Arabella expressed the hope that Todmorden would soon grow enough to force them to reopen St Mary's, the old church, near the Hall. Christ Church was well enough, but there was a world of difference between worshipping in a new building and one that was centuries old.
For Nora, Sunday worship was like washing—an act whose necessity it would be foolish to deny but one worth little comment or notice. She could remember back eleven years to when her father had gone with other methodist levellers to the Welseyan chapel up at Brunswick in Leeds, near the cattle market, to riot against the new organ the trustees had put in, but the enthusiasm behind such acts remained incomprehensible to her. Just as there were those who would argue the merits of washing the skin in hard water and soft water, so there were those who got excited over the merits of high, low, moderate, primitive, evangelical, New Connexion, and all the other one-true-and-only churches; all such enthusiasts were far beyond her understanding. For her, water was water, and if it was at least moderately pure, you could wash in it; and churches were churches and if they were at least moderately respectable, you could worship in them. Nevertheless, she found the Right Honourable and Reverend Mouncey's sermon tedious—a long, private ramble through Christmas customs back to the days of the druids, with a heated little tirade against the Puritan levellers to enliven its most barren stretch. Walter was fairly certain that it was the first draft—or even the finished draft—of a paper for some antiquarian journal.
When they returned to Pigs Hill, they exchanged their presents. Walter gave Arabella a pair of wrought-iron, five-light candelabra, cunningly worked to look like roses growing up a narrow, ruined classical column; and she gave him a japanned iron coalbox, equally ornate.
Nora shyly produced a little present she had bought for the Thorntons and was alarmed to see Arabella's face fall. "But I have nothing in return for you," she said. "It is not the custom, you know, outside the family."
But Nora, warmly squeezing Arabella's arm, reassured her. "You have already given. The most wonderful present. This Christmas with you…sharing your home…your invitation to the Hall."
"Yes," John added, "it's just a little trinket to express our thanks in more lasting form."
The "little trinket," a white porcelain cameo of a pretty maid in profile encrusted in a blob of clear glass, was, Arabella said, "just what we have always needed."
"I chose it because the girl looks so like Arabella, you see," Nora said, as she pushed it toward Walter. "It'll make a paperweight."
Nora's present to John was the special riding crop she had commissioned. At the top of its silver knob John Stevenson—Christmas 1839 was engraved in a circle around the image of a train wheel. The side had low-relief representations of the south and north portals of Summit Tunnel as they would appear when finished; she had had to take Jack Whitaker into the secret so that he could sneak out copies of the final designs. The tunnel between them was, of course, the channel for the wrist thong. The lower border was finished with a formal, repeated motif of crossed picks, shovels, and boring bars. Everyone was impressed by the ingenuity and realism of the design, and John, who had had no idea that anything of this kind was in the offing, was delighted.
"That'll be something I'll never tire of," he said. "My two little things are very dull after this."
His presents were in a parcel labelled "Nora—To Ease Rough Stones." She opened it with trembling fingers and found the two things she wanted most. One she already knew she wanted—her own copy of Cottage Economy; but she had not known that John was even aware of her interest in it. The other was something she would never have thought of in a lifetime—a telescope. But as soon as her mind's eye pictured the view from the upstairs windows of Rough Stones, looking down the steep hillside to the workings, and the men just too far away to be easily identifiable, she knew it was exactly what she would have asked for if she'd had the wit.
"You couldn't have done better," she told John.
And Walter and Arabella agreed they were a wonderful set of presents; though later, privately, they reached a different conclusion. Nora's was very good; but what would Stevenson give her next year, Arabella wondered—a ready reckoner and a set of survey instruments?
John and Nora, too, privately agreed that the Thorntons were a rum couple when it came to present giving. "I suppose next time," John said, "he'll give her the dog cart and she'll give him the wheels!"
Nora wondered how Tommy had liked his little whistle and the plume of hearse feathers.
In the evening, after family prayers, they played whist, in which John and Nora finished up three mother-of-pearl buttons, a domino, and two draughts poorer.
Later, when she and John lay in bed, with the moonshine spilling upward into the room off the fresh snow, Nora listened to the faint grinding of his molars and leaned across to put an arm around him. "Never fret," she said. "You'll see the tunnel again tomorn and be back at work the day after."
He snorted a gentle laugh. "Plain as that is it?"
"You're twitching like the devil in a gale of wind. You must in some way learn to ease yourself from work."
"That I s'll never do," he said. He spoke not challengingly nor with pride but with a weary resignation.
"I know," she said, soothingly. "I know. It's the same with me. There's not ten minutes in any day, taken at haphazard, when I've not had me mind dwell on us and our affairs."
"Aye." He tapped her arm with a finger tip. "Are you all set now for starting with the tommy shop?"
"Yes," she said, a little surprised at his sudden change of subject.
"When you said you knew where to get a good price, was it Charley Eade ye had in mind—him who tried to kill you?"
"Yes." She felt him shake his head. "What now?" she asked.
"I hope our bairns get their courage from thee—whatever they may take from me."
"Strength, goodness of heart, cunning…" she began.
He chuckled. "I think I may set all three of those at your service when we face Charley Eade this Friday, day after tomorn. If there's a produce mart."
No question of hers could wring more from him than that. The following day she found herself ready so quickly that there was a full hour to spare before breakfast, so, eating a bit of cold plum pudding from yesterday and washing it down with a cup of beer, she left John to his shaving and went out for a walk. She followed the path they had taken to church the day before.
The temperature had moderated and now stood only a degree or two below freezing, so the snow no longer blew in a light powder but packed crisp and firm underfoot. A few light clouds hung almost motionless in an ultramarine sky, and the pale sun of an early winter's morn stood a finger above Turley Holes Edge, high over the town, which still slumbered in a deep blue lake of shadow. It was the sort of day that filled you with a zest for life.
She had walked more than a mile, right around to the north side of the hill, and, not wanting to go on into its shade, was about to return when she heard a sound to kindle ecstasy and electrify every nerve—the winding of a huntsman's horn. He was playing the retreat, three strokes and a blast, to gather straying hounds. The sound carried clear up the valley through the frosty air and turned her eyes unerringly upon a stretch of parkland opposite, landscaped around a large country house with a stone-columned portico. Though it was almost half a mile away, she could just discern the master and the huntsman among the two dozen riders at the meet. The pack was a russet swarm that spilled restlessly this way and that upon the snow.
With every fibre of her being, she yearned to be among them. And when at last the moment came for them to turn, and the huntsman blew the single blast for move to covert, she actually took three steps in their direction before she realized the futility of it and danced on the spot in her vexation. They were headed north, too, away from Todmorden, away up to Stansfield Moors. She could have cried with frustration.
"Eay cop lass! Tha'llt bust a vessel."
It was John's voice. She turned, like a
child caught stealing apples. He came to where she stood and sought whatever it was that angered her so.
"Todmorden Hare Hounds?" he asked incredulously.
"I don't care what they hunt—hares, stags, otters, foxes—I'd give"—she was going to say everything but she was too practical for that—"a lot, I'd give a lot, to be there."
"Can you ride? Horseback?"
"Never mind that—I'd find a way."
"No, but can you?"
She lowered her eyes. "I mean to learn. If ye had to run to the moon and back to qualify, I'd do it. Did you mean it about getting a horse? I've been feared to ask."
He laughed. "Every word!"
But she bridled, for she thought he was simply patronizing her. "I'm not jesting. You think of yon Thornton with his Irish toothache—well, that's me with any sort of hunting. It's my blood. I can't help it."
He took her arm and turned her for home. "I'll not stand in your path," he assured her. "There's no sense making money if ye can't do the one thing you want."
When they came to the point where the northern arm of the valley would pass from view, she stopped and turned for one last look. And he, watching her eyes seek and scan for the pack and its followers, recognized again the burning girl who had walked down from the wasted rabbit warren last August and entered and filled his life.
Lime trees raised their bare boughs on either side of the lane, arching overhead to mingle with one another. The sun, now higher in the sky—high enough for it to begin to feel warm—struck among the trees, laying sharp blue shadows on the untouched snow.
Nora, turning from the view of the hunt, breathed a deep sigh of repletion and, looking up among the branches and along the vaulted canopy they stretched overhead, said: "Eay! It's like an open cathedral here. I fancy hunting'd be my best way to worship the Almighty. If worship is an exaltation, as the ministers all say, that's my worship."
He sniffed. "Make an interesting new church. The Connexion of Sabbath Hunters…The True Church of the Lord's Day Chase…You'd get half England joining you!"
But she did not laugh. And when he squeezed her arm and said "eh?" all she would answer was: "I hope you don't think that's funny."
"Dear God!" he complained. "I hope you don't think me serious."
She laughed a little then, but only a little.
After lunch they all four went down to Gawks Holm to take the regular two o'clock stage operated by Outhwaite & Co. between Leeds and Manchester. They descended at Calderbrook but they still had to pay the full-stage fare from Todmorden to Littleborough, which annoyed Nora, even though, as John pointed out, it was less than half the price of hiring the car again. He and Walter had to ride outside. When they got off at Calderbrook bridge a gentleman, walking toward Littleborough, blessed his luck and took one of their outside seats. Nora, seeing this, shouted to him that the seat was paid for to Littleborough and he was welcome to it and was to make sure they only charged him from Littleborough onward. The man smiled gallantly and tipped his hat and several of the other passengers laughed. The driver glowered at her but waited until he set off before he cared—or dared—to shout that tickets were not transferable.
"It's their way of charging," John chided.
"An excellent trick," she said, grimly. "We must learn it."
He wondered what was troubling her. Was she still feeling frustrated by the memory of the hunt? Or was it nervousness at taking the Thorntons up to Rough Stones now?
They had to walk south for a furlong or so before they came to a place where the ladies could easily reach the track. This was just south of Meg's Palace, so Nora was, in effect, tracing in reverse her first stroll along this way with Lord John. On the fairly level ground behind the Palace, most of its inhabitants were playing a game of football with occupants of the huts and smaller shanties up the line. It was the usual hundred-in-one-team-ten-in-the-other sort of game where dogs and children changed sides quicker than generals in a civil war and where no referee spoiled the play.
In front of the Palace, a few nonsporting navvies sat sunning themselves. Most were asleep, but two were reading—one of them being Pengilly, who scratched his stump incessantly and mechanically. Verminous bedding and workclothes, partially laundered, festooned every bush and hedge or hung draped from lengths of perished winding rope good for no stronger purpose.
Pengilly and the other reader, a navvy called George Hartley, known as Letterman since he had taught himself to write as well as read, stood up as soon as they saw the party approach. John, seeing Pengilly, hesitated in whatever he had been going to say. So much so that Walter eventually had to ask what the trouble was.
"I wanted two men to light us, but…" He pointed to Pengilly's leg.
"Wake one of the others," Walter suggested.
But Pengilly, hearing this, volunteered himself. "I aren't no damn cripple," he said angrily, making Walter tell him quite sharply to control his tongue.
"Two shilling each to see us through," John offered.
It seemed an outrageous fee to the other three but they all kept their counsel. And to be sure, Pengilly and Letterman were delighted to oblige. All six set off up the line, walking on the continuous stone sleeper under each rail, Walter and Arabella, followed by John and Nora, followed by the two navvies.
"It seems more huts and shanties here than last summer," Nora said.
"Lots more," John answered. "Winter time. They've all come down off the tops."
Indeed it seemed that every level inch beside the line was occupied by a shack, turf hut, or some other kind of temporary structure. Their sole purpose was to provide shelter to hardworking men after a twelve-hour day; when, as now, they had to serve, too, for the recreation of those men and their families, their woeful inadequacy was apparent even to the least discerning eye. Arabella, looking out over this squalor from the vantage of the embankment, hoped Stevenson would not start again with his suggestions that she should undertake some kind of work among these unfortunate creatures.
In any case, it was stretching things to call them unfortunate; they were paid double the wage of the best of the labourers she knew in her father's parish. If they chose to live in this way, it was an interference in their liberty to try to force them to better themselves. One had a duty to assist those in sin, to bring them back into God's grace; but to live in squalor was no actual sin—however much sin it might cause or lead to. And one's duty to alleviate poverty did not extend to harrying and interfering with those who, though far from destitute, chose to live like the lowest of the low. At heart she wanted a world like the one she had grown up in, where every labourer had his hovel, where the deserving poor were known from the wretches whose poverty was self-inflicted, where charity could tread a regular and orderly weekly course. The idea of working like some kind of missionary in this shiftless, squalid world they were now walking through was revolting to her soul.
She turned and saw Stevenson's eyes fixed upon her with that dreadful sardonic gaze, and she had to ask Walter to explain some detail about the track's construction to mask her disquiet.
The arch of the southern portal was almost complete, with only the keystone and a few of its neighbours still be to inserted. Around it, the design provided for radiating fins of dressed stone, capped by two massive rounded ledges. When complete, it would all appear to be carved from the living rock, which reared in a conical peak a hundred feet or so above the tunnel mouth.
Arabella, gazing into that black hole, gave an involuntary shudder. "It looks so dark," she said.
"Your eyes soon grow accustomed to it," Nora reassured her.
"Why—have you been in there?" Arabella asked, startled, for she remembered the brusque way she had been refused entry on her first visit to the workings.
Walter described the drama of that day to her, turning several times to Pengilly for confirmation.
"We'll see if I can even recognize the place now," Nora said. "It was nothing like so brave as Mr. Thornton claims. All danger was past
by the time I went into the working."
"Will they not object now to our entry?" Arabella asked.
"Not now the drift is finished. From this moment forth, it's Summit Tunnel to us, not Summit drift."
Nora had made two burnooses of a coarse woolen waterproof cloth lined with cotton for Arabella and herself to wear during the tour. These, together with the two torches, were stored in the linesman's hut at the mouth of the tunnel. They tied the garments on while the men got the torches well alight. Then, with Letterman ten paces ahead and Pengilly stumping ten behind, they entered the drift. The curves at each end made it impossible to see daylight through the length.
The first section, already completed and lined with brick to the full twenty-six foot diameter when Nora had last come this way, was much as she had remembered it, though now it ran considerably farther in.
"We're more advanced this end because gravity has done most of our work for us," Walter explained.
The World From Rough Stones Page 50