Foreign Mud

by Andrew Wareham

  I thought there was a certain gleam in his eye when he talked of his daughter’s marriage; I said nothing then.

  “They tell me of fortunes being made in iron in this country. Sir Alexander.”

  “Aye, and in coal and to a lesser extent, canals. I have bought partnerships in a dozen iron foundries, all of them busy in cannon and muskets as well as ordinary iron goods. We have a war that don’t look as if it will go away these many years and I shall take my profit from it. There is a shortage of money in this country the while, Mr Jackson. The man who can drop gold into a firm will look for twenty per centum, at a minimum. I have put more than a hundred thousand into my foundries!”

  I was within reason certain that was no more than a fraction of his wealth.

  “What I have in mind, Mr Jackson, is to buy into good land in the States, in the profitable parts. While I was looking at settling those sons of mine, I discovered much about the new country. There is a shortage of cash money there as well. A man with half a million of their dollars to set to use might put himself into any number of pretty little bargains. Down in their more southern parts, not in what they call New England, there are plantation lands going begging for lack of a little hard cash, and there is word of coal and iron up in their mountains, the properties to be bought for a song.”

  It was clear what he wanted of me. I was not at all sure that I wanted to oblige him. America was a long way distant and I had wandered too much in recent years. There was much, in my opinion, for spending a few years in England, my roaming days over.

  Little did I know of what fate had in store for me – my peripatetic days were hardly begun!

  From the stables we walked a couple of hundred yards through the woodland to the bottom of the scarp face, looking up to the Downs.

  “I extend two miles up to the north, Mr Jackson, and the better part of three miles west of here, all sheepwalk and hardly profitable, although the price of wool is slowly climbing. I expect it to rise more – there is word of new spinning machinery which may increase the demand for fleeces.”

  He led me back through the beeches on another path out at an angle away from the house, coming to the head of a of valley little more than a quarter of a mile long and less wide.

  “Four of these, Mr Jackson. Flat lands and protected and south-facing and within reason well-watered. Five hundred acres between them of best wheatfields. Worth thirty shillings an acre to me, which is less than half as much as I can earn with the same money up north in the iron foundries. My richest land and bringing in seven and a half per centum! That’s why I shall be putting little more of my money into the Land. The squires locally seem to think they are rich these days – yokels who know nothing of money!”

  They haven’t changed. Damned nigh fifty years later and they still think that they are wealthy. They will learn. The Corn Laws are going to go soon – no keeping them. When they go, the price of wheat will be halved in the space of two years, maybe less. Then won’t they wail as their incomes disappear! Won’t affect me – I have been putting the bulk of my money into industry for more than forty years. I keep the acres here because I like the country life and it’s handy to grow our own foodstuffs. We shall continue in that way, unless young Fred makes a fool of himself when I’m gone. Hard for him to do much else, considering it.

  I’m putting my money where it will do some good, this year. Buying up land on the docks at Liverpool and Bristol. Deepwater wharves where they are available and with space for grain warehouses behind them. There will be merchantmen by the score bringing in wheat within five years, and I shall own the grain-handling at our two biggest western ports. Easy to make money if you have some already and you have a brain to think with!

  We ambled in with no more said about business and parted to dress for dinner. Ainslie’s Eurasian wife made her appearance then – she was much in the habit of hiding away from all visitors. She did not look Indian and in any case, I would not have cared if she had. I greeted her politely and kindly, as ever, and received a smile and a few words from her.

  “Sunitra tells me you have bought her a beautiful piece of jade, Mr Jackson.”

  “It was to hand in Macao, ma’am. A business acquaintance had it on his shelves and was only too pleased almost to give it away, in hope of sweetening me in our deals.”

  She did not believe me. She also did not care, having long since decided that she approved of me. Why, I did not know. I think it was because she much disliked the sons of the first marriage and found me a refreshing change from them.

  We ate and talked and spent a quiet evening catching up with each other.

  Ainslie and I sat over a last glass of brandy before we retired, still chatting.

  “If you wish, Mr Jackson, we could drive a few miles south of Winchester, on the river, to look at the property I am considering there. In the morning?”

  I agreed, obviously.

  Chapter Ten

  Ainslie displayed his equipage in the morning – four matched bays behind a light and well-sprung travelling carriage, a private post-chaise and equipped for comfort. The four horses were almost identical, the same height to an inch and their coats unmarked and precisely the same shade.

  “No sense being a nabob if you don’t announce the fact, Mr Jackson!”

  The little I knew of prices suggested he had spent the better part of a thousand on that rig.

  “Handsome horses, sir.”

  “Took months to find them – not easy to pick up a matched team. I live in terror of one stumbling and breaking a leg. Impossible to replace one of them.”

  “Now that you have them, almost too risky to actually use them, it seems, sir!”

  He laughed, acknowledging a hit.

  “Footman up behind and a postillion of my own. They know where we are to go this morning.”

  Using a chaise meant that there was no driver within hearing range. Any conversation was certainly private, the footman, Jenkins, being on the step behind and out in the open air.

  “Good man, Jenkins. He was a sailor, a gunner, and a powder charge blew up close to him. Half deaf but completely reliable. He has a pair of pistols and a short carbine tucked away in the dry, in a little box to his front. Don’t expect ever to use them, not in these parts, it ain’t as if we were in Ireland, but it’s pleasant to be certain sure.”

  We stepped up and sat on the bench, upholstered in the best of suede leather and well cushioned.

  “A bare fifteen miles to travel, Mr Jackson. Could do it in an hour with these horses, if I wanted to tire them out. We shall take more than ninety minutes and rest them a couple of hours before we return. Meeting my attorney there and a representative of the seller, so we shall be two hours at the very least in our business. Untidy affair, in fact. The current owner has been locked away for false pretences, a minor offence. There are more charges facing him and I much suspect he will face the capital sentence before the Law is finished with him; I shall be annoyed if he don’t, in fact! Thing is, if he hangs then all of his property will be sequestered to the Crown and will be sold off to a favourite for a pittance. If I get in now, before he faces trial on the more serious charges, I may purchase with a good title and retain the property. If he is placed in dock before the transfer is complete, then I may lose out. Some celerity is demanded, and haste is anathema to lawyers!”

  “I had thought that gold in the hand would always hasten the heels of the legal profession, sir.”

  “It will, too, Mr Jackson! The footman has a small valise tucked away and I shall bleed gold before this morning is out. I want an exchange of contracts within the day, which is unheard of, of course. Nonetheless, I believe it to be possible. In the normal way of things, contracts are to be handwritten by the lawyers’ clerks and compared, word for word, one with the other. I have arranged for a pair of copyists – ancient dominies, schoolteachers without places – to do that drudgework in advance and thus save the clerks the better part of three weeks of unnecessary tedium. The
y will have less excuse to be dilatory as a result.”

  I admired his ruthless willingness to break with tradition.

  “Might it be possible to run off blank contracts at a printery, sir? A standard contract with spaces for the necessary variables to be filled in would save a deal of time. You might be able to sell them to the legal trade.”

  He was much struck by this innovation, thought that he might tout the idea to his own attorney, a young man and open to novelty still.

  It occurred to me that a lawyer who was willing to at least bend the rules in a novel fashion would be useful to Sir Alexander. He had cut his teeth in the piratical atmosphere of country trading in the Orient and might not find it easy to adapt to the more restrained ways of England; as I understood it, crime was equally prevalent but less public in business here.

  “It is unusual, is it not, for a country gentleman to be taken up for a felony, Sir Alexander? The little I recall of the breed says them to be stuck-in-the-mud respectable.”

  “This gentleman is not your ordinary run of squire, Mr Jackson. Anything but! He was a speculator in canals before he took the estate. More accurately, he was in the way of selling shares in canals to the unsuspecting. I doubt that any of his projects actually got as far as the building stage. He was a rogue all of his days, Mr Jackson, the more easily later for having picked up the estate that made him appear respectable. He was in fact taken up only for making the mistake of trying to sell to me!”

  That was entertaining – in the extreme. A rogue would have to get up early in the morning to take advantage of Sir Alexander.

  “Who was this foolish fellow, sir? What’s the tale?”

  The scheme had been entirely rational on the surface of it. The enterpriser had produced some pretty maps showing how isolated Southampton was from the rest of the country. The Itchen Navigation – the oldest working canal in England – stretched from Southampton to Winchester and stopped there. There was no connection inland to the rest of the country. The plan was to extend the Navigation north to the Thames near Reading, sending out arms, tributaries one might say, to Salisbury on the west and Guildford to the east. The leg towards Guildford would make use of the Itchen itself, would be easy to cut.

  I grinned, admiring the simplicity of the scheme – it seemed logical and attractive at first sight. If one ignored the tall chalk hills in the way, there was much to be said for it.

  “Part paid shares, I presume, sir?”

  “Naturally, Mr Jackson. The projector suggested that shares should be paid at five shillings in the pound, thus to give great advantage to the first purchasers.”

  I had heard of such schemes, knew of voyages to Canton that had been financed part paid and had avoided them like the plague they were. The foolish investor would buy shares at face of one hundred pounds, paying up front only twenty-five and with the prospect of making a massive profit when the contract was complete. The agreement was that in the ’unlikely’ event of a problem arising, the projector could call for the other seventy-five pounds, without notice – the demand would come one day and must be paid the next.

  Where the investor actually possessed the funds, he would pay up and lose his profit, if he did not lose the investment as well. Most often, the investor had put together everything he could raise to make the initial payment, foolishly believing in El Dorado, the pot of gold, something for nothing. The demand for payment would be followed by rapid bankruptcy proceedings, the investor losing everything except the clothes on his back, thrown out into the street, business gone and not a penny to his name. The projector would cry his crocodile tears, proclaiming his own losses as well – as far as the law was concerned, all would be above board, a business that had failed and nothing more.

  In reality, the project would have been a fraud from the very start, the funds squirrelled away and the projector rich from them. In this case the canal would never have been dug in any part.

  “What did you do, sir?”

  “I listened to this Mr Stephens, made him welcome in my house, suggested that I would be pleased indeed to fund him in his entirety. I could find fifty thousand, I said, given just a little time to raise the wind. I asked of his other schemes before this and he talked, explaining all that he had done and the successful canals he had been a part of. He named a dozen towns which had benefitted from his endeavours, waterways that could be seen today. I sent an investigator off to discover the names of the proprietors of these profitable enterprises. Not surprisingly, his name was not associated with any of them. I arranged for Mr Stephens to meet up with acquaintances of mine and he obliged, making his claims before witnesses. One of them was a Runner and he placed him under arrest then and there.”

  “Clean and tidy, sir. That put him in prison waiting for trial and gave you time to examine his past, I presume.”

  “Exactly, Mr Jackson. He was tried for the initial false pretences, a misdemeanour, no more, before the magistrates. He will come up for actual fraud, a felony carrying the most severe penalties, next month. It took a little time to discover all of his victims, you will appreciate. At the moment he still possesses his estate and I am to purchase from him, at the price I set. He knows he is to be imprisoned for a year and fears he may die of the gaol fevers – at least a quarter of prisoners commonly do. If he has the money from the sale of the estate, he will be able to purchase an escape and still have a good few thousands in hand, sufficient to start up in the Americas and live rich. The purchase price will be part paid, the remainder to go to him next year, by which time he will be in no position to collect from me!”

  That was the final stroke – I realised now the extent of Ainslie’s duplicity and admired it greatly.

  “Does Stephens know that he is to face a trial for a felony, sir?”

  “Well, no – he will not be informed until he is brought to book. He will go to the magistrates on the day before the assize court ends in Winchester and will be remanded by the beaks to stand before a judge and jury. All done in twenty-four hours and hanging day always takes place immediately after the assize is over. I estimate forty-eight hours from his discovery that he is to be tried on new charges to the noose being placed over his neck.”

  “And the biter shall be well and truly bit, sir! Well done!”

  It was an entertaining piece of trickery and had no doubt entertained Ainslie – which was worthwhile in itself. That he would take a substantial profit was even better. I sat back in the carriage, prepared to be amused for the morning.

  The postilion took the roads to the east of Winchester, meeting up with the Itchen in the water meadows under St Catherine’s Hill and then travelling a few miles due south. The country was vaguely familiar, childhood memories resurfacing.

  “This is close to Shawford, is it not, Sir Alexander?”

  “The village is half a mile to the right, Mr Jackson. Your old house is up the lane here, on the river terrace looking out across the valley.”

  A minute or two and I was looking at my birthplace. I recognised nothing – I had left as a little boy and had no particular recollections of red-letter days.

  It was a manor house, typical of its day, built in the reign of Good Queen Bess by the look of it. At a guess there was a score of bedrooms across the upper floor and servants’ garrets above to house at least twenty of maids and more senior bodies. The lower floor was split up into a dozen small reception rooms around a great hall, in the Elizabethan way. I presumed the kitchens and such offices were at the back, next to the stables yard and out of sight behind a high wall. Three gigs were already drawn up, their occupants, all professional men from Winchester and acquainted, quietly chatting.

  “My attorney and his clerks to the left. The vendor’s people on the right and the agent in the centre. The agent is the one with the worried expression – for all he knows I might award him the noble order of the boot before the day is out.”

  “Is he tainted with his master’s criminality, do you believe, sir?”


  “No. An honest little man, I am certain, Mr Jackson. I have had him investigated and he does not have a bank account and lives quietly in his cottage by the Home Farm. No wife and no less licit companion to warm his back at night. I have no interest in the farming of this little estate and will retain him, if he wishes to stay, and he has nowhere to go that I know. I shall make much of him, in fact, because I do not wish to spend my days in supervision and must trust him.”

  We stepped down from the chaise and the postillion took it round to the stableyard, the footman handing over his heavy little box and then accompanying him.

  “They will see to the team and put them up in the boxes there, Mr Jackson. Reliable men, both. I pay them a few shillings over the odds – they could not do as well anywhere else in Hampshire. In return, they work and are trustworthy.”

  We had both learned that lesson in Bombay and Canton. The employer who paid his people well received more than his money’s worth in terms of willing labour. I have never understood these people who expect something for nothing from their workers. Pay high and the hands will work hard, and willingly – it’s a simple enough principle.

  “Mr Hathaway, I trust I find you well, sir?”

  Ainslie turned to me.

  “My Attorney-at-Law, Mr Hathaway, long established in Winchester. Mr Giles Jackson, Mr Hathaway.”

  Hathaway bowed, deeper than me; Chinese habits were ingrained in me and I could not bow low to my inferiors.

  “A pleasure, Mr Jackson… The name seems familiar, Sir Alexander?”

  “As it should, Mr Hathaway. His father was one of Stephens’ early victims, I believe. Mr Jackson was forced to leave England and has but recently returned from Canton and Bombay, where, of course, we met.”

  The attorney made no comment – a show of sympathy could be interpreted as support for any claim I might be considering to the property or any part of it.