“No,” he said, sharply, “not for a second. I would have done that much for you before you came to me with this scheme. I never had any doubts about your ability or judgement or initiative. I’ve never heard a word out of you that I didn’t recognise as good sense, and as for your loyalty to me and to all of us in the network, that was never in question, not even when you talked about turning your back on us.”
“Then it's done? I take over from my father and I leave here with full authority over Goodbody and Horncastle in the Crescents?”
“Yes,” he said, “overall manager of all three territories, backdated from the first of the year on your father's salary, plus a five per cent bonus on turnover.”
“It's generous,” she said, “but I can justify it.”
There was no more to be said. They went down into the yard and out into Tooley Street, where he found her a growler to take them over to King's Cross. In the semi-darkness of the cab he held her hand and she let him, saying little as they trotted through trailers of river mist. Each had a sense of having arrived at a new point of departure in their relationship, and when they parted, after he changed her second-class ticket for a first-class with a small joke about her new managerial status, it gave him the greatest satisfaction to see that the strain and uncertainty that had attended all their other partings was no longer there. He said, taking her hand, peeling down the glove and raising it to his lips, “Pay no attention to what I said about grudging you a good husband, Edith. I never met a woman who deserved one more. Whatever happens from here on you can count on me,” and she said, with a smile, “I always could, Adam. In that way I imagine I’ve been luckier than most women. I’ve crossed paths with two men who didn’t have to resort to pomposity and whiskers to prove their masculinity. Poor Matt drowned but you’ll swim on. Away into the next century I wouldn’t wonder.”
The guard's whistle shrilled and the long train gave its first, convulsive jerk. He stood watching her face until it was swallowed up by the February murk, a small, pale triangle that somehow reminded him of Avery's in its assertiveness and singularity. Then, like a man who has dined well and is conscious of a spring in his limbs, he walked with long strides to the cab rank and made his way to his own terminus.
He could see that something tumultuous was afoot the moment the gig passed the last of the leafless copper beeches. The entire frontage of the house was lit up, as though for a celebration, and the old Colonel, muffled to the eyebrows, met him in the yard, as excited as a schoolboy greeting a companion at the start of a new term. “It's a boy!” he cried, exultantly, “Lively as a cricket and caught the whole damn lot of of ’em on the hop! It was over by late afternoon and the gel is splendid!”
He said, catching his breath, “That about crowns a remarkable day but you oughtn’t to be out here with your chest. Let's hurry in and mix you a hot toddy!”
“I’ve already had three,” the old Colonel said, chuckling, and Adam thought the old fellow could have shown no more jubilance had he been the father.
Inside all was controlled bustle. He went softly upstairs and peeped at Henrietta. She looked, he thought, radiant, with a clear, blooming skin and her copper hair spread across the pillow in delightful disorder. Nurse Hoxton told him she had a moderately easy time of it, and had taken her broth and toast before going to sleep. He went along the corridor and looked down at the gurgling, winking George and it was then that the sense of purpose that had dominated the last twelve hours crystallised in an impression of cresting a steep hill and looking down on the prospect below. It had shape and a promise that enfolded him and his, insuring them all against the future. He thought too of Edith, speeding through the darkness towards her private destiny and somehow, he could not have said why, it all converged on that saucy little bundle winking up at him from the cot. He went down again and warmed his hands at the fire. Outside the wind got up, soughing through the bare branches of the beeches and stirring Henrietta's curtains, part of the material ordered for a party that was never held because an unknown waif had died in a chimney flue. He thought, “Well, that's all behind us now and we’re set fair, I suppose, the whole lot of us. It’ll be up to me to keep on course.” A little over six years had passed since he opened his eyes on the littered field behind Jhansi and seen what he thought of as a half-circle of cobras’ eyes that were not cobras’ eyes but the genesis of everything he had achieved, and looked to achieve in the years ahead. He thought briefly of Avery, and of Avery's child down at Folkestone, of Henrietta asleep upstairs relieved, he supposed, of the unspoken pledge of continuity she had made him that night at the George inn. The identification of the child's name with the place where he had been conceived made him smile, a rather vain, self-satisfied smile of proprietorship over a higgledy-piggledy assortment of men and teams and waggons and the generous body of the woman sleeping upstairs who had somehow, in these last few months, found a new identity, much as he had done when he came crashing down at Jhansi and fallen on the means to adopt it. Then, yawning, he was conscious of the demands of the day and climbed slowly upstairs, too tired to eat the supper laid for him but more composed in his mind than he had ever been, at any time in his life.
Four
1
THERE IS A CERTAIN AFFINITY BETWEEN THE GROWTH OF A COMMERCIAL enterprise and the tactics a trained athlete brings to a long-distance event upon which reputation and prize-money are staked.
It was in these terms, or something like them, that Adam Swann gauged the strength of the tide that turned so definitely in his favour on St. Valentine's Day, 1864, seeing himself as a marathon runner nearìng the halfway mark, with a prospect of not merely holding on but finishing well ahead of his rivals.
By the late spring of 1864 Swann-on-Wheels had, as it were, caught its second wind, and was settling down to a steady, mile-consuming pace, aware of the hazards of the future but fortified by the achievements of the past. The first, spirited attack of the sortie torrentielle had all but spent itself, its ripples spreading out across England and Wales, there to be absorbed in any number of minor forays, but while this was taking place new energy was being generated at headquarters, where the hard-won gains of farflung storming parties were being assessed in ledgers and consolidated on staff maps, so that by midsummer the enterprise was ripe for a second offensive to be mounted on a larger scale than its predecessor. Sortie torrentielle had, in effect, transformed itself into an advance on all fronts.
The advance, like any successful breakthrough, was uneven. Here and there, across a front that embraced all England, progress could be measured in yards, while in other sectors the breakthrough yielded sizeable territorial gains and a rich haul of booty. Then, for one reason or another, a promising local advance would falter, to be taken up elsewhere, so that Adam, studying his wall maps in his belfry, and feeding them with Tybalt's returns and information filtered to him through the post, could never be quite sure where progress would continue, or where reserves were most urgently needed. For the first time in his life he was able to generate sympathy for a general like poor Lord Raglan, whom he had once written off as a hopeless dolt. It was not so easy, he decided, to make wise, overall decisions on the basis of a dozen conflicting reports, or to make accurate allowance for a time-lag that sometimes tricked him into despatching reserve teams to sectors that no longer needed them, thus depriving those that did. Freakish accidents, and equally freakish weather, often had an important bearing on a situation, and neither Frankenstein nor his experience could warn him in advance of the breaking strain of a worn axle in Cumberland, or an unseasonal downpour that turned a Dorset road into a morass overnight. By and large, however, he made few serious mistakes and even managed to learn something from those errors he did commit. By that summer, when the business was on an even keel again, he had learned how to use philosophy as a recoil and also to rely less upon judgement (his own and his adjutants’) than upon luck. One lesson he learned well. Of all the apparatus needed to haul goods from one end of the co
untry to the other the least predictable was human. By June 1864, he was incapable of being surprised by those who manned his picquet-lines and sapheads from Berwick to Brixham, from Cockennouth to Canterbury. Dockett, who looked and spoke like an overgrown shepherd lad, had cornered the house-removal market in his territory with a slogan and in a sense they were all Docketts. One never knew what would emerge from any one of them.
Hamlet Ratcliffe, enlarging his hold upon the Western Wedge, had all but accomplished Lord Courtenay-Hopgood's migration to the edge of the Exmoor plateau, but the effort of coordinating the exodus, without disrupting his bread-and-butter runs, had exhausted him. When the last of his borrowed frigates had trundled up the Exe Valley to discharge its load in the clamorous courtyard of Milord's new headquarters above Simonsbath, Hamlet was a spent man. In three months, the period it took him to shift Milord's chattels over miles of execrable farm tracks, he lost more than a stone in weight. His comfortable paunch had shrunk to three folds of slack flesh that had to be held in by a leather belt, an item Hamlet had never used when the waistband of his breeches was taut, whereas his few grey hairs, that had been regularly plucked by his doting wife Augusta, were now so numerous that it was as well to leave them be for fear his scalp would begin to show.
All through May and June, when the great exodus was building to its climax, Augusta worried herself sick about Hamlet. She had never seen him so nervously extended, not even when terror of dismissal had driven him to catch a runaway lion, and her pitiful appeals to “’ase off a particle, midear” only made him irritable, so that at last he rounded on her bellowing, “Dornee talk so bliddy daft, Gussie! ’Ase off, you zay, time an’ again? But how can I, when I’m zittin yer on me arse all day, trying to pour zix foaming quarts into zix pint pots without spilling the bliddy lot?” She subsided at that, of course, but she went on worrying, neglecting her housework to keep a close watch on him, and surreptitiously dissolving malted-milk tablets into his nightcap cider as well as burying Iron Jelloids, three at a time, in the slice of walnut cake he always ate with his morning cocoa. They must have benefited him in some way for at least he survived and on the final day of June, when the last empty frigate returned to the Southern Square, she crept into his office to find him smiling in his sleep and looking, she thought, like the child she had never given him. She stood looking down at him suffused with tenderness, reminding herself for the thousandth time how fortunate she had been to be chosen by such a genius from all the maids in Devon, and as she gazed it came into her mind that someone should do something for him in return for all he did for others. What he desperately needed, she thought, was to be taken out of himself, to be whisked away from all this clatter and excitement and bustle, and allowed to vegetate and grow his paunch again, and it was then she decided that, whether he liked it or not, he would take a holiday before another rapacious ogre appeared to sow more grey hairs over his ears.
It was not often Augusta Ratcliffe made an independent decision, but when she did it took a great deal of persuasion on the part of others to alter it. And so it was on this occasion, when Hamlet, refreshed by his nap, appeared for his midday meal long before it was ready. He said, when she proposed the holiday, “Tidden possible, midear. Us’ve zeen the last of His Lordship, thank Christ, but now us is faaced wi’ the job of unscrambling the eggs and getting all the routine runs back on schedule. And a main tiresome job it’ll prove, dornee maake no mistake about that!”
She said, with an asperity that startled, “I daresay t’will, Hamlet. But you worn be about it. For one thing us dorn keep dogs to bark ourselves, do us? And for another, you worn be on tap, nor me neither!” Her assertiveness puzzled him so much that he decided to humour her, saying, genially, “What was ’ee thinking on, mother? A foo days in Dawlish? Or a week wi’ the quality at Budleigh Salterton, while the weather holds?” and Augusta said she wasn’t thinking of anything of the kind, for at both places he would be within close range of the stables and would, as like as not, be recalled to unravel some other tangle. “Us’ll tak’ one of they pinnaces an’ move off, gipsy-like,” she announced. “You need the change, midear, an’ youm ’aving it, for that way us’ll zee places us baint never zet eyes on.”
It was not unpleasing to hear her lay down the law in this way, so long as she did it on his behalf. As always, he looked to her for enlargement and notion of the pair of them driving into the sunset attracted him for he was, at base, an idler by preference, and had often yearned to visit places to which he dispatched goods within his territory. He said, approvingly, “Now that baint a bad idea at all, Gussie! I’ll put me mind to it, zoon as I’ve got some o’ that apple pie down me!”
She had the good sense not to press the point, having learned in twenty-five years of marriage that he preferred to think of himself as the originator of an idea and never experienced difficulty in returning it to its source in the form of an inspiration. And so it proved for that same night, when she was struggling with her corsets, and he was lying flat on his back contemplating the ceiling, he said, suddenly: “I’ve a fancy to take ’ee to Plymouth, midear, to zee that bliddy gurt battleship that's put in there. Tis an ironclad, the virst they laid down, but why ’er dorn zink like a stone is more than I can zay. Would ’ee like that?”
“Why, for zure I would, ’Amlet,” she said, but then, artfully, “zo long as us travels by the coast road, for I dorn fancy crossin Dartymoor, an’ passing by that gurt prison. Chock full o’ rogues, tis, or zo they tell me, and they’m alwus up to some caper. Us’ll go by way o’ Dawlish, Teignmouth, Torquay, and Dartmouth-ferry. Us can afford it, can’t us?”
He chose to accept this as a slight on his qualification as a provider and sat up, giving her a stern look. “Gordamme, o’ course we can afford it! We got the bonus commin’, baint us? Afford it? Why, us’ll put up at the best inns all the way down, and maake it a round trip while we’m at it. We’ll zee Plymouth, cut across to Bood with a fresh team, move on up to Ilfracombe an’ Barum, and then home down the valleys, where I c’n show ’ee where I caught that lion.” His imagination took fire as he went on, “Dam’ it, it worn cost us a penny piece. I can write it off as a Western Wedge survey, an’ get London to foot the bed an’ board bills. What do ’ee zay to that, midear?”
She disposed of her corsets just in time to set the seal on his genius with an embrace. “What do I alwus zay, ’Amlet? Youm one in a millyon, and there tis then!”
They set out in the newest light van, harnessed to two of the best pair of draught horses in the stable, for he reasoned that one horse could not be expected to tackle some of the gradients they would meet on their journey. They averaged about fifteen miles a day, winding their way slowly along dusty country roads gay with wildflowers and towards evening, having picnicked en route, they put up at one or other of the old coaching inns that had survived in great numbers down here, despite the blight laid upon hostelries by the Great Western.
She had expected a leisurely progression from stage to stage and looked for nothing more, but she had forgotten his erudition, and how closely he had been involved with all the communities they encountered. He knew the names and singularities of every village, their basic industries, and the distance separating them down to the last furlong, and on the fourth day, when they joined a party of sightseers to inspect Warrior, the first British ironclad, he not only astonished her with his store of information concerning the vessel but attracted to himself a party of hangers-on, who seemed to accept him as the official guide engaged by the Navy.
It was this incident that gave her another idea that was duly fed to him, masticated, and regurgitated as an inspiration. As they were ambling north across the peninsula, on the first leg of their return journey, she said, pensively, “Lookit yer, ’Amlet. Seein’ as ’ow zo many folk come to the zeaside zince the railroad was laid, why dornee use some o’ they ole waggons o’ yours to taake ’em around at zo much a mile? Woulden it pay ’ee through the holiday-season? Woulden they zee more than
they would on Shank's?”
His answer was noncommittal at the time but when they had entered Bude, and were inspecting the wreck of a steamer that had gone ashore in Widemouth Bay and was the season's attraction, circumstances conspired to put a practical polish on the notion. The wreck was some way out of town and the leader of the bedraggled Sunday School outing, caught in a heavy shower, offered Hamlet sixpence per head to convey them back to Bude before they all caught cold. In the drive along the coast towards Ilfracombe Hamlet was very thoughtful, and remained so, even when they were heading over the western spur of Exmoor towards the scene of his lion-catching exploit. He reined a few miles short of the South Molton farm where he had been born, surveying the rolling landscape on his left, “Lookit there, Gussie,” he said, with the irradicable pride of the west-countryman in the hills of home, “dorn it maake ’ee wonder why volks who once zeed it dora bide yer till the’m carried away veet virst?” and when Gussie reminded him that they themselves had exiled themselves after learning that gold pieces were to be gathered on the streets of London, he said, “Arr, and us come posting backalong the minnut us zeed what a bliddy ole lie it was, didden us?” It was at this point, possibly, that the twin trains of thought, set in motion by Augusta's comment and the Bude Sunday School Superintendent's dilemma, struck fire. “Brakes!” he exclaimed, “that's what us’ll use! Brakes! Four ’orse if need be, wi’ knife-edge zeatin’! Damme, there's no knowing how much we could take in between June and September, when all they bliddy townees descends on us! Becky Valls, Haytor Rocks, Widdicombe-in-the-Moor, Kent's Cavern. Think on it, midear. A hundred an’ one places to gawp at and no means o’ getting there be rail. ‘Zee Devon on Wheels.” That yokel Dockett baint the on’y one who can think up slogans. I’ll put young Tapscott to work adapting one o’ they old flats we don’t get no call for this time o’ year.”
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