World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Never!" She laughed again, and then, new light breaking on her, added: "Not Lady Henshaw of Henshaw Park?"

  "I believe it is. Yes—that was the name."

  Arabella began to laugh again. "He would!" she said. "I can just see the pair of them!"

  "See what?"

  But Arabella shook her head and began to lead her horse again along the road. "I won't spoil it for you by even attempting a description. But I'll say that if you thought the lawyer a comedy, wait until you see the Lady. And you can't miss seeing her, for she's just around the corner from you at Rough Stones."

  Nora, content with the promise, returned to their earlier talk. "What were you about to say when he came by, Mrs. Thornton?"

  "Oh yes," Arabella said, and this time there was no diffidence; the intimacy of their shared laughter now made it easy. "Do you not feel that, as we are neither of us yet twenty and are soon to become much closer neighbours, all this Mrs. Thornton-Mrs. Stevenson is a trifle stiff? I would be so happy if you would call me Arabella."

  Nora was suddenly too shy to speak. She could merely nod and smile and hope this would be taken for consent.

  "Come," Arabella said, slipping her arm through Nora's and giving it a warm squeeze, "and may I not call you Nora?"

  "Oh yes!" Nora spoke at last. "It will be so champion to have a friend… Arabella. I think you are my only friend up here. Apart from John."

  Arabella's laugh carried overtones of bewilderment. "But Mr. Stevenson is your husband," she said. "That is different."

  Nora agreed that it was and they walked on a little way in happy silence, still arm in arm. Yes, it was different. The friendship of another woman was different. Nora hadn't realized how true her words were until she had heard herself speak them.

  "But…" Arabella added in a while, her voice delicately poised between thought and speech, "it is quite one thing for us, as we are still so young. But as Mr. Thornton and Mr. Stevenson are already quite the graybeards"—she giggled and Nora joined her—"it would be Most Improper for them to share in such intimacies. That is agreed I hope."

  "I think," Nora said timidly, "that I should still sometimes like to call him 'John.'"

  She spoke so solemnly that Arabella had to stare at her for some time, and with growing embarrassment, before she realized that Nora was not being serious. "You tease!" she laughed and shook Nora's arm, which Nora let go limp so that no other part of her was moved. "You tease! I see I shall have to keep my eyes and ears sharp with you!"

  Until this moment, Nora had not realized how far she had grown into womanhood since her father's death. It had been all that time since she had enjoyed a laugh with another girl her age or talked of inconsequential things—things of absolutely no consequence, things you forgot the minute you'd spoken them because they were not really information, or opinion, or even gossip, they were…like singing.

  She looked down at her dress, so plain it might have been chosen to express the sole idea of poverty—and poverty not just of pocket but of spirit, too. And there was Arabella's, so dashing and elegant—it was another of the things she had been missing without properly realizing it. Well, she was going to Manchester tomorrow—she could choose the materials and get a good day dress and a good evening dress made up in time for Christmas. And she could surprise them all on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day.

  At that moment, the first drops of rain began to fall. They had by now reached the courtyard gate of The Acorn, where Nora had intended to make her excuses and leave Arabella to the weather. Instead, she suggested that Arabella come inside and shelter while the shower passed.

  In that way, Arabella came to learn of the help Nora was giving to the Metcalfes. But she also saw the other side to Nora's character when Nora lay down what were virtually orders governing Mrs. Metcalfe's next few days. Tomorrow, Sunday, after chapel, she could try the mills toward Rochdale for work. If that were fruitless, she could spend Monday looking in the other direction, toward Todmorden. Once they had work, Tommy was to come down to her at the Royal Oak each morning at six. Mrs. Metcalfe could spend today and tomorrow teaching him one or two simple meals to make so that if Nora had to send him home mid-afternoon he'd have employment to keep him from mischief.

  Mrs. Metcalfe was tongue-tied with her gratitude, which seemed to annoy Nora. The two youngsters were greatly in awe of the beautiful lady in her fine clothes, for they stood and gaped at her from the moment she came in until the moment she and Nora left.

  "Do you think it fitting," Arabella asked when they were back by the gate, "to send her seeking work on the Sabbath?"

  Nora appeared not greatly interested. "I'm sure the Lord would think less of her for sitting at home using up another's charity when she might be busying herself abroad. All the mills hereabouts do some work on Sundays—as we do at Summit."

  The broken roadway glistened brightly in the rain. A woman in the house immediately opposite took the chance of a let up in the weather to hang a pair of very soiled sheets out to air. Arabella, shirking an honest rebuke to Nora's laxity, now felt acutely embarrassed at this display a few yards from them.

  "I must return," she said, "or I'll outrun the hire on this hack." Nora arranged that anytime between now and Christmas when she was at Rough Stones she'd hang a pillowslip in an upper window—"a clean one," she said pointedly, having noticed Arabella's reaction to the sheet. They embraced and parted.

  Arabella, as she rode away, wondered how she could ever have considered Nora to be at heart a servant girl. While Nora, remembering Arabella's fine colour and smoothness of skin wondered whether she, too, was pregnant.

  Part Four

  Chapter 31

  In the days following the trial, John, seeking to trade on his new fame as "Better-combination" Stevenson, had put in a tender to build a small factory on the Duke of Bridgewater's canal. Despite Payter's good offices, the company had refused to take his bid seriously, thinking him far too big to give proper supervision to a contract worth a mere £950. The job went to a navvy gang acting as its own contractor.

  "And where will they be when the wharf begins to leak?" he asked. But he had to swallow his disappointment and nurse the wound to his pride—and turn, exclusively again, to Summit.

  The drama of Metcalfe's strike meeting, of the strike itself as well as Stevenson's counterstrike in Summit East, all of it topped off by the trial, had drained down every vestige of ill will at the site, and the work began to go forward with a better spirit than ever. The rapid succession of the breakthroughs also helped, as blind caves, where the air grew quickly foul, became one open tunnel between a succession of ventilation shafts.

  Nevertheless, the fractures between six and seven were a cause of great and increasing concern. For, with the best will in the world, there is nothing you can do if, when you have drilled out a foot of what is intended as a fifteen-inch powder hole, the overburden cracks and shifts, turning your neatly bored hole into a nutcracker vice clamped together by forces unimaginably great. You must simply stay calm, take up another boring bar, and begin again. And even when it happens three times in a row you must, with that same equanimity, take up your fourth boring bar and start once more—knowing that, for all the progress you have made, you might as well have had another ninety minutes abed today. Progress between six and seven was running at a quarter of its predicted rate.

  Stevenson tried every possible expedient to overcome this problem. He found that a trapped boring bar often came loose when a second was inserted, and he tried the experiment of driving a softwood peg in the hole the first had made and dowsing it with hot water. The swelling of the wood had the effect then of locking the fractured rock and making further drilling a little less risky.

  They all said what a master Stevenson was to have hit on the idea—except Thornton, who said: "I should have thought of that. It's the way the Romans used to quarry stone, without powder, you know."

  But still the progress did not satisfy Stevenson. He elaborated the te
chnique further by getting the drifters to cut wedge-shaped holes into the face along the lines of the fractures. Into these he drove softwood wedges that, when wet, served the same purpose. In a day or two, he was satisfied that a wedge angle of

  35 degrees was sufficient and the shallow cut it permitted was easily and quickly made in the rock. He had the smiths make up iron templates to this angle so that the carpenters above and the drifters below were working to a common standard, and every wedge above fitted every niche cut below. His reward came by the end of the first week in December, when progress, despite the difficult nature of the rock, was actually a little faster than predicted. Nevertheless, so much way had been lost earlier that it was still doubtful that the faster rate would consume the backlog by Christmas.

  On the tenth of the month he put a nightshift of eight men on each face, using ladders to avoid steaming the engines round the clock. Their bonus was eightpence a shift, and there was no shortage of volunteers.

  At this time, too, he began his practice of paying out weekly, which was then virtually unheard of in navvying trades. It was a risk, to be sure, but with everyone concentrated on the performance and attendance bonuses, he thought he'd not lose too many men to the brewers. Events proved him right, and by the third weekly payout, in mid-December, there wasn't a contractor on the line who wouldn't have envied his daily roster of absences.

  By Sunday the fifteenth, the driftway was complete from south and north with only the troublesome burden between six and seven to break. It was down to thirty feet, which, if no further problems intervened, was within—just within— their present capacity to drift through in the ten remaining days. Of course, the financial penalty for finishing on, say, New Year's Eve instead of Christmas Eve was trivial—three days' pay, no more; but the cost to his pride and to the men's spirit would be incalculable. Come tempest, come hell, he was going to walk Nora and the Thorntons from Calderbrook to Rough Stones on Boxing Day.

  During these weeks Nora, too, was busy. She knew how much Arabella was doing at Pigs Hill by way of preparation, and she was determined not to let Rough Stones show any less brilliantly on its special day. So what she had intended as simple preparations for their move grew daily more elaborate. Extra help had to be brought up from the cottages along the Bottoms and the house was cleaned and polished from threshold to attic trap.

  These chores were greatly enlivened by young Tommy Metcalfe. Whatever he did—whether scrubbing floors, colouring the walls, washing down the paintwork and windows, or grubbing out docks and nettles from a disgracefully neglected path—his cheerful voice and endless patter seemed to fill each room or the whole garden. Nora could easily understand why widow Ede would not have him at the price of ten and why, left alone, he would get into endless mischief. His curiosity was insatiable. He wanted to know whether an engine was stronger than a horse, and then—when that was clear—why they had to work so hard making the slope easier for the engine when the horses could take the much steeper slope by the road, and why Mrs. Thornton's horse could come up the very severe slope to Rough Stones. To Nora's mind, John did not acquit himself too well explaining that one.

  The funny ideas his mind leaped to also fascinated her. Once she had come into the room upstairs that was to become their bedroom, where he was supposed to be scraping and washing the glass in the windows. Instead, she found him looking solemnly out at the hillside.

  "Come, come, Tommy—that's not what you're paid for," she said. He sighed and returned to his work. "Wouldn't it be champion if we could find th'engine as makes all th'clouds?"

  Looking over his shoulder, she could see the engine of number ten shaft and from it came great fleecy billows of steam that lingered long in the chill December air. She laughed, making him look around sharply, full of suspicion that she was mocking him. So she turned him to face the window and put her arms around him from behind to hug him. "What'd you do with it if you found it?" she asked.

  "I'd make rain when folk wanted and I'd tell them when I wasn't so they could enjoy the sun."

  Often, when Nora was doing quiet things, such as fitting the curtains, or patching clothes, she would ask him to come and sit by her and read from the book on Cottage Economy. She grew very tired of Mr. Cobbett's social and political prejudices—especially his endless tirades against the paper money—and told Tommy to skip those passages. But whenever he gave a recipe or quoted some prices, she would stop what she was doing and, taking pen and notebook, make Tommy repeat it all at dictation speed, always substituting today's prices for the ones Tommy read out and then checking that the argument still held.

  Once she made an elementary slip in her addition, making seven and five add to eleven. She felt Tommy stiffen at once and was about to correct herself when she saw his fingers hard at work under the table. He rechecked three times before he plucked up the courage to point out her error.

  "I'm terrible at adding," she confessed. "One day I'm sure Mr. Stevenson's going to find me out and then he'll give me the sack."

  "You must bring all your reckonings to me, ma'am."

  "You promise you'll help me?" Nora was just as solemn.

  "Yes. If you went away, where could I go?"

  She laughed and hugged him all the more firmly. And often after that, she would make little errors in her reckoning and always he would check and recheck, three times, on his fingers before he corrected her openly.

  Even when she went to Manchester she took him with her, like a page boy. She was astonished at how little the idea of a shop conveyed to him, apart from provisions shops; he wandered in and out of them as if they were museums or menageries. But, of course, once he had seen Nora make some purchases and had grasped the idea, he wanted her to buy everything he set his eyes on.

  "Oh, you could get that," he would say of a large boiler or a set of glazier's tools or a corn shaver. And when he had said it for the tenth time—about a large bolt of broche taffeta in this case—she asked: "But what would we do with it, Tommy?"

  "We could keep it," he said.

  Then, passing a saddlers in Portland Street, his eyes fell on a set of hearse feathers. This time he said nothing, but she felt the tug of his hand as he halted. She waited for him to say, yet again, that she could buy that, but still he was silent. "What is it?" she asked.

  But he only smiled, looked shyly up at her with those deep brown eyes, and prepared to walk again at her side.

  "Do you know what they are?" she asked.

  He shook his head.

  "Hearse feathers." It meant nothing to him. "When people die they go to the cemetery in a special carriage called a hearse, and it has feathers like those at each corner. And the horses, too, wear them—like a crown."

  He looked back at them in even deeper wonder. "When I grow up," he said, "I'm going to die and have feathers like that on my hearse."

  She laughed at his fancy. "Time enough yet to think of dying," she said. "You've a long, hard road in front of you."

  But while they stood there, talking, she had suddenly noticed a riding crop with a silver handle, and the question that had plagued her for days—what do I get John for Christmas?—was answered.

  She went inside and arranged with the shopkeeper the rather special design she required for the knob, several times reminding Tommy that this was secret, a surprise, that Mr. Stevenson was not to know of until he opened the box on Christmas Day. "In fact," she said, as one conspirator to another, "I'd be obliged young man if you'd go to the door this minute and look carefully both ways, up and down the street, and make sure Mr. Stevenson hasn't followed us to town. So that our secret will be safe."

  And while he went to the door, she quickly arranged for one of the hearse feathers to be wrapped and sent as well.

  They had little over half an hour before they needed to hurry for their train, so she took him around by the street where her lodgings stood, the ones from which she had fled, leaving six gold sovereigns hidden in the wall. For a moment she thought she must have pick
ed the wrong street, it was so unfamiliar. Then, aghast, she realized that the whole row of tenements, including her lodgings, had been demolished. Already the first tender shoots of grass sprouted from the rubble; somewhere under there—unless someone had made a very lucky find—lay buried the wealth whose extortion, and then whose loss, had led to her present altered fortune. She stood and shook her head in amused chagrin at the devastation before them.

  "What's that?" Tommy asked.

  "That…is all that now remains of the house I lived in until this summer."

  He looked at the rubble with new interest. "Does it make you sad, ma'am?" he asked.

  She laughed. "One thing makes me sad—I saved up a little money and hid it in one of the rooms and forgot it. Now it's hidden for ever, somewhere in there."

  Without pausing to hear more he dashed across the road. "I'll find it," he shouted with all the confidence in the world.

  Scolding him half-heartedly she followed across, telling him not to dash out into the road like that—and not to get dirty. But even before she reached the opposite gutter he gave a cry of triumph and came racing back to her holding two coins. They were not gold and they were not hers, she could see that at once. But he was so overjoyed and proud that when he said: "I told you. I said I would," and gave them over to her, she had not the heart to disown them.