Theirs Was The Kingdom (44 page)

She said, carefully, “No doctor, and certainly no report to the police. Nothing whatever would be gained by going down there and something might be lost. As it is they will have to wait a day or so to learn how Mr. Stead handles the story. Believe me, Ned, I know what I am about. For the first time since I began this business. Sicard was a good teacher. I’ll run him down in the end, but it may take years. A new start will have to be made. My uncle was right after all.”

“Swann? What can he know about it?”

“He knows the way of the world, Ned. Better than we do, and better than Stead. He told me something like this could happen. From here on I’ll listen to him, rather than my conscience. If you want to be useful start making arrangements for us to travel back and make sure you meet Mrs. Butler’s train when she gets back from Paris tomorrow.”

“She’ll know what to do, Deborah. She’s still in charge, isn’t she?”

“Not of me she isn’t.”

She left him then, moving stiffly into the bedroom and closing the door. It was curious how finally she could turn her back on people like him and Mrs. Butler, on the fervent and vociferous, who clamoured for reforms and spouted scripture in support of their crusades. She understood now that Stead was more right than he knew when he said that compassion played little part in work of this kind. She took a jar of cold cream from a drawer left open by the searchers, applying it gingerly as best she could. Very gradually the heat went out of her wounds and she lowered herself gently on the edge of the bed.

Four

1

I
N THE EARLY DAYS, WHENEVER ADAM SWANN LOOKED COVETOUSLY ON AN unexploited piece of territory and decided, sooner or later, to make it his own, his method was to cast about for a lieutenant born and raised in that area, someone familiar with the local quirks of character and the local speech idioms, someone with friends and relatives within close call, who would hold the door ajar, wide enough for a Swann waggon to move through on to new ground.

By and large the method had served him well. Hamlet Ratcliffe, who had ruled the Western Wedge for more than twenty years now, was Devon born, and had won the west in a single day by recapturing the Bamfylde lion and returning him to Exeter in a Swann two-horse frigate. Bryn Lovell, who had spoken nothing but Welsh until he taught himself English by reading Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
, had done the same for the Mountain Square, a great tract of land almost innocent of railways northwest of his base at Abergavenny. John Catesby, who had opened up the Polygon north of the cotton belt, was Lancashire born, had stood beside a loom as a child and served a term in a Lancashire gaol for rioting in the forties. Edith Wadsworth, and her father before her, who had made the Swann-on-Wheels insignia familiar in the east coast crescents, were natives of the North Riding of Yorkshire, and had later moved down into Lincolnshire. Godsall, a Kentishman, had been picked to replace coachman Blubb in the Kentish Triangle. Morris, a Worcestershire man, was in charge of Southern Pickings, based on Worcester. Vicary, of The Bonus, north of the Thames estuary, was a native of Southend.

When it was not possible to apply this golden rule, Adam saw to it that his managers were started young in the territories they were to command, as in the case of Rookwood, the Thameside waif who had taken over the Southern Square at the age of twenty-one and was now well-established at Salisbury. In only one case was an exception made to this method of pre-selection and this was in the far north where Fraser, once a pedlar, had watched and waited for years before mounting his successful foray into the country of his Scots ancestors and had finally established himself in Edinburgh, with the whole of the Midlothian and Border Counties under his hand and a footing north of the Tay. But even so, Fraser had known his beat and the canny customers who inhabited it, so that eyebrows were raised at Headquarters when Adam sent a raw young cockney to replace Fraser, who reached the age of retirement in the autumn of 1880. Conservatives like Tybalt, the chief clerk, and Saul Keate, the waggonmaster of the network, regarded this selection as a mistake. However, Jake Higson, who had begun life as a chimney sweep and been lucky to escape with his life in one of Swann’s flues back in the sixties, was a forceful character, with good leadership potential, who might, in Keate’s view, have done well as a depot manager in the southeast. They did not question the Gaffer’s judgement openly, however, suspecting that he knew what he was about and remembering his uncanny knack of picking deputies. Thus it was that no one at Headquarters was much surprised when Fraser’s beat held its lead after the transfer, and returns from the Edinburgh depot began to forge even further ahead. Only Godsall, in the Kentish Triangle, ground his teeth with rage every time the quarterly circular came in showing sectional turnovers.

There was a reason for this, a reason of which Swann himself was unaware. He had noted the glowing health of the Scottish section, of course, had even commented upon it to Tybalt when the returns came in. He put it down to the cordial relationship that grew up between Fraser, a man of sound judgement and enormous experience, and his heir apparent, young Jake Higson, supplemented, perhaps, by Fraser’s decision to stay on for a period in order to play Higson in.

This was indeed a factor in the prosperity that obtained up here, but it was not the main reason for it. The underlying cause was at once more subtle and more unlikely. It concerned what might have been called the transmogrification of Jake Higson.

Higson, who did not know his correct age but judged it to be somewhere around thirty, had carried his cockney prejudice north of the Tweed, although he had been careful not to let that prejudice show when selected as a possible successor to Fraser, the Scottish viceroy.

There was a Napoleonic tradition in the Thameside yard that every Swann vanboy carried a managerial baton in his lunch box. The founder of that tradition, of course, was “Young” Rookwood, of the Southern Square, whose name dangled like a carrot in front of every urchin who swung from the tailboard rope of a Swann waggon.

Rookwood had been one of Waggonmaster Keate’s successes, scraped from the Rotherhithe foreshore, scrubbed, taught to read and write, set to work, and ultimately installed as stableman in a provincial capital, where he had attracted the notice of Abbott, the slave-driving gaffer of the depot. Abbott had later left the network under a cloud but his recommendation—surprising in the circumstances—had won Rookwood a trial as manager. By the time he was twenty-three, Rookwood had established himself as one of Swann’s most thrustful lieutenants and had gone on to astonish everybody, including Keate, his original sponsor. He had married his landlady’s daughter, come into a modest income when her father died, attended church regularly, behaved circumspectly in every conceivable way, and was now, believe it or not, a city councillor, a member of the Board of Guardians, a sidesman, and the father of three clever children, one of whom was up at Oxford reading Greats.

Rookwood was thus the central figure of a Swann cautionary tale and his name was mentioned whenever promotion was discussed. But those who knew Jake Higson did not expect to see Rookwood’s career duplicated in the north, for Higson was not that kind of chap at all. Indeed, to those who knew him well, nothing seemed less likely than that Higson should marry, settle down, and become a sidesman or a guardian. Unlike Rookwood, he had never made an attempt to discard the shell of the cockney waif, that armour of impudence and derisive humour that accounted for his survival in his chimney-sweeping days. Neither had he shown any desire to improve his education, but continued to glory in backslang and use the thin, nasal vowels of the London guttersnipe. He had the cockney’s rooted contempt for every other city, town, and village in the four nations. To him every settlement outside the southern rim of Essex, and the northern boundaries of Kent and Surrey, was a kind of wasteland where the pickings for the artful might be lucrative, but where no sane man would choose to live, unless it paid him handsomely to do so.

It would have been useless to tell Higson that, from time to time, the provinces threw up a giant, a Shakespeare, or a Brunel, or men of unquestioned commercial importance for whom Swann-on-Wheels shifted goods. He would have replied that none of these men would have amounted to—in his quaint phrase—“a bleedin’ pennorth o’ cold gin” had they not shown sufficient enterprise to move southeast in their formative years. For Higson did not acknowledge Britain or the British Empire as such. To him both were no more than convenient terms, applied to a loose federation of tribes, each looking to London for everything from pence to puddings. If he thought of Scotsmen at all before his translation among them, he would have seen them as music-hall turns, attired in kilt and tam-o’-shanter, blowing bagpipes and proclaiming their obscure origins by prefacing every sentence with the phrase “Och, aye!” He had never heard of Doctor Johnson but would have confirmed his doctrine that the best sight a Scotsman could hope for was the road to England.

It was in this frame of mind, or something like it, that Jake Higson boarded the express out of Euston about the time Gladstone was making his conquest of Midlothian. The coincidental arrival in Edinburgh of Higson and Gladstone confirmed Higson’s estimate that he was now among savages, for he passed out of Waverley Station straight into an overflow meeting of Edinburgh Liberals so that it seemed to him he had arrived in time to witness a native fertility celebration, or some other rite whipped up by kilted witch doctors.

The streets were thronged with men and women, each wearing the same rapturous expression, each given to making identical outbursts of spiritual ecstasy, the like of which Jake had never heard, not even in the Old Kent Road during a weekend Saturnalia. The uproar was stunning and the press of people so great that it seemed useless to wait about for Fraser, scheduled to meet him, so he made his own way to his temporary lodgings in the Cowgate, arriving there battered, breathless, and not sure how one would begin to set about the process of taming such people.

Fraser, equally battered, appeared an hour later, apologising for having missed him and explaining that the Scots took their politics very seriously and that he would doubtless adjust to this. He gave Jake directions to the Grassmarket close by, where Swann’s stables and yard were situated, and promised to take him on a tour of the city the following morning.

Jake lay awake half the night, listening to reverberations attendant upon Gladstone’s visit, and the very fervour of the occasion sapped his confidence in himself so that he thought, with uncharacteristic humility as he drifted off to sleep, “Dunno what I’ll make o’ this bunch… if they put as much ’eart inter ’aggling as they put inter pollerticks they’ll be flamin’ ’ard to best an’ bang goes my chance to show the Gaffer wot I’m made of…”

But then, in the morning, a curious thing happened, something that he could never have foreseen when he emerged from Waverley Station, with the air of a man conferring a favour upon the Scots by being here. Dramatically and emphatically, so that the experience was almost physical, the spirit of Auld Reekie descended from the frosty sky above the looming bulk of Castle Rock, and staked a claim on him so that he began to sense the permanence and antiquity of a place and a race that he had thought of, up to that time, as being good for nothing beyond a quick profit and a chortle.

He could never have said what caused this manifestation. He was very far from being a romantic, susceptible to atmosphere, and yet, as he made his way through crowds of solemn-faced Scotsmen and overheard snatches of their solemn conversation, a conviction grew upon him that he had been whisked from a city of frivolity and inconsequence to the heart of a civilisation where the meanest-looking rascal carried himself like an exiled king, where the small change of barter acquired the status of ceremonial, and the business of the day, conducted in and around the stalls, was entered upon with a gravity and punctilio that made London marketing seem trivial and digressive.

It had to do with buildings as much as people, for the towering rock, topped by the castle and rising starkly out of a cleft filled by violet mist, appeared to him as a kind of symbol of the terrible earnestness and sobriety of Scotland, and this impression was deepened hour by hour as Fraser showed him the sights and introduced him to the heart of his new kingdom.

For a time—it was not more than an hour or so—he took refuge in the gamin’s irreverence but he soon dropped this defence. Quips concerning John Knox and Jenny Geddes (whose place in Scots history, Fraser said, had been gained by throwing a stool at a parson in St. Giles’s Cathedral) sounded childish and facile among all this granite and gravity. He let himself be carried along on the tide of the centuries, so meekly that the perceptive Fraser was instantly aware of the sobering effect the city was having upon him and even praised him for it, saying, “It’s the right approach up here, Higson, and you’ll do well to stick to it. Your cue, as I soon found, is to forget the Act of Union. Let ’em see you think of ’em as a separate nation, allied to England for purposes of trade but nowt else, if you follow me.”

Jake, who did not follow him because he had never heard of the Act of Union, said, “You mean the Jocks was
seprit
once? With a king an’ parlyment diff’rent from ours?”

And Fraser, himself ancestrally Scottish, took a deep breath and said, “Good God, man, of course they were! Until around about your great-great-great-grandfather’s time.”

It was this casual exchange that set the tone of the relationship between the two men on the first day of their association, for Fraser had always regarded himself as an infiltrator up here and it seemed important that he should coach his successor in the essentials of his own technique. He said, “Heed me, lad, and you won’t go far wrong. Up here are the canniest people in the world, not excluding the Jews, so start off on the right foot. Forget all the jokes you’ve heard about a Scot’s stinginess. He has his failings, and mulishness is the worst of ’em, but make friends of a Scotsman and he’ll never turn his back on you, not even if he sees a profit in it, and that’s a damned sight more than you can say of most people! They’ll strike a hard bargain but when it’s struck they’ll stand by it, even when it goes against them. As to education, why man, that shoeless bairn over there could tell you more of his country’s past than many a fine gentleman in London could tell you concerning what happened on his doorstep the day before yesterday! Learn something of Scots history. Never joke about business. Never get into an argument with them about religion or politics, not because they’re intolerant, like the Irish, but because theology and economics is in their bloodstream and if you open the door to them they’ll hold you in argument half the day when you’ve business elsewhere. Take them and their traditions seriously. Don’t look to be shortchanged but don’t try and steal a march over them, either. Drift about a bit while I’m at your elbow, and get the
feel
of the country. Above all, stand by your word and handshake, for they mean more up here than south of the Border. If so much as one of them decides you’re not to be trusted, then word of it will run across the city like a heath fire and we’ll be slipping down the Swann ladder to sixth or seventh place in the regions, instead o’ pride of place that we occupy right now! There, that’s enough advice for one day. Come on down the hill and I’ll show you the very spot where a Queen’s husband and his lickspittles put fifty-six dagger wounds into a foreigner they distrusted.”