"I sh'll go back to Yorkshire tomorrow," he called through the open door to the dressing room, where one of the maids was helping Nora dress. To his surprise, the door was slowly closed against him, making further talk impossible. He shrugged and returned to his letters.
Now and then he heard Nora and the maid giggling, and when, at last, she came into the room, he saw her eyes gleaming with the promise of a secret to unfold. The heady, damp smell of her was gone.
"That Kitty," she said when the maid left the room, "has been here more than ten years.
"Oh?"
"She has. That's before Sir George bought this place from—you'll never guess who from."
John thought hard; the vaguest memory of some useless information stirred. "He was a merchant in the Russian trade. Someone on the Baltic Exchange?"
"But his name. His name was Thornton."
John frowned in disbelief. "Not—no, surely not—not connected with
our
Thornton! Dear Walter?"
"His uncle!"
"I don't believe it!"
"It's true. She's just told me it all…"
"The uncle who brought him up? When he was made an orphan?" The story, as Walter had told it to them—it must have been five years since, sometime in 1840—began to come back to him.
"That's the one," Nora said. "They took a plunge in forty-three. This place changed hands then. Kitty stayed on."
Her slow, salacious grin infected him. He took her hand and led her to the sofa in the bay window. "So she knew our Walter when he was a lad," he prompted.
"In the most biblical sense!" Nora laughed.
"She told you that?" He was astonished.
"I had to get it out of her. But she wasn't that unwilling, not once she'd started to talk. He was even worse here, I think, than when we knew him."
They both laughed again—a little longer and more heartily than the situation might seem to warrant. Walter Thornton was a subject of some delicacy between them. Almost six years ago, Nora, then destitute and tramping from Manchester to Leeds, had sold herself to this Walter for a few shillings—though, as it turned out, he had eventually given her a sovereign. A casual suggestion of Walter's had led to her meeting with John, who was then at the very start of his astonishing rise from being a navvy to becoming one of the foremost contractors in England— indeed, in the world. John had always known of that transaction between Nora and Walter, yet, though he had never reproached her, she was never easy in Walter's presence, and she was always a little too brazen, too cool, when the talk turned to what they politely called Walter's "Irish toothache"—for Thornton, as the navvies bluntly said, always carried four spare pricks in his purse.
"I had to tell her a thing or two about his goings-on since we knew him, to get her talking."
"Not…?" he asked.
"Of course not!" She was annoyed he could even think it. "Just him and that halfwit wench on the canal bank. And the goings on with that skinny servant girl up in Carlisle—things like that."
She was smiling again. "Go on," he said. "What did Kitty say?"
She looked around, as if for eavesdroppers, before she began, in a low voice full of gossipy complicity. "He used to…" She got no further, but covered her face and laughed. "It's awful," she said. "I shouldn't be telling you, really."
He did not reward her with any display of his impatience.
"She says he never left the servant girls alone. He was always hanging about the rooms, trying to lift their skirts while they worked. He was 'fierce to get it' always, she said. Mind you, I think she was more than half willing, was Kitty. I fancy she's a right little cleaver."
"Why?"
"She said he used to catch her in the garden room, which is at the far end of the north wing from here. Well, you couldn't be taken by surprise there, could you? Just imagine it. No matter what direction anyone came from, you'd get good warning. I think she has her heels lightened, all right."
"How old was he then?"
"Once he came about her five times in one day, she said. He let out he was sick, when the family went away out calling and left him, which they usually did. He often used to say he was sick then, and go to bed and get cordials brought up."
"By Kitty?"
"Well, she wouldn't volunteer, would she? Not if she wasn't willing. She tried to talk like she hated it and only did it for fear of dismissal."
"I should think he was sick after that. Five times!"
Nora laughed again. "Aye! She said it didn't take much pretence when the rest came back. He looked like a second helping of death. But next day he was harder than ever for it. She said from the time he was sixteen he had every below-stairs and every above-stairs unmarried female. As often as they'd let him. Also a retired cook above sixty who came back to see the family and had just been widowed."
"A good chance," John said judiciously. "Thornton would know that."
"She was only here the one afternoon, but he followed her out, up the road, and took her into a field. Over sixty!" She shook her head.
He reached his arm around her. "Thou'll be over sixty one day, see thee." He put his lips to her ear. "And I sh'll still crave after thee."
She grazed her ear on his moustache and shivered, serious now. "Nay," she said softly, dropping back into dialect too. "Leave off with thee!" But despite this verbal rejection, she did not repel his caresses. The Walter Thornton catharsis was over—until the next time.
Far out over the park the sun slipped below the pall of rain cloud, moments before it set. In that brief interval it suffused the canopy of unrelieved grey with a raw, burning red.
"Look at that," John said. "Promises fair tomorrow."
"Talking of promises fair," Nora said, her eyes baleful with the borrowed fire, "what of our host?"
John sighed. "You are sure we need to go into ironfounding?" he asked. He did not want to tell her yet how inconclusive his talk with Sir George had been. Nor did he want to confess that he felt threatened in some obscure way by the very idea of partnership with the man.
She bit her lip. "You speak as though it was me forcing us to it."
He did not answer. She pulled away from him then and grasped his arms, compelling him to face her. "It's our business," she said. "Not me."
He nodded, still unhappy.
"I'm not often wrong in these things," she said.
He smiled then. "That's the annoying part. You're never wrong." He touched her forehead gently. "I trust that instinct. Never fear I don't."
"Yet you hesitate."
He pulled down the corners of his mouth ruefully. "I think you and Chambers with your ledgers and balances don't see the half of it."
"What half?" She was not belligerent or challenging. She knew too well that the financial insight which had grown during the years she had spent in managing their books was only one small element in their business.
"Trouble like Sir George Beador, for a start," he said. If only he could put his disquiet into words!
"Drop him! We only took him up to get land and influence cheap. But we don't need either. Not cheap. It's only our greed."
He shook his head. "We must build in Stockton. We both agree it's the best place in the whole kingdom. And we can't build there without Beador. Not now we've taken him up. We can't afford to make an enemy of him. But"—he waved Sir George away to a distant horizon—"that's not the real worry. It's the permanence of a foundry, d'ye see? Till now we've had nothing that's permanent. Not even the depots. It's what I'm used to. I'm a travelling man. But with a foundry we'll have static plant, a fixed gang of workers." He laid his fist heavily on the sill at each item. "Offices. Staff. Fixed deliveries. Orders. Supply troubles. Labour troubles. It's not—my skill, my instinct, it doesn't run that way."
"You've never been one to turn from troubles. Not profitable ones."
"Aye." He laughed. "I'm as keen on profit as the next man." He pinched her cheek lightly. "And as the next woman too, belike. So I sh'll do it. I shall build. All I'm saying is, don't think that because your books say it's one-tenth of our assets, this new foundry's going to be only one-tenth of our troubles."
His answer pleased her. He had never committed himself so fully to the idea of going into ironfounding; until now he had always called his talks with Beador mere "soundings." She did not again raise her unanswered question about Sir George.
"By the way," he called to her as he was dressing, "I'll likely see Thornton next week. Down in Exeter. I've heard Brunel's asked him to take over daily charge down there."
"Well," she said, "I don't expect we shall ever escape him." But she barely thought of Walter Thornton; instead, she wondered what dismal things John had discovered about Sir George—things that had made him lay such an elaborate false trail for her as his own alleged fear of possessing one small factory.
Chapter 2
When the ladies killed that day's fox for the fourth time since dinner, Nora thought it a good occasion to leave them. On her way to the door Hetty Beador, Sir George's sister, beckoned to her.
"If you really are intending to leave tomorrow, Mrs. Stevenson," she said, barely above a whisper, so that Nora had to lean close, "Madame Rodet is in the library. I know she has something particular to say to you."
Nora thanked her and looked uncertainly at the two doors she might use, one leading through the hall, the other through the ballroom. "Take the candle on the bureau," Miss Beador said. "That will light you through the ballroom."
Nora stepped tentatively into the great, dark chamber, where everything was kept shrouded except at the big festivities. Now, if this were my room…she thought, beginning a favourite game. But a roar of laughter from the gentlemen, still at their port, interrupted her. She did two solemn steps from a waltz, being careful with the candle flame, and then began to wonder what Madame Rodet could want.
Rodet was the ironfounder who had supplied rail for part of the Paris–Rouen line, which John had partnered the great Thomas Brassey in building back in 1841. Since the coming of the railways to France, Rodet had prospered. Beginning as a small, well-established patron of the third or fourth generation, he had in less than ten years become one of his country's foremost ironmasters. How he had come to know Sir George Beador she had not yet learned; but she knew it was Rodet who had put Sir George up to this notion of investing in ironfounding as a way of making more money than his rents and bonds could fetch in. And it was Rodet, too, who had suggested John Stevenson as a likely partner. He had even been here on their arrival at Maran Hill to introduce John and herself to the Beadors; but he had left for France within the hour.
"He doesn't want to get caught between us until things are settled," John said.
Nora did not believe that that was a complete explanation.
Madame Rodet had stayed on to enjoy a fortnight with the Hertfordshire
and the Puckeridge, for Sir George hunted with both packs. She was the sort of follower Nora had little time for. She rode well enough, very correctly, but she didn't go. She was content to drop behind the field early in a chase and was delighted at every check, when she would mill around with the "at home" crowd and lose all interest in the hunt itself. In short, she hunted merely in order to ride. Nora, thinking they had little in common, looked forward to their meeting with no very special interest.
At first she did not see Madame Rodet. But when the door latch sprang softly back into its mortise, part of what she had taken to be the upholstery of the high-back sofa moved. It was Madame's lace cap.
"Mrs. Stevenson," she called. "I hoped you would come." Her welcome was very warm; that and the charm of her accent made it hard for Nora to persist in her indifference.
"How do you see to embroider just by the firelight?" Nora wondered aloud.
"Oh!" It was a Gallic laugh. "I can do it when I am sleeping even, you know." She patted the sofa beside her, next to the fire. "Please."
Nora put the candle on the table before them and sat. She shivered at the heat. "I didn't know how chill it had got."
"Tskoh!" Madame Rodet looked intensely at her, with a curious angry sympathy. She had a face like an eagle. "You must drink whiskey. Yes. It's good."
Oh dear,
Nora thought, realizing that the other had believed her to say she'd got a chill. Her heart sank at the prospect of the misunderstandings to come. "What are you making?" she asked.
Madame Rodet stabbed two more deft stitches in to complete one small leaf in a formal arrangement of peacocks and vines; the embroidery was barely begun, most of the design was still just pencilled in.
The more Nora looked at it, the more she marvelled at its intricacy. "Did you make all that up?" she asked.
"Oh no!" Madame Rodet laughed. "It's a copy. Of course. From the
moyen
age.
The middle times." She pierced the twist of silk on to the edge of the design with the needle and put the frame aside. "Are they still killing the fox?" she asked, inclining her head back toward the drawing room.
Nora smiled. "Better each time. Each telling."
Madame Rodet looked sharply at her. "Strange isn't it, this word 'telling.' It was your name of—
demoiselle.
Your…"
"My maiden name," Nora said, surprised.
"Oh!" Madame Rodet was relieved. "You understand French!"
"No." Nora laughed. "But I do remember my maiden name. I was born Nora Telling. How did you know, Madame?"