The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [69]
The bishop rose from his elaborate chair and Matthew Allen stood also, as was required. Holding his teacup in both hands, with nowhere to set it down, he bowed to the bishop as he left the room.
With her father still away, her mother gone with all the servants to deal with the laundry in Fairmead House, it was Hannah herself who opened the door to Thomas Rawnsley. He looked startled at the sight of her, flinched a little more upright, but cleverly melded the motion with the sweeping off of his hat.
‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘These . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘These roses . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, they’re for you, aren’t they?’
In his room at the inn, Matthew Allen stood in his shirtsleeves by the window, looking down at the rain spluttering on the cobbles of the courtyard, the maids hurrying from door to door.The dark-beamed ceiling was low over his head. Brandy had softened him. He stood in this box and thought. The money coming in and the money going out.The demands for dividends and the orders placed. They were colliding. He was being crushed between two columns of a ledger. The hope and air were being crushed out of him. He drank more and decided that, being realistic, the whole thing was over and they would lose everything. People did not know what it meant to lose everything, but he did. He’d been in a debtors’ prison, between dark walls, denied the liberty to act, made an infant, an inmate, between dark walls. To have to beg money to start over - who would dream of lending him money now, after this? There was no light. He was crushed.
He wondered if it was possible to kill yourself by drinking a whole bottle of brandy in one go and decided to try. He raised the bottle to his lips, tipped his head back and drank, watching big bubbles flip up to its base. He shouted as he thumped the bottle down on the table and wiped his eyes, burping a sickening hot vapour. ‘Not enough,’ he moaned. It would take three or four. ‘Not enough. Or. Or.’ He stumbled over to the mirror, catching the wall with an outstretched hand, and stared at his face, his wet, scorched lips and hard, hostile eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no, no, no. Not yet. Not yet. Can be done. Bloody. By me. Don’t die, old fellow. Here’s what . . . what’ll . . .’ He walked erect, then fell forwards onto his bed, reaching for his portfolio, for pen and paper, to write to Tennyson.
He lay there, with the room circling slowly around him and phrases forming in his mind. ‘Immense,’ he said out loud. ‘Immense.’ He sat up and wrote.
. . . We shall have an immense business.All is hope, fear is gone and I feel happy. We are all safe. If you knew the proportion of anxiety that I have gone through and the feeling of relief that overwhelms me and often makes my head swell to bursting with gratitude and relieved only by tears scampering over my eyelids, you would see the depth and sincerity of the heart of the man who calls himself your friend, and who trusts in God, that he will be able to give the lie to all those who were suspicious, but far be it from me to boast, far be it from me to say a word against anyone.
Orders are flowing in from all the great ones. The Bishop of Chester has added four chairs to his order. Never was anything more promising. All things are a lie and all things are false if this fails. The world and human nature might be changed, but it is not so and will not be so.
Tennyson sat by his fire sinking into the grief that will make him famous. When the grief was total and full of questions, full of words, was a world itself, when he’d written it, when the young queen’s young husband had died and she’d let it be known that Tennyson’s poem was the great assuagement and elaboration of her own grief, then Tennyson will be laureate, will be rich, will be one of the great men of the age, known and praised throughout the Empire. He