Ghosts of Engines Past (35 page)

I arrived in mid-afternoon and began work straight away. After clearing out the accumulated rubbish of several days past from the manor itself, I moved on to the offices, which were in a shed beside the factory. The drafting room looked like any other, and the draftsmen had gone by the time I reached it in the evening. I confined myself to sweeping the floor, dusting here and there, cleaning the windows, emptying the wastebaskets, and cleaning the soot from the lamp glasses and polishing the reflectors.

 As I worked I examined the drawings and measurements that the draftsmen had been working on. There were several projects involving turbine pumps, and even on that first day I could see that this was no ordinary factory. Much of the work concerned a new steam turbine, powered by liquid oxygen and paraffin. I memorised the relevant figures. A small boiler was being developed that produced steam at an unbelievably high pressure. A scribbled note said that it was to pump fuel out of the main tank, but what manner of engine needed its fuel delivered at twenty atmospheres? A separate project involved what was called the steam chamber for the main turbine. It operated at a pressure of fourteen atmospheres, and even this had the force of a continuous boiler explosion. I was tempted to dismiss it as fanciful, but forced myself to keep an open mind. I took all the torn and crumpled papers from the wastebaskets to my room and examined them, then fed them into a stove while chatting to the cooks and scullions.

On the second day I again entered the drafting room at dusk. I was confronted by Walter Shelton himself. He was an alarming man to look upon. His clothes were all black, and the lenses of his spectacles were darkened, so that one could not see where his eyes were directed. His top hat had a death's head embroidered into it, and beneath this his hair reached down to his shoulders. Tiny silver tools were glued to his fingernails, such as screwdrivers, spanners, knives and even a magnifier. My first instinct was to turn and run, but I managed to not even scream.

“Can you read, wench?” he asked, without even a greeting.

“No, sir.”

“Read this.”

He handed me a newspaper. I feigned to look puzzled.

“I can't read it, sir. Will I be dismissed?”

“No, but you would have been if you had read anything. The secrets of this room must remain secrets. Scrub, polish, dust and sweep, but read nothing.”

“I cannot read at all, sir.”

“I wonder. You had orders to feed all the waste paper into the office fireplace and burn it there. Nothing is to leave here except dirty water. Were you told that?”

“Yes sir.”

He seized me by the arm and dragged me across to the fireplace. Forcing me to my knees, he took me by the neck and thrust my face down to the grate.

“What is this?” he demanded.

“A—a fireplace, sir,” I stammered, genuinely terrified.

“A
hair,
you damned spy scullion! One of
my
hairs. A hair that I left in the grate yesterday. It means no fire has been made here since then. What did you do with the crumpled papers and drawings?”

“It seemed wrong to waste paper, sir, so I fed them into the stove in the kitchen. You can ask the cook—”

“You mailed them to my father!”

“Please sir, I never mailed nothing, I can't write—”

He flung me aside, and as I got to my feet he took a revolver from his coat. It was plated with silver, and the barrel had been reworked into the shape of a dragon's head with ruby eyes. The open mouth was pointed directly at me as he thumbed back the hammer. With his other hand he pointed at the newspaper on the floor.

“Pick it up!” he shouted. “Read!”

“Please sir, I can't read.”

“Won't, not can't! Read, and be dismissed. Don't read, and die.”

“I can't read, sir. Please!”

I had bound my hair into a topknot, and it was this that his bullet passed through. It must have been deliberate, because had he meant to kill me he could not have missed at that range. I screamed, turned and fled. Walter ran after me, firing his gun again and again. As I ran out into the cobbled yard, I collided with a young workman. He took hold of me, then Walter burst through the doorway, waving his pistol.

“Get away from her, Tom Parker!” he shouted. “She's a spy.”

“Put the gun away, sir,” said Parker, pushing me behind him.

“I caught her red-handed.”

“Last month you shot a pigeon for looking through the office window, and before that you shot a dog for wandering into the workshop. Put the gun away, go inside and calm yourself. Have a drink.”

“She said she can't read. She lied.”

“You thought the pigeon could read too, sir. Put the gun down.”

“I'll not have spies in Wallsford Downs!”

“Put the gun down, sir.”

Walter fired a shot between his legs, and the bullet passed through the folds of my skirt. My defender did not move. I heard the hammer of the pistol click back again.

“Put the gun away, sir.”

“You're fired! You're a spy too.”

“Very well sir, but remember that I can write as well as read. I'll be sure to write to his lordship about all this unless you go inside and calm yourself.”

“Damn you. Damn you both.”

With that Walter turned away and strode back into the office. At that moment I was ready flee back to Oxford and go into hiding. I did not realise that I had just made a friend.

Tom Parker took me to the factory, explaining that the nurse had a room there. The factory was precisely what I most wanted to enter, but I tried not to seem eager. As we walked, I saw that it contained a small foundry and four work areas, but it was not laid out for the mass production of anything. I am a mathematician so I did not recognise everything that I saw, but some machinery matched up with what was in the drafting office drawings. There was a steam turbine being tested when I entered, and from the smell on the air it seemed to be fueled by paraffin.

A rail track had been laid all the way into the factory, and upon this was a very odd contraption called the long wagon. It was indeed long and narrow, in fact it was two tankers and a flatbed wagon bolted together.
It looks temporary,
I thought,
in fact it looks like the tanks have been loaded aboard to disguise it. It could carry something very long.
At the middle a death's head had been painted, along with the word HELLFIRE. The rest of it was painted black, from the bogies to the tanks.
Something long is to be transported at night,
I concluded.

The nurse checked both Tommy and myself, but apart from some torn hair and a bullet hole through my skirts, neither of us had been harmed.

“Does this mean I'll lose me job?” I asked as the nurse examined my scalp.

“I wouldn't worry luv, the daft young lordship shoots at people all the time. He likes
to look fierce to frighten off the spies his father sends.”

“I'm no spy. I might've got shot if that nice Mr Parker had not seen him off.”

“Young Tommy? He's a good boy, and brave. Already an engine driver, an' I reckon he'll be foreman afore he's thirty.”

I paused to look about as I left the nurse's office. A large, wedge-shaped thing the size of my room was being riveted together in the closest work area, and it trailed pipes and cables. It had a single window, and looked like the battle helmet of some giant cyclops. Tommy was waiting nearby, and he now walked over.

“What's your name then, lass?”

“I'm Jane, sir.”

“I'm Tommy, and there's no sir when talking to me. All this must seem like a big puzzle to you.”

“Oh, I'm used to not understandin' things above me station.”

“But that's not right,” he said very earnestly. “You should always try to better yourself.”

“But I am, young sir. I work hard and I save a bit every week in a real bank.”

“Aye, that's good, but it's not really bettering yourself. You must learn to learn to read, write and count.”

I giggled, and slapped his shoulder coyly.

“I'm just a scrubber girl. All that clever work's much too hard.”

“It's worth the effort, lass. For instance, do you know what you have in your bank account?”

“Er, no, but the man in the bank could tell me.”

“Would you know if he was lying?”

“No, but he's nice, so he wouldn't do that, would he?”

“Just as I thought. You, my lass, are going to learn to count and read, and it's I who's to be teaching you.”

Before I had even agreed he picked up a piece of coal and started drawing marks on a workbench.

“This is one,” he said. “And this is a plus sign, it means you add one number to the next number. Let's do one plus one. What do you get?”

“Two ones,” I said, trying to look as if I were making an effort. “Oh, er, that's two.”

“See?” Tommy exclaimed, looking very pleased already. “You could do simple adding up all along, but you never knew it. Now you're to take it a lot further.”

The lesson was one of the hardest of my entire life. Feigning ignorance of arithmetic is not easy when one has done original research on inductive progression analysis techniques, but my act was good enough to fool Tommy. The lesson had ended, and he was escorting me from the factory when one of the engineers called him over.

“Master wants long wagon taken te Doncaster tonight,” he said. “More flow tests.”

“All these tests, yet nary a sign of the big turbine,” said Tommy. “I'd wager there's a problem with the making of it.”

“I'd wager it can'ne be built. Ninety thousand horsepower in an engine that could fit in a bleedin' coal wagon. Ain't natural.”

For the next week Tommy took me through the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Although I tried to act a bit thick, I must have seemed to make amazing progress. At first I thought he really wanted no more than to get his hands up my skirt, but he behaved like a gentleman at all times. On the Saturday night he invited me to a dance in Doncaster. We danced until after midnight, and I had not been so happy since the dances of my childhood in Poland.

Every two or three days a conventional steam locomotive would be taken out onto the line and driven to its limit. It was enclosed in steel streamlining, and was achieving speeds in excess of ninety miles per hour. These trials were open to everyone, as the line passed by the manor house and workshops. I watched, but learned nothing new.

My impression was that Walter was experimenting with shapes suited to very high speeds. The experimental train seemed designed to fly rather than roll along tracks. I wondered if Walter was testing the technology needed for flight without leaving the ground. That made sense, in fact it was very clever because one could experiment without crashing. Of course the clever technology had been devised by a lunatic, but even lunatics can be clever.

That Walter was a lunatic was beyond question. When a fox hunt was led onto the estate by their desperate quarry, he rode out after them with a bolt action Lee-Enfield. It must have been the first time that the hunters had found themselves hunted, for they scattered as soon as he opened fire, as did the hounds.

“Any excuse to spy on my factory!” said Walter as he returned to the manor.

Apparently the fox escaped.

Meantime I noticed that my room was being searched. The signs were subtle, but as the daughter of a rather manic revolutionary, I was very good at watching for spies. Tommy had given me a slateboard and chalk to practice writing between lessons, so every evening I would work through my kinetic energy and thermodynamics equations, then wipe the board clean and write 'The cat sat on the mat' ten times for Walter to find when he next searched my room.

It was in the manor house that I made my second friend, and the contrast with Tommy could not have been greater. Walter's wife, Lady Caroline, hated Wallsford Downs, but was forced to live there. Because I was diligent about cleaning and trying to brighten the place, she took a liking to me. In my second week there I gently steered one of our conversations to Walter.

“I don't understand why young master Shelton has a different surname to his father,” I remarked as I took the curtains in Caroline's bedroom down to wash.

“What do you mean?”

“Why one's Raslin, and the other's Shelton.”

“That's the rules of peerage, girl. Lord Raslin is the First Viscount Raslin, but his real name is Walter John Shelton. His son, my husband, is Walter James Shelton.”

Father and son had the same initials! Having been raised by a paranoid revolutionary, I had developed a very good instinct for plots and conspiracies. At once I imagined some policeman writing a letter to the owner of a burgled house, a letter explaining that a burglar had been shot, and that his wife's jewelry had been recovered from the burglar's lodgings. Like me, the policeman may not have understood titles. He had addressed the letter to Walter J. Shelton instead of Viscount Raslin. Thus it was mistakenly delivered to young Walter.

That was not all, because no burglar keeps stolen jewelry for eighteen months. He would have passed his loot onto an underworld jeweler within a day or two. The gemstones would be removed and the precious metals melted down. That way nothing could be traced, even on the black market.  

I could imagine the burglar being hired to steal some jewelry by Lord Raslin, just as he had hired me. He would have been told to hold the pieces until instructed, then slip them to some prearranged fence who would make sure that they were discovered by the police and returned to Lady Raslin. Lord Raslin would need to be sure that Elizabeth would not live long in prison, otherwise Walter would have faithfully waited for her to be released. Did Lord Raslin have blood on his hands? Was Elizabeth murdered in prison? I began to fear for my own safety, and was tempted to run. Again.

“I suppose you have been told about Walter and me?” Lady Caroline asked as I put the curtains into a washbasket.

“I heard he had another sweetheart, but she died,” I said innocently.

“Better for me had she lived. Walter has never... well, why pretend, everyone knows. We have never shared a bed.”

I had not expected such an intimate revelation, and was not sure what to say.