The Rich Are with You Always (11 page)

  "I'll wager you wish you could silence Denison as easily," John said.

  Hudson waved him away as if he were a beggar. "Denison will sink without trace, and his great London and York railway with him. I didn't make all my amalgamations to have Mr. Edmund Denison come and take the prize from me. There's only one way to York, and that's over
my
metals."

  "There's a lot of interests against you," Nora said. "The Lincolnshire people have a big voice."

  "They shall have a big line too. My own Nottingham, Newark, and Lincoln. Next year. The man I blame is Locke. I believe Locke to have been a disaster to railway progress. This nonsense at Shap now. Four miles up a gradient of one in seventy-five. Think of the unnecessary coals that will consume this next fifty years. He says hang the running costs; I say hang the capital cost. I know who the shareholders will bless, fifty years from now."

  John and Nora fought the temptation to look at each other and smile.

  "He's good for such as us," John said. "Brunel likes a confusion of big and small contractors. But Locke is happy to hand over a hundred miles and more to me or Brassey or Peto."

  Hudson supped his drink with relish, cupping the tankard in his hands. "You like him then. And the coal miners must like him. There's an epitaph—and the sooner, the better." He laughed, and then, changing mood, said, "By the by, there is a basket of eggs outside your kitchen door. I almost fell over them on my way round to the garden."

  John and Nora both looked heavenward. "Mrs. Jordan," Nora said wearily. "The cook. Will not bring eggs indoors after sunset. She will also not sweep dirt from the house because the luck goes with it." Nora began to tally Mrs. Jordan's oddities on her fingers. "She will not cut a child's nails till its first birthday, for fear of making it a thief. She will not count her own teeth, for what reason she will not say. She will not put a lantern on a table…what was it she said about that?"

  John prompted: "'A lantern on the table, a death in the stable.' Once when I set a lantern down on her table she came in very triumphant next day—at breakfast, no less—with a dead rat she'd just found in the stable!"

  "It had been dead already for weeks," Nora said. "But that didn't worry her. And what was it about hair? When she gets the girl to cut her hair she throws the bits on the fire. And if they flare up, she's going to live a long time. But if they oh, what was the word? A lovely word."

  "Crozzil?" Hudson suggested. "If it crozzils up, she'll soon be dead."

  "Yes!" Nora said. "That was it."

  "That's an old saying hereabouts. What does she say about cutting a loaf at both ends?"

  "Yes!" Nora laughed. "The devil will fly over the house. And if you put the loaf on its side, the breadwinner will fall ill. Really! If anyone wanted a book of superstitions, they'd only need to follow her around for a week and they'd have a library."

  "She wouldn't come to us on Friday," John said. "Remember? We engaged her on a Thursday and she wouldn't come until Saturday. They do it to provoke us, you know. I'm sure of it."

  "And she gets the others at it," Nora said. "Even Cox, who is the most sensible of them."

  "Yes, I thought that the other day, when I met her out in that cold wind with Caspar, whose nose was streaming. She said she thought the chill air might just 'draw the cold from the wee mite.'"

  "Aye! That's Mrs. Jordan's doing, all right. And Cox went in and out of the house by different doors, I'll be bound," Nora said. "That's another of hers."

  Hudson, who had nodded as to an old friend at each superstition, now wagged his finger. "Power, you see." He turned to John. "You say they do it to provoke us. And you're right. It gives them power of a kind—for we tolerate as superstition what we would otherwise certainly call an outright insubordination. Have you ever known a man who would start to sink a shaft on the thirteenth of any month? Even for triple pay?"

  John shook his head. "I had a man once who brought his dinner wrapped in a clout made from one of his wife's old shifts. Took it underground. You never heard such a fuss. I had to dismiss the man, and it almost took bell, book, and candle to get the others back below."

  "I'm sure it's to do with power," Hudson said firmly. "And I don't think we are so very superior. We smile at Mrs. Jordan and her cross of 'wiggin'…"

  "What's that?" Nora asked. "That's a new one to me."

  Hudson chuckled. "Somewhere about her, you may be sure, in the hem of a skirt or somewhere, she'll have a rough wooden cross made of wiggin twigs— wiggin is mountain ash, rowan—tied together, to bring fortune and keep off witches and werewolves. We smile at it, yet"—he fished in an inside pocket and drew forth a sheet of paper—"what's that? A piece of paper. A share certificate. What, pray, does that signify?"

  John volunteered the obvious feed: "It's supposed to be a share in an enterprise or an adventure. But?"

  "Quite so. A piece of paper, to bring fortune and keep the wolf, if not the werewolf, from the door." He looked at the share. "Saint Kilda Railway Company," he read and burst into laughter. "Someone sent me that today, happy and hopeful. Saint Kilda! Forty miles beyond the Hebrides, fifty inhabitants, sixty furlongs end to end!"

  "Do I hear any advance on sixty?" John asked.

  "Any advance on sixty and the next stop's New York," Hudson answered. "Yet"—he waved the paper—"people are buying. These will sell."

  "They will if George Hudson's put his name on the scrip list," Nora said. "It's a name we see subscribed to many lists."

  John looked sharply at her, thinking her tone a bit smart; but she kept her eyes steadily on Hudson. And Hudson looked unblinkingly at her. "That is self-protection," he said, trying to win her with a smile. "If I don't, someone else will. And that means some other railway will." He sighed, drained his tankard, and stretched his boots toward the fire. "For five very lean years—not lean for you or me, I know, but lean on the Exchange—people have been straining at the leash for loose capital to invest in railways. And now that money is beginning to float again, there are bound to be"—he crumpled the share certificate and threw it on the hearth—"nonsensicals. Bits of paper like that are going to scour the purses of a lot of fools, including, I regret to say, your Sir George Beador."

  At once the tension became almost palpable; John and Nora scarcely breathed, watching Hudson intently. "The question is: Who is to get the scourings? Some overnight moneybags who will put it all into land? That's no good to progressive people like yourselves and me. Or will it go to Mr. Edmund Denison, Mr. Glyn, Mr. Labouchere, Mr. McGregor? That's no good to progressive people like my shareholders—and me. Now tell me what I am to do, since this lunatic floating capital must be fixed
somewhere
?"

"Why not tell us about Sir George Beador instead," John said quietly.

  Hudson smiled, taking this as a concession of his point. From another inside pocket he drew a single folded quarto sheet. He was on the point of opening it when he paused and looked up, first at John, then at Nora. "Is it your impression," he asked, "that Beador has mortgaged Maran Hill?"

  "He as good as said so," John answered. "I know he's mortgaged Framwell, his place in Durham."

  "Interesting." Hudson opened the paper. "I've had my best ferret on this. A man called Croucher. I'd say if he can't find it, it doesn't exist. And he can find no such mortgage on Maran Hill."

  Nora was at once alert. If Maran Hill was still free of charge, and if its value was enough to cover the debt, Beador might be one of those problems that turned into blessings.

  "Oh, that's hopeful surely," John said.

  Hudson, with compassion, merely handed over the paper he had opened. John began to study it.

  "Aloud," Nora said.

  John, who had already seen enough to raise his eyebrows and sink his guts, sighed and read: "Pilbrow's Atmospheric Railway and Canal Propulsion Company, forty shares; London and Dublin Direct, thirty-five; Railway Guarantee Company, ten; Great Welch Junction Railway, also ten; Railway Banking Company, fifteen—or is it thirteen?—no, fifteen; Atmospheric Rapid Mail Conveyance Co., twenty; Prosser's Patent Wooden Railway Guidewheel Co., forty-three—no!" He let the paper fall. "I can't continue."

  Nora, calm—indeed, frigid—took the paper up and scanned it rapidly. "Everything except Cooke's National Extravaganza," she said.

  "One or two will pay," Hudson offered, as a bystander might offer cheer in a condemned cell. "But it will stand him a good eighteen thousand, in my view."

  John took the paper back. They watched him read it with more composure. "I could turn a profit on these," he said carefully.

  Nora drew in breath to speak but it was Hudson who voiced the thought. "All three of us could. But we'd look to Sir George and the rest of the Foolish Tribe to furnish us those profits. Is that"—he darted Nora a swift, amused glance—"what honest Yorkshire folk the likes of us were put upon this world to achieve?"

  "But he's a partner," John protested.

  "Then he has an odd way of expressing his idea of a partner's obligation. Half those were subscribed since December last." Hudson looked from John to Nora; neither replied. "Mrs. Stevenson?" he prompted.

  Nora, looking steadily at John, laid a finger on the paper and said: "It's the nearest I've seen to an autographed death warrant."

  John winced at her hardness but offered no argument. Instead he sat up, thanked Hudson handsomely and briskly for his help, and suggested they go in to dinner. The subject was not raised again until after they had retired to bed.

  John's lovemaking was brusque and perfunctory, as unrewarding to himself as to her. His warmest act was to kiss her, with a gentleness that was in itself an apology, before he composed himself to sleep.

  "Nay," she fretted. "Don't brood now."

  He sighed. "'Death warrant,'" he quoted. "Is it really that simple to you?"

  "There's only one reprieve I can see," she said.

  "What's that?"

  "If Sir George furnishes us a list identical to the one Hudson brought."

  John gave a neutral grunt. "It would solve the moral problem."

  "But the money problem. No."

  She felt John shake his head. "It's not really a money problem. It's a
man
problem, a problem of George Beador."

  There was a long, thoughtful silence before Nora said: "What would you say Maran Hill is worth?"

  "Every bit of twenty-five thousand; he'd be well covered if eighteen's the limit of his debt."

  "Aye," Nora said. "It's not a bad house. And not a bad situation."

  She felt John rocking with silent laughter. "Have ye counted the windows?" he asked at length.

  "They'll abolish window tax this year. Or next."

  "But have ye counted?"

  "Eighty-four," she said.

  He stopped laughing and sat upright. "You are in earnest!"

  "I don't know," she said truthfully. "But it's a thought."

  "A big thought. It would take a lot of thinking."

  "It's plain to me we're going to need a house in the south. If you start in Germany, Italy, Spain—never mind France. Living in Thorpe adds two days to every voyage.

  "Aye," he said. "That's true, right enough."

  He was not going to discuss it further, his tone implied. He sucked a tooth and scratched in his sidewhiskers. "It's strange," he said. "How little freedom we really have!"

"Why d'you say that?"

  "If we take a house in the south, it'll not be that we wish to live there or that it suits our station or that we find it congenial—but that our business demands it."

  "Surely a very good reason." She tugged his sleeve. "Hold me. Lie down and hold me. It frightens me when you talk as if it was all turning to dust and ashes. Why do you so often sneer when you say 'business'?"

  He lay down and pulled her firmly to him. "It's not in me," he said. "The discontent is not in me. It's in the work. We're big enough now to take on any line, any length, over any terrain; but what's left? Cornwall…Wales…the Scotch Highlands…"

  "London–York direct," Nora added.

  "If Hudson doesn't squash it. It's not much when it's shared out. The average length of lines recently authorized is about ten miles. It's all little feeder and junction lines."

  "They pay as well per mile."

  "I learned my trade on the London–Birmingham…Liverpool…Preston… Manchester. All trunk lines. And where am I applying it? On the Piddlehinton– Sopping Wetbury single branch! Where's the glory in that?"

  "Oh, I see. It's glory we take to the bank, is it?"

  He squeezed her shoulders gently, giving them a little shake as he spoke. "You're right, love. Of course you're right. There's no glory in making a loss, however noble the venture. But why not both, eh? Why not? And the time to start thinking is now. We must think to the Empire: to India, Canada, Australia, and to Europe. They'll all come to us now. Brassey told me the Belgian company couldn't raise the capital until they had guaranteed an English engineer and an English contractor."

  Nora relaxed and hugged him, reassured. "We'll amaze them all. Or you will," she said.

  "I can do naught without thee."

  "And if the profit on the Piddlehinton–Soaking Wetmarsh helps us strike farther afield, we'll build a hundred single branches."

  He laughed then. "Aye. Seen in that light, it's endurable. Tolerable."

  Much later she said: "I wonder if Beador will turn out honest."