England has not seen since the monarchy was toppled. Locomotives are direly dangerous even now, while they run on tracks and carry goods and innocent passengers, but when they’re adapted for use in war—their engines fitted with cannon and their carriages filled with artillerists—they’ll be so destructive that indiscriminate mechanized massacre will become routine. Enjoy your mechanical honeymoon, Hope—it can’t and won’t last.”
“The days of warfare are numbered, Escott,” Hope affirmed, confidently. “The Pax Romana was a feeble affair compared to the Pax Anglica. The world has never seen an alliance like that between the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy, and their association will make certain that social progress advances hand in hand with technological progress. We are privileged to be alive at the dawn of the Euchronian Era, and hands that are idle today, or reduced to mindlessly repetitive labor because their old skills have become redundant, will not need the Devil to find them clever work. The march of science will do that, infallibly and triumphantly. Future generations of laborers will not be akin to slaves, even in careless metaphor; they will be true collaborators with machinery, participating in a marvelous complementarity of skills. Steam is brute force, but electricity is art, and electricity will be the foundation of the next technological revolution—as witness the telegraphic systems that control the signals distributed along the railway.”
Michael observed that the Monticarlos had already lost the thread of the argument; although they both spoke conversational English with commendable fluency, and hardly any accent, the terms in which Hope and Escott were pontificating were too esoteric to be easily comprehensible. Carmela whispered something to her father in Italian, as if to start up a second, rival conversation, but the violinist frowned at her and shook his head, instructing her not to be impolite.
Having heard such exchanges a dozen times before, Lady Phythian obviously had no desire to listen to another, but it seemed that she had already despaired of any possibility of controlling such disobedient individuals. For the moment, she contented herself with making her disinterest in the argument manifest, turning away from Michael and Hope alike to gaze loftily out of the widow, as if she were indeed Britannia reviewing her estates.
Michael was now convinced that Hope and Escott had only been eager to invite him to join them in their carriage in order that they might obtain a relatively fresh audience for their eternal quarrel rather than to invite any contribution to their discussion, but he did not hold it against them. The same chatter that had informed him so fully of Lady Phythian’s history and character had filled in their background for him. They had gone on from Eton to Balliol, and then—having come into their respective inheritances within a matter of months—had set out to make the Grand Tour together. Instead of following the customary route to Italy, however, they had decided to design their own itinerary, which would take them to even remoter cradles of civilization: to Greece, to Egypt, and finally to Crete, where they had spent a full year exploring the ruins of Knossos, the ancient capital in the vicinity of Makro Teikho, whose recently-excavated remains had become a playground for the assiduous antiquarians of England and the German States. It was there that they had met the present Earl of Langstrade, who had then been known as “young Harry Langstrade” to distinguish him from his father—who had only recently become “Old Harry Langstrade of Langstrade” instead of mere “Old Harry Langstrade”—and who had not yet met his wife-to-be, Emily Hale.
According to the gossip, it was the Grand Tour that had completed the opposition between the two traveling companions, perfecting its universality. It had been the three years of their “educational odyssey” that had extended Hope’s innate optimism into a wholehearted philosophy of progress, and Escott’s natural pessimism into quasi-apocalyptic gloom. It had also stretched Hope’s Whig sympathies into near-radical enthusiasm for political reform and Utopian—or, as he preferred to call it, Euchronian—social planning, while elaborating Escott’s Toryism into a near-mystical appreciation of the lost glories of the past. It had even been their years in and around the Mediterranean, so it was said, that had made Hope so plump and Escott so thin, because the former had thrived on native diets they had encountered there, whereas the latter had never been able to reconcile his stomach to their unfamiliarity.
Some people professed surprised that the two men had remained friends once they had returned to England to enjoy life as consummate amateurs, but they had always represented themselves as inevitable dialectical elements of a greater unity, like the north and south poles of a magnet. Now that he was able to listen to them holding forth at close range, as it were, Michael was able to appreciate the truth of that judgment. Had only one of them been present, his ideas would have been mere philosophical pontifications, overblown and essentially tedious, but because they were together, their contrasted ideas obtained a kind of vibrancy from a cut-and-thrust combat that was almost akin to music in its rhythm and resonance. Instead of being tedious, they seemed alive and electric, spitting sparks at one another like the various kinds of apparatus that had been built and exhibited to demonstrate the telegraphic principle.
For the moment, however, Michael was glad that the duty the two men had sought to impose upon him by means of their invitation was not particularly burdensome. Although he continued to lend a reverent ear to the erratic course of their flamboyant dispute, the painter soon allowed his attention to wander. His eyes strayed to the window, while his mind relaxed into a pleasant reverie, the principal image of which was Cecilia Langstrade’s lovely face. How he longed to paint her cornflower-blue eyes and silky blonde hair! How he longed, in fact, to reach a far greater intimacy with that face than mere paint could ever permit!
Michael did not have the faintest idea what the probability was that he would ever achieve that kind of intimacy. That Cecilia liked him a great deal he had no doubt, but they had only met on formal social occasions, surrounded by crowds, and the letters they had exchanged had so far been rather tentative in their affectionate tone. He was very hopeful that the weekend house-party at Langstrade Hall would give him more than one opportunity to speak to her in private, far more confidentially than the formality of a letter would allow, and he was also very hopeful that such circumstances would confirm and enhance her manifest regard for him—but the small steps he might be able to take between a Thursday evening and a Tuesday morning were a long way short of the social ground that he would eventually have to cover if their relationship were to mature.
In theory, differences in social status were far less important nowadays than they had been in his late father’s day—and if Mr. Hope could be believed, the erosion of that importance could only accelerate in future—but the fact remained that the Langstrades were now fully-fledged members of the aristocracy, while the Laurels were not. Horatio Laurel’s highly distinguished naval career had won him sufficient social status to launch Michael into Society—in which circles a painter had to move if he were to have any chance of making a living—but could not give him “quality”. The Langstrades’ elevation to the aristocracy had, by contrast, provided the family with an inalienable certificate of quality, and the fact that it was recent inevitably served to make the present Earl even more conscious of that status than he would have been had he been the thirty-second instead of the second. The fact that the first Earl had insisted on regarding the entitlement as a re-elevation rather than a simple promotion, and as a long-belated recognition of an ancient due, was a further complication. Michael had no idea how the second Earl might react to the possibility of acquiring a mere painter as a son-in-law, even if Cecilia could be completely won over to the prospect.
The first Earl of Langstrade had been appointed to the peerage at the behest of the Academy, for his contributions to industry. He had been one of the pioneers of mechanization in textile manufacture even before the advent of steam engines, and had become famous in political circles for his stout resistance to Richard Arkwright’s monopolistic maneuvers—a resistance that had become known as the Second War of the Roses, even though Arkwright’s enterprise was based in Derbyshire rather than Lancashire. The first Earl had, however, always been insistent that his family had been aristocrats long before the Norman Conquest or the “Saxon Tyranny” that had preceded it. He claimed to be a direct descendant of Celtic Longstrides, who had
