Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

Ulrich responded with words about the efficiency and economic growth delivered by rail transportation.

  And as they politely argued, Edith came pushing past Sir Joshua, towards the bandstand. Her face was drawn. ‘Oh, Giles – Giles, it’s awful!’

  ‘Edith?’ He was shocked. He had lost sight of her while he climbed down. From the smiling coquette of just a minute ago she was transformed, on the verge of tears. ‘Whatever is the matter?’

  ‘Gemma’s been telling me things – oh, Giles! You must not race,’ she said, her voice earnest, a half-whisper. ‘You mustn’t go on that bridge. Promise me!’

  He was bewildered. ‘Edith – the race, it’s everything to me – how can I possibly promise such a thing?’

  ‘But you must.’ She glanced around, evidently scared. ‘I’ll get myself in the most frightful fix if I say more. Please, don’t race – I must go –’

  With that she was gone into the crowd. Ulrich had witnessed the little scene, and watched Giles curiously.

  And there was a bang like a clap of thunder, so loud it was like a physical force, a blow in the chest.

  Everybody flinched. There were screams. Sir Joshua took his cigar out of his mouth and turned around. ‘What in blazes was that?’

  Giles quickly shinned a couple of feet back up the bandstand pillar. And he saw, over the heads of the crowd, that the Queen’s Trevi steam omnibus had exploded. Its big boiler was broken open like a burst paper bag, and it had careened off the roadway. The passenger carriages had become detached, but seemed unharmed. Soldiers were already running towards the shattered road train. People seemed stunned, but now the screaming started, shouts of fear and anger.

  And Giles, clinging to the pillar, sensed that his life had changed forever.

  Sir Joshua strode into the crowd, trying to exert control. He insisted Giles stayed close to him in the chaos that followed, for the sake of Giles’ own safety.

  Police and even military officers knew who Sir Joshua was, and deferred to him; he spoke to members of parliament, ministers, members of the royal household and other senior figures as an equal, giving advice and commands. Indeed, Sir Joshua held a parliamentary seat of his own, representing a ‘rotten borough’ on the outskirts of Luton whose few hundred electors were mostly his relatives or employees.

  And through his father’s conversations Giles, shocked, learned that although the royal party was unharmed by the explosion, an elaborate plot was unfolding this day of the Queen’s Jubilee.

  The detonation of the Queen’s Trevi had been no accident. A bomb had broken the seam of its high-pressure steam boiler. The saboteurs had got their timing wrong, as the road train had been running too slowly to do any harm. But that wasn’t all. There had also been an attempt to blow up Westminster Abbey, intended, presumably, to detonate at the time of the Queen’s attendance at a thanksgiving service tomorrow. That had been uncovered because of a stray remark in a London pub by an Irish labourer. The Metropolitan Police had quickly broken the man, using techniques honed against strikers and other agitators over the decades, and had exposed a conspiracy by Irish Home Rule campaigners.

  So two attacks had been thwarted, but the police and senior soldiers wondered aloud if there were more plots to be uncovered. Giles fretted over what Edith had said to him, which had seemed to imply that there must indeed be such a threat – something to do with the race perhaps. He needed to talk to her.

  But Edith and the other girls had been sent home, whisked away in a fast road-train to London. He knew her address, in Euston, though he had never in his life been to such a district. But how was he to get there, on this day of confusion?

  He mused on this with Ulrich, who had witnessed his fraught conversation with the girl. Ulrich disappeared for a while.

  Then he returned, and tapped Giles on the shoulder. ‘I have found a way. Come with me.’

  ‘Found a way to do what?’

  ‘To get you to Euston in a hurry. Isn’t that what you want?’

  Giles hesitated. ‘And leave me stranded in north London and out of the race – is that the game?’

  Ulrich sighed. ‘Oh, do not be a fool. I know you say you care little for this girl, Edith. But I saw her agitation for myself. Might this not be more important than a mere race? Anyway, you will be back by six. I will accompany you, so you can be sure there is no deceit involved! Will that satisfy you?’

  Giles felt mollified, and faintly ashamed; the man did seem to be trying to help him. ‘All right. But how are we to get there and back in a few hours? In your smelly Daimler?’

  Ulrich grinned. ‘I have been speaking to a few of your troops. I know soldiers. I have relatives in the military.’

  ‘All Germans have relatives in the military.’

  ‘Well, with a little sweet talk, and a promise of a grandstand seat to see the race’s finish, I have secured us places on the next troop train back to London.’

  Giles wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘A train? The railway? I’ve never ridden the railway in my life!’

  ‘Then it is a day of novelties. Come on.’ He led the way.

  Giles followed with a backward glance at his father, who had apparently not yet noticed his son slipping away. But then Sir Joshua paid him little attention at the best of times.

  The troop train was a row of grimy wooden carriages behind a hissing locomotive of French design. With a smile and a promissory note Ulrich talked them past the corporal guarding the train.

  There was no station here, no platform; they climbed into the carriage up a short wooden ladder directly from the rusty tracks. The carriage was like a barn on wheels, with a wooden floor and slats for walls, and rows of simple, backless benches. There were only a few troops aboard, tired-looking men cradling packs and rifles, with red coats unbuttoned. They glanced at Ulrich and Giles, uninterested, then turned back to their cigarettes and card games. Giles settled reluctantly on a bench, trying to keep his leathers clean.

  Just minutes after they boarded, a whistle shrieked and the train jolted into motion. Giles had to grab the bench to avoid being thrown to the floor. As the train picked up speed, the breeze whistled through the slatted walls, and Giles was glad it was such a hot day, but was dismayed when smoke and soot and even sparks came blowing into the carriage.

  Ulrich laughed at his discomfort. ‘You are an iron-road virgin.’

  ‘I told you, I’ve never ridden a rail train before in my life. And this is why.’

  ‘But you should visit Germany some time.’ He had to speak up over the chuffing of the locomotive, the rattle of the wheels on the track. ‘There you travel in heated coaches, with dinner served to you by a pretty waitress. Why, German cattle are transported in better conditions than this!’

  ‘But even so, who wants to ride a train? To be shunted from fixed point to fixed point – you have none of the freedom you have in an autocar. And you can’t choose what sort you travel with. No offence.’

  ‘But look at the economics. As I explained to your father, the rail can transport high volumes at low cost and high speeds. For industry’s needs—’

  ‘Canals will do for England, and turnpike roads, as they have always done. My father owns shares in the Silver Cross, the country’s greatest canal system, connecting the Thames, Trent, Severn and Mersey. Once we had a cruising holiday, a summer in a houseboat. The canals were fair crowded with commercial vehicles and cargo.’

  Ulrich grunted. ‘Lumbering along at the pace of a broken-down horse! The British invented modern industrial society. You have an empire that spans the world. Yet you are the poor man of Europe! And now continental entrepreneurs will come over the Jubilee Bridge to take away your coal and iron ore and other raw materials as if you are a colony to be exploited. You should come to Germany, my friend,’ he said again.

  Giles was relieved when the train picked up more speed, and the noise drowned out Ulrich’s
voice.

  The train cut briskly across the country, heading north-west. It stopped at Ashford, Maidstone and Sevenoaks, where troops and equipment were disembarked, and others loaded aboard. Then it turned north towards the capital, and joined the London Loop south of Greenwich. This grand circle of rail track, designed to ferry troops rapidly to trouble spots around the city, was the only major rail development to have taken place in Britain for forty years.

  On the Loop, the train headed west and rattled through Deptford, Peckham and Camberwell. Ulrich peered out curiously at the capital’s sprawling, grimy acres, houses and factories jammed in together under a pall of smoke, cut through here and there by the tracks of the motor roads – shining paths kept empty of pedestrians by law, to make way for the coal-gas-powered autocars of the rich, and the occasional steam omnibus.

  Giles felt proud of this vision of London’s roads, for his own family had had a great deal to do with its creation. In the 1830s a man called Sir Goldsworthy Gurney had run a trial steam-driven road train service between Gloucester and Cheltenham. After the early railway experiments by Stephenson and the rest failed, the Romillies and other interested parties had argued for Gurney’s system, and poured money into resolving the attendant technical problems: high pressure boilers to make engines powerful enough, road surfaces toughened by Thomas Telford’s expensive processes, pneumatic tyres to make the ride itself bearable for passengers. Sir Joshua always said that it was a much more civilised solution to Britain’s transport needs than the rail, a solution that did not involve laying waste to whole swathes of ancient English countryside with bridges and cuttings and embankments, and shrieking locomotives putting the cows off their milk.

  But Ulrich did not seem impressed. ‘London is not like Berlin.’

  ‘Well, I should hope not.’

  ‘The roads are so poor, save for the motor routes. And without rail how do people travel to work?’

  Giles was puzzled by the question. ‘In their autocars.’

  ‘Not the rich,’ Ulrich said. ‘The workers, the ordinary people.’

  ‘They don’t. Well, they walk. If everybody travelled about it would ruin the character of the place, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Why, look there – a cow!’ Behind every grimy house or terraced row was a scrap of green, populated by cows, sheep, chickens. ‘Cows, in your capital!’

  ‘How else are you supposed to get fresh milk in the city?’

  ‘You transport it in from the countryside. By rail!’

  ‘Maybe you like your milk sour in Berlin,’ Giles said defensively. ‘Here we take it warm and udder-fresh.’

  ‘How medieval!’

  Giles cast about for a way to shut him up. ‘Look – you’re starting to sound like an agitator.’

  ‘Oh, I would not dream of causing trouble.’ But, glancing at the soldiers with whom they shared the carriage, Ulrich fell silent.

  The line swept over the river at Vauxhall, and they peered out sullenly at the crowded, grimy Thames.

  The train stopped at Marylebone, and here Giles and Ulrich alighted. It was a walk of only a mile or so east to Euston. But this was a slum area. The old Marylebone road was lined by shabby houses and tenements and jammed with traffic, most of it horse-drawn. In one doorway they saw a man fallen down drunk, though it was barely past lunchtime; in the next a sad-looking prostitute bared bony ankles. And over it all hung the foetid stink of the city.

  Ulrich muttered, ‘In Berlin such areas have been cleared. The penetration of the railways into the city saw to that alone. In Berlin we have a hauptbahnhof, a big central station from which tracks push out in all directions. This is the north of London, is it not? Perhaps a great rail terminus might have grown up in Euston, if the iron roads had come this way, connecting the city to the northern provinces. Instead’ – he waved a hand at the crowded squalor – ‘this.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard enough about Berlin, thanks very much.’

  Edith’s home, when they found it, was a common lodging house, where you could stay for threepence a night. They had to tip the woman on the door, the deputy, a shilling to be allowed in.

  Edith and her family inhabited two basement rooms. Here a black woman of about fifty held court over children of all ages, both black and white – there might have been a dozen, but they squirmed around so much it was hard for Giles to keep count. The walls were flaking and unpainted, and a kind of green mould was breaking through the ceiling. The only partitions were grimy blankets hung from ropes, and there was a stale stink of drying clothes, cooking and unwashed bodies.

  And Edith was here, still in her cream uniform, but her hair was undone. She looked shocked when Giles entered, and with a squeal she hurried out, primping her hair.

  The black woman sighed. She was going through a child’s hair, evidently searching for lice. ‘Don’t you mind her, gentlemen. She’ll come round. Does like to look nice always, like a china doll, that’s what’s wrong with her …’ Her accent was strong and hard for Giles to place, a mixture perhaps of the African of only a generation back, and of the Liverpool area from where the family had recently come. She offered them tea, which they politely refused.

  And as they waited for Edith their hostess told them something of herself.

  Her name was Patience Wilcox, and she was Edith’s mother. Edith’s father, a white man from Liverpool, was only recently dead – killed, in fact, during the Jubilee Bridge construction, along with a thousand others, drowned when working in a caisson that had failed. Not all of these children were Patience’s. Some of them belonged to the other family that shared these two rooms, two families living here without partition or boundary like animals in a pen. Patience was trying to encourage some of the children to sleep, while preparing others for work; all these little ones worked in factories or shops, all save the very smallest.

  Patience herself, born in Britain, was the daughter of an African who had been captured by slavers on the Gold Coast; she barely remembered him. After slavery was formally abolished in Britain in the 1820s, Liverpool, which had made its fortune from the slave trade, had looked to a future as an imperial port. But when the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester railway had failed following the notorious 1838 Olive Mount disaster, the industrial trade from Manchester was choked. In those desperate times for the port, slaving returned – illicitly at first, and later legally when parliamentary bills set out various ‘exemptions’ to the abolition act. The trade ceased at last in the 1860s after the American Civil War, and any slaves in Britain at the time were given their liberty. Freedom – but no work, not from the great land-owning aristocrats who dominated the region’s economy. So Patience’s family had come to London, which was big and hungry enough to offer them employment.

  ‘Edith herself was born a slave.’ Patience cackled, opening a mouth with only a couple of stubby teeth. ‘Scrubs up well, doesn’t she?’

  As if on cue, Edith returned. Giles and Ulrich stood. She was freshly washed and with her hair properly done up, her royal household uniform spick and span. ‘Giles. Thanks ever so for coming. I’m sorry to be so silly.’

  ‘It’s all right. Your mother has been most gracious. Look, I’ve come because I thought we should talk. What you said about the race – and then the Trevi bomb going off like that—’

  ‘It was Gemma who told me! You know, my friend, you met her. I got it all from her. She just warned me to stay away from the Queen’s Trevi, that was all. We are good pals, you know. She was only looking out for me. She made me promise not to tell, not even you! But I was shocked. I couldn’t let you go ahead with the race, could I?’ She looked at him with an intensity of affection that disturbed him. ‘Not if—’

  ‘Not if what?’ Giles crossed to her, took her hands and tried to calm her. ‘Start at the beginning, Edith. It’s all right. I’m sure we can sort this out.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’m not.’

>   And she told him what her friend Gemma had told her, of the Jubilee Plot.

  It was to have been a threefold strike: the already-foiled Irish assault on Westminster Abbey, the sabotage of the Queen’s Trevi – and finally, Edith told him, her voice trembling, the most devastating assault of all, a detonation that would sever one of the long spans of the new Jubilee Bridge, just as the inaugural autocar race reached that point.

  She whispered, ‘Oh, nobody expected all the bombs to work. But if just one did it might be enough. It’s all about striking back, you see. That’s what Gemma told me. About showing they are strong.’

  ‘And how,’ Ulrich asked sternly, ‘does this Gemma know such things? And who are these saboteurs?’

  The saboteurs, it turned out, were a mixed bunch with mixed motives, all of them unhappy under the regime. Gemma Brady had family connections to the Home Rule campaigners who had attacked Westminster. But the Irish had links to other groups, anarchists, agitators for universal suffrage, campaigners against poverty, who together had worked out this spectacular multiple plot timed for a most symbolic moment, the Queen’s own Jubilee.

  Giles shook his head. ‘Do these fools imagine they will win their arguments by blowing up the Queen?’

  ‘But what else are they to do, Giles? Call it an experiment in revolution! I’ve talked this through with Gemma and others. There are a lot of very clever people working below stairs, believe me! I’ve even been to a few meetings to hear for myself.’ But she hesitated; almost certainly any such meeting would be regarded as an illegal combination. ‘Look, for decades reform in this country has been thwarted at every step. The last attempt at parliamentary reform failed in 1832. The Chartists were prosecuted in 1838. Laws about factory inspections and the hours you can work a child were defeated or repealed in the 1840s. Efforts to repeal the Corn Laws were defeated in 1846, and the poor stayed hungry …’

  This litany of history dismayed Giles, who knew little of these events; he found it slightly obsessive. And yet there was something admirable in this girl’s self-taught understanding.