“I trust I have a sharp eye for any piece of machinery so elegantly conceived and finely constructed as one of Monsieur Breguet’s watches. But in this case I have a personal interest. My father sent me as a very young man to work for Monsieur Breguet in Paris. He told me there was no better person from whom I might learn what I needed.”
Watch in hand, Ruispidge bowed. “Your father was indeed a man of perspicacity.”
The watch was dangling on its chain from the old man’s hand, swinging to and fro like a pendulum, coming perilously close to the wall. Mr. Brunel, Robbie thought, was growing agitated for the watch’s safety.
At that moment, the world tilted on its axis and became an entirely different place. Mary came to life. His friend Mary, whom Robbie had known since he was a child in short-coats; who had played the part of sister to him for most of his life; who went to church at least once, usually twice, on Sundays-his friend Mary, with whom he was more than half in love-well, she picked up her cloak and skirt with her left hand and ran forward, keening like a madwoman.
She snatched the old man’s watch from his hand. Sir John and Mr. Brunel froze, both with their cigars moving towards their open mouths. Mary dived into the crowded station yard, dodging among the carriages and horses and wagons until she was lost in the seething mass of humanity.
2: A Gown of Yellow Silk
Robbie Trevine lodged above a cobbler’s near the market, where they let him sleep under the rafters in return for sweeping floors and running errands. By the time he had finished his jobs for the evening, the sky was darkening. He slipped out of the house and made his way to Hotwells, to the damp and crowded house by the river where Mary and her mother lodged in a tiny room up four pairs of stairs.
Mary opened the door. When she saw him, she stepped back to allow him into the room. He glanced towards the curtained alcove beside the empty fireplace.
“She’s asleep,” Mary whispered. “The doctor gave her something.”
“Give my love when she wakes.”
Robbie reckoned that Mrs. Linnet had given him more love than his own mother, though that wasn’t hard because, when he was three years old, his mother had gone off for a few days’ holiday with a Liverpool publican and never come back.
Mary’s face was impossible to read in that shadowy room. “I was afraid you’d come.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you steal the gent’s watch at the station?”
“I had to do something. The doctor don’t come cheap, and Ma needs medicines, and proper food. The nurse is coming back later this evening. It all costs money.”
“But if they catch you-”
“They won’t.”
“But selling something stolen is almost as risky as taking it in the first place.”
She shrugged and turned her head away from him. “There’s someone I know.”
“This isn’t the first time, is it?”
Mary said nothing. They listened to the breathing of the sick woman.
Robbie said: “I’d do anything to help. You know that.”
“Go now,” she said. “Just go. I don’t want you here.”
Robbie stumbled out of the room. He crossed the street and took shelter in the mouth of the alley on the other side. There was a tavern on the corner, and the constant bustle of the place made him almost invisible.
A distant church clock chimed the quarters and the hours. He calculated that he waited nearly an hour and a half before Mary appeared in the doorway of her house. She was hooded and cloaked as before, but he would have known her anywhere. She set off up the street, her wooden pattens clacking on the cobbles. He followed her, holding well back, keeping to patches of shadow and varying his pace. Soon they began to climb towards the dark mass of Clifton Wood.
Mary followed the rising ground towards the Downs in the northwest. They were not far from the tower of Brunel’s unfinished suspension bridge, looming over the Gorge and the river Avon. Before she reached the Downs, however, Mary turned into a terrace of great stone-faced houses set back from the road. Only one of the houses had shuttered windows, and this was the one she approached. Robbie, watching from across the street, saw her dark figure descending into the basement area in front of the house.
He crossed the road. A plate had been screwed to one of the gateposts. It was too dark to decipher the words engraved upon it. He ran his fingertips over the brass, tracing the cold metallic channels of each letter.
THE RODNEY PLACE MISSIONARY SOCIETY
Mary knocked on the basement door. A candle flame flickered in the black glass of a nearby window. Bolts scraped back. The door opened.
“Child,” said Mr. Fanmole in his soft voice. “You are long past your time.”
“I beg pardon, sir. The nurse was late and I couldn’t leave my mother.”
When she was inside, Mr. Fanmole closed and bolted the door. He wore a long grey dressing gown of a silken material that gleamed in the candlelight; his little head was perched on a broad neck that rose from narrow shoulders.
“Come, child.” He led the way along a whitewashed passage vaulted with brick, his shadow cavorting behind him on the wall. “You saw him?”
“Yes, sir. He came out with the other gents, and then he stopped for a while and talked with one of them. Mr. Brunel himself.”
She followed Mr. Fanmole into a room at the back of the house. A coal fire burned in the grate and there were shutters across the two windows. He sat down at a mahogany table laden with papers and angled his chair to face the fire. He beckoned her to stand before him.
“Well, child? What did you learn?”
“He’s interested in a new railway, but he hasn’t made up his mind. He’s lodging at the Great Western Hotel. And… and I took his watch.”
Mr. Fanmole slapped the palm of his hand on the table, and his pen fell unnoticed to the carpet. “I told you to be discreet, you little fool. This was not an occasion for thieving.”
“But he was playing with it, sir, just asking for it to be prigged. And my ma, she’s took bad again, and she needs a nurse as well as a doctor-and it’s a good watch, too, sir. You give me a sovereign for the last one, and I’m sure-”
“Hold your prattle.”
“Sir, he didn’t see my face, I swear it. And I was away through the crowd before he knew the watch was gone.”
“Give it me,” he commanded.
Mr. Fanmole held out his hand and she dropped the watch onto his palm. To her surprise he smiled. “Ah! He will be enraged. He’s deeply attached to his Breguet timepiece.”
“Sir,” she asked timidly, “how much will I have when you sell it? My mother-”
“It’s too precious to sell, child. Far too precious.”
“But, sir, I don’t understand.”
He gazed at her, whistling tunelessly, and put down the watch, very gently, on the table. “You don’t have to understand.”
“I-I thought you’d be pleased, sir.”
Suddenly he was on his feet and looming over her. His hand shot out and seized her by the hair. He dragged her to a tall cupboard built into the wall on the right of the fireplace. He opened the door. Hanging inside was a yellow silk gown.
“This is how to please me, child.”
3: Not Quite the Gentleman
In the opinion of Sir John Ruispidge, Mr. Brunel was not quite the gentleman. But it would be churlish to deny that he had been kindness itself after the distressing theft of the Breguet watch at Temple Meads Station. He had summoned police officers and urged them to prosecute their enquiries with the utmost vigour. He had ordered advertisements to be placed in the Bristol papers, offering a reward of twenty guineas for the watch’s safe return.
“Not for the world, my dear sir,” he had said, “would I have had such an incident occur.”
Sir John could well believe it. The long and the short of it was that Brunel had every reason to keep him sweet.