Ashenden (5 page)

Yet there had been trouble from the beginning. And in Woods’s experience, trouble came in one chief form: money, or the lack of it.

There was a knock on the door and Joshua came in without waiting for an answer. Joshua Wainwright, nineteen years old, was the best and brightest of his apprentices. A devourer of treatises and pattern books, a natural draftsman, a quick learner. And, in the way of the young, a taker of liberties.

“What do you want, Joshua?”

“I thought you’d still be awake.”

“So I am,” said Woods. He closed the accounts book, rubbed his eyes. “Have you prepared the drawing for the foreman?”

“I have. But I doubt he’ll look at it. He hasn’t looked at the others.”

“If he chooses not to, that’s up to him. A drawing is an instruction, but it is also a record that an instruction has been given. That comes in useful more often than you might think.”

“Yes, sir, so you’ve told me,” said Joshua, shielding his candle from the open window. “I came to see if you wanted a bite of supper. Do you want me to fetch you something? The old woman’s fast
asleep in the chimney corner, but I know where she keeps the food and drink.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Woods. The boy ate like his legs were hollow. He shook his head. “No, I should go to bed. And so should you. There’ll be plenty to do tomorrow when the stone arrives.”

“They say,” said Joshua, not leaving, “that More’s up from London, staying with one of his friends. Not five miles away.”

“Is that what the housekeeper told you?”

“No, the girl who brings the eggs in the morning. Daughter of one of the tenant farmers.”

“A reliable source,” said Woods drily.

“News is all over the neighborhood,” said Joshua, still not leaving. “Tomorrow, when the stone comes, do you think he’ll be here to see it?”

Woods rested his hand on the accounts book. It was Joshua’s first trip south, the nearest he had come to the capital and what he must imagine to be the sophisticated taste and refinement of its inhabitants. Little did he know.

“I doubt it. He hasn’t paid for it yet.”

*  *  *

Sir Frederick More, who had commissioned Woods to design and build the house, was a fellow Yorkshireman. In all other respects they differed. Woods had made an honest living in the county where he had been born. More had made a fortune in Bengal by rising through the ranks of the East India Company and laying his hands on every material advantage, legitimate or otherwise, that fell his way. Several years after he returned to England, bought the Berkshire estate, and engaged Woods as his architect, shares in the East India Company collapsed and bled him of money, thousands of pounds lost in a single day. Hard on the heels of that calamity, a parliamentary inquiry found him guilty of corruption, fined him a vast sum, and stripped him of his seat in the House. The charge of corruption related to his dealings in the Dorset constituency he had bought his way into, but there was also the matter of the taxes he had unfairly levied in Bengal, for which he was investigated and publicly censured.

Woods had thought the job was dead, had written it off and filed the drawings. To his surprise—and to the surprise of many others—More, who had been Mr. More then, and a widower with small sons, had somehow survived the scandals, clawed back his position in society, and married a second wife, who was rich. He was now a baronet and a member for a different borough.

That was the way of the world and there was no cause for Woods to complain about it. If More had not married money and rebuilt his life on the proceeds, work on the house would never have resumed. Yet he could not say he had ever warmed to the man.

More had always been slow to pay. Since the inquiry, however, he treated every account presented for settlement as yet another outrageous fine unjustly imposed upon him. Funds dried to a trickle and for long periods work on the house stopped altogether.

Sometimes Woods found himself wondering whether his patron wanted to see the house built at all, whether his reluctance to pay arose out of a deeper ambivalence. Memories were short, it was true, but the house was now unlikely to serve its original purpose as a place where a political career might be made. A number of More’s friends from the East India Company, who had also chosen to settle in this Berkshire valley on their return from the subcontinent, had not been so successful in restoring reputations tarnished by fraud. Their proximity, and the relative nearness of the estate to Westminster, might no longer be regarded as advantages.

Writing from York, before this last site visit, Woods had tried to make it as clear to his patron as he could. Once the stone was ordered, as soon as it arrived, there could be no going back.
Please advise me of your wishes. I beg to remain, as ever, your humble servant.
A polite form of words: he was neither especially humble nor anyone’s servant.

*  *  *

Two things happened overnight. It rained and the Gypsies returned to the wood.

“That’s all we need,” said the foreman, nodding in the direction
of the camp, or where it was said to be. “Gypsies. You’d think they’d have a care for their necks. Trespass is a hanging offense.”

“It’s no business of ours.”

“When they thieve our tools or our horses, it will be. Besides which, they’re bad luck.”

“I’ll speak to the steward. It’s his job to deal with them.” Woods was more concerned about the rain. Moving stone from the riverbank to the site was going to be difficult on soft ground. “Have you cast your eye over the drawing, Mr. Wilkes?”

The foreman, Wilkes, clearly hadn’t. He spat. “I know my trade.”

“Then you’ll understand that the stone must lie in the building as it lay in the ground. That’s the way to get the best out it.” Bath stone was a freestone, which meant you could cut and square it in any direction. It wasn’t like slate, which you split along its planes and which was strong only against the grain. Even so, Bath stone came from the living earth and had its preferences. “You’ll need to pay close attention to the way the faces are marked.”

“I hear you, sir. But first let’s see them blocks arrive safe and sound.”

Two days ago Woods had received word that the first of the shipments had reached Reading. “I hope we may depend on that.”

It was the second week of May. Early-morning mist hung in the valley. Towards the east, pink promised the sun; on the low-lying ground hares bounded out of thinning, shifting veils of gray-white and vanished as if they had never been there.

Fields, woods, a waterway, a little straggle of a village huddled round pump and green, some way off a church and churchyard, all sheltered between gentle, rounded hills. This was ancient land, deeply settled, tilled, and husbanded through good times and bad, a country of yeomen and squires.

Ancient land, in a time of transition. The countryside was not as open as it once had been. In this age of exclusion—of money made elsewhere in cities and trade—ditches, hedges, fences, and walls enclosed fields and woods into parcels of ownership and put a price on every tree. The common land, where generations of villagers had grazed their
livestock and scratched out a living, was fast disappearing, taking with it all the old ways. No one knew yet what the new ways would bring, but the poor, who found themselves poorer, had reason to dread them.

The sun rose and burned off the mist. Light caught the windows of the old manor house and reflected off broken, faceted panes, glanced up the leaning chimneys, and grazed the irregular roofline. On the upper story a casement squeaked open and a dust cloth shook out of it.

In front of the old manor, daylight laid bare the raw scars of trenches and earthworks that had been dug into the chalky soil, exposing flints and whitened animal bones. The foundations of the new house, which made its plan tangible and real, scored an intention of building into the ground.

Gazing at the trenches, Woods was aware that an intention could always be reversed, if not by human will, then by the lack of it. Left alone, the foundations would become waterlogged, the sides would erode and eventually fall in, and grass would grow over the top. The ground would stitch itself up. To build was a form of human folly that pitted itself against forces of nature bent on reclaiming their own. To imagine otherwise, to imagine that what you built might last, was akin to madness.

“I hear the Gypsies are back.”

Woods turned. Joshua, unshaven, red-eyed, and slipshod, a gray blanket draped round his shoulders, was chafing his hands.

“So rumor has it.”

The mist had lifted and the sky was clearing, but there was not a trace of the camp to be seen nor a sound to be heard, not a wisp of smoke, not a single child’s cry, not a dog’s bark to break the morning silence. The Romany were masters of stealth, a law unto themselves. By now their fires would be covered, and their shelters, formed of supple hazel twigs covered with skins, were fashioned to blend into the woods.

“Wilkes thinks they’re bad luck.”

“My mother thinks so too,” said Joshua, yawning.

“Your mother is an excellent woman, but all females incline towards superstition. Bad luck is bad judgment.”

Joshua’s mother was a handsome widow from Thirsk. She had been left comfortably off and was no more inclined to take another husband than Woods was inclined to take any wife: their arrangement, conducted discreetly over the years, suited them both. A widow’s company was one thing, and a fine thing in moderation, but he would never have taken on the lad had he not seen his promise for himself. None of this was spoken of.

Joshua shrugged. “Did Wilkes read the drawing?”

“No.”

“I thought as much.”

“Get yourself dressed. You’re a sight,” said Woods. The lad must have sat up drinking until the small hours, judging by the state of him. “You should have listened to me last night and gone to bed.”

“I did,” said Joshua, drawing the blanket around him. “So you needn’t look at me like that. But then I had such a strange dream. It woke me and I couldn’t get back to sleep again.”

Woods was unsympathetic. “And Nurse didn’t come to tuck up your covers.”

“No,” said Joshua, shivering. “Nurse didn’t come. In my dream the stone was floating up the river. Piles and piles of it, stacked high.”

“Then let’s hope your dream was prophetic.”

Joshua stared into the distance for a time. He was a good-looking lad, tall and dark, not yet grown into his rangy frame. Normally his intelligence was a flare of energy; this morning he was subdued. He shivered again. “Let’s hope not. It was a terrible dream.”

“It’s the waiting,” said Woods. “You’ll get used to it. A good deal of this work is to do with waiting. It takes its toll on the nerves.”

“My dream was not about waiting. It was about harm.” Joshua shook his head, as if he might dislodge something in it, and went off to the manor.

Gypsies, dreams, a pattern of leaves in a teacup. Bad luck was nothing more than bad judgment, thought Woods, and bad judgment you could do something about.

*  *  *

They had made a kind of roadway of split logs from the site to the landing stage at the riverbank, skirting the steepest part of the slope. The roadway was Wilkes’s notion and the rabble of men he had hired as jobbing labor had been sawing and splitting and tamping for days. When Woods walked the length of it later that morning, he could feel the timber teeter under his boots. The earth was sodden.

He called one of the men over. “See this?” He bounced on a split log and splashed his boots with mud. “This, all this”—he gestured up and down the roadway—“needs to be backfilled. It’s not going to hold the weight with the ground so wet. Where’s Wilkes?”

The man didn’t know. Wilkes had his team of craftsmen, a tight-knit group, chiefly masons and joiners. These rough laborers were disaffected, unused to pulling in harness. Itinerants or villagers, largely unskilled, they were aged by hardship beyond their years.

“Tell the rest of them,” said Woods. “Don’t use the coarse rubble. The finer gravel is better. There’s a pile of it up on the south side of the site, so you’ll need to cart it down in barrowloads.”

The man stared at him and nodded his assent, which under the circumstances meant next to nothing.

Woods gazed downriver in the direction of Reading. In his mind’s eye he was pulling the stone closer and closer, willing it along. The worst, surely, was over. The journey down the Avon from Bath to Bristol, then into the open sea, skirting the treacherous west coast, along the Channel to the Thames estuary, was hazardous even in good weather, and the threats—piracy, rocks, the French—were many. Now a mere few miles of inland waterway remained.

Despite what he had said to Joshua about waiting, and the need to learn how to endure it, Woods was not a patient man on the whole. He may have been stubborn, meticulous, and precise—qualities which were in themselves forms of patience or of subduing the will to a greater end—but waiting upon events that were in the control of others was not in his nature. After watching the river for a while, during which time one lone heron lifted slowly up from the water, and coots and moorhens scuttled in the shirring, hissing reeds, he returned up the muddy slope.

On the way back, he saw Joshua, now dressed and shaved after a fashion, coming from the manor. As they passed each other, Joshua frowned, put up his hand, and moved his mouth as if to say something. Woods, the stone on his mind, gave him a brisk nod and went on with no further acknowledgment. The lad had to learn how to stand on his own two feet.

Later, during the long and unanticipated years of his old age, Woods would have time to regret his reluctance to show close affection. Joshua was near enough a son; he’d known the boy half his life and he had all the qualities anyone might wish for in their own flesh and blood. Warmth was due him and warmth Woods may have felt but rarely showed. Others might have put it down to a north-country reserve bred in the bone, a lid clamped down on sentiment, a suspicion of smooth and emollient words. But he knew the origins of this reluctance lay in something less excusable. On the few occasions when he allowed himself to think about it, he recognized it as a form of selfishness. He had lived a long time alone and on his own terms.