Hector lay on the bed next to her, with their heads almost touching, and looked up at the ceiling. “What are you staring at?”
She pointed to a thin crack edging a rough patch of plaster.
“Looks like the Thames at Windsor to me,” he said.
“More like the Webb’s Brewery sign in Aberbeeg, or maybe Mussolini’s profile,” Caitrin said as she stood and moved toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to have myself a nice hot bath.”
“Lucky you.”
“I’ll leave the water for you if you want. And the Madison-Hardynges worked out we’re not married, so Penelope graciously made up another bed for me.”
“Where?”
“I’ll be right next door, so no snoring—or sleepwalking. Good night.”
She waved and left before he could reply.
11
The morning was colder, with a frost that promised an early winter as they left Walvert Frome Hall and turned north. At Studmarsh village they stopped for Hector to make his London telephone call before continuing on. The road, narrow and twisting, was empty, as was the color-drained landscape.
“There are no cattle, no sheep, no people,” Caitrin said. “Not even any birds. We could be on a different planet.”
“We are moving toward the north of England. It’s a different country up here.”
“What did London have to say for themselves when you called?”
“They agreed that we should go to one more home and then drive straight to Marlton. Soon we’ll have to come off the side roads, though, because there are so many small towns and villages to slow us down that we’ll never get anywhere.”
“Would you like me to drive?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t beg; you’re big enough to steal. I’ll say it louder: would you like me to drive?”
“You?”
“There’s no one else in the car. Me. Why not?”
“I just assumed—”
“Because I was a woman I couldn’t drive?”
“Not so much that, but it is rather a big car and towing the loaded horse box makes it handle differently.”
“I understand. So, I repeat, at the risk of sounding boring, would you like me to drive?”
“All right, after we stop for petrol. Thank you.”
By late afternoon they had crossed the Manchester Ship Canal; filled up the petrol tank at Warrington, where Caitrin got behind the wheel; and taken the A49 north. The daylight was absorbed by a cloud-heavy sky, which made the land dark. The towns, row after parallel row of anonymous houses, were dim, without contrast or detail, and unemployed men clustered at every corner.
“Same country, different country,” Caitrin said.
“I beg . . . sorry, what did you say?”
She gestured to the groups of men. “This morning we left the Madison-Hardynges with their thousand acres of farmland and seven hundred acres of woods and orchards, and now we’re passing town after town filled with men who haven’t worked in years. Poverty and no opportunity. Same country, different country.”
She glanced at Hector. He was a handsome man, and kind, but he would never, could never, understand working-class life.
“When we were in the Cotswolds, we were close to Sudeley Castle,” Hector said. “The Sudeley name was extinct by the fifteenth century. Other families lived there, made fortunes, wasted them, and the castle fell into ruins, although it was a pub at one point, the Castle Arms. In the eighteen hundreds, John and William Dent bought the ruins and rebuilt the castle. They were not nobility; they were merchants who made their fortune selling gloves. Death duties brought it all to an end about ten years ago.”
“I don’t understand the connection.”
“There’s more.” Hector continued, “The English revere Richard the Lionheart as a legendary hero, a true-blue Englishman. The country paid a staggering ransom to free him from the clutches of the German king Henry VI, but he spent only six months in total in England, spoke little English, and mulcted the people for money to finance his endless continental wars. Some English hero.”
“Now I understand even less.”
Hector rubbed his face, blinked, and stared through the windscreen. “What I am saying is that there is no rhyme or reason to wealth or fame or poverty. Your grandfather must have had a miserable life to leave Ireland for work in a Welsh coal mine, but you, his granddaughter, will have a much better one. It’s Fortune’s Wheel, and we’re all on it, Caitrin. It’s always turning, and we have no control over it.”
“Have you ever had to worry just once in your life about paying the rent, Hector? Or how to afford new shoes, or where the next meal is coming from?”
Hector shook his head.
“I’m going to put a spoke in that damn slow-moving wheel so the people at the bottom can get off and find a better life. And the ones at the top need to climb down and help them. Or get torn from their privileged perch.”
