Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [590]
“What can you do?”
“What is there to do?”
She tried to think. The cloth trade had improved a little, but it was still poor. There was the carpet factory at Wilton, which now employed over two hundred people; she had heard that the tanning works in Salisbury was starting to look for extra men. There were paper mills down the Avon at Downton; and of course there was the railway. She could not see the man at her side in any of these occupations.
“I was at a meeting once when they read out a letter from a man named Godfrey in Australia,” he said. “You’d hardly believe the good life the farmers have out there. And the food! Half the men there were for taking the boat out at once.”
“Many do. Would you?”
He sighed. “I don’t want to, miss. There is a possibility,” he went on. He could give up the farm, leave Sarum, and go to the other side of the plain. “To the one cousin who speaks to me!” he grinned. He had a family farm up in the cheese country, and he needed help. “I could go there, but I’d be working for him then,” he explained. “And,” he paused before concluding quietly: “I’d not like that.”
She could imagine.
“This farm could still be made to work,” she urged him.
He gave her a gentle look, as though she were a child.
“Not by me.”
It irked her to see the man dragged down like this, through ignorance and lack of capital as much as by his own fault. And suddenly, on an impulse she cried:
“Would you accept help – financial help – to improve?”
“Where from?”
She smiled at him hopefully.
“From me.”
The investment of Jane Shockley in Jethro Wilson’s farm was not a huge outlay.
“Besides, when we do the accounts, I shall take a return on my investment,” she told him.
But it was by far the most exciting project she had ever undertaken.
He went about the business quietly. He was neither assertive nor submissive because of their financial arrangement, and as far as the farm was concerned, he seemed to accept the improvements as necessary evils. The first thing she did was to introduce new stock: “Hampshires,” she insisted. “You could grow root crops on the lower part of your land as well,” she told him. She took advice from farmers and landowners she knew, who were so surprised and then amused at her enthusiastic and sometimes pointed inquisitiveness, that they often gave her their best and most expert advice.
“It may be cheaper to import manure for the two west fields,” she announced one day. “I’ll see about it.” And though he looked surprised, he did not oppose her.
She was wise, however. With the single farm labourer, and his gawky son, and the old woman who came each day to keep house, she had nothing to do at all, maintaining her distance as if she had been a complete stranger. Indeed, with Jethro himself she claimed: “All I do is make a few suggestions and keep accounts.”
But not a week passed without her riding over to Winterbourne to watch his progress.
The children remained with the Methodist farmer and his family.
“You have no wife,” she reminded Jethro, “and they are receiving proper schooling there.”
But if the changes came at the initiative of Jane Shockley, she soon realised that she herself was receiving a greater, and far more subtle education than any she was giving. Few people knew where she rode to across the plain; they would have been more surprised still to see her walking with the tall farmer along the edge of the high ground, listening and nodding as he pointed out every detail of the tiny, delicate life forms in those huge waste spaces.
He looked well; his colour and strength had long since returned, and each time she visited the farm, she noticed how his lean, powerful form seemed to belong in those windswept regions. “He is like an animal,” she sometimes thought. On a warm day, as he moved lazily along the edge of the ridge, or sat on a stone outcrop watching the sheep, she could picture him as a lizard. On a windy day, as the clouds raced over the land and his thin narrow face with its deepset eyes faced into the weather, he seemed