She wished it were as simple to overcome all other opposition to her central role in the business. Their banker, Nathan Chambers of Dowgate, was a particular antagonist. Five years earlier (a lifetime, it seemed), she had intercepted a few letters to him and used them in applying some gentle pressure. Chambers had laughed at the time, and since no actual harm had been done, she had thought herself forgiven. And she had to admit that he never flatly opposed her, never was rude or even short with her; indeed, he treated her with great deference, was always chivalrous and attentive, and always praised her financial…what did he call it?
Intuition!
That was the trouble. In a thousand subtle ways he gave out that her brilliance was intuitive. Unreliable. Not based on logic or analysis. At heart it was (that most damning of all City judgements) "not sound."
He never said it openly. He never failed to imply it.
The judgement was doubly galling to her since all the facts spoke the other way. At John's instructions, Chambers took a tenth of all the firm's profit and put it into a trust fund for her and the children. No one but Chambers could touch it; certainly it was beyond John's control. Thus, if the inconceivable happened and Stevenson's failed, Nora and the children would be safe. They would have (at the moment) ninety thousand pounds to fall back on. That was all that Chambers, safe, stolid, sound Chambers, had made out of the eighty-odd thousand he had been given to invest. Yet she, intuitive, unreliable, unsound Nora, had taken a mere nineteen thousand pounds—the entire profit of the victualling licences over the last five years—and turned them into investments worth all of sixty thousand.
It began after their first year in business, at Summit Tunnel over near Manchester. When they got their profit on that, John had given her a thousand pounds. Earlier the same year, on her first visit to London, she had seen the power of the railways to promote the outward growth of cities into regions people thought would always be mere farmland. She longed then for some spare cash to put into land. Suddenly she had it.
Within a week she had driven out along the course of the new line south of Manchester, looking for land. Clever people had already bought up around Cheadle Hulme and Handforth. Some adventurous souls had even gone as far as Wilmslow. Only Nora had had the courage to go on, beyond the valley, up to Alderley Edge. There, she had taken one look at the view, one sniff at the air, and had snapped up a hundred acres for her money.
Already more than half her land was built over with new houses—and such grand houses! There seemed to be a competition among the Manchester merchants to move far out along the line; the richer you were, the farther you went. The richest came to Alderley Edge. And there, on Nora's land, which was to be had only on ninety-nine years' lease, they built their fine mansions, country houses with miniature estates of one, two, at most five, acres. They seemed glad to pay ground rents of ten or even fifteen pounds an acre; it kept out the poor. So in five years, the land had become worth around twenty thousand and when the remaining seventy acres were leased it would rise to some thirty-five thousand. Already it brought in substantial rents.
Alderley Edge had been the first of a number of similar purchases. Not all had worked, of course. She had been too clever over judging the line to Nelson and was now stuck with forty acres of worthless land near the Forest of Pendle. But that, and another fifty near Ayr in Scotland, were exceptions. Apart from Alderley Edge, she now had nearly twelve hundred acres in small estates near Blackpool, Warrington, St. Alban's, Henley, Plymouth, and Bromley. When they were all developed, their value would be at least a hundred and seventy-five thousand. So what could she not do with the money Chambers kept tucking away at a mere two and a half per cent? She seethed every time she ruled the double line under the accounts for each contract as it finished and totted up the profit, one-tenth part of which went at once to Chambers.
John himself had no idea that she had done so well. In a foolish moment, when she had first bought the land at Alderley Edge, the scorn of those who thought she had thrown her money away had goaded her to boast aloud to John that she would see the money back tenfold in as many years. From time to time now he reminded her of the promise, but she was always vague and furtive, giving out the impression that she wished she'd never said such a thing. Of course, he knew that she had made some profit, on that and her other transactions, but she hoped he had no idea of its size. For John had an obsession that if he died, leaving Nora a rich widow and the money loose, she'd fall victim to the first fortune hunter who left his card. She had tried everything—laughter, petulance, ridicule, and anger—to rid him of this absurd notion. But all he ever said was "a grieving woman's easy game." So their finances were a maze of trusts—trusts for her and the children now, in case the firm went bankrupt, and everything into trust if he died. As Chambers said, it made fund raising as easy as raising a gale in a shuttered room with a blocked chimney and no door.
Still, through all their first five years, the market in money had been easy, especially for railways. Even the fools had been able to turn in respectable profits, while a blood professional like John had done well beyond even his own dreams. His specialty was to take the hazardous parts of a contract, the cutting, tunnelling, embanking, and viaduct-building, where both the risk and the potential profit were high. Then, by good management, careful planning, and the use of seasoned navvies all versed in his ways, he would bring the risks as low as those on a level, open-skies working. Their profit usually fell between thirty and forty per cent of the tender.
The Penmanshiel Tunnel contract, which they had finished last December and whose accounts she had just closed while John had been playing with the children on the "castle," was a case in point. The tender had been taken at £42,800, no trouble being expected. But halfway through they had met a section where the slaty-black Lingula flagstone of the lower Silurian beds was badly fragmented. It would have bankrupted a less experienced contractor. But John knew just where to lay his hands on some hydraulic presses, which his engineer, an impatient little Irishman called Flynn, had quickly adapted to hold the overburden while iron stanchions were placed. Then, entirely on his own initiative, Flynn had further modified the hydraulic devices so that they could be used for forcing a slurry of cement deep into the rock fissures and thus bind the fragments together, the way you might grout a crumbling stone wall. The fact that Flynn had wrecked all six hydraulic cylinders, giving John an awkward day with the friend who had lent them, was neither here nor there in the long run. The point was that John knew a thousand dodges for getting around the thousand-and-one troubles you could meet on any sort of working, and he'd pick the right men to invent the other eleven, so that Stevenson's could always go ten better than anything the firm of Nature, Fate & Co. might pit against them. The proof had come in that day's mail, in the final accounts for the Penmanshiel tunnel.
"There," she said proudly. "The profit on Penmanshiel was thirty-seven per cent."
He nodded, trying to look nonchalant. "It'd be more if we'd known the geology. We are the first to tunnel through that lower Silurian."
"It would have been a loss if any other firm had tried it."
He picked up the summary of the heads of account and looked at them.
"Were you long with the children?" she asked. "They were freezing."
"Not long," he said. "I'll tell you who I met today. Came riding out a-purpose to see me. George Hudson." He laid down the account and crossed the room to draw the curtain. Far away to the west the last glimmer of twilight was settling on the horizon. "He says he met you on York platform and you talked about iron."
He saw a confusion behind her eyes. "I'd forgotten that," she said. "It must have been last back end. November, sometime."
"So why, this front end, does he go out of his way, early one cold morning, to see if Stevenson's has gone into ironfounding?"
He watched her closely. This time there was no confusion; her astonishment was genuine. "He never did!"
"Four miles. And rode on with me to Burythorpe, near enough."
"What did he say?"
He snorted. "You know Hudson. His mind clicks like a compound engine. He'd get three bites at any cherry."
"But his exact words?"
John turned and went back to the fire, speaking as he went. "He just said he'd wager I wished I had my ironworks already."
"Already!" Nora said, falling into the selfsame trap.
John spun around, pointing at her and grinning. He did not need to tell her that was just what he had said. "Did he mention ironworks to you?" he asked. "In December. He says it was December, not November."
She stood up then, very firm and erect, and she looked at him steadily. "I first mentioned ironworks to you last August. Because it was during the Reverend Woods' sermon for Saint Bartholomew that the notion came to me. You talked to Brassey about it in September. And to Rodet. And again to Rodet in November. There's a dozen ways it could have gotten to Hudson."
John nodded, still restless. "Rodet!" he said. "The little frog is never there—yet never too far away."
"I don't honestly know about Rodet. But this meeting with Hudson means nothing," she assured him, truly believing it. "He sniffs about him like a champion hound. He's forgotten it already. George Hudson can take pound shares and sell them at twenty-pound premium any day of the week. So why should he want to get into anything so dull and safe as simple ironfounding?"
At last John seemed reassured, and her mention of Hudson's freelance stockjobbing prompted the memory of the GNE shares and the promise of fifty thousand clear. "Beats me," he said, when he had told her that bit of good news, "where the money all comes from."
She had to peer at him in the firelight and the glimmer of her distant oil lamp to see if he was serious. "D'you really not know?" she asked.
"Obviously some of it comes from fools—like Beador if he's applying for shares at big premiums—but that can't be the whole of it." He had not meant to use Beador as an example; the name had slipped out. But now he was glad. Now perhaps they could talk about it.
She appeared not to hear him, her eyes fixed on the dancing flames. And then she continued: "There was a thing you said to me once. It must have been right back early on when we first got married. You said we'd got gold 'not buried in a bloody tropic island, but gold buried in the future. Waiting while we grow toward it.' I've never forgotten that."
"I said that to you the very first night we met. The twenty-sixth of August, 1839." His eye was on her, but his mind's eye was back there, relishing the precision of his memory. "On the banks over the south portal of Summit Tunnel. That's when I said that."
"Well, George Hudson's gone one better than you. He's found a way of digging a tunnel to the future. And he's bringing that gold back here by the Troy ton!"
He laughed, delighted at the thought. But Nora was adamant. "It's the shareholders of the eighteen fifties and sixties—and beyond—who are paying that profit to us. What! Capitalize at fourteen million and call up four. Amalgamate with three others and keep the cash switching around so fast that half of it melts and everyone's blinded! I tell you, George Hudson may be the wax on the colonel's moustache for
this
generation of shareholders, but their sons will curse him—and their grandsons too—if he continues much longer."
Her vehemence made him smile. "A tunnel in time!" he said, and then fell silent.
"Is that your worry about Beador?" she asked suddenly. "Did he say he's been speculating in shares?"
"As good as," John admitted.
"Is he badly stretched?"
"He wouldn't say. I told him we would need to know the full extent of his liability before we made any further move together."
"Not that we'd trust him," she said.
"Of course not. We must make our own inquiry."
"Yes."
"Or perhaps not. I'm coming round to your view. Let's drop Sir George and look for land elsewhere."
"No!" She was emphatic. John's admission excited her. The air carried upon it the distant smell of blood. "No. We can find out. Let's not be hasty. I imagine, then, you didn't ask Hudson about Beador?"
He shook his head. "Certainly not."
"Did you think we might ask Reverend Prendergast? Time we put him to work again."
The Reverend Doctor Prendergast had once tried to blackmail John and Nora. But since they had turned the tables on him, he had earned himself a respectable and far from trifling commission for help rendered; he had the back door password to most of the railway boardrooms in Britain—certainly to all in the north of the country. If Beador was on any applicants' list, the Reverend Doctor Prendergast could soon find out.
"Fancy not thinking of him," John said.
"You live hand-to-mouth, love," she told him. "You only thought of Hudson because he lives so close by."
He smiled grudgingly at the truth of it.
But Nora did not smile back. A memory had just come to her. The day she met George Hudson on York station was, in fact, the day she had seen John off to Stockton, to inspect the proposed site for the foundry. At the time, she had dismissed it as coincidence. But now it had to be something more than that.
What was behind it? Hudson was obviously saying, "I know your game." But why? Was he also saying, "Don't think you can do anything in this world without my getting to hear of it"? In other words, was he just gently joking with them? Or was he laying the ground to walk off with their prize and then turn around and say, "I did my best to warn you; fair's fair and all's fair in business."