by John Creasey
‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ declared Deborah.
‘I am not shocked but I am surprised,’ Francis replied. ‘I believed you loved this place.’
‘John came to love it.’
‘And you loved it only because of that? Ruth,’ Francis went on, getting up and drawing close to his sister-in-law, ‘you are a most unusual woman, but reasonable also. Will you ponder your decision at least long enough for us to sleep on it?’
‘You’ll never bribe her to change her mind,’ Deborah declared. ‘That’s a thing you’ve never learned, Francis - the good are the most stubborn people on earth. Did you ever hear of a martyr in a bad cause?’
Quite suddenly James began to laugh, and his mother followed; soon all of them were laughing.
James spent a few minutes in his mother’s room before going to his own, staying long enough to assure her that whatever decision she made he would support her. In fact, the only anxiety he felt was about Henrietta, but even that did not weigh enough to prevent the best night’s sleep he had had for some days. Yet the next morning he was up before the others, striding through the grounds - until suddenly he realised with a shock that he had forgotten Johnny.
But his mother could not have forgotten her youngest child. Had some arrangements been made for Johnny’s future? Or did she expect to be able to keep him bv her when she laboured? Utterly confused, James stood by the little stream watching the early-morning mist rising almost invisibly before he hurried back to the house. Soon, they were all at breakfast in a pleasant room overlooking the hillside. Dust was already rising as the first stagecoach of the day from London approached at what seemed even from there a wild speed. That was a sight which, a few years before, Johnny had loved to see. He would rush down towards the stagecoach, pointing a wooden gun and crying in his unmistakable voice, ‘Stand and deliver! Stand and deliver or I shoot!’
‘No, Jamey,’ his mother said, ‘I had not forgotten Johnny.’ There was a strange expression on her face.
‘Then what is to happen to him?’
‘His father and I did not attempt to deceive ourselves,’ Ruth Furnival replied. ‘We knew that our time together would be limited, and we discussed my need to serve. We agreed that Johnny should be cared for by one of his uncles or aunts. Because John had left the House of Furnival there is no reason to deprive Johnny of its benefits. That is one reason why he was sent so early to school. Had there been more time to talk, my son, you would have been told of this.’
‘It is not important whether I knew,’ James replied, and yet he had a sense of hurt. His mother could have written to him while he had been away; he had a right to know what was happening to members of his family, especially to Johnny of whom he was inordinately fond. It was on the tip of his tongue to make some comment when he reminded himself that his mother had suffered too great a loss to be harassed because of his stung pride. Lightly he substituted, ‘But it would be interesting to know what else my absence has kept from me.’
To his surprise his mother looked away, and he saw Francis draw his brows together as if at some distasteful prospect. Had his remark been so sharp as to earn their disapproval? Only Deborah, who was slicing a large steak on her platter, appeared oblivious of any undercurrents.
‘There is one other thing which has been kept from you,’ Ruth admitted slowly.
‘About Johnny.’
‘Yes, about Johnny.’
‘I should be very glad to hear it.’
‘You may be very sorry to hear it,’ replied his mother, ‘but you would have been told and indeed consulted had you not been away. As it was, I believe I was glad you were not here.’ She paused, and when James said nothing, she went on: ‘Your brother has always been self-willed and intractable. You well know that at one time only you were able to make him behave; you were the one person among us all whom he would heed. When you went away to your studies, this wilfulness became much more pronounced. He began to run wild, tormented his sisters, defied us, and spent much of his time with lads in the village, always the ringleader in escapades that were dangerous and caused much distress and trouble. Because of who he was and because countryfolk often have more tolerance of the waywardness of the young, he escaped severe punishment. When many a lad would have been taken before the justice, Sir Mortimer Tench, Johnny was brought home for correction. But on one occasion when he had, with some others, trapped a fox and let it loose in a farmyard with the gates closed so that there resulted a great slaughter of fowl, he was taken before the justice. Indeed, that is how Beth met her betrothed, who was given the task of bringing him back here. For a while after this Johnny was more subdued, but before long he was at his tricks again.’
‘You make him out a little monster!’ protested James, horrified.
‘He is a little monster,’ Deborah declared.
‘Aunt Deborah—’ James began hotly, only to be stopped when his mother stretched out a hand and touched his arm.
‘There were additional and even stronger reasons for sending Johnny to the Gordon School, where there are many others of his own age, activities which will absorb his high spirits, and a strict code of discipline. Had you been here I am sure you would have agreed that this was the best course.’
‘I must say I wish I had been told,’ James said. ‘I might have come back and brought influence to bear on him.’
‘At sacrifice of your own good and your own opportunities,’ his mother replied.
‘A man has a right and a duty to help a member of his family!’
‘A mother has a right and a duty to do what she believes best for her children,’ Francis interpolated. ‘This your mother did, James, both for Johnny and for you. She consulted Johnny’s father to the full. This matter was discussed at much length, and I for one have no doubt of the wisdom of the course that was taken. Johnny is a headstrong child who is maturing at remarkable pace.’
‘He is a little monster,’ declared Deborah once again.
‘I am sorry but I cannot sit here and listen to such words about my brother,’ James declared, rising to his feet. ‘I will ask you to excuse me.’
Deborah leaned back in her chair.
‘You won’t get anywhere if you don’t face facts, Jamey,’ she declared.
‘But if I am not satisfied that they are facts, ma’am?’
‘James, your Aunt Deborah and I must return to London later in the day and afterward I have no doubt that you will have much to discuss with your mother,’ Francis put in. ‘I urge you to endeavour to see this situation without heat. And I hope you will not leave us at this juncture for I would like to talk to your mother about her own plans and it would be helpful if you were present.’
Reluctant to create a more difficult situation, James drew his chair back to the table. A hundred questions burned through his mind, but all his training told him that Francis was right and he should take time in which to consider the news dispassionately. By now, moreover, he was able to accept the justice of the implication that he had been away in his own interests and could hardly expect family decisions to have been postponed until his return.
‘So you have slept on my plans,’ Ruth remarked, turning to Francis.
‘Yes, sister Ruth, I have slept on them. May I ask you some - a very few - questions?’
‘Indeed you may.’
‘Do you love St. Giles?’ asked Francis.
‘Greatly, yes.’
‘Is your reason for desiring to leave due to the pain of its association with John?’
‘In no way,’ Ruth Furnival replied without hesitation.
‘Have you a great love for London?’
‘Affection perhaps but no great love. Brother Francis, may I explain that to serve one must go where the need exists, and there is great need in London for work of charity among the newborn. Many are left to die, as many are born out of wedlock to young women who are then never likely to find any life outside a brothel. It is a known truth, sir, that mothers kill their babes because
they cannot suckle or feed them, and the parish authorities do nothing to prevent this, not wishing to spend funds on keeping them alive in misery.’
‘Oh, I don’t dispute what you say for one moment,’ Francis declared. ‘In fact, I can tell you that in the year 1750 there were more than three thousand foundlings left in the streets and alleys. It is said that most of those who do find homes of any kind are taught to steal as soon as they can walk. The situation is a grievous and shameful one; and the foundling hospitals are already overcrowded. Nor are they properly staffed, and they are situated in parts of London where smallpox and cholera are most likely to originate.’
‘One must accept the situation which exists and try to help as best one can,’ Ruth rejoined.
‘I do not think that is the proper philosophy for the wife of John Furnival,’ said Francis, but the tenderness in his expression eased the words of any sting. ‘He would insist on changing the situation.’
‘While nevertheless overworking to alleviate conditions within that situation!’
James had never seen his mother more animated.
‘True enough,’ agreed Francis, placing some honey on a crust of bread. ‘I believe there is a way in which you can do both.’ He popped the morsel into his mouth, thus leaving time for Ruth or one of the others to comment, but no one did.
Something in Francis’ manner suggested that he was wholly confident that what he had to propose would appeal to his sister-in-law but it was difficult to imagine what it was, and clearly Ruth was as baffled as James. Deborah, who had finished her steak, was now eating bread and honey with intense application, as if nothing that had been said affected or interested her; perhaps it did not.
‘I shall be most happy to hear of such a solution,’ Ruth Furnival said at last.
‘Very well, I will submit it for your consideration! Instead of going to London to alleviate the sufferings of a trifling number of foundlings brought to places we know are already overcrowded, why do you not help to create a foundling home here at St. Giles? In this house. The conditions are well-nigh perfect, and additional buildings could be erected at little cost. You would find foster mothers and nurses eager - aye, anxious! - to work here, far away from London. You would be able to have a resident doctor and yet be so close to London that more experienced doctors and surgeons would always be available. You would have—’
‘Francis,’ interrupted Ruth very quietly and deliberately, ‘are you saying that the House of Furnival would finance such a home?’ She was pale, and a hand which rested on the table trembled slightly.
‘I believe that it would, yes. If there were some legal impediment or other objection, I would myself finance—’
‘We could invest the necessary money.’ Deborah cut across her husband’s words. ‘What Francis could not afford, I could.’ She stared belligerently at Ruth as if defying her to refuse.
James, astounded, looked from Deborah to Francis and back to his mother and saw what he had not seen in his life before: tears spilling from her eyes.
Beth and Henrietta were back and stood at the gates with James and their mother as Francis and Deborah drove off with their own pair, brisk in a sultry morning’s air in which rain threatened; rain had been falling on and off for several days and there were reports of huge thunderstorms in the West Country and in the Midlands. A streak of lightning showed vivid in the sky to the north but the thunder which followed was distant and overhead the sky was blue. Beth was full of excitement at plans for the wedding, now only two months away, and James left his sisters together while he went up to his room and stood looking at the wooded hillside where a hawk hovered and swooped downward.
The pleasure and excitement he shared with his mother about the future of this house was subdued by the burden of other problems.
When he had come here he had been concerned with only himself. Now there was the problem of Johnny. Surely the boy could not have changed as much as had been suggested. And even if he had, should he, James, acquiesce in the others’ plans for him? He was worried, too, about Henrietta’s future - it was almost as if his mother was planning a life in which her children had no part. At any other time he would have talked to her frankly, but the sight of her tears at the breakfast table had told him clearly what Aunt Deborah had confirmed when they had been left alone for a few moments.
‘Your mother has been living in a state of high tension which is bound to cause a collapse or an outburst of some kind. Be kind to her, Jamey.’
Yet outwardly, once the paroxysm had ended, Ruth had been almost her old self again and obviously pleased at the prospect of making a home for foundlings in the house she had learned to love.
There was a great deal James did not understand but he had no doubt of the basic goodness of Francis and the kindliness of Deborah.
He was contemplating this when he heard footsteps outside his door, and then heard Henrietta say, ‘You are so excited I declare I do not know how you can wait two months!’
‘Everything is so wonderful,’ Beth said. And then in a voice pitched in a lower key, ‘If only Johnny does not spoil it.’
James stood motionless for a moment as if struck with an axe, and then strode towards the door, but as he opened it that of another room closed and both girls were lost to sight. He fought the temptation to go to them and turned to a spiral staircase which led down to the back of the house and to a door into the walled garden. He strode through this, then set off at a furious pace across the fields. How could Johnny spoil Beth’s marriage?
He was fulminating over this and at the same time warning himself that he must be dispassionate, must review the situation as an intellectual, not an emotional, problem, when he saw a horseman leave the highway and turn in the direction of the house. He was a man in his middle thirties, James hazarded, wearing no hat, and with fair hair blown wild in the wind; judging from the lathered sides of his horse he had ridden a long way.
James hurried back to the house to meet the stranger, but when he arrived he found the man already waiting by an open front door and a maid’s voice sounding clearly:
‘I will tell Lady Furnival that you are here.’
Ruth arrived at the door as James approached from the side. The stranger bowed to her and spoke almost at once.
‘Lady Furnival, I am grieved to bring you harassing news. I am a master at the Gordon School and have my credentials in my pouch. My task is to inform you and the parents of four other students that your son and theirs ran away from school two days before the river pageant and have not been traced beyond London. It is my hope that your son has come here.’
Ruth closed her eyes and seemed glad of James’s steadying arm as he stepped to her side; the rider drew the back of his hand across his sweaty forehead and waited for her answer.
‘This is most disturbing news,’ she said at last. ‘No, he is not here, sir. But you will have ridden a long way and need rest and food. Will you not come in and recover from the journey? And if you will, tell us what makes you think my son went to London.’
‘The evidence was conclusive,’ James said to Francis when he reached Furnival Tower House late that afternoon. ‘Johnny was leader of the truants and they made it clear to their fellows that they were going to visit the river pageant. The messenger talked with an innkeeper at the Kent Road Turnpike and identified the five chiefly by describing Johnny. It’s a thousand pities the boy looks so much older than he is - although the innkeeper swears he would not serve them with beer, simply gave them bread and cheese and sent them on their way. This was in the early afternoon of the day of the pageant.’
‘How can we search for him in London?’ Francis asked in a harsh voice. ‘Who can possibly find them if they do not want to be found?’
‘If I may suggest it, uncle,’ said James, ‘Mr. Henry Fielding’s men are the best trained in London and have no doubt he would immediately organise a search for Johnny. He would, however, require funds to use as bribes and persuasion to loosen the tongues of
watchmen, turnpikemen and their like.’
‘He may name his own sum,’ said Francis briskly, ‘and not a moment should be lost.’
‘It is an opportunity to prove our worth such as we have seldom had,’ Henry Fielding declared as soon as he heard the request. ‘I will ask my brother John to take from you a description of your brother and have him send this description, printed in a pamphlet, to all parish constables, watchmen, trading justices, alehouses - yes, and bawdy-houses, too. I shall be disappointed and surprised if the boy is not found, with his friends, in forty-eight hours.’
Only an hour later, the blind brother of the magistrate raised his head and declared, ‘This description might well be of a younger John Furnival - the father, not the son.’
‘There could be no better way of describing him,’ James declared.
‘Then we shall have no difficulty at all in finding him and I do not think there need be the expense or publicity of a printed notice. We can spread this by word of mouth. With the proper use of fifty pounds, by tonight a hundred men and by tomorrow night a thousand will be on the lookout for the boys. Will you see that the House of Furnival is made aware of this?’
