God Is an Englishman (22 page)

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flock at all events, for I’ve never seen a ruby as large or as perfect as that big one. Maybe you should keep that in reserve. So here’s a proposition. I’ll give you a banker’s draft for three thousand and we’ll see what use you make of it. A year would be long enough, for by then you’ll either amount to something or you’ll have gone bankrupt. If that happens don’t look to me to bail you out. The partnership I bought for a song was owned by someone like you, who came home determined to climb on the haywain, fell off, and broke his neck. On the other hand, there’s a certain promise about you, Swann. The way I look at it is this—you’re alive, and all the others save Roberts are dead, so it must follow that you’re either excep tionally lucky or exceptionally quickwitted. I’ll gamble on you being both.”

“Am I to infer from that you want to put your own money up?” Avery smiled and Adam thought of an old dog-fox sitting well to windward, and watching the pack stream by on a false scent. “No, my friend. I wouldn’t invest sixpence in transport by road, rail, or canal. For every transport venture that shows a profit ten stock holders throw themselves out of windows come quarter day. But I’ll cheerfully invest
your
money in it, being the difference between what I pay and what I get paid for twenty-nine rubies, won from the Ranee of Jhansi in all but single combat. How does that strike you?”

“As playing the hand you played in Bengal,” said Adam, “win ner take all.”

“Ah,” said Avery, “but I’ve learned since then, and two years is a long apprenticeship in Pam’s London. You never saw me take the risks in the field that I take every day in the city. Now you were once a death-or-glory boy, Swann. You even tagged on to Cardigan’s charge at Balaclava, but I won’t hold that against you. I like that kind of man out ahead of me. He draws the fire and what have I got to lose but time?” He paused, thumbs hooked in the armpits of his canary yellow waistcoat. “You like my proposition?”

“So long as it isn’t committed to paper.”

Avery smiled and nodded three times, and Adam recalled that, although continuously interesting, he had never been liked, except by the troopers who always admired a showman. “I stopped putting things on paper when I resigned my commission,” he said, “but now and again I like to shake hands.” They shook hands. It was a strange and rather casual beginning.

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Looking back on that exploratory period in later years Adam al ways saw it as a feat of mountaineering attempted by an amateur.

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The first base camp was his initial decision and then followed the long, toil-some advance. Later on, once he was fully committed and had his second wind, the foothills were accounted for at a good, steady pace, each successive summit representing an encounter, and what resulted from those encounters.

There was his chance meeting with Aaron Walker in the depot at Plymouth; the long ride across England; the witnessing of the riot that gave him an insight into the latent menace of the relationship between master and man and then, most improbably, Henrietta Rawlinson’s flash of inspiration concerning the naming of the enter prise.

After that came his loose arrangement with Avery and all that emerged from that, so that he came to see this as the scramble that carried him, breathless but optimistic, to the peak. And it was here, again improbably, he came face to face with Saul Keate.

Keate, perhaps more than anyone else, was his catalyst, for it was Keate who was instrumental in recruiting and training his original labour force. Josh Avery’s lazy patronage was to prove of great and lasting value to him in a variety of spheres, but no one aspect of it was as rewarding as his contemptuous gift of ex-sergeant Keate.

He met Keate on his final day in London, but all the preceding days, including three Sundays, were spent in affrays planned by Avery but executed without benefit of his chaperonage. For here Avery was as good as his word, generous with introductions and information but remaining very much in the background and only ap pearing from time to time, like the daemon in a pantomime.

Despite this, Adam could have gone further and fared much worse, for Avery’s passport into the world of the men of Moloch and Mammon was not his flamboy-ance and surface charm, and not even his nerve or his access to capital although he used all these weapons. At a much deeper level it was his memory for trivia that put him on such good terms with a wide cross-section of men, without whom Adam might have floundered for months without achieving very much.

Avery directed him first to Blunderstone, a coach builder who made drays and waggons for some of London’s most prosperous breweries, and here, in the waggonmaster’s yard off Galleywall Road, he invested a third of his promised capital in a fleet of waggons, placing his orders on the strength of Blunderstone’s designs for one-horse and two-horse vehicles, of the kind in general use for the trans port of light and heavy goods over provincial roads. To Adam’s amazement the coach-builder was able to promise delivery within eight weeks of signing the contract.

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From here he was passed on to McSawney’s stables, where he spent a day inspecting cart-horses of every breed and crossbreed, heeding the advice of McSawney’s nagsmen but, in the main, making his own decisions. He left McSawney’s having spent another five hundred pounds’ worth of Avery’s money on a string of haulage animals capable of transporting the baggage train of a battalion over terrain where no metalled roads existed. The beasts he chose, Clydesdales for the heavy work, Cleveland Bays for lighter, faster routes, were probably the best available in Europe. The Clydesdales particularly inspired confidence. The smallest of them stood seven teen hands, weighed two thousand pounds, and was capable, he was told, of hauling a full load twenty miles a day if harnessed to the type of dray Blunderstone was making to his specification. His cavalryman’s eye was attracted to the Percherons and Suffolk Pun ches, but he chose the two alternative breeds as most likely to serve a purpose that was becoming more clearly defined every day after discussions with wholesalers to whom Avery introduced him, usually by letter.

These letters amused but slightly embarrassed Adam, represent ing him as a man well-established in the haulage business, and in variably referring to him as
“…my good friend Swann, owner and managing director of Swann-on-Wheels, Ltd.,
a concern I have no hesitation in recommending as highly competitive in rates and time
schedules.”
The wholesalers, who seemed to have many dealings with Avery and his associates, accepted this introduction at its face value, and by keeping his wits about him Adam was able to learn a good deal about likely competitors, notably the main line railways, whose rates seemed to him high and whose service was accepted as being notoriously unpunctual.

In the course of his expeditions in and about the city, and an occa sional visit to the wharves above and below London Bridge, Adam came to the conclusion that, although railways now linked the capital with every main centre of industry south of Tyneside, the policy decisions of almost every important manufacturer in the country were made within hailing distance of London Wall. Here were based the distributors of all the clamorous enterprises that had quadrupled their output under the impetus of steam, and although most of them might have originated in places like Seddon Moss, in one or other of the pottery towns, in the Yorkshire dales, or the coalfields of the North-East and Midlands, the newcomers lost no time in acquiring the brashness of the London-born merchant, and were quick to adopt his contempt for provincials. He met Staffordshire men who would never have admitted to walking two hundred miles south east in search of work after the riots of ’48, and Manchester men who might have been among those GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 114

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who fled from the yeomanry sabres at Peterloo but had since learned to look upon their northern kinsfolk as chawbacons. He heard a Batley man mangling his vowels in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal a strong Yorkshire accent and correct the odd idiom that slipped out when boasting of how much shoddy he had shipped to the Orient last month. They were all, it seemed, disenchanted with the provinces and spoke of their home towns, if at all, as an absentee bishop in the last century would have referred to rural pocket-livings that enabled him to drive a coach and four through his fashionable diocese. Every one of them had an office or a warehouse hereabouts, the steel men of Sheffield, the wool barons of Bradford, the more important spinners of Rochdale and Oldham, the leather men of Leicester. Here, eating themselves to death in fashionable chophouses, were Dubliners, Glaswegians, Lancastrians, Geordies and Welshmen, merchants with thriving busi nesses on Mersey and Tyne, and Midlanders building their mock-Georgian houses in Kensington and Bayswater on the proceeds of factories that were fouling the skies over Walsall and Dudley. There were spare men, gross men, sober men, and men whose clothes and breath reeked of the taproom.

There were men who were open-handed and others who, like Rawlinson, would have taken pride in skinning a grape for a profit. There were men who spent their time impressing others that they were on Christian-name terms with the cousin of an earl, and others who made a cult of vulgarity and could have been hobnobbing with Sam Rawlinson the day before yester day. Three things they had in common, an impressive display of whiskers and energy, and an insatiable greed, but it was greed that made the more socially ambitious among them as ruthless as a starv ing fox in a hen-run. To Adam Swann this had advantages. Trans port rates quoted at a penny a hundredweight below the current average ensured their civility from the moment he entered their offices, and not one of them demanded credentials after glancing at one of Avery’s larded introductions.

He had taken lodgings in a small hotel kept by an ex-butler in a clean little street off the Gray’s Inn Road, returning there each evening too tired to do more than enter up his day-book, eat a simple dinner, and go to bed, but he found, to his surprise, that sleep did not come as easily as it had after a day in the saddle and that, in the last after glow of the sunset, his thoughts would return not to the debts he had incurred during the day but to Henrietta, some three hundred miles to the north-west.

At this hour, when the city clamour was muted, he wondered if she thought of him too and their madcap association seemed, at this dis tance, as improbable as a GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 115

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runaway match in one of Mr. Mudie’s chain-library romances. And yet, reviewing it objectively, he dis covered that he had no regrets and few anxieties concerning her, for the truth was he sometimes thought of her with amused tenderness that made him half understand what had encouraged him to make such a leap in the dark at a time when he was likely to need every penny he possessed. Then the essential lightness of her place in the new pattern of his life would reassert itself, and he would see a certain inevitability in the chain of events that had occurred since that first glimpse of her on the moor, and find himself smiling at some thing she had said, or one of the expressions that chased another from her face. And with this came a kind of certitude that they were, in many ways, a matched pair, striking out together in search of change and adventure.

He was particularly aware of this the night Avery appeared at his lodging shortly after supper and talked him into a night on the town. He remembered enough of Avery’s reputation to know that this meant no more or no less than a visit to some of the capital’s houses of pleasure, and so it proved, for after an hour’s drinking and parad ing in Cremorne Gardens, they went on to Kate Hamilton’s notori ous establishment in Princes Street, Leicester Square, described by Josh as

“the safest and most exclusive whorehouse in Europe.” “Kate,” he said, “not only employs girls selected and groomed for elegance, but subjects them to regular medical inspection. She num bers crowned heads among her regulars.” They might, indeed, have been paying a call on a foreign poten tate. To pass the portals of the house required the scrutiny of two commissionaires, after which they were inspected by a third through a peephole. Once inside, a dark passage led them into the most ornate and brilliantly lit salon Adam had ever seen. Mirrors covered the walls and between immense chandeliers were insets of ceiling glass.

At the far end sat Kate herself, enormously fat and strikingly ugly but none the less enthroned like a queen, her half-naked handmaidens grouped about her, and, here and there, occupying couches covered in sky-blue, crimson, or black satin.

The impact of this vulgar splendour was so striking that it was a moment before Adam noticed that every woman in the salon save Kate was dressed in a single, diaphanous gown that revealed, in the greatest detail, figures calculated to appeal to every conceivable taste. The girls, all of them young and attractive, and a few possess ing great beauty, were heavily rouged and carmined but their bearing, obviously imposed on them by what he assumed the parlour equiva lent of a drill-sergeant, struck him as comic in such a setting. It was as though they were not whores at all but priestesses, here to per form some kind of mystic rite rather than cater for the extravagant whims and perversions of Kate’s customers, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 116

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and when he and Avery sat down to a supper of oysters and devilled kidneys it was served them by two of these goddesses, who introduced themselves gravely as “Olympia” and “Flavia.” Olympia was a brunette and Adam judged her to be about Henrietta’s age, but his girl, Flavia, was a well-upholstered blonde, with blue eyes and smooth, slightly pendu lous cheeks. She was foreign and spoke English with a guttural accent that he took to be Dutch or German. Avery, as a regular patron, was at once recognised by Olympia, and acknowledged her decorous greeting with a friendly slap on her thinly veiled bottom, after which he ordered champagne, and the girls sat with them, sus taining a conversation that would have been acceptable at a tea-party on a vicarage lawn. As they ate supper, however, the place slowly filled with gentlemen of fashion, and Avery, sardonically amused, pointed out some of the notabilities, who included an impor tant foreign diplomat and two members of Parliament. He talked to Adam as though the girls were sempstresses’ dummies, telling him that about half of Kate’s women were imported from the Continent and others, just emerging from the trainee stage, were youngsters from the provinces, some of them no more than fifteen, who had been enticed to London by advertisements appearing in journals that were Sunday reading in pious homes and promised service with a good family and the prospect of Continental travel.