Foreign Mud

by Andrew Wareham

  McKay was a sensible man and commented that it smacked of something for nothing, which was all very well but could not last for too long.

  “Everything has a price, Mr Jackson. If, for some inscrutable reason, there seems to be a windfall profit, then the wise man asks why. It seems to many that the drawback to this agricultural prosperity is that men and their families are forced from the land and have to find a place to live and work to do. For the moment, there is a call for hands in the North Country, where there are new coal mines and iron foundries and cotton mills, all grown out of nowhere, it seems. For those who will not go so far, there is the Army and the Navy. For the adventurous – America beckons.”

  “It all sounds very fine, Mr McKay. Where’s the catch?”

  “The rookeries in the big towns, Mr Jackson. The feckless do not seek employment, they swarm into the cities and create festering dens of criminality. You have not seen the hellholes which exist not half a mile from this warehouse, Mr Jackson – but you have observed that I keep men to protect my goods and I purchase the goodwill of others - gang leaders, not to put too fine an edge upon it! Good order is rapidly disappearing in this land, Mr Jackson, and that is the price of the new way of doing things!”

  I had vague recollections of Hogarth and Gin Lane – I had seen prints, I recalled of the debauched poor of fifty years previously. One of the books I had read in Ainslie’s Bombay house had plates showing Hogarth’s works. I commented to McKay that there seemed little new in riots and drunkenness in the streets.

  “Partly true, Mr Jackson. In Hogarth’s day, a few streets in the few large towns. Now, I assure you, many streets in every town of any size at all – and there are far more towns than there were. London alone has attracted huge numbers to it and many of them have no means at all, live at the border of starvation, waking up each day to empty bellies and pockets. I have heard it said that there are more than eight hundred thousand souls in London, and growing every year. It may be so that one tenth of the whole population of England dwells in London, and perhaps a half of the feckless are included in that number!”

  That seemed another, and more likely, reason for the raising of Fencibles and Volunteers. Amateur soldiers might not do much against the French - they would have a part to play in keeping down the Mob.

  “I must discuss the whole matter with Sir Alexander, it would seem, Mr McKay… There are implications in what you have said. Am I to remain a trader, do you think?”

  Mr McKay could not answer that question – he would not presume to imagine what might be in Sir Alexander’s mind.

  We plotted a route to Sir Alexander’s estate and decided to allocate two days to the journey.

  “Being England in the spring, it will likely rain and reduce you to five miles an hour, Mr Jackson. No more than sixty miles to traverse, but you cannot plan for that to take but one day. There are no good roads on your direct route. The best course might well be to take the Portsmouth road as far as Guildford and then by way of Alton to Winchester and north to Micheldever. Not a straight line by any means, but with the advantage that some of the roads will be of better quality. The Portsmouth road is well kept up, being military.”

  I hired a chaise and four horses and winced at the cost, working it out at seven shillings a mile. I compared it to travelling to Bombay and reckoned out that land travel came in eighty times more expensive than sea! That being said, I had chosen the costliest form of passage available – had I been content to sit in a carrier’s cart I might have paid less than one tenth as much. Whatever, there can be no doubt that road travel was prohibitively expensive in those days.

  The new steam railways seem to offer the solution to that – I understand that two or three pence a mile is the normal there. I might just persuade Sunny that we might venture onto the rails ourselves when we go up to London. She will not be inclined to adventure for her own sake – I shall play the old man’s card and beg indulgence of my whims… I shall report later on my success!

  The Portsmouth Road was one of the most travelled in the country, the port being the premier naval harbour in the whole of Great Britain. Private chaises, stagecoaches and wagons proliferated, as did herds of beef cattle being driven down to the slaughterhouses and the salters. I saw three separate gangs of road-menders busy in the miles from London to Guildford, repairing the damages of winter and doing their best to produce a carriageway.

  That said, the road was narrow, barely wide enough for two big drays to pass each other, and the surface was a long way from smooth. Where it was patched, the menders had used local stone to fill the holes, tamping down the top and crushing the upper two inches to gravel. In those parts where there was no rock naturally to hand, they brought in loads of brick and threw them down instead, the wheels of passing traffic rapidly crumbling the fired clay. The bulk of the road had been laid down in Roman times, giving the modern-day builders a firm base to work from. It said something about the country that we had yet to match the Romans’ skill in roadmaking!

  I spent the night in Alton, exhausted from the hours of bouncing in the chaise. Fred and my two servants were equally knackered from sitting forward and hunching up to give me space for my longer legs. I will confess that I did not give too much consideration to their comfort, being more concerned for my own.

  The following day’s travel was shorter, on worse roads. The sole virtue to be discovered was that part of the distance lay over the chalk, which was naturally better drained, the surface within reason hard rather than the bog of the clay lands. For much of the distance from Alton to Winchester the parishes had ‘repaired’ the track by throwing cut brush into the bigger mudholes. The chaise managed walking pace and little more, took a good three hours to traverse that part of Hampshire.

  I stared around me as we came within sight of Winchester and the fingerposts pointed to Twyford and Shawford, recognising the names of my boyhood. I could not remember the land, however – no bells rang. We stayed to eat a midday snap and took off north onto the downland, following a pair of white ruts across the turf which we were assured was the highway to Micheldever. The postboys were local – the postillions changed with the horses – and were happy that they were on the right track.

  “Goin’ up to that foreign bloke what’s full of the rhino, mister?”

  “Sir Alexander Ainslie’s manor, do you mean?”

  “Thass it, mister. Full of it, ain’t ‘e! Wipes ‘is nose on silk snotrags, don’t ‘e.”

  The boy seemed to regard that as the height of conspicuous consumption, the measure of the ultimate in wealth.

  We stepped up into the chaise, satisfied that we were to go to our correct destination – not always a certainty when road maps were rarities and not always accurate. The boy had one last question.

  “Oi, mister! Is them Chinks what you got with you?”

  “They are Chinese gentlemen, yes.”

  “Landlord said they was, that’s ‘owcome I asked. I thought they was supposed to be yellow?”

  “Not that I have ever noticed, lad. I have spent a good few years in Canton – which is in China – and I never saw yellow folk there. Tanned, perhaps. Nothing more.”

  “Buggered if I know, mister! What they say it for if it ain’t right?”

  I could not answer that question.

  The boy mounted his horse and called the ostlers to let go and led the chaise out of the inn yard and carefully through the crowded, narrow streets of the old city, uphill and away from the cathedral on one side and the Castle on the other.

  “Ancient, ain’t it, Master Giles!”

  Fred was impressed by the ambience of the city – no older than London but with all of its sights compressed into half a mile across and seemingly the greater.

  “A fine old place, Fred, as long as you do not have to drive these streets every day.”

  He laughed as he agreed.

  “Better to look at than live in, maybe, Master Giles. Where we going to settle down, sir?”

>   That was a good question. I was not at all sure that we were to do so.

  “Might be that we shall be back on our travels, Fred. Mr Ainslie – Sir Alexander as he now is – will have something to say about that, I don’t doubt. He must have something in mind for us.”

  Fred said no more. I knew that he had some doubts about Ainslie, did not wholly trust him to be an honest dealer. The voyage from Galle, where we had run into pirates in suspicious circumstances, had left him with questions about Ainslie’s probity. I was inclined to accept that he had found a use for me and thought me more valuable alive than dead.

  I suspected as well that he was an indulgent father, one who would give his little daughter anything she begged for… I had come to realise that Sunny had a child’s infatuation for me. It would not last, I believed, and I would not take advantage of it to do her harm – who could be cruel to such a lass? Thinking over that question, I suspected the answer might be any number of young men – objects like the late and unlamented Binks might abuse anybody for their passing amusement. I grew hot under the collar at the very concept!

  A strange man, Ainslie. He had no affection for the three sons of his first marriage, I knew. He had performed his duty to them, and had removed them from under his feet, sent them off to the new America, there to vegetate on their plantations, slave-holders making a living from cotton and tobacco and reposing in unthinking idleness, which was all they were fit for. I believed the three young men actually to be grateful to their father for setting them up as ‘gentlemen’, stalwarts of the plantocracy, pillars of the new Republic.

  Good luck to them and well done the old man – he had done the right thing. No doubt the remaining bulk of his wealth would descend to his little girl, far brighter and more able than the three sons put together. She deserved her good fortune.

  I thought no further – I was not a particularly perceptive young man.

  We topped a hill – a down, correctly, being on the chalk – and Ainslie’s manor was disclosed in all its glory, almost two hundred feet below in the wide dale, sheltered from storms and close to a clear stream. There was a band of woodland behind the house to the north, providing further shelter from winds that might whistle down the valley in winter. The trees were evenly spaced, an obvious plantation rather than natural growth, and a good century old, tall and mature beeches. The house itself was not of the greatest, perhaps a score of bedrooms, and as old as the trees, I thought. It was made in brick – chalk providing no natural building stone, other than flint for infill. The roof was tile, old red turned russet with the years. There was a stretch of lawns and rose garden to the front, below a terrace. It was a settled, comfortable, rich place where any man could sit back in contemplation of a life of successful labour.

  I estimated that it would prove confining within a month, prison-like before the first year was gone by – I was not ready yet to retire from the hurly-burly.

  The boys took the chaise down on the winding road that led to the front doors – a newly gravelled track, I noticed.

  I stepped down from the chaise and stretched in the sunshine, was greeted by a running little girl who reached up to grab me and hug me to her.

  “At last! We have been waiting forever for you to come home, Mr Giles!”

  “I have been busy in Canton and Bombay, Sunny. I should not be here now – I should be working in the Sugar Isles. I preferred to come back, however. How do you like England?”

  “It is cold and wet, all year round! It does not have a proper monsoon. It rains at random, and you never know what tomorrow will be like. As well, in winter, the days are short and in the summer, very long – it is not like Bombay at all!”

  Close to the equator, the days were about twelve hours long the whole year round. I looked down at her, laughing, saw that she was starting to grow up. Thinking on it, she could not be a lot less than fifteen. She grabbed my hand, led me up to the terrace where her father was waiting.

  “Sir Alexander! I hope I find you well?”

  Ainslie looked better for his new life, less tanned, obviously, but carrying a little weight rather than rake thin as he always had been. I disentangled my hand from Sunny’s and shook with her father.

  “Aye, better than I was in Bombay those last years. Too much fever there for a man as he grows older. You look well, Mr Jackson. Have you shut up shop in Bombay?”

  “I shall trade there, possibly, sir, but not in person. Mr Fong will act as agent for me and will be happy to move cargoes as he can. It might be, however, that he will accompany his lord to New York. Trade across the Atlantic might be a better occupation for my future.”

  “We will discuss that in due course, I do not doubt, Mr Jackson. It might be that we should consider alternatives to trade. We have made our pile from foreign mud and might be advised to consider other activities in future. I trust you can stay a few days, Mr Jackson? We could pay calls upon some of the locality and perhaps discuss possibilities with them. I have asked one or two questions and discover that the Jacksons of Shawford were once a leading Hampshire family. It might be possible to establish yourself back in your home country.”

  We strolled indoors, leaving Fred to deal with the postboys and oversee the pair of footmen who were attending to our luggage. I had given my measurements to a tailor at Mr McKay’s recommendation and was outfitted reasonably well for dinners and local balls, if such things were to be part of the agenda. No doubt the fashionable would have sneered at the cut of my new coats, but I would have sneered at their dainty ways so we were equal in my mind.

  “Little Sunny is glad to see you, Mr Jackson. She has been waiting for your return, increasingly impatient, I might add!”

  “Three or four years and her mind will turn to consideration of a husband, I don’t doubt, Sir Alexander. A girl’s mind turns from uncles to sweethearts about then, or so I believe.”

  Ainslie raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

  Sunny poked me in the ribs and gravely informed me I was too young to be an uncle.

  I wondered and said no more. I have since discovered that there is little to be gained by argument with her, so no doubt I was wise.

  We sat over a welcoming glass in the biggest withdrawing room, furnished in a way the locals no doubt thought exotic, displaying ivories and curios from Bombay and Canton. It seemed homely to me. I handed Sunny a little gift I had come across in Macao, a dragon in Imperial jade, deep in colour, the product of hundreds of hours of labour by a craftsman who had seen the figure in the twisted piece of stone and had brought it into existence with his fine chisels and knowledgeable hands. She was delighted, much to my pleasure.

  Ainslie took up the conversation as she ran off to find a proper place for ‘Draggy’.

  “You wrote me that you had been obliged to return to Canton, Mr Jackson. Did all go well there?”

  I told the tale, of how I had been used by the lord of the Triad and had been rewarded by him.

  “A great risk, Mr Jackson! I trust it received a commensurate reward?”

  I explained about Pearl River and my reluctance to go to sea in her.

  “I know there is money in privateering, Sir Alexander, but it is not my choice of occupations. I may still benefit from her activities, of course. I am glad to remain on land for the while.”

  “There are fortunes to be made at sea, Mr Jackson. There is an early death for too many of those who seek adventure in ships of war. It is not my choice of ways to make a living. You are wise to keep clear of the privateering lay, sir.”

  “I believe so, Sir Alexander. I must, however, give thought to what I shall do. I have placed my funds in Mr McKay’s hands for the year, as you appeared to imply might be wise. I must discover some sort of activity when the year is up, for I feel too young to remain in idleness.”

  “The Devil makes work for idle hands, Mr Jackson, as well ye will know. A man needs activity of some sort if he is to avoid mischief. I might well be able to make a suggestion or two for you over t
his next week.”

  I had expected that to be the case.

  Fred appeared and gave me the nod that the valet was waiting for me, all unpacked and ready.

  “Will you take a turn around the grounds for an hour or two, Mr Jackson? We can show you my new grandeur!”

  I strolled upstairs and was put into correct dress for the countryside, all as the valet had learned was appropriate. He had been trained in Bombay, at the feet of the valet to the Governor there, he informed me. He would learn more in England, I did not doubt, but he was very competent already. I had no name for him, other than his trade, which he had austerely informed me was proper in Canton and would do in England. He spent twenty minutes on turning me out to do him credit. Barber stood waiting with a comb to ensure that I was tidy as I went out.

  Ainslie took me out to peer into the stables first, that, he informed me, being proper behaviour for the gentleman.

  “Always seem quietly knowledgeable about horses, Mr Jackson. No need to make a great fuss but ye must show competent and interested. Damned expensive beasts, horses, and to be able to mount a coach and four and have half a dozen hacks besides demonstrates that either ye have money or ye are headed for the bankruptcy court! More than one of my neighbours is in that latter state, I would add. I have already received quiet invitations to purchase land – contiguous to my boundaries and sensible for me to take, ye will appreciate. I am in fact in process of buying in a few acres directly upstream of me. A couple of hundred pounds spent on the watercourse and there will be no more winter flooding and the land on either bank will go down to wheat rather than waste. There is no great money in anything other than grain, however. I shall not be buying in sheepwalks across the Downs.”

  “You do not think that the Land is a proper place for my money, sir?”

  “No! Not at all! Or mine. I might snap up a place to the south of Winchester that is likely to come soon to the market. I have it in mind for Sunny. When she marries, in five or six years, perhaps, she will want a place of her own. I can see to that for her. Will do. But that’s not investment, not the way to make more money.”