A Dark and Distant Shore (79 page)

The engineering shop was Theo’s pride and joy, and all the machinery in it was new. The strangeness, here, didn’t surprise her. But elsewhere she had been taken aback to discover that she had forgotten the unforgettable. The sheer, naked savagery of the foundry, the heat, the glare, the stench and the din, had hit her with an impact as brutal as on that day in 1814 when her father-in-law, Duncan Lauriston, had introduced her to it for the first time. Later, during the twenty years when this had been her world, she had learned the trick of subordinating the whole to the parts, disciplining herself into a kind of selective awareness so that, in the end, she had been amused by the undisguised horror which was most visitors’ reaction to it, and their greater horror at the thought of a delicately bred woman being exposed to it day after day, week after week. But she had been away from it all, in the flesh, for five years now, and in the spirit for the three years before that, and she had lost her immunity. Even so, she wouldn’t have thought it possible for her to feel like this – stunned, panicky, irrelevant – in a place that had once been so much her own.

It wasn’t only the foundry that was doing it. The man who walked beside her was partly to blame, for although in looks, style and background Felix von Sandemann bore not the slightest resemblance to Duncan Lauriston, his manner recalled the old man unequivocally to her mind. Her initial encounter with Gideon’s successor had taken place, accidentally, just inside the main gate, and had been stiff and exceedingly stilted. Even while she scrupulously made allowances for his English, she had been annoyed over having to introduce herself to an employee in her own foundry. She had, perhaps, been a little abrupt with him. But gradually, it had begun to dawn on her that the trouble lay not with her, nor indeed with his grasp of the language, but with his attitude towards her. Under the automatic courtesy was something that might have been impatience or irritation but, she realized with sudden, speechless fury, was more like contempt. Did he –
dared
he? – consider her as no more than a nuisance of a woman, the interfering mother of the men who employed him?

The effect was curiously demoralizing. Vilia was long past the age of being upset by other people’s antipathy; making enemies was a normal business risk, and only the incompetent could be assured of universal liking. But the people who had hated V. Lauriston, ironmaster, had also respected her – and Felix von Sandemann didn’t. She wished very much she had told Theo she was coming today; she hadn’t, only because she had hoped to get the feel of the place again on her own, and wanted no ironically solicitous guide at her elbow. She couldn’t have foreseen that von Sandemann would wish himself on her instead.

He said something that she didn’t catch. ‘I beg your pardon?’ But she seemed to have lost the ability to pitch her voice on the level that, effortlessly, cut through the clamour, and had to repeat herself on something very near a shriek.
‘I beg your pardon
?
’

‘We have in the forge from tilt hammers to the new steam hammers to change begun. Steam has more power, and more control offers. We may now beams and plates larger make.’

Even his cavalier way with verbs didn’t obscure the fact that he was talking to her as if she were a complete ignoramus. Her lips snapped together. Although it was difficult to be curt at the pitch of one’s voice, she didn’t grudge the effort. ‘Mr von Sandemann,’ she exclaimed, ‘I am really very well acquainted with the principles and advantages of steam power. I should perhaps point out...’

Infuriatingly, he wasn’t attending, but had turned away to consult with a sturdy, grime-smeared workman about some problem to do with temperatures. It was like that all the way round the foundry, every time she tried to respond to his grossly over-simplified explanations of metal planing machines and punching machines, copying lathes and screw-cutting lathes, water-cooled coils for the tuyers, cast-iron bottom plates and rounded hearths, and the Württemberg system of using waste gases to preheat the blast – something Mungo Telfer had put into her own mind as far back as 1816, but that she had never quite managed to translate into practical terms. There had been an astonishing number of technical advances in these last few years, she reflected, and Theo and Drew had taken advantage of them all.

Perhaps her frustration over being continually talked down to had something to do with the weakness that assailed her when they were outside Number Three furnace shed. Either that, or one of the unaccountable leaps in body temperature that struck her sometimes without warning. A symptom of her age, she had been told. She felt the perspiration start from every pore, and her head began to swim, and it was as if all her limbs had turned to jelly. Her only desire was to strip off her bonnet and veil, her heavy pardessus and the gown and chemise beneath, and stand naked in a cool breeze until she became herself again. Weakly, she leaned against the wall of the furnace shed, seething with the knowledge that von Sandemann had probably been expecting her, all afternoon, to succumb to an attack of the vapours. That, after all, was what most females would have done. She inserted a hand between her throat and the high, constricting collar of her pardessus, and wondered how to say, without admitting defeat, that she would prefer not to go into the furnace shed.

As she straightened up, beginning to recover, he turned away as if to lead her towards the warehouses. He was not motivated by consideration, she was sure. And he certainly
ought
to take her into Number Three shed, where the new wet-puddling process had been introduced. With creditable decisiveness, she said, ‘I should like to see the new wet-puddling process, please.’

‘It differs not from the dry.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Surely! I understood it was no longer necessary to use men for stirring the metal in the furnace. I should like to see.’

He sighed extravagantly. ‘The furnace floor is with pieces of cooled slag coated. With the molten metal this combines a boiling effect to give. That is all.’

The funny thing was that his accent was almost flawless. She repeated. ‘I wish to see it.’

The hard brown eyes, with their yellow lights, looked down at her athwart a nose that was thin-boned and sharply hooked. He was an angular man in his late thirties, not much above the average height, with thick jet-black hair and tight, clean-shaven cheeks shadowed with blue-black near the jaw. There was a harsh distinction about his looks that might well be ruined, she reflected astringently, by anything as human as a smile.

‘If you insist,’ he said.

The air inside was pullulating with heat, but there was a group of men gathered close round one of the furnaces, their backs to the newcomers. Their sweating skins gleamed red-gold with the reflection from the fires. Overcoming her recoil at the searing temperature, and taking a moment to adjust to the contrast between the overall darkness and the pools of flame in the open furnace doors, Vilia recognized Theo in the centre of the group. His bright hair was stranded with damp, and he was clad in nothing but a pair of filthy under-breeches. It looked as if he were explaining something, for the men nodded, and one of them asked a question. Theo, replying, raised one arm and laid it round the shoulders of a brawny fellow beside him, the muscles of his back rippling smoothly under the marked skin. The fellow turned his head a little, and grinned as Theo’s hand tightened on his shoulder.

There was something disturbingly private and intimate about the scene that shattered as von Sandemann, with Vilia at his heels, approached the group. The quality of Theo’s smile, taut and vivid, changed, although she couldn’t read his eyes behind the darkened goggles.

‘Felix, dear boy,’ he drawled, ‘you should have warned me. I don’t believe my mother has seen me stripped since I was in the nursery.’

Was there a discordant note under the lightly sardonic words? Vilia couldn’t tell. Her mind was preoccupied with the threadlike tracery of scars she had seen on his back, most of them white and healed, but a few still angrily red. She could scarcely ask about them in front of the men, without sounding nauseatingly maternal.

Theo, tipping up his goggles, extended a hand sideways and snapped his fingers. One of the men picked up a shirt from a bench and handed it to him.

Shrugging himself into it. Theo smiled again more naturally and asked, ‘Has Felix explained wet puddling to you?’

She replied, acidly polite. ‘No. I believe Mr von Sandemann considers it beyond my poor female comprehension.’

Her son threw back his head and laughed. ‘For shame, Felix! My mother is not just a female, you know, however decorative. She probably knows more about iron than you do. I hope – I truly hope – that you have not damned yourself irrevocably by being condescending to her?’

Von Sandemann, Vilia was pleased to see, was wearing the faintest trace of a frown.

‘Vilia, my dear,’ Theo went on. ‘Come and look. It’s a very neat way of using chemical reactions to save puddlers like Jock and Willie here a good deal of heavy labour. They remember Joseph Hall in their prayers every night, don’t you, dear boys? We line the furnace floor with roasted slag – “bulldog”, you remember – and when we put the pig iron in, the oxide in the slag combines with the carbon in the pig to produce carbon monoxide under the surface of the metal. It comes to a kind of independent boil, and of course the pig decarbonizes at the same time. Fast, and far less wasteful than with human puddlers, even when I do it myself.’

The men didn’t seem to mind. They even nodded in agreement, and one of them said, ‘Aye, there’s nae doubt you’re the best, Mr Theo.’

She looked at them with a touch of puzzlement and Theo, as so often, read her mind. ‘It doesn’t cut human labour out altogether,’ he said. ‘Far from it. The metal still has to be worked up until it’s malleable, but the boiling makes that a less heavy task.’

‘I see. Well, I’m relieved that Jock – was it? – and Willie and the others haven’t been put out of a job by the new process.’ She smiled at them, and they bobbed their heads, embarrassed. She had the feeling she recognized one or two of them from the old days, although she had made it a rule to stay out of the furnace sheds – for the men’s sake, not her own. Smiling at them, again, more directly, she turned back to Theo. ‘Is it economical?’

‘In some ways, though it uses more fuel.’

‘That’s minor enough.’ She stopped herself with a sigh. ‘My goodness, I remember when we had to coke all our coal, and fuel was almost like gold dust. Changed days!’

Taking her by the elbow, he began to lead her towards the door. ‘I worked it out recently,’ he remarked. ‘What the hot blast process has done for us since we installed it, and the saving from raw coal. Do you realize that since 1828 we’ve cut the cost of pig by almost two thirds? We’re producing today at £1.15s a ton, while in the south they haven’t got below £3
yet. They’re being very slow to change to the hot blast. It’s a pity we haven’t been able to make similar savings on the refining and finishing sides.’

‘I shouldn’t let it worry you,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘There’s always going to be a demand for pig iron, whereas I have the feeling that someone – quite soon perhaps – may well find the answer to cheap steel production. And that could make a nasty dent in the wrought-iron market.’

‘Thank you!’ her son said with a grimace. ‘Don’t let the puddlers hear you say that, please!’

‘It’s beautiful stuff, steel. I’ve always been interested in it. I believe you would be well advised to consider the possibilities. Do you remember when you were a child, and I had some steel experiments done here? I couldn’t afford to go into it, far too expensive, but I had some very handsome jewellery made. I have it still.’

‘You wore it to the Peers’ ball in ’22, when George IV was here. I remember it very well.’ He looked at her consideringly. ‘Do I detect a note of revived interest in the foundry? I thought Kinveil had replaced it in your affections. You haven’t even wanted to hear about it for the last five years, and now...’

‘And now I do?’ Her smile was vivid, lighting up the dull November afternoon. The furnace flames, darting upwards to lick at the clouds, were reflected back to give a glow of colour to her face. ‘I want to talk shop! I’ve been turning into a vegetable, Theo, and it’s time I began thinking again. My mind needs exercise. You must tell me all about what’s going on!’

There was amused resignation on her son’s face. Felix von Sandemann, she noted with satisfaction, was looking distinctly sour.

She was tired of being tactful. They were back in Theo’s office drinking a civilized glass of wine and nibbling shortbread, crisp and not too sweet. Theo was his usual elegantly groomed self again, clean and fully dressed. He had always kept spare shirts and neck-cloths at the foundry, but Vilia wondered whether he was still wearing the filthy pantaloons under his fashionable checked trousers. Perhaps not. He had looked very much at home in the furnace shed. Although he had always said he would never ask the men to do what he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself, she hadn’t realized he took the principle to quite such lengths; she had always assumed, without really thinking about it, that he didn’t do more than make a few token motions with the stirring-bar. And yet – ‘There’s nae doubt you’re the best, Mr Theo’! In some ways, different ways, all her sons were a mystery to her.

Theo’s office, which had once been hers, had changed very little although it now had a satiny gleam that suggested he used it seldom, and mainly for entertaining customers. She had been startled to see two portraits on the wall that she had consigned, long ago, to the darkest corner of the cellars at Marchfield House. Duncan Lauriston and his wife, painted by some journeyman artist whose inspiration hadn’t extended to mastery of facial expression. With all trace of personality bleached out of his features, Duncan Lauriston had been quite a good-looking man. Shuddering, Vilia had averted her eyes, only to meet those of Felix von Sandemann. She shuddered again.

What would his office be like? Stern, efficient, austere, or ponderously ornate? He had been talking at length about ‘modern taste’ but she couldn’t tell whether such taste was his. She was much concerned lest he should impose it on Lauriston Brothers, ruining the reputation for craftsmanly simplicity that she had been at such pains to build up. Drew, it seemed, was enthusiastically on von Sandemann’s side. He would be.