The Drayton Legacy

by Rona Randall

  The Drayton Legacy

  Rona Randall

  © Rona Randall 1985

  Rona Randall has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1985, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1985 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Jessica Drayton slammed the door of her brother’s house and, lifting her skirts, raced down the steps in a manner decidedly hoydenish, or so thought Hannah Walker, watching from a mullioned window. Her face still burned from the young woman’s pointed remark when colliding with her outside the Master’s study.

  “Madam, a lady never listens at keyholes.”

  As if she, intent on polishing the door knob, had been doing any such thing! But Miss Jessica’s scornful eyes, equalled only by her scornful tongue, had dismissed the convenient rubbing cloth, plainly indicating that she would have been more convinced had it been wielded by a housemaid. Never would dear Miss Phoebe have been so impolite, but dear Miss Phoebe was sweetness itself, respectful of the brother who was head of the Drayton family and courteous to her elders, whatever their standing. To put a wrong interpretation on a housekeeper’s attention to duty was something that admirable young lady would never do.

  Miss Phoebe was also pretty, which could never be said of her sister. It was hard to believe they were twins, dimpled Phoebe with her lovely curves, her red-gold ringlets and her charm, and plain Jessica, tall and thin as a beanpole, with straight dark hair pulled back from a high forehead to coil in the nape of her neck. Not even their noses bore comparison, Phoebe’s pert and tip-tilted, Jessica’s high-bridged and proud. Phoebe’s small teeth were pretty as pearls in her rosebud mouth, whereas Jessica’s, though well shaped and sparkling white, were slightly on the large side in a mouth which bore no resemblance whatsoever to a rosebud.

  No indeed, the dark-haired twin could never claim to be a beauty, whereas the dimpled one could do so with no effort at all. She had only to raise limpid blue eyes and the triumph was hers. By today’s standards of beauty, Jessica Drayton passed none of the tests, whereas her twin qualified in all.

  But even more to her discredit, Miss Jessica was outspoken as no young lady should be.

  Condemning her as a bold creature who well deserved the sharp edge of her brother’s tongue, and enjoying the recollection of heated words from beyond the study door, in which the young woman had been decidedly vanquished, Hannah Walker withdrew quickly when the girl, reaching the foot of the steps, turned and shook her mittened fist. The gesture encompassed the house and everyone in it, and not only did the housekeeper see it, but Martin Drayton in the waiting gig. He needed no keyholes to tell him that brother Joseph had made short shrift of their sister but, unlike the housekeeper, he felt only compassion.

  Not that he was surprised. He had tried to warn Jessica not to beard the lion in its den or it would certainly roar. Joseph, head of the family, could be ruthless in his jurisdiction and adamant in his demand for implicit obedience, and in this he had every right for the rule of primogeniture had laid it upon him. From his fine house on the hill, with its convenient view of his mother’s on the slope below and, at the other side of the valley, the family pot bank, he knew everything that went on in both establishments.

  Or believed he did.

  “Say not a word!” Jessica commanded as Martin reached down to help her up beside him. “Not a word, I tell you, or I shall choke!’”

  Fury was choking her already, despite her valiant attempts to stifle it, so he gathered up the reins in silence and urged the horse forward.

  “And don’t look back, brother. I am sure the detestable Hannah Walker is watching. Nothing would gratify her more than to see concern in your face.”

  Once beyond their brother’s gravelled drive, the gig lurched along rutted tracks downhill to Burslem, but Jessica seemed unaware of the jolting until Martin slowed down to avoid pot holes, whereupon she declared, “Joseph should forbid his men to dig clay from the byways, leaving them unfit for travellers.”

  “Men who make pots dig their clay wherever they can find it.”

  “Then they should repair the holes when finished, instead of leaving them to fill with water when it rains or to jolt a body to pieces when dry.”

  “You were born in the potteries, sister. By now you should be accustomed to their hazards.”

  “I hate the potteries! I hate the dirt and the smoke and the drunkenness of the men, idling in inns when their pots are being fired, brawling with tinkers and hawkers and even amongst themselves, their tongues so loosened with ale that any passing crateman soon finds out when the next pack load will be travelling to Liverpool or Manchester or any other destination. No wonder the mules arrive late, either bereft of goods or with merely a pile of broken crocks, and no wonder consignments of Cornish clay intended for Drayton’s find their way to rival potters.”

  “We need better modes of transport and a good trunk road direct to Liverpool on which carts could travel well and the drivers give fair challenge to lurking crate men.”

  “A trunk road in this inaccessible part of England!”

  “It would cease to be inaccessible then. But canals would be even better for moving consignments to Liverpool’s docks and for transporting china clay from Cornwall once it has been unloaded from coastal steamers in the Mersey.”

  “Joseph would scoff”

  “Joseph has already scoffed, but the day will come…”

  Briefly, she forgot her own distress in the face of her brother’s fervour. One day, Martin would be a greater potter than Joseph would ever be for he not only possessed greater imagination, but greater vision too.

  Joseph Drayton, though only thirty, was one of the most respected men in Staffordshire as well as being handsome and, in the eyes of ambitious mothers, a very eligible bachelor. Hadn’t he trebled the output of the family pot bank since his father’s death and so been able to add three more bottle ovens on the wasteland adjoining it, and hadn’t he bought for himself that very desirable residence, Carrion House — desirable to anyone who was wise enough to disregard the sinister legends attached to it — as well as providing for his widowed mother? Thanks to Joseph, Emily Drayton had remained in Medlar Croft, the house which had been her home ever since she married and in which her ten children had been born.

  Of these children five remained — Joseph himself, then Harriet, a year younger and now married and living in Cheshire, then the ill-matched twins, Jessica and Phoebe, who had celebrated their joint nineteenth birthday only last week, and lastly Martin, nearly eighteen.

  A fine
man and a dutiful son, was Joseph Drayton, somehow managing to bestow a dowry on Harriet despite the rundown state of his father’s affairs at the time of the man’s unexpected death, and accepting Martin for a five-year apprenticeship at the age of fourteen.

  He had also increased the employment of children, including those who were tiny enough to crawl beneath the ovens to clean out the piles of wood ash, thereby earning the gratitude of their parents for the penny a day he paid them. Joseph had never shared his father’s aversion to child labour, asserting that such children, like Si Kendall who came from one of the poorest homes in Burslem, had no need of schooling, and that to ban child labour — as some fanatics were currently campaigning for — would be to deprive their needy parents of money and the children, in consequence, of food. He was therefore not only philanthropic, but charitable.

  His own brother’s education had been terminated for the betterment of the family fortunes. Their father’s belief that knowledge was worth acquiring for its own sake — even for his daughters, on whom he had squandered money for governesses — had landed him nowhere, and his habit of browsing among books had only resulted in neglect of the family business.

  To his eldest son’s protests George Drayton had turned a deaf ear. They had been constantly at loggerheads, Joseph vehement in condemnation of his father’s attitude to life, and George stubbornly clinging to it. So his death had really been a blessing, though a shock to everyone since he had seemed to be in the best of health. George Drayton had never suffered a day’s real illness in his life, except during the last few months when bouts of what Dr Wotherspoon diagnosed as indigestion had been repetitive. Such indispositions were common enough when a man was aging — as, indeed, was the rapid loss of hair which had overtaken the old man, plainly attributable to the constant wearing of a long, old-fashioned wig.

  But his wife, who saw him more frequently without it, had viewed the loss with regret. She had coaxed him to try Aylsham’s Pomade in the hope of restoring the locks which she had always admired, but either the pomade failed to live up to its reputation or, more likely, he forgot to use it. So the loss of hair persisted, as did the stomach upsets. And then, quite suddenly, he collapsed and died.

  The shock of his death was all the greater because he had seemed hale and hearty that day. He had eaten his usual midday meal at the big, carved table which had been the Master Potter’s desk ever since the family business had been founded, and the meal was the same as his workers’ because he always maintained that what was good enough for them was good enough for him — a bowl of broth, a hunk of crusty bread and a wedge of cheese, washed down with a beaker of ale; not enough to cause even a mild stomach upset, let alone an attack which old Wotherspoon could only attribute to heart failure since he recognised no other symptoms.

  Perhaps, as Joseph had declared, his father would have been wiser to return home for a proper meal, as befitted an employer. Being indulgent to his workers was one thing, but placing himself on a par with them was another. He had even refused to dock the cost of the midday meal from their wages, a matter soon remedied when his heir succeeded.

  Joseph had personally broken the news of George Drayton’s death to his mother, refusing to allow the muddle-headed doctor to do so. Wotherspoon was a ditherer whose agitated announcement would have made it a great deal worse for her. Everyone admired Joseph’s thoughtfulness and compassion — except perhaps a certain hussy in the finishing shed. Meg Gibson had looked up from her banding wheel, turning-tool poised, and said, “So he’s gone, God rest his soul. Couldn’t be more timely, eh?”

  Through the open door of the shed she had watched Joseph Drayton walking sorrowfully beside the hand cart on which his father’s body was being conveyed home, then, when the humble cortege was out of sight, she had sauntered across the potters’ yard to the Master’s office and emerged with the crocks from which he had taken his last meal. She had washed them reverently at the yard pump and returned them to the empty desk where the old man had sat browsing through his beloved books instead of attending to business matters, but when she re-entered the finishing shed the reverence in her face was replaced by a brooding look that struck a chill into those who saw it.

  But Meg Gibson was an uncomfortable sort of girl. Even her looks were different — black eyes, black hair, white skin. Men thought her a beauty. They eyed her openly and she never discouraged them. Women hated her. Some said she had the second sight; others called her a witch, but when she heard their whispers all she did was laugh.

  Once Joseph Drayton took command, there was no more gossiping at the benches and no more idleness in the Master’s office. The books which had enticed his father away from his duties were used to stoke the ovens — parchment made good kindling along with timber and satisfied Joseph’s aversion to waste because the remains, mixed with wood ash, became an additional glazing ingredient. Waste not, want not, Joseph frequently quoted along with other virtuous slogans. The days of neglect were over. There would be no more indolence, no more dreaming now he was Master of Drayton’s, and the indentures of Martin’s apprenticeship ensured that the boy was aware of it.

  What made Martin recall those indentures now, when concern for Jessica was uppermost in his mind, he had no idea, but without warning the recollection overrode his anxiety about his sister’s love for Roger Acland and her folly in facing the head of the family with it. Acland was an impoverished relation of the Freemans, hereditary owners of Tremain Hall with its vast estates, also of the Tremain coal mines in Stoke and Spen Green. The inheritance stemmed in direct line from their mother’s side — Charlotte Freeman had been a Tremain before marriage — and had there been the faintest hope of a poor relation acquiring the Freeman wealth Joseph might have looked more favourably upon him as a suitor, but there were too many Freeman offspring throughout the many branches of the family for there to be any chance of that. The number of these branches was as extensive as those of the Draytons, and all with children in the hereditary line.

  Martin grieved for his sister, regretted her impulsive visit which must surely have made matters worse, rued his own weakness in letting her persuade him to drive her there, and allowed his imagination to create a vivid picture of Joseph’s reception of her. He could see their brother’s face all too vividly, and in doing so recalled its expression when his own indentures had been signed on his fourteenth birthday, a little over four years ago and barely two weeks after his father’s death. For Jessica, Joseph’s face would have been cold and unyielding; for his young brother it had been satisfied, complacent, and equally unyielding.

  “These indentures must and shall be observed to the full,” he had emphasised after the two witnesses he had summoned had departed. “I rely on you, my dear mother, to do your part in seeing that the boy heeds them constantly, and I, for my part, will do likewise.” And their mother, who had unwillingly curtailed her youngest son’s education at her eldest son’s command, had uttered an inarticulate agreement, then listened obediently as Joseph read them aloud.

  “…the goods of his said Master he shall not embezil or waste, nor them lend, without his consent to any; at Cards, Dice or any other unlawful Games he shall not play. Taverns and Alehouses he shall not haunt or frequent; Fornication he shall not commit; Matrimony he shall not contract. From the services of his said Master he shall not at any time depart or absent himself without his Master’s leave, but in all things as good and faithful Apprentice shall and will demean and behave himself toward his said Master…’

  Martin knew the words by heart, and for almost another year, a period which stretched ahead like eternity, he was bound by them.

  Sensing his sudden depression, Jessica was jerked out of her own distress. She said comfortingly, “You are right, Martin. The day you dream of will come because you will make it come, and all this will be changed because of you…”

  She flung out an arm in an expansive gesture, encompassing the whole of Burslem village spread out below. In the early part of the c
entury it had been virtually isolated from the rest of England, but now, with the approach of 1750, it had achieved a reputation for an industry with increasing potential. Because of the availability of clay, and of coal for fuel, it was becoming the hub of the pottery industry, but it still remained an insular community in the backwoods, untouched by outside influences and the growing culture in the south, and so it would remain until men with Martin Drayton’s vision expanded its horizons.

  Drayton forebears had been listed in parish registers as far back as 1570, an illiterate family who had been amongst the first to dig up the local clay, build their own ovens and, through trial and error, perfect those ovens into the bottle shapes quickly copied by their rivals and which now scattered the landscape. Someone far back in the family had possessed the vision and imagination now manifesting itself in Martin, and had developed it within the limits of his time and generation; another had trekked across England on horseback in search of additional clay sources when demands on the local earth threatened their own supplies, and discovered, in faraway Cornwall, clay of a whiteness to equal any that came out of China and so stole a march on their competitors’ rough earthenware.

  But transporting clay from such a distance took more time and money than the current owner of Drayton’s considered justified, and in the interests of economy Joseph had cut the production of chinaware to a minimum since his father’s death, maintaining that red earthenware was good enough for the masses and glazed stoneware for those able to afford it, and the prosperity he had brought to Drayton’s confirmed his judgement. Even so, Martin dreamed of more elegant ware, finely executed and decorated, and was convinced that there was a select market which would pay handsomely for such goods.

  Burslem had once been a pretty village of thatched cottages all crowded together on the crest of a hill, since when it had spread downwards until the cottages were outnumbered by the bottle ovens which Jessica’s expansive gesture now included. These massive structures scarred the landscape, belching smoke to increase the pall already hanging over the place. Then her wide, engaging smile flashed out as she finished, “ — but I shall leave it all behind, whatever dear Joseph decrees.”