The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (24 page)

“A hereditary title, Mr Martin, would not be of
great interest to me in the absence of an heir.”

“Purchase the Thingdon Estate, Mr Andrews, and your
chances of remaining unwed will be very slight indeed! You will be a rich
landholder and the hunt will be up – to be an acceptable
parti
to the
gentry, Mr Andrews, you must have birth and breeding or lands and riches,
ideally both but either will suffice at a pinch.”

Tom laughed delightedly, but could not really
imagine himself as a fox with a whooping, tally-hoing pack of genteel young
ladies at his tail.

“Make the offer, Mr Martin.”

It took six more months to make the offer and
negotiate the price with Rockingham’s lawyers and creditors, a three-way fight
with no community of interest between them. The initial demands were
outrageous, scaled down to the unrealistic and eventually to the possible in
the current economic climate; a year before good fields had sold at twenty
pounds the enclosed acre and there would have been competition between a dozen
buyers for each parcel of land, the estate split up farm-by-farm. Now there was
only one possible purchaser and last year’s prices were irrelevant.
Rockingham’s people found this incredible at first – they were all lawyers and
did not believe in change – and then exceedingly difficult to swallow.
Clapperley informed them by letter that he would oppose bankruptcy proceedings
on the grounds that an offer had been made that would cover Rockingham’s debts
at twenty shillings in the pound and leave him a surplus; no judge would take
action against a solvent debtor and they would have to come back to Clapperley,
weakened by their failure at law.

Clapperley travelled to Kettering and made an
initial offer of twenty thousands, cash; they countered with one hundred and
forty thousands, claiming to have an interested party who was busily putting
his finances together. Clapperley smiled deprecatingly, said he would like to
meet this gentleman who could find any source for finance in the climate of the
day; his offer, he reiterated, was in gold coin. The creditors’ lawyers, who
were very little concerned with Rockingham’s fate, signified that they would
have no objections to any offer that paid them in full and ostentatiously rose
from the table. Rockingham’s attorney, a local man in the company of wolves
from London and the north country, out of his depth and aware of the fact, brought
the meeting to an adjournment, needing to seek instructions from his principal.
Clapperley assented and raised a questioning eyebrow to the creditors’
barristers, who obligingly congregated in his room at the Periquito Hotel an
hour later.

“My client will be very pleased to make immediate
payment of your claims, gentlemen, including, of course, outstanding interest
and fees to your calculation. I believe you may have heard of Martin’s Bank in
St Helens?”

They had – everybody who was anybody had heard of two
providential tons of gold coin appearing in the banker’s hour of need.

“Your client was the gentleman who came up trumps,
as one might say, Mr Clapperley?”

“He was, sir – he had foreseen the inevitability of
a collapse and had turned his not inconsiderable wealth into gold – and, I
might add, had persuaded me to do the same with my small savings, greatly to my
pleasure – and has, of course, been able to make purchases to his own choosing
since. I believe it might not be stretching the truth to call him a
millionaire, vulgar though the expression may be.”

A man in possession of even one hundred thousands
was rich, was one of very few indeed; they contemplated a million, and the
power it conveyed. Inevitably, they then contemplated Rockingham, a failure, worth
nothing except the purchaser took pity on him. It was then simply a matter of
disposing of the affair carefully and tidily in lawful fashion – the estate was
so big that its transfer must be a matter of public knowledge, so they had to
wrap everything up neatly – it would be best to pay poor Rockingham off.

“How old is Mr Rockingham, gentlemen?”

They thought him to be about fifty, too old to make
a comeback in business.

“Then if we were to put twenty thousands into
Consols, in his son’s name, in trust, the income to come to him until his son’s
majority or inheritance, he would have a respectable income on which he could
live quite comfortably, with no grounds for complaint.”

“Eminently fair, Mr Clapperley, generous in fact –
but might I venture to suggest that five hundred pounds extra would buy him a
house and gardens, and another thousand would give him living money for the
first year?”

Clapperley agreed, modifying the proposal to the
extent that he would buy Rockingham a house, at least twenty miles distant from
the estate and town – out of sight and mind.

The lawyers shook hands on the agreement – nothing
so vulgar as a deal – and departed, the creditors’ people to speak sternly to
Rockingham’s man, Clapperley to catch the overnight mail coach north to
Birmingham and thence to St Helens, so as not to be present at the scene –
there could then be no hint of collusion. Once at home he called on Tom, told
him it was all over bar the last minute details, that he could make his
arrangements with Martin for the payments to be made.

“Joe, I’m getting out.”

“What’s taken you so long, brother? You’ve had the
itch in your pants these last five years, and even more so since your pretty
lady left. If you want to break up the partnership – which may be for the best
if you are elsewhere and can’t be got hold of day-to-day – then how’s about a
straight swap? My quarter of Roberts is worth much the same as your three parts
in the cotton, I reckon.”

“Done! Saves arguments that way, Joe. I will be
keeping Roberts, both sites, and the mines for an income. The Masons can run
the works between them, I’ll put George up to fifteen parts in the hundred on
the profits, and Paddy Reilly will take over at the mines except that he can’t
do the bookkeeping and sales so well, so I have to find a manager I can trust
to work with him. At the moment that’s a problem, because there will be a
hundred men out of work who could do the job and would come begging for the
chance, and trying to pick between them will be a real bugger!”

“Easy done, Tom. My junior clerk is the man you want
– he’s learnt all about running my offices and all he is doing is waiting for
old Higgins to drop dead so he can step into his shoes. His name’s Paisley and
he’s an Irishman, so he’ll fit in with your people.”

Neither man had heard of a place called Ulster.

“What about your house, Tom? Not a lot of sense
keeping it on for a couple of weeks a year.”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Do you want Bennet?”

“I’ll take her and the house both, Tom – it will
save me building another wing onto the Lodge – we shall need more room.”

“She’s not!”

“She is!”

“Number nine?”

“That’s right – six boys to two girls, so far.”

“Take it as a gift, Joe – a wedding present, because
I never did have time to get round to a proper one as I remember.”

The question of Clapperley arose – what to do about
his knowledge of all of their dealings. Joseph had never had close contact with
the little lawyer, disliking him from the first, detesting him as he came to
hear of his personal habits and amusements; Tom, at a distance and unable to
keep an eye on him, was sure he would be put in the way of temptation and the
fraud resulting would be both expensive and, eventually, scandalous. They
decided after long discussion that they could either buy him or shoot him, and
that it was, marginally, better to offer him money, though putting a bullet
through his head, or other portions of his anatomy, might be doing the human
race a favour. He would be given control of Tom’s speculative money, with an
absolute freedom to invest where and how he would, and the major firms, Roberts
and Star Spinners, would be made into joint-stock companies, ninety-five per
cent held by Tom and Joseph respectively, five per cent of each in Clapperley’s
name, ‘in recognition of his loyal service to them’.

Clapperley, easily sufficiently astute to recognise
their motivation, showed admirable gravity and gratitude as he accepted their
gift, worth ten thousands at the moment and up to five times that when
conditions returned to normal. Fifty thousands, an income of two thousands a
year, irrespective of his other activities, was a genteel fortune, more than
many of the County lived on; it was too much to jeopardise and would keep him
honest, as far as Andrews and Star were concerned; he laughed to himself as he
came to his conclusions, candid enough – in the privacy of his own thoughts –
to know that he was a villain, and not caring in the slightest. He would take a
wife, he decided, buy a large house and settle down to father an heir and become
respectable; it would mean frequent congress with a female somewhat older than
his tastes habitually ran to, but he felt he could make the sacrifice – a few
years and he could become a member and then either very wealthy or politically
powerful – which amounted to the same thing.

The little house, which Tom had bought back from
Mary in exchange for her larger premises in Corfe, and its occupant provided a
temporary problem, but one Mrs Morris solved, able to find another gentleman
who needed discreet accommodation and could pay for it and would keep Mrs
Johnson and Martha in their places – Tom felt he owed them that much.

Tom spent several hours in conferences with Martin,
begging his advice, and listening to it. Martin, like many other country
bankers, had been born to the County, fourth son, sharing only the tiniest
inheritance and obliged to take up a profession. His eldest brother had
inherited father’s three thousand a year; the next had become a midshipman and
was now a retired Rear-Admiral, without squadron, a ‘yellow’ admiral living on
half-pay and memories; the third had become a soldier in a very unfashionable
regiment of the line, all the family could afford, and had gone to America and
never come back – he had taken up, somehow, a large tract of land in Virginia,
a woman involved, they understood, and had changed allegiances early in the War
– he was never mentioned; Martin himself, cleverest of the boys, had been
bought a place in the bank of a relative, a cousin of sorts, where he had
learned the business and married the daughter to keep it in the family, there
being no son, in the fullness of time becoming the Martin of Martin’s Bank. He
was an authority on the
mores
and ways of the County, Tom’s sole
reference to that unknown class; it was necessary to the running of the estate
that Tom should fit in and although he had no particular desire to rub
shoulders with the lesser gentry he would have to keep on terms with them,
their terms.

He must have a man, Martin said, a gentleman’s
gentleman, a valet, a personal servant who would ensure that he was dressed
correctly, because looking like a gentleman was often more important than
acting like one. His valet, Martin warned him, would be a bully and an
intrusive, interfering nuisance, but he would prevent him from making a fool of
himself – there was nothing the shabby genteel loved more than mocking the
gaucheries of the newly rich. The old landed gentry still possessed the
political power that could make a newcomer’s life uncomfortable – they were the
magistrates, their sons the lawyers and bankers and churchmen, and between them
they could be a thorough nuisance – ostracising him socially, cold-shouldering
him economically. If Tom wanted to straighten the course of a waterway, to
build a new road or canal, to shift a public right-of-way, then he had to have
the goodwill of his neighbours, and that meant that he must become part of
their community. His valet was a vital part of this process of assimilation, so
he should be chosen carefully – a man of much the same age as Tom, so as to
have a good thirty years of service in him, knowledgeable in his trade and
willing to spend most of his life in the country, for Tom would not really
expect to grace fashionable London with his presence. With Tom’s permission,
Martin would see to the process of hiring this paragon – not easy, but it could
be done.

Brown had appeared in December – short, slightly
built, silent on his feet, dressed in unobtrusive blacks, he had a slight lisp,
faded blue eyes and thinning fair hair, though barely Tom’s age, and some
slightly effeminate mannerisms. He had been the victim of the local bullies all
through his childhood and had been forced out of his village and into service
as an indoor manservant at the earliest possible age – he could not have
survived on a farm, country folk were vicious to those who did not fit in, who
were in any way ambivalent. He had become footman in a larger house and then
servant to an elderly member of the family living on the fringes of fashionable
life, still remembering his past glories and dressing the part; he had learned
the trade with him for three years and had left the family on the old
gentleman’s death. Now he preferred to take service with a master who would
live a country life – in Town a valet was not insignificant, but he was one of
many while out on an estate he was the Master’s man, his confidant and worthy
of respect from the tenantry, recognised and saluted by all. A country dweller
of good lineage was his desired employer and Mr Andrews was one half of that,
and by the time Brown had finished with him he would pass as a gentleman as
well.