Sarum (163 page)

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Authors: Edward Rutherfurd

BOOK: Sarum
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His reception was no less warm in the town. For when, later that day, he entered the coffee house in Blue Boar Row where the gentlemen of the town liked to meet, he had a similar experience.
But the greatest accolade, he thought, took place that evening when young Ralph came alone to his room and asked with great solemnity if he could, please, see his wound.
The month of March was a time of continuous delight. He had forgotten it was possible to feel so happy. He bought new clothes; he even acquired some of the newly fashionable shoes with a diamond ornament instead of a buckle. “More fit for a woman than a man I’d have thought,” he protested laughingly when Frances insisted he buy them. She did not let up. Before he knew what had happened, she had taken him to buy a new wig as well, with splendid short side curls, worn with a tight plait behind, turned up and tied with a ribbon at the nape of his neck. She fitted it on his head and arranged it herself.
“It’s the latest fashion for a military man to wear his hair,” she assured him. “They call it the Ramillies style.”
He submitted to all this cheerfully. It was seldom enough, he thought, that he had had a woman to tie his hair.
“I look like a fop,” he remarked with a grin, when all these improvements were completed; but she only laughed and kissed him.
It did not take him till the end of the month to love his sister and brother. They were both so artless and high-spirited. He went to watch Ralph at his studies at school; he sat through and admired the theatricals in which Frances took part.
“My children keep me young, now their mother’s gone,” Jonathan remarked cheerfully.
But there were serious matters to be discussed too.
“I’ve been able to provide for the children,” Jonathan told him after he had been there a week, “not handsomely, but enough to keep them from penury. And their mother has a brother at Winchester who has engaged to look after them if anything should happen to me. But I’m afraid that doesn’t leave anything for you. What do you intend to do?”
It was a question he had several times asked himself, and at present he did not know the answer. For the time being he was on half pay. He must either resume active military service, or sell his commission. The commission would give him a useful sum, but not nearly enough to live on.
“Is there anything for me to do here?” he asked.
“Not much,” Jonathan had replied. And he had carefully outlined the local economy.
They had talked for an hour. He had forgotten, once one made allowances for his Tory prejudices and his carping wit, what a sound, clear mind his father had. Despite his age and retirement, there seemed to be very little going on in Sarum that he did not know about.
“Our landowners are doing well. They don’t like the land tax of course, but some of them are passing it on to their tenants. Corn prices are rising, so the landowners’ incomes are good. But the tenants are being hit – not only by taxes either. With rising prices many landlords, I’m afraid, are being tempted to grant only short leases so they can raise rents. We were doing it on the Forest estates, though I didn’t enjoy having to go round the tenants and tell them, as you can imagine. So if you’ve a mind to farm, I’d advise against it – you haven’t the money.”
He asked his father about the sheep he had seen on the high ground. Were they not different to the sheep he had known as a child?
Jonathan sighed.
“I told Forest not to try it but he did,” he answered, “as did many others.” The Wiltshire farmers had experimented with an improved strain of the ancient breed – a heavier animal with larger legs and its belly free of wool.
“It’s a handsome animal, but it doesn’t thrive on our downland pasture and it’s liable to goggles – half of them are sick already. It’s true that the old breeds could be improved, but the only region in South England that has really made strides is on the Sussex downs, where they’re a breed of sheep with much finer wool. It should be introduced in Wiltshire, but our people have been too slow about it so far, so we suffer.”
There were parts of the cloth industry that were growing, it seemed: cottons, flannels, serges and fancy-cloths. Salisbury bone lace was excellent. But most of these were businesses run by tradesmen and craftsmen. “Hardly of much interest to you,” Jonathan said.
Then there was the carpet business at Wilton. Adam remembered this being started when he was a boy, and how Lord Pembroke had patronised the venture to produce carpets as good as the French.
“The workshops burned down ten years ago,” Jonathan told him. “They’ve been rebuilt again, but they’re making similar carpets at Southampton now; and it’s said the ones from Kidderminster in Worcestershire are even better.”
“In short,” he concluded, “Sarum is getting by, but it’s not expanding, and it’s a difficult place for a gentleman without much money.”
“I don’t know what I shall do,” Adam confessed.
“Get yourself a rich widow in Bath,” his father advised him frankly. “Plenty of them I dare say. That’s my advice.”
It was perfectly reasonable advice; but Adam was not sure he wanted to take it.
 
Just before the end of March Adam Shockley had a strange encounter.
He was sitting one morning in the coffee house in Blue Boar Row, reading the newspaper when he was interrupted by a voice.
“There is a chair opposite you, sir. May I take it?”
“Of course.”
He glanced over his paper – and saw nothing.
“I’m obliged, sir,” the voice announced. Adam glanced under his paper and made the acquaintance of Eli Mason.
He was just over four foot high. He might have been forty; or thirty. His head was large, red and round. His nose was pointed: his ears stuck out so absolutely at right angles that one could only think they had been stuck there as an afterthought; his body seemed puny, yet, as he positively bounced up on to the seat, it was clear that he was extremely agile, and he projected an aura of cheerfulness that amounted to bonhomie.
He smiled at Adam.
“How d’ye do, sir.”
“How do you do.”
“You like your newspaper?”
“I think so.”
“Well printed.”
“Well enough.”
“I printed it,” he said with cheerful satisfaction. He held up a pair of small hands with fingers and thumbs that looked almost like stumps, and Adam saw that they were stained black with ink.
“Eli Mason, sir,” he said. “And you, I am informed, are Captain Shockley, back from the wars.”
“I am, sir,” Adam replied, and put his paper down.
It was a sound little paper, not as large as the
Salisbury Journal
, which had been started earlier that century, but it contained some well-written articles and a good supply of advertising.
“We print a thousand copies,” Eli explained. “Not as many as the
Journal
– that has a four thousand circulation – but it’s good work for our presses all the same.”
Everything worthwhile in Sarum, it soon turned out, was printed by Eli and his family, and Adam was delighted with his pride in his work. Soon the talkative little fellow was giving him all the gossip of the town, and Adam listened, fascinated.
For though he had been a month in Sarum, it was the first time he had had a conversation with a tradesman.
It was not so surprising. There were families in the close whose fathers might have been aldermen, but they were gentlefolk now. Jonathan Shockley might be poor, but it would certainly never have occurred to him to invite one of the prosperous traders of the town to dine at his table, any more than he would have expected to meet them at the house of one of the canons in the close or a local gentleman in his manor house. The children of gentlefolk and tradespeople might meet at school, but afterwards, unless luck or talent raised the tradesman’s child into a different class, their paths would diverge and scarcely cross again.
But Adam, when he was in America recovering from his wound, had come to know another kind of men: independent farmers and merchants who did business together and who married and lived their lives without the sense that they were somehow less fine than a layer of gentry above them. Though he was their prisoner, he had begun to appreciate them, and often related their views on life to the self-possessed Hillier boy he had encountered back on the St Lawrence river. As he chatted to Eli Mason, he almost thought himself back amongst them.
He was soon talking to Eli on easy terms, discussing the relative merits of his printing presses as against others and asking him about his business as cheerfully as any tradesman.
“And what will you do now, Captain?” Eli asked.
“I wish I knew,” Adam confessed without embarrassment. “There’s not much in Sarum for a captain on half pay.”
Eli considered.
“Sell your commission?”
“Not enough to live on.”
Eli considered again.
“Man like you should be married,” he said.
“Can’t afford it,” Adam smiled.
“Rich widow?”
“That’s what my father said.”
“You don’t want one?”
“Don’t think so.”
“What work would you do, Captain?”
“Anything, I dare say,” Adam laughed.
“Anything? Fine gentleman like you?”
Adam grinned.
“You mean, a gentleman shouldn’t work, Mr Mason?”
Eli looked down at the table thoughtfully.
“It’s not often,” he said slowly, “that a fine gentleman like you, Captain, stops to talk for half an hour with a tradesman like me.”
Adam glanced at his paper and said nothing.
He would have been surprised indeed to know what was in the little fellow’s mind at that moment. For in Eli’s brain, a single thought had formed: this one at last, this is the man.
After a short pause he said:
“My family live nearby, Captain. They’d be glad to meet an officer home from America. Would you shake my brother’s hand?” And as he saw Adam hesitate he added anxiously: “We’re not gentry, Captain. Oh no. Not gentry. We’re only small people.”
Supposing by this that they must be a family of dwarfs like Eli, and not wishing to offend, Adam Shockley agreed to come.
Ten minutes later, when Eli led Captain Adam Shockley into the modest parlour of a house in Antelope Chequer, he was surprised to see before him not a family of dwarfs, but Benjamin Mason, ironmonger and printer, his wife Eliza, their two children, and Benjamin’s sister Mary, none of them below average height.
Eli announced enthusiastically, “Here’s Captain Shockley. Fine gentleman. Needs a wife,” and all the people in the room burst out laughing.
Adam Shockley did more than shake the hand of Benjamin Mason. He spoke to him for some time. He learned that he was, in a modest way, a substantial tradesman in the town; that he had built up his father’s business of making scissors into an altogether grander affair; that he owned a hardware store and a printing works; that he and his wife looked after his brother Eli, who had for some reason never grown to full height, and his young sister Mary – a quiet, good-humoured young woman of, Adam guessed, between twenty-five and thirty. Benjamin Mason was somewhat like a full-grown version of Eli, except that his ears did not stick out, and he carried himself with a certain gravity. He wore no wig; his unpowdered hair was neatly drawn back and tied; he wore a plain, dark brown coat and grey woollen stockings. His children kept staring at the splendid captain, who smiled at them, and tugged at their father’s sleeve, but he quietly rested his hand on them and told them not to interrupt. Surprised as he was by Adam’s sudden arrival in his house, he was delighted to get the opportunity to question him about America, and particularly about the state of religion there.
“We are Methodists, Captain,” he explained to Adam. “By that I mean that, with John Wesley, we desire no break with the established Church of England, but only to reform it and increase its dedication to preaching and acting upon God’s word. I trust that does not offend you?”
“Not at all,” Shockley assured him.
Indeed, though his father, as a point of Tory principle, still denounced the Wesleyans, it was hard to see how any sensible Church of England man could complain of many of their ideas. They disapproved of the practice of clergy holding benefices they never visited but from which they drew income and they urged the clergy to preach.
“The Reformation was intended to cure just such abuses in the Roman Church,” Benjamin Mason observed calmly; “yet now we find them in our own.”
But the talk was not all of religion, and it soon became clear that Benjamin’s children were as anxious to inspect the captain’s wig as their father was to learn about America’s religion. Adam was glad to oblige them by taking it off, and explaining to the family how his sister had forced him to buy it.
“’Tis her attempt to make a plain man fashionable,” he said with a laugh, “but I fear the imposture will soon be discovered.”

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