Death of a Stranger - Anne Perry [38]
He jerked himself back to the present and stared below him. There were laborers all over the place, hundreds of them, swarming, tiny and foreshortened in the distance. About half a mile before the viaduct there was a ridge, and they were cutting through it. He could see the pale scar of the rock face and the slope where men were “running” the barrow-loads of earth and stones up to the top, balancing with high skill on the narrow planks. It was one of the most dangerous jobs. He knew that. A slip could cause a fall, with the weight of the load crashing on top of him.
They were almost through. It was not quite high enough to require a tunnel. He could remember the brickwork, the digging, the shoring-up of tunnels. The smell of clay was in his nostrils as if he had left it minutes ago, and the steady sound of dripping from roofs, the wet splashes on the head and shoulders. He knew the labor was backbreaking. Men sometimes worked for thirty-six hours with no more than a few minutes for food, then were replaced by another shift, also working night and day.
He urged his horse forward and went carefully down the incline, following what track there was, until he was on the level and only a hundred yards from the rail. Now the noise was all around him, the thud of pick heads hitting rock and earth, the rattle of wheels on the wooden runs up the cutting, the ring of hammers on steel, voices.
The nearest man to him looked up, his shovel idle in his hands for a moment, his back straightening slowly. His skin was caked with dust and the sweat cut rivulets through it. He regarded Monk’s casual clothes and well-cut boots, and the horse standing at his shoulder. “Yer one o’ the surveyor’s men?” he asked. “ ’E in’t ’ere yet. Yer a day soon.” He half turned. “Eh, ’Edge’og!” he shouted at a short, heavy-shouldered man with a shock of gingery hair. “Yer sure yer in the right place, then?”
There was a guffaw of laughter from half a dozen men further away, and they all resumed their digging and shoveling.
Hedgehog screwed up his face. “No, Con, we’d better start all over an’ dig through that damn great ’ill over there!” he replied.
“Three weeks, mebbe,” Con said to Monk. “If that’s wot yer want ter know. I in’t see’d yer ’ere before. Yer come up from Lunnon?”
Apparently they assumed he was from Baltimore and Sons’ main office.
“Where’s your foreman?” Monk enquired.
“I’m the foreman, Contrairy York,” the first man replied. “Like I said, three weeks. Can’t do it no faster.”
“I can see that.” Monk squinted along the line of the rail. The last bit of the viaduct would take another two weeks at least, and then there were sleepers to lay, the rails themselves to lay and tie. It was double track most of the way, single through the cutting and as far as the other end of the viaduct. There must be a plan for timetables and trains passing. A length like this was far too expensive to use only one engine at a time on.
He had studied the survey map. The shortest route lay through the hill he had just crossed. “Couldn’t you have cut through that?” he asked. “Then you would have avoided having to build a viaduct.”
“ ’Course, we could,” Contrairy said dismissively. “Cost, though! Too ’igh fer a straight cuttin’, an’ tunnels are about the most expensive things there is. Look at yer map. See the ’eight on it! An’ granite! Takes time, an’ all.”
Monk swung around and looked up at the hill. He pulled out the map from his pocket and read the height on it, then looked at the crest of the rise again. Something flashed in his memory and was gone before he caught it, but it was a moment of unease, nothing more, nothing he could explain. He should check the alternative routes, see who owned which land, where the vested interests lay, estimate the costs of cutting and tunneling the hill for a direct route compared with the small cutting there was here, and the viaduct, and the extra land, and length of rail. It would be a long, tedious task, but the answer, if there was one, lay in the figures. He had had the skill once. It had been where his business