God Is an Englishman (59 page)

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who get the last ounce out of their people and take out their insurance in church every Sunday.”

It was as though he had suddenly ceased to breathe stale, un profitable air.

He understood then that his instinct had not been at fault in going to such pains to seek her out and also that, whatever he did from here on, would be done with the assurance that had been a feature in the early days, when he had taken conscious pleasure in backing his own judgement. He got up and went down to the water’s edge, watching the strong current break on the stones and eddy, like his gloomy thoughts, into the pools under the cutaway.

The sun danced on ten thousand ripples and bubbles and peace lurked under every wavering shadow.

He heard her stowing the gear in the tool-box and the greys being snapped back into harness. Then she was standing beside the fire, covering the embers with earth, and he crossed to her and said, briefly, “That was worth the journey, Edith. Thank you, my dear,” and taking her hand raised it and kissed it, so that she looked quite bewildered for a moment before withdrawing it, saying, “That’s a nice gesture, Adam, but it isn’t necessary. You would have arrived at the same conclusions yourself if you hadn’t been in your usual tear ing hurry. You’ll ride alongside as far as Richmond?”

“I’ll ride beside you,” he said, and unhaltering the chestnut, hitched her and scrambled over the tailboard and through the curtains to the box. They rode the two miles into town in silence.

2

When she had shed her load, and met him by appointment outside the livery stable he said, “I’ll be crossing the Pennines into the Polygon, for I might as well go back to work from here. Where will you turn off?” She told him at the turnpike above Ripon, for she had calls to make on the way down. He said, in a way that forestalled discussion, “I’ll travel that far with you, and turn in the mare at Ripon. Then I’ll go down the Great Northern and find a connection with the North Western. I can sleep the night under the waggon, it’s dry and I’m well enough used to it.”

Whatever she might have thought of this proposal she kept to herself and it was not until they were out on the open moor again, crossing a tract of wild, unsettled moorland cut about by innumer able streams, that she emerged from her shell again, pointing with the whip to a square outcrop of stone on their GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 312

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right, all that was left, she told him, of Middleham Castle, once the seat of the great Neville family. “Full of ghosts, is Wensleydale, and one of them royal.”

“Who was that?” he asked, sensing that the spell of this country side, with its open sky, chattering rivers, and vast, elemental loneli ness, was in her bones. She replied, lightly, “Ah, now, there’s a tomfool question from a man who has earned the Queen’s shilling. The last king we had. The last
real
king, that is. Richard, the one libelled by that liar Shakespeare, and others who shall be nameless. King Dick spent the happiest days of his life hereabouts and fell in love for good measure.”

“He was a blackhearted scoundrel, none the less, on a par with my father-in-law and the sweep Millward, wasn’t he?”

“Stuff and nonsense,” she said, “you’ve swallowed all that stink ing fish they left lying about. I don’t know as he murdered his nephews, but I do know he loved England and died for it. Which is more than can be said of any of the misers and weaklings who suc ceeded him.”

Her jocular assessment of history interested him. He saw it as another facet of her character and now that he thought about it it was not so unlikely that she should reveal herself as a champion of Crouchback. He remembered that the man had been respected up here, and his habit of driving himself and his adherents was in keeping with her own drive and self-sufficiency. “Tell me more about him,” he said.

She told him then of Richard of York’s associations with the area, how, as a sickly boy, he had been sent up here to train in the profession of arms, and had made himself not only the equal but the superior of all the other lads farmed out to learn their trade under the warlike Nevilles.

“He was nine when he arrived at Middleham, and thirteen when he left,” she said, “but he was a man for all that.” She gave him a steady, sidelong glance. “Your kind of man I like to think.”

“You said he fell in love. It must have been calf love?”

“Why? Children grew up earlier in those days. The more privi leged they were the less they were coddled. That younger Neville girl, Anne, had a tiresome time of it. She was chased from pillar to post, in and out of sanctuary, and then disguised as a kitchenmaid when he eventually found her and married her.”

“Aye,” he said, indulgently, “I remember. She was a widow too, for he killed her husband at Tewkesbury, didn’t he?”

“Oh, he might have, in battle,” she said, carelessly, “but it was only a marriage arranged by the French woman. Margaret. Anne had no say in it.”

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“No, but I like to think she preferred him to the son of an idiot. They both spent the happiest years of their life up here, and came back as soon as they could.

I don’t fancy a man like that would stifle his nephews with a bolster. It’s not in character, somehow.”

“That’s Yorkist prejudice,” he said, jokingly, but she flashed back, “Oh, no it isn’t! The Yorkist kings were always prepared to fight for their crown, like the Stuarts. That German line we’ve been saddled with since are a poor lot. Look at our present Majesty, making a cult out of mourning.”

“If you had lost your man I daresay we should find you in mourning!” She gave him another of her keen glances. “It so happened I did,” she said.

It was absurd, he told himself, but he experienced a pang of jealousy. It had never once occurred to him that she had been deeply attached to anyone. She always gave him the impression that she despised most men, and would be unlikely to surrender to one incapable of dominating her. “But maybe he did,” he thought, admit ting to a positive curiosity about her past, “Maybe he was some surly, six-foot Yorkshire lad, who walloped her regularly, and this forthrightness of hers is a northcountry version of Victoria’s lamentations.” “Well,” he said, as she readdressed herself to the team, “you can’t leave it there. I’ll be making guesses for the rest of my life.” She said, noncommittally, “Matt was a sailor, mate and part-owner of a brig. A lad to be reckoned with was Matt Hornby. We were to be married the day he was home from a coaling run up to Leith. But his brig was lost off Holy Isle and he drowned, along with the rest of them.”

“How old were you then?”

“Rising twenty.”

“What was he like, Edith?’’`

“Like you in build. Big, strongly made and with ideas of his own.” She seemed unwilling to vouchsafe more information and as they went creaking over the moor he thought about Matt Hornby, pictur ing him stumping ashore in jersey and sea boots, and sweeping her off her feet as she ran to greet him. It seemed an improbable picture. The only aspect of it that struck him as plausible was her silent battle to come to terms with the wreck of her hopes, and without knowing why this brought her closer. He said, suddenly, “They know where I am back in London and I got the impression they gossip about us. Will that annoy your father if he gets to hear of it?”

“Father and I go our own way,” she said, with a shrug, and then, “This marriage of yours; it seems a rum thing to fight about, a dead chimney sweep. Or maybe you didn’t tell me the full facts.”

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“Now what the devil am I to make of that?”

“Whatever you like. I can give you the kind of advice you came looking for because I know what is important to you. But I’m not qualified to judge you as a husband, and I’ve never set eyes on your wife.”

“Then why confuse the two issues?”

“It isn’t me that’s confusing them. Wasn’t that one reason you came looking for me?”

He said, thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t care to have to hide things from you, Edith.

What do you want to know, exactly?”

“As much as you care to tell me.”

He told her than of the circumstances in which he and Henrietta had met and married, of the successful and unsuccessful aspects of the match, and the difficulty he had reconciling his domestic life with the demands of his business. He tried to do Henrietta justice, and made no attempt to excuse his own shortcomings, but admitted he was close to abandoning hope of finding in Henrietta the kind of maturity he had hoped for when she settled down and became the mother of two children. “I was thinking during the ride over here that this is more my fault than hers,” he concluded, “that I’ve spoiled her.”

“Aye, I’d already decided that,” she said, “but it was none of my business. They say she costs you upwards of four hundred a year in ribbons and bonnets, but having started on that tack you’ll have to abide by it, unless you want a scold on your hands.”

“And I daresay you think I’m begging further trouble settling her in a place the size of Tryst?” he said, but she replied, surprisingly, “No, I don’t. I should want that if I was in her place. It’s fitting you should live in style, fitting for both of you,” and when he asked why she said that, having launched something new in the way of an enterprise, he was a natural inheritor of the kind of home the adven turers in the past had made for themselves out of the proceeds of piracies. “There are two changes I’d make if I was in your shoes,” she went on, “and the most obvious is to own your own acres. People like the Nevilles and Conyers have had their day. This one belongs to people like you, able to make their own way in the world. Most of the men who succeed in business build themselves a town house within a carriage drive of their counting houses, but that isn’t for you. Having found yourself a home why pay rent for it? No Yorkshireman would invest hard-earned brass in property he couldn’t lay title to.”

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“You’ll think them even more presumptuous.” She gave a tug on the reins and sat back, facing him squarely. “Where the devil were your brains to install a young wife in a house of that size, saddle her with a couple of children, and then surround her with a flock of hangers-on to make certain she lived in idleness.”

“Oh, come now,” he protested, “Tryst has forty rooms…”

“That castle yonder had more, and the lord was away to the wars and about his state business most of the year. But you aren’t such a fool as to think his wife spent her time drooping over the battlements watching the road against his return? She had servants, yes, but she also had the ordering of them. You’ve got an ignorant peasant in stalled in your house, usurping both your wife’s place and yours, but that isn’t the worst of it. You’ve got any number of girls and lads to fetch and carry for her, and I daresay some drudge to answer a bell and put coal on the fire. You’ve got a cook who helps herself to the best cut of roast before it finds its way to your table, and a bit of a lass to wipe the children’s noses when they need wiping, and teach them their A.B.C. Your wife turns up her nose at trade, you say. Well, that’s neither here nor there, because a man like you wouldn’t take kindly to nagging in that area, but how is she to fill her days if she’s nowt to do but worry about her waistline, and try on a new bonnet while she’s waiting for you to come home and ‘pleasure her with your boots on’ as the saying goes?

Lady Cicely Neville kept her own keys and linen, supervised the salting, bottling, and pickling for five hundred retainers, and was glad to put her feet up at the end o’ the day.”

“Good God,” he said, “Henrietta’s had no kind of training in that field!” but she said, glowering, “She can set about getting some, can’t she? She’s young and healthy and northcountry born, and if she doesn’t use up her energy that way she’ll get into mischief one way or another, or turn into one o’ those wilts who spends her time on a sofa pretending to be delicate. You came here seeking advice of one sort or another but here’s some you didn’t ask for. Sack that housekeeper, sack half the staff, tell your doll of a wife she’s re sponsible for the way the place is run down to the last detail, and tan her backside every time she lets you down.

She’ll love you the more for it if she’s from over the Pennines, for the Lancastrians might be fools wi’ their brass but there’s few of ’em who don’t thrive on hard work. There now, I’ve spent myself talking sense into you, so jump down and go about your business, leaving me to go about mine!” He gave a great guffaw of laughter and his appreciation of her, demanding physical expression, induced him to throw his arm round her shoulder and kiss her on the mouth. She accepted the kiss for what it was, an impulsive gesture of GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 316

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goodwill, but beneath her show of impatience with him there must have been turmoil of a sort, for when he proposed, half-seriously, that she shifted down to The Bonus in order to be handy as a counsellor, she said, very sharply, “Nay, I’ll stay where I am, thank you!”

“Why?”

“There’s no telling what might happen next time you come sharing your troubles. For my part that is, to say nothing of yours.” The remark was intended to convey more than it said but somehow he missed the hint, saying, “You’re not telling me a person as level headed as you would be bothered by gossip?”

She hesitated a moment, as though considering his artlessness, but then, regarding him stolidly, replied, “For a man of business, Adam Swann, you can be damned thickheaded. If I was persuaded things were past mending between you and your wife it would come easily to me to send you home with something better than talk to remem ber me by. It’s not from want of inclination, I’ll tell you that. But you’re a family man at heart, and a man who needs to keep his home life as tidy as his accounts, so it wouldn’t be in your interests or mine in the long run. However, I’ll not tempt Providence by spending a night under the stars with you, so ride on ahead into Ripon and be done with it.”