He took her hand and squeezed it. "Not be too long now," he said.
Over the Foss and out of the city they passed the malt kiln. The air was laden with its sugary reek.
"That'll put fresh heart into Ironside," John said.
Nora grinned back, her face red in the glow from the glassworks next door to the malting; it was a wayward grin too. And sure enough, when the light had died, she began to worm her hand into his trousers. He gripped her wrist and said firmly, "No."
"You always say no, anywhere except in bed, and you always end up doing it."
"You will make noises when you get excited. And Ironside will hear."
"Any minute now Ironside will start to sing. The dark frightens him and he sings."
"Anyway, I don't always say no."
"Often enough." She helped him not to burst his buttons.
"I'm not going to take them off," he said. "Suppose the coach upset and we
were knocked senseless."
As well as her voluminous skirts would allow, she leaped across him, straddling him with open thighs. She put her nose to his as he began to caress her. "So practical," she whispered. "That's why I love you. Practical man. For being such a practical contractor and getting company coaches just for you and me."
She could feel his excitement growing. "These new hoops are more practical than the old walls of Jericho—or calico—or whatever it was," he said. He tried to be light and nonchalant but could not keep the shiver from his voice.
She inched her knees forward, close to contact. His hands strayed over her cheeks, around her waist, and forward to her navel. With his thumbs he pressed gently; there was an answering pressure from the baby inside. She breathed sharply inward. "No denying it now, is there," he said.
"You know how"—she shivered—"superannuated that makes me feel. When they squirm like that. Oourgh!" And she shuddered again at the memory.
His hands slipped away to encircle her waist.
"Shan't hunt anymore," she said. "Just ride."
He chuckled. "With Winifred you gave up riding soon as you knew. It gets later each time."
"Aye If we have ten, the last will be born in the saddle. A birth at a death." She giggled at the thought.
He patted her bare hips and pushed her lightly away. "I thought you weren't really inter—"
Her warm lips smothered his and, moments later, her fingers eased him into her. The motion of the carriage, over long, luxurious minutes, while they kissed and caressed and amplified its rhythm, carried them up. Ironside did not sing, but Nora did cry out in her ecstasy. The coach went relentlessly on. Only John went limp with the fear that they were overheard. Nora, when she was calm again, chuckled as she felt him shrivel within.
"Sorry!" she whispered into his neck; it was at least half true.
Thorpe Manor, or Thorpe Old Manor as it had now to be called, was begun in the fourteenth century. It had lost its manorial rights some fifty years back when the Creswold family moved to their new Hall, a large Palladian mansion on the higher ground to the northwest of the village of Fangthorpe. On a smiling day in spring or summer, when the warm Yorkshire stone was crisp and sunlit and when the shade of the young cedars dappled the sweeping lawns, it was easy enough to approve the change. But when the northeast winds came howling down out of Scandinavia and thick blankets of snow turned the whole Yorkshire wold into a continent of its own, to which there was no access and from which there was no escape, then the villagers would look up at the new manor and shiver. And they would remember all that their parents and grandparents had said of the folly of building on yon 'ights. Then even the proudest Creswold must have wished to be back at the old place, nestling on sheltered southern slopes overlooking the deep dale of Painslack Dikes. Didn't legends say the Romans had once built a great town there? Well, they had understood the sun and the south, all right.
Even when the night was merely drizzly and uncomfortable, as now, it felt somehow milder off the browtop. John and Nora, who had opened the carriage window for a better view, sensed the difference as soon as they lurched off the stony, rutted highway and on to the superbly levelled drive that John had given one of his best gangs a whole month and a hundred pounds to lay.
He relaxed at once, no longer needing to correct the random lurches of the carriage. "Home is where the road runs smooth," he said contentedly.
"That's a definition I prefer," she told him.
They heard Ironside vainly trying to blow a blast on the horn he kept in his pocket. John leaned out of the window, took it from him, and, wiping it well, blew the sweet, piercing note he had learned as a shotfirer years before.
Nora, in a voice deliberately girlish and vapid, said, "Say—is there anything you can't do, Mr. Stevenson?"
"Aye," he said. "You proved it." In the dark he felt for her breasts; and though he found only her shoulder blades, she knew what he meant.
"Sorry," she said again, hugging him.
"We'll make up for it later," he said.
She thought, but did not say, peut-être; the ambiguities were too rich.
Willet, their groom, came strolling up the lane to meet them. The turn into the stable yard was too sharp for a broad coach with three up, so they had to stop outside and unhitch the leader. Tip, the King Charles dog, and Puck, the small Dane dog, yapped and fretted at the perpetual iron cataract of the carriage wheel, impatient to be noticed.
As John and Nora dismounted from the coach, Todd, the younger of the two upstairs maids, came hurrying over the lawn bearing a lantern to light them in. Nora was surprised. "Where's Mrs. Jarrett?" she asked, pushing down the leaping dogs.
"It's her music night at the asylum, m'm," the girl said. And what dull weather! And had the journey been tedious? And please to mind the paving stone that had been put back wrong. Pleasure and nervousness kept her babbling the whole way in.
Tip, the loyalist, stayed by them, sniffing and fussing. Puck, long-suffering egotist, left to claim pride of place at the hearth.
"What's for supper?" John asked.
"The children and Mrs. Jarrett and nurse had collared calf's head. Cold."
They stamped the mud from their feet and John bolted the lobby door. "And the servants?" he asked.
"Shepherd's pie, sir."
"If there's any left, we'll have the shepherd's pie." And when the girl was gone, he added: "The woman's mad. Both of them. She and the nurse. I hope they keep her at the asylum."
"John!" Nora pinched his arm.
"Who else but her would give a cold meal on such a night?"
"It's her way. And we've always said we didn't want them brought up to luxury."
The argument cut not the thinnest ice. "You've been poor too," he said. "Even if you had only one potato, or a half a turnip, you'd never have served them cold on a night like this. And I'll wager it was cold baths too. Eay!" His eyes rolled in exasperation. "Cold supper, cold baths, cold nursery."
She caught his arm as he turned to the foot of the stairs. "Well, don't wake them now. They'll get all excited, and it'll be impossible to get them back to sleep. When are you off tomorrow?"
Resigned, he crossed to the fireplace and poked the logs to life. "Early," he said. "I'll ride over to Malton, see to this trouble on the Scarborough line, this quaking bog. I'll come back by York, so I'll be early."
"You'll see the children then."
"I've not seen them for a fortnight," he sighed. "Still…" He picked up two letters waiting for him on the mantel. "France," he said, looking at them. "And Exeter."
"What are your plans for the week?" Nora asked; with half an ear she was listening to Willet carrying a trunk upstairs, preparing herself to run out and shout at him if he grazed the woodwork.
"I'll go on to Stockton Thursday, see how they're coping with the brick troubles. On to Warrington Friday. And Exeter Saturday."
She relaxed as Willet reached the landing and put down the trunk.
"I'll revise that," John said, having read the lette
r from France. "They want me in Rouen next week."
"Not trouble?"
"They mention none. I'll come back here from Warrington and go on to Exeter to arrive Monday." He stretched and yawned. "I can sail to Havre from Plymouth." He pulled a face, for he hated sea travel.
"Never mind," she comforted him. "One day they'll build a bridge to France, and then you can ride all the way on horseback."
"Oh, thank you," he said glumly and read the second letter. "From Thornton," he said, passing it to her when he had finished.
She did not at once read it. "What do you think of my coming to France?" she asked. "This strange invitation from the Rodets. The more I think of it, the more certain I am that he put her up to it."
"You don't think she's genuine?"
"Oh, she is genuine. But he knows how to use her."
John smiled to himself.
"What's that grin supposed to convey?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Well, it'd do no harm to learn a word or two of French," he said. "And you'd enjoy meeting Sam at proper leisure."
She nodded and turned to the letter from Thornton:
Dear Stevenson,
I hear from your man Tucker that you and Mrs. S. have been spending some days at Sir George Beador's place. Did you know that it used to belong to my uncle before he sold up and went to France, where you can play the gentleman on £120 a year? He was the uncle who brought me up after my people died. I can just imagine Beador there; he and Uncle Claude George Thornton are two cast from the same mould. How long, I wonder, will he last?
I wonder, too, if you met anyone who remembered me? Curious, is it not, that I dislike the place so intensely and desire no memory of it to linger, yet am vain enough to wish to be remembered! And who would remember me? Servants and outdoor staff! Heigh ho!! Believe nothing they say, of course. You know how credulous country people are and how they cannot live without making a nine-years' wonder of every petty event.
However, my real purpose in writing was merely to say how glad I was to be appointed down here where I am certain to meet you again, and right soon. Our jaws will ache with talk of old times I'm sure. And you will marvel at the atmospheric railway! Have you seen the one near Dublin, from Kingstown to Dalkey? This is to work on the same principle. I may tell you privately that I have grave technical doubts, but I shall not commit them to paper. Do you think Brunel is really as confident as he always gives out? I frequently wonder. How the great engineer, who built two trans-Atlantic steamers and designed the whole of the Great Western Railway, can even consider this atmospheric system baffles me. Still, I suppose that, if Homer is permitted to nod, our own geniuses may be allowed their failures, too. But rather expensive, what?
Mrs. Thornton continues in indifferent health, sometimes blossoming, but always languishing again. She has never been entirely healthy since Letty was born a year ago. Perhaps we are to have no more than four children, God be praised that three of them are boys and all are so well. They adore their baby sister, who is a pickle and a joy. Nicholas constantly asks after his big godfather and nice godmother. I hope their mother may be well enough this year to accept your kind invitation to Thorpe Manor; I am sure your splendid upland air would benefit her…
Nora skipped the closing pleasantries. "He still wears his heart well hung out," she said.
Chapter 4
A watery moon shone in the dawn sky when John set off next morning on Hermes, his favourite horse. Hermes had been with him since his earliest days as a contractor over in the West Riding. Just before John mounted, Willet put a finger to his lips and beckoned him over to the tack-room door. There in the dark lay Ironside, stuporifically asleep in the sodden greatcoat he had worn through last night's drizzle. He was gently steaming. The air was pungent with him.
They shut the top half of the door quietly. "An amazing machine, the human frame," John said, "when you think of all the punishment it can tolerate."
"Aye," agreed Willet, who did nothing to excess.
The light northeasterly breeze grew stronger as John neared the highway. The skies must have cleared in the small hours, for the ground and air were close to freezing. There was no shelter from the cold for several miles either; the Malton road led north along a high ridge of the wold. But the views were compensation enough—eastward over the rolling hills to the German Ocean and the sunrise; westward over the deeply shaded Vale of York and down into the dying night.
He blinked to shake the windwater from his eyes and drew his lungs full of the morning air. It was almost worth a quaking bog to have the excuse to ride this way on such a day. The only folk he met were shepherds and field labourers starting their day's work; their greetings were cheerful enough, but their pinched faces and starved bodies spoke of poverty and neglect. John noticed it more than most, being used to his navvies, who could outwork half a dozen of these farm labourers. He had always thought starvation wages were bad business. Even on his first contract, when the shopkeepers in the villages beside the line had tried selling rotten goods to his lads, he had set up his own tommy shop to sell cheap wholesome staples, like beef and bread and beer and potatoes.
No, he thought, to be fair, their tommy shop had been Nora's idea. She had meant it as a way of making more money; but it had paid both ways—financially and in well-fed gangs. Now, on every contract where there were more than three hundred lads, there was at least one Stevenson tommy-man on commission, buying staples of wholesome quality and selling at small margins. For the privilege, they paid Stevenson's thirty pounds a year for each hundred men, and if they weren't altogether too clever, each tommy-man could make a little more than that for himself. If they were too clever and cut the quality or swelled the price, the gangs could vote them off the site.
The whole system was Nora's, really. She always claimed that she had hated their first shop, which she herself had managed for several months. Her dislike was odd, because in fact she had a great gift for the business. She knew how customers' minds worked. She understood avarice and cupidity—and how even the poorest customer, who bought, say, just a pound of udder fat to cook for her man, needed nonetheless to feel it was almost as good as sirloin. Often he had seen her pass over the counter a poor piece of lean beef without a trace of good fat on it—and even in the way Nora handled it, even if she said nothing, there was a suggestion that it was quality meat. And that instinct for a customer's feelings was what she had somehow passed on to the tommy-men. At present, the system was earning them three thousand pounds a year; that, too, was characteristic of Nora.
She was quality, he thought. There were few like her in the whole kingdom. He had known as much from the day they first met. Without her, he might well have gone under, like dozens of other ambitious navvies these last few years. And yet…and yet he could not feel entirely easy nor deal quite plainly with her, especially of late. There was a sense in him that she was manipulating their affairs, pushing him in directions he would rather not go, while making it seem that each step was dictated by some outside logic, unconnected with her own will or preference. Or was that being unfair to her?
For some time he had been aware of a pack of hounds giving tongue as they approached the road along one of the lanes to the west. He reached the corner as the leaders, sterns waving, poured onto the highway. It was a bitch pack out for exercise with a whipper-in and some kennel servants. He nodded curtly to the whipper-in and got a cool nod in return. This was York Union country, where they would no more let in the likes of John Stevenson than the King of the Hottentots. He subscribed—and heavily, too—to the York & Ainsty, and Nora went down there to hunt. She said that the wold was poor country, but he knew that was not so and that the exclusiveness of the York Union hurt her.
"Never mind," he had once said. "They're on the way out; we're on the way in. They have to cling on to something."
"Then I could wish they'd chosen something unimportant for their raft," she said.
The dull red globe of the sun was looming ab
ove the far-off mist as he went down over Birdsall Brow and made for Burythorpe. George Hudson's place at Howsham was only a few miles distant, and he toyed with the idea of making a detour that way. He wondered whether Hudson had heard of the trouble on the line, which the "Railway King" had himself surveyed some years earlier. Also, he had an idea that the great man could help him in the question of Beador's involvement in railway shares.
In fact, John had turned off and was already on the lane to Leavening when he saw coming toward him a mounted figure who could only be George Hudson himself, pink in the rising sun.
"Stevenson!" he called before either could make out the other's features. His tone was filled with relief. "Hoped I might cross your path. I owe you an apology."
"Oh?" John was wary. The great autocrat did not often speak like that, except when he wanted a favour of you.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 3