“Police it?” Elizabeth asked, alarmed.
Alexander Kinross looked out of his daughter’s eyes. “Yes, Mum, her care will have to be policed. People can be so deceptive, especially the assortment of people who care for the helpless. They are natural victims for petty cruelties and needless inhumanities. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just do. So I’ll police the place—drop in unexpectedly, look for injuries, see how clean she’s kept, all that sort of thing.”
“It will tie you down,” said Alexander with a growl.
“Dad, it’s high time I contributed something to Anna. Mum has had to do it all so far.”
“I’ve had good help,” said Elizabeth, in a mood to be just. “Imagine what it would have been like if I couldn’t have afforded help. There’s a family in Kinross with the same problem.”
“But unlikely to have a Dolly from it. Their girl is very stigmatized—harelip, cleft palate, stunted growth,” said Nell.
“How do you know that?” asked Alexander, astonished.
“I used to see her when I lived here, Dad. She interested me. But she won’t live nearly as long as Anna might.”
“And that’s a mercy,” said Alexander.
“It won’t be to her mother,” Elizabeth said abruptly. “Or to her brothers and sisters. They love her.”
A WEEK LATER Anna broke Dolly’s arm and attacked Peony when she tried to rescue the frantic child. Suddenly no one had the time for remorse as the fighting, kicking Anna was subdued and her child permanently removed from her. Until an alternative in Sydney could be found, Anna was relegated to a guest suite owning a tiny entrance foyer that could be locked before unlocking the rooms themselves. Worst of all, the windows had to be fitted with bars, as the suite was on the ground floor.
Alexander and Nell hurried off to Sydney to look at houses, an ideal opportunity for Nell to put her proposals to him during the journey. Though the train was approaching Lithgow before she summoned up the courage to begin.
“I think,” she started, “that eventually we’ll have to build a house, Dad. No one puts a courtyard at the center of a house, and we have Donny Wilkins to design it for us. That keeps it in the family, don’t you agree?”
“Go on,” said Alexander, eyeing his daughter with a mixture of amusement and skepticism.
“There are big tracts of land going down to the harbor in Drummoyne and Rozelle that I hear are going to be sold thanks to hard times. A lot of the men who could afford mansions in huge grounds are declaring bankruptcy now that the banks are crashing right, left and center. Is Apocalypse in trouble, Dad?”
“No, Nell, nor will be.”
She heaved a sigh of relief. “Then that’s all right. Am I correct in thinking that harborside land is a good investment?”
“Yes, you are.”
“So if you bought one or two bankrupt estates, you wouldn’t lose on them?”
“No, I wouldn’t. But why concentrate on the backwaters of the harbor when there are equally grand mansions going for a song in Vaucluse and Point Piper?”
“They’re posh suburbs, Dad, and posh people are—funny.”
“I assume that you don’t consider us posh?”
“Posh people don’t sequester themselves in isolated places like Kinross, they like to be where they can entertain royalty and governors. Put on the dog,” Nell said, using a new phrase.
“So what are we, if we’re not posh and don’t put on the dog?”
“Filthy rich,” she said gravely. “Just filthy rich.”
“Dear, dear. Therefore I should buy my vast tracts of land containing mansions in pedestrian suburbs like Rozelle?”
“Exactly!” She beamed.
“Well, it’s actually quite a good idea,” Alexander said, “save for one thing. You’d find it difficult to get from the Glebe to Rozelle to police Anna.”
“I wasn’t thinking of putting her somewhere like Rozelle yet,” Nell temporized. “Later, when the mansion could become the nucleus of a hospital. Not an asylum, a hospital. Somewhere that good work could be done to find a cure for the mentally afflicted.”
He was frowning, but not direfully. “Just where are you going, Nell? Finding an avenue of philanthropy for my filthy riches?”
“No, not really. It’s more that—um—well…”
“Get it off your chest, girl.”
She gulped and took the plunge. “I don’t want to continue in Engineering, Dad. I want to do Medicine instead.”
“Medicine. When did you decide that?”
“I really don’t know, and that’s the truth,” she said slowly. “It’s always been there, you see, right back when I used to cut open my dolls and make organs for them. But I never thought I’d be able to—Medicine was the only faculty that banned women. Now they’ve started to admit women into Medicine, and women are flocking to do it!”
He couldn’t help it, he began to laugh. “And how many lady medical students constitute a flock?” he asked, wiping his eyes.
“Four or five,” she said, laughing back.
“How many men students are there?”
“Almost a hundred.”
“Still, you’ve had a worse trot in engineering and survived.”
“I’m used to being a woman in a man’s world.” A wriggle, a jump. “Quite honestly, I’m more afraid of how I’ll manage to get on with the women medical students than the men.”
The train was coming into Lithgow, its speed slackening; for perhaps five minutes they sat facing each other and said not a word, Nell in anguish, Alexander in thought.
“We’ve never spoken,” he said finally, “about you and your expectations, have we?”
“No, we haven’t, but I suppose I assumed that I was to do engineering so I could join the firm, maybe help to run it.”
“That’s true, but not what I meant. I mean your inheritance. Which is seventy percent of Apocalypse Enterprises.”
“Dad!”
“It’s a difficulty that I’ve never sired a son,” Alexander said, forcing himself to keep looking at her, “but in you I sired a daughter with a prodigious brain. A brain capable of any kind of technical or mathematical reasoning. And as you grew, I began to believe that, your gender notwithstanding, you would prove as good an administrator as any father could hope for in a son. To have you graduate in mining engineering is a way to prepare you for your inheritance. What I hope is that you’ll preserve your good sense and marry a man who will complement your own genius, who will be a partner for you in every way.”
She got to her feet and went to a window, opened it and put her head and shoulders out to watch the activity as the Kinross train was shunted to its siding and their car uncoupled. “The Bathurst train is late,” she said then.
“It’s easier to talk without the racket.” Alexander got out a cheroot and lit it. “I’ll make a bargain with you, Nell.”
“What sort of bargain?” she asked warily.
“Finish Engineering and I won’t oppose your doing Medicine. Then you’ll have at least one degree. There may be more women in Medicine than there are in Engineering, but I won’t have the same influence with your professors that I do with factory owners.” His eyes twinkled through the smoke. “I suppose I can dangle the bait of a new building or two, but I suspect I’m going to have to save some of my filthy riches for that mental hospital.”
Nell extended her hand. “Done!” she said.
They shook solemnly.
“The Professor of Physiology is a Scot, Dad. Thomas Anderson Stuart. The Professor of Anatomy is another Scot, James Wilson. Most of the teaching staff is Scottish—Professor Anderson Stuart keeps bringing them out from Edinburgh, which irritates the Senate and the Chancellor mightily. But Anderson Stuart won’t be denied—does that sound familiar, Dad? When he arrived in 1883, the medical school was in a four-room cottage. Now it has a huge building all to itself.”
“And who’s the Professor of Medicine?”
“There isn’t one,” said Nell.
“Shall we walk on the platform a little, Dad? I need to stretch my legs.”
The air was hot, but that didn’t stop Nell from clutching her father’s arm and snuggling against him as they strolled up and down. “I love you, Dad. You’re the best,” she said.
And that, concluded Alexander, is really all one can ask of one’s children. To be loved and deemed the best. Her news had come as a bitter disappointment, but he was too fair a man to want to force her where her heart didn’t want to go. Well did he remember those dissected dolls! The thumbed pages of his precious Dürer. A growing collection of medical books that she had ordered from his London bookseller. All there staring him in the face for years. And she was a woman, she would go where her heart wanted to go. Strange creatures, women, he reflected. Nell wasn’t a bit like Elizabeth, and yet her composition was half Elizabeth. Sooner or later that half would show itself.
From Nell his mind veered to Lee.
I have always sensed that Lee was my natural heir, right from the beginning of knowing him. Now I have to find him and get him back. Even if that means I bend my stiff neck and apologize.
ALEXANDER AND NELL had a busy two weeks in Sydney. They found a forty-year-old house on Glebe Point Road not far from Nell’s abode and decided it would do. Built of plastered sandstone blocks, it was roomy enough to accommodate Anna and six attendants in comfort, plus a cook, a laundress and two cleaners. Because it sat in half an acre of ground, Alexander had an exercise yard constructed just outside Anna’s own quarters, only a door between.
Finding suitable attendants was more difficult. Alexander and Nell interviewed them together, Nell going so far as to sniff at each applicant’s breath. The scent of cloves was as significant as the reek of liquor, Nell told the fascinated Alexander.
“The chaps chew cloves if they’ve been on a bender the night before lectures,” she explained.
Alexander was in favor of a beaming, patently motherly woman as the chief attendant, whereas Nell held out for an austere soul with whiskers on her chin and spectacles perched on her nose.
“She’s a battleship in full sail!” Alexander protested. “A dragon, Nell!”
“True, Dad, but we need someone like that in charge. Let the nice ones fuss and cluck over Anna to their hearts’ content, so long as the starchy one has the power. Miss Harbottle is a good person, she’ll not abuse her authority, but she will insist on running a tight battleship. Or a decent dragon’s den.”
AND IN APRIL, when everything was ready, a heavily sedated Anna was conveyed from Kinross to her new home in the Glebe. Only Elizabeth, Ruby and Mrs. Surtees wept. Anna’s Dolly was too busy exploring a whole new world, Alexander had gone abroad yet again, and Nell was back at university doing engineering.
Part Three
1897–1900
One
The Prodigal Returns
A YEAR IN Burma had yielded Lee rubies and star sapphires, as well as the useful fact that here too petroleum leaked to the surface. As yet it was used only for the manufacture of kerosene after an arduous journey from the highlands in earthen jars. A year in Tibet yielded no diamonds, but spiritual riches of greater import than a Koh-i-Noor. And a year among Proctorian friends in India had commenced with a search for diamonds, then branched into something of more benefit to the maharajah’s people. The production of iron from immensely rich ore deposits was hampered by a smelting technique that hadn’t changed in literal millennia, depending as it did on charcoal, in short supply thanks to felled forests. Funding new methods through the sale of manganese, Lee shipped coal from Bengal and put the principate on a strong industrial footing. When some members of the British Raj protested at his gall, he answered that he was simply the maharajah’s servant, that the maharajah still ruled (albeit with British consent), and what were they complaining about? The Empress of India would get her share, he was sure.
After that he skipped rather hastily to Persia to see his best friends from Proctor’s days, Ali and Husain, two sons of Shah Nasru’d-Din, who seemed likely to rule from the Peacock Throne for fifty years, a jubilee he would celebrate in 1896.
Curiosity drove Lee into the Elburz mountains to see for himself the petroleum soak-wells and tar pits that Alexander had described. They were still there, still undeveloped.
Sitting his Arab horse with one booted leg across its withers, he nibbled at a nail and let his eyes roam almost sightlessly over the rugged terrain. “Elburz,” he had discovered, was a misnomer dumped upon all the mountain ranges of western Persia by European geographers; the actual Elburz lay around Tehran, towering peaks under perpetual snow. What he looked at were just—mountains. No name at all.
A pipeline to the Persian Gulf…One well per five acres…A way for Persia to extricate itself from hideous debt, and a way for him to make his own fortune. Petroleum was finding more and more uses—lubricating oils, kerosene, paraffin, better tar than coal tar, vaseline, aniline dyes and other chemicals—and as fuel for a new engine that vaporized it inside the working parts with a degree of efficiency that steam couldn’t rival. Hadn’t the maharajah told him how artificial indigo was ruining India’s trade in the natural dye?
Making up his mind, Lee returned to Tehran and sought an audience with the Shah.
“Iran possesses great wealth in petroleum,” he said, using the proper name, his Farsi improved enough to dispense with an interpreter, “but no local knowledge to exploit that wealth. Whereas I have the knowledge as well as the funds to exploit it. I would very much like to be granted permission to do this, in return for an agreement giving me fifty percent of the profits plus whatever moneys I outlay in equipment and apparatus.”
He labored on in a language that had no technical words, Ali and Husain helping where they could.
Another man sat listening: Nasru’d-Din’s probable heir, Muzaffar-ud-Din. He was serving as the governor of Azerbaijan, a Persian province bordering the Caucasus that was at constant loggerheads with the Turks and the Russians. Because of the rapid development of Baku as a source of petroleum for Russia, Muzaffar-ud-Din was very interested. He was also anxious that Iran shouldn’t be shouldered aside in any race to control ground on—or in—which a valuable resource might be located. To the Shah’s family, Lee represented a relatively benign party, in that he had no territorial ambitions nor other axes to grind than Mammon. Mammon they understood, Mammon they could cope with. The old Shah had sunk into an executive torpor, hamstrung by the system of privileges and entitlements that all too often saw the wrong men gain the power. But Muzaffar-ud-Din was just past forty years of age, and as yet had not developed the grave illness that would later dog him. It was not the Turks who most worried him, but the Russians, always intriguing to gain access to the oceans of the world without running the gauntlet of someone else’s sea and formidable navies. Iran was highly desirable.
So, after months of dickering, Lee Costevan emerged with the right to exploit petroleum in western Persia over an area of 250,000 square miles. Peacock Oil had to be gotten up and running, which was a matter of hiring disgruntled wildcatters in America, buying drill rigs that pumped pressurized water through hollow casing to the latest toothed rotating bits, and setting up steam engines to provide power.
His difficulties were many, none actually technical. He had to get used to being accompanied by a battalion of soldiers because the mountains were full of untamed tribes that did not subscribe to Tehran’s rule; the daunting heights turned road-making, even of the most elementary kind, into a nightmare; of railroads there were virtually none; and, worst of all, the whole country was desperately short of burnable fuel, coal or wood.
Therefore, Lee decided, I start with what’s feasible under the existing circumstances. So he confined his first wells to Laristan, where a railroad connected the city of Lar to the Gulf, and where, around Lar, there was coal. His wildcatters, he soon learned, had noses for oil as well as great experience; Lee listened and accumulated practical knowledge to back up his degree in geology from Edin
burgh. A pipeline was clearly, as he said to himself in a wry pun, a pipe dream, but the oil could travel by rail tankers, and the British policed the Gulf, which they regarded as theirs. Port facilities were primitive, seagoing tankers scarce. Undaunted, sure that petroleum was coming into its own more and more with every passing year, Lee battled on to see Peacock Oil viable. Luckily the Shah and his government were so impoverished that a return of £10,000 was a fortune.
In 1896 old Nasru’d-Din Shah was assassinated scant days before his fiftieth jubilee; the assassin, a humble Kerman, said he was acting under orders from Sheikh Kemalu’d-Din, who had thanked his kinsman the Shah for great kindness by preaching sedition and then seeking refuge in Constantinople. Extradited to face charges (the assassin was hanged), Kemalu’d-Din died en route, and Iran settled down quite peacefully under the rule of Muzaffar-ud-Din. The new Shah commenced his reign in a promising way by regulating the copper coinage and abolishing the ancient tax on meat, but beneath the surface the usual plotting went on.
For Lee it was an anxious time; a little oil was getting through and he was showing a profit, but not the millions that he knew would come.
UNAWARE THAT the new Shah was sickening, in 1897 Lee decided to visit England. He had been away from Kinross for nearly seven years and had deliberately dropped out of sight; letters to Ruby were given to a traveler passing through to post in some European city, and never revealed his whereabouts. So Alexander, searching for him, had not managed to locate him. The reason was simple: it didn’t occur to Alexander that Lee might go into the petroleum business, especially somewhere like Persia. Once Lee hurried out of India, he became the invisible man.
Only two items from Kinross accompanied him: photographs of Elizabeth and Ruby. His mother had sent them to him in India together with one of Nell, but somehow looking at a feminine version of Alexander didn’t please Lee, so that one he dropped in a pile of burning leaves. Taken early in 1893, just three years after his departure, they still came as a shock. Ruby’s, because she had aged so much, and Elizabeth’s, because she hadn’t aged at all. Like a fly in amber, he thought when he first saw it; not life finished, but life suspended. Though the ache was old, something that he didn’t feel unless inadvertently he put a hand on it. So the photograph was carried on his person but not looked at very often.
The Touch Page 44
