Jesse Strange had few words, in those days; and nobody willingly crossed him. He was a driver; he drove his hauliers, he drove his machines, but most of all he drove himself. If he chose to drink, he’d put the best man under the table; that happened sometimes of a night down in the village inn. But he’d walk home steady; and the boys, rolling across the street at chuck-out time, would see the light burning in his office or in the sheds, where like as not he’d be stripping the valve gear on one of the locos or cleaning her boiler or mending her massive wheel treads. They’d wonder then if Jesse Strange ever tired, and when he slept.
He’d made his hundred thousand a long time back, then his first half million. It seemed to him work was a sacrament, a panacea for all ills. The firm of Strange and Sons grew, spreading out beyond Dorset with depots as far away as Isca and Aquae Sulis. Jesse broke Serjeantson, his one competitor in Durnovaria, running his trains at cutthroat rates, stealing load after load from under the old man’s nose. They said at the height of the war no train showed him a profit for nearly a year; there were battles and beatings among the drivers, blood spilled on the footplates; but he broke Serjeantson and bought him out, added forty steamers to the huge Strange fleet. The sheds and warehouses that joined the old house at Durnovaria were extended again and again till they sprawled across more than an acre; and still it wasn’t enough. Jesse broke Roberts and Fletcher at Swanage; then Bakers, and Caldecotts, and Hofman and Keynes from over Shaftesbury way; and then he bought outright Baskett and Fairbrother of Poole, with more than a hundred Burrells and Fodens on the road, and Strange and Sons owned the West Country haulage trade. And after that even the routiers let their trains be; because money works wonders in high places, and one swipe at a Strange loco would bring a hornet swarm of cavalry and infantry down round their ears and the game wasn’t worth the price. The maroon nameboards with their oval yellow plaques were known from Isca to Santlache, from Poole to Swindon and Reading-on-the-Thames; drivers gave way to them, the Serjeants cleared the roads for them. In the end Jesse won respect even from his enemies. He paid his way, gave nothing; and what you stole from him, you were welcome to keep… A lot of men wondered what drove him. At college he’d been a dreamer, head in the clouds; but somebody somewhere had taught him what life was about. Some whispered he killed a man once, a friend, and the empire he built was somehow his atonement; there was even a rumour he was jilted by a barmaid, and this was his answer to the world. Certainly he never married, though there were women enough later on who found they could put up with his ways, and men who would have sold their daughters fast enough to tie their family to the name of Strange; but none of them got the chance. Nobody ever dared ask outright, except his niece; and though she remembered, as he’d warned her she didn’t understand.
Margaret seemed suddenly to be moved forward in time. She was going away to school, a whole twenty miles to Sherborne for her first boarding term. A half mile through the streets of Durnovaria, a little scrappet stumping along clinging to Sarah’s arm, wearing a new uniform, leather satchel swinging from her shoulder, apples in the satchel and sweets, pitiful little bits of home. Head stuck high, face set, sniffing to stop from bawling at the wrongness of everything, on her way to death and worse… Sarah seemed huge, the paving slabs huge and the cobbles and the old leaning houses, as afternoons and mornings had seemed huge, each bulking a separate entity in her mind as she crossed off the frightened days to start-of-term. The last night, last morning, an inevitability against which she seemed suspended, in a dream within a dream. The September dawn was blue with mist and cold, she buzzed with the chill of it while images floated unconnected and remote and her body was a machine, forgotten legs pumping her along. A road train passed at the end of the street and the light from the loco firebox glowed back on her steersman and driver and the child wanted in sudden bitterness to run forward and be swept away, snuggle under a load tarp in the rumbling and darkness to end some mysterious closed circuit in her own room at home; but instead she turned left mechanically to the station, still hanging onto her nanny’s arm. Old Sarah, hated often, seemed lovable now; but there was no help in her. The train was waiting, crowded and dank; Margaret was hustled onto it, stood pressing her face to the windows smudging the breath-steam with her fingers while Sarah and station and the whole of existence swept into a dot that dwindled behind her and vanished for all time.
And there was school, the big house dark and cold, and the strangeness of the nuns with their startling starched white cowls, the whisper and shuffle of them crossing the stone-floored rooms. A twilight of loneliness, sombre and unbearable, shot through at last with little gleams of hope; letters from home, a cake, a box of fruit standing on the table in the hall. Frosty vividness of games days, whispered dormitory conversations, first stirrings of friendship…
Time passed quickly while Africa became a continent and? r2 was forced to equal the area of a circle and Caesar fought the Gauls. Other days and months declined impossibly and Christmas was near. A concert, services for end-of-term in the great hall; candles burning in their sconces through the short December days, issuing of rail vouchers, excitement of packing and waiting; the last morning, when Margaret was taken mysteriously in charge by her house-mistress Sister Alicia. Shoutings in the grounds, noises rendered crystalline by the bright winter air; flapping and chuffing of the butterfly cars thronging the front of the school while Anne waited feeling lost, the Sister secretive and smiling. And the great surprise; first a rumbling, distant but known, a sound her blood could never forget; and a plume of steam, a wink of brass as the loco, hugely unbelievable, edged her way along the drive, rutting Mother Superior’s precious gravel with her great treads, hooting and shouldering and bluffing her way through the butterfly cars, her wheels as tall as the highest of their masts. She was towing a single trailer, its flat bed nearly empty, and her uncle was driving and Margaret knew he’d come specially for her and started, hating herself, to howl, while Sister Alicia muttered ‘ridiculous child… ridiculous child…’ and prodded sense back into her with painfully bony fingers.
She was lifted up wincing with expectation to pull the cord that woke the Burrell’s huge deep voice; while the children clustered round the wheels ogling and laughing till Jesse drove them back with shouts and thrust forward reversing lever and regulator and they were on their way with a fussing of valves and crossheads, a great jetting of steam. Margaret clung to the hornplate staring back and waving as school receded, swept away by the windings of its drive to be lost and forgotten for a lifetime of three whole weeks. Often after that her uncle fetched her, or told off one of the men to detour. If he came it was always with Lady, the old Burrell that was still the pride of the fleet, and Margaret would boast endlessly to her friends and the mistresses that the loco had been named after her, she was her own special train. Jesse would laugh at that sometimes and shove her hair and say it were funny the way things worked themselves through. For the child’s mother too had been called Margaret; her dad kept a pub out Portland way and when he died and left her no place to live she’d been glad enough to settle for a man years her junior. Though it had cost Tim Strange his job and his home…