The conversation was a reminder to Margaret that she would need to consider her own future. But her thoughts were diverted from this by a letter which had arrived at The Ivies during her brief absence. She had written earlier to her friend Lydia to say where she was staying. Now she was alarmed to see that the letter sent in return was, like her own, sealed with black wax. She opened it hastily.
The news it contained made her cry out in sympathy. Lydia’s news was as bad as could be imagined. Her fiancé had been killed in an ambush laid in the Khyber Pass by the Afghan leader, Sher Ali. This fact she stated baldly enough, but then her writing became a scrawl and her message distraught as she expressed desolation at the thought of the life of futility which lay ahead. ‘For you know, my dear Margaret, how high I rated my good fortune in being chosen by so admirable a man when I had so little to recommend me.’
Margaret guessed what she meant. Even if her grief should abate sufficiently for her to take notice of any other man, Lydia herself knew well enough how lacking she was in outward grace and beauty. And although her parents lived comfortably enough in Bath, she had revealed to Margaret in past exchanges of confidence that her father’s whole estate was entailed on his nephew. If she failed to establish a household of her own before her father died, she must look to a future life without independent means.
For a second time Margaret was reminded, even as she hurried to write her condolences, that this was also her own situation. She began to consider the possibilities seriously, but did not speak of them to anyone at first, preferring to wait until the family’s affairs had reached a more settled state.
Ralph’s position was more quickly improved. He burst into the nursery a few days later. Arthur was receiving his evening feed from the wet-nurse, so that Ralph ought to have retired from the scene at once, but he was still staring at the woman’s bare breast when Margaret hurried him from the room. She intended to scold, but did not have the heart when she saw his excitement.
‘I am to go to Oxford after all, Margaret. William has undertaken my support. I may repay him, he says, later in life when I have a stipend to bear the debt. He approves my plan of ordination and feels that it should not be prevented by an accident which comes at such an unfortunate time in my life. I should leave at once, he says, and work hard to make up the time lost.’
Margaret was pleased on his behalf, and called Betty at once to help with his packing. She wondered whether the generous offer came from William’s own purse or whether by some miracle the jade collection had proved to be more valuable even than anyone had suspected, raising enough money at auction to pay off the whole of her father’s debt. But William shook his head gloomily when she enquired after the success of the sale. The collection had raised a far smaller amount than expected. It was difficult to tell why. Perhaps the whole country was feeling some of the effects of the trading difficulties which afflicted Bristol and Glasgow with such particular severity. Or perhaps John Junius had exaggerated the value of his own pieces in order that the legacy he had intended to make to the city should seem more generous.
On the heels of the jade sale came the auction of Brinsley House. Margaret, of course, did not attend it, and it was once again from William that she learned how low the bids had been. There was no one in Bristol, he explained, who could afford at this moment to put down a large amount of capital for such a substantial property. The Receiver had been told in advance that this would certainly be the case, and that it would be necessary to place a low reserve on the house if it were to find a buyer at all, but he had refused to believe it. His reserve had been too high, and had not been reached. Now he would have to accept that its value today was only a fraction of what might have been asked for it a year or two earlier. He would have to sell it to anyone who was prepared to take it on, however low the price.
Margaret was disturbed by the news, but William tried to persuade her that it was not important.
‘When all this is finished, Father will have nothing left in any case,’ he said. ‘You must make up your mind to that. Whatever the size of the total amount raised by the sale of all his possessions, the advantage can only be to the creditors of the bank. There has never been any possibility that the Receiver’s calls could be met with any money to spare.’
It was what David had already told her, and this time she forced herself to believe it. She asked William more questions and learned that David’s other prophecies were also coming true. The Receiver had made a first call on the shareholders for a sum equal to eight times the shareholding which each possessed. Even that would not have been enough to cover the debt, but still it was too much. So many had already been driven into bankruptcy, failing to meet the call in spite of the sale of their houses and businesses, that a second call had gone out to those who remained solvent.
‘How is Dr Scott? Did he survive the first call?’ asked Margaret, remembering how grateful he had been when allowed to invest in the bank, and how abusively he had reacted to its collapse.
William shook his head.
‘His worst fears have already been realized. His house is up for sale, like so many others, but it is no longer his own property. The proceeds will go to the Receiver.’
‘So what will he do?’
‘He should be luckier than some, since his profession requires little capital. And he has a son, Charles, who is also a qualified doctor, working in London. He will presumably be able to find work in the capital if he goes to live with Charles. For the time being, I have come to an arrangement with him. If I pay his bills now, the money will go into his pool of assets on which the Receiver may call. I have promised instead to settle the whole account for his attendance on Sophie and Arthur after he has been formally declared bankrupt.’
Margaret had been so upset by the doctor’s drunken behaviour on the night of Arthur’s birth that she found it hard to be as sympathetic as she ought. Yet she could not help seeing that his provocation had been great - indeed, she was surprised that he was still willing to attend William’s family.
Until a short time ago her life had been sheltered, allowing her no experience of the manner in which passion overcomes reason. By now she had learned the strength of love. What she had not yet experienced, and could not comprehend, was the power of hatred.
17
To a man of humbled pride, what generosity can exceed a gift made with such discretion that it is impossible to thank the giver? Not long after the auction at which Brinsley House had failed to find a buyer, Margaret was visiting her father when a letter was delivered for him. He read it through twice and then handed it across to her. It came from a firm of lawyers, not his own. They had the honour to inform Mr Lorimer that Brinsley House had recently been purchased by a client who wished for the time being to remain anonymous. Now that the price had been paid to the Receiver, their client wished to assure Mr Lorimer that he would be welcome to remain in the house for as long as he wished.
‘Who can it be?’ asked Margaret.
‘I have never doubted that I still have friends,’ said her father with some complacency. ‘No doubt they have banded together to support me. Will you come back, Margaret, or do you intend staying with William?’
Margaret recognized the appeal which her father was too proud to put into words, and at once assured him that she would return. It proved a bleak homecoming. The contents of the house were to be auctioned in situ - notices of the sale had already appeared in the local newspapers. She arrived at the house with her luggage to find the auctioneer and his clerk busily naming and numbering each lot for the catalogue. They worked without sentiment, only pausing occasionally to debate whether a particular piece of furniture could be ascribed to a particular date or maker; whether the handsome leather-bound books whose gold tooling glinted behind the mesh which guarded the bookcases should be sold by the volume or by the shelf. Margaret watched as they inspected the portraits of her ancestors. They were unlabelled, because the family had always known who they were. ‘Port
rait of an unknown man in seventeenth-century costume,’ dictated the auctioneer in a toneless voice, and Margaret turned away from the scene with a heavy heart.
One of the earliest pieces of property to be impounded by the Receiver had been the jewellery which John Junius gave to his wife on the occasion of the ball for the Prince of Wales. She had worn it only for that one event, the last social occasion of her life. The jewels had been sent to the bank for safe keeping on the day after the ball and were found there when the chairman’s strong boxes were opened by court order. Like the jade, they were sent to London to be valued and sold. Their magnificence had so much impressed the fashionable society of Bristol that rumour increased their value with every day that passed. This made the news which finally arrived from London nothing short of a sensation. Every piece - necklace, ear rings and hair ornament - was made of paste! The imitation was of good quality and had been set with consummate skill, but as jewels the stones were worthless.
Margaret heard this news with bewilderment. The local newspaper, which printed it at length, filled even more of its space with an account of how imitation jewellery was made, describing in detail how much in such cases the colour owed to the foil which was used to back the paste. Margaret recognized that her opinion was uninformed, but she remembered the pile of stones which she had been allowed to slide through her fingers. Their colour and beauty even then, before they had been set, had taken her breath away. She had been certain that they were worth a fortune. Could she really have been deceived?
Others in the city shared her doubts. The affairs of the rubies took a prominent place in many subsequent issues of the Bristol Mercury. Mr Parker, the jeweller, was interviewed and made a statement. He had been given the larger stones by Mr John Junius Lorimer, who had asked him in addition to purchase a sufficient number of tiny diamonds and then to set the whole to a design which was supplied. The stones which he had set were the stones which he had been given. He believed them to be genuine. He had nothing more to say.
Mr Parker’s situation was not a happy one. The correspondence columns of the Mercury were filled with theories from which he could not hope to escape with credit. Was he so unskilled as a jeweller that he could not distinguish between real and false stones? If he still maintained that he had been given real rubies, what had he done with them after replacing them with imitations? As he maintained his silence, other comments and accusations flooded in. There was someone who had been sure at the time and was prepared to swear now that Mrs Lorimer’s jewels on the night of the ball, although showy, were worthless. There was someone else who had no doubt at all that on that occasion she had been wearing a small fortune round her neck, and that its subsequent disappearance must mean that her husband had abstracted it because of his advance knowledge of the collapse of Lorimer’s Bank. Mr Parker, no doubt, had been asked by his client to prepare duplicates of all the pieces so that the real jewels could be hidden away in preparation for the time when the chairman emerged from that prison sentence which he appeared richly to deserve. Mr Parker should realize that although he had committed no criminal act in making an imitation at the request of his client - for it was well known that many wealthy women were content to wear replicas of the real jewels which they kept in the bank - his silence now constituted an act of fraud against those innocent creditors to whom all the Lorimer property rightfully belonged.
Mr Parker remained silent but consulted his lawyer. The Receiver took note of the correspondence and consulted the police. John Junius Lorimer asserted in a signed statement that he had commissioned the captain of one of the Lorimer Line’s trading ships to buy rubies on his behalf, that the stones he had received from the captain were those which he had handed to the jeweller, and that the jewellery which his wife had worn to the ball was the jewellery which had been placed in his strong box the next morning and not removed by him at any time since then.
None of these statements did anything to quieten the public debate. It was as though a community which found the complicated financial dealings of the bank too difficult to understand had decided to base its estimate of the chairman’s guilt or innocence on one comparatively small transaction, and was discovering that even this was far from simple. Into this atmosphere of surmise and suspicion another newspaper announcement fell like a bombshell: a Mercury reporter had visited Mr David Gregson’s apartments and discovered that he had fled the country.
At once there was a swing in public opinion. Leading articles were written demanding to know why regular visits to the police had not been made a condition of his bail. In a new spate of correspondence it was pointed out that the manager of a bank must have more opportunity than anyone else for abstracting articles from his own strong room. The assumption that he had been responsible for fraudulent accounts was used to justify the accusation that he had somehow managed to steal and copy the jewellery; the assumption that he had in fact committed such a theft and had the replicas made was turned back on itself to prove that he was the sort of man who would have no compunction in defrauding his depositors.
As the accusations against David mounted, Margaret’s tears began to flow again. She thought that she had managed to control her emotions and reconcile herself to losing him. But if she had needed any proof that she still loved him, it was to be found in the distress she felt now. While unable to accept his criticisms of her father, she had recognized that they were sincerely felt; in fact, it was because he was sincere that he had so irremediably damaged their relationship. She still trusted her judgement of his sincerity; and if she was right, David himself could not be guilty of all the terrible things that were being said against him. She took her troubles to the library one afternoon when William had come to see her father. It was the day before the trial was at last due to begin, and all of them were feeling the strain of its imminence.
The lack of sympathy which greeted her suggestion that David could not possibly be such a villain as the newspapers were trying to suggest shocked her. William, in particular, gave the faint, contented smile which had irritated her ever since the days of their nursery quarrels.
‘He should have faced it out like a man,’ William said. ‘If he was innocent, he would have been a fool to run. You must accept his flight, Margaret, as a confession of guilt. It will certainly be seen in that light tomorrow.’
Margaret turned to her father in the hope that he at least would provide reassurance. ‘He only followed your instructions, Papa,’ she said. ‘You did everything for the best. So must he have done.’
‘He was not equal to responsibility,’ said John Junius dismissively. ‘I am sorry, Margaret, that you should have had this disappointment. We were all mistaken in him, I fear. I blame myself for allowing you to become too greatly attached. I hope you will soon be able to forget him and to make a new life for yourself.’
Margaret stared at him for a moment. Then she ran from the room. For almost an hour she lay on her bed, sobbing with despair and helplessness that, in an affair whose truth she was incapable of judging, the views of the two men she loved most in the world should prove irreconcilable.
Her misery could not last. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair might be, David had gone out of her life for ever. She must be loyal to her father, because no one else was at hand to accept loyalty from her.
Taking a deep breath to bring her emotions under control, she put on her warmest cape and went to refresh her body with a walk in the gardens. The atmosphere of the neglected house was cold and damp, but she felt as much stifled by it as in the heaviest days of summer. Although she had by now emerged from the two-month period of mourning in which a bereaved daughter was expected to stay at home, the disaster which had struck the family had continued to confine her there, just as the need for economy prevented her from changing her dress from plain paramatta to the black silk which by now would have been allowed by convention. She felt the need of exercise and took no account of the cold as she walked briskly to the edge of the lower terra
ce and stood looking down over the river.
Down this channel, she supposed, David had sailed soon after their quarrel. Was it her fault that he had destroyed his reputation by leaving the country? She had offered to go with him at first, and later had allowed him to leave without her: at no time had she had the good sense to warn him that he would be criticized for going. If she had accepted his suggestion and gone to William to ask for the money for her own passage, her brother, with his greater worldly sense, would have pointed out the dangers of such a disappearance. Unsophisticated as she was, the conclusions which would be drawn from David’s flight had not even occurred to her.
Again she reminded herself that it was too late for regrets. She made her way past the ice-house which would not be filled this year, and walked down through the wilderness which began where the formal part of the garden ended. The paths here were steep and rough, shaded with high banks of rhododendrons and accompanied by runnels of water which at this season became waterfalls, splashing their way down to the Avon. The climb back would be a hard one, although the paths zig-zagged to reduce the gradient, but she looked forward to the exertion.
She came to the point where the ground dropped sheer away in a cliff above the riverside road. The land still belonged to the Lorimers — or, rather, to the unknown gentleman who had bought it - but it was too steep here to be climbed. Instead she made her way to the side boundary of the garden.
The Lorimer Line Page 19