Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [528]
“The workshops burned down ten years ago,” Jonathan told him. “They’ve been rebuilt again, but they’re making similar carpets at Southampton now; and it’s said the ones from Kidderminster in Worcestershire are even better.”
“In short,” he concluded, “Sarum is getting by, but it’s not expanding, and it’s a difficult place for a gentleman without much money.”
“I don’t know what I shall do,” Adam confessed.
“Get yourself a rich widow in Bath,” his father advised him frankly. “Plenty of them I dare say. That’s my advice.”
It was perfectly reasonable advice; but Adam was not sure he wanted to take it.
Just before the end of March Adam Shockley had a strange encounter.
He was sitting one morning in the coffee house in Blue Boar Row, reading the newspaper when he was interrupted by a voice.
“There is a chair opposite you, sir. May I take it?”
“Of course.”
He glanced over his paper – and saw nothing.
“I’m obliged, sir,” the voice announced. Adam glanced under his paper and made the acquaintance of Eli Mason.
He was just over four foot high. He might have been forty; or thirty. His head was large, red and round. His nose was pointed: his ears stuck out so absolutely at right angles that one could only think they had been stuck there as an afterthought; his body seemed puny, yet, as he positively bounced up on to the seat, it was clear that he was extremely agile, and he projected an aura of cheerfulness that amounted to bonhomie.
He smiled at Adam.
“How d’ye do, sir.”
“How do you do.”
“You like your newspaper?”
“I think so.”
“Well printed.”
“Well enough.”
“I printed it,” he said with cheerful satisfaction. He held up a pair of small hands with fingers and thumbs that looked almost like stumps, and Adam saw that they were stained black with ink.
“Eli Mason, sir,” he said. “And you, I am informed, are Captain Shockley, back from the wars.”
“I am, sir,” Adam replied, and put his paper down.
It was a sound little paper, not as large as the Salisbury Journal, which had been started earlier that century, but it contained some well-written articles and a good supply of advertising.
“We print a thousand copies,” Eli explained. “Not as many as the Journal – that has a four thousand circulation – but it’s good work for our presses all the same.”
Everything worthwhile in Sarum, it soon turned out, was printed by Eli and his family, and Adam was delighted with his pride in his work. Soon the talkative little fellow was giving him all the gossip of the town, and Adam listened, fascinated.
For though he had been a month in Sarum, it was the first time he had had a conversation with a tradesman.
It was not so surprising. There were families in the close whose fathers might have been aldermen, but they were gentlefolk now. Jonathan Shockley might be poor, but it would certainly never have occurred to him to invite one of the prosperous traders of the town to dine at his table, any more than he would have expected to meet them at the house of one of the canons in the close or a local gentleman in his manor house. The children of gentlefolk and tradespeople might meet at school, but afterwards, unless luck or talent raised the tradesman’s child into a different class, their paths would diverge and scarcely cross again.
But Adam, when he was in America recovering from his wound, had come to know another kind of men: independent farmers and merchants who did business together and who married and lived their lives without the sense that they were somehow less fine than a layer of gentry above them. Though he was their prisoner, he had begun to appreciate them, and often related their views on life to the self-possessed Hillier boy he had encountered back on the St Lawrence river. As he chatted to Eli Mason, he almost thought himself back amongst them.
He was soon talking to Eli on easy terms, discussing the relative merits of his printing presses as against others and asking him about his business as cheerfully as any