Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Now how was John to explain as much to Nora without wounding, perhaps fatally, that sense of self which sustained her blindness through every social encounter? How could he tell her that only by accepting Society’s estimation of her as an ex-slut could she prepare the way for her children’s acceptance?

  Until this night it had been easy to pretend that the problem was remote. The recent dreadful news from the Crimea had crowded out all other thoughts. As soon as word had come through that the army was hopelessly bogged down at Sebastopol and that it could barely be supplied from Balaclava harbour, eight miles to the south over roads axle-deep in mud, John had volunteered his best navvy gangs and his own services to build a light supply railway from the port to the siege lines—an offer the government had gratefully accepted. The necessary organization had filled his days since then: seven steam vessels and two in sail, totalling nearly five and a half thousand tons, laden with nearly two thousand tons of rail, six thousand wooden ties to hold them, and about three thousand tons of other material (fixed engines, cranes, piledrivers, trucks, wagons, barrows, blocks, chainfalls, wire rope, capstans, crabs, sawing machines, forges…) all to be distributed in such a way that even the loss of three vessels at sea would not endanger the venture—all this had occupied his time. On top of that there were the five hundred navvies and overseers to select, issue with kit, to victual, to provide with clerks and surgeons…Oh, these last few weeks John had found little time to worry about the future social acceptability of his children!

  In the rush of things it had seemed easy and logical enough to arrange, almost in passing, for Young John and Caspar to go away to school. And in the press of all that organization it had been easy, too, to let each “right moment” for telling Nora slip away, one by one; and now there were no such moments left. The Crimean venture was organized; they’d see the ships off next week and then he and Walter would go overland to Naples, and thence by ship to Balaclava, gaining ten days for the survey. There was nothing now to prevent him from telling Nora—except that all the right moments had been squandered.

  “Nora, there’s something I forgot to tell you…” “Eay, love! I don’t know how it slipped me mind, but…” “Didn’t I tell you? I’m sure I did. I could have sworn…”

  Oh dear, oh dear! He lay in bed listening to her moving around in her boudoir, waiting for her to come and join him.

  ***

  Seen through the aura of the lamp she held before her, John was no more than a blur on the white of the pillow. His eyes, following her movement, gleamed back a pale fire borrowed from the lamp. It gave him the appearance of a wary night creature. When she put the lamp on her bedside table and drew back the curtain, the light fell squarely on him. How ill he looked!

  He had worked too hard these last weeks. She ought to have paid more attention to him. She ought to have insisted that one of his deputies should do the organizing if John himself was to take charge of the actual work in the Crimea. She knew how he’d throw his heart and stomach into the job once he arrived.

  Yet she knew, too, that all this blaming of herself was idle. John looked on this Crimean venture as his personal sacrifice for England—a return for all that England had given him. How, then, could he spare himself?

  “If you’re not more careful of yourself, you’ll wake up dead one morning soon,” she said as she climbed in beside him.

  He pulled a face. “I’ll rest a day or two now. Thornton’s a tonic. I’d not feel half so happy with any other engineer.”

  He was still full of tension, belying the promise of these words.

  “You need a month’s rest, against what you’re going to do.”

  “I’ll try and get it,” he promised, “tomorrow and Sunday.”

  She turned down the wick and extinguished the light. For a while they lay side by side until the immediate dark turned pale in the moonlight. She listened to his breathing. He drew breath easily enough but he held it for a second or two before letting it out. He always did that on the nights when worry chased sleep away.

  Why tonight? Was he telling the truth when he said that all the organizing was done? She thought she knew how to relax him then. She propped herself on one elbow and began to run the fingers of her other hand through his hair, avoiding the thinner parts, where it annoyed him to be touched.

  He closed his eyes and smiled. “Hmmmm!” he murmured.

  She kissed him, gently at first, then with passion. Having intended only to soothe him, she found she was arousing herself. She dug her kneecaps into his thighs and induced an experimental shiver. “Do I take this nightdress off all by myself?” she asked.

  He continued to smile. “Hmmmm!” This time there was an edge of complaint.

  “Oh, aren’t I a terrible woman?” she mocked. “Forcing the poor fellow!”

  “’Twill do you no good,” he warned in a tired whisper.

  She snaked a hand down to the hem of his nightshirt, then up his thighs. More hair there than on the top of his head.

  He was limp. “See?” he said. “Gone away.”

  She smothered his words with her lips and pushed her tongue onto his. “See!” she whispered, moments later. “Welcome back!”

  Soon she was drowning in goosedown as his weight bore upon her with that marvellous thrust and pull that was John and only John—and herself and only herself. It was not the greatest love they had ever made, but it was still stupendous. After fifteen years of an often stormy marriage, after eight children, and after such a weary month as this had been, it was miraculous.

  But it failed of its original purpose—to relax him into sleep. She awoke—was it hours or only moments later?—to hear that same check in his breathing; and she knew he was trying to lie especially still, trying not to disturb her. His very effort had awakened her, for she could sleep on through all his natural restlessness.

  “What is it?” she asked. The words rasped as they cleared her throat.

  He sat half up and began to caress her arm; accidentally his knuckle kneaded her breast. “Don’t get me going again,” she warned lightly. “I’ll show no mercy.”

  He lay back then, absolved.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Can’t you tell me?”

  She saw his lips vanish into his mouth. His eyes trembled, so tightly did he hold them shut.

  “I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m weeks late as it is.”

  She almost laughed. The unintended metaphor of the failed menstrual period was so incongruously forced into her mind that his real meaning did not at once strike her. When it did, the edge had gone off the fear it induced.

  “When I went to Carlisle last month, I stopped off on the way back and went to Fiennes…”

  “What’s that mean—‘going to fines’?”

  “No, Fiennes,” he said. “The school. It’s spelled f, i, e, n, n, e, s but pronounced ‘fines.’ I went there, to Fiennes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Up in one of the dales, near Langstroth. Just on the southern slope of Whernside. It’s very remote. But I think it would suit Young John and Caspar very well.”

  “I disagree,” she said flatly. “Another Dotheboys Hall!”

  “Not at all. It is a first-rate public school. New headmaster, Dr. Brockman, who was an assistant at Rugby. Excellent man. Keen as mustard. And there’s a fine military tradition there.”

  “Fine for the middle classes,” she agreed. “But our boys hardly need it. We can buy them better tutoring than any school can give.”

  John was already shaking his head. He was not listening. She had to fight down her anger. “But we can!” she insisted. “And then Young John will go into the business. We can buy Caspar any commission he wants in any regiment he names. We can buy Clement his indentures or whatever he wants to do. It’s the same for all the children: We can launch them better than any of these middle-class manufac
tories. Gents made wholesale from tradesmen’s sons, indeed!”

  “Before you say any more, Nora, you had better know I have entered them. As soon as they are out of quarantine next week they will go.”

  For a moment she lay frozen, not believing, yet knowing it to be true. It was true that John had taken this most important decision without consulting her. It was true that he now presented her with it, fait accompli. She knew these things to be true from his very tone. Yet still she could not believe it.

  He had made himself a stranger. He had made her a stranger to him. When time began again to move, she flung herself on her side, turning her back to him and pulling the eiderdown up over her head. She wished she could sleep. Or scream. She wished for any violent release from this terrible cold bitterness that now filled her.

  He pulled away the eiderdown, enough to reveal her ear.

  “I meant to tell you straight away but then I got called to the War Office. And then this measles quarantine somehow made it less urgent. And then—well, you know what these last weeks have been.”

  Her voice, even to her, sounded remote, straight down from the North Pole. “If you had returned immediately and told me, do you think it would have been different? The delay is nothing. What hurts is that you decided without me.”

  “We have discussed it often enough.”

  “Indeed. So you knew how I feel about tarring our children with the middle-class brush.”

  He chuckled. But there was a special note to it, one that was never there when his amusement was genuine. “You’ll make a grand old lady!” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked gruffly, annoyed with herself that she could not help taking such obvious bait.

  “I mean there are certain ways of treating Society that only eccentric elderly viragos can carry off.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. She resettled herself and sighed. “I must assume you are very tired,” she said.

  “In time you will see that the boys will benefit by going away to school.”

  “Hmm!”

  “I promise you will.”

  “I thought our marriage implied an unspoken promise, at least, that such things would not be settled as you have settled them.”

  “Oh come, Nora! We should not be quarrelling. I’m off to the Crimea on Monday.”

  She burst into tears then; but not at the thought he was trying to implant—the thought that he might die out there (though the truth of it only deepened her misery). It was his crude attempt to manipulate her into acquiescence, first with that nonsense about viragos and now with this reminder. She was wounded too deeply to fathom him—that he could think she would not notice his blatant engineering of her emotions and, worse, that he thought she might respond to it.

  She lay long awake that night and would not be comforted.

  Chapter 3

  The tide had turned and was now visibly rising. The Thames, after some choppy confusion, was flowing “upstream” again, flooding the banks of grey mud. Here and there the mud, cracked and glistening like wet elephant hide, clutched at the hulks of abandoned boats. Some were reduced to mere ribs, festooned with estuary weed; others seemed from a distance to be still seaworthy.

  “Papa, why don’t you take some of your men and make those ships float again?” Boy asked.

  “Yes!” Caspar agreed eagerly. “Then we could have our own ship!”

  John laughed. “You may be sure,” he said, “that if anything could get those wrecks to float again, there’s enough skill on either bank of this river to take them to China and back.”

  “But there may be useful things still on them.” Caspar was unwilling to let go his dream.

  John tousled his hair. “They didn’t last a single low tide. Believe me—anything a strong man and a crowbar could shift has gone long ago.” He pointed at the flocks of birds, wheeling and screaming. “They belong to the seagulls now.”

  One of the officers from the leading ship of the Crimean party came out to join them on the wooden gangwalk that ran around the warehouse at their back. “Your men are almost assembled, sir,” he said.

  “Couple of minutes more?”

  The officer laughed. “Aye, it is fresher out here. They seem a rough lot. I hope you’ll manage to caution them to good behaviour on the voyage, sir.”

  For a while the two men, towering over the boys, looked down at the temporary rivers and streamlets between the sodden banks of mud. The northwest wind cast shivering nets of ripples over the water.

  “Have you been to the Crimea before?” John asked the officer.

  “Not on the Mohawk. I was on the Vectis when we carried stores to Balaclava.”

  “What is it really like out there?”

  “You feel no danger in the port, but the muddle is terrible. It’s a disgrace beyond my power of description, sir. If your railway moves those mountains out of Balaclava and gets the stuff where it’s really wanted, you’ll do a lot to win this war.”

  John smiled at him gratefully. “That is exactly what I shall tell my men. As to their behaviour, you need have no fear there.”

  They went inside then. John pointed to Walter and gave the two boys a push in his direction. After the cold air on the balcony the heat in the warehouse and the stink of men hit them like a wall; it almost pushed John physically off balance. While he recovered he looked down from the improvised rostrum—a large hatch cover balanced on four sacks—and surveyed his navvies. He could understand the officer’s alarm. A railway navvy was a man of legendary strength and violence. It took a year for even the best farm worker or building labourer to put on enough muscle to match the navvies; but the violence that had made them the scourge of the countryside in the early days of the railways had now become quite rare, thanks to the steady work and orderly conditions provided by the big contractors like Brassey and Peto—and, to be sure, by John himself. Even so, five hundred of those huge-muscled, self-reliant titans made an awesome assembly. Even John, who moved among them every day, felt it; and if he had just put his hand to the controls of the biggest leviathan steam engine in the world, he would not feel master of a power half so great as this.

  “How many of ye,” he shouted, “began on the London–Birmingham line?”

  There was a puzzled stir. It was not the way they expected him to start. In the gloom he saw only a few dozen hands raised up.

  “Thirty or forty. And the rest of you younger, I’ll be bound. Eighteen years is a lifetime in this trade. The reason I ask is because that’s where I began—on the London–Birmingham. I made the running at Camden up cuttings that would test the strongest of us still. I near lost a leg on the banks at Tring. I carried the remains of four good men out of Kilsby Tunnel in sacks.”

  The silence was now absolute. There was no other audience in the world to whom he could talk in such direct shorthand and who would instantly grasp his meaning. Boy and Caspar were thrilled. They loved all his tales of navvy days.

  “Aye. There’s things about the navvying life that folk outside will never fathom.” A murmur of agreement began to rise. He grinned. “Do ye remember how they feared us? There’s folk who still hush their young ones with threats of navvies. Ye’d think we were hordes of Tartars. Yet what did we do? We fired a few hedges. We invited the farmers’ geese to an early supper.” They began to laugh.

  “We maybe bloodied a nose or two and broke the odd window. And we left behind a few spare feet for baby boots.”

  He let the laughter rise and die. “It was little enough to fear us for. Yet if they had known what we were really about, they would have both feared and marvelled.” His raised finger and glinting eyes, darting this way and that over the crowd, promised a rich secret.

  “For what have we really done? I’ll tell you: We’ve left behind us a land enriched beyond dreams. We’ve changed the face of this world! Yes,
you, and you, and you—you’ve done it. D’ye remember that time when a bale of raw American cotton in Liverpool docks was sent to Manchester and was back in Liverpool the very next day as woven cloth ready to export? Our metals made that possible. We’ve given a new bloodstream to civilization. We’ve made our mark on the face of time! We did that.

  “But have ye ever stopped to wonder why us? Why not the Germans, eh? Or the French? Why not the Dutch? Why not the cowardly Russians even? Why us, the English? And by English I mean Irish and Scotch and Welshmen, too. Why?” He lowered his voice and leaned toward them. “Because we’re free. The Europeans stumble from revolution to tyranny and back. The Russian serf dares not call his soul his own; he must slay and be slain without even asking the cause. There’s no strength in that. One free man will face down a dozen of them. Free men like us. Free Englishmen, volunteers every man, at full liberty to go or stay as we please. And just at this minute it pleases us mightily to go and fight the barbarian.” They cheered at that.

  “So! We who changed the face of England now have it within our power to change the course of history. When we’ve done our task it will be possible for a Russian to die at nightfall, his heart pierced by a bullet that less than twelve hours earlier lay in the hold of a vessel on the Black Sea. We did it with cotton; now we’ll do it with bullets and guns. It’s never been done before. In the long tide of human conflict no army has had such service behind it as we shall now provide. Think of it, my friends—just five hundred of us, and we are going to make history. Look around you and feel the pride of it. And now let the Russians tremble, for they’ve cause enough!”

  His ending was as abrupt as his beginning had been; it, too, took them unawares. Silently their minds repeated his closing words and then the thought gripped them and they shivered the rafters with their cheers. He stood above them, arms folded, smiling back to give them a focus. Then, while their cheers rang on he jumped lightly down and joined Walter Thornton and the ship’s officers.