The Rich Are with You Always (74 page)

  The last hour of the lifting took an age, it seemed. John, consumed with worried curiosity over Paxton and Cole, could hardly wait for it to be done. He had to force himself to slow down and check all that had to be checked, with an automaton's thoroughness.

  But at last, when the champagne was all consumed and the men all well feasted on the roast sheep that had been prepared against this celebration, John climbed aboard the special for London, taking care to be near Robert Stephenson.

  "The fifth, including Conway," Stephenson said. "Didn't it go like clockwork? I wish my father had lived to see it."

  They talked about their feat and congratulated each other for many miles before John casually brought up the subject of Cole and Paxton. "Have you co-opted him onto your committee?" he asked.

  Stephenson grinned. "Probably shouldn't be telling you," he said. "Paxton's a friend of Cole's, who brought him to us the other day with some mad, monstrous idea of making the Exhibition building entirely of iron and glass—like a giant hothouse. Paxton's gone in with Fox and Henderson to change their tender."

  "What do you and Brunel think?" John asked.

  "We wouldn't normally look at it—but I must admit it's the only sort of building that would allow us to keep the trees. That would pull the rug out from under the opposition."

  "Interesting." John pretended to stifle a yawn. "You know the roof of my ironworks is entirely of wrought iron and glass."

  "Really?" Stephenson was suddenly interested. "Your own idea?"

  "Based on the roof at Euston. I thought if they took the tiles off and put panes of glass in their place…it grew from that."

  "Strange. I'd never consider glass a
building
material."

  "It's not structural. The wrought iron is the structure."

  "That's exactly what Paxton said. He's building a house like it at Chatsworth. Talked a lot of stuff over my head about the 'architecture' of some giant water weed being its inspiration."

The following morning, John was standing in a coppice at Chatsworth looking through a telescope at the new iron-and-glass hothouse then being built. That evening, in a tour of the local pubs, he spotted an ironfounder who had once worked for him—and he fortunately not only recognized the man but remembered his name. An hour later he had all the details he needed.

  For the next ten days or so, he kept his ear to the ground and heard that Paxton had finished his design and had turned it over to Fox & Henderson to be costed. On the sixth of July, a preliminary sketch of Paxton's design appeared in the Illustrated London News, together with a list of all the advantages it offered: ease and speed of erection, cheapness, use of standard, interchangeable parts, strength, beauty…right up to the preservation of the trees. It was exactly what John had been waiting for.

  That evening at home, he was in higher spirits than he had been for years. He romped on the lawns with the children until they were almost bilious with the jogging and the laughter. And indoors he tried to waltz with Mademoiselle Nanette in time to a tune Nora was fighting at the piano—accelerating, halting, jerking in a manic ballet to point up her struggles.

  "What have you been and gone and done?" Nora asked, wide-eyed, abandoning her battle with Chopin.

  "I've put one over foxy Fox and Henderson."

  "Oh, yes?" she said guardedly. "It sounds expensive."

  "It is." He laughed. "It is—but it will make a second fortune for us.

  She smiled. "Tell me from the beginning," she said. "You've been up to something for days."

  So he told her everything, from the first exchanges on the bridge at Menai to what he had done that day. "I went to the committee's rooms in Westminster and put in a bid for eighty thousand on the building as shown in the illustrated London News. The 'Glass House' as they call it."

  "Is it really so cheap as that?"

  "Wait. Listen. I made it a condition that we acquire the materials after the Exhibition closes. One great advantage of this all-iron building is that you can put it up and take it down and put it up again. And that's what we'll do!"

  "Where?"

  He laughed. "If I told you, you'd go and buy the land ahead of me."

  "Don't be silly. I'm about to have a baby. I won't be going anywhere for six weeks."

  "I saw just the place to re-erect the Glass House—when we were building the Great Northern. You know the stretch just by Wood Green—quite near the Female Refuge, where we drop Sarah off sometimes? You remember the big hill beside the line? There! On top of that hill. A great, permanent pleasure palace for London—the Colosseum and Wyld's and the Panorama and Cremorne and Vauxhall Gardens and Batty's Hippodrome and Epsom race course all in one: The Wood Green Palace of Glass. What about that?"

  "Eay, John!" she said. "I think it's the most exciting idea I've ever heard!"

  What else could she say in the face of all that enthusiasm?

  "What makes it certain we'll get the contract is my condition about keeping the material after dismantling. No one else will think of that. So no one will get near eighty thousand!"

  She hid her dismay as best she could, though John's enthusiasm made her want to weep. What on earth could have possessed him? And how could he possibly see himself as a sort of cross between a theatrical impresario, a circus ringmaster, and the proprietor of a pleasure garden? What picture had he come to form of himself that such an enthusiasm could carry him off?

In the sixteenth of that July, Nora had a small but healthy baby boy, whom they called Mather. On the same day the committee, by word of mouth, conveyed to Fox & Henderson acceptance of their bid of £79,800, which had been made on condition of their receiving the materials when the building—the "Crystal Palace" as
Punch
had scornfully called it—was dismantled. The news did not come out at once, and it was not officially confirmed until ten days later. On the thirtieth, Fox & Henderson obtained possession of the site and began their work. They had 274 days until the opening ceremony, and their task was to enclose thirty-three million cubic feet of space in a building of a type that had never before been attempted.

  Privately, Nora was overjoyed that they had failed. Like John, she was certain that someone on the committee had passed the word to Fox & Henderson. For their bid to come at just two hundred pounds under John's was too narrow a coincidence to afford any different explanation.

  Nonetheless, she thought Fox must be insane. There was no royal charter permitting the building, and its proclamation was unlikely to come until 1851. Before that, the committee could issue no contract. So the firm was undertaking at least fifty thousand pounds' worth of expenditure with nothing more than a word and a handshake to go on. She was glad it was their contract, not Stevenson's.

  John was at first too shocked and then too deeply hurt to allow it to show in any superficial display of anger. But, as he agreed much later, it knocked the heart out of him. His interest in the business seemed completely lost. He appointed Flynn his general manager and left him the whole running of the firm. He took to walking and reading a great deal. He played with the children, told them stories of his adventures in the contracting business, made toy sailing boats, and once he made a hot-air balloon from tissue paper which soared into the branches of a dead tree, crashed, and set it ablaze. The children loved those weeks and he seemed always happy too. He sat with Nora a good deal, telling her of the farmers he met on his walks and of their views about the coming harvest.

  "We might retire to Ireland," he said. "We could take a hand in the estate there with the Quakers. Very good hunting with the Galway."

  Sometimes he went to London to walk about the site of the Crystal Palace, seeming to feel no rancour at what had happened. "They wanted to move a line of young trees last week and couldn't get permission. So they moved them nonetheless and put the carpenters' benches against the former line so that the shavings would cover their traces!" he said once when he came home. He was as wrapped up in the building as if the contract had been his.

  Nora could not bear this change in him. Indecision had turned him soft. His aimless days had made him into a shambling, mild-natured child who, at the lift of an eyebrow or any other faint encouragement, would regurgitate the callow nostrums of the yokels whose gates (and whose chewing straws, for all she knew) he shared, as if each rustic word were a distillation of all human wisdom. He was becoming—she could hardly bear to think it—a bore.

  Her unease redoubled when he revived, though briefly, his interest in the circus-pleasure garden idea. He came back from London in great excitement. "I've spoken to some of our people and we think we can build an exact replica of the Crystal Palace out at Muswell Hill Park for only a hundred and ten thousand! I think we'll begin ours the day they start to dismantle theirs. Pity there's a Phoenix Park in Dublin. We could call it the Crystal Palace Phoenix otherwise. But it'll still make a fortune."

  Nora decided she had to do something, and soon. She had to get him back wholeheartedly into the work of the firm.

  One day, Flynn came out to Maran Hill. When he was shown briefly in to see her and the baby, she sent John down to the library on some errand and took her chance.

  "Flynn," she said, "what work is coming up that two years ago you'd have said only Lord John could manage?"

  "Why, ma'am?"

  "Don't question. There's no time. I'm worried about him. I want to get him back into—into being himself again, and I need your help."

  "There's the Bristol sewerage contract the week after next. Someone must go there and spread the oil of angels around to make sure we get it. I was intending to go."

  "I want you to be too ill. Or something. Make it the last minute so there's no time to find another deputy. Make it so he has to go—so it has to be him."

  Flynn was singing a lullaby in Irish to baby Mather by the time John came back.

  Later that week, Sarah came to tell her that Arabella had opened a branch of the Female Rescue Society in Bristol and was planning a Female Refuge there too. She, Sarah, would soon go to Bristol to assist her.

  "She came to our London house last year and is certain she can manage it. Especially if she may rely on my help," Sarah explained.

  "How terrible for poor Walter Thornton," Nora said.

  Sarah's blushing confusion at the words astounded her. But she went on smoothly: "Surely you know of his—er—predilection? It will be a case of he breaks 'em, she mends 'em!"

  At that, Sarah's confusion grew even worse. So Nora changed the subject and spoke instead of their gratitude to Sarah and how they would all—and especially the children, and most especially Winifred—miss her. Mr. Morier Watson, their new tutor, might have a string of M.A.s and Cantabs after his name but he was no substitute for her.

  After Sarah had gone, Nora, remembering her deep embarrassment, fell to wondering if John had not, after all, been speaking the simple truth about Sarah and Walter. The more she thought back over the incidents of the past few years, the more likely did it become—and the more awful she felt at the infidelities she had so unjustly held to John's discredit.

  She had grown so used to thinking of Sarah as John's occasional mistress, so used to thinking that theirs was an unacknowledged
ménage a trois,
that it took her all the fortnight between then and Sarah's departure for Bristol (accompanied, ironically, by John and Young John) to rehabilitate them both in her mind and to understand that he was hers and hers alone—and always had been so.

"Thornton! I don't want to worry you but…"

"Stevenson! Ye gods, but how splendid!"

  "Spare all that. Leave all your equipment—do as I say now, you and the lad— leave it all and come up here as fast as you may if you value your lives."

  Thornton knew better than to argue. He and the apprentice fairly ran up the slope to where John was standing. "What is it?" he asked.

  John pointed sombrely at a crack in the brickwork of the bridge Walter had just been testing. Walter turned pale. "Ye gods!" he whispered. "Right above us."

  "Were you testing for deflection?"

  "Yes. I can't understand it. We were getting quite normal quantities. What was your side, Whiting?"

  "A quarter-inch, sir, a bare quarter."

  "And I got three-sixteenths—yet there's a great crack like that in it."

  "What weight's on top?" John asked.

  "Enough to make me shiver." They looked at the two trains, all laden with iron rail, stretching right across the bridge. "It must be a thousand tons. Whiting, take the bosun's chair back aloft and tell them to get those trains off as quick as possible!"