The Last Geomancer

Scene 6: Jack Leaves Cornwall, But Takes a Bit With

Truro Station was immediately more noise and confusion than any of the previous. Jack blinked for a second on exiting the wagonlit onto the West Cornwall terminus arrival platform. A man behind him said “excuse me” rather pointedly, and Jack moved out of the way with a start. He’d been to Truro more than a few times before, just last week for the company representative, but his mind had been very far away from cities and railways for the last few miles.

He fell in with the flow of other passengers, slinging his basket onto his back with a quick check for clearance around himself. Past the railway clerk with the clicker, counting the passengers leaving the platform, they passed through a one way turnstile to the other side of the waist high iron fence, and into the main hall of the station. Across the hall lay another iron fence and turnstile, letting out passengers from the down line from Plymouth. The rail lines, narrow gauge West Cornwall up, turntable, and down on one side and the broad gauge Cornwall Railway down, turntable, and up formed the legs of a letter H, with the station as the crossbar. To Jack’s left, the ticket office and baggage counter took up the entire wall. Must be nice, Jack thought, to have enough baggage to need to check it, or be able to afford to. He set off across the hall, veering to the right, toward the street exit, to avoid the line at the ticket window. The woman selling fried fish in cones of newspaper at the cart where her husband worked making more glanced at him, then away to someone a little less threadbare.

The turnover sat happily in Jack’s stomach, though, and he did not regret the fish. Railway food tended to be a bit risky, anyway, who knows how long that fish had been out of the water. They drowned it in enough malt vinegar the air shimmered above it from the fumes. Poorly drained, whatever fat it had been fried in turned the newspaper half translucent. Best not to chance it even if he could afford it. The few shillings he had for travel money had to last him all the way to Adelaide, and no telling what might happen between here and there. Enough people were buying anyway, so many workers on their way home from the overnight shift, looking for their dinner to eat on the walk or the next train.

Jack ducked aside up the cast-iron stairs just short of the iron railing, showed his ticket to the railway clerk standing at the landing and crossed the iron bridge over the tracks. At the foot of the stairs on the other side, another clerk punched his ticket and let him through the one-way turnstile onto the up platform. The train hadn’t pulled in yet, still being on the turnaround in the railyard beyond, but easily two dozen people already stood about waiting for it. A few peddlers wandered through the small crowd in a desultory fashion, only the coffee seller with the bucket of wooden mugs and the cask of probably warmish beverage that one might hope was actually mostly coffee doing any trade at all.

He found a space on the platform midway down from the sign that said MEN’S CARRIAGES to the one that said PENNY FARES, and put his basket down at his feet. The stocky, broad-shouldered young man he’d picked a spot next to glanced his way, looked pointedly down at the basket and back up at Jack’s face, and grinned.

“Adelaide?” he asked, a very Cornish accent for someone whose sandy-brown hair and hazel eyes didn’t exactly say Cornwall. He had the stocky build, though, if a bit more broad of beam with those massive shoulders.

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Tiparra Mining Company?”

The young man stuck out a hand. “Howel Goss. We’re part of the same batch of new blood, looks like.”

Jack shook the offered hand, a single firm clasp and no strength games from either side. Both nodded appreciatively. “Jack Hollow, formerly of Forcette.”

Howel glanced about. “I’m Truro born and raised, myself. So I got to sleep in later than you this morning.” He glanced back at Jack with a cheeky smirk.

jack laughed. “Lucky you, you got to sleep, family wasn’t fretting all night.”

Howel’s face fell into a serious frown for a moment. “Oh, they did, they did.” But then he brightened again. “Until Da poured everyone a tot of gin and then people went off to sleep right well.”

Jack glanced away.“Yeah, we had ours a couple of weeks back, when Mum was still having so much trouble getting used to the idea.”

“So you were a miner already, or a fisherman? It’s one or the other that far west as Forcette.” Howel brushed his hair out of his eyes where a stray puff of wind had blown it. He kept the forelock long, Jack noted, and tucked aside so it wasn’t obvious.

“Neither really,” Jack said, turning back after a lean out and a glance down the tracks. The occasional puff of smoke and steam told him the locomotive was still on the turntable, having just come out of the railyard and not yet hooked up to the cars it would be pulling. “The tin had run out before I turned fifteen, and after me Da was lost at sea Mum wouldn’t hear of me going out with the morning fleet.”

Howel’s brows drew together, and he made a sympathetic frown, cocking his head to one side as he reached up a little to clap a hand to Jack’s shoulder. “Sorry to hear, that must have been ’ard.”

Jack shrugged the other shoulder. Howel’s hand fell away. “It was years ago, and what can you do? We moved on. Me uncle Peran kind of stepped in, made sure I went to school, Jennifer learned her sums and got a job, but there were just too many young men out and about. He and his son Kenver went over two years ago.”

Howel brightened, rummaged about in his coat pocket, came up with a drawstring pouch. “Was it him what got you the job? You smoke?” He offered the pouch one-handed, fumbling about in his other pocket and fishing out a well-worn brier.

Jack laughed. “Yes, and as of this morning, yes.” They spent a couple of minutes in companionable silence, loading their pipes, getting them going, putting away the tobacco pouch.

“So, yes,” Jack said finally, half his attention on the plume of smoke he exhaled through pursed lips. It refused to behave and dissipated in the light breeze. “Uncle Peran sent a letter saying the company needed men bad enough they were willing to advance the ticket for anyone their employees would vouch for. How about you?”

Howel puffed at his brier a moment. “Sheer luck, really. My Da is a blacksmith, seventh generation, so yes, he can do some very interesting things at a forge, but there’s just not the work there used to be.” He shrugged, a bit like a small mountain having a flex. “He taught me the basics, but started talking around at the pubs about jobs, and opportunities for a young man, and where there might be a bit more of a future. Nobody’s spending steady money on forge craft these days. They do it all at the big steam driven mills. And this son of a blacksmith just happened to be round the corner, coming to find his old man and bring him home, when a stranger at the bar told me Da he had positions open for strong, likely young men, but he was leaving that night, had just finished up signing up some other boy –”

“Snap!” Jack cried, “Couldn’t be! Funny little Glaswegian talked through his nose?”

“The very same.” Howel shook his head in amazement. “With odds like that, I should have put a pound on with the punter. So he stands up, and I walk in, and Bob’s your uncle. Or Peran, you said? Wait, that doesn’t work, the joke won’t hold.” He waved off the mad thought.

Any further comment was made impossible as the West Cornwall blew its departure whistle and got under way, having gone round the turntable, got its new wagons, and taken on the Penzance-bound passengers. As the last of its cars cleared the down platform, the Cornwall Railway broad gauge drew up to the northbound. The locomotive’s great main drive wheel, taller by half than Jack, and him taller by a hand than the average Cornishman, gave a final partial turn and halted, the drive arm carefully halfway between directly up and directly forward so as not to deadlock. Howel drew attention to it.

“Sign of a careful driver,” he commented, pointing to the drive arm.

Jack raised an eyebrow. “You take a lot of trains then?”

Howel shrugged, and picked up his suitcase, a battered leather one with rusting iron rivets on the corners, and a complete lack of border transit decals. “Just up and down the line a few stops to fetch back supplies and deliver finished work. There was barely enough to keep Da busy but just enough he needed me to run the errands.” He paused for a sigh. “But it’s got slower.”

Aboard the wagonlit, the young men picked out a bench a bit past midway on the left, facing forwards. An older man in a workman’s waistcoat and bowler glanced over the top of his newspaper at them, gave them a quick assessment and a nod, and went back to page seven.

“And so here I am, by being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a once in a lifetime opportunity.” Howel tapped the wooden windowframe three times with his index fingertip as he pronounced the words. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

“Julius Caesar, Act four, scene 3,” Jack mused, tucking his basket away but keeping back the bag with the remaining rolls. “Brutus having it out with Cassius once and for all, and determined to not waste any more time, but act while they had both the strength and the opportunity.” He shrugged off the gloomy mood that was building, held out the bag. “Roll? They’re yesterday’s, I’m afraid.”

Howel waved them off. “I had a pasty this morning, lucky bugger I know, going away present from the pub. I heard the recruiting agent left a nice shiny gratuity on the bar next to his mug. Besides, we’ll want them later, it’s hours on to Plymouth from here or so the railway map board said.”

“True enough, true enough.” Jack tucked the bag under his coat on the side by the window and leaned on it slightly, not enough to crush the rolls although by now you’d almost need a hammer to do it, they’d have to be soaked in something to eat by morning. The conductor came down the aisle. Everyone held their tickets up to show they’d been punched for at least one station further on. He bustled off through the door at the back of the wagonlit and into the next seating wagon. There were four now, with one a first class carriage, one a ladies’ carriage, two for the men and now two of the penny standing cars.

“So.” Jack frowned pensively. “We’ve both then come to that river and we must cross, with Australia on the other side, and let the bridge be burned behind us. There is no going but forward.”

“You’re a gloomy enough’un,” Howel chided, and shook Jack’s knee companionably, the way one might shake a dog to rouse it to play. “And what’s that you’re quoting, you never made that up yourself.”

“Bits and scraps from several works, I think,” Jack replied, his attention taken from the window and the potential of watching the station out of view. Board had been called. The great wheel heaved, slipped, heaved again, and the locomotive lurched into motion, a quicker heave, and another and into smooth progress as the cycles blended into the next.

“You play whist?” Howel asked, pulling a deck of cards out of his vest’s inner pocket.

That got Jack’s attention. “Did John Wesley invent the tent meeting?”

He turned and scooted aside to make a bit of room on the bench for the cards. Howel began dealing, indicating the hand to each player’s right as their dummy.

“It’ll have to be for points, though,” Jack went on, “and we’ll figure out what to do with them later on.”

Howel shrugged. “We’ve got three months to decide that at the very least.” He produced half an envelope and a bit of pencil, and made the columns.

Grampound Road came and went, with its cottages for the station master and for the staff, being so far from everything else. Howel was up by three and fairly crowing with his run of starting luck. They went through the bypass loop round Burngullow, still under construction and probably another six months before it would be open, and Jack took a point and then another point as hand after hand played out. The older man sitting across from them put down his paper, and began kibitzing.

“Ruan Penhaligon,” he introduced himself after making a somewhat acerbic remark over Jack’s taking a trick Howel should have expected to lose with that lead.

“Ruin, you said?” Howel retorted, perhaps a bit too archly. Jack laid out his card, and that of his dummy, and Howel pounced, playing from his hands to reveal a card just barely high enough to take the trick. “And now that’s out of the way and I’ve smoked out his ten.”

Jack nodded to the older man. “Mr. Penhaligon, perhaps you shouldn’t underestimate my new friend here. I know I’m the smart lookin’ one, he can’t help it.”

“Excuse me?” Howel stared at him in wide-eyed mock incredulity. “How can you say such things about me, and us just having met. And I’m up a point this hand.” He scooped up the cards, aligned them, and set them down crosswise atop the stack he’d been building with previous tricks.

“If it doesn’t work out,” Ruan said, rather pointedly to Jack, “you go to this address in Saltash.” He plucked a calling card from his vest pocket with finger and thumb, extended it to Jack. Putting down his hand, Jack accepted the card and glanced it over as he picked up the dummy hand to review it.

“They’ll trade you room and board for two months for your ship ticket. They can get a nice refund on it, and put you at the mill. There’s still need of young Cornishmen of industrious nature” – he leaned into the phrase and gave Howel a pointedly slow take – “within the border. Once you cross that river, though, you’re in England. That may give either one of you the shivers, but you,” appraisingly, to Jack, looking him over again, “you more likely. Your Da Irish by any chance?”

Jack’s eyes went cold. “Me Da was a Cornishman of Cornish parents, but he’s gone these twelve years now and you’ll not be speaking ill of the dead.”

Ruan flinched back. He rose quickly, gathered his things. “You see how they treat you at the ship. You’ll be traveling steerage and no better than cattle for three months. Ask around if you don’t believe me.”

Outside, the arrival station at Lostwithiel drew alongside, a big, fancy wooden structure with two waiting rooms, one a well lit and comfortable parlor for the first class passengers, the second a bare wooden room with a few benches the Calvinists had rejected as too uncomfortable, a Franklin stove in the fireplace, and a couple of kerosene lanterns hung on chains from the ceiling. At least the entire exterior was brightly painted and in good repair, and not just the one end of the platform. A few porters, their big tin badges authorizing them to work on railway property for what they could get people to pay in coin, milled about at the border, belonging to one side but needing to serve the other to afford their rent. The roof projected well out over the rails, allowing both sides of the train to be reached without going out into the weather, at the cost of the smoke trail left by the locomotive rolling through the station, causing a good deal of coughing, streaming eyes, and uselessly fanning the air to try and disperse it. Thankfully, the wind followed along, and carried the smoke out the far end and up around the outer edge, past the locomotive and into the larger goods shed platform a hundred yards down the track.

“You get cold feet,” Ruan repeated, determined to finish his pitch even if he thought it was a lost cause, “you can trade your tickets for room and board and a job.” And then he was the first down the steps as soon as the railway attendant unfolded them.

“What a terrible salesman,” Howel said, shaking his head and watching the man hurry away.

“Hope he’s not paid on commission, poor fellow will starve to death.” Jack folded up the man’s card and dropped it into the ashtray. “My deal, I believe.”

Bodmin Road went by next, with its new cattle pens. Howel gave thanks that the cattle had their own train, and jack took a point on the hand. Doublebois was barely a station, a single platform with the signal box standing up midway of it, and tracks down both sides. Half the traffic, people and cargo both, had to go down to the crossing where gates and a gatekeeper helped prevent folks from being run down. Some was that just couldn’t get the concept that a machine that big doesn’t stop on a ha’penny. Jack took another point and Howel’s banter died away, his focus more on the cards and less on the comradely chaffing they’d been using to pass the time. Same batch, same ship, they’d be three months in each other’s company and longer if they went to the same shift at the mine. Plenty of time to banter, and trade stories. Wouldn’t want to use them all up on the first day, now, would you?

And so, in that slow meandering way of telling a number of side stories before getting to the return of the gargoyle, they passed the time and the stations of Liskeard and Menheniot, but when they drew within the first whistle marker of St Germans, Jack nervously patted his pockets, looking for something he knew good and well wasn’t there.

“Lose owt?” Howel asked, distracted from the cards, having given up ever regaining that second point. “Need a light?” He pulled out a pack of lucifers and offered them.

“No, thanks.” Jack waved the box off. “I’ve got my tinderbox, and besides, those things go off like a firework, throwing sparks all over, and they reek of brimstone. Didn’t know they even made those any more.”

Howel tucked them away. “They’re a bit foul, but have you seen what happens to the factory girls where they make the white phosphorus matches? No thank you, I’m not having those anywhere near me nor anybody I’m even on speaking terms with.”

“No,” Jack went on, “what’s got me fretted is lack of a spare copper for the undine. That’s St. German’s coming up there now.” He nodded toward the distant station and the village around it. “Only copper as I’ve got is the penny in me left shoe.”

“Can’t have you tossing aside a charm, now, can we?” Howel dug about in his pocket, came up with a tuppence. “This’ll do for both of us, and then I’m even for that point.”

Jack laughed. “You and that point, you’re like an old dog that can’t admit he’s lost the rabbit.”

The second whistle blew before Howel could retort. “Bridge approaching,” Jack said, glancing out, and pushed the sash further aside, opening the window so Howel could get a fair shot.

The train clattered onto the bridge, and the driver blew two short and one long as the fireman leaned out over the edge of the platform and tossed a silver coin down into the creek far below. As soon as the clack under the wagonlit told of the car passing onto the viaduct, Howel started counting.

“One Penhaligon, two Penhaligon –”

And then he flung the coin out the window and collapsed in a paroxym of laughter at the faces Jack was making, imitating the recently departed recruiter to devastating effect.

An elderly man across the aisle gave them a stern frown. “Ought to be respectful of the tradition, there,” he chided. “Wasn’t but three years ago, just two days after the station opened, the evening train from Plymouth went off the rails and down near forty feet into the creek below. Landed upside down and the boiler blew from the shock of the cold water. Would have killed the driver and the fireman and the guard that was on the plate but for the undine washin’ ‘em clear and upstream before the blast. T’other guard got five pound from the railway for keepin’ his head, puttin’ the brakes on, and keepin’ the rest of the train on the rails after the loco and the tender went over.”

Jack nodded, lower lip stuck out a little in an attempt at a sagacious frown. It didn’t work. “Wasn’t that because the fireman was secretly a Papist, and flung his Saint Christopher medal into the water as the loco went over?”

Howel sat forward a little, literally leaning into the discussion. “And that would be why the fireman tosses down a silver coin these days, a proper coin of the Empire instead of such heathenish idolatry as a good Methodist must eschew?” He raised an eyebrow at Jack for confirmation of the point on the last word. Jack gave a sideways head bobble, not really of acquiescence but conceding the point at least.

“Absolutely,” Jack picked up the thread before the old man could get a rejoinder started. He raised his index finger to count his own point on. “Although folk did forgive him for his misguided practices when he put them aside, went to Ireland, and enrolled in the Brehon’s College.” He and Howel pivoted as one and locked eyes with the elder, a bit challenging, at the very least clearly telling him they weren’t sorry at all for ruining his fun telling these kids a thing, they’d heard this story often enough already and knew it as well as he did.

The old man stared out the window the other direction and muttered to himself all the way to Saltash.

The first stop into Cornwall for the Railway named after the region, and the last stop going out of it, Saltash boasted stone arrival and departure stations, well appointed with all the requisite offices for the accommodation of the traffic. Much around them was, however, still under construction. The goods shed had workmen crawling over it like ants on a fallen fruit, half of it still posts and beams and exposed roof trusses. Roadway approaches likewise had swarms of men in bowlers and weskits, tamping the substrate, rolling the macadam, or on a couple of the newer bits grafting away with shovels to level and straighten the way before the paving got started. Much of the car emptied out. Only a few men down at the far end, older, more experienced, a bit better dressed, remained, and they were deep in a conversation that did not include Jack or Howel.

“We’ll pick back up after we’re aboard,” Howel said distractedly, looking out the window at the last town in Cornwall while putting away the cards.

“I’m fine with that,” Jack replied, his mind no longer on the game either. Ahead lay the Tamar Bridge, and the crossing of the river that was the border of Cornwall and England proper. His fingers curled lightly around the clay pipe in his pocket. The train got under way.

Passing over the end of the bridge and out over the river, jack felt suddenly unsteady. He gripped the arm of the bench a little tighter. Howel, noticing, gave him a quizzical look. Jack shook his head.

Before he could reply, everything just sort of fell away. It was like those dreams when you’re falling, and you wake up, he said later, trying to describe it. “Or when you tip your chair too far back on the back legs and you start to fall but you catch yourself. Somewhere out there in the river, I left everything I knew behind and went flying out into a whole new world like I’d been launched from a trebuchet.”

“Jack?” Howel asked, now concerned. His new friend had gone glassy-eyed, pale, broken out in a cold sweat. He took Jack’s hand, gave it a firm squeeze. “You still in there?”

“I’ve no idea,” Jack gasped, trying to find his focus. “Feels like the floor just dropped out from under me.”

Breathe, said Peran’s voice in the back of his head, a memory playing out of the first time he’d gone out past the shelf on a boat with the men. That was before his Da was lost, back when the world was solid under his feet. A deep breath, hold it, let it out slow. Another. Things shifted a little, quit swaying, the feeling of the world having gone frail and flimsy and out of kilter settling down.

“I’ll be good, I think.” Jack said it more to convince himself than Howel, who still held his hand and looked worried, and had reached past Jack and opened the window to let in a bit more air and in case Jack needed to vomit.

“Boy not doing well?” one of the older men asked from the far end. Jack flushed. He’d drawn all their attention, going queasy like a child who hadn’t got his sea legs yet.

“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, but a quaver crept into his voice instead of the strength he’d hoped for.

“First time out of country?” the man asked, not unkindly.

“Yes, sir,” Howel answered for both, sparing Jack more embarrassment if his voice cracked again, and giving him a chance to further collect himself.

“It can be a bit rough if you’re more tied to the land than most,” the man went on, now in Kernewek.

“I’m no more than most,” Jack protested, likewise switching languages. “Me uncle, now, he could do a few things, but he didn’t teach me, said I was still too young.”

The man shrugged. “But you speak the language, and maybe that’s enough to feel it when you pass the line where it’s no longer spoken.” He glanced round to see that the train was already pulling into Devonport, a fancy Italian architecture arrival station of cut stone. “Here’s where we’re off.”

As he and his companions rose, he dug in his pocket, pulled out a small leather bag tied with a split leather lace, tossed it to Jack. “Keep that with you. I can get a new one tomorrow but you’re not coming back to Cornish soil any time soon, are you.” It wasn’t really a question.

Jack felt of the pouch, small enough to fit in one palm. What was inside felt grainy, a little crunchy. He sniffed at the opening. “Dirt.”

“Take the soil with you for luck. God speed you, lads.” And with that the men were off the train and gone.

Jack slipped the pouch into the inside pocket of his shirt, Jennifer having put a pocket on both sides so he could turn the shirt out if need be and still have one. With it lying next to his heart, he took a deeper breath, and felt more solid at the end of it.

Howel had let go of Jack’s hand and sat back when Jack reached for the flung pouch. “You’re looking better certainly.”

“Don’t know what came over me.” Jack touched his shirt, feeling of the pouch inside the pocket.

“You were awfully worried about not having a copper for the undine.” Howel glanced outside as the train got into motion again. The conductor came through, announcing Plymouth and the docks at the next and final stop. “I don’t know, Jack. I’m a Truro man born and bred, traveled up and down a little bit. Maybe I’ve got a liittle too much city in me, not enough roots, but who’s to say what’s better?”

“We’ll find that out soon enough,” Jack replied. “Here’s Plymouth coming up. I’ve got to stop at a news agent’s, get tobacco and a couple of other things before we board. Unless you’ve got change for a shilling and I can get a penn’orth from a street peddler like an honest man does?”

Howel laughed. “This is Plymouth. The peddlers can change a shilling.”