A Bridge in Time

by A Bridge in Time (retail) (epub)

  The policeman asked, ‘What sort of man was this? Did you recognise him?’

  The footman shook his head. ‘I’d never seen him before. It was dark, but I could tell he was tall, and dressed in a long cloak… that’s all I saw.’

  For three days the ruins smoked and during that time Colonel Anstruther lay in bed at Falconwood House, but on the fourth day he rose to receive an official party from Rosewell.

  ‘I’m afraid your house is completely gutted, sir,’ said the Chief Magistrate sadly.

  The old warrior fixed him with dead eyes. ‘I’m insured. What about my family? Have you found the bodies?’

  ‘No, sir, we haven’t but we’ve made a list of the missing persons. Perhaps you’d like to look at it.’

  The Colonel ran his eye down the list: Major Augustus Anstruther, age 30; Mrs Bethya Anstruther, age 24; Mademoiselle Francine Perrot, age unknown but thought to be about 25; Thomas Telfer, bootboy, age 12; Robert Macintosh, kitchen boy, age 15.

  ‘She wasn’t twenty-four, she was only twenty-three,’ he said bleakly, handing the paper back, and everyone knew to whom he was referring. Then he gave a little sob and asked, ‘You’re absolutely sure she’s dead?’

  The policeman stepped forward with something in his hand. ‘We found this on a body, sir.’ It was a mangled piece of jewellery, twisted out of shape by the fire.

  The Colonel took it and turned it over, then his head dropped. ‘Yes, it’s hers. It’s the brooch I gave her for Christmas two years ago — garnets and diamonds. She thought it was very pretty…’

  That night the old man was taken ill. In the morning when his servant went to wake him, he found the Colonel lying in bed, his eyes mutely appealing for help. His speech was affected and he could not move his left arm or leg. ‘Oh God sir, not that too!’ cried the anguished servant, before ringing the bell for assistance. He stayed by the bed, cradling his employer in his arms like a baby, until Dr Stewart arrived.

  Next day, a sombre-looking Sir Geoffrey Miller arrived at Falconwood to express his sympathy. Mrs Anstruther was too upset to receive callers, for the terrible succession of tragedies had left her numb and inconsolable. The Raeburn women, who were kindly souls, were at their wits’ end about how to help her.

  The sick Colonel was in bed but Raeburn took Miller upstairs where they stood together gazing at the old man while Sir Geoffrey spoke some carefully chosen words. ‘This is a terrible tragedy, my friend. I’ve come to express my deepest sympathy and that of my fellow directors to you and your wife. It is almost unbelievable that your son and his lovely wife both lost their lives in the fire. We’ll do everything we can to help you.’

  The Colonel did not speak but his eyes were bleak. ‘I’m going down to the bridge now,’ said Sir Geoffrey, speaking loudly and slowly as if to someone who was half-witted. ‘It’s in trouble too, I’m afraid. As well as the bridgehead being washed away, Jopp now tells me that they’ve found a crack in one of the piers in the field. That makes it almost certain that the girl won’t finish in time. We’ll save some money, anyway.’

  The Colonel wearily closed his eyes. It was obvious that he had no desire to be told about any other troubles or any plots and plans.

  Miller felt relieved when he left the grief-filled house to ride with Raeburn to the bridge. ‘It’s a pity that pier’s cracked because it’s beginning to look very fine,’ said Raeburn guilelessly as he stared at it.

  ‘It’s not fine if it’s in danger of falling down. God knows when we can run a service over this line. It’s eating up money now. I should never have allowed that girl to keep the contract. I should have bought her out of it – it would have been cheaper in the end,’ was Miller’s angry reply.

  Emma Jane and Tim Maquire were standing in the field beside the third pillar from the south end and a young lad on crutches was with them when Miller and Raeburn rode up. Without dismounting, Miller abruptly asked, ‘Which is the cracked pier?’

  ‘This one. There’s a long crack on the inner side,’ said Emma Jane, laying her hand on the stone. ‘We’re working out what we should do.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what you’ll do – you should make it safe as soon as you can before the whole damned thing falls down. I’ll sue you for breach of contract if it’s not finished by August the first,’ bawled Miller.

  She flared up at him. ‘Don’t talk to me like that! The bridgehead fell down because your man Jopp didn’t do his job properly. That is what’s holding us up, not the crack.’

  He was not prepared to listen, however. ‘The crux of the matter is that it’s cracked. What will go wrong next, that’s what I’d like to know? I doubt if we’ll have a bridge in a year’s time, far less two months. The line’s finished and this damned bridge is holding it back from opening. It’ll cost you dear. You can’t get out of your undertaking now. You’ll be paying for it for the rest of your life.’

  His rudeness made Tim Maquire’s Irish temper rise. ‘You listen to me,’ he said, walking up and grabbing Miller’s stirrup. ‘You listen to me. I’ll prove you wrong, see if I don’t. We’ll do it – we’ll damned well do it even if we have to work night and day for two months. Your bridge’ll be ready on the day it was promised.’

  Wrenching his foot out of the navvy’s grasp, Miller rode off, followed by Raeburn. Emma Jane watched them go and then turned on Tim to ask, ‘Why did you say that? He’s probably right. There’s no way we can finish this in time. I’m ruined and I might as well accept it now!’

  Robbie looked at her with pity but Tim’s eyes flashed fire. ‘Don’t talk like that. Here’s what we do first. We’ll make this pier safe and then we’ll finish the bridgehead. After that it’ll be plain sailing.’

  If she had not been so miserable, she would have burst out laughing. To call what they were faced with ‘plain sailing’ seemed to be plain folly, more like.

  Maquire, however, seemed to be infected with some sort of madness. He ran around the field, shouting, waving his arms, gathering men about him. ‘We’ll buttress it: we’ll make it safe. Get started! Build a shell round it, ten feet thick on every side.’ Then he ran back to Robbie and demanded, ‘Are there any unemployed masons left in Camptounfoot?’

  ‘One or two, and there’s a few old men who’ll come out and help.’

  ‘We’ll hire them. We’ll hire every mason for miles around. It doesn’t matter what we pay, we’ve got to finish this.’ Hair flying, he dashed off up the hill in the direction of the village where he stopped at the alehouse and issued his appeal for workers before going on to William’s smiddy. He burst into the forge, calling out to the labouring blacksmith, ‘Stop what you’re doing! I want you to forge big metal bars to bolt round the broken pier. We’re going to buttress it and then tie it in with iron. That’ll stop it shifting: it won’t move for a thousand years.’

  William, hammer in hand, gazed in astonishment at the madman in his doorway who was saying urgently, ‘I mean it. I want iron bars twelve inches thick and as long as you can make ’em. We’ll bolt them together. It’ll work.’

  His urgency and enthusiasm were so infectious that the smith set about forging forty iron bars immediately, while in the field, navvies were digging out the foundations for the new buttress and masons were busy chipping huge lumps of stone into rough blocks. For three days Maquire did not sleep. He went to the quarry and arranged for more stone; he harangued the navvies and kept them working; he supervised the rising buttress and shouted at any man he thought was working too slowly. People feared for his sanity as he dashed from place to place in a state of absolute frenzy.

  Emma Jane watched his wild behaviour with disquiet. When he was finally found fast asleep in her hut on the fourth morning, she tiptoed around him and let him lie undisturbed because she had been afraid that he would drop dead with exhaustion if he didn’t halt. For her own part she was working harder than she had ever done before, harder and longer than she ever thought possible. From dawn till dark she was on site, supervising, hiring, paying
out money, arranging for supplies of stone, sand and concrete and all the time making sure that the building of the brick arches overhead still went on.

  She rarely spoke to Tim for he was too busy doing what he considered necessary and relied on her to do the same. Robbie rode down to the site every day on one of the tradesmen’s carts and spent hours there, smoothing out structural problems or making useful suggestions. His grasp of building practice was astonishing in one so young and Emma Jane congratulated herself on giving him her father’s books.

  On the afternoon of the eighth day of their marathon effort, Maquire’s head appeared round the hut door and he said shortly, ‘We’ve buttressed the cracked pier. Come and see it.’

  The men had been working behind wooden palisades but now these were down and Emma Jane was able to see what had been done. A thick stone skin had been built round the bottom of the narrow, elegant pier and bolted round with bars of black metal. Her jaw dropped. ‘But it’s spoiled the line. It’s thicker than the others. It’s spoiled the design,’ she gulped.

  Tim was walking behind her and he clenched both fists and jumped in the air. ‘Is that all you can say? To hell with the design! It’s up and it’s holding! It’ll never fall down. You’re a stupid woman, that’s what you are – a stupid woman!’

  She turned to apologise for she knew she had been wrong. Sacrifice of symmetry was nothing if the pier was going to hold and would not need rebuilding, but Black Ace had charged off across the field towards the river where men were dragging up blocks of stone from the fallen bridgehead. She knew better than to run after him. He was obviously not in the mood for polite conversation.

  All through June the sun beamed down. Camptounfoot was full of bustle because almost every able-bodied man was working on the bridge. Emma Jane left home at sunrise and did not come staggering back until late, too tired for one of the fireside conversations with Tibbie, too tired for anything but forcing down a meal and dragging herself up to bed.

  Tim still kept a room at the Abbey Hotel though he seldom slept in it, preferring to doss down in Emma Jane’s hut because he could not bear to leave the site. Sometimes he went into Rosewell early to hire a gig for expeditions to order more stone or bricks or recruit extra workers. On those mornings he would stop in the pearly dawn at Tibbie’s door and rap loudly to waken up Emma Jane. Still half-asleep, she would get dressed, run downstairs and climb in beside him. He’d collect Robbie too and the three of them would clatter quickly down to the bridge where they separated and went about their individual tasks. They didn’t talk except about what was to be done that day.

  At sunset Dr Robertson still waited in the roadway for Emma Jane, but she often did not come and stayed working in her hut. Then he turned and rode sadly back to Maddiston without seeing her.

  Colonel Anstruther did not die, as so many people had expected. Slowly, very slowly, he improved in health. His speech returned and he was able to move a little. His faithful manservant never left his side, nursed him as if he were a child and when the sun shone, pushed him in a wickerwork Bath chair out on to the lawn of Falconwood House where he sat in the sun with his eyes closed thinking and grieving without weeping. His subdued wife sat beside him holding his hand and talking constantly, but fortunately she had enough feeling and tact not to mention Gus or Bethya. Mostly she talked about India and the people and places they had known there, for she felt it was safest to concentrate on the past.

  On the last day of June, Tim was working with a gang of men on refilling the embankment behind the new stone pier, when the post-runner from Rosewell came in search of him.

  ‘I’ve a letter for you, Mr Maquire,’ he said. ‘I took it to the Hotel but they said I’d find you here. It’s got Urgent written on the front of it.’

  A large square envelope was handed over. Tim looked at it with curiosity. ‘It’s from France,’ he said. ‘Who’d be writing to me from France?’

  ‘You’ll no’ ken that unless you open it,’ said the postman laconically.

  The letter was written on a square of thick linen paper with an embossed coronet at the top of the page. The sender wrote in a large confident hand and had used black ink.

  ‘Dear Black Ace, I suppose by this time everyone will know that when I left Camptounfoot I did not go alone. I’d been infatuated with the lady in question for a long time though I’d done nothing about it. I actually travelled quite a distance before I decided to turn back and speak to her about how I felt. To my surprise and astonishment she felt the same way about me and we decided to go off together.

  ‘Of course she left a husband behind, but she wrote a letter for her father-in-law, of whom she’s very fond, and put it on his desk for him to find in the morning. She gave him a contact address in London but so far there has been no reply and we are becoming rather concerned because we want to marry. Before we can, of course, there will have to be a divorce. She is worried in case she left a great deal of trouble behind, but neither of us cares about who divorces whom. Her husband can divorce her if he likes – we’ve given him plenty of cause and hope to continue to do so. Could you be a good fellow and ask around to find out what’s happening at Bella Vista? I apologise for involving you, but I can’t ask my old friend Allandale because he’s in Italy and won’t be home till autumn. I want to marry Bethya because my vagabond days are over now. We’d like to be respectable for a change and we can’t be that until we marry. At the moment we’re in Paris but will be back in London by the time you receive this letter, so address your reply to me at 114 Pall Mall, which is my townhouse. And I have to sound uppish but you should address it to Lord Godolphin. I succeeded to the title on the death of my father. Your old friend, Gentleman Sydney.’

  Tim threw back his head and laughed and laughed. Then, when his first fit of amusement was over, he sobered, for he remembered the fire at Bella Vista and the grief of the old Colonel. ‘Poor old devil, he doesn’t know the girl’s still alive. Someone ought to tell him,’ he thought. Sticking the letter in his pocket, he scrambled down the embankment and crossed the low-running river by the ford. Emma Jane was in her hut making minute calculations on scraps of paper, trying to work out if the money she still had available for wages would last until the end of the job. She was surprised when he stepped in out of the sunlight and abruptly asked, ‘Do you remember Gentleman Sydney?’

  She looked up with a furrow between her brows. ‘Yes, of course I do. He was very kind to me, especially when Bullhead was shot. I was sorry when he went away. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, you’re in for a shock. He’s a lord and he didn’t go away alone. He took Colonel Anstruther’s daughter-in-law with him, so she didn’t burn to death in the fire after all.’

  Emma Jane clasped her hands. ‘Oh, I’m so glad! I used to see her on the road with the Colonel and she was so beautiful. I thought it tragic that she’d died. The Colonel will be delighted – people say he’s broken-hearted about her death. He didn’t like his son much, but he was very fond of her.’ Then she looked puzzled. ‘But how do you know all this?’

  Tim brandished the letter. ‘Sydney’s written to me. He obviously doesn’t know about the fire and I’ll have to write to him about that, but right now I’m going up to Falconwood to tell the Colonel.’

  ‘Let me know what happens. I think it’s wonderful,’ she said with a brilliant smile, the first she’d bestowed on him for weeks.

  It was difficult for Tim to speak to the Colonel but he insisted and stood his ground. ‘I’ve information about the fire,’ he said stoutly. ‘I’ve further details about his daughter-in-law, and I won’t tell anyone but the Colonel.’ In the end he was admitted to the terrace in front of Falconwood House and led across to where the Colonel lay under a thick rug in spite of the warmth of the day.

  ‘Don’t expect him to talk much,’ warned the manservant. ‘Just say what you’ve got to say. He’ll hear you.’

  Tim said his piece. He told about Sydney’s letter and the startling news it contained.
He brought it out of his pocket and held it in front of the Colonel’s face so the old man could see what he said was true.

  ‘She’s eloped with Gentleman Sydney, who’s really Lord Godolphin. They were in Paris last week but now they’re back in London. She doesn’t know about the fire, or her husband dying, or her maid either,’ Tim finished up.

  The Colonel’s eyes stared at him blankly for a few moments and then it seemed as if a light had been lit behind them. A low chuckle rumbled in the old man’s chest and he croaked the first words he’d uttered for a long time. ‘Damned good, damned good!’

  His servant rushed towards him, terrified in case the astonishing news would be more than his constitution could endure, but he need not have bothered. The Colonel was rejuvenated. By gestures he told the servant to offer Tim money, but this was refused so then he offered him a drink instead, which was accepted. Holding the glass high, Tim toasted the old man before he swallowed the neat whisky it contained. ‘I’m glad you’re pleased, sir. I’ll leave the letter with you and you can decide what you want to do. Good day. I’ll have to go now because I’m very busy.’

  On his way home the whisky swirled in his brain and made him feel happy and optimistic. ‘When I finish the bridge, I’ll do something wonderful. I don’t know what, but I’ll change my life somehow, the way Sydney changed his,’ he resolved.

  He was still beaming when he stopped at the hut and shoved his head in to inform Emma Jane: ‘I told the Colonel. He’s pleased as Punch.’

  She glanced up with a yearning expression on her face and said dreamily, ‘It’s so romantic. It’s like a miracle, isn’t it?’

  Tim nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking that, too. I’ve decided that when the bridge is finished, I’m going to do something wild – take off for somewhere I’ve never thought of before.’ Then he sobered, surprised at having unburdened himself so much to this girl. ‘But the bridge has to be finished first, doesn’t it? Back to work, back to work,’ he said before he disappeared.