Inheritance Feud

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

"The dear little angel!" Paul's stepmother had added then. for nobody, and Cecily Melrose was not an envious woman in any case, could dislike so fair a little creature, who never gave anyone trouble for all she was an only child. "When she's of an age to have a London season, she'll be a beauty as well as rich; then Cousin Hermione will needs bestir herself, and be come less precious and taken up with her own health," and with that Cecily had bustled off to supervise the maids at the fruit-preserving, for it had been a good year for damsons at Maddon.

But the strange man today at the Fleece ... Paul had strolled in there after leaving his stepmother's receipt with the apothecary, to be made up for Cousin Anna bel's headaches. Leaving the dark little shop and its myster ious, spice-filled air, and it shelves where great delft jars, many of them dusty, contained no doubt the sovereign remedies for most things, Paul had first made certain they were watering his horse behind the inn-yard, as he had already instructed; they would find him, he then told them, in the taproom. As he bent his head and entered the Fleece he was, as in the apothe cary's shop, assailed by odours; but this time they were of fresh sawdust, soap, beeswax, and the familiar, tonic smell of good ale. It made Paul feel manly, and glad he'd given his top-boots, under the sardonic eye of Papa's valet, an extra polish yesterday; he still would not have had the courage to ask that dignitary to do them for him, but he had wanted them to look well for riding to Baron. He had then ap proached Abel Judd behind his counter shyly, and asked for ale on draught; Abel, in almost arch-priestly dignity behind his leather apron, had drawn it himself, and brought it to the young master; everyone remotely connected with the Doon family was known to Abel Judd, and rated extra attention from him, though he himself, with the growing fame of the Fleece since his second marriage, was now a very important personage. The taproom at this hour was not as full as it would have become later; a handful of sheep farmers, return ing north from Carlisle market, wagged their bonnets angrily together over the mean English prices they had fetched. Otherwise, only one customer sat near Paul by the taps, drinking in silence. Paul glanced at him, and could hardly repress a shudder of distaste; the man stank, and looked like a cadaver.

One thing intrigued Paul; he was sensitive enough to per ceive it. Between Abel Judd, stout, balding and prosperous in his pontifical leathers and whitely laundered shirt-sleeves, and this ragged, greasy, malodorous skeleton was a link of some kind; their eyes never met, and it was evident to Paul that, on his entry, they had been discussing some private matter. The ragged man raised his arm now, to quaff more ale, and a rancid, indescribable smell came from his clothes as he moved; they might once have been of blue-grey hodden stuff, perhaps a prison-issue. Now they hardly held together; a stubble of beard on the man's jaw was almost the one sign of life. His eyes surveyed Paul incuriously. Another young gent, he was evidently thinking; a sprig of the county, whom at one time, no doubt, in his younger days, he'd have cozened and fleeced. But the half-dead gaze by now conveyed less interest in the present and future than the past; a not too remote past, redolent of living death, infinite distances, untamed silences.

He interested Paul, deprived of experiences such as the Grand Tour. The young man brought out, with an air he vainly tried to deprive of bravado, a handful of coins from his pocket, and offered to buy the other more ale. Over this, although his manner was grudging and ungrateful, the ragged fellow talked. His own name, he said, was Tom Neilson. He spoke of things Paul had never heard of. He was, he said, back lately from Austraila, from Sydney Cove, from Botany Bay.

Paul was strongly tempted to ask at once about Theon; but the habit, ingrained in him by now, of being ashamed to mention a kinsman who had been sent out there prevailed, and he said nothing, only listened as Tom Neilson talked, his tongue less taciturn now with the flow of ale. "I walked north from Tilbury," he said. "Took two weeks; been out there seven year. Not many changes here, 'cept that it's greener than I'd remembered. I forgot how everything here's so green." He wiped his mouth; the lack-lustre eyes slewed round hope fully to Paul, who immediately ordered more ale; seven years, the same sentence as Theon!

Abel shook his head warningly; Tom Neilson had had enough, his expression said. Paul settled down to listen to all Neilson would say; sooner or later, he'd get in a question about Theon. The man spoke of the voyage out. "First they brought us up out o' Woolwich hulks, and that was no Ne'er day dinner. Five stinking months we had of it after that, us chained two and two together in the orlop by night "What's the orlop?"

"The between-hatches; where no man wants to go. Couldn't neither sit nor lie there, or move much, by night for fear o' waking them: couldn't but vomit and do all else over the other man, see?" The dead eyes stared. "Twenty-four on us there were, below decks in one hole like that; ten on 'em died, and never saw Australia."

"What had they done?" Paul had been about to ask. But he did not; even for Theon, who'd killed a man, it was inhuman; nothing was bad enough to have to chain men together in an airless hole below the waterline for five months, living in their own excrement, and the food-"Was the food bad?" he said aloud. Again, the eyes slewed round at him.

"Ay."

"What did they-" But he didn't, he realised, want to hear about it; he, fed twice daily on fresh fish and game from the estates, and new-baked bread and eggs straight from the home farm, and Cecily's small-beer. For sightless Theon, the voy age must have been black indescribable hell; how had he sur vived it?

Perhaps he had not. What had any of them heard since then of Theon, to prove that he was still alive? Oh, ay; old Aaron's legacy, Papa had told him. But the need to hear direct news of Theon had overcome hesitation and shame, and Paul blurted out, "Did you know Theon Doon?" and the name echoed through the room; he saw the farmers stop their talk for a moment and look round curiously, then resume as though nothing had happened. He blushed with confusion, unaccustomed as he was to making himself conspicuous. But Tom Neilson answered squarely.

"Theon?" he answered. "I should know him; chained to gether half a year we were, with his plank by mine. I did all things for Theon," he added hopefully.

He might be lying; but in so vast a country, and across end less leagues of sea, the colony was still small enough for most blind. Paul pressed a crown into his hand. "Tell me all you men to know one another. And he'd known Theon was can," he said.

Tom Neilson had lost sight of Theon Doon for a while after landing. Himself, they'd sent him to the Island, he said, for near a year, he didn't say why. When he left Theon, the latter had been set to polishing the Governor's silver. "Neat with his fingers, he'd learned to be already, being blind; and his high and mightiness liked all his gear bright and shinin', and couldn't be sure but that the likes of me would make off with it, but never Theon." A grin, showing the remains of black teeth, showed and Tom scratched his pate. "Then when I come back to the port again, there was Theon in charge o' cornstores, and a black fellow along with him. Samson, he called the boy."

"A native?" Paul knew little about the Antipodes; but he'd heard they had savages there, and that Captain Cook had been killed; more than that, he realised, he knew almost nothing. Tom shook his head.

"Na. Them's no good to the likes o' Theon. Eyes to him, this one was. How do I know where he come from? When I left, they was still together. He got me to say "

The burnt-out gaze turned again to where Abel stood, inscrutably, at the counter. "He got me to say I'd bring word," said Tom Neilson innocently. "Whatever's the way of it, here I am!"

That hadn't been what they would have said together had he not been listening, Paul decided; to his sharpened aware ness it seemed as if everything in the room was suspended for a moment in time. No one moved. His presence, he knew, as an incomer, incommoded the two men; but whatever the mes sage was it had been delivered, no doubt, before he came in. He stayed for a while, turning his tankard in his hands and refusing to allow them to shorten his sojourn by silence; after all, he was Theon's kinsman, wasn't he, and a Melrose besides? He'd go, in a moment or two, when it suited him; not when it suited Tom and Abel.

"Will he come home?" he asked Neilson clearly. He'd heard the man say at some time, during their discourse, that some found the voyage so fearful that they would never again risk a return, but stayed on in the far lonely land. Would Theon stay? Would he ever come home again? But the released convict looked at Paul Melrose indulgently, as one looks at an importunate small boy.

"Ay," he said in a low voice. "You can tell them that up there at any rate. Theon Doon'll soon be home." Abel had moved sharply then behind his counter. "Leave that, leave it now," he said, gesturing Tom to be silent; be coming, suddenly, himself, no more than a troubled, sweating, middle-aged man, the bald patch on top of his fringed head shining with moisture; he wiped it absently. He could never bring himself to wear a wig.

Paul turned his head to observe the cause of so sudden a silence in both men. A black-haired young woman had come in and was crossing the sanded floor, leading a little boy by the hand. The child's hair was black also, thick, shining and rough. He was eating an apple. Idly, he threw the core on the floor.

"William Judd, pick that up and go and put it in the mid den," said the young woman. "How can I keep the place clean and decent, or Tib either, when you go on so?" And she cuffed the boy, absently. William ducked and presently ran out by himself into the sunlight; Paul saw him kick the retrieved core across the yard. "More trouble there," he thought, smiling; he himself would have liked a younger bre er. He heard Livia Judd tell her husband she and Wil liam were going out for an hour. "To the butcher, and that," she said. "You'll manage, Abel?"

Abel said he would manage. He had turned away and begun to polish the tankards with a clean cloth. Everything here was clean. Paul remembered he wondered afterwards how, being a small boy at the time, he could have happened to be per mitted to hear it-how on Abel's second marriage about seven years ago or so, to the young woman who had just come in, folk had talked. They said she was a bad lot, and the child she was about to bear wasn't Abel's; but Abel had neverthe less married her and given the boy his name. Since then, the Fleece had become renowned for spotless comfort, and was now a famed hostelry, for Livia Judd was a good worker; even her enemies admitted that. And she hadn't so many enemies now; folk forgot, as the years passed and they found other scandals to occupy them, and Livia had a pleasant manner to the women as well as the men.