The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (4 page)

'You do look muddled,' Mrs Greenway said. 'Come now and hev a sit-down and a bit of chat. Did I hear a knock on the door?'

'Sir Charles, come for his boots. I promised he should have them tonight. Father'll just have to finish them off before he has his supper and I'll take them up.'

Mrs Greenway did not comment upon this. There had been a time--nearly four years ago it had ended--when she and her daughter had been on one side, Amos on the other. They'd never gone against him, or defied him...but there it was, they'd been together and he'd been alone. Then there'd been that revivalist meeting at Summerfield with a Mr Whitwell preaching, and all of a sudden Damask had gone over to the other side. Mrs Greenway had been very lonely ever since. Religious fervour, she thought, was very much like some sort of disease; some people caught it, some didn't, no matter how much they were exposed to it. She never had. Loyalty to Amos had carried her to hundreds of meetings, she had sat through innumerable sermons, knelt through innumerable prayers and never experienced any change. She had conformed to pattern, never did any work on Sunday, wore plain clothes, attended chapel as long as she could walk to Nettleton, never said a bad word, but her heart was not in it. She would look round at her neighbours, Matt Juby and Matt Ashpole, and naturally be glad that Amos was not as they Were, drunken ne'er-do-wells; but wasn't there, she wondered, a middle way, the way of her family, where a girl could wear a pretty dress and curl her hair...and a man tend his business and make a good living and be proud of it?

And wouldn't it have been better if Amos had made enough money--as he was well able lo do--to let Damask go and be apprenticed, as she herself had been, to the dressmaking instead of going to work in the kitchen at Muchanger? She had once ventured to say as much to Amos, just at the time when Damask was of an age to begin work, and he had looked at her with astonishment. 'What can it matter?' he asked. 'So long as she leads a good life, what do it matter where?'

'Well, service is a hard life, and Damask ain't very big. And she's dainty-handed, she'd do well at Miss Jackson's.'

'She'd hev more temptations, living in the town, and be more prone to get vain and giddy. I shall get over to Muchanger, time she start, and fix so she hev one Sunday every month so as to attend chapel.'

Now, looking at her daughter's hands, still slender and shapely, but rough and reddened from hard work, Mrs Greenway gave a little secret sigh; and looking at scraped-back hair whose prettiness had once been her pride, she sighed again. Then she rebuked herself, and thought what a good girl Damask was, and compared her with Matt Ashpole's ripstitch of a daughter, Sally. And then she asked herself again that old tiresome question, was there no middle way?

Meanwhile Sir Charles had found ample justification for his ride beside the Waste. It was not the first time by many. Once he had found a stranger, a Nettleton man, slyly taking fuel there, quite illegally; another time he had been just in time to save Shad Jarvey's donkey from drowning in the pond, and a fine mess he'd made of himself, dragging it out of the mud; and on more summer evenings than he could be bothered to count he had come across couples engaged in illicit love-making in the--one would have thought--unpromising and unsuitable shelter of the gorse bushes which edged the Waste. The opportunity of preventing the begetting of bastards was not likely to offer itself this afternoon in October daylight; June evenings were the dangerous times. Still, one never knew; young people were quite unaccountable.

He did find, however, two of Matt Juby's snub-nosed, ill-clad brats amusing themselves by throwing stones at two tethered cows: Bert Sadler's with the broken horn and Jim Gaunts with the defective quarter. He bellowed at them in a voice which could have been, and probably was, heard in Nettleton.

'Stop that, you young devils, and come here to me.' They came cringing, and he gave them, not a talk upon kindness to dumb creatures, which he would not have known how to deliver, but a stern lecture upon the ill-effects upon the milk-yield of cows thus made unduly active; and to impress the lecture on their memories he followed it with two good stinging cuts with his crop upon each ragged behind. That, he reflected, riding on, was the way to keep order; constant vigilance, prompt rebuke. Given a free hand, he knew himself capable of keeping all England in order, and the Continent too, if it came to that. Disgraceful the way the Continent had been going on lately. Not that it had ever been properly run-- and here he had the evidence of his own eyes; for he, in his youth, had made the Grand Tour. And he summed it up in a verse of doggerel which had been his only excursion into the world of creative art. He had written it in a letter to his father, and also in the visitors' book of the inn, just near the St. Gotthard Pass, where he had spent the night and entertained the spirit of poetry for a brief moment. It ran thus: 'In France I ate well, but paid dear for my meat; In Germany there was nothing but calves' flesh to eat; In Italy the inns are bad and the people are beasts; But the Swiss, honest Swiss, charge fair for their feasts.'

It might not be verse of the highest standard, but it summed up tersely and accurately young Charles Shelmadine's reaction to 'foreign parts'; it also emphasised his difference from his father, who had enjoyed every mile of his tour, and often harked back to it with wistfulness.

Nothing else demanded immediate action. He noted with approval that the geese were doing well, and his mind slid forward to Christmas. He reared no geese of his own, but he always bought half a dozen, spreading his custom justly among his tenants. He observed with interest that Shad Jarvey's donkey was still alive and able to forage; the beast must be of incredible age. He marked, with disapproval, the fact that Matt Juby's cow still had husk. Only a fortnight ago he had drawn Matt's attention to the fact and offered him the necessary linseed and hore-hound to make it a draught, and a long-necked bottle with which to administer it; but the loplolly fellow had evidently done nothing. It was typical of Juby to allow his boys to stone other people's cows on one part of the Waste while his own coughed itself to a skeleton on another. If Juby wished to share in the Christmas dole he'd have to mend his ways.

The Waste ended in a thicket of gorse and bramble and bracken, beyond which lay a grass-covered ridge called the Dyke, which ran in a ruler-straight line between the river bank and the ride which ran through Layer Wood. The rector, who was something of an antiquarian, believed it to be part of a Roman road which run direct between Colchester and the sea. He had been talking for twenty years of doing some digging to test his theory, but he had never had time; he never would have. The Dyke's interest for Sir Charles was that it made a firm boundary between the Waste and the cultivated land and also served as a , windbreak, since the fields lay directly to the south of it. Between the end of the Dyke and the opening where the ride which he intended to take ran into Layer Wood he halted and looked out across the two great open fields. They lacked interest at this season. The one nearest the wood, known as Layer Field, had just enjoyed its fallow year and all but a few of its many sections had been ploughed during the last few weeks so that the frost, when it came, could do its part in making the soil friable. The other, slightly larger field, called Old Tom, had been left with the stubble on it after harvest, and the village livestock had been turned into it, to lick up the fallen grains of corn, to nibble the greens tuff which sprang up through the stubble, to knead with their hoofs and manure with their dung the soil which would this year lie fallow. They were gone now; most of them to the butcher, thus fulfilling the year's pattern. Stock beasts, the cows and a bull or two were kept alive through the winter, the rest went into the brine vat. That made the Squire remember Fuller...and turning his darkening glance he looked out over Old Tom. There in the level afternoon light the even furrows lay, acres and acres of them, each man's sections divided from his neighbours' by a narrow unploughed baulk. One side of each furrow shone pale violet in the light, the other was chocolate-coloured. And they wanted to alter all this. People who called themselves 'progressive'--all sorts of people, from members of parliament down to dung-booted fellows like Fuller--they wanted to do away with the big, beautiful open fields, to chop them into little piddling pieces, fenced round and given over to pernicious ruinous experiments--no fallow year, for example. These so-called progressive fellows wanted to grow clover or turnips or some such nonsense instead of resting a field that was wearied from a corn crop. It might make money for them for a year or two, as it had Fred Clopton, but at what a price. The spoliation of the good soil which had been tilled in the sound, tried old way ever since Domesday Book. Sir Charles knew that that was true, for somewhere in the cluttered records in his library he had a copy of the particulars of Clevely as it had existed then; it was on sheepskin, and the writing was illegible, but the map was amazingly accurate and the two great fields, the common pasture by the river, were just as they were today. All those hundreds of years the fields had given a harvest, rested a year, been sown again, and nobody was going to tell him that a system that wasn't good could have lasted so long! Fuller's words came back to his mind, 'You can't hold back the tide.' It Was the threat of change, not the insolence of the remark which rankled. As a rule he ignored the thought of his own mortality as firmly as he ignored anything else which displeased or discomfited him; but he knew, of course, that one day, like everyone else, he must die. What then? How would Clevely fare when he was no longer there? He would have given a great deal to have been able to say, 'My son will uphold the good old traditions.' Instead he had been obliged to face the glaring, appalling fact that unless he was prevented Richard would fall upon Clevely with the ferocity of a tiger upon a lamb...

Nowadays he seldom thought of his son, save at moments like these when he was thinking of Clevely's future. There was nothing to be gained by cherishing sentiment or regret about something that was over and done with, and which could not be helped. God knew he had tried, been patient, indulgent, tolerant to the point of folly, always bearing in mind that Richard was Felicity's son as well as his own.

Staring out over the peaceful fields, he allowed himself to look back over his years as a father and found himself in no way to blame, unless overkindness were blameworthy. He'd loved the boy; they'd had seventeen very happy years together; then Richard had gone wrong. Completely wrong, bad to the very marrow of his bones. One failing, one vice, would have been different, if he'd been merely drunken, merely a wild gambler, merely lecherous, merely spendthrift; but he was all four, and more--there wasn't a vice or a folly or an insane extravagance which Richard hadn't taken to with the avid ease of a suckling taking its mother's milk. When Sir Charles looked back upon what he had borne between Richard's seventeenth and thirtieth year he was amazed at his own forbearing. Debts and scandals, promises made just to be broken, insolence, ingratitude and, worst of all, that frightening feeling that there was actually something lacking in the boy, that there was nothing there to get hold of, to appeal to, to reason with. It was like having to deal with an imp out of Hell.

He'd gone on, for thirteen long years, thinking it couldn't last, Richard must come to his senses; gone on blaming bad company, loose women, changing times; gone on making conditions--'I'll pay this time if you give me your word never to see this Mrs Davison again', 'We'll forget all this, if you'll swear to keep away from Angelina's'; and knowing, knowing all the time that the imp was laughing at him, making its own plans for his defeat and mockery.

There could be, of course, only one end; and it had come just on ten years ago when he had said, 'I've done with you. Go to the Devil your own gait. If you show your face here again the servants have orders to deal with you as they would any other intruder.'

He had never regretted it. Like many another fearfully postponed act, it had hurt less than he had expected. He could now think of Richard as though he were dead. And the handsome, merry, high-spirited boy whom he had loved was dead; some strange evil thing had come and devoured him and taken possession of his body and made use of his name. Sir Charles would not own that thing as his son.

So Clevely had no heir-apparent; Richard would inherit the title and would become lord of the manor, which nowadays meant little beyond some say in the rights of the Waste. The estate was not entailed and Sir Charles had his own ideas for its disposal. Sir Richard, when the time came, could come home to England and build himself a hovel next door to Amos Greenway's and live like Matt Juby for all Sir Charles cared. And if Fuller and others like him were looking forward to enclosure at Clevely as soon as Sir Charles was gathered to his fathers they were in for a surprise. One day--not tomorrow or even next week, naturally--but one day, all in good time, he was going to send for old Turnbull of Baildon and make a good water-tight will; everything he owned, down to his gold watch and chain, was going to be left to the Guildhall Feoffees, that august body of guardians who administered several trusts bequeathed by a man named Nankyn Reed who had died rich and heirless in the year 1540. Nothing in the care of the Feoffees ever changed; even the bequest which provided for thirty red-hot pennies to be thrown among thirty poor boys every Christmas Eve was solemnly and faithfully administered. They would keep Clevely exactly as Sir Charles had kept it, an everlasting memorial to good sense and tradition. The income which he now enjoyed could be used towards reducing rents in bad seasons, for maintaining the property in better order than he had been able to afford to do, and to help individual deserving men who had fallen on evil days through no fault of their own. He had it all worked out; it would be no more than an hour's work for old Turnbull to write it down with the appropriate number of 'aforesaids' and 'whereases'.