Off the Rails

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Ah well,’ his father said. ‘We can’t argue with a duchess. I suppose ’twill be a convenience to have my own lawyer on hand. But I trust you will allow me to assist you in the matter of findin’ a suitable wife. You will stay in London for the Season and attend such balls as I deem necessary, will you not?’

  He had to agree. How could he do anything else?

  ‘I will be back as soon as it is humanly possible,’ he wrote to Milly that evening, ‘which will not be until the end of the Season, I fear. I must attend these wretched balls now that I have given my word to the pater although I will tell you candidly that I am dreading them and that in any case it will all be a waste of time for there is no one else for me but you nor ever will be. Please tell Mr Cartwright that his advice has been taken at last, which will surprise him, and thank him for all his kindness towards me.’

  Milly was most upset to know that she would have to spend the summer without him, especially as she’d been looking forward to it so much, but she put a brave face on it and when she went to York for a couple of days she explained it to her mother as though it was all perfectly normal and to be expected. And Jane, who was now quite sure that this was a serious love affair, made commiserating noises but otherwise said little to her.

  She told Nathaniel all about it, naturally, when they were on their own together later that night, describing how sad her poor Milly had been when she arrived and how bravely she’d tried to hide it.

  ‘’Tis such a nonsense to make him stay in London,’ she said, ‘when anyone with half an eye can see he wants to marry our Milly.’

  ‘He is on the social merry-go-round,’ Nathaniel said, ‘like all the other eligible bachelors in London and they will find him a wife whether he will or no. He’ll need to be uncommon strong-willed if he’s to resist them.’

  Jane thought about that for a few minutes, remembering how meek her poor Felix had been as a little boy and how easily his father had bullied him. ‘We must hope love will give him strength,’ she said at last.

  ‘Now,’ he said, pulling on his nightshirt, ‘ask me what my news is.’

  ‘I hope ’tis better than mine,’ she said, climbing into the bed and smoothing the covers over her legs.

  ‘We are invited to a party,’ he said, and when she looked the obvious question at him, ‘to celebrate Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday. I met Mr Nicholson in town today on his way to buy another painting and he was telling me all about it. ’Twill be a very grand affair, so he says, which I don’t doubt, seeing it’s being given by Mr Hudson. He was sure we would be invited. And when I got home, there was the invitation. What do you think of that?’

  She said she wasn’t a bit surprised and agreed that it was a fine thing to be invited, although she was secretly thinking how unfair it was that George Hudson should be rich and prosperous and throwing grand parties while Milly and Felix were being deliberately kept apart.

  It was a very grand party indeed and, to her perverse disappointment, really quite enjoyable. Whatever else you might say about the obnoxious Mr Hudson, he certainly knew how to celebrate. It was the talk of the town for weeks afterwards. Then just as interest was dying down, the news arrived that the old king was dead and that Princess Victoria had been proclaimed Queen of England.

  ‘There will be no hope at all of getting to Longfield to see you now,’ Felix wrote dolefully to Milly, ‘even for a day. London has gone wild over the new queen. There are more parties planned than ever and the pater is insistent that I attend every single one. I cannot see any end to it except the end of the Season, for which I pray.’

  He was back at Longfield Hall on 11 August and went straight to the schoolroom, where Milly and the girls were sitting together by the window, reading their fairy stories. He strode across the room and had caught his beloved by both hands and kissed her before he could come to his senses and realize what an improper thing he was doing. Fortunately his nieces were so preoccupied by their story that they barely noticed the interruption, except to scold him for it.

  ‘Do sit down, Uncle Felix,’ Maria said. ‘It’s “The Fisherman’s Wife”.’

  He was still bemused by being with his darling again and quite unable to think straight. ‘What?’

  ‘Just sit down,’ Arabella told him, sternly. ‘You are standing in the light.’

  So he took one of their chairs from the table and placed it where he had a perfect view of his lovely girl and when the story was done he persuaded them all out for a walk in the park where he managed to snatch several kisses and planned to meet his darling again after dinner. He was so happy he felt quite dizzy.

  Later that evening as the day cooled and a quiet dusk descended, they walked in the grounds and he told her about the balls, ‘which were uncommon dull’, and the scores of young women who had been pushed his way, ‘and not a pretty one among ’em’ and how he had met Sir Godfrey Featherstone at the Inns of Court and been taken on as his junior and would start work in October.

  ‘In London?’

  ‘I fear so.’

  The knowledge pinched her heart. ‘You will still be able to come here?’ she hoped.

  ‘Not very often, I fear.’

  Her heart flinched again but she answered him sensibly. ‘Then we must make the most of the time we have,’ she said.

  They made the most of it until it was completely dark and they only had the light of a fitful moon to guide them back to the house. And from then on they took every opportunity that offered, even if it was in more company than they would have liked, riding with the children every morning, pretending to teach them archery, dining together en famille whenever Sir Percival was away and walking in the wonderfully enclosing darkness of every evening, talking of the time when they would be married and living in a house of their own, ‘which will be soon, I promise you, my darling’. It was a short, sweet, tantalizing time and over far too soon.

  ‘I will write to you every day,’ he promised on their last evening together.

  And did. Although, as she told her mother sadly the next time she visited Shelton House, ‘Tis not the same as having him beside me.’

  ‘You will see him at Christmas,’ Jane comforted.

  But to her miserable disappointment, Christmas was denied them because his father wrote to say that his presence was required ‘at home’ over the holiday.

  ‘It is most unfortunate,’ he wrote to Milly, ‘because I had hoped that I would be able to find the right moment to ask Mr Cartwright if he would be agreeable to our courtship, but it cannot be helped. I must keep the pater sweet or he will forbid our marriage, which, I promise you, is coming nearer day by day. It will not be long before I have earned sufficient to rent a house out in the country, in Mortlake perhaps or Clapham or Eltham. There are some pretty villages south of the Thames, and then we will marry, Mr Cartwright being willing, which I am sure he will be – will he not – and be together for the rest of our lives. I miss you more than I can say and am yours most unhappily until I see you again,

  ‘Felix.’

  George Hudson spent his Christmas in the happiest frame of mind, planning his next extravagant party. Princess Victoria’s birthday party had been a tremendous success but he wasn’t a man to rest on his laurels – never had been – and one success simply spurred him on to want another even greater. As soon as he knew that Queen Victoria’s coronation would be on 28 June he began to make plans and preparations. He had six months in which to organize his great event and six months would only just be enough for the sort of magnificence he had in mind. He started work on it as soon as the new year began.

  This time Jane Cartwright paid very little attention to what he was doing, although she went to his party, having been invited, and ate his food and drank his champagne. But her mind was elsewhere, fretting over Milly’s rather too obvious unhappiness and her own inability to do anything about it. Felix was in London, enduring his second ‘wife-hunting’ Season, and that would have been reason enough for the poor
girl to be cast down but this time being kept apart from him seemed to be even more of a trial to her. On her last visit to Shelton House, she hadn’t been herself at all. She’d drooped and stayed silent at table and even gone out walking on her own in a shower of rain.

  ‘’Tis so unlike her,’ Jane said to Nathaniel after her poor sad daughter had climbed into the dog cart to be driven back to Long Hall.

  ‘She‘s bound to be missing him,’ Nathaniel said reasonably.

  ‘Aye, she is,’ Jane said. ‘But there’s more to it than that. I’ve never seen her so cast down. Never. I tell ’ee there were times when ’twas almost as if the affair were over. Oh Nathaniel! That couldn’t be the cause of it, could it? He’d not have quarrelled with her, surely. Not my Felix. He were allus such a tender heart. Oh my poor Milly! I shall have to do summat about it.’

  ‘But not until I get back from Rugby,’ Nathaniel said rather anxiously, ‘and not until you know what is really happening, what I’m certain she’ll tell you in her own good time.’

  ‘Aye. Happen she will,’ Jane said, but she didn’t sound as if she thought it very likely. ‘This is what comes of long courtships. I never did hold wi’ long courtships.’

  ‘Aye,’ he laughed at her. ‘So I’ve noticed.’

  She smiled at that but her forehead was still puckered with worry.

  The problem plagued her for the next two days and would have gone on troubling her for even longer if her thoughts hadn’t been dramatically interrupted. On the third day after Nathaniel had left for Rugby, when she was planning the day’s meals with Mrs Cadwallader, she had an unexpected visit from Mother Hardcastle, and the news she brought put all thought of poor Milly right out of her head.

  ‘I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, my dear,’ the midwife said, as she took the seat that Jane had offered her. ‘But there it is. In the midst of life we are in death.’

  The word put Jane into an instant alarm so that her thoughts spun like fireflies. It couldn’t be Nathaniel because Mrs Hardcastle wouldn’t know what was happening to him, nor Milly, but it could be Lizzie. ‘Who is it?’ she said, forgetting her manners in her need to know.

  ‘I’m sorry to tell ’ee straight out,’ Mrs Hardcastle said, ‘but there’s no way I can mek it easy. ’Tis your father.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Aye. Dropped dead in the fields yesterday at the end of the day. Never said a word, apparently, just dropped down dead where he stood. I came on account of your Ma being in such a state, poor woman.’

  Jane’s thoughts were still spinning. He couldn’t be dead. She’d only seen him last week and he was his usual red-faced self, stomping into the kitchen and kissing her in his usual rough way, looking every bit as strong as he always did, if a little more stooped. Then she took a deep breath and understood that her mother was in a state and needed her and that brought her to her senses and she knew she had to go to Scrayingham at once. She got up, walked briskly over to the fireplace and gave the bell-pull a sharp tug. There were things to be done. For a start, she would need the carriage and Audrey would have to be told to look after the children until she got back.

  Half an hour later she and Mrs Hardcastle were on their way to her father’s cottage. It was a quiet summer morning, the sky was full of gentle clouds and there were skylarks singing over the cornfields. It simply wasn’t possible that her father was dead.

  But one look at her mother brought reality into the sharpest focus. She was sitting in her old chair beside the empty hearth and she was totally distraught, rocking to and fro, to and fro, her face so pale that even her lips had no colour. Jane strode across the kitchen at once and took her in her arms. ’Tis all right, Ma,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  ‘What am I to do?’ her mother said, looking down at her old patched skirt. ‘Oh Janey! What am I to do? They’ll not let me stay here, bein’ tied an’ all. What’s to become of me?’

  ‘Tha’rt to come home wi’ me and be cared for,’ Jane told her. ‘I’ll see to t’funeral and such. Have ’ee had owt to eat?’

  ‘I couldn’t eat,’ her mother said. ‘’Twould stick in my throat.’

  I’ll coax her to eat when we’re back home, Jane thought. A little bowl of gruel or summat. For the moment the important thing was to get her out of the cottage and away from the anguish.

  It surprised her when her mother got up meekly and allowed herself to be led out to the carriage. ‘If you’ll just wait for another five minutes, Mr Morton,’ she said to her coachman. ‘I’ll not be long.’ Then she went back into the cottage to gather her mother’s belongings and say goodbye to her father.

  He was lying on his back on the bed with his arms folded across his chest and his familiar face looking completely empty, just as poor little Dickie’s had done. ‘Dear Pa,’ she said to him. ‘Don’ ’ee fret about Ma. I’ll look after her. I’ll look after everything.’ And she kissed his cold forehead.

  She was true to her word, even though everything she did over the next few days was fraught with grief. She drove to Scrayingham Church and arranged the funeral, organized the funeral breakfast, ordered mourning clothes for her mother, sent invitations to her father’s three cousins and wrote to Nathaniel, who sent a letter back by return of post to say he would be home in time for the funeral and to Milly, who came home the very next day. And then, after what seemed an endless time and no time at all, they were all standing beside the grave as her pa’s simple coffin was being lowered into the ground and the priest was speaking the ritual words of farewell. And she turned her head to look at her weeping mother and her sad-eyed daughter and remembered how worried she’d been. How life and death do sweep you on, she thought. I haven’t given ’ee so much as a thought since Pa died. But I’ll make up to ’ee now.

  It was easier thought than done. Her mother needed a lot of gentling, Nat and Mary were difficult, Nathaniel was away in Rugby again and Milly’s three-day stay was over before she’d barely had a chance to speak to her, leave alone ask her about Felix. In fact nothing was said until she was packing her travelling bag and ready to leave. And then it was her mother who opened the subject.

  ‘We’ll see thee again come Christmas,’ she said, as she kissed her drooping granddaughter goodbye.

  Milly smiled at her. ‘Aye,’ she said.

  ‘And Felix too?’ her grandmother pressed on. ‘He comes to stay at Christmas, en’t that right?’

  ‘Only if his pater will allow it,’ Milly said sadly, ‘which I doubt he will.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he will,’ Mary Jerdon said. ‘He’ll not want to keep ’ee apart at Christmas time, not bein’ tha’rt so fond of each other.’

  She was most upset when Milly sat down on the bed and burst into tears.

  ‘My dear child,’ she said, putting her arms round Milly’s shaking shoulders. ‘What is it? Tell your old nanna.’

  And out it all came tumbling, how Sir Mortimer was a brute – ‘tha knows that, Ma’ – and how he was determined to make Felix marry ‘some awful girl from some awful family, whether he will or no’, how Felix didn’t like to argue with him and was being pushed from one party to the next and not allowed to visit anyone except his family and how unhappy she was.

  ‘If he’d only make his mind up that he’s got to say summat,’ she said, looking at Jane, ‘but he can’t do it. He puts things off when they’re difficult – what I can understand bein’ how gentle he is and I wouldn’t want him any other way – but that only makes ’em worse. He said he was going to ask Mr Cartwright if he could marry me, all proper like, and that was last Christmas. He promised me, Ma. You’d think that’d be the easiest thing in t’world, but no, he couldn’t even pluck up t’courage to do that. For the life of me, I can’t see how we’re ever going to get married. We’ll just go on and on, growing further and further apart. He used to write to me every day in the Season and now it’s only every other day, and in the end he’ll marry some awful girl because that’s what his father wants him to
do and he can’t stand up to him. I’ve lost him, Ma, an’ that’s the truth of it.’ And she cried worse than ever.

  Jane took a handkerchief from the drawer and handed it to her. ‘Dry your eyes,’ she said, ‘and try not to fret too much. Tha’s not lost, not by a long chalk. We can change things atween us, you’ll see. I’ll not stand by and see thee unhappy and do nowt.’

  Milly mopped her eyes. ‘I don’t see what you can do,’ she said.

  ‘There’ll be summat,’ Jane promised. ‘There allus is. For a start, I’ll not let the old man bully you. I’ve stood up to him afore and I’ll stand up to him again, if need be.’

  ‘She will too,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve never know’d such a fighter.’ And that made Milly smile.

  ‘That’s better,’ Jane said. ‘Now you leave it to me and don’ ’ee fret. Tell your Felix he’s more than welcome here whenever he wants to come.’ And when Milly looked at her bleakly: ‘Christmas if he can or if not Christmas some other time. ’Twill all work out, my darling, I promise.’ She didn’t have the faintest idea what could be done, but she knew she would do it.

  19

  ‘GENTLEMEN!’ GEORGE HUDSON said, standing before the committee of the York and North Western Railway, legs commandingly astride, thumbs in the pockets of his white waistcoat, round face beaming with self-satisfaction. ‘I think I can promise you that this will be the biggest celebration our old city has ever seen. This will be the official opening of the York and North Western Railway, and this will top every party I’ve ever given. You have my word for it. And if George Hudson gives you his word, you may depend on it.’

  His listeners cheered and thumped the table, for if there was one thing they knew about the ebullient Mr Hudson, besides the fact that he paid good dividends, it was that he knew how to entertain.

  The news pleased Jane Cartwright too.