The River of No Return Bee Ridgway (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📖

out, and summoned up a small smile. “No thank you, Sister. I’m sorry I . . .” He fought the phrase stressed you out and came up, after a panicked trawl through his memory, with the correct expression. “I am sorry I discomfited you. I quite literally forgot myself in Spain, and I am afraid I forgot myself again just now. Of course I will not, indeed cannot, renounce my title. I am glad to be home, and I am eager to take up the reins again.” He inclined his head to her. “And I am quite willing to apprentice myself to your greater knowledge of how to manage this blasted place. Are you willing to serve as my steward? Alongside Mr. Cooper, of course.”

She set the teapot down again. “Mr. Cooper ran off with a seamstress from Tavistock. Mrs. Cooper is now the housekeeper at Castle Dar.”

Nick paused, assimilating that information. “And you were selling land because you need the money? The land . . . it isn’t in good heart? What are the problems?”

“No, it isn’t for the money.” She shook her head. “Or rather, it is for the money, but mostly it’s because everything has changed, including money itself. All the silver’s drained away to China and India, and now into the war. There’s hardly enough silver left in Britain to make a child’s rattle! They’re overstriking foreign coins, asking us to accept slips of paper and thin little tokens that represent nothing at all.”

Nick raised his eyebrows. “My apologies, but I have no idea what you are talking about, Clare.”

She looked at him curiously, her head on one side. “I suppose you are more familiar with lead than with silver. But honestly, Nick, you will have to start noticing the way things are if you are to make Blackdown a success. The weight of a coin in your hand will tell you everything about the trouble we’re in. And not just here. All over Britain. Nothing adds up. It’s a different time now.”

“I know it is,” Nick said. “Believe me. And I want to learn from you.”

“So humble!” But her smile was sad.

“Tell me what happened,” Nick said. “Just tell me the truth.”

“All right.” She glanced down, then up at him again. “You know, you are like the old Nick again. The way you were before Father died. Kind. I wouldn’t have thought war would do that to a man. Open his heart.”

Nick blinked, confused. “I thought we were talking about the degradation of British coinage. What does that have to do with my heart? Or with the estate, for that matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” She sighed. “Except that I am glad you are more like your old self. It makes it easier to tell you the state of things here. You have heard, perhaps, of the riots a few years back? The Luddites? But I am ahead of myself. After you left, we began to lose tenants. To America. To the wars. Two men didn’t come back from Spain. Ben Tucker and Red Wycliff. Jonas Hill came back and he seemed physically fit but . . .” She paused.

“He was unable to work,” Nick said.

“Yes. And one day he just went away.” She searched his face, her eyes lingering again on his scar.

He reached up and touched it, and her eyes shifted away. “It’s just a scar,” he said. “It matters not how or why or when.”

“The war—”

“Was terrible. The land is underworked, then?” He turned the subject firmly around, like a plow at a furrow’s end.

“Yes.” She followed his lead. “We lost more men to the manufactories than we lost to the war; they came one by one to say they were going. It wasn’t that they weren’t well treated here. It was that you were dead, or rather, that the marquessate was dissolved. Suddenly Blackdown was only acreage. The men felt free to put off their fathers’ shoes and strike out on their own. Off they went, filled with hope. But then there were the riots, and one of our men who had left to work in the north was killed. Executed actually.” She drew a shuddering breath. “John Stock.”

“Good God!” John’s face flashed before Nick’s eyes.

“Yes. He was executed with sixteen other men in York a little over a year ago. For machine breaking. His brother Asa was transported. Their wives and children came back to us here.”

“Are there no men left at all?”

“There should have been, but the year before last there was the magnificent harvest, so by the time of John’s execution the tenants were in such low spirits, eight families left en masse for America.”

Nick had to search his brain for why a magnificent harvest would crush morale. The answer came slowly. “Rents,” he finally said.

“The corn, Nick, I wish you could have seen it. By July the stalks were bent with the weight of the seed. It was as if England was Eden, with the fruit of the earth bursting forth in praise of creation. But the more enchanting the countryside, the more fecund and rich, the more the tenants fell into despair. They harvested that magnificent crop in fear. It was the same all over England and it was as clear as day: The price of corn must fall. In June it was at a hundred and seventeen shillings a quarter. A year later, Nick, imagine; it had fallen to just sixty-nine, and it remains so! The tenants could not make their rents, so of course I dropped them, but with John executed, the war over, and all of Russia poised to drown us in corn, everyone knew the prices would not rise again soon. And Blackdown cannot survive on low rents, at least not if it is to remain what it is.”

“So the men left.”

“Yes. The strongest and best farmers, of course. They pooled their resources and bought land in America, in a place called Ohio, and they left with hardly a fare-thee-well. They have named their new town ‘Blackdown,’ but they own it,