"Mary, what is it? It's me."
"Creeping up like that! You scared the life out of me!"
"What are you doing? Collecting?"
"No.” She looked away. “Not today."
Sometimes Mary collected money for the Rodney Place Missionary Society, though usually she took her box up the hill to Clifton or down to Queen's Square, where the pickings were better because the people were rich enough to afford to be generous. Sometimes she was sent further afield, to Bath or Chippenham or Swindon. The railways had made the world smaller, more manageable.
"So why are you here?” Robbie asked.
"Taking the air."
"Here? At Temple Meads?"
"Why not? The doctor brought a nurse, Mrs. Allardyce. She's sitting with Ma."
"How is she?"
"No better. Worse, if anything. And what are you doing here?"
"Tried for a job. Just digging, that was all. Foundations for a signal box. But they'd already—"
"Robbie,” she cut in. “Go now, please. Go."
He gawped at her. “But why?"
A door had opened on the other side of the porter's trolley. A man laughed. A cloud of cigar smoke wafted through the air.
Mary gripped his arm. “Too late. Look at that notice. You don't know me."
"You've lost your wits."
"Just do as I say."
He turned away and pretended to study a notice concerning the transport of livestock on the Great Western Railway. The fact that he could read it all was due to Mary's mother. Several gentlemen emerged through the doorway. They exchanged farewells and most of them strolled through the archway to waiting carriages.
But two of the gentlemen lingered. Side by side, cigars in hand, they surveyed the seething crowds. Porters shouted and cursed. Trains murmured and hissed and rattled. The sounds rose to the high vault of the roof.
"Ten years ago this wasn't here, Sir John,” said the younger and smaller of the two. “Twenty years ago it was barely conceivable. Thirty years ago it would have been beyond the wildest dreams of an opium eater."
"Impressive, I grant you,” answered his companion, a white-haired gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age. “But the noise is intolerable."
"Noise? Yes, indeed. It's the sound that money makes. The Great Western Railway has restored prosperity to the towns it touches. Railways are the arteries of wealth. As you yourself will discover, I trust, when the Lydmouth and Borders Railway is built."
"You go too fast for me, sir."
"Because there is no time to waste!” cried the younger man, waving his cigar. “The fruit hangs ripening on the tree. If we do not pluck it, then someone else will. Which is why my directors and I are so desirous of your joining us on the board. Where Sir John Ruispidge leads, other men will follow. Your position in the county, sir, your influence with the administration, your friends in Parliament—you have it in your power to smooth our way considerably and, I may add, to reap a just reward for doing so. Once the line is built, you may transport your coal at a fraction of the price you now pay, and at many times the speed. The general prosperity the railways bring—the freer movement of people and capital—cannot but have a benevolent effect on the fortunes of all those concerned."
"Ah, but the investment must be considerable. Nothing will come of nothing, as the Bard tells us."
"I speak from experience. You must allow me to show you the figures from South Devon.” There was another wave of the cigar. “And consider the convenience of it. You will be able to travel from your country seat to your house in town within a day, and in the utmost comfort. If Lady Ruispidge desires quails in aspic from Fortnum's, they could be on her table within a few hours."
"You are a persuasive advocate.” Sir John took out his watch. “Alas, I must leave you until tomorrow."
"Good God! Is that a Breguet watch?"
"It is indeed. You have sharp eyes, Mr. Brunel."
Robbie's eyes swung towards the little man. The great Brunel himself!
"I trust I have a sharp eye for any piece of machinery so elegantly conceived and finely constructed as one of Monsieur Breguet's watches. But in this case I have a personal interest. My father sent me as a very young man to work for Monsieur Breguet in Paris. He told me there was no better person from whom I might learn what I needed."
Watch in hand, Ruispidge bowed. “Your father was indeed a man of perspicacity."
The watch was dangling on its chain from the old man's hand, swinging to and fro like a pendulum, coming perilously close to the wall. Mr. Brunel, Robbie thought, was growing agitated for the watch's safety.
At that moment, the world tilted on its axis and became an entirely different place. Mary came to life. His friend Mary, whom Robbie had known since he was a child in short-coats; who had played the part of sister to him for most of his life; who went to church at least once, usually twice, on Sundays—his friend Mary, with whom he was more than half in love—well, she picked up her cloak and skirt with her left hand and ran forward, keening like a madwoman.
She snatched the old man's watch from his hand. Sir John and Mr. Brunel froze, both with their cigars moving towards their open mouths. Mary dived into the crowded station yard, dodging among the carriages and horses and wagons until she was lost in the seething mass of humanity.
* * * *
2: A Gown of Yellow Silk
Robbie Trevine lodged above a cobbler's near the market, where they let him sleep under the rafters in return for sweeping floors and running errands. By the time he had finished his jobs for the evening, the sky was darkening. He slipped out of the house and made his way to Hotwells, to the damp and crowded house by the river where Mary and her mother lodged in a tiny room up four pairs of stairs.
Mary opened the door. When she saw him, she stepped back to allow him into the room. He glanced towards the curtained alcove beside the empty fireplace.
"She's asleep,” Mary whispered. “The doctor gave her something."
"Give my love when she wakes."
Robbie reckoned that Mrs. Linnet had given him more love than his own mother, though that wasn't hard because, when he was three years old, his mother had gone off for a few days’ holiday with a Liverpool publican and never come back.
Mary's face was impossible to read in that shadowy room. “I was afraid you'd come."
"Why did you do it? Why did you steal the gent's watch at the station?"
"I had to do something. The doctor don't come cheap, and Ma needs medicines, and proper food. The nurse is coming back later this evening. It all costs money."
"But if they catch you—"
"They won't."
"But selling something stolen is almost as risky as taking it in the first place."
She shrugged and turned her head away from him. “There's someone I know."
"This isn't the first time, is it?"
Mary said nothing. They listened to the breathing of the sick woman.
Robbie said: “I'd do anything to help. You know that."
"Go now,” she said. “Just go. I don't want you here."
Robbie stumbled out of the room. He crossed the street and took shelter in the mouth of the alley on the other side. There was a tavern on the corner, and the constant bustle of the place made him almost invisible.
A distant church clock chimed the quarters and the hours. He calculated that he waited nearly an hour and a half before Mary appeared in the doorway of her house. She was hooded and cloaked as before, but he would have known her anywhere. She set off up the street, her wooden pattens clacking on the cobbles. He followed her, holding well back, keeping to patches of shadow and varying his pace. Soon they began to climb towards the dark mass of Clifton Wood.
Mary followed the rising ground towards the Downs in the northwest. They were not far from the tower of Brunel's unfinished suspension bridge, looming over the Gorge and the river Avon. Before she reached the Downs, however, Mary turned into a terrace of great stone-faced houses set
back from the road. Only one of the houses had shuttered windows, and this was the one she approached. Robbie, watching from across the street, saw her dark figure descending into the basement area in front of the house.
He crossed the road. A plate had been screwed to one of the gateposts. It was too dark to decipher the words engraved upon it. He ran his fingertips over the brass, tracing the cold metallic channels of each letter.
THE RODNEY PLACE MISSIONARY SOCIETY
Mary knocked on the basement door. A candle flame flickered in the black glass of a nearby window. Bolts scraped back. The door opened.
"Child,” said Mr. Fanmole in his soft voice. “You are long past your time."
"I beg pardon, sir. The nurse was late and I couldn't leave my mother."
When she was inside, Mr. Fanmole closed and bolted the door. He wore a long grey dressing gown of a silken material that gleamed in the candlelight; his little head was perched on a broad neck that rose from narrow shoulders.
"Come, child.” He led the way along a whitewashed passage vaulted with brick, his shadow cavorting behind him on the wall. “You saw him?"
"Yes, sir. He came out with the other gents, and then he stopped for a while and talked with one of them. Mr. Brunel himself."
She followed Mr. Fanmole into a room at the back of the house. A coal fire burned in the grate and there were shutters across the two windows. He sat down at a mahogany table laden with papers and angled his chair to face the fire. He beckoned her to stand before him.
"Well, child? What did you learn?"
"He's interested in a new railway, but he hasn't made up his mind. He's lodging at the Great Western Hotel. And ... and I took his watch."
Mr. Fanmole slapped the palm of his hand on the table, and his pen fell unnoticed to the carpet. “I told you to be discreet, you little fool. This was not an occasion for thieving."
"But he was playing with it, sir, just asking for it to be prigged. And my ma, she's took bad again, and she needs a nurse as well as a doctor—and it's a good watch, too, sir. You give me a sovereign for the last one, and I'm sure—"
"Hold your prattle."
"Sir, he didn't see my face, I swear it. And I was away through the crowd before he knew the watch was gone."
"Give it me,” he commanded.
Mr. Fanmole held out his hand and she dropped the watch onto his palm. To her surprise he smiled. “Ah! He will be enraged. He's deeply attached to his Breguet timepiece."
"Sir,” she asked timidly, “how much will I have when you sell it? My mother—"
"It's too precious to sell, child. Far too precious."
"But, sir, I don't understand."
He gazed at her, whistling tunelessly, and put down the watch, very gently, on the table. “You don't have to understand."
"I—I thought you'd be pleased, sir."
Suddenly he was on his feet and looming over her. His hand shot out and seized her by the hair. He dragged her to a tall cupboard built into the wall on the right of the fireplace. He opened the door. Hanging inside was a yellow silk gown.
"This is how to please me, child."
* * * *
3: Not Quite the Gentleman
In the opinion of Sir John Ruispidge, Mr. Brunel was not quite the gentleman. But it would be churlish to deny that he had been kindness itself after the distressing theft of the Breguet watch at Temple Meads Station. He had summoned police officers and urged them to prosecute their enquiries with the utmost vigour. He had ordered advertisements to be placed in the Bristol papers, offering a reward of twenty guineas for the watch's safe return.
"Not for the world, my dear sir,” he had said, “would I have had such an incident occur."
Sir John could well believe it. The long and the short of it was that Brunel had every reason to keep him sweet.
That evening he dined in Queen Square with two men who might become fellow directors if he decided to accept Brunel's overtures. Still shaken by his experience, he drank deep and left early. The loss of his watch had been a double blow—first the watch itself, which he cherished, and second the circumstances of its theft. As an old soldier, Sir John prided himself on being a man of action, always prepared for the unexpected. But he had not even tried to apprehend the young person. He had behaved, in short, like a milksop.
But he would not be caught unprepared again. As the carriage whirled him back to his hotel near the Cathedral, Sir John patted the pocket of his overcoat and felt the reassuring outline of his Adams revolver. Only recently patented, it was a double-action model enabling rapid fire; according to his gunsmith, its bullet would stop a charging tiger.
The carriage drew up outside the hotel. A servant let down the steps and opened the door. As he climbed down, Sir John stumbled, and would have fallen if the man had not steadied him. He was perhaps a trifle bosky, but he prided himself on being a man who could hold his liquor. There might even be a case for a little brandy to aid digestion before he retired.
His apartments were on the first floor. He opened the sitting-room door and discovered that the people of the house had forgotten to bring lights and make up the fire. He marched towards the fireplace, intending to ring for a servant.
But something stopped him in his tracks, something amiss. There was a perfume in the air, clearly identifiable despite the underlying smell of his cigars. He acted without conscious thought. He pulled the heavy revolver from his pocket. Simultaneously he glimpsed a shadow shifting on the far side of the room.
The revolver went off with a crash that stunned him, the echoes almost masking the sound of scuffling and a cry and the closing of the door to the bedroom next to the sitting room. He was so surprised he nearly dropped the gun. He had not intended to shoot; he had forgotten that the Adams revolver was self-cocking and lacked a safety catch.
"Stop, thief!” Sir John cried, and the words came out little better than a whimper.
He moved unsteadily to the connecting door and flung it open. The bedroom appeared to be empty. A second door, leading directly to the corridor, stood open; the corridor was empty, too.
Trembling, Sir John returned to the bedroom and tugged the bell rope so hard it came away in his hand. As he looked about him for the brandy decanter, a piece of material on the carpet caught his eye. He picked it up and examined it under the light.
It was a scrap of yellow silk.
* * * *
During the following day, Robbie earned a few coppers helping a stall holder at the market. Everyone was talking about the burglar at the Great Western Hotel, and how an old gent had put a bullet in him. When Robbie got back to his lodgings, the cobbler called out to him from his workshop.
"There's a woman asking after you. That nurse, Mrs. Allardyce. She said you was to go over to Mrs. Linnet's. But first things first. I need a dozen tallow candles from Hornby's. If you look sharp you'll catch them before they close."
Robbie ignored the order, just as he ignored the shout that pursued him up the street. He ran all the way to Hotwells. The house where the Linnets lodged was full of lights and noise but their window was dark. He climbed the stairs and tapped on the door. There was no answer. He turned the handle and went inside the room. The air made him gag.
"Mrs. Linnet? Mary?"
"Robbie?” Mary's mother whispered from the alcove near the fireplace. “Is that you?"
"Yes. Shall I light the lamp?"
He blundered through the darkness and found the oil lamp and a box of matches on the mantel. Mrs. Linnet's face appeared in the wavering light. She was lying on her pallet, huddled under a mound of blankets.
"What's happened? Where's Mary?"
"She didn't come back last night. Mrs. Allardyce stayed till morning but then she had to go."
"Is she coming to sit with you tonight?"
The head rolled on the pillow. “No. I can't pay her. Mary said she'd bring some money. Where is she, Robbie? I'm worried."
"I'll find her. Did she go out again last night?"
"Again? What do you mean? She went out once, and she never came back."
* * * *
Mary Linnet was on fire. Her lips were chapped and she felt as though her skin was flaking away. Her tongue lay huge and dry in her mouth. She was aware of the pain in her left shoulder. There was moisture, too, dark and thick and tasting of iron.
She did not know how long she had lain in this dark place, drifting in and out of consciousness. Once, in the glow of a candle, the Reverend Mr. Fanmole loomed over her like a great grey slug in a dressing gown. She remembered Mr. Fanmole waiting for her with a closed carriage when she had stumbled through the side door of the hotel. She remembered his hot breath on her cheek, and how he had made her lie on the carriage floor as they jolted up the hill to Clifton.
"Don't sit on the seat, you stupid child, you'll bleed on the leather."
Now Mary was lying on a thin layer of straw spread over a flagged floor with a mound of logs in the corner. A barred window was set high in a wall. Sometimes there was natural light on the other side of it—not much, but enough to see the outlines of her prison.
But perhaps that was a hallucination, too. She could no longer distinguish between what was inside her mind and what was without. Once she saw the Breguet watch swinging like a pendulum before her eyes, measuring away her life.
Another time she saw as clear as day Robbie's face framed by the little window. He tapped on the glass with fingers that were pale as bones, and she opened her mouth to call him, but she could no more speak than she could move.
* * * *
4: A Tribe of One
On the second evening of his visit, Sir John Ruispidge dined at the Great Western Hotel. After his adventure the previous evening, he was pleased to discover that he was regarded as something of a hero. The story had already reached the newspapers—how a distinguished visitor to Bristol had surprised a burglar in his room and coolly put a bullet through the scoundrel. The villain had not yet been apprehended, but traces of blood had been found.
Returning to his rooms after dinner, Sir John passed through the lobby of the hotel. A young man was engaged in an altercation with two of the hotel servants.
"I'm not going,” the man was saying in a strong Bristol accent. “Not till I've seen him."
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