The Rich Are with You Always (72 page)

  Hudson could not answer. His eyes were moist though not actually brimming with tears. He nodded gratefully and looked rapidly from her to the sunset and back.

  "You'll manage, I take it," she said, hoping her tone implied help without actually offering it.

  He drew breath and rallied. "I've sold Albert Gate to the French ambassador, and my estates are going up on the market. But I'm far from done. In fact"—he sniffed—"I'm here on a bit of business now. May I?"

  "By all means." Intrigued, she turned away from him and began the descent, forgetting to limp until they were halfway down.

  "Do you remember the rail we used for the Newcastle & Berwick?"

  "Aye. We supplied most of it."

  "I heard a whisper that you'd made too much of it."

  It was true. They had made, in fact, over ten thousand rails too many—enough to lay fifteen miles of track. It stood on the books at nearly five thousand pounds. Rather than scrap it they had put it into stock to sell when the line needed maintenance. This was not among the stock they had reduced—the Newcastle & Berwick was the only buyer for that shape of rail.

  "Ooh, you
have
gotten out of touch, Mr. Hudson. It's true we put a certain amount by for stock."

  "Ah." He seemed to lose interest. "Pity. It's no good then. I need a fair bit. I have a market for thirty miles of it. Twenty-one thousand one hundred and twenty rails. Good price too, for quick delivery. In Norway, so your mill was ideally placed."

  "How quick?" she asked and before he could dictate she added: "We could supply enough for five miles at once. Then three and a half thousand a week— enough for five miles a week. You could have the lot by mid-February. If the price was right."

  This rate of production was, in fact, twice their actual capacity, but she wasn't going to tell him they had such a heavy stock. Let him make what he liked of the rust on it when it was delivered. She wondered where his buyer really was.

  They haggled on until she got her price—and the promise of a ninety-day bill to be waiting at the York City & County Bank in the morning.

  They did not go back indoors but went straight around to the stable yard.

  "So," he said as he remounted. "You think they'll remember me?"

  "No doubt of it, Mr. Hudson. History might even know you as George Hudson, the great ironmaster who also had something to do with railways—in his youth."

  He laughed uproariously at that. "Thou'll do!" he said as he spurred his horse away. "Eay, thou'll do!"

  
A broken man indeed!
she thought, scorning the rumour mongers, as she watched him trotting back up the lane to the highway. She filled with pride to be of the same Yorkshire race.

John spent that Christmas in Italy before going on to Bohemia, Moravia, Hungaria, and then back to southern France, and so home via Spain. Nora expected him to be exhausted, but he was leaner and more vigorous than ever. It took years off her just to be beside him again. From the moment he stepped off the train, she could feel how strongly he wanted her. As soon as they were in their carriage he began to kiss her and fondle her with an overwhelming fervour.

  "Want to risk it?" she asked. They were only just driving onto London Bridge.

  He shivered and pulled a little apart. "You'll never meet a man more charged. But we'd better wait awhile, eh?" He folded his arms and kept her gently at bay.

  "Well I can't," she said. She had her skirts up and was straddling him before he could move. His resistance was a mere token. It was all over before they were fully across the Thames.

  "More!" she whispered.

  He lifted her bodily and put her in the seat opposite. "Don't you move until…"

  "Until we reach where?" she taunted. "Come on. Name it!"

  "I'll decide."

  They giggled like schoolchildren as they dawdled on through the City. He opened the window to let the chill March air revive him. "Your true home," he said, looking out.

  "It has been for the last half year."

  "How are we?"

  "You mean the firm? Or me and the baby?" She grinned.

  "Well, I've just had proof of you and the baby."

  "The firm's out of the wood, but I still can't say how far."

  "Still not!" He was disappointed.

  "We're too big to get a clear picture day by day. I sometimes think there's a sort of square law for businesses. Twice as big is four times harder to manage. Three times as big, nine times harder."

  He shut the window to a crack and settled contentedly into the upholstery. "I won't say we could exist in the conditions of last year all the time. That strain. But while it lasted, I don't think it was…I believe it did us a lot of good."

  She beseeched the heavens. "Speak for yourself."

  "I do. It put everyone on their mettle. Taught them what they're capable of when they're really stretched. I tell you, we've come out of this with some first-class deputies. Men who know they've won something. They know how to win now. I could take a year off now, and no harm done."

  "You!" She was astounded. "Four days off and you start to twitch."

  As if to give point to her words, he made a stop at Finsbury Park to see the progress on the Great Northern, and again at Wood Green, where they also took tea. Then he made the coachman hurry on so that he would see the Welwyn viaduct before dark. They made love again on that last part of the journey; slowly, luxuriously, exhaustingly. The sun went down before they turned into the Maran valley, where the great viaduct was now nearly complete.

  By moonlight it was even more impressive than by day. Its abutments in the hills each side were lost in a mysterious dusk, stretching its forty vast arches to an infinite chain, arriving out of the dark and vanishing back into it. Over the road in the centre of the valley the arches soared to lift the track more than a hundred feet above ground. The brick piers, so delicately light from a distance, were black and massive close to. Just the farther edge of each tight curve was silvered by the moon. It was awesome to drive in the rumbling coach beneath so vast a mass. John kept his head out of the window, looking back, until a network of intervening branches, also silver in the moonlight, obscured the viaduct completely.

  He sat back and sighed out his satisfaction.

  "A piddling little line!" Nora told him.

  He pinched her in the dark. "You waited a year to say that," he said.

  She giggled.

A week later, "twitching" as Nora said, he went to North Wales, where his other large bridge, the Britannia, was being prepared to have the third of its great iron tubes lifted into place. Then to the Highland Railway for a week. Then to France…and on it went, as busy as ever.

  He paid flying visits to Maran Hill between these journeys and always his question was, "How is the firm now?" And still Nora did not want to tell him exactly how well off they were. Partly she was afraid he would pledge all their profit into even vaster railway schemes—work for all those first-class deputies, but work that would put the firm back into the perils it had faced last year. And partly she wanted to have some really breathtaking profit to distract him—for she was also going to have to confess what she had done with the trust and with her properties. Indeed, she was surprised he had said nothing on the subject yet. He had not even made the most casual inquiry.

  By mid-April, though, there was no point in still refusing to be specific. Many of the lines for which they had been paid in stock had now been completed. In almost all of them, the stock rose to its face value and soon began trading at a premium. Stevenson's, who had got the paper at big discounts, now began to make profits out of all proportion to the work and investment. The change in the market rubbed off on the unfinished lines too, and they began to trade at or even above face value.

  When John next asked his eternal question, she decided to answer him specifically.

  "How do you want it?" she asked with a broad grin. "We now have a fortune of sixteen million silver roubles." His brow furrowed. "Or would you prefer eighteen million American dollars?" He began to smile. "Or twenty-five million Austrian gulden?" He laughed. "Or…let me see…forty-five million Swedish crowns?"

  "No!" His laugh was accelerating.

  "I've not done yet. You may have fifty-one million German marks."

  He advanced upon her, grasped her arms, and shook her lightly, laughing even harder. "Stop!"

  "Very well. Sixty-three million French francs?"

  "Stop! Just tell me what it is in real money."

  "Oh, that!" She sniffed. "A bit of a letdown I'm afraid. Only two"—she made a glum face—"and a half million pounds."

  He lifted her off the ground and turned her in a gentle half circle. "Eeee! To me that sounds a great deal more than all that foreign muck."

  In his euphoria, he arranged for them to go to Paris for a month. Nora stuck it out for three days. She had her hair done in a new swept-back style. They went to the Italian opera and heard Madame Persiani in
Lucia
di Lammermoor. But the city was so torn and patched, so sad and rotting, s
o vicious and mistrustful, that she and John agreed they would enjoy far more a visit to Normandy.

  So they went to Coutances and sat on the beach at Granville and explored Mont St. Michel and went on excursions to the Calvados hills and visited Cherbourg and Caen and saw the Bayeux Tapestry—in short, they did nothing at all. The world came to see them. Deputies came to ask John's advice and left after telling him what they proposed to do. The London office ran a regular courier service of delighted clerks who came bearing files, summaries of account, and memoranda. Mademoiselle Nanette was given the month off to stay with her mother, but nevertheless came almost every day to help Nora with whatever she was doing. "It's my life now," she said simply.

  Toward the end of the month, when the euphoria was dying, John asked her if she wasn't going to make any arrangements about Deauville this year.

  "When you've gone back," she told him.

  "You—er, still have the land there, then?"

  "Me and Ferrand."

  "Of course. Ferrand." He cleared his throat. "I've been meaning to ask, love. About your properties. I've felt right bad about it, ever since…you remember."

  She put her face close to his. "Right bad!" she echoed sarcastically. "You flaming liar! You only did it to encourage me."

  He brightened. "You mean you didn't sell them off?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Well…" He could not meet her eye. "I thought about it since. How unfair it was. You turning so little into so much and then the firm coming along and taking it all from you. I think you ought to take that money out again and—I don't know—buy back what you can. Or buy something else."

  It suddenly struck her that he was talking not about her properties but about them, their marriage, their love.

  The last time he had made this offer, it had devalued her rescue into a mere loan. She had known it, even at the time, and yet she had accepted the offer; she had connived at the act which had done more than anything to drive the wedge between them. Chambers's cunning, Sarah's charms, the Irish mess—these were trivial compared with what she had done in taking the money back.

  These thoughts flashed through her mind as she realized she once again faced an identical choice—except that this time the price of a refusal was a quarter of a million pounds. She knew she was going to refuse the offer, but something within her could not utter an outright no. Instead, she tried to tell him how she would have felt if her properties had gone on the open market.

  He was puzzled now. "I can't make out whether you sold them or not. Give us a straight answer."

  She told him the bare facts of what had happened that week before Christmas, omitting her fight with Chambers and her suspicions about the letter from Collins & Wilcox. Instead, she threw all the weight of her narrative upon the

wisdom of the trust's investment in the property.

  "It's taught me something about myself, all this," she added. "The ownership of money is much less important to me than the control of it."

  She thought he took the explanation very well.