to pluck him out of second-class chaos into first-class comfort, and the urgency with which they were exercising their invitation. For another, if there was the slightest possibility that Hope might be a rival for Cecilia’s hand—if not her affection—then he certainly ought to seize the opportunity to confirm or falsify the hypothesis.
“Marlstone set off five days ago with six assistants and half a dozen carts,” Escott told him. He had to pause thereafter when the cry of “All aboard!” was raised and echoed all along the platform, accompanied by a blast on the station-manager’s whistle, but as soon as the thin man could make himself heard again, he continued: “Anyone else would have sent the equipment on ahead and followed at his leisure, but Marlstone won’t let the components of his precious time machine out of his sight, all the more so since the fiascos at Horton Lacey and Chatsworth. If all has gone well with the convoy, he’ll be there ahead of us, but my guess is that he’ll have got bogged down somewhere in the Midlands, and probably won’t arrive until Sunday. By the time he’s got his blessed machine set up, the rest of us will be on our way home.”
In spite of the difficulties of shoving their way through the crowd, Hope and Escott had succeeded in reaching the carriage containing their reserved compartment without ever letting go of Michael’s captive arms. They literally lifted him off the ground in order to deposit him in the carriage, somewhat to the surprise and alarm of Lady Phythian, who had taken advantage of her early arrival to claim a window seat. The famous violinist Signor Monticarlo and his daughter Carmela had taken the two opposed seats on the far side of the carriage, next to the door to the corridor. Michael had been introduced to all of them at one time or another, but knew them even more slightly that he knew Hope and Escott.
The virtuoso and the two ladies did not seem unduly surprised to see Michael, obviously having no inkling of the ignominy of the second-class ticket, but they did not seem unduly delighted either. They greeted him politely, but rather coolly; when Hope propelled him toward the vacant seat between the two ladies, both of them seemed to Michael’s anxious eyes to be a trifle disappointed that Hope had not taken the seat himself. In fact, the optimist took the spare window seat, while his meager companion took the seat opposite Michael.
Now that the carriage was fully-loaded it seemed rather cramped, largely because the luggage racks were full to overflowing and several items of luggage had had to be accommodated on the floor or on the passengers’ laps. Signor Monticarlo, a short and delicate man with an abundance of sleek black hair and a moustache, was clutching one of his violin-cases. In spite of the capacious bandage she was sporting on her wrist, Carmela, who was a little taller and wirier than her father, was cradling another. Lady Phythian, who seemed rather large by comparison with the two Italians, had a proportionately enormous handbag on her lap. Michael had to maneuver his way to his seat with some skill, and felt that he was easing himself into a narrow gap as he sat down. Compared to conditions in a second-class compartment, however, the plushness and softness of the seats were sheer luxury.
Michael resolved to accept the inevitable with a good grace, sit back, and do his level best to enjoy the hectic journey to come.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY
“Well,” said Quentin Hope, as the train drew away from the platform, while the crowd left behind cheered and waved, “here we are in the very bosom of a mechanical miracle, participating in the latest glory of English science. Long live the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy!”
“”If ever there were a Ship of Fools…,” Escott began, pitching straight in with evident relish—but he was immediately interrupted by Lady Phythian, who had obviously been present at more than one of Hope and Escott’s showpiece arguments and was nursing a faint hope of being able to derail this one.
“I must be mad to have let young Langstrade talk me into this,” the dowager pronounced, striking a melodramatic pose. “At my age, given my delicate health, the excessive speed is sure to prove fatal!”
Lady Phythian certainly did not seem to be in delicate health, in Michael’s non-expert opinion. She was short of stature, but her embonpoint was robust, and her lungs were obviously in very good order indeed. In truth, she was not so very old, although she gave an impression of antiquity. She was probably no more than sixty, if that, but widowhood had conferred a particular stamp of authority upon her attitude and manner as well as her perceived status. As daughters and wives, however rich or aristocratic, Englishwomen were necessarily subservient, but if and when they became widows they acquired an independent authority that was somehow beyond challenge. Michael’s mother had responded to her own widowhood by assuming an exaggerated concern for his well-being, but Lady Phythian had given birth to two sons and a daughter, and had married them all off successfully, so her widowhood had given her a far more general imperiousness reminiscent of the mythical Britannia in whose name the Admiralty ruled the waves.
Michael knew, by virtue of society chatter, that Lady Phythian had been relatively humbly born, as Ariadne Potts, but that she took great pride in the facts that her grandmother had been an Asherson, and that her husband, the late Viscount Phythian, had been a cousin of the Lowthers—a family that included the Earls of Lonsdale as well as several baronets of no particular significance. She had once been the evident social superior of her close friend Millicent Houghton, although the latter had overtaken her when her husband, Harold Langstrade, had been elevated to the peerage as the first Earl of Langstrade, reconnecting his surname to the Yorkshire village from which his ancestors supposedly hailed, and whose ancient manor he had bought from the Lords Office. Michael was not at all surprised, therefore, that Lady Phythian seemed to be looking down at him as he sat by her side, even though he was a head taller than she was. There was no hostility or contempt in her gaze when she deigned to turn in his direction, though; she was evidently reserving her judgment as to whether he was to be placed in the same “naughty boy” category to which she had long ago consigned Hope and Escott.
Michael guessed that the dowager’s objection to high-speed travel was more a matter of conformity to expectation than genuine terror. He knew that there were legions of diehard conservatives in the land, who swore that nothing on Earth would ever tempt them to step aboard a carriage pulled by a steam locomotive. Such people were wont to opine that the human body had not been designed—whether by God or Evolution—to withstand the stresses of movement at such terrifying velocities, and that, in any case, such a mode of transportation had none of the camaraderie, romance and history of a journey by road. No one in his right mind, such skeptics stoutly maintained, wanted to live life at such an insane pace that a journey that had always taken at least two days was now crammed into a mere four and a half hours. He suspected, however, that Lady Phythian was not of that company. There was a slight twinkle in her eye when she made her dramatic gesture, and she pronounced her complaint as if she were reciting a line in a play.
“Reassure yourself, Lady Phythian,” said Hope, serenely. “Destiny is on our side. The Commonwealth has long enjoyed the Empire of the Oceans, and now it has the means to exercise the same authority on land. Just as John Dee’s telescope and Cornelius Drebbel’s submarine paved the way for England to rule the waves, Dick Trevithick’s Cornish Engines will make us masters of the Earth’s surface, and its bowels too!”
Lady Phythian frowned at the use of the word “bowels” in a mixed carriage, but she was insufficiently quick off the mark to seize the initiative again by means of a further melodramatic pronouncement. Escott was not about to be forestalled for a second time.
“Steam will be the nation’s ruin,” Hope’s rival stated, sententiously. “Using powerful engines to pump water out of mines will only encourage miners to dig deeper, so that the inevitable collapses will be all the more disastrous when they occur. Using those same engines to power mills has already thrown tens of thousands of craftsmen out of work, and reduced the remaining mill-workers to mere mechanical hands, rude slaves of machinery.
