The Lorimer Line Read online

  ANNE MELVILLE

  The Lorimer Line

  Contents

  Prologue

  ANCESTORS

  Book One

  THE CHAIRMAN

  Book Two

  THE CHILDREN OF THE CHAIRMAN

  Part I Margaret and William

  Part II Margaret and Charles

  Part III Ralph and Margaret

  Part IV Margaret, Alexa and Charles

  Prologue

  Ancestors

  On a stormy day in 1677 a red-headed young captain named Brinslcy Lorimer set sail from Bristol. He was bound for the Guinea Coast of Africa, to exchange his merchandise for a cargo of healthy slaves. Not all his purchases would survive the Atlantic crossing, but when he had sold all those who arrived in Jamaica alive, he would return to Bristol with a load of sugar, rum and indigo. If his fortune held, there would be a profit at every port. Not for nothing had this route been christened the Golden Triangle.

  Brinsley Lorimer was a merchant adventurer in the true sense, although not by charter. He owned the ship he sailed, and his daring challenged more than the elements. He was braving the anger of the London merchants, who claimed a monopoly of the Slave Coast trade and backed their claim with a royal patent. He was leaving behind a great burden of debt, but that caused him no anxiety, for he had no dependants who could be called on to make repayment. If his ship, the Star of Bristow, foundered, the captain’s debts would sink to the bottom with him.

  But the Star of Bristow did not founder, and so with the profits of his voyage Brinsley Lorimer paid off his patrons and bought another ship. Before he sailed again he chose a wife, begat a son, and commissioned the building of a Guincaman that was to be longer and taller than any ship which had yet sailed out of the great port of Bristol. From Brinsley’s enterprise was to grow a great shipping company and a wealthy merchant family. The foundations of the Lorimer line, in both senses, had been laid.

  Two hundred years later, the head of the family was John Junius Lorimer. During the two intervening centuries daughters as well as sons had been born to the Lorimer family, but they had never been regarded - even by themselves - as of much significance. The line descended steadily from eldest son to eldest son, and a pattern became established over the generations. The Lorimer fathers were autocratic, natural commanders of ships or offices: the Lorimer sons sought their own fortunes while waiting for their inheritances.

  Brinsley’s son, William Lorimer, did not go to sea like his father, but he did continue to trade, becoming prosperous and re-investing his profits in the building of more and more ships. While still in his twenties, William’s son John equipped a privateer at his own expense and with patriotic zeal captured a Spanish ship worth thirty thousand pounds. Even before his father’s death, a sugar refinery built near the Bristol docks with John’s prize money was bringing more wealth into the Lorimer family with every smooth white sugar loaf it produced.

  None of these early Lorimers spent much money on his own comfort. Whether tossing in a cramped ship’s cabin or calculating figures for long hours in an ill-lit office, they were too busy building a fortune to enjoy it. But in 1785 John’s elder son, Samuel, used part of his substantial inheritance to buy himself a choice piece of land on the outskirts of Bristol - high above the Avon Gorge in the fashionable district of Clifton. There he built a mansion which he named Brinsley House, after his great-grandfather. Although Samuel’s wife was rarely without a small black boy in handsome livery to run her errands and amuse her with his antics, the word ‘slave’ was never mentioned in the magnificent drawing room of the mansion.

  While Samuel Lorimer worked at the task of becoming respectable, his younger brother Matthew - who had inherited the dare-devil blood of his ancestors, and the red hair which went with it - took the one ship which was his share of his father’s estate and became her captain. In the Rose of Redcliff he roamed the seven seas, looking for adventure and profit in new ports and cargoes. While Samuel saw his fortune increasing in the careful records he kept of his ships commissioned and built, and of his trading profits, the gold coins which Matthew accumulated on his sailing exploits grew to a value almost as prodigious as rumour reported it to be.

  The route of the Golden Triangle was of little interest to Matthew because it came into his brother’s sphere, and he was middle-aged before he first saw Jamaica. Its balmy climate and unconventional society immediately delighted him, and he welcomed the chance to remove himself for good from Samuel’s sanctimonious respectability. In the lush foothills of Jamaica he bought a cheap estate of uncultivated land and enough slaves to clear and plant it, and he designed for himself a great house to rival the mansion in Clifton. Then, as the work of construction began, he loaded the Rose of Redcliff with tobacco and sailed back to Bristol to take his profit and collect his savings. When he left his home port again, only part of his cargo was for sale: most of it consisted of the furnishings necessary for a gentleman’s residence. Matthew ensured that his cupboards would be well stocked with linen and his pantry with silver, but he neglected to provide himself with a wife. Nevertheless, his life in Jamaica did not prove to be a lonely one, and he never returned to England.

  Meanwhile, in Bristol, Samuel Lorimer worried himself into an early grave, so that his son Alexander - Brinsley Lorimcr’s great-great-grandson - inherited the family responsibilities while he was still young. Under the influence of a pious mother Alexander abandoned the slave trade before it became illegal at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He continued the direct West Indies trade, but at the same time developed new routes - to Australia and Canada and round the Horn to the west coast of America. The risks of the long voyages were great, but the profits were even greater.

  When Matthew Lorimer died in Jamaica his descendants were all of a colour which made them ineligible under island law to own property. Alexander therefore inherited his uncle’s sugar plantation and the workers on whom it depended: he also inherited a deathbed request from his uncle that three women and the ten children they had borne him should be provided for during their lifetimes. Alexander’s high moral sense forbade him to comply with this suggestion, but for some years he enjoyed the income from his inheritance. After the slaves were emancipated he allowed the plantation which he had never visited to run quietly to seed under an agent, whose reports on its unprofitability arrived at increasingly long intervals and were not missed when they stopped altogether.

  The compensation which was paid for the slaves in 1833 enabled Alexander to found a bank - a bank which proudly bore the family name. From its headquarters he chose a prime site in Corn Street, the commercial centre of Bristol. There, immediately facing the Exchange, he erected a palace of marble and mahogany. Its facade, in bright yellow stone, had friezes, pediments and pillars that put the Parthenon to shame.

  While Alexander reigned in this financial palace, his son, John Junius - Brinsley Lorimer’s great-great-great-grandson - waited to prove himself a worthy successor to the Lorimer reputation for profitable adventure and accountancy. Like every Lorimer eldest son before him he looked for a way in which he might occupy his energy until the time came for him to inherit.

  It was an age when coal turned everything it touched to gold, and so John Junius dedicated himself to the cause of industrial progress. He persuaded his father to order new sailing ships made of iron for the run to Australia, he encouraged the coming of the railway to Bristol and the building of the Great Western in its shipyards. An engineering genius like Brunei could do almost anything with iron and steel. Young John Junius regarded it as a duty to see that such a man was liberally supplied with funds on advantageous terms – advantageous to John Junius as well as to Brunei.

  The direction of his interests led h
im, when his father died in 1840, to attach more value to the family bank, Lorimer’s, than to the shipping line. Bristol’s triumph in constructing the earliest steamships was marred by the discovery that once the ships left port they never returned to Bristol: their captains refused to venture the new vessels along the seven miles of tortuously winding tidal river which led from the Bristol Channel to the harbour within the city limits. This was a lock-controlled basin with deep water for all the ships which reached it, but too many fell victims to the muddy banks of the river at low water as they made their way towards the docks. It was obvious to all except those who profited from the high duties charged by the Bristol Docks that deep-water berths must be built at the mouth of the River Avon. Only then would a shipping company such as the Lorimer Line be justified in buying the steamships which John Junius already regarded as the craft of the future.

  With the wealth and reputation of Lorimer’s Bank at his disposal, John Junius invested widely. He looked for short-term gains in the construction of factories and engineering works, and he used the profits for long-term advantage by supporting one of the new dock schemes. In the middle years of his life John Junius displayed the same flair for recognizing promising openings that had distinguished all his ancestors, and his faith in his city’s future was rewarded by a generous share in its increasing prosperity.

  From its earliest days, Bristol had been a city of adventurous seafarers and honest merchants. They earned their rewards by courage or application and were not extravagant in spending them, despising the soft luxuries of London society. As the two strands in the city’s life mixed and married, great fortunes were built and proud names established. It was a city without respect for the aristocracy of land. There were no dukes to dominate society, no duchesses to impose their whims on fashion. But the city was, in its own way, as conscious of status as any court. In every walk of life there was a family recognized as supreme; a dynasty whose members, in each generation, were not ashamed that their wealth came from trade.

  Certainly John Junius had never been ashamed: not of that and not of anything else in his life. At the age of seventy-seven, two centuries after the Star of Bristow had embarked on its first voyage in the Lorimer interest, he was the head of such a line, perhaps the greatest of all the Bristol dynasties. His fortune was huge, he had an income of a comfortable fifteen thousand pounds a year, and his reputation was untarnished.

  Nothing but death could humble the chairman of Lorimer’s Bank. Or so it seemed in the spring of 1877.

  Book One

  The Chairman

  1

  On the morning of Whit Monday in 1877 Margaret Lorimer hurried down the marble staircase of Brinsley House. Punctuality was more important than dignity -most particularly when her father, John Junius Lorimer, was the one who would be kept waiting. It was time for the day to start with family prayers - if a day could be said to start when already the servants had been hard at work for more than two hours. Ranges had been stoked and blacked, water heated and carried, horses groomed, carriages polished, lamps trimmed, gravel paths raked, flowers cut and arranged. The footmen had little to do at this hour except look handsome. To the housemaids and parlourmaids and kitchen maids who had crept down from their dark attics so much earlier in the day, however, the assembly afforded a welcome rest from their scrubbing and polishing.

  Although the occasion was called family prayers, few of the family were expected to attend. The younger son of the house, Ralph, had already left for school. A day boy at Clifton College, which his father had helped to found sixteen years before as a select school for the sons of the rich Bristol merchants, he was required to attend morning prayers in chapel with the boarders. His elder brother, William, had married six years earlier and was established in his own home. Their mother, Georgiana, did not nowadays leave her boudoir before noon, although Dr Scott had never been able to find a name for the illness of which she complained. Margaret, slipping quickly into her place in the great dining room, was the only member of the family to await the arrival of the head of the household.

  As was his custom, John Junius Lorimer arrived in the room while the grandfather clock in the hall outside was striking the hour. In his old age - for he was now in his seventy-eighth year - he had become heavy and moved slowly. But his white hair was thick and plentiful, curling on to his collar, and his square-cut beard and sideburns framed a pink and healthy face. His bushy eyebrows had not turned white but remained the rich chestnut red of his youth. From beneath them his greenish-blue eyes, missing nothing, took a quick roll call of the room.

  The force of his personality dominated the room at once. When John Junius expressed a wish in the boardroom of Lorimer’s Bank, of which he had been chairman since his father’s death, that wish passed swiftly downwards as an order not to be questioned. At this hour of the day his requests were addressed upwards in the hierarchy towards the Almighty, in the form of prayers, but this did not prevent them from emerging as instructions. With equal clarity he read a passage from the Bible. Margaret, who knew it by heart, allowed her attention to wander.

  The great dining room was used only for entertaining guests and for family prayers. It was furnished on a grand scale, with Venetian chandeliers suspended over the huge mahogany dining table. Round the walls hung a set of family portraits, and from her earliest childhood Margaret had enjoyed studying them and wondering what the men depicted there were really like. Samuel Lorimer had at first commissioned paintings of himself and his youthful son, Alexander, from life. Then - mindful of the social respectability bestowed by the possession of ancestral portraits - he had ordered a complete set of forefathers from the same artist - who consequently found it easy to indicate a family likeness. Even that light-hearted Stuart adventurer, Brinsley, had been awarded a resolute Hanoverian jowl.

  With surprise Margaret noticed that since yesterday there had been an addition to the black-framed line - the portrait for which her father had been sitting earlier in the year. She scrutinized it with interest. The artist had succeeded in catching the subtleties of his subject’s expression. The long nose and downward turn of his mouth gave John Junius a forbidding look: yet his cheeks curved with benevolence. It was an accurate picture of a man who tyrannized both his family and the bank which bore his name but who was at the same time capable of large generosities and small kindnesses, a man who judged every business venture by its profitability but who would buy a new piece of carved jade with no motive except to delight his own eyes with its beauty. There were few amongst his business associates, or even within his family, who wholly understood John Junius Lorimer. The artist, Margaret decided, had well earned his handsome fee by suggesting the inconsistencies of character without attempting to resolve them.

  Guiltily she realized that the reading was over, and that while she was staring at the portrait, its subject was staring at her. In the same grave voice with which he had intoned the final prayers, he requested his daughter to follow him to the tower.

  This was an order which on many occasions in the childhood of his three children had filled them with terror. Every morning after prayers John Junius turned his attention to whatever domestic problems had arisen the previous day, so that by the time he left the house his mind would be free to concentrate on the affairs of the bank. All too often these domestic problems had been solved by harsh discipline. Today, however, Margaret could reasonably hope that he wished only to discuss the arrangements for the afternoon. She climbed the stairs without apprehension.

  The situation of Brinsley House was a dramatic one. All its best rooms afforded a spectacular view of the tree-clad cliff on the further side of the gorge. From the lowest terrace of the steeply tiered garden it was possible to look straight down at the water of the Avon itself as it curved towards the estuary and the open sea. But the panorama from the tower dwarfed both these spectacles. Through the windows around its highest room John Junius Lorimer was able to look down on the city or over to the hills. From here he
could admire the miracle of the new suspension bridge, which owed its existence to his efforts, or catch the first glimpse of a pennant which meant that a ship, of the Lorimer Line was returning safely to port. He could watch with pride as the tall ships passed almost directly underneath, pulled by the little steam tugs which made it no longer necessary for them to wait at the mouth of the Avon until a high enough tide could bear them in. He could observe the bustle of the docks as one cargo was unloaded and another loaded, as sail-makers and carpenters repaired the ravages of a voyage round the Horn. And with pride again he could watch the slow and graceful start of a new voyage which would take the ship and all its crew away from their home port perhaps for as long as three years.

  The ships, it was true, belonged to William now. John Junius had made that part of his empire over to his elder son six years earlier – not because at the age of seventy-one he felt himself any less competent to run the line, but in order that William should taste responsibility whilst his father was still in a position to advise him. Soon there would be no more masts, no more of those breath-catching moments when the unfurled sails filled with the wind, seeming almost to lift the craft out of the water and fly with it through the air. But even William’s enthusiasm could not transform the whole fleet to steam overnight. The sailing ships still came gliding up the river, and every member of the family took a personal pride in their brave adventures. With the Lorimers ‘all ship-shape and Bristol fashion’ was no idle boast.

  John Junius was standing in his favourite place by the window as his daughter came into the tower room.

  ‘Good morning, Papa.’

  ‘Good morning, Margaret.’ He accepted her kiss without warmth. He had never been a demonstrative father, and since the incident of the Crankshaw alliance eleven months earlier he had deliberately withheld even the pretence of affection. Grudgingly permitted to have her own way, she could not expect to be quickly forgiven for it. ‘I wished only to remind you that today is the Bank Holiday.’