Sons of Fortune (3 page)

Nora made her peace with John. Or, she wondered, had he made it with her? At all events a peace of sorts had been declared between them before, as an end-of-quarantine treat, he had taken the boys south to see his ships steam and sail for the Crimea. Hurt though she was, it would have been unthinkable to let him go on such a mission with bad blood between them. Nevertheless he was in no doubt that her acceptance of the fait accompli was very conditional. As far as she was concerned, this school—Fiennes or whatever it called itself—was on trial.

Her first instinct had been to take Caspar and Boy all the way there in her own carriage. Not that she thought they needed mothering; they were well used to travelling alone by train. But she wanted to see the place for herself. John had been so vague on all matters of the boys’ accommodation and the arrangements for their ablutions, laundry, sickness, playing facilities, and so on, she suspected he had never even asked about such details. It was so like him. With every new railway contract he or his deputies took assiduous care to ensure that conditions for the navvies would be (in her view, as the firm’s comptroller) palatial; but for himself he took no thought. He’d sleep in barns and wash in cattle troughs or drinking fountains if need be. So, naturally, he’d extend the same carelessness to his oldest boys.

All he had been able to say was that Dr. Brockman believed every boy in the school was due the same care and attention as was traditionally allowed only to the most gifted. That idea was revolutionary enough in itself to blunt the edge of Nora’s anger and to prick her curiosity. And that was another reason for her wanting to go with them to Fiennes.

But John’s protest, coupled with the urgent pleas of the two boys themselves, persuaded her that she should, however reluctantly, let her children arrive at school like all the other boys, unaccompanied. She compromised by going with them as far as Leeds, where she went east to York while they went west to Ingleton. The York train went first. The Stevenson private railcoach had been hitched to the end of it, so she could stand on the little rear balcony and wave until the curve cut off her view.

“See you at Christmas!” she shouted, not even sure they were still in earshot.

How small they looked—twelve years old and eleven! It seemed ridiculous to be sending such tiny things away to that remote, unknown, and no doubt fiercely spartan place. Many times over the days that followed she had to fight back an impulse to get into her coach and drive the eighty-odd miles that now separated them. And their meagre letters (“Today it is raining…yesterday I got beaten for talking…tomorrow the two halves of our school play football. It is great fun…”) were no guide at all to what was really happening.

There were the odd moments over those same weeks when neither Boy nor Caspar would have protested her arrival; indeed, quite the reverse. But they suffered no premonition of those fleeting instants of homesickness as they stood and waved her train goodbye; in fact, they could barely contain their impatience until it was out of sight.

“Come on,” Caspar said. “If we change our first-class for third we can save about nine bob each, I should think!”

In fact it saved them ten shillings each.

“Nick says that at Winchester the school grub’s not enough to keep a sparrow alive, so if Fiennes is the same, we’ll need the extra,” Boy said. He was annoyed that he hadn’t thought of selling their tickets.

“Don’t let on to our father we’ve done this,” Caspar told the ticket clerk. “Or our mother.”

The man grinned.

“Why put the idea into his head?” Boy asked crossly as they walked away.

“You know how Papa and Mama talk to everybody in railways.”

Already “Papa” and “Mama” sounded like strangers. They had no place in this new, third-class world.

In the open wagon you could put your trunk against the front siding and huddle in its partial shelter against the rushing wind. There, too, the shower of soot and cinders was least. Unfortunately the snow, which began to fall before they were even halfway, seemed to obey a different aerodynamic rule; it curled around in a windy eddy and struck upward at them, reaching into the legs of their breeches and around the turned-up collars of their coats.

From Skipton to Hellifield they sang and stamped their boots and cracked jokes with the cattledrovers and stall women from Skipton market. But as they climbed higher into the Pennines, into a world that grew whiter and colder by the minute, their good spirits died and they huddled their chill flesh into smaller and yet smaller knots and they thought of the footwarmers in the first-class coaches, and the soft plush seats of the first-class coaches, and the oil lamps and curtained windows of the first-class coaches, and wondered that such a paradise could be had for a mere ten shillings. Only their pride—the sense that they were both already on trial—kept them from confessing it to each other.

From Giggleswick to Ingleton they felt it was a miracle simply to survive from each
dee-da
,
dee-da
of the wheels on the rails to the next. When the train stopped, Caspar was frozen to whimpering and Boy was on the verge of joining him. They could barely move their legs, much less tug their heavy boxes to the gate in the side of the truck. Boy barked his shin in getting down and was surprised to feel nothing.

“Bless me, are you the Stevenson boys?” A stout coachman in half a ton of clothing came waddling down the platform. The fact that they were the only boys to get off the train was answer enough to him. “Happen ye’ll dress for it next time,” he said. “We’re not your London tropics here, see thee.”

“Nay, we’re from these parts,” Boy told him, using a Yorkshire intonation but not the full dialect.

“Then thou ’ast no more gawm than Old Man Fuzzack,” the coachman said, grinning with all the superiority of righteous contempt. He gave a brief, piercing whistle and his horse raised its head from its nosehag and ambled down the platform, pulling a small carriage behind it. The coachman still grinned at them, the grin of a man whose world constantly rearranged itself to his convenience.

“Dr. Brockman’s very own equipage,” he said. “A rare enough honour. Allow me to introduce myself: Percy Oldroyd, known as Purse. Coachman, gardener, gasworks stoker, rodder of drains, ratcatcher, kitemender, breeder of fighting cocks, cistern unfreezer, ratcatcher—did I say that?—drink fetcher (at a price) and bet placer (ditto ditto), leaf burner, hider of disasters, fire fighter…” The list petered out; he had been speaking merely to fill the air while he loaded their trunks onto the carriage. “And just this minute,” he added, throwing wide his arms and sweeping them beside him down the platform toward a tavern at the station gate, “reviver of two cold tykes who think they’ve seen and felt the worst of the Yorkshire dales. But have they? Have they? They have
not
!”

An hour later, mildly drunk and very warm, they came out of the tavern, pulled the blankets from the horse and, huddling in their warmth, climbed up one on each side of Purse. Their revival had cost him nothing; each of their ten shillings had shrunk to nine. But they felt wonderful. It was a true privilege to buy the drinks for a splendid fellow like Purse.

There was a sharp climb out of Ingleton; they all got off and walked to lighten the load on the horse, who, even then, barely managed it. Over three hundred feet they climbed in less than a mile. It was a transition from the sheltered, tree-lined streets of the dale to the moaning winds on the old Roman road below Raven Scar. They climbed back beside Purse and looked around, in the fast-fading light, at a landscape as bleak as any they had ever seen. To their right, southward, reared Ingleborough summit, its vast gritstone cap perched on deeply fissured cliffs of weathered limestone—a dirty-coloured mass in a white world. A mile or so farther on, with the day almost done, they came to the crest of a shallow ridge that ran across the valley, cut only by the waters of Winterscales Beck. Before them and to their left the land sloped away, treeless and desolate, until it rose once more to the massive coffin shape of Whernside, some three miles away.

“There’s the school now,” Purse said.

Without the aid of his pointing whip they would not have noticed the gaunt pile of stone huddled in the snows to the south of Whernside; it was a mere darkening of the deep lilac grey with which the late twilight painted the distance. Under these snows the only prominent feature of the moors was the network of drystone walls that ran up and over the mountains. Where the walls came to a “scar”—a small limestone cliff, deeply etched by wind and rain—they would halt at its foot and run onward and upward from its head. They were black and angular, like straight-run cracks in white porcelain. With the coming of night the lights of the town of Langstroth began to twinkle.

It was a landscape that its makers, the serfs of Yorkshire’s great medieval abbeys, would have recognized in almost every detail, for little had changed since their time.

As they went, Purse told them something of its mysteries—of streams that vanished into gaping ghylls, some so small you could slide down into them before you saw them, others large enough to swallow a village; of clints, vast stretches of barren rock so eaten by wind and rain they looked more like the exposed brain of a giant sheep than anything made of stone; of holes that wormed their way down deeper and farther than any man dared go. Once a farmer from over Yockenthwaite way had tried to explore one of these caves; he had been gone a month and had come back by another hole six miles away, singed bald by the devil’s flames and yellow with the sulphur. He had “never from that day forth talked to no man.”

“There’s whole secret kingdoms under here,” Purse told them. “And a deal of work to do! There’s a farm at Bruntscar—ye may see it well from the college—where if ye put an ear to the rock, there’s a
thrum-thrum
as never ceases. Idle folk’ll say it’s a watter fall below ground, but”—he gave a wink—“
we
know better!”

What a privilege!
thought the two tipsy children. To travel beside such a splendid fellow as Purse and to
know better.
Happily they wandered, guided by him, through secret grottoes and measureless caverns, by winding tunnels and subterranean causeways in fairylands of dwarfish industry, scorning the earthbound folk above who did not know better.

By the time they reached Langstroth dale they were almost sober and beginning to feel the cold once more. Fortunately the wind here was a mere breeze compared with the blasts that had chilled them on the train. The looming bulk of Whernside, now black against a near-black sky, sheltered the whole dale from the northeast wind.

Later, when they came there by daylight, Langstroth town would seem quite ordinary, a market town huddled in its dale, shrinking from contact with the peat bogs and moors around it. But that night the dark and the blanket of snow gave it enchantment. Every leafless sapling was part of a larger but unseen stately tree. Every candlelit cottage window marked the invisible façade of a substantial house, invisible but there. The silent and deserted alleys seemed about to fill with people on their way to a splendid entertainment. Yes, they thought, Langstroth was a splendid town full of splendid houses—doctors’ and lawyers’ and cornmerchants’ houses.

Just as they were about to leave the market square Purse pulled up the horse.

“Where’s the pair of ye to mess?” he asked. “I’d forgotten ye’d be in Old School. Ye’ll need a mess in Langstroth.”

“We don’t know,” Boy said. “No one said anything about that.”

Caspar giggled; he always thought it fun when bits of the grown-up world crumbled.

“Eay, there’s that many changes now,” Purse grumbled. “I thowt as ye’d be in one o’ the new Houses. They don’t mess in the town.”

“What’s ‘Old School,’ Purse?” Boy asked.

Purse laughed grimly. “I’d not put swine in it,” he said. “Ye’d best mess by me and Mrs. Oldroyd, then. It’s five bob a week, now: laundry, a room between ye, and a good savoury tea, and dinner Sundays.”

“Four and sixpence,” Caspar said.

“Nay!” Purse laughed. “Fee is set by College, see thee. I can’t abate it. College pays us, see, and your father’ll pay College.”

“Boots to be cleaned then,” Caspar persisted.

Purse chuckled and nudged Caspar with his elbow. “We’ll see,” he said, conceding without announcing the fact. He clucked the horse into motion again and turned down an uneven lane leading uphill from the square. There were only a dozen or so cottages before it gave way into the moor.

“You’re nearest the school of all the messings,” Purse said. “Young Bell messed here till last week, but now they’ve lodged him in one of the new Houses.”

The Oldroyd cottage was the last on the left, the nearest dwelling to the school. It was stone built and, like most daleshouses, tiled with stone slabs. Mrs. Oldroyd, roused by the noise of the horse and carriage, opened the door a crack, poked her head out, saw them, shouted, “Be quick, it’s that cold!” withdrew again, and slammed the door.

“Mrs. Oldroyd, as ye’ll find,” Purse said, “has a tongue she could hire to a tinsmith. But a champion heart. Depend on it.”

When they were at the door, Mrs. Oldroyd opened it again, plucked them in out of the cold, and slammed it at once, leaving Purse to unload their boxes in the dark outside. They stood blinking owlishly in the light, though it came from but a single candle and was feeble enough. The kitchen was as warm as a bakehouse; indeed, the most delicious smell of baking bread came from the new iron range across the room.

“Well? Have you names?” she asked, looking rapidly from one to the other. “And are you naked under them horseblankets?”

“I’m John Stevenson, but they call me Boy. And this is my brother Caspar, m’m.”

They unwrapped themselves from the blankets and stood holding them awkwardly, not wanting to put them down.

“They’d best drape over the horse while we sup,” Mrs. Oldroyd said. She took Caspar’s blanket and gave it to Boy, nudging him toward the door. “Ye’ll eat, if it’s not a soft question? I know that man of mine put naught but spirits inside you.”