Sweet and Twenty (5 page)

“I never saw anything half so handsome,”
Sara answered.

“It is surprising he knows so many people. He got here only yesterday.”

“He has lived here forever, Cousin.”

This reply informed Miss Watters that they were discussing two different gentlemen, but at least, she thought, they were looking at the same duo. “Oh,
you refer to Mr. Fellows.”

“Mr. Fellows? No indeed, I mean Mr. Alistair.”

“The Conservative?”
Lillian asked with interest.

“No, he’s a Tory,”
Sara told her.

“They mean the same thing, Cousin, as a Whig, you know, is another label for a Liberal. But which is Mr. Alistair?”

“The awfully handsome one in the blue jacket.”

Nine-tenths of the gentlemen wore blue jackets, but there weren’t many that could be designated as handsome, and by following Sara’s intent gaze, Lillian soon picked out Mr. Alistair as being a tall, good-looking blond gentleman, accompanied by an older, gray-haired man to whom the term seedy seemed to apply—not for any dishevelment in his toilette—but owing to an air of dissipation in his face.

“So that’s Mr. Alistair. I think he will give Mr. Fellows a good run for his money. He seems popular,”
Lillian said.

“All the girls are crazy for him,”
Sarah assured her.

“I meant popular with the
townspeople, the farmers—generally popular. He’ll get a lot of votes.”

“He’s looking at us,”
Sarah said in a low, excited voice.

He was indeed not only looking at them, but walking toward them, and at the
same time Mr. Hudson and Mr. Fellows were coming toward them from the opposite direction. The two groups converged at the same time on the four females from New Moon, and while Miss Monteith and Lady Monteith greeted the Whigs, the Tories were greeted by the young ladies. Miss Watters had to admit she was more impressed with Mr. Alistair’s charm and wits than she was with Mr. Fellows. He seemed well-spoken, well-mannered, well-informed, well-everything. Her only complaint was in regard to his politics and his mentor, who was introduced as a Mr. Reising from
London, Mr. Alistair’s campaign manager. Reising’s glance more than once went to the group with the elder ladies, and after a few remarks he walked the two steps to join them.

“Well, Mr. Hudson, we meet again,”
Lillian heard him say. By a few small side-steps she soon edged her way from Sara’s side to the other group, watching with interest as Mr. Hudson reached out his hand and gave Mr. Reising’s a firm shake, then proceeded to make him known to the ladies as “a friend.”
She had thought they must be mortal enemies.

“I’ll take you this time, Mr. Hudson,”
Reising said. “But it’s no fair
fight. I have all the advantages in this riding.”

“In the riding, yes, but not in the candidate,”
Hudson objected. “I have not had the pleasure of your candidate’s acquaintance, but I have an excellent man.”

“I haven’t met yours, either. Time we did so, don’t you think?”

The omission was taken care of, and within a few minutes Hudson had learned more of interest from his two competitors than he had from any of his cohorts in two days.

“You fight a losing battle,”
Mr. Alistair told him. “With a promise from my party to build the bridge within eighteen months, I really don’t think you stand a chance.”

Mr. Hudson heard this awful news without a blink. “They’ve been promising it for a long time, I understand. Every election the promise is renewed, but never kept.”

“It’ll be kept this time,”
Mr. Alistair said very firmly. “When I am elected, I will make it my chief interest to see that Crockett gets its bridge.”

“
If
you’re elected,”
Hudson corrected.

“Jolly glad to hear you mean to get that bridge for us,”
Fellows congratulated his opponent. “Lord Allingham mentioned we might get it, now that an election is upon us.”

Mr. Hudson was in despair to see his candidate make such a fool of himself. “Well, we’ll believe it when we see it, eh, Tony?”

“If Alistair says he’ll get it, we’ll get it,”
Tony confirmed. “But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, ha ha,”
As well as his twelve Latin quotations, Fellows had a whole string of clichés at his fingertips. A word triggered a cliché
very often, Hudson had observed, and was relieved that this one was not as irrelevant as many others.

“That, of course, must depend on Mr. Alistair’s getting elected. Remember you are running against him, Tony,”
Hudson said.

“That’s right. And if I get in we won’t see hide nor hair of the bridge, for the repressive Tories run the whole show, you know, and only give the goods to their own ridings.”

“I don’t think we need worry about your getting in, Mr. Fellows,”
Reising said, with a glance almost of sympathy at his sworn rival, Hudson. He was a little sorry it was to be such an uneven match; he would have enjoyed a good tight race with Hudson.

Hudson gazed in disbelief at Mr. Fellows. He had never thought he was a clever man, but this was the first evidence he had that he was a complete and utter fool.

“We’ll be running along,”
Reising said. “I see you are going to have your hands full, Mr. Hudson.”
His eyes flickered in Fellows’s direction, and his lips were slightly unsteady.

Then, with bows and farewells, the Tories left.

“My, I wish I could vote,”
Sara said, looking after the wide shoulders of Alistair as he departed.

“Thank you, Miss Monteith,”
Fellows said. “I appreciate the thought. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, eh?”

It was not only Sara who was at a loss as to his meaning, if he had any. Mr. Hudson was fagged after the better part of a day with Tony, and thought the undemanding company of the four supporters—and outside of Allingham and Basingstoke they seemed to be the only sure Whigs in the riding—might allow him to lower his vigilance till he had caught his breath.

“We all pitched in and addressed those envelopes this morning,”
Lillian said to him. “What shall we do with them?”

“What fast workers you are! Thank you very much, I’ll pick them up. I begin to think letters might be very useful in this campaign.”

Lillian bit her lip to suppress a smile, and as the candidate was telling the other ladies what a tough piece of mutton he had had at the Cat’s Paw and warning them away from it, she turned to Mr. Hudson for some private conversation. “Mr. Alistair promises tough competition, I think.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Tony is a good chap. A dry wit—his humor is not always appreciated.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “Neither is yours in this case. You know he meant no joke. He has a severe case of foot-in-the-mouth and you will have to watch him closely.”

“I personally like to see a good, honest man with no tricks about him run for public office. You can trust such a man as that.”

“I think Mr. Fellows’s tricks were inadvertent, although he played a few nasty ones, and you are generous in your views. But then you mean to run a good, honest, straightforward campaign, and a little ingenuousness will not go amiss, I suppose.”

“You have hit on just the right word. He is ingenuous. An honest, well-meaning, hard-working man.”

“I think
you
are working harder than he is, but I hope you are not so ingenuous. It seems to me one of you ought to have your wits about you. Reising has a sly look about him.”

“He’s as wily as a fox, but he doesn’t often beat me, Miss Watters. One
of us has his wits about him, but thank you for the warning. The envelopes are all addressed, you say?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you would be interested in another little job for Tony and myself?”

As he had added the magic last word, Miss Watters agreed without even knowing what the job was.

“Tony has bought a great load of stuff today, and we would like you ladies to decide what we should do with it.”

“What kind of stuff?”
she asked.

“All kinds—vegetables, clothing, various foodstuffs...”

“Why did you buy them?”

“To ingratiate the merchants.”

“Oh, what an expensive way to do it!”

“It is a sort of charity, and he can well afford it. I have to help Tony prepare for a public meeting at the Veterans’
Hall tonight. He and Alistair are to make speeches to the farming community. I have asked the merchants not to deliver the goods till I give them the address, for we don’t want it all landing in on us at the abbey. Your aunt will know who could use the things. An orphanage or the local poorhouse, that sort of thing, but distributed as widely as possible.”

“Then we must know exactly what you bought, and from which merchants.”

“We bought things in every shop—the merchants will tell you what.”

“You want us to go into
every shop
in town, you mean, and find out what you bought, and decide where it is to be taken?”

“If it isn’t too great an imposition. I wouldn’t ask it if your aunt had not so kindly offered to help us in any way she could. And really, I come to feel we need a great deal of help.”

There was a note of repressed desperation in this last speech, and as her relatives had really nothing better to do, Lillian agreed. But it was really quite an imposition.

After the gentlemen had left, Lillian explained what task had been foisted on them. Martha could not have found a job more to her liking—to have an excuse to go into every shop and complain of its wares. To be consigning turnips to the poorhouse and potatoes to the orphans and deciding who should get six ells of cotton—only see how poorly it was bleached, good for nothing but dustrags—and all without having to spend a penny, was her idea of heaven.

“Mr. Fellows is certainly a remarkably generous man,”
she repeated several times as she went from shop to shop, identifying herself as “here on behalf of Mr. Fellows of St. Christopher’s Abbey, the Whig candidate.”
She could not say as much for his wisdom in paying so much money for such shoddy goods, and added an aside to Sara, “You’ll have to keep a sharp eye on the purse strings when you are married. He has no management, no economy, but he is remarkably generous.”

At the end of the long afternoon, Sara turned to Lillian with a soft smile. “Look what Mr. Alistair gave me,”
she said, and offered her cousin a pamphlet. It was a Tory bulletin, puffing their candidate and mentioning the party’s platform. “He gave me a whole pile of them for my friends, and I have been leaving one in each shop we were in.”

“Oh Sara, he’s a Tory!”

“Papa, was a Tory. That’s why he asked me if I would like to do it.”

“But we are working for Mr. Fellows!”

“That’s nice.
I
am working for Mr. Alistair,”
Sara said, and gazed meaningfully at the pamphlet with all the terribly hard words in it that she couldn’t make heads or tails of.

She handed Lillian her next-to-last one and her cousin accepted it with some eagerness to see what she could learn of Mr. Alistair. She chucked it quickly into her purse to be read at home, for if Aunt Martha ever discovered what Sara had been up to, she’d skin her alive.

Whether through courtesy or for a lack of friendly homes in which to parade his candidate, Mr. Hudson stopped with Fellows at New Moon again the next morning on his way into the village. He thanked the ladies for distributing the charity goods and again for addressing the envelopes. He appeared a little depressed, but Fellows was in high gig, bragging to Sara about the fine showing he had made the night before at the Veterans’
Hall when he met the grain-growers.

“We had a marvelous turnout,”
Fellows said. “Every grower for ten miles around was there to hear me speak. But I didn’t toady up to them as Alistair did. I stood my ground like a good Whig and laid into them for their greed, wanting to keep all the money for themselves. Money is the root of all evil and I begin to think grain is the next worst root.”

“Do you not grow grain yourself?”
Martha asked.

“Certainly I do, but I don’t insist on ten shillings a bushel for it. Mind you, it is the going rate this year as a result of the Corn Laws. It is the Corn Laws that have given us such a good price, and it wouldn’t do to undersell my neighbors, but I hope I am not greedy. I have seen the light and am no longer a Tory. And when I am elected I mean to repeal the Corn Laws. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

“What do you mean?”
Martha asked.

“Why—why—repealing the Corn Laws would prevent those repressive Tories from selling at ten shillings a bushel!”

“I trust that was not the tenor of his speech to the grain-growers!” Lillian said to Mr. Hudson in a low voice. He had the air of a man who wants to put his head in his hands and weep.

“You were right to warn me yesterday,”
he said.

“Did he make a very bad showing?”

“He made wretched work of it. Just what you are hearing now, and worse. It had to be to the farmers he delivered what he was dipping into at Allingham’s yesterday. We’ll have to keep party literature from him.”

“But you mean to run a good clean campaign, Mr.
Hudson. He could hardly claim to be in favor of the
Corn Laws.”

“He could have explained why we are against them. The poor must be fed, and if their wages don’t enable them to buy food with the high cost of it due to this law, then the money must come from the parish dole, and where does that money come from but the wealthy of the parish? They give with one hand and take with the other. Better to sell their grain at a fair market price than to hike it up with duties on imported grain and put food beyond the reach of the working man. Every man is entitled to earn a fair wage. No one wants to be a beggar, and it must go against the pluck for a man who works sixteen hours a day to have to stand in line and beg for his bread.”

“Mr. Fellows said nothing of that?”
she asked, well-impressed with his words and principles, and particularly with his impassioned manner of delivering them.

“He knows nothing of it, and he’s a grain-grower himself. But I don’t mean to disparage him; his intentions are certainly good. He is an honest man. Perhaps he is too honest for this game.”