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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Part One – 1898
1. The House on the Hill
2. An Eye to the Future
3. The Ladies’ Man
4. Sunday in the Park
5. A Kiss and a Promise
Part Two – 1901
6. The Coral Strand
7. Postcard from Portsmouth
8. Floating Capital
9. A Musical Evening
10. The Great Exhibition
11. The Launching Party
12. A Lesson Ignored
13. The Winter Rains
Part Three – 1906
14. A Marriage of Sorts
15. Weapons of War
16. Marching with the Times
17. Just Between Friends
18. The Deciding Factor
19. Night without End
20. For Ever and a Day
21. The Piper’s Tune
Also by Jessica Stirling
Copyright
PART ONE
1898
CHAPTER ONE
The House on the Hill
At one time the Franklins had all lived together in her grandfather’s house on Harper’s Hill, but wives, babies and that process which Lindsay did not yet understand – growing old rather than growing up – had changed everything. Two by two, like Noah’s creatures, Owen Franklin’s sons and daughters had left the rambling mansion close to the heart of Glasgow to follow the fashionable trail out of town; not far out of town, however: only a mile or so along the valley of the Clyde to the elegant terraces of Brunswick Park.
The park itself was small and unremarkable. It contained no boating loch or curling pond, no bandstand or bowling green, only three or four drooping shrubs, a flower bed as mysterious as a burial mound and a solitary rustic bench. Above it lay Brunswick Crescent, a handsome piece of architecture with hood-moulds over the first-floor windows, square mullions and pediments that somehow humanised an otherwise austere design. The Franklin brothers had taken to it at once. They were intrigued by the fact that the crescent’s apparent curve was made up of subtly angled straight frontages. They were also attracted by the more obvious fact that from the second-floor windows you could look out over the river and observe not only docks and shipyards but a great brooding welter of chimney pots, factory gables and steeples stretching off to the gaunt line of the Renfrewshire hills.
In the last house in Brunswick Crescent Anna Lindsay Franklin had been born and raised. At one time Uncle Donald and Aunt Lilias had resided nearby. And just across the park in a sandstone tenement that even now seemed new, Aunts Kay and Helen had courageously set up residence together.
In the same year that Lindsay’s mother had died, though, Aunt Helen had fallen sick and died too. Grieving Aunt Kay had moved across the park to keep house for her widowed brother and care for the newborn infant. Then Kay had found a husband of her own and decamped to Dublin where – so Uncle Donald claimed – she had become more Irish than a field full of leprechauns and more fertile than Macgillicuddy’s goat. Ten of Lindsay’s cousins, the McCullochs, dwelled near Dublin. But her six Scottish cousins all lived in Grandfather’s house where Donald and Lilias had returned after Grandmother had passed away and the big four-storey mansion had proved too forlorn for Owen to occupy on his own.
The Franklins were a close and affectionate family. Lindsay had schooled with the girls, romped at parties and picnics with the boys, and spent almost as much time at Harper’s Hill as she had done at home. On that sober Sunday afternoon, however, she felt oddly uneasy as she accompanied her father to her grandfather’s house, as if she sensed that some change was about to take place and, whether she liked it or not, she was bound to be affected by it.
She had turned eighteen in February and had shed the Park School’s whale-boned bodice, voluminously bunched skirts and the hideous crock-combs that had kept her unruly blonde hair in order. Even cousin Martin, three years her senior and a dreadful tease, treated her with a modicum of respect now. The boys had seen her in more becoming togs, of course, summer dresses and tennis blouses. But it was not until she blossomed into close-fitting skirts and narrow-waisted jackets that Martin, Johnny and young Ross really began to appreciate that Lindsay was not a rough-and-tumble tomboy and could not be flung about like a rugby football.
She was as tall as she would ever be, which was not very tall, alas. She had had her hair coiffed in a style that did not make her seem too coquettish in spite of its coils and carefully nurtured side curls. Papa had also treated her to a halo-brimmed hat and a pair of doeskin shoes with round toes and half heels that Aunt Lilias said added inches to her height, which was just as well, given that she was as small-boned and dainty as her mother had been.
It was a cool, dry April afternoon. Everyone who was anyone was strolling Dumbarton Road or along the paths of the Kelvingrove. Labourers, artisans, wives, sweethearts and children rubbed shoulders with draughtsmen and managers, even with the masters of the factories and shipyards. Those tall-hatted, frock-coated gentlemen and their ornamental wives did not regard it as beneath their dignity to share the Sabbath air and a few hours of leisure with their employees.
Lindsay’s father was no exception. He was as brisk and dapper as a redbreast and dressed like ‘Sunday’ most days of the week. It was not unusual to find him still wearing his morning coat come supper time. He claimed that he did so because he believed in traditional values. Lindsay suspected that he was embarrassed by boyish features upon which, at one time, he had tried to force maturity in the shape of a gigantic moustache until Nanny Cheadle had told him that it made him look like a wanted felon and he had quickly shaved it off.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Franklin. Fine day, is it not?’
‘Indeed it is.’ Hat off, a bow, not too effusive: ‘Would this be your good lady wife, by any chance?’
‘Well, if it isn’t, sur,’ the man said, ‘Ah’m in trouble.’
‘Not a word out of turn then.’ Arthur Franklin touched a finger to the side of his nose and winked at the matronly woman whose astonishment at being addressed by such an august person was palpable in her weary brown eyes. ‘Good afternoon to you, ma’am.’
‘Guid a-a-afternoon, Mr Fr-Fr-Franklin.’
Lindsay smiled too; she could not evade the responsibility of being a Franklin even if she was merely a female. Then her father took her by the arm and with a breeziness that suggested urgency rather than impatience, drew her on towards the fountain and the climb up Harper’s Hill.
‘Who was that?’ Lindsay asked.
‘His name’s McGregor, I think.’
‘One of your employees?’ Lindsay said.
‘One of our contractors.’
‘I’m surprised you remember them.’
‘Now, now, Lindsay.’
‘I don’t mean that they all look the same,’ Lindsay explained, ‘rather that they all look quite different when they’re dressed up.’
They walked rapidly up the sloping gravel path towards the gate. Behind them the university tower soared into a pale grey sky. Ahead, curiously foreshortened, were the mansions of Park Circus and Harper’s Hill. Grandfather’s house was not visible from the Kelvingrove. It was tucked away on the lee side, a few hundred yards from Lynedoch Street where Lindsay’s school was situated. She was so well acquainted with Glasgow’s west end that she could have found h
er way blindfold around the quadrants and terraces that crowned the hills above the leafy banks of the River Kelvin.
‘Afternoon, Mr Franklin.’
‘Afternoon, afternoon.’ Arthur checked his step. ‘Calder? Didn’t notice you sitting there. Sorry, old chap, can’t stop for a chat. Late as it is.’
‘Quite all right, sir.’ The tall man removed his hat and managed to give Lindsay a little bow – ‘Miss Franklin’ – before she was whisked away.
‘That was very rude, Papa,’ Lindsay said. ‘Couldn’t you have spared him a minute or two?’
‘No time.’
‘If,’ she said, ‘we’re in such an all-fired hurry to reach Pappy’s by three o’clock, why didn’t you find us a cab?’
‘Soon be there, dear, soon be there.’
‘Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?’
‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘You mean you won’t.’
‘I can’t because I don’t know. It’s your grandfather’s surprise.’
‘It’s not his birthday, is it?’
‘No, that’s not until next month.’
Papa helped her up the high kerb that separated the cobbles from the pavement. He paused to dab a bead of perspiration from his brow with one of several linen handkerchiefs that Miss Runciman had placed in his pockets. He put the handkerchief away and checked the time on his watch. Then, adopting an air of leisurely decorum that befitted the younger son of a shipbuilding tycoon, he escorted his pretty daughter around the corner and up the steps to the big, brass-handled front door.
* * *
Owen Franklin had no middle name and none of the ancestral debris that perpetuated itself in jaw-breaking monikers. He was lucky to have any sort of name at all, in fact, for he had been abandoned as an infant on the coal-tip at Franklin in the shadow of Penarth Head.
He was by no means ashamed of his humble origins, however. He liked to brag to his grandchildren in the Welsh accent that he had never managed to shake that his father had been a miner, his mother a fishwife and that he had been suckled on salt water in lieu of breast milk and weaned on coal-dust instead of saps. The sad truth was that he had no clue who his parents were. He had been reared in a foundlings’ house overlooking the mudflats at the mouth of the Ely until, aged ten, he was put out to work. If you believe in the awkward forces of destiny, which Owen undoubtedly did, it was at this point that fate stepped in and saved him from an undistinguished life of drudgery on the deck of a coastal collier or fishing smack.
He was apprenticed to one Hugh Pemberton who, in a smoky little forge on the banks of the Glamorganshire canal, was engaged in improving the efficiency of steam valves. In this aspect of mechanics young Owen demonstrated a talent so precocious that it amounted almost to genius. In the course of the next fifteen years he also acquired an aptitude for the management of money. When Cardiff eventually became too small for a man of his talents, he journeyed north to Scotland. He had just enough capital to set up on his own and ensure that his ‘bright ideas’ earned profits not for some new master but for himself.
It was not until 1874 that Owen plucked up the courage to purchase the sequestrated firm of Patrick Hagen & Hall, a near-derelict little shipyard tucked between Scotstoun and Whiteinch where, aided by a loan from the Bank of Scotland, he set about building river craft, ferries and small, fast steam launches.
Although labouring with metal and money occupied most of his attention, Owen also found time to fall in love. He met Katherine Forbes at a concert given jointly by the Perthshire Choral Union and the Glasgow Tonic Sol Fa Society. Halfway through a composition based on Haydn’s ‘God is Our Emperor’ Owen realised that he had found his soul-mate. He remained smitten with Kath throughout twenty-eight years of married life, rejoiced in the births of five children and mourned one poor little one, Mary, who died when she was eight months old. He was still in love with his dear wife when she fell ill and was finally taken from him early in the morning of a bright and beautiful May day, a tragedy that robbed him, at least for a while, of ambition in all its fiery forms.
‘Pappy?’
Lindsay did not have to reach up to kiss her grandfather’s cheek; he was hardly much taller than she was now. In the past decade it seemed that age had squeezed him down sinew on sinew so that his grandchildren could look him square in the eye and his sons, Donald and Arthur, appeared at long last like full grown men in his presence.
‘Pappy, what is it? What’s this surprise you have for us?’
‘Patience, child, patience,’ Owen Franklin said as Lizzie, the front-hall maid, removed Lindsay’s coat and carried it and her father’s hat off into the cloakroom beneath the massive staircase. ‘What did you tell her, Arthur?’
‘How could I tell her anything when you’ve kept me in the dark too?’
‘You don’t have to be so peevish,’ Owen said. ‘It’s no more than a bit of indulgence towards an old man that I’m asking for.’
‘What old man? You’re not an old man.’
‘Perhaps not by your lights, Arthur, but I’m rapidly steering that way.’
They were in the great hallway of the mansion, on the huge Indian rug that had been the gift of some foreign shipping agent or other. The rug added cohesion to the oak-floored entrance’s job-lots of armour and broadswords and the array of military muskets that Owen had purchased umpteen years ago when he still thought that the best way to please Kath was to turn himself into a duplicate of a Highland laird. In other rooms the decor was more acceptably maritime, with several fine Dutch sea-paintings on the walls, old chronometers, quadrants and sextants laid out in glass cases, and scale models of craft designed and built at the Franklins’ yard in Aydon Road.
There was no daylight, save a dusty shaft from the stained-glass window at the bend of the staircase. Lindsay had often wondered if this was what it had felt like to be incarcerated in the hold of an old wooden-walled slaving ship or the engine-room of one of the ironclads that had plied the Atlantic routes thirty years ago, for her grandfather’s house reminded her of some sort of vessel beached on the summit of Harper’s Hill.
The door to the drawing-room on the right of the hall was closed. She wondered where her aunt, uncle and cousins were, and the manservant, Giles, who as a rule was never very far away.
She studied her grandfather with a degree of apprehension. His wrinkled features and watery blue eyes were not threatening and, indeed, his wispy little smile seemed to hint that the surprise would not be unpleasant or turn out to be some trade matter that didn’t concern her.
‘Are you ready?’ he said.
‘Oh, get on with it, Pappy, for heaven’s sake,’ his son said. ‘Open the blessed door, let’s see what you’re hiding in there.’
Grandfather Franklin allowed himself one more chuckle, then, like a mischievous child, pushed the door open inch by inch.
‘What the devil!’ Lindsay’s father exclaimed. ‘It’s Kay. Our Kay.’
‘Didn’t expect that, now did you, Arthur?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me she was coming home?’ Arthur hissed. ‘If this is your idea of a joke, Pappy, I must say it’s in damned bad taste.’
It had not occurred to Lindsay that there had ever been animosity between her emigrant aunt and her father. She could not recall having heard him say anything detrimental about his sister. Now that she thought of it, though, he had made no effort to visit the McCullochs when business took him to Ireland. Donald had visited Dublin once or twice over the years and kept in touch with Kay by regular exchange of letters, but her father received the Irish news only at second hand. At that moment Lindsay realised that perhaps she didn’t know all there was to know about the Franklins’ chequered past and that there might be more to this family reunion than first met the eye.
Her father adopted the haughty air that he usually reserved for naval inspectors or agents from foreign governments, a chilly sort of arrogance that Lindsay did not care for. ‘Katherine.’ He weaved towards his s
ister. He obviously had no intention of falling into her arms and certainly felt no obligation to kiss her. ‘How nice to see you again.’
Allotted pride of place in this pride of Franklins, the woman was seated in a walnut armchair in the centre of the room. The massive gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece falsely enlarged the size of the gathering so that the room seemed crowded. In the mirror Lindsay could see the back of her aunt’s head and the dark hair of the young man at her aunt’s side. His hand was pressed to her shoulder as if to dissuade her from rising too hurriedly or, for that matter, from rising at all.
Aunt Kay remained steadfastly seated. She crossed an arm over her bony bosom, extended her right hand and permitted her brother to take it across his palm like an offering of fish. He dipped his head as if to sniff rather than kiss her ungloved fingers.
‘Still no manners, I see,’ Kay said.
Lindsay’s father stepped back.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Late as usual,’ Aunt Kay answered.
‘Minutes,’ Arthur Franklin said. ‘Mere minutes. If a certain party had thought fit to inform me that we were being honoured with your presence I’d have made a point of being on time.’
‘Well, you’re here now, I suppose,’ Kay said.
‘I suppose I am,’ said Arthur.
He moved away to seek protection from his brother or comfort from Aunt Lilias who, to judge from her expression, was amused by the display of sibling rivalry. Left in the firing line, Lindsay took a deep breath and with all the warmth she could muster presented herself to the lean, untidy woman who, just eighteen years ago, had been – albeit briefly – a mother to her.
‘Aunt Kay,’ she said. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you at last.’
The woman looked up. In her eyes, the pale blue unspeckled eyes common to all Owen Franklin’s offspring, Lindsay thought she detected an ember of affection. ‘Anna?’ her aunt said.
‘I prefer to be called Lindsay.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ her aunt said. ‘By jingo, you’ve changed. You were such an ugly baby. I thought you were one of Mr Darwin’s monkeys when the midwife first brought you out.’
The Piper's Tune Page 1
