The Rich Are with You Always (6 page)

  He found no fault in the line, nor did he expect to. Ferris had worked for him long enough to know the Stevenson standard and how John set it and kept it. He wouldn't sack a deputy whose work was below expectation; he wouldn't even demote him. Somehow he would bring the man to feel that he had let down not just John Stevenson, not just the navvies and the tradesmen who looked to him for an example, but, worst of all, himself. And thereafter, he had to redeem himself in his own estimation. In that way, John made each man feel that the Stevenson standard was the property of every Stevenson man, not something imposed from on high. A sigh and a reproachful shake of the head from John was more feared than the most ferocious reprimand of lesser contractors or even their blows and curses.

  Wherever he saw men he would stop for a talk, renewing fellowship or asking their names, discussing where they had been and what sort of work it was. Each scrap of information was like a mosaic in an ever-changing picture of works now in progress or recently completed in England and Europe—and in America too. There were several navvies who regularly went across the Atlantic each summer for the higher wages where their kind of labour was short. He wished the world of business and finance was as easy to investigate and to picture.

  Then he and Ferris had a midday dinner at the Cross Keys. He told Ferris of all the other Stevenson contracts then in progress and described some of their problems, asking if Ferris had had similar experiences and canvassing his advice. John liked all his senior staff to have as full a picture as possible of all the firm's workings. Every contract had its peck of trouble; to share troubles helped each deputy see his own in perspective. John also used the opportunity to encourage or discourage an agent, as might be appropriate. To a timid man who tended to send for him at the first sign of each setback, he would tell of another deputy who overcame far severer problems on his own, ending with some such remark as, "I give Wilf Tenby top marks for that. I was in France at the time, explaining to a lot of nervous Froggies as how I'd built this business in such a way as I didn't have to be dashing everywhere all the time. It wouldn't have done to be called off to Sunderland in the middle of that!" But for a rash deputy, too apt to forge ahead with a half-thoughtout solution to a problem, the story would be different; some other deputy would get his top marks for having the sense to call in the mister: "Takes a big man, a very experienced man, to recognize the value of a second opinion and not think twice to call it!" Thus, with a nudge, a pat, a hint, and a wink, he kept his firm well shaped and orderly.

  Dinner over, he abandoned his intention to go to York and rode due south for home, relishing the thought of a rare early day with Nora and the children. These last few hours among iron and oak, stone and clay had refreshed him wonderfully.

Winifred saw him first. While she and Young John were straddling the stile, playing at horses, and waiting for Cox, who was carrying baby Caspar, to catch up, she looked across the field and saw her father moving among the bare trees on the skyline. Tip and Puck, aware of him at that same moment, scampered up the lane, barking all the way.

  "Papaaaa!" she called and waved, startling a flock of crows that had settled in the bare fallow. He waved back and broke into a trot.

  Young John, facing his sister, craned back to see and almost fell; he hitched his skirts higher to get a better grip with his knees but, by the time he turned, his father had passed from sight at the head of the lane.

  Cox tugged a cloth from her sleeve and wiped long strings of snot from Caspar's face. "Good afternoon, sir." She curtseyed when John drew near.

  "That's a raw, red face," he said with a frown.

  "Aye, it is," Cox agreed. "The wee mite has taken a chill. This cold air might just draw it from him."

  John nodded, unconvinced, but it was not his business to interfere. He looked at the girl's big-boned face, plain, pleasant, and unrelenting, polished smooth by the sharp afternoon wind. No tear would soften those steady hazel eyes, no winning smile catch her unawares. Her implacable calm often made him shudder.

  "Papa!" Winifred called again and stood on the topmost timber of the stile to reach for him.

  No word came from Cox. No tender "Winifred!" or peremptory "Sit down, miss!" John knew well enough what she was thinking:
If the child falls and hurts
itself, it will learn.
It!

  He spurred forward over the half-dozen yards to the stile and swept Winifred onto the pommel of his saddle. Her lips were cold on his neck, her nose like ice below his ear; but her breath and the hug she gave him were warmth itself.

  Young John, solemnly ignoring him, making him be the first to speak, spurred the stile to a final charge homeward. Even when John pulled Hermes back, so that the boy could reach up and be lifted behind him, only a stubborn and distant smile showed his recognition.

  John winked at Winifred. "D'ye know," he said, "I was set to swear that was our Young John. It must be"—his voice sank to a horrified whisper—"a changeling! Let's hie us hence and right fast!"

  The boy could hold out no longer. With a protesting bleat he stood, on the next-to-top rail, feet well locked, and reached up to be hauled aboard. He sat on the cantle, behind his father, hugging as much of him as he could in his tiny embrace.

  "King of the castle?" Winifred suggested.

  Young John began to jog excitedly. "Kingacastle, Kingacastle!" he said again and again.

  John looked westward, where the sun was just dipping down to set. Why not? There'd be a good half hour yet. "Yes," he said. "King o' the castle. Why not!"

  Sauntering, Willet just made it to the gate in time to let them through. He helped the children down and then, when John dismounted, took Hermes off to the stable. John opened and shut the gate for Cox and baby Caspar, who stared listlessly around through swollen eyelids and would not be coaxed to either laugh or whimper.

  "Best get him to bed," John said.

  Cox nodded calm agreement. "Aye," she said.

  The dogs looked wistfully after John and the children but, sniffing at the frost, followed Cox indoors, quarrelling over a hearthrug that was still two hundred yards away.

The garden had once been fortified, and a straggling wall, part stone, part brick, still encompassed it on most of three sides. Downhill, to the east of the house and at a sharp angle of the wall, stood the remains of a medieval tower. A stone stair without a balustrade ran steeply up one side to a sharp turn, where it continued up a short tunnel into a small chamber, now roofless; at most, it could have held a watch of three in comfort. On its far side, a much narrower stair spiralled up three-quarters of a turn to a ruined turret, made slightly less hazardous by a low railing of deeply corroded iron. This was their castle, and the turret the seat of their king.

  It was really a game for high summer days when little breezes could be found at that height long after they had died between the baking ramparts down below. Today, in raw February, with a cloudless sky darkening above and frosty evening mists rising silently in the vale below, even the mildest breeze seemed to push icicles through the thickest cloak and down inside the tightest collar.

  "We mustn't stop long," John said. "What do my courtiers see?"

  "I see beggars three," Winifred said even before he had finished the question.

  He looked for three objects. The three pine trees? Could be, but if he guessed wrong he would cease to be king. He looked farther afield. Then nearer at hand. He had to ask soon or he'd be dethroned for silence. Three crows. It could be them. Chance it. "Is their raiment black?"

  She wrinkled her face in good-natured disappointment. "Their raiment is black."

  "What do we do with beggars three?" he asked, knowing the answer.

  "Beat them black and beat them blue! Beat them till they're only two!" she shouted and laughed.

  "Beat them. Beat. Bam! Pchhhh!" Young John said with a sudden, astonishing savagery.

  Beggars were always beaten. "Why?" John asked, still kingly and judicial.

  "Because they steal the farmer's corn. I see angels four," she gabbled.

  But Young John did not wait for her to finish; he stole in ahead with, "I see football."

  He always saw a football and it was always the sun.

  "Does it burn the players' feet?" John asked.

  Young John punched him and burst into tears. His father squeezed his arm but otherwise ignored him.

  "I see a kingly orb," Winifred said. She spoke so reverently it might have been a line of poetry rather than a new step in their game. For a four-year-old she could be very solemn.

  "Does it outshine mine?" he asked.

  The boy, so easily distracted, stopped crying; leaning into his father, he slipped a cold thumb inside his mouth and listened with rapt attention.

  "It does," Winifred said, the game three-quarters forgotten.

  They were all looking straight at the setting sun, huge and oval, swathed in mist. Above it, far off, a swan or some other large bird flapped wearily southward.

  Mists pinched out the sun before the horizon could mask it. The colour vanished from the sky soon after, leaving the world silver and black, damp and very chill.

  He shivered, stirring them. "Come on," he said. "Before we stumble in the dark."

  The shadows were uniting and the grass already bore the first thin lining of frost as they stole back over the lawns to the house. The smoke curling from its chimneys and the oil light reaching out through its small leaded panes had never seemed so welcoming.

  "Pray for all the poor children sleeping out tonight," John told them as they edged through the rose beds to the garden door.

  Nora met them in the passage. "Eay, I don't know!" she sighed, running her warm hands over the two children, feeling their ears and fingers. "You're a fine one," she said to John, "talking about cold baths. It's a good thing they've a hot tea coming."

  He smiled. "A very good thing," he said, unperturbed.

  Cox was waiting for the children at the foot of the nursery stairs. She turned them as a sheepdog turns sheep—with a Look.

  "If Cox says you're good, I'll tell you a story later," John promised. He and Nora went to the winter parlour.

  The previous week's accounts had come from the London office—summaries of the ledger entries at each contract. Nora had been doing her regular weekly check.

  All the firm's business—that endless battle with rock and mud, mountain and marsh (and good men and rogues)—was eventually rendered down to neat rows and columns of figures and passed across Nora's desk. In the earliest days, she had kept every account and made every entry herself, in a schoolchild's penny copybook. Now they came in a dozen hands: loose-leaf copies of ledger pages from the workings and fat duplicate account books with gold lettering on their leather spines, sent up weekly by William Jackson, the chief clerk in their London office.

  Over the years, Nora had developed "the sharpest eye in the City," as Jackson said. She noted with amusement the way he would often try to anticipate her by pencilling little notes beside certain entries:
I question this…too low?…twice last
week's figure…
and so on. In this way, he placed himself on her side of the table in her relentless weekly inquisition.

  At first Jackson had not liked his situation one bit—to work for a man and yet to take most of the orders from his wife! And in matters of finance too, where women were supposed to be most supremely ignorant. It went hard. But now she had no greater champion. She needed only to indicate the slightest preference for something and Jackson would turn it into an iron rule. For instance, she had once said she thought it might make accounts easier to follow if debits and liabilities were in red ink, and credits and assets were in blue. The younger clerks made jokes about working in Mrs. Stevenson's Drawing Academy…and would she like the accounts on lace-edged paper…and much more in that vein; but from that day onward, Jackson insisted on Nora's red-blue system. And now everyone agreed it made the pages much easier to read at a glance.