Cross Channel (4 page)

Yorkey Tom was proud to be a Brassey man. Some of them had been with him from the start, like Bristol Joe and Ten-ton Punch and Hedgehog and Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby. With him since the Chester and Crewe, the London and Southampton, even the Grand Junction. If a navvy fell ill, Mr Brassey supported him until he was fit to work; if one died, he relieved his dependants. Yorkey Tom had seen some deaths in his time. Men crushed by falls of rock, blasters sent to kingdom come by the rash use of gunpowder, boys cut in half under the wheels of soil wagons. When Three-Finger Slen lost his other seven fingers and both forearms too, Mr Brassey paid him forty pounds, and would have paid sixty had Three-Finger not been drunk at the time and nudged the brake with his own shoulder. Mr Brassey was mild in his manner but firm in his decisions. He paid good wages for good work; he knew that ill-paid men took things slow and worked to a lower standard; he also recognised
weakness where he saw it, and wouldn’t allow tommyshops, or let travelling beer-sellers trade amongst his men.

Mr Brassey had helped them through that devil’s winter three years ago. Hungry navvies crowding the boulevards of Rouen; work on the line from Paris stalled, and nothing on offer back in England. Charity and soup kitchens had kept them alive. It was so cold that the game had gone to ground; Streaky Bill’s lurcher scared up hardly a hare all winter. That was when young Mr Brassey the contractor’s son had come out to witness the excavations and seen nothing but starving navvies on the idle. His father had forcefully and often repeated the opinion that philanthropy was no substitute for brisk work.

And they had had brisk work in the main, ever since the spring of 1841 when they’d started the 82 miles from Paris to Rouen. Five thousand British labourers brought out by Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie had proved insufficient; the contractors had been obliged to hire a second army of Continentals, another five thousand: French, Belgians, Piedmontese, Poles, Dutch, Spaniards. Yorkey Tom had helped train them up. Taught them to eat beef. Taught them what was expected. Rainbow Ratty had the best method: used to line them up, point at the work to be done, stamp his feet and shout
D—n
.

Now he was being examined by Mossoo Frog and his Madame and a boy who trailed behind, peeking and peering. Well, let them look. Let them see how carefully Mossoo Barber went with his razor: everyone knew what had happened when Pigtail Punch was made to bleed by a clumsy cut. Now they were commenting on his Johnny Prescott and his breeches, as if he were some specimen in the zoological gardens. Perhaps he should growl and bare his teeth, stamp his feet and cry D—n.

The curé of Pavilly was enthusiastic in his faith, protective of his flock, and privately disappointed with the tolerant worldliness of his bishop. The curé was ten years younger than the century, and had been a seminarist during the heretical and blasphemous events of Ménilmontant; later, he had experienced joyful relief at the trial of 1832 and the breaking-up of the sect. Although his current parishioners had little understanding of the intricacies of Saint-Simonisme - not even the pretentious Mlle Delisle, who had once received a letter from Mme Sand - the priest found it useful in his sermons to allude to the
Nouveau Christianisme
and to the diabolic behaviour of the followers of Enfantin. They provided him with helpful and chastening examples of the ubiquity of evil. He was not one of those who, in their observation of the world, confused ignorance with purity of spirit; he knew that temptations were put on earth to strengthen true belief. But he also knew that some, when faced with temptation, would endanger their souls and fall; and in his private solitude he anguished for those sinners, both present and future.

As the Rouen and Le Havre Railway began to scrabble its north-westerly curve from Le Houlme towards Barentin, as the encampments moved nearer, as livestock began to go missing, as the devil’s army drew nearer, the curé of Pavilly became troubled.

The
Fanal de Rouen
, which liked to take an historical perspective on contemporary events, knowingly observed that this
was not the first time that
les Rosbifs
had facilitated progress in the nations transport system: the first road between Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand had been laid down by British captives under the Emperor Claudius in
AD
45-46. The newspaper then offered a comparison between the year 1418, when the city had for months heroically resisted the onslaught of the English King Henry V and his fearful Goddons, and the year 1842, when it had succumbed without a struggle to the mighty army of Mister Thomas Brassey, whose warriors carried picks and shovels across their shoulders in place of the fabled longbow. Finally, the
Fanal
reported, without coming to its own judgment on the matter, that some authorities likened the building of the European railways to the construction of the great medieval cathedrals. The English engineers and contractors, according to such writers, resembled those wandering bands of Italian craftsmen under whose guidance local workmen had erected their own glorious monuments to God.

‘That fellow there’, said Charles-André when they were out of earshot of the English ganger, ‘is capable of shovelling twenty tons of earth in one day. Lifting it above the height of his own head and into a wagon. Twenty tons!’

‘Assuredly a monster,’ Mme Julie responded. ‘And with the diet of a monster.’ She shook her pretty head, and the student watched her ringlets tremble like the crystal drops of a chandelier moved by the breeze. Dr Achille, a tall, long-nosed man with the bright vigorous beard of early middle-age, indulgently corrected the fancies of his wife: ‘Then look at the sumptuous residence of the Minotaur and his companions.’ He pointed to a series of verminous, troglodytic holes gouged directly from the side of the hill. Scarcely superior were the turf shanties, long communal huts and rude
wooden sheds which they passed. From one of these dwellings voices were heard in argument, amid them a woman’s.

‘I understand that their wedding ceremony is most picturesque,’ Charles-André remarked. ‘The happy couple are made to jump over a broomstick. That is all. Then they are adjudged to be married.’

‘Easily done,’ said Mme Julie.

‘And easily undone,’ continued the student. He aspired to sophistication, and was keen to please the doctor’s wife, though afraid to shock. ‘I was told … it is said that they sell their women when they are done with them. They sell them … often … it seems … for a gallon of beer.’

‘A gallon of
English
beer?’ enquired the doctor, setting the student at his ease by a levity of manner. ‘Now that really is too low a price.’ His wife struck him playfully on the arm. ‘I would not sell
you
, my dear, for anything less than a tonneau of the finest Bordeaux,’ he continued, and was struck again, to his pleasure. Charles-André was envious of such intimacy.

In constructing the 82 miles of the Paris and Rouen Railway Mr Joseph Locke the Engineer was able merely to follow the leisurely descent of the River Seine between those two great cities. But in extending the line to Le Havre - where it would connect with steamer services across the English Channel, and thence with the London and Southampton Railway, completing the route from Paris to London - he was confronted by more strenuous feats of engineering. These difficulties were reflected in the tender price: £15,700 per mile for the Paris and Rouen, in excess of £23,000 per mile for the additional 58 miles of the Rouen and Le Havre. Moreover, the French
government insisted upon an investigation into the proposed gradients of the line. Mr Locke had initially proposed a maximum of 1 in 110. Some of the French argued for 1 in 200 on grounds of safety, a proposal which would either have imposed a considerably longer route, or else caused much additional cutting and embanking, thus greatly increasing the cost. Eventually, a compromise gradient of 1 in 125 was agreed between the parties.

Mr Brassey had established himself at Rouen once more, this time accompanied by his wife Maria, who spoke the French language fluently and was able to act as interpreter with officials from the French Ministry. They paid their respects to the Consul, and made themselves known at the Anglican church of All Saints on the Ile Lacroix. They enquired about a circulating library of English books, but none had yet been established. In her idle moments Mrs Brassey visited the great Gothic edifices of the city: St-Ouen, with its lofty triforium and glittering rose-window; St-Maclou, with its carved doors and grotesque Last Judgment; and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, where a verger in full regalia, with plumed hat, rapier and staff, imposed his presence upon her. He pointed out the circumference of the Amboise bell, the resting place of Pierre de Brézé, the effigy of Diane de Poitiers and a mutilated statue from the tomb of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. He indicated the Gargoyle Window, and recounted the legend of the Tour de Beurre, erected in the seventeenth century with money paid for indulgences to eat butter during Lent.

Mr Brassey’s men took the line from the terminus of the Paris and Rouen, swung it across the Seine on a new bridge, then bent it in a northerly loop through the hills and valleys of the city. They built the Ste-Catherine Tunnel, 1600 metres
in length; raised the Darnétal Viaduct; blasted out the tunnels of Beauvoisine, St-Maur and Mont Riboudet. They traversed the river Cailly just south of Malaunay. Ahead lay the river Austreberthe, which was to be crossed at Barentin by a fine and elegant viaduct. Mrs Brassey informed her husband about the Tour de Beurre, and wondered what edifices could be raised in their own day from the sale of indulgences.

‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.’ The assembled villagers of Pavilly duly expected an appeal for willing hands to improve the ragged path which ran from the church to the cemetery. But there seemed no immediate connection between the curé’s introductory citation from the Book of Isaiah and his subsequent comments. He began to warn his flock, and not for the first time, against the perils of a doctrine few had heard of and fewer still would have been tempted by. The farmer who kept the land at Les Pucelles stirred impatiently at the priest’s educated style. In the back pew Adèle, who had been worked harder than usual by her mistress that week, yawned openly.