The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (18 page)

“Yes, sir.”

She smiled in satisfaction as she made her way to
her kitchen – a place with an open-handed master and a young mistress who did not
know her way about was as near to the ideal as she had ever dreamt, would do
her very nicely until the time came to retire to a little cottage of her own,
no doubt with a pension and a few bob saved. They would get the best service
she could manage and the house would be kept spick and span, shining clean, no
mistakes. As for the little girl, well, she had never had children of her own
so it would do no harm to look after this one, teach her how to work at least
and she would be earning her keep within a few months.

The attorney and his clerk left and Mrs Morris
patted Mary’s hand and gave her a big wink before taking herself off and
leaving the young lady in the parlour with her ‘protector’; she looked
anxiously up as he stood, fully expecting to find herself upended on the sofa
next minute.

“Well, Mary, shall we look at your new house?”

“Yes, please, Mr Andrews.” Anything to delay the
inevitable.

“My name is Tom, Mary.”

There were three bedrooms on the first floor, one of
them with a made-up and very large four-poster. Mary gulped and averted her
eyes from the awful sight. Tom sat down and took his boots off.

“Take your clothes off, Mary.”

“What, everything? Not just…”

“Everything, my dear.”

She was a stranger to the tender indignities, was
unaware of the concept of sexual pleasure for the female and her very limited
physical experience had been unenjoyable – two brief encounters on the music
parlour floor and a third quite appallingly interrupted – and was surprised to
discover herself responding to Tom’s gentle, leisurely hands. He left her
thoughtful and with half a smile on her face. He swept into his office that
afternoon, more relaxed and paradoxically alert than he had been since leaving
New York and Jenny’s efficient ministrations.

Young Frederick Mason had made his appearance a
fortnight before, had shown himself to be a couple of years older than Tom but
very much his junior; he was sat at the desk that had been Miss Roberts’, busy
copying out his reports in best copperplate, transcribing briefly scrawled
notes into elegant prose worthy of sitting in the firm’s files.

“Mr Mason! How do you do? I see you have been busy.”

“I believe I have been very lucky, Mr Andrews,
happening to be at the right place at a fortunate time. I was at the riverside
in Liverpool, introducing myself to businesses there when I heard that the
sugar refiners had met a problem – they are extending their wharf and building
a new warehouse and set of boilers. You will know, sir, that sugar imported
from the Islands normally comes in as coarse brown or as molasses in barrels;
white sugar is refined in England.”

Tom nodded – everybody knew that much who had ever
been to the West Indies.

“Their warehouse is built, the walls that is, up to
‘plate’, they called it, waiting for a set of cast iron trusses for the roof
beams to sit on. The beams themselves will be timber but it is hardly possible
to buy straight and strong timbers to act as joists any more – the navy and the
charcoallers between them have stripped the forests bare. Their supplier has
let them down, the castings badly made and erratic in dimensions, to the extent
that they have rejected his whole delivery and are at a stand. I introduced
myself to them as the representative of the
new
Roberts Ironfounders and
offered our services; they have agreed that we shall take the measurements and
drawings and supply them piece by piece, each on acceptance to be paid at cost
and a mark-up – no contract, of course. I have warned them that to meet their
need for urgency we shall have to set on a night shift and probably work the
Sabbath as well, and they have accepted that the case is pressing and they must
pay for an answer to their problems. Their plight is known to everybody on the
waterfront and if we solve it, we shall be known too, and land is being cleared
and the river dredged in a dozen places.”

“Well done! Have you spoken to your brother yet?”

They visited the docks next morning, Tom making a
point of being personally present for so important a task. They inspected the
refiners’ plans and took measurements from the drawings – twenty roof trusses,
each to be cast as a single piece shaped like a flat letter ‘A’, nearly thirty
feet across and ten at the highest, almost at the limits of what could be done
with cast iron. They would be made singly, one to each pouring of the furnace
and could be transported two to a barge.

The brickwork was ready, the piers built up to
height and a pair of wooden cranes constructed to lift the great weights nearly
forty feet up to roof level, the lift achieved by capstans turned by two dozen
labourers apiece. The warehouse had four bays, would be roofed by five trusses
to each.

“Mr Mason, have you your surveyor’s chain?”

He had, of course.

“Good! You will oblige me by checking the
measurements on the ground – bricklayers may often be an inch or two out when
following plans, I am told.”

Tom knew that because Mason had told him so.

The Clerk of the Works looked mildly annoyed,
assured them they need have no concerns, but the directors, present to a man,
overruled him, preferring to be doubly certain. There were twenty-five piers,
all except two of them accurate within half an inch and acceptable; of the
other pair, one was four and a half inches, the width of a brick, out and the
other was seven inches over size and not quite true in line to its partner.

They left to grim assurances that all would be
corrected by the date of their first delivery, three weeks hence; they
suspected they would be dealing with a new Clerk of the Works.

They had made a good start – it remained only to
deliver to time and specification.

They took a special order of a barge load of best,
clean sand, free of clay and gravel, from a quarry rather than dredged from a
river, and built their first mould with much anxious calculation of distances
the molten metal must flow, of potential air pockets and of weaknesses where
flows came together and slag could form in the join. They ran their first
pouring, fully prepared to scrap the lot and start again, three or four times
over if necessary. All went well and they broke the mould and cleaned off the
slag and flash and carried the tons of cold metal out into the open air for an
inch by inch inspection, crawling over it like anxious mother hens fussing over
their brood. Three days later they placed the first pair onto a barge and met
it at the docks the next morning, stood back confident and serene as they were
lifted into position and settled neatly and precisely onto the bolts waiting
for them.

Nine more loads over four weeks and the sugar makers
paid them in banknotes, very publicly, and placed an article in the local paper
praising the ironmaster who had saved their project and contributed to their,
and the city’s, future prosperity; they were fortunate indeed, they said, to
have such a firm as Roberts in their locality. As expected they were contacted
within the month by a dozen of Liverpool projectors with demands for roof
trusses, pillars, lintels, cast iron window frames and guttering, all of the
larger, awkward castings which had been difficult and slow to source.

“Third furnace next year, Master?”

George Mason was deeply respectful – Mr Andrews had
earned his title and had made his mark – in the process he had also put Mason
in the way of earning a lot more money than he had ever expected, and that was
not a bad thing either.

Chapter Seven

Tom laid back in the big bed in Mary’s cottage,
pleasantly tired – he had been away from town for three weeks, off in the North
Country visiting a works in Sheffield, in a county where there seemed to be
more going on in iron; Lancashire was increasingly a cotton area, iron and
steel very big but not quite the leader that it was down in Birmingham or far
away in the North East. Clapperley had put the possibility of an investment his
way, had told him of a Mr Edwards, a man of vision and ideas with a particular
interest in steam but short of funds; the papers Edwards had sent were clear
and his proposals were original and, probably, workable. Tom had gone north
with high hopes – had come away disappointed; Edwards was an inventor of some
genius, but he was a disaster as a businessman, his works a disorganised
shambles, his accounts rudimentary and seeming to consist of a running journal
detailing cash payments in and out and made up whenever he remembered. The man
should not have been let out on his own.

Tom had spoken long with Edwards, had tried to
persuade him to concentrate on his inventions and to sell up his works and then
come down to St Helens where there would be a workshop and a salary and share
of all the profits he made, but he was sure that Edwards would not take his
advice. The man had known that his inventions were good, brilliant in fact, and
that customers would soon be beating on his door – he must have quoted ‘Build a
better mousetrap…’ a dozen times over – a pity, for he would end up in debtor’s
prison within a very few months and would die there, his ideas with him. Tom
did not regard himself as a great man of business, in fact he was increasingly
disenchanted with the life, but he knew how to run his own concern and could
tell when another man was failing; Edwards was bound for bankruptcy, would lose
all of his own money, but he would take none of Tom’s with him.

“Not to worry”, Tom murmured aloud, allowing a hand
to slip down Mary’s breast and gently find the nipple, stroking and teasing and
bringing her out of her doze; he grinned in satisfaction as she rolled on top
of him and spread her thighs wide, taking him deep inside her. She had learned
a lot in four years, and had invented one or two tricks of her own, providing
him with all the home comforts he required and pleasantly undemanding as well.
She appeared to be content to live very quietly, pottering in her little house,
borrowing novels from the Circulating Library, playing on the piano he had
bought her two years previously, going out to the market and the town shops and
nodding to a few acquaintances but making no friends, no close contacts at all,
remaining effectively invisible; he doubted a dozen people in the town knew her
name and even fewer associated it with his.

It was very different to the life she must have
expected, he thought, a little guiltily because he almost never thought of her
at all, she was merely there, a convenience to him, rather like a pet dog would
be he supposed. She had told him of the tutor, Jevons, who had ruined her and
had wondered in passing how many other silly girls had fallen victim to him;
perhaps he should do something about that, he owed her a favour, several, in
fact.

“Mr Clapperley, two things, I wonder if you could
assist me with some information about an enterprising young gentleman…”

A month and Mr Jevons was found to have left
Birmingham and to have been run out of Warwick; he was currently living in
rooms in Coventry, still tutoring young girls in their homes. Clapperley
introduced Tom to two pugilists of his acquaintance, men who travelled with the
fairs in a boxing booth, inviting local hopefuls to step into the ring for
free, a guinea the prize for being on their feet at the end of ten minutes,
five guineas if they achieved a knock-down. They charged a penny to spectators
at the ringside and made a steady profit fighting clean and fairly – they were
hard men; they also did not like flash gentlemen who abused young girls and
were very willing to earn fifty guineas, gold, for the privilege of putting a
stop to this one’s capers. They promised to do a thorough job and to explain
exactly why while he was still awake, left on the stage in holiday mood.

They returned three days later, job done. Mr Jevons
was no longer a handsome young man, nor would he ever be so again with a
flattened nose and no front teeth; nor would he teach piano again, they having
taken a ball-peen hammer with them and used it very carefully on his fingers –
not a bone left unbroken, they cheerfully told Tom, thanking him for his
payment and assuring him they would be at his future convenience if he ever
needed them again.

Tom saw Clapperley, thanked him for his
recommendation, his men had done all that could be asked of them, and collected
the results of his second commission before going off to Mary’s cottage.

“Mary, I found out the whereabouts of Mr Jevons just
recently and have taken steps to assure that he changes his way of life. There
were some ‘silly young girls’ after you, but there will be no more.”

“What did you do, Tom? You did not kill him? You cut
it off?”

“
No
, not that!” There was a limit to revenge
he found.

“Tell me, please.”

“I sent two men to beat him and make him ugly and
they broke his fingers as well.”

“Good! Thank you! Let him make a living now! He has
no money of his own – he told me how he had been brought up to wealth but his
father had lost all and left him to earn his way – now let him prosper if he
can. I doubt he will have the alternative that was open to me!”

She burst into tears, hauling her dress off as she
dashed at her eyes.

“I can at least show you my thanks, Tom.”

“Wait a moment, Mary. I thought of something else
last week. Here, this is for you.”

He handed over a large, stiff envelope, sealed with
official wax on the tape binding it.

She pulled out the documents inside, standing nude
and uncaring to read them, having difficulty with the legalisms.

“Deeds… my name, Mary Amberley, on them. This
direction. You have given me the house, Tom?”

“Yes, it is yours, and Mr Martin the banker will pay
one hundred pounds a year into an account in your name and will pay Mrs Johnson
and Martha their wages and the housekeeping monies. I thought it was best,
realising that I might catch the smallpox tomorrow and then where would you be?
Now you will be safe and comfortable whatever happens.”

“Not comfortable, Tom, never that, but well
looked-after by a kind gentleman, and I know how lucky I have been – it could
have been much, much worse. I wonder if Mama still thinks of me, whether she
worries, or whether she has forgotten me, a sinner condemned? Do you think I
could send her a letter, just to say that I am safe and well?”

“You could…”

“But perhaps it would only open the old wounds, you
think?”

“I don’t know – you must choose.”

“Hallelujah, Thomas!”

“’Morning, Joe – have you got religion or is it
Christmas and I didn’t notice? Or is Amelia increasing, again?”

Three children under the age of four suggested that
the last was by no means unlikely; Joseph grinned and said he thought not, but
he would really like a second daughter and when there were three in the
nursery, a fourth would make very little difference, just another maid brought
in to assist Nurse.

“Well, you will be able to give her a good dowry, so
why not?”

“A man named Cartwright, Tom, has published that he
has a power loom, and the word is that it works.”

“Is he selling them?”

“A fee for building to his design. McKay is making our
first already.”

“Then build the mill, brother – next to the
spinners, I suppose? Will there be enough head in the stream to run another
wheel?”

“Arranged, Tom. We build a little higher up the
hillside and divert another stream across; we have talked with the farmer
already, paid for using his land, and can dig a channel across to another
header pond, flowing over to the spinning mill stream and away. Costs us
precious little because it also drains the farmer’s bottom lands, something he
could not afford to do on his own, so he has charged us almost nothing.”

“Have we got enough set aside, or do we need to put
more into it?”

“Five thousand in the pot and that will cover us for
this year and with reasonable good fortune for as long as we need. We calculate
to make thirty looms this year, add ten or twenty more next, then probably
rebuild them all in the third year, with our own improvements.”

“What do you intend, run a single shift Monday to
Saturday to start with, then go to double working if they are reliable enough?”

“Probably – we think we will be able to sell
everything we can make from the very beginning. Kent, the man who makes shirts
and chemises, says he could sell five thousand pairs of ladies drawers a week,
if he could find the cloths to make them, and Isaacs was round last week
looking to buy cotton handkerchiefs and neckcloths rather than import them from
India as he does now. Provided the looms are reliable, we can undercut the East
India Company and make a good profit the while.”

They had banked all of the profits from the spinning
for three years, paying Joseph a thousand a year and setting the rest to
accumulate at interest in expectation of the day when they built a weaving
mill; they had known the day must come – too many intelligent engineering men
were working on the question for it not to be solved.

Tom had few questions to ask, little comment to
make, for Joseph was far the better businessman, enjoying nothing more than to
immerse himself in his mill, talking easily with his people, casting a knowing
eye over the quality of their produce, keeping his accounts, bidding at the
dockside auctions, selling his yarns and threads, poring over his engineer’s
drawings and, in the evenings, keeping his vigorous young wife happy. Apart
from a necessary extension of Lodge Cottage, and the probable need to build on
another wing in a few years, very little seemed likely to disturb the
comfortable, and highly profitable, existence he had built for himself.
Memories of Antigua had faded and his boyhood was now so alien to him that it
might have happened to someone else; his life had begun on the Star and he kept
the pair of horse pistols as a memento of that happy, lucky ship, making sure
they were safe on a very high shelf, well clear of little boys’ hands.

Just occasionally Joseph made plans for his
children, though he was normally sensible enough to accept that they would grow
up to be their own men and women. His eldest boy, Thomas, would inherit the
firm, of course, but young Bob might become a soldier, or a midshipman in the
navy and pretty little Jenny would marry a lord!

Tom had given the management of Roberts almost
wholly into George Mason’s hands – he was much better at it, had no other life
except for the chapel which now took up almost all of his few free hours, being
single still, and saw the burden as a privilege. They had built a third furnace
and casting shed, extended the canalside wharf, fitted the trackway with
wrought iron rails and installed a pair of steam engines to turn the winches to
pull tubs all the way from the quarry – itself extended by the purchase of the
rest of the hillside – to the furnaces and then down to the canal. The ropes
that pulled a train of half a dozen tubs at a time - long, long cables bought
new from ropewalks that contracted to the navy, the best that could be obtained
- were a permanent worry; they were four hundred yards long and the loads were
heavy and as they coiled and uncoiled so the coal dust and ironstone particles
worked into their fibres, weakening and wearing them through so that they had
to be replaced quite regularly – and they were very expensive so it was
necessary to get every day’s work from them that was safely possible. Cables
had snapped and whiplashed and killed and maimed a dozen men at a time at other
works, and that did give a place a bad name, one that Tom wished to avoid –
better far for George to make those decisions.

Tom had become somewhat more interested in general
finance, investments outside of the ordinary run of trade and the five
thousands he had set to speculation a few years before had grown to eleven –
the country was booming and more and more people wished to borrow at higher and
higher rates, the main problem seemed to be to choose between them.

It was a time of prosperity and the Corporation had
shared in it and had built for the benefit of the town; the Infirmary had put a
cool thousand in Tom’s pocket by way of profit on its land and a thank-you from
the builder who had obtained the contract, but the Workhouse, an austere building,
had contributed only four hundreds. Tom had great hopes of the new Town Hall,
planned to represent the glory of the town and with a wealth, in both senses of
the word, of Gothic ornamentation promised. Mrs Morris had shared in the
general prosperity, gambling flourishing while men’s purses were full; she had
bought a second house with Tom’s capital and was paying him a share of her
profits; she had also gladdened the hearts of the local silk merchants with her
frequent purchases as well as hiring on a young and powerfully muscled footman
whose duties were said mainly to take place after hours.