A Dark and Distant Shore (34 page)

He shook his long head lugubriously. ‘Aye, well. It would mean taking men from other work.’

There was one item that, for no particular reason, had stuck in her mind. ‘I see that making the working gears for
a Boulton and Watts forge-hammer engine takes one man a whole month, and yet we can’t charge more than two guineas for them. How much work could that man do on simpler things like beams and plates?’

It was a home question, and Moultrie’s teeth appeared to stick for a moment before he replied. ‘Aye, well. I’d have to think about that.’ It was a concession – or something that might be developed into one.

Her first victory. She didn’t tell him that, after the canal work, she hoped to tender for some of the iron bridges that were being planned on the lines of the ones recently put up at Bonar and Craigellachie. Nor did she mention Count Rumford’s stove and the possibility of using waste furnace heat to drive the boilers and blast engines. Least of all did she talk about architectural ironmongery. One thing at a time.

Writing to Mungo helped her keep it all in some kind of perspective. She even began to assess the things that were preying on her mind according to the difficulty she had in treating them lightly. She didn’t know, although she suspected, how anxiously Mungo awaited her letters. She did know what a lifeline his were for her. Although Kinveil was only two hundred miles away, she felt as much of an exile as some empire-builder on the other side of the globe, and a hundred times more of an exile than she had felt in London.

This puzzled her for a while. And then she realized that, when she had been in London, her hands had always been tied. Whether living with Magnus and Lucy, or married to Andrew, the initiative had never been hers. By saying yes to Andrew she had deliberately, and she had thought irrevocably, cut herself off from Kinveil. But this time nothing was irrevocable. She had made her choice, and chosen the foundry, but she could abandon it just as easily. Indeed, assaulted by the everyday realities of it, she couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to embark on it. It was only pride that kept her here. Forlornly, she recognized that the sense of exile was stronger and harder to bear because she
could
go to Kinveil if she wanted to, but that, for everyone’s sake, she mustn’t. Although for Mungo’s sake she couldn’t stay away entirely. She was trying, still honestly trying, to break free, but no one was helping her.

Mungo’s letters were like some drug, which she depended on while trying to reject. There was nothing he could say in them that didn’t set her either dreaming or despairing. There were days when, sitting at her desk, her eyes would look right through some wretched drawing for a sugar mill that had come in from the West Indies, and see instead Ewen and Robbie and Johnnie hauling in the seine nets. Days when Wally Richards’s attar of roses dissolved into the sharper scents of seaweed and peat smoke. Days when the shriek of the blast pipes was blunted into the roar of a September gale, wet and powerful and bracing.

Sometimes he wrote about things that all her senses rebelled at. In July, he reported that Charlotte’s baby had arrived, ‘a bonny wee girl who’s to be called Shona. Charlotte’s recovering well enough, but she’s got no warmth for the bairn.’ Vilia found she couldn’t read the words that came next. The pain, it seemed now, would never leave her. The pain of the betrayal and, more, of the year of silence that had followed. Not a word. For all she knew, he might be dead.

It was half an hour before she brought her eyes into focus again.

‘I can’t think,’ Mungo wrote,

that Charlotte’s attitude can be good for the other bairns, though Edward hasn’t even noticed, maybe. I’ve never come across anyone so insensitive before. A real wet blanket. Luke calls him The Wastepipe, because he says that after an hour in Edward’s company he feels as if someone has pulled the plug out of his big toe, so that all his life essence has drained away with a horrible whoosh. From which you’ll gather that Luke’s growing up. The two girls are an unlikely pair. Georgiana – she’s eight now, or nine, I never remember – is a bright wee thing, full of fun and gig, while Grace is as earnest and bossy as you could well imagine. Wants to take all the ills of the world on her shoulders. And if she’s like that already, God knows what she’ll be like when she grows up! Sometimes I find it hard to remember that it’s she who’s Perry Randall’s child, and Georgiana who’s a Blair. It ought to be the other way round.

Och, well, that’s enough about Glenbraddan. The weather here’s terrible, if that cheers you! I need one of your letters to brighten me up.

He wrote again at the beginning of September, urging her to do what she wanted to do more than anything in the world.

Are you not going to be able to come to Kinveil for a wee break? Luke and I would be blithe to see you. He came back last month – after being in London since I sent him off there so hurriedly in March – with Henry Phillpotts still in tow, drat it! Magnus came too for a fortnight, and maybe it’s a sign of age, but these duty visits fairly rile me. One of these days, I’m going to have to put my foot down and insist that he and Lucy come here permanently. That way, at least, I’ll be able to set him on the right track with the estate. If he doesn’t come till I’m dead, God knows what kind of mess he’ll make of things. Don’t worry, though. I’m not feeling ill, just looking ahead.

I was delighted to hear that you’ve seen James Hope and he’s giving you a trial for the lock gates on the Canal. I remember him as a very clever fellow, though I aye had to be careful not to talk politics with him, me being a Whig while he’s a red-hot Tory. Anyway, I’m glad my introduction came in useful to cushion the shock when V. Lauriston, ironmaster, was ushered in and turned out to be a lady. We should be ashamed of ourselves, misleading the poor fellow like that!

Vilia could almost hear him chuckle. But she wrote back to say she couldn’t leave the foundry when she was just getting to grips with things. Maybe at the New Year. But at the New Year the roads were impassable.

The weeks passed, and the months, and it became clear to Mungo that he was going to have to provide her with a real reason for coming, not just an excuse. Craftily, he began bombarding her with information about the latest developments on the Caledonian Canal. There was a new kind of dredging machine being tried out; if it worked, there’d be a demand from elsewhere for something of the sort. It was the kind of machine Lauriston’s could make – ‘no bother!’ That didn’t bring her. Then an old bridge near Invergarry collapsed to let a postchaise – ‘horses, occupants, and all’ – fall into the water, though none of them was much damaged. ‘But a wee cast-iron bridge would be just what the doctor ordered.’ That didn’t bring her either.

Not until the spring of 1818 did she come, while the snow was still lying. It was a bridge that brought her, after all, this time the one near Glenbraddan that had been put up when the Skye road was being built. It was made of wood, and had looked solid enough to stand for a hundred years. But the winter of 1817–18 was unusually severe, and Charlotte’s grieve, who had been busy with the forests, had piled up four thousand birch logs on the river bank, ready to be floated down when the weather improved on the first stage of their journey to the north-east, to be used for making staves for herring barrels. The floods in January were tremendous, and on one wild night all the logs had been swept into the torrent. There was a log jam of impossible dimensions, and it was the bridge that lost the battle. For the people who used the road from Skye to Loch Ness it was a disaster, and a temporary replacement had to be flung up in haste. Something more substantial was needed, in stone or cast iron.

Vilia was competent, and rather impressive. She knew now how to study a site, assess what was required, and give a general estimate – on the spot – of time and costs.
The local Roads superintendent wouldn’t have hesitated about recommending Lauriston’s to his superiors, if only she had been a man. As it was, he muttered, and dithered, and procrastinated.

She stayed with Mungo for a week. She hadn’t brought the children, and she looked tired and preoccupied, and took all of two days to stop being brisk. But although she didn’t laugh at all, and smiled only seldom, she talked a good deal and Mungo was reassured. When the superintendent finally gave in and decided to forward her estimate to the appropriate quarter, Mungo was so proud of her he was almost speechless.

There were things Mungo didn’t tell Vilia, though he would have been hard put to it to explain why. There was no real reason why he shouldn’t have mentioned that he’d heard from Perry Randall, even if he kept it from Charlotte – who was better off not knowing – and from Magnus, who would have started carping about ‘that fellow’ all over again. He did tell Luke, though he didn’t show him the letters and swore him to secrecy.

But Vilia and Perry had met only twice, once at that dratted ball, and once, according to Magnus, at Ascot. Why load his letters, long enough already, with information about someone she scarcely knew?

The first note came in the summer of 1818, brought from Canada to Liverpool in the baggage of an acquaintance, and posted on from there. It was brief. The voyage, Perry said, had been trying, and by the time the brig had made its landfall, forty passengers had been dead of typhus and a dozen others of acute dysentery. The
Rapido
had not lived up to its name.

Nova Scotia is not unlike the Highlands, but I don’t think I was made to break virgin soil. I moved over to Montreal after the first winter, but am finding it difficult to make progress. Everything is in the hands of the early-established settlers, who form a kind of aristocracy and grant favours only to those and such as those. It is, you must agree, a neat irony that I, with my background, should for the first time be on the receiving end of this kind of condescension. The biter bit, in effect. I wish I had been here a few years ago, when smuggling from Canada to the United States was quite
de rigueur.
As it is, I have been trading in furs from the west, but that will almost at once come to an end, for it looks as if free Canadian access to that part of the fur country is to be forbidden, and besides, a new convention has at last decided where the western boundary between Canada and the States should lie – along the 49th parallel, if you care! – which will take all the spice out of life. Undelineated borders have their uses.

Mungo sniffed to himself, a little disapprovingly, and it was almost as if Perry had anticipated his reaction.

So it will, no doubt, please you to know that I am about to decamp for New York, where I hope to find some more congenial, respectable, and perhaps even rewarding occupation. I must only add that I will never cease to be grateful for your kindness and understanding during my last weeks in the old country. When opportunity offers, I will write again. Please give my kindest wishes to anyone who will find them acceptable!

It was more than two years before the next letter arrived. Mungo hadn’t replied to the first, because there had been no return address, though that wasn’t surprising.

It may amuse you to know that I have become a drummer. No, not that kind! A drummer here is a kind of salesman, and most of them inhabit the narrow and – in more senses than one – exceedingly crooked thoroughfare known as Pearl Street, New York, which is where importers and store keepers from all over the country do their buying and selling. The store keepers come into town every year, or every few years, to do their stocking up, and are recognizable from a mile away by their well cared for but exceedingly antiquated Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and their cowhide boots, which are cut to a pattern that compromises between right foot and left foot, so that one may pull on whichever boot comes to hand first. Convenient, you must admit, if not precisely elegant. I have decided that I like America.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I discovered that this country has no equivalent of the commercial travellers with whom we are so familiar at home, those rubicund old gentlemen in their top hats and brass-buttoned coats with samples in their saddlebags and whips in their hands, who had begun to penetrate even into the glens by the time I left. It seemed to me that the American backwoods might welcome a travelling ‘drummer’, and since the only saleable objects of which I have any worthwhile knowledge happen to be guns, I have become a gun salesman. Everyone here, outside the cities, needs a gun, if only to fill the pot, and most appear to be made by local blacksmiths. Even so, there are some fine gunsmiths, and I have an arrangement with a man in Pennsylvania for selling his Kentucky rifles, which, like Ezekiel Baker’s, are based on the old German jaeger. I hope soon to be able to offer a new kind of hand gun, too, a version of the pistol made by a man named Collier, with a revolving cylinder that fires five shots before it needs reloading. The future, I think, is promising, though my profits are still very small.

Mungo was pleased. It sounded as if the laddie was settled into something at last, and even if it didn’t sound over-respectable at the moment, what did that matter? Charlotte would have a fit at the thought of her husband becoming a commercial traveller!

How much I would like to have news of you! But I move from inn to inn around the country, sleeping on the floor to avoid the bedbugs – which are omnipresent – and jouncing along in my buggy over roads surfaced with cross-laid tree trunks so that they resemble corduroy to the eye, if not to the base of one’s spine. I have no settled address to give you. Nor are the store keepers who act as postmasters very enthusiastic about holding letters for a recipient who may not turn up for a year or so to claim his mail and pay the postal dues!

Pray give my kindest remembrances to Luke, and also to Charlotte, if you think they will be acceptable. I find it difficult to credit that little Grace must be eight years old by now. Strange to think that my only child is growing up half a world away. Strange and sad. Knowing that so much of the fault was mine doesn’t make it easier, however much I try to think of the past as water under the bridge. The present, however, has its own interest and challenge, so I don’t repine too much. My warmest regards to yourself, of course.