Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [77]
‘You will know what you have awaked, sir, if you persist in your insolent freedoms with these ladies.’ Erasmus, who had not understood the reference to Daphnis, felt his rage begin to rise again. ‘I will make you know it,’ he said.
For the first time Adams looked directly into the younger man’s face, something that disdain had hitherto prevented. His own face had whitened, but his voice was firm enough. ‘It is not the ladies you are concerned for,’ he said after a moment. ‘It is the pretty one, Wolpert’s sister. Did she ask you to speak on her behalf? No, I thought not. Are you affianced? No again. Well, sir, in that case it is for the lady herself to make her wishes plain. She has not protested to me.’ Adams made the mistake now of permitting himself a certain kind of smile. ‘Quite the contrary,’ he said.
Erasmus took a pace forward and his hand went to the hilt of his sword. ‘You beastly popinjay and sponger,’ he said. ‘If you touch her again, I will kill you.’ His throat was dry and his voice sounded remote and strange to him.
Adams stepped hastily back, the rouge on his cheeks standing out in irregular patches against the pale skin. ‘Do you offer to murder me?’ he said. ‘For the sake of touches in a rehearsal, where such things mean nothing at all, things I have hardly noticed and can scarcely remember and she no doubt even less? You are mad. Stand away from me. I am not wearing a sword.’
‘You will have one in the house. I will wait for you here.’
‘Fight without witnesses and risk a capital charge? You are out of your senses. Stand out of my way, I wish to pass.’
‘I will wait to hear from you,’ Erasmus said, and stood aside at last to let the other pass.
He watched the thin-legged, agitated figure of the director recede, disappear finally. The tumult of his heart quietened slowly, but this brought him no peace. Adams had not behaved as expected. It was not so much that he had shown no smallest trace of guilt or defensiveness; in such a reprobate this was hardly surprising. But he had been taken aback, he had been astonished as well as indignant. Of course, the fellow was an actor …
At the moment that the son was threatening a fellow-being’s life on grounds that to anyone else might have seemed flimsy, a report on the father’s financial affairs, provided by the indefatigible Partridge, was being digested by old Wolpert in his place of business on the waterfront.
‘Time and money, sir,’ the scrawny, sharp-eyed lawyer had said, in the course of collecting the balance of his fee. ‘It generally comes down to that. The right relations between ’em is as important for the man of business as winds and tides for the mariner. And of the two it is the time that matters most. A man is rich so long as his creditors are patient.’
It was surprising what Partridge, by means of innumerable small and grubby enquiries, had been able to find out. Much of it came as no surprise. Kemp, in company with others that Wolpert knew of in the cotton trade, had suffered heavy losses in the disruption occasioned by the recent wars with France. On the ceasing of hostilities he had, again like others, imported quantities of raw cotton on credit in anticipation of a boom in prices which had yet to materialize. Some of this he had sold at a loss to meet short-term bills; much of it clotted his warehouses still. The Manchester dealers with whom he had been accustomed to do a large part of his business relied on resale to the manufacturers within a few days of purchase; their profit margins were too low for them to buy at prices over the market. In this pass, Kemp had turned to printed cottons, entering into partnership with the textile firm of Barfield Brothers. For a while, according to Partridge’s informants in Lancaster, they had done well; but printed cottons of Indian manufacture, transported in bulk in the huge East Indiamen, were daily increasing their share of the African and South American trade.
‘Unfair foreign competition, sir, as any true patriot would agree,’ Partridge said. ‘These confounded Indian cottons are