God Is an Englishman (52 page)

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town and boarded the first train for Abergavenny. He knew, somehow, that they would get through in time. And unlike his colleagues, Ratcliffe and Blubb, self-advertisement debased him.

It was four days after that, when the whole country was aware that fifty-one of the missing eighty-seven had been brought out alive after the installation of a Shannon pump, dragged up the hill side by ten dray horses and any number of Welshmen, that Dowlais ran him to earth in his shabby little lean-to at the Abergavenny yard.

He said, with a northcountry oath that sounded foreign in this area, “Don’t you realise the whole bloody shift would have been down there yet if you hadn’t told me about that pump, and hauled it up there practically singlehanded? I don’t give a damn whether you like it or not, a full report including your name has gone in to the owners, and you’ll be well paid for your trouble. Aye, and for your brains.” He glanced around, noting a billhead on the desk flap bearing a curious trademark, a swan with wheels where its wings should have been. “This boss of yours in London,” he said, “what’s his name, and where can I reach him?” and when Lovell told him, “He ought to know what kind of chap he’s got down here, running his tin-pot waggon service!”

But then Bryn Lovell surprised him again, saying, with dignity, “The fact that you seem to be unaware of the service is your loss, Dowlais. Swann-on-Wheels is established now in all parts of the country. It has a good reputation, both as regards rates of haulage and delivery on time, sometimes ahead of time. If that hadn’t been so that pump would have been scattered about the goods yard yonder, instead of where it is, drying out your ill-found pit. Remember to put that into your report to the owners.”

Dowlais was not offended. He stuck his short pipe in his mouth and said, equably, “And so I shall, man. Every damn word of it. And while I’m here I’ll take the liberty of pocketing some of these billheads and drum up some Valley trade on your behalf. You deserve that if nowt else! How many waggons has your firm got based about here?”

Lovell told him a dozen, two three-horse-men-o’-war, four two-horse frigates, and half-a-dozen pinnaces for local deliveries. Dowlais said, grimly, “You’ll soon need a dam’ sight more if I have owt to do wi’ it!” and then left. Like Lovell he was a man of few words.

The story leaked out in driblets. Down here there was no trumpet blast of publicity, as in the case of Ratcliffe’s lion-catching exploit, or Blubb’s brush with GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 274

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the Fenians, but the impact was more lasting and productive. The people of the Valleys, Adam found, had retentive memories. No man who had witnessed or taken part in that haul over the snow ever forgot it, or the man who made it possible, so that whenever Lovell appeared in the district people referred to him as “Swann’s man,” and what he had accomplished with some one else’s drays, and someone else’s horses, attached itself to his employer’s trademark rather than to himself. Soon the insignia was familiar all over the southern part of the Mountain Square. When waggons were needed it was the sign rather than the man who sprang to mind, even among prosaic men, who had once been content to let their goods hang about railway sidings during complicated cross country deliveries.

They would say, when consigning merchandise here, there and everywhere, “Get it on the rail…” and then, “No…send it by road. That Swann-on-Wheels joker, who stole the pump from Steepcote’s, time o’ the Llangatwg disaster,” so that ripples of that struggle up the narrow gauge moved out across the Principality and beyond, finally reaching Tybalt, in the Bermondsey yard. He would say, pushing up his spectacles, “My word! Lovell is a trier, Mr. Swann. Here’s another contract from the collieries. Do you sup pose he’s found a way to undercut the railways on short hauls from dock to pithead?” And Adam would reply that one could never be sure what was to be expected from Lovell or Ratcliffe, or from that old drunkard Blubb, and this would sometimes set him thinking on the nature of a race that could produce, out of the hat as it were, three such eccentrics, each such a contrast in character and temperament but having some qualities in common; courage, ingenuity, and a streak of obstinacy, that set them apart from the ordinary run of mankind.

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Neither Henrietta nor Ellen Michelmore, the miller’s wife now installed as housekeeper at Tryst, had ever heard of the Baroness Lehzen, or of the crisis at Windsor shortly after the young Queen’s accession that was caused by the German governess’s reluctance to abdicate her role. And yet, by the spring of 1863, when the Swanns had been settled at Tryst for three years, an almost exactly similar situation developed between a young woman who saw herself as lady bountiful of the district, and an astute peasant, herself the mother of a string of married daughters and the disappointed wife of an amiable rustic.

Ellen Michelmore, in whose sagging body burned a flame of am bition rare in a woman of her circumstances, behind whose pale, ex pressionless eyes lurked a brain as sharp as a pin, lost no time at all in exploiting her stroke of luck at being the only person on hand to deliver Henrietta Swann’s first child. It was this that had gained her the confidence of man and wife and once she was elevated to the role of housekeeper, and had satisfied herself that Adam Swann, obsessed by his business concerns, spared hardly a thought to his domestic background, she set about translating that confidence into indispensability. In a few months she was recognised by all as the force to be reckoned with at Tryst. Within two years, when Hen rietta’s second child Alexander was still in long clothes, she was accepted, in all but fact, as the mistress of the place, Henrietta having become entirely dependent on the seventeen-stone villager, who issued most of the orders and vetted all the servants, engaging those who were likely to pay her deference and dismissing applicants who promised to resist dictatorship.

She achieved all this by a skilful mixture of bluff, stealth, and flattery, together with a single-mindedness that Baroness Lehzen her self might have envied.

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Towards Adam she was careful to display the utmost respect, and when she could kept clear of him, for her instinct told her that he was a man not easily gulled.

Her efforts were therefore directed exclusively towards Henrietta, concerning whom, within a month or two of the commencement of their association, she made a number of interesting and profitable discoveries.

She discovered, for instance, that what Adam tolerated as imma turity and inexperience in his wife was really part of her inheritance as the product of a penniless Irish immigrant, and a man who had started out in life as a coal-comber in the furnace of a Lancashire cot ton mill. Adam had seen, indeed he still saw, Henrietta’s quaint obsession with scarlet-clad Empire builders as a romantic fancy for the traditional trappings of military pomp, of the kind put to good account by the manufacturers of the tin of toffees she had packed in her basket trunk the night she ran away from home. Ellen Michelmore, having served time as a scullerymaid among the newly rich in a country house in Hertfordshire, recognised it as something more significant, the terrible yearning on the part of an upstart to be absorbed into what she thought of as something deeply rooted in the social pattern of the nation, an impulse as hard and thrusting as her husband’s apparent need to look for his reputation in the matrix of the new age.

Ellen was not, of course, alone in this assumption regarding her employer.

Every member of the staff at Tryst flattered themselves that they could distinguish between the “real” gentry and one of them selves, who had made a fortunate marriage. They did not hold this against the missis. The least generous of them begrudged her her luck, and the others, a majority, accepted the situation as confirmation that their folklore was spun from fact and that, from time to time, a Cinderella did watch a pumpkin turn into a coach and marry the Prince. There was nothing in the fairytale to suggest, however, that, once installed in the palace, Cinderella was eager to move over for one of the Ugly Sisters, and this was precisely what was occurring before their eyes. Everybody for miles around was aware that Ellen Michelmore was disposed, if permitted, to give herself intoler able airs, but not until now had the locals taken her pretensions at all seriously. With the new missis entirely under her sway this was something they were obliged to do, and those who continued to snigger were soon identified, sent packing, and replaced with the house keeper’s nominees.

Steadily, month by month, and sometimes, it appeared, day by day, the influence of the miller’s wife became more absolute, and no one understood, in precise terms, how this subtle miracle was achieved. But Ellen knew, and hugged herself in the knowledge.

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Ellen Michelmore made other discoveries about the twenty-two-year-old girl of whom she learned to speak (but did not think) as “the pore lamb,” as though Henrietta had been the ailing heroine of a tragic tale in one of the weekly magazines, or even a subject for one of Mr. Tennyson’s gloomier poems. In addition to her longing to be absorbed into the class, of whom the old Colonel was a fair sample, her mistress was, Ellen decided, a lazy, shiftless girl who was inclined, at the least excuse, to leave the mechanics of day-to-day living in more experienced hands and retreat into fantasy. Her complete lack of practical experience in the field of housewifery was, in fact, one of Ellen’s trump cards, and she played it remorse-lessly, even going so far as to proclaim to anyone who would listen that she was

“takin’ the pore lamb in hand,” or “teachin’ young missis ’ow to conduct ’erself,

’ome an’ abroad.” Ellen Michelmore’s notions of how a per son in Henrietta’s situation should conduct herself were based upon her observations, through the green baize door, of the large house hold where she had served part of her childhood and most of her youth as scullerymaid, kitchenmaid, still-room maid, and ultimately, for three blissful months before marriage, as parlourmaid. Her tui tion hinged upon the simple precept that no “real lady” ever soiled her hands with work, or made a single decision concerning the ordering of the house without first consulting the departmental expert, via the housekeeper. There were, however, certain matters that she was pri vileged, indeed obliged, to attend to, including the issuing of invita tions to her monthly “At Home,” an occasional croquet party and, of course, the visiting of the sick and aged in the surrounding villages. These duties, in her opinion, were more than enough to occupy the mind of the lady of the manor, leaving her no leisure to participate in such mundane rituals as the preparation of menus, the weekly check of linen, the training of young servants, and the replenishment of household stores. In the odd, unoccupied moments between visit ing, entertaining, and “resting” on the sofa, she could, if she felt dis posed, do a little flower arranging, sew a little, picnic, or play with the children, so long as she confined this to regulated hours that did not conflict with the syllabus of the plummy-voiced governess Ellen had engaged. That was all, apart, of course, from keeping the master happy on the rare occasions he was at home, and as regards this Ellen was very particular, for it was not lost upon her that her mis tress wilted at the knees the moment Adam embraced her. This suited her very well. It meant that, during his brief visits, she was free to run Tryst the way she would have run it herself had she enjoyed Cinderella luck when she was seven stones instead of seventeen, or had possessed the looks and figure that had secured, for this chit of a girl, the good fortune of attracting the roving eye of a gentleman.

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In this way, moving stealthily from covert to covert, Ellen Michelmore soon had the entire ménage safely in hand. The comfort and security that had eluded her in life was now within her grasp, and she felt she could look forward to an uninterrupted reign of cushioned privilege that would have seemed an impossible dream before that horse Dancer had taken it into his head to deposit a man and wife on her doorstep. In the whole of her calculations Ellen made but one minor error. She did not, it seems, make allowance for the effect a life of idleness might have upon Henrietta, once she had come down stairs after her second confinement and was looking about for a means of passing the time during Adam’s follow-up expansion period, when he was away three weeks out of four.

It was this miscalculation, one that anyone might have made, that led to an incident that ruined the whole enterprise, exposing her ex pectations as fantasies of the kind her mistress indulged in concerning gentility and her future role as the mother of heroes. For the fact of the matter was, as time went on, and Adam became more and more absorbed in business that swept him from one end of the country to the other, Henrietta grew insufferably bored, and her boredom, unable to digest a nonstop diet of fantasy, induced in her a petulance that was wholly uncharacteristic. “At Homes,” where she entertained, or was entertained by, a succession of tittle-tattling old trouts, were not frequent enough to absorb the energy she accumulated during the periods Adam was away and neither, it seemed, was sick-visiting, an occasional croquet party, sewing, flower-arranging, and an hour or so a day spent in baby-talk with Stella and Alexander. Slowly, and reluctantly, she came to realise that life at Tryst was not all it had promised to be, that there were times when she yearned to cook a little, scrub a little, even flirt a little, but she had not yet arrived at the point where she would admit, even to herself, that the colours were beginning to fade and she felt as unsettled as she had been at Scab’s Castle before flashpoint.