Part II
Family Matters
Blackthorn Hall, Sussex
Grey knew that his mother’s first husband, Captain DeVane, had been a most impressive man to look at—tall, handsome, dark, and dashing, with an aristocratically prominent nose and hooded gray eyes that gave him the aspect of a poet; Grey had seen several portraits.
Edgar, like his elder brother, Paul, exhibited these same characteristics, to a degree that caused young women to stare at him in the village, their mouths half open, despite the fact that he was well into his forties.
Filial respect caused Grey to hesitate in passing ex post facto opinions on his mother’s judgment, but after half an hour in the company of either Paul or Edgar, he could not escape a lurking suspicion that a just Providence, seeing the DeVanes so well endowed with physical beauty, had determined that there was no reason to spoil the work by adding intelligence to the mix.
“What?” Edgar frowned at him in incomprehension. “Somebody thinks I might have blown up a cannon? Bloody cheek!”
Of course, Grey reflected with an inner sigh, his mother had been only fifteen when she married DeVane.
“Not you, personally, no,” he assured Edgar. “The question—”
“Wasn’t even there, was I?” Edgar’s high cheekbones flushed with indignation.
“I’m sure I should have noticed if you had been,” Grey assured him gravely. “The question—”
“Who’s this Marchmont fellow, anyway? Piddling Irish title, not more than two generations out of the muck, what does he think he’s about, insulting me?” The DeVanes boasted nothing more than the odd knighthood, but could—and Maude often tiresomely did—trace their lineage back to well before the Conquest.
“I’m sure no insult was—” Well, actually, he was convinced of exactly the opposite; Marchmont’s purpose had been specific and blatant insult—and he did wonder why. Was it only to rattle Grey himself—or had he been meant to convey Marchmont’s remarks to Edgar, all along? Well, that was a question to be turned over later.
For the moment, he dropped any further attempts at soothing his half brother and asked bluntly, “Who oversees your powder mill, Edgar?”
Edgar looked at him blankly for an instant, but then the mist of anger in the hooded eyes lifted. Cleverness and intuition were not his strongest suits, but he could be depended on for straightforward facts.
“William Hoskins. Bill, he goes by. Decent man, got him from Waltham, a year ago. You think he’s something to do with this?”
“As I’ve never heard of the man ’til this moment, I’ve no idea, but I should like very much to speak with him, if you have no objection.”
“Not the slightest.” They were standing in the orchard behind the manor house; Grey had waited for an opportunity to speak to Edgar in privacy after breakfast.
“Come now,” said Edgar, turning with an air of decision. “We’ll cut across the fields; it’s quicker than fetching horses and going round by the road.”
It was rough going across the autumn fields, some already turned under by the plow, some still thick with stubble and the sharp, ragged ends of cornstalks, but Grey didn’t mind. The day was cold and misty, the sky gray and very low, so the air seemed still around them, wrapping them in silence, unbroken save for the occasional whir of a pheasant rising, or the distant calling of crows among the furrows.
It was a good two miles from the house to the powder mill, located on a bend of the river, and the brothers kept to their own thoughts for some time. At a stile, though, Grey caught his foot coming down and twisted awkwardly to save himself falling. The movement sent a sharp hot wire lancing through his chest, and he froze, trying not to breathe. He had made an involuntary noise, though, and Edgar turned, startled.
Grey lifted a hand, indicating that he would be all right—he hoped he would—but couldn’t speak.
Edgar’s brow creased with concern, and he put out a hand, but Grey waved him off. It had happened several times before, and generally the pain passed within a few moments; Dr. Longstreet’s irritation of the nerves, quite harmless. There was always the possibility, though, that it might indicate a shift of the sliver of iron embedded in his chest, in which case he might be dead within the next few seconds.
He held his breath until he felt his ears ring and his vision gray, then essayed the slightest breath, found it possible, and slowly relaxed, the nightmare feeling of suffocation vanishing as his lungs expanded without further incident.
“Are you quite all right, John?” Edgar was surveying him with an expression of worried concern that moved him.
“Yes, fine.” He straightened himself, and gave Edgar a quick grimace of reassurance. “Nothing. Just…taken queer for a moment.”
Edgar gave him a sharp look that reminded him for an unsettling instant of their mother.
“Taken queer,” he repeated, eyes passing up and down Grey’s body as though inspecting him for damage, like a horse that had come up suddenly lame. “Melton’s wife wrote to Maude that you’d been injured in Germany; she didn’t say it was serious.”
“It isn’t.” Grey spoke lightly, feeling pleasantly giddy at the realization that he wasn’t going to die just this minute.
Edgar eyed him for a moment longer, but then nodded, patted him awkwardly and surprisingly on the arm, and turned toward the river.
“Never could understand why you went to the army,” Edgar said, shaking his head in disapproval. “Hal…well, of course. But surely there was no need for you to take up soldiering.”
“What else should I do?”
Grey wasn’t offended. He felt suffused with a great lightness of being. The stubbled fields and clouded sky embraced him, immeasurably beautiful. Even Edgar seemed tolerable.
Oddly enough, Edgar seemed to be considering his question.
“You’ve money of your own,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “You could go into politics. Buy a pocket borough, stand for election.”
Just in time, Grey recalled his mother mentioning that Edgar himself had stood for Parliament in the last by-election, and refrained from saying that personally, he would prefer to be shot outright than to have anything to do with politics.
“It’s a thought,” he said agreeably, and they spoke no more, until the powder mill came in sight.
It was a brick building, a converted grain mill, and outwardly tranquil, its big waterwheel turning slowly.
“That’s for the coarse grinding,” Edgar said, nodding at the wheel. “We use a horse-drawn edge runner for the finer bits; more control.”
“Oh, to be sure,” Grey replied, having no idea what an edge runner might be. “A very aromatic process, I collect?”
A gust of wind had brought them an eye-watering wave of feculent stink, and Edgar coughed, pulling a handkerchief from his coat and putting it over his nose in a practiced manner.
“Oh, that. That’s just the jakesmen.”
“The what?” Grey hastily applied his own handkerchief in imitation.
“Saltpeter,” Edgar explained, taking obvious satisfaction in knowing something that his clever-arse younger brother did not. “One requires brimstone—sulfur, you know—charcoal, and saltpeter for gunpowder, of course—”
“I did know that, yes.”
“—We can produce the charcoal here, of course, and sulfur is reasonably cheap; well, saltpeter is not so expensive, either, but most of it is imported from India these days—used to get it from France, but now—Well, so, the more of it we can obtain locally—”
“You’re digging it out of your tenants’ manure piles?” Grey felt a strong inclination to laugh.
“And the privies. It forms in large nuggets, down at the bottom,” Edgar replied seriously, then smiled. “You know there’s a law, written in Good Queen Bess’s time, but still on the books, that allows agents of the Crown to come round and dig out the jakes of any citizen, in time of war? A local lawyer found it for me; most useful.”
“I should think your tenants might find having their privies excavated to be a positive benefit,” Grey observed, laughing openly.
“Well, that part’s all right,” Edgar admitted, looking modestly pleased with all this evidence of his business acumen. “They’re less delighted at our messing about their manure piles, but they do put up with it—and it lowers the cost amazingly.”
He waved briefly as they passed within sight of the jakesmen, two muffled figures unhitching a morose-looking horse from a wagon piled high with irregular chunks of reddish-brown, but kept his handkerchief pressed firmly to his nose until they had moved upwind.
“Anyway, it all goes there”—he pointed at a small brick shed—“to be melted and cleaned. Then there, to the mixing shed”—another brick building, somewhat larger—“and then to one of the milling sheds, for the grinding and corning. Oh, but here’s Hoskins; I’ll leave you to him. Hoskins!”
Bill Hoskins proved to be a ruddy, healthy-looking man of thirty or so—young for an overseer, Grey thought. He bowed most respectfully when introduced, but had no hesitation in meeting Grey’s eyes. Hoskins’s own were a striking blue-gray, the irises rimmed with black; Grey noticed, then felt an odd clench in the pit of his stomach at the realization that he had noticed.
In the course of the next hour, he learned a great many things, among them what an edge runner was—this being a great slab of stone that could be drawn by horses over a flat trough of gunpowder—what raw sulfur smelled like—rotten eggs, as digested by Satan; “the devil’s farts,” as Hoskins put it, with a smile—how gunpowder was shipped—by barge down the river—and that Bill Hoskins was a noticeably well-built man, with large, clean, remarkably steady hands.
Trying to ignore this irrelevant observation, he asked whether powder of different grades was produced.
Hoskins frowned, considering.
“Well, can be, of course. That’s what the corning’s for—” He nodded at one of the flimsily built wooden sheds. “The finer the powder’s ground and corned into grains, the more explosive it is. But then, the finer it’s corned, the riskier it is to handle. That’s why the milling sheds are built like that”—he nodded at one—“roofs and walls nobbut sheets of wood, cobbled together, loose-like. If one should go up, why, then, it’s easy to pick up the bits and put them back together.”
“Indeed. What about anyone who might have been working in the shed when it…went up?” Grey asked, feeling his mouth dry a little at the thought.
Hoskins smiled briefly, eyes creasing.
“Not so easy. What you asked, though—in practice, we make only the one grade of powder at this mill, as it’s all sold to the Ordnance Office for artillery. Hard enough to pass their tests; we do better than most mills, and even so, a good quarter of some batches turns out dud when they test it at Woolwich. Not that any o’ that is our fault, mind. Some others is mebbe not so careful, naming no names.”
Grey recalled the incessant thuds from the proving grounds.
“Oh, pray do,” he said. “Name names, I mean.”
Hoskins laughed. He was missing a tooth, far back on one side, but for the most part, his teeth were still good.
“Well, there’s the three owners in the consortium—”
“Wait—what consortium is this?”
Hoskins looked surprised.
“Mr. DeVane didn’t tell you? There’s him, and Mr. Trevorson, what owns Mayapple Farm, downriver—” He lifted his chin, pointing. “And then Mr. Fanshawe, beyond; Mudlington, his place is called. They went in together to bid the contracts for powder with the government, so as to be able to hold their own with the bigger powder mills like Waltham. So the powder’s kegged and shipped all as one, marked with the consortium’s name, but it’s made separate at the three mills. And as I say, not everyone’s as careful as what we are here.”
He looked over the assemblage of buildings with a modest pride, but Grey paid no attention.
“Marked with the consortium’s name,” he repeated, his heart beating faster. “What name is that?”
“Oh. Just DeVane, as your brother’s the principal owner.”
“Indeed,” Grey said. “How interesting.”