The Touch (8 page)

They had passed from formality to calling each other by their first names within a week, and had established a routine that did much to alleviate Elizabeth’s loneliness. Theodora came up on the car at ten o’clock each weekday morning; they did the theory of music until lunch, which they ate in the conservatory, then transferred to the piano for those interminable scales. At three Theodora took the car down to Kinross again. Sometimes they walked in the garden, and once took the snake path until Theodora could point out her little house to Elizabeth; she was entranced with it, so proud of it.

But she didn’t invite Elizabeth to visit it, and Elizabeth knew better than to ask. Alexander had been firm on that point; his wife was not to visit Kinross for any reason whatsoever.

WHEN ELIZABETH missed her second lot of courses, she knew that she had conceived. But what she didn’t know was how to tell Alexander. The trouble was that she still didn’t really know him, nor was he the kind of person she thought she might want to know. Rationalize her fears though she did, he still loomed in her mind as a rather remote figure of authority, immensely busy—she didn’t even know what to talk to him about! So how could she give him this news, which filled her with secret joy that had nothing to do with the Act or with Alexander? No matter which way she turned it over in her mind, she couldn’t find the words.

Two months after she arrived in Kinross House, she played Für Elise for him; for once he had come home to dinner. Her performance delighted him, as she had wisely waited until her fingers could negotiate the keyboard without a mistake.

“Wonderful!” he cried, plucked her off the stool and sat down in an easy chair with her on his lap. First he chewed his lips, then cleared his throat. “I have a question to ask.”

“Yes?” she said, expecting a query about the piano lessons.

“It’s two and a half months since we married, but you’ve had no monthly courses. Are you with child, my dear?”

Her hands clutched at him, she gasped. “Oh! Oh! Yes, I am with child, Alexander, but I haven’t known how to tell you.”

He kissed her gently. “Elizabeth, I love you.”

Had the interlude continued with Elizabeth cuddled on his lap and tenderness flowing in him—had he only confined what he said to the delight of a coming baby and the sweet fact that this girl, still half a child herself, was ripe for closer intimacies—who knows what might have happened to Elizabeth and Alexander?

But suddenly he jerked her to her feet and stood before her with grim face and angry eyes that she took as evidence that she had in some way displeased him. Elizabeth began to shiver, to shrink away from his hands, which were squeezing hers convulsively.

“Since you are to bear my child, it’s time that I told you about myself,” he said in a hard voice. “I am not a Drummond—no, be still, be quiet! Let me talk! I am not your first cousin, Elizabeth, just a distant cousin on the Murray side. My mother was a Murray, but I have no idea who my father was. Duncan Drummond knew my mother had been seeing some other man for the simplest of reasons—she had refused to sleep in his bed for over a year, yet grew heavy with a child he knew he hadn’t generated. When he taxed her, she wouldn’t say who the man was—only that she had fallen in love and couldn’t bring herself to be intimate with Duncan, whom she had never loved. She died giving birth to me, and carried her secret to her grave. Duncan was too proud to say that I was not his son.”

She listened torn between relief that he wasn’t angry at her and horror at the story he told, but most of her was wondering why he had destroyed her lovely moment of feeling enfolded and enfolding. Someone older, more mature, might have asked why this news couldn’t have waited for another day, but all Elizabeth knew was that the devil in him was stronger than the lover. Her baby was less important than his secret illegitimacy.

But she had to say something. “Oh, Alexander! The poor woman! Where was the man, if he let her die like that?”

“I don’t know, though I’ve asked that question of myself many times,” he said, voice harder still. “All I can think is that he cared more for his own skin than for my mother or me.”

“Perhaps he was dead,” she said, trying to help.

“I don’t think so. Anyway,” he went on, “I spent my childhood suffering at the hands of a man I thought my father, wondering why I could never please him. From somewhere I had a mulish streak that wouldn’t let me cower or beg, no matter how hard or how often Duncan beat me, or what foul thing he put me to do. I simply hated him. Hated him!”

And that hate still rules you, Alexander Kinross, she thought. “How did you find out?” she asked, feeling her heart slow a little from its frantic tattoo.

“When Murray arrived to take over the kirk, Duncan found a soul mate. They huddled together from Murray’s first day, and the story of my parentage must have been told almost at once. Well, I was used to half living at the manse, studying with Dr. MacGregor—Duncan wouldn’t go against his minister—and was naïve enough to assume that Murray would continue. But Murray banished me, said he’d make sure I never went up to university. I saw red, and hit him. Broken jaw and all, he managed to spit out that I was a bastard, that my mother was a common whore, and that he would see me in hell for what I and my mother had done to Duncan.”

“A terrible story,” she said. “So you ran away, I was told.”

“That very night.”

“Was your sister kind to you?”

“Winifred? In her way, but she was five years older than I, and married by the time the truth came out. I doubt she knows to this day.” He released her hands. “But you know, Elizabeth.”

“Indeed I do,” she said slowly. “Indeed I do. I sensed that there was something wrong from the moment I met you—you didn’t act like any Drummond I knew.” A smile came, dragged up from some reservoir of strength and independence that she hadn’t known she possessed. “In fact, you reminded me of the Devil, with that beard and those eyebrows. I was absolutely terrified of you.”

That provoked a laugh, a look of astonishment. “Then the beard comes off at once, though there’s not much I can do about the eyebrows. At least there can be no doubt of the identity of this child’s father.”

“None at all, Alexander. I came to you untouched.”

For answer he lifted her right hand and kissed it before he turned and left the room. When she went up to bed he wasn’t there, nor did he come that night. Elizabeth lay wide-eyed in the darkness, weeping. The more she found out about her husband, the less she believed she could ever come to love him. His past ruled him, not his future.

WHEN ALEXANDER ran away from home on the night of his fifteenth birthday, he took nothing with him except a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese. The only decent clothes he had were those he wore to the kirk, everything else too torn and ragged to bother packing. Though he wasn’t massively built, the life his father had forced on him had endowed him with more than usual strength, so he ran at a lope all through the dark hours without needing to stop to catch his breath. Other Kinross boys had absconded occasionally, but they were always found a mile or two from home; Alexander fancied that in their hearts they weren’t committed. Whereas he was absolutely committed, and when he paused at dawn to suck water from a brook, he was already seventeen miles from Kinross. What did that place hold for him if he couldn’t leave it to go up to the university in Edinburgh? To spend his life working in the tartan mill was worse than a sentence of death.

It took him a week to reach the outskirts of Glasgow—he couldn’t bear to head for Edinburgh—where he hoped to find some sort of employment. He’d chopped firewood or hoed gardens for food as he traveled, but these were activities he could perform in his sleep. What Alexander wanted was a chance to work at something he could learn, something that required intelligence as well as brute strength. And he found it as soon as he reached Glasgow, the third-largest metropolis in the British Isles.

The thing sat inside a yard forcing air into a foundry, its stack smoking, its round girth wreathed in white vapor. A steam engine! There were two steam engines in the Kinross flour mills, but Alexander had never laid eyes on them—nor ever would have, had he stayed in Kinross. Mill territory was divided up among the local families, and Duncan and James Drummond were denizens of the tartan mill, which meant their children were too.

Whereas I, thought Alexander, am going to follow in the footsteps of my namesake, the Great, by striking into completely unknown territory.

EVEN AT FIFTEEN, he had a way with him. Until now it had been directed at no one save the departed Robert MacGregor, but when he sallied into the foundry yard he found a new target—and not the grimy figure shoveling coal into the boiler’s flaming, hideously hot maw. A better dressed man was standing by, a rag in one hand, a spanner in the other, but doing nothing.

“Excuse me, sir?” asked Alexander, smiling at the idle one.

“Yes?”

“What do you make here?”

Why, thought the man later, did I not just put my boot up his arse and send him flying on to the road? As it was, he lifted his brows and smiled back. “Boilers and steam engines, laddie. There’s no’ enough boilers and steam engines, no’ enough.”

“Thank you,” said Alexander, slid past him and walked into the cacophony of the foundry.

In one corner of this inferno was a flight of wooden steps that led upward to a glass-windowed eyrie from which everything going on could easily be seen. The manager’s lair. Alexander leaped up the steps four at a time and banged on the door.

“What?” asked the middle-aged man who opened it.

He was clearly the manager, for he wore pressed trousers and a laundered white shirt, its sleeves rolled up, its collar not attached—well, it would wilt in the heat, and who here cared?

“I want to learn how to make boilers, sir. Then, as soon as I can make boilers, I want to learn how to make a steam engine. I can live in a hole and do without a bath, so I don’t need much of a wage,” said Alexander, producing the smile again.

“A shilling a day—that’s a penny an hour—and free salt tablets. What’s your name, laddie?”

“Alexander”—he almost said Drummond, but changed his mind in a split second—“Kinross.”

“Kinross? Like the town?”

“Aye, like the town.”

“We can do with an apprentice, and I’d rather take on one who came asking for a job than have one brought to me by his dad. My name is Mr. Connell, and don’t hesitate to ask questions. If you don’t know how, don’t do it until you’ve asked. When can you start, laddie?”

“Now,” said Alexander, but didn’t move. “I have a question, Mr. Connell.”

“Aye?”

“What are the free salt tablets for?”

“To swallow. A man working in here sweats gallons. Taking salt means he doesn’t get muscle cramps.”

NOT ONLY did the new apprentice learn quickly; he also had the happy knack of making the other men like him despite his evident excellence, excellence being a quality that usually tended to irritate other, less clever or willing workers. Perhaps they saw no danger in him, thanks to his making no secret of his desire to move on once he had learned everything to be learned from Lanark Steam. His abode was a corner of the yard adjacent to the steam engine producing compressed air; it was sheltered from the elements by a sheet of iron and warm enough provided he kept the boiler stoked during the night—a favor Mr. Connell deemed worth the accommodation.

In that year of 1858, when Alexander first arrived, Glasgow was an appalling city; it had the highest death rate in Great Britain—and the highest crime rate—because the bulk of its residents were jammed into waterless, sewerless, lightless slums that formed a tortuous maze no policeman or official would dare enter. The city fathers talked of mass demolition, but, as in most places, talk was never allied to action; it was just a way to appease the ever-growing number of well-to-do people who were developing a social conscience. The iron and coal industries were of paramount importance because of Glasgow’s proximity to both these raw materials, which meant that a suffocating pall of noxious smoke blanketed the entire city, made worse by the fumes of a thriving chemical industry that specialized in substances calculated to corrode the stoutest lungs.

Not a place wherein Alexander wanted to linger, yet he knew he must remain there long enough to earn his ticket and a good reference, a written testament that he was thoroughly conversant with boilers and steam engines.

Once he had graduated from the foundry floor and was put on constructing the engines themselves, his busy brain saw many ways to improve the product. Of course he was well aware that, as an apprentice, his ideas were the property of Mr. Connell, who took out the patents on his series of inventions. Strictly speaking, that meant that Mr. Connell was not obliged to give Alexander even a tiny share of the profits, but he was a fair man for his times; every so often he would slip this wonderfully gifted lad ten gold sovereigns by way of thanks. He also hoped that when Alexander was out of his apprenticeship, he could be persuaded to stay; those inventions had pushed Lanark Steam well ahead of its competitors. Further to this, Alexander’s wages went from a shilling per twelve-hour day to five shillings in his second year and a pound in his third. Mr. Connell needed him.

But Alexander had no intention of staying. Almost everything he earned went into his secret cache behind what looked like all the other bricks in the yard wall. He didn’t trust banks, especially the Glaswegian ones. Eighteen fifty-seven had seen the collapse of the Western Bank, with terrible consequences to industry, commerce and the savings of ordinary people.

He still lived in his corner, bought secondhand clothes, and once a month caught a Caledonian train into the countryside to wash his clothes and himself in a quiet glen stream. Food represented his greatest expense; he was growing so fast that his belly growled perpetually from hunger. Sex hadn’t entered his life because he was too permanently tired to seek it.