Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [583]
The sleepy eyes had opened very slowly, but focused at once.
“Waal . . . Miztur Mason.” It was a slow, easy drawl. He looked calmly from the determined Methodist to the young lady at his side. “Come to reform me, I suppose.” And with surprising ease, he got up.
He had been handsome, she thought. His long hair, dirty and matted, might once have been a rich brown, like his side whiskers. His tall, lean body, his long aquiline face, suggested power. Was it laziness, drink or contempt for the world that made him move so slowly and carelessly about his business? He looked at his children and, with just a small motion of his head, sent them scurrying to harness the cart.
“You’ve been drinking,” Mason accused.
“Had a few. Slept it off.”
“Your children are a disgrace, man. You know it.”
Wilson looked at them thoughtfully.
“They can harness the cart.”
“I beg you, Wilson, consider them, if you don’t consider yourself.”
“What would you do for them?”
“Much. Educate them. Teach them to know God.”
“They know the country.”
“Not enough. You know it.”
“Mebbe.”
“We shall speak again.”
“Mebbe.”
The cart was ready. The two children scrambled in. He lifted a broad-brimmed hat and placed it on his head; then he gave the small pony a lazy flick with his whip and they began to move slowly away. After they had gone fifteen yards, he turned and, looking straight at Jane, slowly raised his hat, still silently looking at her for a moment after he had returned the hat to his head.
“Impudent rogue,” Mason muttered; and turning to Jane he remarked: “If you could help me reform him, or at least save those children, Miss Shockley, I should think it the best of all our efforts.”
They had often worked together, over the last few years. There were in Sarum, God knew, enough poor souls to care for.
“And Miss Shockley,” he always told his family, “is most unusual.”
She was indeed. She taught at a school, though she certainly had no financial need to do so. She spent weeks, during the long summer holidays, acting as a nurse in Lord Radnor’s Infirmary and never went there without a copy of Miss Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing tucked into a pocket of her dress.
“We should have lost her long ago if it weren’t for her uncle,” Mason would say.
The advent of her Uncle Stephen had been one of the great disappointments of her life. He was brought to Sarum, one bright December day, by the little steam train from Southampton – a thin, gaunt figure in his fifties, with blue eyes, which seemed never quite to focus, peering out of a yellowish face. He was liberally wrapped in a shawl and a blanket and walked stiffly with a stick. He spoke very quietly, always let her know what he required, and never considered, even for a moment, that his niece might ever wish to leave him or, if she did, that it would be possible for her to do so.
It had never before crossed her mind that a lifetime of service might make a man selfish.
“But I fear, my dear, my stay will not be long,” he had told her sadly when he first arrived. And so he did still, from time to time, as he moved stiffly about the town, enjoying the reverence that was his due; really, she admitted wryly to herself, predicting his departure had become almost more of a promise to her than a regret.
“Can you really find time to teach when there is so much to be done here?” he would sometimes ask, a little querulously.
“Oh yes, uncle,” she would reply, and escape, if she politely could, into the close.
Porters had proposed once again, by the choristers’ green.
“If it were a question of also looking after your uncle, then I should be honoured . . .”
“Quite impossible,” she assured him, and begged him not to speak of it again.
He had assumed a new role in her life now, which seemed to heal his wound and which she could tolerate – that of adviser. For it was clear to Porters that young Miss Shockley was still wayward and must be in need of advice.
He had settled in the city. The new railway station and the influx of people had caused a huge building