Circles of Time (20 page)

He had reached a clearing and lay flat in the icy grass. Shadows and pale moonlight in the glade. The shadows moved slowly, keeping together, gliding soundlessly through the moonlight. He stared at them, straining to hear … and then it came—a little whisper of death only a few yards off to his right, the click of brass against oiled steel, the snap of a bolt. But not France. Not no-man's land—Abingdon … Leith Woods …

He rose screaming to his feet—
“Bastard—you bastard!”

A rifle cracked and a herd of deer scattered, hooves thundering on the hard ground, crashing off into the woods. He heard men cursing and running, two or three of them, blundering through the underbrush. He took a few faltering steps and shouted after them—
“Bastards … bastards!”

His words echoed back and then faded. The sounds of running faded also and it was silent in the glade, so silent he could hear the beating of his heart. He stumbled on a few more paces and nearly tripped over the gunnysacks and ropes the men had left behind. He sank down beside them and began to wrap the stiff sacks around his feet and legs. He would die before morning if he didn't do it. His fingers were stiff as bone and they bled against the rough hemp, but he wrapped himself in the sacks and sat quietly, waiting for the dawn. He was sitting there when a light flashed across him and someone began shouting. He was so cold—so terribly tired—but he managed to raise his head and smile into the rays of a torch.

“I'm Charles Greville … live at … the Pryory. Some … bastards tried to poach … my father's deer.”

I
T SEEMED STRANGE
to Ross to be back in England. He had never felt so much as a twinge of homesickness, had barely given the place a single thought in six years, but as the tugs pushed the big liner against the Mersey tide and eased her into the Cunard dock, he had felt a lump rise in his throat at the sight of the Union Jack fluttering atop one of the buildings.

Liverpool in February, sleet blowing in the wind, hissing into the dirty brown river. The buildings of gray stone and sooty black brick. A cheerless-looking place, old and tumbled together. Narrow, twisting streets. He remembered Liverpool and the country around it—Birkenhead across the channel, and Runcorn and Widnes further upriver. Had worked his itinerant trade along the Mersey a long time ago and could not think back on those particular times with much fondness. Still, it was the old flag. It was England.

He shared a taxi with Mr. Mayhew. He had met Mr. Mayhew on the second night out from New York, the ship rolling and pitching in a bitter northeaster. They had been just about the only passengers showing up for dinner and had joined company. Afterward, they had gone into the saloon for brandy and cigars. Mr. Mayhew was a man in his sixties and owned a large gearworks in Bradford. He sold his gears to the Jordan Motor Car Company in Cleveland, and to the Apperson Brothers and Studebaker, among others, and so they had common ground for conversation. Ross had worked for Rolls-Royce and had been sent by them to America early in 1916 to oversee the building under license of their aircraft engines. He had worked for nearly three years at the Chambers Motor Factory in Cleveland, a concern that Mayhew knew well. A friendship developed between them that lasted the voyage—and beyond.

“Have you stayed at the Adelphi before, Ross?”

“No, I don't believe I have.”

“My home whenever I'm in Liverpool—which is often. First-rate service, I can assure you. And if one has a taste for mutton chops—which I confess I certainly do—the Adelphi cooks them to a turn.”

Ross suppressed a smile and looked out the window of the taxi at the early-evening traffic crush in Derby Square.
Have you stayed at the Adelphi before, Ross?
Not bloody likely.

It was as he imagined it would be—a marble and mahogany lobby, crystal chandelier hanging from the domed ceiling and reflecting tiny shards of light onto red carpeting. An orchestra was playing somewhere in the cavernous, gilded place. Muted sounds of violins. A tinkle of cutlery. Music with the mutton chops. No, he had never stayed at the Adelphi when in Liverpool. It had been sixpence a night for a hard bed in those days—and three pennyworth of rancid fish and chips for his supper.

He felt a momentary sense of ill ease as he approached the desk, wondering if the dapper, smiling clerk would see through the trappings of well-cut suit and topcoat, the expensive shoes and Stetson fedora and recognize instantly the lower-middle-class man wearing them. But the clerk only continued to smile and turn the registry book toward him.

“Welcome to the Adelphi Hotel, sir.”

“Thank you.” He signed: James A. Ross—Coronado, California, U.S.A.

The clerk glanced at the book. “I say, sir. Must be very nice
there
in February.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Will you be staying with us long, sir?”

“Just overnight, I'm sorry to say.”

Well, that was a lie, but his room was comfortable and reasonably warm and the mutton chops were everything Mr. Mayhew had said they were. After dinner, the two men went into the bar for brandy.

Mr. Mayhew took out his cigar case and extended it to Ross. He had grown quite fond of the sturdy, sandy-haired, freckled young man.

“You seem a bit on the subdued side, lad. It's being back in England. Am I correct?”

“I'm not sure I understand what you mean.”

Mr. Mayhew bent forward and offered the flame from his cigar lighter. “Oh, I think you do. I know America. God knows I've been there enough times, from Maine to California and most of the states in between. Know the land and know the people. Know Old Blighty for that matter, too. You're a bit—well, ill at ease in the Adelphi. I can tell.”

Ross shifted slightly in his seat and looked down at his hands. His nails were well manicured but of a darkish color. His hands were scrupulously cleaned, washed with soap and rubbed with pumice, but there were minute black lines on the palms that would never be scrubbed away. They were the hands of a man who had worked more than half of his thirty years with oil, grease, and machines.

“I wouldn't say I was ill at ease exactly.”

“A hotel like this …” Mayhew leaned back and waved his cigar at the room—the oak walls and leather chairs, the shiny glass behind the bar. “A place like this to have a drink. An establishment for
gentlemen
, Ross—for
toffs
.”

Ross looked up, scowling, then saw the look of friendly amusement on the older man's face. He smiled shyly. “Is it so obvious I don't fit in?”

“Yes, it is—but only to you. I'm sure you wouldn't think twice of going to a fine hotel in New York, Detroit … San Diego, Ross. That hotel in Coronado. You've been there, surely.”

“I live there. My room has a balcony and faces the ocean.”

“Facing the blue Pacific.” Mayhew sighed and puffed for a moment on his cigar. “Why, you live like a king in California, but feel like a navvy in dirty, smoky, freezing Liverpool.”

“Hardly a king,” Ross muttered, shaking his head. “I don't pay that much for the room.”

“It's attitude, not price. You live in one of the most gracious hotels in the world and never question your right to live there. And no one else questions it either, even if you were to drop an ‘h' or forget to sound your ‘g's. I've known many an American millionaire who chewed tobacco and spat on the ground and never saw the inside of a schoolroom after the age of eleven. A land with a different set of values, Ross. Any man who has the talent for making money or getting things done ranks above a duke there. You're an American now, aren't you?”

“Yes. Got my citizenship papers just before I left California.”

“Well, there you are, then. Lean back, dear boy, smoke your cigar, sip your brandy, and act like the
bloomin' toff
you are!”

L
IVERPOOL TO
L
ONDON.
A first-class carriage. He watched the towns flash past the windows. Stoke-on-Trent and Longton. Stafford and Birmingham. Slag heaps and mills. Row houses with slate roofs stretching away endlessly, street after street, featureless and drab.

He had grown up in one of those houses, raised by an aunt and uncle, long dead. His future had been set to everyone's satisfaction, including his own, the day he turned thirteen. It had been on that day that his uncle, a foreman at Lockhart & Whitby, had taken him to the sprawling engineworks in Wolverhampton to begin his years of apprenticeship at five shillings for a sixty-hour workweek. At the end of six years he had become a journeyman mechanic and brought home one pound eight shillings in his pay envelope, the money placed in his aunt's hand and seven shillings returned to him.

“You're a good lad, Jamie.”

But then what was it? Spring? Riding his bike one Sunday afternoon in the golden country between the Severn and Wyre forest, from the top of a hill seeing westward the Shropshire dales and, over his shoulder, east by north, the haze of Birmingham, Sandwell, Wolverhampton staining the sky even on the sabbath. Something had called to him, a wild gypsy voice, to make him pack his tools the next morning and tie the canvas bag to the tail of his bike and pedal off into the unknown.

“The lad's an ass,”
had been his uncle's only comment.

He found that he could make more than one pound eight shillings in a week cycling through the west country, following the course of the Severn—Stourport and Worcester, Tewkesbury, Gloucester, and on into south Wales. Not a town, village, or farm that didn't contain something that wouldn't run properly or run at all. A tractor, a pumping engine at a mine, a doctor's Vauxhall …

“Is it worth ten shillings to you to make it go?”

A journeyman. Journeying. Free as a tinker. He slept under the stars if need be, but his merry good-looks rarely went unnoticed if evening found him in a town. The number of women he had slept with from Hereford to Anglesey was beyond recall. He got rid of his bicycle that first winter on the road, purchased a secondhand motorbike, and worked his way along the Mersey and up through Manchester, Bradford, and Leeds. A Sheffield millionaire hired him as chauffeur and mechanic. He had taken the job partly to spend the winter in a warm house eating decent food for a change, but mainly because it gave him the chance to delve into the mysteries of the Rolls-Royce motorcar—the only type of motorcar he had never worked on.

A fine job, but he left it after a year and made his way to London, driven by a restlessness he could not explain. A chauffeur-mechanic had no trouble finding employment. He could pick and choose. In the spring of 1913 he entered the employ of the Earl of Stanmore.

Odd, he thought, how fate or circumstances worked. Here he sat in a first-class carriage with a letter of credit in his suitcase for fifty thousand dollars, on his way to meet with Sir Angus Blackworth at the Blackworth plant near Abingdon. He wondered idly if the Pryory was still lived in. As he lit a cigar he decided it would be worth going by there—if he had the time.

T
WO MECHANICS IN
white coveralls checked the bolts securing the engine to the test frame, then turned on the ignition switch and pulled the propeller. The nine-cylinder radial kicked smoothly into life, the full-throttled roar muffled by the sound baffles in the testing shed. One of the Blackworth engineers scanned the flickering needle on the test panel.

“Three hundred,” he shouted. “We can get her up to three hundred fifty easy enough.”

Ross, his suit covered with a blue smock, leaned forward and scowled at the dials. “Not that easily. She's straining at three and a quarter. Blow a cork in a minute.”

The engineer eased off on the throttle control and then cut the switch. “It's still the best aero engine on the market. Reliable as all get-out.”

Ross nodded in agreement. “It's the engine we're looking for, all right, but we've got to have more horsepower. Our specs call for four hundred minimum.”

The engineer lit a cigarette and eyed Ross through the smoke. He had been prepared to dislike the man when they had first met. Had put him down as just another Yank, cocky and overpaid. But after talking with him for a few minutes he had detected Birmingham in his speech and they had spent an hour over tea talking about their apprentice days, the engineer having served his at the Clybourne works in Coventry, Lockhart & Whitby's chief competitor.