The Rich Are with You Always (12 page)

  John was so close to sleep that all he did was to grunt.

  Before she too fell deep into slumber, Nora had rearranged the shrouded ballroom at Maran Hill many times.

  One half of her—the cautious half—wanted to be rid of Sir George Beador and all the uncertainty he represented. The other half—the huntress—wanted to part him gently and cleanly from Maran Hill; and Hudson's news seemed to offer a way of doing exactly that.

The snows of 1845 were the worst anyone could remember. For ten weeks the temperature did not once rise to a thaw. The poor got out-relief cutting timber, clearing snow—even along lanes that none wanted clear—and building needless walls and extensions to kennels and stables; even so, the times dealt hard with them. Eight cords of oak and elm went to keep Thorpe Old Manor warm, and there was no nonsense about cold nurseries; tepid baths were allowed.

  John built a snowman, but he rolled the head too long on one axis so that, by chance, it turned into an amazingly lifelike bear. It squatted on its haunches and fixed the house with a daylong, nightlong stare. Winifred scratched a peephole in Jack Frost's patterns on her window and watched to see if Bruin moved at night, as Mrs. Jordan said he did. But there he stood, blue in the glacial moonlight, frozen in the frozen garden; Mrs. Jordan said it was cruel to torment the creature so, for he'd not stretch if he knew folk were looking.

  Each day they trotted the horses and the pony, sometimes in the paddock, sometimes up on the highway. On one of her rides, Winifred found a broken tin whistle sticking out of a snowdrift. Cox and Todd made a second effigy of snow, to play tin-whistle music to the bear in his loneliness. One night the breeze lay in just the right direction to moan through the pipes as through an aeolian harp. Winifred awoke briefly, heard it, and went smiling back to sleep; magic was abroad.

  Next morning she opened her eyes to an indoor fairyland, for overnight the nursery had been transformed into an ice grotto. Folds of ice festooned the wall and long stalactites hung from the ceiling—milky green and grey and white and blue, all scintillating in the early sun. Her first thought was that she had been bewitched and transported to the Halls of the Ice Faeries. She lay rigid, taking stock and fearing that every movement of her eyes would bring the hordes of her captors around her. But as one and then another familiar nursery feature claimed her attention, she realized she was still at home—though a very changed and beautiful home.

  Whoever had done it had worked a miracle. The little framed picture of a girl on a pony stared out through a wavy inch of ice upon the wall. The washstand was bound in gnarled roots of ice that grew in columns up the corner. She woke up Young John and together they danced and clapped hands and laughed at the wonder of it all.

  Then Cox came in and said "Dear God!" And shortly after, their mother appeared and wrung her hands and said that the cistern had cracked. "Just when your father's away too." After breakfast, Willet and the new stable lad, Myles, apprenticed from the orphanage, spent the morning with spades, trowels, hammers, chisels, and crowbars demolishing fairyland and throwing the shards out the window.

  The plumber came and said the cistern hadn't cracked, one side of it had merely been pried slightly apart. He showed Nora how the lead in the screw sockets had shrunk and split and allowed the ice to thrust one side of the cistern away—the screws pulling out of the lead and coming away with the side as it went. He said he could melt fresh lead into the sockets but it might only happen again. The sockets ought to have been skewed, not straight.

  That evening, John came back wearied by a three-day journey from Havre, through a black-and-white world all the way home. He wanted only to thaw out, eat, love, and sleep. But when he heard why the children were sleeping in the rose bedroom, the problem intrigued him, and after dinner he made Nora take him up to the attic and show him the cistern as the plumber had explained it.

  "He's right about one thing: The sockets should've been skewed. But since they weren't, we'll drill diagonal holes, blind, upward and downward from the socket. Make a bird's-foot socket. That's what we are going to do."

  Nora took the lantern from him. "We," she said, backing down the stairs, "are going to bed. And we are going to leave plumbers' troubles to plumbers because engineering contractors have troubles enough of their own."

  "Oh?" He followed her.

  "Sometimes I think you're still a ganger at heart, you know," she said. "You'd rather drill that slate than—"

  "What troubles?"

  "Income tax, for one. Our return is near due."

  "Is it bad?"

  "A few pence short of ninety pounds!"

  John winced.

  "You shouldn't pull faces," Nora said. "Lady Henshaw, God rest her, always used to say you could tell people of quality from parvenus by their willingness to pay taxes; only parvenus grumble."

  He ducked the beam at the foot of the attic steps. "That's because the quality have had time enough to reach certain accommodations with the Revenue."

  "We've not done too badly on that score, ourselves."

  They went downstairs again to the winter parlour. On the way they passed Mrs. Jarrett, taking a glass of port to her room. "I've poured you a glass each," she said, "and locked the tantalus. Will you have the key?"

  John said that one glass would do for them, and they bade her good night.

  "There's still no letter from Beador," Nora said.

  "I've been to see him," John told her, and then shook his head at the hope that came into her eyes. "Our problem there has simply moved one station down the line."

  "How?"

  He handed her port over and sipped his own, relishing it on his tongue. "Let's see the tax return first. I suppose, as usual, you've left me nothing to do but to sign."

  Smugly, she put the forms in front of him. "The solicitors have seen it. The chief clerk has seen the relevant parts. Chambers has seen it."

  The summary, after the usual preambles and cautions, read:

  Before John could speak she passed him a bill of exchange drawn up by Charles Stoddart, her lawyer, for £52-10-0. "My contribution," she said. "Schedules A and B are mine."

  He made an appreciative face. "Doing well," he said. But because he was used to once-for-all profits of thirty to forty per cent, he failed, once again, to realize quite how well; for Nora's contribution represented a steady gross income of more than £2,200, year-in, year-out.

  She turned down the corners of her mouth and smiled—courageously, she hoped. "Not as well as I'd hoped. But"—she sighed—"well enough. Yes, well enough. Better"—and you would have thought the comparison had just occurred to her—"than Chambers and our trust, anyway."

  He patted the small of her back. "Ye never give up," he said.

  "Never," she agreed. "Anyway. The tax on Schedules C and D represents the two thousand-odd guineas we drew to live on. You moved £45,000 to France, which has to be spent by the end of June, or we'll face some inquiry on the residue."

  "No trouble," he said.

  She let a small silence grow before she spoke again. "What about Beador, then?" she asked. "By the way, we've heard from the Reverend Prendergast. He politely declines to help."

  He finished his port and tossed the last drop at the fire; it landed on an unburned log and evaporated without catching fire. Glumly he turned to her. "Prendergast is in for a bishopric, so he may be having serious attacks of virtue. As to Sir George, I never met a man more difficult to assess. At one point I really caught myself wondering if he's got all his buttons."

  "Oh, he's sane. Did he give us this wretched list?"

  John went across to his travelling case and returned with a sheet of paper, which he passed to Nora.

  "No tearstains," she said as soon as she looked at it. Then, after closer study: "Mr. Hudson did well; there's only two here he missed—Marine Glue Co. and The Patriot Association. What's that?"

  "Beador can't remember."

  "Can't remember? Where did he buy them?"

  John made a hopeless gesture. "In Bartholomew Lane and Capel Court!"

  "From alley men!" Nora was scandalized.

  "They were 'so cheap,' he said!"

  "Well, at least he can tear those up and burn them. Where did the rest come from?"

  "He either wrote away or got them through his bank—through the Stock Exchange."

  "So he'll have to pay deposit and calls on them all."

  "Or sell out quickly and leave the country."

  "John, we cannot let such a man get his feet in our trough."

  "He bought them all within the space of one week. He says he has no notion what possessed him, except that he felt utterly convinced of his rightness and virtue. He had a vision of saving his estates and founding a new fortune."

  "A brainstorm."

  "Now, of course, he's sick with worry. He wants us to buy the foundry land. I told him it's not worth two thousand. No help at all."

  "But a partnership would be far too risky."

  "He feels he's let us down. His sister, his tenants, his staff—everyone. He's lacerating himself now."

  "I wish to God we'd never heard of George Beador. Did you commit us to help?"

  "No. Of course not. I said we'd have a think and see if any sort of rescue were possible. But I doubt it will be."

  It was the note of pessimism for which Nora had been waiting. "Very difficult," she agreed. "I see only one possible answer." It caught his interest. "Instead of a partnership, let us form a company under this new, simplified Board of Trade system."

  She watched the idea sink in and take hold of him. He smiled. "I hadn't thought of these new companies."

  "They're better than a partnership—in this instance, anyway. It would limit our liability to aid Beador. And he could raise money on his share."

  He took her hand and pressed it. "I think you've hit it," he said.

  She smiled and leaned on his shoulder. "Bed?" she suggested.

  "Of course, Beador could try selling these useless shares."

  She laughed, a full rich laugh. "Beador couldn't sell free pardons on a gallows morning," she said.

  It was working out well. Now Beador could breathe easy all summer, while she was in France. And then, come the autumn, Beador would reach the end of the lifeline—and find the noose that was tied there.

The French language gave Nora far more trouble than she expected. She had a parrot's gift for mimicry—witness the ease with which she lost her native Leeds dialect as soon as she and John began to move in the world. But that was of little use in Thorpe, for Miss Woods's French sounded as English as the bells of York Minister. However, the idea of these lessons was not so much for Nora to gain a good pronunciation as to lay the elementary groundwork on which she could build during her months in France. The impediment, surprisingly enough, lay in the fact that everything in French was artificially endowed with sex. Carpets, for instance, were male. Doors were female. Moreover, there was no logic to any of it. For example, one could hardly think of anything more quintessentially feminine than eggs or more masculine than beards; yet the French perversely called a beard "she" and an egg "he."

  This perversity affronted something too deep in Nora for her to name. But when she pointed out the illogicality of it, Miss Woods warned: "You mustn't say that when you are in France. The French take great pride in being the most logical people in the world. They think we are very muddleheaded."

  To Nora, whose blood ran imperial red, it was enough to damn the French forever. Only her realization that the language was going to be important to their business kept her at it. And in her pedantic, humourless way Miss Woods was an able teacher, who fully earned her five shillings an hour each weekday. So that when April came, bringing with it the long, slow thaw, Nora could talk about the weather, ask directions, inquire about health, and manage the etiquette of a family meal—all at a very elementary level. Il fai
t
beau; ou est la plage; je vais bien, merci; non, merci, madame, je suis très contente cam
e out as in the guidebooks: eel fay bow, oo ay lah plahje…and so on. She had no idea what French sounded like, but she knew that she sounded very English. That, plus the uncertainty about the sex of everything, was very inhibiting. Nor was John much help. He had picked up a smattering of French on his many visits to the railway workings he'd undertaken with Brassey and on his own. Normally he was very good at accents. He could imitate any navvy, from Cornwall or Scotland or Lincolnshire or Ireland—or anywhere. But he refused to imitate a Frenchman, except in gross parody in which he shrugged, spread his hands, lolled on one side, stuck out his lips, and made Gallic coughs and nonsense syllables.