"I doubt if the government will do that. I doubt it very much."
"Too much. There is altogether too much doubt. We ought to wait until it's resolved."
"You twist my words."
"And you don't answer mine."
He began to pace the room restlessly. "But we cannot just hold on to that money while people are starving to death. We'd never sleep easy again."
"And I say we cannot lay it out anywhere the government may later come blundering in. We could lose it all."
"Now we have it! There is the exact difference between us. I would rather lay it out and lose it—knowing at least I did all I could."
"Then you ought to be in politics, not business. Go and vote the repeal of economic law—and throw in the law of gravity while you're at it."
"How dare you talk to me like that!" His tolerance broke at last. But then he merely glowered at her, afraid in case he should go too far as well.
To her surprise his anger calmed her. "What else should I do? Pretend I no longer care for our business?"
"You care for it well enough. You care for it to the exclusion of everything else."
"But it
is
everything else. It makes everything else possible."
"Things are so terrible here," he said, making one last stab at the argument. "Distress is so abject. It is not time to observe every scruple and nicety of economic law."
She buried her face in her hands. "John, oh John!" She looked up wearily. "There's no two people in all the country who know better than you and me how to take one pound and turn it into two—or twenty-two. If there's any faculty Ireland needs desperately at this crisis, it's that faculty. For God's sake—and for Ireland's sake—let us use it. How will it be if we, and all the others who possess it too, if we all resign our responsibilities and contemplate instead of turning each pound into—into nothing? How can that ever help this country?"
He sighed. "I wish we'd never come here. Brassey's wise to stay away."
"Amen to that," she said.
Chapter 37
Stevenstown, or its first two hundred houses, and the vast steelworks, or at least the first bay of what might become such a works, was opened just before Christmas that year—twelve months to the day from the turning of the first sod. It was a festive ceremony, with a dinner for the operatives in the works and a champagne supper for deputies, supervisors, and local bigwigs in Stockton. John spoke at both—a simple message that labour and capital were a partnership, not foes locked in permanent and inevitable combat. They had more in common, he said, than the interests that divided them. Above all they had initiative; the road to the top was open to any man who lived in Stevenstown; thrift, diligence, perseverance, study, daring, and luck were all that was needed.
The message was better received at the mill than among those already well advanced along that road. And there were rumblings from the townsfolk too. The mayor pressed John especially on the sewerage system he had installed; he was plainly worried it would lead to demands in Stockton among the "progressives" for a municipal drainage system there too. It was all very well to put in a system in a new town; but the cost in a town whose buildings went back over the centuries was ruinous. "D'ye mind," he asked John, "if I put it about that it's mainly for the run-off from your ironworks? The connection to the housing's only incidental?" He was diffident because of Sir George's connection with the firm. Sir George, restored now to modest fortune, was there, ensuring respect.
"Oh," John said, with a wink. "I thought that fact was already perfectly understood." He liked aldermen; he felt at home with their petty-minded venality.
But his spirit was not really in these proceedings. Over two hundred miles away to the south, at Maran Hill, Nora was having a hard time of it with their fifth child. They ought not to have moved; he saw that now. But she had had a succession of minor ailments all autumn and with the baby due and winter coming on, it seemed only sensible to move somewhere milder and less isolated. Their doctor had advised it, as well. And now the child was two weeks late in arriving.
He was on the point of retiring for that night, ready for an early start south next morning, the morning of Christmas Eve, when a lad in a fly came hell-forleather to the inn. He did not even hammer at the door but stood in the yard and bellowed "Mr. John Stevenson!" over and over.
John flung wide the window. "Aye, lad?" It was a porter from the station.
"You're to come back with me, sir. A train is waiting to take you south."
He wasted no time over questions. Nor did he take anything but his writing case and wallet. The horse, which had been merely winded in the tavern yard, was lathered to a terror by the time it got them back to the station. Mills, the stationmaster, grim-faced, handed him a sheet of paper. "Off the company's telegraph, sir. Twenty minutes ago."
John read: 'Stevenson go south at once special waiting at Stockton with priority through to Boxmoor regret grave news from Marran Hall God speed Hudson.' He looked again at the misspelling; it definitely read "Marran Hall."
"From Mr. Hudson himself, sir," Mills said. "Thank the powers we had one still fired up." He pointed down the line, where an engine was lurching toward them on skirts of steam. "She'll get you to Stockton."
John nodded, unable to speak. His mind, clutching at any straw, prayed for there really to be a Marran Hall and for that misunderstanding to be the basis of this nightmare.
"I'll wish you God speed too, sir," Mills said.
"And me," the porter added.
"Thank you." John spoke at last as he swung himself in beside the engineer on the still-moving engine. The porter, trotting beside, dropped his writing case onto the footplate.
"I'll fire for you," John said, grabbing the coal shovel from the engineer. The man hesitated. John thrust the shovel back into his hands and opened the steam valve further. "Or I'll drive," he said. The engine, free of any load but its own tender, lurched forward. The engineer gave him back his shovel. "Right!" he said.
They took that engine to its limit over the twenty-six-odd miles between Stockton and the main line at Darlington—the line on which public steam railways had begun, twenty years earlier. On that day, a man had walked in front of the engine; tonight, a hare could not have run before them. The engine groaned and clanked as it hurtled through the dark over the ringing metal; the fire roared and the water boiled with a muted thunder—the explosive birth of a million steam bubbles.
The night was windless but the air, rushing past them, shrieked over the engine's surfaces and streamed through their hair. It was like a goodish gale. John put his hat on the writing case.
"Must be fifty mile an hour," he shouted to the driver.
"Just the night for sheep on the line!"
"How often does that happen?"
"Never! But it's times like this you think of it."
The man's words were comforting. Indeed, John thought, it's times like this you think the worst—and it doesn't happen.
At least the sheep didn't happen, and they reached Darlington in just thirty-one minutes. His hat had blown away somewhere on that record dash.
Christmas Eve was thirty minutes old when the special pulled out of Darlington on its long journey south; it was Kitson's long-boilered Hector, the very engine of which Hudson had given a silver model replica to Chambers. John wondered if that was an omen. This time there was both an engineer and a fireman; he had a coach to himself. The master at Darlington apologized that it was not a directors' coach.
There was a further telegraph message, also from Hudson: "News is no worse and I will see you at York."
He tried to sleep. His rolling-stone way of life had taught him to catnap in any position at any time of day. But tonight, with the whole padded seat to lie out on, sleep was nowhere near. The unthinkable clamoured at his mind, besieging his wakefulness. To hold it at bay he said, "Nora my love…Nora my love… Nora my love…" like a compulsive prayer, in time with the chatter of the wheels over the rail butts. He pressed his ear to the cloth of the seat and filled his mind with the deep, sonorous rumble of the axles. It was, he said, the coursing of the blood in Nora's veins.
At York they stopped to take on water. While they were still moving, the door opened and Hudson's huge bulk swung up and in. He hung his lantern, momentarily blinding John, and sat shivering, drawing himself inward. His neck, never prominent, vanished into his great chest.
"It's very good of you, this," John said.
"Good? I never felt less adequate."
"Any more news?"
"None from your home. You will be met at Boxmoor. I wish the Great Northern were already built!"
John laughed faintly. "The worst is being so far away," he said. "These things are often better when we're there." He saw from the faintness of Hudson's smile that such hope was, in this case, thin.
A porter opened the door and put in four footwarmers and a number of blankets. Behind him stood the engineer. "Ready, Mr. Hudson, sir," he said. Hudson climbed out as swiftly as he had got in. "How long to Boxmoor?" John asked.
"If we make the same time as we made since Darlington, we'll be there by five. A little earlier."
Hudson gripped his hand. "If prayers count," he said, "there's hundreds praying already. Tomorrow it will be thousands. The day after, tens of thousands."
John nodded, too moved to speak his thanks.
A half-mile down the line he blew out the lantern Hudson had left and, wrapping himself in the blankets, sat with two footwarmers by his feet and one on the seat each side of him—a tent of warmth in that icy carriage.
Years ago Nora had said to him, "Why don't they conduct the waste steam back through the coaches?" and he had explained there was no heat in waste steam. But it would surely be warmer than this.
He let himself think of Nora now—of all the amazing contradictions she was. How she could think of their business and future with such cold and longsighted vision; she put more effort into that alone than most people could put into several lives. And yet how impetuous she was at times, and what risks she took! In anyone else, it would have seemed both blind and mad; but with Nora you felt that even in the highest flights of her impetuosity that cold, logical part of her mind was still quietly at work. There were times in their discussions (outsiders who did not know them well would say "arguments") when she was pressing some point of view most vehemently and yet he could see a momentary flicker of doubt in her eye, which showed that other possibilities were even then passing through her mind. How did she hold that endless ferment together? It was like a monster class of unruly but brilliant children.
There was an image of her he had carried from the day they had met, that hot August day in 1839, when he had been no more than a navvy ganger. They had supped together and walked out on the banks of spoil from the tunnel he was working on. Then she had gone back to his bed to wait on him while he spoke with Walter Thornton, who was the engineer to the tunnel. He had come back to find her exhausted and asleep. Again in his mind he saw the rough blanket fall from her, saw her underfed, naked body in the moonlight, saw her waken and realize where she was, saw the lust and invitation kindle in her eyes. And then his own reluctant voice, saying, "Nay, lass, there's more important work afoot." How she had worked that night! She had costed the operations and materials on that tunnel six ways to Sunday before dawn, while he had forged his letter of credit on Chambers' bank, and thought of ever-more desperate ways to spin his capital out until the payments came in. All next day, while he fought and won his case with the railway company to become their main contractor on the tunnel, she had helped break open a rabbit warren, standing over the holes and hurling great rocks down upon the luckless would-be escapers. When he saw her that evening she had two dozen of them slung over her shoulder.
That was the image he treasured above all: Nora, turned to gold in the evening sun, dusty, barefoot, stained with blood, smiling, and breathless. But the image was coloured too, as it had been then, by the memory of Nora with her pen, making the figures come alive, and Nora in her nakedness in the moonlight, and the parting of her thighs as she smiled that invitation. They could never be separate again, those images. You could not say "lust" and "huntress" and "adept" and say you had described her. But what word was there? There was only…only…
Nora.
No other word came near it.
Nora.
He whispered it and did not hear himself above the furious rattle of the coach and the huffing of the engine. He said it aloud. He shouted it at the darkness. He had the idea that if he could hold the image of her constantly in his mind, it would somehow keep her alive. He pictured himself as a free spirit, soaring and wheeling over the park at Maran Hill, always turned toward the house. He imagined that, though he was so free, his very movement above the house turned the intervening air into a heavy weight upon its roof and walls, imprisoning everything within it. Not imprisoning. Securing.
When he could sustain that image no longer, he reached his hands into the blackness before him and sought to form her in the nearby air. If she were there, he would grip her so, though it made her cry out; he would hold her so, pull her to him so, fold her so, kiss her so, hug her so, say Nora Nora Nora Nora in the hollow of her ear, hear the soft richness of her laughter hot in his, Nora, put flesh to flesh…
treasure
her. Nora! Golden, bloodstained, smiling girl, do not die, do not leave me.