The Rich Are with You Always (19 page)

  John looked pityingly at her. "Go on, it's not two hundredweight and the station's less than a mile. I've seen that man carry four hundredweight up forty foot of ladderwork without pause. He could dance all the way."

  She watched the man's muscles work and tighten as he accepted the load; and, like others around, she gave a semi-whistling gasp of admiration when he strode off as if it were no more than a sack of potatoes he carried. They followed at sufficient distance to attenuate the smell of him.

  Halfway over the square she looked back and saw the conductor helping two gentlemen and a lady up into the coupé. She itched to go back and demand their refund.

  Once or twice on their way to the station she heard the words "Lord Jean," as folk recognized him and pointed him out to one another. On the way they bought some cheese from Camembert, some butter, some dense grey bread, and a bottle of cider corked like champagne. Everything was weighed in pounds instead of in the new Buonaparte kilogrammes.

  "Forty centimes," Nora said—the lowest John had been able to reduce the butter woman to. "That's threepence three farthings. Butter's a farthing cheaper than Yorkshire."

  "Eay, thou knows where to handle for meat in the future then," he said.

The Stevenson office at Rouen was a wooden shed between the passenger section and the goods yard. Hogan, knowing John was coming, had stayed in; normally he would have been up the line somewhere. His greeting froze as his eye took in the huge bulk of Jacques Duquesne, silhouetted thirty yards back on the platform. "Niver," he said at once, taking a step back. "God, no. Not if you're thinkin' what I'm thinkin' you're thinkin'. Niver."

  "Was it bad then?" John asked. "Were you hurt?"

  "Hurt is it," said Hogan. "I was kilt on the spot." He craned his head forward to the point of imbalance, daring his feet to follow. "Look at it."

  There was a nasty bruise lurking in his sidewhiskers. "Seven days of soup, that is," Hogan complained. "Soup and blancmange. And mustn't I sup both without a chew in it." The bruise did not seem to interfere with his talking.

  "Did many see it happen?"

  "The ones he hadn't blinded. Sure there was eight men and two horses knocked to a pulp. And a good horse is hard got."

  "He's a good man. Or was. And I fancy could be again." John smiled. "Still, Hogan, it's your decision. Ye know me, soft as Poor Will. I felt right sorry for him down there. And losing his wife like that. And remembering how he can do the work of three. Still, I'll not interfere like." Another smile. "Eay, I forgot. I've a souvenir for thee." He turned and made for the platform, where the trunk now stood.

  Hogan gave a single, wry snort, smiled reproachfully at the heavens, and turned to Nora. "You're lookin' grand, ma'am, so you are," he said. "And ye'll soon make your man there even prouder, I see."

  "So I hope, Mr. Hogan. And yourself?"

  "Ah, we're ahead of ye still, God be praised, with a darlin' wee girl not six weeks old."

  Nora was delighted. "So that's Mary, Dermot, Sean, and what'll you call the girl?"

  Hogan swelled with pride that she should remember, not knowing that Nora kept a book for John in which every such detail was recorded for all his senior people. "Isn't that the memory!" he marvelled. "The girl's baptized Kathleen." He watched John returning, cradling something inside his jacket. "Sure a good family is the crowning of a man," he said.

  The something that John was cradling so carefully proved to be a bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey. "Ten years old," he said as he withdrew it and passed it over. Hogan playfully fell to his knees, which must have jogged his jaw, for he winced tenderly. It cut short his thanks.

  "You'd best get back in practise on that stuff," John said. "There's work in Dublin from this August."

  Hogan leaped to his feet again, over the moon with happiness. "For me?" he asked in anxious disbelief.

  John looked apologetic. "Unless you can persuade someone else," he said reluctantly, "I'm afraid it'll have to be you."

  Hogan roared with laughter and uncorked the whiskey with his teeth. No pain showed. He took a sip as a drowning man might gasp at air.

  "I'll send Monsieur Duquesne back to the market then," John said and turned to go.

  "Ah, for God's sake," Hogan said. "Tell him he may go back to Yvetot and keep out o' my sight for a week. Tell us about Dublin."

  "I'll give you the details when I come back this way tomorrow. It's the Great Southern and Western from Dublin to Cork and a branch to Carlow. There's four years' exile if you can stand it. Until tomorrow, then."

  John turned and helped Nora back to the platform leaving Hogan stupefied with joy. He found his tongue when they were almost there. "If Jack Duquesne has a twin," he shouted, "ye may put him on too!"

  "Was it wise," Nora asked when they were on the train to Havre, "telling him that news and leaving him a whole bottle of his mother's milk?"

  "And saying I'd be back tomorrow," John answered, surprised she had not grasped his purpose. "It's a test of the man. I hope he understood that."

The ferry sailed from the north jetty, on the farthermost side of the harbour from the station, so their fly had to traverse the whole maze of basins on its way between the two.

  "That's where we docked after the crossing from Devon." John pointed to a quay. "There's the only bit of French soil I've actually gone down on my two knees and kissed!"

  He took a keen note of the harbour works in progress.

  "Anything for us, d'you think?" Nora asked.

  He shook his head. "Not a sniff. The locals have it neatly divided; I'd have to shine too many palms to show any profit. Anyway, they're ahead of us in marine work, the French. Always have been. When they say 'canal' they mean an inland way for ships—not little puddles you can just about drown a small dog in."

  Nora waved her hand contemptuously at a gang of men doing some bottom work behind a cofferdam. "What can
they
teach us?" she asked.

  John looked at the working. "Thank you," he said suddenly and made the driver stop. "I'd not have noticed. That's clever." He got out and walked to the edge of the quay.

  The cofferdam was circular, about twenty-four feet in diameter, close to the quay wall. At its foot was an iron structure made up of a central ring from which ran eight radiating girders to an outer ring that fitted the dam with only inches to spare. The central ring formed a hole about six feet across. The radiating segments were floored with hinged iron flaps that could be swung open to reveal the harbour bottom below. One segment was at present open in this way, and men were digging out the bottom and piling the spoil on the closed iron flaps of the neighbouring segment of flooring.

  "See what they do?" John said. "They work right round like that, digging out each segment and piling it on the floor of the segment next door. Then the bucket fits down into that hole in the centre and they just scrape it into the middle and haul away. They're elegant, the French. That's what I call elegant. It takes a man with a quite uncommon hatred of hard labour to think up that."

"What would we do?" Nora asked.

  "We'd have men at the circumference digging and throwing in to the centre, and men at the centre shovelling the spoil up over their shoulders into a six-foot bucket. They've got eight men there, we'd have twelve or fourteen."

  Nora thought briefly. "Difference in wages would never make up the cost and daily expense of that great lump of iron. I'll wager there's some local French Brunel saying 'Hang the cost, I've got this grand idea.'"

  He chuckled and squeezed her arm, guiding her back to the fly. "Probably," he said. "But it gives me an idea. And one that will pay a bit more than that." He craned forward to look into her face as if he expected a negative response.

  "I'm in favour of that," she said. "Never be first. Let others run on the rocks. It makes the safe course easier to chart."

  They climbed back into the fly. "We need them though," he said seriously, "the folk who want to be first."

  "Who would you rather be," she asked, "Admiral Lord Franklin in his tomb of ice or plain Mr. Can't-quite-remember-his-name who brought the first paying cargo through the Northwest Passage that Franklin will die in seeking?"

  "Who says he's going to die?"

  "Suppose."

  The question troubled John. He pulled his moustache. He took off his gloves and scratched his knuckles. "I don't know," he said at last.

  "What I really want to do is find the Northwest Passage
and
bring a paying cargo through, at one and the same time."

The wind was westerly and the tide was flowing against the river, so after a short reach to starboard, they almost ran before the wind all the way across the estuary to Honfleur. The sun was well down in the sky when they nosed into the slack waters between the sandbars of the harbour mouth. A team of ducks flew overhead and settled noisily in the reeds to the west of the port.

  "I saw some spoonbills there in April," John said.

  A chill was forming on the air.

  "I could just fancy a nice fire, a cup of tea, and a plate of muffins," Nora said.

  The carriage waiting for them had a platform at the back, like an ancient britzka. A coachman, a groom, and a stable lad from La Gracieuse leaned against it, waiting. The coachman recognized John first and nudged the others into life. The lad sprang onto a horse and cantered off on the Trouville road to warn the house of John and Nora's arrival. Moments later, with their trunk more or less secure upon the platform, they set off westward into the sunset. They rode through a world of deepening shadows, where tree-shaded blackness gave way to sudden grand vistas of the sea, luminous in the twilight. It was dark by the time they arrived at the gates of La Gracieuse. A faint band of deep purple light settled upon the horizon, and a crescent moon, only two hours off its own time of setting, hung in a haze, lighting the waves that distance moved as slowly as the clouds. Their breaking on the shore, somewhere below the cliff on which La Gracieuse stood, was a mere whisper.

"Oh, it is beautiful," Nora said, as if that were a concession.

La Gracieuse had been recently built, though it sought to appear quite venerable, part red-brick château, part baroque palace—all on a domestic scale. Its public face looked northward to the sea and was built around three sides of a square cobbled yard. The fourth side consisted of two small, identical gatehouse cottages with blind dormer windows let into the roof above the ground-floor windows. The wrought-iron gates were in a modern baroque from the Rodet factories, uncomfortable and mannered. The left-hand post had settled a few inches, so the gate was usually left open until dark, when the mismatch was not noticeable.

  On the wall of the house immediately facing, across the yard from the gate, was a shallow, projecting bay with a two-arched entrance and three sets of twinarched windows rising above, being finished at the top with baroque achievements, almost Dutch in flavour. Thus the first impression was that the house rose four storeys. But away to the left was a further bay, with a mere three storeys of windows; only from the inside was it clear that the "four storeys" of the entrance bay were really lights for the stairwell. To the right of the yard was a circular stucco turret with a steep conical roof. The main roof of the house was steep too, soaring above the building, as high above the gutter as the gutter was above the ground. The two northward wings, completely overshadowed by trees on both sides of the house, were for the servants, of whom the Rodets seemed to have a great number. In her many weeks in the house Nora never felt confident she had seen them all. The young girls, especially, changed very often; in fact, she heard that the diligence conductor used to advise any new girl coming to take a position there to leave her bags down in Trouville and save carrying them the double journey to La Gracieuse and back.