“I do not pretend to aspire to the heights you occupy, Mr. Tillingham,” she said. “But I believe I am in a unique position to edit my father’s work.”
“I would not wish to squabble over a small book of letters for which the audience will be respectable at best, even with my name on the boards,” he said. “Against the scale of this international calamity, for which we are all making such sacrifice of blood and tears, I know you will share my distaste for petty argument.” He turned to look at her, lowering his heavy eyelids in an approximation of the self-effacing stare of a saint.
“You are right,” she said. “In such a tragic time, I should be grateful that my father’s name is not just to be considered irrelevant.”
“We must all suffer from such anxiety,” he said in what seemed a moment of unguarded honesty. “In war, age may be swept aside by vigor and art crushed by mere sensationalism. In our careful stewardship of your father’s work, we may strike a blow for both.”
“I assume you mean to invoke an authorial plural pronoun,” said Beatrice. “People keep saying ‘we,’ but I find they rarely mean to include me.”
“Why not give the matter some further thought, Miss Nash?” said Mr. Tillingham. “If you continue to feel strongly, I shall be happy to recuse myself and return your manuscript unread. If, upon further reflection, you think me the man for the job, why then I would be honored to use your drafted notes to augment my research, and perhaps I could find the time to look over one or two of your other pieces?”
She said nothing. She had to quell a childish thrill that the famous writer might read her work.
“And you would of course come to dinner and give me all your thoughts on the subject,” he added, rising with difficulty from the wooden bench. “Good day, Miss Nash.” He kissed her hand with his dry lips and went away along the high street with his peculiar shuffling walk, tapping with his silver-headed stick.
As she watched him go, Beatrice knew she had been almost ready to put aside her anger for a seat at the great man’s dinner table, and she smiled to think how much closer Mr. Tillingham had come to bribing her than poor Mayor Fothergill with his ten pounds. She wondered how many other young writers and artists Mr. Tillingham had seduced so easily with his fame and his reputation. As she rose to continue down towards the lower street, she told herself that if she let him edit the book, it would be for the sake of her father’s legacy, not for the opportunity to be counted among the great man’s young protégés. But as she walked home, her desire was all to be welcomed into such a fortunate circle.
—
Out on the marshes, the sun was burning Snout’s back as he bent low to the burnished steel of the railway tracks. Heat radiated from the brown timbers that anchored the line to the ground, and sweat matted his hair and trickled down his chest. There was little shade. Only scrubby trees and rough thickets of bramble separated the railway from the fields. Rooks lived in some of the thickets and flapped about him, cawing in their angry language and pecking the ground, all the while holding their black wings aside as if trying to shed a wet mackintosh. Sometimes, when his bucket grew heavy, he would step aside under one of the scrubby trees, hawthorn mostly, with thin, shivering leaves, and rest awhile, smelling where flaming cinders blown from passing trains had burnt circles into the grasses and turned tree limbs to charcoal.
He seemed to be the only one who collected the spilled coal and coke from the trains in the summer. He wondered at the short memories of those who only thought to scrabble along the line when the frost was on the fields and the price of coal went up. His father paid him a penny a bucket to add his foragings to the forge’s coal cellar. But Snout saved another third of every bucket for himself and stored it against the winter, when the town ladies who beckoned him from their windows were willing to slip him tuppence to empty his bucket into their scuttles. With the price of coal soaring he had some hopes of more this year. His storehouse was an old badger hole in a steep bank where the railway crossed a stream. A mat of brambles hid it, and as trains came only a few times a day, it was safe from passing eyes.
Last summer he had employed two younger boys to pick with him, offering them a ha’penny a bucket. But they had proved to be lazy and prone to complaining. One of them, unhappy to be paid a ha’penny for the half bucket he had taken hours to fill, fetched his father, who threatened to box Snout’s ears if he didn’t hand over more. Snout had been quick to produce a shiny tuppence, but as he expected, the father gave him a hard punch to the side of his head anyway and threatened to fetch the railway officials.
Such were the vagaries of business. Snout did not dwell on his failures but rather on his accumulating wealth, which he kept in a glass jar hidden beneath a loose board under his bed and known only to him and his sister, Abigail, who could keep a secret better than any grown man or woman. He did not play with the jar, or raid it for sweet money, or aspire to turn coins into gold buttons on a waistcoat like his great-grandmother’s people. He just regularly lifted up the board, and unscrewed the metal lid, to drop in more coins against the day when he might leave Rye.
He had no intention of staying to follow his father, who had been taken in at the forge when he married Snout’s mother. His father had the best eye for horses in the county, and there was often a nice piebald Gypsy cob, with hairy mane and feathered legs, tucked in the large box stall behind the forge awaiting a sale. He had the knack of talking all horses into sweetness and all buyers into believing they were fine judges of horseflesh, and as he only sold good horses, they were never proved wrong. So they liked him and his reputation spread, but Snout saw how the recommendations sometimes came with a finger laid along the nose and a whisper of his father’s Romany pedigree.
He also saw how his great-grandmother never came to their home. He would see her walking with her basket of lucky white heather, knocking on all the doors except the little cottage next to the forge. Not a cup of water or a chair in the shade was she offered by her grandson’s family. If Snout passed her in the town, he would step into the road to pass her and they would never look at each other. It was his own shame at this unspoken arrangement, more than the taunts of others, which made him yearn to leave.
He had visions of owning a business in some prosperous town where he would be respected, and had even promised Abigail that she might come to look after him. But now Miss Nash had explained about scholarships, his plans had a new urgency that came from being possible. A train whistle sounded and the clanking black engine came rushing by, spewing steam and cinders, dragging its blue and scarlet wooden carriages, wheels shrieking and banging against the steel rails. When it was gone, he stepped casually across to the far side and picked up a rook, knocked senseless by the train. The rooks never seemed to learn their lesson. The train drivers would sometimes stop and pick them up, but today the train went on and Snout knew his father would not be averse to a rook pie for dinner.