The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  The Ladies' Cabin was full and they went back up on deck to the General Cabin. Gentlemen and ladies were stretched head-to-toe, head-to-toe, on all the divans around the walls, and more gentlemen lay on cushions on the floor. Most of the recumbent men kept their eyes shut, pretending not to see her; but at last one stood and offered her his divan.

  She thanked him and, helped by John, lay down full length while he put a rug over her feet and skirt hems.

  She had not lain there ten minutes when a vast wave, cutting across the general direction, spun them hard to starboard. A universal shriek and groan went up in the cabin and at least four of them vomited at once. The illness spread among them like a chain letter. Stewards busied themselves throwing sand and passing eau-de-cologne around.

  If I stay, I'll lay a carpet too, Nora thought, and sat up resolutely. One of the floorbound gentry eyed her divan with hope.

  "I'm going on deck," she said sweetly to him. "I must offer this back to the gentleman who relinquished it. Will you kindly see that no one else occupies it?"

  Grudgingly the man agreed and helped her to her feet. He sat on the divan, half claiming it. A delicate-looking lady by the door was being genteelly sick into a handkerchief, a teaspoonful at a time. Only the bracing gale as she pushed open the door brought Nora back from the grip of that same predicament.

  All around the outside of the cabin was a thick mahogany rail. Nora used its support to work her way over to the slightly less windward quarter, to starboard, where John and the polite gentleman sat in shouting conversation on a crate with two frightened goats inside it. Both men were wearing thick grey oilskins. They did not notice her until she was almost upon them.

  "You may have your divan back, kind sir," she shouted over the roar of sea and wind.

  The man smiled and shook his head. "Better here," he said.

  John took off his oilskin and wrapped it around her.

  The other, unbidden, went to get John a replacement from the crew's quarters.

  "Interesting man," John shouted while he was gone. "Name's Addison. Has great knowledge of the iron trade. Knows Nasmyth. Comes from Sheffield."

  Addison came back with the oilskin. Nora sat on the goat crate, huddled in the lee of the two men, watching the waves speed ahead of them toward France and catching one word in ten of the men's impossible dialogue. Inside, the oilskin was a warm, still world.

  By mid-channel the waves had become truly mountainous—huge, rolling greenbacks of wind-lashed water that thundered toward the ship as if created to destroy her; yet they lifted her and careened onward as if she did not exist. Looking crosswind, Nora could see that any ripple or wavelet which reared more than a few inches was at once peeled from the face of the ocean, turned to black-and-silver grapeshot, and hurled far over the waters by the gale. She could not look upwind for long because that same broadside would lash her face and sting her eyes.

  At least she no longer felt nauseous.

  Six miles or so from the French coast, the storm began to blow itself out. The sea still ran hugely, but the lash of the spray and the roar of the wind dropped to a spatter and a moan. For the first time since they had left Folkestone, the smoke did not fall seaward near the bow. The cabin folk began to venture out on deck. Looking at the green pallor of their skin Nora felt decidedly superior.

  "Your first crossing, Mrs. Stevenson?" Addison asked.

  She nodded and smiled.

  "Well, you're quite the sailor."

  She beamed at him; there was something instantly likeable about Mr. Addison. He was in his early forties, much the same age as John, with curly, pale brown hair, greying and thinning at the temples. Thickets of hair sprouted from his ears and cantilevered over his eyes, blue-green in their shade. It was a reserved, careworn face, the face of a working gentleman. His hands were gnarled and flecked with many white scars from the spatterings of slag and molten iron.

  "Is this a holiday for you, Mr. Addison?" she asked.

  "A working holiday." He nodded. "I am about to go in business on my own account, and it occurred to me I might never again have so unfettered an opportunity to see what our French and German rivals are doing."

  "He's about to become a competitor," John said.

  "Nay." Addison laughed scornfully. "There's room for hundreds more. I'd say the new iron age hasn't even begun. Ye couldn't have picked a better time to go into iron production. I'd swear that. Bible."

  "And where shall ye set up shop?" Nora asked, all casual and innocent.

  "Not Sheffield, that's certain. It's plagued by the old styles. Ye could pick a dozen places. There's…'er…Doncaster now"—he looked sharply at Nora—"I know it's only a village but if ye look at the railroads, it's bound to grow. Or"—again he looked at Nora, who by now realized she was being fished for her reaction—"there's good land going cheap south of Leeds."

  Nora decided to play him out then. "Leeds," she said, nervously looking at John. "Good gracious!"

  John suppressed a smile.

  "Oh?" Addison, thinking he was on the scent, looked even harder at her.

  "How extraordinary!" John said heavily. "You were born there, were you not, my dear?"

  She looked at him, pretending to be ever so grateful for his rescue. "Yes, that's it!" she said.

  "I see." Addison smiled. "And ye could even"—he laughed dismissively, to show how ridiculous the idea was—"build in Cumberland! Good harbours. Good railway soon enough."

  They laughed too. "Build there and you could build anywhere," John said.

  "That's a fact!" Addison was seized with a paroxysm of laughter. "Aye. That's a fact."

  They docked in the lee of the jetty, where it was calm enough for John to get out his writing case and dash off a letter of introduction to Rodet on Addison's behalf. He thanked them hugely and left, well pleased.

  "Cumberland," Nora said thoughtfully. "So he's going to build at Furness."

  "Aye," John agreed. "It may be worth looking into again."

  "Oh no," Nora said happily. "We're yoked to Beador now. That die is cast."

  When she stood to go, she realized that the goats had eaten a hole in her borrowed oilskin. John gave it back to the coxswain with five shillings on top—knowing the man would patch the coat and drink the bounty. They went ashore at five-thirty.

  Their luggage was piled along one side of the custom house. They waited five minutes for the douanier, and then a band of soldiers in green uniform, came and looked at their passports and told them not to wait any longer. Nora was disappointed that they spoke English.

  They took a fly to the Hôtel des Bains, leaving the hotel porter to collect their trunk. Farther down the jetty some dockers were unloading a cargo of iron cannon from a vessel that had berthed earlier that day. When John remarked on this to the hotel manager, he replied: "Oh, that must be for the war."

  "What war, for the love of goodness?" John asked.

  "France has declared the war on Austria," he said calmly. "They are fighting in the Alps. You are in number twelve, facing the sea, m'sieu, 'dame."

  "Can I pay in these?" John showed a Bank of England note. Smiling, the manager pulled out a fat wallet and opened it. There was hardly a French note among them. John smiled too.

  "Normandy is returning to the English," the manager said, "while we fight the Austrians."

  Half an hour later, washed and changed into dry clothing, they were back downstairs, ready for a brisk walk before dinner—Nora's first meal since eight that morning and John's first meal of the day.

  "I was wrong about the war," the manager said.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. It was the Austrians who have declared the war on France."

  They walked down the north quay of the port. There were two steamers and one sailing ship in dock, all English. Outside the custom house, the goat crate lay abandoned on the jetty. An old woman was reaching her hands into it, trying to milk the nanny. John, taking pity on her, offered her an English sixpence, but she laughingly rejecte
d it and explained, in flawless English—for naturally she was English—that she was milking the goat from charity, not poverty. "I am a sister to Lord Dorland," she said, enjoying their discomfiture.

  They went on as far as the fish market and the English churches, opposite the railway station. John pointed to it: "A bit of genuine Stevenson."

  "Aye," she agreed. "It has that solid, dependable look. Is that the Napoleon column?" She pointed to a tall monument on a hill over the town. She had been reading her Murray.

  John chuckled. "This town's full of monuments to futile hopes of invading England. Did ye see a little brick ruin on the cliff north of the harbour? That was built by Caligula while he waited in vain to cross our channel."

  "And I must see the château," she said, "where they locked up Napoleon III when he tried to land."

  They turned up the hill, toward the old town. "The moral of it seems to be: If you want to get anywhere, don't start from Boulogne."

  His words were prophetic, for they never reached the château. At the corner of the Rue de la Lampe, where it opens into the marketplace, Nora suddenly turned back and pushed John to face into a shop window.

  "Earthenware pots?" he asked.

  "No," she said quietly. "But look across at the nearest vegetable stall and you'll see a man. In a tall hat. With check trousers."

  John looked. "Well, talk of the devil!" he said.

  "And the girl with him?"

  "Oh, yes! Or is it her?"

  "I'd swear it. The point is: Do we acknowledge them?"

  He was astonished. "Why ever not?"

  "Well," she said, not liking to be pressed. "An English innkeeper arm in arm with one of his female servants in a French seaport."

  He parodied a shock far greater than hers. "I hadn't thought of that. You are right, my dear. Come, let us hence."

  Her arm straightened like an anchor cable, pulling him back. "Don't be hasty," she said.

  He abandoned his posture and looked fondly at her. "Have you forgotten, love, what you said when I asked you to marry me? The very minute I asked?"

  She coloured.

  "You said," he went on, "that I hadn't tried you and you might be barren. And you said: 'Shall us not live together a while?'"

  "That was before I knew better," she replied crossly.

  "Not in my book." His eyes would not let her escape. "I loved the lass as said them words; and I love her still, see thee."

  In the end she had to smile, and her smile was unstinted. "Thou art soft as a suckin' duck," she told him.

  "Mebbe," he agreed. Then he straightened himself and dropped the dialect. "So we'll cross this road and we'll greet them and chat with them and maybe we'll have a little glass of something in a café and we'll go our ways. And we'll do naught but give out that what's their business is their business."

  She was already pulling him across the road, following a large cart piled with seaweed.

  How to attract the attention of two people so rapt in each other's company and in the living moment that the world might catch fire around them? John and Nora stood at right angles to them, at the edge of the stall, smiling, waiting to be noticed and then recognized. "Good news," John said out the corner of his mouth. "There's a wedding ring in it."

  After what seemed an age the man looked up. He looked harder, he looked astonished, he looked delighted. "Mr. Stevenson!" he called. "And Mrs. Stevenson too." He snatched off his hat and shook hands with her and then with John. "My dear, you remember Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson, our favourite guests at the Tabard? Allow me"—he turned back to them—"to present Mrs. Cornelius. Mrs. Sarah Cornelius. Sarah NevilI as was. As I'm sure you'll remember! What? Forget Sarah?" He rattled on as they, smiling under his barrage, reached over the stall and shook hands. "The treasure of the Tabard? The finest jewel…"

  "Tom!" Sarah laid a finger on his lip and shook her head.

  "Too much, eh? Too much?" He sighed. "Yes, too much. Yes."

  Sarah laughed and clung to his arm.

  "How marvellous," Nora said. "We were wondering about you only this morning, when we caught the train at London Bridge."

  "They all say you've gone to the West Country," John told him. "We heard you'd sold out. But when did you marry?"

  "Oh, recently, recently," Cornelius said.

  "It's such a whirl." Sarah laughed and clung to his arm even tighter.

  "Well, we must congratulate you," John said. "Though it's too late to wish you happiness, for I've never seen it shine so clear."

  "We can wish its continuity," Nora said.

  "More than that," Cornelius held out an arm to scoop them back into the road, "we can drink to it."

  "Or eat," John said. "If London's best tavern keeper can't find Boulogne's best eating house, he deserves the West Country."

  The stallholder shrieked something abusive at them as they left—the first clear words of French Nora had heard. Cornelius whipped round at once and, unabashed, shouted at her: "Ah, quelle musique affreuse! Vous chantez, madame, comme la vache qui pisse." It stopped her in mid-flow and brought shouts and laughs of delight from shoppers and other stall folk.

  "It's an old Breton saying," Cornelius said as they began again to walk. "But I fancy it travels well. Now"—he smelled the air around him—"to put on my sniffing cap and find us a good table d'hôte."

  The place he took them to looked more like a slum than an eating house.

  "Close your nose and eyes to the sanitary arrangements," he said as they walked down a dark, narrow stone passage, littered with mussel shells and fish offal. "They think sanitation is an English disease. They prefer to cure the gripes with gassy spa water."

  "What did you say to that woman?" Nora asked.

  Sarah cut in hastily. "It was improper, Mrs. Stevenson. Now, Tom—we shall at least begin the evening decorously."

  "Voilà!" he said, throwing open the door of a long, dark, low-ceilinged room. Four fishermen sat by the window, playing cards in the last straggling light of day. A man and a woman sat at a candlelit table at the other end. What the rest of the room contained was anybody's guess.

  "I knew he'd bring us here," Sarah said.

  Nora had never seen anything less appetizing. She was already preparing to have a convenient spasm of abdominal symptoms.

  "Like a thieves' kitchen," John said.

  "Like?" Cornelius laughed and pressed them forward into the gloom. "There's a table over there somewhere."

  "Par ici, m'sieu." A huge woman, who bounced and rebounded with every step, came through a door opposite, bearing a candle in a pewter stick. "Ah! Monsieur Corneille!" She curtseyed and put the candle on their table. There was no escape.

  "Madame Thierry!" Cornelius bowed elaborately. "The best cook—what! The most incomparable cook in Boulogne. Perhaps in the entirety of Normandy!"

  "Oh, non non non non non" Madame knew enough English to follow Cornelius' particular words. "En Boulogne—oui. Peut-être. Mais la Normandie entière! Oh…" She shook her head and cackled with motherly laughter, throwing up her hands in benediction and then drowning Cornelius in her obese clutch as she kissed him on both cheeks. Twice.

  They sat down, their eyes growing used to the dark. The candlelight softened their contours and warmed the colour of their skin, lending an eager sparkle to their eyes and, when they smiled, to their teeth. If John had really thought Sarah "quite plain" it would have been a hard opinion to defend that evening. True, she was no great beauty. And though not yet twenty-five, her face already showed the ravages of sorrow, loneliness, and hard toil. Nora, who had once been inside her old room, back at the Tabard in London, and found it furnished with books of poems and sermons and the stories of Dickens, had guessed she was the penniless daughter of a poor clergyman, perhaps orphaned and for some reason unable to take a place as a governess.

  But this evening, whatever sorrows she may have endured were far behind her. She was enchanted by Cornelius and seemed astonished that he even noticed her. Whenever he said anythi
ng amusing, or just mildly interesting, she turned to John and Nora to make sure they enjoyed his wit and savoured his learning as profoundly as she did. She wanted to share him with the world. And she wanted the world to share him too. She hung on his every word.

  "Love-come-late, love-come-hard," John said afterward. Neither he nor Nora was ever sure that the meal had really been the epicurean delight it had seemed at the time—or whether half its pleasure had not been induced by the company of two such eager, vivacious people, so deeply and so unashamedly in love.

  Cornelius teased Madame Thierry without mercy, pretending that if he could only slip away from this gorgon of a wife…And she would cry out in laughing embarrassment and beg everyone in the room, which grew steadily more crowded as the evening wore on, not to listen to a word—and then she would nudge him eagerly and provoke him to say more of the same. For years, Nora treasured a memory of Cornelius, astonished between two huge udders, one on each shoulder, as Madame served across the table. It was the only moment when he was temporarily nonplussed. But he soon recovered. "Hold me feet," he cried. "I think I'm half in paradise!"