The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  He made a token trot over eight of the last ten yards and hugged her, speechless with joy. When she presented him to Madame Rodet he kissed her hand as if he kissed twenty hands a day.

  The britzka came at last, crunching and rumbling over the gravel and cobbles; its coarse leather hood had gone, being replaced by a light canvas awning with a silk fringe. Rodie waved at it. "You two go," she said. "Collect Mr. Telling's baggages."

  "And you, Rodie? Don't let us deprive you of your drive. You know how much you enjoy it."

  "Not today." She spoke with great conviction. "It's too hot." And she smiled and returned to the house.

  Sam helped Nora aboard. "She's a grand woman," he said.

  "One of the nicest and most interesting people I've ever met. But, Sam, it's good to see you! Isn't this a grand notion of hers!" She gripped his arm and shook it. They started to move.

  "She really doesn't mind?" he asked. "She knows I'm in service and doesn't mind? What does her husband say?"

  "Oh, that! In France we look differently upon these things."

  "I see!" He grinned. "We, eh?"

  "Mais oui!" Nora laughed.

  He looked at her with amused pity. "Another good Yorkshire soul lost."

  She clung to his arm and giggled, thinking how like Sarah with Mr. Cornelius. "Oh, Sam," she said, "you're going to be good for me. I was beginning to miss England and home and family."

  "That's a deal better," he said, lounging back in the seat and looking born to it.

  Sam had been given a splendid room on the top floor to the left of the stairwell—about as far from the entrance as it was possible to get. When Nora asked Rodie why he hadn't been put on the floor below, on the opposite side of the stairwell from her, Rodie laughed and said it was impossible and Sam would not like it. "The decor is ancient and there are no paintings on the walls. But upstairs he have Courbet, Vernet, Boudin, Capronnier, Regnault—he will prefer."

  The next day, and the next, Rodie found reasons not to go out driving with them, letting them catch up on all their news and acquaintance. They went to Honfleur, where they sat at a table under the trees, overlooking the inner harbour, and drank cold cordials. Moored crab and lobster boats swayed at their anchorage, nudged by a gentle breeze; the waves were no more than restless ripples that broke the bright reflections of sails and masts and houses into a writhing tableau of colour.

  "You could watch it for hours," Sam said.

  "D'you recall the wool our dad used to weave in Hunslet?" she asked.

  He had to say yes, though he'd only been four when they left and went to Manchester.

  "If you looked at it long enough, it used to shiver on the loom like that water. Especially by candlelight."

  He nodded. "I wonder what it's like now, that part. And who's living in our place."

  "Guess who owns it," she said.

  Her smile alerted him. "You?"

  She nodded. "I bought back our five acres. And ten more beside. You know that lawyer, Hicks, who swindled us and stole the land? He never had the benefit of it. They built a foundry and some mills on the Leeds side of the land, and it turned that little stream, Dow Beck, where you lost a shoe and got put through a small sieve by our dad, remember?"

  "Aye!" He remembered that well enough.

  "Well. The land got all flooded. Hicks never saw the benefit. So there's fairings in the world. He spent a tidy sum seeking compensation at law, which he never got. And then, when he was over a barrel for cash, I took back our five acres, and ten on top, for the same price we agreed for the five when we parted with them."

  Sam giggled with delight. The lawyer, Samuel Hicks of Nelson's Yard, had taken the land as his agreed fee for defending Daniel Telling, Nora and Sam's eldest brother, on a charge of conspiracy when he formed a trade union, but at the trial Hicks had put in a plea of guilty and still kept the land.

  "Did he know who you were?" Sam asked.

  She intoned, "Samuel Hicks, Nelson's Yard, 46 Briggate." And there was such soft malevolence in her voice and such cold delight gleamed in her eye that for a moment Sam was in fear of her.

  "Eay, I'd give a lot to have seen that," he said uneasily. "What'll you do with the land?"

  She came back as if she'd almost forgotten he was there. She smiled and looked away toward the sea. "It's your inheritance," she said. "You may have it. I'll give it you the day you marry. I've had it drained. There'll be factories on it soon. You'll get a tidy ground rent."

  He laughed, not thinking her serious. "It's our Daniel's by rights. He's the eldest."

  Again that hardness, even fiercer this time, as she turned upon him. For an instant, as their eyes met, he felt he was staring into the very soul of hate. But her voice was calm and chill. "Daniel is none of my family. He made his choice when his demands were granted. And yet he chose to prolong the strike until they recognized his Union as well. He knew they'd arrest him. He knew he'd be transported. He knew he'd be leaving me to look after you and Wilfrid and Dorrie. In that hovel. Without even a proper door. His last night of freedom he spent organizing his own useless petition instead of mending that door. If that door had been mended…"

  She could not finish.

  Sam held his breath. "I still get nightmares," he said. "Coming back and finding young Wilfrid's arm like that."

  Wilfrid had been eaten alive by a straying boar, all but one arm. Dorrie had died of gangrene following rat bites.

  "He wanted it to happen, of course," Nora added.

  It struck Sam as such a shocking thing to say that even when he cleared his throat to speak the sound had a note of protest.

  "He wanted it," Nora insisted. "I almost sent him those paragraphs in the newspaper, about Dorrie and Wilfrid. But I thought, no. That's what he wants. He wants to know that England is a land of oppression and misery, and that it must be torn apart in revolution before he can build the new Jerusalem."

  "So he doesn't know yet? About the bairns?"

  "Not from me."

  "They got up a subscription for his appeal. Did you hear that?"

  "Aye. I sent a clipped farthing—and a letter to say it was two thousand guineas more than he was worth."

  Sam's laugh had no humour in it. "I gave three pounds," he said. "It took me a year to save."

  Nora made a mental note that when she conveyed the land there would be one or two restrictive covenants attached.

  "I was fond of him," Sam went on. "He was always kindly to me."

  "And to me," Nora said. "That's what made his betrayal worse."

  "Mr. Nelson keeps himself informed on the petition. For my sake. He says it's close to being granted. This session of Parliament there may be a pardon."

  "I'll have a raspberry drink this time," she said.

  It amazed Nora that she could find Sam such good company, for they agreed on almost nothing. Maybe it was that their contentions were so mild and gentle-natured—being really a warm agreement to differ. But Rodie, perhaps sensing that some deeper aggression lay beneath the surface and fearing that a week's confinement and repetition of the same daily pattern might bring it out, suggested that Nora and her brother should take the coach, and a groom and the maid Honorine, and go on a little journey. "Go to Avranches," she suggested. "You can see Mont Saint Michel. And your friends who have bought the inn at Coutances—that is very neat. It would be pleasant for you."

  It was this last suggestion that swayed Nora; the thought of seeing Sarah and Cornelius again—and of introducing Sam to them—was too tempting to refuse.

  "What about your baby?" Sam asked.

  "Listen," she told him. "When I had Winifred, I behaved as if I were carrying a bar of pure gold. And I made my life and John's a martyrdom to it. After that I determined I'd not sacrifice the best ten years of my life and marriage on the altar of motherhood. Babies? Let them blow where they list. I delivered Arabella Thornton's first in a cemetery in Lancashire. And no fuss. I'll do meself the same honour here. If necessary—which it will not be. It
's not due this seven weeks." She poked him in the ribs. "Doan't fretch so."

  "I'm mindful of thy John," he said.

  "I'll write to him this day and absolve thee there."

  And so, on Sunday, the first in June, having survived three more endless sermons that Matins, they set off westward down the roads Nora had come to know so well. They headed first for Caen and then on to Vire, where they had decided to spend their first night, despite Murray's rating of "not good" for the inn there.

  The country they drove through was even prettier than on the other side of the Seine—a succession of woods, orchards, and pastures, with increasing stretches of wilderness where rocky outcrops sprang from a sea of heather. Nora could believe Cornelius's description of the land as one mosaic of ripe and unripe blackberries, for here they were in prolific flower all around—vast spreading bushes laden with blossom.

  She repeated the description to Sam.

  "I'll wager no one picks them," he said. "Not even the children."

  "Why?"

  "Oh, they're a degenerate, indolent, selfish, arrogant lot, these folk."

  "Apart from that," she said, "you quite like them?"

  He laughed. "There's no quality here. That's the trouble. Even our hosts, the Rodets—they're not quality."

  "How can you say that, Sam?" She did not show her annoyance.

  "They're nice enough folk. Very nice. Nicer than a lot of folk of quality. I grant that. But they've the instincts of peasants. They put equality before quality, if you ask me. Everyone here does."

  "I don't understand that."

  "All this 'monsieur and madame' to anyone over the age of twenty-five or so. Did you see her on the way to church this morning, saying 'madame' to that beggar woman? And not a smile."

  She stifled all the arguments that clamoured to be expressed and laughed instead. "Oh, Sam!"

  "Look how all the big houses are shuttered," he went on, undeterred. "Just one or two beginning to open. It's obvious that all the great families are away. But could you guess that from the villages? Now, you go into an English village and you can tell at once whether the quality families are away or in residence. The whole atmosphere is dry and dead when they're gone. Here, it makes no difference."

  She followed him with great, amused, pitying eyes. "What does that tell you?"

  "It tells me that the English can recognize quality and respond to it. Here they are rich peasants, middling peasants, and poor peasants. And"—he quelled an interruption from her—"it tells me that in England, despite the upheavals of these years, we shall never have revolution. But here, however good the conditions of life, they will never free themselves from the terror of it. You laugh at the English road sweeper in his tall hat and Chesterfield coat cast out by a duke ten years back; I tell you there's enough cold ambition in that to douse any revolutionary heat. But here, where everyone is citizen…" He shook his head. "It's folly."

  She smiled, determined not to get drawn. "I miss the smell of the oaks," she said. "A month ago they were stupendous."

  He nudged her gently. "Don't give out you don't know what I mean. You move among the quality yourself now. You hunt with them. You know what…"

  "Hah!" Her single scornful cry cut him short. He had touched the open-sesame nerve at last. "Hunt! I'll tell you about hunting, Sam. And quality. In any field of sixty, taken at haphazard, you'll find no more than half a dozen who really understand what they're there for. Three of them'll be hunt servants, one of them a farmer, and two—two out of fifty-odd—two will be folk of quality. The rest are there to enjoy 'a slashin' good trot' or to gossip or to cut a dash or to kill time or because they lack the brains to think up anything better. They have no notion of the true business of a hunt; they'd be happier on a drag scent if they were honest."

  Sam tried to pacify her, banking her down with his hands. "I oughtn't to have said about hunting," he said. "I forgot. It was a bad example."

  "To the contrary, it was a very good example. You talk about the English country being dead until the big families come down, and you are right. Where do they come down from? From London society, from German spas, from Alpine walks and Italian museums. And they're back in the saddle and after Charley James Fox five days a week. And they bring the villages to life with an ideal of leisure and sport. That's what your crossing sweeper puts on with the duke's castoffs—the notion that the ideal life is sport and leisure. Just give that belief a good century to soak into the bones of the English workingman and you can kiss England farewell. She'll drown in a flood of quality."

  He looked at her in astonishment. "It is Nora Stevenson, isn't it? Nora Telling? The lass as once told me she could never get through Rule Britannia for the lump it brought to her throat?"

  She blushed. "You're right," she said. "I don't mean to attack England. But," she rallied, "I don't think it right to criticize France for being different."

  "Not different," he said smugly. "Just inferior."

  His condescension rankled with her and, after willing herself not to rise to it for several furlongs, she taunted him with the words, "You have the heart of a servant, Sam."

  He laughed at once, good-naturedly. "Aye," he said. "And a good one too. Don't leave me money, Nora love. Nor give me any. You'd ruin me." And later he said, "I'm happier at what I do than any man I know. Many rich folk stop with the Nelsons. There's naught would make me change stations with any on 'em."

  She squeezed his arm. "I'm happy for you," she said. "To have an untroubled mind and sleep easy—it's a champion gift."

  "And you?" he asked.

  She sighed. "I'm not troubled by conscience," she said. "But there's responsibility. Stevenson gives work to nine thousand. That's a lot of men—and wives and bairns—to depend on the wisdom or folly of just two people."

  It sobered Sam. "Eay, I'd never thought," he said.

  "Still"—she sat up and rearranged herself with determination—"I'm free of it for a day or two. Look at this wonderful scenery."

  They gazed around over a sea of heather and down into twisting wooded dells where waters dashed and complained unseen, and up along rocky escarpments where trees and shrubs clung perilously to sheer faces of granite.

  "I'll tell you what this is like," she said. "It's like Killiecrankie. Have you ever been there?"

  He shook his head.

  "Well, that part of the Scotch Highlands is very like this."

  It was late afternoon and the slanting sun fell across the valleys, modelling them starkly and throwing the hot green of the sunstruck woods against the deep, rich turquoises and blues of the shaded hollows. The trees and the heath were alive with the shrill of birdsong, though the only birds they could actually see were the harriers, sitting in complacent silence on the craggy summits, and the kestrels, teetering on the updraughts overhead.

  "These folk don't deserve it," he said.

  She pinched his arm until he withdrew it in protest, laughing. "We must be there soon," she said.

  He looked around, remembering something. "The valleys of Vire," he said. "What's 'valleys' in French?"

  "Vaux. I think."

  He tugged at the coachman's shirt. "Les vaux de Vire, m'sieu?" he asked.

  "Mais oui, m'sieu, les vaux de Vire." He swung his whip all around, demonstrating.

  "Why?" Nora asked.

  "D'you hear any singing?"

  "No. Why? Only birds."

  "It's something your Monsieur Rodet told me last night. There used to be some right jolly singing in these parts and that's where we get the word vaudeville from. Vaudeville—vaux de Vire. He says. I don't suppose it's true. He also said they make all the shirts for the French army here."

  "What a lot we learn when we travel," she said.

  Murray's "not good" had been, if anything, kindly. The rooms were so filthy Nora had to lift her skirts as she walked. She made the innkeeper's wife sweep the floor and then tried to order her to scrub it, but the woman refused, saying something of which the only intelligible
word was Anglaise. Sam saw the horses well stabled and looked at the rooms and beds for Honorine and the coachman before he went to his own.

  "Mr. Nelson always does that," he said. "A master relies on his horses and his servants."

  "He and Stevenson are of a pair," Nora replied. "When John surveys a line, he always looks at the lodgings and victuallers beside the way." The food was good, though they had to drink everything—wine and café au lait—from bowls. Cups and glasses seemed to be unheard of.

  The beds were alive with fleas and lice, but they were well prepared for that. As soon as they arrived they had sprinkled spirits of naphtha (nearly a shilling's worth, as Nora said) into every corner and fold of the linen and mattresses; by bedtime, half an hour's assiduous hunting was enough to rid both beds of a small pile of dead or twitching livestock.