Redemption - Leon Uris [34]
He set the price for planting seeds and carried the peasant’s debt, which was paid off at the next harvest with obscene interest. He then set the price of the flax that was harvested. Conversion of flax to linen was a slimy job, done mostly with labor provided by the younger children of the peasants, often to keep even with the family debts.
Evictions on the land assured a constant flow of desperate and jobless people into Londonderry and into their squalid neighborhood of Bogside. Thus, he always had a surplus of cheap labor. Unemployment of men ran around fifty percent, and those who worked had menial jobs.
The big profit-maker was his shirt factory, the largest in the British Isles, which used the linen produced by his peasants.
Roger Hubble’s control of everything from seed to finished product, power over the political machinery, and labor force represented all that was deemed glorious in colonization and imperialism.
The decent positions in the municipality, in the shipyard, in the schools as well as the mercantile were locked in for those who swore loyalty to the Crown. This was Ulsterism.
Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Party dented the system and opened their own salvo for Home Rule. Londonderry both historically and geographically belonged in County Donegal, which would have been outside Ulster’s boundaries. By shamefully gerrymandering the borders, Roger Hubble was able to shift Londonderry into Ulster.
In the beginning of the new political era, Sir Frederick Weed and the Belfast industrialists wanted to expend Londonderry as a liability. Roger Hubble, and later Randolph Churchill, threatened civil war if the sacred Protestant city was lost to the Catholics. The marriage of Roger and Caroline set the alliance in stone.
Caroline was an exciting lady with a recent past that included a marriage to a penniless gigolo, an Italian count. Her main purpose was to enrage her father, which she did. Many thousands of pounds sterling were spread around the Vatican, which ultimately came up with an annulment.
The heady lady smashed up a hotel suite filled with priceless antiques, bolted Rome, and took on Paris. Here she shared a garret with a struggling but extremely talented artist painting in the new Impressionistic style. When his garlic and gout and the climb to his attic no longer endeared him, she returned to Ulster, where she became the model of decorum, a queen of culture and charity, and awaited her fate, which appeared in the form of Roger Hubble.
They realized the power of their union. Titillated by whispers of Caroline’s past, Roger’s sexuality was unearthed and aroused to a point that he became an excellent lover. Roger adored her.
Caroline bore him two sons, one for the earldom and one for Weed Ship & Iron. Lord Jeremy, the elder and heir, seemed to be a throwback to Roger’s own father, the dawdling Arthur Hubble, a boy too frivolous to do the stern stuff necessary to run the hard course.
Fortunately, Christopher, the younger son, showed all the ice of his father. So be it. Jeremy would be the ceremonial earl while Christopher would be schooled to run the machinery.
Caroline! Caroline the magnificent! She turned Londonderry from a cultural blob to a cultural way station. Every touring Shakespearean company, every second-rate troupe of operatic Italians, every lecturer, poet, musician, orchestra who touched Ireland made the now mandatory trip to Londonderry. Most were brought there through her cultural foundation. Caroline was the grande dame of Western Ulster.
Life was complete for Roger Hubble, except for one grating habit of Caroline’s. She never stopped remodeling. Hubble Manor was a historic monstrosity with its dozens of fish and gun and knife rooms and ice houses and fowl rooms and stables and a Buckingham Palace-size kitchen, subkitchens, a poultry room, twenty linen closets, and workshops for the drapers, rug