Until the Colours Fade (3 page)

‘Does George ever talk to you?’

‘I’m no use to you, I tell you. I accept the world as it is. Baronets’ sons may get Governors recalled and play politics. I have other things to do.’ Although Tom was sure that Crawford must be aware that he was trembling with suppressed fury, he showed no sign of being put out, but said calmly:

‘Understand this. A man like Braithwaite, whose power depends on an absence of will in others, ends up as their servant not their master. I’d no right to ask anything of you until better acquainted; but what if we’re not to meet again?’

‘When you’ve worked for Mr Braithwaite perhaps you will then tell me about servants and masters with more authority.’ Tom regretted the bitterness of his tone but could not help it. Normally pacific and courteous, he was appalled by the power of the emotions which Crawford’s challenge had aroused in him. Doubtless the man had personal reasons for wishing to confound Braithwaite. Then let him pursue the matter on his own without enlisting the help of the first likely-looking accomplice, with no thought for what it might cost him. The look of disappointment on Crawford’s face was so obviously genuine, that Tom could not help being disturbed by it.

‘If you want to find out anything about George,’ he said, ‘ask your sister.’ Tom had meant the suggestion to contain a slight irony, but when he saw the amazement with which it was received, he wished he had remained silent. Miss Crawford had promised George an answer to his proposal in three months; quite long enough surely for her to have written to her brother, even as far away as Ceylon. But apparently neither she nor Charles Crawford had said anything to him. He would have been several weeks in London giving evidence to the Select
Committee
.
Confused, and mortified to have been indiscreet after all, Tom added quietly: ‘George Braithwaite hopes to marry your sister.’

‘Has Miss Crawford accepted?’ Magnus asked shakily.

‘She gives her answer next month.’

Crawford let out his breath in a long sigh of relief.

‘Well, Mr Strickland,’ he said, ‘you’ve told me something anyway.’

A moment later there was a loud tapping at the window, and Tom saw a soldier’s face under a plumed shako.

‘Cap’n Braithwaite wants summat wi’ you, sir,’ the man shouted through the glass, seeing Crawford in the far corner. Tom caught Crawford’s eye, and was surprised to find himself smiling. Seconds afterwards Magnus had left the ‘fly’ and was following the trooper down the road. As Tom stepped out, he saw George Braithwaite come up to Crawford, and heard him say:

‘Mr Crawford, I fear I must ask you to give up your carriage.’

Half-a-dozen frightened troopers were stumbling towards the ‘fly’ carrying three of their comrades. As they laid the wounded men down, Crawford bent over one, whose arm had been
hanging
limply and was now twisted to one side at an unnatural angle. Tom saw that the sleeve had been ripped open at the elbow, where the arm was a mess of lacerated flesh; blood was still
welling
steadily, and Tom thought he saw fragments of shattered bone. He had taken this in in a moment and looked away at once, feeling sick and faint. Not so Crawford, who grasped one of the troopers by the shoulder and shouted:

‘Your shirt, man, take off your shirt.’

The man hesitated; it was a cold night; but when Magnus tore open his tunic, the soldier hastened to oblige him. Magnus snatched the garment from him and ripped off a thin strip. With another man’s sabre he cut away the upper part of the wounded trooper’s sleeve and tied this crude tourniquet firmly round the arm above the wound. While Crawford had been at work, the other two, who seemed less seriously hurt, had been placed on the floor of the ‘fly’ under several fur-lined pelisses. The gravely wounded man was laid on the seat. Magnus took out his flask and helped the men on the floor to drink; when he had finished he turned furiously on Braithwaite.

‘These men owe their injuries to you, sir.’

Tom saw George flinch as though he had been struck.

‘Those fellows on the hill had nothing to do with it?’ George retorted, recovering some of his composure. Crawford’s eyes
narrowed
.
Tom noticed dark blood-stains on his previously spotless gloves.

‘You sent a small detachment ahead in darkness on this road. Why?’

Braithwaite fiddled with the chin-strap of his shako; his face looked drawn and ghastly.

‘Damn it, Mr Crawford, we were surprised.’

‘You had no hostile demonstrations going to the station?’

‘On my honour, none.’

Crawford’s sardonic smile showed what he thought of George’s denial.

‘And where’s the man you hit? Or can I congratulate you on killing any others?’ Crawford pulled off his ruined gloves and tossed them away.

‘We fired high. We found no wounded.’

‘I suppose they’d leave men behind to spend years behind bars if they recovered? Better to risk mortifying wounds in some filthy cellar than that.’

‘Good God, Crawford, they
chose
to attack us.’ Braithwaite sounded more bewildered than angry. Tom expected Magnus to tell him that incompetence was an invitation, his plans amateur and negligent, and his inexperience a crime, but, to his surprise, Crawford merely wiped his hands on the shirt and sighed. Tom’s premonition of what Magnus would say to his sister, about the man who had proposed to her, made him wince. Having told George that the trooper’s arm needed immediate amputation, Crawford asked for a horse and suggested that his luggage be sent to Leaholme Hall the following day. He sounded tired and downcast. Although three horses had had to be shot, two men would be going with the wounded in the ‘fly’, so there was no difficulty about finding Crawford a horse and the troop-sergeant soon led one up to him.

As soon as Magnus had mounted he started the horse at a brisk trot. Braithwaite ran beside him.

‘I must entreat you to stop. We must escort you.’

With a gesture in the direction of the burnt out omnibuses, Crawford shook his head and, giving his horse a light flick with his cane, cantered into the darkness.

*

After the chaos of the past hour, the profound silence of the road ahead seemed strange to Magnus, and he had trouble getting used to the darkness now that the blazing vehicles were out of sight. At the first crossroads he turned his horse to the right and
struck out across country. Earlier there had been clouds, but now the stars shone brightly from a clear frosty sky. In the
distance
he could make out well-remembered landmarks: the spire of Trawden church sharp against the skyline, the massive barn at Blayshaw Farm, and behind it the dark line of woods skirting the rugged moorland beyond. The windows of isolated cottages glowed palely with the light of smoking mutton-dips and rush tapers within. From across the fields he heard a shepherd’s dog barking. The horse’s hoofs thudded satisfyingly on the grassy track. But, though Magnus had not been in this once familiar country for almost seven years, he felt no emotion: all that had been spent on the station road. On his hands he was aware of the slight tackiness of dry blood. The bizarre coincidence of the riot with his return and the shock of hearing that George
Braithwaite
had proposed to Catherine, had left Magnus distraught and dazed.

His sister was the only member of his family for whom he felt real love, and it hurt him deeply to suspect that she might be
considering
marrying solely for convenience, even if thereby
escaping
a restricted life of dependence on her family. He hated this suspicion but, because she had not refused George outright, could not rid himself of it. He had been away too long to be sure that the girl he had known had not changed. Another thought haunted him: his powerful premonition of devastating violence on polling day. The two preoccupations seemed at first quite separate, and yet he could not help their merging in his mind. He was struck by the strange fact that the father of the man whom his sister might marry, also held the key to the wider problems in the town.

Magnus reined in his horse and, while the animal pawed
fretfully
at the ground, sat motionless, deep in thought. Action in one sphere might influence events in the other. Hadn’t he known enough corruption in Ceylon to be able to sniff out the same
infection
in Rigton Bridge? His hatred of the Braithwaites was a longstanding one. A moment later he was trembling with
excitement
. If he could prove Joseph guilty of electoral corruption – and few elections were free of bribery – he could defeat not only George’s marriage plans but also his father’s political ambitions. Nor could he be accused of personal spite: if Braithwaite was forced to stand down and abandon his candidature there would be no bloodshed on polling day, and Catherine would be saved a wretched and loveless marriage, since she would never marry into a family dishonoured by fraudulence. The perfect solution:
private and public disaster averted by the same means.

The simplicity of the idea astounded and yet dismayed Magnus. There would be much he would never be able to find out. He felt suddenly despondent. Joseph Braithwaite would know how to cover his tracks. Then Magnus smiled. The artist. Of course. And the man had clearly known far more than he had been prepared to say. He had been evasive, certainly, but there had been an openness about him too: something very appealing. Magnus could not quite put his finger on it, but he had an
intuitive
hunch that, if faced with a clear-cut moral decision,
Strickland
would side with the angels. He was amused by his memory of the young man’s righteous remarks about baronets’ sons not understanding the vulnerable position of those without means. If he only knew my real situation, thought Magnus, my God if he only knew. But he will soon enough, if I need him; he will then.

Soon Magnus came to a decision not to return to Leaholme Hall that evening but to spend the night in Rigton Bridge. It would be better not to see Catherine until he had first made some inquiries in town. After so many years a day would be forgiven, and he had only specified the week during which he could be expected. Several hours before Magnus had felt close to despair; he had been returning home not just to see his brother and sister but because he could think of nowhere else to go; now matters seemed quite different. Old Braithwaite would be a formidable adversary, but there was always great consolation in having nothing to lose. The cold air stung Magnus’s hands and face as he rode, but he did not care. A rabbit crossed the track in front of him; in the distance he could see the lights of Rigton Bridge.

*

As he rode beside George, Tom Strickland made no attempts at conversation. Braithwaite’s morose silence suited him. If it
persisted
he might never have to explain why he had been at the
station
; if George were to ask, he had decided to fob him off with flattery about having been interested in his yeomanry duties, but reluctant to mention this in case George had felt imposed upon. In fact Tom was confident that George’s only wish would be to forget the events of the past few hours as swiftly as he knew how, and in any case Tom was still too disconcerted by his
conversation
with Crawford to give much thought to George.

While remaining as certain as ever he had been that it was harder to paint, with even average competence, than to perform the most exacting military duty, Tom could not help feeling that by being unforthcoming with Magnus, he had missed an
opportunity
– worse still that, where an important principle had been involved, he had let himself down. He was not proud to be
working
for Joseph Braithwaite, whom he knew to be ruthless and unscrupulous, and this increased his discomfort. Only when Tom thought of the work he would be doing in a few months’ time, while living on Braithwaite’s money, did his conscience
disturb
him less. He had a duty – as onerous as any military one and more compelling, because self-imposed – to convey his feelings in paint. There was nothing intellectual about it; he felt it as an emotional and intuitive necessity.

In the past year, without an adequate income, he had been constantly diverted and debilitated by the struggle to survive. Endless interruptions caused by the need to earn a few pounds, had made him almost despair of ever having a long enough period to mount a concentrated attack on particular problems which he had so far failed to solve: not just technicalities
involving
light and mass, but a way to make others see things through his eyes. He remembered the individuality of the men on the
platform
and yet their anonymity. To convey the tragedy of that paradox … that was something to be dreamed about. His recent failures had left him afraid that he had been trying to attain standards beyond his abilities, and this had terrified him. When his work had been rejected not just by the Academy and the British Institution, but by the lesser private galleries too, he had found it hard to produce anything. His sustaining hope had been then, and was still, that with the fair chance which a modest level of security would bring, he would be able to confront his terror of failure and prove that his faith in himself was grounded upon solid rock.

If George Braithwaite should say disparaging things about Crawford, Tom knew that he would not contradict him; if need be, he would add criticisms of his own. Joseph Braithwaite’s patronage meant more to him than money – far more. If he
succeeded
in securing Lord Goodchild’s commission too, he would have his long-awaited chance within sight. Nobody could divert me then, he told himself, not Crawford nor an army of such men.

Soon they were crossing the iron bridge over the river, the horses’ hoofs ringing out on the macadam. Tom clenched his teeth. A man in the ‘fly’ had started to scream; the agony of the sound mocked by its echo returning from the black cliff-like walls of the mills on the far shore.

The elaborate wrought-iron gates with their tall flanking piers and heraldic griffins lay behind him and, ahead, the drive
described
a gentle curve across a mile of level parkland. Driving the Braithwaites’ new dog-cart with its high red wheels and
wasp-like
body, Tom Strickland smiled to himself as he gained his first sight of the honey-coloured stone of the east front of Hanley Park.

In the centre a fine portico – four slender Corinthian columns supporting a pediment – was crowned by a statue of Juno or Diana, and on each side, symmetrical wings, in the same
neo-Palladian
style, were topped with an elegant balustrade, its limits at each end marked by massive stone urns. The peaceful park and the formal grace of this classical building, glowing in the pale morning sunshine, contrasted so strangely with the
industrial
town five miles away that Tom, in spite of being nervous and very well aware of the purpose of his visit, could not escape a powerful sense of unreality – as though he were driving towards no real house, but through the frame of an eighteenth century painting into another world: an impression enhanced by the ornamental lake to his right and the green dome of a temple, glimpsed through the bare branches of a screen of beech trees.

If Tom had once been tempted to suppose that the elegant
spaciousness
of such surroundings must produce a corresponding self-development in their possessors, George Braithwaite had done his best to disabuse him of the idea. Lord Goodchild, George had assured Tom, would neither humiliate him with
educated
talk and scintillating wit, nor even shock him with refined scandal – his lordship’s pleasures, as befitted one of the leading sportsmen of the age, being entirely physical. A year ago, on a snow-covered road, he had beaten Lord Shrewsbury’s
four-in-hand
team, driving twenty miles in less than an hour. In his youth, it was said that he had been able to give any pugilist in the country a good fight, and had often amused himself by taking friends to pot-houses in London’s dockland and starting brawls. Marriage had mellowed him somewhat, but George had relished telling Tom that Goodchild still enjoyed heavy gambling, liaisons with married women and riding in steeplechases.

On the subject of Lady Goodchild, George had been less
forthcoming
. That her reputation as a beauty was not exaggerated, he had admitted but had then confessed his failure to discover any redeeming qualities to offset her natural coldness and arrogance – unless a mordantly scathing sense of humour could be said to be a redeeming quality. George had made it clear to Tom that, although his father’s recommendation to Lord Goodchild would be enough to persuade his lordship to commission a portrait, the final decision would still lie with her ladyship. If she took it into her head to find Tom commonplace or tiresome, there would be no commission, and a lady, who had been known to throw
boot-jacks
at her lady’s maid and to grind a miniature of her
mother-in-law
under her heel in front of numerous spectators, was not somebody who could be relied upon to be charitable.

Because his future hopes so much depended upon this
commission
, Tom was naturally depressed by this description, and his despondency was the greater for having allowed himself to imagine aristocratic generosity to rival Lady Holland’s
championing
of the young Watts; but he had by no means abandoned hope of success. His best frock coat might be shabby and his
flowing
necktie conceal a shirt with similar shortcomings, but he had had ample proof in the past of being attractive to women. While the thought of any close relationship with Lady Goodchild did not enter his mind, he was comforted to know that his mistress, one of the leading singers in London’s music halls, cared a great deal more for him than he did for her, and this in spite of
propositions
from numerous affluent and eminent men.

While many young men strained to appear mature men of the world – often in consequence merely seeming bored and vapid – Tom did not try to emulate anybody. Being shy by nature, any attempts to seem nonchalant and loftily self-confident would in any case have been hopeless. In fact his unaffected enthusiasm and unfeigned reticence usually achieved better results. Since he rarely liked people who pretended to great refinement, he tried to avoid similar excesses of gentility; but his desire to please did sometimes lead him to be too zealously polite, and a lot of his hesitance stemmed from the basic conflict between this eagerness to please and an equally strong inclination to be honest. This ambiguity, although he did not know it, gave his modest and deferential manner a disconcertingly ironic edge, especially when he occasionally slipped an entirely candid remark into an otherwise blandly tactful conversation. Nor could he from time to time help laughing when he had been listening with great
seriousness to a lengthy monologue which he secretly viewed as anything but serious. After such behaviour he was usually far more embarrassed and confused than the affronted person.

But laughter was very far from his mind as he approached the broad steps under the portico, having left his vehicle in the stables. He had never met anybody of Lord Goodchild’s rank and was not unaware of the fact that he had been asked to call in the morning, a time usually reserved for tradesmen – friends and
acquaintances
generally calling in the afternoon. Under the tall Corinthian columns it was some consolation to him to imagine that many of the aristocrats, whose scrap books Turner and Landseer had deigned to draw in, would have thought it the artist’s privilege rather than their own.

As Tom reached the top step and saw a liveried footman with powdered hair and white stockings open the glass-panelled door, he vowed not to allow his pride to make him defensive, and prayed that neither the grandeur of the house nor his desperate eagerness to get the commission would overawe him into
behaving
with a servility which would later make him ashamed.

*

Lord Goodchild stormed out of his steward’s office and stalked across the wide domed rotunda, his top-boots echoing on the marble floor. In his right hand was a wad of letters and papers, and on his face a fixed angry frown. Dressed in hunting pink with a massive ivory handled whip in his left hand, Henry Audley Fitzwarine Grandison, 5th Baron Goodchild, Justice of the Peace, Lieutenant Colonel of Her Majesty’s 17th Lancers and Master of Foxhounds of the Pembury Hunt, cut an
impressive
figure. Although almost forty, hardly a squire in the county looking at his sweeping whiskers, slender waist and
upright
carriage did not envy him. But on this November morning his lordship felt far from self-satisfied. He had already missed the hunt breakfast and would now probably be late for the meet too, a sin which, as Master, he had a punctilious horror of
committing
. But this sporting discourtesy to the members of the hunt was not at present uppermost in his mind.

Half-an-hour earlier a letter from the Reverend Francis St Clare, the chief magistrate in Rigton Bridge, had arrived by special courier with a description of a riot which had taken place on the station road the evening before. With his letter, St Clare had enclosed a more deadly communication, originally sent by the Home Secretary to Lord Delamere, the General
commanding
the Northern District.

There were two cavalry regiments stationed in Manchester: Goodchild’s own 17th Lancers and a regiment of Light
Dragoons
, and these therefore would be the regiments to be ‘held in readiness’. Goodchild had no sympathy with strikers, but the thought of ordering cavalry to disperse an unarmed mob on
polling
day was utterly repugnant to him, and this was what he now fully expected to have to do. Various personal considerations would make such a duty particularly invidious. While it was public knowledge that his lordship had supported Joseph Braithwaite’s adoption as Tory candidate, it was less widely
appreciated
that the grateful manufacturer had subsequently lent the obliging peer twenty thousand pounds on the security of that nobleman’s Belgravia town house. Three years before,
Goodchild
had lost thirty thousand in the 1849 railway stock fiasco and, with his Irish estates already heavily mortgaged and his racing stud and stables alone costing him four thousand a year, so large a loss had brought him to the verge of bankruptcy. Some land sales had bought time but only Joseph Braithwaite’s
interest
-free loan had saved him. Joseph’s price had been his
lordship
’s political support. Without the votes of Goodchild’s tenant farmers, Braithwaite had known that he could not be sure of winning the poll; with Lord Goodchild’s public support those votes would be safe.

Goodchild was not an imaginative man, but it was very clear to him that if he had to deploy his regiment to keep the peace on polling day, the mob would be unlikely to enjoy being
constrained
by men under the command of a lieutenant colonel who was also the unpopular candidate’s proposer. With this thought in mind, Goodchild had resigned himself to missing the hunt
breakfast in order to write two letters. The first, addressed to Joseph Braithwaite, had been a plea to do whatever was
necessary
to end the cotton operatives’ strike, even acceding to some of their demands if need be; the alternative being further acts of violence which might jeopardise his election. Goodchild believed Braithwaite to be incapable of compromise, but for all that had felt bound to try to persuade him. The second letter was to St Clare and in it Lord Goodchild suggested that the magistrate laid charges against as few of the station road rioters as he could conscientiously contrive. Many men committed for trial would merely increase the tensions in the town, as would the premature despatch of troops from Manchester. Lord Delamere, Goodchild advised St Clare, should be warned to send no troops for two weeks and better still none until the eve of polling day itself.

Having written these letters, Goodchild had visited his
secretary
in the steward’s office to ask whether he had heard any news of the riot from any other sources. He had not; but before Goodchild could leave the room, the man had requested his master’s signature to a cheque for almost five hundred pounds made out in favour of a London dressmaker, Lord Goodchild, within his limited capacity for such things, had been attempting to reduce his own expenditure during the past year and this bill, announcing so clearly that his wife had not done likewise,
following
so hard on the heels of the morning’s other unwelcome news, had sent his lordship hurrying across the rotunda cursing under his breath.

He was about to open the door of the morning room, where he expected to find Lady Goodchild, when a footman came up
behind
him and begged to inform his lordship that a Mr Strickland was asking to see him. Goodchild, who had forgotten that the painter existed and had in any case intended his wife to interview the man, snapped out: ‘He must wait,’ and threw open the
morning
room door.

As he entered, he saw Helen Goodchild’s reflection in the
pier-glass
between the tall windows. She was sitting reading near the fire; her face protected from the direct heat of the flames by an oval fire-screen. In his agitated frame of mind the peace and
stillness
of the room irritated Goodchild.

‘My dear, not gone yet?’ murmured his wife, laying aside her book and smiling at him with a mixture of concern and covert amusement. ‘Surely the meet is not cancelled?’

To any outsider, seeing Helen’s brown questioning eyes and pale upturned face – redeemed from classic perfection by a
sprinkling of faint freckles across the bridge of her nose – these questions would have seemed entirely innocent, but to Lord Goodchild they contained unpleasant traces of mockery.

‘And why pray might the meet be cancelled?’ he asked curtly.

Lady Goodchild shot him a surprised and reproachful glance.

‘A bad frost perhaps? The ground too hard for the scent to lie well?’ She gave a little shrug. ‘You’re the one who knows
everything
about such things.’ She raised a hand to her temple where a lock of auburn hair had escaped from the narrow bandeau of lace, serving as a cap. The studied grace and calmness of this movement made Goodchild grit his teeth. No worries for her about last night’s violence or the approaching election. He threw down his whip and moved closer to her.

‘I am asked to settle an account of yours to the tune of five hundred pounds. Is it in order, madam? I daresay you have looked it through?’

‘Do
you
look through tradesmen’s bills?’ she asked, as though surprised that he should be suggesting such an unfamiliar
procedure
.

‘I have recently made such matters my business,’ he muttered, stung by the irony of her tone, and reddening as he saw her nod understandingly and then raise the tips of her fingers to her lips as if to conceal a smile. But he detected no amusement a moment later when she said:

‘Am I reproved for dressing as your wife ought to dress? I have done so out of respect for your position, not from vanity.’

‘Position be damned. If you wore rags you’d still be my wife. Clothes don’t come into it.’