Down in the Western Wedge and across the Dorset border to the Southern Square, two other adjutants of Adam Swann had no such thoughts. Hamlet Ratcliffe, fearful of diverting Augusta's attention from himself, had never wished for children, whereas young Rookwood would not be thinking of them until some weeks from now, after he walked out of a Salisbury Methodist Chapel with his landlady's pretty daughter on his arm. Both, however, wished Adam well when news reached them that the Gaffer was back among them and that the days of petticoat government were over.
Reading the Headquarters’ circular aloud over his boiled eggs that morning, Hamlet gave expression to this relief, saying, “Us’ll be able to put our veet up now, midear, for although I alwus reckoned Swann was a rare one fer stirring us up yereabouts, his missus, an’ that fancy woman of his, could best him at it, as you’ll own after the winter us had wi’ the pair of ’em hounding us up hill an’ down bliddy dale.”
Augusta (who nursed a secret admiration for Mrs. Swann but dare not admit to it) said that no doubt Henrietta would be glad to get back to her kitchen, and that nothing was to be feared from Edith Wadsworth now she had a kitchen of her own, to which Hamlet replied, “Arr, an’ time enough too. For if there's one thing I can’t abide it's a woman outside one. You can’t never tell what mischief they’ll be at if they get where they’m no bliddy bizness to be!”
He said this so emphatically that Augusta interpreted it as a rebuke. “Baint your eggs hard enough, my love?” she asked, timidly, and Hamlet, who was never loath to proclaim himself champion wife-spotter of all England, patted the back of her freckled hand as he said, “They’m just right, midear. And I wasn’t implying nothing personal. Why, damme, youm a woman in a millyon, Gussie, and it baint the virst time I’ve said zo, be it?”
“No, it baint, my love,” said Augusta, and blushed, as she always did when he paid her one of his rare compliments.
The very last man in the network to learn that Headquarters was drumming up subscriptions for a welcome-home gift to Adam Swann was its youngest, and probably its most conscientious manager, Rookwood of Southern Square. The letter arrived at Salisbury in early May but Rookwood inadvertently pigeonholed it, together with a number of other directives, and this was uncharacteristic of him, as indeed was his state of mind at the time. For the fact was Rookwood was not himself these days and might be said to have been bewitched, all his faculties having treacherously deserted him in a matter of seconds after intercepting a single smile across the breakfast table on the day after his landlady's daughter Hetty, eighteen, pert, dark-haired, and devastatingly pretty, had arrived home for good from her Ladies’ Academy in Torquay, whither she had been sent three years before to be trained in grace, dancing, music, sewing, drawing, and deportment.
He remembered Hetty vaguely, a giggling schoolgirl with long, coal-black plaits and a merry mouth, scampering about the house in the days when he was learning his trade under Abbott, but since then (although she had visited from time to time) he had been so busy that he had no opportunity to learn how a young man might armour himself against the shattering impact of a carefully calculated glance, directed by a pair of brown eyes veiled in long, curling lashes.
Rookwood, man and boy, had come a long way since Keate had prised him out of the Rotherhithe mud and Adam Swann, prince of gamblers, had casually promoted him to the position of manager over one of the largest segments of the network. All in all he had responded well to the opportunity the chance had offered him, and the territory, under his earnest and attentive direction, had maintained its initial start over its nearest rivals gained by Abbott in the first days of the expansion. He had overcome the handicap of youth by strict attention to duty, by long hours of study, and by a tendency to watch the pennies that was a legacy of his vagrant days on the banks of the Thames. In addition, he had at last, by dint of endless coaxing and the application of several jars of Howarth's Graded Moustache Oil, succeeded in growing an impressive pair of whiskers that would not have disgraced a young Sicilian bandit, and these, reinforced by a wary expression and a permanently outthrust jaw, had aged him by a decade, so that carters had ceased to refer to him as “young Rookwood” and knew him as “Young Gaffer,” which could be regarded as promotion.
For all that he was still young inside, still very much inclined to doubt his potential and still morbidly sensitive about his obscure origins, so much so that he had commissioned his landlord, in the capacity of a lawyer's clerk, to trace his ancestry. No documentary evidence had emerged proving that Rookwood was the missing heir to a ducal inheritance or even that he was the byblow of a raffish earl out of an obliging chambermaid. He remained what he had always been, and what he had always thought himself, a piece of flotsam on the bosom of the Thames that had drifted in on the tide, or possibly downstream from Westminster, to mingle with other flotsam near Brunel's Tunnel.
The failure of Mr. Gilroy's inquiries had not worried Rookwood at the time. By now he had a modest pride in himself, as well as money in the bank, and an assured future in the firm. And yet, to Rookwood's disciplined mind, there was something missing, and he was uncomfortably aware of this the moment he intercepted Hetty Gilroy's frank, tender smile. For how was he to know that Mrs. Gilroy had acquainted her pretty daughter with every relevant detail of her lodger's past, or that she had been enjoined, by both father and mother, “to go out of her way to be nice to that dear boy and treat him like a brother.” Hetty, an excessively amiable young lady, was perfectly prepared to do this, particularly as the dear boy was in possession of good looks and was also, according to her father, putting money by at a prodigious rate and already earning twice as much as, say, the music master at the Torquay Finishing School.
Pondering these facts on her first day out of school, she looked and she smiled over her morning porridge, unaware that this mild show of courtesy would have a calamitous effect upon the time schedules of Swann-on-Wheels all the way from the Solent to the Cotswolds, or that Rookwood, a victim of love at first sight, would be thrown into a turmoil of self-doubt that ruined his appetite, reduced his sleep to a few fitful hours a night, and set him contemplating the terrible disadvantages of not knowing who he was, where he came from, or even if his name was more than a label attached to him by some forgotten circumstance in the days when he had slept out under tarpaulins opposite the dock where they had once hanged pirates.
He had never been troubled by thoughts such as these in what he could now look back on as his happy-go-lucky past, but now he began to see all manner of gloomy possibilities in his situation, and his first step was to instruct Mr. Gilroy to cease his search of the registers of Thameside parishes for a Rookwood male, born about 1844, give or take a year or two. When Gilroy demurred, saying that information might be gleaned from the books of recently registered baby-farmers, he said, desperately, “Leave it be, Mr. Gilroy. I don’t want to know, for what I don’t know I can’t fret about, can I?”
It might have stopped there had not the Gilroy home been a matriarchal establishment. Fortunately for all concerned, Mrs. Gilroy (who had long since elected herself Rookwood's foster-mother) heard about it that same day and set herself to watch. It was not long before she discerned the hidden reason behind her young lodger's disinclination to meddle with his ancestry, and in passing she noticed something else but at that time preferred not to confuse the issue. She put her afterthought on one side as it were, merely thanking God that Hetty had come home from that genteel establishment prescribed by her father with her sense of values relatively unimpaired.
For her part Mrs. Gilroy had never favoured the idea much, having a suspicion that a girl who had been taught music, painting, dancing, housewifery-by-the-book and not by-the-kitchen-stove, might become petulant and unmanageable when she found herself all dressed up and nowhere to go. Her observation, however, told her that this risk had been exaggerated. Hetty returned to them more polished, certainly, but otherwise unchanged. She was not above giving her mother a hand with the cooking and clean
ing, and it was soon demonstrably clear that she was very intrigued by the shy young man with the worried look and the carefully cultivated whiskers, notwithstanding the fact that in Mrs. Gilroy's estimation the frenzied application of Howarth's Graded Moustache Oil had aged the boy ten years.
The ageing process, due to the whiskers and the stain of the winter's work, led Mrs. Gilroy somewhat astray in the first instance. She set the blame for his drooping spirits and loss of appetite squarely upon Adam Swann's shoulders, jumping to the conclusion that the dear boy had been overtaxing himself of late. She made up her mind, therefore, to have it out with him, and persuade him to take a holiday, but on the very day selected for the confrontation Rookwood himself brought the issue into the open by hinting that he might soon be leaving the district, and seeking a transfer back to London.
The prospect of losing him appalled her. She had become accustomed to having him there in place of the son she had been denied, and the thought of having no necessity to prepare his breakfast kippers was a foretaste of death. She was very sorry then that she had not made more of a stand when that boss of his came posting down from London, and talked the boy into accepting the post vacated by that dreadful man Abbott and said, with a quaver in her voice, “Leaving us? Leaving me and Mr. Gilroy? After all this time? For London! Why, Mr. Rookwood,” (she had avoided using his Christian name all these years to help buttress his dignity)…“that's unthinkable! I won’t hear of it! You mustn’t think of it! There must be another way of easing that cruel workload they put upon you!” and at this, Rookwood looked very puzzled so that she added, “That is what's bothering you, isn’t it? That's why you don’t like my kippers any more and why you toss and turn so much of a night? Oh, I hear you, and so does Mr. Gilroy, and we’re very worried about it. He said it's those inquiries he's making about your parents but I told him nonsense, the boy has more sense than to fret over that. I said it was all the work they put upon you, and you not much more than a lad, however well you stand up to it, but how will working for the same people in London help? If I was you I’d send in my notice and look about for another position right here. Hickson and Dacre are reputable hauliers…”
She could not have said anything more calculated to expose the true source of Rookwood's disenchantment with her kippers. Hickson and Dacre were his most dangerous rivals, and the prospect of transferring his allegiance to a firm that had refused to rent him a single waggon when all his spares had been sent to help Ratcliffe in December was so outrageous that he fell headlong into the kind of trap barristers set for unsuspecting witnesses, exclaiming, “Me? Move over to Hickson and Dacre? Leave Swann for those brigands? Good Lord, Mrs. Gilroy, I’d sooner sign on before the mast and go to the South Seas to forget!”
He realised his mistake at once and could have clipped an inch from his tongue. He went very red and gestured with his hands, trying to think of something that would repair the gap torn in his defences. It was a vain attempt. A strong, white light lit up the twilight areas of Martha Gilroy's logical brain and suddenly, as though he had proclaimed it in unequivocal terms, she perceived the real reason for his rejected kippers and rumpled sheets. She saw something else too and it made her bubble with excitement. Suddenly a tremendous prospect opened up before her—a daughter off her hands, the dear boy officially enlisted in the family, and the near-certainty of grandchildren to spoil in her old age.
“Hetty!” she gasped. “Dear life, what a fool I am! It's Hetty, isn’t it?”, and he nodded, morosely, but this did nothing to prevent her from grasping him in a fierce maternal embrace, something she had so often longed to do but never had, for fear of embarrassing him. Then a sobering thought occurred to her and she clapped both hands over her ears as though to ward off bad news, and said, “You’ve not…not spoken to her? She hasn’t said no, has she?” and Rookwood, now so far out of his depth that he despaired of touching bottom again, mumbled, “Spoken to her? Good heavens, you can’t know me if you think…what I mean is I wouldn’t presume…Speak to her about it behind Mr. Gilroy's back? Good Lord, ma’am, as if I would…” and he tailed off, muttering something about being shown the door, or invoking Mr. Gilroy's unspeakable indignation but precisely what it was Martha Gilroy never did learn, for suddenly his modesty struck her as something that deserved more than a push; it needed a well-judged kick, and if no one else was there to administer one then she was, praise God.
“Stop it!” she shouted, “Stop talking like that! I won’t listen to a word of it and neither will Mr. Gilroy when he gets home. Whatever is wrong with you courting our Hetty? That's what I’d like to know, for if she doesn’t jump at you she hasn’t the sense I credit her with. As for me, I can’t think of anyone I’d as lief see wedded to my flesh and blood, for I’ll have you know, since you don’t seem to know it already, that I don’t give a thimble who you are or where you come from! It's plain to me you’re a good, steady lad, and very biddable with it, to say nothing of keeping clear of taverns and bad lasses all the years I’ve known you! There, now I’ve made you blush, but I’m not sorry for it. It's time someone told you and if you want to begin courting Hetty you can start at any time you’ve a mind to, with my blessing!” She paused just long enough to draw a single, whistling breath. “Do I make myself clear?”
He was standing in front of her with his mouth open, his hands limp, and his knees slightly bent, so that he seemed to her to be cowering and it was this pitiable aspect of him that caused her to lead him to a chair and give him a chance to make some kind of attempt to pull himself together. He said, at last, “You’ve not…not mentioned it to her?”
“Indeed I haven’t,” she replied, tartly, “for in my day lads didn’t need sponsoring. Mr. Gilroy took his time, now I think on it, but that was on account of him being a lawyer. All the other young sparks I knew wanted holding off not setting on!”
“But, don’t you see, Mrs. Gilroy? Hetty's educated, besides being…well… beautiful. She could have anyone, anyone at all, and I don’t even know who I am. I thought…” but Mrs. Gilroy was not in the least disposed to listen to a recital of his disqualifications. Modesty in a man was becoming but only up to a certain point. Beyond that point it became nauseating, so she said, quite sharply, “I told you to stop talking that way and I meant it, Albert Rookwood! Now you listen to me, and stop sitting there looking up at me like a stranded codfish! I’ve told you what Mr. Gilroy and me think of you, and as to Hetty, I’ve got my suspicions as regards her, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and that can’t be soon enough to my way of thinking. No mother wants to see her only child make a fool of herself, and what with her music and painting and all the whatnot her father would have her learn there's no knowing what kind of loafer she might introduce into the house as her intended. Now me, I like to see what I’m getting in advance, and you’ve been as good as a son to me and Cedric, so there's no question of us buying a pig in a poke, is there? I’m sorry to speak that plain, but circumstances demand it. If you fancy Hetty that much then all I can say is she's a very lucky girl, so, for pity's sake, stop fretting about who you were and try and remember who you are, a lad holding down a job that would tax the wits of a college man, and the patience of Job into the bargain. What's more you’ve been taking more money to the bank every week than most lads your age save in a month, so if you’ll take a final word of advice, say your piece to Hetty right now, without giving yourself time to think on it. If I’m any judge of my own flesh and blood you’ll have occasion to thank me for it, and so will she when she gets used to the idea. Then you can go back to eating a proper breakfast again, and go to bed with the prospect of a good night's rest. Are you man enough to try, or do you prefer to stay hanging about while she has her bit of fun keeping you waiting?”
In the last few years Albert Rookwood had been called upon to make any number of quick decisions but never one like this. Perhaps, however, the uncertainties and the manifold hazards of his profession, had tested him in a way he had not acknowledged up
to that moment for now, faced with a straight choice, he did not hesitate long. He said, lifting his hand to his long, drooping whiskers, “I’ll do it now, Mrs. Gilroy. I’ll get it over with, for I couldn’t stay on not knowing, any more than I could if Hetty didn’t see it your way. Give me ten minutes and I’ll come down and perhaps…well…perhaps you could pretend to be doing something out in the kitchen.”
“Aye, I could that,” she said, smiling, “for there's always one woman's work waiting out there, notwithstanding the way you’ve been picking at your food ever since our Hetty ogled you!”
She went out then and down the stairs, calling sharply to her daughter who was playing with the fat marmalade cat in the backyard. He resisted a temptation to listen at the head of the stairs and resolutely closed the door, peeling off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, and studying himself in the mirror clipped over the splashboard of his washstand. He stood there for more than a minute and then he made another decision. Breathing hard, and holding his face so close to the mirror that it began to mist, he groped for a pair of scissors he kept in his oddment drawer, alongside his razor, his Moustache Oil, and a pipe he had laid aside after a few whiffs had made him as sick as a cat. With the solemnity of a mayor snipping the tape of a new bridge he made two cuts, reducing the carefully cultivated moustache to a ragged fringe extending about two inches beyond each nostril. The alteration was not a success. It gave him the look of a young Irish navigator who shaved by candlelight so he dipped his fingers in his water can, finding the water lukewarm. “Better start fresh,” he said aloud and began to lather. It was his final misjudgement that season. The first thing Hetty did was to insist that he grow it again.
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