World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Yet, Sir Sidney was not even sure that Stevenson had done anything amiss; that was where he had to tread to delicately. At the back of his mind ran the perpetual caution that there just might be a reasonable explanation for this seeming forgery. Even Prendergast, who by all accounts knew Stevenson quite well by now, had said he could not really believe the man capable of outright forgery. It was all such a bloody delicate mess.

  After the usual pleasantries, he and John strolled back along the turnpike toward Stone House. Sir Sidney plainly did not want eavesdroppers for what he had to say. John, watching him closely from their first moment of meeting, soon understood that Prendergast must, in the end, have played his cards cautiously. He must have hoped that, when faced with it, Stevenson would find no answer and so would be forced to incriminate himself. He shuddered to think how close that potential moment of unmasking had come.

  Sir Sidney now amplified Prendergast's reluctance tenfold. Indeed, for a full quarter of an hour he spoke of nothing but his Board's delight with the way the Summit contract had gone ever since John had had the disposal of it. Finally, John had to prompt him—by asking after Prendergast's health. That provoked a spate of assurances that the priest, too, held Stevenson in the highest, the very highest regard.

  But at last he came to the delicate nub of the matter: "It's your letter of credit, you see, dear fellow. A bit of bother about the date."

  "Surely not."

  "I fear so."

  "I mean—well, surely Prendergast explained it to you? I remember I explained the whole thing…oh, months ago, back-end of last year."

  Sir Sidney was now both embarrassed and puzzled. A prelude to anger. "He said nothing of that to me."

  "To be sure, he was very ill soon after. Very ill. I hear they despaired of his life at one time. Could that have induced him to forget?"

  The other was glad to have this escape. "That must be it. Poor fellow. Not better yet, perhaps."

  "But how embarrassing for you, Sir Sidney. And, I suppose for me, too. We shall have to be very tactful with the old gentleman."

  Sir Sidney looked at him in rapt admiration. "By Jove, Stevenson! You're a prince among men! Let me shake your hand. No, no—I insist. Not many men could see their honour impugned and show such charity. No man I know."

  John laughed to mask his embarrassment. "What miserable sort of man would think his honour impugned when a poor, sick clergyman, still convalescent, has a little slip of memory! On the contrary, my admiration of Dr. Prendergast is redoubled. He did a difficult thing in difficult circumstances. And I'll wager he did it with the utmost circumspection, eh? No outright accusation? Behaved with fairness itself toward me."

  "Yes," Sir Sidney confirmed. "Yes. Very fair. Very fair. Said he wouldn't believe a word against you. Felt you ought to have the chance to explain. Was sure you could."

  "Ah! And that was why you asked me to call on you today!"

  Sir Sidney nodded glumly. "Thank the powers I took it upon meself to call like this first. I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. Thank heavens I came."

  John turned them back toward the waiting carriage. "Amen to that," he said. "If I may suggest…? I have somewhere the letter from my banker where the entire confusion is explained. I also have—I hope—a copy of my reply. I believe all escaped the fire. If you were to take them and show him…say I laughed it off…no offence taken…make light of it…perhaps it will not mortify him too greatly, then."

  "I think you've hit it," Sir Sidney said, overwhelmed in his relief that today's distressing business had all come out so happily. "You're the very example of Christian charity, sir. We're greatly in your debt—Prendergast most of all."

  "I hope he won't feel it too great a burden."

  Later, when John had handed over the letters, Sir Sidney climbed back into his carriage and said: "So—no need for you to come to Manchester today."

  "I've been pondering that," John told him. "I think I will come, you know. Just to reassure the poor old chap."

  Again that admiration in Sir Sidney's eyes. "A prince, sir. A veritable prince!"

  And John, watching the carriage pull away, smiled and said: "Il principe, anyway!" But the arrogance of his words and the very ease of his triumph had already turned sour within.

  The luck that had gilded this entire year had accompanied him even into this the most arrant and stupid of blunders. There was something very selfdiminishing about a triumph that was so richly undeserved. And no learned jocularity could restore that curtailment.

  For Nora, he tried to pass his meeting off as a success. She was not deceived. She smiled dutifully but she busied herself with any distraction that offered, and she could not quite meet his gaze.

  It was a chastened and unusually self-examining John Stevenson who went to Manchester for that long-awaited triumph. He arrived later than he had intended at the Company offices and met Prendergast just as he emerged into the street. He had never seen a man look so dejected.

  The thought that he could even contemplate easing the anxieties and anger of this past half-year by a few moments of crowing over this pathetic, dispirited, and essentially despicable creature was suddenly revolting to him.

  He was at Prendergast's side before the priest even noticed him. He thrust out the packet he was bearing and, with a smile, a genuine smile, said: "That's five hundred and twenty-five pounds. Late, I fear, but not I hope too late."

  Prendergast all in the same dazed instant recognized him, accepted the packet, and took in his words. Then it seemed he had to do all three over again, transferring the packet from one nerveless hand to the other.

  "But…you have no need now…" he began, once the message had finally penetrated. He looked back at the window of Sir Sidney's office.

  "It was you who had no need, Prendergast. You had a perfectly reasonable proposal. You still have. You had no need to compel my agreement by this blackmail."

  "I hadn't?" Prendergast was still confused.

  "It is an irrelevance. It always was. But would you ever have believed it if I had told you so?"

  A faint and slightly rueful smile crossed the priest's face.

  "But now I have proved it to you. Eh? Now you must believe it. Now we can enter a real partnership. At…shall we say—five per cent? Something a touch more realistic?"

  Prendergast became his recognizable self at last. And John, to his own astonishment, found that he was actually glad to see the re-emergence of the old reprobate whose threats had for so long brought nothing but fear and loathing.

  "Dammit, Stevenson. You're an odd one! I've never met a man like you. There's a touch of something strange…" He thrust the packet deep into his innermost pocket and nodded his gratitude as he stumbled through his unfinished sentence.

  "Touch of greed, anyway," John said. "Let us talk, you and me, about a contract that's soon to be let on the Bolton & Preston line…"

  Chapter 44

  May and June that year were showery and cool; July was wet. The hay cut was light and people shook their heads over the prospects for the harvest. The inclemency of the weather caused some people to postpone or suspend the less essential of their building operations—for which John Stevenson was heartily grateful. As it was, he learned a sharp lesson in the laws of supply and demand; and if he had not taken George Roberts's advice and got a contract price set for all the bricks needed at Redmayne's site and to complete the tunnel, he would have doubled its cost to him. The rate of bricklaying in the tunnel was itself enough to create a shortage of skilled bricklayers; but when the demands of the Redmayne site were added to it, shortage became famine and the daily rate went up to 6s 6d, and for two weeks even to 7s, in order to attract enough labour to the sites. When all the accounts were done, Nora reckoned it had cost them at least an extra thousand pounds on both contracts to avoid the enactment of the penalty clauses.

  But she worried about it more than John. It was a time of challenge for him to find the most effectual way of disposing of the
work and minimizing the erosion of their expected profit. Meeting that challenge was its own reward. Redmayne's site had costed out at £86,000 and he had topped it up to £97,000 to allow for profit and contingencies. It was not a high-risk contract and he knew he could not expect the thirty and forty per cent margins he would want for something more speculative. So there was little room left to navigate within.

  His clerk of works was an old master mason called Spicer. He'd "built more mills and more houses than John Stevenson had had hot dinners." There was no problem in building he hadn't already met and overcome. That was all to the good, and there wasn't a day on which John did not warm with thankfulness and admiration for the old man's skill. But there was one great disadvantage, too; Spicer knew how the whole site should be built; he knew exactly how. For him it might have been a religious service: Everything had its order and place and time. And John's idea of digging out all the foundations, of laying all the sewers and service mains and soil drainage, and of surfacing all the roads and pavements, and of building the chapel, which was mainly stone, and of making the new canal basin, which was also mainly stone, and of carrying every brick to its appointed pile among the dozens of piles that dotted the site…in short, of postponing to the last possible moment the time when the costly bricklayers would have to be brought on site in any number—such an idea was for many weeks quite beyond Spicer's grasp.

  He watched foundations grow to two courses above ground and there halt, and he shook his head. He watched roads thread their way among the weeds, and he sighed. And when the piles of bricks stood in neat arrays of rank and file and the bricklayers at last had to be set on, he declared he'd never seen a work done so arsy-versy.

  But a week later, he was able to dismiss a third of the hod carriers, whose job it was to feed the bricklayers with fresh bricks. And only days after that he was admitting, still with some surprised bewilderment, that he'd never seen building go so quickly. Donkey carts of sand and aggregate pulled easily and swiftly over the made-up roads; on other sites they often fell into potholes, breaking wheels and spilling loads. No brick had to be carried more than a dozen yards; on a traditional site, a man might spend all day wheeling barrowloads of them from piles several chains' length away.

  One day Spicer said to him: "Tha knows, Lord John, if it were winter time and not frozen, an if we 'ad yon gas plant workin', we could light them streets an' build to summer hours!" And when he heard that, John knew he had a valuable new man upon his staff—a man who, despite age and long experience, was now thinking more of cash outlay and effectual working than he did of blind tradition.

  But in one respect, John's ambitions were not realized. He was not able to keep together his bands of navvies and offer them work on his other sites. The "arsy-versy" work at Redmayne's had, in part at least, been an attempt to keep some of his lads together as long as possible, but it merely postponed their inevitable departure. And as the sheer volume of stonebreaking and muck-shifting at Summit dwindled, his navvy labour force shrank in the same measure, from

  800 to only half that number. He looked around for other railroad or navigation work, but the only line then actively begun and not let out (apart from the Bolton & Preston bid, which Prendergast was working on) was the link from

  Manchester to Crewe by way of Alderley Edge. And, as he reluctantly had to confess, he was just not big enough yet to put in a bid for such a major section.

  To him this was an especial sadness, for, of all the hopes that had encouraged him at his start, the desire to keep together a corps of navvies who would think of themselves as "his" lads first and navvies second, who would see him through his lean times if he saw them through theirs, and who would, in time, share the wealth that came by their work and his enterprise, all that had lain closest to his heart. He took his leave of each man singly as the work ran out, and he gave to each a crown, and a penny into the hand of each child, to see them to the next working. And to every man he promised work when his contracting business was big enough to be taking on men instead of laying them off.

  Often on his way back to Rough Stones after these leavetakings, the tears would stream down his face. He knew each man, knew which parts of the tunnel he had worked, knew his value. To send them off, however you argued it logically, was like a betrayal. He had betrayed them by not being big enough to keep them on.

  At first Nora tried to comfort him with softness and sympathy, but she soon found the best way was to point out that, if it meant so much to him, he could easily keep the men on, every single one of them, by foregoing a little of his profit on the working. "Oh no," he said when she first made the proposal. "If I do that, we shall never be big enough to do it the proper way." Soon all she had to say was: "Well—if it really means so much to you" and leave the rest unspoken. And he would sigh, and suppose she was right, and devour his supper with relish. At the beginning of August, Prendergast let them know that £20,000 was the probable winning bid on the new Bolton & Preston line. If they won that contract, it might stop the rot.

  Nora had bought Millwood from Lady Henshaw soon after their return from London. It made little change in the pattern of her life for she still went to Henshaw Park at least twice a week and helped her ladyship with her endless three-volume novel; and she still went riding with McGinty, who was teaching her to leap small fences and cut-down gates. "Ye've that many bruises," John grumbled. "We s'll need an oriental doctor to show us how to enjoy our connubial rights."

  Nora had tolerated the goats and ignored the mad dogs and endured the half-wit girls for so long now that Henshaw Park had come to seem quite normal. As she never knew what Lady Henshaw would be doing when she arrived, nothing she actually did was a surprise. One day she was painting wildflowers—an easy task since they grew right up to her walls. Another day she was waist-deep in what she called an "archaeological digging." Another day Madoc was shoulder-deep in the same pit and she, on its edge, would be calling it "me new cesspit." Another day it was all filled in again and, until it grew over, was referred to scathingly as "Madoc's Folly." Another day Nora found her in the yard with three naked, terrified, giggling, hysterical, feebleminded girls, a yard brush, scouring soap, and a pail of water. Once you have accepted all these encounters as "normal," where might "surprising" begin?

  John, too had bought a horse—Hermes, a large, five-year-old, dappled gray gelding, which he rode to Redmayne's site as well as to Littleborough for his visits to the Manchester canal workings. To save the expense of keeping their own groom, they stabled Hermes and Millwood with the drayhorses from the workings, and paid the farrier another crown each week.

  Usually John would start the day with the arrangements at Summit and then go over to Redmayne's about mid-morning. Nora would ride with him as far as Gawks Holm, where she went up to Arabella at Pigs Hill. There she would spend an hour or two reading to Arabella from "improving and diverting books of a secular nature" as Arabella called them—the works of Johnson and Addison, the novels of Scott and Jane Austen, and the poems of Byron and Wordsworth. Nora had, since her visit to London—since her visit to Sarah's room, to be precise—become an avid reader, an omnivorous devourer of the printed word. It had begun as something of an exercise in self-improvement; but it had quickly turned into a pleasure unalloyed, and every spare moment would find her with her face whitened in the light reflected off some page. And each evening she would renew her frustration as she tried to describe to John how insufferable Mr. Darcy was, or how exciting had been the jousting between the Disinherited Knight and Bois-Guilbert and the four Normans, or how "elegant and refined" (to use another Arabella phrase) Addison was.

  For John had neither time nor inclination to lose himself in fantastical stories, though he, too, became an earnest reader—in his case of books on civil engineering, road making, invention, and the history of manufacture. He devoured almost every book that Walter brought home from the Institute library.

  As summer wore on and as, between the showers, hot days gave way
to hotter, and Arabella's pregnancy grew daily more like a totally paralyzing illness, Walter showed a pathetic eagerness to vanish down the line to Manchester on no greater pretext than that Stevenson needed another book. And John, seeing him leave all solemn and trembling, was moved to pity the engineer his slavery to his obsessions. But there, for once, he was wrong.

  In later years, Walter was to look back on that winter and spring of 1840 as an idyll of young manhood. Even at the time, even before memory had blunted the sharper edges of the experience, he knew it for a season of unusual satisfactions. It had given him great pleasure to contemplate—on the train, when he returned from that expensive house of civil reception in Salford, just after Christmas—how well his life was settling down into its compartments. Everything that happened in the weeks which followed merely confirmed the essential rightness of his feeling.

  For Arabella, too, it was a time of joy. Though she was quickened, and had been so at least since December, she was still unaware of it. Tight lacing masked many symptoms. And, since no one had ever explained the connection, it never crossed her mind that the failure of her little friend to come on those more-orless regular monthly visits had anything to do with generation. All she knew was that she felt exceptionally well, contented to the point of a steady, muted happiness. She, too, was to look back on those days as idyllic.