William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

one, go ter Liverpool, I reckon, an’ start from there.”
    “Derbyshire? Derby, I suppose.” That was not really a question. He had supplied his own answer. “Thank you.”
    “Yer welcome, I’m sure. I ’ope it’s some use to yer,” the clerk said graciously.
    “Yes. Yes, thank you.” Monk left the office in something of a daze. Liverpool was what mattered, but if he found out whatever land purchase was concerned in the present Baltimore line, at least he would be familiar with the mechanics of it. Liverpool had waited sixteen years, and he had to report back to Katrina Harcus. If it had been fraud which had somehow caused the first crash, he was morally obliged more than any other man to prevent it from recurring. He could not go off to Liverpool chasing the demons of his memory and allow the whole nightmare to happen again because he was too preoccupied to attend to it.
    He went back to Fitzroy Street to collect clean clothes and sufficient money, and to tell Hester where he was going and why. Then he took a hansom to Euston Station, and the next train to Derby.
    The journey cost nineteen shillings and threepence and took nearly four hours, with a change at Rugby, which he was glad of. The second-class carriage was divided into three compartments, each less than five feet long and with twelve bare, narrow wooden seats in it. The compartments did not connect, and the partitions were covered with advertising posters. The whole was only five feet high, which meant that Monk had to duck to avoid hitting his head. First-class would have been higher, but also more expensive, and not necessarily any warmer or cleaner—although the louvered windows would have stopped vendors from sticking their heads in at the stations and breathing gin on the occupants!
    It was a chilly day, alternate sun and rain, which was usual for late March, and of course there was no heating on the train. The metal foot warmers filled with hot water were restricted to first-class. Still, it was a lot better than the nicknamed “Parliamentary trains,” required to fill Lord Palmerston’s legislation that rail travel should be available to the ordinary people at a penny a mile.
    Monk was delighted to get out at Rugby and stretch his legs, use the convenience, and buy a sandwich from one of the peddlers on the platform.
    He also bought a newspaper to read on the next part of the journey. Having been in America at the very beginning of the civil war which was raging there, he was interested to see an article on the progress of the Union troops under a Major General Samuel R. Curtis, beginning a campaign in Missouri. According to the latest dispatches, the Confederates, outnumbered, had withdrawn to northwestern Arkansas.
    He remembered with a shiver of grief the slaughter he had witnessed in the battle he had been caught up in during the previous summer, the uncontrollable horror he had felt, and Hester’s courage in helping the wounded. His admiration for her had never been more intense, more based in the hideous reality of the broken bodies she tried to save. Everything he had ever thought or felt about her before was seen through different eyes, her anger, her impatience, the cutting edge of some of her words now passionately understood.
    He looked at the peaceful countryside through the carriage windows with a sharper gratitude for it, and an upsurging will to protect it, preserve it from violence or indifference.
    He was pleased when the train pulled into the station in Derby and he was able to begin his search.
    He spent all day in the city records offices looking at every purchase along the entire track from one border of the county to the other until his eyes ached and the pages swam in front of him. But he found nothing illegal. Certainly there were profits made, advantage taken of ignorance, and hundreds of families dispossessed of their homes—although there was also some effort made to find them new houses—and an enormous amount of money had changed hands.
    Monk tried to bring back the skills he must have had with figures in his banking days, in order to understand exactly what had happened and where the profit had gone. He pored over the pages, but if there had been any transgression it was too cleverly hidden for him to find. Perhaps he would have seen it sixteen or seventeen years ago, but if he had had that skill then, he had lost it since.
    Railways were progress. In a country like England, with its mines and