by Diana Norman
Watching them, Makepeace became irritated. Why do you get everything right all the time?
Because, she supposed, unlike her he’d always been at peace with himself—and remained so. Even now, with all his wealth, he’d hardly changed his way of living—too busy setting up miners’ benevolent funds, pensions, societies for the betterment of this and the prevention of that. His one luxury, which he regarded as an essential, had been to turn the but ‘n’ bens at Raby into one of the best-equipped metallurgical laboratories in England.
‘Tell me about your fire-damp experiments, Mr Hedley,’ she said.
Immediately the coach interior became a Leyden jar of energy. If we’d got fire-damp in here, she thought, he’d explode it all by himself, he wouldn’t need a candle. As it did when he was in the grip of emotion, his speech became increasingly Northumbrian.
‘Blowers are no bloody good, nor steel mills, it was a steel mill set off Gerrards. And I’d bray the bugger as left the ventilation door open except he blew hisself up wi’ the rest.’ He was pounding the coach seat so that little Hildy, beside him, bounced up and down. ‘But Ah tell thee, pet, it don’t go off every time. Ah know. Ah’ve tried. Singed wor eyebrows once or twice, nothin’ more. There’s a mystery to yon bloody gas and ’lessen we solve the sod it’ll continue to slay good men.’
He glared at Makepeace as if she’d contradicted him. ‘An’ bloody coal-owners are wussun useless—“Why fret, Andra? It’s coal that matters, not the poer yakkors as hew it.” ’ He gave another thump to the upholstery. ‘Porvorse sods.’
It would have been useless to point out that he was a coal-owner himself, he could never ally himself with the overlords.
And that’s why I love him.
She said: ‘You’re bloody-minded enough to make a good American.’
He didn’t rise to it; he wasn’t going to ally himself with her either. ‘I met another o’ them, t’other day,’ he said. ‘Young Beasley introduced us. ‘Benjamin Franklin. Know him?’
She shook her head.
‘Born in Boston, so he said. I’ve read his papers on electricity. I was telling him about fire-damp, very interesting conversation.’
Makepeace fell asleep; there seemed nothing else to do.
They dined at Barnet, went to their separate beds and set off again next morning, smoothly over the turnpike stretches, of which there were few, horribly over those still in the care of their parishes.
At Hatfield, she told Sanders to stay on the Great North Road instead of making for Hertford, where they usually stayed and changed horses. ‘I’ll tell you when to turn.’
She was tense now, as if what was to come was a confrontation. Hedley and Hildy were watching her fidget. She stopped the coach, got out, ordered Smith onto the roof and clambered up beside Sanders.
Evening was drawing in; they were encountering wagons carrying corn, bales of straw and tired men and women. She realized with a shock that in London she had lost track of the seasons—in the years since Dapifer’s death, she’d been too busy to relate that September to this.
The weather was more chilly, though drier, than it had been then; it looked as if it was another poor harvest. She thought: That’ll put the price of coal up, and grimaced at herself for thinking it.
Mrs Yates’s shop at the bottom of the hill, where she’d waited for Dapifer to come back to her, had been pulled down and a new inn stood in its place.
‘Next turning left, Sanders.’
The lanes seemed narrower than she remembered, at some points brambles scratched the sides of the coach.
‘Gawd help we don’t meet summat coming the other way,’ Sanders said.
This was neglect: they hadn’t been trimming the hedges. She experienced irritation, as if at an insult. Conyers might have had no idea how to run an estate but, for God’s sake, Dapifer’s people should have kept it tidy in his memory.
By the time they’d gone through the splash and were heading uphill to the village, it was becoming difficult to see into the fields but light from the carriage lamps fell on a broken gate and thick colonies of willowherb obstructing the little stream that ran down the track’s right-hand side.
At the Littles’ house she made the introductions then cut the family’s welcome short. ‘I’ve foreclosed on the place, Peter. I’m the new owner.’
She was too strung up to give explanations or hear out his effusions of thankfulness. ‘I’ll leave my party here for a while if I may. Are the gates open?’
‘Let me run up and tell Mrs Bygrave you’re coming,’ Mrs Little said. ‘She’ll be that pleased, but there’s only her and Minnie there now and they’ll needs get the beds aired.’
It hadn’t occurred to Makepeace that they’d be expected to stay at the Big House. For a moment she was at a loss. I can’t. There was no reason why she shouldn’t, it belonged to her now, but she knew she couldn’t. The place wasn’t really hers, never had been; the time in it with Dapifer had been a lovely idyll—she saw it now as one of Aaron’s entre’actes, a happy but illusory pause in which she’d been allowed to play a comic shepherdess. She was too altered to learn the lines again, too . . . different. Anyway, the stage set had gone dark.
She gathered her wits; they had to stay somewhere. ‘Sanders, go back to that inn on the main road. See if they’ll take us for the night.’
Without a look at Hedley, she left him and the others to the care of Mrs Little and set off along the village street. Peter walked with her, carrying keys and a lantern.
‘What happened?’ Some of the cottages were empty.
‘They didn’t have any interest in the place,’ he said. ‘Absent most of the time. Took the rents but didn’t pay the wages. Freeholders have mostly gone—Edgar went to Birmingham to work in a factory, doing well so I hear. Young Bill Nash took his family to Luton, gone into the hat trade all of ’em. They’d have starved here else.’
‘We’ll enclose now,’ she said, ‘I want you to see to it.’
‘Good.’
The gates were locked. She’d been dreading them. They’d lost their massivity and looked rusty. Weeds grew around the bolt that secured one of them to the ground, the other squealed as Peter pushed it open. ‘Hasn’t been coach nor carriage up here in a year,’ he explained. ‘Wagons generally use the back way.’
‘You go back now,’ she said.
‘You’ll need the key.’ He handed it to her; he knew where she was going. ‘May be a bit stiff but the lock’s been oiled.’ He paused. ‘We keep it nice.’
‘I knew you would.’
He was reluctant to leave her. ‘There’s not much candle left in the lantern.’
‘I won’t be long.’
The elegant leaves of the sweet chestnuts showed yellow and pale in the light of the lantern as she made her way up the avenue. A barn owl, disturbed at her approach, launched from a branch and made her jump as it flapped heavily away.
Taking the path to the church, she left the avenue behind her, glad of the lantern; cloud kept covering the moon, which was anyway on the wane. The lych gate made an entrance to a tunnel between yews which had provided longbows for the archers who’d accompanied a fifteenth-century Dapifer to Agincourt.
In the churchyard she dithered for a moment before she remembered where it was that Dapifer had taken her once to meet his ancestors. She went towards it and hit her foot against the tiny, half-hidden gravestone of a child.
At the door of the vault she had to put the lantern on the ground and struggled with both hands to turn the huge key in its escutcheoned lock. The door was eight inches thick and solid iron—God Almighty, did they expect tomb robbers?—and she had to lean backwards to pull it open.
She picked up the lantern and went carefully down the steps. One relief; the place smelled merely of fungi. The candlelight fell on shelves filled with coffins, coffins of stone like sarcophagi, coffins of ancient, cracked wood, funerary urns. She raised the lantern up and down, looking.
They have taken my
Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.
But, of course, it was the newest. She found it at the vault’s far end next to that of his mother. She’d been expecting simplicity, something constructed quickly—they’d had so little time. But this . . . oh God, they’d found some London undertaker to provide a monstrosity of lead funerary wreaths and eye-hiding cherubs to acquit their conscience and satisfy the audience they played to.
Did you laugh at it, Pip? Of course you did.
The only thing of dignity was the plaque bearing the family motto: ‘Dapifer Aquillifer’. ‘Dapifer the standard-bearer’. He’d said it was the shortest and most meaningless of all mottoes, but she’d liked it—it suited him. She put her fingers to her lips, kissed them, touched the plaque . . . and waited. There were so many things to tell him and she couldn’t think of any of them.
After a while, the cold of the stone penetrated her feet and she went back to sit on a corner of the steps, packing her skirt underneath her bottom to cushion it.
The coffins breathed mushrooms at her to mingle with the smell of autumn grass from the churchyard. Beside her, the lantern guttered and went out, leaving her in the dark—though not the blackness she’d experienced in the Raby drift; the moon came and went, casting a weak path through the door behind her that ended on her shoes.
What had she expected? Confrontation? Reunion? Instead, she was sending love and gratitude into nothing—but not a vacuum, a space. He’d gone on to wherever he was going and left her to go on to wherever she wanted to go. ‘Oh Pip,’ she said.
A figure in the doorway interrupted the light from outside. ‘Where are you? You all right? You’ve been a long time. I were worried.’
She said, crying: ‘He’s gone, he’s not here.’
‘I am,’ Hedley said.
She reached up and touched his boot. He came down the steps and sat beside her, proffering a handkerchief so that she could blow her nose. It still smelled of engine oil.
‘Shall we go, pet?’
‘Yes.’
Once they were outside, she took his arm. ‘Do we have to be married?’
‘I’m not fathering bastards, I can tell you that.’
She stopped. ‘You want children?’
‘My brains and my looks,’ he said, ‘they’ll be grand. And we’ll have young Philippa home. Ben Franklin reckons it’s not so quiet over there as it looks. I told him: I know Americans, I said, red-haired, mule-headed, bound to cause trouble.’
‘Porvorse sods,’ she said, happily.
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
BOOK ONE Boston
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
BOOK TWO London
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
BOOK THREE Newcastle
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty