by Erica Brown
Hand resting on the back of the chair, he leaned over Tom’s shoulder. ‘It’s the fun of playing the game, getting the refinery for as little as possible.’
‘Hardly a game,’ said Tom, suddenly seeing that business was only a sport if you were already successful and had everything you wanted.
‘Prior to my purchase of these shares, I asked Conrad if he would employ a member of my family in order to put my mind at rest that things are run as they should be.’
Tom frowned. The Heinkel Sugar Refinery was a well-known, part of the city skyline, the biggest refinery in the city. ‘But surely this refinery is already successful. Why does he contemplate taking on a partner?’
Emmanuel smiled broadly and tapped the side of his nose. ‘The British do not trust foreigners. It has been noticed that the Germans have too much control in the trade. They are both the instigators and main membership of the Sugar Bakers Association. Nothing gets refined without their involvement. Serves our own right, of course. In the past we made so much money from slaves and sugar, we weren’t interested in refining. The Germans were already doing it, were good at it, and were offered good money to come over and boil up the cane we brought over. In they came from Hanover and suchlike to do what we didn’t want to do. Now they are being accused of keeping their skills to themselves, of controlling output. There are rumblings in Parliament—’
‘Prompted by the Merchant Venturers Association?’ said Tom without a hint of surprise and earned a slap on the back.
‘You’re a clever young fellow, Tom, and obviously see my point. Rather than risk confrontation and possible legislation against what is already regarded as a foreign monopoly, Conrad Heinkel agreed that I should become a partner.’
‘So what is my part to be in all this?’ asked Tom, wary that Emmanuel might be asking him to use his brawn rather than his brain to bring about some particular event.
Emmanuel poured more drinks. Holding the glass up to the light as if to study its contents better, he said, ‘Nothing for the present. Just be a part of the refinery and ingratiate yourself. When the time comes, I will tell you what I want you to do.’
Deep inside, Tom wanted to say no, but what harm would it do? It would indeed prevent him becoming bored and he couldn’t go back to sea, not until Jeb was gone. Staying in England would also allow him time to investigate Jasper’s disappearance…
This was becoming increasingly important to him. If Jasper had not disappeared, Tom would never have known the privilege of living as a member of the Strong family. He owed him everything.
Tom had always been aware of Emmanuel’s ruthless ambition, so taking advantage of hostile legislation was characteristic. But he couldn’t help thinking that Emmanuel had an ulterior motive and wondered what it was – until Horatia swept into the room and saved the biggest smile for him. On seeing the expression on her father’s face, Tom guessed that Emmanuel wanted to keep them as far apart as possible.
Chapter Ten
Charcoal scratched across the paper, its fine dust flicking upwards on to Nelson’s cuffs and staining his fingers black.
He was drawing a likeness of Adelaide Tillingham, his cousin – and bride, if his father had anything to do with it.
Adelaide was posed on a chair over which was draped a large piece of red velvet that might once have been a curtain. She had an upturned nose, which Nelson gave a slightly pig-like quality on paper. Her eyes were small and looked smaller by dint of her thick, black eyebrows, which Nelson drew meeting in the middle.
The most beautiful part about her was the silk embroidered shawl that Nelson had placed over her shoulders. It was red, a colour she’d protested was too garish. It was decorated with a Chinese dragon embroidered in gold silk thread. Madame Sybil had given it him years ago, ‘As a memento, mon cher.’
Adelaide’s mother was sitting close by, her bulging eyes flicking between the young couple, ready to detect and act swiftly at any hint of impropriety. Every so often, she glanced down at her crochet hook before shoving it through the first stitch of a seven-sectioned shell. But her eyes did not linger.
Nelson smiled to himself. Just in case I poke her daughter in the time it takes her to complete her stitch.
He’d been sketching for an hour and Adelaide was beginning to fidget.
‘Mother, can I see it now?’ she asked.
Nelson shook his head. Why didn’t she ask him?
Right on cue, her mother asked, ‘Is it ready?’
Piqued by their impolite treatment, Nelson threw the stub of charcoal into the fireplace, and placed the drawing into his red leather folder. ‘That’s enough for today,’ he said and got to his feet.
‘Mamma!’ Adelaide exclaimed, looking almost ready to cry.
‘I want to see it,’ her mother demanded, her lace-covered fist stabbing Nelson with the crochet hook as she grabbed the folder with her other hand.
Nelson sighed and looked up at the ceiling as he waited for the inevitable cries of anguish.
Both women peered avidly at the drawing he’d placed on top of another in the folder.
Adelaide wailed, ‘Mamma! I don’t look like that. I don’t look like that at all!’
‘My daughter looks like a pig!’ shouted her mother. ‘And what’s this?’
Nelson turned quickly. ‘Put it back!’
‘She’s naked!’ Mrs Tillingham exclaimed.
‘No, she’s not!’ Nelson grabbed the latest sketch he’d done of Blanche. She was exactly as he remembered her, dark, exotic and alluring.
Mrs Tillingham was red in the face. ‘She looks like a savage! I will not allow my daughter to marry a man who paints half-naked savages.’
Nelson’s spirits rose to astronomic heights. He’d been unable to convince his father that Adelaide was not the bride for him. Now it looked as though Adelaide and her mother had made up their own minds.
He scratched his head but hid his grin before he said, ‘I was looking forward to painting my new wife without her clothes on. Are you quite sure?’
He congratulated himself on his expression, a mix of pathos and outright amusement.
Mrs Tillingham bustled Adelaide towards the door. ‘Come along, my dear child. This man is not for you. Scoundrel!’ she shouted before slamming the door.
Nelson waited until it was safe before breaking into laughter. Saved by a sketch! He almost fell on to the draped dragon counterpane that Madame Sybil had given him. As fingers touched the roughness of the gold thread, his laughing broke out anew. If only Adelaide and her mother had known the origins of the red coverlet and the couplings he’d enjoyed upon it.
* * *
Conrad Heinkel wore dark, conservative clothes and muttered little prayers to the Almighty, mostly in German, when things weren’t going quite right. He was a widower, and although the refinery was a dangerous place of great heat and dark labours, Heinkel seemed loath to let his two children out of his sight. They followed him everywhere.
‘They have to learn how men toil for their daily bread. They must understand that nothing in life comes easily,’ he told Tom.
Tom agreed with that, although his own life had been much harder. Conrad took him around the refinery and outlined the production method. Tom caught on quickly, and although he didn’t need to, opted to spend most of his time with the workforce rather than in the offices. Management, he suggested to Conrad, needs to lead from the front not push from behind. Most men would have chosen the easier option.
The heat was oppressive and a thunderous roar sounded from the furnaces that heated the bulbous stills in which cane sugar was being refined. Men, stripped to their breeches, shovelled coal continuously into the row of arched furnaces, sweat and coal dust running in streaks down their backs.
A few days after Tom’s arrival at the refinery, Emmanuel Strong came visiting with Horatia in tow. Emmanuel’s expression was like thunder. Horatia was tight-lipped and stiff-backed, her eyes fixed straight ahead. Tom guessed she’d been told by her father to
wait outside. Obviously, Horatia had refused.
Still seething, Emmanuel needed to vent his anger on someone else. He spotted Tom scooping impurities off a bubbling sugar vat with a long-handled ladle. The bowl of the ladle was the size of a large saucepan and its handle was over ten feet long. Though it afforded distance between the scooper and the vat, Tom’s shirt was wringing wet and clung to his body.
Emmanuel brought his head close to Tom’s ear and shouted, ‘Where’s the man that should be doing this?’
Without turning from his task, Tom shouted back, ‘Got overcome by the heat. Gone outside.’
Emmanuel was in no mood for sensible explanations. ‘He shouldn’t leave his post and you shouldn’t be doing that.’
Tom eyed him sidelong, but avoided looking at Horatia. ‘And have the man faint? Bull’s blood in the sugar’s one thing. It takes out the impurities. A man of fifty with a hairy body and sweating like a horse only adds them.’
The noise increased as a tub of lime was tipped on to the charcoal filter beds through which the sugar seeped before being pulsed through a vacuum and spun round until it was pure.
Emmanuel moved away, and Tom bent back to his task. Assuming that Horatia had gone with her father, he stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt and tossed it at one of the small square windows, which had wide, clean ledges.
Most of the men in the refinery stripped to the waist when the heat became unbearable. Semi-nakedness had never worried Tom. Like most seamen, he’d seen varying degrees of nakedness all over the world.
He thought he heard one of the chargehands calling to him. When he looked, he saw Horatia. She had not gone with her father but was standing just a few yards away, her mouth open, looking at his body.
He heard Emmanuel shouting for her to come. When she did, he pushed her through the door after which he came marching back to Tom, his face red with anger as much as heat.
‘Remember what I said,’ he growled into Tom’s ear. ‘She’s not for you. Be warned, Tom. So long as my brother is alive, you’ll not be on the streets. But once he’s gone, if you touch my daughter…’
Tom stretched himself to his full height, his fists clenched. The day had finally come when one of the Strong family had made it plain that he wasn’t really one of them, that he never could be. The knowledge hurt far more than he had expected, though deep down he’d always known it.
For Jeb’s sake, he wouldn’t hit Emmanuel. For Jeb’s sake, he wouldn’t shout what was in his heart. He had to be at Marstone Court when Jeb died. He owed the old man that. He reached for his shirt.
The stink and feel of sugar covered his hair and body. He was sickened by the smell of it, the heat of the boiling pans and the sight of men with scald marks that disfigured their bodies.
Tom shouted to Conrad that he was going out and felt Conrad’s eyes following him. Although he hated to let Conrad down, he’d had enough and needed fresh air.
Once outside, he felt like a convict, released early and intent on supping the full cup of freedom. His steps quickened and, try as he might, he couldn’t stop himself walking along Rosemary Street and towards the quay where he’d berthed his ship. It wasn’t due to sail for three days under her new captain.
The tide was in, that much was apparent just by the wheeling and shrieking of the gulls. A ship was already making her way out, men climbing about her rigging, loosening sails ready for the moment they were out in the channel and setting a course. For now a pilot cutter was rowing her out of the harbour and down the Avon. Even without seeing her name or having a closer view, Tom knew the ship was his. Captain Rogers had cast off early. Tom turned away, thought about going back to the refinery, but couldn’t. He needed to feel a deck beneath his feet. He needed a ship, any ship, and headed to the spot just below St Mary Redcliffe church where the Miriam Strong was moored.
When he got there, a group of boys were practising knots under the watchful eyes – or rather one eye – of Jimmy Palmer, mate on one of Tom’s many voyages and now confined to land without an eye and the fingers of his right hand. His eye had gone in a fight with a mad ship’s cook off the coast of Tierra del Fuego and his fingers had been shorn off by ropes racing through his hands in the heart of a gale.
‘Captain Strong aboard!’
At Jimmy’s cry, the group of boys let fall pieces of rope with which they were practising half-hitches and bow lines, and saluted Tom as if he were a grand admiral of the Royal Navy, not merely a captain on a fleet of vessels taking manufactured goods across the Atlantic and bringing back sugar, rum and molasses.
Tom shook Jimmy’s hand, which felt more like a fist. The boys stood to attention until Tom told them to go back to their knots.
None of them was exactly neat as a new pin. All had been deloused, most washed their face and hands every day, but the more subtle niceties such as not letting wind in company, were not rigidly adhered to. Clarence, he was told, had made a good friend, a boy called Joe, who had a harelip and continuously running snot.
Tom perceived that Jimmy was worried about something and asked what was wrong, despite his own problems.
Jimmy sucked on his pipe. ‘Will you take a drink with me?’
Tom nodded and followed him down below. Jimmy brought out a flat-bottomed decanter from one of the neat and narrow cupboards a master carpenter had spent time and trouble fitting into the sloping side of the ship.
Jimmy poured a measure of rum into two glasses. ‘Someone wants this berth or this boat,’ he said after downing his rum in one swift swallow. ‘Must do. I’m told by the Venturers or Port Authority, or whatever they are nowadays, that there’s a party waitin’ to pay two hundred pounds a year berthing fee.’
‘Two hundred!’ Tom was so surprised, he could barely get the words out. ‘Someone wants to pay two hundred pounds for this berth?’
‘So it seems.’
Jimmy poured each of them another shot and they drank those too. Both studied the inner walls of the ship as other men study the neck and shoulders of a beautiful woman.
Ships got you like that, thought Tom. Even when they were lying like a dead whale on the mud, their great weight supported by the huge wooden stanchions beneath, they were still a thing of beauty.
‘What’s to do?’ asked Jimmy eventually.
Tom looked towards the curve of the wharf and a host of decrepit warehouses. At one time they had held sugar, tobacco and tea. Too old and damp, they hadn’t been used for years. But someone wanted their berth, so it stood to reason, thought Tom, that someone had plans for them too. Emmanuel would know. He’d be bound to.
‘I’ll ask some questions, Jim,’ he said and drained his glass.
He followed his old mate back up on deck, and laughed as the boys raced to be first to climb the rigging. As he shaded his eyes against the weak sunlight and watched them, he could almost believe he was at sea again, the deck heaving beneath his feet, the sails unfurling and cracking like whips in the wind. He knew the Miriam Strong would have sailed well and asked himself the same questions he’d asked Jeb Strong a hundred times before; what was her real name and how had he come by her?
As he watched the boys carry out more drills and disciplines of seamanship, his earlier unease was completely forgotten. Helping these boys towards a better future was more important to him.
If his attention hadn’t been taken up with the ship and the boys, plus Jimmy’s pronouncement about the rise in berthing fees, he might have noticed that he was being watched.
Hidden in a corner where the chimney from a glass works cast lengthy shadows, Reuben Trout stuffed a clay pipe with black shag, struck a flint and lit it. He was being paid well to keep watch on the comings and goings around the training ship, and also to keep an eye on Tom Strong. Watching had become his livelihood. What was more, he liked the job, far easier than keeping drunken seamen in order. Besides he was older than when he’d first come across Tom on that chilly winter’s night, but he was still fit enough to keep watch.
He d
idn’t care much for Tom. Never had. Blood and breeding will out, that was Reuben Trout’s creed. Tom Strong was not a born gentleman. He had come from the gutter, and, in Reuben’s opinion, he’d never quite left it behind.
* * *
After leaving the Miriam Strong, Tom made his way back to the refinery in the hope of finding Emmanuel. He was lucky. Emmanuel was helping Horatia up into the carriage. Tom got there in time to grab the door before it was closed.
Emmanuel was surprised. ‘What the devil—?’
‘I want to talk to you.’
Tom gripped the coach door with one hand, and Emmanuel’s sleeve with the other. He could barely control his anger.
‘What do you want with the Miriam Strong’s berth?’
Emmanuel looked puzzled at first, but his tone turned surly. ‘What would I want with a run-down berth presently occupied by a run-down ship?’
‘Why would anyone want to offer two hundred pounds for a run-down berth?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Emmanuel expelled air down his nose like an impatient horse. ‘You obviously think me a very hard man, Tom, if you think I’d steal my brother’s little project from under his nose. Believe it or not, but I wouldn’t do that.’
Tom glared at him, unsure now. ‘I need to know,’ he said at last.
‘Why? No one else in Bristol has enough money to outbid us over that berth. While my brother lives, no one gets that berth. No one at all!’
After they’d gone, it occurred to Tom that Horatia had been extraordinarily silent. Her father had probably laid down the law about men and marriage yet again.
Thoughtfully he stroked back a stray lock of hair that had tangled with his lips. Emmanuel could be telling the truth. A powerful bond existed between the three brothers. Although Emmanuel was more ambitious than either Jeb, whom he knew, or Otis, about whom he’d heard many good things, they looked after each other.