Page 125 of The Armor of Light

‘Good,’ said Amos. ‘I’ll buy him a turnscrew.’

*

Hornbeam took his son, Howard, to see his new mill.

Howard had produced a child since getting married three years ago. His wife Bel had given birth to a boy, and they had named him Joseph after his grandfather, which had pleased Hornbeam more than he had expected. ‘As long as you never call him Joey,’ Hornbeam had said. ‘I hate the name Joey. Call him Joe for short, if you must.’ He did not care to be reminded of the time when he had been a scrawny kid scavenging London’s rubbish heaps and his name hadbeen Joey. But he did not need to explain his feelings. His family would do what he said without asking why.

Joe was now almost two years old, and big for his age – he would be tall, like Hornbeam himself. And he would not be called Joey.

And Hornbeam’s great wealth would be passed on to a third generation. It was a kind of immortality.

Deborah and Will Riddick were childless, so far, but it was too soon to give up hope of grandchildren from them, too.

The new mill was in its finishing stages on a site where formerly there had been a piggery. Hornbeam and Howard tramped across a field of mud churned up by the wheels of carts. Builders brought in from Combe had pitched tents, built fires and dug latrines all around. The mill would replace Hornbeam’s existing three. ‘It will be entirely devoted to producing cloth for uniforms,’ Hornbeam said. ‘Not just for the Shiring Militia and the 107th Kingsbridge Regiment of Foot, but for a dozen other major customers.’

The mill was not beside the river, but next to a small stream, for the machinery would not be driven by water. He had been keeping everything secret, not even telling his family, but it was becoming impossible to disguise the work that was going on, and he had decided to let the news out. Howard was getting briefed before anyone else. ‘This will be the first steam-driven mill in Kingsbridge,’ Hornbeam said proudly.

‘Steam!’ said Howard.

Steam was steadier than the river, whose force varied from day to day, and more powerful than a horse or an ox. And it was now used in hundreds of mills, especially in the north of England. Kingsbridge had been slow to catch on. But not any more.

They went inside. It was awesome: the only building in town larger than this was the cathedral.

Workmen were whitewashing the walls and glazing the big windows – mills needed light. They held shouted conversationsacross the great spaces, and some sang as they worked. Men from Combe did not know who Hornbeam was. If they had known, they would have fallen silent when he passed. For once he did not mind this lapse. He was too pleased with his building.

He showed Howard the coal-burning furnace, which was the size of a small cottage. On top of it was a boiler built to the same scale. Next to them stood a cylinder as tall as Hornbeam himself, driving a flywheel which in turn was connected to a manifold. ‘That manifold takes power to every part of the mill,’ Hornbeam said. ‘Now, follow me upstairs.’

He led the way up. ‘This is the weaving room.’ It contained dozens of looms in four parallel rows. ‘You see the shafts that run the length of the ceiling? They are connected to the looms by driving belts. When the shaft spins, the belt drives the loom to perform the three actions of weaving: one, it lifts every alternate thread in the warp to open the “shed”, a gap like a crocodile’s mouth; two, it passes the shuttle through the shed, as it were between the crocodile’s teeth; and three, it presses the thread firmly into the throat of the shed, the movement they call beating up. Then it repeats the process in reverse, completing the weave.’

‘It’s fantastic,’ Howard said.

‘But it can’t be done with water power. A power loom requires an exact and steady force, one hundred and twenty revolutions per minute, plus or minus five. Otherwise the shuttle may move too fast or not at all. The river cannot provide such exact and constant power, but steam can.’

‘Will we needanyhands?’

‘Yes. But one man can manage three or four power looms at a time, they tell me – sometimes more, depending on the man. We’ll need no more than a quarter of our present workforce.’

‘I can imagine it,’ said Howard. ‘All these looms working by themselves, making money all day, with just a handful of men watching them.’

Hornbeam was thrilled, but also anxious. By the time it was finished the mill would have used all the money he had saved in the last twenty years plus a substantial loan from Thomson’s Kingsbridge Bank. He was confident that it would make profits: his business judgement had been proved many times. And he had the military cloth contracts sewn up. All the same, there was no business without risk.

Howard was thinking along the same lines. ‘What if peace breaks out?’ he said.

‘It’s not likely,’ Hornbeam said. ‘This war has been going on for six years and there’s no sign of an end to it.’

On the way back they passed through the neighbourhood of houses they had built for the hands. Great piles of rubbish and ordure stood in the occupied streets. Hornbeam said: ‘These people are filthy.’

Howard said: ‘It’s our fault, really.’

Hornbeam said indignantly: ‘How can it be our fault that people live in dirt?’

Howard trembled, but for once he stood his ground. ‘These are back-to-back houses. They don’t have yards.’

‘Ah, yes – I’d forgotten that detail. It saves us a lot of money.’

‘But there’s nowhere to put the refuse other than the road.’

‘Hmm.’