Sarum (179 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
“Do what you can,” he told the agent.
The battle had raged two years. A group of councillors who owned quantities of slums, and with whom Mickelthwaite had discreetly allied himself, fought tooth and nail. They lost.
It had been early the previous year that Joseph Porters, civil engineer, had obtained a post in Salisbury and travelled down from Leicester to inspect the place.
He set to work cheerfully, filling in the old water channels and inspecting the chequers. He had been as appalled as Doctor Middleton by what he had seen.
But he enjoyed the sleepy close, with its comfortable gentry and ecclesiastics in tall black hats, the busy market town with its sudden influxes of livestock, the sheep fair at nearby Wilton, the racecourse up on the high ground.
“There are years of work here,” he declared, with some satisfaction; and he looked for comfortable lodgings.
Joseph Porters was thirty-seven. He wore, always, a buttoned frock coat, grey waistcoat, white shirt, tie in a small, neat bow, side-whiskers clipped rather short, and black top hat. His hair was sandy and thinning. He was not quite without humour, but did not feel sufficiently confident of himself to take any chances with his appearance. He had worn a moustache when young, but had abandoned it later because it did not seem to go with his half-moon spectacles.
Since his arrival in Salisbury, two things had fascinated Joseph Porters. The first was in the drains. For as these were cleared, they revealed a fantastic quantity of articles, the refuse and careless droppings of six centuries – combs, shears, clay pipes, coins – a treasure trove for the antiquarian. Though he had no training in this field, he began to study them, and it was soon a regular occurrence for the workmen to stand back respectfully while Mr Porters so forgot his dignity, and the whiteness of his shirt, as to poke about in the mud for half an hour at a time before hurrying back to his lodgings in Castle Street to store his new found treasure and change his shirt.
“In time,” he told the dean, “we shall need a small museum for all this, you know.”
The second – it had taken Porters some time to dare to admit to himself the second thing that had fascinated him – was Miss Jane Shockley.
The little library in the Shockley house was upon the main upstairs floor. It was a modest, pleasant room, and less full of the Victorian clutter that had now appeared in the drawing-room where heavy draperies on the table, two potted palms, an ornate clock, a bowl of wax flowers and four china figures had already forced their way in.
The library only contained, besides its floor to ceiling bookshelves, two leather armchairs, an uncovered walnut table, and a bureau, at which Jane was writing.
It was three in the afternoon and she had already composed four letters, when glancing out of the window, she saw Joseph Porters in the street below.
“Oh dear.”
Why had she ever spoken to him? She remembered their first meeting perfectly. It had been a year ago, not long after he had arrived: she had been in a boisterous mood with a group of other young ladies from the close when one of them had pointed to the thin, serious man standing beside his workmen and said: “That’s Porters. Drains. Very glum.” They burst out laughing and she, more to show off than anything, boldly marched across the street, gazed into the empty watercourse and declared: “Well, Mr Porters, I’ve come to inspect you and your drains.”
He was so harmless, so dedicated. He had taken her quite seriously and, for half an hour, there and then, had explained every detail of the business to her, from the need to stop cholera to the medieval wonders lurking in the mud below. She had been trapped: without being rude she could not get away. For a full thirty minutes she stood there while he lectured her and her friends stood in the doorway of Surman’s Boot Shop and held their sides.
“In fact,” she said defensively afterwards, “he was very interesting. And indeed,” she added, for she had listened to much of what he had told her, “the council behaved abominably.”
It was hard, after this, not to speak to Mr Porters politely when she saw him. In fact, though the young ladies sometimes teased her by asking after her drains, she had more respect for Porters’s opinion than theirs. Almost in defiance of them, she consented to sit with him at the St Cecilia annual music festival and walked with him round the horticultural fête.
“He is also a considerable expert on the subject of dahlias.” she informed her friends.
Once they had even spent a day together – as members of a group, of course – when one of the canons had taken a party to visit a sarsen cutting works at Fyfield on the far side of the plain. Mr Porters had even given them a little talk explaining how the hard stones, now popular as curbing stones, were exactly those used thousands of years ago at Stonehenge.
He was a remarkably interesting man and she enjoyed his company.
But more than this – oh dear.
Lizzie opened the door. His card was on the little silver salver.
“Mr Porters, Miss Jane.”
Could she say she was not at home? He would take it too much to heart. It was all her own fault.
She laid down her pen.
“Please show him up.” If only she could make him dislike her, it would all be so much easier.
He had not been in the library before. What a light and pleasant room it was. He peered round quickly before remembering that it was bad manners to do so. Books round the walls. On the table, a catalogue from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of three years before; beside it, a more modest version of the Salisbury exhibition in the guildhall that had followed it.
In the largest bookshelf, and given pride of place, stood huge leather-bound folios of Hoare’s mighty history of Wiltshire together with their companion, Hatcher’s history of Salisbury.
No more impressive work had ever appeared in the county: a huge historical Domesday book that listed every parish in every hundred, with their monuments, country houses and the landed families who had owned them since feudal times. Every gentleman should have a set and indeed, the gentry of Wiltshire had widely subscribed to the project. The last volume, on the city, told a more modest though more detailed historical account of the doings of the townspeople over the centuries, and this had been prepared not by Hoare, a gentleman, but by Hatcher, a modest man of the middle classes like himself. When the books were issued, Hatcher’s work had been praised, but the poor author himself had been completely ignored.
The sight of these huge volumes in her house momentarily depressed Porters.
Beside the catalogues on the table lay three issues of Mr Dickens’s last serial
Hard Times
, Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
, a copy of
Wuthering Heights
and a volume of Lord Byron’s poems. The last, though he had only glanced at them once, he thought rather unfitting for a lady, though he had been told that it was mostly ladies who read them.
Hard Times
, Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
, a copy of
Wuthering Heights
and a volume of Lord Byron’s poems. The last, though he had only glanced at them once, he thought rather unfitting for a lady, though he had been told that it was mostly ladies who read them.
“I trust I do not intrude upon you.”
“Not at all.”
He glanced once more, disapprovingly, at the volume of Byron.
“I fear I do not read poetry.”
“No.” Her heart sank. He would not, of course. “Please sit down Mr Porters.”
He flushed. She knew how much courage it had taken him to call upon a woman who still lived alone.
“Lizzie will bring in tea directly,” she told him.
Then, as usual, they talked. As long as he spoke of things he understood, he was very agreeable company. They discussed the new railway lines that must soon come to Sarum. It was a particular enthusiasm of his.
“The council has already petitioned Parliament – it is absurd that we still only have the line to Southampton. Why, they are the new turnpike roads of the age. We need a London line. And the Great Western too. This town could still be the Manchester of the south, Miss Shockley.”
She smiled at his enthusiasm.
“I’m not sure the people in the close would like that, Mr Porters.”
“And would you say they were right, in this age of progress?”
“No. I think you are,” she told him frankly.
He beamed.
“It will come, I promise you.”
They discussed the Great Exhibition in London and the marvellous Crystal Palace of glass that had contained it, to which no less than six million had come.
“You know that Mr Beach’s cutlery was exhibited there?” She did not. He smiled. “He is very proud of the fact.”
“You manage to know everything Mr Porters.” She would make a point of complimenting Mr Beach, all the same.
“The Great Exhibition had an effect on this household,” she told him laughingly. “I bought a gas cooker for the kitchen.”
“A noble invention,” he agreed. “And does your cook like it?” he asked quizzically.
He was not stupid.
“You unmask me at once. She tried to light it with a tinder box and took so long she nearly blew the house up. Now it sits there to mock me, Mr Porters, quite unused.”
“Reforms take time.”
She saw her opening.
“I am become quite a reformer myself of late. I am quite persuaded of Chartism, Mr Porters.”
She saw his mouth open. He closed it directly.
“Chartism?”
“Indeed.”
“The Chartists were quite finished, Miss Shockley, when their great demonstration failed six years ago.”
“But their cause is just.”
“One man, one vote?”
“Yes.”
The Chartist movement with its call for secret ballots and universal suffrage for men had seemed like revolution to many and had certainly been successfully crushed. Yet when she thought about the matter, Jane had always found it hard to rebut the Chartists’ arguments. She feared them, of course; after all, if all men vote, and only a few have property, then might not the majority vote to destroy property of the few? It was exactly the fear her ancestors had faced in the Civil War two hundred years before.
Did she truly believe what she said?
She did not know. But it had shocked Mr Porters.
“These are dangerous ideas, Miss Shockley.” He looked worried.
“Why Mr Porters, surely you are not against reform? Look at the Mines and the Factory Acts of Lord Shaftesbury. Are you for repealing those reforms and putting children back in the mines as they used to be?”
“Not at all.”
“Or for taking away the Health Board and having cholera back in Salisbury?”
“Naturally not.”
“Then if you care for the welfare of the people you must agree with me.”
He looked perplexed. Please God she had broken his attachment to her.
“I cannot agree with you.”
“Well, Mr Porters, there it is then.”
They spoke of other things over tea. But as Porters gazed at her, his thoughts were not what she had intended.
“She is a little wild,” he thought, “and discontented. She needs a husband to settle her, not a doubt about it. But what strength, what honesty.”
It was after tea that she broke the news.
“I am leaving Sarum shortly, Mr Porters, so we may not meet again.”
His cup rattled as he held it. He cursed himself inwardly.
“Indeed?”
“I am to go and train as a nurse. In London probably. I hope to join Miss Nightingale.”
For a moment he did not speak.
“I am sorry to hear it. You will be a great loss to Sarum, I’m sure.”
“Sarum will do very well without me,” she laughed. “Glad to lose a Chartist, I expect.”
He was silent for a little time.
“How soon do you leave, Miss Shockley?”
“Any day,” she smiled. “I fear we may not meet again.”
She had done it. She had got rid of him, quite painlessly.
But something was wrong. As she gazed at him now, she could sense it; his fingers were trembling, there was something in the attitude of his bowed head; he was clearing his throat. Just before he spoke, she saw it coming, with horror.
“Miss Shockley,” he had to clear his throat again. He glanced up at her face, saw shock, but ploughed on. “Before you leave I must say something to you.”
Should she stop him now? Was it crueller to cut him off or listen? She flushed with embarrassment at the choice. He saw the flush, mis-interpreted.
“I believe – you have been kind enough to let me be your friend . . .”
“Of course.” But it was only a whisper. What should she do?
“I have observed that you are very different in your attitudes to most young ladies of your station.”
Was she? Or was it only a pose? Faced with the awfulness of Mr Porters she was not sure.
“I realise of course that I . . .” he faltered. That he was not a gentleman. It was too painful. He could not say it. “That I am a modest man with a modest fortune, but I dare to hope that you are aware how greatly I admire your extraordinary qualities of mind.”
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