Sons of Fortune (44 page)

But the pat assurance of his answer seemed to satisfy the editor.

“If she’s so sick, how did she get this information?” he asked next.

Caspar fidgeted with weary impatience—like, he hoped, a man deciding to go to the
Realm
instead. “She told me where to go and I went out and got the information for her,” he said.

“Where?”

“You may not believe me, sir,” he said with light sarcasm, “but I went directly to Avian’s and this Patent Bed place out in Holloway. I’m well known for being devious.”

The man suppressed a smile. “Whom did you see at Avian’s?”

Caspar looked at the ceiling. “Mr. Vane…” he said, counting off his thumb and raising a finger as if he were about to begin a list. But the editor held up a hand.

“Very well, lad. Very well. I just had to make sure. Now let me tell you something: If you can find out things like this and write about them in this manner, then you are wasting your time running errands for stupid ladies who can’t put two words together without boring the world to tears. You could put that Wesley College education of yours to work and make a very decent living, for a lad your age.” He looked again at the paper. “Did you really write this?” he asked.

Caspar nodded, hoping it didn’t show—the way his hair was bristling.

Dramatically the editor separated the sheets containing Caspar’s writing from the rest, crossed out the two words ‘we understand’ from the final sentence (for even editors must justify their existence), passed them to his clerk, and said: “Rush that down to Turner’s. Set and print, word for word, tomorrow’s issue. Make sure it’s in tomorrow’s issue, now. Cut Spring Fashions from the bottom.
Shift! Shift!
”

When the clerk ran out, the editor turned, still with that dramatic largesse, to Caspar and said, “Now, lad, I’m going to astonish you, I’m going to pay you five pounds for what you brought here today. That’s fifty shillings for what it’s worth and fifty shillings to encourage you to…”

“Ten pounds,” Caspar said. He was only thinking of giving Mrs. Abercrombie a decent burial, but he saw in the other man’s eyes that he was going to get it. The fight that was coming was pure commercial sparring.

For five minutes they argued, Caspar feeling absolutely in his element. It was only when he threatened to go to the
Realm
with all his future discoveries that the editor reluctantly agreed to ten pounds.

“Make up your mind to it,” Caspar told him. “It’ll be twenty next time—and even more in future!” His mother had dozens of friends, and he could sell them one by one! “And the stuff’ll be a lot better than this rubbish about beds.” He listed three or four grand ladies he could sell right now if he wished. It was enough. He knew he’d get his twenty and more. What on earth had he been worrying about beds for! Why hadn’t he seen the possibilities when Mrs. A. had come to him first! Time to sharpen up his instinct for business—if he had one.

***

He went home via the tobacconist in Cleveland Street and handed over seven pounds; he was damned if he would pay ten for a five-pound funeral. The man was surprised to see Caspar in his working-class clothing but it shook him into accepting the seven instead of the ten. Caspar put that fact away, too: A dramatic change could unnerve people and make them accept things they would otherwise reject.

He told the man he would come to the funeral, which was to be tomorrow at St. Marylebone’s—that was to prevent fraud between him and the undertaker. Caspar had no intention of actually turning up. Then he went home, had a bath, read a few papers, and waited for Mary to come, though there had been no arrangement.

The house was long silent by the time she came tiptoeing down the corridor and stole into his room.

“I’d given you up,” he said, delighting in the feel and warmth of her.

“I had to wait till I was sure they were all asleep.”

“I mean I thought you might not want to.”

“Ah, ye were so careful of me last night, don’t I know I’m safe? And sure I like it too.”

Again he wanted to ask her to wait and be his mistress in two or three years; but still he fought shy of the words. Anyway, it was so lovely to hold her slim, graceful body and to know it would always be there for him.

She was gone before he awoke.

***

In the end he went to the funeral, where he was the sole mourner. He and another man, someone from the undertaker’s, easily managed the coffin between them. By the time he had tipped everyone, from vicar to sexton, there was none of his—her ten pounds left. He was glad then to have seen her go properly, even though half of him kept reminding the other half that the Mrs. Abercrombies of this world and those other basement dwellers were the inevitable and essential victims of progress. He had to keep wiping those pictures from his mind. It was the only time he ever envied Brockman his gift for ignoring all concrete and down-to-earth considerations and sticking exclusively to lofty, abstract ideals.

Then, the Stevenson office being so near (and his father so far), he dropped in to see the people he had known from his childhood up. Among them was a new face—a man introduced as Ewart Hodge, a production engineer from the Stevenson steelworks at Stevenstown. He had come to London to report on a new Swedish improvement to the Bessemer system of steelmaking. He ended up taking Caspar to a pub for lunch and filling half his afternoon with steelman’s talk.

He left Caspar in no doubt that the future in steel lay elsewhere than in the furnace shed or the hearth. “The big, bold man with the burn scars on his hands and face,” he said, holding forth his own pitted fists, “has gone as far as his nose and eyes can take him. Now it’s the turn of the man with the microscope and the bottles of chemicals. This Swede now, fellow called Göransson, very clever. He’s shown how to make any grade of steel—
any
grade—by stopping the Bessemer converter at the proper moment during the blow. But he’s using that Bergslagen ore, see—no phosphorus. So what are we going to do with our phosphoric ores, eh?” He winked. “The fellow with the test tubes is your man to tell you.”

And though Caspar was merely filling in time until the
Companion
came out, he left that pub, where Ewart Hodge was still quenching his vast steelman’s thirst, with his enthusiasm for industry fired to a new high. He saw it all so clearly. War, the soldier’s trade, was increasingly being reduced to minor skirmishes, where civilization clashed with primitive and barbarous peoples. Among the civilized peoples themselves war was perhaps already becoming outmoded. After all, war was no more than an extreme form of competition; and did not trade and industry now offer a much more effective and direct means for countries to compete?

He could imagine the history books of the future with their descriptions of the Great African Steel War, in which England triumphed over France and Sweden in the race to capture the vast steel market of a Europeanized Africa. Or, perhaps, the triumph was over America—Hodge said that in three or four centuries America might become a serious commercial rival to England. The winners would get the markets; the losers would have to buy sub-licences or come to private arrangements with victorious English companies. That was civilized war! No one would die or be executed or imprisoned. Mass starvation and poverty would be just the natural, inevitable kind—not the exceptional kind that followed traditional wars.

Soldiers would become no more than colourful policemen who kept backward or disgruntled people in order; otherwise they would be sort of national toys kept for ceremonial occasions. The officers would all be the youngest sons of the aristocracy. How grand he felt to be on the crest of history’s leading wave! How dull his father was to think that the army offered any sort of future to men of ambition. Only half-men like Boy, who needed rules and discipline so badly he’d been prepared to sacrifice his manhood for them, could find a niche there.

But how to persuade first Boy and then his father to see such an obvious truth?

***

His intention, once he was sure the item had appeared in the
Companion
, had been to go out at once to Maran Hill and tell his mother everything—to stop her from storming into Wych Court or Avian’s demanding apologies, denials, and damages. But as soon as he opened the issue and leafed through it with fingers so trembling he could hardly control them, as soon as he read the item—which was word-for-word as he had written it—and seen what a “splash cut” they had made of it, portrait of Lady Stevenson and all, he knew he had to secure his sale with Avian’s first. That would be his peace offering to his mother.

Or would it? Lordy, it was a rather dreadful thing he had done, he was just beginning to realize. A little item tucked at the end of a column was one thing, but this whole-page splash! Should he go to her at once and throw himself on her mercy? No—no! Businessmen didn’t behave like that; mercy was not in the business lexicon.

No. He should go at once to Avian’s and make a contract. But for that he would need a bed, or several beds, as samples. So he would have to go to the barn in Holloway first. Then he remembered Mr. Vane’s warning about not trying to sell anything as the Honourable Caspar. Very well—he would go as the Yorkshire Tyke. “Caspar who? Never heard of him!” That would be fun.

When he got down from his cab in Hamilton Place at four o’clock that afternoon it was already dark. He was aware of a girl’s figure under one of the gas lamps but he was very close to her before he recognized she was Mary. She was crying.

“Oh, Master Caspar!” she said, in a torrent of words and sharp inhalations. “I’ve been dismissed. And not a penny in wages, she says. Would you ever go and tell her ’twasn’t me who told that paper anything? Sure she’ll not even heed me.”

The article! And Mrs. Jarrett—nasty, suspicious old harridan.

“I’ll tell her,” he said. “You come back inside with me.”

At first she would not but, in the end, he persuaded her she could not stay out in the cold. He took her into the drawing room and sent a footman for Mrs. Jarrett.

“Sit down,” he told Mary, pointing to a seat behind him, against the wall.

“No!” She shook her head in fear.

“Do as I say,” he commanded. “When she comes in she’ll tell you to stand up. I will agree with her and speak sharply to you. We don’t want her to think there is”—he fanned his fingers—“between us.”

Smiling, she sat.

“Get up, you baggage!” Mrs. Jarrett said the moment she entered the room.

Guiltily Caspar rose, looking with a mixture of fear and surprise at the housekeeper. She at once became flustered. “Goodness, Master Caspar—I didn’t mean to address you.”

Caspar looked behind him. “Oh! Quite so—how dare you, Coen!” He sat and faced Mrs. Jarrett, who remained standing. “Now, Mrs. Jarrett,” he said. “I understand you have accused this woman of writing some article in…”

“Not writing, sir. I don’t suppose she
can
write.”

“I can so,” Mary said.

“Be silent, woman!” Caspar barked, not looking around.

“But she must have spoken to that Abercrombie person.”

“Why ‘must have’?”

Mrs. Jarrett smiled the smile of the supremely confident. “Because, sir, no other servant knew that bed was there. They were all busy in servants’ hall. She carried it up alone.”

“
You
knew it, though.”

She drew angry breath. “You are not, I trust, suggesting, sir…”

“And
I
knew it.”

“Or that…” Doubts assailed her.

“Quite so, Mrs. Jarrett. It was, in fact, I who wrote that article.
And
the one back in October.”

“But I don’t understand.”

He had been too clever. He should have said it straight away, humbly begged her pardon, and smoothed the whole thing over. It might just have worked. But he had humiliated her, and she was not going to forgive it. He was now in the position of a raw subaltern who had tried to use his theoretically senior rank against the regimental sergeant major. He would be lucky to escape intact himself. There was no hope left of saving Mary.

He saw Mrs. Jarrett’s face harden.

“So you will, of course, reinstate Coen,” he said quickly. “You were right to suspect her. And to dismiss her. Not one breath of criticism can be levelled at you—and certainly no apology is called for.”

It was a good rearguard action but it was too late. He had done the damage already.

“I will not reinstate her, sir.”

“But I think you must.”

“And if you are wise, sir, you will not press it.”

What could Caspar do but—with sinking heart—insist on knowing her reason?

“I happen to know, sir, where she spent last night.”

Caspar knew his own face betrayed nothing, but he heard Mary’s gasp from behind him.

“And,” she went on, “knowing that, I have the strongest of suspicions about the previous night, too.”

Caspar made his mind up at once. Of course, he could not continue to sit there and bandy words with the woman. “That will be all,” he told her. “Kindly see that a coach is brought to the door in fifteen minutes.”

She smiled in thin-lipped triumph. “Certainly, sir. I trust I shall hear no more of Coen.”

“You shall,” Caspar said vehemently. “By God, you shall. You leave me no alternative but to take Coen to my mother now and explain it all.”

“No!” Mary called out.

Mrs. Jarrett looked not the least worried. “And ask her to choose between a son—a mere boy, who debauches servants and writes scurrilous articles about her—and a housekeeper who has given nearly twenty years’ faithful service and managed this most difficult house, without causing complaint, for five? I think not, sir! I think not. The contest is too uneven.”

It was bluff and counterbluff. Caspar smiled with an assurance he did not by any means feel. But that fact made him wonder if Mrs. J. was as confident as she seemed. “That is not quite the choice my mother faces. Coen, as you know, enjoys Lord Stevenson’s most zealous protection. Lady Stevenson will have to balance his anger against your act of injustice. An even contest, would you say, Mrs. Jarrett?”