The Iron Master

by Jean Stubbs

  ‘I begin to perceive your intention, sir.’

  ‘But, ma’am, what have we now in our revolutionary hand of cards? An experienced editor, a gifted pamphleteer, a convinced Radical with excellent connections, in the form of Mrs Charlotte Longe! And where is she by chance to be placed, but in the very centre of our activities?’

  ‘You are asking me to spy for you, sir?’ Incredulously.

  ‘No, ma’am. I am asking you to act as an organiser of the growing movement in Wyndendale Valley and around, to work in conjunction with one of our central agents there, and to preserve an unimpeachable façade.’

  Charlotte thrust the poker into the heart of the fire, and mulled some more claret. She had forgotten everything that troubled her in contemplation of this new proposal.

  ‘Think now,’ said Ralph Fairbarrow, accepting another glass, ‘of all that entails. If you are caught you will be hanged, no doubt of it! What of your children then?’

  Charlotte said, through cold lips, ‘My mother would have them.’

  ‘Point one,’ said Fairbarrow, marking it off on his fingers. ‘Point two. You will lead a life of deception, and you have a very nice mind, Mrs Longe. You must become two people: one of them the loving mother and daughter and niece and so forth, the other … ’

  ‘The Northern Correspondent,’ said Charlotte, not without a certain doleful humour.

  ‘Aye, very good, very good. But this will be the harder part for you, so consider it well, this point two. Then, point three, although you must lead a social life you must not become entangled emotionally — do you understand me? It is of no use coming to me in a year or so, with a blushing confession that you have fallen in love with the Mayor of Millbridge — or some such riactionnaire — and would like to tender your resignation. You will hold too many lives in your head and hand for that sort of indulgence, Mrs Longe.’

  ‘Of that you need have no fear, sir,’ said Charlotte bleakly. ‘I shall not marry again. I have no mind for marriage.’

  ‘Well, you speak now out of grief, and so forth. But you are young yet, and a woman. Women can never distinguish between head and heart.’

  ‘This woman can,’ said Charlotte quietly, ‘though you must take her word for it. I promise you that this is the easiest condition you have asked of me so far. Are there others?’

  ‘You must not confide your position or your beliefs to anyone outside this agent, or his fellows. Moreover, Mrs Longe, you must seem to suffer a conversion. This will be the more credible because of your sex, which is notably fickle in its opinions. You come to Millbridge shocked and chastened. In any event, you are not pleased with the state of affairs in France, so that should not be too hard for you? Then, gradually, your views become less extreme. I should think it unwise, in a woman of your intelligence, to revert to Toryism, but a moderate stance will appear to suit your new condition in life.’

  ‘So I cannot teach my children what I believe to be good?’

  ‘They above all must remain innocent, ma’am, for out of their mouths can you be proved guilty!’

  She wrapped the shabby brown pelisse more closely round her, imagining that betrayal.

  ‘Mind, I do not expect you to decide in a moment,’ he said, emptying his glass and standing up. ‘You may let me know in a month or two, when you have settled in. For once you put a foot upon this road there is no turning back, Mrs Longe, and no one can promise you what lies at the end of it.’

  ‘Oh, come,’ she answered drily, ‘no one can promise anything. That lies in a higher province than our own, Mr Fairbarrow!’

  ‘Ah! I am an atheist. I would not know about that, Mrs Longe!’

  She followed him down the stairs. The house sounded hollow, cleaned and swept out, ready for the new occupants. In the hallway stood a very little luggage. Outside, the rusting sign of Longe & Son, Printers, Publishers & Booksellers had been removed. Another name swung in its place, upon oiled hinges. And now Ralph Fairbarrow shook hands in silence. They had said all that was needful. Charlotte lingered on the threshold, listening to the sound of his boots on the cobbles until they died away.

  The city was not yet ready to sleep. Time and again it had kept her company at this hour of the night. She could hear a fragment of song, the shout of a reveller, the cry of a watchman, hooves and wheels. In one corner of the narrow court a whore plied her trade, regardless of the bitter weather. A window was flung up into the night, a name called into the darkness. No answer.

  ‘Toby,’ said Charlotte to herself.

  He had left her, as though he had never been. And all that was once his had gone with him. Shop and house and friends, even London itself, were no longer any part of her. At day-break she would leave almost as she came here, with a few personal possessions. Almost as she came, since two young lives now travelled with her, depended upon her, and in the background Ralph Fairbarrow waited for his answer.

  It had been such a winter as this when Toby Longe first met her, and she sought a greater freedom than Millbridge could afford. The belief pierced her, as she stood shivering upon the doorstep, that she would never be free, that every flight was followed by retribution. Her eyes, glazing with tears, saw Polly’s forgotten broom against the wall as the symbol of a dark tale.

  ‘Why, they have swept our lives away!’ she thought. In her pain.

  Part Two

  Man of Iron 1793-1800

  Thunderstorm

  Twelve

  Summer 1793

  William had a knack of seeing the quality in a person and choosing him in a highly flattering manner, so that the man belonged to him, as it were. Jim Cartwright, the foreman, was such a one, and a handful of skilled workers could be reckoned in with him. But William would have more than that. Ideally he wanted his labourers, too, to be first-rate: like navvies, who were accounted the strongest and bravest workers in the country, and had even dazzled folk abroad with their achievements. Mind you, a navvy must eat and drink well and prodigiously to keep up his strength, and therefore be paid higher wages. Nevertheless, William hired a gang of them for excavation and hoped they would set an example to the rest.

  Millbridge had a long memory, and old tales of the navvies who dug the branch canal back in ‘74 still percolated through the valley. So no one would lodge them, and William had to build a large hut on the Belbrook site, where they slept and cooked and ate in rough comfort six days of the week. But on Saturday night and Sunday they would dress up and roam Wyndendale in search of amusement: their white felt hats stuck jauntily on one side of their heads, their plush waistcoats gleaming like rubies, bright kerchiefs tied round their bull necks. The lower taverns put up with their roistering for the sake of their custom, but among the people they were greatly feared, and with some reason, for their reputation was violent. There were incidents whispered, concerning women of low morals, who thought to earn easy money and had nearly been put out of business in consequence, since the navvies would pass one woman between them all night. Drunkenness, fighting and swearing were commonplace. But every Monday morning they would be back at work: sober, silent and industrious.

  Caleb deplored them from the beginning, but William thought them a wonderful acquisition. They had a style of their own, and he liked that.

  Their ganger was a man called Ignatius Riordan. William’s shoulders grazed the doorposts of the men’s living quarters, and he had to duck his head to get inside the hut. But Riordan’s shoulders would have fetched the doorposts with them, and he could have beheaded himself entirely had he stood upright and walked straight through.

  On what bog had he been bred, this mighty child of nature? By what mountain was he fathered? Unlettered, inarticulate, he did not know his age let alone the day of his birth. His hair was the colour of his temper, his blue eyes unfathomable. He had a charisma of sorts. He could lift greater weights, drink more heavily, swear more obscenely, and whore longer than any of his gang, and they worshipped him.

  Now the need to make money being pressing, Will
iam and Caleb had decided to open the Foundry as soon as the upper furnace could be used, and to carry on building the lower furnace and fill out the rest of the architect’s plan at the same time. This would be hectic and require considerable organisation, but both partners felt it could be done. And William used his imagination, making each completed building, each machine installation, an occasion for mild celebrating. Thus it was free ale all round when the steam-engines arrived from Boulton and Watt: free ale when the first load of coal was hauled up the inclined plane: and promise of a roasted ox when the furnace was lighted.

  ‘Thee should not bribe them, William,’ said Caleb reproachfully.

  ‘This is not bribery but encouragement, my friend.’

  ‘Aye, but thy gifts and promises make them reckless. Accidents are too frequent for my liking.’

  ‘See to the payments then, Caleb, according to our welfare scheme. So much for maiming. So much for death. That is only fair.’

  ‘My dear Will,’ said the Quaker, with a hint of reproach, ‘this morning a workman fell from the scaffold, and hath left a wife and six young children to face the world without him. Money cannot recompense them.’

  ‘The men are not forced to take risks.’

  Caleb shrugged his shoulders, unhappy, unconvinced. But the work went on. They toiled like the beasts they used. Their efforts were herculean, but the results of their labours dwarfed them, threw the men into shadow.

  No longer part of a rural landscape, Belbrook now bore the ponderous burden and sombre housing of a foundry. Its workers hazarded their lives and limbs daily, hourly. Cumbrous wagons tilted tons of spoil into new hills. Iron barrows teetered heavy loads up narrow planks. Iron cranes swung massive weights. They could be crushed like beetles, toppled to oblivion. Flesh and bones were fragile things in such a place. This monster they created could overwhelm them in an instant, in the weakest of its workings and the least of its parts. It towered above them, fell away beneath them, yawned to receive them, threatened them on the earth, in the air, with water. Soon they would add the final element of fire, and only the dominion of mind could hold all this in check and make it serve them.

  William stood outside the completed furnace with Caleb. His navvies and labourers, in a vast half-circle, joined them in contemplation. This house of sacrificial fire had been enlarged to produce an appropriate quantity of pig iron, and was perhaps fifty feet high: flanked by gigantic bellows. The area around it was walled against the pressure of water from behind. Sheds housed the bellows and the sand pig bed, and to one side the great waterwheel was poised in its pit.

  All was prepared. Boys ready to wheel barrows of coke from the coke heaps on the right of the dam, to carry baskets of fuel and lime and iron-ore and pour them into the circular mouth. The sluice-gate waited to be opened. The ox roasted.

  Caleb nodded in silent satisfaction, smiled on the assembly and stood back. But William stepped across the forehearth and into the belly of the empty furnace, and lifted his face to the little hole of sky far above, and looked and looked as though he would imprint every brick upon his mind. And to his side, without the least embarrassment, came Ignatius Riordan, saying nothing, simply looking as William did at this colossal artefact.

  After a minute or so master and man turned to regard one another, again without need of explanation or apology. And William said, ‘This is good.’ And Ignatius said nothing. But in the depths of his eyes he answered William, and the meaning was the same.

  Then the spell lifted. Ignatius ducked his head under the arch and came out to join his gang. William gave the order to begin work, and Caleb walked back to the office to deal with the day’s requirements.

  *

  As evening approached, William’s family converged upon Belbrook to see the furnace fired, and a number of well-wishers and time-servers also joined the crowd. Word had spread throughout the valley that Wyndendale’s first ironworks was about to go into production. The smell of roast beef was perhaps an even greater attraction.

  ‘Now it will make a vast noise, Mamma,’ said William, taking Dorcas’s arm, ‘so be prepared for it. There is nothing to be afraid of. It is all sound and fury, merely signifying — in the long run — pig iron!’

  She laughed and clasped his hand, so proud of him in this first moment of glory, wearing her new bonnet.

  Dick Howarth, a raw young man of eighteen, spoke little and smiled shyly: not quite at his ease in this iron realm, being used to green fields. While Charlotte talked animatedly to Caleb, and her children looked solemn and held fast to her skirt.

  ‘Is everybody ready?’ William cried.

  ‘By Gow,’ said Ned Howarth, staring up and around him. ‘Tha’s getten a right hell’s kitchen here, our Will!’

  Now the firer came forward with stately tread, bearing his beacon, and approached the waiting altar. Now the audience was hushed, and also waiting. The working shift hovered: ready to begin their twelve-hour vigil before they were relieved the following day.

  ‘Of course,’ said William to Dorcas, in defence, ‘this is but an ordinary type of furnace. The ones we are building lower down will be three in number, and powered by a pair of steam-engines. But it does well enough. For a start.’

  She could not have been more impressed.

  ‘It is a question of chain reaction,’ William murmured. ‘Water runs, wheel turns, bellows blow, fire brightens … ’

  The torch was thrust into the kindling.

  … and so the Works was opened and I took out my Watch to observe both Minute and Hour of Belbrook Foundry’s birth. Then to the Ox, yr Caleb and I carved so Poorly that my Father took Ox in our Stead. And all the while a steady Roaring in our Ears, as tho’ we were under Cannon Fire, and Blasts of air wh Sounded like the Compound Shriek of Poor Souls in Purgatory. But, sweetest Zelah, my Heart beat every Moment in thought of Thee, for now I have Asked thy Father if we can be Engaged. And I shall many Thee as soon as Possible, and Pray that it be Tomorrow, dearest Love …

  Old Caleb walked out of the library with William’s letter in his hand, and Zelah let fall her own into her lap at the sight of his face.

  The ironmaster had suffered a double blow, being deceived by. two persons close to him, and Quaker though he was he could not be called a forgiving man. Like one of the ancient prophets he stood now, and his daughter rose trembling before him with her love-letter tumbled to the carpet, while his wife did not know whom to comfort or for what.

  ‘Zelah, thou hast betrayed me, and all thy family, and a man who did not deserve aught but honour and fair dealing from thee. As for William Howarth, who hath crept like a serpent among us, and now expects to be rewarded for his treachery, let his head be bruised by my heel as the Scripture sayeth.’

  ‘Caleb,’ said Catherine, understanding everything. ‘My love. Caleb.’

  And she came to him at once, warding off his wrath, beseeching Zelah to be silent. Caleb Scholes held his tongue with difficulty, mastered himself, turned on the heel which was to bruise William’s head, and left the room. Catherine followed him. Alone, Zelah picked up her letter, but could not read the words. So sat there, waiting for her mother’s return, and all the sun had gone from that summer day.

  It was characteristic of Catherine Scholes that she dealt with what was uppermost, and did not trouble herself with details of what was past. This and this must be done, therefore she did it. Why and wherefore would be revealed in time, but that was not her province. So she returned in half an hour, not smiling, and certainly concerned, but calm.

  ‘There will be no engagement, child, nor thought of one,’ she said, kissing Zelah’s cold cheek. ‘But thy father sees now that young folk will be young, aye, and loving even when they should not. So do not speak to him again of this matter. He will write to William. And if he seem strange and silent with thee in the next few days — bear with him, for he loves thee. And if thou must weep, daughter, then save thy tears for me.’

  The year’s frail castle had crumbled in momen
ts. Disbelieving, Zelah held out William’s letter that her mother might understand, but Catherine motioned it gently away.

  ‘Thou hast no love for George Horsefield, so that is over,’ she continued, ‘but the other may not be. Though I have a concern and care for William he hath done wrong in courting thee, and double wrong in courting thee behind our backs and swearing thee to silence. Thy father will have none of him. Do not hope, for hope can only make thy heart sore.’

  Then Zelah comprehended the enormity of her offence and of her father’s retribution, and began to shake. She could not stop herself. Her teeth chattered as though she were cast out into a winter landscape. Catherine held her close and spoke soothingly, smoothed her hair and kissed her cheeks, rubbed her hands. Still the girl shook, and could not form the words she needed to say, and she drew air in gasps, staring ahead of her with wide and frightened eyes. So they put her to bed with a copper warming-pan for company, and burned feathers under her nose, and poured drops of brandy down her throat, in an effort to revive her. Caleb sat in his library like the God of Wrath, and would not spare his child’s suffering because it made him, too, suffer.

  *

  William turned over the coin which he carried as a talisman. On one side sailed a small brigantine, possibly commemorating the launching of ‘Wilkinson’s first iron ship in 1787, though it bore no resemblance to that vessel. On the other side a homely middle-aged gentleman in a curled and flowing wig presented his profile. Round this bust ran the legend JOHN WILKINSON IRONMASTER.