Sons of Fortune (20 page)

“You would. And you could. If you thought of anyone but yourself. What a feeble answer to my question!”

Seeing now that she had nothing to lose she decided to speak her mind quite openly: “What question? Are you interested in possible reasons for denying you a peerage?”

He was making for the door to his dressing room, apparently not heeding her.

“What about the law of
scandalum magnatum
then?” she asked.

He paused a moment, shrugged, and went into his dressing room. Before he could shut the door she raised her voice: “I intend you to hear this, John, since you’ve goaded me four times to tell you. It can be for your ears alone or for the whole household to hear. Shut that door and you’ll be making the choice.”

Angry still, but now with a certain wariness, he came back and stood in the doorway. “More blether?” he asked.

“That law says anyone who spreads scandal about a peer can be fined and imprisoned,
even if the scandal proves true.
”

“Very interesting.”

“So they don’t hand out peerages these days to anyone who might force them to dust off such an embarrassment to modern democrats.”

He yawned ostentatiously.

“What I’m saying, John, is that they investigate the origins and background and character and behaviour of all potential peers long before they make any direct approach to the men in question.”

He leaned against the doorjamb.

“You,” she went on, “began our business with the benefit of a forged letter. You forged it yourself…and Dr. Prendergast, who’s now Bishop of Manchester, spotted it. They are almost certainly going to be asking him about you.”

“He wouldn’t dare! We covered all those traces. He tried it once, remember.”

“It may be just the revenge he’s waited for. You’d never prove he spoke. Nothing would ever be written down. You’d simply never hear of your barony again.”

She could see the thought worried him.

“But it needn’t be Prendergast,” she went on. “When Charley Eade tried to set two mob men onto me in Manchester that time, they only needed one look at you and they turned into walking apologies for dancing masters—two of the hardest criminals in Manchester!”

He was now looking at her very uncertainly.

“Where did you get five thousand pounds from, John? The five thousand you had when we started this business? I’ve never asked, but I’m surely not the only one who’s wondered. And if there’s any serious notion of giving you a peerage, I’ll wager there’s half a dozen men in Whitehall have already begun to wonder, too—or are about to start.”

“Have you finished?” he asked, biting his lip.

“So if you don’t get the call to St. James’s, love, the reason may just be something other than that your wife has the odd portrait painter to dinner or takes luncheon with her banker once a month. Why play a low card if they hold the ace of trumps, eh?”

He did not even say good night but slammed the door hard enough to rattle the windows. She sighed and lay down. It saddened her deeply to have to do what she had just done. It almost made her cry. But life would become intolerable if the idea were allowed to take root that her behaviour had cost John his peerage.

Besides, if getting a barony really entailed giving up all the pleasant things in life and putting on that dreadful straitjacket of Society, she’d stay plain Mrs. “Mistress” it meant, mistress of your own life. She’d go on having painters and doctors and professors at her table, even if Society frowned at the depravity of it. Such people could often be perfectly respectable—and were a sight more interesting than most of the nincompoops who were
in.

Stevenson’s new London office was in a modest pair of terrace houses in Nottingham Place, just off the New Road from Paddington to the City— a mere hundred yards from Regent’s Park. It had not been intended as their headquarters. They had acquired the buildings, and several others on that side of London, in settlement of a debt. In the normal way they would have put the properties up for sale at once, but last year they had been forced to modify their old premises in Dowgate rather extensively and had moved all except their financial office, which had to stay in the City of course, out to these houses in Nottingham Place. To prevent total divorce between these parts of the firm, the senior people in every department, and anybody with some especial contribution to make on that particular occasion, assembled at banqueting rooms in Holborn every Saturday for a teetotal buffet luncheon.

John’s first day back in the saddle had been on such a Saturday. It had seemed sensible to return at the end of the week, with the sabbath break immediately following; and also the luncheon would give him the best chance to meet and talk with all his senior people. The teetotal rule had been broken to allow everyone a glass of champagne cup to toast his recovery and the latest news about the operation of the Crimea railway, which was excellent.

It had been a heartening return to work, yet the very elements that made it so heartening had, for him, a certain amount of chagrin. In short, he had hardly been missed.

At the most abstract level that was a high compliment. In his navvying days and during his rise he had seen many contemporaries who insisted on being one-man bands, who would even sack a man for doing this or that aspect of the work better than they themselves could. Five of his own senior men owed their careers (and often a considerable fortune—for half a dozen Stevenson deputies had country estates above a hundred acres) to such dismissals by others. Inevitably the one-man bands fell into the pit of financial disaster. Not, John maintained, because of any great error on the part of the man himself but because he could assemble around him nothing but yes-sirs and no-riskers, people who were by their very natures made incompetent when competence mattered most.

So, to return after more than two months’ absence and find the company as vigorous and healthy as if he had been there every day was a striking indorsement of his skill at picking men. But what would members of Parliament feel like when society was perfected and the last useful law was on the statute book? What would doctors do when the practice of their art had banished disease forever? Or painters when every character, gesture, twig, petal, and dewdrop had been depicted to photographic perfection, somewhere, by someone? What would
everyone
do when there were no more working goals? What was paradise like?

If his mood as he walked alone through Regent’s Park that afternoon, after the luncheon, was any gauge, paradise was a very purgatory. He would now have to take seriously his own threats of many years’ standing to enter public life, locally or nationally. And if he were honoured with this peerage, that transition would be even more expected of him.

These thoughts led him at once to Nora. He realized—had long ago realized—that his main reason for not playing a larger public role had nothing to do with the demands of his business but rather with the unconventional behaviour of his wife. No man could take any large part in the affairs of the nation—or even of the parish—if his wife refused to play a corresponding part in Society. Why could she not see that? Why could he not bring her to understand it? Nowadays whenever he came near the topic, she would sense it a mile away and put up her hackles like a hedgehog. It was something they simply could not discuss sensibly.

And she could so easily do it, too. All her friendships in the hunting field—if she played on those a bit, she could, in a season or two, find herself at the very heart of London Society. And no one could keep Nora down for long. Very soon she’d be one of the leaders; if she put her mind and heart in it, she could do anything. And then she could indulge these strange tastes of hers for the company of painters and writers and people she called “interesting”; she could even make it a sort of fashion, as long as she kept it within sensible bounds. Why, when he could argue it all to himself in such a reasonable way, could he never explain it to her? Something about her always made him angry first and led him to say wounding things. And then, naturally, she would retaliate.

Like last night. Except that she had now gone much farther than ever before; she had strayed right into the truth! He had to be honest about that. But she’d done it only because she knew the truth would hurt so much; there was a great deal in the past, in his past, that would not stand examination now. But any man who could honestly say otherwise about himself was rare and fortunate.

And Nora had touched on only the half of it. For she did not know that once, long ago, when he was a lad of twenty, he had married (or what passed for married in his circle) a girl named Alice. And for one happy year—the happiest of his life, he now thought—he and she had lived in a little timber cottage at the end of a lane in Irlam’s-o-th’Ights, just west of Manchester.

Then, one dreadful day, he had been forced to run for it. Even to have delayed while he explained things to her could have cost him his life; as far as she knew, then, he had simply ditched her. Very common. It happened all the time.

But he had not ditched her. He had come back as soon as the immediate hue and cry was over, though he still was not exactly safe—at least, not safe enough to be making the sort of open and widespread inquiry he longed to be making for her. So, in the end, it was she who had vanished without trace—she and the baby she had been carrying. Where? To the workhouse? Not to another man—he could not believe that of her. To the grave? The house stood rotting, untenanted, bereft of clues.

Despite all the happiness he had once known with Nora, he had never ceased to mourn the loss of his Alice. Nora was a marvellous person; objectively he could see that. But Alice! She had been an angel, a unique girl, the only girl he would ever truly love. If he knew she was alive, he would give up everything—family, money, business, friends…everything—simply to be with her. Or so he now told himself.

Her absence, however, left many unanswered questions. What of his marriage to her? True, it was only “over the anvil” as navvies said, but did that make Alice his wife in common law? And did the possession of a common-law wife make bigamy of his regular church marriage to Nora? Anyway, was Alice still alive? And what of the child? He realized that these were questions he had not been eager to pursue these last sixteen years; but they became very pertinent now, with the peerage in the offing. And Nora had, unwittingly, put her finger right on the wart when she had taunted him in that way last night.

He had even been unwilling to face the possibility of official inquiries. Now she had forced him to consider that, too.
Damn her!

Memories of Alice—beautiful, gentle, sweet girl—now contrasted very harshly with these much more urgent memories of Nora. Awkward, obstinate, clever, full of self, empty of duty, unfeminine…unfeminine? No, you couldn’t say that; but too determined to express herself, too angular in character to be properly womanly. He should have tried to find Alice again instead of taking up with Nora.

***

Charity Bedfordshire (as the workhouse master had named her) could not have chosen a more apposite moment to come back into John’s life. He had first met her one evening the summer of 1850, down on the quays in Bristol, plying the only trade she knew. She was then, at seventeen, such a living image of the Alice he had known eighteen and more years earlier that for a while he had been convinced she was the child Alice had been carrying. His child! Even that possibility had made it unthinkable to leave her there on the streets; he had waited for Walter to finish his horizontal refreshments (which was why John had been on the quays at all) and together they had taken Charity back to Arabella as her first Fallen Woman. Arabella had procured a hysterical conversion of which Wesley himself would have been proud, and ever since then Charity had been Arabella’s prize exhibit, chief adviser, and—as Arabella always said—“ever present help in time of affliction.”

And now here she was, distraught almost to tears, riding around the southern end of Regent’s Park in a cab whose fare she could not pay, looking for a street she half remembered from a visit with Arabella Thornton almost a year ago. Mrs. Thornton had gone into the Stevenson office while she had remained in the cab outside. All she could remember was that it was near Regent’s Park and was named after some place in England.

So the cab driver had taken her to Nottingham Terrace, York Place, York Mews, Cornwall Terrace, Ulster Terrace…and now here they were in Brunswick Terrace with the driver swearing Brunswick was somewhere in England and Charity wondering how to explain she couldn’t pay him until she found the right street and Mr. Stevenson. What she would do if Mr. Stevenson wasn’t in his office she had no idea; the things she had to say were for no other ears but his. And then, suddenly, the whole pall lifted and there was Mr. Stevenson walking along York Terrace, not two dozen yards away.

“Sir! Oh, sir!” she called out. “Driver, that’s the man I’m looking for.”

“Oh, yus?” He glanced warily down through the trap she had opened. “I thought you was a decent gel,” he said. “You’re rigged out decent enough. I don’t touch this class o’ trade, young ’un.”

“How dare you!” She tried to say the words as Mrs. Cornelius would say them, but she knew she merely sounded like a servant aping her mistress. Nevertheless, desperation must have lent her outrage some urgency, for, although Mr. Stevenson had not responded to her cry, the driver flicked his whip and in next to no time they were alongside John.

She opened the door. “Mr. S.!” she called. And when he hesitated, thinking no doubt that this was some kind of ambush, she added, “’Tis Miss Charity, from Bristol.”

Still cautious he came toward the open door.

“I told ’er—I don’t touch this class o’ trade, sir,” the cabby said in preparatory apology.

John recognized Charity and saw that she was the cab’s sole occupant as the man spoke. “Hold your filthy tongue,” he said, getting in at once. “Drive on!”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. Round the park.”

The man made no move. “I told yer—I don’t touch that trade.”

John, at the limit of his patience, leaped out and grabbed the fellow by the arm. It was a grip that had once broken a man’s hand. “You’ll drive off the end of Vauxhall ferry stage if I tell you,” he said quietly.

The man gave one yelp of pain and agreed he would at least take them around the park.

Back inside the cab John saw the mingled relief, gratitude, and admiration in Charity’s face. “Was he giving you trouble?” he asked.

“Just starting,” she said.

He settled back in the cushions, facing her. She wore a sober green dress and plain collar, like a Quaker girl. Her hair was pulled severely back into a plain, tight bun. She looked the very image of piety. And pious women had always exerted the strongest fascination on him. Add to that her resemblance to Alice—less marked now that she was five years older, but still strong—and she began to have the most disturbing effect on him. He had to look away.

“Why are you here?” he asked, trying to lose his gaze in the network of bare branches of the trees outside. “Where is Mrs. Thornton—or Mrs. Cornelius?”

It was grotesque, but Sarah Cornelius, as soon as she had thrown over Walter Thornton and ceased to be his mistress, had become the closest of friends with Arabella Thornton, had provided most of the money for the Home for Fallen Women and had done most of the hard day-to-day work there while Arabella was away campaigning. Charity was, nominally at least, Sarah’s lady’s maid.

As soon as he asked the question she became flustered, half beginning a dozen sentences but making no sense. “I dunno who to talk to,” she said at last.

“Me?” he suggested. “Did you come up here to see me?”

And then she told him how she’d come up from Bristol that day and all the trouble she’d had finding his offices and how she’d been at her wit’s end when she had seen him walking by.

“It was Nottingham Place,” he said. “The other side of the New Road!”

Their laughter, and this recapitulation of her relief, made it easier then for her to begin her tale.

“Mrs. Cornelius now, was there ever anything between her and Mr. Thornton, sir?” she asked.

“You mustn’t concern yourself with things like that.”

She looked gloomily out of the window. “My God, and I wish I never had to! I wish I never seen. Nor heard.”

In the silence John thought of a dozen ways he might explain away a seeming infidelity of Walter’s—a stolen kiss or something like that. But he knew it would be impossible to deceive Charity; she was no young innocent.

“Oh dear!” was all he said.

“
Was
there anything?” she repeated. “’Tis important to you, too, sir.”

“I don’t know for certain,” he said truthfully. “I…suspected it.”

“When she was staying at your place? Not after she came down to Bristol?”

“If there ever was anything, I’m sure it stopped before that.”

“’Cos he come this morning, after he went to work like, he come back, not to his own house but up to us, up the Refuge. Now he never
do
come there, never. So I thought well, that’s a strange one, right off.”

“Were…ah…the women there?”

She grinned. God, but she had a lovely little grin! Fit to knock the feet from under you. “That’s why he stays away—too many old friends of his up with us being rescued!”

John frowned. “You shouldn’t talk like that, Charity. He’s your master.”

“And she’s his mistress, Mrs. Cornelius,” she said, unrepentant. “Come on, sir. ’Tisn’t no secret, how
he
is.”

“Except from Mrs. Thornton.”

Her face went hard. “He isn’t worth to touch her,” she said vehemently.