Her eyes were as hard and unyielding as enamel. And so he turned, let himself out of the room, and set down a chair facing the bedroom door. Early the next morning, just as the sky was lightening, the door opened. Gabrielle was dressed and made up. Without a word, she walked past him and let herself out the front door.
A week later his concierge sent him a message at work. He was to come at once. He found Gabrielle wrapped in a blanket in front of the fire. Her face was white, her lips bitten, and her eyes sunk deep into her head. He sent for his doctor, who came within the hour. After a brief examination, he recommended bed rest and Indian hemp. The next day, Émile sent a note to her husband explaining that she was safe. He received no answer.
“I have to go back to work,” he told her. “And I must see my mother. But I will be back after that.”
He went to the office, tried to catch up with everything he had missed, and then he spent a few hours with Madame Nouguier. After dinner he looked over the glassworks accounts and signed some checks before making his excuses and heading home. He needn’t have rushed. The ashes in the fireplace were cold. Gabrielle had been gone for hours.
The trees were a haze of new green in the Bois de Boulogne. The air was filled with the rich smell of the damp earth, while up above flocks of starlings blotted and wheeled in a sky of the emptiest blue. The coachman dropped him off at the main gate of the park, at the Porte Dauphine, and Émile declined his offer of help to carry his large bundle. On foot, he crossed the path to the lakes and the other to the racecourse and set off to find a secluded spot somewhere near the river. Once he heard the crack of a musket fired nearby. It was a little late in the day for a duel, but still they came, the wronged husbands and the audacious lovers, the insulted and the abandoned, squabbling over women like gulls over a fish.
The pyre of paintings caught fire easily. The wood of the frames spat sparks as they split, and the canvas curled and shivered before it turned to ash. Émile watched the lick of flames as it crept along Gabrielle’s pale skin, her face, her smile, turning them black before wiping them out forever with one gentle stroke.
9
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EVEN AT NIGHT, Glasgow seemed to glow. The great furnaces of the Caledonian Railway Locomotive Works in Springburn and the shipbuilding yards and rolling mills of Fairfield’s in Govan roared all night, turning the low-lying clouds that blew in from the Campsies a dirty ochre. That evening, a new locomotive was being taken from St. Rollox to Stobcross Quay on a horse-drawn dray. There it would be loaded by crane onto a boat and shipped out to India or South Africa or China. Some of the men who had worked on the locomotive—the iron molders and the boilermakers, the smiths and the erectors—paraded behind it all the way to the docks. Others applauded from the pavements or waved from their windows as the huge steam train passed by at little more than walking pace, its vast boiler and chimney cap carried slowly along almost twelve feet above the cobblestones.
The tram that Cait was riding on stopped to let the steam train pass. Everyone strained in their seats or crowded forward to the driver’s cab to get a better view.
“They must be making one of those a fortnight,” the driver called out over his shoulder.
“Wherever there’s a railway,” said a man at his elbow, “you’ll find the work of a Glaswegian.”
The city lay beneath a fug of smog and smur. At William Arrol’s ironworks in Dalmarnock, the yard was full of steel girders on their way to the Queensferry workshop for the new Forth Bridge. Arrol’s office was on the first floor above the erecting shop. In his letter he’d asked if she could drop by sometime the following day to see him about a personal matter. Cait’s timing was unfortunate, his secretary told her. Arrol had just been given the news that a twenty-year-old rigger had died in a fall from the Forth Bridge construction site.
“Shall I come back another time?” Cait asked.
“Mr. Arrol always keeps his appointments,” she replied.
Cait knocked on his door and was commanded to enter. Inside the office the shutters were closed and the fire was lit. At first, although the room was stuffy with tobacco, it seemed as if no one was there. Then somewhere, glass clinked against glass. Whiskey, she could smell it, was poured.
“I keep telling them,” William Arrol said, “that if they work high they must use the safety cages. Have you informed his family yet?”
She saw now that Arrol was sitting in an armchair facing the windows with a whiskey decanter in his hand.
“Mr. Arrol,” she said. “It’s me.”
He turned and his face screwed up in the light from the door behind her. “Mrs. Wallace,” he said. “Of course. My apologies.”
He stood up, put the decanter of whiskey back on the tray, and turned on a lamp. On his desk a huge drawing was held flat at each end by two cabinet cards. With a glance she saw that both cards were photographic portraits of his wife, Elizabeth.
“I’m sorry to hear the bad news,” she said.
“What can you do?” he said. “These young fellows, they are foolhardy, reckless. Actually, it’s exactly this that I wanted to see you about. Tea?”
“Please.”
“I hear that congratulations may be in order?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“An engagement? At least, that’s what the jungle drums are saying. Please, sit down, I won’t be a moment.”
Of course she had been expecting it, she had seen Sinclair’s proposal coming—how could she not? It was in the deferential bow of his head and the flourish of his handwriting when he wrote out her name, it was in his light touch in the middle of her back and the way he examined her when he thought she wouldn’t notice, like a horse that he was considering purchasing. After all, he had told her, it made perfect sense. Although he was older, they were united in the loss of a spouse. And yet the fingers of his right hand still rolled those hair bracelets around and around his wrist. Would he ever remove them? Couldn’t he put them away in a drawer? And just the thought of the cold strands of his first wife’s and daughter’s hair touching her skin filled her with revulsion.
“May I think about it?” she had replied when he had finally asked her. They were standing in the doorway of her tenement block to shelter from a burst of torrential rain. Sinclair’s face had turned rigid in response. This hadn’t been the answer he had been expecting.
“Of course,” he said with a small guffaw. “How long?”
“A week,” she said.
“But no longer,” he clarified.
She was just about to let herself into the building when she noticed that he had something else to say.
“You must miss it,” he said, “the conjugal duty.”
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“You were a married woman. Don’t look so shocked. Even older fillies like a bit of sport at the right time of the month. Especially one like you—I can tell.”
His mustache wiggled. His eyes were hidden by the shadows reflected in the glass of his spectacles.
“I await your answer with bated breath.” And he then turned and hobbled off toward the railway station.
This had been six days earlier, and in that time she had barely slept. It wasn’t only the fact that she felt absolutely no desire for Roland Sinclair, nothing but a vague heaviness behind her face, like the early onset of a cold. It was the fact that she had no good reason not to accept his proposal, at least none that she could admit. She was thirty-one years old; she had no income of her own. Roland Sinclair was solvent, he was unattached, he was respectable; it was a foregone conclusion. She would marry him and become Mrs. R. Sinclair. They would live on the Esplanade with his sister. And he would come to her for what he referred to as “sport.”
Arrol came back into his office with a tray loaded up with a china tea set, two cups and saucers, and a cake.
“Sugar?” he asked once he had poured the tea and added milk.
She shook her head.
“No?” he said as he
handed her the teacup. “By the looks of you, a little sweetness might do the power of good.”
“Does everyone know?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded sagely. She drank some tea, then placed the cup back in its saucer.
“I must give him an answer by tomorrow,” she said.
Arrol stared at the floor for an instant before he spoke. “You don’t have to agree,” he said.
“How can I refuse?” Cait said. “I have no grounds.”
And then she placed one hand over her face and sobbed. Arrol pulled a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. Outside on Dunn Street the sound of men drifted up as they laughed and teased and swore.
“I’m so sorry to trouble you again when you have so much on your plate already,” she said as she wiped her face.
“No trouble,” he replied. “A woman like you needs to be careful. Once bitten, twice shy. Isn’t that what they say? Especially after what happened last time.”
She stared at him. What did he know about her marriage?
“Last time?” she repeated.
Arrol gave her a puzzled look.
“They said it was cross-bracing. And the workmanship was inferior. But it was all poor, in my opinion. The design, the construction, and the maintenance.”
“Ah yes. Of course.”
She suddenly felt foolish, hysterical, and so she focused on folding up the handkerchief.
“The new Tay Bridge is finished, so I hear,” she offered.
“It will open in July. Do you know how we’re building the new bridge across the Forth?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s very exciting.”
“It is the first bridge in the world to be built entirely out of steel—not iron, but steel,” he clarified. “The structures will work on the balanced cantilever principle; each of the three spans will initially stand alone. And then we will build them out foot by foot and inch by inch across the river until, with any luck, they will meet.”
“You mean they might not?”
“We must have faith.” He smiled.
“In God?”
“In mathematics,” he replied. “Once it is complete, it will be safer than any other bridge ever built. But still there will be that moment, that reaching out of one arm to another when nothing is certain, nothing is fixed.”
For a moment they were silent.
“Mr. Arrol,” said Cait, having regained her composure, “just exactly what was it that you wanted to see me about?”
“I’m worried about my nephew, Jamie,” he replied. “I have the sense that his spans may never reach, so to speak.”
“What has he done now?”
“He wants to go back to Paris.”
“I think he mentioned it,” said Cait. “When I saw him last.”
“Says he has the chance of apprenticeship with someone at Gustave Eiffel’s firm. Wants to work on the construction of his iron tower. Why, I asked him, when we’re in the middle of building the bridge across the Forth?”
“Have you tried talking to him?” she asked.
Arrol let out a short burst of indignant laughter, then picked up his whiskey glass and poured what was left of it into his tea.
“I was going to ask your opinion. About whether you thought it was a good idea. But now, now an idea has occurred to me that might offer a possible solution for all of us.”
The factory whistle sounded from the other end of the yard, long and low with a dip in the middle. And in that brief lull, as the men below put down their tools and picked up their dinner pails, as their wives and daughters heard the whistle and stoked up the fire beneath a pot of potatoes or began to brew a pot of tea, she blinked. What Arrol suggested had been the very last thing she expected to hear. She opened her mouth as if to speak and then closed it again.
“Well?” Arrol said.
“Paris,” she clarified.
“We’re talking about Jamie. And Alice, who would marry a lamppost if it asked her.”
Cait’s heart was beating too fast, speeding ahead of herself. She took as deep a breath as her corset would allow and then looked straight at William Arrol.
“Are you perfectly serious?”
He stared at her in the half-light. “It wouldn’t all be plain sailing. You’d be the responsible adult to my two wayward charges again.”
She picked up her teacup and took a sip. Her hand shook.
“And how long were you thinking?” she asked.
“As far as I’m aware, the tower has to be finished for 1889, for the Exposition Universelle, the World’s Fair. If nothing else, it would provide you with a viable reason to put off your man Sinclair, at least for the foreseeable future.” Although she was aware of a rapid rising, a throwing off of weight, of ballast, this time there was no sense of vertigo, no grip of fear.
“I’ll do you a favor and you’ll do one for me,” he continued. “You would be the metaphorical safety basket, to keep my reckless young niece and nephew safe. Yes, the more I think on it the more I like it. A perfect plan for all.”
Arrol seemed to relax. He stretched out his legs and crossed them.
“All except the Sinclair fellow, of course,” he added.
“Mr. Arrol,” said Cait, “you have no idea how much this means to me.”
“I can take a fair guess,” he said, and laughed. “Cake?”
II
____
10
____
June 1887
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE TOWER were finished; four huge metal caissons, or shoes, as they were known, had been sunk into the ground, two near the river and two farther away from it. This was how the construction always began, Émile knew, with a subtraction rather than an addition; the workers had removed hundreds of kilos of earth and stone, shoveling it onto carts and into wagons to be taken away by train or barge. And now the site looked like an architectural dig, an uncovering of the remnants of another civilization whose particulars were forgotten but whose scale was enormous, whose ambition was gargantuan, and who had left behind a geography of vast walls and massive girders.
They had to dig much deeper on the side of the river to make the foundations stable. The men had quarried down through damp clay and wet sand, through mud studded with broken crockery and shards of glass, with splinters of animal bone and flakes of flint, and now the air reeked of decayed things, of sulfur and rot. Cutting across everything, however, making your eyes water and the world intermittently gray and indistinct, were clouds of woodsmoke. The fires seemed to burn day and night, purifying and polluting in equal measure.
The smells reminded Émile of Auvergne, where they’d built the Garabit Viaduct, and Portugal, where they’d constructed the Maria Pia Bridge over the River Douro. In the center of Paris, however, just across the river from the lavish towers of the Trocadéro Palace and straddling the entrance to the Pont d’Iéna, the site seemed to smell worse than usual. Maybe it was the city; maybe it was depth of the hole? The excavation felt messy, vulgar, an unsightly tear in the city’s flawless fabric. No wonder so many people came to gawk and stare, to point and peer.
Since the first day they had begun digging, a line of carriages had been pulling up at the curb on the Quai d’Orsay and letting out scores and scores of curious, indignant, or outraged onlookers. Men in bowler hats strolled slowly past, or paused at the perimeter to lean on their walking sticks and wait for something to happen. Ladies, their cloaks billowing out in the wind like the feathers on a crow’s wing, scurried by, their faces covered with handkerchiefs against the dust and the smoke and the deep, damp, unsettling smell of the foundations. There wasn’t a lot to see at first. All the site did was to confirm what people already thought: the construction would be a monstrosity, a truly tragic lamppost. And yet Émile knew that the tower would soon begin to rise; the works were on schedule. At this rate they’d reach the first platform before Christmas.
“Monsieur!” a voice cried out from the other side o
f the site. “Monsieur Nouguier?”
He turned and squinted across the rubble and the wagon tracks. Out of a billow of smoke came a figure, a man dressed in black coattails and a tall hat, as if about to go to the theater or the opera or the ballet. As they watched, he tripped over a rock, let out a curse, and then continued toward them.
“Who is this?” Émile asked the foreman.
The foreman shook his head. “I don’t know who gave him permission to enter the site,” he said. “As soon as I find out, they’ll be reprimanded. We can’t have members of the public stumbling around. Damned liability. I’ll escort him out.”
As the man came closer, however, something about him looked familiar.
“Hold on,” Émile called to the foreman. “It’s all right. I know him.”
Jamie Arrol clasped Émile by the hand and shook it vigorously.
“They told me you’d be here,” he said. “I went to Levallois-Perret first, you see. Bit of a wasted trip. Anyway, it’s so good to see you again. And glad to see that you didn’t start without me.”
He turned and motioned his hand toward the site.
“Actually we started months ago,” Émile said hesitantly.
“I’m joking,” the man replied. “Obviously. Anyway, it’s nice to see you again.”
Émile stared at the Scotsman he had met five months earlier. What on earth was he doing here?
“It’s Arrol,” the man explained. “Jamie Arrol? Remember?”
“Monsieur Arrol, of course,” he replied. “Having another holiday?”
After the tiniest pause, Jamie Arrol laughed. “Very amusing,” he replied. “Look here, I have a letter for you.”
From his inside pocket he pulled a white envelope sealed with wax, and handed it over.
“It’s all there,” Arrol said. “Permission to take up an apprenticeship on the project as was suggested. My uncle William Arrol is already acquainted with Gustave Eiffel, so he was quite happy about the arrangement. Vive the auld alliance!”
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