The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Winifred saw him first. While she and Young John were straddling the stile, playing at horses, and waiting for Cox, who was carrying baby Caspar, to catch up, she looked across the field and saw her father moving among the bare trees on the skyline. Tip and Puck, aware of him at that same moment, scampered up the lane, barking all the way.

  "Papaaaa!" she called and waved, startling a flock of crows that had settled in the bare fallow. He waved back and broke into a trot.

  Young John, facing his sister, craned back to see and almost fell; he hitched his skirts higher to get a better grip with his knees but, by the time he turned, his father had passed from sight at the head of the lane.

  Cox tugged a cloth from her sleeve and wiped long strings of snot from Caspar's face. "Good afternoon, sir." She curtseyed when John drew near.

  "That's a raw, red face," he said with a frown.

  "Aye, it is," Cox agreed. "The wee mite has taken a chill. This cold air might just draw it from him."

  John nodded, unconvinced, but it was not his business to interfere. He looked at the girl's big-boned face, plain, pleasant, and unrelenting, polished smooth by the sharp afternoon wind. No tear would soften those steady hazel eyes, no winning smile catch her unawares. Her implacable calm often made him shudder.

  "Papa!" Winifred called again and stood on the topmost timber of the stile to reach for him.

  No word came from Cox. No tender "Winifred!" or peremptory "Sit down, miss!" John knew well enough what she was thinking: If the child falls and hurts itself, it will learn. It!

  He spurred forward over the half-dozen yards to the stile and swept Winifred onto the pommel of his saddle. Her lips were cold on his neck, her nose like ice below his ear; but her breath and the hug she gave him were warmth itself.

  Young John, solemnly ignoring him, making him be the first to speak, spurred the stile to a final charge homeward. Even when John pulled Hermes back, so that the boy could reach up and be lifted behind him, only a stubborn and distant smile showed his recognition.

  John winked at Winifred. "D'ye know," he said, "I was set to swear that was our Young John. It must be"—his voice sank to a horrified whisper—"a changeling! Let's hie us hence and right fast!"

  The boy could hold out no longer. With a protesting bleat he stood, on the next-to-top rail, feet well locked, and reached up to be hauled aboard. He sat on the cantle, behind his father, hugging as much of him as he could in his tiny embrace.

  "King of the castle?" Winifred suggested.

  Young John began to jog excitedly. "Kingacastle, Kingacastle!" he said again and again.

  John looked westward, where the sun was just dipping down to set. Why not? There'd be a good half hour yet. "Yes," he said. "King o' the castle. Why not!"

  Sauntering, Willet just made it to the gate in time to let them through. He helped the children down and then, when John dismounted, took Hermes off to the stable. John opened and shut the gate for Cox and baby Caspar, who stared listlessly around through swollen eyelids and would not be coaxed to either laugh or whimper.

  "Best get him to bed," John said.

  Cox nodded calm agreement. "Aye," she said.

  The dogs looked wistfully after John and the children but, sniffing at the frost, followed Cox indoors, quarrelling over a hearthrug that was still two hundred yards away.

  The garden had once been fortified, and a straggling wall, part stone, part brick, still encompassed it on most of three sides. Downhill, to the east of the house and at a sharp angle of the wall, stood the remains of a medieval tower. A stone stair without a balustrade ran steeply up one side to a sharp turn, where it continued up a short tunnel into a small chamber, now roofless; at most, it could have held a watch of three in comfort. On its far side, a much narrower stair spiralled up three-quarters of a turn to a ruined turret, made slightly less hazardous by a low railing of deeply corroded iron. This was their castle, and the turret the seat of their king.

  It was really a game for high summer days when little breezes could be found at that height long after they had died between the baking ramparts down below. Today, in raw February, with a cloudless sky darkening above and frosty evening mists rising silently in the vale below, even the mildest breeze seemed to push icicles through the thickest cloak and down inside the tightest collar.

  "We mustn't stop long," John said. "What do my courtiers see?"

  "I see beggars three," Winifred said even before he had finished the question.

  He looked for three objects. The three pine trees? Could be, but if he guessed wrong he would cease to be king. He looked farther afield. Then nearer at hand. He had to ask soon or he'd be dethroned for silence. Three crows. It could be them. Chance it. "Is their raiment black?"

  She wrinkled her face in good-natured disappointment. "Their raiment is black."

  "What do we do with beggars three?" he asked, knowing the answer.

  "Beat them black and beat them blue! Beat them till they're only two!" she shouted and laughed.

  "Beat them. Beat. Bam! Pchhhh!" Young John said with a sudden, astonishing savagery.

  Beggars were always beaten. "Why?" John asked, still kingly and judicial.

  "Because they steal the farmer's corn. I see angels four," she gabbled.

  But Young John did not wait for her to finish; he stole in ahead with, "I see football."

  He always saw a football and it was always the sun.

  "Does it burn the players' feet?" John asked.

  Young John punched him and burst into tears. His father squeezed his arm but otherwise ignored him.

  "I see a kingly orb," Winifred said. She spoke so reverently it might have been a line of poetry rather than a new step in their game. For a four-year-old she could be very solemn.

  "Does it outshine mine?" he asked.

  The boy, so easily distracted, stopped crying; leaning into his father, he slipped a cold thumb inside his mouth and listened with rapt attention.

  "It does," Winifred said, the game three-quarters forgotten.

  They were all looking straight at the setting sun, huge and oval, swathed in mist. Above it, far off, a swan or some other large bird flapped wearily southward.

  Mists pinched out the sun before the horizon could mask it. The colour vanished from the sky soon after, leaving the world silver and black, damp and very chill.

  He shivered, stirring them. "Come on," he said. "Before we stumble in the dark."

  The shadows were uniting and the grass already bore the first thin lining of frost as they stole back over the lawns to the house. The smoke curling from its chimneys and the oil light reaching out through its small leaded panes had never seemed so welcoming.

  "Pray for all the poor children sleeping out tonight," John told them as they edged through the rose beds to the garden door.

  Nora met them in the passage. "Eay, I don't know!" she sighed, running her warm hands over the two children, feeling their ears and fingers. "You're a fine one," she said to John, "talking about cold baths. It's a good thing they've a hot tea coming."

  He smiled. "A very good thing," he said, unperturbed.

  Cox was waiting for the children at the foot of the nursery stairs. She turned them as a sheepdog turns sheep—with a Look.

  "If Cox says you're good, I'll tell you a story later," John promised. He and Nora went to the winter parlour.

  The previous week's accounts had come from the London office—summaries of the ledger entries at each contract. Nora had been doing her regular weekly check.

  All the firm's business—that endless battle with rock and mud, mountain and marsh (and good men and rogues)—was eventually rendered down to neat rows and columns of figures and passed across Nora's desk. In the earliest days, she had kept every account and made every entry herself, in a schoolchild's penny copybook. Now they came in a dozen hands: loose-leaf copies of ledger pages from the workings and fat duplicate account books with gold lettering on their leather spines, sent up weekly by William Jackson, t
he chief clerk in their London office.

  Over the years, Nora had developed "the sharpest eye in the City," as Jackson said. She noted with amusement the way he would often try to anticipate her by pencilling little notes beside certain entries: I question this…too low?…twice last week's figure…and so on. In this way, he placed himself on her side of the table in her relentless weekly inquisition.

  At first Jackson had not liked his situation one bit—to work for a man and yet to take most of the orders from his wife! And in matters of finance too, where women were supposed to be most supremely ignorant. It went hard. But now she had no greater champion. She needed only to indicate the slightest preference for something and Jackson would turn it into an iron rule. For instance, she had once said she thought it might make accounts easier to follow if debits and liabilities were in red ink, and credits and assets were in blue. The younger clerks made jokes about working in Mrs. Stevenson's Drawing Academy…and would she like the accounts on lace-edged paper…and much more in that vein; but from that day onward, Jackson insisted on Nora's red-blue system. And now everyone agreed it made the pages much easier to read at a glance.

  She wished it were as simple to overcome all other opposition to her central role in the business. Their banker, Nathan Chambers of Dowgate, was a particular antagonist. Five years earlier (a lifetime, it seemed), she had intercepted a few letters to him and used them in applying some gentle pressure. Chambers had laughed at the time, and since no actual harm had been done, she had thought herself forgiven. And she had to admit that he never flatly opposed her, never was rude or even short with her; indeed, he treated her with great deference, was always chivalrous and attentive, and always praised her financial…what did he call it? Intuition!

  That was the trouble. In a thousand subtle ways he gave out that her brilliance was intuitive. Unreliable. Not based on logic or analysis. At heart it was (that most damning of all City judgements) "not sound."

  He never said it openly. He never failed to imply it.

  The judgement was doubly galling to her since all the facts spoke the other way. At John's instructions, Chambers took a tenth of all the firm's profit and put it into a trust fund for her and the children. No one but Chambers could touch it; certainly it was beyond John's control. Thus, if the inconceivable happened and Stevenson's failed, Nora and the children would be safe. They would have (at the moment) ninety thousand pounds to fall back on. That was all that Chambers, safe, stolid, sound Chambers, had made out of the eighty-odd thousand he had been given to invest. Yet she, intuitive, unreliable, unsound Nora, had taken a mere nineteen thousand pounds—the entire profit of the victualling licences over the last five years—and turned them into investments worth all of sixty thousand.

  It began after their first year in business, at Summit Tunnel over near Manchester. When they got their profit on that, John had given her a thousand pounds. Earlier the same year, on her first visit to London, she had seen the power of the railways to promote the outward growth of cities into regions people thought would always be mere farmland. She longed then for some spare cash to put into land. Suddenly she had it.

  Within a week she had driven out along the course of the new line south of Manchester, looking for land. Clever people had already bought up around Cheadle Hulme and Handforth. Some adventurous souls had even gone as far as Wilmslow. Only Nora had had the courage to go on, beyond the valley, up to Alderley Edge. There, she had taken one look at the view, one sniff at the air, and had snapped up a hundred acres for her money.

  Already more than half her land was built over with new houses—and such grand houses! There seemed to be a competition among the Manchester merchants to move far out along the line; the richer you were, the farther you went. The richest came to Alderley Edge. And there, on Nora's land, which was to be had only on ninety-nine years' lease, they built their fine mansions, country houses with miniature estates of one, two, at most five, acres. They seemed glad to pay ground rents of ten or even fifteen pounds an acre; it kept out the poor. So in five years, the land had become worth around twenty thousand and when the remaining seventy acres were leased it would rise to some thirty-five thousand. Already it brought in substantial rents.

  Alderley Edge had been the first of a number of similar purchases. Not all had worked, of course. She had been too clever over judging the line to Nelson and was now stuck with forty acres of worthless land near the Forest of Pendle. But that, and another fifty near Ayr in Scotland, were exceptions. Apart from Alderley Edge, she now had nearly twelve hundred acres in small estates near Blackpool, Warrington, St. Alban's, Henley, Plymouth, and Bromley. When they were all developed, their value would be at least a hundred and seventy-five thousand. So what could she not do with the money Chambers kept tucking away at a mere two and a half per cent? She seethed every time she ruled the double line under the accounts for each contract as it finished and totted up the profit, one-tenth part of which went at once to Chambers.

  John himself had no idea that she had done so well. In a foolish moment, when she had first bought the land at Alderley Edge, the scorn of those who thought she had thrown her money away had goaded her to boast aloud to John that she would see the money back tenfold in as many years. From time to time now he reminded her of the promise, but she was always vague and furtive, giving out the impression that she wished she'd never said such a thing. Of course, he knew that she had made some profit, on that and her other transactions, but she hoped he had no idea of its size. For John had an obsession that if he died, leaving Nora a rich widow and the money loose, she'd fall victim to the first fortune hunter who left his card. She had tried everything—laughter, petulance, ridicule, and anger—to rid him of this absurd notion. But all he ever said was "a grieving woman's easy game." So their finances were a maze of trusts—trusts for her and the children now, in case the firm went bankrupt, and everything into trust if he died. As Chambers said, it made fund raising as easy as raising a gale in a shuttered room with a blocked chimney and no door.

  Still, through all their first five years, the market in money had been easy, especially for railways. Even the fools had been able to turn in respectable profits, while a blood professional like John had done well beyond even his own dreams. His specialty was to take the hazardous parts of a contract, the cutting, tunnelling, embanking, and viaduct-building, where both the risk and the potential profit were high. Then, by good management, careful planning, and the use of seasoned navvies all versed in his ways, he would bring the risks as low as those on a level, open-skies working. Their profit usually fell between thirty and forty per cent of the tender.

  The Penmanshiel Tunnel contract, which they had finished last December and whose accounts she had just closed while John had been playing with the children on the "castle," was a case in point. The tender had been taken at £42,800, no trouble being expected. But halfway through they had met a section where the slaty-black Lingula flagstone of the lower Silurian beds was badly fragmented. It would have bankrupted a less experienced contractor. But John knew just where to lay his hands on some hydraulic presses, which his engineer, an impatient little Irishman called Flynn, had quickly adapted to hold the overburden while iron stanchions were placed. Then, entirely on his own initiative, Flynn had further modified the hydraulic devices so that they could be used for forcing a slurry of cement deep into the rock fissures and thus bind the fragments together, the way you might grout a crumbling stone wall. The fact that Flynn had wrecked all six hydraulic cylinders, giving John an awkward day with the friend who had lent them, was neither here nor there in the long run. The point was that John knew a thousand dodges for getting around the thousand-and-one troubles you could meet on any sort of working, and he'd pick the right men to invent the other eleven, so that Stevenson's could always go ten better than anything the firm of Nature, Fate & Co. might pit against them. The proof had come in that day's mail, in the final accounts for the Penmanshiel tunnel.

  "There," she said
proudly. "The profit on Penmanshiel was thirty-seven per cent."

  He nodded, trying to look nonchalant. "It'd be more if we'd known the geology. We are the first to tunnel through that lower Silurian."

  "It would have been a loss if any other firm had tried it."

  He picked up the summary of the heads of account and looked at them.

  "Were you long with the children?" she asked. "They were freezing."

  "Not long," he said. "I'll tell you who I met today. Came riding out a-purpose to see me. George Hudson." He laid down the account and crossed the room to draw the curtain. Far away to the west the last glimmer of twilight was settling on the horizon. "He says he met you on York platform and you talked about iron."

  He saw a confusion behind her eyes. "I'd forgotten that," she said. "It must have been last back end. November, sometime."