God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  “You can put that sack down for a start,” she said, “for there's nothing in it but bricks and shavings. The real one was put off at Cambridge, consigned to ‘Waterbeach.’”

  He said nothing to this but sat down very suddenly on the step, his legs folding like those of a man half-stunned. She said, “Open it,” and like a robot he took out a clasp knife and slit the sack its full length. Rubbish, and a single half-brick, rolled out on the plank floor and he studied it, not so much ruefully as contemplatively, as though it would somehow explain her presence. And then he did a strange thing. He threw back his head and laughed, moderately at first as though tickled by a small joke, then heartily and finally uproariously, until he was helpless with mirth.

  She let him have his laugh before saying, “I might be a woman, Mr. Wickstead, but I’ve had a good deal of experience in the trade. The thing I resent most, I suppose, is being taken for a damned fool. Particularly yesterday, when you passed yourself off as Sir Launcelot. That was quite a performance for Jack Sheppard.”

  “I enjoyed it,” he admitted, readily. “You’re a very cuddlesome lass and, as to your legs, they’re among the best turned I ever saw.”

  “We’re a long way from home now, Wickstead, so spare me your kiss-in-the-ring compliments. The point is, what the devil do I do about you? Can you tell me that?”

  “I could offer suggestions,” he said, equably, “but I’d sooner know how you rumbled me.”

  “It wasn’t difficult. Mostly a matter of putting two and two together. For a professional thief it was very stupid to volunteer for the trip.”

  “Yes, it was. I see that now, of course, and I saw it at the time, but there didn’t seem any alternative. However, you wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble on that much evidence.”

  “I didn’t. I paid you a call and went through your things. You have interesting luggage, Mr. Wickstead. A revolver, a mask, and a fascinating collection of other people's watches.”

  He blew out his lips, as though on the point of whistling. “You’re a corker,” he said, “a real corker! I hope that chap Swann realises what a treasure he has on his payroll.”

  Suddenly she was tired of bandying words with him. The enormity of his deception, and the price she would have paid for it had it been successful put a cutting edge on her voice. “Great God!” she exclaimed, “why does a man like you have to go through life like a jackdaw with his beak in everyone else's property? Why the devil can’t you stand on your own two feet, as I have to, and make your own way in the world? It isn’t as if you were a cripple, is it?”

  “I’m a kind of cripple,” he said.

  “Because you’re bone idle and would sooner steal than work?”

  “No,” he said, dreamily, “I’m not an idle person. I work harder than most at my trade.”

  “Trade!” She spat the word down at him. “You call it a trade? Trade has dignity and where's yours at this moment, run into a corner by one woman? Aye, and a woman without a pistol strapped to her wrist.”

  He seemed to consider this and accept it as valid. He stood up, slowly, brushing shavings from his breeches. “That's fair as far as it goes,” he said, “but it doesn’t go far enough. To begin with, those diamonds are as much mine as Beckstein's.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it is so. To you Sol Beckstein is a merchant. To me he's something else. I know how he came by those particular stones and why he's using your service to get them off his hands. Being Sol he could find a safer way of fencing them if he wanted, but he's like most of his kind, as greedy as a gull, and couldn’t wait for the two thousand per cent profit they’ll fetch him.”

  “You’re telling me those diamonds were stolen?”

  “Of course. Most of the stones he handles are in one way or another. We take the risks. He takes the profit.”

  It made a difference. In a way it answered some of the questions she had asked herself about him over the last twenty-four hours. She said, slowly, “Have you always done this? Wasn’t there a time when you were like other people?”

  “I am like other people. A great number of people. I don’t mean like you, or old Duckworth, or any of those pound-a-week carters at your yard, but there's a kinship between me and the kind of men who pay you pence to make guineas. Honesty? Industry? Thrift? What do these words really mean to people in a big way of business? What do they mean to that gaffer of yours, living on strawberries and cream in London?”

  She felt the colour rush to her face and turned away from him. “Far more than a cutpurse like you could imagine. Adam Swann puts in a longer day than any of us. He pays good wages and accepts personal responsibility for every living soul he employs.”

  “Then he must be an exception proving the rule. You called me a jackdaw. All the merchants I’ve come across are hawks. One was instrumental in transporting my father for twelve years, on account of a single bale of calico. He stole it to provide clothes for my mother and sisters during a workless spell and we never saw him again. You don’t have to believe it but it was the first thing he ever stole, other than spoiled vegetables in Covent Garden.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Nine. And the eldest of five.”

  She reckoned back, quickly. That would have been getting on for twenty years ago and the savagery of the sentence painted a sequence of pictures illustrating the probable background of the tall, embittered man, lounging on the threshold of an empty luggage van, committed to a nonstop war on society. She said, “How did your mother manage, Wickstead?”

  “Indifferently, for two to three years. Then she died in the local Grubber. I saw her in her coffin and calculated her age. She was around thirty-five. She looked sixty.”

  “And your sisters?”

  “The three youngest were taken in by neighbours. Gilda, the eldest, was pretty. She didn’t have to steal. She had something to sell.”

  She had sometimes thought of herself as sorely tested over the years but she saw now that hardship was a relative experience. She had always had a roof over her head and enough to eat. She had always worn woollens in winter, and there were many days in her childhood and girlhood that had kept their colours over the years. It struck her then that by no means every theft he had committed was as calculated as this, and that there had been occasions, perhaps many of them, when stealing had been an alternative to starving.

  She said, quietly, “Were you ever taken, Wickstead?” and he replied, casually, “I served three years building their stinking fortifications at Gibraltar. Three of seven I was directed to serve,” and then smiled, adding, “Long enough to build the muscles that held that load off you yesterday morning.”

  “Is that why you carry a loaded pistol?”

  “I don’t mean them to take me alive again.”

  It was not a threat exactly but a statement, at one with his coolness and impudence and with his resolution too, for he was not in any sense a blowhard. She saw him then as she had half-seen him from the first, not as a stablelad turned waggoner, not as a professional thief, but as a freebooter as old as time, hammered into the man he was by the hit-and-miss blows of an imperfect society. Whatever thoughts she had of putting the police on his track were washed away by the strong current of sympathy she felt for him.

  “They’ll take you in the end. This isn’t the only way to hit back.”

  “It's my way,” he said.

  She thought hard for a moment, contemplating the risks of a compromise. “You could do better. You’ve got brains and brawn and nerve, and it's all such a terrible waste. I stand in well with Swann and he needs men like you. I should have to tell him the truth but I believe he’d back my judgement…”

  She stopped because he was smiling, the way he had smiled when he was cleaning the wound on her knee.

  “I wouldn’t put you or him to the test,” he said. “Things have a way of going astray in your kind of business. It's one thing to risk a stretch chasing a handful of sparklers. It'
s another to have to prove to one's benefactors one wasn’t there when a packet of pins went missing. It's handsome of you, none the less, so I’ll give you some advice in return. Steer clear of Solly Beckstein. His orders aren’t worth having at double the rates you’re charging.”

  “I’d already made up my mind as to that.”

  “Yes, you would have.” he considered her, his eye roving from top to toe and back again. “I said it once and I’ll say it again, Miss Wadsworth. You’re a corker. Any man on the make would be damned lucky to lay his hands on you. Commercially speaking, that is, although not exclusively so. Do we shake hands now? Honour seems to be satisfied.”

  She took his hand and shook it, wondering why she felt so diminished, the loser rather than the winner of this curious duel. Perhaps it was a final attempt to draw level that made her say, “If you change your mind I’ll speak for you any time. So long as you’ve thrown that pistol in the river,” but he was equal to that. “I’ll do as much for you,” he said, gaily, “If you change yours, that is. I operate over a wide field but a whisper to the Boots at the ‘Wheatsheaf ’ will always reach me.” He tipped his hat gravely but there was laughter in his eyes as he stepped round her, on to the platform and down towards the exit. She saw him for a moment against a tide of passengers moving across the hall to the London train and then he was lost.

  She was still at her desk when Duckworth ambled across the yard and closed the gates after the last, homegoing waggoner. Her leg, coiled in an unnatural position because the scab on her knee was hardening, felt stiff and numb, and she stood up, yawning and at odds with herself, wondering if there were any more loose ends to be tied before she went home to supper. Kitson, of Cambridge, had been wired to extract the casket from the Waterbeach sack and to return it by hand to Beckstein's warehouse, sending the remaining packets on to Harwich. She herself had written and posted the letter explaining to Beckstein that instructions had come from Headquarters prohibiting the handling of jewellery as freight. She wondered what he would make of this but decided she did not care. Duckworth and Edward Brockworth had been given adequate explanations, the one as regards her second thoughts on Beckstein's traffic, the other a fabricated story about suspicions concerning a waggoner's honesty. Both had accepted the stories at face value, just as she had accepted Wickstead's. Arrangements had been made with the Harwich agent to collect bags at the left luggage office and make the local distributions a day behind schedule. She didn’t care about that either, although it was the first time a parcel run had lost a clear twenty-four hours.

  There was one thing left to be done. She picked up the report for Headquarters, the letter that would have been on its way to London by now had she failed to return from her thief-taking jaunt within the period, and tore it into small pieces, burning them all in the grate. It took a moment or so and then it was gone in a final spiral of smoke, just like Wickstead, just like all the men who touched her life and moved on out of sight and sound. She called to Duckworth, “Go on home, I’ll lock up and let myself out the back!” and he raised his arm in acknowledgement and left. Petulance stirred in her when her sore knee came into contact with a stool, and she kicked at it like a sulky child. Then, catching herself, she pulled herself together and stared into the tin-lid she used for a mirror, seeing there a new kind of doubt that hadn’t been there two days ago, when she had run shouting into the yard, to berate a carter for slipshod loading. For a moment Yorkshire commonsense battled with dragging loneliness and body-hunger, with the impulse to break with a way of life that seemed likely to deny her the security and comfort of a man of her own and children of her own, with all that a healthy woman of twenty-eight took for granted. Wharfedale forthrightness won. She said, aloud, “Oh, give over, you silly slut! Where's the sense in lusting after a footpad, with his neck in a noose?”

  She picked up her scarf and drew it over her head, knotting it with such emphasis that the jerk elevated her small, pointed chin. She went out, slamming the door on its spring lock and marched across the yard, her flatheeled shoes raising a scuffle of dust like a series of soundless explosions.

  TOWARDS THE WEIR:

  1865–1866

  One

  1

  HE ALWAYS LOOKED BACK ON THAT PERIOD—THE FEW WEEKS LEADING UP to the early summer of 1865—as his apogee, a time when he and all his concerns were riding high, when the sun shone every day and the nights, wherever he happened to be, were redolent with novelty and promise. His domestic affairs had never enjoyed a period such as this, with Henrietta recapturing much of her original sparkle as the household settled to its comfortable collar, and the children seeming to grow a little every day, Avery's rewarding byblow as well as his own Stella, pudgy little Alexander, and baby George, who lay in his cot, chuckling over his inexhaustible stock of private jokes. His financial affairs were stable, with the house paid for, Blunderstone and McSawney off his back, the quarter-rents paid, and a reserve accumulating against the delivery of more boxcars, more horses, and a fleet of holiday brakes in time for the indents of Ratcliffe, Dockett, Catesby, and Blubb.

  He spent the entire month of May on an extended spring tour, visiting every district in the network, and although he was never satisfied that all were fully stretched, what he found there gave him a personal glow of achievement and private assurance that very little had been overlooked in the regions.

  He went first across the Kentish Triangle, finding Blubb established down here like a mellow old potentate, whose shrewdness had gained him the confidence of all his customers and subordinates, so that they tended to speak of him with a mixture of jocularity and awe, a ruler who was admittedly old, gross, and beery, but who knew precisely how many beans made five and, moreover, possessed an additional pair of poached-egg eyes positioned somewhere near the top of his spinal cord.

  By Mayday he had passed into the Southern Square, to find the boy Rookwood grown to manhood in a matter of months and bringing to the territory a zest and crackle that had not been evident in Abbott's day, notwithstanding the latter's drive and administrative ability. He spent two days here before passing across to Tom Tiddler's Ground, and accompanying Dockett on a rapid horseback tour of the island, counting no fewer than fourteen Swann waggons in their progress across the chines and into the interior. Two days later he was at Exeter, fussed over by Augusta Ratcliffe, and introduced by Hamlet to innumerable country cousins, whose buzzing speech recalled his ride across the full width of Devon after his landfall at Plymouth when the enterprise was a dream.

  From Exeter he took a train to Worcester and was conducted by Morris on a tour of the porcelain factory, taking note that Morris was accepted as a man of substance by the merchants on account of cornering the market after his deal to haul china all the way to Cardiff. Morris did not take kindly to supervision so he spent less than a day here and passed on into Bryn Lovell's territory, astonished to find the taciturn Welshman married and legal guardian to a flock of copper-coloured children, the sons and daughters of a pretty half-caste, whose first husband had died of blackwater fever off the West African coast the previous year.

  Lovell had always registered at Headquarters as the incorrigible bachelor, who sought the small bonuses of life in his books and social theorising, so that his new status came as such a shock to Adam that he felt justified in demanding an explanation. The old Bryn would have retreated into his terrible personal privacy but marriage, or multiple step-fatherhood, had greatly enlarged him, and he said, with a smile, “We all come to it, Mr. Swann, and I’ve no regrets for she's a rare woman, with a still tongue and the sense to keep from under a man's feet when he's about his concerns. The truth is, I was nudged into it at Barry dock, where Lottie—Lizzie's youngest that is—fell between jetty and a moored collier, and would have drowned if I hadn’t been there to fish her out with a boathook. I gave her mother a tongue-lashing for letting her stray there unattended and then one thing led to another, and here we are, six of us in the cottage where I thought to spend my old a
ge reading books I’ll never have leisure to open now. Would you care to make the acquaintance of Lizzie while you’re here?”

  Adam said he would indeed and was introduced to a slender, sloe-eyed woman, who looked young enough to be the manager's daughter and was, for Bryn said she was not yet thirty. She was very subdued in her husband's presence, but he noticed that, for all his long years of bachelorhood, Lovell seemed to adjust naturally to the role of paterfamilias and was already teaching the two older boys to read.

  He went on to the Northern Pickings in thoughtful mood, reflecting that it did not do to make assumptions about anybody for, in spite of Lovell's casual approach to his new responsibilities, it was obvious that he derived great satisfaction from the reverent ministrations of Lizzie and was very pleased with his readymade family. He met Godsall by appointment at Derby and found him chafing for promotion, although he seemed to be doing well on the fringe of the industrial area and holding his own with competitors in the Dale country, where he had hopes of organising a holiday-brake service, based on Ashbourne. He said, when they were inspecting the stables, “How long is old rascal Blubb going to cling to the Kentish beat, Mr. Swann? He should have died of apoplexy years ago,” and Adam said that coachees of Blubb's type had been known to make a century, and there were tombstones around to prove it, but that he intended to retire him on pension in the new year and Godsall should replace him, as promised. “Not that Blubb needs a pension,” he added, “the old reprobate has amassed a fortune in tips and commission, for it's that kind of territory. Not like this, where they count the pennies.”