Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  But more might be found. The hills were full of it. There might be a parallel stratum, a basset, below this. A trial-shaft here, a cross-probe there. Frank Lomas was committed. He was a man who thought and walked in straight lines and went through obstacles rather than round them. And was there not, besides, the evidence of Gilbert Slack? The night that Gilbert had told him of Dead-Nettle Drift, he wasn’t telling lies. They had both been too near their Maker in the hours that preceded that dawn to want to take chances with their immortal souls.

  He set out towards Margreave Hall.

  Chapter Three

  A mock Palladian cube, a facade of pilasters and balconettes and false balustrades that gave the impression of little more depth than if it had all been painted direct on the dour stonework. I tried to tap Lomas’s reactions, when he came to tell me of his first visit to Margreave Hall; it fascinated me to know whether he had some streak of instinctive aesthetic taste which might lead him, off guard, to some gem of summary judgement. The place might have over-awed him by its size and by its pretensions to antiquity; or he might have held it in contempt for reasons of sour-grape politics, or even through some true vein – some scrin, basset or pipe – of genuine values.

  He disappointed me. He had walked into the place taking it as he saw it, and had not thought about it at all; the den of the lion he was about to beard, no more. He had heard in the inn the previous evening of the adverse feeling of the community against the man who had bought the manorial rights. Did this affect the spirit in which he approached the new châtelain? I think not. I think that Frank Lomas was only ever affected by two considerations: the job currently in hand, and the possibility that somewhere, someone or other might have taught him an epigram that assessed, clarified and disposed of the whole situation.

  He passed fallen statuary, Arcadian youths with chipped noses in lichen-crusted shifts, prone with their curvaceous arms and stringless bows amongst the seeded grasses of neglected lawns. Wild thyme luxuriated amongst the massive amphora of a weathered terrace, sowthistles lorded it in the crevices between flag-stones. But it was the confusion of partial repair, not the chaos of decay. Everything was progressing towards new order, not running downhill to final dilapidation. The area around an Augustan belvedere had been weeded and swept clean, a barrow laden with sere nettles, teasles and wilting white goosefoot waiting to be wheeled behind the scenes. But no one was in evidence to do the wheeling.

  Lomas found the portentous front door open and there was no answer to his tug at the bell. He went in and looked about himself, as far as he could manage it without vulgar curiosity, expecting to meet someone at any moment. Behind a door at the other end of the mock-Adam hall, a quarrel seemed to be in progress: a man’s voice, confident but exasperated, and a woman’s, fluent, emphatic – and amused.

  ‘Pray, then, for a radical Tory or a paternalist Leveller. It matters not what name you give him. If he calls himself one thing, and then does the other, he shall perhaps have the votes of us all.’

  ‘Or none,’ the woman said.

  ‘And the Co-operative Movement shall live by the Wealth of Nations.’

  Lomas tapped on the panel of the door, and when there was no reply, was about to try once again before penetrating further. But as he raised his hand, the door was torn open in his face. The woman, who could not have heard him, was striding out of the room and pulled herself up so close in front of him that he stepped back in confusion. She was laughing – not at him, but at the discussion in which she had just been involved – and which must therefore have been lacking in the acrimony that Lomas had ascribed to it. She was a woman of about Lomas’s age, dressed for morning country visiting, gloves in her hand, natural dark curls peeping neatly under her hat, the image of the immaculate and untouchable.

  ‘Please be so kind as to lower your knuckles,’ she said. ‘You look as if you’re about to hit me. And I’m not sure that I fancy gentle persuasion from that particular hand.’

  Lomas told me that the moment reminded him of an encounter he had had once with the daughter of his Adjutant, on home-station, in a red-brick barracks built at the time of the Crimea. They had both been in some measure out of bounds: he in the shade of a kitchen-garden behind the officers’mess, to which he had gone to steal privacy; she, like as not, on the way to an assignation with a subaltern. The shock of coming upon each other round a sudden corner threw them both into an instant of unguarded intimacy. He had looked directly into her eyes and smiled; she had looked back at him – and had been the first to collect herself. She pouted – weak lips that sank at the corners – and though he had stood well aside to let her pass, she had gathered up a handful of her skirt as if she feared contamination. Later, she had complained to her father that he had accosted her with dumb insolence; he had been awarded confinement for fourteen days without the option.

  But outside the door of the morning room of Margreave Hall he looked into Isobel Fuller’s eyes and she did not divert them.

  ‘You have some business with my father?’

  Two encounters with women: both differing mightily from his first meeting with Hetty Wilson.

  For the moment Isobel Fuller stood looking at him, a light of not unkindly amusement still playing in her eyes. She then stood aside and swept her arm in the direction of her father, who was sitting in a chair by the window overlooking the terrace. She appeared almost to be making Lomas a present of him.

  Lomas went in and was asked to sit down, clumsily conscious of his boots on the parquet. He explained his business, and Fuller listened with the occasional interruption of a brief and acute question.

  ‘Well, it seems to me, Mr Lomas, that the laws and customs of this locality give me no choice. I simply must sit back and allow you to add to my income with no contribution on my part in any shape or form. The prospect pleases me immensely. I shall of course have to face a bitter scene with my vicious Radical of a daughter for not waiving my rights to a share in your takings. But I assure you that no man shall ever find me guilty of such weakness. It is not by feeble-minded generosity that I have been able to buy myself everything but ancestors.’

  I do not know whether Lomas understood this as embittered irony, or whether he thought it idiosyncratic plutocracy at its face value. Possibly he was so innured to eccentricities in his superiors that he had the habit of ignoring them. Esmond Fuller was an elderly man whose bodily chemicals had preserved in him an appearance of lean austerity, even at the height of his evident prosperity. He made a sort of mock heroism out of sharp business dealing, implying shameless guilt of all those malpractices which, in a life of almost unvaried success, he had undoubtedly shunned at whatever cost to himself. I do not know whether Lomas was subtle-minded enough to see this. What matters is that he immediately and thenceforward liked the old man, whether he understood him or not. And the old man – whose understanding of Lomas was, I think, consummate from the start – evidently took to him at once.

  ‘You may think that I am a heartless capitalist, a combination of Shylock and Scrooge, though unrelieved by the more endearing qualities of either. I should go on thinking that, if I were you. You will find it an umbrella against ultimate disillusion. But remember that if I reach out for my percentage whilst you burst your arteries at the rock-face, I am still only being paid for the labours of my younger years.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lomas broached the question of the Dead-Nettle cottage.

  ‘I know, of course, the ruin that you mention. You are telling me that that too might become a source of unearned income to me?’

  ‘I know I can make something of it.’

  ‘Three shillings and fourpence a week,’ the old man said. ‘Paid in advance, and any improvements are your own concern and liability.’

  And Fuller looked down at the surgical boot.

  ‘That isn’t going to interfere with your work in enclosed spaces?’

  ‘It never interferes with anything I want to do.’

  ‘An acc
ident?’

  ‘A Boer bullet. It took away the calf muscle – or, at least, the army surgeons did. It has shortened my leg, because the heel is permanently raised. That’s why the boot is four soles thick.’

  ‘At Colenso, was this?’

  ‘At Vaal Krantz. But I had been at Colenso too.’

  The old man had a patriot’s expertise in even minor skirmishes of the South African War.

  ‘General Buller made me a Queen’s Corporal in the field after Colenso,’ Lomas said, naturally and unboastfully. Fuller’s admiration was genuine.

  ‘But don’t try to live on it, young man. There are troubles waiting for you in Dead-Nettle Drift, I am sure. But I don’t think you’ll meet many Boers in there.’

  Later, when Lomas was crossing the room to go, Fuller called him back.

  ‘I’ll leave you to regularise all the mining matters with Grundy. I don’t run to an agent, so I have to do most things for myself. I’ll draw up an agreement about the cottage and send it round for you to sign. In the meantime, I hope you will let me know from time to time how things go. I’m making no promises, but there might come a time when a modest investment could save work for you and make money for me. There are two kinds of interest, and I need both of them. One you take from a job, one you take in it. I’m finding that a park full of broken statues leaves me bored most of the time.’

  Lomas passed those statues again on his way back into town. But his eyes were scanning all horizons more keenly for any signs of the woman who had laughingly accused him of raising his fist to her. She was nowhere in sight; only tall elms, their leaves already veined with incipient orange after a dry late summer. In a field a man to whom Lomas had talked in the Adventurers’Arms was spreading stable muck with slow rhythmic sweeps of a two-pronged fork. He did not look away from his work to notice Lomas’s passing. But after Lomas had passed, the man leaned on his fork and looked steadily after him.

  Chapter Four

  Isobel Fuller was disturbed, if not actually worried about her father. It had all been so unfair, the early retirement after the economic heart-searching; the house and grounds that did nothing for him, though they would have done everything for the pair if her mother had lived. As it was, she had died between the signing of the conveyance and the arrival of the first batch of workmen to make the place habitable. Her father had tried to sustain his interest but, utterly unlike himself, had flitted from task to task and finished none of them. And she had some inkling of his other disappointments, though he kept the worst of his sadness to himself. He had been snubbed by the County, who looked on him as a parvenu tradesman, which perhaps he was, though his success had done no harm to their continuing prosperity, either. Even the working men hereabouts treated him with no more than a suspect veneer of respect. He had tried to organise a shoot over his hills – what he had tried to call a park warming, and then with hollow laughter a park cooling, when the gentry had one after another pleaded polite engagements elsewhere; and even the beaters and drivers had shown water-tight, cap-fumbling reasons why they could not beat or drive on that particular day.

  Esmond Fuller was on the right track when he called his daughter a Radical, though he could afford to make a pleasantry of it, since he knew he could trust her not to embarrass him. She knew, without breaking his heart by reminding him, how much he had lost. They agreed to differ, and revelled in the battles that arose from their differences. She went out to look for district visiting and good works, but found that it was all being done; her intrusion seemed as bitterly resented by the recipients as by the Establishment. She was on the side of these squalid Suffragettes – but could not answer her father’s scorn at the methods they were using.

  I do not think that it ever occurred to Esmond Fuller that his daughter was gradually submerging even her sincerity under her kindness and pity for him; it chafed as it dawned on her, too late to change her ways without a personal holocaust, that her kindness and pity were in any case not doing him any good.

  Then Frank Lomas came to Dead-Nettle Drift. An ingenuous ex-Queen’s Corporal with a copy-book sense of decency and a strong taste for Herculean work-loads; a suppressed Radical with a disgust at pretentiousness and a deep sadness at what she had already seen of the injustices of common life. It is surprising that Esmond Fuller did not see the likelihood of events earlier than he did.

  Frank Lomas had accumulated a little money from somewhere – not a lot. Savings from army pay, some sort of bounty for his aggregate war service, a grant from a regimental charity for his injury; this, that and the other, all carefully husbanded; even the sale of pieces of embroidery, which he had learned in his hospital bed, to the nurses who had helped him to regain the command of his shattered leg. In all it was a modest sum – but he spent a carefully calculated share of it the morning he came away from Margreave Hall (without seeing Isobel Fuller again on the way).

  He bought timber, hinges, hooks, hasps and padlocks. There were tools he would need in the Drift: gads, for wedging out faces of rock; kibbles – iron-bound buckets for hauling up ore; a bucker, a flat-headed hammer for dressing the lead; a triangular spade, a range of crowbars. There were men in Margreave who knew what he was about and could have equipped him twenty times over from the old implements cluttering their sheds. But they clung jealously to their own. They did not offer and he did not ask. He left precise requirements with the Margreave blacksmith.

  It took him three quarters of a day to swing a door over the entrance to the Drift, strictly resisting temptation to be side-tracked into any experimental chipping in the mine itself. By late afternoon he had made a start on the interior of the cottage, tearing out mouldering plaster into a heap in the middle of the living-room without regard for superficial appearances.

  He was amid and astride a mountain of mildew and dust when Isobel Fuller appeared in the frame of the doorway. He had not heard her horse’s hooves. She held out an unsealed envelope, second-time used. Fuller often made great play over outrageous economies.

  ‘My father has sent you your agreement – also your rent-book.’

  He kicked a sliver of broken lath off his toes, wiped his hands on his corduroy trousers and took the papers from her. He looked casually into the little book, saw that the first four weeks had been entered as paid.

  ‘My father says that it would be gross exploitation to make any charge until you are in position to start work,’ she said. ‘That’s Papa all over. He may seem ferocious when he’s negotiating a deal, but at bottom he’s so generous, you’d wonder how he ever kept us out of the poor-house. I don’t suppose you’ve ever read Goldsmith’s The Man in Black?’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’

  ‘I don’t suppose your life’s given you much time for reading?’

  ‘That has all depended on where I was. Life in the army was nine-tenths killing time. Some of us did read books – when they were about. Someone lent me The Trumpet Major when I was in the Base Hospital. I’ve read Doctor Thorne, quite a few by Sir Walter Scott. And The Newcombes, The Book of Snobs –’

  It was unintentional, but devastating. She blushed flaming red.

  ‘I’m sorry. I ought to have realised –’

  He was slow to see the significance of her confusion.

  ‘By William Makepeace Thackeray,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, Miss, I must ask you to excuse me now. There’s a certain stage I’ve set myself to reach before sunset.’

  She looked round at the filth and decay. ‘You really mean you’re intending to live here?’

  ‘Come back and see it in another forty-eight hours, Miss. I’ll guarantee you’ll not recognise it.’

  ‘I’d like to. I’d like to look in from time to time and see how you’re doing.’

  ‘You’re very welcome, Miss.’

  ‘If I do, you’ll not think I’m – spying?’

  ‘Why should you be?’

  When she had gone, he was annoyed with himself for having made
no effort to detain her. To all intents and purposes he had asked her to go. He had not desisted from his work for more than a passing minute, had not even had the courtesy to see her to the threshold of his doorless door and watch her ride over the green hummocks into the more genteel reaches of the park.

  There was one single image foremost in his mind: her standing, looking with incredulity verging on horror at the repellent debris under which he was almost submerged.

  Two days later, almost precisely to the hour, she returned. The litter was all out of sight now, buried under the dead waste of the mine. The inside walls had been washed down, the earth floor dug over and tamped, dangerous rungs in the staircase ladder replaced by new wood. Lomas was astride the roof-ridge when he saw her approaching across country. He came down at once and was ready to receive her when she dismounted, a wood fire enlivening the hearth and a kettle on the trivet.

  ‘You’ve worked wonders,’ she said.

  ‘A lesson I learned in the army. The art of roughing it is not to rough it at all, as far as it’s in your own hands. Can I offer you a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’d like nothing more.’

  He made it strong and richly orange in colour. She noticed that he had brought basic house-ware, had two cups and saucers ready on a tray, fidgeted with consternation when he saw that dust had settled on the milk.

  They talked; about lead and what were his hopes, and at what angles he was going to drive out his trial borings. He was conscious of some change in the passing of time, as if all that was happening now was on a different plane from everyday living. Their talk was making frightening inroads into the rest of the day’s working programme. He was utterly unbothered at the knowledge.

  ‘I’m holding you up,’ she said at last. ‘You were on the roof doing something. I saw you a mile off.’

  ‘Stopping a gap or two. It’s as good as done.’