This Thing Of Darkness (85 page)

‘The New Zealanders are not savages, properly speaking,’ said Wakefield, his tone one of gentle admonishment, ‘but a people capable of civilization. A main object of the New Zealand Company will be to do all that can be done for inducing them to embrace the language, customs, religion and social ties of the superior race. Indeed, it is precisely this great work that I have come here today to address: for with your lordships’ wisdom and assistance, I believe that the New Zealanders can be helped to realize their full potential, as partners in the building of a new and Christian nation. My son informs me that there is but one small stumbling-block: the regulation requiring all land sales to be carried out through the officers of the Crown. The governor’s staff are but few in number, and are confined to Auckland, many hundreds of miles to the north. Inevitably, there have been considerable delays and confusions. Few land sales have taken place, and much fine arable farmland remains idle. What is needed, my lords, is not an administrative bottleneck through which all such land transfers must pass - a measure that could well see the progress of nation-building impeded for many a decade - but a general formula for land use, one that is fair and acceptable to all parties. I propose that the New Zealand Company settlers - those good Christians who will, after all, provide the labour, the expertise and the funding required to build this new country - should be given a ninety per cent interest in all newly cultivated land; and that the New Zealanders themselves, who do not after all use their land, leaving it almost exclusively to Mother Nature’s mercies, should retain a ten per cent stake. If, that is to say, the inferior race of New Zealanders can be preserved at all, in long-term contact with civilized man.’

There was a long pause while the committee digested Wakefield’s remarks. Murmured conversations began to break out among their lordships, one sporing another like mushrooms. Wakefield could sense that his ideas were taking hold. He could almost taste the eagerness that his vision of a glimmering new nation had engendered. His manner, he knew, had been as engagingly plausible as his words. He had their lordships now. He had them right in the palm of his hand.

The chairman fanned his perspiring face with his papers, no doubt dreaming of gentle sea breezes rustling the cornfields of all those pretty, white-painted New Zealand farmsteads.

‘Are there any questions for Mr Wakefield?’

None of the committee spoke. So far so good.

‘If your lordship will permit me, I have two questions I should like to ask Mr Wakefield.’

The voice came from the back of the room. Wakefield swivelled round in his chair. There, amid the flustered pink clerks, was a grimly confident, dapper man in his mid-thirties. Wakefield immediately sensed that here was an adversary.

The usher identified the speaker. ‘My lords, it is Captain FitzRoy, the prospective Conservative candidate for Durham City. If your lordships recall, Captain FitzRoy interrupted his campaigning in that constituency to travel down and give evidence to the committee yesterday morning.’

There was a brief flurry of conferring between the members, before the chairman reached a conclusion: ‘Captain FitzRoy, the committee is prepared to entertain your questions. Pray proceed.’

‘Your lordships oblige me greatly with your kindness. In the first instance, I should like to ask Mr Wakefield: is it not the case that each of the prospective settlers taken by your company to New Zealand was made to pay a large sum of money for the purchase of land there - land that, when you accepted these sums of money, you had yet to acquire yourself, either legally or illegally?’

Wakefield smiled indulgently, like a priest accused by a small boy of hiding the fact that there is no God. ‘Quite clearly, the gallant captain is labouring under a misapprehension. Each of our passengers was required to deposit a bond - no more - with the officials of the company, as a mark of the commitment they were prepared to make towards our enterprise. Our passengers, my lords, are the investors in this great enterprise, and what use is an enterprise without investors?’

There were murmurs of assent among the committee members.

FitzRoy returned to the attack: ‘My second question is a rather simpler one. Is it not the case that both you and your brother Edward Wakefield served three years in prison for kidnapping a fifteen-year-old heiress and forcing her into marriage against her will, in a failed attempt to secure control of her family’s inheritance?’

For perhaps the first time in his glib, confident career, Edward Gibbon Wakefield was stopped completely and utterly in his tracks. He sat there, silent, fuming, having not the slightest idea what to say, and knowing that whatever he decided, it would make not one whit of difference. All his patient hard work had been thrown away in an instant. He was left with just one simple fact at his disposal: the knowledge that someday, somewhere, somehow, he would finish this Captain FitzRoy for good. That much was certain.

‘Thank you, Mr Wakefield. That will be all,’ said the committee chairman.

 

The night before the election, FitzRoy walked the deserted gas-lit lanes alone, up Saddler Street and into the Bailey, following the ramparts that girded Durham’s rocky peninsula. Above him, caught beneath a white moon, soared the medieval cathedral, ‘Half church of God, half castle ‘gainst the Scot’. Before him, the classical Georgian façades of the Bailey lined the city walls like lacy skirts. The houses were not much older than he was - he had been entertained and feted in a good many of them over the preceding weeks - but here in the hissing, deserted half-light of the lamps, their spindly verticals and sagging horizontals seemed as lost in time as the unforgiving bastions above. Without the periwigs and bustles that had attended its birth, the Bailey wore a sad, ineffectual air, like a deserted ballroom after the guests have departed. Below the city walls, gardens and plantations reached down to the banks of the rushing Wear. Out in the black distance, amid the undulating hillsides and the torn-down forests, the nineteenth century was closing in on the old citadel with the pitiless inexorability of a modern-day Burnham Wood. Cast-metal foundries, iron-works, potteries, glass-houses, salt-works, brick- and lime-kilns, firestone and limestone quarries, all were marching slowly but implacably forward across the landscape. The vanguard of this irresistible host, the New Durham Gasworks, had already established a salient on the riverbank near Framwellgate Bridge. It was surely only a matter of time before the waters themselves were breached.

FitzRoy climbed up a side-lane to Palace Green, that lofty plateau where the election was to be held on the morrow, and gazed up at the crumbling battlements of the Norman keep: a tracery of wooden scaffolding already assailed its walls, where workmen prepared the castle for its new role as a university. The broken crenellations grimaced back helplessly, the last toothless frown of England’s feudal power.

 

Election morning saw Palace Green dressed to the nines and giddy with high spirits, her jaunty mood and attire quite unrecognizable from the solemn seclusion of the night before. Blue flags and red flags rippled from their poles, blue banners and red banners swirled, blue bunting and red bunting fluttered, but wherever one looked the Tory red outweighed the Liberal blue, for Sheppard’s squadron of agents had been conscientious in their work. There were ‘Vote for Sheppard’ placards by the score, a brass band with ‘Vote for Sheppard’ inscribed on the big drum, even horse-drawn carts with ‘Vote for Sheppard’ painted on their sides. The hustings, in the form of a two-storey wooden shed with a speaking platform protruding creakily above the heads of the crowd, had been erected before the Shire-Hall, wherein the Courts of Assize and Session had been closed for the day. Eleven hundred men were entitled to vote out of Durham’s population of thirteen thousand, being the city’s resident freemen and ten-shilling householders, and even now a team of harassed constables with staves was trying to ensure that they remained within the roped-off area, while the many hundred hangers-on who had come to jeer and laugh and join in the fun were kept outside. There were hot-pie men and puppet shows, youths selling muffins, men taking illegal bets, panicked horses both inside and outside the voting enclosure, rival musicians braying back and forth at each other in noisy competition, enterprising publicans carrying trays of drinks up from their beer-shops in the lower town, barracking party members, swearing drunks and catcalling small boys. Everyone, it seemed, wore a red or a blue favour. The candidates and their agents, arrayed upon the hustings, wore red or blue cockades upon their hats. Finally, the crier rang a bell and the mayor called for silence.

‘Gentlemen, aldermen, freemen and brother electors of the City of Durham, we are met here today for the purpose of choosing two representatives in the room of William Harland, Liberal, and the Honourable Arthur Trevor, Conservative, to go forward from this city to the House of Commons.’

Granger, the Liberal candidate, smiled in triumph. Last time out, Harland had beaten him into third place by just two votes. This time, as the only Liberal candidate, his election was a certainty, and the blue-draped hordes yelled their delight when he stepped forward. His speech was short, and aimed squarely at the mercantile interest: Lord Melbourne’s government was doing all it could for men of business, he said, but more time was needed for its austerity measures to work, and for an unruly populace to be brought under control. Loud cheers greeted his brief statement.

Cowper, the Radical candidate, was next. He wore no colours or favours, nor had he the slightest chance of victory, for his natural constituency stood disenfranchised beyond the ropes. His calls for universal suffrage and justice for the starving poor were met with forbearance by the electors, for the British have always sympathized with an underdog; but really, the good burghers of Durham were far too worried about being butchered in their beds by an unruly mob to consider granting them the power to go ahead and do it. Cowper retired, to isolated gibes and a hoarse cheer or two from the back. Lieutenant Colonel Pringle Taylor then stepped forward, and proposed William Sheppard as a fit and proper person to represent the electors of Durham on the Conservative interest. Raucous shouts of approval arose from that small section of the crowd gathered about Sheppard’s brass band, where a phalanx of young men had been paid to provide raucous shouts of approval, but the rest of the multitude knew a pink-faced, moneyed youth when it saw one. A thumb in each waistcoat pocket, quivering like a sapling in a high wind, Sheppard stepped up in his new top-boots, and struck the jaunty pose he had practised so assiduously before his looking-glass.

‘My brother electors,’ he began, and then paused, for the voice that had issued from his throat was not his own but a strangulated parody of the same, ‘allow me to state, with the utmost confidence, that nothing could be dearer to my heart than the trade and prosperity of all of you gathered here today, be you men of commerce or men of agriculture.’

‘any, an’ Headlam hens lays twice a day!’ shouted a voice from the back, and there were cackles from that quarter.

‘And why is your prosperity so dear to my heart? For unlike certain of the other candidates, who are not of this neighbourhead, I am a man of Durham. I was born and bred here.’

‘Ef ye wor born an’ bred heor, wey do ‘ee crack so strange, like?’ called another voice from beyond the ropes. It was true, Sheppard realized : in attempting to regain control of his wayward vocal cords, he had imposed a harsh, elocution-class formality upon them, with the result that his voice now resembled a comic impression of the local bishop.

‘As many of you will know, I reside to the east of the borough of Elvet, not a mile and a half hence,’ he continued huffily, making the fatal decision to engage with the crowd.

‘An’ what mayst thou be doin’ heor, a’ the way frae Elvet?’ hooted his tormentor, this time to general laughter.

‘And why, I ask you, is your prosperity so dear to my heart?’ enquired Sheppard, who had lost his place.

‘Aa wish ye’d stayed at hyem in Elvet wi’ ye mammy!’ yelled another voice, to widespread hilarity. Shouts and catcalls were coming thick and fast now. Why the devil were the constables not keeping order? Sheppard wondered despairingly. How was it that the great unsoaped were allowed to disrupt such an important occasion of state as this? He realized that he had not spoken for some seconds, and struggled to think what he might say next.

‘Dost not knaa that blayte bairns git nowt?’ gurgled another delighted voice. At last, the mayor attempted to call for silence, but it was too late. Pandemonium reigned. Red-faced with embarrassment, Sheppard took a step back in confusion. Mighty cheers greeted his apparent decision to concede defeat. Before he even knew it, Major Chipchase had moved forward to propose Captain Robert FitzRoy as a fit and proper person, and so on and so forth. Burning with shame, and sickened by the realization of impending defeat, Sheppard glared daggers of hatred at FitzRoy from the back of the platform.

The atmosphere was still rowdy, so FitzRoy simply took in his sails and waited for the storm to subside: he had addressed the men of the
Beagle
enough times to know a little of public speaking. Finally, he had quiet.

‘There are seven thousand more people living in County Durham this year than last. Next year, there will be a further seven thousand. Seven thousand more mouths to feed. What shall we do, gentlemen? Shall we go on starving them, and forcing them into workhouses? And shall we go on building more workhouses every year, for every seven thousand more children that are born to the poor of this county? Until our county, and our country, is bursting at the seams, and the multitude of the poor and hungry rises up in fury against us? The Radical candidate, Mr Cowper, would give each and every one of them the vote, and let them decide their own future. He would let them follow the Chartist lead, and smash the machinery in our factories and mines and woollen-mills. He would have them loot the houses of gentlemen, ’til all prosperity is levelled to nothing, and every man made a pauper. One has only to look at the French example to see what happens when power is placed in the hands of the masses - terror, chaos, the destruction of wealth and property, the end of culture, the abandonment of religion, and the death of society itself.