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.
He had studied the survey map. The shortest route lay through the hill he had just crossed. “Couldn’t you have cut through that?” he asked. “Then you would have avoided having to build a viaduct.”
“ ’Course, we could,” Contrairy said dismissively. “Cost, though! Too ’igh fer a straight cuttin’, an’ tunnels are about the most expensive things there is. Look at yer map. See the ’eight on it! An’ granite! Takes time, an’ all.”
Monk swung around and looked up at the hill. He pulled out the map from his pocket and read the height on it, then looked at the crest of the rise again. Something flashed in his memory and was gone before he caught it, but it was a moment of unease, nothing more, nothing he could explain. He should check the alternative routes, see who owned which land, where the vested interests lay, estimate the costs of cutting and tunneling the hill for a direct route compared with the small cutting there was here, and the viaduct, and the extra land, and length of rail. It would be a long, tedious task, but the answer, if there was one, lay in the figures. He had had the skill once. It had been where his business lay… his and Dundas’s. That was a chill thought he would rather not have owned, but it would not go away.
He thanked the navvy, mounted his horse again and rode slowly back up the slope, thinking. He had studied the surveyor’s maps and reports, and Baltimore and Sons’ estimate of costs for rerouting. On paper it seemed reasonable. The investors had accepted it. Some of the new land necessary was expensive, but the land for the old route had been expensive also. It was the hidden costs that would make the difference: the bribes to do one thing or another, what to purchase, what to avoid. That could be where the fraud lay.