Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [529]
“And what will you do now, Captain?” Eli asked.
“I wish I knew,” Adam confessed without embarrassment. “There’s not much in Sarum for a captain on half pay.”
Eli considered.
“Sell your commission?”
“Not enough to live on.”
Eli considered again.
“Man like you should be married,” he said.
“Can’t afford it,” Adam smiled.
“Rich widow?”
“That’s what my father said.”
“You don’t want one?”
“Don’t think so.”
“What work would you do, Captain?”
“Anything, I dare say,” Adam laughed.
“Anything? Fine gentleman like you?”
Adam grinned.
“You mean, a gentleman shouldn’t work, Mr Mason?”
Eli looked down at the table thoughtfully.
“It’s not often,” he said slowly, “that a fine gentleman like you, Captain, stops to talk for half an hour with a tradesman like me.”
Adam glanced at his paper and said nothing.
He would have been surprised indeed to know what was in the little fellow’s mind at that moment. For in Eli’s brain, a single thought had formed: this one at last, this is the man.
After a short pause he said:
“My family live nearby, Captain. They’d be glad to meet an officer home from America. Would you shake my brother’s hand?” And as he saw Adam hesitate he added anxiously: “We’re not gentry, Captain. Oh no. Not gentry. We’re only small people.”
Supposing by this that they must be a family of dwarfs like Eli, and not wishing to offend, Adam Shockley agreed to come.
Ten minutes later, when Eli led Captain Adam Shockley into the modest parlour of a house in Antelope Chequer, he was surprised to see before him not a family of dwarfs, but Benjamin Mason, ironmonger and printer, his wife Eliza, their two children, and Benjamin’s sister Mary, none of them below average height.
Eli announced enthusiastically, “Here’s Captain Shockley. Fine gentleman. Needs a wife,” and all the people in the room burst out laughing.
Adam Shockley did more than shake the hand of Benjamin Mason. He spoke to him for some time. He learned that he was, in a modest way, a substantial tradesman in the town; that he had built up his father’s business of making scissors into an altogether grander affair; that he owned a hardware store and a printing works; that he and his wife looked after his brother Eli, who had for some reason never grown to full height, and his young sister Mary – a quiet, good-humoured young woman of, Adam guessed, between twenty-five and thirty. Benjamin Mason was somewhat like a full-grown version of Eli, except that his ears did not stick out, and he carried himself with a certain gravity. He wore no wig; his unpowdered hair was neatly drawn back and tied; he wore a plain, dark brown coat and grey woollen stockings. His children kept staring at the splendid captain, who smiled at them, and tugged at their father’s sleeve, but he quietly rested his hand on them and told them not to interrupt. Surprised as he was by Adam’s sudden arrival in his house, he was delighted to get the opportunity to question him about America, and particularly about the state of religion there.
“We are Methodists, Captain,” he explained to Adam. “By that I mean that, with John Wesley, we desire no break with the established Church of England, but only to reform it and increase its dedication to preaching and acting upon God’s word. I trust that does not offend you?”
“Not at all,” Shockley assured him.
Indeed, though his father, as a point of Tory principle, still denounced the Wesleyans, it was hard to see how any sensible Church of England man could complain of many of their ideas. They disapproved of the practice of clergy holding benefices they never visited but from which they drew income and they urged the clergy to preach.
“The Reformation was intended to cure just such abuses in the Roman Church,” Benjamin Mason observed calmly; “yet now we find them in our own.”
But the talk was not all of religion, and it soon became clear that Benjamin’s children were as anxious to inspect the captain’s wig as their father was to learn about America’s religion. Adam was glad to oblige them by taking it off, and explaining to the family