The Rich Are with You Always Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Malcolm Macdonald

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  Cover design by Abbate Design

  Cover photography by Jeff Cottenden

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Originally published in London in 1976 by Hodder & Stoughton.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Macdonald, Malcolm The rich are with you always / by Malcolm Macdonald.

  p. cm.

  1. England—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Rich people—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title. PR6068.O827R5 2010 823'.914—dc22

  2009049938

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Beador was desperate for money. That ought to have made negotiations simple. Sir George Beador wanted money, and John Stevenson wanted land. Specifically, he wanted twenty acres near Stockton on the river Tees, the best place in the whole country, he decided, for a small iron foundry and smelting works. Sir George Beador had land in Stockton, and John had money in the bank. Yet the negotiations were not proving at all simple.

  You're a liar, John thought. And not even a good liar.

  The young baronet's frank, blue, uncaring eyes wavered as if he read John's thoughts.

  "See here, Stevenson," he blustered. "I'm putting land into this partnership." He was shivering, as if his sincerity had already been challenged. "Land!" He repeated the word, making it sound like "blood." John could see him trying to say "good land" but the words stuck in his throat.

  "And therefore…?" John prompted.

  "Well… I mean to say, just as land conveys certain privileges in life—privileges that mere money can never purchase—don't ye think it should convey the same sort of privilege in business too?"

  John pretended to consider this nonsense while he wondered what lay behind it. Sir George was trying to distract his attention from something. But from what? Nasty, uncharitable suspicions were already forming in his mind. He hoped he was wrong. In a curious way, he almost liked Sir George—an amateur swindler who had not even practised how to lie convincingly. It touched some reserve of sympathy within him.

  One end of a burning log fell onto the hearth. Sir George rose and pulled the bell chain; then he stood, looking directly down at the burning wood. The smoke rising from it made him cough. Even his coughing lacked conviction. It sounded like a smothered laugh.

  Wheezing, Sir George crossed to the tall French window. His water-filled eyes trembled. The sky beyond was a uniform leaden gray, and from it fell a steady rain, warm for early February. While his breath returned, he looked morosely out. "They'll find nothing today. We had the best of it this morning."

  Fleetingly John thought of Nora, still out there somewhere amid the weather; if they had found, she'd be up among the leaders, no matter how strange the country or how cunning the fox. Yet how she'd love to be here too. She'd soon run Sir George Beador to a standstill. And she'd stay to see him broken.

  A footman came in and, without a word, rebuilt the fire. He did not look at Sir George, and Sir George did not even notice him.

  "But you've said you're willing to pay me ten thousand pounds for the land," Sir George wheedled. "Surely you'd not go back on your word!"

  John, counting silently to retain his patience, looked around the room at the books of polished leather and soft suede, warm by the firelight in their tall glass cases. The man was not the fool he seemed. It would pay to remember that. "I will offer ten thousand to secure the land and your partnership. You know the value of your name around Stockton. And elsewhere. Subtract that from ten thousand and you have the price of your land."

  Sir George turned toward him at last. John could not read his face against the brightness of the window, but the voice was cold and morose. "Money! Even one's name is negotiable nowadays."

  "Be thankful for that," John said.

  Sir George laughed. "Aye," he agreed. "I'll not deny it." He came and sat by the fire, cheerful again. The mud that had earlier fallen from his boots crunched on the polished floor. "Should get out of these wet things. I'll regret it."

  John smiled. Sir George looked at him and chuckled, an echo of his earlier laugh. "That's a smug sort of a smile, Stevenson," he said. "You've no cause for it, I may say. You may be dry, but you stink of that wretched mackintosh stuff."

  Sir George would not risk such warmth unless he felt he had somehow mastered this discussion. It was the moment of overconfidence for which John had been waiting.

  "Not railway shares, is it, Beador?" he asked, his voice suddenly crisp and brutal. "Not been speculating there?"

  Sir George's immature cunning could not withstand such an assault. His eyes registered shock, fear, guilt, confusion, and finally anger at having registered anything at all.

  "Dammit, Stevenson!" he said.

  "What have you applied for?" John did not relent.

  "I've been allotted nothing." Sir George Beador regained some of his

  composure. But it was too late. The mask had slipped, and all the truculence and all the cold blue blood he could muster would never divert John Stevenson from pursuing this particular inquiry to its end, however many weeks or months it might take.

  "But you have applied?"

  Sir George looked sharply at him, offended.

  "As a partner, I'd have to know," John said. "I'd be liable for any debt of yours."

  Sir George lowered his eyes; his shoulders slumped. "Damn complicated," he said to the palms of his hands.

  "I must know. Before we engage in any deed."

  "I'll draw up a list," Sir George said. His interest in his hands was now intense, making it difficult for John to persist.

  The distant clatter of hooves on sodden gravel announced the return of the rest of the party. It annoyed John; his whole purpose in leaving the field early had been to settle this partnership once and for all. If only Sir George would behave rationally, like a man needing money, instead of with this boyish mixture of dumb cunning and lordly indifference.

  Sir George looked up the avenue and rubbed his hands gladly; for him the returning riders were a rescue party. John kicked a dead ember back into the grate and left the room. A more open show of his annoyance would achieve nothing.

  His way out lay through the gun room, then down the passage to the north wing, which flanked the stable yard. This wing was, in fact, the remains of an H-shaped Tudor manor—or I-shaped, to keep the convention that puts north at the top. The passage was the crossbar, but where the southern wing had once stood, there was now a large square block built in Georgian stone. Its full three stories laid a permanent shadow over the two humbler floors of the old red-brick manor, now called the north wing.

  A large weeping ash dominated the stable yard. Through its tired branches, gleaming in the rain, he saw the riders, some still mounted. The grooms stood waiting to take their charges. He kn
ew at once that they had broken up a fox; why else would people soaked to the skin, weary from a day's hard riding over drenched fields through Hertfordshire gravel and clay, slip so jauntily down, pat their horses' flanks and necks so heartily, and laugh and chatter with such gusto? Vapour from the horses hung above the group, rising with their laughter.

  The last to dismount was Nora, savouring the chase to its uttermost moment. In that brief supremacy her eyes raked around the yard until they fell on John, still sheltering from the rain under the canopy of the Tudor door. The radiance of her smile banished all trace of his annoyance; for a moment their eyes dwelled each in the other's. He smiled reassuringly, conveying no more than a welcome. Already he could imagine the questions lining up in that part of her mind closest to speech—Had Sir George agreed? What were the terms? What was the extent of his debt? She would put them into words soon enough. And what would he tell her? That Sir George Beador had gone to earth—to a very foul-smelling earth?

  She hitched up her habit and ran to him through the pendant branches of the ash, reaching the nearer cobbles in a star-burst of rain droplets shaken from its glistening twigs. "We saw blood. There were only six on terms at the end," she said. Rivers of rain gleamed on her skin. An intoxicating steam curled from her sodden clothing.

  He grasped her outstretched arms and turned her gently in a half-circle, as in a stately dance. "And you among them, I know," he said.

  She grinned, breathed happily in, and nodded. The rest of the party now began walking more slowly toward them.

  "Missed a slashing good trot, Stevenson," Dalgliesh called; he was a captain in the Greys, a friend of Sir George's younger brother. The others, knowing how shallow was John's love of the chase, laughed.

  "I was well represented, I think," he answered.

  Sir George, despite the protests of Mrs. Lambourne, his housekeeper, had put the Stevensons in the main guest suite, over the ballroom on the south of the house. All the other guests were of higher rank—indeed, as John had been no more than a railway navvy only six or seven years earlier, it would be hard not to be. It was Sir George's none-too-subtle way of stressing how important Stevenson was to him at this moment; it was also, John was sure, Sir George's highly subtle way of blackmailing him—saying, in effect: See how many friends I will slight for the sake of John Stevenson!

  Nora had not needed to have all this explained to her. As soon as Mrs. Lambourne had left them alone, having pointedly announced that this was the principal suite, Nora had laughed, with more pity than humour, at the transparency of it. "We'll plug that gun for him," she said. "Behave as if it was no less than our due."

  Only Mrs. Lambourne had seemed disappointed at their cool acceptance of the honour.

  Now John left Nora to change from her soaking habit and take a bath, while he did his daily correspondence with his deputies, partners, and subcontractors. In railways alone he was laying about 600 miles of road that year, including Berwick– Edinburgh, York–Scarborough, Faversham–Margate, and, for Brunel, a stretch of the new atmospheric railway from Exeter to beyond Teignmouth. He had many other contracts too: a foundry and some back-to-back housing at Holbeck, just south of Leeds; some harbour works at Newcastle and more at Stockton; some wharfs at Teignmouth; and about fifteen acres of mills and housing in Warrington.

  Often he thought back with something close to nostalgia to the days when he had had just one or two contracts to oversee—when sometimes an entire week would pass without a single important problem or setback. Now not a day went by without news through the mails of at least one headache: a quaking bog in the Vale of York; an uncharted subterranean river in Warrington; nondelivery of the atmospheric tube at Exeter; a scarcity of brick at Stockton, where frost and floods were making the local clay beds unworkable. One needed good partners and smart deputies to work so many contracts at once. Yet he would rather cope with a hundred such troubles, even by mail, than with a single George Beador or his grubby kind.

  "I sh'll go back to Yorkshire tomorrow," he called through the open door to the dressing room, where one of the maids was helping Nora dress. To his surprise, the door was slowly closed against him, making further talk impossible. He shrugged and returned to his letters.

  Now and then he heard Nora and the maid giggling, and when, at last, she came into the room, he saw her eyes gleaming with the promise of a secret to unfold. The heady, damp smell of her was gone.

  "That Kitty," she said when the maid left the room, "has been here more than ten years.

  "Oh?"

  "She has. That's before Sir George bought this place from—you'll never guess who from."

  John thought hard; the vaguest memory of some useless information stirred. "He was a merchant in the Russian trade. Someone on the Baltic Exchange?"

  "But his name. His name was Thornton."

  John frowned in disbelief. "Not—no, surely not—not connected with our Thornton! Dear Walter?"

  "His uncle!"

  "I don't believe it!"

  "It's true. She's just told me it all…"

  "The uncle who brought him up? When he was made an orphan?" The story, as Walter had told it to them—it must have been five years since, sometime in 1840—began to come back to him.

  "That's the one," Nora said. "They took a plunge in forty-three. This place changed hands then. Kitty stayed on."

  Her slow, salacious grin infected him. He took her hand and led her to the sofa in the bay window. "So she knew our Walter when he was a lad," he prompted.

  "In the most biblical sense!" Nora laughed.

  "She told you that?" He was astonished.

  "I had to get it out of her. But she wasn't that unwilling, not once she'd started to talk. He was even worse here, I think, than when we knew him."

  They both laughed again—a little longer and more heartily than the situation might seem to warrant. Walter Thornton was a subject of some delicacy between them. Almost six years ago, Nora, then destitute and tramping from Manchester to Leeds, had sold herself to this Walter for a few shillings—though, as it turned out, he had eventually given her a sovereign. A casual suggestion of Walter's had led to her meeting with John, who was then at the very start of his astonishing rise from being a navvy to becoming one of the foremost contractors in England— indeed, in the world. John had always known of that transaction between Nora and Walter, yet, though he had never reproached her, she was never easy in Walter's presence, and she was always a little too brazen, too cool, when the talk turned to what they politely called Walter's "Irish toothache"—for Thornton, as the navvies bluntly said, always carried four spare pricks in his purse.

  "I had to tell her a thing or two about his goings-on since we knew him, to get her talking."

  "Not…?" he asked.

  "Of course not!" She was annoyed he could even think it. "Just him and that halfwit wench on the canal bank. And the goings on with that skinny servant girl up in Carlisle—things like that."

  She was smiling again. "Go on," he said. "What did Kitty say?"

  She looked around, as if for eavesdroppers, before she began, in a low voice full of gossipy complicity. "He used to…" She got no further, but covered her face and laughed. "It's awful," she said. "I shouldn't be telling you, really."

  He did not reward her with any display of his impatience.

  "She says he never left the servant girls alone. He was always hanging about the rooms, trying to lift their skirts while they worked. He was 'fierce to get it' always, she said. Mind you, I think she was more than half willing, was Kitty. I fancy she's a right little cleaver."

  "Why?"

  "She said he used to catch her in the garden room, which is at the far end of the north wing from here. Well, you couldn't be taken by surprise there, could you? Just imagine it. No matter what direction anyone came from, you'd get good warning. I think she has her heels lightened, all right."

  "How old was he then?"

  "Once he came about her five times in one day, she said. H
e let out he was sick, when the family went away out calling and left him, which they usually did. He often used to say he was sick then, and go to bed and get cordials brought up."

  "By Kitty?"

  "Well, she wouldn't volunteer, would she? Not if she wasn't willing. She tried to talk like she hated it and only did it for fear of dismissal."

  "I should think he was sick after that. Five times!"

  Nora laughed again. "Aye! She said it didn't take much pretence when the rest came back. He looked like a second helping of death. But next day he was harder than ever for it. She said from the time he was sixteen he had every below-stairs and every above-stairs unmarried female. As often as they'd let him. Also a retired cook above sixty who came back to see the family and had just been widowed."