Death of a Stranger (9 page)

It was a chilly day, alternate sun and rain, which was usual for late March, and of course there was no heating on the train. The metal foot warmers filled with hot water were restricted to first-class. Still, it was a lot better than the nicknamed “Parliamentary trains,” required to fill Lord Palmerston’s legislation that rail travel should be available to the ordinary people at a penny a mile.

Monk was delighted to get out at Rugby and stretch his legs, use the convenience, and buy a sandwich from one of the peddlers on the platform.

He also bought a newspaper to read on the next part of the journey. Having been in America at the very beginning of the civil war which was raging there, he was interested to see an article on the progress of the Union troops under a Major General Samuel R. Curtis, beginning a campaign in Missouri. According to the latest dispatches, the Confederates, outnumbered, had withdrawn to northwestern Arkansas.

He remembered with a shiver of grief the slaughter he had witnessed in the battle he had been caught up in during the previous summer, the uncontrollable horror he had felt, and Hester’s courage in helping the wounded. His admiration for her had never been more intense, more based in the hideous reality of the broken bodies she tried to save. Everything he had ever thought or felt about her before was seen through different eyes, her anger, her impatience, the cutting edge of some of her words now passionately understood.

He looked at the peaceful countryside through the carriage windows with a sharper gratitude for it, and an upsurging will to protect it, preserve it from violence or indifference.

He was pleased when the train pulled into the station in Derby and he was able to begin his search.

He spent all day in the city records offices looking at every purchase along the entire track from one border of the county to the other until his eyes ached and the pages swam in front of him. But he found nothing illegal. Certainly there were profits made, advantage taken of ignorance, and hundreds of families dispossessed of their homes-although there was also some effort made to find them new houses-and an enormous amount of money had changed hands.

Monk tried to bring back the skills he must have had with figures in his banking days, in order to understand exactly what had happened and where the profit had gone. He pored over the pages, but if there had been any transgression it was too cleverly hidden for him to find. Perhaps he would have seen it sixteen or seventeen years ago, but if he had had that skill then, he had lost it since.

Railways were progress. In a country like England, with its mines and stockyards and shipbuilding, its cotton mills and factories, canals would inevitably have given way to faster, more adaptable railways that could cut through mountains, climb hills, and cross valleys without the time-consuming and expensive business of locks filling and emptying, and the moving of tons of water. The destruction along the way was merely a part of that progress that there was no art or skill to avoid. Farmers, landed gentry, vicars, or the tenants of villages or towns would not have liked canals any better.

He saw articles with drawings of protestors holding placards, cartoons in newspapers and periodicals calling the roaring, steam-belching iron engines the work of Satan, whereas in fact they were only the work of industry and time. Corruption, if there was any, was in the nature of man.

He sat until his head ached and his shoulders were stiff, searching every record he had determined to. There was gain and loss, but it was only the ordinary fortunes of commerce. There were stupid decisions, beside those that he could have foreseen as mistaken with the wisdom of some half-recollected experience. And of course there were those which were simply bad luck-but there was good luck as well. There were errors of judgment, but small, a matter of distance, a mismeasurement here or there.

As he pored over the pages the work became more and more familiar to him. Time stopped, like a wheel moving a cog, and he could have looked up from the lamplight on the papers to see Dundas smiling at him, not the empty inn bedroom, or the lonely tables of the records office or the library.

It was the second night that he awoke in the dark, lying rigid in the bed, startled by the silence and with no idea at all where he was. There were still shouting voices in his head-furious, accusing, people jostling each other, white faces twisted with grief.

He was breathless, as if he had been running. Without realizing it he had sat up in the bed. His body was stiff. What was the dream? He wanted to escape, run and run and leave it behind him forever!

And yet if he did, it would follow him. His mind knew that. If you fled your fears, they pursued you. He could remember that much from the coach crash which had taken his past, and from the nightmares that had followed it.

Nothing in him was willing to turn and look at those accusing faces. He felt almost bruised by them, as if they could physically have touched him, so real had they been. But there was no escape, because they were inside him, part of his mind, his identity.

Very slowly he lay down again, against sheets that were now cold. He was shivering. The fear was still there, some nameless horror that even when he found the courage to look, or could no longer help it, held no form. He could remember the anger, the loss, but the faces themselves were gone. What did they think he had done? Taken their land? Cut a farm in half, ruined an estate, demolished houses, even desecrated a burial ground? It was not personal; he had been acting for the railway!

But it was acutely personal to those who lost. What was more personal than your home? Or the land your fathers and their fathers had farmed for generations? Or the earth in which your family’s bones were buried?

Was that what it was? The blind, terrified resistance to change? Then he was not guilty of anything but being the instrument of progress. So why did his body ache and why was he afraid to go back to sleep because of the demons in his mind which would return when he had no guard to keep them out?

Was it not land but the infinitely worse thing he dared not think of at all… the crash?

He had found nothing except the possibility that Baltimore and Sons had made too much profit from the land where the track had been diverted around the hill he had climbed with so much pleasure. Another, older survey had made it at least fifty feet less. With a skillful mixture of gradient and cutting, a tunnel would have been unnecessary. But the blasting would still have been expensive. Granite was hard and moving it was costly. Was the profit enough to justify calling it fraud? Only if he could prove foreknowledge and intent. And even then it was open to doubt.

The following morning it took Monk an hour and a half after leaving the town to reach the workings of the new railway.

It was a fine day with a light wind rippling the grass, carrying the scents of earth and spring and the sound of sheep in the distance. From the height of the horse’s back he could see the hawthorn hedges sweeping low, already with leaves bursting. Later he knew they would be heaped with white blossoms almost to the ground. He was following a track that climbed slowly up toward the summit over a mile away, beyond which lay the last curve of the railway line. The breeze was light and cool in his face, and sweet with the smell of earth and grass.

There was an acute pleasure in feeling the strength of a good animal beneath him. It was a long time since he had ridden, yet the moment he had swung up into the saddle, there was a familiarity to it and he was at ease. These great rolling spaces were at once a freedom and a resurrection of something quite different.

Far away to his right he could see the roofs of a village half hidden by trees, the church spire towering above them, and elms scattered over green parkland.

A rabbit shot out of the grass almost at the horse’s feet, white tail flashing, and ran a dozen yards before disappearing again.

He half turned to speak, smiling, prepared to say how surprised he was to see it, and then realized with a jolt that there was no one else with him. Whom had he expected? He could see him as clearly as if he had been there, a tall man with white hair, a lean face, prominent nose and dark eyes. He would be smiling also, knowing exactly what Monk meant so there was no need to elaborate on it. It was a comfortable thought.

Arrol Dundas. Monk knew it as surely as if it had happened. They had ridden together on bright spring days like this, up hills in all kinds of country, towards rail tracks half finished where hundreds of navvies worked. He could hear the sounds of shouting, the thud of picks on earth, the ring as the iron hit stone, the rumble of wheels on boards as if they were only beyond the rise. He saw in his mind’s eye the bent backs of men, bearded as navvies nearly all were, lifting shovels, pushing barrows of rock and earth, urging the horses on. He and Dundas would be going to see the progress, to estimate the time till completion, or to sort out some problem or other.

Here there was silence but for the wind carrying the distant sounds of cattle and sheep, the occasional bark of a dog. Half a mile away he could see a cart moving along a lane, but he could not hear the sound of the wheels in the muddy ruts; the cart was too far away.

What kind of problems? Protesters, angry villagers, farmers whose land was divided, saying their cows were giving no milk because of the disturbance and when the engines were roaring through, shattering the peace of the fields, it would only be worse.

It was different in towns. Houses were knocked down, and scores of people, hundreds, were dispossessed. He dimly remembered some plan to use the arches of viaducts to house the homeless. There were to be three classes of accommodation-different qualities, different prices. The lowest was to be on clean straw, and free. He could not remember if it had ever come about.

But there had been no moral or practical decision to make. It was progress and inevitable.

He tried to snatch back more detail of memory, not the emotional but the practical. What had they spoken of? What did he know of the land purchases in detail? What was the fraud involved? Wedgewood had said there was no such thing as land across which it was not possible to make a track. It was only a question of cost. And navvies knew how to set up rails on pontoons, if necessary, which could cross marshland, shifting streams, subsidence, anything you cared to think of. They tunneled through shale or clay, chalk, sandstone, anything at all. Again, it was only cost which made the difference. Back to money.

All land had to be purchased. Was it as simple as money passed back to the officer of the company who decided which route to take? A track diverted from one path to another, the officer bribed by the landowner in order to keep his property intact? Or otherwise worthless land sold at an inflated price, and the profits shared back with the officer, straight into his own pocket, defrauding the company and the investors?

That was obvious, but was it so much that it had been overlooked, at least for a while? What arrogance, to imagine they could escape forever.

Had Dundas been arrogant? Monk tried again to recapture a sense of the man he had once known so well, and the harder he looked the more any clear remembrance evaded him. It was as if he could see it only in the corner of his vision; focus on it and it vanished.

The wind was growing warmer across the grass, and far above him, piercingly sweet, he heard skylarks singing. It was timeless. It must have been like this when trains were only a thing of the imagination, when Wellington’s armies gathered to cross the Channel, or Marlborough’s, or Henry VIII’s for that matter, bound for the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Why could he not turn in the saddle now and catch some clearer glimpse of Dundas?

The brightness of the sun on his face brought back a feeling of affection and well-being, but it was no more than that, a remembrance of being utterly comfortable with someone, laughing at the same jokes, a kind of happiness in the past that was gone, because Dundas was dead. He had died alone in a prison, disgraced, his life ruined, his wife isolated, no longer able to live in the city that had been her home.

Had he had children? Monk thought not. There were none he could recall. In a sense Monk himself had been son to him, the young man he had nurtured and taught, to whom he had passed on his knowledge, his love of fine things, of arts and pleasures, good books, good food, good wine, good clothes. Monk remembered something of a beautiful desk, wood like silk, shining, inlaid, a depth to the color like light through a goblet of brandy.

He had a sudden sharp vision of himself standing before the looking glass in a tailor’s rooms, younger, thinner in the shoulders and chest, and Dundas behind him, his face so clear the tiny lines in the skin around his eyes were etched sharply, telling of years of squinting against the light, and quick laughter.

“For heaven’s sake, stand up straight!” he had said. “And change that cravat! Tie it properly. You look like a popinjay!”

Monk had felt crushed. He had thought it rather stylish.

He knew later that Dundas was right. He was always right in matters of taste. Monk had absorbed it like blotting paper, taking a blurred but recognizable print of his mentor.

What had happened to Dundas’s money? If he had been found guilty of fraud, there must have been a profit somewhere. Had he spent it, perhaps on fine clothes, pictures, wine? Or had it been confiscated? Monk had no idea.

He breasted the rise, and the panorama that spread out in front of him took his breath away. Fields and moorlands stretched to the farther hills five or six miles distant and around the curve of the escarpment on which he sat. The unfinished track snaked over farmland and open tussock toward the sudden dip of a stream and an adjoining marshy stretch across which spanned the incomplete arches of a viaduct. When it was finished it would be over a mile long. It was a thing of extraordinary beauty. The sheer engineering skill of it filled him with a sense of exhilaration, almost spiritual uplift at the possibilities of man and the certainty in his own mind of what it would be when the last tie was driven in. The great iron engines with more power than hundreds of horses would carry tons of goods or scores of people at breakneck speeds from city to city without resting. It was a marvelous, complicated beauty of strength, the force of nature harnessed by the genius of man to serve the future.

He remembered his own words: “It’ll be on time!” He could see Dundas’s face as clearly as if he had been there, hair a little windblown, skin burned, narrowing his eyes against the light. Monk was stung by loneliness that there was nothing but miles of empty grass rippling over the long curve toward the valley, broken by a few wildflowers, white and gold in the green.

He could remember the joy of it like a beat in the blood. It was not money, or gain of any natural things; it was the accomplishment, the moment when they heard the whistle in the distance and saw the white plume of steam and heard the roar of the train as it swept into view, a creation of immense, superb, totally disciplined power. It was a kind of perfection.

Dundas had felt exactly the same. Monk knew that with certainty. He could hear the vibrancy in his mentor’s voice as if he had just spoken, see it in his face, his eyes. Time and again they had ridden until they were exhausted, just to see a great engine, boiler fired, belching steam, begin to move on some inaugural journey. He could see those engines, green paint gleaming, steel polished, great wheels silent on the track until the whistle blew. The excitement was at fever pitch, the railmen with faces beaming as at last the great beast stirred, like a giant waking. It would gather speed slowly-a puff, a gasp, a turn of the wheels, another, and another, the power as huge and inevitable as an avalanche, albeit man-made and man-controlled. It was one of the greatest achievements of the age. It would change the face of nations, eventually of the world. To have a part in it was to shape history.

Dundas had said that. They were not Monk’s words. He could hear Dundas’s voice in his head, deep, a little edge to it, a preciseness as if he had practiced to lose some accent he disliked. Just as he had taught Monk to lose his lilting country Northumbrian.

What had Monk really felt for Arrol Dundas? It had probably begun with ambition and, he hoped, gratitude. Surely later on affection had been the greater part? What he remembered now was the sense of loss, the absence of that warmth of friendship, and the certainty of having owed Dundas so much more than knowledge and advantage, but things of the inner self that could never be repaid.

He tried to put together more of the pieces, memories of laughter shared, simple fellowship in traveling. It was not only riding up hills like this on horseback, but sitting in public houses somewhere, the sun shining on a stretch of grass by a canal, bread and pickles and the smell of ale, voices he could not place. But the feeling was the same-comfortable, looking to both past and future without fear or darkness.

It should have been like that now. He had found the woman he truly loved, far better for him than the women he had wanted then, or thought he wanted. In spite of the fear at the front of his mind, he smiled at his own ignorance, not of them so much as of himself. He had thought he wanted softness, pliancy, someone to answer his physical hungers, be there to provide the home that was the background for his success, and at the same time not intrude into his ambitions.

Hester was always intruding; whether he intended her to be or not, she was part of all his life. Her courage and her intelligence made it impossible for him to exclude her. She demanded his emotions. She was a companion of his mind and his dreams as well as of his physical self. What he imagined women to be had been startlingly incomplete. At least he had not committed himself to someone else, and hurt both himself and whoever she had been.

He jerked himself back to the present and stared below him. There were laborers all over the place, hundreds of them, swarming, tiny and foreshortened in the distance. About half a mile before the viaduct there was a ridge, and they were cutting through it. He could see the pale scar of the rock face and the slope where men were “running” the barrow-loads of earth and stones up to the top, balancing with high skill on the narrow planks. It was one of the most dangerous jobs. He knew that. A slip could cause a fall, with the weight of the load crashing on top of him.

They were almost through. It was not quite high enough to require a tunnel. He could remember the brickwork, the digging, the shoring-up of tunnels. The smell of clay was in his nostrils as if he had left it minutes ago, and the steady sound of dripping from roofs, the wet splashes on the head and shoulders. He knew the labor was backbreaking. Men sometimes worked for thirty-six hours with no more than a few minutes for food, then were replaced by another shift, also working night and day.

He urged his horse forward and went carefully down the incline, following what track there was, until he was on the level and only a hundred yards from the rail. Now the noise was all around him, the thud of pick heads hitting rock and earth, the rattle of wheels on the wooden runs up the cutting, the ring of hammers on steel, voices.

The nearest man to him looked up, his shovel idle in his hands for a moment, his back straightening slowly. His skin was caked with dust and the sweat cut rivulets through it. He regarded Monk’s casual clothes and well-cut boots, and the horse standing at his shoulder. “Yer one o’ the surveyor’s men?” he asked. “ ’E in’t ’ere yet. Yer a day soon.” He half turned. “Eh, ’Edge’og!” he shouted at a short, heavy-shouldered man with a shock of gingery hair. “Yer sure yer in the right place, then?”

There was a guffaw of laughter from half a dozen men further away, and they all resumed their digging and shoveling.

Hedgehog screwed up his face. “No, Con, we’d better start all over an’ dig through that damn great ’ill over there!” he replied.

“Three weeks, mebbe,” Con said to Monk. “If that’s wot yer want ter know. I in’t see’d yer ’ere before. Yer come up from Lunnon?”

Apparently they assumed he was from Baltimore and Sons’ main office.

“Where’s your foreman?” Monk enquired.

“I’m the foreman, Contrairy York,” the first man replied. “Like I said, three weeks. Can’t do it no faster.”

“I can see that.” Monk squinted along the line of the rail. The last bit of the viaduct would take another two weeks at least, and then there were sleepers to lay, the rails themselves to lay and tie. It was double track most of the way, single through the cutting and as far as the other end of the viaduct. There must be a plan for timetables and trains passing. A length like this was far too expensive to use only one engine at a time on.