Free The Blue Field by John Moore

black-letter things are quite useless to an ignoramus like myself’.) He gave presents of furniture to people who said they collected antiques (‘The fellow’s abit of a connoisseur and really
appreciates
that Louis Quinze stuff’). He made the Saturday afternoon gunners free of his woodlands (‘Take what you can find, my dear chap – I have an absurd prejudice myself against killing things’) and the Sunday afternoon anglers free of his trout-pond (‘Though I warn you there’s little in it beside eels, which I understand are not highly regarded by sportsmen’). And he even handed over bits of his land to tenants who were hard up, pretending to his critics that he actually gained by the transaction because ‘The man has paid me no rent for years and now at any rate he’ll have to pay the tithe.’
    By the time he had got rid of the whole of his patrimony in this fashion he had fallen into an incurable habit of giving, and like a dipsomaniac he was unable to stop; and so with a kind of sublime innocence he went to the moneylenders and borrowed at a high rate of compound interest the largesse which he continued to distribute to all comers. His bank manager tried to point out the folly of this behaviour: ‘Really, sir, the equation doesn’t work out!’ ‘Alas, I am the worst mathematician in the world!’ smiled the Mad Lord. His friends, seeing him drift towards bankruptcy, renewed their attempts to persuade him to mend his ways; and he answered them with sweet reasonableness and a logic which does not belong to our hard world. ‘But, my dear friend, it is not strictly accurate to say that I
gave
the man a hundred pounds. He was very clever with figures – so unlike me! – and he had discovered an infallible system of winning money at roulette; but he’d lost all he had in trying it out at Monte Carlo. All I did was to
lend
him a hundred pounds so that he could return there and win it back again!’
    So it went on, until the dilapidated mansion and the un-tended gardens were a match for their threadbare owner, and the shabby-looking beggars who slouched almost dailyalong the weedy drive were joined by shabbier-looking duns, and at last there came a time when neither beggars nor duns found it worth their while any longer to make that pilgrimage; for nothing was left but the crumbling stones of Orris Manor and the green acres in which it stood and which alone of the Mad Lord’s possessions they could not carry away.
O Fortunatos Nimium
    Without a doubt William had the trick of making things grow. Much of the hillside land was thin and chalky, sheep-grazing ground rather than arable; and like all the Mad Lord’s estate it had been woefully neglected. Nevertheless within two or three years William was growing such crops of oats and barley and clover as Brensham had never seen. It was true that the weeds came up as well – perhaps the Garden-god is not selective! – and the good and the bad flourished together, the golden corn and the rank tares. William’s was not a tidy or orderly farm. Nevertheless he got a huge yield off it, and in a period of scarcity, during and after the First World War, he made, from time to time, a good deal of money. He never kept it long, for that was not his way, and he still had his occasional bouts of wild drinking during which he let the farm go hang and spent every shilling he could lay hands on.
    In 1924, being then well over fifty, he courted, in a boisterous and highly indecorous fashion which you shall hear of later, the cook from Brensham Rectory. The Rector’s reluctance to marry them (for she was an excellent cook) was offset by his suspicion that there was a child on the way; and sure enough the child was born five months later, and was christened, perhaps inappropriately, with the name ofPrudence. About the same time William’s two daughters by his first wife, who had married