Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [547]
Barnikel bowed his head. It was certainly unthinkable that Porteus could be generous to anybody without their being acutely aware of the fact.
“Yet my wiser counsel is, I fear, ignored.”
“I see.”
“I should like you to dine with us today, doctor, observe him, form your own conclusions. And, since my voice does not prevail, speak with him yourself, as you think best.”
Barnikel had no wish to do any of these things; but he found it hard to refuse.
“What form, exactly, do these disturbing signs take?” he asked curiously.
“Ah,” the canon raised his long arms in a gesture of despair, “that you will see, all too soon; I think I hear his arrival now.”
At first – to someone that is who did not know the canon’s sensitive nature – at first it might have seemed that all was well.
Ralph Shockley came into the house cheerfully. His tangled yellow hair fell over his brow; he was dressed as a gentleman should be in the tight-fitting pale trousers of the day, tail coat and cravat, but he had somehow acquired a small tear in his trousers at the knee, his coat was covered in chalk dust, and his cravat, if it had ever been well-tied, had long since taken on a life of its own. Of all these improprieties he was unaware. Porteus was not, but greeted Ralph as affably as he was able.
Ralph then went upstairs to see his two children, stayed there despite being summoned to dinner, for a quarter of an hour, and then, still very cheerfully, reappeared. He had not tidied himself.
As they went in to dinner Agnes came quietly to Doctor Barnikel’s side and whispered:
“I pray you will keep the peace between them.”
“Is it so bad?”
“It has been getting worse all month. Each day I fear there will be an explosion. ’Tis like a powder keg on a fuse.” She touched his arm lightly. “Help us, doctor,” she murmured, and looked appealingly into his eyes.
He would, he thought, have fought Bonaparte’s armies single handed if she had asked him.
The case of Ralph Shockley was simple enough. He had been nearly twenty when the French Revolution burst upon Europe; like many young men, he was swept along by ideals which seemed to him to be the dawn of a new world. Barnikel remembered some of the young man’s excited chatter even a few years later. Since then he knew that Ralph occasionally expressed reformist views – for abolition of the rotten boroughs, or religious toleration– ideas which, though they would certainly be anathema to Canon Porteus, were not so terrible.
Ralph Shockley’s error however was one of judgement. Faced with the towering conservatism of his brother-in-law, he was unable to resist teasing him with reformist opinions, and would do so until the canon began to grow pale. It was childish. It was like a boy bouncing a ball against a cliff.
And it was a mistake – greater than he knew.
Now he appeared. He was pleased to see Barnikel and welcomed him warmly.
Indeed, as the company sat down to dinner, there was little outward sign of tension. As usual, Ralph began to talk at once.
As soon as he did so, Barnikel could see trouble ahead.
“I have been to see our cousin Mason,” he announced.
Poor Porteus winced.
It was not that Daniel Mason, like his father Benjamin, was a Wesleyan: better that, at least, than one of the less respectable sects like Baptists or Quakers; it was that Daniel Mason was a tradesman and that his wife’s brother insisted – incorrectly too – in referring to him as cousin.
“He is not, in fact, related to you,” he observed coldly.
“Well, my brother Adam married Mary Mason,” Ralph replied. “But even if he’s not my cousin, I like to think of him as one.”
Porteus suffered in silence.
“Daniel Mason says the cloth trade has never been better,” Ralph went on cheerfully. “’Tis the wars of Bonaparte you know, doctor. Thanks to the disruption abroad, our clothiers here have the world markets all to themselves.” The declining cloth trade of Salisbury, though a poor and meagre business compared with the mighty trade of former times, had been given a temporary boost