The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  “Well, my dear?”

  “You are right, ma’am – better one man, in a house of my own. What happens, ma’am, if he grows tired of me?”

  “You must save your money, and try to keep him amused, my dear. Mr Andrews is a gentleman, in his own way, and he will look after you properly, will not throw you out into the gutter.”

  They met and she was appalled by the scar, but then felt ashamed of herself for being so hateful to the poor man – he had gained the wound in battle, no doubt, fighting honourably for his King and his Country, it was a badge of respect. She made her curtsey, a schoolgirl’s little bob, and smiled bravely at him, walked out to the gig at his side, going nobly to martyrdom, though sitting several decorous inches from him on the bench as they followed Mrs Morris in her considerably more opulent town carriage to the western outskirts and the cottage where her attorney waited for them.

  The ‘hundred pounds’ Mrs Morris had estimated became one hundred and thirty by the time fees and extras had been paid, but Tom had learnt enough about lawyers to foresee that, had brought two hundreds in gold with him. The cook-maid and skivvy were produced and approved, the one a respectable forty, the other the merest scrap of a child, claiming to be twelve but looking more like eight or nine. Tom placed ten guineas in the cook’s hand.

  “Housekeeping, Mrs Johnson,” she had been introduced by surname alone, the honorific promoted her to housekeeper status. “Buy in the stores and staples you need and set up accounts with a butcher and a dairyman. Will you buy in bread or bake your own?”

  “In a small house like this, sir, ‘twill be less wasteful to buy than fire up our ovens for baking every day.”

  “Right, your choice, Mrs Johnson. Accounts to me, of course.”

  Both knew that the bills would include a few extra pennies for her pocket; looking at the scar she decided that it would be kept on the low side, he was no man to be trifled with.

  “Put a guinea of those ten in your own purse, Mrs Johnson, and a half-crown for ribbons and buns for the little one – she looks as if she needs to be fed up, so tiny as she is. You have rooms in the attics, I believe; are they furnished sufficiently?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir, though I think Martha might welcome another blanket for her bed, skinny little rabbit, she is, will never keep warm without.”

  “Buy it for her, and make sure she has warm clothes for winter.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She smiled in satisfaction as she made her way to her kitchen – a place with an open-handed master and a young mistress who did not know her way about was as near to the ideal as she had ever dreamt, would do her very nicely until the time came to retire to a little cottage of her own, no doubt with a pension and a few bob saved. They would get the best service she could manage and the house would be kept spick and span, shining clean, no mistakes. As for the little girl, well, she had never had children of her own so it would do no harm to look after this one, teach her how to work at least and she would be earning her keep within a few months.

  The attorney and his clerk left and Mrs Morris patted Mary’s hand and gave her a big wink before taking herself off and leaving the young lady in the parlour with her ‘protector’; she looked anxiously up as he stood, fully expecting to find herself upended on the sofa next minute.

  “Well, Mary, shall we look at your new house?”

  “Yes, please, Mr Andrews.” Anything to delay the inevitable.

  “My name is Tom, Mary.”

  There were three bedrooms on the first floor, one of them with a made-up and very large four-poster. Mary gulped and averted her eyes from the awful sight. Tom sat down and took his boots off.

  “Take your clothes off, Mary.”

  “What, everything? Not just…”

  “Everything, my dear.”

  She was a stranger to the tender indignities, was unaware of the concept of sexual pleasure for the female and her very limited physical experience had been unenjoyable – two brief encounters on the music parlour floor and a third quite appallingly interrupted – and was surprised to discover herself responding to Tom’s gentle, leisurely hands. He left her thoughtful and with half a smile on her face. He swept into his office that afternoon, more relaxed and paradoxically alert than he had been since leaving New York and Jenny’s efficient ministrations.

  Young Frederick Mason had made his appearance a fortnight before, had shown himself to be a couple of years older than Tom but very much his junior; he was sat at the desk that had been Miss Roberts’, busy copying out his reports in best copperplate, transcribing briefly scrawled notes into elegant prose worthy of sitting in the firm’s files.

  “Mr Mason! How do you do? I see you have been busy.”

  “I believe I have been very lucky, Mr Andrews, happening to be at the right place at a fortunate time. I was at the riverside in Liverpool, introducing myself to businesses there when I heard that the sugar refiners had met a problem – they are extending their wharf and building a new warehouse and set of boilers. You will know, sir, that sugar imported from the Islands normally comes in as coarse brown or as molasses in barrels; white sugar is refined in England.”

  Tom nodded – everybody knew that much who had ever been to the West Indies.

  “Their warehouse is built, the walls that is, up to ‘plate’, they called it, waiting for a set of cast iron trusses for the roof beams to sit on. The beams themselves will be timber but it is hardly possible to buy straight and strong timbers to act as joists any more – the navy and the charcoallers between them have stripped the forests bare. Their supplier has let them down, the castings badly made and erratic in dimensions, to the extent that they have rejected his whole delivery and are at a stand. I introduced myself to them as the representative of the new Roberts Ironfounders and offered our services; they have agreed that we shall take the measurements and drawings and supply them piece by piece, each on acceptance to be paid at cost and a mark-up – no contract, of course. I have warned them that to meet their need for urgency we shall have to set on a night shift and probably work the Sabbath as well, and they have accepted that the case is pressing and they must pay for an answer to their problems. Their plight is known to everybody on the waterfront and if we solve it, we shall be known too, and land is being cleared and the river dredged in a dozen places.”

  “Well done! Have you spoken to your brother yet?”

  They visited the docks next morning, Tom making a point of being personally present for so important a task. They inspected the refiners’ plans and took measurements from the drawings – twenty roof trusses, each to be cast as a single piece shaped like a flat letter ‘A’, nearly thirty feet across and ten at the highest, almost at the limits of what could be done with cast iron. They would be made singly, one to each pouring of the furnace and could be transported two to a barge.

  The brickwork was ready, the piers built up to height and a pair of wooden cranes constructed to lift the great weights nearly forty feet up to roof level, the lift achieved by capstans turned by two dozen labourers apiece. The warehouse had four bays, would be roofed by five trusses to each.

  “Mr Mason, have you your surveyor’s chain?”

  He had, of course.

  “Good! You will oblige me by checking the measurements on the ground – bricklayers may often be an inch or two out when following plans, I am told.”

  Tom knew that because Mason had told him so.

  The Clerk of the Works looked mildly annoyed, assured them they need have no concerns, but the directors, present to a man, overruled him, preferring to be doubly certain. There were twenty-five piers, all except two of them accurate within half an inch and acceptable; of the other pair, one was four and a half inches, the width of a brick, out and the other was seven inches over size and not quite true in line to its partner.

  They left to grim assurances that all would be corrected by the date of their first delivery, three weeks hence; they suspected they would be dealing with a new Cl
erk of the Works.

  They had made a good start – it remained only to deliver to time and specification.

  They took a special order of a barge load of best, clean sand, free of clay and gravel, from a quarry rather than dredged from a river, and built their first mould with much anxious calculation of distances the molten metal must flow, of potential air pockets and of weaknesses where flows came together and slag could form in the join. They ran their first pouring, fully prepared to scrap the lot and start again, three or four times over if necessary. All went well and they broke the mould and cleaned off the slag and flash and carried the tons of cold metal out into the open air for an inch by inch inspection, crawling over it like anxious mother hens fussing over their brood. Three days later they placed the first pair onto a barge and met it at the docks the next morning, stood back confident and serene as they were lifted into position and settled neatly and precisely onto the bolts waiting for them.

  Nine more loads over four weeks and the sugar makers paid them in banknotes, very publicly, and placed an article in the local paper praising the ironmaster who had saved their project and contributed to their, and the city’s, future prosperity; they were fortunate indeed, they said, to have such a firm as Roberts in their locality. As expected they were contacted within the month by a dozen of Liverpool projectors with demands for roof trusses, pillars, lintels, cast iron window frames and guttering, all of the larger, awkward castings which had been difficult and slow to source.

  “Third furnace next year, Master?”

  George Mason was deeply respectful – Mr Andrews had earned his title and had made his mark – in the process he had also put Mason in the way of earning a lot more money than he had ever expected, and that was not a bad thing either.

  Book One: A Poor Man

  at the Gate Series

  Chapter Seven

  Tom laid back in the big bed in Mary’s cottage, pleasantly tired – he had been away from town for three weeks, off in the North Country visiting a works in Sheffield, in a county where there seemed to be more going on in iron; Lancashire was increasingly a cotton area, iron and steel very big but not quite the leader that it was down in Birmingham or far away in the North East. Clapperley had put the possibility of an investment his way, had told him of a Mr Edwards, a man of vision and ideas with a particular interest in steam but short of funds; the papers Edwards had sent were clear and his proposals were original and, probably, workable. Tom had gone north with high hopes – had come away disappointed; Edwards was an inventor of some genius, but he was a disaster as a businessman, his works a disorganised shambles, his accounts rudimentary and seeming to consist of a running journal detailing cash payments in and out and made up whenever he remembered. The man should not have been let out on his own.

  Tom had spoken long with Edwards, had tried to persuade him to concentrate on his inventions and to sell up his works and then come down to St Helens where there would be a workshop and a salary and share of all the profits he made, but he was sure that Edwards would not take his advice. The man had known that his inventions were good, brilliant in fact, and that customers would soon be beating on his door – he must have quoted ‘Build a better mousetrap…’ a dozen times over – a pity, for he would end up in debtor’s prison within a very few months and would die there, his ideas with him. Tom did not regard himself as a great man of business, in fact he was increasingly disenchanted with the life, but he knew how to run his own concern and could tell when another man was failing; Edwards was bound for bankruptcy, would lose all of his own money, but he would take none of Tom’s with him.

  “Not to worry”, Tom murmured aloud, allowing a hand to slip down Mary’s breast and gently find the nipple, stroking and teasing and bringing her out of her doze; he grinned in satisfaction as she rolled on top of him and spread her thighs wide, taking him deep inside her. She had learned a lot in four years, and had invented one or two tricks of her own, providing him with all the home comforts he required and pleasantly undemanding as well. She appeared to be content to live very quietly, pottering in her little house, borrowing novels from the Circulating Library, playing on the piano he had bought her two years previously, going out to the market and the town shops and nodding to a few acquaintances but making no friends, no close contacts at all, remaining effectively invisible; he doubted a dozen people in the town knew her name and even fewer associated it with his.

  It was very different to the life she must have expected, he thought, a little guiltily because he almost never thought of her at all, she was merely there, a convenience to him, rather like a pet dog would be he supposed. She had told him of the tutor, Jevons, who had ruined her and had wondered in passing how many other silly girls had fallen victim to him; perhaps he should do something about that, he owed her a favour, several, in fact.

  “Mr Clapperley, two things, I wonder if you could assist me with some information about an enterprising young gentleman…”

  A month and Mr Jevons was found to have left Birmingham and to have been run out of Warwick; he was currently living in rooms in Coventry, still tutoring young girls in their homes. Clapperley introduced Tom to two pugilists of his acquaintance, men who travelled with the fairs in a boxing booth, inviting local hopefuls to step into the ring for free, a guinea the prize for being on their feet at the end of ten minutes, five guineas if they achieved a knock-down. They charged a penny to spectators at the ringside and made a steady profit fighting clean and fairly – they were hard men; they also did not like flash gentlemen who abused young girls and were very willing to earn fifty guineas, gold, for the privilege of putting a stop to this one’s capers. They promised to do a thorough job and to explain exactly why while he was still awake, left on the stage in holiday mood.

  They returned three days later, job done. Mr Jevons was no longer a handsome young man, nor would he ever be so again with a flattened nose and no front teeth; nor would he teach piano again, they having taken a ball-peen hammer with them and used it very carefully on his fingers – not a bone left unbroken, they cheerfully told Tom, thanking him for his payment and assuring him they would be at his future convenience if he ever needed them again.

  Tom saw Clapperley, thanked him for his recommendation, his men had done all that could be asked of them, and collected the results of his second commission before going off to Mary’s cottage.

  “Mary, I found out the whereabouts of Mr Jevons just recently and have taken steps to assure that he changes his way of life. There were some ‘silly young girls’ after you, but there will be no more.”

  “What did you do, Tom? You did not kill him? You cut it off?”

  “No, not that!” There was a limit to revenge he found.

  “Tell me, please.”

  “I sent two men to beat him and make him ugly and they broke his fingers as well.”

  “Good! Thank you! Let him make a living now! He has no money of his own – he told me how he had been brought up to wealth but his father had lost all and left him to earn his way – now let him prosper if he can. I doubt he will have the alternative that was open to me!”

  She burst into tears, hauling her dress off as she dashed at her eyes.

  “I can at least show you my thanks, Tom.”

  “Wait a moment, Mary. I thought of something else last week. Here, this is for you.”

  He handed over a large, stiff envelope, sealed with official wax on the tape binding it.

  She pulled out the documents inside, standing nude and uncaring to read them, having difficulty with the legalisms.

  “Deeds… my name, Mary Amberley, on them. This direction. You have given me the house, Tom?”

  “Yes, it is yours, and Mr Martin the banker will pay one hundred pounds a year into an account in your name and will pay Mrs Johnson and Martha their wages and the housekeeping monies. I thought it was best, realising that I might catch the smallpox tomorrow and then where would you be? Now you will be safe and comfortable whatever h
appens.”

  “Not comfortable, Tom, never that, but well looked-after by a kind gentleman, and I know how lucky I have been – it could have been much, much worse. I wonder if Mama still thinks of me, whether she worries, or whether she has forgotten me, a sinner condemned? Do you think I could send her a letter, just to say that I am safe and well?”

  “You could…”

  “But perhaps it would only open the old wounds, you think?”

  “I don’t know – you must choose.”

  “Hallelujah, Thomas!”

  “’Morning, Joe – have you got religion or is it Christmas and I didn’t notice? Or is Amelia increasing, again?”

  Three children under the age of four suggested that the last was by no means unlikely; Joseph grinned and said he thought not, but he would really like a second daughter and when there were three in the nursery, a fourth would make very little difference, just another maid brought in to assist Nurse.

  “Well, you will be able to give her a good dowry, so why not?”

  “A man named Cartwright, Tom, has published that he has a power loom, and the word is that it works.”

  “Is he selling them?”

  “A fee for building to his design. McKay is making our first already.”

  “Then build the mill, brother – next to the spinners, I suppose? Will there be enough head in the stream to run another wheel?”

  “Arranged, Tom. We build a little higher up the hillside and divert another stream across; we have talked with the farmer already, paid for using his land, and can dig a channel across to another header pond, flowing over to the spinning mill stream and away. Costs us precious little because it also drains the farmer’s bottom lands, something he could not afford to do on his own, so he has charged us almost nothing.”