God Is an Englishman (16 page)

She found it very difficult to imagine him in any other capacity. “But what will you
do,
Adam? For a living, I mean. Or are you rich, and won’t have to work at anything?”

“I’ll tell you if you’re interested, but after supper. I’m famished, and I’ll wager you are, so scout around for some more firewood. Why should I work like a black when I’ve got a camp-follower?” and de lighted at last to be of some service to him, she scrambled up and poked about the copse until she had a nosebag full of faggots but was deflated when he told her that some of them were chestnut and wouldn’t burn well. Despite this, the rabbit stew was excellent, one of the most appetising she had ever tasted, and when the pan was scoured and set on its tripod for tea, he showed her Aaron Walker’s map and told her something of the kind of enterprise he hoped to launch after he had paid his duty visit, got her off his hands, and gone about the business of buying teams and recruiting waggoners.

She was disappointed by the ordinariness of the project and unable to keep disapproval from her voice. “You mean be a
carrier?
Hump ing boxes and cotton bales from place to place?” but he laughed at her crestfallen expression.

“I certainly don’t intend doing my own driving, if that’s what you’re afraid of, and I shan’t limit myself to cotton. The railroad system in the cotton belt is good, and all the important centres are linked but down south, and in places like GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 77

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Wales and the West country, there are any number of little manufactories miles from the nearest railhead. I’ve got what I think is a good idea. I’m going to have three services, light, heavy, and medium, and they’re going to be fast and run to a schedule, like the railways. I’m going to have a crest or a trademark that everyone in the country gets to know, and all the waggons will display it and be painted in the same colours, and the men who drive them will wear a distinctive uniform, like the com missariat in the army. Whenever one of my vehicles goes by you’ll say,

‘Ah, there goes a Swann delivery.’ I shall recruit the right kind of men, work out the shortest and fastest routes, and in time I could be known all over the country.”

“Like Pear’s soap,” she suggested and he laughed.

“That’s right, like Pear’s soap.”

The project began to sparkle a little under the elbow-grease of his enthusiasm so that she could regard it as a somewhat more exciting endeavour than those men practised in Seddon Moss. With him directing it, there was at least a hint of adventure here, enough to prompt her to inquire thoughtfully, “Did you save money while you were abroad? Enough to buy a fleet of horses and waggons, and hire all those men?”

“They don’t pay soldiers on that scale,” he told her, “but I can raise it, one way or another. What I’m concerned about is giving it an individual stamp, something that makes an impact on tightfìsted merchants like your father, and that old miser Goldthorpe. Those are the kind of men I mean to go after. I want to hit on something that makes them associate me with the business of transporting their products from one county to another. I’ve been cudgelling my brains for days but nothing has recommended itself. Suppose you think about it?” His tone was jocular, so that she knew he was patronising her again and this put her on her mettle. She said, unexpectedly, “You’ve got an easy name to say and an easy one to remember.
Swann.
Everyone likes swans. No one takes a swan for granted. People stop whatever they’re doing and say ‘Look! A swan!’” For the very first time in their acquaintance he looked at her as though she was an adult.

“Have you thought of something already?”

“You’ll only laugh at it.”

“Try me!” and he sounded serious.

She said, blushing, “The
name
is what people will remember. You could use it as…well…as a trademark. A swan on wheels.”

She said it very diffidently and was therefore quite unprepared for his exuberant and immediate reaction. In a bound he had cleared the camp fire, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 78

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thrown his arms about her and kissed her on both cheeks. Then he held her off at arm’s length, eyes alight with excitement, jaw out-thrust, looking very boyish and ardent.

“By God, that’s capital! That’s
precisely
the kind of inspiration I’ve been looking for ever since that stationmaster put the idea into my head! A Swann!
A Swann
on Wheels!
Wait—” and he lunged over to where his saddle rested on a bough and picked up a square leather satchel of the kind she had seen strapped to the swordbelts of the cavalry officers who attended the Victory Ball. Then he was back again, and taking a notebook from the pouch found a blank page and began to draw, his pencil flying over the paper with such precision that she found herself thinking, “He can draw pictures faster than a drawing master and more lifelike ones I wouldn’t won der,” and was so interested that she quite forgot the burning spots on her cheeks where he had planted his kisses.

He said, handing the book to her, “Is that what you had in mind?” It was far more precise than anything she had had in mind. He had sketched an arrogant-looking swan in full sail down a river and superimposed on the facing wing was a large wheel, like the wheel of a gun carriage with each spoke outlined.

“Why, Adam, that’s marvellous! Where did you learn to draw like that?”

“To the devil with the drawing, I can do better than that on a draw ing board.

What colour should it be? And what about background?”

“Well, all the swans I’ve ever seen are white,” she said, “and on the side of a van it would show up best on black canvas, wouldn’t it?” She thought then that he was going to embrace her again, and so he might have done if she hadn’t raised the notebook in defence. As it was, he snatched it back, crying, “Better and better!” and fell to shading in the background until the swan on wheels stood out in sharp relief and the broad-bladed spokes had each a name—”London,” “Birmingham,” “Manchester,” and “Leeds.” It was such a distinctive trademark that she began to feel smug about having in vented it. “Why, I can see it,” she told him, “stencilled on the hood of a waggon. You’re quite right, Adam. It
is
something people will remember. It has a kind of—well—
difference
about it, like the lion and the unicorn.”

“Henrietta,” he said, “you’re your father’s daughter in spite of yourself, and I’m going to keep in close touch with you when I set up for I might need that head of yours.” Then, his smile giving way to a contemplative expression, “You mentioned capital just now. Can you keep a secret? From everyone?” She assured him that she could. In fact she knew she wasn’t at all good at GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 79

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keeping secrets, especially important ones, but she would have promised him anything at that moment. He replaced the note book in the pouch (telling her in passing that it was called a
sabre tache)
and probed in its depths for what looked like a small sachet of sailcloth, double-stitched along the folds. He took his claspknife, cut the thread, and drew out the most breathtaking string of jewels she had ever seen or expected to see, a necklace composed exclusively of rubies, a handful of rubies, some as large as a small egg, down to several the size of peas. Each jewel was cut so that it trapped the slanting rays of the setting sun filtering through the leaves above their heads.

“Why, Adam,” she said, ecstatically, “it’s lovely, the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen!

Could I…
hold
it?”

“You can wear it but only for a moment, and if that sounds un gracious it’s because the necklace represents all the hope I have of hitching the swan to a dray.” And then came a moment she was to remember all her life. He moved behind her, held the necklace before her eyes, and snapped the filigree catch into its socket Her fingertips came up to caress the largest jewel, the ruby hanging at the full extent of the loop, while he sat back on his heels and said, “I daresay it looks better on you than it did on the scraggy neck of that damned Ranee. Do you know anything about the value of jewels?”

“Nothing at all, but I’m sure these are the kind the Queen might wear, aren’t they?”

“I hope so,” he said, lightly, “but if they are I shall have to sell them at about a tenth of their real value, and think myself lucky into the bargain.”

“You mean you stole them?”

She said it as though she was not much concerned if he had robbed a coach to get them.

“Would it matter to you if I had?”

She considered this. “No,” she said, stubbornly, “after what you’ve done for me it wouldn’t matter a bit. I’d still be grateful and glad you rode up to that hut when you did.”

“Then set your mind at rest. I didn’t steal them, at least, not in the sense you mean. I stuck my nose in them when I was unhorsed during a brush at a place called Jhansi,” and he told her briefly about the encounter with the horseman carrying the casket.

“You think of them as belonging to you, then?”

“Why not? I could have left them lying where they were, in which case a medical orderly or a burial party would have pocketed them. I could have handed GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 80

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them into the paymaster, when they would have been impounded, locked up in a safe somewhere, and then found their way to the Company directors. Neither course recom mended itself to me at the time and it doesn’t now. I risked my life a thousand times to protect the John Company’s investments and came out of it with three hundred pounds after seven years of far rougher living than we’re experiencing now.”

“What will you do with it? I mean,
how
will you turn it into money?”

“Old soldiers have ways and means,” he said, evasively, “but now I’m going to put it to bed again. If you wear it a moment longer you won’t care to part with it.”

She reached behind her and unfastened the clasp. It was only when she was returning it to him, and he was carefully retying the severed threads of the canvas wrapping, that she understood the stupendous compliment he had paid her by trusting her with such a secret and this was ample compensation for parting with such a prize. She said, shyly, “Why did you tell me, Adam?”

“Why not? I don’t care to be under an obligation to anyone, and your idea of the swan on wheels was worth money to me. It’s as hard to put a value on that as on the rubies, but we’ll see. And now, Hen rietta, it’s high time you tucked yourself up in that tent. We’ve a long ride ahead of us tomorrow. If the weather holds we might get beyond Kendal and then we’re almost home.” The mention of his home reawakened her anxiety for the future so that she said, her lip trembling, “What’s to become of me, Adam?” He looked at her then with tolerance and sympathy devoid of patronage.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve been in far worse scrapes and come out of them.

Aunt Charlotte will think of something. She’s had a great deal of experience with flighty young women.”

His tone was casual but when she had crawled into the little tent and he had laced the entrance, extinguished the fire, and rolled him self in his cloak, he remembered that involuntary quiver of the lip. He lay looking up at the stars for a long time, contemplating the chain of circumstances that had saddled him with such an unlikely companion near the end of his journey. He had ceased to think of her as a nuis ance, a truant child, even the self-willed daughter of a man who could bludgeon a terrified boy to death. He saw her now as a new factor in a vastly complicated puzzle he had set himself to solve the moment he regained consciousness after the brush at Jhansi. Somehow, like it or not, she was closely involved with him, not so much as a woman but as a comrade, and this, for some reason he did not fully under stand, pleased and comforted him.

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His relationship with women had been those of all professional wanderers. From time to time he had hired the services of a garrison moll, or one or other of the nautch girls introduced into overseas stations and tolerated by the authori ties.

They had brought him physical relief but little pleasure, cer tainly none in retrospect. Only one did he recall with any tenderness, a fifteen-year-old Circassian, who must have been little more than a child when her parents sold her to the trade in Scutari. Her trained stealth, and her pathetic eagerness to please, had touched him, so that he had given her enough money to buy the clothes and gewgaws that would enable her to hoist herself several rungs up the ladder of her profession. Henrietta Rawlinson had no kind of kinship with girls like that and almost as little with the sisters and nieces of serving officers, who came out husband-hunting on the autumn bride-boat, as the pagoda-shakers had learned to regard it. She seemed, in fact, to have no destiny beyond latching on to him, and making his complicated life more complicated on the strength of a town riot and a chance encounter on a deserted moor. He already accepted this and perhaps it had a bearing on the confidence he had reposed in her by showing her the necklace. She was like a stray mongrel, looking to him for scraps and a dry place to sleep. Socially, the association was prepos terous and yet, in another way, it had about it an element of inevitability crystallised in that remarkable idea she had produced so effortlessly.
Swann. Swann. A Swann-on-Wheels.
It was apt yet outrageously simple, knitting together all the loose threads that had emerged from Aaron Walker’s advice, giving it shape, substance, and purpose. Close by an owl hooted and the north-westerly breeze came soughing in from the Firth, rustling the leaves overhead and causing the near extinct embers of the camp fire to glow like the rubies. He fell asleep, still wondering about her.