Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [537]
He had guessed such an offer might come. His father, when pressed, had admitted it to him that morning. His own successor, it seemed, had been a failure and he had himself written to Sir Joshua to suggest he consider his son.
“I dare say they tested you pretty well last night,” Jonathan laughed. “You can be sure he’d already made every enquiry about your military record.”
It was a staggering opportunity: an excellent salary and the opportunity to manage estates that spread over three counties.
“You could live at Sarum if you pleased,” Jonathan said. “You’d be set up for life.”
He asked for a short time to consider it and Forest, though a little surprised, readily agreed.
“I have to depart for London on business in a few days, Captain Shockley. Let me know upon my return.”
He promised he would.
But what he could hardly admit to himself, and certainly not to his father, was that he did not want it.
There was no one to discuss the problem with. Forest had offered him the chance he needed. Why, with this new position and the money from his commission, he could even afford to marry. If he turned it down, was there any man in Sarum who would not think him a fool?
So it was perhaps natural that the only person he did discuss it with should be a woman, the very next day, when he happened to meet Mary Mason on the footpath to Harnham Mill.
“The devil of it is,” he confessed to her as she walked silently by his side, “I’m not at home in Sarum any more.”
“Tell me why, Captain Shockley,” she asked.
How could he explain? How could he tell her about the long miserable years in the tropics when he had so longed to be back at home; of the years in Ireland when he had thought that a house back in the close was all that a man could desire; of the year spent in captivity in America, of his long conversations with the men who had captured him; of the Hillier boy and the impression he had made upon him? How could he explain how he had come back, with wonder and joy, to his home and suddenly found that in some strange way, while he had been absent, the civilised world had grown old? The dinner at Forest’s was the culmination of a process that had been in gestation for two months.
“It’s me that’s changed,” he concluded, after trying to put a few of these thoughts into words. “I suppose I’ve seen freer men in a new land, and when I come back I find our old society, civilised though it is, too full of restrictions, too fond of order. It’s as though I couldn’t breathe.” He paused, puzzled by his own thought. “It’s not that I want to reform England, Miss Mason. I’m not a political fellow. But I want,” he searched for words, “a wider horizon, larger freedoms.”
“And how would you like to live?”
“Oh,” yes, he knew the answer to that well enough, “if I were young, if I had my life again – do not say this to others, I pray – but I’d go and live in the new colonies, in America.”
It had taken longer than he himself realised, but the captive Hillier boy had finally converted him.
Mary Mason looked very thoughtful, but made no comment, letting him talk, and pour his heart out. Only at the end of the path as they came into Salisbury did she turn to him and say quietly:
“I cannot advise you, Captain Shockley, except to tell you that you must follow your heart.”
Then she left him.
His heart. He smiled ruefully as he watched her go. “Why then, Miss Mason,” he thought to himself, “I think perhaps I’d take Forest’s cursed offer and marry you.”
For the first time in his life, he could not make up his mind.
In June 1779, French and Spanish ships, over sixty in number, appeared off Plymouth, where, unknown to the enemy, the ammunition did not even fit the defenders’ guns.
Sir Joshua Forest was detained in London.
And Captain Adam Shockley, thinking that the local militia might be called out, let it be known that he was ready for service if needed.
But in Sarum, a still more exciting event now took place.
Its author was Eli Mason.
It