Sarum (174 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
It was all this that Ralph Shockley saw as he entered the cotton mill.
But it was not the huge machines, the seemingly endless lines of thread that turned and clicked like so many soldiers on an eternal parade ground; it was not the monotonous thumping of the great steam engine that, in another area, drove the looms: it was not the fact that, as he saw for the first time a full-scale northern factory at work and understood, at that instant, what it really meant – that the old ways, the Wessex ways his ancestors had always known, would soon be gone for ever: it was not even the terrible, mechanical din and inhumanity of the place that turned his stomach.
It was the fact that half the machines were manned by ragged children.
Forest glanced at him.
“Children are cheaper,” he remarked calmly. “We treat them better here than in other factories. I won’t allow them to be flogged.”
And for once Ralph Shockley had the sense to be silent. As he looked about the huge, pulsating monster he realised also, for the first time, that he personally was completely powerless.
“As powerless,” he would afterwards recall sadly, “as those children.”
Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel had no illusions.
“It will be many months before Porteus allows him to return,” he told Agnes. “And Porteus will decide everything.”
The canon, indeed, was only reflecting the mood of the city at that time, which was both warlike and conservative. Long before his final triumph, the council had awarded Nelson the freedom of the city. In an astounding act of generosity, the city had even offered to equip six hundred volunteers for the war. Some of the Wiltshire Volunteers had been drilling in the cathedral cloisters. They had made rather a mess of the place, and one of them had made charcoal drawings of his comrades on the walls. But nobody seemed to mind what was done in the cause of the war. A few in the close even wore the white cockades of the royalist Bourbon cause. To the canon’s huge delight, a series of local petitions against Catholic emancipation had even been prepared. All his causes were in the ascendant.
“If Porteus tells them Ralph is a traitor, he’d better not show his face here,” the doctor concluded.
Sarum thought of nothing but the war. Porteus, cold and self-righteous, could be inflexible.
In the months after the departure of Ralph, Barnikel often saw Agnes. She lived now at her own small house in New Street; but most afternoons, when Canon Porteus was out, she would be found with Frances, and it was there that Barnikel would call, twice a week, before escorting her back to her own door, where he left her. He gave presents to the children. Sometimes, either with Frances or alone, he would walk with her, but always in some public place, usually in the cathedral close.
Several times he also met Frances alone and would ask her whether Porteus showed any signs of relenting.
“Not yet doctor, I fear,” she would reply stiffly, and it was impossible to tell what she really felt about the matter. The nearest hint came early in 1805 when one day, without meeting his eye she remarked: “My husband is like Mr Pitt, doctor. His passion is very great, but it is for his country.”
“I think your brother is a man of passion too,” he replied.
But she shook her head.
“Ralph has sudden enthusiasms, which pass. That is not passion. He knows nothing of passion.”
He wondered what else her strange life with Porteus behind the closed doors of his house, and his mind, had taught Frances; he wondered if there lay in her words a message of understanding for him too.
For the passion of Thaddeus Barnikel for Agnes, like a charcoal fire, gave little outward sign, but it burned all the same with a steady, relentless heat, as fierce as any furnace.
“The truth of the matter is,” he confessed to himself, “she is my whole life.”
Ralph wrote frequently: usually to Agnes, once or twice to Mason.
He told Mason of his visit to the cotton factory and received a depressing letter in reply.
The terrible machines you describe still, thank God, have scarcely appeared in Wiltshire and I see no prospect of such things at Salisbury.Our own broadcloth industry continues very weak. Two more poor weavers went out of business last month. It is sad to see that old Sarum broadcloth trade entering its final decline.
To Agnes he wrote tenderly, and told her his return could not be long delayed.
Apart from his work as tutor, he was not idle. The horror of what he had seen at the cotton mill drew him back to the city again and again. He would take a horse and ride over there on a spare day; or he would go further and visit the port beyond. He soon discovered that what Lord Forest had told him was perfectly true: there were far worse places than his mill.
But worst of all, he visited the mines, where the precious coal to fuel the great machines was dragged up, “As though,” he wrote to Agnes, “from the infernal regions themselves.” To Mason he wrote:
I have seen mines, three hundred feet deep, lit by candles – and considered safe until the gasses snuff the candle out. Safe that is, unless there is an explosion below, from which the other day I saw bodies brought out with no more concern than if they had been so many rats killed down their holes by terriers.Worse even than the dead, are the living. In some mines they still use little boys to open and shut the ventilation doors below ground, and I have frequently seen little girls, harnessed like mules, dragging baskets of coal up ladders, for ten hours a day.Yesterday, at one such infamous place, I saw what I took to be a small black dog emerging from a mine shaft. I went over to it to find that the black creature, though it went on all fours and could indeed have been taken for an animal, so utterly degraded was its filthy condition, was not a dog but a child, sent by its parents down to work. It – I say it – was four years old.We know poverty at Sarum; but we have nothing, I thank God, like this.
These conditions, in England, were to persist for some time.
To his wife, however, Ralph, through delicacy did not think it proper to describe such terrible particulars. He wrote only in general terms.
There are things here that seem to me, more than ever, to be a crime against human freedom and dignity: I see conditions that are worse, I believe, than slavery. Porteus himself would agree with me I think, but it is useless, I suppose, for me to communicate with him at present.
And Agnes, seeing nothing of her husband, and like most well-meaning folk at Sarum, knowing nothing about the conditions to which he was referring, assumed that he spoke of conditions on the estate or his relationship with the Forest household, and shaking her head sadly, wondered if he would ever grow up to be a mature man. So that when Frances tentatively asked her: “Do you think Ralph is growing any wiser in his absence?” she could only reply, “I trust so,” without much conviction.
The resistance of Canon Porteus to Ralph’s return took everyone by surprise. It was awesome.
“And the devil of it is,” Barnikel confessed after a year had passed, “he’s only to stir up trouble at the school and in the close, for his position here to be quite untenable. He must either return with Porteus’s blessing or not at all.”
He thought the triumph of Trafalgar, which the town celebrated joyfully, might provoke a change of mood. But the gloom of Ulm and Austerlitz and the death of Pitt made the canon sourer still and the mood of the town more conservative than ever.
By the end of summer 1806, Ralph was reaching another conclusion. He wrote to Agnes.
Since it seems the vindictiveness of Canon Porteus has closed Sarum to me, I have asked Lord Forest if he will help me find a post elsewhere, if possible in London, where there are many schools and where I may be reunited with my wife. He has engaged, if I will tutor the two boys until next summer, to find me a good post with a generous salary by next September.
The letter arrived on the day that Thaddeus Barnikel was to escort Agnes to an open air entertainment.
The sport of single-stick combat was similar to fencing except that the weapons in question were sticks rather than pointed swords, so that the worst injury a man was likely to get was a bruise or two. Unlike the great bare-fisted prize fights that took place occasionally on the downs, single-stick combat was, in Barnikel’s opinion, fit for a woman to see. The purse was handsome and they saw some excellent contests. It was afterwards, as they walked through the town, that Agnes told Thaddeus about Ralph’s letter, and his plans for her to leave Sarum.
“To London?” He swallowed. For a moment he could not speak.
For it was only then that he realised how much a part of his life she had become. “Though we have never even touched,” he realised sadly, “it’s as though we were married.”
“I should be sorry if you left,” he said at last, and they walked in silence for a little time.
They were outside the door of her house in New Street. There were no people about at that moment. She stopped.
“I fear that in London, my husband would soon cause as much trouble for himself and his family as he has caused in Sarum,” she said with a gentle smile. It was the first time in two years that she had said a word to him against Ralph. He looked down. “Besides,” she went on steadily, “I have no wish to leave Sarum – or my good friends.”
Then, before she left him and went through her door, she reached out and gently touched his arm.
He did not move for some time. By that tiny sign of affection she had told him that, although neither of them could ever mention the subject, she loved him. This moment was the crowning glory of Thaddeus Barnikel’s passion. He turned into the close and watched the soft rays of the sunset fall on the cathedral.
Ralph was surprised, a few days later, to receive a letter from Agnes saying that she did not wish to leave Sarum.
The years 1806 and 1807 brought two events that made Ralph Shockley more optimistic.
The first was that, after the tragic death of Pitt, and in an attempt to unite every shade of opinion in the country behind the government, Charles James Fox, his radical hero, was brought into the ministry. He was to die within the year, but before he did, he championed through Parliament that most noble piece of legislation, prepared by Wilberforce and other good men, the Act that prohibited British participation in the slave trade.
“England has turned her back on slavery. Perhaps soon she will stop the terrible traffic in children too,” he exclaimed hopefully.
Perhaps with this change of heart in the ministry, there would be a change of spirit in the country and in Sarum too.
There was not. By 1807, Fox had gone and the mood of the country was as belligerent and reactionary as ever.
“It is Bonaparte, by threatening us, who stops all change in England,” he concluded.
And still he had not solved the question – “how was he to get back to Sarum?”
In the year of Our Lord 1807, the old Bishop of Salisbury at last died. Canon Porteus was apprehensive.
“When a bishop dies,” he confessed to Frances, “one is always afraid there may be change.”
In July, the new bishop was enthroned. He was a pleasant-faced, intelligent, active man named John Fisher; he was destined to be one of Sarum’s finest bishops, and Mrs Porteus, Agnes and Doctor Barnikel were all given excellent seats to view the splendid ceremony in the cathedral.
It was in the Porteuses’ house afterwards, thinking himself alone, and overcome with love for the woman who sat quietly on the sofa beside him, that Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel committed his indiscretion.
Porteus was in his study; Frances had left the room for a moment. He looked across at her. When she smiled, as she did now, her smile was so gentle, so easy that he could not help thinking, “She is really, if the truth be told, mine.” And in an access of love, he allowed himself to reach out, take her hand, and kiss it. She did not stop him: how could she, after all his years of devotion? Their backs were to the door; and so they did not see that it had opened and that Frances was silently watching them.
She closed the door again. She did not blame either of them. But suddenly she knew what she must do.
“It is time for Ralph to return,” she murmured.
The next day, she went to see the new bishop. She was with him for nearly half an hour, and when she quietly emerged from the bishop’s palace, it might have been noticed that she was smiling – or to be exact, she was almost grinning, as she had not done since she was a girl.
That very evening, an extraordinary interview took place in Canon Porteus’s study.
There in the door, stood Frances. It seemed to Porteus that she looked different: her face was relaxed, fuller, somehow than he remembered seeing it of late. It reminded him of the rather wayward girl he had married all those years before. He frowned.
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