Nan Easter’s twenty-seven regional managers were none too pleased when they heard her plans. It was bad enough that Mr William had decided to leave the company, as they told one another afterwards, but to appoint a woman to replace him! Well, that really was the height of folly. Mr Jernegan of the City of London and his friend Mr Maycock of the County of Middlesex were so aggrieved by it that they took themselves off to the nearest hostelry for several pints of porter and considerable complaint. And at their particular invitation ‘their very dear friend and valued colleague’ Mr Edward Easter went with them.
‘You should have been asked to replace Mr John,’ Mr Maycock said to Edward. ‘That’s my opinion of it.’ He was a plump gentleman with very slack, rubbery-looking lips and consequently every word he said had to be thorougly munched. ‘You should have been the one.’
‘Very true,’ Edward said miserably. Because it was. There was nobody so well suited to take command of the firm. His father was too weak and Nan was too old, for all her tough ways. And yet there she’d sat, telling them all she would be ‘running the firm for the time being’ as if he, Edward Easter, didn’t exist. It was deeply hurtful to be overlooked like that. And all done so quickly too, before he’d had the chance to suggest a better arrangement.
‘We don’t want women in the firm,’ Mr Maycock said, stroking his mutton-chop whiskers so as to pull his mouth back into realignment. ‘You should have taken Mr William’s position, Mr Edward, sir, at the very least, and after that we should have become a full management committee, with voting powers. That’s what I say.’ He’d been saying the same thing to the other regional managers for more than a year now, but he’d never found one brave enough to suggest it to Mrs Easter. Lily-livered lot!
‘Petticoat government,’ Mr Jernegan said, signalling to the pot-boy that their glasses needed replenishment, ‘petticoat government is the very devil. No good ever comes of it, on account of it ain’t natural.’
‘No good will ever come of Miss Caroline Easter and her meddling,’ Mr Maycock agreed. ‘That’s a certain sure thing. Bookstalls on railway stations! I ask you! New-fangled nonsense, that’s what it is. The public won’t stand for it.’
‘I agree with you, Mr Maycock,’ Edward Easter said, nodding his fair head so energetically that his hair bounced up from his forehead. ‘I tell you if there were any way I could persuade her straight out of the firm again I would take it. No matter what the cost.’ He was more than a little drunk, his speech slurred and his blue eyes bleary, but there was no doubting the sincerity of his sentiments. Now that cousin Will was leaving, he should have been the one to take his place. It was insulting to give such a position to cousin Caroline. Downright insulting.
‘Scandal,’ Mr Jernegan said, slopping his next glass of porter as he tried to raise it to his lips. ‘A nice juicy scandal to frighten her off. That’s what we need. Petticoat government is the very devil.’
‘Perhaps she’ll get married,’ Edward hoped, ‘and settle down with her husband, a nice long way away, and raise a few kids.’
‘Meantime,’ Mr Maycock said, munching moistly, ‘we’ve to watch her wasting the firm’s money on that hare-brained scheme of hers. Bookstalls! I ask you. Your very good health, Mr Easter sir.’
‘Nothing will come of it,’ Mr Jernegan promised, belching slightly. ‘Because nobody will take it seriously. And for why? Because it’s a stupid idea. A very stupid idea. The stupidest idea I ever heard. Railways are nothing. A flash in the pan. That’s what railways are. Never amount to anything, won’t railways.’ He fumbled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and tried to focus his eyes upon it, and failed, frowning at the mist of shifting numerals. ‘I tell you what,’ he said importantly. ‘We were better off in the old days with the coaches. You knew where you were with coaches. Coaches didn’t mean having women foisted on you.’
‘All this change is so unnecessary,’ Mr Maycock complained, spraying spit into his porter. ‘Much better off – things stay as they are.’
In the Strand outside the window, carts and carriages and coaches clogged the road as they’d been doing all his life, struggling through the crush a few feet at a time, rough with bad temper and worse language. ‘Much better off – things stay as they are.’
It was unfortunate for Mr Maycock that the managing director of the mighty London and Birmingham railway didn’t share his opinions. and doubly unfortunate that the same managing director was none other than Mr William Chaplin, Sheriff of the City of London, who was a life-long friend of Mrs Nan Easter and a man who not only accepted change but encouraged and caused it. He had once been known as the coach king, because he ran the largest fleet of stage coaches in the country, but being a shrewd business man, he was one of the first to see the potential of Mr Stephenson’s invention. He had sold his coach companies while he could still command a good price for them and transferred all his capital and all his energy into the railways. Now he was a managing director of two London based companies, held shares in several others, and was constantly on the look-out for ways to increase his trade and influence.
So when Nan sent him a note to his office in Fleet Street requesting a business meeting ‘at your earliest convenience’ his answer was prompt and positive. If Mrs Easter and her granddaughter would care to meet him at four of the clock the following afternoon, he would be more than happy to see them.
‘I will strike this first bargain,’ Nan said to Caroline as they walked along the Strand towards the meeting, ‘as Mr Chaplin is an old friend. Watch closely. See how ’tis done and when you’ve learned the art you shall manage the next.’
‘Yes,’ Caroline promised breathlessly. Oh, she would watch most carefully, for so much depended on this meeting. It was her chance to make good. To show them all that she was every bit as valuable to the firm as that wretched Edward. Maybe even as good as Will. And why not, when they were brother and sister? But most important of all it was the way to redeem her unkindness. She would increase trade in Papa’s firm and do it so well and so dramatically that nobody could fail to notice. He would see it too, wherever he was, and know that she loved him and was trying to make amends.
‘Here we are!’ Nan said, and whisked them into a brown hall and up two flights of scrubbed stairs and straight into a wide office full of wide furniture where an elderly gentleman in a beautiful brown cloth coat was holding out his hand in greeting. ‘Nan, my dear, I’m glad to see you well. I heard your sad news.’
‘A bad business,’ Nan said, briefly. ‘The storm, you know. This is my grand-daughter Caroline.’
He seated them before the fire and listened, sombre-faced and attentive, while Nan outlined her proposition. And Caroline sat in the warm and watched and listened too. It was a fascinating experience, for there were so many undercurrents beneath the words, so many moments when she could see them both struggling for mastery even though neither moved or said a word. They were like two lions she’d once seen in the Zoological Gardens poised for a fight; they’d been so still that she’d thought them sleepy until she noticed the tips of their tails twitching.
The deal was struck in twenty hard-thinking minutes. For the princely rent of £1,320 per annum, A. Easter and Sons had acquired the sole concession to open a large bookstall on Euston station and lesser ones on all the other stations along the full length of the London to Birmingham railway.
‘Now,’ Nan said to Caroline, when their carriage had arrived to collect them as arranged, ‘you must tell me all you’ve learned.’
Caroline settled herself onto the upholstered seat and collected her thoughts to answer. ‘First,’ she said, ‘you ask for more than you expect so as to leave room for your opponent to bargain.’
‘Bravo!’ Nan applauded as the carriage began to move. ‘First rule of good business.’
‘Which means that you need to know the sort of price he expects to pay before you start negotations.’
‘Of course.’
‘And also the lowest price he would accept and how much he will want to negotiate?’
‘Yes.’
‘How is it done, Nan?’
‘By knowledge of his other deals, knowledge of the man, information about the financial state of his company. And instinct. What else did you notice?’
‘That you chose a straight annual rent rather than a percentage of the profits.’
‘Aye, I did. Can you imagine why?’
‘Because you expect a percentage of the profits to come to a higher figure, I daresay.’
‘I made a wise decision when I invited you into the firm, my dear,’ Nan said with great satisfaction. ‘You have a business head on your shoulders and no mistake. We will write to the London and South Western tomorrow and see how you make out there.’
For the first time since John’s death, dinner that evening was quite a jolly occasion, for Henry was invited and everybody about the table had been out of the house that day and busy with matters they enjoyed.
Euphemia had gone back to Clerkenwell Green and was full of news about her pupils. ‘Josser has been taken on as a monitor,’ she told them. ‘He’s horribly conscientious, but Jimmy thinks he will calm down with experience.’
Henry had been to see the Editor of the Weekly Herald, in some trepidation, he had to admit, because he hadn’t managed to write a single poem about the railways, what with one thing and another. To his great relief he’d been granted two more months to complete the work, ‘and that should be ample. Now.’
And Will had been to Devonshire Terrace to see Mr Dickens, and was full of subdued excitement because he was going to be sent to Ireland to report on the potato famine there. ‘I’m to leave in the New Year,’ he said, ‘and if I do well I’m to be sent abroad again.’
‘Then you will need a valet,’ Nan said. ‘And here’s Tom Thistlethwaite ready and to hand.’ She’d taken several of John’s servants into her household where most of them had settled usefully, but so far she hadn’t found work for Tom, who very plainly needed a master to care for.
‘I could do worse,’ Will said.
So that was settled.
‘What plans do you have for tomorrow?’ Nan asked them. She was delighted to hear that they all knew exactly what they would be doing. They would ride together in the morning, as they usually did when the weather was good enough, and then they all meant to go their separate ways. Euphemia would be back at the school, Henry would compose a poem, Will intended to write an article on the damage the storm had done on the Thames and in the London docks, and Caroline said she was going to visit a publisher called Mr Longman.
‘He is producing a new popular series of well known works,’ she said. ‘Coleridge’s Table Talk for instance, and some of Mr Wordsworth’s poetry and Mr Tennyson’s. If it is the right price, I think we should buy.’
‘And what is the right price, pray?’ Nan asked, spreading horseradish sauce on a long lean slice of beef.
‘Sixpence,’ Caroline said at once. ‘Sixpence per book. That’s quite enough to spend on a journey. A sixpenny book from a sixpenny stall.’
And she will do it, Nan thought, beaming at her. She’s a child after my own heart.
The next few weeks were intensely busy. Euphemia spent every afternoon in Clerkenwell and returned home dirty and exhausted but so well pleased with her endeavours that they were all happy for her, despite her dishevelled appearance. Henry worked diligently at his poetry and completed one verse almost to his satisfaction and came to dine with them three times a week. The first edition of the Daily News was published to great acclaim and with one of Will’s articles on the last page. And Caroline negotiated with all three of the remaining London railway companies, designed the stalls and contracted two companies to make them and erect them, ordered her sixpenny books from Mr Longman, and persuaded Messrs Chapman and Hall to produce a ‘Select Library of Fiction’ especially for Easter’s.
By the middle of February, when Will left for Ireland, with Tom in attendance, the first six stalls were up and doing business.
‘I suppose I shall have to buy a book for the journey now,’ he teased, as he and Henry and Caroline and Euphemia arrived at Paddington station. ‘If I can get near the stall!’ For they could barely see the sides of their little wooden shop for eager customers, gloved hands stretched out to buy, hats and bonnets nodding, and the huge skirts of the ladies swaying and rotating with excitement. ‘Now there’s a subject for a poem, Henry.’
Henry didn’t think much of it, but he didn’t say so, for that would have meant admitting that he was finding it very hard to compose his commissioned odes. It was all very well for poets like Keats and Shelley. They could choose poetical subjects, like skylarks and autumn and the wild west winds. But there was nothing poetical about railways.
Above his head the glass roof of the station curved like a wide white sky, full of reflected light and risen steam and an accumulation of captured sound, the rhythmical chuff and clatter of departing trains; brakes squealing arrival; the wheel-tapper’s clang; the shriek of whistles; and the cheerful hooting of the engines reverberating like owls. Carriage wheels crunched the cobbles, horses snorted, and the high cavern echoed with a cacophony of voices, porters’ cries and the news vendors’ repeated song, the murmur of goodbyes and the delighted shrill of greeting. How could he be expected to make a poem from such chaos?
The guard was blowing his whistle. People were rushing about him, climbing aboard. Tom Thistlethwaite had the door open for Will.
‘You must write to us, Will, as soon as you arrive,’ Caroline instructed, because she knew that was what Euphemia wanted to say and couldn’t.
‘I promise,’ he said, climbing aboard.
‘Well, see that you do,’ she scolded, teasing him. ‘If I know you at all, brother Will, you’ll be so busy reporting, you’ll forget all about us slaving away at home.’
‘I promise,’ he said again. And he kissed both the young women, warmly but absently, his mind already travelling on ahead of him.
It was a wasted vow. Departure brought such an overwhelming sense of release that he’d forgotten what he was saying before the train pulled out of the station. He was on his way to Ireland. Mr William Easter, foreign correspondent of the Daily News. It was like beginning his life all over again.
It was a long cold journey to Chester; the coaches that carried them along the north coast of Wales were horribly uncomfortable; and the crossing, in a rank, tossing cockleshell of a boat, was every bit as bad as he had expected. But even then he didn’t care. The coast of Ireland was visible on the western horizon, a dark smudgy promise of fame and fortune. Mr William Easter, foreign correspondent.
Dublin seemed a settled city after the noise and bustle of London, quiet and staid and rather old-fashioned and with no sign of famine anywhere, as far as he could see. There were beggars at every corner, the usual stinkingly dirty creatures, but they didn’t look as though they were starving, and although the street sweepers were even filthier and more ragged than their London counterparts, they seemed to be fed.
But the Irish journalists had another tale to tell. ‘Sure,’ they said, ‘’tis a terrible situation. Total failure o’ the crop so ‘tis. Tree quarters of it gone to ruination.’ There was typhus in County Cork and the flux in Kilkenny. The workhouses were filled to bursting, and people were dying like flies. ‘A terrible situation. You ask Mr O’Connell here.’
Mr O’Connell was a tousled man with a frizz of ginger hair and a bristle of ginger whiskers.
‘You’ll need to see it yourself to believe it,’ he said. ‘That’s about the size and scale of it. If you’ll meet wit’ me here tomorrow morning, I’ll escort ye, so I will. ’Tis time the British knew the trut’ of it.’
He was as good as his word, although the cart he’d hired for their journey was a ramshackle affair drawn by a dispirited donkey who had to stop every few hundred yards to cough and wheeze. It was still raining, in a continuous drizzle that had them all well dampened before the donkey coughed to its last halt out in the countryside.
The green fields rolled like breakers all around them and to the south the Wicklow mountains were blue with rain, but there was no sign of life in any direction, no beasts in the fields, no standing crops, no labourers, nothing except the rough grass sighing in the wind and a pungent sickly smell that pulsed towards them through the rain.
‘Tatties,’ Mr O’Connell explained when he saw Will sniffing the air. ‘From that pile over there, d’ye see?’
There was a dark hump among the grasses. They walked across to examine it and the stink grew more nauseous with every step. There were hundreds of potatoes in the heap and every single one was black and rotten and scored with oozing sores.
‘Don’t touch ‘em,’ Mr O’Connell warned, ‘or the air will be too foul for us to breathe.’
‘No fear of that,’ Will said, recoiling. ‘They’re bad enough just to look at.’
‘’Tis the same all over Ireland,’ Mr O’Connell said, backing away from the heap with his hand covering his mouth. ’Tis the quickest disease that’s ever been known to man. They come out o’ the earth as sound and sweet as a bell and wit’in the hour they’re stinking to high heaven. Nobody knows the cause or the cure. And the people die like flies by the rubbish dumps of them.’
‘Are there people hereabouts?’ Will asked, following his new friend away from the smell.
‘There may be,’ Mr O’Connell said grimly. ‘If we’re not too late. Come wit’ me.’
Now Will saw that there was a low dry-stone building further down the field. He’d done little more than glance at it when they arrived, because he’d assumed it was a ruin. Half the roof had fallen in and there was a gaping hole in one of the walls, but that was where they were headed.
As they approached Will saw that there was a dirty piece of sacking nailed across the hole where the door should have been, but apart from the patter of rain on the stones, there was no sound. The two men stooped beneath the sacking and crept inside, moving slowly and with caution, for neither of them were at all sure what they would find. Despite the hole in the roof it was dark between the walls and the air was foetid with decay, but to Will’s relief the place appeared to be empty. There was foul straw scattered on the earth floor and a pile of grey rags in one corner, but that was all.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said to Mr O’Connell.
The rags stirred and coughed, with a dry harsh rattle like the cough of sick cattle, and the hair stood on the nape of Will’s neck, as a long, grey, bony arm rose from the midst of the pile and a skeleton’s hand uncurled to claw at the air.
‘Water,’ a faint voice pleaded. ‘Water, for the love o’ God.’ A gaunt face lifted slowly from the rags, a gaunt, aged face hauling itself up as though it were being held down by some fearful invisible weight, blue eyes glazed in deep black hollows, every bone clearly visible beneath slack grey skin, a gaunt, aged face framed by the long black hair of a young woman.
Mr O’Connell was at her elbow with a stoop full of brackish water, and the woman drank, sucking the liquid into her mouth as if it pained her, and falling back afterwards totally exhausted. And now that his eyes had adjusted to the light inside the hut, Will could see that there were other bodies among the rags, small legs like sticks, a distended belly trembling, an emaciated baby lying on its back with its mouth wide open in a soundless wail.
‘This is a nightmare,’ he said to Mr O’Connell, staring in horror.
‘Then see that your countrymen share it,’ Mr O’Connell said.
That afternoon Will wrote the first of his dispatches, describing the hovel and the rotting potatoes and the warehouses full of corn that the starving couldn’t buy. He wrote with such passion and speed that he made his fingers sore.
‘We talk of the power of England,’ he concluded, ‘her navy, her gold, her resources – Oh yes, and her enlightened statesmen – while the broad fact is that she cannot keep her children perishing by hunger. Something must be done!’
The next day he and Tom set off on their travels, journeying south. He would see this starving country for himself and report upon it as fully and accurately as he could. It was his job. At last.
Back in London Henry Easter was still finding it a struggle to find any words at all. He’d made more than twenty attempts to finish his ode to Euston station and none of them were any good. They didn’t scan and they didn’t rhyme. In fact if he was honest about them, they didn’t even make sense.
It was miserably disappointing, and especially now, when he’d been accepted as Caroline’s suitor and it was more important than ever to make his mark upon the literary world. When her first six months’ mourning was over and they got married, he had to be in a position to keep her, and what was more, to keep her in Nan’s high and rather extravagant style. And how could he do that on his annuity? Why, it hardly kept him. It was all very demoralizing.
All through the spring he tried to compose, prowling about in his sitting room every evening with a cold compress held to his aching head. During the afternoons, while Caroline was busy with publishers and railway tycoons, probably making more money than he could envisage, he haunted the stations, notebook in hand, hoping for inspiration that never came.
When Caroline or Euphemia asked him how his work was progressing he told them it was going well, of course, for it would never have done to appear incompetent. But the deadlines passed one after another and he hadn’t finished a single poem or earned a single penny, and he was no nearer to being in a position to support a wife. And to make matters worse he couldn’t court Caroline while she was in mourning, that would have been improper, and the busier she became the less interested she seemed in their future together.
His brother Joseph told him not to worry, which was no help at all, and his sister Jane suggested that he might consider some other way of earning a living, but that didn’t help him either because he couldn’t do it. Finally and in some despair he decided to go and talk to Nan Easter. She was fierce and she was powerful but she understood how very much he wanted to marry Caroline and her advice would be sound.
‘She’s in a powerful bad temper,’ her clerk said, when he presented himself at the Easter headquarters. He’d had an inkwell thrown at his head not half an hour before. His jacket was splodged and stained to prove it. ‘A-studyin’ Mr John’s timetables, she is. I’d give her the go-by if I was you.’
But he’d already been heard.
‘Who is it?’ Nan’s voice shouted from behind her door.
‘It’s only me, Mrs Easter,’ Henry said putting his head round the door, but keeping his feet in the corridor just in case he had to make a run for it.
‘Well, come in, come in,’ she said tetchily. ‘Don’t dither.’
‘I could come back another time if it’s inconvenient,’ he offered.
‘Damned timetables,’ she said, scowling at the pile of books that littered her desk. ‘Can’t make head or tail of the beggars.’ John’s meticulous work was too thorough and subtle for her quick mind. And besides, she was cross and ill-humoured that day because Frederick had written to tell her that in October he was going to relinquish his seat as a member of parliament so as to spend more of his time in Westmoreland. And how he imagined she could afford to take six months away from the business every year and join him there as he suggested was more than she could bear to contemplate. Blamed fool!
Her distress was too plain to be ignored. ‘Could I help you in any way?’ he offered.
‘You’d need to be a genius to understand all this,’ she said, stirring the paper about in anger. Her white hair sprang above her forehead in furious curls, and the two deep frown lines above her brown eyes were thunder black. ‘A nice, simple summary. That’s what we need. Something to tell us where to send our merchandise and when, so’s I don’t have to go a-rummaging all through this lot every day. My heart alive, ‘tis enough to make a saint wild, so ‘tis.’
‘I can’t claim to be a genius,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘but I could look at it if you’d like. See if it made sense to me. I’ve a good head for mathematics.’
’Do as you please,’ she said ungraciously. ‘’Tis all one to me. I’m sick to death of the blamed things. I’m off to the warehouse to see Billy.’
And she was gone before he had a chance to say anything else, leaving the room in a sudden silence, with the fire licking in the grate and the folders sliding from her desk.
He should have been shocked by her bad temper, but he wasn’t. He was full of admiration for her, because she was renowned for being old and tough and yet she could admit defeat and weakness. If I can help her, I will, he thought, for she is a very great lady.
He spent the rest of the afternoon poring over John’s careful plans, following them from the very first entry on the very first page. When the clerk came tip-toeing in to light the lamps and bank up the fire he was so immersed in their complications that he didn’t even look up, and when the building closed for the night he gathered up all the folders and took them home with him, leaving a note for Nan to explain what he’d done and to promise he would return them in the morning.
They kept him awake all night, following the thread of each timetable year by year, and gradually unravelling the pattern of John Easter’s plan. Although Henry had suffered from John’s intransigence, the further he read the more he understood the man. Secretive and biased, certainly, but painstaking too, and as determined in his own way as his daughter was in hers. It was an admirable, adaptable plan, and would run as well in 1846 as it had done in 1820. As daylight dimmed the candles and he finished the last page of the last book he realized that he not only understood the plan but could put it into operation. Mathematics had always come easy to him but until that moment it had never occurred to him to value that particular skill.
‘My heart alive!’ Nan said, when he told her. ‘Could ‘ee so? Then I suggest you do it, my dear. I’d be uncommon grateful to ‘ee. Providing you can spare the time from your poetry.’
‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I ain’t so much of a poet as I thought.’ Somehow or other it was possible for him to confess it to her, especially now that he could see that there might be another way to make his mark on the world.
She grinned at him like a conspirator. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I thought as much. Well then, there’s a job tailor-made for ‘ee if ee’ll take it.’
He hesitated, even though he knew it was what he wanted. ‘I’m honoured to have such a position offered,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘but I wouldn’t want to cause any difficulties.’
‘Difficulties?’ she said, as though such an idea was ridiculous. ‘Why should there be difficulties?’
‘It is a post of some responsibility,’ he said. ‘It might be more proper for it to be given to a member of your immediate family.’
His delicacy pleased her. ‘None of ‘em want it, my dear, or they’d have took it long before this. And besides, if you en’t a member of my family now, you very soon will be.’
So he accepted her offer, moving in to John’s old office, and with a salary the same as Will’s had been when he started in the firm. For as his new employer said, ‘We must all be fair, square and above board in this.’
To his relief Caroline was very pleased with the decision, welcoming him into the firm as her equal and saying she couldn’t think of anything more fitting, and by the time Will came home from Ireland at the beginning of April he was settled and almost entirely accepted. Only Edward and his two discontented cronies on the regional board had reservations, and for the time being they were keeping them to themselves.