Theirs Was The Kingdom (46 page)

She said, smiling, “You could begin by ceasing to address me as ‘Miss Mary.’ Then you could get it into that head of yours that you can go just as far as you want to go, if you’ve got the patience. If you really want to educate yourself, it’s a perfectly straightforward process. You can do that by reading, once you’ve spent a little time on the spadework, and I could help there. Suppose you spend an hour or so at my school in the evenings. We have primers there, and a blackboard and copybooks, and everything you need, and I’m sure I could get permission from the authorities to coach you from seven to eight, three evenings a week. They’ve started evening classes for adults, of course, but I don’t think you would make much progress there because you’re shy with people outside your business. Besides, no pupil could expect a teacher all to himself as you could have if you wished it.”

Her practicability, her patent understanding of his plight elevated her to a niche in his mind almost as high as that occupied by Adam Swann. He said, fervently, “You mean you’d do that? You’d take that much trouble?”

“If it’s so important to you, of course I would, Jamie.”

“It’d be the most important thing that ever ’appened to me, Miss Mary.”

“Mary,”
she said, and looked at him in a way she had never looked at him before, as though she was already assessing his ability as a student.

Then began for Jake Higson a sojourn in a kind of euphoric purgatory, where his senses, sharpened in one way to a degree where he became aware of all manner of irrelevant detail, were dulled in another way. For while his wits responded to the instruction he was receiving, with his long legs cramped under one of the small schoolroom desks in front of her blackboard, the rest of him was half-anaesthetised by the presence of Mary McKenzie, who moved to and fro before his ecstatic gaze. Sometimes—moments that he came to anticipate as a foretaste of Paradise—she stepped down from the rostrum and bent over him, correcting his exercises and addressing him as though he was not a future manager of Swann-on-Wheels but a chimney sweep again, albeit a privileged one.

She went about the process with great practicality, dividing their three hours a week, hours when the caretaker was cleaning up after the children and attending to the stove, into six periods, four devoted to improving his word power and handwriting, the remaining two to what she called “free periods,” in which she strove to bring his knowledge of geography and history up to what she called “standard Six level.”

He found each period equally absorbing, imbibing the rudiments of grammar (he had not realised until then that the English language was something that could be taken apart and examined piecemeal) and labouring away at what the children called “pothooks and hangers,” copied from a book compiled for someone just such as he, who had the greatest difficulty in shaping letters and getting them to run together legibly, so that his scrawl began to take on a monkish aspect, uniformly sloping and, to him at least, as stylish as the writing of Tybalt, the chief clerk.

Sometimes she would hang a large, shiny map on the blackboard and take a pointer, moving about the world in a way that implied she was as familiar with, say, the upper reaches of the Congo and the foothills of the Andes as the Royal Mile and Castle Rock. At other times she would read passages describing Wallace’s struggle against King Edward, or the Young Pretender’s foray in 1745, but there was a handicap here, for it meant a tedious session at his lodgings after they had parted, when he was under orders to summarise a passage of Scott’s
Tales of a Grandfather
, or some other book, in what she called “a composition.” The next time they met she would turn the pages he had written and strike out words with her blue pencil, and sometimes make a disparaging comment on the work. He made progress, however. Even he was not oblivious of that, and she was just as ready with praise, when he earned it, as with reproof concerning his spelling or the use of a phrase borrowed from the
Police Gazette.

All the time, however, part of him was observing irrelevancies attendant upon their sessions, some relating directly to her but others to aspects of the room in which they worked, with its rustling stove and ineradicable smell of chalk, dust, ink, paper, and apple cores. Ever afterwards he associated the smell of school with snugness and serenity, in a way that must have been unique among those who had occupied those desks all the years the building stood there.

He had, of course, other sharper impressions, like the way the evening sun filtered through the tall, Gothic windows, lingering for a moment or two in her hair. It astonished him sometimes that he could be aware of such things whilst bending the whole of his attention to the loop of a pothook, or Bruce’s order of battle at Bannockburn—a word, incidentally, that he loved to hear her speak aloud, for it was one of the few that proclaimed her race, emerging as a long, rolling, rattle:“Bannockburrrrrrne.”

So they continued, in the role of tutor and pupil, right through the summer and autumn, never missing a single session. He adjusted his business trips to fit into the schedule, until Christmas loomed and word arrived from Headquarters that there was to be a gathering of Swann’s viceroys in London on the first day of the new year.

Ordinarily, he would have been delighted to attend his first conference (and what promised to be an important one according to the circular) as trainee gaffer of the Scottish territory, but he realised that this would mean missing at least three evenings in her company. He was only slightly comforted by the way she frowned when he announced the fact, for to him the grimace proved she took his lessons as seriously as he did.

She said, pouting, “Eight days? Ten, allowing for travelling time? Now there’s a nuisance! It’ll mean you missing Hogmanay, and Aunt Flora was looking forward to it so much.”

“Me too,” he said, “but it can’t be helped. The Gaffer’s keen on all of us meeting round that table once a year. He must have something special lined up or he wouldn’t have risked leaving the branch without someone to keep an eye on things.”

She stepped off the rostrum and stood close to him as she made a pretence of correcting his latest exercise. Her neat grey dress, or the little tartan cape about her shoulders, held the scent of lavender. He had never seen her in that high-waisted dress before, that fastened to the neck with a long row of jet buttons and a brooch shaped like an Irish harp. Probably, it had been laid away in a drawer and that explained the scent of lavender; now that he looked closely at it, he thought how smart and trim it was, emphasising the gentle swell of her breasts and the long, graceful sweep of her thighs as she half-sat on the adjoining desk looking, for once, as if she was impatient with his work. Then, laying aside the pencil, she leaned back on her hands and smiled down at him.

“It’s odd,” she said, “but I’d almost forgotten you worked for Swann-on-Wheels. All the time we’ve been here, ever since I heard you talking to yourself about John Leyden, I’ve thought of you as a bairn learning his lessons in front of a blackboard.”

“You mean… as a kid? Never as someone older’n you?”

“I mean just that,” she said, and there was a hint of teasing in her voice. “After all, Jamie, that’s what you’ve been to me for nearly a year now, a boy who came here to learn how to spell and write and parse. Why, we’ve hardly ever talked of anything else, have we?”

“No,” he said, “we’ve not that, but sometimes it wasn’t so easy not to.”

She reacted to this. “No? Well, that
is
a surprise! Tell me, Jamie, or are you too shy?”

“I dunno,” he said, guardedly, “I reckon that depends on you, Mary.”

“Why, Jamie?”

“Well, see here, I’ve put me mind to the work, you’ll own to that. But I’m not a kid, am I. Why sometimes…” but he stopped, biting his thumb nail.

“Sometimes what, Jamie?”

“Aw, let it go.”

“But I don’t want to let it go. Just you say what you had in mind to say.”

“Well, then… sometimes, wi’ me down here, and you up there, moving about before that blackboard, you seemed a lot more’n a teacher and that’s a fact!”

“Just what did I seem, Jamie?”

“Why, a woman, and a mighty pretty woman at that.”

She did not blush or look bleak and disapproving. About half a minute ticked by, the schoolroom clock regulating the pace of his thoughts but doing nothing to regulate his heartbeats. Then she said, slowly, “Do you know that’s the first compliment you’ve ever paid me, Jamie. And so long as you mean it, it’s very welcome, tho’ long overdue!”

“If I mean it!”
He sounded outraged. It seemed inconceivable that she could have failed to detect the worship he had directed towards her all these months, that she could have mistaken all the unwavering looks he had aimed at that rostrum for dutiful attention. “Why, Gorlumme,” he complained bitterly, “I sat here… every word you said… every time you moved,” but, notwithstanding his lessons in word power, he had no phrase that was adequate to this occasion. He fell back on instinct, catching up the hand nearest to him and crushing it against his lips and holding it there for what seemed to him a long time before he realised what she would take such a gesture to mean; whereupon he dropped it like a hot coal and stood up, looking, she thought, like a bull calf awaiting the slaughterer. “I’m sorry,” he growled, at length, “that’s spoiled things for us, ’asn’t it?”

It was her turn to be amazed. “
Spoiled
things? The Lord give me patience, why should it? Why would it alter things in any way, except for the better? Do you imagine I haven’t been hoping and praying you’d do something like that for months and months, instead of just… just
sitting
in that silly little desk, with your tongue peeping out as you copied those dreadful pothooks into your books? I told you once to stop being humble and you heeded it so far as your work went. But in all other ways—why, you think less of yourself than the day I met you, and for the life of me I’ve never known what to do about it, without seeming forward! Well, that’s done with, thank goodness, for now I don’t care a hoot how forward you think I am. I love you, Jamie, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to tell me you loved me. And now you have, or
I
think you have, at least enough to get things moving. So here’s how I feel about it and if I’m wrong I don’t care if you run out of here and never come back!”

She jumped off the desk and threw her arms about his neck, showering his face with kisses and finally, having tugged him round so that they were face to face, finding his mouth, and straining herself to him so that he had to brace himself against the angle of the desk lid. Having done this, however, he was able, to some extent, to lift her clear of the dusty floor and crush her in an embrace that drove the breath from her body, so that neither of them saw the grey head of the caretaker through the half-open door, or his grin as he bobbed out of sight and rattled a warning with his dustpan and brush. At the sound, they leaped apart, but when they heard his shuffling steps moving into the adjoining classroom, he said, breathlessly, “I never dreamed anything like this could ’appen, never once! I thought… I bin thinking… well, put yourself in my place, Mary. You’re educated, and a parson’s daughter inter the bargain. A girl like you could hook just about anyone, anyone at all…”

“I don’t want anyone. I want you, Jamie Higson.”

“Then by God, you got me,” he said, fervently, “and we’ll marry soon as you give the word. And what’s more, I’ll tell the Gaffer to make my managership final and let Fraser go. How soon could we get married? I don’t mean the daft way some of ’em do up here, plighting their troth an’ what not, but properly married. In your Dad’s church. Wi’ bridesmaids and hymns and all the trimmings?”

And at that she laughed and said, “Oh, Jamie, Jamie, you are a bairn in spite of it all. But I wouldn’t have you a whit different, and as to us getting married, ‘with all the trimmings’ as you say, that
will
take a little time. I shall have to discuss it with Aunt Flora tonight, or perhaps you could, after supper, for I’m sure she’ll be surprised as I am! Now strap your books and kiss me again and we’ll talk about dates on the way home. April, perhaps. Why not the first Saturday in April?”

“I can’t wait that long,” he said. “Just you and Aunt Flora hustle it up and make it early in the new year. My birthday—the one the Guardians give me that is—is the 29th o’ January and I can’t think of a present I’d like more. Will that be too soon?”

“Not a minute too soon,” she said, gaily. “I wish it could be tonight!”

And then, to the surprise of both of them, a sudden shyness took possession of them, and they avoided one another’s eyes as they pottered about rolling up the map of the world, and packing his books away. But afterwards, when they stepped out into the frosty night, turning their backs on the great bulk of the Castle to cut through narrow streets to George Square, the wonder of the occasion demanded some physical expression and they slowed down and walked with arms about one another’s waists and Jake, transmogrified not merely as a man but also as an honorary Scotsman, had the feeling that he not only owned Edinburgh but also was on his way to claim it.

Five

1

E
DITH WICKSTEAD—“EDITH-WADSWORTH-THAT-WAS” AS SHE WAS STILL thought of in the network—derived considerable amusement from these occasions.

As one woman among so many men, she could sit back and watch them ride their hobbyhorses into the ground, for she no longer had a region to defend. She only bothered to attend a conference in case Tom, a very amiable man, allowed himself to be put upon by the more aggressive of Swann’s viceroys.

She always saw them, in her mind’s eye, as an assembly of privateer captains, reporting to the Admiral-in-Chief and hoping to gather praise or evade blame for personal triumphs or errors of judgement over the past twelve months. As for Adam, he fitted the role exactly and over the last few years had even begun to look like a pirate, with his narrow, dark-browed face, mahogany tan, and that way of sitting with his artificial leg extended as he listened, without seeming to listen, to their interminable wrangles and debates, to their judgements, extenuations and excuses, almost as though his handicap was the result of a broadside in some half-forgotten venture of his splendid, predatory youth.

The fancy returned to her now as they sat grouped around the long trestle table, puffing vigorously at their pipes and cigars, until the atmosphere of the warehouse smelled like a taproom, and an ill-favoured taproom at that. Privateers, the whole damned lot of them! Owing no loyalty to anyone save to themselves and to him, each concerned with his own private venture and profits that would result from it, spilling from his pockets to theirs.

She had known most of them for a quarter of a century now and a few, she told herself, were past their prime. But Adam never pressed for retirement so long as a manager was up to his work, like that little cider-apple of a man,

Hamlet Ratcliffe of the Western Wedge, still living on credit reaped from two incidents early in his Swann career, the recapture of a circus lion and his initiation of the now famous holiday-brake service that operated throughout the midland and southern regions but had never caught on in the northern sectors of the Swann Empire.

Then there was Catesby, reinstated as manager of the Polygon after a brief spell as gaffer of Sam Rawlinson’s cotton mill. She always thought of him as Caius Cassius, of the lean and hungry look, and the temperamental affinity between him and Adam accounted, she supposed, for the success of their partnership. Both were idealists, although their idealism was no more than a kind of furious obstinacy and dedication to a job of work. Catesby was now an important man in his own right, having been a founder of the Trades Union Congress in days when it was regarded by most employers as a nest of Jacobins, plotting bloody revolution. Never by Swann, however, who had always held eccentric views in the field of capital versus labour and was rumoured by some to have encouraged John Catesby in his efforts to form a trades alliance strong enough to strike bargains with bosses.

There were others round the table who had little in common with bumpkins like Ratcliffe and fanatics like Catesby, or nothing beyond a steady devotion to the firm. She remembered Adam had once commented on this, saying that a Swann-on-Wheels conference was as good a cross-section of England and Englishmen as one would be likely to find anywhere on earth, even in a regiment. It was true, too, as she could judge for herself, letting her glance move down both sides of the table and half-listening to the free-for-all that invariably attended these occasions.

There was the patrician Godsall, known among them as “The Grandee,” who had once held the Queen’s commission but now ruled in the Kentish Triangle; the dapper Morris, from Southern Pickings, shrewd enough to have made a fortune on his own account but who had clung to Swann’s coattails ever since the two had met by chance at a Worcestershire inn. There was the Welshman, Lovell, who always sounded as if he was preaching a sermon when submitting views on insurance rates, or the useful life span of a Clydesdale pulling a frigate or a man-o’-war. There was the shock-headed Dockett, of Tom Tiddler’s Ground, another Swann original who had been the first to speak at the first conference held in this room twenty years ago, proposing the introduction of box-waggons for house-removals, and later that saucy slogan painted on each of them—
From Drawer to Drawer
, a boast, she recalled, that had irritated the clerk Tybalt, who disapproved of all forms of commercial levity.

Keate, the missionary-waggoner, was still in his place, urging the claims of one or other of his waifs, who passed through the yard in an endless stream and were represented here by the prim-faced Rookwood, of Southern Square, and that new broom Higson, who had made, so they told her, a very promising start up in Scotland under Fraser, formerly of the Border Triangle.

In a way she shared his regard for every one of them and why not, since she was married to the best of them, Tom Wickstead, who did not shine at conferences.

The line of talk they were taking surprised her today. They were planning, with the collective enthusiasm of a gang of schoolboys about to swoop on an orchard, a breakout from the accepted policy of the network up to this time, and she wondered who had set it in train. Not Adam, she was sure, for he had grown conservative over the years and inclined to shy away from innovations, of the kind they were now discussing. Perhaps that thrustful youngster, Jake Higson, or perhaps Dockett, who had always been something of a maverick. Or possibly Morris, or the ambitious Godsall, or even Young Rookwood, who had once confounded them all by digesting a large slice of England when he still grew down on his upper lip.

Rookwood’s spectacular spurt, she remembered, had been encouraged by early marriage and the responsibilities of fatherhood, and her mind shifted a little, contemplating the effect their several womenfolk had had upon the careers of these men. A considerable one she would say, taken all round. Hamlet Ratcliffe had been rescued time and again by his great, motherly spouse, Augusta, whereas Bryn Lovell had moved from triumph to triumph after marrying that half-caste woman, and saddling himself with her brood of coffee-coloured children. Godsall, she knew, was well-married to a handsome, happy-go-lucky woman, whereas Morris, to buttress an independence he had always flaunted, had married money years ago. And on top of this was the part she had played in the making of Tom Wickstead, who had graduated, under her tutelage, from professional thief to third place on the managerial graph that Adam kept locked away in his tower.

It was a matter of making some kind of pattern of one’s life, she supposed, and Adam himself had done that by marrying Henrietta Rawlinson a month or two before he recruited this colourful army. It was strange, in view of that, that he should have fathered five sons and still wanted for one to follow him. Then, having caught the word “diversify,” uttered in ringing tones by Godsall, she began to pay closer attention to what they were discussing; the theme of the conference began to emerge, with the usual factions lining up beside one another: the “diehards,” like Fraser, Ratcliffe and Vicary of The Bonus, and the “Thrusters,” represented by Morris, Rookwood, Godsall, and the Irishman O’Dowd.

It took her no more than a moment to realise that the day would go to the venturesome. She could read as much in the tolerant eye of Adam Swann, as he sat rolling a cheroot round his lips at the head of the table, and she thought, smiling, “They’ve won him over, that’s for sure! There’ll be a right about turn before we’re through today’s agenda…” And she understood precisely how eager all of them were to play the parts she had sketched for them—privateers, each with a proud ship of his own and an individual way of sniffing out a prize and boarding her.

A verse or two of Longfellow came to mind to illustrate the thought: a poem entitled
A Dutch Picture
concerning an old corsair called Simon Danz, who had retired from piracy to live a bourgeois life by the river Maas, but had thought better of it. How did it go…?

… but when the winter rains come on
He sits and smokes by the burning brands,
And old seafaring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, with double chin,
And rings upon their hands…

And they talk of ventures lost and won,
And their talk is ever and ever the same,
While they drink the red wine of Tarragon
From the cellar of some Spanish don,
Or convent set to flame…

That was it exactly! A score of ageing men, with a few younger ones eager to take their places, made permanently restless by success and prosperity, so that they came here to sit under a Thameside Simon Danz and plan ventures that would make them feel young again. He should hear about that when the time came, and it would probably flatter him. In the meantime, however, she owed it to Tom to listen, for wherever these new ventures led one thing was certain. Her Tom would be involved in them and so, God willing, would her sons, both earmarked for the Swann network.

2

There was a rhythm to Swann-on-Wheels, a rhythm and tempo that insinuated itself subtly and secretively as a theme that was not of his making, nor of the making of any one individual, or grouping of individuals, but stemming, in some way, from the rhythm of the tribe as a whole as it went briskly about the business of building the new Rome in the long afterglow of Waterloo.

He was aware of the inner rhythm but had no power to regulate it. It was governed by all manner of quirks and circumstances that arose out of his personal life and the lives of his associates, so that he was sometimes slow to isolate it and adjust to it. Once he did, however, he adapted swiftly, letting himself be caught up in the swirl of the concert, telling himself that it had been and still was his destiny to conduct the orchestra, to get it firmly under his hand, and encourage it to make its contribution to the deafening cacophony of the tribe at large. Once he had succeeded in doing this, he was in his element. Once that happened, he would not have been anywhere else but here, wielding a baton of his own choice and design.

It was always easy, looking back, to isolate the phases of the saga, beginning with the faltering overture of the years 1858 to 1862, when they had been no more than a bunch of amateur fumblers, with little but his faith to sustain them, and this was followed by a flattish patch when they had been occupied getting their second wind and groping for national recognition. But then something went wrong. By the autumn of that same year they were floundering, and in such awful disarray that it seemed to every one of them, to Adam Swann most of all, that the entire enterprise had been an exercise in personal vanity and was likely to take its place among all the other failures in Carey Street, that national repository of failed challengers of the century.

That this did not happen was due to a string of factors, including luck, a small injection of capital, legal expertise from an unexpected source, the personal reputation he had established among customers and creditors, but, above all, to his obstinate belief in his own qualities of leadership, that had been proved beyond all doubt at that first managerial conference, a week or two before Christmas 1862.

It was then, within hours of his putting Danton’s audacious dictum into practice, that the rhythm and tempo had changed and changed very dramatically. By St. Valentine’s Day 1863, the day his second son George was born, they were forging ahead under a full head of steam, set fair for permanence and stability and imprinting themselves, week by week, on the national consciousness. The year 1864 and the first six months of 1865 had been a perfectly splendid period, with expansion in every quarter of the network and more work than they could handle. But then, because of a trivial error on the part of a foreman ganger on a fast stretch of rail between Ashford and Tonbridge, the entire enterprise had been brought to the brink of disaster and would almost surely have collapsed had it not been for the foresight of one woman, Edith Wadsworth, and the hardihood of another, Henrietta Swann, both of whom loved him for his courage.

There had been a break in the tempo then and the rhythm had faltered, but it picked up again and was more insistent than ever when Adam returned, healed of his terrible wounds. After that, through the remainder of the sixties and the whole of the seventies, the beat had been strong and steady, with the whole island under his hand, and lodgements made as far north as the Grampians, as far west as the Dublin Pale.

But then a curious thing happened, something that those who knew him well could never have predicted. A stale and repetitious theme began to emerge that first baffled and then exasperated the more discerning instrumentalists.