Sons of Fortune (59 page)

She made a little murmur of pain and kept her arms tight about him. He felt her head shake on his chest. The blood seemed to have stopped oozing from the graze on her scalp.

Once she was on the mattress—a brand-new one, looted from a shop, together with several luxurious covers—she became a great deal easier and more relaxed, until she turned her head and saw the ghastly, mutilated body of the police officer hanging from the lamppost. The cart began to move at that moment but her eyes were fixed upon the corpse until they were going north on Pearl Street and their refuge house cut off her view of it. Moments later it was put to the torch. They saw only the reflection of the flames in the windows around. The gleeful laughter followed them. The driver also laughing, told her all the things they had done to “dat dam fella.” Throughout the narrative her eyes never left Caspar’s face; he sat on the cart at her side, his legs dangling.

There were tears in her eyes as the man finished. She pulled her hand from beneath the covers and grasped Caspar’s, giving it a squeeze. “God love you,” she said, not understanding the sudden pain that clouded his eyes.

***

It was several hours before he was allowed into her bedroom—at her insistence—for a brief farewell. During that time he had come to terms with many surprises.

She was not “Dee Lane” but a Delaney. Leonora Delaney, known for short as “Laney” Delaney. Her father, Joe Delaney, was an important politician in the Fourteenth Ward—undisputed territory of the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, the Shirt Tails, the Chichesters, the True Blue Americans, the O’Connell Guards, and all the other gangs whose blood ran as green as a shamrock leaf. His response to the appearance in his house of a young English aristocrat as the saviour of his daughter’s life may be imagined. It took more swallowing than Joe Delaney could manage in the space of one evening, especially on top of a gruelling day spent in prying his constituents from the grip of the Yankee police, the agents of England.

He made no secret of his dislike for Caspar; so much so that when the man came down from his daughter’s room and told Caspar to go up for a few minutes, Caspar could not help saying, “You surprise me, sir.”

A grim smile of amusement showed briefly through the man’s set features. “’Tis that girl is surprising me,” he said. “But if I cross her, sure she’ll only be worse.”

Laney was bathed and bound and comfortable in a huge mound of a goosedown mattress. A pretty little mob nightcap covered the wound on her head, leaving her auburn curls loose about her face. Caspar’s heart turned over. She was beautiful, he realized.

She held out a hand. He took it and sat beside her. An old woman—a grandmother?—sitting in the corner, and unnoticed by Caspar until then, put down her knitting, cleared her throat, and pointed to their linked hands. Reluctantly Laney let go of him. “She’s mostly deaf,” she said quietly to Caspar. “If you talk no louder than this, she can’t follow.”

“I’ve been pondering one or two things, Miss Laney,” he told her.

She blinked prettily. “Yes, Hon’able?”

“You were in no danger from that mob—”

“Ah, ah!” she warned.

“All right—from that Sunday-school outing. They wouldn’t have harmed a hair of your head.”

“Did I say they would?”

“You let me believe it.”

She shrugged her right shoulder and smiled. “God, you’re so full of false beliefs, where would I begin? You believe our people have no good cause…”

He drew breath to interrupt, but she went on: “Of course you do. You’re English, aren’t you? Don’t you damn us the minute you hear the brogue? You don’t even listen once you hear that.”

“Oh, come up!” he cajoled. “You know full well there’s a difference.”

“But you don’t deny it.”

“I do, as it happens. But you’d have to know me and my family and what we’ve done in Ireland a great deal better before I’d expect you to believe it.”

She looked at him a long time then. “All right,” she said. “I should have told you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Again the silence. She drew breath. She almost spoke. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

He smiled knowingly. She joined in. “We could talk so easily there, couldn’t we,” she said. It was partly a comment on their silence, partly the explanation she had just refused him.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she went on. “If you’re going to start in business here, you’re going to need the help of men like Joseph Delaney. So what you did today won’t…”

He laid a finger on her lip to silence her. The old woman stopped knitting. He took his hand away and, when the woman looked down again, he briefly kissed the finger that was still warm and wet from her.

“You don’t need to say that,” he told her earnestly. “If you said your father was my sworn enemy, I would still try and see you again. I am not to be bound to you by promises of help—you pick my nits, I’ll pick yours. There is no need for that.”

“I’m glad.”

“So am I.”

This time the silence was warm and easy.

“We’re mad,” he said at last.

“Of course we are.” She spoke with her eyes shut. She seemed greatly at peace.

He left her then and came quietly back downstairs. Halfway down he was surprised by Joe Delaney’s peremptory, “Is that the fella?”

He looked over the banister rail. Delaney was holding the arm of the man Caspar had kicked down the steps of the house in Platt Street. Behind them stood the giant. Caspar turned and ran back to the stairhead…how could he escape? Where?

“Come back, me boyo!” Delaney called, roaring with laughter. “We’re not after you.”

As if Caspar would believe him! He ran to the back of the house and threw open a casement window. His thigh was beginning to get muscle-bound where the cart shaft had grazed it—could he make it over the sill, let alone to the outhouse roof below? Even then, was there any way out of the back yard? Grunting with the pain, he lifted one leg out of the window. Already there were heavy footsteps on the stair.

He almost got the other leg over before his pursuer—the giant, not the man he had kicked—grabbed him back into the house, pinning him in a huge embrace.

“You’re all right!” the voice said softly in his ear. “They mean you no harm now.”

It sounded genuine enough. “I’ll walk,” Caspar said, pleased that the man let him go and made no attempt to stand near, where he could grab him if he ran again.

“Well,” Delaney asked when Caspar showed again, “is it him?”

“Sure how would I know!” The kicked man laughed and held his hand flat near his knees. “Wasn’t he so high when last I saw him. And me not much bigger.” But he turned to Caspar. “Do you know Keirvaughan?” he asked.

“What if I do?”

“Does your father be having a farm there?”

“He might.”

“John Stevenson?”

“That’s my father’s name.”

“Who took a big estate at Keirvaughan and paid the passage and eighty dollars each to three hundred families?”

There was no point in denying it further. “He did so,” Caspar said in the man’s own vernacular. “And made going farms for the twenty who were left behind.”

The kicked man turned to Delaney. “’Tis the very same,” he said.

Delaney was one big grin, from political ear to political ear. “Young man!” he said. “Don’t I owe you the grandest apology that ever man gave or got?” He turned to the giant, who had overtaken Caspar on the stairs. “A drop, Michael,” he said. “That fella’s as dry as a stone and much too sober for my liking.” He beamed the full six inches of his smile back to Caspar. “
Fáilte romhat!
”
he said, waving at the room beyond. “
Fáilte romhat.
”

His cheerfulness was so sudden and so complete that Caspar instantly knew him as a man never to be trusted. But he would certainly be useful. In so many ways.

“
Sláinte!
”
Caspar said when the malt was in his hand.

It was his second night in New York and the second night in a row that he ended up drunk. This was one hell of a city for liquoring up a stranger.

That same evening the
Great Eastern
sailed from Liverpool, outward bound for New York. Among her passengers were the Countess of Wharfedale and her daughter Lady Winifred Stevenson.

Although Boy organized and managed his railway working more effectively than even his father had dared to hope, he at last did something that really worried John. A Councillor Ericson, on one of the local councils, had done a great deal to ensure that Stevenson’s got the contract; it was the sort of “oil of angels” that went on all the time. And of course John had shown appropriate gratitude—or had thought it appropriate. Ericson had believed otherwise. He felt he should have had double, and he came, and said so to Boy.

Boy had naturally refused to believe his father could be involved in any such underhanded business and had sent in a full report to the chief constable of Lancashire. After that it had taken John a great deal of behind-the-scenes work to keep the whole affair quiet and get it dropped. When this was safely done in mid-May, John asked his son to come down to London for a “half-term report.” Somehow the young man had to be made aware what sort of a world he was now moving in.

They spent the morning going through the books.

“Even your mother says they’re impeccable; and there’s no higher praise possible,” John told him.

They also went through the daily log and the progress sheets—Boy, in effect, talking his father step by step through the project and John just nodding and smiling and finding nothing to disagree with or even to criticize, except in the mildest way.

It made for a very pleasant lunch, especially for Boy, who was longing to hear all the family news at first hand. He had felt it would be wrong during business hours to talk family.

“How’s Winnie?” was his first question. “She’s stopped writing.” He hoped his father would now take him into his confidence—after all, he, too, believed that Winnie should be disciplined.

“Er…she’s at a school in France. She’s very well. She writes to me several times a week.”

The lie left Boy feeling betrayed. “Well, tell her to drop you just once in a while and think of sending me a line,” he said coldly.

John nodded. He knew he was storing up future trouble in deceiving Young John like this. The fact was (as Winifred knew) the suppressed cry in each of her letters—her cold, damning, relentless, unanswerable letters—was tearing his heart out. He longed for some sufficient reason to bring her back home, but she gave him none. He had sent her there for falsely claiming she was submitting to his will; now she could repeat that claim—and make it a hundred times less sincere—and still he would release her. But he knew it was the very last thing she would now do.

What was wrong with these Stevenson children? All as stiff-necked, in their different ways, as a rusted weathercock! Winifred, who would not bend an inch; Caspar, who simply vanished rather than bow to his father’s will; and now Young John, who had almost put a valued business friend in jail. Well, at least Young John was amenable to reason. He always saw sense in the end.

They decided to walk around the park rather than go straight back to the office. It was a fine afternoon. The whole of the first half of May had been rainless and sunny, though rather on the cold side. The turf underfoot was hard and springy. Fleecy clouds streaming overhead kept a satisfying interplay of light and shade dappled over the view.

“No news of Caspar,” Boy said. All through lunch he had been dying to raise the topic but, having no idea how his father would respond, did not want to risk the awkwardness. Here, walking around in the open air, it would not be so sticky.

“No,” John said.

Boy sighed. “I miss him, you know. He was always good company.”

John grunted. He did not want to confess it, but he was missing Caspar, too. There was a hole in his landscape where that stubborn, self-possessed, ruthless face should have been.

Boy decided to risk a bit more. “I’ve often wondered, since—you know—whether the army would have been absolutely the thing for him.” He was encouraged by his father’s mildly interested expression. “I mean to say, guvnor, when a chap runs off like that, giving up everything, don’t you know, rather than join the colours, it’s bound to make one think a bit.”

“He should have tried it at least,” John said. “He could have purchased out after a year if it didn’t suit. I’m not unreasonable. I wouldn’t have jibbed at that.”

“Oh, quite, sir. One hesitates to say this, not just because he’s one’s own brother, but about any man behind his back—but there’s something not quite up-and-down about Caspar. Don’t you feel it?”

“In what way?”

“One always feels he’s holding something back from one. Never giving the full account—only the necessary account. And one feels he wouldn’t be above picking and choosing his truths, and…and helping them to fit his case. That wouldn’t really do in the army, would it.”

“The army is very big, my boy. And in the upper…”

“But it’s founded on honour, pater. It is honour alone that distinguishes the soldier from the slaughterer.”

“True. Yes. But there are times and places…and, ah, circumstances…where different kinds of honour, different levels of honour might conflict.”

“Are there, pater?”

“For instance, where the honour of your country might require you to sacrifice your own honour.”

“I find that hard to imagine. What sort of honour would feed upon dishonour? I would not own that country. Anyway, what I was going on to say—about Caspar—was that, if he had been in charge of this railway of mine, I believe he might not have reported that wretched Ericson to the police.”

“Ah! Now…”

“I don’t say he’d have any dealings with the scoundrel. Of course, that would be unthinkable. But he wouldn’t have pursued the matter. That’s what I’m getting at, you see.”

“Let’s sit down,” John said.

Boy sighed with contentment. He had dreaded today and now he could not imagine why. It was perfect. “I think heaven will be very like Regent’s Park,” he said.

John was silent a while. “D’you ever wonder why heaven is perfect, Young John?” he asked.

His son laughed in embarrassment. The answer was so obvious.

“I mean,” John said, “with all eternity before them, they can afford to be perfect and stay perfect, can’t they! They would be fools not to.”

Boy began to feel worried. That was not the answer which seemed so obvious to him.

“But look at this city. Look at this country. Think of the few who have power and money, and the millions who have neither—who are consumed from dawn to dusk merely with the problems of keeping body and soul together. And look how short life is, even for the man who lives a century! It’s never long enough. It’s nearer to hell than to heaven, what?”

“I suppose so, guvnor. Are you talking about Original Sin or something?”

John cleared his throat. “I’m trying to say that you’ve led a very privileged and sheltered life. I’d just like you for a minute to imagine you had nothing. A little test, if you like. Let’s say we exchange your clothes with that verminous heap of a man lying under that tree there. Now! There’s London. Here’s you. No money. No food. No home to go to. No friends to call upon. What d’you do?” He laughed. “It’s a bit like what Caspar’s doing, I suppose.”

“Except that he has money.”

“Has he? But your mother assures me she is not…”

“He has his own money. I thought you knew.”

“What d’you mean—his own money?”

“Oh. Well, a couple of years ago, when he was always going on and on about wanting to be in business. I don’t know much about it. Mama lent him a hundred pounds as a sort of test and he doubled it in a few months—paid her back and kept the rest.”

“The devil he did!” John tried to sound annoyed but his pride was uppermost.

“Of course, I didn’t hear a word of it from him. Winnie told me. Anyway, Caspar isn’t in poverty—wherever else he may he. And as to your test, I’m afraid I don’t quite grasp it, pater.”

John sighed. “No. It’s too roundabout, isn’t it. What I’m saying is that your mother and I both began life very much in the sort of situation I was asking you to assume.”

“I know,” Boy said, and, lowering his voice, he added: “She said they used to steal! They took a turnip from a field once. I was so ashamed for her.”

“Even though it was their only way of staying alive?”

“But it wasn’t. There were workhouses then, surely? Anyway, I’d sooner die than steal.”

“Of course you would. Yes, of course you would. And great credit it does you. But the world, you see, is not so simple. And Stevenson’s—the firm, I mean, as distinct from us as people—Stevenson’s is of this world. Very much so.”

Boy drew breath to speak but John spoke on, a little louder, and silenced him. “The firm has to do things, sometimes, that you and I, as people, would shrink from doing—would ‘die rather than do,’ d’ye see? Just as with countries, you know. People in charge of countries have to do things on behalf of those countries they would never do on their own behalf.”

Boy was rigid with tension. “What sort of things, sir?”

John paused. “For instance, we have to seek help from people—help, information, influence, a good word in the right ear—that sort of thing. And, of course, we have to pay for it.”

“People?” Boy was shivering. “You mean people like Councillor Ericson.”

“
Many
people like Councillor Ericson. Many, many people.”

There was a long silence. “I see,” Boy said at last.

“We have been doing it for so long—from the beginning, in fact. I had to pay over a thousand pounds on our very first contract to a man who is now a bishop! We forget, you see. And then you come along and—with different standards.”

Boy stood up, anguish in every line of his face. His hands took independent life. He walked away, but not far. John did not follow. He watched his son struggling to come to terms with these new ideas.

Boy kicked at a pebble in the grass and missed. He stooped and picked it up, weighing it. He clenched his fist around it and, at last, dashed it back to the ground. He came back to his father. “Different standards?” he said, his voice barely under his control. “But I thought they were
your
standards. Your motto for your earldom:
Sit sine labe decus—
Let honour be spotless. I believed that of you!”

“They are my standards,” John said quietly.

Boy looked puzzled. “But how…I mean, how can that be?”

“My personal standards. They are the standards, the very highest, by which I would regulate my personal life. But, as you must have learned even in these last few months, any man in charge of the fortunes of others has responsibilities, duties, obligations that make it impossible for him to apply those personal standards as rigorously as he would like.”

“No, pater. I can honestly say I haven’t learned that.”

“Then you’re a fool, Young John! The whole contract exists only because of Councillor Ericson’s help and our payment for it.”

Boy stood rigid; his voice was back under control—very icy control. “I’d rather be a fool than a scoundrel, sir.” He expected his father to become angry, but John was most placatory.

“Please try to distinguish between personal and business morality. Business has its rules. Everyone knows it ways. Everyone plays by them. You cannot come into the business world and apply the rules of some Utopia—some far-off, future, heavenly state. Believe me, Stevenson’s has a deserved reputation for being among the most honest and straight-dealing firms. And so we are—where it matters. We never do shoddy or dangerous work. We don’t pad out our costs. We don’t let people down on dates and deliveries. We shoulder responsibility honestly for our few mistakes and put them right at our expense. We pay our people on time and in coin of the realm. We give pensions…injury compensation. We don’t seek legal ways out of responsibilities that are morally ours. I could go on and on like this. Believe me, a list like that puts us amoung a very small and select group of employers in this country. In the world.”

“But…” Boy began.

“But,” John cut in, “if we turned ourselves into Utopia and Co., we very soon wouldn’t be in existence. D’you understand that? We would not be here to extend these very considerable benefits to our customers and servants.”

Boy sighed.

“D’you see?” John pressed.

“I do. I do see. It’s very hard to swallow though.”

John stood and gripped him by the shoulders. “I know, my boy. I’m sure it is. But remember: I am not talking about personal, individual behaviour, only company behaviour. In our personal lives
Sit sine labe decus
is always the motto.”

Boy nodded glumly, but John knew it was now only a matter of time before he grew up and joined the world at large. “Tell you what, my boy,” he said. “You stay out here and think about it. Walk around for an hour or so. Get used to these ideas—they’ve come as a bit of a shock, I can see. Let them rattle around a bit. Then come back to the office and see me.”

***

Boy took more than an hour to come to terms with the new morality, but he was just about reconciled to it as he went back across the Marylebone Road and into Nottingham Place. He was on the doorstep of the office, still deep in worried thought, when a messenger boy came up to him with a letter.

“Lord Stevenson?” he asked. “Would he live here, sir?”

“Yes?” Boy said. “I am Lord Stevenson.”

“Ah.” The lad still clutched the letter. “That would be the name of John Stevenson? I was to put it particular into his hands.”

“Yes, yes.” Boy was excited now for of course this was the promised message from Caspar. He felt it in his bones. He gave the lad a sixpence and took the letter. “Lord Stevenson, Nottingham Place,” was all the directions it bore.

It never crossed his mind that the letter was for his father. In that case, Caspar—or anyone—would have put “The Rt. Hon. the Earl of Wharfedale” on the envelope. With trembling fingers he opened it.

“Hamilton Place,” it was headed. But not Caspar’s hand at all. An illiterate hand, in fact. Who was writing to him from his mother’s house?

“My darling darling…”

He gulped. A hoax?

“Little Ormerod is coughing very bad and the doctor dispairs of him. I know I am not to write or communicate with you like this but seeing as he is your flesh too I…”