Fourpenny Flyer (53 page)

But the evidence was forthcoming. It was quite gratifying to note how many of his shopkeepers disapproved of advertisements, ‘nasty untidy looking things' and clearly didn't want them in their shops. ‘'Twould mean more work for someone, Mr Easter sir, what I hopes en't me, if you takes my meaning.' For the next three weeks he travelled from town to town, writing every comment in a notebook neatly labelled ‘Opinions'. By the end of October he had collected thirty-four disapprovals to nine approvals, and all from one region alone. Surely that would be evidence enough.

It wasn't.

‘Yes, I daresay,' Nan said, when he finally showed her his notebook at their next business meeting. ‘'Tis as I'd expect. They know nothing of the benefits so they oppose the idea out of hand. What of it? They'll learn better sense when the advertisements are in the shops and trade improves.'

‘With respect,' John said, keeping his temper with considerable effort, ‘none of us may know for certain what the effect will be. Only time will tell us that.'

‘Squit!' Nan said. ‘What do you think, Billy?'

‘Don't ask me,' Billy said affably. He didn't want to take sides. Let them fight it out between them. He was comfortable in his leather armchair.

‘Cosmo?'

‘Well,' Cosmo said diplomatically, ‘since we are in the realms of conjecture and opinion, it is difficult, you must admit, to form any very clear policy upon the matter. The subscription list for the new reading-room does seem to bear out your contention, ma'am, that advertisements will not deter trade; howsomever it might prove otherwise out in the provinces where opinions are always a good twenty years behind those in the capital.'

‘I doubt it,' Nan said forcefully.

‘But we cannot be sure,' Cosmo insisted. ‘That is so, is it not?'

‘If we always waited until we were sure,' Nan said, ‘no business would ever get done, let me tell ‘ee.'

‘True,' Cosmo agreed. ‘Very true. But it does not solve our present difficulty.'

‘There is no difficulty,' John said stiffly. ‘The shopkeepers do not want advertisements. Surely that much should be plain and obvious even to the most foolhardy. In my opinion 'twould be folly to insist.'

But his mother had an answer for him and a very fierce one. ‘In my opinion 'twould be folly not to.'

‘We shall lose trade.'

‘On the contrary, Johnnie, we shall gain it.'

‘I
know
we shall lose it.'

‘You know nothing,' she shouted at him, sharp with fury. ‘Deuce take it, am I to be told my business by my own son?'

He jumped to his feet, his control breaking under the combination of her fury and his own impotence before it. ‘Yes, you are,' he shouted back. ‘You are. I know as much about this firm as you do, every bit as much, oh yes, for I work every bit as hard. And if I can't tell you you're wrong, then who can? See sense, Mama!'

She stood up too and took a deep breath, eyes glittering while Cosmo winced and dropped his eyes, and John stood facing her, white-faced at his own presumption. And Billy spoke into the pause.

‘Can't see what all the fuss is about, damne if I can,' he said mildly. ‘Why don't you both do what you want and have done with it?'

Nan turned to vent some of her fury on him, and Cosmo looked at him, face peaked with anxiety, but he went on before any of them could speak. ‘Seems quite simple to me. Let those who want advertisements have 'em, and those who don't can go without. Run it for a year or two. See what happens.'

Surprise stopped Nan before she could roar. She considered it, thinking fast, eyes narrowed. ‘Deuce take it,
Billy,' she said, grinning with delight at him, ‘you've a-given us the answer, so you have.'

The fight was over as quickly as it had begun and the decision made.

‘Thank God for that,' Billy said, easing himself out of his chair. ‘Now I can go home to Tilda.'

‘I have a year in which to prove my point,' John told Harriet later that night. ‘Maybe two. But a year certainly. 1 shall need to travel a great deal, to check upon sales in all the shops that matter, to urge them on and encourage them to refuse, if that is what they wish to do. You know the sort of thing.'

She knew only too well. He would barely be in the house. But she didn't comment.

‘I
must
show Mama what a difference there will be,' he said, his eyes strained with the urgency of it. ‘It is a terrible thing to have to do, but I must prove her wrong. You understand that, don't you, Harriet?'

‘Yes, John.' Oh, if only he didn't take it so seriously. What if he were the one to be proved wrong? She would never have admitted it to him, of course, because that would have been disloyal and unkind, but in her opinion Nan was far more likely to be right than he was. Once a few shops started taking advertisements, sooner or later they all would.

‘I shall start straight away,' he said.

‘Now John? With the winter coming on?' Oh surely not.

‘Yes indeed. I cannot allow bad weather to hinder me. This is far too important.'

It was a long, cruel winter but he travelled, even in the worst of the weather, when coaches foundered in snow and horses fell, and passengers ran fevers all about him. He even continued his journey on one occasion when an old man died in the seat beside him. Bad weather always took a heavy toll of old men, he explained to Harriet, and there was work to be done.

It was a danger to babies too. ‘Take care of yourself, my dear,' Harriet wrote to Annie, ‘and look after Jimmy and
Beau and dear little Meg. I will return in the spring.' For Annie's fourth baby was due in March, and by then the cold weather must surely be over.

But if anything March was the worst month of the lot. It started badly and got progressively worse. On the fifth day a south-west gale blew into London with such extraordinary violence that it actually stopped the tide on the River Thames.

Naturally enough, Nan took Matilda and Harriet and their children and their nursemaids straight down to London Bridge to see it. It was a most peculiar sight.

The river should have been in flood at one o'clock in the morning but at ten o'clock, when they arrived on the bank, the tide was still ebbing as though it had been bewitched, more than half the riverbed was exposed and there were scores of boats lying aground right in the middle of the Pool of London where they should have been riding at anchor. To the children's delight, the water disappeared as they watched, and although they were wind-buffeted and cold they were too excited to care. After an hour it was so low that they could see the riverbed even in the middle and two boatmen set off to see if they could wade across. And to cheers and catcalls discovered that they could! It was amazing.

After that all sorts of people strode into the shallows and soon they were picking up treasures from the slime, old plates, chipped cups, ancient boots, coins, combs, even a necklace, held aloft in the air to drip greeny-black mud and rapturously declared to be ‘Pure gold!'

‘Come on!' Nan said, taking Will and Mattie by the hand. ‘Let's go see what we can find, eh?'

And despite Matilda's protestations, off they went with Rosie squealing behind them. It was marvellous fun.

By midday all four of them were spattered in slime from their toes to their waists and Will had found a golden sovereign, no less, and was tense with the excitement of it. But then the wind changed abruptly and the tide suddenly turned and within seconds it was flowing back, and running with such speed and strength that they were in real danger of being knocked over. Matilda yelled a
warning, but Nan was already taking action. She scooped up a child under each arm and ran to shore, bent double but determined, with Rosie trailing after her, squealing and yelling and kicking mud in all directions. And not a moment too soon. Within twenty minutes the river was in full and violent flood and the anchored boats were being thrown together like corks, with a most dramatic rending and splintering of wood. Mattie and Will and Rosie were thrilled by it.

Matilda was not. ‘How she imagines we are ever to get these children clean again,' she complained to Harriet, tucking baby Edward into his shawl and returning him to his nursemaid, ‘I do not know. Look at the state of your Rosie. Why does she encourage her? It's so childish. Running off into all that filth. Oh I know she's a great business woman and all that, but really …!'

Harriet made sympathetic noises and then turned her attention to her excited son. Secretly, she'd been watching her mother-in-law with admiration, envying her energy and vitality, and wishing she could share her extraordinary sense of fun. ‘She is the sort of woman I would dearly like to be,' she wrote in her diary that night, after a full account of the events of the morning. ‘I feel pale and insignificant beside her, as I fear I am.'

The next morning it was time to pack for her journey to Rattlesden.

‘Must we, Mama?' Will wanted to know.

‘Oh yes, lambkin, indeed we must,' Harriet said, unfastening the carpetbag. ‘Your Aunt Annie is going to have another baby, and when ladies have babies they are very weak and we have to look after them.'

‘Couldn't Jimmy and Beau look after her? Then we could stay here an' paddle in the mud again with Nanna an' find another sov'reign an' see some more boats gettin' smashed.'

‘The very idea,' Harriet said, lining the bag with clean paper. ‘Do you like seeing boats smashed, you dreadful child?'

She didn't sound cross or reproving, only affectionate, so he told her the truth, ‘Yes, Mama, very much.'

‘Well,' she said, packing his nightshirt, ‘I daresay you'll see a good many things broken in your lifetime. Humanity is uncommon destructive. But for the present we must go to Rattlesden and see your new cousin.'

So although he would much have preferred mud to a baby, to Rattlesden he went. And the baby wasn't there when they arrived. It appeared three days later and it was very small and uninteresting and spent all its time fast asleep. And Aunt Annie was as fit as a flea; she said so. So it was really rather a sell. The christening was quite fun because they had honey cakes afterwards and the baby, who was called Dorothy, kept its eyes open for once and looked at him. But it would have been much more sensible to stay in London and play in the river.

And then after all that they had to stay on in Rattlesden for another four weeks because Pollyanna was getting married to Mr Jones, the curate, and old Bessie said they'd got to give them ‘a proper send-off.

A proper send-off turned out to be a very big party, with more food than the guests could possibly eat and wine flowing like water and dancing into the small hours, and children allowed to sit up until well after supper time.

Nan and Frederick came up to Bury for the occasion and Annie was flushed with pleasure at the great success of her matchmaking and the obvious happiness of her nursemaid. ‘Although how
we
shall make out I do not know,' she said cheerfully to Harriet, as the party chuckled about them. ‘We mustn't expect her to be at our beck and call all the time, not now she's a wife. That wouldn't do at all, would it, my dear?'

‘If I know Pollyanna,' Harriet said, ‘she'll not leave your baby unattended, wife or no.'

‘Oh I know it,' Annie said, smiling lovingly at the bride as she danced by on her new husband's arm. ‘I know it. We are greatly blessed in our Pollyanna.'

‘I do wish John could have been here,' Harriet said sadly. She was the only married woman in the rectory that evening who didn't have her husband to escort her. He'd gone straight back to London after the ceremony. ‘He works
so
hard, I rarely see him these days.'

‘Would you like me to speak to him about it?' Annie offered, smiling her sympathy.

‘Oh no, no, no,' Harriet said at once. That wouldn't do at all. It would upset him terribly if he thought she was complaining about him. ‘If there is work to be done, he must do it. I know that. I am being selfish even to speak of it. He will soon be home again.'

‘'Tis my opinion,' his sister said trenchantly, ‘that he is being uncommon foolish to waste so much of the time he ought to be enjoying with you. Work comes to us every day, but a wedding is a rarity, and we only live once. But I will not speak of it, my dear, since you do not wish it. Ah, here comes my dear James to claim the waltz.'

But it was an unhappiness to Harriet to be so much alone, hide it as she might. In fact if it hadn't been for Matilda's cheerful company, she would have been very lonely indeed that year. Nan was hard at work introducing advertisements to one shop after another, and John was equally busy travelling the country in an increasingly vain attempt to prevent her, and Annie was preoccupied with Beau, who was nine years old now and had followed his brother to school at St Edmund's Grammar in Bury and needed ‘a deal of attention'.

‘I drift from one day to the next without my dear John,' Harriet told her diary. ‘I need occupation.'

And rather to everybody's surprise, that summer she found it.

June that year was as hot and humid as March had been cold and stormy. Harriet and Matilda evacuated their families out of the city as soon as the hot spell began, for heat brought fevers, and none of their children was old enough to withstand a city fever. But even in Rattlesden the corn was as dry as bone, Harriet's roses burned as they bloomed and the trees in the garden could only cast a sticky shade.

Annie kept baby Dot indoors away from the sun and dressed her in silk to keep her cool. And Harriet paid particular care to marketing, searching out the freshest meat she could find, and walking to the farm gate every
morning for fresh churned butter and milk straight from the cow, because food turned bad so quickly in the stifling air.

Beau was very impressed with his new life as a scholar. ‘We have such fights, Aunt Harriet,' he said, blue eyes wide.