“I’m Blackstone,” he told her.
Her watery gaze took stock of him; he felt her assessment go through his bones. “They told us you would come,” she said in Scots. She revealed all her remaining teeth in a smile. “They say you visit the hamlets.”
“May I look inside your home?”
She nodded and stepped aside. He knew from the blueprints that the cottages here had two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. When Wright joined him, Lucian toed the flagstones with the tip of his boot. “Stone floors,” he said. “Make a note, I want wooden floors with the proper insulation underneath.”
Mr. Wright was scribbling diligently.
“I want a larder added to the back of each house—after the ditches have been redrawn, that is.”
The woman followed him around in the small space, careful to balance her obvious pride in her meagerly supplied but tidily organized kitchen with harried sighs acknowledging the damp and missing larder and badly done ditches. No need; he saw how dire it was.
“What happened?” he growled when he was back outside in fresh air. “Accommodation was more humane in the sixties.”
Wright and Stewart looked away, embarrassed, as though they could sense the emotion beating through him. Are you a violent man, then? Harriet’s face was tied to the question; he could see her, wide-eyed in her parents’ parlor. He was, at least, an angry man.
The smell of poverty hung in his clothes and hair after visiting the cottage, this distinct blend of damp walls and stale cigarette smoke, of the watery stew that always simmered on the stove, of sweat and clammy woolen clothes that were never given the time to fully dry after washing because they were needed for wearing again. It smelled like all the evenings when he’d come home as a boy after the shift. Hours later, while they were shuttled to Heather Row, he was still contemplating razing Drummuir Grove to the ground.
They ate their packed luncheon in the empty classroom of the village school before the next assessment. The situation here was indeed better: dry brick houses, most of them boasting a parlor and decently sized windows. They finally ended the inventory in the kitchen of Mr. Boyd, the community spokesman. Boyd’s lined face gave no clue about his age, but he had a head full of thick chestnut curls and all his teeth in a row. A recent accident with a runaway wagon had put his arm in a sling, so he couldn’t go underground, but his wife and daughters were out on the field sorting coal.
“Here in Heather Row, it’s the water for the households that’s the main problem,” he explained while his mother was serving them oversweetened tea. See here, said that tea, we have the means for sugar, and lots of it. “The water comes from the newly opened pit, but there’s something wrong with the filtering process. If you’d look at the pump well here, you’ll find lots of matter in the water and there’s bouts of dysentery in the community.” Boyd’s uninjured hand was broad, callused, and forever dusty, and it rested perfectly motionless on the table surface as he spoke. A calm man. He was also deeply wary of Lucian; the look in his habitually squinting blue eyes made no secret of it.
“Mr. Wright here will look at the water,” Lucian said.
Boyd’s practiced gaze measured the engineer, who was presently eyeing the contents of his tea mug with great suspicion.
“I’ll be blunt,” Lucian said, “we’ve work to do. The first thing I must ask of you is to talk to the men about joining the region’s trade union.”
Boyd’s lips twitched, as if suppressing his impulse to spit. “No worries, sir. We’ve no intention to unionize.”
“You mistake me,” Lucian said. “I want you to put it to the men to join the union.”
Boyd regarded him with a poker face and said nothing; Stewart and Wright were puzzled; the lad carrying the equipment was watching him with blatant astonishment.
“You didn’t consider it before because Drummuir is on its last legs?” Lucian prodded.
Boyd gave a huff. “Oh, we considered it, but it was made very clear that if we joined, we’d be shut down,” he said. “Drummuir, she’s become a tough and stingy old mistress, isn’t she.”
That was one way to sum up a bad investment. “She is.”
Resignation warred with stubborn pride in Boyd’s expression. “Durham, Northumberland, the south of Wales—that’s where the pliant fields are these days, I understand.”
“I intend to revive Drummuir’s profitability by investing in transport infrastructure and new cutting technologies, and not by working miners into an early grave for a pittance,” Lucian said. “So put it to the men—unionize.”