Looking around, he whistled through his teeth. “What can’t you do without?”
She gestured, mutely, unable to take in her sudden change of fortune. “All of it.”
He nodded. “And why should you leave anything behind?” Turning with a whirl of figured velvet skirts, he strode from the room. “I’ll be back!” he called, and the front door slammed.
“We have the house in Bunhill Row,” she said. Her mind snapped back into action. “I’ll go out to the yard. We’ll have to defer production for a few days, but the most important thing is to get back up and running in as little time as possible.”
Out in the yard, she called her men around her and brought them up to date. She went over the plan of the new house, as much as she recalled. “The house has a large garden we can erect workshops in.”
“Soil won’t do for the machinery, ma’am. And how do we get it up and running?”
Some of the machinery was bulky. “We can set up workshops on the ground floor of the house for now. I want to take as much as we can over today and concentrate on getting production back. Everything else must be secondary to that.”
“What about the furnaces? We’ve not had them on for the last two days, but they’re still hot.”
Swiftly, she assessed the cost of new furnaces. “Leave them for now. If we have no time for them at the end, we’ll get new ones. We must take the mill, it has to be our priority.”
Her foreman nodded, scratching the back of his neck. “I’ll get the machinery packed, ma’am.”
“We have no time for that. By tomorrow we need to be out of here. It’s only two streets away. We may carry the large pieces there.”
“Do you have the key, ma’am?”
She had forgotten that part. “I have the deeds to the house. The owner is arriving with the key shortly. Start moving the larger equipment, and leave a man at the house in charge of it.”
She felt better now. At last she was doing something. Returning to the house, she found Maud ordering the maid to gather the smaller pieces in the living quarters. “You might as well strip the beds,” Annie said. “I don’t intend to spend another night under this roof.”
Maud grinned, but drew her out of the room, where the maid was carefully packing away the china and the clocks. She was using linen to protect the pieces, as they’d had no time to collect anything else. The house was in uproar, but it was a happy, busy kind of activity, with a joy that had been missing recently.
Her heart soared. Whatever came next, she had a future, and she had Gerald by her side. For now, at least. He had given her the means to go on, to continue. She hadn’t intended to accept the house, but she had little choice now. She would make matters right.
She had no time to think anything through, but for now, he was not married and neither was she. They were free to enjoy each other—if they found the time.
Back downstairs, she found the men had collected one of the carts they used to transport the wire to local customers. They had no horse. Usually one or more of the men would pull the contraption, or they’d hire one. Now they were discussing if they should try to load everything up at once, or as much as they could fit, or separate them. Annie took charge.
“Separate them into loads. If the cart breaks from the extra weight, we’ll have to move the things by hand. Carry anything we can. And we’ll carry the valuable items and leave someone to guard it.”
Their stock of silver ingots was low. They also collected silver waste, which they melted down for re-use, both household items they bought and waste from the processes.
They agreed to take the rolling mill first. God knew what that thing weighed. It took four strong men to heave it up, and at Annie’s order, they lowered it back down to the pavement. “That won’t go in the cart,” she said flatly.
“Rollers,” said her foreman.
The mill was a relatively new machine, and the highest value piece that Annie owned. She didn’t want to risk the machine falling and its cogs getting misaligned. The thing was temperamental enough, but it saved so much time over the previous method, which was simply to hammer the ingot into thin sheets. Her husband’s perspicacity in buying it, expending a great deal of their income on the contraption, had paid off. Cathcart’s had prospered ever since.
Annie would drop everything else to supervise moving this piece.
They found some rollers, four long, wooden poles about six inches thick. Two men fetched them while Annie and the foreman Jem hovered over the machine, guarding it as best they could. Not that anyone was likely to be interested in running away with it.
They used an age-old method to move the machine. After spacing the rollers, the men carefully lowered the machine on them. Then they set off.