The Rich Are with You Always (15 page)

  Nora's mouth and eyes opened wide. "That's terrible, John." She could just remember the cholera in Manchester and Leeds in her childhood. The drained, limp bodies and faces of its victims had haunted many of her bad dreams.

  John nodded. "As Bazalgette said. Don't pray for cholera. But since it must come, pray for it in Westminster and at Guildhall. Then perhaps we'll get a drainage system fit for modern times. Never drink water in Chelsea, by the way. Their intake is right next to the sewer outfall. Aee! I've learned that much," he said. "I must get to Hamburg sometime this summer. They have a new system washed through with river water twice a week."

  "Hundreds of miles!" Nora gloated.

  "Aye." He grinned. "And I'm guessing three to three and a half thousand quid a mile. For a ten or fifteen per cent net profit. Fault that!"

  "It'll do," she said.

  "And think," he added, "to walk around a city without middens. And no bubbling lakes of cess. And no stink. And no pigs running loose on the scavenge. We'd be remembered as the firm that made London fit to inhabit."

They got off the train at Folkestone at two, so the South Eastern had lost even more time than John had cost them. The paddle steamer, having missed the tide, now lay at anchor and fast to a buoy beyond the basin. The seas were running high.

  "How do you feel?" John asked when they were in the horse coach that plied between station and jetty; the rail line to the harbour carried only goods traffic as yet. "It's not going to be an easy passage."

  "Oh" Nora said lightly, "let's be done with it. We could wait a month for a calm sea." Nevertheless, she peered nervously down; the steamer looked so very small among those huge waves.

  "Sure?" John pressed.

  "How long will it be?"

  "Oh, quite quick with this wind behind us. Two and a half hours at most."

  "Let's go then," she said, her resolve completely recovered.

  She regretted it as soon as the rowing boat cleared the harbour mouth. It rose, struggling like a beetle, across huge shivering swells of translucent green water. At the peak, where the oarsmen caught crabs and the salt spray stung like spikes, they could see glimpses of the oh-so-distant steamer's deck. Then down the side they skittered to the trough, where all the world was a wall of water and where three feet of hard-won headway seemed swallowed in a dozen yards of enforced leeway. Yet as each towering peak bore them up, the steamer inched miraculously closer, and within twenty minutes, they were in the relative calm of its lee, rising and falling only slightly faster than its great bulk. At each peak, two or three passengers managed to gain the ladder and shin up it to the deck, helped all the way by the sailors. Nora and John were among the last to get off. And theirs was the last rowing boat to have left the jetty.

  "Oh, thank God for something firm underfoot," she said when they were up on the heaving deck at last.

  There was a sudden commotion up forward, where a sailor, waiting to weigh anchor, had his shirt set on fire by a spark from the funnel. He leaped into the sea like a human torch and then, without pause, climbed on deck by the anchor rope and resumed his place at the capstan as if it had all been a part of his daily routine. Some passengers cheered and he took a bow, grinning.

  They weighed anchor and, because of the seas, lashed it inboard before they cast off from the buoy. This brought the ship's bow round so that both paddles turned in unison as she began to make way. The drive was direct, without intermediate gearing, and the two big cylinders seemed to sigh alternately as they filled and emptied. Their maximum turning force was between one-third and two-thirds of the stroke, making the crankshaft sprint and labour by turns, in time with the sighing. On calm days this gave the steamer a lurching motion not unlike a slow train. Today, however, the storm completely masked such irregularities and imposed far severer ones of its own.

  Once they were clear of the soaring white cliffs, the swell came at them from the stern and it ran at a slight diagonal to the ship. As a result, the two paddle wheels never drew the same amount of water at the same time. And since the deeper draught gave the better purchase, the vessel would always slew toward the shallow quarter, making the bow seek from side to side as it yawed. This motion was superimposed on the random buffeting she took from the waves and the squalls of wind that soughed in her shortened sails and shrieked through her rigging. Smoke and steam and sparks ran before them in a dirty, tangled plume.

  Nora watched the white cliffs vanish into the storm and spray.
I'm going to
France,
she kept thinking.
Goodbye, England!
She had determined beforehand that this would be an exciting moment; but the weather made it difficult for the reality to match her expectations. Her imagination had passed this way with John too many times since he had first gone over to build the line from Boulogne to Amiens. "I think I'll change my mind and go below," she said. He took her arm and steadied her as they walked.

  The Ladies' Cabin was full and they went back up on deck to the General Cabin. Gentlemen and ladies were stretched head-to-toe, head-to-toe, on all the divans around the walls, and more gentlemen lay on cushions on the floor. Most of the recumbent men kept their eyes shut, pretending not to see her; but at last one stood and offered her his divan.

  She thanked him and, helped by John, lay down full length while he put a rug over her feet and skirt hems.

  She had not lain there ten minutes when a vast wave, cutting across the general direction, spun them hard to starboard. A universal shriek and groan went up in the cabin and at least four of them vomited at once. The illness spread among them like a chain letter. Stewards busied themselves throwing sand and passing eau-de-cologne around.

  
If I stay, I'll lay a carpet too,
Nora thought, and sat up resolutely. One of the floorbound gentry eyed her divan with hope.

  "I'm going on deck," she said sweetly to him. "I must offer this back to the gentleman who relinquished it. Will you kindly see that no one else occupies it?"

  Grudgingly the man agreed and helped her to her feet. He sat on the divan, half claiming it. A delicate-looking lady by the door was being genteelly sick into a handkerchief, a teaspoonful at a time. Only the bracing gale as she pushed open the door brought Nora back from the grip of that same predicament.

  All around the outside of the cabin was a thick mahogany rail. Nora used its support to work her way over to the slightly less windward quarter, to starboard, where John and the polite gentleman sat in shouting conversation on a crate with two frightened goats inside it. Both men were wearing thick grey oilskins. They did not notice her until she was almost upon them.

  "You may have your divan back, kind sir," she shouted over the roar of sea and wind.

  The man smiled and shook his head. "Better here," he said.

  John took off his oilskin and wrapped it around her.

  The other, unbidden, went to get John a replacement from the crew's quarters.

  "Interesting man," John shouted while he was gone. "Name's Addison. Has great knowledge of the iron trade. Knows Nasmyth. Comes from Sheffield."

  Addison came back with the oilskin. Nora sat on the goat crate, huddled in the lee of the two men, watching the waves speed ahead of them toward France and catching one word in ten of the men's impossible dialogue. Inside, the oilskin was a warm, still world.

  By mid-channel the waves had become truly mountainous—huge, rolling greenbacks of wind-lashed water that thundered toward the ship as if created to destroy her; yet they lifted her and careened onward as if she did not exist. Looking crosswind, Nora could see that any ripple or wavelet which reared more than a few inches was at once peeled from the face of the ocean, turned to black-and-silver grapeshot, and hurled far over the waters by the gale. She could not look upwind for long because that same broadside would lash her face and sting her eyes.

  At least she no longer felt nauseous.

  Six miles or so from the French coast, the storm began to blow itself out. The sea still ran hugely, but the lash of the spray and the roar of the wind dropped to a spatter and a moan. For the first time since they had left Folkestone, the smoke did not fall seaward near the bow. The cabin folk began to venture out on deck. Looking at the green pallor of their skin Nora felt decidedly superior.

  "Your first crossing, Mrs. Stevenson?" Addison asked.

  She nodded and smiled.

  "Well, you're quite the sailor."

  She beamed at him; there was something instantly likeable about Mr. Addison. He was in his early forties, much the same age as John, with curly, pale brown hair, greying and thinning at the temples. Thickets of hair sprouted from his ears and cantilevered over his eyes, blue-green in their shade. It was a reserved, careworn face, the face of a working gentleman. His hands were gnarled and flecked with many white scars from the spatterings of slag and molten iron.

  "Is this a holiday for you, Mr. Addison?" she asked.

  "A working holiday." He nodded. "I am about to go in business on my own account, and it occurred to me I might never again have so unfettered an opportunity to see what our French and German rivals are doing."

  "He's about to become a competitor," John said.

  "Nay." Addison laughed scornfully. "There's room for hundreds more. I'd say the new iron age hasn't even begun. Ye couldn't have picked a better time to go into iron production. I'd swear that. Bible."

  "And where shall ye set up shop?" Nora asked, all casual and innocent.

  "Not Sheffield, that's certain. It's plagued by the old styles. Ye could pick a dozen places. There's…'er…Doncaster now"—he looked sharply at Nora—"I know it's only a village but if ye look at the railroads, it's bound to grow. Or"—again he looked at Nora, who by now realized she was being fished for her reaction—"there's good land going cheap south of Leeds."

  Nora decided to play him out then. "Leeds," she said, nervously looking at John. "Good gracious!"

  John suppressed a smile.

  "Oh?" Addison, thinking he was on the scent, looked even harder at her.

  "How extraordinary!" John said heavily. "You were born there, were you not, my dear?"

  She looked at him, pretending to be ever so grateful for his rescue. "Yes, that's it!" she said.

  "I see." Addison smiled. "And ye could even"—he laughed dismissively, to show how ridiculous the idea was—"build in Cumberland! Good harbours. Good railway soon enough."

  They laughed too. "Build there and you could build anywhere," John said.

  "That's a fact!" Addison was seized with a paroxysm of laughter. "Aye. That's a fact."

  They docked in the lee of the jetty, where it was calm enough for John to get out his writing case and dash off a letter of introduction to Rodet on Addison's behalf. He thanked them hugely and left, well pleased.

  "Cumberland," Nora said thoughtfully. "So he's going to build at Furness."

  "Aye," John agreed. "It may be worth looking into again."

  "Oh no," Nora said happily. "We're yoked to Beador now. That die is cast."

  When she stood to go, she realized that the goats had eaten a hole in her borrowed oilskin. John gave it back to the coxswain with five shillings on top—knowing the man would patch the coat and drink the bounty. They went ashore at five-thirty.

  Their luggage was piled along one side of the custom house. They waited five minutes for the douanier, and then a band of soldiers in green uniform, came and looked at their passports and told them not to wait any longer. Nora was disappointed that they spoke English.

  They took a fly to the Hôtel des Bains, leaving the hotel porter to collect their trunk. Farther down the jetty some dockers were unloading a cargo of iron cannon from a vessel that had berthed earlier that day. When John remarked on this to the hotel manager, he replied: "Oh, that must be for the war."

  "What war, for the love of goodness?" John asked.

  "France has declared the war on Austria," he said calmly. "They are fighting in the Alps. You are in number twelve, facing the sea, m'sieu, 'dame."

  "Can I pay in these?" John showed a Bank of England note. Smiling, the manager pulled out a fat wallet and opened it. There was hardly a French note among them. John smiled too.

  "Normandy is returning to the English," the manager said, "while we fight the Austrians."