A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  In the middle of the room, from what she could see through the steam clouds, the puffing dragon consisted of a brass cylinder on top of a washing boiler on top of a fierce fire in a bucket, the whole thing topped by a moveable beam with two vertical arms, one of which, connected to the cylinder, was going up and down, while the other, also going up and down, went into another God-knew-what beyond her view.

  ‘Hello?’ she called.

  ‘What?’ The figure of Andra Hedley came like a ghost out of the steam, his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his short hair had gone into tight curls that glistened with damp. He was not pleased to see her. ‘Go ’way, pet, Ah’m busy.’

  She’d had her education; school was finished. He disappeared again.

  She waited. In all the information he’d given her yesterday, there’d been mention of the names Savery and Newcomen, two gods who had converted fire to the pumping of water out of mines and had thereby supplanted the antiquated method of a horse-drawn gin-mill. The contraption before her, she supposed, was one such engine.

  Again, she was reminded of Boston’s shipyards and odd little men, like this one, who built model hulls in their parlour in order to make a marginal improvement on them, who drew better charts, conceived of better block and tackle, suggested better seamarks; men who obstinately refused to accept things as they were but had a vision of things as they could be; men who drove their wives mad and the world forward.

  Eventually, the boiler ran out of steam and the contraption shuddered to a halt. Hedley approached the thing with implements in his hand, muttering something to himself about ‘a separate condenser’. Cessation of noise was a relief.

  ‘I’ll find us the ten thousand pounds, Mr Hedley,’ she told him.

  She had, she realized, made up her mind some time before. What else was there to do? Those with nothing might as well make a throw for everything.

  Hedley looked at her as if unaware of who she was. ‘A valve box,’ he said to himself. ‘Inject steam in on both sides, that’d be it, thinks tha?’

  ‘A good idea,’ she said, and left him to it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IN order to raise the ten thousand pounds she needed to develop the Raby coal mine, Makepeace decided to approach Philip Dapifer’s richest and closest friends. She felt no qualms about it, she would swallow her contempt and go to those who knew she’d been his preferred wife, playing on their sympathy and conscience. Investing in her mine would be recompense on their part to Dapifer’s ghost for having allowed a woman he loathed to disinherit both his child and the woman he’d loved.

  She disliked the thought of entering their world again, especially as a supplicant, but her hatred of Conyers and Catty was the stronger force. If it meant that she could take up arms against those two enemies she’d grovel to Old Nick himself.

  Betty had a more jaundiced view. ‘They done you wrong,’ she said, ‘an’ nobody don’t like feelin’ they done a body wrong, they goin’ to act like you ain’t there—that’s what they done so far.’

  Which might or might not have been the case. But what neither Betty nor Makepeace took into consideration was that the time was right for investment. There was an excitement now, almost amounting to panic, which possessed men who saw that Britain was entering a new era. Wonderful inventions were finding practical application. Industries without ancestry were springing up at every turn. There were vast fortunes to be made through adventuring as there had not been since the reign of Elizabeth. The world was starting afresh.

  Nor was it entirely greed. There was a sense that the whole country could be bettered. Britons were an old people but a new nation. The word ‘new’ was magical: hurry, hurry, don’t leave modernity to others, join the new crusade or remain stranded in the Middle Ages.

  Because Dapifer had shown no interest in the coming of the Mechanical Age, Makepeace hadn’t either. But the men she was to visit during that winter of 1767, asking them almost literally for money to burn, knew better. The new Jerusalem could only be built on coal.

  They might have initially granted Makepeace a hearing through guilt or compassion or even curiosity, but it’s doubtful whether they’d have given her anything more—if it hadn’t been for Andra Hedley.

  She very nearly didn’t take him with her. They were seriously at odds over their partnership contract; Makepeace wanted a controlling interest in the company to be formed if they found coal; fifty-one per cent.

  Hedley refused to countenance such an agreement. ‘Fifty-fifty or nothing, pet.’

  ‘I own the damn land,’ she said.

  ‘And I’ll be getting the coal out of it.’

  His experience of coal-owners had not been happy; all of them ‘pornicious sods’ who treated their miners no better than rats and paid them crumbs for doing the most dangerous job in the world. At annual hirings the men were bonded for a year not to go on strike, and to deliver so many baskets of coal a day. For each six-hundredweight basket, they were paid five farthings—nothing, sometimes even a fine, if it contained any rock—and had to deliver one free. Few collieries gave sufficient compensation for injury or death incurred in an accident, some gave none at all.

  In order to earn a living wage for the family, wives and daughters had to join their men underground and drag the baskets from the coal face to the surface. ‘And I’m not having that in any pit of mine.’ Hedley’s colliery was going to treat its men and women as human beings should be treated.

  He refused to believe that Makepeace wouldn’t tolerate inhumanity either. ‘I heard ducks fart before,’ he said. What farting ducks had to do with it she didn’t know but the message was clear enough: he didn’t trust her.

  Infuriatingly, he saw her as a representative of the ruling class. She might call herself Mrs Burke—the title she’d opted for—but in truth she was Lady Dapifer and ipso facto a persecutor of the labouring poor. All government, aristocracy, landowners and new industrialists were in a conspiracy to maintain a cheap work force.

  She knew that to some extent he was right. At dinner tables with Dapifer there had always been someone to propound the theory that the illiterate poor must remain poor and illiterate or they would not want to work—and would demand higher wages if they did.

  It was useless to protest that she didn’t subscribe to this proposition—‘I’m an American, damn your eyes’—in Hedley’s book she’d betrayed the cause of Liberty by marrying one of its oppressors.

  In any case, Americans beating some drums and burning a few effigies to escape a bit of tax. . . that wasn’t serious protest. ‘In ’sixty-five the whole bloody Tyne and Wear coalfields were out to get some food in wor children’s bellies—that were rioting.’

  He described the violence, burned houses, injured miners, injured troops who’d been sent in to put them down—and nodded at the distaste brought to her face by this reminder of what had happened in Boston.

  ‘See, pet?’ he said. ‘When it comes to us poor sods fighting for wor existence, you’re on the other side.’

  The first visit to Raby by Aaron, who brought Fanny with him from Newcastle where their run was being extended by genuine public demand, had merely confirmed Hedley’s view that here was a family with social pretensions. Introducing her brother to him, Makepeace saw that the two men were inimical. Against Hedley, whose idea of elegance was a clean shirt, Aaron looked every inch an actor, clothes a little too highly coloured, heels a little too high, gestures too grandiloquent.

  ‘Coal?’ asked Aaron, to whom sinking holes in the ground was merely a new method of boring people to death.

  ‘It’s the future,’ Hedley said, shortly.

  Aaron shrugged with incomprehension: ‘If you’re raising money, ‘Peace, you couldn’t do better than build a theatre for Newcastle. The demand’s there.’

  She grinned. ‘When I’ve made my fortune, maybe. Not until.’ She was irritated by Hedley’s reaction to the two thespians, though it would once have been her own. He had all the common man’s prejudi
ce against the theatre and, while he treated the blooming and confident Fanny with his usual dogged courtesy, it was obvious he regarded her as a woman no better than she should be. He mistook Aaron’s bafflement at the mining process as belonging to a man who despised those who got their hands dirty.

  He might have had more understanding if Makepeace had told him what had happened to Aaron at the hands of men who dabbled in tar, but she didn’t. Nor did Betty, though she had confided much else to him.

  Since Aaron had healed, mentally and physically, as well as he had by pretending his scars were not there, it was not for the two women who loved him to display them to others.

  In fact, that Boston had left her in sympathy with the causes for which people rioted while loathing riots themselves, was a complexity which Makepeace felt was too intimate and betrayed too much of her personal life to confide to him. Anyway, she decided, it wouldn’t make any difference; she could present libertarian credentials from the Archangel Gabriel but Hedley would not be shaken in his belief that, given the chance, she would grind the faces of her employees and that he must not therefore allow her a controlling interest with which to do so.

  ‘He’s worse than John Beasley,’ she fulminated to Betty. ‘Thinks he’s the only radical in the business. A pretty penny I’ll get out of Rockingham and the others with him in tow. He’s so damn rude.’

  ‘Clever an’ all,’ Betty pointed out.

  There was that. According to him, his adaptation of the Newcomen engine made it a more efficient pump. Makepeace had no way of judging the mechanism but she thought she could judge men and whatever else Hedley might be he was neither self-deluded nor a boaster. Furthermore, that swarthy head of his boiled with ideas for improvements to this or that mining technique.

  If potential investors could disregard how uncouth he was, she might yet get her money. But she wasn’t going to sign an equal partnership agreement.

  In fact, on anything connected with business she and Hedley had come to conduct themselves almost like a married couple, swearing horribly and with complete freedom as each harangued the other, arguing their different positions, planning, and sharing unembarrassed silences while they contemplated.

  It was, she supposed, what an honest partnership should be. On that plane they were intimate and she was content. On that plane. Delve deeper, return underground, descend into the coaly darkness where her grief, her very intestines, had been momentarily exposed . . . she wouldn’t go there again. Her private places belonged to Dapifer and she guarded them with ferocity. Her past was forbidden territory; she might have emerged at Raby fully fledged from a long delay in some womb. It made her more comfortable with Hedley that he showed no curiosity about her history and was nearly as reticent about his own.

  What was less comfortable to her was the fact that, if she took him with her, they would be travelling on their own. Aaron’s players had put on a benefit performance to raise money for the journey but the takings had been only enough to provide accommodation and coaches for two. Betty and Tantaquidgeon would have to remain at Raby with Philippa.

  Even in these morally easy days it was questionable for a woman to journey unchaperoned with a man not her husband or a relative. Makepeace didn’t care what the people she was going to visit thought of her but she did need their money; they must feel no hesitation on moral grounds about giving it to her.

  Yes, she would take him but, first, she gave him a lecture on behaviour. ‘The men we’re going to see won’t lend us a farthing if you talk to them like a damn Leveller. Where’ll your Ideal Colliery be then?’

  He looked her straight in the eye. ‘Credit me with sense, pet.’

  ‘And don’t call me “pet”.’ In his Northumbrian mouth the use of ‘pet’ was a comma, not an endearment, but she didn’t want it taken as a sign of intimacy between them.

  She had to hope he would behave himself and that his obvious social inferiority would acquit them both of anything other than mutual business interests in the eyes of those who saw them together. And, as they stood side by side in the glory that was Wentworth House, waiting for a footman to show them in to the presence of the Marquis of Rockingham, she was sure it would. Hedley looked as if she’d brought him along to do the plumbing.

  The hall was sixty feet square and forty high. Fluted Ionic pillars in white and sienna marble supported a gallery round the whole, niches held antique marble statues, gold leaf was everywhere. It loomed over her so that she felt like a pygmy pushed into the ring of the Colosseum to amuse the crowd. But at least she looked smart. Susan Brewer had sent up a loaned wardrobe of clothes to see her through the tour, though sitting on a coach roof—they could only afford outside passenger seats—had not improved it.

  Hedley’s coat might have travelled the world already. It was mouse-coloured, careworn and under strain across his massive shoulders, and its pockets bulged with drawings. The most that could be said for him was that he wasn’t showing anger at the riches around him. ‘Grand,’ he said, dismissively. ‘Can’t expect it to be comfortable.’

  He’s going to insist on being common, she thought. On the other hand, the observation was apt; the place didn’t overawe her either. She’d lost the capacity to be impressed by grandeur.

  The Marquis of Rockingham came to them in the hall, almost bounding. It flashed into Makepeace’s mind that not only did this man own the fifteen hundred manicured acres of Yorkshire that constituted his grounds but also a large part of the county beyond them, and what he didn’t own was in his political control.

  This eager courtesy from such a magnate to one poor woman was either guilt on his part or, possibly, because he was a very nice man. She didn’t care either way; she merely wanted his money.

  ‘My dear, dear Lady Dapifer, I cannot tell you the relief of hearing your name announced . . .’ But he continued to do so, detailing the enquiries he’d made for her, his worry, his distress over Dapifer’s death ‘ . . . of all Englishmen this country could spare him the least.’

  You could have found me if you’d wanted to, she thought. Wasn’t he related to Catty in some way? Yes, she thought she remembered Pip mentioning that he was.

  Unsmiling, she introduced Hedley. ‘It’s a matter of business, my lord.’

  Rockingham ushered them towards his library ‘so that we may be cosy’.

  He looked much older now that he was out of office than he had during his Prime Ministership. Never a favourite with the King, his liberal attitude to America had earned him George’s particular dislike, and Pitt, recently created Earl of Chatham, had refused to co-operate with him in keeping the administration alive. Pitt was a politician whose approach to government was to build one round his own personality.

  He’s missing Pip, Makepeace thought. Pip was the one who worked behind the scenes to keep them all together. Out loud, she said: ‘How is Lady Rockingham?’

  ‘Mary’s taking the waters. She will be laid low again to learn that she’s missed your visit, she was always so attached to you.’

  Was I attached to her? I can’t remember.

  The Rockinghams’ marriage had been that rare thing among the aristocracy, a love match, but it was barren. As if conscious that his own lack of a child must not let him ignore the fact that other people had them, he was quick to ask: ‘The baby is thriving?’

  Doesn’t know the sex, she thought. ‘Philippa is very well.’

  He lowered his voice: ‘And the law suit? How does that fare?’

  ‘In abeyance until I’ve got funds to proceed with it.’ Now he’ll think I’m begging for charity.

  ‘Cosy’ was not a word she’d have chosen to describe a library sixty feet long, but firelight and walls of gold-brown books rendered it more welcoming than the hall. Coffee and sweetmeats were laid on a table by the fire, chairs drawn up.

  Makepeace began by reminding Rockingham that his wife had been present at Almack’s on the night of the wager between her and Headington. She explained what she’d found at Raby a
nd stated her business.

  Immediately she mentioned the word ‘coal’ Rockingham’s expression sharpened out of its dutiful chivalry and became more truly interested: the face of an entrepreneur. Makepeace realized, almost with shock, that if he did indeed lend her money it wouldn’t be from charity but because he saw the chance of profit.

  He’s got millions already, she thought. At the inn where she and Hedley had put up for the night, they’d been told by Rockingham’s adoring villagers of the eighty-five thousand pounds he’d spent on building Wentworth’s stables, a work that had employed large numbers of local men at decent wages for several years—hence the adoration.

  But that was noblesse oblige; this was . . . what? Where had she seen the look before? Pioneering! Good Lord, it was the same gleam that had been in the eyes of her father and other men setting out to explore the American wilderness.

  He’d turned his attention to Hedley, asking sharp questions, listening carefully to equally sharp Northumbrian answers. How thick was the seam? Hard coal, was it? How deep?

  Watching them, Makepeace saw a new thing: two people from the two most distant ends of society bridging what had previously been unbridgeable.

  Here was the new age. Aristocrats with forebears going back to Saxon times recognizing the worth of men with no ancestry whatever. A Hedley in a dreadful coat could say impatiently—as this one was doing now—‘Na, na, it’s the vessel with the steam acting on the piston has to be always as hot as the steam itself, d’you not grasp that?’ And a silken, brocaded marquis could answer, humbly—as Rockingham was—‘Oh yes, Mr Hedley, I see now.’

  For all three of them at that moment there was something in the room representing more than ambition, profit or vengeance.

  Makepeace thought: Sam Adams should see this.

  The two men left the subject of pumping water from the mines and passed on to the problem of raising coal from its depths—Hedley had taken a pencil from his pocket and was drawing with it on one of the table’s fine linen napkins. Makepeace heard Rockingham ask: ‘Rectangular corves?’ and Hedley say: ‘Wheeled, d’you see. Save emptying, put ’em straight on rails. We’d stop fouling with conductors braged on opposite sides of wor shaft . . .’