The Touch (55 page)

“There are big tracts of land going down to the harbor in Drummoyne and Rozelle that I hear are going to be sold thanks to hard times. A lot of the men who could afford mansions in huge grounds are declaring bankruptcy now that the banks are crashing right, left and center. Is Apocalypse in trouble, Dad?”

“No, Nell, nor will be.”

She heaved a sigh of relief. “Then that’s all right. Am I correct in thinking that harborside land is a good investment?”

“Yes, you are.”

“So if you bought one or two bankrupt estates, you wouldn’t lose on them?”

“No, I wouldn’t. But why concentrate on the backwaters of the harbor when there are equally grand mansions going for a song in Vaucluse and Point Piper?”

“They’re posh suburbs, Dad, and posh people are—funny.”

“I assume that you don’t consider us posh?”

“Posh people don’t sequester themselves in isolated places like Kinross, they like to be where they can entertain royalty and governors. Put on the dog,” Nell said, using a new phrase.

“So what are we, if we’re not posh and don’t put on the dog?”

“Filthy rich,” she said gravely. “Just filthy rich.”

“Dear, dear. Therefore I should buy my vast tracts of land containing mansions in pedestrian suburbs like Rozelle?”

“Exactly!” She beamed.

“Well, it’s actually quite a good idea,” Alexander said, “save for one thing. You’d find it difficult to get from the Glebe to Rozelle to police Anna.”

“I wasn’t thinking of putting her somewhere like Rozelle yet,” Nell temporized. “Later, when the mansion could become the nucleus of a hospital. Not an asylum, a hospital. Somewhere that good work could be done to find a cure for the mentally afflicted.”

He was frowning, but not direfully. “Just where are you going, Nell? Finding an avenue of philanthropy for my filthy riches?”

“No, not really. It’s more that—um—well…”

“Get it off your chest, girl.”

She gulped and took the plunge. “I don’t want to continue in Engineering, Dad. I want to do Medicine instead.”

“Medicine. When did you decide that?”

“I really don’t know, and that’s the truth,” she said slowly. “It’s always been there, you see, right back when I used to cut open my dolls and make organs for them. But I never thought I’d be able to—Medicine was the only faculty that banned women. Now they’ve started to admit women into Medicine, and women are flocking to do it!”

He couldn’t help it, he began to laugh. “And how many lady medical students constitute a flock?” he asked, wiping his eyes.

“Four or five,” she said, laughing back.

“How many men students are there?”

“Almost a hundred.”

“Still, you’ve had a worse trot in engineering and survived.”

“I’m used to being a woman in a man’s world.” A wriggle, a jump. “Quite honestly, I’m more afraid of how I’ll manage to get on with the women medical students than the men.”

The train was coming into Lithgow, its speed slackening; for perhaps five minutes they sat facing each other and said not a word, Nell in anguish, Alexander in thought.

“We’ve never spoken,” he said finally, “about you and your expectations, have we?”

“No, we haven’t, but I suppose I assumed that I was to do engineering so I could join the firm, maybe help to run it.”

“That’s true, but not what I meant. I mean your inheritance. Which is seventy percent of Apocalypse Enterprises.”

“Dad!”

“It’s a difficulty that I’ve never sired a son,” Alexander said, forcing himself to keep looking at her, “but in you I sired a daughter with a prodigious brain. A brain capable of any kind of technical or mathematical reasoning. And as you grew, I began to believe that, your gender notwithstanding, you would prove as good an administrator as any father could hope for in a son. To have you graduate in mining engineering is a way to prepare you for your inheritance. What I hope is that you’ll preserve your good sense and marry a man who will complement your own genius, who will be a partner for you in every way.”

She got to her feet and went to a window, opened it and put her head and shoulders out to watch the activity as the Kinross train was shunted to its siding and their car uncoupled. “The Bathurst train is late,” she said then.

“It’s easier to talk without the racket.” Alexander got out a cheroot and lit it. “I’ll make a bargain with you, Nell.”

“What sort of bargain?” she asked warily.

“Finish Engineering and I won’t oppose your doing Medicine. Then you’ll have at least one degree. There may be more women in Medicine than there are in Engineering, but I won’t have the same influence with your professors that I do with factory owners.” His eyes twinkled through the smoke. “I suppose I can dangle the bait of a new building or two, but I suspect I’m going to have to save some of my filthy riches for that mental hospital.”

Nell extended her hand. “Done!” she said.

They shook solemnly.

“The Professor of Physiology is a Scot, Dad. Thomas Anderson Stuart. The Professor of Anatomy is another Scot, James Wilson. Most of the teaching staff is Scottish—Professor Anderson Stuart keeps bringing them out from Edinburgh, which irritates the Senate and the Chancellor mightily. But Anderson Stuart won’t be denied—does that sound familiar, Dad? When he arrived in 1883, the medical school was in a four-room cottage. Now it has a huge building all to itself.”

“And who’s the Professor of Medicine?”

“There isn’t one,” said Nell. “Shall we walk on the platform a little, Dad? I need to stretch my legs.”

The air was hot, but that didn’t stop Nell from clutching her father’s arm and snuggling against him as they strolled up and down. “I love you, Dad. You’re the best,” she said.

And that, concluded Alexander, is really all one can ask of one’s children. To be loved and deemed the best. Her news had come as a bitter disappointment, but he was too fair a man to want to force her where her heart didn’t want to go. Well did he remember those dissected dolls! The thumbed pages of his precious Dürer. A growing collection of medical books that she had ordered from his London bookseller. All there staring him in the face for years. And she was a woman, she would go where her heart wanted to go. Strange creatures, women, he reflected. Nell wasn’t a bit like Elizabeth, and yet her composition was half Elizabeth. Sooner or later that half would show itself.

From Nell his mind veered to Lee.

I have always sensed that Lee was my natural heir, right from the beginning of knowing him. Now I have to find him and get him back. Even if that means I bend my stiff neck and apologize.

ALEXANDER AND NELL had a busy two weeks in Sydney. They found a forty-year-old house on Glebe Point Road not far from Nell’s abode and decided it would do. Built of plastered sandstone blocks, it was roomy enough to accommodate Anna and six attendants in comfort, plus a cook, a laundress and two cleaners. Because it sat in half an acre of ground, Alexander had an exercise yard constructed just outside Anna’s own quarters, only a door between.

Finding suitable attendants was more difficult. Alexander and Nell interviewed them together, Nell going so far as to sniff at each applicant’s breath. The scent of cloves was as significant as the reek of liquor, Nell told the fascinated Alexander.

“The chaps chew cloves if they’ve been on a bender the night before lectures,” she explained.

Alexander was in favor of a beaming, patently motherly woman as the chief attendant, whereas Nell held out for an austere soul with whiskers on her chin and spectacles perched on her nose.

“She’s a battleship in full sail!” Alexander protested. “A dragon, Nell!”

“True, Dad, but we need someone like that in charge. Let the nice ones fuss and cluck over Anna to their hearts’ content, so long as the starchy one has the power. Miss Harbottle is a good person, she’ll not abuse her authority, but she will insist on running a tight battleship. Or a decent dragon’s den.”

AND IN APRIL, when everything was ready, a heavily sedated Anna was conveyed from Kinross to her new home in the Glebe. Only Elizabeth, Ruby and Mrs. Surtees wept. Anna’s Dolly was too busy exploring a whole new world, Alexander had gone abroad yet again, and Nell was back at university doing engineering.

A YEAR IN Burma had yielded Lee rubies and star sapphires, as well as the useful fact that here too petroleum leaked to the surface. As yet it was used only for the manufacture of kerosene after an arduous journey from the highlands in earthen jars. A year in Tibet yielded no diamonds, but spiritual riches of greater import than a Koh-i-Noor. And a year among Proctorian friends in India had commenced with a search for diamonds, then branched into something of more benefit to the maharajah’s people. The production of iron from immensely rich ore deposits was hampered by a smelting technique that hadn’t changed in literal millennia, depending as it did on charcoal, in short supply thanks to felled forests. Funding new methods through the sale of manganese, Lee shipped coal from Bengal and put the principate on a strong industrial footing. When some members of the British Raj protested at his gall, he answered that he was simply the maharajah’s servant, that the maharajah still ruled (albeit with British consent), and what were they complaining about? The Empress of India would get her share, he was sure.

After that he skipped rather hastily to Persia to see his best friends from Proctor’s days, Ali and Husain, two sons of Shah Nasru’d-Din, who seemed likely to rule from the Peacock Throne for fifty years, a jubilee he would celebrate in 1896.

Curiosity drove Lee into the Elburz mountains to see for himself the petroleum soak-wells and tar pits that Alexander had described. They were still there, still undeveloped.

Sitting his Arab horse with one booted leg across its withers, he nibbled at a nail and let his eyes roam almost sightlessly over the rugged terrain. “Elburz,” he had discovered, was a misnomer dumped upon all the mountain ranges of western Persia by European geographers; the actual Elburz lay around Tehran, towering peaks under perpetual snow. What he looked at were just—mountains. No name at all.

A pipeline to the Persian Gulf…One well per five acres…A way for Persia to extricate itself from hideous debt, and a way for him to make his own fortune. Petroleum was finding more and more uses—lubricating oils, kerosene, paraffin, better tar than coal tar, vaseline, aniline dyes and other chemicals—and as fuel for a new engine that vaporized it inside the working parts with a degree of efficiency that steam couldn’t rival. Hadn’t the maharajah told him how artificial indigo was ruining India’s trade in the natural dye?

Making up his mind, Lee returned to Tehran and sought an audience with the Shah.

“Iran possesses great wealth in petroleum,” he said, using the proper name, his Farsi improved enough to dispense with an interpreter, “but no local knowledge to exploit that wealth. Whereas I have the knowledge as well as the funds to exploit it. I would very much like to be granted permission to do this, in return for an agreement giving me fifty percent of the profits plus whatever moneys I outlay in equipment and apparatus.”

He labored on in a language that had no technical words, Ali and Husain helping where they could.

Another man sat listening: Nasru’d-Din’s probable heir, Muzaffar-ud-Din. He was serving as the governor of Azerbaijan, a Persian province bordering the Caucasus that was at constant loggerheads with the Turks and the Russians. Because of the rapid development of Baku as a source of petroleum for Russia, Muzaffar-ud-Din was very interested. He was also anxious that Iran shouldn’t be shouldered aside in any race to control ground on—or in—which a valuable resource might be located. To the Shah’s family, Lee represented a relatively benign party, in that he had no territorial ambitions nor other axes to grind than Mammon. Mammon they understood, Mammon they could cope with. The old Shah had sunk into an executive torpor, hamstrung by the system of privileges and entitlements that all too often saw the wrong men gain the power. But Muzaffar-ud-Din was just past forty years of age, and as yet had not developed the grave illness that would later dog him. It was not the Turks who most worried him, but the Russians, always intriguing to gain access to the oceans of the world without running the gauntlet of someone else’s sea and formidable navies. Iran was highly desirable.

So, after months of dickering, Lee Costevan emerged with the right to exploit petroleum in western Persia over an area of 250,000 square miles. Peacock Oil had to be gotten up and running, which was a matter of hiring disgruntled wildcatters in America, buying drill rigs that pumped pressurized water through hollow casing to the latest toothed rotating bits, and setting up steam engines to provide power.

His difficulties were many, none actually technical. He had to get used to being accompanied by a battalion of soldiers because the mountains were full of untamed tribes that did not subscribe to Tehran’s rule; the daunting heights turned road-making, even of the most elementary kind, into a nightmare; of railroads there were virtually none; and, worst of all, the whole country was desperately short of burnable fuel, coal or wood.

Therefore, Lee decided, I start with what’s feasible under the existing circumstances. So he confined his first wells to Laristan, where a railroad connected the city of Lar to the Gulf, and where, around Lar, there was coal. His wildcatters, he soon learned, had noses for oil as well as great experience; Lee listened and accumulated practical knowledge to back up his degree in geology from Edinburgh. A pipeline was clearly, as he said to himself in a wry pun, a pipe dream, but the oil could travel by rail tankers, and the British policed the Gulf, which they regarded as theirs. Port facilities were primitive, seagoing tankers scarce. Undaunted, sure that petroleum was coming into its own more and more with every passing year, Lee battled on to see Peacock Oil viable. Luckily the Shah and his government were so impoverished that a return of £10,000 was a fortune.