The Rich Are with You Always Read Free

his arm around her. "Thou'll be over sixty one day, see thee." He put his lips to her ear. "And I sh'll still crave after thee."
      She grazed her ear on his moustache and shivered, serious now. "Nay," she said softly, dropping back into dialect too. "Leave off with thee!" But despite this verbal rejection, she did not repel his caresses. The Walter Thornton catharsis was over—until the next time.
      Far out over the park the sun slipped below the pall of rain cloud, moments before it set. In that brief interval it suffused the canopy of unrelieved grey with a raw, burning red.
      "Look at that," John said. "Promises fair tomorrow."
      "Talking of promises fair," Nora said, her eyes baleful with the borrowed fire, "what of our host?"
      John sighed. "You are sure we need to go into ironfounding?" he asked. He did not want to tell her yet how inconclusive his talk with Sir George had been. Nor did he want to confess that he felt threatened in some obscure way by the very idea of partnership with the man.
      She bit her lip. "You speak as though it was me forcing us to it."
      He did not answer. She pulled away from him then and grasped his arms, compelling him to face her. "It's our business," she said. "Not me."
      He nodded, still unhappy.
      "I'm not often wrong in these things," she said.
      He smiled then. "That's the annoying part. You're never wrong." He touched her forehead gently. "I trust that instinct. Never fear I don't."
      "Yet you hesitate."
      He pulled down the corners of his mouth ruefully. "I think you and Chambers with your ledgers and balances don't see the half of it."
      "What half?" She was not belligerent or challenging. She knew too well that the financial insight which had grown during the years she had spent in managing their books was only one small element in their business.
      "Trouble like Sir George Beador, for a start," he said. If only he could put his disquiet into words!
      "Drop him! We only took him up to get land and influence cheap. But we don't need either. Not cheap. It's only our greed."
      He shook his head. "We must build in Stockton. We both agree it's the best place in the whole kingdom. And we can't build there without Beador. Not now we've taken him up. We can't afford to make an enemy of him. But"—he waved Sir George away to a distant horizon—"that's not the real worry. It's the permanence of a foundry, d'ye see? Till now we've had nothing that's permanent. Not even the depots. It's what I'm used to. I'm a travelling man. But with a foundry we'll have static plant, a fixed gang of workers." He laid his fist heavily on the sill at each item. "Offices. Staff. Fixed deliveries. Orders. Supply troubles. Labour troubles. It's not—my skill, my instinct, it doesn't run that way."
      "You've never been one to turn from troubles. Not profitable ones."
      "Aye." He laughed. "I'm as keen on profit as the next man." He pinched her cheek lightly. "And as the next woman too, belike. So I sh'll do it. I shall build. All I'm saying is, don't think that because your books say it's one-tenth of our assets, this new foundry's going to be only one-tenth of our troubles."
      His answer pleased her. He had never committed himself so fully to the idea of going into ironfounding; until now he had always called his talks with Beador mere "soundings." She did not again raise her unanswered question about Sir George.
      "By the way," he called to her as he was dressing, "I'll likely see Thornton next week. Down in Exeter. I've heard Brunel's asked him to take over daily charge down there."
      "Well," she said, "I don't expect we shall ever escape him." But she barely thought of Walter Thornton; instead, she wondered what dismal things John had discovered about Sir George—things that had made him lay such an elaborate false trail for her as his own alleged fear of possessing one small factory.

Chapter 2

    When the ladies killed that day's fox for the