Winifred, remembering the frightening dark clamour of the rapacious hordes of birds, was charmed by this new idea.
"Willet shall make a little table and we can hang it from the old sundial arm over the nursery window, and you may put a small measure of oats there every day," John said, straightening again, with a cracking of joints. "Eee!" he added. "Hades' flames are crackling today!"
"We could still put water down for them," Nora said. "That costs nothing."
"Oh, aye," he agreed. "Put down water by all means." They began to stroll back indoors.
"I put down that," she said, pointing to the pans and trays.
He laughed and chucked her under the chin. "I'd never have guessed it," he said, "from your manner of speaking."
She pouted. "Have you eaten?" she asked.
"I could put myself around a slice of cold pie. Hudson is coming at about six and will stop for dinner before going on to Bessingby Hall."
"But that's twenty, nearly twenty-five miles. You go up and look at the children's scrapbook and Winifred's stitching, and I'll see about a bite for you. Hudson'd do better to stop the night."
"Oh, he probably will," John said, lifting a child under each arm to go upstairs; he spoke over their struggling laughter. "But you know him—never promises anyone more than an hour."
"I'll get a fire lit in the rose room and pans in the sheets."
"That wasn't like you, John," she said later, after he had romped with the children and eaten and come back downstairs to go through correspondence and accounts.
"I thought there'd be a crop of problems with the freeze-up," he said. "But it seems to have solved more than it's posed. I don't understand it." He put the pile of letters down.
"John?"
"What's not like me?" he asked, knowing the answer.
"All they did was feed the birds. You made a regular sermon out there. I'd say that's not like you."
"Aye," he laughed, embarrassed. "I thought I was going it to start with. Then…I don't know." He sighed. "Winifred is so—she feels everything so. Takes it all so much to heart. She'll have a lot of money one day. It's bad enough running the gauntlet of all that 'sell what thou hast and give it to the poor' and rich men and camels in the eye of a needle or whatever it is. I can see her taking it all seriously and giving every penny away."
"John! She's but four." Nora laughed.
He would not be cajoled into seeing the comic side of it. "She was just the same at two. Always giving things away. We've got to make her understand that that sort of generosity isn't—well, it isn't a kindness in the end. Not to her. Not to the objects of her generosity—certainly not to them. It frustrates God's will, in my view. You'll never make a man better by doing for him what he could and should do for himself."
"I think the birds frightened her. She thought it would be like scattering crumbs after a picnic. But it was more like free-beer day at elections. I know I was frightened."
"Well, maybe that's God's way of saying the same thing to her. And to you."
"Aye," she said, slipping facetiously back into dialect. "'Appen. Be-like. Mayhap." She disliked the implied rebuke and grew tired of the subject.
He grinned and looked sharply at her through narrowed eyes. "If I ask you for a kiss," he said, "one kiss, and if you grant it, will you promise not to try any of your mucky tricks?"
She breathed out sharply, pretending astonishment, as if he had hit her in the stomach. "You may sing for it," she said and then made him chase her twice around the room before he got his kiss. "Just one," she said, and she kept her hands folded behind her back.
"There must be a happy mean," he said as they settled again.
"You be happy, and I'll be mean," she said.
He gave a hollow laugh and pretended to fall asleep. She sighed and leaned back into the sofa. There were always these trivial failures of mood and understanding when he came back from a journey; like dog and bitch, circling each other warily, wanting a depth of companionship that could not be instantly had—a depth that had to be plumbed anew each time.
"Lucky Thornton," she said. "Came out on top, as ever." In his letter from Exeter, he had told her of one of Walter's adulteries.
"Came in on top, if I know him," John said.
It was her turn not to laugh, and she wondered why; if he had said it tomorrow, or at any time except in this hour of returning, she'd have laughed.
"Candidly I'd forgotten him," John said. "There's one thing hammering in here." He tapped his skull. "Iron. Ironworks. I tell thee, love, there's no need to goad me on now. I'm red hot to start. The things I've seen!"
She sat up, delighted. "In France?"
"Aye. And here, in Manchester. I came back through Manchester."
"Ooh. Tell us!"
"Have ye heard of Schneider-Creusot, the French ironworks?"
"Of course," she said. "They did a lot of rail for the Paris–Versailles. And others."
"Well, they sold a big forging hammer to Rodet. And Schneider himself came up with it. I had a long talk with him. Broken French and mangled English but we got through; now there's a man. At the end of 1839, as near as he can remember it, he happened to be at Nasmyth's works in Patricroft, and Nasmyth was away. One of his assistants skimmed through the pages of Nasmyth's scheme book, thinking it was his book of appointments. Well, while he's doing that, Schneider's eye happens to fall on a sketch. 'What's that?' he asks. 'Oh,' says the assistant, 'that's something Mr. Nasmyth sketched for Humphreys before he died—a steam-powered hammer. For the old paddle shafts of the Great Britain. They're not going to build it though; now they're going over to a propellor instead of paddles. No one else has got any use for a hammer that big.' Ha haaa! When Nasmyth called on Schneider at Creusot next year—'What's that?' he says. 'Why, it's your steam-powered hammer, Mr. Nasmyth!' says Schneider."
Nora was shocked. "And he didn't pay for it?"
"Of course not. Nasmyth hadn't bothered to take out a patent. Why should he pay? Schneider was quite open. Eay—but you never saw such an engine. That's why I came back through Manchester, to see the works at Patricroft."
"What's Nasmyth like?" Nora asked.
John thought a while. "You remember that dancing bear at Kipling Cotes Derby?"
Nora nodded.
"Something about him put me in mind of that bear. Same puzzled eyes, head on one side, tight little mouth. Must be near forty now. He's built a steam hammer there where he can lift it and lower it with steam under ever such fine control. This'll show you—he put an egg under it and brought the hammer down with such force you'd think not a smattering'd survive. And then in the last instant he halted it so that the hard shell was cracked but the soft shell was left intact!" His eyes shone as he spoke. "What do you say to that?"
"It's hard to imagine such power."
"I said at once, 'That's just what we need for driving piles.' Think—it can deliver a blow a second." He began to pound the back of the sofa with his fist in time with the tall clock between the windows. "Ten tons falling like that every second. It solves the problem of wet ground. We could bridge the Wash with a dozen of those. Anyway, he's promised to get out sketches for a transportable engine for pile-driving."
Nora laughed and put her hands to her cheeks. "Think!" she said. "Your Mr. Nasmyth makes a sketch of an engine to forge a paddle wheel and, without knowing it, he quadruples the value of every bit of marshland at present impeding the progress of every city in the kingdom!"
"I also told him when our foundry was built I'd take a pair. Schneider says he's made more wrought iron at less cost with that hammer than with five helve hammers. It's the ability to control them, you see. Schneider said a good operator can crack a nutshell without harming the kernel. I thought it was just Frenchman's talk until I saw Nasmyth."
"So," Nora said, leaning back and grinning at him, "having procrastinated for eight months, we now want our foundry built yesterday."
He smiled and sighed his agreement.
"Le
t's hope Mr. Hudson has brought some good news of your friend and mine, Sir George Beador."
When Hudson's coach came crunching over fresh snow into the courtyard, nearer to seven than the promised six, Nora was certain he'd stay the night. He came in by the garden door, being closer to the stables, and stamped the snow off his boots. "Sticky," he said in disgust. "It keeps heaping and crunching under the tyres. Very discomforting."
"You'll surely stay the night, Mr. Hudson," Nora urged.
"Yes, do, Hudson," John said. "You could get halfway to Flamborough and spend the night in a drift."
Hudson patted a bulge at his breast pocket. "Important papers," he said.
"Ah well, do what suits your business best," John agreed.
"Perhaps I will stop," Hudson said quickly. "If it's no great inconvenience." He looked at Nora, who merely smiled as John said, "Madame Clairvoyante there has had a room heated three hours or more."
Hudson rubbed his hands briskly. "Fate then," he said. "I'll give it no argument. Profound thanks, rather."
John had put a poker in the fire to heat while they were seeing Hudson in. As soon as they returned to the winter parlour, he withdrew it and plunged it, spitting and fuming, into a punchbowl. "Here's a navvy's drink for you, Hudson," he said. "Rum and rough cider—civilized by Mesdames Stevenson and Jarrett with raisins and cinnebar."
"Cinnamon!" Nora corrected.
"Whichever it is," Hudson said, "it's the most welcoming aroma ever to greet me."
Its fragrance filled the room like an incense.
He took his glass, waited for Nora, and then supped noisily through his teeth; breathing out fiery satisfaction, he leaned back and shut his eyes, a careful picture of happy exhaustion.
"Hard times, Hudson?" John asked.
"Capital times," Hudson said.
"It's the obtuseness of his codirectors vexes him," Nora said.
He chuckled scornfully, still with his eyes shut—a good orator's trick, that, Nora thought. "Directors! One of them said the other day to me—to me! At a board meeting too. To me!—'We'd like some account, Mr. Hudson, of the decisions being taken in our name.'" Eyes still shut, he chuckled. Then, quite suddenly he sat up and looked straight at Nora with his blue-grey eyes wide open, as if surprised at himself. "'Do you, sir?' says I. 'Do you indeed? Then you shall not have it!'" He burst into loud, infectious laughter, compelling them to join him.
"I'll wager you wish you could silence Denison as easily," John said.
Hudson waved him away as if he were a beggar. "Denison will sink without trace, and his great London and York railway with him. I didn't make all my amalgamations to have Mr. Edmund Denison come and take the prize from me. There's only one way to York, and that's over my metals."
"There's a lot of interests against you," Nora said. "The Lincolnshire people have a big voice."
"They shall have a big line too. My own Nottingham, Newark, and Lincoln. Next year. The man I blame is Locke. I believe Locke to have been a disaster to railway progress. This nonsense at Shap now. Four miles up a gradient of one in seventy-five. Think of the unnecessary coals that will consume this next fifty years. He says hang the running costs; I say hang the capital cost. I know who the shareholders will bless, fifty years from now."
John and Nora fought the temptation to look at each other and smile.
"He's good for such as us," John said. "Brunel likes a confusion of big and small contractors. But Locke is happy to hand over a hundred miles and more to me or Brassey or Peto."
Hudson supped his drink with relish, cupping the tankard in his hands. "You like him then. And the coal miners must like him. There's an epitaph—and the sooner, the better." He laughed, and then, changing mood, said, "By the by, there is a basket of eggs outside your kitchen door. I almost fell over them on my way round to the garden."
John and Nora both looked heavenward. "Mrs. Jordan," Nora said wearily. "The cook. Will not bring eggs indoors after sunset. She will also not sweep dirt from the house because the luck goes with it." Nora began to tally Mrs. Jordan's oddities on her fingers. "She will not cut a child's nails till its first birthday, for fear of making it a thief. She will not count her own teeth, for what reason she will not say. She will not put a lantern on a table…what was it she said about that?"
John prompted: "'A lantern on the table, a death in the stable.' Once when I set a lantern down on her table she came in very triumphant next day—at breakfast, no less—with a dead rat she'd just found in the stable!"
"It had been dead already for weeks," Nora said. "But that didn't worry her. And what was it about hair? When she gets the girl to cut her hair she throws the bits on the fire. And if they flare up, she's going to live a long time. But if they oh, what was the word? A lovely word."
"Crozzil?" Hudson suggested. "If it crozzils up, she'll soon be dead."
"Yes!" Nora said. "That was it."
"That's an old saying hereabouts. What does she say about cutting a loaf at both ends?"
"Yes!" Nora laughed. "The devil will fly over the house. And if you put the loaf on its side, the breadwinner will fall ill. Really! If anyone wanted a book of superstitions, they'd only need to follow her around for a week and they'd have a library."
"She wouldn't come to us on Friday," John said. "Remember? We engaged her on a Thursday and she wouldn't come until Saturday. They do it to provoke us, you know. I'm sure of it."
"And she gets the others at it," Nora said. "Even Cox, who is the most sensible of them."
"Yes, I thought that the other day, when I met her out in that cold wind with Caspar, whose nose was streaming. She said she thought the chill air might just 'draw the cold from the wee mite.'"
"Aye! That's Mrs. Jordan's doing, all right. And Cox went in and out of the house by different doors, I'll be bound," Nora said. "That's another of hers."
Hudson, who had nodded as to an old friend at each superstition, now wagged his finger. "Power, you see." He turned to John. "You say they do it to provoke us. And you're right. It gives them power of a kind—for we tolerate as superstition what we would otherwise certainly call an outright insubordination. Have you ever known a man who would start to sink a shaft on the thirteenth of any month? Even for triple pay?"
John shook his head. "I had a man once who brought his dinner wrapped in a clout made from one of his wife's old shifts. Took it underground. You never heard such a fuss. I had to dismiss the man, and it almost took bell, book, and candle to get the others back below."
"I'm sure it's to do with power," Hudson said firmly. "And I don't think we are so very superior. We smile at Mrs. Jordan and her cross of 'wiggin'…"
"What's that?" Nora asked. "That's a new one to me."
Hudson chuckled. "Somewhere about her, you may be sure, in the hem of a skirt or somewhere, she'll have a rough wooden cross made of wiggin twigs— wiggin is mountain ash, rowan—tied together, to bring fortune and keep off witches and werewolves. We smile at it, yet"—he fished in an inside pocket and drew forth a sheet of paper—"what's that? A piece of paper. A share certificate. What, pray, does that signify?"
John volunteered the obvious feed: "It's supposed to be a share in an enterprise or an adventure. But?"
"Quite so. A piece of paper, to bring fortune and keep the wolf, if not the werewolf, from the door." He looked at the share. "Saint Kilda Railway Company," he read and burst into laughter. "Someone sent me that today, happy and hopeful. Saint Kilda! Forty miles beyond the Hebrides, fifty inhabitants, sixty furlongs end to end!"
"Do I hear any advance on sixty?" John asked.
"Any advance on sixty and the next stop's New York," Hudson answered. "Yet"—he waved the paper—"people are buying. These will sell."
"They will if George Hudson's put his name on the scrip list," Nora said. "It's a name we see subscribed to many lists."
John looked sharply at her, thinking her tone a bit smart; but she kept her eyes steadily on Hudson. And Hudson looked unblinkingly at her. "That is se
lf-protection," he said, trying to win her with a smile. "If I don't, someone else will. And that means some other railway will." He sighed, drained his tankard, and stretched his boots toward the fire. "For five very lean years—not lean for you or me, I know, but lean on the Exchange—people have been straining at the leash for loose capital to invest in railways. And now that money is beginning to float again, there are bound to be"—he crumpled the share certificate and threw it on the hearth—"nonsensicals. Bits of paper like that are going to scour the purses of a lot of fools, including, I regret to say, your Sir George Beador."
At once the tension became almost palpable; John and Nora scarcely breathed, watching Hudson intently. "The question is: Who is to get the scourings? Some overnight moneybags who will put it all into land? That's no good to progressive people like yourselves and me. Or will it go to Mr. Edmund Denison, Mr. Glyn, Mr. Labouchere, Mr. McGregor? That's no good to progressive people like my shareholders—and me. Now tell me what I am to do, since this lunatic floating capital must be fixed somewhere?"
The Rich Are with You Always Page 8
