The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Oh, faint heart!" John scoffed. "He only wants them to come more slowly so he can have time to kill off some and amalgamate with others. He was like Horatio on the bridge—until he saw the enemy was quietly building another bridge beside him."

  Nora, who had hoped that sometime on this journey the opportunity might have arisen for a serious talk about Stevenson's and the future, realized from the briskness of John's tone that he was in no mood for such an examination. She hid her annoyance and packed the arguments away for another day. She stretched and yawned. "How marvellous," she said. "For two months railways and capital and iron will all take second place."

  He put his lips to her ear and whispered, "Thou flamin' bloody liar." He laughed at her shock. "A day I might believe. But two whole months! And anyway, who was it arranged for five leading railway journals to be sent to Trouville—each issue?"

  She put out her tongue at him and returned to her book, where Richelieu was just about to denounce the queen, using the diamonds Milady had got from the Duke of Buckingham.

  "It's a good thing we found each other," John said. "There's no other man I know would fathom thee—and no woman whom I'd not long since have driven to strong drink."

  It was several seconds before Nora realized that this was, in effect, an admission that he had known her intentions and had deliberately sidestepped them. She knew he had intended the remark to be placatory but its effect was to anger her. Why should she be ever ready to discuss their affairs, to have a whole line of suggestions for improvement kept at the point of utterance, waiting his nod or the lift of his eyebrow—while he could go as long as he liked, telling her nothing? She did not reply, nor did she look up again until the engine was decoupled at Camden Town. Her annoyance with John was too familiar to possess her for long; by then it had quite evaporated.

  Since the previous July, outgoing trains had come up the gradient under their own steam instead of being hauled up by cable; but trains going into Euston Square still coasted down under the control of a brakeman.

  "This is the part I like," Nora said. "The smooth part."

  They arrived at the terminus ten minutes later, at twenty past five. The porter from the Adelaide, the station hotel, recognized them and came forward to take their bags.

  "Don't forget the time, Mr. Stevenson, sir," he said.

  John put his watch forward five minutes, from York time to London time.

  "It's not changed much then," Nora said, looking around. "D'you realize it's five years almost to the week since we first stood here wondering if we were walking into a fortune or straight to jail?"

  He looked at her a while, oddly indecisive. "Not us," he said. "Two green hands, wet behind the ears. If we had known how thin the ice was…!" He looked heavenward.

  It's no thicker now, did you but realize, she thought.

  "Anyway," he said, taking her arm and strolling with her to the head of the platform, "it won't stay this way long. They're at it again with another grandiosity. This time with Hardwick's son."

  "Oh?" Nora asked; it had the sound of money.

  "First that pompous Doric arch, now a Great Hall, a furlong by ten poles." He shook his head at the folly of it.

  "Why?" she asked, puzzled. "It's become an important terminus. That bedraggled collection of offices…"

  "It's about to become an impossible terminus. Look. There's the arch there." He pointed to it, towering between the two hotels. "And there's Wriothesley Bridge." He pointed in the opposite direction. "A total of seven hundred and sixty-odd feet. Or forty-six poles. And into that they have to fit everything— offices, waiting rooms, wagon sheds, platforms. And right in the middle of that, they're going to dump this Great Hall. Seven acres of it. I really think a station was never so bungled as this. The Hardwicks and the London and Birmingham cannot put their heads together without engendering a monster."

  "What's the midwife's fee?" Nora asked.

  "It's to stand here," John said, pointing out its dimensions. "You see? Not even central with that Doric monstrosity but skewed off to the west."

  "But what's it worth?"

  He chuckled. "Don't you care?"

  "Of course I care. And then I wonder what's in it for us. I'd say we should build thieves' kitchens and houses of assignation if the price was right." How typical of John—to go on about plans and architecture before he even mentioned profit.

  They walked out, through the great Doric portico (which Nora still thought very grand and imposing, despite John's sneers), and turned left toward their hotel.

  "I'm guessing a hundred and forty thousand," John said. "But this is one that Prendergast can help with, bishop or no, if he wants to stay on terms with us."

  Just before they went inside, a pungent draught of foul air engulfed them, making them hold their noses and run through the doorway; the odour of old cheese and bad eggs still hung faintly within.

  "What's happened?" Nora asked the porter.

  "They think as an ole sewer is busted. But can they find it? They looked 'igh and low. We 'ad a great invasion o' rats yesterday, so it's most likely a sewer." He had a round face and small black eyes that almost vanished when he laughed.

  He assured them that the smell never came round their side of the building. All they need worry about was the last trains of the evening, which made a lot of smoke getting up steam for the steep climb to Camden Town. Still laughing he took his twopence gratuity and left.

  "Are you going to the office?" Nora asked.

  "I fancy I'll go at once, let Jackson get off home. He'll wait for me, knowing I'm come to town."

  Nora was delighted. "Then I can finish this book before you come back," she said.

  "I've told you how it ends. It's the best description of cannibalism in the whole of French literature."

  "Yes," Nora said seriously. "They are barbaric. D'you know, four of them, four fine French gentlemen, played police, judge, jury, and executioner to this poor woman, Milady, and cut her head off by the river. An English gentleman would never do that. Yet these four go on about honour for pages."

  "Honour!" John laughed. "Honour and offer—have you heard that one?"

  "No?" She was interested.

  He kissed her and turned to leave. "No," he said. "On second thoughts, it would only inflame you. Don't go to sleep before I get back." He was in the doorway now.

  "Oh?" she said, with a different interest.

  "Yes. There may be some estimates to look at." He bared his teeth and left.

  She rang for the maid to come and unpack. "Honour and offer!" she said, and smiling fondly, picked up her book and settled to read it to the end.

  Chapter 11

  When they had held the train five minutes at the London Bridge terminus and there was still no sign of John, Nora really did begin to worry. The guard had already stopped saying, "Never fret, Mrs. Stevenson, we'll hold it for him." He, too, kept looking at the time. Nine thirty-five. It crept on toward nine forty. Nora was just about to order their things to be unloaded when a clerk came trotting down the platform with a piece of paper, which he handed to the guard. The guard ruffed out his sidewhiskers as he read. He turned to Nora, all smiles again. "A message upon the electric telegraph, Mrs. Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson is now upon the way here."

  "Telegraph?" Nora said. "How can that be? Where is it from?"

  The guard held the paper to one side and looked at it aslant, making Nora wonder how he'd got the job with such eyesight. "From our Bricklayers Arms station, ma'am. He must have gone there in error. Hundreds do."

  Only moments later John came hurrying through the crowd; he sprinted down the platform to ironic cheers from the third-class coaches on the Greenwich line and cries of "Don't shoot up the straight!" and "Yer shop door's open!"

  "Bricklayers Arms!" Nora scoffed when he sprawled, breathless and sweating, opposite her. The train began to move at once.

  "Damn!" he panted. "I wagered I'd get here before the telegraph. The last time I came to London Bridge…
" He stopped to catch his breath again. "Last time they said all the Croydon trains and all the South Eastern trains now go from Bricklayers Arms. I wish they'd just stop fighting."

  "At least they held the train. I do like travelling with you," she said.

  "Oh, if you think this is regal, wait until we get to France. We really are kings there." He peered through the window, down the line. "There they are," he said. "The third-class carriages for this train. The third-class, nota bene, does go from Bricklayers Arms and it joins up with us here in Deptford—and all because the Greenwich railway charges the Croydon and the South Eastern fourpencehalfpenny a passenger between here and London Bridge. And the parliamentary rate for the third-class won't stand it. Madness."

  The train halted and there was a brief interval of banging and shuttling while the third-class coaches were coupled up. The baby did not like it and began shunting and shuttling on its own account. "We should have stopped at the Tabard," she said, hoping the sound of her voice would work its usual balm within. "Then you could have just walked to the station and found out. I don't like the Adelaide. I don't like water closets. Give me a good earth closet any day of the week."

  "I don't think we'll ever stop at the Tabard again," John said. "I forgot to tell you. Tom Cornelius has sold. Sometime last month. Gone to buy a tavern down in the West Country, they say."

  "Oh? I wonder if Sarah Nevill has gone with him! She was sweet on Cornelius, I'm sure."

  "Sarah Nevill?" he asked, puzzled.

  "Go on!" she chided. "I've seen your eyes on her."

  "Me?" he protested. "I'm the butcher's dog, you know that."

  "Well, she was the tall, well-spoken upstairs maid. With the room above the Pilgrims' Hall."

  "Oh, yes. Quite plain. I didn't see her there last time."

  "Perhaps she pined away." Nora lost interest. "Anyway, how was your sewer?"

  John had risen at five-thirty that morning to go and see the new work on the Fleet Street sewer, which was then being enlarged, section by section, the entire length of the street. "Ah!" he said with relish. "It's our sort of thing. No doubt of it. It's like a twelve-foot-wide cutting with sheer sides, almost forty foot deep. And the sewer is like a tunnel of brick about ten foot high, with a section like an egg, narrow at the foot. Or at what would be the invert if it was a tunnel."

  He needed the whole compartment to gesticulate his description. "That means you get a good flow even with low volumes of water, ye see?" She nodded, caught up in his enthusiasm. "That's at the foot of the cutting, of course. And overhead there's a forest, a horizontal forest, of struts and walings and poling boards. And there's water pipes and drains and gas pipes and your-guess-is-asgood-as-mine pipes, all supported on struts and chains and ropes and props. It's our work. It's skilled work."

  "And is it paying work?"

  "I could make it pay. And I've met the man to keep in with."

  "Today?"

  He nodded. "Thirty-six foot under Fleet Street, at six of the morning. An enthusiast, ye see. Who else would be in such a place at such an hour? Funny name too. Bazalgette. Joseph Bazalgette."

  "A contractor?" she asked.

  John screwed up his face. "Not sure. Difficult to say. He's an engineer in his way of thinking though. He's like Brunel. This Fleet Street thing is just a single sewer. But Mr. B. has a notion of putting, listen: hundreds of miles of sewers under London!"

  Nora sat up straight and listened with rapt attention.

  "You say you don't like water closets," he went on. "Well, I tell you: Use them whenever and wherever you can. They'll be the making of us." She laughed. "I'm serious," he told her. "They fill the cesspits faster than the night men can empty them. That's why they had this burst sewer at Euston Square. The night men don't go out to the farms anymore. They just tip it all down the sewers. All over London people are emptying water closets into sewers, despite the laws against it. And"—his voice dropped—"night soil plus water equals cholera."

  Nora's mouth and eyes opened wide. "That's terrible, John." She could just remember the cholera in Manchester and Leeds in her childhood. The drained, limp bodies and faces of its victims had haunted many of her bad dreams.

  John nodded. "As Bazalgette said. Don't pray for cholera. But since it must come, pray for it in Westminster and at Guildhall. Then perhaps we'll get a drainage system fit for modern times. Never drink water in Chelsea, by the way. Their intake is right next to the sewer outfall. Aee! I've learned that much," he said. "I must get to Hamburg sometime this summer. They have a new system washed through with river water twice a week."

  "Hundreds of miles!" Nora gloated.

  "Aye." He grinned. "And I'm guessing three to three and a half thousand quid a mile. For a ten or fifteen per cent net profit. Fault that!"

  "It'll do," she said.

  "And think," he added, "to walk around a city without middens. And no bubbling lakes of cess. And no stink. And no pigs running loose on the scavenge. We'd be remembered as the firm that made London fit to inhabit."

  They got off the train at Folkestone at two, so the South Eastern had lost even more time than John had cost them. The paddle steamer, having missed the tide, now lay at anchor and fast to a buoy beyond the basin. The seas were running high.

  "How do you feel?" John asked when they were in the horse coach that plied between station and jetty; the rail line to the harbour carried only goods traffic as yet. "It's not going to be an easy passage."

  "Oh" Nora said lightly, "let's be done with it. We could wait a month for a calm sea." Nevertheless, she peered nervously down; the steamer looked so very small among those huge waves.

  "Sure?" John pressed.

  "How long will it be?"

  "Oh, quite quick with this wind behind us. Two and a half hours at most."

  "Let's go then," she said, her resolve completely recovered.

  She regretted it as soon as the rowing boat cleared the harbour mouth. It rose, struggling like a beetle, across huge shivering swells of translucent green water. At the peak, where the oarsmen caught crabs and the salt spray stung like spikes, they could see glimpses of the oh-so-distant steamer's deck. Then down the side they skittered to the trough, where all the world was a wall of water and where three feet of hard-won headway seemed swallowed in a dozen yards of enforced leeway. Yet as each towering peak bore them up, the steamer inched miraculously closer, and within twenty minutes, they were in the relative calm of its lee, rising and falling only slightly faster than its great bulk. At each peak, two or three passengers managed to gain the ladder and shin up it to the deck, helped all the way by the sailors. Nora and John were among the last to get off. And theirs was the last rowing boat to have left the jetty.

  "Oh, thank God for something firm underfoot," she said when they were up on the heaving deck at last.

  There was a sudden commotion up forward, where a sailor, waiting to weigh anchor, had his shirt set on fire by a spark from the funnel. He leaped into the sea like a human torch and then, without pause, climbed on deck by the anchor rope and resumed his place at the capstan as if it had all been a part of his daily routine. Some passengers cheered and he took a bow, grinning.

  They weighed anchor and, because of the seas, lashed it inboard before they cast off from the buoy. This brought the ship's bow round so that both paddles turned in unison as she began to make way. The drive was direct, without intermediate gearing, and the two big cylinders seemed to sigh alternately as they filled and emptied. Their maximum turning force was between one-third and two-thirds of the stroke, making the crankshaft sprint and labour by turns, in time with the sighing. On calm days this gave the steamer a lurching motion not unlike a slow train. Today, however, the storm completely masked such irregularities and imposed far severer ones of its own.

  Once they were clear of the soaring white cliffs, the swell came at them from the stern and it ran at a slight diagonal to the ship. As a result, the two paddle wheels never drew the same amount of water at the same ti
me. And since the deeper draught gave the better purchase, the vessel would always slew toward the shallow quarter, making the bow seek from side to side as it yawed. This motion was superimposed on the random buffeting she took from the waves and the squalls of wind that soughed in her shortened sails and shrieked through her rigging. Smoke and steam and sparks ran before them in a dirty, tangled plume.

  Nora watched the white cliffs vanish into the storm and spray. I'm going to France, she kept thinking. Goodbye, England! She had determined beforehand that this would be an exciting moment; but the weather made it difficult for the reality to match her expectations. Her imagination had passed this way with John too many times since he had first gone over to build the line from Boulogne to Amiens. "I think I'll change my mind and go below," she said. He took her arm and steadied her as they walked.