family jollities; they would come immediately after what he expected to be a very trying month in Leicestershire.

  The Massinghams had a large estate sprawled across the hills to the north of Melton Mowbray, in the very heart of hunting country; the pursuit of the fox was all in those parts. Lord Rothwell had no particular objection to people who chose to don fancy dress and then ride across the countryside in the wild pursuit of vermin, though he thought it an amusement better suited to the lesser squirearchy than to the true gentleman, but he saw no reason at all why his estates should finance the procedure. He had discovered that he was, in effect personally, paying for the upkeep of two packs – the dog pack and the bitch - and no fewer than eight hunt servants, forty-eight hunters and the stable yards they dwelt in. First enquiries had disclosed that the hunters had originally been the product of a stud but that none had been sold in recent years, his lordship having announced that he was ‘no gypsy horse-coper’; they were now loaned out to any of the local young gentlemen whose income did not permit them to maintain their own string.