Off the Rails (18 page)

He would have to be answered, George thought. Wretched little man. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps that admits of some explanation. The fact is that I believe in 1832 I was what they call treasurer but I received no monies; but I was told by the chairman that cheques on the city and county bank would be answered, if I drew them on account of the expenses of the election. That is the explanation.’

‘The total amount drawn from the bank was
£
3,240,’ another committee member put in. ‘Is that correct?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Was this polling money?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by polling money,’ George said loftily, and he turned to appeal to the chairman. ‘I don’t like to be entrapped into an answer by a question of that sort. Let him put his question in a
straightforward
way.’

It was done. Instantly. ‘Very well then, I ask you, do you know whether any polling money was paid on behalf of Mr Lowther?’

George drew himself up to his full pompous height. ‘That question,’ he said loftily, ‘I respectfully decline to answer.’ And he glared round at his persecutors, daring them to challenge his right to stay silent.

The questioning went on for three days but George stayed obdurately obscure about his financial dealings. In the end the meeting was adjourned and no further action was taken.

It certainly seemed to be. By the end of that year he owned seven railway companies and had so much money he was a millionaire and sure enough not one further word had been said about their stupid trumped-up charge of corruption. And to set the seal on his success, by that time the local Tories held the balance of power within the Corporation and in their view, when it came to choosing the new Lord Mayor for 1837, there was only one man for the job.

It was marvellously gratifying. ‘Didn’t I tell ’ee I’d be Lord Mayor,’ he said to Lizzie. How well he remembered standing in that little church when they were getting wed and looking down at the tombstone to another Lord Mayor, whose name he had quite forgotten, and vowing that one day he would follow him into office.

Lizzie looked up at him in admiration. He seemed to have swollen to twice his size that evening and he looked so well with his cheeks red and his eyes shining and that gold watch chain shining on his chest like a medal.

‘’Tis no more than you deserve,’ she told him. ‘I mean for to say you’re just the man for the job. I’ve allus said so.’

‘I shall have my portrait painted in my mayoral robes,’ he said, admiring himself in the long mirror. ‘And I shall throw a banquet. An inaugural banquet. That’s the way to win hearts. Good food and champagne and plenty of it.’

W
HEN
P
RINCESS
V
ICTORIA
was eighteen, the law was changed so that she could be declared to have come of age. Most people knew that the old King could die at any time and nobody in parliament wanted her mother to be regent. That wouldn’t have done at all.

There was considerable celebration and anybody who was anybody threw a party. Even Sir Mortimer, who was usually too dour for parties, decided to host a large one and invited half society as well as all his
children
. Felix couldn’t see the point of it but he attended dutifully, telling himself that he could slip away unnoticed after an hour or two because it was bound to be a crush.

As it was. The drawing room of his father’s fine town house was booming with loud voices and dazzling with flamboyant diamonds, most of them, as he noticed sourly, decorating wrinkled bosoms, and it was so impossibly crowded it was really quite difficult to move around in it. But he stayed polite and asked after the health of anyone who addressed him and tried to watch where his father was, so that he could keep out of his way.

He was out of luck, for just as he was asking after the health of another drawling young man, a duchess in full sail bore down upon him, bearing his father in her wake.

‘Me dear,’ she said. ‘I’ve been searchin’ for you all over the room. Where have you been hidin’? You mustn’t hide. ’Tain’t kind, ye know, and it ain’t the style. Now tell me what you mean to do with yourself now you’ve come down. You will come to my soiree, naturally.’

He agreed with her, giving her the slight bow that was her due. What else could he do? ‘Naturally, ma’am.’

‘Quite right,’ she said, nodding her plumed head so that the feathers swept his father’s face. ‘Now tell me what you mean to do with yourself until you come into the estate. It ain’t a bit of use puttin’ on that face to me,
Mortimer. A young man should have an occupation otherwise he runs to the bad. We all know that.’

Her words put Felix into a state of delighted shock. Had the moment actually come? Could he tell
her
what he wanted? Would she prove an ally? It probably wasn’t the place or the time but, even so, he was scrabbling about in his mind to remember the words he’d planned to say.

The great lady leaned towards him and whacked him on the shoulder with her fan. ‘Speak up!’ she ordered. ‘What do you have in mind?’

‘Well now, as to that, ma’am,’ he said, gaining a little time while he got his thoughts in order, ‘I’ve been considering the law, ma’am.’

She looked at him quizzically. ‘Have you now?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I thought it might be helpful for Pater to have his own personal lawyer. A trustworthy one, if you take my meaning.’

‘Quite right,’ she said, whacking him with the fan again. ‘Some of ’em are rogues. Absolute rogues. That all sounds very sensible. Wouldn’t you say so, Mortimer?’

Sir Mortimer had retreated into his chilly face and didn’t answer but the lady sailed on in her imperious way. ‘It’s quite the done thing, ye know,’ she said, ‘dependin’ on the number of sons you have available. One to the army, one to the church, one to the law. Quite the done thing and a matter of good sense to my way of thinkin’.’ She gave Felix a nod as if the whole matter were settled. ‘Call on me a’ Friday,’ she ordered. ‘I will speak to the duke. He has friends in the Inns of Court.’ Then she sailed away, skirts swishing as she bore down on an old friend. ‘Me dear!’

Felix realized that his heart was beating uncomfortably fast and that his father was looking as if he’d been frozen into his skin. ‘I wouldn’t do anything against your wishes, Pater,’ he hastened to assure.

‘Quite!’ his father said. Then he gave his son a short formal bow and left him.

Has he agreed or not? Felix wondered. How am I to find out if he will keep walking away? But there was no point in worrying about it and
fortunately
just at that moment he saw an old college friend so he struggled through the crush to join him and they spent the next twenty minutes making ribald comments about the various impossible people in the assembly, which was entertaining and cheering. He would know his father’s decision soon enough.

He knew it five days later after he’d paid his courtesy call on the duchess and been given the address of the ‘best chambers’ and a letter of
introduction
to the head of those chambers, whom the duchess pronounced ‘a stout chap’. He went back to his father’s house feeling so elated that his feet were
barely touching the ground and showed him the letter with some pride and considerable satisfaction.

‘Ah well,’ his father said. ‘We can’t argue with a duchess. I suppose ’twill be a convenience to have my own lawyer on hand. But I trust you will allow me to assist you in the matter of findin’ a suitable wife. You will stay in London for the Season and attend such balls as I deem necessary, will you not?’

He had to agree. How could he do anything else?

‘
I will be back as soon as it is humanly possible,
’ he wrote to Milly that evening,
‘which will not be until the end of the Season, I fear. I must attend these wretched balls now that I have given my word to the pater although I will tell you candidly that I am dreading them and that in any case it will all be a waste of time for there is no one else for me but you nor ever will be. Please tell Mr Cartwright that his advice has been taken at last, which will surprise him, and thank him for all his kindness towards me.’

Milly was most upset to know that she would have to spend the summer without him, especially as she’d been looking forward to it so much, but she put a brave face on it and when she went to York for a couple of days she explained it to her mother as though it was all perfectly normal and to be expected. And Jane, who was now quite sure that this was a serious love affair, made commiserating noises but otherwise said little to her.

She told Nathaniel all about it, naturally, when they were on their own together later that night, describing how sad her poor Milly had been when she arrived and how bravely she’d tried to hide it.

‘’Tis such a nonsense to make him stay in London,’ she said, ‘when anyone with half an eye can see he wants to marry our Milly.’

‘He is on the social merry-go-round,’ Nathaniel said, ‘like all the other eligible bachelors in London and they will find him a wife whether he will or no. He’ll need to be uncommon strong-willed if he’s to resist them.’

Jane thought about that for a few minutes, remembering how meek her poor Felix had been as a little boy and how easily his father had bullied him. ‘We must hope love will give him strength,’ she said at last.

‘Now,’ he said, pulling on his nightshirt, ‘ask me what
my
news is.’

‘I hope ’tis better than mine,’ she said, climbing into the bed and smoothing the covers over her legs.

‘We are invited to a party,’ he said, and when she looked the obvious question at him, ‘to celebrate Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday. I met Mr Nicholson in town today on his way to buy another painting and he was telling me all about it. ’Twill be a very grand affair, so he says, which I don’t doubt, seeing it’s being given by Mr Hudson. He was sure we would
be invited. And when I got home, there was the invitation. What do you think of that?’

She said she wasn’t a bit surprised and agreed that it was a fine thing to be invited, although she was secretly thinking how unfair it was that George Hudson should be rich and prosperous and throwing grand parties while Milly and Felix were being deliberately kept apart.

It was a very grand party indeed and, to her perverse disappointment, really quite enjoyable. Whatever else you might say about the obnoxious Mr Hudson, he certainly knew how to celebrate. It was the talk of the town for weeks afterwards. Then just as interest was dying down, the news arrived that the old king was dead and that Princess Victoria had been proclaimed Queen of England.

‘There will be no hope at all of getting to Longfield to see you now,’
Felix wrote dolefully to Milly,
‘even for a day. London has gone wild over the new queen. There are more parties planned than ever and the pater is insistent that I attend every single one. I cannot see any end to it except the end of the Season, for which I pray.’

He was back at Longfield Hall on 11 August and went straight to the schoolroom, where Milly and the girls were sitting together by the window, reading their fairy stories. He strode across the room and had caught his beloved by both hands and kissed her before he could come to his senses and realize what an improper thing he was doing. Fortunately his nieces were so preoccupied by their story that they barely noticed the interruption, except to scold him for it.

‘Do sit down, Uncle Felix,’ Maria said. ‘It’s “The Fisherman’s Wife”.’

He was still bemused by being with his darling again and quite unable to think straight. ‘What?’

‘Just sit down,’ Arabella told him, sternly. ‘You are standing in the light.’

So he took one of their chairs from the table and placed it where he had a perfect view of his lovely girl and when the story was done he persuaded them all out for a walk in the park where he managed to snatch several kisses and planned to meet his darling again after dinner. He was so happy he felt quite dizzy.

Later that evening as the day cooled and a quiet dusk descended, they walked in the grounds and he told her about the balls, ‘which were uncommon dull’, and the scores of young women who had been pushed his way, ‘and not a pretty one among ’em’ and how he had met Sir Godfrey Featherstone at the Inns of Court and been taken on as his junior and would start work in October.

‘In London?’

‘I fear so.’

The knowledge pinched her heart. ‘You will still be able to come here?’ she hoped.

‘Not very often, I fear.’

Her heart flinched again but she answered him sensibly. ‘Then we must make the most of the time we have,’ she said.

They made the most of it until it was completely dark and they only had the light of a fitful moon to guide them back to the house. And from then on they took every opportunity that offered, even if it was in more company than they would have liked, riding with the children every morning, pretending to teach them archery, dining together
en famille
whenever Sir Percival was away and walking in the wonderfully enclosing darkness of every evening, talking of the time when they would be married and living in a house of their own, ‘which will be soon, I promise you, my darling’. It was a short, sweet, tantalizing time and over far too soon.

‘I will write to you every day,’ he promised on their last evening together.

And did. Although, as she told her mother sadly the next time she visited Shelton House, ‘Tis not the same as having him beside me.’

‘You will see him at Christmas,’ Jane comforted.

But to her miserable disappointment, Christmas was denied them because his father wrote to say that his presence was required ‘at home’ over the holiday.

‘
It is most unfortunate
,’ he wrote to Milly, ‘
because I had hoped that I would be able to find the right moment to ask Mr Cartwright if he would be agreeable to our courtship, but it cannot be helped. I must keep the pater sweet or he will forbid our marriage, which, I promise you, is coming nearer day by day. It will not be long before I have earned sufficient to rent a house out in the country, in Mortlake perhaps or Clapham or Eltham. There are some pretty villages south of the Thames, and then we will marry, Mr Cartwright being willing, which I am sure he will be – will he not – and be together for the rest of our lives. I miss you more than I can say and am yours most unhappily until I see you again,

‘Felix.’

George Hudson spent his Christmas in the happiest frame of mind,
planning
his next extravagant party. Princess Victoria’s birthday party had been a tremendous success but he wasn’t a man to rest on his laurels – never had been – and one success simply spurred him on to want another even greater. As soon as he knew that Queen Victoria’s coronation would be on 28 June he began to make plans and preparations. He had six months in which to organize his great event and six months would only just be enough for the
sort of magnificence he had in mind. He started work on it as soon as the new year began.

This time Jane Cartwright paid very little attention to what he was doing, although she went to his party, having been invited, and ate his food and drank his champagne. But her mind was elsewhere, fretting over Milly’s rather too obvious unhappiness and her own inability to do anything about it. Felix was in London, enduring his second ‘wife-hunting’ Season, and that would have been reason enough for the poor girl to be cast down but this time being kept apart from him seemed to be even more of a trial to her. On her last visit to Shelton House, she hadn’t been herself at all. She’d drooped and stayed silent at table and even gone out walking on her own in a shower of rain.

‘’Tis so unlike her,’ Jane said to Nathaniel after her poor sad daughter had climbed into the dog cart to be driven back to Long Hall.

‘She‘s bound to be missing him,’ Nathaniel said reasonably.

‘Aye, she is,’ Jane said. ‘But there’s more to it than that. I’ve never seen her so cast down. Never. I tell ’ee there were times when ’twas almost as if the affair were over. Oh Nathaniel! That couldn’t be the cause of it, could it? He’d not have quarrelled with her, surely. Not my Felix. He were allus such a tender heart. Oh my poor Milly! I shall have to do summat about it.’

‘But not until I get back from Rugby,’ Nathaniel said rather anxiously, ‘and not until you know what is really happening, what I’m certain she’ll tell you in her own good time.’

‘Aye. Happen she will,’ Jane said, but she didn’t sound as if she thought it very likely. ‘This is what comes of long courtships. I never did hold wi’ long courtships.’

‘Aye,’ he laughed at her. ‘So I’ve noticed.’

She smiled at that but her forehead was still puckered with worry.