There were times, as she battled through the drifts, when she felt they might not make it to the house, even though its lights were fitfully in view between the flurries of snow. Despite her exertions, and all those layers of clothing, she was cold to the very marrow. It made her realize, in the most immediate and physical way, her vulnerability. All their money, all their power, all their influence— these were of less use out there in that snow-clogged lane than the warmth of a single lucifer!
Yet, in a way, it was merely a physical restatement of how she felt most of the time. Not once had their increasing wealth and position brought her any true ease. Each step up the ladder made the prospect of a fall that much more giddy—without bringing any very tangible reward. John often said he wished they were back at a single contract, so that he could deal firsthand with the men and the rock and the elements. She often wished it too, so that they could feel the poverty at their heels again and feel the reward of each penny of profit. Without those two, the stick and the carrot, what was their struggle all about?
She was glad, when they finally reached the house, that she was too exhausted to pursue such questions.
Next day Willet said "No rest for the wicked" so often that Mrs. Jordan, the cook, almost ran a knife through him. It was certainly one of the most strenuous days of his life. With the help of two field men hired from the farmer below, who naturally had no work for them, he had to dig out the driveway up to the brow of the hill. Then Nora made them clear a trotting circle around the paddock, where she could see it from her bedroom window (and where Willet could never be certain if she were watching or not), and finish the day with a two-hour trot with all four horses and Winifred's pony, Pendle. He brought them in cool and rubbed them down. Before he was finished, another heavy fall of snow began.
Young John and Winifred were delighted. It put another three feet on the previous fall and completely blanked out the windows on the ground floor, so that, even when the sun came out at noon, they walked from room to room in a frosty, opalescent twilight.
Because of the cold, Nora let them stay in the winter parlour and paste in their scrapbooks or play with the acorns, chestnuts, and bits of wood that Young John called "my sojers." Cox and the servants were kept busy digging away the snow before the windows. Every hour, they carried pans of boiling water up to the loft to pour into the two big slate cisterns and prevent them from icing over. It was all the water they had, for the pipe from the well had frozen and the handpump would not even turn.
Having less snow to dig, Willet and company finished soon after midday dinner, thinking themselves set for a less strenuous afternoon. But Nora sent him up to the ridge of the roof with a rope yoked to a broomhead. One farmhand stood on either side of the house, each with a hold on the rope, and together they swept the snow down, before it could melt and freeze and pry apart the tiles. Indoors the children followed their progress from room to room and cheered as each sunlit avalanche fell upon the men below. Nora, looking up and down the vale, saw with pride that the Old Manor was the first to clear its roof. That night another eighteen inches fell.
By noon the following day, the roads were cleared enough for letter mails at least to come through, and Nora heard from John that he would go straight from Warrington to Exeter and then to France. This bland announcement annoyed her, though it was plainly foolish for him even to think of returning to Yorkshire in such weather. She envied him the itinerant freedom of his work; and then she disliked herself for that envy.
The trouble was that John had exactly the sort of freedom she was denied: to do precisely those things he was good at. Her skill, she knew—she
knew
—was to handle money with a flair that few others could equal. In fact, to be quite honest, no one could equal it.
Once, at a dinner of the York & Ainsty hunt, she had overheard a retired general talking about a new book on Caesar's wars in which, he maintained, some of the diagrams were wrong. What had impressed Nora was the general's claim that as soon as he had cut the pages, before he read any of the text and even before he looked to see which particular campaign or battle was being described, he knew they were wrong. The wrongness of the supposed dispositions of legions and cohorts leaped at him from the page. There was no conceivable set of circumstances that could have led a commander of Caesar's stature to put men in such-and-such order. Nora could see that the general's listeners were politely skeptical, thinking that anything so complex could never be so immediately apparent as to "spring off the page," and she had longed to join in and say, "Yes, yes, it is so; it can be so; I know it." For that was precisely how she could now "see" anything to do with money.
But it remained no more than a party trick. Like the game Hudson played with her of figures-in-the-head. If she had been born a man, she would have parlayed that skill into a fortune. If she were allowed to own property, even, or to have money that was inalienably her own, she could have gone some way in that direction. But all the money that John called "hers" and all the land she had bought were actually and legally his. If the firm was stretched, every penny of it would go into the melting pot too. She could lose everything her skill had created, not through any fault of John's but merely because times were slack or through uninsurable geological disaster.
Yet in a way it would be John's fault, for it was he who insisted not only on keeping all the eggs in one basket but on actually having just one giant egg. There, if anywhere, was the real source of her envy: that he was free to pursue his incautious way while she could achieve all that she knew to be right only through him—and only by making him deviate from what he felt to be right. And her envy shamed her because she knew how tolerant he was of her, how much attention he paid her ideas, how he relied on her judgement—all to a quite extraordinary degree when one thought how other husbands treated their wives, both in the circles that she and John had sprung from and in those where they now moved.
And so, dissatisfied with life and at odds with herself because of that dissatisfaction, she turned to the railway papers. Usually they brought the welcome tidings of new surveys, new routes, new companies inviting subscription, others beginning parliamentary work, others gaining their charters and actually asking for tenders—work, work, work. Today there were announcements for twenty five new companies. It did not please her. For a month and more now, such announcements had failed to please her.
As a matter of course, she kept in her head a running total of the capital invited for new railway work. It was, after all, from that seemingly inexhaustible well that the Stevenson buckets were filled. For some years past, the annual new capital put into railways had been about six million pounds. But this year people seemed to have gone mad. New lines projected since December, two months ago, would, if sanctioned and completed, call for capital of over a hundred million—£106,724,000 to the nearest thousand. That represented a hundred and four new lines to add to the forty completed and the hundred-odd now under way. It was obvious to her that not one-tenth of that number could be built; vast sums were going to be wasted on surveys, lawyers, parliamentary bribes, prospectuses; vast numbers of people were going to subscribe their deposits for companies that would never exist; and vast fortunes were going to be made by the unscrupulous. Hudson's name was down on twenty of today's twenty-five lists.
How could a country that found it difficult to raise six million a year possibly find nearly twenty times that amount?
John would not be made to worry. And neither would Chambers. "The governors of the Bank of England have great experience in these things," he said. "There will be no repeat of the panic of 1836."
The governors of the Bank of England,
Nora thought to herself,
were so deep in hot
water themselves that they dared not raise the lending rate above two and a half per cent
for fear their own private companies would start falling to bits.
She alone seemed to find anything alarming in this ridiculous railway bubble, but that was not what irked her. There was nothing of the journalist or missionary in Nora—no wish to parade her vision before the world or set it to rights. She would rather use private insight for private advantage. Let fools hang.
But here she could not do that. For her private insight amounted to this: A money crisis unparalleled in history was now brewing. Nothing could prevent it. And unless John could be persuaded to share her anxiety, Stevenson's would do nothing to prepare to meet it.
For the first time, she began to regret her role in suggesting the Beador partnership; it added one more unknown to a landscape already cluttered with too many uncertainties.
Chapter 7
Ten days later, when John was due to return from France, the snow still lay deep over most of the country. It obliterated hedgerows, filled lanes and cuttings, and smoothed out the wrinkles of the landscape like a flatiron over linen. Only the mail-coach routes were cleared. Villages, hamlets, and farms more than about a half mile off such routes preferred to sink back into ancient self-sufficiency, rather than expend the energy needed to put them back in touch with the nation. Shepherds would go after lost sheep, people would run for doctors, creditors would come for their money…among them, they would beat some sort of usable path. Even the heaviest snow in memory was not eternal.
The worst to suffer were the birds, who could find not an inch of ground to peck at nor a trickle of water to drink. They huddled feverishly in farmyards and at back doors, scratching through the hen runs and barnyards, mobbing the pig swill pails in the hands of the pigmen, and flocking at every thawed-out pump. The sight of them so upset Winifred that she spent a whole morning, part aided and part hindered by Young John, rubbing together the fat skimmed from the lights boiled for the dogs with the sweepings of the hayloft and the winnowings from the horses' oats. Her hands felt raw with scratches by the time she and Young John had finished, but they had made a good three pounds of birdfeed between them. After lunch they penned the dogs in the harness room and scattered the food over the stable yard; Nora, caught up in their enthusiasm, put out several shallow trays of melted snow water.
Normally there were perhaps a hundred birds, at most, overwintering in the Old Manor grounds. But by some telepathy, the mere presence of so much food seemed to become common knowledge among all the birds of the vale, so that several hundred descended on the yard, screeching, squawking, chirping, and cawing. They fought, darting shrilly at one another, rising in alarmed flurries of wind and feathers, while predatory bands wheeled above and fell on the groundlings like clamouring angels of death. Winifred and Young John were at first delighted at the wealth their offerings of fat and cereal had conjured up; but as the mob grew thicker and the noise more menacing, their excitement became hectic and took on a bright-eyed tinge of fear.
The noise completely masked all sounds of John's approaching horse. Mrs. Jarrett, who had been upstairs to move the newspapers that kept the sun off the carpets, saw him from one of the bedroom windows and just had time to get below and tell Nora before John came trotting into the yard, scattering the melee of crows, blackbirds, thrushes, and robins. He reined in, amazed, while birds of every size and winter colour wheeled and darted around him, and then, by that same strange telepathy, rose and scattered to their everyday territory.
"What's this?" he asked as he swung from the saddle. "Robin Red-breast's workhouse?"
"Papa!" Winifred and Young John ran forward to clutch at his thighs and try to hug him off the ground.
"Dearest!" Nora, just behind them, held out her arms for him to grasp in his. Her skirts swept the scanty remains of fatty gleanings into the hollows of the cobblestone floor.
Willet let out the dogs and came to take the horse, which was railway property. "Sh'll I ride'm back in now, master?" he asked hopefully. He could just tolerate a good evening in York. Puck and Tip yapped and fussed around John.
"Nay," John said. "He can follow the mail tomorrow. Unless we go in ourselves."
Dejectedly, Willet took the horse indoors for a rubdown.
"When you've done that," Nora shouted after him, "you can trot our four to the foot of Garraby Hill and back. And"—she turned to Winifred—"do you want to go too?"
Winifred looked at her father, not wanting to leave him, yet longing to ride Pendle after so many inactive days. John smiled. "Go on!" he said. "Your mother and I have much to talk about."
"Birds," Young John said, flailing at the walls and gutters and roof ridges where the remnants of the horde still sat, chattering with impatience.
"Yes," John said. "Who's been feeding birds, eh?"
"Me!" the children shouted.
"They spent all morning, and it went in about two minutes." Nora laughed.
"Only it wasn't our birds. It was birds from Painslack Farm and Deepdike and all around."
"Just like humans," John said.
And though he was joking, there was an edge in his voice that made Nora realize that part of him was not so much displeased as shocked at what she and the children had done. Even Winifred must have felt it for she said quickly: "We used the fat off the dogs' pail and the sweepings from the hayloft. And look at my hands!" She displayed their redness like an honourable scar.
John bent and kissed them before he folded them and pulled her sleeves back straight. "It does your heart credit," he said.