He pulled away, straightened the covers, and cradled her in his arms until she went to sleep. Himself, he lay relaxed, awake, trying to imagine the problems attendant on extending canals and on building streets, houses, chapels, and mills.
Chapter 40
Beneath the embers they found, very charred but still intact, the strongbox that held the cash; so they did not need the vitriol. The carpenters started at once to build new site offices; John got them to fashion each one in sections that could be bolted together—"then we can move it to another site without taking it all to bits," he explained. Shortis, the supervising carpenter, thought it no way to build but was surprised, when the structure was erected two days later, to see how firm it stood.
The shop was not rebuilt. Instead, they adopted Nora's earlier plan of selling directly from the wagons in the sidings. For the cashier, usually Wardroper's wife, they built a portable shelter. Already more than half their sales were made direct from the wagons to the women who had charge of the big shanties at Calderbrook.
The main problem posed by the fire was the loss of records and of the latest revised specification. John and Walter decided not to try to re-create the history of the tunnel but to prepare an up-to-date description of the existing site and a working specification of all that remained to be done. John said that if the Manchester & Leeds draughtsmen could prepare a blank scale map of the tunnel with each ten yard interval marked, he would be able to recapitulate the geology of the lengths already bricked in. "Fernley has always maintained," Walter said, "that there's no need for paper where Lord John goes. It's often irked me that I've had to consult drawings merely to confirm what you've already told me from memory; but I've never been so glad of the faculty as now."
Bonuses for the gangs were not affected by the destruction, for their progress marks were physically cut in the sides of the working. The records in the office were merely to prevent the men from effacing the marks and recutting them farther back or—as had been done on other workings—removing the marked brick intact and re-laying it farther back. This was the "travelling-bonus swindle" by which a spurious extra yard of achievement could be kept marching along the tunnel each week. To prevent it, John sent Whitaker and Fernley through the entire tunnel to note the positions of last week's markings before anyone could change them.
At eleven, he left the site and went to keep his appointment in Todmorden. There was no mention of his gaffe on Christmas Eve. By noon he and Redmayne were standing on the eleven acres of waste ground at the eastern edge of the town. The squire was no longer apologetic, rightly feeling that his offer of this site had been compensation enough; instead, he now rubbed his hands with glee as his mind's eye pictured the houses and streets and the chapel, all huddled around the mill that was to fill this rough ground between canal and river.
"I mean to pay the lowest possible wage that will ensure bare survival," he said earnestly. "For it's my belief that cash just burns the linings from their pockets. What do they need it for eh? For drink? For gambling? A high cash wage is an inducement to sin. Look at my son. It's money's been his ruin. D'ye think he'd behave so if we were paupers! If it weren't for his being a gentleman and my son, he'd be hanged for last night's caper. Or transported at the least. Well—I mean to save them from that."
"It's certainly a point of view," John said. "You've done test diggings here I suppose. What are the footings like?"
"Very dry. It's all dry as a bone here, though you'd not think it to look at it."
The land must have been deserted for over a year; a second generation of weeds, vernally green, shimmered in the spring sunshine among the black and rotting stalks of an earlier crop. Abandoned hovels, thrown up in less than twenty-four hours, had soon tumbled down, gutted for their meagre timber, their hearthstones, or the rocks that had marked their doors. The turf roof of one had slid down almost intact and reknitted itself over the year to make a tumulus of grass.
Redmayne pointed to one of these mouldering remains as they passed. "We'll give them palaces compared with these…pigpens. Well, you'd not even keep pigs in something like that, would you. It's my belief that if they're well housed, with substantial walls around them, and well fed, you'll get the best out of them. It's what they really need."
John laughed: "Try telling that to the farmers around here!"
"Farmers?" the squire was puzzled.
"The way they keep pigs, you'd think they never cared whether—"
"No no," Redmayne said testily. "I mean people, not pigs. Give your operatives good substantial houses, good drains, street lighting, an active chapel, and wholesome food, and I can't for the life of me see what they need a great deal of cash for. That's where your tommy shop interests me, Stevenson. They say the quality of your tommy exceeds the best in many of the shops; is that so?"
"We thought the shopkeepers took advantage of our lads, yes. We never looked for great profit on the tommy, believing that well-fed men working to the timetable would be our real profit."
"By jove, you're a man after me own heart! Look after your operatives and they'll look after your profits, eh! What!" Redmayne was delighted at the idea. "Anything you can tell me about operating such a shop…anything…would be vastly appreciated."
"When the time comes. Surely. Mrs. Stevenson's the one, really. She manages it all—does the buying, supervises the selling. Keeps the books."
Redmayne stopped and stared at him. They were almost at the canal bank now, in the shade of Hey Head, towering over them to the south. "You don't say so," he exclaimed. "Really? Mrs. Stevenson eh? Something of a risk what?"
"Risk?"
"Well—you're responsible for any financial shortfall or any contractual error."
John threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, I'm sorry!" he gripped the squire's elbow lightly. "Sorry! I'm not laughing at what you said but at the idea that Mrs. Stevenson and 'financial shortfall' belong in the same sentence! They're not even in the same world." And he told the story of the timber shipment and Ossie Oakshaw. Redmayne chuckled but not at all as heartily as he would have if a man had pulled such a trick.
"My grandfather made our fortune," he said. "He'd never have let a woman do such things."
"Times change," John said mildly. "Ye'll want wharves here I take it."
"More than that—a basin." He gestured out the area of the dock that was planned at this point along the canal bank. "Oh, just think of it Stevenson—can't you picture it? The basin…the mill…and four hundred houses…the streets… the chapel…my own little town—I've dreamed of it for years."
He sighed and Stevenson saw a more-than-entrepreneurial gleam in the man's eyes. Redmayne was a frustrated patriarch. He was not picturing streets but himself walking through those streets, among those houses, acknowledging the respectful greetings of his people. Perhaps he also saw Mrs. Redmayne and their two daughters going the rounds with food from the Hall tables and kitchens—and himself at Christmas, leaving barrels of beer at the head of each street and a dole of plum pudding at each house. It would fit the picture of the third-generation squire reviving and keeping up traditions that the primeval gentry had already long abandoned. If that were the key to Redmayne's aspirations, it would dictate certain aspects of their relationship. He stored away the thought.
As John left, Redmayne made one final allusion to the events of the previous night. "Well, Stevenson, I don't know if it's not almost sinful to say it, but I feel a great deal of good may have been done this neighbourhood by last night's villainy."
John said he hoped so and, to himself, marvelled at the ability of enthusiasts to take silence, or indifferent answers, for wholehearted endorsement.
That afternoon in the private bar at The Gryphon in Littleborough, he handed into the Reverend Prendergast's eager fingers an envelope containing £475 in paper money. He smiled as he watched those fingers tear apart the seal but, before they could count and discover the shortfall, he said: "It's a great deal less than promised but—as I dare
say ye heard—we had a near-disastrous fire at Deanroyd last night. It'll take another week now to assemble the rest."
Prendergast stared in dismay at the cash until light dawned. "You've led me a dance," he said, incredulity in every tremor of his voice. "You've been playing me!"
The friendship of the week before was gone now. John was both calm and distant. "You shall have the rest next week. As I have already told you."
"And the books?"
"Do you listen to nothing? I said—we had a fire."
"But I need the money," Prendergast said in genuine anguish, as if the real depth of his loss had only just got through to him. "I need it." He looked at the banknotes as if they would hardly buy a box of snuff.
"In a week," John insisted steadily.
When Prendergast looked at him next there was no disguising the hatred in his eyes. "If you are not here next week, Stevenson, nothing shall prevent me from going at once to Sir Sidney with…with my discovery."
Later, Stevenson was to place great significance on the fact that Prendergast used the word "discovery" in his threat rather than something all-embracing, like "evidence of your forgery" or, even stronger, "proof of your chicanery."
"I shall be here," he promised. "You had better bring my letter—both my letters."
Prendergast, now back on familiar territory, smiled. "You know full well the price of those."
John pretended to suppress a smile in return, as if to say "it was worth a try." When they parted, immediately after this exchange, the priest was—or so John hoped—just sufficiently reassured to keep him quiet for one more week. There was no doubt that, when he came here next week and found he had been thoroughly duped, he would go at once to Sir Sidney.
But by then it would not matter; a week tomorrow the forgery would either have found its adoptive parent, or Nora and he would be setting out across the Atlantic with eighteen thousand pounds to take care of any seasickness.
"You might as well kiss my royal Yorkshire arse," he said beneath his breath as he watched the priest cross the road and walk up the driveway to the station.
The following Friday, four days before their London visit, brought a letter from Chambers to say he would welcome them next Wednesday at eleven in the morning, and another from Fielden to say that, with Easter falling so late this year, neither House of Parliament was sitting during the week of their visit, but he'd gladly show them around the remaining buildings and the ruins of the palace as well as what little could be seen of the new building. He himself would be visiting London at that time and would, in any case, very much welcome a further chance to meet Stevenson and talk one or two affairs with him. He, Fielden, had heard of Redmayne's new business with Stevenson and there was a possibility of some further work of a similar nature at Waterside.
"Eee!" Nora said, "that's less than a mile from Redmayne's contract—and both right slap on the canal! Think of the saving!"
"You see what we've done," John said. "We've played their game. Because we didn't go rushing for the magistrates on the one hand, or trying to sting Redmayne for a fortune in shhh-money on the other—or, to put it differently, because we've behaved to them exactly as they'd have behaved to one another, we're being invited inside to warm our hands at their fires."
A postscript to the letter advised them not to try the new direct route through from Normanton via Derby, Leicester, and Rugby because the North Midland Railway and the Midland Counties Railway behaved as if the very idea of a passenger wanting to travel all the way to London on one ticket were absurd. It was better he said to go the old way round through Earlestown and Crewe. But they were to be sure to travel first class in that case as the Grand Junction Railway had no provision for second or third class passengers from Newton to Birmingham between the hours of six in the morning and six in the evening. But at least the three companies involved had been working the route long enough to be familiar with the notion that people in Manchester actually wanted to go all the way to London.
"It's a poor omen for railways when Members of Parliament write in such terms," John said.
Chapter 41
Their journey to London was by the up-line of the same railroad that Walter and Arabella had taken north the previous summer. From the Liverpool Road depot in Manchester to the Birmingham depot at Euston in London took a little over ten hours, what with waiting on connections at Newton and again at Birmingham; but for Nora and John not a moment was grudged. The secondclass coach they took on the Liverpool and Manchester portion of the journey was showing its years. But the company was so agreeable—two midshipmen and a wine merchant with a vivacious young lady he introduced as his wife—that Nora was quite sorry to sink into the plush splendours of the first-class coach at Newton for the journey south.
Their fellow travellers were an elderly and obviously fairly senior clergyman with a relaxed left-half to his face; the mouth on that side needed constant wiping. He wore black silk gloves on his spindly hands and all the way to Birmingham he read—and shook his head in vexation at—a heavily annotated copy of Barr's Scripture Students' Assistant. Opposite him sat what was either his wife or some very poor relation or someone else to whom he was not particularly obliged to be pleasant and the tedium of whose journey he was not expected to lighten. Every ten minutes or so this miserable lady fed a fresh cachou into her jaws, snapping at it like a dog afflicted with summer flies.
John and Nora divided their time between watching the landscape flying past—at speeds which at times reached forty miles an hour—and reading. He was deeply into Thomas Edward's Rudiments of the Art of Constructing and Repairing Canals and had bought for her a new copy of Grant's London Sketches, which she found totally absorbing. Not that its chapters—on Imposters, Debtors' Prisons, Penny Theatres, Police Officers, Workhouses, Lunatic Asylums, Gaming Houses, and so on—were particularly relevant to their present visit; but the picture it gave of teeming life and myriadfold activity was enough to alert her to the nature of the city toward which they were now hurtling. Before two hours had passed she had read enough to know that London would be nothing like Manchester, the only other city of which she had any adult knowledge. She only had to read that London had no fewer than eighty Penny Theatres for juvenile patrons, many with eight separate houses each evening and catering in all for something like 24,000 young persons, to know that Manchester was but a village by comparison.
Also there was their map, Cruchley's New Plan of London, which showed the vast extent of the built-over area—nearly six miles in one direction, from Bayswater almost to Bow, and three miles in the other, from Camden Town to Camberwell. Soon, it was clear, outlying villages like Kensington, Hampstead, Peckham, and Stratford would be swallowed…and where would it stop? Once they started building railways from London's present outskirts reaching out to the villages around, there was no limit. The city might swell even as far as Acton or Barking or Barnet or Croydon, though people now would laugh at such a notion. It would be an astute thing to do, she thought, if one had capital one didn't actually need to call on at short notice, to buy up land around the projected stations in the hope of selling it later for building plots. That was an idea worth considering.
The only chapter in the book that directly bore upon their present visit was one dealing with the Victoria Parliament, though there was very little about the actual building, old or new.
Mostly, it was about Peel and Melbourne and disastrous maiden speeches, especially the terrible one by the writer D'Israeli. "I doubt," wrote James Grant, the book's author, "if he will ever acquire any status in the House." And if his maiden speech was anything to go by, Grant was right.
From Birmingham they had the coach to themselves, for the clergyman and lady were not going on to London. At Rugby two gentlemen got in, one with a brilliant black eye, but both fell fast asleep almost at once. On this stretch of the line John found reading impossible. He had been a navvy on many reaches of the track and was constantly turning to her to say things like: "It was v
ery soggy here—it rained all month!" or "Here's where I first saw Robert Stephenson."
At Kilsby Tunnel, shortly after Rugby, he said, "Here is the one we can be grateful we didn't get! Shorter than Summit, but it took from eighteen thirtyfour to thirty-eight. I should think Stephenson would never want to go underground again after…" He was counting the ventilation shafts by their pools of light; after one he said, "It was about here that all the trouble lay. They struck quicksand. Poor Nowell, the contractor, he took to his bed and died they say. But Stephenson got a number of steam pumping engines rigged up there and they pumped…I think it was sixteen hundred gallons a minute! Think of that— you never saw such a man-made torrent pouring away."
"That must have cleared it!" Nora said as they burst again into daylight.
John smiled slowly. "Oh it cleared it. Yes—nine months later! They had to drain upwards of five square miles of quicksand."
World From Rough Stones Page 63