Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [560]
There was something else. As he saw more of the Forest family on their periodic visits, and of their guests on these occasions, he began to understand it better.
They treated him well; as tutor, he was almost like one of themselves, yet though the good manners, even of the children, made them capable at times of a delicacy towards him that would never have occurred to Porteus, he sensed that, deep down they simply did not care what he thought. There was no personal animosity towards a man of the middle classes like himself in the charmed lives of these aristocrats: in a way, it made all dealings with them very easy and restful. But sometimes it seemed to him that he could see in their eyes a callousness that only comes from generations of living selfishly apart.
“They are hard, these aristocrats,” he murmured.
The house, by the standards of the great houses of the time, was not enormous, but it covered several acres and had fifty bedrooms besides the servants’ quarters – a maze of numberless chambers in the roof reached by back stairs into which he never penetrated. There was a fine landscaped park, and a tree-lined drive a mile long. The stone arch through which one entered the drive was so broad and high that it seemed to frame a sizeable portion of the sky.
It was not the family nor the house that troubled him: it was what he saw outside the park gates.
The first relevation came three months after his first arrival at the northern house when old Lord Forest came to spend a few weeks with them. He heard the steward remark that his lordship was going into Manchester to inspect some of his property and Ralph asked if he could accompany them. Forest had no objection. Thus, on a crisp February morning, he found himself rolling through the Lancashire countryside towards the growing city.
The countryside was beautiful: rolling ridges of oak woods dipping down to broad valleys where the farms lay in their rich fields. The new industries in the cities and the minefields had begun to bring wealth to the area, but had not yet scarred it or raised into the sky the great cloud of grime that was to darken the face of so much of northern England. It seemed to Shockley, as they went along, that the cottages and farmhouses had about them a richer air than the often dilapidated little villages he was used to seeing in the bare sheep country around Sarum.
“They do well here, by comparison,” Forest remarked. “The north grows richer than the south every day.”
They came to the outskirts of Manchester. These had about them the atmosphere of a military camp. Everywhere Shockley looked it appeared that new buildings were going up: a warehouse here, a factory there; on a nearby slope, two rows of neat terraced brick houses, solidly built, suggesting a new, if somewhat regimented prosperity. With so much fresh activity, such a plethora of carts, piles of materials and digging, it seemed as though the whole surface of this part of the world was being scraped by a huge rake before a new raw world was planted.
Then they reached the cotton mill.
It was a long brick building, three storeys high, with big staring, rectangular windows and large doorways every dozen yards. Even before the carriage door was opened, he could hear the hum of machinery from within.
But nothing had prepared him for what he saw next, and he never forgot it.
The cotton industry of England owed its truly remarkable rise to two machines, and to two minerals. Like the production of woollen cloth, cotton too requires two processes – spinning yarn and