Sons of Fortune (18 page)

“That was brave,” Nora said admiringly.

“Futile, rather. My ‘corps of masters’ consists of Mr. Carter. And to persuade him to build Crecy I had to guarantee him two hundred and fifty guineas a year—which is the full extent of my own income. And I had to guarantee a loan of three thousand pounds to build the house—which is the full extent of my capital. I am a younger son. There will be no more. So there, Mrs. Stevenson, we lodge. And I hope if I now repeat that I share your horror at what happened to Caspar, you do not doubt me.”

Nora had a fleeting suspicion that the whole afternoon had been deliberately engineered toward this conclusion—like a well-constructed begging letter. But she was a rich woman, and the rich have many opportunities every week for such suspicions. In practical terms it hardly mattered whether Brockman was cunning or just ingenuously lucky. Indeed, if she was now to get financially involved, it would be better if he were cunning.

“Why can you not turn Old School into a House as it is?” she asked. “You’d save the building costs.”

He clasped his forehead. “We have not covered one hundredth part of my beliefs touching education,” he said. “A House of a hundred boys would be a monstrosity. I will permit no House of more than forty boys. A class of one hundred boys is also a monstrosity. I would like no class of more than thirty. And the school will never hold more than four hundred and fifty boys. That is as much as any headmaster could deal with properly—in my view.”

They had now reached the gate of his own House. He let her pass and then, as they went up the drive, he said: “I dearly wish to abolish the distinction between public and private tuition here. I think all boys should receive thirty or so hours of formal classroom instruction each week in classes no more than thirty strong. But for that I need twenty masters—not four. And I would have to abolish the free places and instead give scholarships for the boys from Langstroth. Money, money, money, you see, Mrs. Stevenson. I cannot pay the masters until I have put up the tuition fees. I cannot raise the fees until I have the masters to justify it.”

He came past her to open his front door. In doing so he took her arm, this time knowingly, for his grip was feather light. “But we shall do it,” he said. “Make no mistake of that. I shall do it despite the Trust. I shall do it in the teeth of the boys’ opposition—and that of some of their parents. I shall do it no matter how skeptical my colleagues here may be—and no matter what it costs in personal sacrifice.”

For a moment she glimpsed through his boyish bravado an intense weariness. She knew then, as if the experience were her own, what it must be like to have pledged all his capital and mortgaged all his income to achieve Crecy, after his own Agincourt. And there were nine more Houses to build—nine more battles to fight, to win, to commemorate! How could she ever have imagined him to be a weak man?

She reached a decision. “I’ll stop here tonight,” she said. “And we’ll puzzle how you may achieve it in under one lifetime, doctor. I have a certain way with money—as you may know.”

It took him completely aback. His surprise was so spontaneous that she knew she had guessed wrong. He had not schemed to trap her into helping; at most he might have hoped for some trifling donation.

“But…I…ah…you cannot possibly…that is, I cannot allow…you to give money—good heavens, madam, that was not my intention in telling you…”

Now it was she who laid a hand on his arm. “If you knew me,” she said with a laugh, “you’d know how comic that last remark was. Me—
give
money! Give! No, doctor, I smell investment here, and that does to my blood what the smell of chalk and slate probably does to yours.”

“Investment?” He seemed bewildered.

“You pledged two hundred and fifty guineas to Mr. Carter if his House failed to provide that income?”

“Yes.”

“Has he taken up your pledge?”

“Indeed not. In fact…” Brockman hesitated.

“In fact, he’s earned above your guarantee.” She supplied the words for him.

“He has.” Brockman’s loyalties were being strained.

“
Well
above?” Nora pressed him.

He did not answer. But his silence did not worry her. Two hundred and fifty was over eight percent gross return off the three thousand he had mentioned. That was all the incentive she needed. And she was going to offer Brockman the prospect of getting his Houses the moment he was ready for them. Every man had his price.

No, his silence did not worry her. Before the evening was out she would know the school’s finances down to the last brass farthing.

***

She was up early the following morning, but Brockman was up before her. She saw him and a handful of boys making the morning run up Whernside; they would be boys whose parents, for one reason or another, could not have them at home this Christmas. She could not see their stone cisterns from her window, but she could imagine them all splashing around in the icy water, gaining in manliness by pretending to have it already. The mere thought of such a plunge made her shiver.

The sight of the runners also added to her understanding of Brockman as a person with strong beliefs and a willingness to endure anything in order to put them into practice. Even if no boys were left in school for these holidays, she had no doubt he would be making the same run and splashing in the same cisterns all by himself.

As she dressed, she reviewed the agreement she had reached with Brockman the previous evening. Not quite as good as she had hoped. He had insisted that the housemasters should have some financial stake in the Houses and that ultimately each should buy out any loan on his own House. To Nora, who always looked for perpetual investment where bricks and mortar were concerned, this was not very satisfactory. Only the knowledge that her own boys would be benefiting (and the fact that the return on the advances would be five per cent) persuaded her to go forward with the scheme at all.

The bargaining that had gone before her acceptance had increased her respect for Brockman. Her fertile mind had put forward half a dozen alternatives as to how the whole scheme might be managed—different ways of timing it, different forms of administration, different provisions for involving the housemasters, and so on.

She had watched him weaving among them, testing each not by the yardstick of profit and loss but by seeing how well it furthered his own principles. From them he would not be budged by so much as the thickness of a single banknote.

His resistance to financial temptation especially impressed her. Here was a man racked by debts and the burdens of guarantees. He was in charge of an institution that, if managed in certain ways—and not bad ways, either—could yield amazing returns on a fairly modest outlay; yet all he thought of was “educational principle”! His school had to be profitable, of course—but only to protect that principle, not to make him rich. Such monumental self-denial left her speechless with admiration.

But it also made her feel wanted! The Brockmans of this world—or, rather, not
quite
of this world—needed the Noras, who were so totally of it.

Breakfast was passed in a very English reticence about yesterday’s discussion and decisions. Brockman, his appetite honed keen by the winds of Whernside, put down a plate of devilled kidneys, a bowl of fish kedgeree, two poached eggs, and some cold chicken. As he ate he spoke heartily of his hopes for the school; but his tone was so bluff, so different from his earlier seriousness, that it was as if he were telling them to Nora for the first time—and as if she were a casual visitor who needed this jocularity to capture and hold her interest. She could not imagine why he was taking this new line with her, but she felt the distance it put between them.

Again she saw that unworldly, boyish quality in him, beneath the learning and the undoubted authority he carried as headmaster. Only in their last few moments together, when, clearly, some reference to their agreement had to be made, did his seriousness return—though he said little, preferring, for some reason, for Nora to make the summary.

“I think it best, doctor,” she concluded, “if I write to you, setting out these arrangements. And though we do not, perhaps, need a legal agreement, I shall, nevertheless and with your leave, ask my lawyer to look through the letter.” When he looked doubtful she added: “And I believe you should do the same.”

Then she understood the cause of his doubt, for he said, “When you say ‘you,’ you mean
Mr.
Stevenson, I presume? Surely you must consult him?”

She smiled. “No, Dr. Brockman. This is not my husband’s money.”

It was not hers, either, but she was not going to tell him that. In fact, the money she was going to use belonged to a syndicate headed by two German-Jewish bankers named Wolff—two brothers. In the money panic of 1848 Nora had been given exclusive control of their London funds. She had turned their original £180,000 into well over half a million, so no one was going to interfere with her control of the fund now. She could quite safely pledge this tiny fraction of it to Fiennes.

As she spoke, all his embarrassment returned. “But…I had no idea…I mean…I naturally assumed…dear me!” He added something in Greek and smiled, assuming absent-mindedly that she understood him.

“Money has no gender, Dr. Brockman,” she chided. “At least, not in plain English. And in Latin I think you’ll find it in my camp, not yours?”

He nodded, agreeing with her Latin grammar, but she deliberately took this gesture for a general agreement and a waiving of all objection. She heard him draw breath to add some further point, but she had already passed beyond him. Quickly she spoke in French to Nanette. Then she turned round and told Brockman—still in French—that she really had to be on her way. That was to pay him out for his Greek. He was nonplussed enough to forget whatever thoughts he had been about to pursue.

Later she wondered if this ruse had been entirely wise. Perhaps she should have let him talk it out; perhaps those objections would now fester within him and poison the whole scheme. At all events she would now know just how keen he was to get his Houses. If he let some irrational objection about taking loans from a woman override what he claimed was his dearest wish in life, then he was a small man of no account.

Perhaps, on reflection, it had been best to leave him to wrestle alone with it.

Nanette was disgusted at the way things had turned out. “Money!” she sneered at Nora when they were on the train and homeward bound once more. “One sniff of it and you forget everything else!”

“Money
is
everything else,” Nora answered evenly. “At least it makes everything else possible.”

“Hah—good! Then poor Caspar is already healed!”

Nora was well used to Nanette’s bluntness; indeed there were times when she relied on the girl as a sort of conscience. But this was not one of them.

“Oh, look!” Nora said, pointing at a turf hovel about a hundred yards from the line. “I once lived in a place identical to that. Identical!” An old woman leaned wearily in the doorhole, listlessly watching the train go by. “That could be me,” she added. “Old before time.”

Nora imagined she had been changing the subject; but Nanette stared at her in bewildered pity and a sort of baffled affection. At last she shook her head at the gulf in understanding that stood between them.

When she returned home Nora found she could not look her two eldest sons in the eye and tell them exactly what she had and had not done up at Fiennes, so some of Nanette’s scorn must have found its mark. She thought this reluctance odd because the two boys would, in fact, heartily approve of what she had done—anything that didn’t prevent their return and that didn’t give Brockman cause to single them out.

All she told them was that Mr. Cusack had gone. She did not claim his departure was her doing; even if it had been, she would never have told them so. But she used that very fact to allow them to assume that she had insisted on Cusack’s removal and that Brockman’s acceptance of it had become the basis of a most satisfactory compromise.

But then, the very next day, came news that drove out all thoughts of Fiennes and money and Brockman’s Houses. Even Caspar’s bruises became trivia. For John was gravely ill. The message did not exactly say his life was despaired of, but the implication was there in every line.

He was being brought back in stages, overland from Naples, resting, recuperating, and then braving a further hundred or so miles by coach or rail. It was a dour, prayerful Christmas at Maran Hill. Then, early in the new year, word came that he had reached Paris and would soon be in Dieppe for the sea crossing to Folkestone.

Nora went at once to Folkestone, intending to take the ferry to France and nurse him until he was well enough to face the crossing. She arrived at the English coast to see a great storm thrashing the waters of the Channel; it was unthinkable for any kind of vessel to put to sea. She sat in her hotel room, looking out through rivulets of rain upon the windowpanes, her eyes raking those shivering, angry wastes of water…for what? Not a boat, certainly. They were all jostling at anchor in the harbour below—ketches, brigs, schooners, luggers, steamers—fretting to be out and away. Their hands, unpaid and idle, were a great nuisance about the town, begging and drinking, fighting and carousing.

There was really no point in her staying at the coast. London was a bare two hours away. The company could telegraph her. She could easily be back before the steamer was made ready. And there was certainly plenty of business to attend to in London.

Twice she told Nanette to pack for the return. Twice she paid their lodging. Once she got as far as the railway station yard; the second time she went no farther than the end of the street before she told the driver to turn around and take them back to the hotel. There she resumed her vigil at the window, peering through the wind-lashed rain looking for the clearing skies that would not come. Nanette did not sneer at
these
changes in plan, for they were of the heart, not the head.

Nora, who had not even seen the sea until she was twenty—almost two years after her marriage—came to know its many angry faces too well now as, over the best part of a week, the gales veered from southwest to north. The sou’westerlies, reaching up the Channel, pushed vast torrents of water before them, making mountainous green breakers that hurled themselves at the chalk cliffs and spent their energy in a seething white confusion on the banks of pebbles between the tides. Along the breakwater these giant waves rose in solid sheets of shimmering, translucent grey. Some of the water thus raised never fell again to the sea but was borne upward on the storm and swept over the masts and sheets of the sheltering fleet to batter the town in a salty deluge.

As the winds went round west and then nor’west the character of the sea changed. The waves, no longer pushed from behind, fell somewhat in height; but the fall was relative—these were still angry and powerful rollers. Now, in the crosswind, they sidled at the coast as if each bit of water elbowed its neighbour for the chance to lead the charge. And the onslaught was no less thunderous, though now the salt deluge swept clear over the harbour and fell in the black shelter of the farther jetty.

Finally, with the wind in the north, the immediate coastline fell into the lee of the land. Half a mile out the storm dipped down off the clifftops and peeled back the crest of every wave. At that distance all their violence turned to beauty—serried ranks of white combers displaying their plumes, the young on the heels of the prime in the wake of the spent. Inshore, shivers of ripples shook the harbour, as the unrelenting north wind turned cold and yet colder.

“If this direction holds and the wind drops, we’ll fairly bustle over to France,” Nora said.

A telegraph message came from Dover, via the new Channel cable. It was from Walter, saying that he and John were in Dieppe at the Hôtel des Bains, and that John, in their enforced rest, was making good progress. But from what, she wondered? From critically to merely dangerously ill? From ill to convalescent? Unless she knew how bad he had been, she could not tell just how good the news from Walter was. At least it meant John’s life was not in danger; this (she could now admit to herself) had been the fear that had kept her in Folkestone when it would have been so much more sensible to go to London.

The day after the telegraph message came there was a drop in the wind, though it still held northerly and now grew even colder. In the harbour there were unmistakable signs of preparation for sailing. Seamen vanished from the streets and began to swarm the masts and spars, unfurling the shrouded sails. The wind tore black smoke from funnels and, within an hour or two, thin plumes of vented steam showed briefly white before the vapour vanished in the cold and now dry air. Nanette packed yet again, confident that it was now to some purpose.

The first time Nora had made this voyage, in the spring of forty-five, passengers were rowed out to the steamer. A storm had been blowing then, too, and merely to reach the ship had been quite an achievement—especially as she had been heavily pregnant with Clement at the time. Now a small steam launch took them out to the steamer in much greater comfort.

The storms had discouraged travellers—never very numerous at this time of year anyway. So she and Nanette had the Ladies’ Cabin almost to themselves. Nora was a good sailor but not so Nanette. To keep her occupied, Nora made her read aloud, above the clank and whoosh of the engine, the groan of the paddlewheels, and the roar of the wind. She chose Gerard de Nerval’s
Les filles de feu
, especially the sonnets called
Les chimères
,
because they angered Nanette and would keep her mind off the heaving of her innards. They angered Nanette for exactly the reason that they delighted Nora: The haunting beauty of de Nerval’s language moved both of them, but his subject matter—that strange mixture of private obsession, alchemy, myth, and the occult—repelled the down-to-earth romantic in Nanette just as it excited the ultrarealist in Nora. It showed Nanette herself grossly, dangerously magnified; it showed Nora states of being that she could never aspire to and that she could therefore toy with in safety.

At all events the ruse worked. Nanette felt no nausea until they were standing in the customs shed at Dieppe—and then, paradoxically, it was because the land now appeared to be heaving. The fifteen minutes they had to wait for the customs to appear were the most nerve-racking of the week for Nora—to know that John was within half a mile of where she stood and that only two dirty officials in stained uniforms, jacks-in-office grudgingly torn from their tots of brandy, now kept them apart. As soon as the ritual was over she took a fly to the hotel, leaving Nanette to organize a couple of porters and their luggage.

Every inch held a familiar memory. Here was where she took her first walk on French soil—with John. Here was where they bumped into Tom and Sarah Cornelius. Here was where the four of them had eaten one of the finest meals of their lives—in a dirty fishermen’s café you wouldn’t have looked at twice. There was the railway station, Stevenson’s first contract in France. His work was everywhere; memories of him were everywhere.

She shook herself, annoyed that she could not think of him in more positive ways—as if she feared to believe he might live, as if such belief were tempting Providence. It filled her with foreboding, too, this taste of a world filled with everything about John except his living presence.

Walter Thornton must have known she would be on the first cross-Channel boat into Dieppe. She saw him standing at the window of the hotel lounge, already smiling and waving encouragement, certain that the first fly to draw up would be hers.

“How is he?” she asked before she was fairly through the door.

“Asleep now. He had a fretful morning, knowing the storm was gone and you might be here any hour. We sent to the harbourmaster every fifteen minutes, I’d say!”

“Yes, but how
is
he? Can I see him?”

Walter did not want to say no. She felt a passing anger that this man (whom she had never been able to admire) was coming between her and John. Then she saw how tired Walter was, too, and her anger turned to shame. Their work in the Crimea must have been done in appalling hardship, quite unimaginable to her. And on top of that they had this dreadful journey back, Walter with the added responsibility of a sick friend.

She sat down then, to let him sit too. “Poor you,” she said. “You must have had the worst of it.”

Walter smiled thinly and rubbed his eyes. “It’s over. The worst is over. Thank the Lord he’s recovering so well now.”

“He
is
, isn’t he? You aren’t just saying that?”

“Oh, completely. He doesn’t need anyone with him now. He’s not ill any more. Just exhausted.”

“What was it?”

Walter shrugged. “Exhaustion. As I say. Sheer, utter…exhaustion.” He could think of no other word. “We ought to have noticed it, Tucker and I, but we’re so used to the way he drives himself at the best of times. You know.” He raised his eyes skyward and snorted. “And these were the worst of times. I doubt I’ve ever seen worse.”

“You were all at the limit.”

Walter nodded his agreement, eyes closed. He kept his eyes closed.

“You must rest now, Mr. Thornton. I’ll look after John. You must still be all in.”

He revived then, opening his eyes and smiling. “No,” he said with self-encouraging vigour, “not any longer. This storm gave us both rest. I think I’ll go out and walk a bit. Blow away the cobwebs.”

She smiled tensely, trying to appear nonchalant, as though she believed him. Of course he would go directly to the nearest brothel.

She knew him well enough to be sure of that. And he would go at once because to be alone with her embarrassed him—embarrassed them both. For more than fifteen years ago she and Walter had met by the wayside, about three hours before John had entered her life. She had been barefoot and penniless, and Walter had put a sovereign in her pocket, paying for a favour whose memory would forever make it impossible for either to be in the other’s company without that particular embarrassment.

They both rose. She put a hand on his arm. “I doubt I can ever say how grateful I am to you,” she said. “And John, of course.”

He grinned. “It was little enough. I couldn’t say which of you I did it for. I’d have done it for either.”

It was the first moment of true warmth between them since their original meeting, so long ago. She was glad to have taken the plunge—and so, she could see, was Thornton; they had surmounted something, pulled down a bit of the old barrier.

To be sure, she could not respect him any the more. How could you respect a man who went off whoring several times a week? Especially a man who let his wife devote herself to the rescue of fallen women!

When Thornton had gone she asked the manager where John was. He looked surprised that she should inquire; it was the best room—the one they always had. She left instructions for Nanette to wait below, or in her own room, and not to bring up the bags until sent for; then she slipped quietly into their room.

The curtains were drawn and it took some moments before her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. She stood still, feeling a small moment of panic—she could not hear John’s breathing. Then he stirred in his sleep and she was afraid she had woken him. Rather than risk that, she turned toward an alcove at the far end of the room, where one small uncurtained side window let in the only light the room possessed.

She stood awhile, staring down at the cold, grey street. A fly drew up. Nanette got out. At that moment Thornton came out of the hotel and spoke to her. Had he been waiting? Nora drew back a little in case she should be accidentally caught watching them, but when they looked up, the window he pointed to was the curtained one away to her left, not hers.

Why, when one saw Thornton talking to any female, did one imagine only a certain suggestive conversation taking place? Nanette liked Thornton, she could tell. Nora watched his greedy, glittering, foxy grin at work on her…could almost imagine his rich, gurgling, basso-profundo laugh…could see Nanette, being flattered, turning coquettish. At this safe distance Nora, too, could afford to admit that the man had attractions beyond the reach of moral sense.

She remembered then that from this same window, after that Olympian meal, she had watched Tom and Sarah Cornelius walk hand-in-hand in the moonlight. She knew that Sarah had been Thornton’s mistress for a time after Tom had died. Now, watching him at work on Nanette, she understood exactly what had made Sarah succumb to him—but, after sixteen years of friendship with the Thornton family, she knew just what had ultimately repelled Sarah, too.

“Nora? Eay, love!”

She turned to see John struggling to get up. She ran to him to stop him from rising any further in the bed. In the flurry before he sank into her embrace she caught only the briefest glimpse of him, but it was enough to fill her with horror. She barely recognized him, his cheeks were so drawn, his eyes so hollow, his hair so thin—he gave the impression of toothless senility. Only his body belied that impression. His huge frame had not changed. The muscle he had acquired in his years of navvying was all still there; she clung to it, ran her fingers over it, dreading the moment when she would have to pull away from it and look him in the face again.