A Dark and Distant Shore (84 page)

Even coming from Magnus, this statement had a blinding irrelevance that momentarily deprived Vilia of speech. She said, ‘But they grow the potatoes themselves. They would have to pay for any alternatives.’

‘Well? It’s not unheard-of to have to open one’s purse to buy food, is it?’

She took a deep breath. ‘But there is nothing
in
their purses.’

‘Rubbish!’ he replied. ‘I daresay nine out of ten of them have a sock full of money hidden away under the bed.’

‘Very clever of them, considering they live mainly by barter! Where would they get it, do you suppose?’

‘How should
I
know! Really, Vilia, it’s no concern of yours. They have to learn to sort out their own problems. Besides, it’ll probably turn out to be a storm in a teapot. It seems the farmers have started opening up the storage pits and there’s nothing wrong with the potatoes in them at all, so even if the new crop fails there will still be the old one to fall back on.’

But then the pits were opened at Lochcarron, and then in Ross and Sutherland and the Isles, and the potatoes in them had rotted. It was the same at Kinveil. Vilia racked her brains trying to discover some way of helping, but there was nothing she could do. Magnus had flatly forbidden her to lay out any money, and he meant it. She did, however, write to Theo and tell him to buy seed potatoes and send them to Kinveil. He was to use her private funds, although she would imply to Magnus that a collection had been made at the foundry and that the men had been generous. At least it would give the people of the estate something to plant, something to give them hope.

In July, even after weeks of drought, followed by unnatural storms and floods, the potato fields looked rich and green.

Magnus said, ‘There you are! I told you it was a fuss about nothing.’

Then, in August, drifting invisibly in with the rain and mist, the blight arrived. The plants drooped, their leaves turning black and slimy. When a spade was dug in, the potatoes it turned up were grey and oozing and smelt of decay. The transformation took place in the space of no more than two days. From survival to starvation in forty-eight hours. Within weeks, the whole potato crop of the Highlands had failed.

As winter began to set in, with cruel winds and snow and black ice, the authorities at last began to act – ‘if,’ as Vilia said bitterly, ‘running around squawking like decapitated hens can be called acting’. What it all added up to was recommendations and road-mending. The starving were to buy oatmeal, peas and beans and cabbages, with the money they earned from working on specially devised road schemes. No one knew where the oatmeal, the peas, beans and cabbages, were to come from, and there were too few roads to mend for the number of people who needed to work on them.

But miraculously, some of the great Highland proprietors put their hands into their own pockets and Magnus felt he owed it to his position to follow their example. ‘Not charity, mind you!’ he warned Vilia. ‘I don’t believe in it. But there’s no denying it would be useful to have some kind of road over the Black Mount to the Summer Loch. You can get the people working on that, if you like.’

‘Thank you,’ Vilia replied tightly.

Already, she had set Shona the task of raising public donations in Edinburgh, and Shona had cooperated with all her gentle heart. Grace, in London, was preoccupied with a charity gala designed to benefit the people of Glenbraddan – although Vilia suspected that by the time the gala took place it would all be too late – but Gideon, with the money raised by Shona, was able to buy barleymeal at a competitive price and send it north. ‘Blackmail, pure and simple,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I tell the merchants I am considering an article for the
Times-Graphic
on the subject of excessive profits in the food retailing trade, and the price comes down with a bump!’

Even so, there was crisis after crisis. It was madness to try and build a road over the mountains in the depths of winter, but Magnus wouldn’t hear of paying the men unless some work was done; it was twenty years since he had been up in the hills and he had forgotten what they were like. Sometimes, the food dispatched by Gideon couldn’t get through because the roads were blocked. And when Destitution Boards were set up in Edinburgh and Glasgow to collect and administer funds from public appeals, Shona found more difficulty in raising money; the Boards themselves were incompetent and wasteful.

Every day during that long, dreadful winter, the penniless and the starving drifted over the causeway to Kinveil in search of aid. All over the countryside people had left their homes looking for somewhere more kindly – whole families, fathers, mothers with children in their arms and others, bare of head and foot, at their skirts, sleeping when they could, begging a few salt herring or a bowl of thin broth where such was to be had. To the east and in the Lowlands, there were riots, but the people who wandered the Highlands showed a fatalism that broke Vilia’s heart.

Harriet Blair, of all people, proved to be a tower of strength. Vilia almost forgave her for her black bombazine and the sermons she served with the soup, because she never turned away the unfortunates whom Vilia sent on to Glenbraddan from Kinveil. Even Edward showed a flicker or two of humanity, if only because whatever Harriet did must be right.

It put them firmly back in Magnus’s black books. After the first few weeks of basking in the euphoria of good works, he began to relapse into a more normal frame of mind. Vilia was tiring herself out, he said, and uselessly. It was foolish to think she could save the world single-handedly. Besides, she was neglecting her domestic duties. His study hadn’t been cleaned for days; what were the maids doing with their time? Juliana hadn’t had a French lesson since last October. He was tired of nothing but salmon and mutton every night; it was time she started giving some attention to the menu again. It was time she sent someone out stalking; he fancied some venison for a change. Had she noticed that the share market was unstable? Were rail shares going to collapse? What did Theo say about it? Should he sell the scrip Theo had talked him into buying? He couldn’t afford to lose money, not when Vilia was spending it like water.

It went on and on, and in the end – one day when for some impenetrable reason he had walked into the castle kitchen and found Juliana and Lizzie timidly serving mutton broth to some thin, filthy, and probably disease-ridden children – the explosion came. What he and Vilia said to each other was, in effect, no more than what had been said over the Disruption, but underneath it was a far deeper bitterness. This time, Vilia could neither forgive nor forget his selfishness. And this time, because she refused utterly to obey him, he did not forget, either.

It had all happened more than two years ago now, two years during which they had lived in a state of armed truce, in a state of coexistence that was sometimes amicable enough but always and unfailingly distant. They heard each other, but didn’t listen, and neither of them cared at all.

Jermyn, Lavinia, and Peregrine James Lauriston arrived at Kinveil in November 1848, and not even Magnus was able to fault them at first. They had the most beautiful manners. Even Jermyn, who would have been too clever for Magnus’s comfort, was quick to recognize that intelligent conversation was not what was required and lapsed almost at once into a dreamy, absent politeness that gave his step-grandfather a very good opinion of him. Lavinia, too, found favour. She was a bright, pert child who was not in the least afraid of him, and he was disarmed. Indeed, as Juliana remarked crossly to Lizzie, he laughed at conduct in Lavinia that he would not have tolerated in them! Only about Peregrine James did he have reservations, detecting in him too much of his father – not in looks, but in that celestial belief in himself that had always been a source of acute irritation in Drew. ‘What’s he got to be so pleased with himself about?’ Magnus muttered to Vilia, who – herself far from doting where her youngest grandchild was concerned – replied, ‘He
is
only eight years old, and boys are often difficult at that age.’ Magnus harrumphed, and said he hoped he would improve soon, or he would wear out his welcome.

Christmas came and went, and New Year, and spring, marked by great floods that brought widespread damage, wrecking bridges and causing the Caledonian Canal to burst its banks. Summer arrived and the children were still at Kinveil, for the cholera epidemic was still increasing. By August more than a thousand people were dying every week in London alone.

Kinveil had settled down to a peaceful routine. Lavinia shared her schooling with Juliana and Lizzie, while Jermyn alternated between setting Peregrine James exercises that his brother complained were far beyond him and flying for refuge to the temporary laboratory that Vilia had allowed him to set up in the disused topmost room of the Kitchen Block. No one was quite sure what he did there, and since the day when he had tried to explain to Vilia about patent electric light, and long-distance explosions, and electric guns – about which he seemed alarmingly well informed – she thought, on the whole, it was safer not to ask. All she insisted on was that he spend some time outdoors every day. Three more ponies had to be acquired and stabled with Juliana’s and Lizzie’s pair, who were known as Honey and Oatcake because, as Juliana said, they went so well together.

In September, Theo arrived on a visit. ‘How gratifying,’ he remarked, as he surveyed all the faces assembled to welcome him. ‘If I were not naturally modest, I should be persuaded you were all delighted to see me.’

He exaggerated very little. Only Lizzie, a stranger to any sensation as positive as delight, and Lavinia, whose self-assurance was not proof against the satire in her uncle’s smile, greeted him with reserve.

Vilia had never seen him looking tired before, but his body seemed to have lost some of its resilience, and there was strain behind the suavity of his expression. The last three or four years, of course, would have been enough to exhaust Vulcan himself. The railway mania of 1845 had meant urgent pressure at the foundry, and the ‘battle of the gauges’ that followed had added its own problems. It made little difference to Lauristons’ whether the Great Western’s seven-foot gauge was generally adopted, or whether the royal commission settled for four feet eight inches as most other railways preferred, but there had been a flood of orders for extra rails from companies struck by the idea of trying a mixed gauge, with a third rail between the other two. Next had come the financial crisis of 1847, when the bottom dropped out of the railway market and shares became unsaleable. That was when Vilia had annoyed Theo quite deeply by finding herself unable to resist saying, ‘I told you so’. But although banks all across the country had been forced to stop payment, Lauristons’ was stable enough to ride the storm. Prudently, Theo had turned his attention to diversification. And still the crises had continued. One of them had been utterly unforeseen. In 1848, when it seemed as if all the continent of Europe was going up in flames, Her Majesty’s foreign secretary had been sufficiently perturbed to pass an Act for the deportation of ‘aliens of disreputable character, whose presence and conduct may be deemed dangerous to the peace and social order of these realms.’ And that had been the end of Felix von Sandemann, who was neither disreputable nor dangerous, but had succeeded in making personal enemies of one or two people who had done their best to make him appear so. That, anyway, was what Theo said, and Vilia – despite her private amusement – was bound to admit that he was hardly the kind of man to consort with revolutionaries.

However, Theo said, it looked as if things were beginning to calm down, if only for the moment. ‘What I have to do now is think and plan. Because on Perry Randall’s advice we are about to enter the American market at last.’

‘Indeed? It’s a long time since I have heard news of – Mr Randall. He and his family are well?’

‘I believe so.’

‘I don’t recall,’ she said airily. ‘How many of a family do they have now?’

‘Three. The two boys, Francis and Benson, and a girl, Reine. Odd name, isn’t it?’

He couldn’t know. He
couldn’t
know of those weeks in France at the house called La Chaumière de la Reine – ‘the queen’s cottage’. She said, ‘Yes, it is. But tell me, what are your plans for America?’ She was a little out of touch.

‘You know about the Gold Rush in California? Hundreds – thousands – of people looking for gold, and no roof over their heads in the meantime? Well, we have just shipped prefabricated, self-build houses to them in corrugated iron, each with three rooms and a store. We produced them in a matter of weeks; it was easy enough once the idea presented itself. And I expect they will sell very well.’

‘Ingenious!’

‘Yes. I can say so because it was the Moulding Shop foreman’s idea, not mine. He has a cousin among the gold-seekers. And the next step – although I scarcely dare mention railways to you nowadays! – is precisely that. Or should I say “those”? Last November, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad shipped its first carload of grain into the city. Perry believes that the Great Plains will soon be opened up, producing all the meat and corn the Eastern states will ever need, and that the railroad will make it possible.’

‘But if the – what was it? – Galena and Chicago company already exists, is it not too late?’

‘Well,’ Theo replied consideringly, ‘when I tell you that the first famous carload was transported over a whole ten miles of track...’

She laughed. ‘I see! And the Great Plains stretch for hundreds, I assume?’

He was opening his mouth to reply when there was a sudden roar, as if thunder had rolled within feet of their heads. The very walls seemed to shake, and the window was obscured for a moment by an avalanche of dust and what sounded like tiny pebbles or hailstones.

‘My God!’ Vilia exclaimed, her hand at her throat.
‘Jermyn!’

Juliana, listening with deceptive interest to Jermyn’s explanation of the manufacture and uses of nitro-glycerine, wondered fretfully what Lavinia and Lizzie were doing. Had they gone along the beach towards the village? Lavinia had been saying for days that she must collect some more shells for the shell picture she was doing. It was going to be quite pretty. Juliana would have liked to help. She wished her stepmother didn’t insist on her spending so much time with Jermyn when she would rather have been with the girls. It had been all very well when the Lauristons first arrived, but now, after almost a year, the reasons didn’t seem convincing any more.