The Rich Are with You Always (4 page)

  "That's a definition I prefer," she told him.

  They heard Ironside vainly trying to blow a blast on the horn he kept in his pocket. John leaned out of the window, took it from him, and, wiping it well, blew the sweet, piercing note he had learned as a shotfirer years before.

  Nora, in a voice deliberately girlish and vapid, said, "Say—is there anything you can't do, Mr. Stevenson?"

  "Aye," he said. "You proved it." In the dark he felt for her breasts; and though he found only her shoulder blades, she knew what he meant.

  "Sorry," she said again, hugging him.

  "We'll make up for it later," he said.

  She thought, but did not say,
peut-être;
the ambiguities were too rich.

  Willet, their groom, came strolling up the lane to meet them. The turn into the stable yard was too sharp for a broad coach with three up, so they had to stop outside and unhitch the leader. Tip, the King Charles dog, and Puck, the small Dane dog, yapped and fretted at the perpetual iron cataract of the carriage wheel, impatient to be noticed.

  As John and Nora dismounted from the coach, Todd, the younger of the two upstairs maids, came hurrying over the lawn bearing a lantern to light them in. Nora was surprised. "Where's Mrs. Jarrett?" she asked, pushing down the leaping dogs.

  "It's her music night at the asylum, m'm," the girl said. And what dull weather! And had the journey been tedious? And please to mind the paving stone that had been put back wrong. Pleasure and nervousness kept her babbling the whole way in.

  Tip, the loyalist, stayed by them, sniffing and fussing. Puck, long-suffering egotist, left to claim pride of place at the hearth.

  "What's for supper?" John asked.

  "The children and Mrs. Jarrett and nurse had collared calf's head. Cold."

  They stamped the mud from their feet and John bolted the lobby door. "And the servants?" he asked.

  "Shepherd's pie, sir."

  "If there's any left, we'll have the shepherd's pie." And when the girl was gone, he added: "The woman's mad. Both of them. She and the nurse. I hope they keep her at the asylum."

  "John!" Nora pinched his arm.

  "Who else but her would give a cold meal on such a night?"

  "It's her way. And we've always said we didn't want them brought up to luxury."

  The argument cut not the thinnest ice. "You've been poor too," he said. "Even if you had only one potato, or a half a turnip, you'd never have served them cold on a night like this. And I'll wager it was cold baths too. Eay!" His eyes rolled in exasperation. "Cold supper, cold baths, cold nursery."

  She caught his arm as he turned to the foot of the stairs. "Well, don't wake them now. They'll get all excited, and it'll be impossible to get them back to sleep. When are you off tomorrow?"

  Resigned, he crossed to the fireplace and poked the logs to life. "Early," he said. "I'll ride over to Malton, see to this trouble on the Scarborough line, this quaking bog. I'll come back by York, so I'll be early."

  "You'll see the children then."

  "I've not seen them for a fortnight," he sighed. "Still…" He picked up two letters waiting for him on the mantel. "France," he said, looking at them. "And Exeter."

  "What are your plans for the week?" Nora asked; with half an ear she was listening to Willet carrying a trunk upstairs, preparing herself to run out and shout at him if he grazed the woodwork.

  "I'll go on to Stockton Thursday, see how they're coping with the brick troubles. On to Warrington Friday. And Exeter Saturday."

She relaxed as Willet reached the landing and put down the trunk.

  "I'll revise that," John said, having read the letter from France. "They want me in Rouen next week."

  "Not trouble?"

  "They mention none. I'll come back here from Warrington and go on to Exeter to arrive Monday." He stretched and yawned. "I can sail to Havre from Plymouth." He pulled a face, for he hated sea travel.

  "Never mind," she comforted him. "One day they'll build a bridge to France, and then you can ride all the way on horseback."

  "Oh, thank you," he said glumly and read the second letter. "From Thornton," he said, passing it to her when he had finished.

  She did not at once read it. "What do you think of my coming to France?" she asked. "This strange invitation from the Rodets. The more I think of it, the more certain I am that he put her up to it."

  "You don't think she's genuine?"

  "Oh, she is genuine. But he knows how to use her."

  John smiled to himself.

  "What's that grin supposed to convey?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "Well, it'd do no harm to learn a word or two of French," he said. "And you'd enjoy meeting Sam at proper leisure."

  She nodded and turned to the letter from Thornton:

A watery moon shone in the dawn sky when John set off next morning on Hermes, his favourite horse. Hermes had been with him since his earliest days as a contractor over in the West Riding. Just before John mounted, Willet put a finger to his lips and beckoned him over to the tack-room door. There in the dark lay Ironside, stuporifically asleep in the sodden greatcoat he had worn through last night's drizzle. He was gently steaming. The air was pungent with him.

  They shut the top half of the door quietly. "An amazing machine, the human frame," John said, "when you think of all the punishment it can tolerate."

  "Aye," agreed Willet, who did nothing to excess.

  The light northeasterly breeze grew stronger as John neared the highway. The skies must have cleared in the small hours, for the ground and air were close to freezing. There was no shelter from the cold for several miles either; the Malton road led north along a high ridge of the wold. But the views were compensation enough—eastward over the rolling hills to the German Ocean and the sunrise; westward over the deeply shaded Vale of York and down into the dying night.

  He blinked to shake the windwater from his eyes and drew his lungs full of the morning air. It was almost worth a quaking bog to have the excuse to ride this way on such a day. The only folk he met were shepherds and field labourers starting their day's work; their greetings were cheerful enough, but their pinched faces and starved bodies spoke of poverty and neglect. John noticed it more than most, being used to his navvies, who could outwork half a dozen of these farm labourers. He had always thought starvation wages were bad business. Even on his first contract, when the shopkeepers in the villages beside the line had tried selling rotten goods to his lads, he had set up his own tommy shop to sell cheap wholesome staples, like beef and bread and beer and potatoes.

  No, he thought, to be fair, their tommy shop had been Nora's idea. She had meant it as a way of making more money; but it had paid both ways—financially and in well-fed gangs. Now, on every contract where there were more than three hundred lads, there was at least one Stevenson tommy-man on commission, buying staples of wholesome quality and selling at small margins. For the privilege, they paid Stevenson's thirty pounds a year for each hundred men, and if they weren't altogether too clever, each tommy-man could make a little more than that for himself. If they were too clever and cut the quality or swelled the price, the gangs could vote them off the site.

  The whole system was Nora's, really. She always claimed that she had hated their first shop, which she herself had managed for several months. Her dislike was odd, because in fact she had a great gift for the business. She knew how customers' minds worked. She understood avarice and cupidity—and how even the poorest customer, who bought, say, just a pound of udder fat to cook for her man, needed nonetheless to feel it was almost as good as sirloin. Often he had seen her pass over the counter a poor piece of lean beef without a trace of good fat on it—and even in the way Nora handled it, even if she said nothing, there was a suggestion that it was quality meat. And that instinct for a customer's feelings was what she had somehow passed on to the tommy-men. At present, the system was earning them three thousand pounds a year; that, too, was characteristic of Nora.

  She was quality, he thought. There were few like her in the whole kingdom. He had known as much from the day they first met. Without her, he might well have gone under, like dozens of other ambitious navvies these last few years. And yet…and yet he could not feel entirely easy nor deal quite plainly with her, especially of late. There was a sense in him that she was manipulating their affairs, pushing him in directions he would rather not go, while making it seem that each step was dictated by some outside logic, unconnected with her own will or preference. Or was that being unfair to her?

  For some time he had been aware of a pack of hounds giving tongue as they approached the road along one of the lanes to the west. He reached the corner as the leaders, sterns waving, poured onto the highway. It was a bitch pack out for exercise with a whipper-in and some kennel servants. He nodded curtly to the whipper-in and got a cool nod in return. This was York Union country, where they would no more let in the likes of John Stevenson than the King of the Hottentots. He subscribed—and heavily, too—to the York & Ainsty, and Nora went down there to hunt. She said that the wold was poor country, but he knew that was not so and that the exclusiveness of the York Union hurt her.

  "Never mind," he had once said. "They're on the way out; we're on the way in. They have to cling on to something."

  "Then I could wish they'd chosen something unimportant for their raft," she said.

  The dull red globe of the sun was looming above the far-off mist as he went down over Birdsall Brow and made for Burythorpe. George Hudson's place at Howsham was only a few miles distant, and he toyed with the idea of making a detour that way. He wondered whether Hudson had heard of the trouble on the line, which the "Railway King" had himself surveyed some years earlier. Also, he had an idea that the great man could help him in the question of Beador's involvement in railway shares.

  In fact, John had turned off and was already on the lane to Leavening when he saw coming toward him a mounted figure who could only be George Hudson himself, pink in the rising sun.

  "Stevenson!" he called before either could make out the other's features. His tone was filled with relief. "Hoped I might cross your path. I owe you an apology."

  "Oh?" John was wary. The great autocrat did not often speak like that, except when he wanted a favour of you.

  They shook hands. John looked steadily into those deceptively soft grey eyes, searching for clues that had not been in the voice. They were not in the eyes either. "Yes," Hudson said. "This wet ground. I'll be damned if it was like that when our party went through."

  "Ah!" John was tolerantly laconic. "These summer surveys!"

  Their horses sniffed at each other and then stood aloof, breathing steam.

  "I hope you won't lose by it," Hudson said, still playing at penitence.

  "That's what you employ a big contractor for. You know we'll not come whimpering at every little setback, grumbling about the survey. Anyway, it can't be bad. My engineer missed it too, and I'd back him against any man." As a deliberate afterthought he added: "Except yourself, of course."