Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [578]
He was so harmless, so dedicated. He had taken her quite seriously and, for half an hour, there and then, had explained every detail of the business to her, from the need to stop cholera to the medieval wonders lurking in the mud below. She had been trapped: without being rude she could not get away. For a full thirty minutes she stood there while he lectured her and her friends stood in the doorway of Surman’s Boot Shop and held their sides.
“In fact,” she said defensively afterwards, “he was very interesting. And indeed,” she added, for she had listened to much of what he had told her, “the council behaved abominably.”
It was hard, after this, not to speak to Mr Porters politely when she saw him. In fact, though the young ladies sometimes teased her by asking after her drains, she had more respect for Porters’s opinion than theirs. Almost in defiance of them, she consented to sit with him at the St Cecilia annual music festival and walked with him round the horticultural fête.
“He is also a considerable expert on the subject of dahlias.” she informed her friends.
Once they had even spent a day together – as members of a group, of course – when one of the canons had taken a party to visit a sarsen cutting works at Fyfield on the far side of the plain. Mr Porters had even given them a little talk explaining how the hard stones, now popular as curbing stones, were exactly those used thousands of years ago at Stonehenge.
He was a remarkably interesting man and she enjoyed his company.
But more than this – oh dear.
Lizzie opened the door. His card was on the little silver salver.
“Mr Porters, Miss Jane.”
Could she say she was not at home? He would take it too much to heart. It was all her own fault.
She laid down her pen.
“Please show him up.” If only she could make him dislike her, it would all be so much easier.
He had not been in the library before. What a light and pleasant room it was. He peered round quickly before remembering that it was bad manners to do so. Books round the walls. On the table, a catalogue from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of three years before; beside it, a more modest version of the Salisbury exhibition in the guildhall that had followed it.
In the largest bookshelf, and given pride of place, stood huge leather-bound folios of Hoare’s mighty history of Wiltshire together with their companion, Hatcher’s history of Salisbury.
No more impressive work had ever appeared in the county: a huge historical Domesday book that listed every parish in every hundred, with their monuments, country houses and the landed families who had owned them since feudal times. Every gentleman should have a set and indeed, the gentry of Wiltshire had widely subscribed to the project. The last volume, on the city, told a more modest though more detailed historical account of the doings of the townspeople over the centuries, and this had been prepared not by Hoare, a gentleman, but by Hatcher, a modest man of the middle classes like himself. When the books were issued, Hatcher’s work had been praised, but the poor author himself had been completely ignored.
The sight of these huge volumes in her house momentarily depressed Porters.
Beside the catalogues on the table lay three issues of Mr Dickens’s last serial Hard Times, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a copy of Wuthering Heights and a volume of Lord Byron’s poems. The last, though he had only glanced at them once, he thought rather unfitting for a lady, though he had been told that it was mostly ladies who read them.
“I trust I do not intrude upon you.”
“Not at all.”
He glanced once more, disapprovingly, at the volume of Byron.
“I fear I do not