“I am aware that you spent too much of your time at university in pursuits other than studies, but that is past now. Now you are a man who will sink or swim on his own merits. If you end up having to rent yourself out as a book-keeper, or, worse, if you return to England in rags and penniless, that is your own account. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Fine,” he said, tucking into his roast, “we understand each other. Two weeks from today you depart. Whatever must be done must be completed by then.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked up at me suddenly. “You haven’t made any promises to any young ladies, I presume.”
“No, I have not.” Miss Phillips had been married to David Wilson for nearly two years, and I had no idea what had happened to Miss Kent.
“Good,” he said, taking another bite. “Because there is a young lady you must meet when you get to Spanish Town. A beautiful and charming person, really, and her father and I have had several business dealings together. He is interested in seeing her married, as his health is not the best, and his wife is…gone. The girl has a brother, but he has not the head for business that you have already shown, and the father—Mr. Jonas Mason by name—is quite interested in you as a possible successor. Mason is thrilled that you have finished with Cambridge and made a good accounting of yourself there. A beautiful wife and an extremely generous arrangement: I cannot recommend this situation highly enough.” This last was accompanied by a shake of his fork to emphasize each word. “You will find,” he went on, “once you get to Jamaica, that a young man who arrives there with nothing but his good name and a willingness to work will find no position of value open to him. The best he can hope for is to be hired as a book-keeper at a plantation—the basest position for a white man, for he works directly with the slaves. If, on the other hand, he arrives with letters of recommendation to individuals of substance on the island, he will find a welcome. And if, asyouare positioned to do, he comes with connections and with a plantation and a town house in Spanish Town, and shipping interests already in hand, nothing can stop him from making the very best of himself, unless he does not take advantage of all that is waiting for him.” His eyebrows rose at the end of that last phrase, but I had caught his meaning well enough.
I nodded, as it seemed there was not much more to be said on the subject, and he dove again into his plate, while I fiddled with my food, my heart already pounding with enthusiasm and anxiety at the opportunities before me.
My father said nothing else until he had finished eating. As he placed his fork down, he said, “I shall be leaving on the coach for London in the morning. I have business there, but I shall return to Liverpool in less than a week. I trust you will have arrived by then.”
“Yes, indeed, I will.”
“Fine. You have sufficient funds, I presume.”
“I believe so,” I said, wondering in fact if I did.
He rose and started away, but turned suddenly back, pulling out his purse as he did so. “Young men never have sufficient funds, I have come to learn,” he said. He laid a couple of banknotes on the table for me. “This should take care of whatever debts you may have around town and get you back to Liverpool. You will give me an accounting when you return. Take care you are not delayed.” And with that he left.
***
I had not known my father to be a generous man, but he was a businessman and he knew the value of a good name. I did have a few debts, and what he gave me would more than cover them, and I was grateful for that. I had nearly gotten used to my father’s abruptness, but I felt sure that underneath his manner, he truly did care about me and my future, or else he would not have taken such pains—and expense—to prepare me for it. I left the inn nearly as soon as he did, but I saw no sign of him, and by the end of the day I had indeed paid off my debts and was packed and ready to leave.
The next morning I rose early to see my father off and to arrange to have my belongings shipped to my father’s town house in Liverpool. I kept out only what I needed to carry me through the next few days, and these items I placed in a small knapsack of the sort soldiers use. It was perhaps an inappropriate choice of luggage, but I was determined to travel by horseback and therefore to carry as little as possible. I did not expect to see anyone I knew or needed to impress; I was traveling only to visit old friends who had seen me in much worse states and had loved me anyway.
The weather was fine: a lovely day in mid-June, and as I urged my hired horse a bit faster, the meadow grasses, daisies and cowslips among them, nodded in the breeze. I had come to love riding, and I came to understand how Carrot could have died in such a way, atop a racehorse at full speed, pushing the both of them to the edge of danger. Young men tend to be fools in that respect.
My ride took the better part of a week, and my first stop was Mapleton, where I found the little church where the Reverend Gholson had been the vicar. He had departed years before, and I had no knowledge of his destination, but it was not he I had come to see. I wandered in the graveyard at the side of the church until I found the grave:William Andrew Gholson—Beloved son of the Reverend Richard and Ann Gholson—“Into God’shands we commend him”—and I knelt and placed my hands on it, filling my mind with thoughts of that small, gentle boy beneath the ground.We three,I thought, and kneeling there in the grass I wept.
But I had more to do, and I mounted my horse again, riding for two days, reaching the little church at the edge of the park at Lanham-Hall just as the bell was tolling the evensong. I did not have difficulty finding the grave in that small churchyard, and the carving on the stone still seemed fresh:Thomas George Alfred Fitzcharles. I wept for him as well, and for the time we had not spent together, the letters he had sent, urging me to come, and how I had put him off, and the times he had told me that I was like a little brother to him and I had not responded that he was a better brother to me than the one I had. I told him that now, too late, standing over his grave.
I gazed down the long drive, bowered by lime trees, toward the Hall itself, wondering who would live in it now. It looked empty, forsaken—perhaps there was no one at all there, which seemed fitting to me. Who, after all, could ever take Carrot’s place? I turned away and walked back to the grave once more, caressed the stone, and then returned to my mount and hastened off toward Cambridge to return the horse, and to find a coach toward Liverpool and, ultimately, start my journey to Jamaica.
I might have made a detour to ride past Thornfield-Hall one last time, but I could not bring myself to do so. There was no way in the world that I could have managed to face a final farewell to Thornfield-Hall.
Chapter 18
Ipreceded my father to his town house by only a few hours, but a few hours was enough time for me to settle in and to pace the floor in anticipation. He had said,Take care you are not delayed, and I understood that to mean that he had plans for me before my departure, as indeed he did. First thing the next morning he took me to his tailor and ordered a complete outfitting of clothing suitable to the life of a Jamaican planter. I had thought that after Cambridge I was finished with tutorials, but I could not have been more mistaken. Even before the tailor’s, over breakfast, he started me on the last set of lectures I would ever receive, and they kept on for much of the next week or so, preparing me for the life I was henceforth to lead.
“You are used to our social order here in England,” he said, “the upper classes who wield influence and power—and below them the merchant classes and the other educated people and lastly the working people and the cottage folk, and at the bottom, the poorhouse dwellers. Do you know where you fit in this scheme?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” I said.
He chuckled dismissively. “Do you? Do you really?”
“We are of the merchant class, surely.”
“Surely.Surely?What of Thornfield?”
“But…you are—”
“I am what? And what of Rowland, what is he?”
