Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘I sometimes think he must have had, Gilbert. I’m beginning to think a man needs second sight, to make a living out of a place like this.’

  Slack brought out a shovelful of waste and threw it down casually behind him.

  ‘Don’t chuck it just anywhere,’ Lomas told him. ‘Let’s keep the place tidy.’

  ‘There’s no colonels here, you know, Frank, inspecting your kit lay-out.’

  ‘I don’t need any colonel to teach me my job at the rock-face.’

  Slack did not answer, but did not alter his way of working, either. Lomas suppressed his anger and crawled back to where he himself had been working. For some minutes he heard the ring of Slack’s shovel and the scattering of small stones wherever they happened to fall.

  ‘Don’t fret yourself, Frank. If I find what I’m looking for, you can forget about lying on cold stones on your back. I’d not opt for this as full-time work.’

  ‘You’d not opt for full-time work, anyway, would you, Gilbert?’

  ‘That depends on what lies at the end of it.’

  Lomas picked up his lamp to inspect a dark line that ran down between the strata. For the thousandth time it was nothing but hard clay, tight-packed under a primeval rock-slide. Gilbert Slack also worked on, a dozen shovelsful, a pause, a curse, then the bite of his blade under the rubble again. Then suddenly he stopped, appeared to be scrabbling in front of himself down amongst the rubbish, flung his shovel angrily up the working and stood astride Lomas’s extended legs.

  ‘You bloody rotter! You rotten bloody bastard.’

  At first Lomas thought these were the sort of comic tantrums they had sometimes played at in the army, imitating their officers and N.C.Os.

  ‘I don’t really think that this is your line of country, Gilbert.’

  ‘Cut out the clever stuff, Lomas. I want to know what’s happened to my stuff.’

  ‘What stuff are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t play the bloody innocent. Peg-leg!’

  Lomas began to ease himself out of his cranny again and Slack had to step aside for him to manoeuvre. His heavy boot knocked over one of his walls of waste. Slowly and patiently he came out.

  ‘Now – what’s all this about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what this is about. That night, in Africa, when I told you there was a fortune waiting in Dead-Nettle –’

  ‘Which I’m beginning to doubt.’

  ‘You? You doubt it? Lomas – when I gave you that piece of information, it was for the sake of whichever of us got here first. On the understanding that it was to be fair shares.’

  This, Lomas assured me afterwards, was entirely untrue. No question of sharing had ever been mentioned – or even of any treasure other than crude ore. In any case, Slack had been too drunk, too maudlin, that night in the Transvaal, to remember any of the niceties of their conversation.

  ‘Calm down, Gilbert. I don’t know what any of this means.’

  ‘No? You weren’t going to dig down there, you said, because that was where the Old Man gave up.’

  ‘I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘So when did you dig down there?’

  ‘Gilbert –’

  Slack looked as if he were going to do Lomas violence. But perhaps he remembered that, living or dead, Lomas now held all the court cards, if what he believed about him was true.

  ‘Listen, Lomas. You were discharged before I was. So you got here first. Fair enough. So you did all the hard labour – and why you’re still buggering about, pretending to be looking for lead, God above knows. All right: so you want people to think you’re on the level, a straightforward lead-getter. Well, you can stand at ease now, Private, sorry, Corporal Lomas, because the betting in Margreave has been that you’d have given up six weeks ago. And all right: you did the bloody work. We‘ll settle for sixty-forty then. But that’s as far as I’ll go. Just remember that I did some of the work, too – the real work. And I found myself in the army for my pains – for seven bloody years.’

  So that was it. We raked the facts together later: Lomas had not known them. Slack, a reluctant apprentice to the grocery trade – and his father, Tiggy, in a very short while equally reluctant to be his employer: and Gilbert Slack advancing from petty theft to major burglary. We never did work out the full tally. It was too long ago for that, and Slack was obviously not going to tell us. But one particular batch of loot was stashed away in Dead-Nettle. And when Slack was arrested in flagrante delicto in some particularly niggardly break-in – he was never a large-scale operator – he came up against one of those judges so unpopular with Her Majesty’s military ministers. Gilbert Slack was preserved from a prison sentence on giving his undertaking that he would join the army. It was said in open court that it might make a man of him.

  ‘So where is it, Lomas?’

  ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Listen, Lomas, let me give you a bit of advice. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to try to sell that stuff. Some of it will still be on the lists, even after all this time. Because some of it was bloody good stuff. You want to watch where you try to place it. You’d do better to leave it to the professionals. If you get seven years, you’ll do them inside. And I do still know a man or two who can help.’

  Lomas saw two things clearly. There was something here that he was not going to touch at any price. And Gilbert Slack was about as dangerous a friend as a man could have: Isobel already knew it.

  ‘Somebody must have had your stuff,’ he said, ‘long before I came on the scene.’

  But it angered Slack that Lomas should even try to talk his way out of it.

  ‘Lomas, if you put a foot wrong, I promise I’ll see you shopped for it. I’ll swear you came with me on the job. You try to pass one item out of that chest, and I’ll have every pie-shifter1in Derbyshire on watch for you, so help me Christ I will.’

  ‘Come and turn the cottage over,’ Lomas said. ‘And there’s a thousand tons of deads you can shift to one side if you like. Make yourself at home.’

  Slack blasphemed. ‘So you’ve had some help to get the stuff off your premises. And you think I don’t know who that might be? Well, there’s a clear way I can fix you with her for all time. I don’t have to tell you what that is. Think it over, Lomas.’

  1 Policeman: late nineteenth century underworld slang.

  Chapter Eight

  On a third occasion Lomas had to come away from his tunnelling to receive an unexpected caller. This time he was in the middle of a burst of unmusical song when he realised that he was not alone.

  Arse-’ole-diers went to war,

  Arse-’ole-diers won;

  Arse-’ole-diers stuck their bayonets

  Up old Kruger’s

  Arse-’ole.

  He could not see whether Esmond Fuller thought it shocking or not. He was probably pretending not to have heard, for this morning the landlord looked well kept and respectable, not dressed as he had seen him when he had first called at the Hall, in the floppy comfort of resigned retirement. This was Esmond Fuller business-like and brisk, in tweed hacking jacket and twill riding breeches that were a cut above anything that any other man in Margreave might be wearing. Seeing that he was looking about himself with systematic curiosity, Lomas lit a second lamp and took him on a conducted tour of the little mine, stopping by each of the trial galleries which he had hewn out and since abandoned. He began to explain the strata in somewhat heavy-going detail.

  ‘You can see from this trough-fault that the whole hill-side must have slipped at some time or other. It’s in just such a cleft that you might expect to find metal.’

  ‘Only you haven’t?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  There were in Esmond Fuller’s conversation this morning none of the cynical pretences that had characterised his talk on the previous occasion. He was not putting on any sort of act this morning, either for Lomas’s sake or his own. This was the man who had climbed by his own diligence from nothing to
the top of an industrial tree. A courteous man, but one whose soft tongue and courteous manner would not stand in the way of commonsense efficiency. Nor was there anything about him that might let a stranger see how lonely and disillusioning he found the top of the tree to be.

  ‘You’ve been putting in long hours, Lomas.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It hasn’t always been easy for you.’ A mere movement of his eyes in the direction of the lame leg.

  ‘No, sir.’

  Then a sweeping glance that took in the lines of fastidiously piled debris.

  ‘You work to a system.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So what have you to show for it?’

  Lomas was slow to answer. The bottom of his dish was covered now – if he spread out the ore with his fingertips.

  ‘I have some way to go yet, sir.’

  ‘I took the liberty of peeping in at your windows. It looks as if you haven’t been idle in the cottage, either.’

  Lomas took the hint and let Fuller lead the way out of the mine and across to the building. It belonged, after all, to Fuller; he was entitled to see what had been done with his property. The rent was paid meticulously to the day. No one but Lomas knew what his reserves were. He must have a date in mind beyond which he did not propose to go on labouring here. But even Isobel did not know his mind on this subject.

  ‘You’ve missed your vocation, Lomas. You ought to be managing a ware-house.’

  ‘I don’t want an indoor job, sir.’

  ‘You don’t call a hole in the ground indoors, then? But I came to make a suggestion. There are other derelict workings on my estate, dozens of them, in fact. Some of them, to my untutored eye, look a good deal more promising than this one. I’m quite prepared to give you a roving commission. Go prospecting anywhere you like. If you fancy somewhere new to set up shop, by all means take possession. Just let me know what you have in mind, that’s all I ask.’

  And this was where Lomas showed the fundamental weakness of his temperament. He knew from Slack’s revelation that his dreams of Dead-Nettle were founded on nothing. He had come to the point where mere staying-power had become an absurdity. But Lomas still opted to stay.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll bear that in mind. I might be glad of it. But I haven’t exhausted the possibilities here, and I’m not one for leaving work unfinished. Once I start a job, I like to see it through.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Fuller began to wander round the room, stopped in front of the photographs of Lomas’s grand-parental groups. He recognised the ornate gilt frames, and they pulled him up short, but he pointedly said nothing. There was an improbable feminine touch, a posy of dried everlasting flowers in a glass vase that Fuller knew he had seen before. There was a pair of brass candle-sticks in the form of cast Grecian figures which had been rescued, it seemed, from a guest bedroom at the Hall.

  ‘I might as well look upstairs while I’m here.’

  He helped himself to the creaking rungs of the ladder. Lomas’s bed was neatly squared up under a patchwork quilt that had been worked by one of Isobel’s great-aunts.

  Esmond Fuller rode home in thoughtful mood. That afternoon, for the first time for several weeks, Isobel did not appear at the mine at tea-time. Lomas set a match to his own fire and the potatoes seemed to take an agonisingly long time to come to the boil.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘What is it that you want from this man?’

  And how could she answer that without hurting her father beyond all measure? It would even hurt him to have to acknowledge that there was a gulf between them. They made fun of pretending that there was, and that was their way of escaping from reality. There was a chasm, and it was not of her making or his; she had been determined to find a way of living with it, not to let it part them. She belonged to one world and had to live in another, and the one she belonged to existed nowadays only in the secrecy of her own heart. The situation was bearable only as long as she could dream-live. Had she been a fool to think that they should continue indefinitely like this?

  Yet she was determined even now that there was going to be no acrimony between her and her father. He had taken enough knocks.

  ‘What do I want from him? I am not entitled to want anything from him. I don’t even know what he wants from himself.’

  ‘You can rule three black lines under that. If he has a mind, he doesn’t know it.’

  Isobel knew that the danger was that her father might be engendering a totally unjust hatred for Frank Lomas.

  She must head him off from that if she possibly could, but her tactics must not be obvious.

  ‘There are plenty of people about,’ she said, ‘who have no minds. Yet they think they know only too well what is in them.’

  ‘Clever, Isobel – and meaningless. How much longer is he going to go on living on liquidated capital, pursuing an obstinate obsession?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s for him to think his own way out of that. It’s not for you or me to do his thinking for him. It would be fatal to try to influence him.’

  ‘Yet you do want to influence him?’

  ‘I’d like to help him find himself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think there is something there worth finding. And he needs help of a special kind.’

  ‘Which you think that you can give him?’

  ‘I shall go on trying.’

  ‘Just to amuse yourself?’

  ‘You know me better than that, Father.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Not by anyone’s standards a satisfactory exchange. But her father had managed to keep his temper. He had shown that he still respected her. She felt as if they were over the worst of the confrontation already. She hadn’t been explicit with him – but had she ever been explicit with herself on the subject of Frank Lomas? Would this discussion force her to make up her own mind?

  ‘You do know that you’re putting yourself in a very dangerous position?’ he asked her.

  ‘With Frank? Not that kind of danger. Father.’

  He looked as if he had regretted bringing up the subject.

  ‘Maybe he’s the one who’s in danger,’ she countered, and immediately wished she hadn’t. The truth about this inevitable row was that they were both too civilised to bring up the things that were really uppermost in their minds. Isobel tried to meet one of these half way and found herself committed to what she had most been hoping to avoid.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. I suppose I can’t help disappointing you. I know you gave me an expensive education.’

  The Convent: they weren’t Roman Catholics, but the place had had the best reputation for academic ambition of any in reach. And then she had gone to a so-called finishing school – in Bruges, of all places. Her mother had felt that that was not so far away from home as Switzerland. It had worked, in that she supposed it had finished her, though perhaps not precisely according to the intentions of the twin old-maid principals. Isobel and one or two friends had managed to maintain a common front of their own opinions – in private. Had her true world always been a private one?

  ‘And I’m grateful for all that you did for me. But what am I expected to do now? Marry a Duke?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Her independence of outlook had upset both her mother and father. There had been an immaculate young man with a tailor-made career in private banking who had been put so pointedly in her way that her only defence had been to treat him with contempt: quite unjustly. There had been others – idlers, potential martinets, fawners, butterflies, hypocrites and dullards. It ought to have been a relief to both her parents that she had seen through her suitors. But it sometimes seemed as if they were blaming her for the faults that she found in the men.

  ‘I only want you to be happy,’ her father said.

  A clichë but he meant it although, paradoxically, he could not possibly know what happiness meant for her. The psy
chologists were beginning to say that it was the unconscious role of a father to teach a daughter how to love. And then not to let her love? To nourish a passion, and then to forbid it?

  ‘You want to marry this man, Isobel?’

  ‘I’ve never given such a thing a thought.’

  That was a lie, and he went on as if she had said the opposite. ‘You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking you can change him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to change him. That would be neither logical nor fair.’

  ‘Nor possible. I’ve known too many women – and men – who tried to turn their partners into something they couldn’t be.’

  ‘I’m not one of those, I hope.’

  He remained silent for seconds, taking care not to reject her answers out of hand.

  ‘He doesn’t belong to your world,’ he said at last.

  ‘What is my world?’

  ‘He isn’t an educated man.’

  Are you? she wanted to ask. Was Mother? Instead, she stayed within bounds.

  ‘What does education mean? Book-learning? Reading fashionable novels? The Grand Tour? He is a considerate, intelligent man.’

  ‘You know nothing of him, really.’

  Silence again, both of them thinking. This time Isobel broke in.

  ‘Look, Father, don’t let’s exaggerate this thing. You must give me credit for at least average prudence. I don’t know my own mind, I’ll admit. You can’t make it up for me, and it would be wrong of you to try. I want to be happy with someone the way you and Mother were happy.’

  Dangerous territory. An unfair advantage? If it was social standing that was stinging him, then had he forgotten that both he and her mother had come from working-class terraces?

  ‘I hope, Father, that you’re too much of a realist ever to try to stake out a pattern for me. Even if you did, I’m sure you’d be too wise to weep tears if I turned out to be the wrong shape.’

  High-minded talk. The only plan that he had for her at the moment was to keep her here as a companion for himself, and that was something to which she had resigned herself. She did not question where her duty lay. It even assured her some measure of freedom. In a great many ways a career could be a bore. She was not entirely an unwilling prisoner at Margreave; but he must not think that he could shackle her spirit too. There was no need for duty to become unpleasant. There might be such a thing as getting the best out of two worlds: the alternative was to get nothing out of either.