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it about? He remembered asking Goldthorpe what the devil had prompted him to penalise the boy at birth, and the old man had told him that his son was named after the novelist, Thackeray, who was, it seemed, distantly related to Goldthorpe’s hoity-toity wife. To Sam it was an inadequate explanation, but he felt obliged to admit that it suited Goldthorpe’s son and from here it was a short step to the contemplation of Makepeace Goldthorpe’s loins.
    It seemed unlikely, at first glance, that the boy would be capable of siring anything more aggressive than a jack-rabbit. He was thin, shambling, toothy, and completely subdued by the prospect of his father’s wealth. He had a moist handclasp, a wispy moustache, and a faint stammer, but did physical disqualifications matter? Admittedly the prospect of grandsons was important, but was that prospect limited to the womb of the one child his own wife had brought him and died, most inconsiderately, in the process? He was only forty-seven and would probably marry again when he could spare time. The lack of a wife over the past nineteen years had not troubled him overmuch. He spent very little time at home, retained the services of Mrs. Worrell, an excellent cook-housekeeper, and had access to any number of lusty operatives glad to satisfy his occasional needs for the price of a shilling. He had no regular mistress (the maintenance of one not only gave women grandiose ideas but invariably got about among the chapel people and was bad for business), but, by his own computation, he had probably sired half-a-dozen bastards. The claims of all had been silenced by a routine arrangement he had with Doig, his lawyer. Having satisfied himself that there was a chance of a claim being established, a small lump sum, and a statement exoner ating his client from any further responsibility, disposed of the mat ter. Lately, on Doig’s advice, Sam had taken care to find his fun in Manchester, among some other mill-owner’s employees. It was, perhaps, an expensive way of going about things, but Sam Rawlinson was not averse to spending money on himself. The arrow-slits and the four Gothic turrets embellishing Stannard Lodge proved that.
    By now, however, with the prospect of finding a well britched hus band for Henrietta, Sam’s thoughts had been turning more and more to bringing order GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 20
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    Fugitive in a Crinoline 2 1
    into his private life, and there seemed to him no reason why he should not begin looking around for some healthy young woman who would get him a string of heirs to compensate for his wife’s extreme carelessness in dying after producing a single child and that a daughter. As for Henrietta, she could make herself useful by marrying young Goldthorpe, or somebody like Goldthorpe. By so doing she would not only make fresh capital available but take out insurance in the matter of grandchildren.
    He made a guess at Matthew Goldthorpe’s pile. It was probably in the six figure bracket, even though most of it reposed in bricks and mortar of which half was property on the point of falling down. Not that that mattered. The real value lay in the sites and the Goldthorpes, who had been landowners about here for two generations, were known to own a great slice of the eastern sector of the town and to have pocketed upwards of twenty thousand when the railway came through twenty years before. On the face of it he was hardly likely to improve on Makepeace, particularly as Matthew also owned the strip of rubble-strewn land between his offloading bays and the railways goods yard. He wondered, remembering this, if Goldthorpe could be talked into making this over to him as a wedding pledge and decided that it was possible. As always, when he was assessing a problem, he identified with his opponent, and on this occasion the result was encouraging. Matt Goldthorpe was copper-bottomed but he was also greedy. Unlike Sam he did not think of himself as a rich man but