God Is an Englishman (58 page)

Guisborough was fast asleep when he rode in, but there was a light at the livery stable the Whitby manager had recommended, so he handed over the piebald and arranged to call for a replacement at seven. The ostler directed him to an inn where he ate bread and cheese and drank a pint of beer before seeking his bed.

Six hours later he was on his way again, following the deserted road almost due east to Marton before turning south-east across open country until he struck one of the great loops of the Tees, where birds sung in thickets beside the shallow, fast-running stream, and a clear sky promised another warm day. Soon he was jogging down the main street of Yarm, recalling that Blubb, driving the Thirsk

“Tele graph,” had changed teams here during his fast night-runs to Stock ton, and also that it was here, of all places, that his boyhood hero Stephenson had persuaded hard-fisted merchants to invest money in the Stockton-Darlington line, the Adam of every railroad in the world.

It was market-day in Yarm and the main street was thronged with carts and carters, but the elusive Edith Wadsworth was not among them, and a carrier’s agent told him she had set out at first light with the original frigate and two dapple greys, leaving the waggon she had hauled from Whitby as a replacement.

He thought, distractedly, “Damn the woman, it’s almost as though she’s evading me,” and left his second horse with the agent, choosing a frisky young chestnut that had been left with him overnight from a Richmond stable.

“You can turn her in when you catch up with Miss Wadsworth,” the agent said. “She’ll be nowt but a mile short o’ Richmond by then. Follow the byroad to Scorton Cross, then the line of the Swale that’ll be fordable anywhere in this dry spell. If you miss her she’ll be offloading at a mill called Forsythe’s, under the castle walls.”

He set off in sweltering heat, glad to seek the shelter of the trees where they GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 306

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arched over the road. The mare, pestered by flies, threw her head about, but once they reached the Swale, and she had slaked her thirst, she kept up a steady trot until the fantastic pile of Richmond Castle showed above the line of the trees. It was here, dismounting to offsaddle for ten minutes while he washed in the river, that he heard through the closeset timber on his right, the thin sound of a reed pipe playing an air on a scale of five notes, and as an accompaniment the slow, gritty grind of waggon wheels descending a hill, with brake-shoes applied.

It seemed to him a very relevant sound in that setting, and although he would not have thought that a person of Edith Wadsworth’s dis position would have lightened her journey with a tune on a hand-whittled reed, he knew, with a curious certainty, that it would be her waggon that came round the bend in the track.

He hitched the chest nut to a tree and took his place beside a willow, chuckling in antici pation of the shock she would get when he hailed her, and when the waggon was still fifty yards off he had leisure to study her, sitting re laxed on the high seat, reins looped over her shoulder, skirt hitched to the knee, feet encased in a pair of clogs and the pipe at her lips, so that she looked more like an illustration in Piers Ploughman than the practical woman he had seen bullying waggoners in the Boston yard.

She was, he thought, an even bonnier girl than he remembered. Her skin was tanned by sun and wind and her arms, bare below the elbow, were a mass of freckles. Her thick chestnut hair, falling to her shoulders, was restrained by a single strand of green ribbon.

He called, “Hi, there! Would you like company as far as Rich mond?” and she dropped the pipe and made a grab at the reins, bringing the dapple greys to a sharp halt and looking across at him with an expression that indicated surprise certainly, but not the degree of astonishment he would have expected. Then colour rushed to her cheeks and she seemed, for a moment, almost embarrassed. He saw her glance down at her threadbare skirt and clogs and then, with a toss of her head that set her curls jostling, her independence reasserted itself.

“You?
Playing highwayman right up here? Who on earth told you I was this far afield?”

“Oh, we keep an eye on you at H.Q.,” he said, “but I had a devil of a job to run you down. It’s taken the services of three trains and three hired hacks, and I was in the saddle half the night. Have you got anything to eat in that waggon?”

“Of course I have,” she said, with a touch of her northcountry asperity, “you don’t imagine I’d haul a waggon across North Riding and over the Humber on an empty stomach, do you?”

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“They have inns in most towns,” he said, unhitching the chestnut, and she replied, “Aye, they have, and all of them full of thieves and twice-warmed victuals.

I cook for myself when I’m travelling. Will cheese and beer do, or will you be wanting a hot meal?”

He had intended tying the chestnut to the tailboard and jogging along beside her as far as Richmond but now he changed his mind, hobbling the mare after leading her over to a stretch of turf growing beside the Swale.

“If you can provide something more substantial then I could do justice to it,” he said, “and those greys of yours could do with a cool ing off. Let’s camp here, where there’s shade and water.”

“You’re the gaffer,” she said gaily, and swung herself down, going to the tool-kit compartment and taking out a wicker basket.

“Light a fire,” she said, “but in that open patch. It’s been dry hereabouts, and it won’t help our reputation to start a heath blaze.”

“I’ve got twelve years’ campaigning behind me,” he said, “so don’t address me as though I was a townsman,” and she replied, with a laugh, “I was quite forgetting. You think like a townsman, and I always picture you as one.” It was extraordinary, he thought, how easily they adjusted to one another, and how little use she had for the flirtatious chitter-chatter that even working-class girls were beginning to cultivate, in imita tion of the weekly magazine heroines.

There was no restraint in her manner and no coyness either. He was just a man who paid her and her father for a job of work, and was therefore entitled to good service but no deference. In five minutes he had a fire going and in five more she had bread, bacon, and eggs sizzling in a frying pan she had produced from somewhere. A tin kettle was filled and edged on to the improvised grate, and while she was busy he led the waggon under the trees, unbuckling the harness and turning the greys out to graze alongside the mare. She had, in that hamper of hers, everything necessary for a picnic—tin plates, enamel mugs, tea, a screw of salt, a couple of two-pronged forks, and even a phial of olive oil. “Dripping melts on the road,” she said, “and the food tastes second hand, no matter how hard you scour the pan. I like a fry-up now and again when I’m travelling, but more often I brew tea and live off bread and cheese.”

He said, as they began to eat, “How often do you make lonely hauls like this, and how far afield do you go? They said at Whitby that this was an emergency on account of an accident.”

“I made that the excuse,” she said, with a smile, “for I had a fancy to see the North Riding in late spring again. It seems a lifetime since I was up here,” and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 308

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then, more seriously, “It’s my country and I love it. We come from here originally, a village near Middleham. Father shifted to Doncaster when Mother died, but I grew up around here. You couldn’t lose me in this part of Yorkshire. You can keep West Riding, the manufactories are fast spoiling it.”

“They’re spoiling most places,” he said, suddenly remembering what had brought him here. “That’s partly why I sought you out, Edith. I needed someone to talk things over with. Have you the patience to listen?”

“What kind of things?” she said, and when he hesitated, “Oh, I’ve heard talk, for you don’t only run a carrier service, you live in a grapevine.”

“What exactly did you hear?”

“That you were thinking of selling out and finding an easier way of making a living. Is it true?”

He knew the answer was important to her and said at once, “No, it isn’t. It’s true I’ve not been near the yard for a month, and I suppose that’s why rumours are flying, but I never thought of sell ing out, not seriously. I’ve got a lot of satisfaction out of what we’ve built here in the last few years: until a month ago, that is.”

“Is what happened to do with your wife?”

He noticed that she was looking at him steadily and that her eyes, the colour of the sea a long way from land, seemed to be assessing his state of mind with a kind of doubtful objectivity, as though she had certain notions about how he regarded her, and was examin ing their portent in her shrewd, uncluttered brain.

“Not specially,” he said, “although Henrietta is involved. You’d best hear it from the beginning and form your own judgements. I came a long way to pick your brains as the one person in the net work I could depend upon to give unbiased advice.”

He told her then, holding nothing back, how his pride and self-sufficiency had been shattered by a black bundle in his hearth, with its mouth full of soot.

He told her how the death of Luke Dobbs had become inseparably linked in his mind with the pressures bearing on every British man, woman, and child who lacked the means, the will, or the education to escape the cogs of the complicated machine fed with Christian ethics, and how, to his mind, the fabric of a traditional set of values had been discarded, and the rough pasto ral justice Englishmen had been at such pains to win was being set aside, in favour of a code based upon money and a man’s ability to make it anyway he liked.

“Something’s gone wrong somewhere,” he said, “and for the life of me I can’t say what or where. In my father’s day they hanged children for stealing five GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 309

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shillings, and the old and sick were at the mercy of circumstance, but charity was there, and a sense of respon sibility among the so-called quality. Today charity, real charity that is, is as clammy as a frog’s belly, and the only responsibility mer chants accept is to make enough money to ape the squires of a cen tury ago. That child Dobbs was a foundling and his fate isn’t in the least uncommon. The same kind of thing happens in the cotton belt, in all your Yorkshire wool towns, in the Potteries, and even among rural communities that used to take a pride in sharing one another’s troubles. I’ve seen it all travelling around and it’s gone sour on me.

That child’s death was no more than a match to a bon fire, a bonfire of a number of experiences—my father-in-law killing another child in haste to save his mill; the murder of those miners at Llangatwg when it took no more than Lovell’s brains to save others by the skin of their teeth; those urchins Keate rescued from the dock-side, no more than a sprinkling of the thousands one sees in London streets every day. Damn it, a man ought to be aware of what’s hap pening, and then do something to make others aware of it! Sup pose…” She had been listening intently but now, interrupting him, she said, “You mean on the lines of Shaftesbury’s campaigns? Getting elected to Parliament? Making windy speeches?”

“Not necessarily.”

“You could buy a newspaper. That would give you a platform to launch a crank’s crusade.”

“Does a social conscience make a man a crank to your way of thinking?”

“No,” she said, equably, “far from it. I used the word because that’s how the majority of people, occupied with the business of fill ing their bellies and keeping a roof over their heads, see a man of means who takes up a cause.”

“Is Shaftesbury a crank? He’s devoted his entire life to check ing the exploitation of five-year-olds by bastards like that sweep.” She smiled, not cynically exactly but with resignation. “Shaftesbury is a kind of saint. You aren’t, and never could be.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said, disappointed at the line she was taking, “but the self-disgust I’ve felt at being on the wrong side is real enough.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that. Knowing you I wouldn’t have expected anything else, Adam.”

He said, thoughtfully, “I’m damned if I’d mind being thought a crank if I was listened to by a vocal section of the public. As a matter of fact, it did occur to me to turn over the business to Avery, and stand as a radical for one of the London boroughs.”

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“That wouldn’t help at all,” she said. “In the first place, to win a seat at all would cost you far more than you could afford. In the second place, not being the holy sort, you’d lose your sense of purpose and throw away the chance you already possess of making your point.”

“What chance is that?”

She looked at him severely. “Why, this service, lad! This thing you’ve conjured out of nothing!”

Suddenly she began to speak with emphasis and conviction, addressing him as though he had been a stupid child, stuck on a slateful of sums and getting a string of wrong answers. “Do you discount your influence on the commercial ethics of the country at this very moment? Do you think you can employ three hundred men, includ ing Keate’s vanboys, without setting an example, good or bad, to others? Good God, man, didn’t it ever occur to you that you’re unique in the trade, that men like my father look up to you, and work over the odds for you, without looking for another sixpence in the wage packets every Saturday?”

“No,” he said, sincerely, “I didn’t know that. I thought myself a businessman, competing with other businessmen and much the same as them except that I’m more open to new ideas than they are.”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying,” she said, “for there isn’t a man working for the network, from the Border down to the Wedge, who hasn’t directly benefited from these ‘new ideas,’ as you put it. Oh, I don’t mean your routes and schedules, and all the mere mech anics of the service. I’m talking about your
approach
to the people who work for you, and that’s original in all conscience! Ask Catesby! Ask Lovell, over in Wales! Ask any of the waggoners in the Cres cents how they would feel if you dropped the reins. They believe in you as I do and take a pride in their work—or most of them do—be cause they know that you know they exist, and are more than a pair of hands standing beside a machine in one of those damned factor ies. You’re known as a good gaffer everywhere your waggons roll, and here you are proposing to go join a debating society, or turn evangelist and snuffle round with a hymnbook and blankets for the poor! That isn’t a man’s work, of the kind you’ve been doing this five years. With some of them it’s no more than a means of catching Peter’s eye at the Gate. Your ideas are your own, and they’re based on a sound set of rules. This mood, brought about by that boy who died in your chimney, doesn’t surprise me. It’s what I would have looked for in a man of your parts, but for God’s sake don’t let compassion make a fool of you. That would be a score for all the mastersweeps and millowners and sweatshop bullies GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 311