The land she wanted lay just across the river, westward along the coast from Trouville. The idea of buying it had occurred to her on her very first outing with Rodie, when the britzka had breasted the hill above Trouville and she had seen the great, flat, deserted beach running for more than a mile to the distant headland. Then she had looked at the fields and coverts that stretched inland along the broad flood-plain of the river, and she had wondered that it was not already a thriving resort, a rival to Trouville itself.
And so, in the final week of her visit, she spent the best part of an afternoon with a man called Pierre Ferrand, a land agent who had worked for Rodet in the past and who came with Rodie's strong recommendation. Nora already knew, from talking to the farm steward at La Gracieuse, that good land hereabouts went for about 630 francs per hectare, or roughly £10 an acre; more marginal land was about half that. So she was able to come to an arrangement with Ferrand for him to buy up any land that came on the market within half a mile of the foreshore and between the river and the headland. But it was not at all the arrangement she had expected to make.
She had decided to be quite frank with Ferrand and to offer him some extra percentage on cheap deals to encourage a matching honesty on his part. But she was hardly through her preamble—painting a roseate view of the future of Deauville, as this undeveloped stretch was called—when she saw his face fall.
"Is something wrong, m'sieu?" she asked.
He shrugged eloquently.
"Am I perhaps too late?"
He laughed. "Too early, madame! Five years, ten years too early!" And he went on to describe how for more than a year now his one silent obsession had been the potential of this very same stretch of the coast. Slowly he had assembled thirty hectares—a field here, a paddock there—but it was too slow. His capital was exhausted. And soon the outsiders would come. Here, indeed, was the wife of the great John Stevenson, soon there must be others.
"Tell me of the Deauville you see, m'sieu," she said, cutting short his threnody.
And he described the hotels, the spa with its salt-water cures for everything from extended liver to scrofula, the race course, the casino, the winter garden, the ballrooms, the theatre, and…certain houses without which no English gentlemen of quality would come—but very select. He hoped she understood. And there would also be…
"You are talking about a great deal of capital, m'sieu, far more than I—"
"Yes, yes," he said, still fervent with his dream of Deauville. "It is important only to own the land. To lease the land. The owner of the land dictates the lease and so dictates the character of the…of everything. The leases can get taken up by syndicates of initiative…"
"Companies."
"Yes. Also companies. It is not necessary, you see, to gain capital for all buildings. Only for land. It is far more important to possess the land."
He needed to say no more; she knew she was face to face with a kindred spirit. "I think, Monsieur Ferrand," she said, "we may join forces. I came here intending to ask you to buy land for me. And my main concern, I'll be blunt, was how to stop you from becoming Deauville's most popular patron at my expense."
He contrived to look shocked and, at the same time, to grin.
"But if we become partners," she went on, "and you are buying for us, you have every incentive to get the land as cheap as may be." He nodded but said nothing. "What are we talking about—a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty hectares?"
"In addition to my thirty. Yes."
"It's my information that seventy to seventy-five thousand francs should secure it?"
"Easily," he said. "I can do it for less."
"Over how long?"
"Three, four years."
It suited her admirably. They talked for a further hour, about the details of the arrangement. No one was to know their purpose; Ferrand would use every trick he knew to disguise the conveyance of so many small parcels of land to one owner. And their bank would be in Caen, beyond the reach of local tongues and conveniently close to Coutances. The money she paid in could be partly concealed as the takings of the Auberge Clément. And he might hint that she had appointed him agent to buy up a small château and some shooting—"Not shooting," Nora said. "Hunting."
"Oh? You are perhaps fond of hunting, madame?"
She laughed. "Perhaps indeed!"
"Oh, you must come in season. All our French hunts are private, but"—he smirked—"that is no problem. We hunt in the woods. It is very superior to your 'steeplehunting.'"
"Of course!" Nora said, laughing. "Like everything else in France."
Ferrand agreed.
As she drove back over the Touques and then down its right bank to Trouville, she allowed herself a momentary daydream: Deauville! She could already hear the ripe, upper-class voices at work upon that sound: "Goin' to Dawvill this summer," "Italy's all vewy well, but a fwightful journey, d'ye know. Thought of twyin' Deoughveel, what!" and "Duvvle's the place nowadays, I heah."
She would finance the dream by selling off some of "her" properties; and she would tell John only when the deed was done.
Chapter 19
Parting with Rodie was, of course, a great wrench—so great, indeed, that having endured the pain of it in the courtyard of La Gracieuse, Rodie decided it was insupportable and, throwing on a cloak and bonnet, jumped into the britzka and came with them to Honfleur. There she played the encore—and came with them to Havre. For one perilous moment it seemed she might even come with them across the Channel to Southampton, but wisdom triumphed and the tears flowed freely and, this time, in earnest. Even Sarah, who had so short an acquaintance with her, was affected. They waved until the quay was out of sight.
"Unforgettable woman," Sarah said. "She's so alive. I forgot to tell you. We all had strawberries, two or three days ago—when you went to see your Monsieur Ferrand. And you know how here they push them onto the spoon with biscuits?"
"Yes."
"Well, that young boy of hers, Arsène, was just beginning to pass among us with a bowl of biscuits when Rodie screamed, 'No, no, the wedge foot' and she turned to me and said 'your wedge foot.'" Sarah grinned at the memory. "Can you guess what it was?"
"She said the very same to me once, the night I came. I have no idea."
"Nor had anyone. But Rodie snatched away the biscuits and vanished into the passage. And then for ages we could hear her opening cupboards, stumping along corridors, clattering up and down stairs. And every so often she'd poke her head in and say, 'You will see. Ah, it's so beautiful and so sharmeeng,' and vanish again. Meanwhile, of course, everyone was going on with their strawberries— using their little fingers and tilting the plate. Second and third helpings too. And then finally, when there were about three strawberries left, she came back with—you'll never guess."
Smiling, Nora waited.
"She had all the biscuits in a green Wedgwood bowl. Wedgwood, you see? Wedge foot!"
Nora began to laugh.
"But the cream of it was," Sarah went on, "that the identical bowl, the very
identical twin, had been put on the table every day, holding the sugar. You remember it? So, having finished our strawberries, we then ate our mouths dry on biscuits." And when their laughter died, she added: "Still, wasn't it pleasant for her to take all that trouble for me to see the bowl? Because it was English and I was English."
And Nora thought—quite apart from any other consideration—how pleasant it would be to have Sarah share their house. Sarah, she was sure, would be a real confidante and friend. Not since Arabella Thornton, Walter's wife, had moved away from the north and gone to settle in Bristol had Nora known the close company of another woman her own age. And Sarah, like herself, had come up through hardship and challenge; she was no goose, as—one had to admit it—Arabella often was.
Sarah had gone over to the port side, from where she could watch the coast of lower Normandy vanish in the evening mists. There was barely a swell on the water, just a lazy network of ripples. Toward t
he setting sun their bow wave stretched a shimmering line of gold and black as far as the horizon, or so it seemed. To starboard, where night was reaching up into the sky, the wave was a muted green band on the darkling water. The writhing effervescence of their wake turned the ocean as black as stout. But it soon calmed, and only a chain's length behind them the sea was a smooth trough of quicksilver. Their little paddle steamer was the only feature in that vast and silent emptiness. Nora, who had glimpsed some of the perils of a seaman's life on her first sea voyage, now, on her second, felt something of its ineffable magic too.
She and everyone else on board experienced some of its frustrations the following morning when, having steamed past Spithead and through the Solent into Southampton water, they came to dock. Their space at the quayside was taken by a three-masted schooner unable to sail. Half her crew was sick from having taken soured pork, and the other half was in dispute with the master for wishing to sail shorthanded. The ferry had to moor alongside her; but the paddlewheel was in the way, so that although the decks of the two ships were level, they were still several yards apart. And across this large gulf, with deep water beneath, the company had placed a narrow ladder.
The first man across was a seaman, who, either out of bravado or because he was under orders to make it seem easy, strolled across like a soldier on Sunday. He almost came to grief halfway and finished the journey, slowly and prudently, on all fours. It was in fact the only safe way to cross, especially for the ladies, hampered by their great skirts and shawls. Baby Clement and several young children were swung ashore, like cargo, in a net. It took over an hour for everyone to disembark.
"For the life of me," Nora said when they were all together again, "I can't understand why the sailors didn't at least put their ship out on an anchorage before they began their dispute."
The porter, collecting their trunks, smiled to himself.
"Do you know?" she asked him.
"Ah," he said. "They say it's because if they slips moorings, a dispute could be called mutiny. But I says, if you asks me, it's because a master must pay more demurrage fast to a wharf nor fast to an anchorage."
As a particularly English combination of bloody-mindedness, of pig cunning, of official indifference and ill-preparedness, of risk to the innocent public, and of muddling through, it was a fitting welcome to the old country and, though even Nora did not know it, a neat augury of the times that lay ahead.
Part Three
Chapter 20
Ruin was inevitable. One of the penalties of keeping immaculate accounts is that they leave no room for hope—there were no errors in Nora's books to offer the firm a surprise salvation.
Only John and Nora could see it, for only they knew of the terrible demand that would sooner or later be made on their resources—and it was going to be well over the hundred thousand that John had estimated. His hope of getting rid of at least half of Beador's worthless debt proved far too sanguine; if they unloaded a quarter, they would count themselves fortunate.
Yet in one way they were fortunate. Everyone could feel the abnormal strains that were now racking the monied world. Everyone knew that a breaking point had to come; and everyone who could took extraordinary measures to protect himself. So the measures that John and Nora now took—to disguise their ruin for as long as possible—could be passed off as acts, not of desperation, but of shrewdness.
John's role was to get together as much hard cash as possible. Nora's was to start moving that cash around from bank to bank—and even from country to country—in quite novel and unconventional ways, so that when the time came, and there was no cash left to move around, the fact might go unnoticed for… how long? She had no idea. Last year an East India company in the tea trade had gone bankrupt, and the court found it had actually been insolvent for a quarter of a century—which had come as a great surprise even to the directors. Yet in each of those insolvent years they had turned over a good half-million.
On such frail straws they floated their hope for their own survival.
All that summer and autumn, John harvested for cash. If there was a contract that might be finished or brought to a stage payment, by mid-September, he bent heaven and hell to achieve it, even to the extent of moving men from longer-term contracts. For the first time in his career, John deliberately allowed some contracts to drag behind their timetable. The supervising engineers were naturally unhappy and only his promise to catch up—and his reputation to back such a promise—prevented the companies from operating the clauses that allowed them to take over the work and reassign it.
He also tendered low for a host of tiny contracts—sidings, drains, realignments, even routine maintenance—things he would not normally bother with. And these too he hastened to finish before September. And every bill dated November or later he got discounted at once and turned into cash. He liquidated all his material stocks and bought everything spot, paying in ninety-day bills if possible.
As the money flowed in, first in a dribble, then in a torrent, Nora began to move it around according to the strategy they had devised. At first she managed from their home up in Yorkshire; later, as the pace grew more hectic, she moved down to a suite at the Adelaide in London.
There was no word to describe what she was doing. Swindle was too crude, for if the plan worked, no one would lose a penny; all that would have happened was that a few banks would inadvertently have lent them money for an undefined period. Most of the other words—cheat, defraud, shave, pluck, mulct, and so forth—suggested something too irreversible; in any case, they were too strongly associated with criminal and aristocratic behaviour. Nora's own word for her strategy was "hudsoning," a word fitted in every way to the matter, the manner, and the age. And if she ever used it where it was overheard, the eavesdropper would consider the activity admirable; for George Hudson was still the Railway King.
The first bank she "hudsoned" was right on her (and Hudson's) doorstep: the York City and County. She let a draft go through for wages when Stevenson's had no funds in that particular bank to cover it. The manager, knowing what a big and steady account he had in Stevenson's, wrote a polite, almost obsequious letter, drawing their attention to the deficiency; but he allowed the payment. Nora composed a tart reply for John to sign, pointing out that these were difficult times for everyone and that sound firms and sound bankers would survive them best by staying calm. To underline the point, she kept that bank well in surplus for a good long time after.
"Sound" and "staying calm" were the constant themes of the whole "hudson" campaign. Bank after bank bleated to John about a sudden dearth of cash in the Stevenson account. Each received a variant of Nora's lofty homily on the virtues of staying calm and of reposing confidence in firms whose soundness was beyond question—plus, to be sure, the gold to back the words and to sugar the message.
Surreptitiously she sold her properties; from her lucrative firstborn at Alderley Edge to her failures at Pendle and Ayr—all went under the hammer. Money was tight that summer and they fetched only two-thirds of what she considered their true value; hoping for sixty thousand, she got a bare forty. But she was too busy then to grieve overmuch; the bitterness was to come later. In return for all this, Sir George handed them the deeds to Maran Hill, still unmortgaged; and he assigned his heavily mortgaged lands around Stockton. None of it was of any immediate benefit, for they could not risk turning him out. Everything had to go on as normal.
The hudson strategy was not without its problems. The one account she did not meddle with was their permanent one with Chambers. Sooner or later every Stevenson bill came to him for discount; and every foreign transaction went via him. In addition, most of the banks they hudsoned would write to Chambers for reference. Stevenson's had to be able to rely on a good word from him. Even so, the abnormal number of requests for references that poured in from provincial and oversea banks was bound to set him wondering. At last he was driven to ask John whether Mrs. Stevenson was quite well.
"I left him feeling unea
sy," John reported back to Nora, "as you asked me to. But I hope he doesn't begin to panic."
"On the contrary," Nora replied, "I hope he does. Begin to, I mean. The whole essence of this thing is in the timing. And Chambers is the key to it. He's no little provincial banker—yes sir, no sir, here's three bags full sir. The problem of Chambers demands very particular attention. We want him to begin to panic and then, just at the right moment, we must appear as the one rock in his own private storm."
From that day, early in the October of 1845, she began drawing on all their outlying accounts and amassing the money with Chambers. But from that day too, events began to pass out of their hands. Now they had to watch every move in the City, snap up every bit of stray gossip and try to assess its true worth, take daily, even hourly, soundings of the railway intelligence. From that day, there was no appeal from the consequences of even one false move.
For John, on his endless round of visits to cuttings and embankments, tunnels and bridges, it was sometimes hard to believe that all this buzz of well-organized industry could be brought to a halt by the movement of bits of paper in the far-off City. He stood, hearing the picks ring on the rock and watching the spoil fly from three hundred shovels, and he would realize that perhaps, even at that very moment, a papermaker in some small East End papermill was drying the very sheet on which Chambers or someone would write the final, damning words, "insufficient funds." Then the workings would fall silent. The navvies and the bricklayers, masons and blacksmiths would troop off to other masters. The bailiffs would seize the wagons, the stores, Thorpe Manor…their very furniture. He knew it could happen for he had seen it, too often now for his own comfort, when other contractors had gone under; indeed, his own business had been founded on the bankruptcy of another contractor.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 22