Sarum (164 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
All this time, he noticed, Eli Mason perched contentedly on a plain wooden chair near the door, taking no part in the conversation but apparently well pleased with what was going on. And the girl Mary sat composedly beside her sister-in-law, watching him with a quiet smile, but leaving her brother Benjamin to do the talking.
She seemed very quiet. Her dress was grey and plain; her face, a little pock-marked, but not unattractive, sometimes lit up in a smile, but mostly gave nothing away; her hands, folded in her lap, were still. Her eyes, rather beautiful he thought, were grey and for the most part looked downwards; her light brown hair, rather wiry and frizzed, obviously declined to be subdued, but seemed to be discreetly tolerated by the head and body to which it was attached.
“And what does your sister do?” he asked Benjamin, with a polite bow towards the lady in question.
“Oh, she manages everything you see in this house or in my business, Captain Shockley,” the merchant replied with a laugh. “She is the practical one of the family, are you not Mary?”
To which Mary only smiled.
Two days later, the highwayman struck again, north west of Wilton on the turnpike of the Fisherton Trust in which Sir Joshua Forest had a considerable stake.
Young Ralph Shockley was beside himself with excitement.
“Take me with you,” he begged Adam. “We’ll ride out and catch him.” And it was all Adam could do to get out of the house after dinner that evening to go to the Catch Club for a game of whist.
In the next month, Adam saw Eli Mason several times in the coffee house; once, at his special request, he visited the printing shop to see the little fellow eagerly at work amongst the great fonts of type which he reached by standing on a stool.
“You see,” he told Adam proudly, “I am small, Captain, but my family are glad of me: I work.”
Several times also, Adam called upon Benjamin Mason to spend an hour in conversation with him. He found the Wesleyan trader well informed upon many topics and each time they discussed the news from America eagerly. The French fleet had joined the American rebels the previous autumn and still neither the forces on land nor those at sea seemed to be making any headway against the rebels; though an English force had taken some of the French islands in the West Indies, news came that Dominica had fallen to the French.
“They’re welcome to the place,” Shockley told Mason with a rueful smile. “All I ever had out of it was an attack of malaria.”
But much as he enjoyed his talks with Benjamin, he admitted to himself that he also came to see Mary Mason.
She only came into the room occasionally; but when she did, Benjamin often turned to her to ask her opinion on the matter under discussion, and though she always gave her answers in a quiet voice, he noticed that they were well-judged and even revealed a sly wit.
“Can we win the war with America, Miss Mason?” Adam asked her.
“No, Captain Shockley,” she replied. “Even Pitt would have ended this war; as it is, I think the war will end Lord North instead.”
He laughed. The great William Pitt, made Lord Chatham, had died the year before; and poor, dithering Lord North, the present prime minister, was hopelessly unequal to his wartime task.
“That,” he concluded to himself, “is a very sensible woman.”
One day when he was talking to Benjamin and his sister, the merchant was called away, and for half an hour he remained in his chair, chatting easily to her, answering her questions about his life.
She had none of the artificial manners of the women he saw in the fashionable world; she would have probably laughed outright at the notion of being coy, and if anyone had ever told her it was out of fashion to have a mind of her own, she would have politely ignored them.
By chance, he met her walking once on the footpath that led across the fields from Salisbury to the little village of Harnham. They walked together to the village, admired the peaceful mill and the mill race, and then strolled back to the city together. He found that he liked the walk and took it almost every day after that. Three or four more times he met her there or up on Harnham Hill, and it was on these walks that the thought gradually formed in his mind:
“If I had the money, I’m not sure I wouldn’t marry her.”
He did not allow the thought to take definite shape.
“You’re too poor and too old,” he reminded himself.
For as the weeks passed, he had still failed completely to solve the question of how to earn his living. And though he was happy to be in the family house with his father and new brother and sister he was coming to love, he could not help feeling uneasy.
Then, on May 30, 1779, Sir Joshua Forest came to Sarum.
Joshua Forest was in his early thirties: of medium height; very dark, very thin, with a long aquiline nose, and thin, tapering hands. He was friendly to all, with studied civility.
“And his eyes see every fly on the wall,” Jonathan remarked when he described him.
Sir Joshua had been in London; then he had been at his new house in the north of the county; now he had come to spend a month at Sarum.
“He has just sent a man round,” Jonathan told Adam as he came in from a talk with Eli in the coffee house that morning. “You’re invited to dinner this very day.” He looked at his son thoughtfully. “Keep your wits about you and you may hear something to your advantage,” he added. But when Adam asked him what he meant, the older man would not tell him.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Captain Adam Shockley presented himself at the house of Sir Joshua Forest, Baronet. The hour of dining was usually about three, but Sir Joshua, it was known, liked to dine late.
The house of Sir Joshua Forest’lay the other end of the close from the Shockleys. It was a big, rectangular brick building, partly faced with grey stone. In front of it lay a gravel drive and a lawn. At one side, behind a low wall, was a path leading to the coach house and stables behind. The main floor was raised; before the front door was a set of handsome curving steps.
There were several splendid coaches on the gravel when he arrived; on the door of the largest he noticed the elaborate arms of the Forest family.
The door was opened by a powdered footman, and a moment later Adam was walking across the polished black and white marble floor of the hall. On the walls above the handsome staircase that rose up three sides of the hall were portraits of the Forest family. On a pedestal in one corner stood a marble bust of Sir George. Over the doors that led off the hall there were classical pediments with plaster mouldings above them. From the ceiling high above, on a twenty foot rope, hung a splendid chandelier with crystal glass that Sir George had acquired in France.
On his left, a second footman opened the tall white panelled door of the drawing-room, and he was ushered in.
They were all men in the room. Two or three of the local landowners; a clergyman he did not know, but clearly a wealthy one; two strangers, presumably from London; and of course, his host.
“Welcome, Captain Shockley. We are honoured you are come to join us.”
He fitted very well the description his father had given him. But there was one thing about Sir Joshua, as he advanced in his exquisite coat of crimson silk and lace, that Jonathan Shockley had not troubled to convey.
He was perfect.
He had learned the art in Italy and France during a grand tour that had lasted four years. He had learned it thoroughly.
There were many things that a man might study on the Grand Tour. He might read a little history. He might get a smattering of French, German and Italian. He might, if he had the introductions, meet the rulers and important men in half a dozen countries who could later be useful to him in a public career. He might, as the present Lord Pembroke had done, make a detailed study of horse breeding and riding at those incredible continental schools of equitation where the horses performed with all the precision of a modern ballet dancer, and bring back horses, illustrations and a handbook he had himself composed, to Wilton.
Or – this was rare, but it was what Sir Joshua Forest had done – he might study manners.
For in Italy and France, Forest had acquired that most elusive of eighteenth century aristocratic arts – the perfect manner. His manner was so artificial, so polished, that it actually put you at ease. He was as perfect as a china figure that can be turned admiringly this way and that. Even when he moved across the room, his body was held in such perfect posture that one hardly thought he had moved at all. His face, though it smiled amiably, or sometimes frowned, returned quickly and easily to perfect serenity. The physical body, beautifully dressed, infinitely polite even to the lower orders of humanity on the rare occasions when they were noticed, had become almost a marionette. This was the perfect manner of those who dwelt apart in the aristocratic world. If a man like Captain Shockley met them, they could – if they chose – be most agreeable. No man can quarrel with a work of art.
Sir Joshua Forest was a minor work of art.
He introduced Adam to his fellow guests: the men from London were both Members of Parliament. The clergyman – a large, powerfully built man who, he soon understood, held half a dozen rich livings – said several kind words about his valour in the American campaign; and the company in general did him the honour to speak to him as though they might have known him all their lives. In short, they practised the art, known then as condescension – which meant not at all what is meant by the word today, but rather the art of letting a man know, through perfect politeness, that you do not seek to patronise him.
“We shall plague you with questions, Captain,” his host said easily.
It was not long before they moved from the drawing-room with its elegantly designed plaster ceiling to a somewhat smaller room.
“Since we are a small company of friends, gentlemen,” Forest announced to them, “we shall dine in the green room.”
It was a small room looking over the gardens at the back of the house. The walls were covered with green damask. A narrow table had been set in down the middle, under a beautiful plaster carving in the ceiling representing a swan, one of the family crests. On the long wall was a fine picture representing the death of Wolfe at Quebec, and on the shorter wall, over a Chippendale table, hung another similar heroic picture of Clive of Plassey. It was a handsome, pleasant, masculine room.
On the table was laid a magnificent dinner service which, being a man of fashion, Forest had ordered from China, every piece proudly bearing his coat of arms. Splendid, plain silver and crystal glasses completed the picture.
As soon as the gentlemen sat, the talk began. It was Forest’s pride that at his dinners the talk should be good, and he gently guided the conversation with an invisible hand.
The dinner was stately.
First came the fish: a huge pike, fried sole, and trout. It was accompanied by a white German wine.
The talk was easy: of Sarum and county matters. Forest asked him how the place had changed in his absence, which was not much; both the gentlemen from London seemed to know Mr Harris and his son. Lord Pembroke was now in London and Lord Herbert his son now en route from Munich to Vienna on his Grand Tour. It was clear at once that all the men present knew these noble figures personally, but they put him so much at his ease that he felt almost as if he did too.
The clergyman, Adam discovered, had the living of Avonsford amongst his benefices: but he had only once visited the place.
“It’s a small place,” he explained pleasantly. “I have a young curate who does what work there is there, I dare say, very well.”
They spoke of local Members of Parliament, of how effectively in past years Sir Samuel Fludyer had promoted the otherwise lacklustre cloth trade of Chippenham.
“The borough told him he should stand for them in Parliament so long as he promoted their cloth, and by God he ran round like a draper for years,” laughed one of the country gentlemen.
“From what I hear,” Adam observed, “Salisbury needs a Member to do very much the same. They need a man prepared to appear at court in the best Salisbury cloth and ready to say where he got it.”
He was pleased that this was well received.
“It’s just what I have said,” Sir Joshua concurred. “Our merchants here still have good cloth to sell, but they fail to press their case strongly.”
Next came a forequarter of lamb, and good claret.
The talk turned to the Government and the war.
“The folly of poor North is,” one of the London men remarked, “that half our cavalry – and God knows he’s reduced the regulars to a pitiful state – are stationed with Ward at Bury, miles from anywhere. If the rumour’s true that the French fleet is coming, they can land where they please, unopposed.”
“And our navy’s so much under strength,” a country gentleman remarked, “that a privateer from America, like this cursed John Paul Jones, can act the pirate off the coast of Ireland, like he did last year, quite unopposed.”
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