Ancient Appetites

XVI

It was late in the evening when Nathaniel strolled down to the stables and took Flash out. Hennessy saddled up the velocycle and Nate clicked his heels against the engimal's sides and rode round to the side of the enormous house. Tatiana sneaked out of a clump of bushes with an exaggerated tiptoed walk, her face alight with nervous excitement. She was dressed in some of Nate's old clothes: some trousers, a shirt, a jacket and a leather velocycle hat strapped under her chin that hid her bundled-up hair. Clancy had dug out the garments, but not before he had dropped ominous hints of the consequences of Tatiana being caught dressed up as a boy. There was every possibility that she was putting her future marital prospects in jeopardy.

This had only thrilled her all the more.

Climbing onto the saddle behind her brother, she put her arms around his waist and gave him a tight squeeze. Flash did not seem to object to the new rider, but Nate was determined to keep a close watch on the contrary velocycle all the same.

'So this is what it's like to wear trousers,' Tatiana observed. 'It's the oddest feeling, not like bloomers at all-'

'I really don't need to hear my sister talk about her undergarments,' Nate interrupted her. 'Hold on tight, we're going to go very fast.'

He tapped his heels and she squealed with delight as they took off down the drive. Actually, they rolled along at quite a leisurely pace, but to Tatty it seemed as if they were riding the wind itself.

Nathaniel got off the main road as soon as he could, following the farm roads and country tracks that would keep them out of the way of curious onlookers. In the fading light they rode along the grassy trails beside the dry-stone walls that threaded through the countryside. It was almost nine o'clock and anyone who worked the land would be settling down to sleep – if they weren't in bed already. Work would start not long after dawn; there would be cows to be milked and brought to pasture, ground to be weeded, walls repaired.

As he thought about it, Nate realized that he knew very little about farming. And yet all the farmland around them belonged to their family. When he had been in Africa, he had spent time with the Boers, the Dutch settlers. In those few months he had seen more of their farming than he had ever seen on his own land. Such menial work had never meant enough to him to spark his interest.

It was growing steadily darker and Flash's eyes grew brighter to compensate, lighting the way ahead of them. They passed a clachan – a group of peasants' cabins – with their turf walls and thatched roofs. They were miserable hovels for the most part, and Nate saw no reason to spare them more than a passing glance. If the steady growl of Flash's engine roused any sleeping souls, there was no sign of them at the windows.

Behind him, Tatiana made appreciative noises and gaped in wonder at how the world looked when seen from the back of a speeding monster.

'I've decided what I'm going to do with my life,' she called to him over his shoulder.

He slowed the velocycle down to quieten it.

'Are you going to find a suitable husband, marry well and have a crowd of children?' he asked hopefully.

'There is more to the life of a modern woman than marriage, Nathaniel,' she chided him. 'Women today must have a purpose. I made up my mind after the explosion. I am going to educate myself in medicine and set up hospitals, like Florence Nightingale or Mary Seacole.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. I'm going to bring health to the common people.'

'That's very decent of you,' he said to her. 'God knows they need it.'

'That's what I thought,' she went on. 'I see them sometimes at the side of the road on the way to town or when we're out riding. Some of them don't look very well at all.'

They were coming to what looked like the end of the track. Flash's bright eyes picked out a pile of rubble. As they drew closer, Nate saw it was the remains of a cottage. The turf cabin had been demolished by some terrible force. There were tracks on the ground around the wreckage and he drew in a sharp breath. He was about to turn round and head back down the trail when Tatiana looked over his shoulder.

'What's that?' she asked.

There would be no pleasing her now until she had seen all there was to see. He pulled Flash to a halt and let her get off. She looked taller somehow, in her boy's clothes. Wandering around the tumbled turf blocks and the broken wooden beams of the roof, she kicked some straw thatch over to see what lay beneath. Nate was gazing grimly at the twin sets of serrated tracks that criss-crossed the area around them, each track more than two feet wide and each pair more than two yards apart. He knew these feet. Nothing had feet like Trom. He looked over to where the ridges of potato plants should have been; the staple diet for peasants. The family's potato plot had been churned up and crushed by the massive engimal.

'This was a house,' said Tatiana. 'I've seen these before, but I've never stood in one. I never realized how small they were.'

She pushed a beam out of the way and paced the length of the whitewashed wall.

'It's smaller than my bedroom,' she remarked. 'I wonder where they put all their things.'

'They probably didn't have a lot of things,' he told her.

'But still – it's so small' she persisted. 'And it's been flattened. What do you think happened?'

'An engimal came through here,' Nate said to her. 'A really big one.'

'My God, people could have been hurt. Shouldn't someone try and catch it before it does any more damage?'

'Someone already has,' he muttered. Then, raising his voice, he said: 'Look, we need to go, Tatty.'

'I'm coming, I'm coming. It's just as well; these trousers are starting to rub between-'

'I don't need to know, Tatty' he said, cutting her off.

'What happened to the people, do you think?' she went on. 'I expect they've moved into one of their other houses.'

'I doubt they had another house, Tatty. Somebody will have taken them in, I suppose. If not, they'll have gone to the poorhouse… Although most people would rather die than end up there.'

'Really? Why? What's so bad about it?'

He thought about it for a moment. He knew very little about the poorhouses.

'I don't know.'

'I can't see how they can be that bad – I mean, they're there to look after people, aren't they? Although Charlie Parnell says people die in there all the time. He says he heard that they take children away from their parents.'

'Oh? And how long has Charlie Parnell been trying his luck?'

'Nate, don't be crude,' she giggled, blushing. 'Anyway how can somebody be so poor that they live in this poky little shed of a thing when there's so much work to do around here? Don't they want to work? Father's always saying there's so much to do. Why don't we pay poor people to do it? They wouldn't be poor any more if we did that, would they? Then everybody could live in proper houses.'

'I don't know, Tatty.'

'I think it's terrible,' she went on. 'Look, they don't even have room for a piano. There doesn't even seem to be a sink or a bath. How did they keep clean?'

'I don't know!

'It doesn't really seem fair – us being so rich when they're so poor, does it?' she mused.

'Our wealth is good for the country' Nate said. 'If we weren't rich, things would be a lot worse. We create jobs, we pay wages and buy goods, and all that money we spend here trickles down to the poor, you see? It's all for the best.'

Tatiana nodded slowly. Then, looking at the wrecked cottage, she added:

'Perhaps it should trickle a little quicker?'

'Come on, let's get out of here,' he urged her impatiently.

'Maybe I'll set up a hospital right here.' She climbed onto the saddle behind him.

'That would be very noble,' he said, growing more and more exasperated.

Turning Flash round, he found that some wire from the wreckage had become tangled in the velocycle's front wheel. He reached down and pulled it free, wrenching at it with unnecessary force and making the engimal flinch. It was time to head back to the house, he decided. Seeing Trom's tracks had spoiled his good mood. He had loved the huge engimal as a child – the great, dull, clumsy brute had been a constant source of wonder for him… until he had found out what it was used for.

Tatiana leaned her chin on his shoulder.

'Nate, do you remember the Famine?' she asked over the sound of Flash's engine.

'A little bit,' he replied. 'I was very young.'

'What was it like?'

He found himself thinking of the bog bodies that lay a few miles away in Gerald's laboratory and he shuddered slightly. They reminded him of the nightmarish things he had seen as a child.

'I don't remember a lot,' he said. 'It didn't affect our lives much. But sometimes we'd take a coach into town and Mother would pull the blinds to stop me from seeing what was outside. That just made me curious, of course, so I peeked out whenever I could.

'It was as if the dead had risen from their graves. People who were little more than skeletons wandered the roads, their clothes hanging on them like ragged curtains. I saw starving children with swollen bellies; it was the oddest sight – fat bellies on bodies that were little more than skin and bone. Gerald told me later that it's a side effect of hunger that can be caused by gas or water retention. The oddest sight. It's hard to describe a starving person's face… It's… It's like they've died, but their soul hasn't left their body. And they have a horrible look of despair. I heard there were rotting corpses in the roads and the ditches and lying out in fields in the middle of nowhere. You could smell them when you passed them – there's nothing as bad as the stench of decaying flesh. If the poor didn't die of hunger, they were killed by disease. It was everywhere. I remember Mother being terrified that we would catch the fever. A lot of children did. You didn't have to be poor to fall sick, and it was a horrible way to die.'

He fell silent, his eyes on the rough road that would lead them back to the house. He remembered being appalled at the way people had lived in some of the tribal villages along the Congo River. It had seemed unbelievable that human beings could still live in such squalor in this day and age – in this Age of Enlightenment. The sooner the Industrial Revolution reached Africa the better. But now, seeing through Tatiana's eyes the poverty that surrounded them here at home, he realized that industry was doing nothing for his own people. Peasants here lived in worse conditions than anything he had seen in the Congo or in the shanty towns on the Cape. It was no wonder so many of them were getting worked up about it. Not that it gave them an excuse to go around murdering people.

It was like Tatiana said: there was plenty of work to do. Anybody who wanted to improve their lot only needed to put their backs into it. And if the rebels thought they were going to change things by attacking his family, they had another think coming.

'Nathaniel,' his sister said into his ear, 'how much of this land is ours?'

'All of it,' he told her. 'Everything you see.'

It was Francie's day off and he normally spent it with some of the other lads from the stables if he could. He got one day off a month and Dublin was too far away for him to visit his family unless he could get a lift there and back. But his father had sent him a message to meet him in a pub near the estate, so once he had finished his chores for the morning, he cleaned himself up and got ready to go out.

On the way out he stopped in to look at the big velocycle, as he so often did. He had managed to touch it a couple of times now and he thought it might be starting to trust him. He dreamed of being allowed to take it out for a walk… or a roll, or whatever.

It appeared to be in a bad mood when he looked over the wall at it. It was twitching and rubbing its front wheel against the wall, making frustrated grunts. Francie knew the signs. Something was irritating it, and it was fidgeting like a horse with a stone in its hoof. He licked his lips, thinking about how much trouble he could get into if he interfered with an engimal. But after helping to blow up a crowded cemetery, the risk of trying to ease an expensive machine's discomfort was small potatoes. He slowly climbed over the wall and lowered himself into the stall. The engimal turned to look at him.

'There y'are, Flashy old thing,' Francie said in a sympathetic tone. 'I'm not goin' to hurt yeh. And yer not goin' to hurt me either, are yeh, Flash? No, yer not. I'm just goin' to get in here and see what's up with yeh. And then we'll make it all better for yeh. How's that sound, eh?'

He edged closer, nervously noticing how the velocycle had bunched up as if ready to lunge forward. Stretching out his hand, he kept making soothing noises.

'Sssh,' he told it. 'There y'are now. That's it, Flash. Let's see what's wrong.'

Going down on one knee, he gently stroked the engimal's front wheel, sliding his fingers up to its right front leg, which it had been rubbing against the wall. Flash trembled with tension but made no move to stop him. He realized it wasn't just being aggressive. It was afraid. He knew then that it must be in pain. Feeling around the metal muscles of its leg, Francie's fingers found their way down to where its ankle joint held the wheel. Something jagged and sharp was caught there and the engimal flinched when he touched it.

'That's it, isn't it, boy?' he said softly. 'Let's just have a look and see what yev got there.'

It was a piece of rusty wire, wrapped around the axle joint where it met the wheel. It had probably got caught up out on the road somewhere. He tugged carefully and Flash flinched again and growled.

'It's all right there, lad,' Francie reassured it. ''S just a bit o' wire. Not to worry – we'll have it out in no time.'

Getting a better grip, he pulled the end out and, with tender movements, unwound the rusted wire. He could see where it had chafed against the engimal's metal skin. The last tangled length of wire grated against the wheel and Flash let out a sudden snarl, slamming Francie back against the wall. The boy winced as the back of his head whacked off the wood, but he didn't panic as the wheel crushed his torso against the wall. The wire had cut the crook of his index finger and he sucked on it, eyeing the machine. There were flecks of rust in the cut, and he stretched over and washed the finger in the water trough. He took his time doing it, determined to show he wasn't afraid of the engimal.

Flash did not release him, but it didn't lean any harder either. With its weight, it could have crushed his chest like a matchbox. Stroking the wheel that was pressed against his ribcage, he reached in and finished unwinding the offending wire, pulling it free.

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry. There now,' he said at last. 'How's that for yeh?'

The velocycle hesitated for a moment and then backed away. It made a noise that sounded like a mixture of apology and grudging appreciation. Francie stared at the magnificent machine with a hint of a smile on his face.

'You 'n' me,' he said breathlessly. 'We're goin' to be friends… aren't we?'