Sons of Fortune (19 page)

“Bit of a shock, eh?” he said. His voice was firm, too; no weakness there.

She gripped him tighter.

“It’s been worse. For three weeks Thornton wouldn’t let me have a looking glass.” He chuckled.

“Oh, John!” She kissed his neck, his ear, his hair, his cheekbone. At last she dared to look at him.

Perhaps the preparation afforded by that first hectic glimpse of him now cushioned the shock, for he seemed less pitiable this time. He was—or had been—ill, very ill. No doubting it. But his smile was strong, his eyes clear.

“We finished it,” he said. “Forty-two miles. We did seven miles in the first twelve days!”

“I know. You wrote and told me. And it has been in all the papers.” She kissed him, his lips, his nose, his cheeks, while relief from all her suppressed fears welled up within her. He sank back on his pillows and closed his eyes.

“How are the children?”

“All well. Of course, this Christmas was not our brightest.”

“And the boys? What about school?”

She did not answer at once; the pause made him open his eyes again. “Trouble?” he asked. “You’re not still…”

She smiled. “No. There was a little bit of bother but it’s all sorted out. Dr. Brockman and I are the firmest friends.”

He lifted his head off the pillow. “You saw him? You went up there? Or did he…”

“I went there.” She laid her hands on his shoulders, bearing him down. “You have a gift for finding people. Thornton once said to me—you remember the day we all went on that picnic, and you hired a starving lame fellow we met…”

“Noah Rutt,” John said. “He works for us still.”

“And I said it was foolish charity to employ rubbish like that, and Thornton told me that cripple’d turn out to be a second James Watt or something.”

John began a diffident laugh.

“Because,” she insisted, “you have a genius for picking people.”

“Picked you,” he said, stroking her cheek. “Unless it was t’other way about.”

“And you picked Brockman.”

“D’you think he’s that good?”

“If any man’s destined to make his mark on the school system in England, it’s him.”

He closed his eyes again.

“You sleep now,” she told him. “I’ll be here.”

One eye opened. “I can’t manage much,” he said. “Ten minutes’ talk even and I’m exhausted.”

“You’ll mend. You’ll soon be your old self.”

As he sank into sleep he said, “You needn’t stay. I’ll sleep an hour or so. Don’t stay.”

She waited half an hour, until she could see how untroubled his sleep was, and then she went out to see Nanette about unpacking their things.
Good
, she thought.
I’ve told him now
.

***

But she had not told him. And over the days that followed, while they were together—first in their room, later in walks over the sands—the rest of the story trickled out. The more he heard the less pleased he grew.

She should have left the assault on Caspar for him to deal with; that was his first complaint.

“But I didn’t know when you would be back,” she said.

The better his health grew, the more he tried to belittle his collapse. He now behaved as if the illness had been a private weakness—something to be ashamed of. It seemed necessary to his recovery now to make light of it—so she could not insist he would have been—indeed was still—too frail to deal with the Caspar business.

“It can’t have been all that bad,” he said. “Boys are flogged at school all the time.”

“And you approve?”

“It’s not a question of approval. Caspar is going into the army. I tell you a woman has no idea of the brutalities of a soldier’s life. It’s not a woman’s place to interfere in these things. A woman has no…”

“I’m not ‘a woman,’” she flared at him. “I’m Caspar’s mother. And when you’re halfway around the world, I’m his father, too.”

He looked at her coldly. “You will never be that. As I was saying: He will witness—he will even have to order—floggings of a brutality that…”

“John!” she cried, desperate for him to understand. “The flesh on his bottom was cut bare and bleeding. There was no skin left! It was butcher’s meat.”

“I’m sure you exaggerate…”

“I do
not
!”

“Will you let me finish just one sentence! He is going into the army. He must be tough. He must be tough in body, mind, and spirit. Tougher than you can possibly imagine. You talk about butcher’s meat! I saw men flogged in the Crimea with six ribs showing through—the flesh flogged off them crumb by crumb!”

She winced and shut her eyes. He put an arm around her then. “I’m sorry, love,” he said, more gently. “It’s the only way to get you to see. The boys are in a man’s world, now. And you brought a woman’s view to it. In the long run, that won’t help Caspar—nor even in the short run, either.”

“Suppose he doesn’t want to go in the army?” Nora asked.

“Of course he will. And if I tell him that’s where he’ll go, he’ll go!”

She smiled, but not at him. “You don’t know him at all, do you!” she said, half speaking to the four winds. “The last way to get Caspar to do anything is to command him.”

“A soldier must get used to command. And he will be expected to go into the army—especially now that…” He bit off the sentence.

“Especially now that what?”

“Never mind. We’ve run this subject into the ground.”

She knew then that he was concealing something from her. So she went right back, hoping to steer him to whatever it was. “Anyway,” she said, playing woman-having-last-word (which she knew would rile him), “the beating Caspar got was so bad that Brockman sacked this Cossack fellow.”

“Tcha! He was probably leaving anyway. Brockman just gilded the truth a bit to pacify you.”

She could not win. A dreadful foreboding began to fill her. There were times when John became very moody and depressed—“when you’re in a valley and see only your own feet,” was how he himself put it. When those moods were upon him, nothing could lighten them or make him take a cheerful view. She was terribly afraid that such a cloud was now descending on him; sometimes it could last for weeks. Later, when it was over, he could admit that his fears and angers had been groundless for the most part, but he could never see things so dispassionately at the time. When she reminded him of past occasions he would only say that this time it was different.

She had tried every way to prevent these moods—ridicule, anger, laughter, indifference, tears—but nothing seemed to have any effect; they followed some course of their own, indifferent to every kind of persuasion. And she, being closest, always bore the worst of it, just as she had the best of him when he was in good cheer.

“Funny he should take that attitude,” Walter said when she explained to him why John seemed out of sorts. “In the Crimea he was ready to fight a duel with a lieutenant of the Fourth Dragoon Guards who had one of our navvies flogged for insolence.”

“A duel? I don’t believe it!”

“He didn’t issue the challenge, of course. The officer did that. Stevenson took the lash out of the sergeant’s hand and wiped the blood on it over the officer’s buckskin. I’ve never seen Stevenson so angry.”

“How did it begin?”

So Walter told her. The officer had been out “hunting” a bobbery pack of mongrels he’d assembled from the strays of Balaclava port; it was one of those flamboyant jokes that Guards officers seemed to enjoy. One of his chases led over the line Stevenson’s was then laying and the navvies had refused to get out of his way. Their ganger had insulted the lieutenant, who had then sent for an armed flogging party and had actually administered twenty or so lashes before John had arrived and, single-handedly, routed the party. That was when the officer had sent John the challenge to a duel.

“And he accepted?” Nora was still incredulous that John could have hazarded his life, his business, or even (to look only at the most immediate risk) the Crimean railway for something so addleheaded as this bit of foolery.

Walter nodded. “He must have been tired beyond all sense.”

“Did they actually fight?”

“Er…military affairs intervened. Another Dragoon Guard had a word with someone on the staff, and the young hothead was sent up the line within the hour. Oh, they can move when they want to!”

“But what could John have been thinking of! If he’d won, he could never have returned to England. And if he’d lost…!” She lifted her hands in despair. “Why didn’t you and Tucker stop him?”

He merely looked at her with a knowing smile. “He just said how could he ever take charge of his men again once word got around that he’d refused a challenge. It was a matter of honour.”

She almost wept. Men who’d worked for him—and with him—for sixteen years! Did he have to go fighting duels to retain their trust and loyalty?

***

Walter left for England that afternoon, looking very much better.

“Amazing what a few hours on the old fork’ll do for that fellow,” John said in a rare spell of good humour. He teased her then. “He was a bit warm to Nanette, eh? Ye don’t suppose…”

Nora dismissed the very thought of it; not only did she trust Nanette, she also knew Thornton. “He may lack all scruple,” she said, “but that doesn’t stop him being a gentleman. He’d never touch a single girl—not a respectable one, anyway. Married women, widows, and tarts—that’s his strict three-course meal.”

Later when they were out walking on the beach—or, rather, picking a careful way over its chalk and flint pebbles—his black mood descended again and he set about her once more for “interfering” at Fiennes.

His attack was so unfair that she was goaded into saying, “Splendid words—from the man who risked making orphans of eight children and a widow of me, and all for a navvy old enough to fend for himself, I’d say!”

She regretted it at once. Reasoned argument never even dented these moods of his. He was silent a time, then he said bitterly, “So you’ve told it all to Thornton!”

“You know better than that,” she said. “You know me better.”

“Do I?”

She shook him urgently. “John! What’s the matter with you? Why be like this!”

He looked at her coldly and then resumed his walk, leaving her to catch up.

***

“We can go home, too,” he said the following day. “I’m well enough. I’m back to normal.”

Glumly she had to agree that in one very negative sense he was “back to normal.” A few weeks earlier, when she had first arrived at Dieppe, he had still been much too feeble to sustain this brooding anger at such a pitch of intensity.

He had enough social grace to feel embarrassed at his anger when Nanette was around; he covered it by pretending to fret at not being back in harness. Nora abetted this deceit by suggesting a further week or two’s convalescence with old friends of theirs, Monsieur and Madame Rodet, along the coast at Trouville.

“Rodet would love to see you again,” she said. “And he knows everything that’s going on in French railways. You could catch up on all you’ve been missing.”

To her surprise he seemed on the point of agreeing; so she added: “And I know I’d love to see Rodie again.”

Rodie—Madame Rodet—was her greatest friend this side of the water. Either side, come to that. It would be marvellous to see her again.

But no sooner had she said the words than he began to shake his head. “Too much work,” he said. “We can’t afford to fritter any more time on our own enjoyment. Besides, I want to see the boys before they go back to school.”

She kicked herself for having brought her own pleasure into it.

The children were delighted to have their father back again. Caspar’s stripes had almost healed; thin lines of dried scab, like old cat scratches, were all that remained—nothing to rouse anyone’s anger. And Caspar, of course, was now being very manly about it all, especially as they were due back at school the next day.

“Not too bad, was it, eh?” John said, jovially.

“Oh, it healed pretty well, sir,” Caspar answered, all nonchalant.

“And you’re looking forward to the new term?”

“I should just say so!”

“Well listen, young man—you’ll be a soldier one day, and wounded soldiers don’t go tattling to the womenfolk at every little scratch. I thought you would be more manly. You’ve disappointed me.” Then, seeing how crestfallen Caspar became and not wanting to mar his return home for something that was, at bottom, Nora’s fault rather than Caspar’s, he nudged the boy in a more jocular mood and added, “Besides, you know what the ladies are—how they like to fuss. So promise you won’t distress your mother in future, eh?”

And for Caspar, his wounds gone, it was an easy promise to make—and it felt like only a very minor betrayal of his mother, the sort you get in families every day.

The schoolroom was closed for the occasion, of course, and there were rides around the park in the governess cart, and a short play by Winifred all about the return of a feudal knight to his castle; and then when the last muffin had followed the last pancake down red lane, the climax of the day:
The Tale of the Crimea Railway, As Told by Its Builder.

Children from any other family would have found it a weird story indeed—ranging from stirring military adventures, like the Battle of Balaclava and the bombardment of Sebastopol, down to the most arcane railway technicalities—gradients, curves, tracklaying details, and all. But these were Stevenson children. When their father said one in one-eighty they could see the slope; a two-hundred radius curve would get them leaning inward as, in their mind’s eye, they raced around it; say to them “two-inch and under” and they could hear the sound that particular grade of gravel made as it was tipped. Without these details a railway story—even one told by their father—would have sounded hollow, concocted.

This secret knowledge bound them in a private glee they could share with no other children—not even the Thorntons, for Walter had not John’s gifts as a storyteller. It gave them great power in their play, too, this knowledge of the real engineering world. For instance, when they made miniature canal systems down by the river, where other children would say, “We must line them with clay,” a Stevenson would say, “We’ll puddle it with best Leicester blue daub,” and immediately the canal was somehow more real—even if what they actually used was a rather leaky Hertfordshire glacial clay.

By the end of the day, nervous energy, buoyed up by the delight of his children, was all that kept John on his feet. Nora could see the exhaustion closing in upon him. But he would not be warned. Every time she suggested he should finish, or at least rest a while, he would brush her words aside and encourage a general chorus of boos at this spoiling of the sport.

Next day, of course, he paid the price of it. He was so weak he could hardly stand. His fingers trembled and could not hold knife or fork. Nora had to take Boy and Caspar to the station without him for their return to Fiennes. It was a week before he regained the strength his one day had cost him. By then all the delight at being home had faded and his dark mood had asserted itself once more.

Nora did her best to keep out of his way, since she more than anyone seemed to have a worsening effect on him; but she could hardly absent herself from their table and their bed. At the end of one especially dour day, when he fretted from sunup onward to be back in their London office, planning a tour of all the current Stevenson contracts to bring himself up to date, he asked her to come to bed early. She hoped she knew why; but she was wrong.

“You ought to be told,” he said when she lay beside him. “I don’t know whether I should have told you before—or whether I should be telling you at all.” He thought for a while. “That man—the officer in the Fourth Dragoons who intervened to stop the…” He cleared his throat.

“Duel?” she said.

He nodded. “Captain Proudfoot. Keith Proudfoot by name. He and I became quite close friends. And he had connections with the general staff. Anyway…from what he said, there may be a peerage for me in the offing. A barony probably.”

“John!” She was thrilled. She wanted him to tell her again, a dozen different ways. “How marvellous!”

“Of course, it’s far from certain.” He began to back away from the idea now it was out.

“You deserve it.”

“I don’t suppose the army can do anything but advise in the case of civilian honours. Not like a medal.”

“When you look at some of the people who get these honours!”

“So it’s only a recommendation from—I don’t know—Raglan, I imagine.”

“I’d say it’s an honour that’s long overdue.” She hugged him, glad not only at the news but also at the chance to show her love. The Right Honourable Lord Stevenson! First Baron—what? “Baron what, have you thought? Eay, John, I’m that glad!”

He barely responded. He lay there, smiling faintly at the middle distance.

“And the children will all be Honourables, too. The Honourable Winifred Stevenson. The Honourable John Stevenson…Oh, John—aren’t you pleased? Why are you just sitting like that?”

He came out of his reverie and looked at her; he looked at the arm she had laid across his chest as if he might be a little more comfortable without it there. “Of course you won’t breathe a word?”

“Of course not! I’m surprised you feel the need to ask.”

“Not even Nanette.”

“John!”

She pulled her arm away. Silence fell. “If you’re in such doubt you shouldn’t have told me,” she said, hurt.

“I told you for a reason.” For a long while he added nothing more.

“I suppose I may hear it this side of dawn,” she said at last.

He breathed in and closed his eyes. This implication that he knew she was going to be angry was, in itself, enough to make her so.

“These honours,” he began. “They aren’t handed out like prizes. It isn’t a…a sum of money that you’re free to spend or save or gamble. It isn’t just a royal pat on the head.”

“It’s a recognition,” she said.

He looked at her speculatively. “Recognition of what?”

“Services done. Service to the nation. And if that doesn’t describe the Crimean railway, then…”

But John was shaking his head. “More,” he said. “It’s more than that. For services they just hand out orders and decorations—Member of This, Companion of That. When they give a barony it’s a recognition of more than services. It’s a recognition that we are fit people for other Englishmen to look up to.” His gaze turned into an open challenge.

“So?” she asked uncomfortably.

“Not just to look up to, but to admit into good society,” he went on.

She grinned then. “Yes! They won’t snub us now. Even Lord Middleton’s hunt won’t dare blackball us any longer—it would be like a slur on the queen’s judgement.” She giggled with suppressed delight.

“Not just to look up to,” he went on relentlessly. “Not just to admit into good society. But to emulate—to use as an example.”

“They’ve far to go to catch us up!” Nora sneered. “There’s no man in the realm could follow you—do what you’ve done, get where you’ve gotten.” She spoke in this way because she now had more than an inkling of where this particular homily of John’s was going.

His annoyance was like a reward—he, who had expected her anger. “I’m not talking about example in that sense. I mean behaviour.”

“Morally, you mean? I hope you’re not implying that I need…”

“No!” he said vehemently. “I do not mean morally either—as I suspect you know. I am talking about behaviour acceptable to Society. I am talking about conforming, Nora.”

There was another silence.

“Very well—talk away!” Nora said at length. “I shall be interested to hear what Lady Stevenson may not do that plain Mrs. Stevenson achieved.”

“Lady Stevenson will have to be At Home more often. Lady Stevenson will have to take a more prominent place in local Society, pay more morning calls, help determine the shape of Society—or that part of it in which she moves. Lady Stevenson will not be able to hang about the fringes of the City, dining alone with her banker…”

“Are you implying that Nathaniel and I are anything more to each other than…”

“Of course not. I know. And you know—and so, I hope, does Nathaniel Chambers. But Society does
not
know. Society will draw a different inference.”

“So Lady Stevenson will have to wash Society’s mind for it, too. It won’t be the first washing I’ve taken in.”

“Lady Stevenson will have to stop glorying in her past poverty and her noble climb out of its depths. Lady Stevenson cannot entertain portrait painters at her table—nor doctors nor clergymen either.”

“Not
Sir
Edwin Landseer?” she asked innocently.

For a moment he was deceived; his mouth fell open. “You mean he’s now in your magic circle, too?”

“I only use him as an example. I’m surprised that no lady could seat Sir Edwin, whom the queen…”

“Of course there are exceptions. Don’t be so deliberately obstructive. What I’m saying is that Mr. Llewellyn Roxby and his kind would not be fit acquaintances for a baroness. They are not, in fact, fit for Mrs. Stevenson either—but the queen did not select Mrs. Stevenson as a suitable person for other members of Society to take example from.”

“The queen won’t select Lady Stevenson, either. It will be John Stevenson she’ll select. I’ll be there by accident—if at all.”

He looked at her then and nodded as if she had said something quite shrewd. “Exactly! ‘If at all.’ If we don’t get this peerage, Nora, do you think it will be because the Crimea railway wasn’t good enough—deserving enough—or because Mrs. Stevenson’s eccentricities make the honour impossible?”

Nora felt her guts drop from inside her. What John was implying was monstrous, yet there was a clever little nugget of truth at the heart of it. Her individualism and neglect of middle-class society (and for Nora the queen herself was the very essence of all that she meant by “middle” class) might not please any of these drab, grey, mid-century administrations who told the queen whom to honour, whom to shun.

“I’m sure all this would have been news to Lady Henshaw,” she said, rallying, “who kept that flock of goats to pull her carriage. You’ve been reading too many books on etiquette—that’s your trouble.”

“Lady Henshaw was an old eccentric. She did not move in Society. And books on etiquette don’t come into it.”

“All right. What’s the name of that fellow Chambers was telling us about last year? Very rich but can’t get into…
Richard!
Mr. Richards. When I’m the Lady Stevenson, I’ll behave so properly you won’t see me for the ice. And I’ll hire my title out to Mr. Richards, be his hostess, greet his guests at the door. Thousand pounds at a time! You know me—I have to make money at something.”

John sighed and raked the ceiling with his eyes.

“Why not!” Nora challenged him. “Is that not exactly what Lady Parke used to do for poor George Hudson at Palace Gate? And didn’t Society look up to Lady Parke? They certainly flocked to her entertainments, even the Duke of Wellington—that’s where
you
met him.”

John rearranged the bedclothes in his exasperation. “This is all nonsense, Nora. It doesn’t come near answering the question I asked.”

She didn’t want to answer that question, for the only answer she could make would be as wounding to him as he had been to her. So she tried a different tack: “Can you honestly see me at morning calls four afternoons a week! Can you imagine me cutting someone who interests or pleases me merely because Society—a lot of frightened old hens…”

John exploded one fist in the other. “That’s just
it
, Nora. That’s exactly what you will have to do. Or would have to do—we mustn’t talk as if the honour were certain. Would have to do. If Society decides that Mr. X is beyond the pale, no one cares if that strange Stevenson woman acknowledges him. But if Lady Stevenson accepts him, they cannot ignore it. And you will embarrass them. Mrs. Tomnoddy cannot cut Mr. X, because Mr. X enjoys the patronage of a peeress. So your thoughtless act—some whim to please your own notions of who’s interesting and who’s dull—could force local Society to tolerate and admit some rank outsider, an out-and-out cad.”

“John! Do you actually
believe
this rubbish?”

“How dare you!” He began to tremble with anger.

But she was not going to be cowed now; it had all got too deep. “Equally, how dare you assume I would befriend the sort of person you’re…that I would befriend an out-and-outer!”

“George Hudson!” he crowed. “Since you’ve brought his name up.”

“What about George Hudson?”

“You’ve gone on entertaining him.”

“But he’s a friend!”

“He’s been cut out of Society since his bankruptcy.”

“Well, I haven’t exactly seen
you
turning the cold shoulder on him.”

John was pointedly silent. Nora now stared at him in disbelief. “You mean if you get a barony, you’d start cutting Hudson?”

“I’d have to. Of course I would. That’s my point, Nora. A peerage conveys difficult responsibilities.”

“Then I say the market in peerages is suddenly looking very bullish from this side of the bed!”

He rocked himself furiously, letting the momentum carry him upright and onto the floor. “I thought you’d say that! You think only of yourself. You’d do anything except answer my question.”

“Listen…it doesn’t matter now. It’s too late. If my behaviour is in question, if my behaviour it going to deny you the barony, it’s too late now.”

“What d’you mean, ‘too late’?”

He was not really going to listen; already he was reaching for his dressing gown.

“I mean I’d have to conform for the next ten years, without one slip-up.”