Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  His anger was now more frightened than choleric. “You will not be here long enough,” he promised. “This place will very quickly break you. You will submit.”

  Now she was serene. She even managed to look at him with compassion as she said the one word, “Never!”

  She neither paused nor even looked back at him before she vanished through the gates. Even the wardresses—and what else could one call them—stood a little in awe of her calm and self-possessed dignity.

  ***

  A bitterly cold dawn the following day found Nora and Caspar (who had not run away quite as swiftly as he had promised in the heat of that argument) hammering at those same gates for admittance. They were allowed to pass in her boxes, but neither threats nor pleas—nor money—could gain their own entry. The rules were clear: no visitors without the father’s consent; no letters unless from the father or covered by a letter from him; and the girl herself might reply only through him.

  Nanette, while all this was going on, found a back-door way of smuggling in a message to Winifred, telling her not to despair and to be sure that everything that could be done was being done to secure her early release.

  Nora and Caspar went straight to the prefect of police. But it was obviously not the first time he had been disturbed at his breakfast by a distraught or angry mother. He was suave, bland, and utterly unhelpful.

  Nora’s own lawyer, who handled all the legal side of her Deauville properties, was no more forthcoming: There was no right of habeas corpus in France, he explained, and that was why such schools were placed here. A father’s rights over an unmarried daughter, whatever her age, were paramount.

  “It’s why people need two parents,” Caspar said bitterly when every potential line of action was shown to be fruitless. “If you and that man were still on speaking terms, this could never have happened.”

  And Nora, although they were standing in the middle of a crowded street in broad daylight, burst into tears. These last twenty-four hours had been too much for her.

  Caspar was now intensely embarrassed. He had hit out at her unthinkingly, needing only to vent his own bitterness and sense of frustration; if his father had been there, Caspar would have killed him. “There, there,” he soothed, slipping his arm about her shoulders and gripping her tightly. She turned inward to him and buried her face between his neck and shoulder, pushing off her bonnet. “I’ve been so little use to you,” she sobbed.

  It had been a hard pill to swallow—after so many years when her money had seemed to spell absolute power, she had now been forced to understand that all the money in the world was futile if the institutions of the state were ranged against it. She, the richest woman in England, could not legally retrieve her daughter from an institution into which any father could jettison that same daughter for as long as he pleased.

  “Don’t go to pieces now, mater,” Caspar said. “You still hold the key for all of us. When we’ve beaten him, we’re going to need you. And so will he.”

  She took heart then and found enough courage to expose her tear-reddened face to the day. “You are going to beat him, aren’t you, darling!”

  “Into the ground,” he answered. Then, realizing the unintended implication of the metaphor, he quickly put a flat hand level with the side of his knee. “Up to here, anyway.”

  “What’ll you do now?” she asked when they were once more in their carriage and on their way back to Dieppe.

  “I have a head full of Latin and Greek, which must make it the second most useless organ this side of Rome, ancient or modern. So I suppose my first aim must be to fill it with something more practical.”

  She smiled for the first time since they had learned of Winifred’s abduction. He was glad. In the long, lonely months that lay ahead he wanted her to remember him as jovial and confident; whenever doubts came, he wanted that brighter picture of himself to sustain her.

  “What practical things?” she asked. “I mean, in particular.”

  “In particular? I’m sure I told you. Small arms and ammunition—a fairly portable skill, I think. And with all those buffaloes and Indians…”

  “Do you know anything about the trade over there?”

  He smiled and drew breath, like a conjuror about to top his act. “New York,” he said, in a reading voice. “Trades Directory, eighteen sixty-two. Arms: ammunition, eight firms; Arms: armaments, four firms; Guns: pistol makers, twenty…”

  Nora laughed. “Very well! Very well!” she said, holding up her hands to fend off this weight of information.

  “No, you asked for it and you shall hear it to the end. Guns: pistols, importers of, twelve firms; Gunsmiths, nineteen; Military goods, twenty-seven; Percussion caps, six; Shooting galleries, five; Shot manufacturers, four.”

  Nora had laughed herself out before he finished, but her humour was restored. “I should have known better than to doubt that you understood what you were about,” she said. But later, in a more serious mood, she asked if he didn’t think the trade sounded a little overcrowded.

  He puffed out his stomach and put his fingertips together in an imitation of a pompous businessman. “If, ma’am, I may summarize a lifetime in the trade, my advice is this: Never strive to be first; strive only to be best.”

  Again he made his mother laugh. “Oh, Caspar! I’m so glad we have you. You are going to help us all, aren’t you? You won’t run away completely and abandon us altogether?”

  “Nay!” He laughed, becoming the Yorkshire Tyke once more—the Aloysius Abercrombie who had sold those beds and who now, in place of the Hon. Caspar, was going to learn all about guns. “Nay! I shall need to know th’ terms afore I can answer that!”

  This time Nora did not laugh quite so freely.

  Two weeks later, living a day-long impersonation of Aloysius Abercrombie, he had vanished among the smoke of the forges and the clang of the engineering shops of the English Midlands—Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton—an apprentice to fortune. And Winifred sat at the barred windows of her cell and drank deep of bitterness. She did not cry. Not once since the outer gate had shut behind her had she cried. Her soul filled with a quiet and abiding hatred of a world in which this outrage was possible. A male world—for, even without Nanette’s smuggled letter, she understood well how powerless her mother now was. Night after night she sat at that window, renewing, reinforcing, resharpening her resolve that from the day of her release out of this odious place to the day of her final release from the larger imprisonment of being a female in such a world, she would work to end that monstrous domination of the regiments of men.

  Beside her lay five letters from her father. Not one had she opened. Her own letters to him were calm, reasoned, and utterly damning. But she knew him; she knew he would hear the cry they suppressed.

  Chapter 42

  Boy heard nothing of Winifred’s fate until, early in March, Caspar took a few days off from his new life and made the journey north to Cumberland to see him.

  Boy had not made the expected mess of the Cockermouth, Keswick, & Penrith contract, yet his methods were as opposite to his father’s as they could possibly be. John’s system was to trust until trust was abused. Boy’s was to trust nothing and no one.

  At first, people—his engineers, tradesmen, and navvies—said it was only natural. He was sort of on trial. Of course he’d be strict, wouldn’t he? Just wait and watch, though—he’ll ease up and become a chip off his father’s block.

  They waited. They watched. And Boy did not ease up. Every inch of working had its deputy, foreman, ganger, timekeeper. Every yard of progress was charted minutely and pinned down to individual workers; no one here was ever going to be able to say, “It wasn’t me, it was someone else did that bit.” God help the man who showed late without damn good, copperbottom cause, or who got drunk, or brawled, or left early, or who did not pull his weight. Even calls of nature were rationed and charted. Two un
paid hours a week went on maintenance, when tools were cleaned, sharpened, tightened, and straightened; equipment repaired; staging checked and renewed; ropes respliced; and every nut, bolt, screw, clip, hinge, fastener, shackle, pin, and bracket checked and rechecked. If any nut showed the week’s mud undisturbed by a spanner, someone got dismissed.

  It was the safest, most orderly, smoothest running, soberest and most miserable working ever to go under the name of Stevenson. But work was hard got that spring and summer, so desertions were few.

  John had regular reports from “friends” on the site, of course. At first he assumed, like everyone else, that his son was starting tight and would loosen up. And even when it became clear to him that Young John was, by nature, a disciplinarian of a very tough kind, he was still more relieved than worried. He laughed, indeed, to think how his greatest fear had once been that Young John would leave everything to his deputies and lie around reading poetry and the classics all day!

  Even as Caspar rode along the line of the workings he could tell that everything—superficially at least—was as it ought to be on a Stevenson contract. His fierce disappointment told him how deeply he still longed to take over the firm instead of Boy. It was a longing his conscious mind and will had disavowed on that baleful day after Christmas when the whole family had fallen apart. If ever there was a moment when his resolve to go to America finally set firm within him, it was when he passed the neat piles of stores and the shipshape workings and sensed that military purposefulness which pervaded every site. At least as an organizer and manager of men and enterprise, Boy was not going to disgrace himself.

  Boy seemed almost ashamed of being so glad to welcome Caspar to the seat of operations.

  “What d’you think?” he asked when their greetings were over.

  “Very impressive, Boy, I must say.” Caspar nodded judiciously and looked around him again as if he thought some little out-of-place element might just have escaped his notice.

  “You all thought I’d make an unholy mess, now didn’t you?”

  “I expected it. But I see I was wrong. There’s no fear of that now.”

  “And you?” Boy asked. “Where have you been—and doing what?”

  By now they had strolled away from the huts that comprised Boy’s headquarters. The small and flimsy structures were dwarfed by the masses of Skiddaw Fell to the north and Grisedale Pike to the southwest. It was scenery of rugged grandeur, closer to God than to man. And today, when a whole landscape of clouds poured overhead, spanning peak to peak in one rolling roof of liberated white cliffs, it would have been easy to understand John’s fears that Boy might lie around reading poetry and classics. It was a place in which to sit and invent new symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven; it was a place that did three-quarters of the inventing for you.

  “I’m more worried about Winnie,” Caspar said. “Has your father let her out yet?”

  “Let her out!” Boy was too astonished at the words to take up the “your father.”

  “Have they not told you?”

  “I’ve wondered about her and worried, I must say. I keep writing and she doesn’t answer. But I’ve been so busy here. What should I have been told?”

  “She’s in a private jail in France. Your father’s put her in there until she agrees to give in to him.” Caspar could almost feel the coldness and stiffness invade Boy at his side.

  “I’m sure it’s in her best interests,” Boy said. “Our father would never do anything so serious unless it were for the best in the long run.”

  “The mater says he regretted it as soon as he’d done it. Now he wants to get her out. Even the slightest gesture from her would do. But, of course, she’s his daughter. She’d die first. And he’d die rather than just give in. So it’s a matter of seeing which stiff neck breaks first.”

  “If you’re going to talk in that disrespectful way, I wish you’d change the subject.”

  “Well!” Caspar gave a bitter laugh. “I suppose that answers the only question I really came here to ask—forlorn hope though it was from the start.”

  Boy looked curious. He obviously wanted to know exactly what Caspar had been going to ask; but he did not want to prolong a distasteful conversation.

  “I was hoping to persuade you to use the fact that you are also, by courtesy, Lord Stevenson, to deceive the governess of Winnie’s jail and get her out. I thought it might appeal to the romantic in you to break this impasse.”

  “You must be mad.”

  “I must be.” He turned and began to stride back toward his horse, forcing Boy to follow. “I’m glad you’re doing so well, Boy,” he said. “I truly am. I hope, though, that you’re never really put to the test. And I hope you will always be able to think of your father as you do now.”

  “What the devil are you talking about?” Boy asked angrily. Half his anger was at being forced to trot along behind Caspar.

  “If you ever find out, you’ll remember I said it.” Caspar swung himself up onto his horse. “If I want to get in touch with you, I’ll write to the London office. All this”—he glanced for one final, envious time at the encampment of huts—“has a depressingly temporary look.”

  “Where will you be?” Boy asked.

  Caspar spurred his horse away at a canter. “America!” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  Chapter 43

  Four months later, when Caspar stepped out of Castle Garden, Manhattan, and into the Battery, he knew more about small arms—their design, manufacture, and ammunition—than anyone in the world. At least, the proof that that was so would not have surprised him. It had certainly cost him enough to acquire this expertise; his capital had shrunk to just over £310—or, as he must now learn to think of it, $2,114.48 American. A miraculously revived Aloysius Abercrombie had haunted the small arms manufactories in and around Birmingham, first as a skilled stockmaker, then, by degrees, rivetter, lathe turner, reamer, general machinist, and temperer. Where he could bluff, he did; where he could not, he bribed or bought.

  Actually, in the few humble moments of his day, those minutes before he sank into sleep, when he allowed himself briefly to contemplate the as-yet empty future not as a Stevenson heir but as an untried businessman of uncertain trade and no fixed address, in those moments he knew how thin his skill really was. He just had to hope it would not be tested too severely all at once.

  Five pounds of his capital had gone on an immigrant ticket from Liverpool to New York. For the first few days he had regretted not paying the extra seven pounds and going second class; conditions in steerage had been really appalling. But then he realized they were actually slightly better than at Old School when he had first gone to Fiennes, especially once he had struck up a couple of friendships among his predominantly Irish fellow passengers. After that, he weathered the six-week passage with little sweat. Those shipboard friendships, though they had endured three thousand miles of ocean, did not survive thirty yards beyond the wide-open portals of Castle Garden. From there on they were all in competition.

  His first call after finding rooms had to be at the National Bank of the Republic where the newly dead Aloysius Abercrombie’s letter of credit should be awaiting the newly revived Hon. Caspar Stevenson. It was, and Caspar breathed a lot easier.

  “Just visiting?” the cashier asked.

  “Quite honestly, Mr. Ford, I don’t know,” Caspar answered. “I’ve not been on your soil an hour.”

  “You surely haven’t.” Mr. Ford grinned and stamped his heel on the bank’s marble floor. “No soil here, sir. This island comprises—if I may so adumbrate—solid, living rock.”

  “I shall certainly stay a while.”

  “Take my advice, sir. This is no town to visit…”

  “Oh, I was looking forward to…”

  “I mean at this particular juncture in history, sir. If it would not seriously discommode you, my advice is to absquatul
ate forthwith and return in a month. Not to say two months, sir. Or three.”

  Caspar was not yet aware of the American instinct when faced with the demands of a formal situation (and what could be more formal than a meeting with an Honourable so early of a Monday morning!) to vanish in a cloud of learned-sounding polysyllables, like a squid into his ink (or, rather, a decacephalopod into his own nigrescent exudations). He could not make out whether or not the man was just trying to be jocular.

  “Why at this particular time, Mr. Ford?”

  “We are at war, sir.”

  “And have been for over two years, surely?”

  “Ah!” Ford held up a finger and beamed as if Caspar had gone right to the heart of the matter. “Exactly so, young man. And we have used up all our patriots. The fodder for next month’s cannon must he drafted, you see.” He looked suddenly as if he feared all this might be boring the young gentleman.

  “Go on,” Caspar said, encouragingly. “I may say, I may tell you, Mr. Ford, for you seem a decent, discreet sort of a fellow”—Caspar leaned over the edge of the man’s desk and lowered his voice—“I might, I just very well might, open a business in this city. So anything you may tell me, in the strictest confidence, you understand, would do more than satisfy an idle curiosity.”

  “A business, mmh? A business.” He looked troubled.

  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Ford?” Caspar asked.

  Ford obviously decided to be frank with him. “We are, you understand, a very Irish city. I would think two out of every seven you meet here are of that…ah…Hibernian…ah…”