Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [530]
“’Tis her attempt to make a plain man fashionable,” he said with a laugh, “but I fear the imposture will soon be discovered.”
All this time, he noticed, Eli Mason perched contentedly on a plain wooden chair near the door, taking no part in the conversation but apparently well pleased with what was going on. And the girl Mary sat composedly beside her sister-in-law, watching him with a quiet smile, but leaving her brother Benjamin to do the talking.
She seemed very quiet. Her dress was grey and plain; her face, a little pock-marked, but not unattractive, sometimes lit up in a smile, but mostly gave nothing away; her hands, folded in her lap, were still. Her eyes, rather beautiful he thought, were grey and for the most part looked downwards; her light brown hair, rather wiry and frizzed, obviously declined to be subdued, but seemed to be discreetly tolerated by the head and body to which it was attached.
“And what does your sister do?” he asked Benjamin, with a polite bow towards the lady in question.
“Oh, she manages everything you see in this house or in my business, Captain Shockley,” the merchant replied with a laugh. “She is the practical one of the family, are you not Mary?”
To which Mary only smiled.
Two days later, the highwayman struck again, north west of Wilton on the turnpike of the Fisherton Trust in which Sir Joshua Forest had a considerable stake.
Young Ralph Shockley was beside himself with excitement.
“Take me with you,” he begged Adam. “We’ll ride out and catch him.” And it was all Adam could do to get out of the house after dinner that evening to go to the Catch Club for a game of whist.
In the next month, Adam saw Eli Mason several times in the coffee house; once, at his special request, he visited the printing shop to see the little fellow eagerly at work amongst the great fonts of type which he reached by standing on a stool.
“You see,” he told Adam proudly, “I am small, Captain, but my family are glad of me: I work.”
Several times also, Adam called upon Benjamin Mason to spend an hour in conversation with him. He found the Wesleyan trader well informed upon many topics and each time they discussed the news from America eagerly. The French fleet had joined the American rebels the previous autumn and still neither the forces on land nor those at sea seemed to be making any headway against the rebels; though an English force had taken some of the French islands in the West Indies, news came that Dominica had fallen to the French.
“They’re welcome to the place,” Shockley told Mason with a rueful smile. “All I ever had out of it was an attack of malaria.”
But much as he enjoyed his talks with Benjamin, he admitted to himself that he also came to see Mary Mason.
She only came into the room occasionally; but when she did, Benjamin often turned to her to ask her opinion on the matter under discussion, and though she always gave her answers in a quiet voice, he noticed that they were well-judged and even revealed a sly wit.
“Can we win the war with America, Miss Mason?” Adam asked her.
“No, Captain Shockley,” she replied. “Even Pitt would have ended this war; as it is, I think the war will end Lord North instead.”
He laughed. The great William Pitt, made Lord Chatham, had died the year before; and poor, dithering Lord North, the present prime minister, was hopelessly unequal to his wartime task.
“That,” he concluded to himself, “is a very sensible woman.”
One day when he was talking to Benjamin and his sister, the merchant was called away, and for half an hour he remained in his chair, chatting easily to her, answering her questions about his life.
She had none of the artificial manners of the women he saw in the fashionable world; she would have probably laughed outright at the notion of being coy, and if anyone had ever told her it was out of fashion to have a mind of her own, she would have politely ignored them.
By chance, he met her walking once on the footpath that led across the fields from Salisbury to the little village of Harnham. They