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continued to behave as though the odd sixpence represented the dif ference between a herring supper and going to bed on an empty stomach. The prospect of marrying into the family of the district’s largest employer of labour obviously attracted him.
    Had it been otherwise nothing would have induced the close-fisted old buzzard to make the first approach. Deciding this Sam also made up his mind on the spot but in doing so gave a passing thought to the couple themselves. Makepeace, he knew, would marry a woman with two heads if his father gave the command, not because he was filial but because, endowed with his father’s extreme fondness for money, the prospect of running contrary to its source, with younger brothers in the offing, was unthinkable. Apart from this, if he was a man at all, he would not find the prospect of marrying Henrietta displeasing, irrespective of any settlement Sam might make. Henrietta was a shapely, spirited girl, with her mother’s refined features and his own clear skin and matchless health. With the minimum of assistance from Makepeace she could, he was sure, produce a flock of children, and old Goldthorpe, a slave to tribal prejudice, would respond to that and be likely to observe the rules of primogeniture when it came to making his GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 21
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    will. Sam did not know, neither did he care, how Henrietta would react to the bargain. Their relationship was humdrum. Most of his time had been spent at the mill, or drumming up orders, and because she was only a girl he had left her education, such as it was, to a suc cession of nursemaid-governesses. She could, they told him, tinkle the piano, sew a little, cook a little, and while away her time on other woman’s pursuits, like pokerwork, crocheting, and dressmaking.
    Unlike her father, she had been able to read and write since she was a toddler, and no man in his senses would give a girl who promised to be pretty more than a minimal education.
    Musing thus, it occurred to Sam that he knew less about her than he knew of some of his hands, and he put this down to the fact that he had never recovered from the shock that she had not only had the gall to be the wrong sex but had, in arriving, killed his Irish wife, Cathy, thus depriving him of a chance to correct the error.
    His memory, so accurate concerning matters of business, retained little of Cathy now. He saw her as a willowy girl who had caught his eye during a visit to the docks at Merseyside, one of innumerable refugees from the first of the Irish potato famines in the thirties. He found her sitting on a tin trunk looking extraordinarily composed in the midst of the dock turmoil, and, for a reason that he could not, for the very life of him, recall at this distance, she had made him laugh so that he had whisked her off and fed her with the intention of seduc ing her as soon as he had concluded his business with a Levantine skipper.
    But although she had eaten what had seemed to him an enor mous amount of beef, cabbage, and Lancashire cheese, she had laughed in his face when he had proposed she should settle the bill upstairs and had offered, instead, to wash his shirt that had been soiled by the Levantine’s tarry cordage. He must have been in excep tionally high spirits on that particular trip—perhaps he got the better of the Levantine in the matter of freightage—for her impudence had made him laugh again and he proposed that she accompany him back to Warrington in his dogcart. Surprisingly she had agreed, and had even entertained him with sad Gaelic songs all the way home. Searching his memory for further fragments of the brief association he recalled now that Mrs. Worrell, his cook-housekeeper, had taken a liking to her, and it was probably the cook’s remonstrances that had prevented him from turning her loose to fend for herself when she rejected his renewed advances with contemptuous good humour. Why, in