Death of a Stranger - Anne Perry [37]
He remembered his own words: “It’ll be on time!” He could see Dundas’s face as clearly as if he had been there, hair a little windblown, skin burned, narrowing his eyes against the light. Monk was stung by loneliness that there was nothing but miles of empty grass rippling over the long curve toward the valley, broken by a few wildflowers, white and gold in the green.
He could remember the joy of it like a beat in the blood. It was not money, or gain of any natural things; it was the accomplishment, the moment when they heard the whistle in the distance and saw the white plume of steam and heard the roar of the train as it swept into view, a creation of immense, superb, totally disciplined power. It was a kind of perfection.
Dundas had felt exactly the same. Monk knew that with certainty. He could hear the vibrancy in his mentor’s voice as if he had just spoken, see it in his face, his eyes. Time and again they had ridden until they were exhausted, just to see a great engine, boiler fired, belching steam, begin to move on some inaugural journey. He could see those engines, green paint gleaming, steel polished, great wheels silent on the track until the whistle blew. The excitement was at fever pitch, the railmen with faces beaming as at last the great beast stirred, like a giant waking. It would gather speed slowly—a puff, a gasp, a turn of the wheels, another, and another, the power as huge and inevitable as an avalanche, albeit man-made and man-controlled. It was one of the greatest achievements of the age. It would change the face of nations, eventually of the world. To have a part in it was to shape history.
Dundas had said that. They were not Monk’s words. He could hear Dundas’s voice in his head, deep, a little edge to it, a preciseness as if he had practiced to lose some accent he disliked. Just as he had taught Monk to lose his lilting country Northumbrian.
What had Monk really felt for Arrol Dundas? It had probably begun with ambition and, he hoped, gratitude. Surely later on affection had been the greater part? What he remembered now was the sense of loss, the absence of that warmth of friendship, and the certainty of having owed Dundas so much more than knowledge and advantage, but things of the inner self that could never be repaid.
He tried to put together more of the pieces, memories of laughter shared, simple fellowship in traveling. It was not only riding up hills like this on horseback, but sitting in public houses somewhere, the sun shining on a stretch of grass by a canal, bread and pickles and the smell of ale, voices he could not place. But the feeling was the same—comfortable, looking to both past and future without fear or darkness.
It should have been like that now. He had found the woman he truly loved, far better for him than the women he had wanted then, or thought he wanted. In spite of the fear at the front of his mind, he smiled at his own ignorance, not of them so much as of himself. He had thought he wanted softness, pliancy, someone to answer his physical hungers, be there to provide the home that was the background for his success, and at the same time not intrude into his ambitions.
Hester was always intruding; whether he intended her to be or not, she was part of all his life. Her courage and her intelligence made it impossible for him to exclude her. She demanded his emotions. She was a companion of his mind and his dreams as well as of his physical self. What he imagined women to be had been startlingly incomplete. At least he had not committed himself to someone else, and hurt both himself and whoever she had