God Is an Englishman (21 page)

Adam remembered him vividly. No one who ever got to know Joshua Avery really well subsequently forgot him. Adam had seen him, but privately, as a kind of pocket Talleyrand, using his musical, low-pitched voice to beguile not merely silly, bored women, like Kitty Sullivan, but bankers and others who should have known better, bazaar merchants, martinet-visionaries like Roberts, and even men who were seeking the Imperial Holy Grail and hoping to bring it home to Windsor on their retirement. A slightly built man, with greenish eyes set in an almost triangular face, hard cheekbones, a pallor that had defied any number of tropical summers, and a small, thin-lipped mouth from which no ill-considered word had ever made its escape.

Avery had written offering him luncheon at a raffish eating-house off Drury Lane, where he had booked an alcove, curtained off from the gilded dining-hal , a place full of diners who were, so far as Adam could discern, either actors, or courtesans, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 106

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together with a sprinkling of city merchants, who somehow contrived to wear a wolfish air of brigandage in a way that made piracy a semi-respectable calling.

After so many years away from the capital, Adam found himself fascinated by the London scene as it moved at a gallop towards the end of a dynamic decade.

Disproportionate changes appeared to have taken place during the seven years he had been overseas, and he sensed that this had a bearing on the proliferation of the railways. The London he recalled as a youth had been a sprawling, half-rural community, with its grass roots still embedded in the era of Brummel, Fox, Pitt, and to a degree, in that of Johnson and Hogarth, but that was past. It was now a frenetic, impersonal city, erupting before the eye with an extraordinary variety of enterprises, and the em phasis on money and conformity rather than on style.

One had only to walk down the Strand and poke about in the labyrinth of streets linking that thoroughfare with the Thames, to note the sharp con trasts between those who were emerging as the new masters, those who served them, and a majority that had been left far behind in the race.

There had always been the London poor, thousands of mutilated beggars and barefoot urchins, the streetwalker, the huckster, and the artisan only one rung above this flotsam. Removed from this swarm there had been the town dandy, and the man of means, spanking along in an eye-catching phaeton, or picking his way along the crowded pavements in an ensemble that would keep any one of the derelicts fed and housed for a twelvemonth. But now the traditional contrasts were muted as society fragmented into a hundred rather than a dozen segments. The fop, and the man of fashion, were still to be seen, but soberly dressed businessmen predominated and these, Adam noticed, occupied a series of social plateaux, all the way down the scale from the steeple-hatted city gent, puffing his cheroot while he struck his bargains, to the hurrying clerk in threadbare worsted, who was probably feeding a family on what his employer paid a head waiter for a single meal.

Money, and the hundred-thousand ventures chasing money, was in the soot-encrusted air, and above the never-ending clatter of grind ing wheels and scurrying feet one could almost listen to the comfort able rustle of bankers’ drafts and the steady chink-chink of small change. Everywhere ratty old buildings of the last century were being torn down and replaced by warehouses and tall, narrow-fronted dwellings with four storeys and a basement area. The new, styl-ishly painted shops were beset by customers, the pavements were thronged, and the traffic jams in streets that had been designed to carry market-carts and a carriage or two, reminded Adam of the clubbed approaches to a bridge in the path of an advancing army. Contem plating it all he thought, “I’m only just in GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 107

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time it seems. If I had left it much longer the door would have been slammed in my face,” and he turned in at the eating-house, giving Avery’s name and noting the servility it earned him.

Avery arrived late, passing between any number of jovial, back-slapping friends in their patent boots, tight, strap-over trousers, blue frock coats with gilt buttons the size of catherine-wheels, and canary yellow waistcoats slung with the inevitable cross-cable chain and fobs. Watching him, and recalling the hardbitten Avery of bygone days, Adam wondered whether he had committed too much of his own story on paper, but once they were settled over their porter he was soon reassured, for Avery drew the alcove curtains, leaned forward, and became, for a moment, the old campaigner, say ing: “I wouldn’t have wagered a shilling you had the wits to take a leaf out of my book. Swann. You brought the loot with you, I hope?” and when Adam looked hesitant, “Oh, easy man, I never come in here unless I’m doing business. Every lackey is in some body’s pay, but I know each of them and each of them knows me,” whereupon Adam dipped into his pocket and dangled the necklace just beyond Avery’s reach.

He saw Avery’s eyes light up for a second and then they were hooded. “You’d trust a man of my reputation with something as genuine as that? Well, I find that flattering, but don’t expect me to return the compliment.” Adam said, with a shrug, “What choice do I have? I’m not such a fool as to sniff my way about London, hawking it to the highest bidder, whereas we all know where you went to butter your bread. The only difference between us is that I faced odds of fifty to one to get this. All you did was to involve two or three hundred other poor devils in somebody else’s quarrel, stand back, and get paid for the lot of them.”

It had never been possible to snub Avery. He said, quietly, “Let me handle it, fondle it,” and Adam passed the necklace across reluc tantly. Everyone in the Company’s service knew about Josh Avery’s lust for stones.

“Before I value it what is it you’re seeking, Swann? A cash transaction? An advance at around ten per cent? Or a straight sale on commission?”

“That would depend on you. I need as much capital as that will produce. I’ll pay commission, of course, and a heavy commission at that, for it can’t be helped.

Are you equipped to value it?”

Avery took out a glass and screwed it firmly into his eye. Then, having come prepared, he ran the necklace stone by stone along a metal gauge of the kind Adam had seen the goldsmiths use in the bazaars. Perhaps a minute passed before he said, “I’ll not attempt a bluff, Swann. It’s worth ten times what you’d get for GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 108

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it, and around five times as much as I could squeeze out of it the way I shall have to go about it.”

“I expected that,” Adam said.

A gleam of humour showed in Avery’s green eyes. “Cards on the table, old comrade-in-arms. Even I couldn’t sell it as a necklace. The stones would have to be recut and disposed of separately. They’d lose a carat or two in the process.”

“I expected that, too.”

“Then let’s consider. Thirty stones, varying considerably in size and quality.

These big ones eight-to-six carats, the smaller ones three-to-five. All Burmese rubies, by the way, none of your Ceylon gewgaws.” He looked intently at nothing just beyond Adam’s head, whistled a stave, and then went on, “Say an average of a hundred a stone in my kind of market, and that’s the only market open to us in the circumstances. Three thousand pounds, less ten per cent.”

“Twenty-nine hundred,” said Adam. “I’m keeping one stone back.”

“Oh, come now, there are less expensive souvenirs of your wasted years with the John Company.”

“I’m getting married shortly and I want one of the medium-sized stones made up into a ring.”

Avery looked shocked. “Married, you say? Good God man, you can’t afford to do that yet, not even if I drop my commission to eight per cent for old times’

sake. But perhaps she brings a dowry and that’s why you aren’t haggling?”

“She brings me the clothes she stands up in and even those were bought with my money.”

Avery said, curiously, “I was surprised to get your letter but know ing you its contents made sense. However, you’re not a man I would have thought to see hooked on that particular bait. Dear old Roberts, maybe, or ‘Circus’ Howard, or any of the young bucks who rode into battle carrying lockets and hair rings. But not you, Swann. Deep down I had the impression we had more in common than any two of them. Was I so wrong?”

“You were half right,” said Adam.

“How many of our Addiscombe class survived the Mutiny?”

“Only Roberts, and he’s been badly bitten by the Imperial bug. You’ll hear more of him if he survives, but let’s stay with the busi ness on hand, Josh.”

“Don’t be so damned greedy. Thirty Burmese rubies are worth lingering over.

Why do you need capital? Is it to buy your way into a crack regiment?”

“Far from it. I’m done with soldiering. I resigned and came home to take a bite at your cherry, Josh.”

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He noticed then that curiosity, of the kind that made Avery as untypical as himself, had been aroused in the man and also, not withstanding the prospect of financial gain, that it would have to be satisfied before he could enlist Avery as his agent. Even so it was not like trusting a civilian. Avery was a scoundrel but there existed be tween them the bond of shared experiences under fire, and it struck Adam that it might be to his advantage to put that bond to the test. He said, “I’ve got a dream, Josh. Not your kind of dream, to set up as a gentleman for at thirty plus I know myself better than that. Six months of it and sheer ennui would drive me back into the army. I need action but not the kind of action I was trained for.

A very great deal has been happening over here in the last ten years, and I want to participate. Fortunes are being made every day by men with less initiative than we needed to survive in the field. Does that answer your question?”

“Only partly. What’s the substance of your dream, Swann?” Adam told him, as much but no more than was necessary, and Avery did not miss a word although, with those heavily lidded eyes, he might have been dozing.

He said, pocketing the necklace, “Well, at least it’s original, but I couldn’t say more than that, Adam.”

“I think you could if you cared to. You’ve been home long enough to get acclimatised.”

“I’m marginally involved in a variety of businesses but I’m not such a fool as to practise one. That would mean breaking my two golden rules, rising before noon and accepting personal responsi bility. In short, I finance but I never operate.

I leave that to people like you, people who dream dreams. However, it is true that I’m in a position to give you good advice. Will you listen, or do you prefer to make your own mistakes?”

“I’ve made one reconnaissance, and I intend making another before I take the plunge. There’s something you could tell me at once. Assuming you advance three thousand, do I buy a rundown estab lished business, or do I set up independently?”

“Nobody sells a business that is making money. Start one of your own but play for big stakes from the day you open. Three thousand, plus what you must have saved, isn’t a fortune for the caper you have in mind, but it’s enough if you go about it the right way. You wouldn’t take kindly to a bona fide partner, I can see that, but you’ll need a backer, someone with close contacts among the men you’ll have to tout as a carrier.”

“You’d be prepared to back me?”

“Perhaps, but don’t let’s keep it personal at this stage. My view is you’ll need GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 110

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guidance, and I could supply that if I had a mind to. You’ll need many other things—agents all over the country, up wards of fifty reliable drivers, and as many vehicles, coach-built by someone with a reputation at stake. You’ll need good horseflesh, for the coach roads have gone to hell since the railroads were built, and that means a number of strategically placed depots, with good stabl ing available. Damn it, I could sit here all day giving you free advice on any one of these matters but you know me. I don’t give advice, not even to old comrades-in-arms, I sell it. That’s my business.”

“Then take first things first. Can you dispose of that necklace on the terms you mentioned?”

Avery said, thoughtfully, “I can do a lot better than that, Swann, depending upon how far you trust me.”

“Say the width of this table, Josh.”

“That’s far enough.” Avery rang the bell, a waiter appeared and he issued orders for a meal. As soon as the waiter had disappeared, he went on: “There were rules in our kind of warfare. Sometimes our opponents didn’t observe them, but we had to, for political and fancy reasons. The war you’re so eager to join in is played without rules, except a few loose ones between the parties investing and the parties who do the spending and earning. You remember the Thugs in the North and Central plains? They sacrificed men to the god Kali. Over here two older gods share a six-day week, Mammon and Moloch. Jehovah still collects his dues on Sunday, but on the stroke of mid night his temple doors are slammed, everyone gets off their knees and goes back to Thuggery. You do business on that principle and it isn’t easy to accept at first.”

“I rode a horse from Plymouth to Lakeland, passing through a lot of country and keeping my eyes open so I’ll accept it. But sooner or later there will have to be rules. It’ll be that or French-style revo lution, in my opinion.”

“Oh, they’ll bend rather than break if they have to. The holy Joes, men like Shaftesbury and Gladstone are already drafting legislation. Factory Acts, fenced machinery, compulsory education, even an ex tended franchise. But that won’t do more than enlarge the free-for-all and multiply your labour difficulties. Mammon will still work a six-day week. What you saw in the Midlands and North is a phase in the switch from an agricultural to an industrial economy, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. I daresay you think you can handle men, Swann, but you haven’t satisfied me yet that you can handle money. If you could you wouldn’t be here, falling over yourself to accept three thousand for something that deserves a place in the Tower of London alongside the Crown Jewels. The flower of the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 111