“Impudent rogue,” Mason muttered; and turning to Jane he remarked: “If you could help me reform him, or at least save those children, Miss Shockley, I should think it the best of all our efforts.”
They had often worked together, over the last few years. There were in Sarum, God knew, enough poor souls to care for.
“And Miss Shockley,” he always told his family, “is most unusual.”
She was indeed. She taught at a school, though she certainly had no financial need to do so. She spent weeks, during the long summer holidays, acting as a nurse in Lord Radnor’s Infirmary and never went there without a copy of Miss Nightingale’s
Notes on Nursing
tucked into a pocket of her dress.
“We should have lost her long ago if it weren’t for her uncle,” Mason would say.
The advent of her Uncle Stephen had been one of the great disappointments of her life. He was brought to Sarum, one bright December day, by the little steam train from Southampton – a thin, gaunt figure in his fifties, with blue eyes, which seemed never quite to focus, peering out of a yellowish face. He was liberally wrapped in a shawl and a blanket and walked stiffly with a stick. He spoke very quietly, always let her know what he required, and never considered, even for a moment, that his niece might ever wish to leave him or, if she did, that it would be possible for her to do so.
It had never before crossed her mind that a lifetime of service might make a man selfish.
“But I fear, my dear, my stay will not be long,” he had told her sadly when he first arrived. And so he did still, from time to time, as he moved stiffly about the town, enjoying the reverence that was his due; really, she admitted wryly to herself, predicting his departure had become almost more of a promise to her than a regret.
“Can you really find time to teach when there is so much to be done here?” he would sometimes ask, a little querulously.
“Oh yes, uncle,” she would reply, and escape, if she politely could, into the close.
Porters had proposed once again, by the choristers’ green.
“If it were a question of also looking after your uncle, then I should be honoured . . .”
“Quite impossible,” she assured him, and begged him not to speak of it again.
He had assumed a new role in her life now, which seemed to heal his wound and which she could tolerate – that of adviser. For it was clear to Porters that young Miss Shockley was still wayward and must be in need of advice.
He had settled in the city. The new railway station and the influx of people had caused a huge building programme on the western Fisherton side of the town and on the northern side where some of the Wyndham family estates lay. Railway cottages in rows, suburban villas, even big, neo-gothic houses on handsome sites were springing up. There was plenty of work for Porters. He had bought a villa.
And so thanks to these circumstances, Jane Shockley found herself still in Sarum, often busy with community service. If she was restless, she gave herself as little time to be so as possible.
She liked Mr Mason and his Methodists. She even admired his efforts to get a regular temperance movement going in Salisbury, which despite much agreement on the subject in principle, had only met with sporadic success.
“I really can’t say I’m prepared to go the whole way and never touch another glass of beer,” she declared. For she thought it one of the small delights of the era that the inhabitants of such genteel places as the close no longer disdained to drink a glass of beer in preference to wine. “I always do, at every meal,” she assured Mr Porters, who was not sure whether to be shocked or not.
But she visited the workhouse with him, when her old friends in the close usually preferred to stick to the pleasant almshouses, and there were few places in Sarum she had not seen and understood.
“It’s the farm labourers on the plain that worry me the most,” Mason explained. “They have the hardest lot.”
But today, as Jethro Wilson and his two wretched children drove the cart away, he clarified:
“I always lament the lot of the poor farmers on the plain, Miss Shockley. But that man,” he glared after Jethro, “has only himself to blame.”
The great Michaelmas Fair at Salisbury that came at the end of the harvest time, was not a proper fair – for little important business was done. But it was carefully kept up all the same, for money was freely spent. There were harvest accounts to settle, clothes to buy, entertainments of every kind to spend money on and the market place was crowded with brightly coloured booths. It lasted three days and on the first two, Monday and Tuesday, it was open until eleven at night for all the peep-shows, rides and pleasures that the fairground folk who journeyed across the plain could provide.
It was on the Tuesday, at nine o’clock, that she saw Jethro.
He was standing stock still by the gothic arches of the big poultry cross. Occasionally he swayed a little from side to side. By the light from nearby windows, she could see that his face was red; he appeared to see nothing around him at all. His beard had several days’ growth. His two children were sitting miserably under the cross, half-dressed and shivering, but the handful of by-standers were paying no attention to them.
She gazed at them. Nobody moved. She went over.
His lips were moving, very slowly. He seemed to be mouthing words, but she could not hear anything as she stood beside him.
Then the little boy spoke:
“He’s singing, miss.”
“Are you cold?”
“Yes, miss.”
Singing. She drew closer. He was staring down the street towards Fisherton bridge, and was completely oblivious to her.
She put her ear close to his lips.
“Ther vly be on the turnip.”
Barely a whisper: the raucous old Wiltshire song, sung at every celebration. She listened again.
“Ther vly be on the turnip.”
It was just the first line: he was repeating it, under his breath, again and again.
“Will he be like this for long?”
The little boy shrugged.
“Dunno, miss.”
“His brain’s stopped,” the girl volunteered.
“So I see.” She looked at them. “You’ll die of cold. You’d better come with me.” Rather to her surprise, they got up obediently. She began to turn towards Brown Street, where Mr Mason lived.
“No you don’t, damn you.” He had suddenly been galvanised into life. He had both children held by the neck. His eyes were blazing at her. “Temperance bitch.”
“He don’t mean it, miss,” the girl said.
“I do,” he roared. He released the children, clenched his fists, and shaking with rage, took a step towards her.
“Run, miss.”
“Certainly not.”
She faced him calmly.
His eyes seemed to stand out; he raised his arms as he stepped forward. Then he crashed to the ground.
“I thought he would,” she murmured.
It was a surprise to her when, two days later, she visited Daniel Mason at the little temperance hotel he had set up for himself near the Greencroft on the city’s east side, and was told that Jethro Wilson had undergone a change of heart.
“It may not be permanent, but it is a start,” Mason remarked.
“Mr Mason, you are a wonder. How did you do it?”
He shook his large head and smiled at her.
“As a matter of fact, Miss Shockley, you did.”
“I? I did nothing, except bring them to you.”
“Not according to Jethro Wilson. His children are here. They spoke of your kindness continually. And he has been told that he attacked you.”
“He didn’t. He lurched towards me.”
Mason gave her a quick, shrewd look.
“He thinks he did, Miss Shockley, and the shock is doing him good.”
She smiled.
“As you wish. Is he a perpetual drunkard?”
“No. From all I know of him, he comes into town occasionally but then drinks heavily for several days – heavily to the point at which you saw him. His wretched children then have to put him in the cart and take him home. They fend for themselves like neglected animals.”
“It is terrible.”
“Yes. But the best news is,” Mason told her excitedly, “that he is prepared to give them up and put them in our care. See him,” he urged. “He is already much changed.”
He was indeed.
The figure who now respectfully rose from his chair in the little room Mason had provided, was shaven and washed. He had been provided with a clean coat; it was brown and went well with the now shining mane of russet hair that was combed straight back over his head. His black eyes, no longer swollen and reddened, took her in with a strange gentle intensity she had not encountered before.
“I am sorry for the other night, miss.”
He was still a little pale she noticed. He must have drunk heavily indeed.
“It is forgotten.”
“Not by me. I never tried to strike a woman before.”
A woman, he had said, not a lady; as though she had been one of his own kind. For some reason she did not mind.
“Are you better now?”
“I was far gone.”
“You were indeed.” She smiled. “How long is it since your wife died?”
“Three years,” he answered quietly. “Giving birth.”
“And you have no one to look after them?”
“An old woman. A farm hand and his boy. That’s all there is – except for help at harvest.”
“Where is your farm?”
“Winterbourne – on the edge of the plain.”
“How big?”
“Fifty acres.”
She sighed.
Of all the combinations, this was the worst. For in recent generations, a great change had taken place at Sarum.
Beginning with the threshing machines which the rioters had attacked back in 1830, the process of industrialisation had come to the Wessex region in many forms. Already, not only threshing machines, but the first steam ploughs had begun to appear in Wiltshire.
“Even paying the ploughman more, and adding the cost of fuel,” Mason told her, “the steam plough cuts a deeper furrow for only a third of the price.”
Rich men like Lord Pembroke could afford to purchase a fine Brown and May steam engine from Devizes. Enterprising men with access to capital, like Lord Pembroke’s consulting agent Mr Rawlence, could afford to build up flocks of prizewinning sheep.
She had questioned Mason about the situation many times in the course of their work together.
“The cloth trade’s weak, and a thousand acre sheep farmer up on the downs can keep over twelve hundred sheep with only three men and a couple of boys. There are many more farm labourers than available work, so the labourer is to be had for cheap. Our men are the lowest paid labourers in the county, you know,” Mason explained. “That’s why you see them leaving for Australia – or here in the workhouse.”
“So it is hard for the labourers; what about tenants like Jethro Wilson?”
“Hard for them too. Landlords are looking for tenants to improve their land and give them a better return for as little outlay as possible. That’s why many of the biggest will only give a farmer a one year lease. Men like Jethro Wilson are getting thrown out.”
“Yet new men are coming in all the time. From the north.”
Mason grimaced.
“The fact is, most tenant farms are still a good proposition if you’re forward-looking. And the trouble is, most of our poorer sort aren’t. That’s why when the Scots discover the low cost of our labour, they come south as fast as they can.”
She had sometimes noticed strange accents in the market.
She had made other inquiries about the subject, which confirmed everything Mason had said and told her much more besides.
So now when she questioned Jethro Wilson, she had a shrewd idea of his predicament: too small to be economic, too poor to improve. And probably, certainly, too backward to take steps to save himself.
And yet, as he stood before her now, gazing at her with his surprisingly quiet, keen eyes, she wondered – might there be hope for him after all?
“Your children. Mr Mason says you’re prepared to put them in his care.”
“’Tis not the workhouse. I’d never allow that.”
“No.”
“He says a Methodist farmer will take them in if I pay for keep and they’ll get schooling until I’ve put the farm to rights.”
“I see.”
“Me with no wife. I think it’s for the best. For the time being.”
“So do I.”
He seemed thoughtful.
“I must reform myself, miss.” He said it not with shame, but with a quiet certainty that she found far more impressive.