Whatever Happened to Mary Bold Read online

  Whatever Happened to Mary Bold

  A tale which owes its inspiration and most of its characters to Anthony Trollope but which was, in fact, written by an admirer called

  FRANCES MURRAY

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

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  CHAPTER ONE

  'as if a builder didn't know better how to build a house…'

  Just at the time when the Prussians and the French were snarling at each other and the prospect of war between them was becoming every day more inevitable the Member of Parliament for Barset East died. His absence was little remarked in the House as he had rarely spoken there, being, on the whole, uninterested in politics. It was little remarked in Barset East either as he had appeared there even more rarely than he had appeared in the House. He had succeeded the man who had displaced Squire Gresham and was very much a party man and a party man of the old-fashioned kind. His party's policies had cared adequately for his constituents' interests and there had been little need for him to discover either what those interests or those policies were. His own interest was in ancient history and he spent much time in the House of Commons library reading about the politics of Ancient Greece and Rome upon which he was something of an authority, though one might ask him in vain what was the subject currently being debated in the House of which he was a member.

  However, he appeared conscientiously for all Divisions and to make his way into the correct lobby was as much as his party demanded of him. Barset East was not a demanding charge and Mr. Lovegood, for such had been his name, had rarely appeared there except to require that he be elected yet again which the county had duly done on three occasions. He was found dead in the library of the House, with a volume of Gibbon open before him and a note in his handwriting challenging one of Gibbon's conclusions but it appeared that he had died before being able to note down his grounds for doing so.

  The machinery of the House creaked into motion and a notice went out that there would be a by-election in the constituency of Barset East on such a date. The Duke of Omnium who was all-powerful in Barset East, the de Courcy interests being more in Barset West, selected as candidate a distant cousin of his own. This caused a good deal of surprise, as it was not the Duke's way to exercise nepotism. The choice was criticised both inside and outside the House. However, it was not the Duke's habit, nor indeed his inclination, to take notice of such criticism and on this occasion his selection was wholly justified by the calibre of the man. Sensing that times were changing since the passage of the latest Parliamentary Reform Act, he had chosen an ambitious man anxious to make his name in the world of politics, one Charles Palliser Thorne, for the county was beginning to require better representation that it had enjoyed hitherto. Furthermore, this Charles Thorne was also a distant relation of the Thornes of Ullathorne in the county which, as the Thornes were an ancient and much respected county family, would do no harm at all should the election be contested. Mr. Lovegood had, on two occasions been returned unopposed.

  The other party were taken somewhat by surprise by the Duke's speedy and unexpected choice and before they could rouse themselves to select a suitable candidate, they were preempted by one Edwin Purser, self-styled 'Mayor' of Barchester, a prosperous builder who proposed to stand for the constituency himself and demanded that the ‘other party’, which in effect meant the de Courcy interest, back him. As the other party entertained very little hope of being able to gain the seat and were glad to have been saved the trouble of selecting some other political tyro who would be prepared to pay through the nose for the privilege of losing they agreed to do so and promptly forgot all about him.

  However, Mr. Purser was no political tyro: he had been upon the city's political scene since he was in his twenties and he was now forty-seven. He held political views, which were as ill constructed as the buildings he erected. He professed to speak for 'the people', though one might be puzzled to understand just who were the people for whom he intended to speak. He raucously condemned the strata of Barchester society which, so he claimed (and with some truth) despised him and all his works, which is to say, the Close and the High Church adherents in the City and their friends and High Tory colleagues in the County. The Evangelicals and the Nonconformists were less opposed to his schemes but mainly on the grounds that those who raged publicly against the High and Dry party in the church must, in some senses at least, be ranged on their side.

  In this they were mistaken. 'Mayor' Purser was on no side but his own. He disliked the Anglican Church worthies because they opposed his scheming, criticized much of his work and regarded him as a greedy upstart. Nor did he regard 'the people' for whom he claimed to speak as other than shiftless, greedy, and lazy. How could it be otherwise, he would say to his toadies in the private bar in the George and Dragon, when he and others like him had risen to eminence through industry and thrift. To spoil such people with luxuries such as running water, gaslight and drainage would take away any initiative they might have and they would become even more shiftless and lazy.

  Mr. Purser's father had been an incomer to east Barset, the youngest son of a prosperous farmer in Essex. He had used his patrimony to obtain a farm in the low-lying fields to the south of the city. There he had intended to provide vegetables for the growing city of Barchester and so he did for a number of years. During this time he married and had engendered one son who was our Edwin Purser. Mrs. Purser died soon after the birth of her son and Mr. Purser did not remarry.

  At the start of the 1850s the coming of the railway had made the Pursers prosperous for not only did the railway company wish the railway to cross the farm, they discovered on it a claypit of considerable extent which the elder Purser exploited to make the bricks from which the railway bridge over the Bar was built. Purser had continued to make bricks even after the completion of the line and the departure of the railway builders and he had expanded the works three times in twenty years. His son, Edwin, had set up a builder's business using his father's bricks to build little new houses on the outskirts of Barchester in which dwelt the growing number of clerks and shop-workers who served the city. They were ugly and ill built for Mr. Purser junior scorned to employ any new-fangled architect.

  "As if a builder didn't know better how to build a house than any jumped-up good-for-nothing holding a worthless scrap of paper who had never so much as carried a hod up a ladder."

  Not that Mr. Edwin Purser had done much carrying of hods, for he had entered upon the trade as his father's son and such time as he spent upon the building sites were wholly supervisory and latterly he spent more time in the counting house watching the profits accrue and attending to his other interests for the Pursers had fingers in many
pies. At this time there was a great demand for bricks so that when the senior Purser died and left the business to his son, the brickworks were employing some hundreds of people and Purser junior had supplied them with rows of back-to-back brick houses built close to the works on the low-lying ground in the angle between the two rivers at the confluence of the Hoggle with the Bar, an area known as Hoggle End, which, as my readers may recall, made part of the Parish of Hogglestock, a living held at one time by the Reverend Mr. Josiah Crawley.

  These fields had made part of the elder Purser’s domain though he had never made use of them, as they were meadows supplying hay and he had no animals to feed. His son supplied his labourers with a roof over their heads, a place to eat and sleep, but very little else. The dwellings were sadly lacking in such luxuries as drains or running water or gas and their occupants were, on the whole, unhealthy. They were engaged in hard and heavy labour with wet clay and they lived in dwellings which were, without exception, chilly and damp. They, and often their wives and children as well, walked to their work, crossing the Bar by a footbridge built alongside the railway bridge at the instance of Mr. Purser senior. One cannot be surprised therefore that Hoggle End was the venue for much of the disease and misery which afflicted the people of Barchester. Epidemics rioted there and, in the time of the cholera, that fell disease had commenced in Hoggle End and spread thence into the poorer areas of the city itself where it had killed a great many. As Mr. Purser, junior, had become Chairman of the City Council the year before the epidemic struck he succeeded in suppressing the demand made by the High Church party that an enquiry be made into conditions at Hoggle End and that he be required to remedy the faults that had made his tenants so vulnerable to this horrible disease.

  No enquiry was made; Hoggle End buried its dead and mourned them and nothing was done either about the lack of drains or about changing the water-supply from the river which, by the time the Hogglenders drew their bucketfuls from the muddy bank or the road-end pumps had passed through the city into which the citizens' waste had already emptied and was, thus, unfit to drink. This matter was also ignored by the Town Council who were, many of them, under an obligation to Purser who was the richest man among them and given to lending money where it might do him some good. This was the man who had taken it upon himself to seek membership for the constituency of Barchester East

  Labelling himself 'Democrat', Mr. Purser set out on his campaign, denouncing Mr. Thorne as the tool of those members of society who were most opposed to him and castigating those prepared to vote for a man who was, he said repeatedly, in the pocket of a Duke and a crawling lackey of the aristocracy. Such men, Mr. Purser declared, were the disease which gnawed at society from within and weakened that society's resolve to rise in the world and to govern itself, not to have laws laid down for it by an insolent minority who thought themselves better than their neighbours. Charles Thorne for his part had decided to ignore Purser as if he did not exist, and this policy irritated and angered Purser almost to apoplexy. The Jupiter newspaper, that confident voice of the nation, which Purser had confidently expected to support him, had, since our earlier acquaintance with it, changed its editor. Instead of Tom Towers who might have written in Purser's support, given sufficient incentive, another man was in the editorial chair and this one had a mind which enquired after such things as bad housing and poor working conditions and information about Hoggle End and the conditions endured by its occupants at their work had been supplied to the newspaper by a correspondent who signed himself One who knows. Others who knew declared that the style of those letters was very similar to that of the Reverend Mr. Crawley, once perpetual curate of Hogglestock and now Rector of St. Ewold's and the renowned author of that influential work Poverty, its Cause and Cure.

  Purser retaliated with a letter repudiating such criticism as biased and inaccurate, signed 'Democrat'. This, unfortunately for Mr. Purser, was printed in that issue of the paper in which a long feature appeared written by a gentleman in the employ of the newspaper who had been to Hoggle End and seen for himself and asserted that the details previously supplied by 'One who knows' had, in his view, underestimated the sordid conditions which he had seen for himself. He waxed pathetic on the subject of want, disease and misery seen in this vicinity. And there, to the extreme dissatisfaction of Mr. Purser, the matter was resting on the day that Mr. Crawley's second grandson was christened which is, effectively, the day on which our narrative begins.

  CHAPTER TWO

  'Are we at the poor Duchess? What a sad business'

  Since the lamentable affair of Mr. Crawley and the cheque for twenty pounds the tenancy of the Dragon, as it was commonly designated among its customers (Saint George and the unfortunate victim of the dragon's appetite being long forgotten), had changed hands. Mr. Stringer, the original landlord, relinquished the lease when his brother Dan Stringer was discovered to be the real culprit. Mrs. Arabin who owned the hostelry had chosen from those who applied to take his place a Scotsman, one Mr Grant.

  How Mrs. Arabin, who was the much respected and ultra respectable wife of the Dean of Barchester, one if the Highest and Driest of all that coterie, had come by such a questionable possession is readily explained: it had been left to her by her first husband, John Bold, whose father, Doctor Bold, had bought it soon after he came into his own inheritance. This inheritance consisted largely of house property for, as Grandfather Bold had declared to his doctor son, "...bricks and mortar don't vanish as paper do, leaving you with nothing but a draft on the parish-pump." The good doctor had heeded his father's advice and bought a good many properties during his lifetime for he was a man of means and he had left both his son and his daughter in comfortable circumstances.

  However, that young John Bold, who was a doctor also, though not the doctor his father had been if you were to believe the Barcastrians, had succumbed to a fever when he had been married only a year and a month and had left all he had to his wife and she, discovering herself to be with his child after he died, regarded herself as holding them in trust for her little Johnny Bold. Consequently, she had disposed of none of these properties, even after marrying Dean Arabin, and amongst them, and not the least profitable, was The George and Dragon.

  The new landlord was a forward-looking man and he had wasted no time in improving the old inn to which little had been done since stage coaches clattered through the Barchester streets and disgorged their passengers at its doors. He had pressed upon his landlady the necessity for repairs to the roof and for the renovation of the stables. Mrs. Arabin had agreed to these and had stipulated only that the repairs for which she was responsible, such as the roof and the plumbing, be spread over a reasonable time. Mr. Grant had agreed to this. He was an experienced business-man, as the new phrase was, and knew very well that the railway had brought about changes in travel, which had to be catered for by innkeepers such as himself. For example, in these days there were many more ladies travelling than there had been in the days of stage-coaches, 'Ladies Only' compartments being a much more convenient and comfortable way to travel about the countryside than on the cramped and stuffy inside seats of a stage-coach or in the mailcoaches which sacrificed comfort to speed.

  Mr. Grant, whose establishment was less than five minutes walk from the Barchester Railway Station, redecorated the old Coffee Room of the Dragon, laid a carpet and replaced the scrubbed table and benches with small round tables and comfortable chairs. During the winter there was always a cheerful fire and an equally cheerful waitress who would serve tea and cakes and who welcomed children. Furthermore, he had caused to be installed behind a discreet plush curtain a most up-to-the-minute 'retiring room' with a washbasin and other conveniences, most agreeable to ladies who had come from Silverbridge to Barchester by the nine fifteen a.m. train to benefit by the greater range of shops in the city and had to wait for the five o'clock train back to Silverbridge. The waiting room at the Station, by comparison, was chilly and the ‘retiring room' spartan indeed.

&nb
sp; This novelty was still known as the ‘coffee room’ but it had rapidly become a meeting place for Barchester worthies. No one now could comment adversely on a gentleman seen to emerge from the Dragon during the morning for it was wholly possible that he had merely indulged himself in a cup of the excellent coffee. Furthermore, ladies might refresh themselves there without incurring criticism, which was a pleasing novelty as well as a much appreciated convenience. As one Silverbridge lady had remarked, "It is such a joy to be able to sit dowwn during one of these excursions without having to trouble one's friends. The benches in the Station are not at all restful. So cold and draughty and so hard."

  Mr. Grant saw his profits soar in the first year and used them to turn the dark and dingy apartment in which meals had been served to those staying at the inn into a Public Dining Room; covering the bare boards of the floor with a carpet and hanging gaily coloured chintz curtains at the windows. The long scrubbed table he replaced by smaller ones so that meals need no longer be communal affairs of a set meal served at a set time. The backless benches he replaced by comfortable chairs with upholstered seats. In there, he served plain, well-cooked meals at a reasonable price and provided yet another innovation. The Barchester ladies already accustomed to drink tea in the Coffee Room were now gradually making their way into the new Dining Room and, on occasion, shared meals there with their menfolk. Until that time such meals had been available only for travellers and for those in lodgings where meals were not provided and few women had ventured therein. After a year or so, the Dining Room found itself almost as well patronized as the Coffee Room.

  Furthermore, the word went forth that the bedrooms at the Dragon were equally agreeable; the rooms were clean and warm, the beds comfortable and the wash-water generous. However, Mr. Grant changed little elsewhere at the Dragon. He knew better than to scare away custom from the Public Bar. Admittedly, the great room was cleaner; the flagged floor was swept twice a day and scrubbed every morning, the tankards shone, the taps glittered and it was now possible to see through the windows, but the beer (brewed on the premises) was as good as ever and no one objected to a pipe of tobacco or an occasional song. Mr. Grant knew better than to make many changes in that aspect of his business, which brought him in his annual rent and something over.