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.
CHAPTER FOUR
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.
