by Diana Norman
Makepeace intervened. She had no idea what braged conductors were but there was no need to make Rockingham a present of them. This new age was wonderful, no doubt, but it still involved the old acquisitiveness; Yorkshire had coal reserves of its own—the Duke of Norfolk owned extensive collieries around Sheffield and for all she knew Rockingham could be planning to set up in competition with him. He damn well wasn’t going to do it on her braged conductors. ‘I’m sure we needn’t waste his lordship’s time on details, Mr Hedley,’ she said.
Rockingham was wily. He took his guests on a carriage tour, ostensibly to show Hedley a new, improved threshing machine and for Makepeace to see the gardens, but during both these inspections, she noticed, he found an opportunity to speak first to one, then the other, alone.
He and she were by themselves in a rose garden when he gently offered to buy Raby outright at a price which, invested, would see her comfortable for the rest of her days. ‘Coal production is a hard taskmaster,’ he said, ‘even supposing your pit proves profitable.’
Then why d’you want it? She didn’t even consider the offer. He might be being kind, paying his dues to Dapifer’s memory, saving her from association with an unfeminine trade—he could certainly afford these motives. But she didn’t want comfort, she wanted to slake her hatred in blood and for that she needed vaster wealth than he could give her. Besides, how else was she to fill these leftover days of her life? Needlework?
‘I have time to kill,’ she said, and was struck by her unconscious double entendre. She smiled.
He saw the smile and gave up. ‘What free-thinking spirits you Americans are. I told the King, we shall be forced to give America her independence one day.’
Her smile broadened. ‘I don’t think you will, my lord,’ she said. ‘We’ll just take it.’
In the end she settled for a straight loan of five thousand pounds; she thought she could probably have got more but Hedley had insisted on not being beholden to one solitary investor who could thereby dictate policy or withdraw on a whim. ‘It’s a long-term investment,’ she warned Rockingham.
‘I have no doubt of it,’ he said, ‘but if I’m a judge of your Mr Hedley, it is a secure one.’
‘Not my Mr Hedley,’ she said quickly. ‘He’s merely my business partner.’
Seated in one of Wentworth House’s carriages on the way back to the inn, she passed on the compliment. ‘Rockingham thinks you’re clever.’
‘I am,’ he said, smugly. ‘Yon’s a canny lad. Asked me to come and work for him.’
So this was the world of business, was it? You couldn’t trust anybody.
‘The shite,’ she said.
At his foundry in Birmingham, Sir Benjamin Judd was less amiable towards Makepeace than he’d been in Grosvenor Square. Her reappearance troubled him and he was one of those who made a virtue of speaking his mind. ‘I was sorry for yow,’ he said, ‘and so was Lady Judd, very upset she was, but yow have to consider my position.’
He’d certainly considered it himself; Catty had returned from the wilderness, not only as his immediate neighbour but as a force in Society—and Sir Benjamin had invested a great deal of time and money on consolidating his social position. He had plans to marry his sons into the nobility.
Under Makepeace’s unblinking gaze he grew almost hostile. ‘Yow seem to have landed on your feet, any road. Well, I’ll lend you a shilling or two for old times’ sake . . .’
‘Lord Rockingham’s investing five thousand pounds,’ she said.
‘Is he? Is he now? Easy come, easy go, I reckon. Ay, but hard coal’s no use to me, my furnaces need coke and a damn job it is to get it with the state of the roads. They talk of canals though when they’ll be finished . . . Any road, where’s your security?’
For all his bluster, he’d been noticeably impressed by the Rockingham connection. Makepeace said: ‘My security is my business partner. Talk to him.’
Sitting quietly in the background while Sir Benjamin and his foundry manager questioned Hedley, she watched the miracle happen again. The iron industry needed contrivances to raise water and turn the great wheels that operated bellows, forge hammers and rolling mills. Any improvement to the atmospheric engine would save energy at the moment going to waste. Iron-masters were prepared to invest in professors with a theory or illiterate men with an idea or anyone in between who might increase production—if they believed him. They believed Hedley. She would get her money, not so much for the Raby mine as for the future of Hedley’s condenser.
Hedging it around with repayment requirements and eventual interest at the standard rate of three per cent, Sir Benjamin raised his offer to three thousand.
Makepeace took it, without thanks.
In Hertfordshire, she called on Sir Toby Tyler, MP, and let Hedley work the oracle once more—to the tune of two thousand pounds.
It had been amazingly easy.
Hedley took the next stage back to Newcastle. Makepeace stayed on; she had duties in the south of England. She wouldn’t go near her old home but she received two people from it in an upstairs room at the White Hart in Hertford. One was Peter Little, its steward, and the other Robert French, her husband’s—now Conyers’s—valet.
Her friendship had narrowed down to the few people who’d rallied round her at Dapifer’s death; even in that time of turbulent darkness she had registered their presence. The rest, apart from her new acquaintances at Raby, could go hang themselves—just as they’d let her and her child go hang. She’d milk them if she could but they remained cattle that must roam beyond the picket fence with which she’d surrounded herself. Only Robert and the men, women and children who’d attended Philippa’s christening had human faces and could be allowed in.
Even so, Peter Little found his meeting with this hard-eyed woman difficult. She enquired kindly enough after his wife and children but when he wanted to tell her how the Dapifer villagers were getting on, she stopped him. ‘I’m not interested in them, Peter. Tell me what’s happening at the big house.’
He pleaded for his people. ‘They didn’t shun you, Lady Dapifer, truly. Edgar, the rest . . . their livelihood depends on the lord of the manor, whoever he—or she—is.’
‘So does yours. You took us in. Tell me about the big house.’
Loyalty to his present employer prevented Little from saying too much. It had been another bad harvest. No, the . . . um . . . lady of the manor had not been at Harvest Supper; she’d stayed in London.
Makepeace filled in the gaps. With its fountain-head gone, the village of Dapifers was neglected; Catty was not a woman to leave the London season in order to attend a ceremony in a country orchard or remember to put a bean in the Lord of Misrule’s plum cake; nor was Conyers a man to encourage his harvesters by helping to toss the corn-sheaves onto wagons. Who, if anybody, put flowers on Dapifer’s grave?
I will, Pip. One of these days.
But, of course, Robert had. On the anniversary of Dapifer’s death, he’d taken French leave and travelled as an outside passenger to Hertfordshire. ‘Nobody else there. Just a quiet little moment twixt him and me. The Major looked at me very old-fashioned when I got back, I can tell you.’
‘Why does he keep you on?’ Makepeace wanted to know.
Robert surprised her. ‘Because he wants everything that was Sir Pip’s. He’d have given his eyes to be like him—oh yes he would, you didn’t know him in the old days. Almost pitiful it was, trying so hard to imitate him and Lord Ffoulkes, using every wit to be what they were and not being able to and hating them for it. That’s what he’s doing, you know, living their lives for them. I think it’s sending him mad.’
In his high, mannered voice, Robert drew sketches of Hogarthian horror: Conyers’s languid ease of manner and frantic lapses; the quarrels with Catty that went through a cycle of screams, blows and eventual reconciliation in violent sex. ‘They’ll do it anywhere, you know, doesn’t matter which servant’s in the room.’ Catty forced to come up from London to attend the ceremo
ny of the rents, bored to distraction; Catty bored again at the Christmas feast for the county: ‘Too, too bucolic, my darlings.’
That was something Makepeace already knew. Sir Toby Tyler had been affronted by his hostess’s yawns. ‘I always served the house of Dapifers well in the Commons,’ he’d told Makepeace during their interview, ‘but if it wants me to put forward an Enclosure Bill it’ll have to show more appreciation.’
‘Are they going to enclose?’ she asked Robert now.
‘Peter Little wants it, always did, but, oh dear me, she and the Major know as much about farming as I know about astronomy. And I don’t think we’ve got the money.’
‘They’ve got all mine,’ said Makepeace, grimly.
‘And are spending it, my dear, make no bones about it. Of course, a lot went in paying off debts but then there’s our clothes, all our pretty new jewels, the gambling, entertainments in Town—we hired all of Ranelagh for a night on our birthday, everybody came. And we’re buying him out of the army, which costs a pretty penny. Then there’s the wedding . . .’ Robert cocked an eye. ‘You know we’re getting married?’
‘Not before time.’ She hurried him on to what was important: ‘Robert, how’s Andrew?’
‘Ah, well, Lord Ffoulkes is a disappointment. The Major’s not only in loco parentis, he wants to be parentis. We’ve tried buying the boy’s affection, we’ve positively rained gifts, but the little serpent’s tooth lacks gratitude. Didn’t want to come down for Christmas. The Major insisted so he came, but he would not enjoy himself.’
‘You’ll tell me if they hurt him. In any way.’
‘Of course.’ Robert began crying again. ‘Didn’t we love that boy?’
‘Can you get a message to him for me?’
In London Makepeace stayed with Susan Brewer in the pleasant Clerkenwell apartment she was renting in Theobald’s Road from a Jewish family, relatives of Mme Angloss.
‘I didn’t know Mme Angloss was a Jewess.’
‘I didn’t either,’ Susan said, ‘not ’til recently, not ’til I gave her notice—’
‘You’ve left Mme Angloss?’
‘Stop interrupting. I’ve left her in one way, not another . . . well, it became impossible, Makepeace, Catty was everywhere. Twice, once when we were fitting Lady Ormond and again at the Brandons’, she came prancing in, twitting Mme Angloss about the clothes she’d designed for you and being hideously amusing about American taste. She didn’t know me from Adam, of course, but if I saw her again I’d have stuck the scissors in her which wouldn’t have done Mme Angloss’s trade any good, so I gave in my notice.’
‘Oh, Susan.’ Makepeace was conscience-stricken; immersed by the tidal wave of Dapifer’s death, she’d ignored the difficulty others might be experiencing in its undertow. Susan had lost weight and much of the rumbustiousness she’d brought from America.
‘It’s all right, Makepeace, really it is. Mme Angloss understood; she’s a surprising woman. She said she knew what it was to hear one’s race belittled in the mouths of vulgar English aristos—that’s what she called them, vulgar aristos. She doesn’t tell them she’s Jewish, of course, or she’d lose a lot of business. I’m not even sure she’s French—Spanish, I think. Anyway, she put me in touch with Mr and Mrs Franco, they own this house, and lots of others as well, and you’ll never guess what I’m doing . . .’
‘What?’
Susan went to a tallboy and opened one of the deep lower drawers to produce a hat such as the second Lady Dapifer in her heyday would have killed for. It was straw, tip-tilted back and front, it was blond, it was springtime.
‘Leghorn,’ said Susan, trying to be casual. ‘Mr Franco trades with Tuscany, they grow some wheat or another which produces the most malleable straw. I draw the designs, the milliner makes them up.’
Makepeace snatched it. ‘You designed this?’
‘Good, isn’t it? I call it the Philippa.’
‘Susan.’
‘Sakes, I’m one of her godmothers, ain’t I? I sent a consignment to Auntie that sold out in a week. Mr Franco says he could put me in touch with importers in the Carolinas—honestly, Makepeace, the Jews are everywhere. They’d have advanced your ten thousand in a wink. They . . .’
Makepeace was standing in shock at the looking-glass. ‘I’m too old for it. God, Susan, I’m old.’ Something had happened to her face, not lines—there weren’t any yet—but as if it had been rigid when the wind changed and was set into permanent austerity. It was not just haunted, it was haunting. She tried a smile—and wouldn’t have wanted to encounter it in a dark alley.
Wearily, she took the hat off. ‘What were you saying?’
Susan said: ‘They . . . the Jews, Mr Franco says they’re grateful to Sir Pip. When he was a young man, at the time of the “Jew Bill”, something about giving them more rights or something, Pip was lobbying to get it made law. It didn’t get passed, there was awful rioting against it, apparently, but . . .’ Susan’s voice became very gentle. ‘ . . . they loved him for it.’
The loss filled the room; Dapifer was everywhere in it, gloomy, funny, valuable.
After a while Makepeace said: ‘They’ve got to pay for him, Susan, I can’t live if they don’t.’
And Susan said: ‘He didn’t have a price.’
John Beasley turned up uninvited and told Susan he was moving in for the duration, having abandoned his own rooms in Grub Street because court bailiffs were after him. ‘Like old times,’ he grumbled to Makepeace. ‘Remember Hyde Park?’ He turned to Susan. ‘She let me crawl under her skirts and look up her fanny.’
Makepeace didn’t rise to the bait; he was only setting it in order to enliven her, her appearance seemed to worry him. ‘What have you done this time?’
He’d drawn a cartoon for Town and Country Magazine—and was justly pleased with it. It showed a man and a woman, both masked and armed, driving off in a coach, leaving its occupants, a mother and her baby, shivering in the snow. The name of Dapifer was writ large on the coach door and, to point it up, the corpse of a Red Indian hung partly out of one of the windows. The title read: ‘Highway Robbery!’
‘Major Conyers didn’t like it,’ Beasley said. ‘No appreciation of art, that bugger. Took out an injunction against me and Town and Country. Too late, though, it had got round most of the clubs by then. Now the bastard’s trying to sue us for libel.’
‘We’ll see about that.’ Makepeace took the matter up with Mr Hackbutt when she went to consult him in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
It was an indication of how widely this particular edition of Town and Country had circulated that Mr Hackbutt had seen it and still possessed a dog-eared copy which had obviously done some circulating of its own, though, as a lawyer, he feigned disapproval.
‘Ah yes, your friend Mr Beasley, a young man sailing very close to the wind,’ he said. ‘However, in this case I doubt if Major Conyers will proceed with the libel prosecution; the resultant case would be unpleasant for him. A scrawl in a scandal rag is one thing, evidence produced in court another. Evicting a recently bereaved widow and child from their home is not an act to rehabilitate him and his fiancée in the minds of respectable people, and respectability appears to be what they are after. I understand that royalty has been invited to their wedding—she’s distantly related through the Stuart line, of course—but whether they’ll attend is another kettle of fish.’
He had bad news. After chafing at the delay in receiving a copy of Dapifer’s divorce papers from Boston, Mr Hackbutt had written again. ‘And I have just received a reply to tell me that such confirmation was destroyed during the rioting, along with many other records.’ He stopped being judicious and gave his desk a blow with his fist that slopped his inkwell. ‘It seems the Boston court registrar of those days took papers home with him, kept them in his house if you’ll credit it—in his house—and the damn building was burned down with them in it.’
Makepeace said nothing; there was nothing to say. No evidence of divorce, no means o
f proving the legitimacy of her and Dapifer’s marriage, no case to regain his property. The stars in their courses were fighting for Catty.
Mr Hackbutt got up to thump his client encouragingly on her back. ‘Now, now, we’ll not give up the chase merely because the fox has a lead. I have hounds in America even now approaching the judges who heard the case. We’ll have their affidavit in time and then it’s “Tally-ho”, eh?’
‘I’m tally-ho-ing now.’ Makepeace told him about Raby. From her pocket-book she brought out the proposed partnership agreement that had been drawn up in Newcastle for Andra Hedley by his son.
Master Oliver Hedley had proved to be a newly qualified young lawyer, very young, with arms too long for his sleeves, and, to Makepeace’s surprise, tall, carrot-headed and graceful. His mother, she thought, must have been beautiful. His offices comprised one cheaply furnished room on a steep hill called the Side, inhabited more generally by Newcastle’s cheesemongers—and smelling like it.
He’d suggested she take the draft he’d composed to her own lawyer. ‘I shan’t sign it,’ Makepeace had told him, ‘I want a controlling interest.’
‘Dadda wants equal shares,’ Master Oliver had said, smiling politely, almost lovingly, down at her.
‘It’s my land, my coal.’
Master Oliver had nodded affectionately. It had been like trying to push through cotton wool. ‘But if you’ll forgive me, ma’am, Dadda says “Find it”.’
Mr Hackbutt took the document to the window. ‘It’s a workmanlike agreement as far as it goes, very workmanlike indeed for a provincial lawyer, but I cannot advise fifty per cent—such an arrangement invariably leads to stalemate.’