Off the Rails (26 page)

It made poor Lizzie feel exhausted simply to hear it being talked about but she said ‘Yes, George’ and accepted that she would have to put up with it. Oh, if only they could go back to the old days in Monkgate. She’d been so happy there with Jane and Richard just a walk away. I’ll write to them as soon as I get a minute, she decided, and tell them what’s been happening.

Richard Nicholson was very impressed by his brother-in-law’s latest
acquisition
and spent the next three or four days bragging to his acquaintances about how wonderful it was. Jane sniffed at it.

‘High time the magic flounder put him back in his hovel,’ she said to her mother.

‘He’ll do it come the finish,’ Mary Jerdon said. ‘Pride allus comes afore a fall. Isn’t it today we’re going to collect our Nat’s new jacket?’

New jacket, new trousers, new shirts, new boots, a whole wardrobe full of clothes, hats, socks, chemises, under breeches, pocket handkerchiefs, silk cravats – nothing had been left out for Jane had made her mind to have everything done to perfection, even though Nathaniel teased her for making such a fuss. Now that her son was leaving home, he was going to do it in style.

He left at the beginning of October, wearing his new brown frock coat, his new cream-coloured trousers and his new scarlet cravat and looking so handsome and so very like his father that she was near to tears just at the sight of him.

‘Write to me as soon as you can,’ she urged, as he and Toby were climbing aboard the Rugby train.

He stood in the doorway and looked down at her, grimacing and rolling his eyes to show her she was fussing. But Toby understood her anxiety and tried to reassure her.

‘I’ll look after him, Mrs Cartwright,’ he said. ‘He won’t come to any harm, I promise you, an’ he’ll write to you the minute he’s arrived or I’ll pull his ears for him.’

He may be aw’kard, Jane thought, and nowt to look at, but he has a good heart. I’ll say that for him. And he’s uncommon fond of our Nat.

He was also as good as his word. Nat’s first letter arrived the very next day to say that he and Toby had had an easy journey and were quite settled in. Their rooms were very grand, he said, they’d explored the college, met up with lots of others scholars and were looking forward to their new life. ‘
Oxford
,’ he wrote,
‘is a truly beautiful place. It’s old and settled and full of colleges, yet all contained within a single square mile. I’ve never seen anything to equal it. You and Pa must come and visit me and see it too. I know you will like it as much as I do. I will write again at the end of my first week and then I will have more to tell you.’

It was very reassuring. And although he didn’t write to her every week – she could hardly expect that – he wrote at regular intervals to tell her about his lecturers and his first tutorial and how he’d joined the debating society and the natural history society and had taken up rowing.

‘Now,’ Nathaniel said, ‘you can stop worrying. He’s settled in, he’s enjoying life, all’s well with the world.’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘So it is.’

‘Which is just as well,’ her husband told her, ‘on account of I’ve to be  in
Sunderland and thereabouts for the next three weeks – or even four. Now I can leave with a stout heart and a clear conscience.’

That autumn was damp, dark and miserable. There were too many fogs to clog their lungs and reduce them to coughing, too many early morning mists to chill the day and their spirits, too many fires that wouldn’t take in the damp or smoked when the wind finally blew, too many runny noses, too many cold hands, too many feet stinging with chilblains.

‘We shall all be ill if this goes on,’ Mary Jerdon predicted. She’d taken a cold on her chest during the first thick fog and was finding it hard to shift. ‘I been hacking and coughing for three weeks now an’ I tell ’ee I’m sick to death of it.’

Jane tried to comfort her. ‘Better weather’s coming, Ma,’ she said. ‘Bound to be. It can’t keep on like this for ever. November’s allus foggy. We all know that.’

‘But not like this,’ her mother said. ‘Not on and on and on.’

Jane was glad that Mary had left school and was at home to help her, for when everyone else was coughing and spluttering she was blessedly healthy and even more blessedly cheerful. ‘Not to worry about Nanna,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a bread poultice for her. That’ll do the trick.’

But even
she
was worried when Toby Henderson’s letter came,
particularly
as her father was away working on some distant railway line out in the countryside and they couldn’t get in touch with him.

Toby had written extremely carefully so as not to alarm them but the message was too bad to be disguised. Nat was ill. He’d had a cold for several days but although Toby had nursed him
‘to the very best of my ability, I do assure you’,
he had got steadily worse and was now,
‘so the doctor says’,
suffering from congestion of the lungs.
‘I felt you should know,’
Toby wrote.
‘I am so sorry to be the bearer of such tidings.’

‘We must go there at once,’ Jane said, putting the letter beside her plate. ‘On the first train. Congestion of the lungs is serious. We must bring him home.’

But when they finally reached his rooms, having been escorted there from the station by Toby, it was obvious that he was much too ill to travel, racked by the most ugly cough and plainly in a fever.

‘We must nurse him here,’ Jane said to Mary, and she set about it at once, turning to Toby for information and answers to her questions. The fire was inadequate and would need stoking up and keeping in day and night. Extra coals must be ordered at once. Could that be done? His feet were icy. Did he have a hot-water bottle? And a kettle? Had he had anything to eat or was he too fevered for food? Had anyone tried him with
gruel? Was there a saucepan in the place and a wooden spoon? Where was the chamber pot? Had the authorities been told what was going on?

‘Indeed they have, ma’am,’ Toby told her. ‘It was the first thing I did when he was taken bad.’

‘You’re a good friend, Toby,’ she said. ‘Are they agreeable to him being nursed here?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Then we will get on with it,’ Jane said, ‘but I must warn you it is going to take a long time. I’ve nursed sick children afore so I know. The only thing we can do at the moment is to watch over him very carefully and keep him warm and see that he drinks as much water as he can until he reaches what they call the crisis – for that’s what happens wi’ congestion of the lungs – and that could take days or even weeks. So for a start,’ she said, turning to Mary, ‘you and I will need to find somewhere to stay, where we can sleep and take our meals when we’re not sitting up with him. I will stay with him tonight and after that we will take it in turns, one night on, one night off.’

‘Or perhaps one night on, two nights off,’ Toby offered, ‘if I were to take turns too. I mean, I wouldn’t want to push in if you’d rather I didn’t but I’m more than willing.’ And then he stopped because he wasn’t at all sure he’d said the right thing.

‘You,’ Jane told him, unconsciously bending her body towards him as if she were going to kiss him or hug him, ‘are the best friend my Nat could possibly have. And we will take you up on your offer. We shall need all the help we can get on account of nursing the sick is a wearying business,
especially
when you love your patient the way we love him.’

‘Thank ’ee kindly,’ he said. ‘And if I may make bold again, should I go out and find an inn for you? There are several hereabouts and I know where they are. It would be no trouble.’

She accepted that offer too, suggesting that Mary should go with him so that if she found ‘summat what would suit she can tek it, there and then, instead of traipsing all the way back here’. Then when her two young helpers had gone she turned the gas down to a glimmer and settled to her first vigil.

It was a long, anxious night, for although she tried to push the memory from her mind, she couldn’t help thinking of the way she and Lizzie had nursed poor little Matthew and their darling Dickie and how dreadful it had been when they died. ‘Please God,’ she prayed, over and over again, ‘let me keep my Nat.’ Towards midnight Toby returned to say that Mary had found a comfortable inn and had taken a room there and that he’d
promised
to go and collect her in the morning to escort her back, so that she
wouldn’t lose her way, and that his room was just across the stairs if she needed him. Jane thanked him and meant every word. But when he’d gone she was on her own with her thoughts and her vigil. The minutes ticked past very, very slowly and her poor fevered son stayed the same.

As he did for four fraught days and five anguished nights but on the morning of the fifth day, just as Jane and Toby had come back into the room to relieve his sister, who’d been sitting with him all night, he opened his eyes and asked for a drink of water and struggled to sit up to drink it.

‘Praise be!’ Jane said, trying not to cry. ‘I think he’s passed the crisis.’ He was certainly much cooler than he’d been since they arrived and although he went back to sleep after about a quarter of an hour, he was a better colour and breathing more easily. ‘Praise be!’

Two days later he was so much better that he was sitting up in bed, eating bread and butter and asking if there was any possibility of a glass of beer, and at that point she decided he was well enough to travel home.

They all went home together, she, Mary, Nat and Toby, who found them a cab to take them all to the station, virtually carried their patient down the stairs to the courtyard – and then went back for the bags – and escorted them gently and attentively all the way back to Shelton House.

‘I don’t know what we’d have done without him,’ Jane said to Nathaniel when he finally came home to his first family dinner in weeks and
discovered
what had been going on while he’d been away. ‘He was a true friend in need.’

‘We will invite him to come and stay with us over Christmas,’ Nathaniel decided, and looked at his daughter to see what she would say about it.

‘A very good idea,’ she said.

So the invitation was sent and accepted and they all spent a very happy and blessedly healthy Christmas together.

T
HE
H
UDSONS MOVED
into their prestigious London address as soon as Christmas was over and George threw his first London party two weeks later. It was the biggest and most extravagant event he’d ever
organized
and he made sure that everybody who was anybody was there. Gilded carriages jostled for position all along Knightsbridge, dukes and duchesses
climbed his splendid staircase, the house was ablaze with gas-lit
chandeliers
, the crush in his flamboyant reception room was the most gratifying thing he’d ever experienced. He’d even prevailed upon an equerry to the Queen to attend and spent several happy minutes during the evening telling him that, ‘if I may make so bold as to offer a little advice’, Her Majesty should be considering a new and truly comfortable way to travel, and that, if she were of a mind to use a train on occasions, he would be happy to commission a special carriage for her which would, of course, be furnished to the highest standards and kept for her exclusive use.

Oh yes, he thought, as his noble guests clamoured to speak to him, I’ve come a long way since I were a lad. A reet long way. I were nowt but a poor farm boy when I set out, an outcast wi’out a penny to my name, and now I’m t’Railway King an’ t’richest man in England an’ I’ve done it all wi’out a soul to help me. I mix wi’ lords and ladies an’ I’ve a son at Harrow and two at Oxford an’ I’ll marry my daughter to one of their high-born sons, just see if I don’t, an’ he’ll be happy to have her. They’ll sit up an’ tek notice when I tek my seat in t’House. I’ve made sure of
that
.’

But, as
The Yorkshireman
had predicted, the great Mr Hudson was to discover that life as a Member of Parliament was a great deal more difficult than he expected. After a few weeks, he realized that he had become a member of a club whose rules he didn’t understand and whose behaviour was completely incomprehensible. It seemed a lot of nonsense to him that you weren’t allowed to speak unless you were wearing a top hat, and that you had to refer to your fellow MPs as Honourable Gentlemen when they were plainly no such thing.

But far worse was the way these drawling, ‘honourable’ gentlemen could deliver an insult. He endured it fairly soberly for a week or two but as it showed no signs of abating and, if anything, seemed to be getting worse, he eventually took fright and brandy, and started to arrive at the House in a state of cheerful inebriation to boom and bellow when he came under attack. His aggressive behaviour made him feel better but in fact it was no help to him. It wasn’t long before an MP called Mr Brotherton stood up to suggest – to hoots of delighted laughter – that ‘the House would beget
additional
respectability if Mr Hudson would join a temperance society’ and another called Mr Joseph Hume complained that ‘Mr Hudson has a nightly habit of coming down to the House,
flushed
’, which the fools applauded. Why couldn’t the beggar talk English? In Yorkshire they’d have said ‘You’re drunk, sir’ and they’d have done it good humoured and given him a chance to stand up for himself, which these drawling dandies never did.

‘God damn it!’ he said to Lizzie after one particularly virulent exchange. ‘I’m not putting up wi’ this. Don’t they know who I am? I’m the richest man
in England, God damn it, and not because I was born to money like them but because I’ve earned it by the sweat of my brow. By the sweat of my brow, damn it. They’ve no right to abuse me the way they do. They were hurling insults at me, and yet
I
was the one who was called to order. It’s insufferable. I’ll not stand for it.’

Lizzie didn’t really know what to say so she murmured that he was quite right and stood back to let the diatribe burn itself out.

‘I’ll show ’em,’ he said. ‘They needn’t think they can ride roughshod over
me
. What’s wrong wi’ taking a drink now and then? Tell me that? I’ve seen plenty of
them
the worse for wear. Well I’ll show ’em, that’s all. I’ll not let ’em get away wi’ it. They’ll dance to my tune come the finish.’

He showed them by holding another extravagant party even larger and grander than the first and, when
that
didn’t silence them, he held a third and a fourth and crowned the fourth by welcoming Prince Albert, no less.

He was drunk with popularity and excess. ‘I’m the talk of the town,’ he boasted to Lizzie.

Which he was, although not quite in the way he imagined.

‘The man’s a buffoon,’ Lady Livingston said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so overblown nor so ugly. He looks like a toad in a suit.’

‘You are a trifle hard on him,’ Felix said mildly. ‘After all, he
has
built a prodigious number of railways, which most people would say is something to be thankful for.’

‘He’s a buffoon,’ Sarah repeated. ‘He never talks about anybody but himself and how rich he is, which is the height of bad taste, and how he’s going to run railways the length and breadth of the country, which is the most boring topic of conversation you can imagine, and how he’s going to find a rich husband for his ugly daughter, which ain’t a thing for a man to brag about. And as to that wife of his, well, really, my dear, she beggars description. She seems half-witted to me and I declare I never saw such deplorable dress sense in all my life.’

Milly had been listening and saying nothing but now she sprang to the defence of her poor Lizzie, speaking before she could stop to think that it might not be proper to contradict her sister-in-law. ‘She means well,’ she said. ‘She was always very kind to me – and to Ma, as I’m sure she would tell you. We were talking about it only t’other day sitting in this very room. I’ll grant she’s scatty – no one could deny
that
– and she does say silly things sometimes but I think that’s because she has such a mortal hard time of it with Mr Hudson.’ Then she stopped and wondered if she’d gone too far.

Sarah wasn’t put out in the least and she didn’t change her opinion either. ‘That may well be so,’ she conceded, ‘but she looks an absolute
fright. The gown she wore at their last party was in purple and orange, if you can imagine such a thing, and so hung about with bows and flounces and ribbons you could hardly see the cloth. And it’s not as if either colour suits her. You will see for yourself if you come to town for the Season. Is that still planned, Felix?’

‘It is,’ Felix told her. ‘I must pay some attention to Charlotte Square – it’s high time – and there are one or two cases I should like to take, just to keep my hand in. But maybe I should be more accurate and say it is planned as far as it is possible to plan when you have three small children.’

‘But you will leave them here, surely,’ Sarah said.

‘No,’ Milly told her firmly and a little tetchily for really Sarah shouldn’t be allowed to think she was right on every single matter. ‘We most certainly will not. If I’m to go to London, they will come with me.’

‘You amaze me, my dear,’ Sarah said, raising her eyebrows. ‘I’ve always been only too glad to leave my children for someone else to look after, which they do perfectly adequately. One needs a rest from time to time, wouldn’t you say?’

‘We all have our different ways,’ Felix said mildly. ‘And of course our Sarah-Jane is young yet to be parted from her mother.’

And as if to prove him right, Audrey came tapping at the door, in her timid way, to say, ‘Not meanin’ for to bother ’ee, sir, but Baby’s took a little tumble. Nowt to worry about, ma’am, but she wants her mama.’

‘Quite right too,’ Milly said, getting to her feet at once. ‘I can’t have my little one crying.’ And she left her sister-in-law to digest
that
.

Mr Hudson’s marriage-broking kept London society entertained all through that Season. ‘The effrontery of the man,’ they said to one another, enjoying themselves immensely. ‘All this talk of money is so vulgar. I wonder he don’t hang a placard round his daughter’s neck and have done with it:
Going with half a million pounds.’
Nevertheless, despite Mr Hudson’s deplorable behaviour, they went to all his parties because Albert Gate East was absolutely
the
place to be that Season and flashed their diamonds at one another and drank his champagne and ate his rich food and amused themselves by watching as Miss Ann Hudson flirted gauchely with every man her father brought her way. ‘So vulgar,’ they said. ‘So utterly, utterly vulgar. Selling her off like that. Dreadful little man.’

George was in his element, playing the host in his costly clothes, decking Lizzie with diamonds, booming greetings to the great and good, as though they were old friends, fawned on by members of the aristocracy – and why not? – flirted with by titled ladies, the centre of attraction and attention, powerful as a prize bull, the lord of all he surveyed. True, Ann couldn’t
make up her mind which of her many suitors she would choose, except for some useless foreign count called Suminski, and he wouldn’t do at all, as he’d told her, but she was young yet and would come round to it next Season. No, the only problem was that he was spending a deal more money than was actually coming in and he’d be seriously out of pocket if he didn’t do something about it. He’d already taken out a sizeable loan from Mr Glyn’s London bank in order to cover part of the cost of his London house. As soon as t’Season’s over, he promised himself, I’ll put my mind to it and see what can be done. Meantime he would go on enjoying the grand life at Albert Gate and put in the occasional appearance at the House, just to show willing, and let those fool MPs go hang.

Milly enjoyed her Season as much as the great Mr Hudson, and wrote full reports of it to her mother, and Fill, who was seven and quite the scholar, wrote a postscript on the end of her letters.
‘We have been to the Tower Nanna and seen the B Feeters’. ‘St Pols is very big. I like our church better. So does Jonathan.’ ‘There are lots of horses in London. The streets are full of dung. You shood see it. Audrey says to look out for our feet because she does not want to be cleening our boots all the time.’

Jane treasured every note and laughed out loud at most of them. ‘Dear little man,’ she said. ‘What style he has.’

The seventh letter contained a snippet of news that delighted her as much as Fill’s postscripts had done.
‘I think I had best let you know this,’
Milly had written,
‘or you will wonder at how fat I am become since I came to London. By the end of the year, God willing, you will be a grandmother again.’

‘So many babies,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I declare she is rivalling the Queen.’ Then he noticed that Nat had had a letter too and that he was reading it with more than usual concentration. He was instantly concerned. ‘Who is your letter from, Nat,’ he said, ‘if I may ask?’

‘It’s from Toby,’ Nat said. ‘His grandmother has just died. He’s in a bit of a state. He says he doesn’t know what to do. I think I should go to Haxby and help him.’ And he passed the letter across the table to his father.

Nathaniel read it carefully. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are right. I think you
should
go and as soon as you can. Grief is hard to contend with, especially when you are young.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Mary said to her brother, her face full of sympathy. ‘Two would be better than one.’

So the carriage was ordered for ten o’clock and the two of them set out, with a list from their father of things that would have to be done and a hamper of food from Mrs Cadwallader, for as their mother said, ‘I’ll wager he’s had nothing to eat. You forget about food when you’re grieving.’

It was the first time either of them had visited Toby’s home and although neither of them passed any comment on it, even at first glance they found it a shocking place, for it was a labourer’s cramped cottage and the living room was dark and dank. It had an earth floor, a rickety stove and very little furniture that they could see apart from a battered rocking chair by the fireside and two plain wooden chairs beside a plain wooden table in the centre of the room. And it smelt of dust and decay.

‘Oh Toby!’ Mary said, when he opened the door to them. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’ And she put her arms round his neck and burst into tears. At which he cried too and the two of them stood with their arms around each other and sobbed together, wet cheek against wet cheek. It took quite a while for them to recover and in the meantime Nat had carried in the hamper and set it on the table and had then gone out to the coachman and told him they might be quite a time and suggested that he might like to water the horses and take some refreshment in the local inn, being careful to provide the money to pay for it.

Mary found plates and beakers in the kitchen and they did what they could to coax their smitten friend to eat. But he was stuck in grief and shock and couldn’t manage more than a mouthful.

‘She was sitting in her chair,’ he told them, over and over again. ‘Sitting there, bolt upright and stone dead and I wasn’t there. I was upstairs asleep and she died in her chair. Sitting there bolt upright, stone dead and all alone. I wasn’t there and I should have been. Oh Mary, what am I to do?’

It was Nat who provided the answers, checking his father’s instructions point by point. ‘Have you seen the undertakers?’

Toby waved towards his grandmother’s rocking chair. ‘They took the – er – er …’ Then he was overcome and wept again.

‘Of course,’ Nat soothed. ‘Has the funeral been arranged?’

‘Funeral?’ Toby said vaguely, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

‘I will arrange it for you,’ Nat said and put a tick on his list. ‘Do you have any relations that ought to be told?’

‘No. It was just us,’ Toby said and added wildly, ‘I left her on her own to die, Nat. How could I have done such a thing after the way she’s looked after me all these years? She was all the mother I ever had.’

It took until late afternoon to make all the necessary arrangements and by then Toby had wept himself into a state of stunned calm. When Mary suggested that he should come home with them he simply nodded. And when she asked if she should help him pack a few things to take with him he nodded again and followed her up the dark stairs like a child.