Theirs Was The Kingdom (16 page)

The thought returned to him during his survey of the Lowlands under Fraser’s chaperonage but they parted on genial terms, Fraser promising to send Headquarters monthly progress reports on the ex-chimneysweep Jake Higson, his deputy elect. “Make sure it’s marked ‘Private,’’’ warned Adam, “for I’m damned if I’ll have Tybalt telling me my business about men I’ve got my eye on. That’s one aspect of the business I won’t share with anyone.” And then, as they were standing beside the southbound express, “That pension scheme I started eight years ago… I was checking before I left, and I see you qualify for a mere fifteen shillings a week. You’ll remember you were slow to join but you’ll have something put by, I daresay.” He went on, before Fraser could reply, “You don’t have to tell me how much. You’ve more than justified the faith I had in you, so I told Tybalt to upgrade you to the ‘A’ class. You’ll get the full rate. About a guinea a week, I believe.”

The whistle sounded then and both men were grateful, Fraser because he had a Northerner’s horror of expressing gratitude, Swann because he hated to have anyone think of him as a sentimentalist. The long train gave a lurch; he settled back for the journey south to Peterborough and a brief reunion with his old flame, Edith Wickstead.

3

Long ago he had mastered the trick of entering up his day book in fast-moving trains, but he did not spend more than half an hour or so of the southbound journey making notes on the regions he had visited. He felt far too complacent for that, luxuriating in the sense of achievement these journeys promoted in him, and although he did not sleep he looked as if he was dozing, as his mind ranged up and down the network like one of those grapevine rumours Fraser had mentioned. O’Dowd, given time and no civil upheaval, would enlarge his hold on Dublin; Catesby would make a great success of Sam’s mill, so that the old rascal, who had been grinding the faces of operatives all his life, would have to admit that there were other ways of mining money from industry. Jake Higson would respond to authority under a man of Fraser’s experience and perhaps prove another Rookwood, underlining Waggonmaster Keate’s precept that, here and there, human beings could be salvaged from the rubbish heaps industrialisation had spewed about the land and converted into sober, useful citizens.

His thoughts probed Keate for a moment, returning to the night the huge, bumbling evangelist had conducted him on a tour of the Thameside Saturnalia, and first suggested his plan for sweeping some of the urchins from the streets and teaching them a trade. He thought, “By God, between us we must have saved the country a pretty penny over the years! I can think of a score of those lads who would have turned pickpocket and finished their lives in gaol, or maybe on the gallows. The professional Holy Joes, in and out of the pulpits, make a lot of noise about their rescue societies and good works, but Keate’s charity proved the more practical in the long run… Rookwood, a boy I first saw dredging coal from Rotherhithe mud, sits on Salisbury Town Council now and has a pretty wife and five healthy children to work for. Jake Higson, who would have died like young Luke Dobbs before qualifying as a master sweep, could be a man of substance before he’s half Fraser’s age. We’ve had our failures, as Keate prophesied at the time, but our successes outnumber them. And here I am at fifty plus, with any number of trained men to hand, whereas most gaffers in my line of business still rely on casual labour, with its sloppy-mindedness and high percentage of petty thieves. It all comes back to the same thing: personal selection of deputies. It isn’t the goods that matter so much as the men one finds to handle them. Tybalt did a complicated sum once and came up with a remarkable answer. According to him, the average wage I pay—higher than anyone in the trade, or so I’m told—is twenty-nine shillings a week, whereas the average weekly yield of each man in the network is three times that sum judged on annual turnover. Why can’t more men understand that pinchpenny wages and brutish conditions defeat their own objects? Why the devil don’t they face the fact that the first rule of any man who wants to convert a shilling into a sovereign should be to use men as allies instead of helots? Capital versus Labour, that’s the bugbear of business today, but it shouldn’t be, not now that we’ve had a century to work things out, not now that there are so many jealous competitors just across the Channel… If we want to hold on to our lead we should change our tune and call it Capital-
plus
-Labour and get ahead as a team! Damned if I won’t impress that on young George when he takes my place. If he heeds me Swann-on-Wheels, it will roll into the twentieth century lengths ahead of its nearest competitor…!”

The train had passed Darlington and was rushing south to Northallerton before he thought again of his immediate destination: Wickstead’s prosperous sector, based on Peterborough. He glanced out of the window to his right and saw the rolling dale country over towards Middleham, and it reminded him sharply of the woman whom he had once hoped to make his mistress, but whose good sense had prevailed at the last moment, second thoughts for which they should both be grateful in middle age. For here he was, settled in his way of life, and on very amiable terms with a wife he wouldn’t trade for a Sultan’s harem. It might not have been so if, on that summer day nearly twenty years ago, Edith Wadsworth had not had the sense to discern his real motives in seeking her out, so that all that resulted in their encounter under Middleham Castle was a kiss and a clarification by her of his innermost desires that relied on a settled domestic background. It was then, he remembered, she had urged him to buy Tryst, and sack half the parasites who were making a lazy little trollop of Henrietta, and he had gone home and done just that, giving her young George in the process steering their marriage back on course again. He was glad now that Edith had found a consolation prize in that likeable chap Tom Wickstead, who always looked at him in a curious way, as if he was very well aware of the relationship that had existed between wife and employer before he bobbed up from nowhere. There was something a little wary about the chap when you came to think of it. Perhaps it was not Wickstead himself that suggested it so much as the interdependence between man and wife, who had been married thirteen years but could still be mistaken for a couple of starry-eyed lovers. Was it a residue of jealousy that made him notice this, marking the way they stood close together when he called on them last year, and the fact that, during a discussion on heavy haulage rates at the last conference, he had seen them holding hands during his summing-up from the chair? He smiled at the memory of this and realised that, married or not, he always looked forward to seeing her again. Somehow she was associated with the very earliest days of his struggle and also, to some extent, with the splendour of his youth. And at this, skimming through Northallerton, the insistent rhythm of the wheels lulled him to sleep.

He was amazed to see her awaiting him at the Peterborough barrier, for he had expected Wickstead to be there in response to his telegram from Edinburgh and was aware that she had surrendered an active role now that she had a home and young children to occupy her.

He said, taking her hand in both of his, “Where’s Tom? Not sick, I hope?” and she said Tom had never been sick in his life, and was enjoying a day off at home, for they had guests, or rather
a
guest and this was the real reason why she had met him and saved him a fruitless journey. If he would take her advice he would travel straight on to London by the next train.

“There’s another fast in just over the hour,” she said, “but an hour is long enough. I brought you this telegram. It came with the early post. Don’t read it here, let’s go into the buffet and talk over a pot of tea.”

She seemed, he thought, a little agitated, but porters and passengers were pushing past them as they stood together just outside the barrier, so he led the way across to the buffet, finding a table furthest from the door and the hissing clamour of the station. While she was pouring tea he opened Tybalt’s wire; his jaw dropped at the message that had originated, not from the head clerk, as he had assumed, but from Henrietta.
Come home wherever you are stop Alex safe stop Other matters requiring urgent attention stop Love Henrietta.

He said, mystified, “Do you know what’s behind this? Is that why you met me instead of Tom?” She said, “I suppose it is, now that I think about it.” And then, less definitely, “I’m involved—marginally that is—but don’t ask me to go into details. That’s Henrietta’s job and she wouldn’t thank me for interfering.” She smiled at his puzzled frown. “Don’t worry. It’s not all that serious. Henrietta seems to have coped very efficiently up to now.”

“I don’t like guessing games,” he growled, “and I’m damned if I’m going to play one all the way from Peterborough to Kent. Is Alex wounded? Is that what the fuss is about?”

“Alex came through without a scratch. I got a second letter from Henrietta yesterday, saying he was back at Durban. He was in that awful battle at that unpronounceable place in Zululand, and after that at Rorke’s Drift. The urgent matter concerns your daughter. The married one.”

“Stella?”

“She’s with me now. She’s the guest I mentioned.”

“Stella is up here? With you and Tom?”

“Yes.” She laid her gloved hand on his. “She’s in bad trouble, Adam.”

“Then damn it, I’ll go to her…” and he half rose. But she stayed him with a gesture.

“
No
, Adam. Not now. Go on home, like I said. The fact is… well… she’s in a state. A state of severe shock, I’d say. Henrietta will explain. She sent Stella to me for a purpose.”

“Stella came alone? Right up here?”

“A neighbour brought her. A very nice young man, called Fawcett.”

“Denzil Fawcett? The farmer’s son?”

“I don’t know, Adam. I didn’t ask him. He gave me Henrietta’s letter, handed over Stella, and went back on the next train.”

“You expect me to go home without asking any more questions? Damn it, Edith, that isn’t reasonable…”

“It is, Adam.” She paused. “I’ve given you good advice before, haven’t I?”

“Many times, but if the girl’s ill…”

“She isn’t ill, not physically that is. She’s had a bad shock but she’ll get over it. She’s on the mend right now, but if you blundered in on her and began pestering her with a lot of questions, you’d set her right back, the way she was when that Fawcett boy brought her.”

He thought for a moment and she glanced across at him sympathetically. She was a pretty, very composed woman, perhaps five or six years older than Henrietta but with the same youthful figure that had attracted him all those years ago when she drove his waggons to and from the Crescent Centre base near Boston Stump. She said, reluctantly, “Very well, against my better judgement I’ll give you the gist of the matter. Stella’s left her husband. For good, I understand. There now, that’s as far as I’m prepared to go, for I’m putting myself in Henrietta’s place and she’d have every right to feel slighted if I put my oar in deeper.”

The balloon of complacency he had been inflating all the way from Edinburgh exploded, pricked by the certainty that here was a situation likely, indeed certain, to invite scorn and ridicule and amused incredulity among all the Johnny-Come-Lately customers whose goods he hauled from one end of the country to another. He had a reputation for prickly pride, as well as for speed and reliability, and a thing like this, mushrooming from county to national scandal, would be snapped up by the wits from one end of the City to the other. He could hear the coffee-house wags already—“That chap Swann, always in such a hurry, y’know. Always prattling about speed and punctuality. Well, here’s a turnup for the book! Nothing equalled the turn of speed he showed marrying into the aristocracy—girl of his, nineteen they say—thousand a year settled on her—and she bolts back to mother faster than one of Moncton-Price’s fillies…!” Something like that. Or a variation of it. Or a conjugation of variants, all the way from the jocular to the obscene.

He picked up his hat and stick but she said, quietly, “Drink your tea, Adam. There’s no train for a while. I checked before you arrived.”

And glumly he laid hat and stick aside, saying, “How much did Henrietta admit in her letter?”

“No more than necessary. I understood that well enough.”

“And since then? The girl herself…?”

“She’s only confirmed what I guessed. I encouraged her to talk. She needed to talk to someone but whatever she said won’t be passed on, not even to Tom.”

“You don’t have to reassure me about that, Edith.” Then, “Can you keep her up here for a spell? Without putting yourself or Tom to too much inconvenience?”

“For as long as she cares to stay. Nobody knows she’s here except you, her mother, and that boy Fawcett.”

He drained his cup and stood up. “Very well. Go back to her now. Give her my love. Tell her I’m handling it. I’ll look to myself, Edith.”

“There’s no hurry. Tom’s at home, as I said.”

“She’ll need you, none the less.” They walked out into the hazed platform area. He said, “I was preening myself all the way down here. The way I used to in the old days, when I’d opened up a new sector or landed a new contract. Things have been going so well lately. But it doesn’t do to take a damned thing for granted, does it?”

“You never took anything for granted, Adam. You were always prepared to work for it.”

He said, mildly, “I took you for granted for a good many years, Edith.”

“I was always there for the taking,” she said, and paused at the barrier of the down platform.