The Rich Are with You Always (33 page)

  By the third week in December, when Chambers had honoured the fourth weekly wages draft not covered by funds, they both admitted, with some mutual bravado, that they had now grown quite used to skating without ice. Nora said she could sometimes forget their predicament for an hour on end.

  They decided to go north to Thorpe Old Manor and spend Christmas as if they had as few cares as they now had pence.

Christmas that year was dry and cold. There was a slight hollow in the field beyond the old fortifications to the east of Thorpe Manor where water sometimes collected. This year it froze right through and they all spent the afternoon of Christmas Eve sliding on it. The strip of ice was not broad enough to skate on but you could run over the crackling, frosty grass and leap onto it and slide the best part of thirty yards. John, with his weight, could get up momentum—and courage—enough to go hurtling and somersaulting off the end; but everyone else came to a halt before the end, despite desperate jerks, which added no more than inches to the length of their slide. Sarah would not take a flying run, but with John and Nora running and holding her at each side, just catching the fringes of the grass, she had her stately share too.

  Mrs. Jordan came down in midafternoon with a basket full of hot spiced rolls and honey, all wrapped in white linen; behind her came Mrs. Jarrett with cups and two cans of steaming chocolate. And of course John and the two oldest children wouldn't let them go without taking their turn at the slide. Todd and Woolley, two of the girls, came out to watch, and John beckoned them down. "And the others!" he called.

  Nora and Mrs. Jarrett protested but he would have none of it: Everyone must come. And one by one, as they arrived, he organized competitions and prizes: prizes for girls with names beginning with C, prizes for all cooks, for all housekeepers, and for all stablehands under sixteen years, and so on—prizes that each was bound to win, being unique to the class. The lad's prize was a silver shilling, the maids got a shilling and a kiss, and Mrs. Jarrett—well, for one terrified minute she thought she was due a kiss too, but instead she had a stately one-round waltz on the meadow with the master, while everyone else laughed or cheered or sang their own idea of a waltz tune. Cox, the cold automaton, got a waltz and, as it ended, stole a kiss, and then ran off giggling up the hill, back to the nursery.

  At last, while the shadow of the ramparts reached quickly over the grass, they gathered up the debris of their afternoon and skipped or ran or walked or grumbled up the slopes to home.

  "What a pleasant way to give out Christmas boxes," Sarah said.

  Sarah had previously suggested that they should try the effect of Queen Caroline's "Christmas trees"—young fir trees set in tubs and put upon the table or in a window seat and then decked with penny candles. They spent the evening trying them in different places and ended with one in the hall and one in the window seat in the winter parlour. John twisted soft iron wire around some thick dowelling, whittled to a taper, to make candleholders.

  The trees looked very pretty when they finished. Then they went upstairs and filled the children's stockings with apples and nuts and sugar pigs with string tails made by Mrs. Jordan. For Winifred there were some hair-ribbons too, and a book of tales by Maria Edgeworth; for Young John, a half-dozen new brass buttons and a coloured alphabet book. For Caspar there were crayons wrapped in a roll of drawing paper.

  At six next morning they heard the treasure being discovered. At a quarter past six Young John came in, bearing a candle and his alphabet book. He poked his father's eyelids open. "Happy Christmas," John said to him in a voice like a death rattle. Nora, without apparently waking or stirring, said, "Who lit your candle?"

  "Winny."

  "That's naughty. Happy Christmas. And don't call her Winny."

  "I can read," Young John said. He put down the candle and began to turn the pages of the book. "I can read that. And that, and that…"

  At the fifteenth, John, his eyes still shut, said, "What's that one then."

  "That's the letter orange. And that's the letter pudding. And that's the letter queen. And that's the letter, um…
colours
."

  John opened an eye quickly. "Rainbow."

  "Yes, rainbow colours."

  Winifred, not to be excluded, began a processional reading from the door: "But his father caught hold of him by the arm. 'I will whip you now,' said he. So Robert was whipped, till he cried so loud with the pain that the whole neighbourhood could hear him." She read with bright-eyed relish. "'There,' said his father, 'now go without supper. See how liars are served.'" She closed the book and clutched it to her. "Aren't they glorious tales, Mummy?"

  The bed shook with John's silent laughter.

  "Happy Christmas, popsie," Nora said wearily.

  "And that's the second letter horse. A different horse. A stripey horse. And that's what I can read."

When the last mince pie had gone and the last slice of plum pudding had been washed down with the last drop of Madeira, the children were sent up to recapture the sleep of which Father Christmas's bounty had robbed them.

  The postman came just as the grownups were moving into the parlour. He rode back up the drive one shilling heavier and two letters lighter.

  "For you"—John handed it to Nora—"from Arabella Thornton."

  "I thought so," Nora said. "She never forgets Christmas." And she explained to Sarah how they and the Thorntons had been married in the same month in

1839 and had all four spent that Christmas together.

  "The GS&W, Dublin, wants us to begin next week," John said, folding his letter. "Flynn can start without me. I'll go over in the spring."

  Nora read rapidly through Arabella's, throwing out her own summaries: "They have a new cook…very good…The road dug up again, drains very bad…Bristol has plans for roads and great civic works which we should interest ourselves in…Scandal at Bedminster parish—but we read all that in the papers… Terrible water shortage all year, a real scandal, and new waterworks urgently needed…Walter offered a tempting salary in the South Wales Union Railway but doesn't think it can ever become profitable…Children all well—oh! and she's to have another next June…hopes for another girl as three boys are quite enough for the moment. They must be—five and a half, and four, and just turned three."

  "Quite enough for the moment!" Sarah echoed.

  "Hello!" John, rooting around near the tree on the window seat, picked up a small package. "For me!"

  "I thought that was a good place for them. Let Sarah have hers first."

  "Oh!" Sarah said, as if she had never suspected it.

  Their present to her was a tortoiseshell brush and comb and mirror, each with her initials engraved on a silver cartouche let into the shell. She was enchanted with the set and thanked them half a dozen times. Then she shyly produced, from behind the sofa, something like a tray wrapped in paper. When they opened it, they found an embroidered firescreen in a mahogany frame with the feet left loose and unglued. "If they'd been on, it would have spoiled the mystery," Sarah explained.

  Nora looked closely at the pattern. "You really do the most beautiful needlework, Sarah. But I say—isn't this the embroidery Rodie was doing?"

  Sarah was delighted she had recognized it. "The same picture. I saw her doing it and took a copy."

  "But it's perfect!"

  "I don't suppose it is. But I thought you could look at it here, by your fire, and think of Rodie at La Gracieuse, with hers. You see?"

  That pleased them even more.

  Nora's present from John was a lovely, dainty little diamond brooch. Its beauty awed her so that her thanks were quiet and almost reverent. "I'll wear it now," she said. "No one can object, surely."

  "I should think not," Sarah agreed. "It's the very opposite of showy. It's exquisite. Now yours, John."

  "Do you know what it is?" he asked, taking out a pocket knife.

  "Don't cut it!" Nora called. "Look, it pulls undone. Your extravagance!"

  He laughed. "Here's me, who condemns miles of rope, each year, most of it probably sound, and now I'm saving string!"

  "Open it!" Sarah almost screamed.

  It was a hunting watch—one of the new ones with a metal cover over the glass.

  "What a splendid idea," he said. "Why didn't anyone think of that before?"

  "Push that little thing that sticks out," Nora said.

  The watch chimed three for the hour and then three for three-quarters. "That means it's between quarter to and four o'clock," she explained. "It'll do it again, as often as you want."

  He pressed and it chimed again. He was about to put it in his pocket when Nora said, "Open the back."

  There he found the greatest novelty of all: a twenty-eight-day dial that showed the phases of the moon—at least, it had been the moon when Nora bought the watch but she had got a miniaturist to overpaint it with an enamel portrait of herself.

  "I shall take it out and kiss it hourly," John said. "And every time I condemn some rope. And if folk ask me why, I shall just say, 'Oh, that's my wife—she's a lunar-tick!'"

  He and Sarah fell about laughing, especially when Nora said she thought it
clever
rather than
funny.

  Later, when they were in their bedroom, preparing for Evensong, John pulled out a long legal envelope from his travelling writing case and said: "Here is my real present to you. I didn't think it appropriate in front of Sarah."

  She took it cautiously. "It won't bite," he said.

  The enfacement read
Power of Attorney: Stevenson to Nora Stevenson, 3
December 1845.

  "Won't bite!" she said. "It could send me to jail. I see now why you were so evasive when I said I hadn't power of attorney." She looked at the document again. How happy it would have made her at any other time. "Here's a pig's pizzle," she said, using a favourite phrase of his. "What ever possessed you?"

  "It was prepared in much happier times," he explained. "You know how lawyers can drag things out into the years. I wanted to give you power to deal with…"

  He could not go on. She realized with shock that he was trying to fight back tears.

  "John!" she said gently. "It doesn't matter now."

  "…to deal with…your property." He choked on the words, fell to his knees in front of her, and threw his arms about her waist. "Oh Nora, love! What have I done to you?"

  She held his head tight but it was an automatic response; she was too astonished to do anything else. Suddenly she realized she had
loved
these last few months. Not all of it, of course. Seeing her properties go, and then signing away all their money—that had been terrible. But everything else had been alive and splendid in a way it had not been for years. She and John had been together again, as they had in their very first year. The excitement had all come back. Even this new threat of jail was part of it.

  And precisely what distressed her about John's outburst was that it once more put that distance between them; it made them opposites—sinner and sinned against, penitent and confessor, worm and angel.

  She pulled his shirt away at the back of his neck and dropped the document down inside. "Never mind what you've done, love. You're not getting me in jail with you—who'd arrange the escape? No—you take this to France tomorrow. Lose it for a while."

  She held him until his dignity returned and then she broke free.

  To get the paper out he had to stand again. "You're better when you're tall," she told him.

  He grinned. "You won't let me do an easy penance then," he said.

  "Such rubbish!"

  He put the document in his writing case, buried among other assorted papers. "Funny thing," he told her. "It was Chambers's idea, really—giving you power of attorney."

  "But he's always
hated
me having properties, independently."

  "I said: funny thing."

Nora endured one day at Thorpe after John had left; then she decided that to be without him but surrounded by the children, the house, the land—by all they stood to lose and all that would make the loss hurt most—would he intolerable. She would go hunting.

  Better still, she would go to Maran Hill, where, squired by Sir George Beador, she would hunt with the Puckeridge under their master, Lord Wyatt. Now they had less than nothing to lose, she felt an ancient pugnacity stirring within her. She had not felt it since her days of poverty, when she had faced the world alone; it was something different from the polished ruthlessness that money had brought; it was brighter-eyed, more truculent.