Dire Shenanigans (The Making of a Man Series, Book 2) Read online

  He suspected that very nearly any unmarried man would do but he was particularly attractive, or so it seemed. He was well off, of course, a businessman with affairs in the South of England as well as his interest in her brother’s wonderful new company. Besides that, he was a strong, upright gentleman – well-spoken and probably of a good education. He had no family, but she came from shopkeeper parents, so that was of no concern.

  They had taken tea together on half a dozen occasions and she certainly welcomed his presence. He returned his empty cup and caught her eye, smiling his best, to her evident pleasure. He took his leave politely, taking care to display his gentlemanly ways, after the correct hour of a tea visit, wandered quietly off to his rooms where he changed into evening dress before making his way to the Criterion Music Hall and an evening of happily vulgar entertainment.

  He laughed at the double entendres of the comedians, sang along to the choruses, admired the tumblers and jugglers, appreciated the leg show of the dancers, drank a couple of pints and ate a hot pie and turned down the offers of the young ladies clustered outside the doors. He occasionally patronised a very respectable house but would not take the risks that street-walkers offered. By the time he had reached his lonely rooms again he had made up his mind – the bachelor’s life was ended for him, this was no way to spend his free hours, night after night, year after unending year.

  “I wonder, Mr Robinson, whether we might discuss a personal matter?”

  Robinson had talked with his sister, regretting her decline into spinsterhood; she was a good girl and would make any man a competent wife. He had idly discovered that she found Mr Williams a very fine figure of a man and on realising Sergeant Bill’s intent was not at all unhappy to enter a discussion with him.

  “Your sister, Miss Susan, sir, is a very pleasant young lady and I would wish to pay my addresses to her. You will be aware that I am easily able to purchase a house and maintain a wife and family…”

  “Susan is well of age, Mr Williams, and must make up her own mind on such matters. I will be willing indeed to tell her that you wish to speak to her and you will have my unquestioning support, sir.”

  He was invited to tea next evening and Robinson drank his cup very quickly and then found reason to leave the room. He had obviously spoken with his sister and she was eagerly awaiting a proposal. Matters came to a rapid resolution between them and Robinson returned to find them sat side by side on the couch, to his great approval.

  “Do you intend a long engagement, sister – and brother-to-be?”

  They laughed with him – he was showing very willing.

  “I must purchase a house, Mr Robinson, and then, of course, furnish it. I do not expect that to take many weeks.”

  “Good! No sense hanging around, I say. Where will you buy, Mr Williams?”

  “On the railway line, out of town a few miles, I think, in one of the small towns where the air is cleaner. There are many possibilities, even in industrial Lancashire.”

  “Towards Southport is much recommended, or out on the Welsh side, towards Chester. Thirty minutes on a train takes you into the countryside or onto a long sandy beach – an ideal place to live.”

  Sergeant Bill travelled south that weekend, possibly for the last time for some considerable while.

  “Getting married, Sergeant Bill? You said you might. Where are you thinking of living?”

  “Near Southport, up on the coast north of Liverpool and clean. Long sand dunes there, can’t be any good for growing, but I reckon I could buy a house and a hundred acres inside my budget, just because it’s useless land. Think of how youngsters could grow up there, sir!”

  “Leave it to me. I ought to have contacts who can find a bit of land without too much bother. I have sold the firm, by the way. The deal was all above board, it worked out. There’s a proposal to build docks at Southampton, at the end of the railway lines. Guess who had a warehouse and yards just where they wanted to plant their wharves and sidings! In the event they were completely open with me – told me straight just why they wanted the business. They said that the firm itself fitted in with their own trading and would let them branch out into the West Country, but their major interest was the land in Southampton. They said that they would have tried to buy Southampton on its own except that they had heard I wanted to get out.”

  “Now all you have to do is work out what comes next, sir.”

  “Easy – I’m building those factories I talked about with Richard and we’ll set about buying up some chemists too, just like you’re doing up north. That will be enough to keep me awake and give me an interest, something to do with my days. For the bulk of the money, I’m taking advice on that, finding the best way of leaving it to him!”

  Sergeant Bill went north again a fortnight later with instructions to visit a lawyer in Manchester.

  Chambers in the city centre, large and comfortable, names engraved on a vast window, a young clerk sat at a desk behind the open front door.

  “Mr William Williams to see Mr Ingram.”

  The clerk glanced at a list in front of him, smiled and led him through the door, knocked at a large office.

  “Do take a seat, Mr Williams! Sir Godby Burke has instructed us to purchase a freehold for you, preferably in the neighbourhood of Southport. We have been able to find a place that I would suggest will satisfy Sir Godby’s instructions almost to the letter. The best course, sir, will be to view the property first. To that end I would suggest that we might meet on the platform at Southport at, say ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  Sergeant Bill agreed and caught a fast train to Liverpool, reached his rooms with time in hand to go out for a meal. He reflected as he ate that dining in his own house would have been much more comfortable. Better cooking as well, in all probabilities, and someone to talk to, and to welcome him home.

  Mr Ingram was waiting on the platform when he arrived, presumably having used an earlier train, though he might have stayed overnight – he did not say. There was a carriage and pair with a driver waiting outside.

  “An open carriage on a day like today, Mr Williams. Your house is only two miles from the station, but why walk?”

  Why indeed, he was a very well paid gentleman these days.

  They travelled fifteen minutes out of town and turned through an open gate into a short carriage drive, pulled up in front of a modern red brick house on three floors with attics. It was not small. It was robustly ugly with turrets to each corner and a great black Gothic front doorway.

  “Built not fifteen years ago, Mr Williams, for the benefit of the family of Lord Barford. He died unfortunately young and his widow and both children perished in the last epidemic in London. The heir, a cousin, has decided that the Lancashire air holds no attraction for him and he has no use for a residence here.”

  Typhoid fever had been particularly virulent in London in its last visit, taking the life of the Prince Consort amidst many others.

  There was a belt of woodland to either side of the house, relatively young fir trees, deliberately planted.

  “The view from the house itself comes as a surprise, sir.”

  Ingram knocked and the door was opened by a maidservant who ushered them inside. The hallway ran the length of the house to a pair of French doors, open to show a vista of the sea and dunes running unbroken north and south. It was about a hundred yards to a small quay with a boathouse to the side.

  “Eight bedrooms, sir, maids’ attics above. Four withdrawing rooms and a dining parlour, sir, with kitchens and household offices, on the ground floor. No fewer than two bathrooms, sir, my Lord Barford being very advanced in his ways. The property comes with about nine hundred acres, sir, stretching in a strip some two miles long beside the sea, varying between one-half and three-quarters of a mile wide. About fifty acres is amenable to cultivation and is used as a home farm. The remainder is sand dune with a sparse covering of marram grass and a few pine trees. The farmer employs two labourers who keep all in order, inclu
ding the small garden to the front, sir. The house is in good decorative order and is architecturally sound. You will wish to look it over.”

  Ingram had neglected to mention that two of the bedrooms had dressing rooms attached. It was a gentleman’s residence.

  “It is a fine house, Mr Ingram, but the question arises of its price.”

  “Sir Godby informs us that the house, if it meets your satisfaction, is by way of a wedding gift, sir. One gathers that you have been associates for many years and Sir Godby considers himself indebted to you.”

  “He is a very generous man, sir. I can only accept – my wife-to-be will, I am sure, be quite bowled over by the house!”

  “Excellent, Mr Williams. The documents will be to hand within a very short period, an offer having been made and accepted in the hope that you would find the house satisfactory. May I offer you my felicitations on your forthcoming nuptials, sir?”

  Miss Robinson was told that a house, ‘of reasonable size and with a bit of land’, had been purchased and she was invited to name a day.

  “What of furnishings, Mr Williams?”

  “The house is ready furnished. It needs but linens and such to be ready for us. It had been used as a summer residence of a noble family and was left intact on their deaths of the typhoid elsewhere.”

  She liked the idea of succeeding the nobility in her own house and set an almost immediate date for the Banns of Marriage to be called.

  A month later she was duly impressed to be escorted to her bridal bed in such magnificent surroundings. She felt like a lady, she said.

  Mr Robinson visited them later in the week at her most earnest desire and decided that he, too, should consider a dwelling appropriate to his new status in the world.

  “What of servants, Mr Williams?”

  “A man, a housekeeper and six maids of different sorts, Mr Robinson – very nearly five hundred a year, sir – but I think Mrs Boswell can afford them!”

  And his big sister to be mistress of such glory! Once again he thanked his lucky stars for the day he met Mr Burke.

  Major Burke had seen all that he wanted of General Grant and of the breech-loading rifle in action and of ironclad gunboats parading up and down the river. He needed now to refresh himself in more civilised surroundings, quickly, before he was invited to join the Union lines again.

  Colonel Gaines had twice more taken him out through the mud and the swamps surrounding the besieged citadel of Vicksburg, on both occasions leading him into the middle of infantry squabbles, of the flare-ups that occurred in any siege.

  On the first afternoon Rebel soldiers had surged forward to straighten out a section of their lines, intending to remove a Union salient that stood on a small rise and prevented easy movement through a part of their defensive trenches. There had been a few minutes of cannon fire and then a shrunken battalion of Arkansawyers had charged, screaming the Rebel yell and waving fixed bayonets. Dick had stood up on the firing step, using his rifle for three aimed shots then pulling out his revolver for five more, each dropping a man; by his sixth round he had been joined by two full companies of Union soldiers, firing accurately and holding the line. Gaines had tapped Dick on the shoulder, nodded him back to reload and then taken his place, firing his own Colt much less precisely.

  The attack had fizzled out, as such things generally did, men deciding that they had failed and one by one pulling back without any specific order to withdraw.

  Gaines had taken Dick back to headquarters and had briefly reported on the incident – a minor sally and defence, nothing at all out of the ordinary. Dick had wandered off to his tent to clean up and change before dinner, came back to hear Gaines talking to Grant.

  “Crazy as a loon, sir! Stood there as if he was taking the air on a balmy spring day, firing aimed shots - eight rounds, eight Southrons down, not a hair turned, sir! I believe every word of the stories, sir, damned if I don’t!”

  “Going to watch our lads take an outpost for themselves, Major Burke. Rounds out the lines nicely. The Rebs keep a half company there, that’s all, and they sit down and brew up what they call coffee mid-afternoon. Roasted goober peas and dried apple, crushed up and boiled – it’s brown and it’s hot and that’s as close as it gets to coffee!”

  Dick dug out the Walker Colt as well, preferring to have some extra shots available. He had debated purchasing one of the Bowie knives he had seen some of the men waving but decided it would be too melodramatic for his taste – there was such a thing as style and that did not include waving a damned great big chopper as he ran to war.

  The works ended on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi and its swamps and little lakes and dozens of tiny curling creeks. The rebel lines took a dogleg, following a higher patch of ground and coming within fifty yards of the low-lying Union trench. Wet, muddy, sticky yards. Life would be easier if they took the very end of the dogleg for their own.

  Three men stood behind the breastworks, each with a small hole to fire through and carrying heavy calibre, telescopically sighted sniper rifles.

  “They don’t always keep a sentry up, Major Burke. Suppose they do, they lads goin’ to put him down. Give us a few seconds more before they calls the alarm – time the sentry drops, they just goin’ to think it an ordinary sniper.”

  The speaker was a deeply agricultural lieutenant from a Missouri regiment. A lieutenant who had come up from the ranks mostly by surviving – he had more experience than any man in his company.

  “Say, Major, ain’t you the boy they done call the Sharps Kid? I done saw you in Kansas City, I reckons.”

  “That was me.”

  “Good. Glad you here with us today, sir.”

  Dick resignedly stepped forward to the front of the storming party, checking the percussion caps on his pistols. News of his identity was whispered among the men, followed by whistles of admiration that he had come to lead them, one of the real gunfighting men looking out for them, protecting the little fellas, just like they old newspapers said.

  “Ready boys? Over we go!”

  They climbed or vaulted over their rough breastwork and splashed their way forwards at a stumbling run, the mud thick enough to slow them.

  Half a minute, almost across and there were two shots as a sentry showed himself and was killed.

  “Quick now, boys!”

  They came to the seven feet high Southern breastwork and boosted each other up and over.

  Dick sat astraddle the top logs, spotted the smoke of the cook fire just thirty feet away, a dozen men around it only now starting to stir. He began to shoot. Aiming carefully low because he was firing downhill, he emptied the Walker before the first return fire whistled past him. With luck he had another ten seconds before they got over their surprise and began to aim carefully. He shot three more with the Navy Colt before the group round the fire were all down, Union rifles joining in.

  He painstakingly reloaded the Walker before he moved forward and joined the lieutenant at the corner where the trench turned to join the rest of the Southern line. He was overseeing a dozen of his men with axes and mattocks who were heaving trunks from the breastwork to block the trench and cutting a firing step facing what had been the rear.

  “Got a working party goin’ to come up in the dark with rocks and trunks to block her right across, Major. We lost one man, Major, and him only shot through the arm, sir! I done reckoned we was goin’ to see twenty dead and maybe get thrown back anyhow, until you come, that was! Settin’ up on top and potting off like it was a Fourth of July celebration, sir! I never did!”

  The story spread and grew, as always, until he had killed a hundred all on his own before he would let the others come and join him to get their share of the fun.

  Dick was unmoved – he had taken a risk, so what? He had assessed the chances and if he had been wrong then the worst that could happen would be death.

  General Grant was a more intelligent man than he believed; it seemed to him that there was something wrong inside Dick’s hea
d, and he was a natural expert on such matters.

  “Time that young man had to leave us, Colonel Gaines. He gets killed then half the men here will be downcast. Let us send him on his way to gain Glory elsewhere. I have sent a despatch to General Halleck recommending him for this new Medal of Honor – he has earned it, and more! Any time we have a battle, I shall be right glad to welcome that young man, but I fear he will grow restless in idleness and create his own battles without any planning of mine.”

  Dick was pleased to be invited to take a steamboat up the river so that he could make his very desirable reports to his own people. The Union army was most wishful to keep on good terms with Queen Victoria’s government, so he was told as he was sent packing.

  Arriving at St Louis, he faced a problem – should he go to the Carondelet Yards or take a train as directly as he could to Washington? Whatever happened, he believed he must soon show himself in Pittsburgh.

  He might be spotted at the station, word might get back to the Yards if he passed though without showing his face, and he was not yet certain that he wished to sever any connection with Miss Oakes. He was becoming tired of the footloose bachelor existence – it would be pleasant to have a home to return to from his wanderings. The sole question, who should preside over that home?

  Of course, thinking more clearly on the matter, it might not be entirely unthinkable to have a home in England and another in America if he was to spend his days travelling between the two countries. The lands were far distant, and few people who knew him in one would go to the other. He could persuade himself that if he was to keep a family in the west then it might well be a secret from the rest of the world.

  He collected his horses from the steamboat, dropping half-dollar coins liberally – they had been well looked-after. He shrugged and nodded to a boy to saddle up on Cardigan, named for being a brainless enthusiast, always happy to proceed at a gallop. He took the leading reins and turned them towards the township of Carondelet.