Sweet and Twenty (6 page)

“Maybe you should give him a hand with his speech-writing till he gets on to it,”
she said, feeling this idea might not sit well with Mr. Hudson.

“I wrote him a good speech. That is, we worked it out together, you know. But Alistair threw himself open to questions from the floor and Fellows followed his lead. It was during the unrehearsed question period that he went all to pieces. Reising put Alistair up to it, I fancy. He sized Tony up pretty well yesterday. Last night was a total disaster for us, but we hadn’t much hope for the farm vote in any case. I hope our jaunt to the village yesterday did some good with the merchants.”

Lillian hadn’t the heart to tell him what Sara had been up to. “I’m sure it did. All the things you bought and gave to the poor must have given the tradesmen a good opinion of your candidate.”

“That’s pretty well standard procedure. Reising would have done the same. One can’t afford
not
to do it.”

He then turned to hear what Fellows was saying to the older ladies. “. . . and if they don’t watch out we’ll have a whole nation of beggars,”
he finished up, still discussing his speech. “Isn’t that right, Matthew?”

“The grain-growers certainly won’t be beggars, as Alistair pointed out. I think it is the matter of all taxes ultimately coming out of the pockets of those who make more than a living wage you should stress. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul, the way they go about it.”

“Ho, the Tories would rob anyone,”
Tony replied. “And Peter Peckham is the worst of the lot. But as to paying Paul, he’ll keep the whole lot for himself.”

“Who is Peter Peckham?”
Hudson inquired, dazed.

“Why, robbing Peter as you just said. He would rob from his own mother if he were given half a chance.”

“No, no, that was not my meaning.”

“Oh, well, I know you don’t want any
ad hominem’s,
but as you mentioned Peter Peckham yourself, and we are among friends, there is no harm in saying the fellow is a scoundrel. I wouldn’t trust him with a brass farthing. He is a sly one. But then it takes one to know one, as they say.”

“Oh ho, so you are a sly one too, eh, Mr. Fellows?”
Martha joked him. He looked grossly offended at this effort to read meaning into his words.

A confused discussion followed, during which Mr. Hudson tried once again to inculcate into Mr. Fellows’s mind his reasons for being against the Corn Laws, and at the termination of his labor Sara said, “I think you are all wrong.”

She had an attentive audience, for she rarely spoke out in such a firm voice and never on a serious matter. “The Tories only want to stop other countries from dumping their grain on us.”
She had been much struck with the phrase in the pamphlet, wondering where those countries would dump it, and thinking how odd it would look—great stacks of grain sitting about the countryside.

“Bless me, where did you learn such a thing, love?”
her mother asked, very proud of her. “Your papa was used to say that very thing. Only think, she remembers that from her father, and Gerald in his grave over a year.”

This was Mr. Hudson’s first indication that the Tory element in the house was still active, and he looked a question at Martha.

“Gerald always talked a deal of nonsense. Have no fear, gentlemen. We are on your side.”

“That is an old Tory idea—that countries are dumping their excess grain on us—but when our own harvest was poor, as it was last year and this, it should not be called dumping, but honest trading; God knows we export enough products to other countries.”
He addressed these remarks to Tony, but his candidate was looking elsewhere, for he was once again struck by Sara’s beauty.

“It’s unusual to find brains and beauty in a lady,”
he congratulated her.

“Oh, I am not at all clever, Mr. Fellows,”
she objected.

“What you just said about dumping—that was clever.”

“No, Tony, that was
not
clever, as I have just been explaining,”
Hudson told him. “It is very shortsighted.”

“I meant clever for a lady,”
Tony said, with a condescending look at the four women. “But a woman’s place is in the home, what? Shall we be off to spend more of the old
sine qua non’s?”
he asked. Hudson rubbed his brow in a weary fashion and said that they had better spend a great deal, and they were off.

Miss Monteith had come to New Moon to get Sara married, and as the groom was to be in the village spending his patrimony, she shepherded her charges in that direction after lunch. Lady Monteith stayed home, as it was not her custom to budge an inch unless it should be necessary.

The groom was not seen, since Hudson had taken him to visit Basingstoke and the families who lived to the West, but Martha discovered two items of interest, one of which inflamed her to wrath. There was to be a large political rally three evenings hence, and its significance to her was that Mr. Fellows would not be able to dine with them on that evening. The other news was that Mr. Alistair was a criminal even if he hadn’t a record, and so she would warn Mr. Fellows accordingly. His crime was that he was corrupting the merchants of Crockett.

She overheard Mr. McGillicutty, the cobbler, say with a laugh that he had never got twenty-five pounds for a pair of boots before, and she stood examining a pair of leather laces till this interesting piece of information should be explained to her satisfaction. She imagined him to be fashioning some marvelous footgear for the royal family, but no. It was soon revealed that Mr. Alistair was paying the cobbler twenty-five pounds for a plain pair of boots without even a white band to the top of them, and if
that
was not corruption she was a wet goose! Her fiery eyes let it be known to her nieces how far from a wet goose she considered herself to be.

“But Mr. Fellows paid a crown for a bushel of turnips, Aunt Martha, and no one ever paid more than a half-crown before,”
Sara pointed out.

“Charity—that is a different matter. Certainly he was taken in on the price of turnips—I mentioned it myself—but it was an error, not bribery. Twenty-five pounds for a pair of topboots is a very different matter. Mr. Fellows will hear of this, and Mr. Alistair will stand revealed for the low, criminal conniver he is. I didn’t like the looks of him from the beginning. He
grins.
Never trust a man that grins, girls. Let it be a lesson to both of you.”

“I like the way he grins,”
Sara said softly.

“He’ll grin on the other side of his face when Mr. Fellows gets after him,”
Martha replied.

Miss Watters rather thought it would be Mr. Hudson who would get after him; she had no doubt that the gentleman of high morals would put a speedy end to bribery and corruption in the village.

Martha went home immediately and sent a footboy off to St. Christopher’s Abbey requesting Mr. Fellows’s immediate—underlined twice—attendance on her regarding a most important matter. It suited her well to have such a good excuse to lure him back to New Moon, where she had every intention that he should remain for dinner and the evening.

Nor did she have the least objection if Mr. Hudson should accompany him, for he had been seen to drive about the countryside in a very dignified black carriage drawn by a matched team of bays. She had observed as well that he had more than one well-cut coat to his back, and a fine gold watch. (There appeared to be sort of a crest on the watch, but her hopes had not soared to the height of thinking he had any right to the crest. There was still enough lowness in him that he might have won it in a card game.)

“You, Lillian, can help me keep Mr. Hudson occupied so that Sara may have a minute alone with Mr. Fellows. A little privacy in a far corner is all I mean, of course, for certainly we shan’t leave the room. Even the best of men, as Mr. Fellows certainly is, is not to be entirely trusted.”

“I look forward to speaking to Mr. Hudson again. He is the more sensible of the two, I feel.”

“He’s sharp as a tack, I have no doubt, but don’t get to dangling after him, my dear, for we really don’t know a thing about him. He cannot be a man of much means or he wouldn’t be doing this low sort of clerical work for Mr. Fellows, but would have a place of his own to look after. I wonder if the party supplies him with a team for his work.”
This possibility, just occurred to her, sent Mr. Hudson down a notch. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and Mr. Thorstein is interested in you.”

“You are learning a trick from Mr. Fellows, I see, throwing platitudes at me, but you must not give them quite so much point.”
Lillian made no mention of Mr. Thorstein’s having twice offered for her and twice being rejected, but accepted quite happily her evening’s job.

Martha’s plan of getting the gentlemen to dinner did not work, however. They did not arrive till eight, and Mr. Hudson mentioned being very busy, giving a glance at his interesting crested watch as though he considered even this late visit an inconvenience.

Martha, who soon usurped the hostess’s role in whatever home she visited, saw the gentlemen seated with a glass of wine in their hands before she exploded her bomb regarding the bribery Mr. Alistair had brought to Crockett.

“By Jove!”
Mr. Fellows said, and glanced to Hudson for a clue as to how he should feel about this outrage.

“Up to that old trick, are they,”
Hudson commented, neither outraged nor even surprised, to judge from his sardonic smile. “It isn’t the first time, believe me.”

“I’m sure Mr. Alistair never corrupted anyone before,”
Sara told him with a very earnest face.

“Alistair? No, no, this is Reising’s doing. Twenty-five pounds, did you say, ma’am?”

“Exactly, and they weren’t worth a guinea or anything near it. Shoddy work.”

“Mr. Alistair never wears shoddy boots!”
Sara exclaimed.

“He has a shoddy way of buying them,”
her aunt said sharply. “What do you mean to do about it, Mr. Fellows?”

“I never buy my boots from McGillicutty. I buy in London,”
he informed her, with a smug smile at his cunning. “If Alistair wants to throw away his
sine qua non
’s on shoddy boots, well,
caveat emptor,
eh, Matt? If the shoe fits, wear it.”

Sara frowned in confusion at such hard talk, and felt strongly inclined to defend Mr. Alistair further.

“What do you mean to do about your opponent sinking to bribery, I mean?”
Martha asked, not yet quite angry but becoming definitely impatient.

“I wouldn’t do a thing,”
Hudson said. Fellows immediately nodded his head in approval, but Miss Monteith and Lillian were amazed.

“You don’t mean to let him get away with it!”
Lillian said. “You wanted an honest campaign, Mr. Hudson. Oh, I see what it is. You will not lower yourself to reveal publicly what he has done, but in private surely you will have a word with him—warn him you will not tolerate such finagling as this.”

He observed her closely as she spoke with some unreadable expression on his face—a little surprise perhaps, a little smile, and possibly a bit of cunning. “I assure you, Miss Watters, I don’t mean to let him get away with it. Have I not already had occasion to tell you I have my wits about me?”

Mr. Fellows was telling the other ladies in his resonant, speech-making voice that he never bought a stitch of his clothing or a stick of his furniture or anything else in this pokey little town, for there wasn’t a decent craftsman in the whole area, and they all charged as much as you’d pay for decent goods in London.

Hudson heard him out, then decided that he must be set straight at once. “It will be your responsibility, after you are elected, Tony, to praise your village as the finest corner in England, inhabited by the cleverest craftsmen, with the best produce and weather and all the rest of it. Begin by buying locally—that is the least the merchants can expect of you, the man they mean to send to London. How are they going to know of Crockett and its problems in the city if their M.P. is not praising the town wherever he goes.”

“They’d laugh me to scorn if I went off to London wearing Jed McGillicutty’s coarse old boots, or Frank Saunders’s misshapen hats. How am I to be entertaining ministers and lords in my home if I haven’t a decent stick of furniture or good food on my table?”

“Publicly and locally, however, you must seem to be enchanted with your town or it will not be enchanted with you, and vote for you, and send you off to London as the Honorable Anthony Fellows, M.P., to represent it in Parliament.”

The magic Honorable and M.P. did the trick. “Just buy their old junk and wear it around the village, you mean?”
Mr. Fellows asked, wondering whether he could sink himself so low, for in spite of his talk of London, he rarely went near it; it was the locals’
opinion of him that he considered important. Of greatest importance was that he be thought a cut above them all—a gent who had a London tailor. What a dilemma!

“I mean buy the excellent wares of Messrs. McGillicutty and Saunders and others, and be seen to wear them.”

“Heh heh—look a dashed quiz,”
Tony said to Sara.

“Mr. Alistair bought McGillicutty’s boots and he would never wear shoddy boots,”
Sara assured him, but was not curious enough or interested enough to once cast her eyes down to see what sort of boots Mr. Fellows had on.

All this was fine, but Martha was soon back demanding to know precisely what was to be done about the corruption. As she put her question to Fellows, Miss Watters listened with interest.

“Matthew will think of something,”
Tony assured them, causing them to look to Mr. Hudson for information.

“I have thought of something,”
Hudson told them, “and it’s time we got busy and did it. We also have to go over the items that are likely to arise at the public meeting. Shall we go, Tony?”

Tony rose obligingly to make his adieux.

“Twenty-five pounds, you said, Miss Monteith?”
Hudson queried Martha as they left.

“Twenty-five pounds. I was shocked,”
she told him.

“I am a little surprised at the sum myself,”
he said with a smile.

“I do believe Alistair is beginning to see the light,”
Tony put in. Only Sara followed his rambling reasoning.