Southampton Row - Anne Perry [18]
The second course was a choice of salmon or smelts.
She chose salmon, and for a little while refrained from conversation.
She declined the entrees, not wishing for curried eggs or sweetbreads with mushrooms, and listened to what she could catch of the discussion across the table.
“I think we should take him very seriously,” Aubrey Serracold was saying, bending forward a little. The light caught his fair head, his long face filled with seriousness, all laughter gone, even his usual self-deprecating charm for once invisible.
“For heaven’s sake!” the senior statesman protested, his cheeks pink. “The man left school at ten years old and went down the mines! Even other miners have more sense than to imagine he can do anything for them in Parliament, except make a fool of himself. He lost in his native Scotland; he hasn’t a chance here in London.”
“Of course not,” said a bluff-faced man opposite who turned around indignantly, reaching for his wine and holding it for a moment before drinking. “We are the natural party for the workingman, not some newfangled creation of wild-eyed fanatics with picks and shovels in their hands!”
“That is just the kind of blindness that will lose us the future!” Aubrey returned with utmost seriousness. “Keir Hardie should not be dismissed lightly. A lot of men will see his courage and determination, and know how he has bettered his situation. They will think that if he can achieve so much for himself he can do the same for them.”
“Take them out of the mines and put them in Parliament?” a woman in poppy-red said incredulously.
“Oh dear!” Rose twisted her glass in her fingers. “Then what on earth shall we burn on our fires? I doubt the present incumbents would be the slightest practical use.”
There was a burst of laughter, but it was high-pitched, and too loud.
Jack smiled. “Very funny as a dinner table joke—not so amusing if the miners listen to him and vote for more like him, who are full of passion to reform but haven’t any idea of the cost of it—I mean the real cost, in trade and dependent livelihoods.”
“They won’t listen to him!” a white-whiskered man said with a gesture to courtesy, but his voice was dismissive of the seriousness Jack invested in the subject. “Most men have more sense.” He saw Jack’s expression of doubt. “For heaven’s sake, Radley, only half the men in the land vote! How many miners own their own houses or pay more than ten pounds a year in rent?”
“So by definition”—Aubrey Serracold turned to face him, his eyes wide—“those who can vote are those who prosper under the system as it is now? That rather invalidates the argument, doesn’t it?”
There was a quick exchange of glances across the table. This remark was unexpected, and to judge from several of them, also unwelcome.
“What are you saying, Serracold?” the white-whiskered man asked carefully. “If a thing works, change it?”
“No,” Aubrey replied equally carefully. “If it works for one section of the people, it is not that section who should have the right to decide whether to keep it or not, because we all have the tendency to see things from our own view and to preserve what is in our own interest.”
The footman removed the used plates and, almost unnoticed, served iced asparagus.
“You have a very poor opinion of your fellows in government,” a red-haired man said a trifle sourly. “I’m surprised you want to join us!”
Aubrey smiled with extraordinary charm, looking down for a moment before turning to the speaker. “Not at all. I think we are wise and just enough to use power only as it is honestly given, but I have no such confidence in our opponents.” He was met with a shout of laughter, but Emily saw that it did not entirely dispel the anxiety—in Jack, at least. She knew him well enough to see and understand the tension in his hands as he held his knife and fork and with dexterity cut the tips off the asparagus spears.