Circles of Time

by Phillip Rock

  Odd, he thought, how fate or circumstances worked. Here he sat in a first-class carriage with a letter of credit in his suitcase for fifty thousand dollars, on his way to meet with Sir Angus Blackworth at the Blackworth plant near Abingdon. He wondered idly if the Pryory was still lived in. As he lit a cigar he decided it would be worth going by there—if he had the time.

  TWO MECHANICS IN white coveralls checked the bolts securing the engine to the test frame, then turned on the ignition switch and pulled the propeller. The nine-cylinder radial kicked smoothly into life, the full-throttled roar muffled by the sound baffles in the testing shed. One of the Blackworth engineers scanned the flickering needle on the test panel.

  “Three hundred,” he shouted. “We can get her up to three hundred fifty easy enough.”

  Ross, his suit covered with a blue smock, leaned forward and scowled at the dials. “Not that easily. She’s straining at three and a quarter. Blow a cork in a minute.”

  The engineer eased off on the throttle control and then cut the switch. “It’s still the best aero engine on the market. Reliable as all get-out.”

  Ross nodded in agreement. “It’s the engine we’re looking for, all right, but we’ve got to have more horsepower. Our specs call for four hundred minimum.”

  The engineer lit a cigarette and eyed Ross through the smoke. He had been prepared to dislike the man when they had first met. Had put him down as just another Yank, cocky and overpaid. But after talking with him for a few minutes he had detected Birmingham in his speech and they had spent an hour over tea talking about their apprentice days, the engineer having served his at the Clybourne works in Coventry, Lockhart & Whitby’s chief competitor.

  “Why don’t you use the Liberty or the Packard twelve? There must be hundreds of the ruddy things back in the States.”

  “Can’t,” Ross said. “The U.S. Navy wants a radial. It’s what our contract calls for—an air-cooled, low-maintenance power plant. There’s nothing being built in America that even comes close to the Blackworth Argo, but we must have more HP.”

  “Better see the old man then. He’s under the impression you’re here to buy what we’ve got.”

  “Did he tell you that? I made it clear to him we’d need changes.”

  The engineer laughed and puffed smoke. “The gaffer only hears what he wants to hear. The plain fact of the matter is we’ve got more engines than we can use or sell. The armistice caught us with a warehouse full. He was hoping to clear ’em all out with a fat Yank contract. You’d best hop over to number four hangar and set him straight.”

  Sir Angus Blackworth had earned his knighthood because of the exploits of one of his planes, the Blackworth BFC-3 scout-bomber. Two squadrons of the tough, fast two-seaters had raided the U-boat pens at Ostend and Zeebrugge early in 1918. Their light bombs had barely dented the ferroconcrete submarine shelters, but lucky hits had sunk two U-boats in the Brugge canal and a large fuel depot had been set aflame, the column of black smoke seen as far away as Ramsgate and Dover. The exploit had fired the public imagination as well, and Angus had been whisked from his workshop to Buckingham Palace to be touched on the shoulders by the king’s sword. The honor proved to be of little worth in the postwar world. He was struggling against stiff competition to make it in the field of civil transport. His hopes rested with the Blackworth Atlas, a three-engine, high-winged biplane of metal and wood construction covered with duralumin and fabric and built to carry a crew of three and ten passengers. Aircraft Travel and Transport, Ltd., was interested in the plane for their London-Paris route, but the test flights of the prototype had been disappointing. Sir Angus now spent every waking moment in the hangar crawling over and through the big machine with a notebook and slide rule. He knew the solution to his problem even as James Andrew Ross of Corona Aircraft Company, San Diego, California, U.S.A., was explaining his own.

  “Power,” Sir Angus muttered, seated on the lower wing, his short legs dangling. “That’s the bleeding ticket, isn’t it? The ruddy secret to flight. Power and more power.”

  “It’s always been the key. More so now. What does this brute weigh?”

  “Near fourteen thousand pounds—unloaded.”

  “There you are, then. The ratio of weight to horsepower is out of kilter. Now, you take our plane. Three hundred HP was fine until the navy wanted more out of it than just scouting. We have to take off and land on this ruddy carrier they’re building, carry a Vickers on the engine cowling and two Lewis guns on a Scarff ring for the gunner-observer, have a range of six hundred miles, and lug five hundred pounds of bombs if need be. We’d never get the beast off the ruddy deck at original specs. We had your Argo in mind from the start, but we’ll need another hundred horsepower.”

  “I could use that myself.”

  “That’s right. Well, the Argo’s a good engine, trusty as a five-quid watch. I’ve got ideas for it. I could get her to four hundred fifty. Mean rebuilding it from the bearings up, but it would be bloody well worth the effort.”

  Sir Angus knew a braggart when he saw one. There were mechanics and engineers floating around who’d promise the blinking moon and deliver nothing but grief. He knew the type all right, and he knew he wasn’t looking at one now. He’d taken the trouble to check up on J. A. Ross when he’d first received the letter from him on Corona Aircraft Company stationery inquiring whether he had thirty Argo radial engines for sale. A man at the American Board of Trade in London had sent him particulars. Corona Aircraft was a growing concern in San Diego with firm contracts from the U.S. Navy. Ross was chief engineer and partner.

  Sir Angus extended his arms. “Help me down from here, lad.” Once on the ground he looked up at the big plane. “She’s a beauty. And she’ll sell. I’ll have two versions, one for passengers and one for freight. It’s a good, honest machine. All she needs is more power. Of course, I didn’t need you to tell me that. I was building engines before you were born. The truth is, I have all these Argo-135’s left over from war contracts that were canceled. Thought I could use them on this aircraft—or, anyway, hoped I could but knew in my heart I couldn’t. Oh, she flies well enough with them, but not with the number of passengers or pounds of freight I want her to carry.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m sure you do.” He rubbed a hand across his shaggy white eyebrows. “When do you need your engines?”

  “The navy wants delivery when they launch their aircraft carrier. That could be a year, year and a half, maybe longer. They’ve been having problems with it. Changing designs all the time. It makes it hard on us. They still haven’t settled on the type of arresting gear they’ll use. We can’t start building the frames until we know how they intend to slow the plane when it lands on the ruddy deck. A hook of some kind, but we have to know where to place it.”

  “And you people just sittin’ around twirlin’ your thumbs?”

  “No. We’re keeping our people busy building ten seaplanes for the navy with ten more on order from civilian companies. Using Liberty engines for those, so we’ve got no problems.”

  “Meanin’ you don’t have to rush back?”

  Ross shivered slightly. The hangar doors were closed against the wind-driven sleet, but the great corrugated-iron building was colder than a well digger’s arse. He thought of Coronado Island, people walking on the beach in the winter sunshine.

  “I’d rush back tomorrow if you had a four-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower to sell me.”

  Sir Angus stamped his feet in frustration. He looked like an angry gnome. “I’d not even be botherin’ to talk to you if I had that! It’d be hand over your money, haul away your bloody engines, and be quick about it!” He plucked a pencil from his pocket and chewed on it, calming himself down. “Now look here, Ross. I know a good deal about you. Solid little company in San Diego and all that. Mentioned your name to a fella I know. We were havin’ a drink at my club in London. He was with Rolls-Royce during the war, engine designer, and told me they’d used seven of your carburetor pat
ents. Said you was one of the cleverest chaps in the ruddy business. A natural-born engineer. Stopped a bit short of callin’ you a bleedin’ genius.”

  “Not very nice of him to stop there.”

  Sir Angus gripped Ross by the arm with a small, strong hand. “Now look ’ere. Two hands wash better than one, I always say. It’s not just the piston displacement or compression ratios we’re facin’, it’s a whole new carburetion system as well. There’s higher-octane petrols coming on the market and a new system’s needed to take advantage of them. If you could stay for six weeks or so and work with my lads, pool your bloody brains like, and come up with the design for what you need in an engine and I need in an engine, I’d be prepared to sell you the first thirty at twelve percent above cost, and give you the exclusive rights to build the ruddy thing in America under license—terms to be worked out to our mutual satisfaction. Does that sound fair enough?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And I’ll take care of all expenses while you’re here—give you a car to use, a nice little cottage in Abingdon to rest your weary head in. Is it a bargain?” He stuck his hand out sharply and Ross took hold of it. “Good—good. It’s been nice chattin’ with you, lad. Now, if you’d just give me a boost up, I’ll get back to checkin’ the aileron linkage.”

  HE COULD FAULT neither the car nor the cottage. The car, fittingly enough, was of American make—a Stearns-Knight Six coupe—and the cottage was far more comfortable and well furnished than he had expected. At the end of a quiet lane, it was one of seven cottages that the Blackworth Company had built in 1917 to house their chief engineers and families. Since those heady war years of rapid expansion and lucrative contracts, three of the cottages had stood empty. Ross had been handed the key to the last in line, the one whose side windows looked out on an unspoiled vista of fields and woods. It was like being in the middle of the country, a hundred miles from anywhere, but he was within easy walking distance of the little town.

  He had rarely gone into Abingdon when he had been in service to the earl. The village had been too provincial for his tastes and he had spent his day off each week either in Guildford or London, racing off to those places on his motorbike. The only times he had gone into the village had been on Sundays when he had driven the family in for church service, and when Countess Stanmore had to attend a charity bazaar of some kind, usually at the vicarage. A sleepy sort of place in those days. One public house—the Crown and Anchor, more of an old codgers’ home than a proper pub. Draughts and darts. It had all changed now.

  He took a walk through Abingdon the afternoon of his fifth day of residence. It was a Saturday, the weather halfway pleasant for a change and the streets crowded with shoppers. He was amazed by the difference—the cinema palace, the variety of shops, the number of pubs, even two petrol stations and three garages. He had a fine lunch in a restaurant owned by three Italian brothers. The brothers pressed Chianti on him, eager to know more about America. They had spotted him by his clothes.

  “Of course you are American. The hat, che bueno! The jacket! The way she nips the waist—magnifico!”

  He told them what he knew. They had relatives in Cleveland. More wine. They had a cousin in California who never wrote. More wine for that. He felt light-headed when he left and walked it off, up the High Street and past the church. The war memorial sobered him.

  FOR KING AND COUNTY

  1914–1918

  And under that inscription twenty-seven names. He remembered four.

  ALBERT DENNING

  THOMAS HANES

  SAMUEL MASTERWELL

  IVY THAXTON RILKE

  Hanes and Denning had been grooms at Abingdon Pryory—cheeky little chaps, envious of his motorbike and keen as mustard to learn how to ride it. He had taught them one long summer day, behind the stables, when the earl and countess were in France. Now they were dead in the Great War, all that patient teaching gone for nought. Sam Masterwell had been one of the footmen, an overgrown boy of a man who was always pinching the maids in servants’ hall or trying to kiss them on the back stairs. The maids had hated him and called him an oaf. Now his name was carved in marble.

  Ivy Thaxton. He had a dim memory of a girl by that name. One of the upstairs maids. Pretty. Dark-haired. They had talked a few times and he had offered to take her to the pictures in Guildford when she had an afternoon off, but never had. Ivy Thaxton Rilke. Lady Stanmore’s maiden name had been Rilke. One of her nephews had stayed for a few weeks the summer of the war. Nice sort of fellow. Worked on a newspaper in Chicago. Picked him up at Southampton when he had arrived and had chauffeured him about London from time to time. It could be he was the one who had married Ivy Thaxton. From housemaid to the wife of a countess’s nephew. Quite a boost up in the world. But the war had spoiled that future, as it had spoiled so many others.

  He walked slowly back along the High Street. He had thought a lot about the war when he had been in America and had felt guilty about being safe in Cleveland, Ohio, while other chaps were dying in Flanders. All of the lads sent over by Rolls-Royce had felt the same way. The chief engineer on the project had given them a little talk about it, pointing out that what they were doing was helping to win the war, that the engines being turned out on the Yank assembly lines were powering the planes that were smashing the Boche good and proper—the giant Handley-Page bombers, the Bristol fighters and DH-4’s. “It’s not bows and arrows that win wars these days, lads, it’s machines. Every Falcon and Eagle engine turned out brings the war that much closer to a victorious end.”

  It made sense. He was doing his bit even if his “trenches” were workbenches and lathes, his “western front” the shoreline of Lake Erie, but still he had experienced an odd feeling when reading about the Somme battles in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. That had been in 1916, the year he had taken the big step to improve himself by enrolling in night classes at the Ohio Institute of Technology. The men he had met there over the next three years had expanded his horizons in a thousand directions. One of them, Harry Patterson, was now his partner in Ross-Patterson Motors and the Corona Aircraft Company.

  “Nothing but blue skies,” Harry had said when seeing him off at the railroad station in San Diego. Perhaps, but there would always be a chill in the blue from the shadows of monuments.

  THE BLACKWORTH ENGINEERS and mechanics were clever, innovative, and hardworking. They also recognized the crucial nature of their work. The beautiful but woefully underpowered aircraft in hangar number four represented their futures, their pay envelopes, and the welfare of their wives and children. Rising unemployment in England was a frightening fact, and if they lost their jobs at Blackworth’s they would all be hard put to find others. Twelve-hour days were normal. Sixteen hours not unusual. In three weeks the basic design for boosting the Argo radial to 450 HP at over 1800 rpm had been developed. It would take another three weeks or so of double shifts in the machine shop to prove the design correct. There was little for Ross to do now except wait for the testing.

  He was drawn to the Pryory, passing the iron gates daily on his way to and from the factory. The house itself, except for some of the chimneys, could not be seen from the road. He had been surprised to learn from Sir Angus that it was still inhabited.

  “More money than sense, if you ask me,” Sir Angus had scoffed. “One ruddy family in a house as big as a railroad station. Twenty servants if they have one. Still, if a man has money to burn, he might just as well go ahead and burn it, I always say.”

  Ross had no reason to go there except curiosity and a certain sentimental urge. He had been happy working for the earl. Lazy, almost indolent days at the Pryory or at Stanmore House in Park Lane. Nothing much to do except swagger about in his well-cut uniform dazzling the young maids. The memory of his former self made him smile—and made him grateful. Because he had had so much time on his hands, especially at night—the earl and countess rarely went anywhere in the evenings when they were staying at Abingdon—he had begun to dig deeper into the m
echanical structure of the Rolls-Royce automobile. The earl’s 1910 model Silver Ghost had its drawbacks and he had thought of ways to improve its performance. A fellow chauffeur, Lord Curzon’s man, had talked him into taking out patents on his various carburetion devices and then into submitting his ideas and mechanical drawings to the Rolls-Royce company. They had found them of little use in motor cars, but of great practicality for their aero engines. When the war began, they had secured his patents and hired him, turning him into a starred man, a man exempt from military service. The substantial royalties they had paid after the war had made it possible for him to go into business with Harry Patterson. His entire life altered by what he had done in the garage at the Pryory. His tinkering with the Earl of Stanmore’s car—if he cared to muse on the fatalistic implications of it—perhaps keeping his name from being chiseled on that memorial stone in Abingdon High Street.

  It was impulse that made him stop his car in front of the gates one Saturday afternoon. He was on his way to Guildford to see a football match, but the gates beckoned and he pulled up and got out of the car. There was no lock on the gates, but he hesitated for some time before swinging them open and then driving through. What would he do when he got to the house? Knock on the front door and introduce himself? He wasn’t anyone’s servant now, but he just couldn’t see himself doing that. When he reached sight of the Pryory, he slowed the car and thought of turning around and going back, but the sheer beauty of the house and gardens kept him moving forward in a state of wonder. Funny, he had worked in the place for nearly two years and had never given its magnificence a second thought. The gravel road branched off, one road curving away to the right to join a circular drive in front of the house, the other going left toward the garages and the back. He turned the car to the left.