Chapter 8 #2
Dinner proved far more agreeable than Darcy had expected: boiled chicken, mutton, duck, lamb, ham, salad, peas, asparagus, and—happily—none of the ubiquitous Irish potato. All washed down with a decent claret.
Yet even this did little to cheer him. The dining room bustled with Englishmen on business, voluble Irish merchants, and a handful of officers whose laughter rang off the walls.
Darcy ate quietly, resignedly thinking of Pemberley’s calm and Georgiana’s music in the drawing room, then reluctantly returned to his apartment.
A knock on the door cut short his reverie. Croft entered, wind-blown and a little sooty. “A lively place, sir,” he reported. “Livelier than London, perhaps, though not so fine. The streets are narrow, the people bold, and I could hardly move for beggars and fellows hawking maps, books, or whiskey.”
Darcy managed a smile. “We shall be glad, I think, when our business is finished. For Georgiana’s sake, I hope it will not keep us long.”
Croft nodded. “All will be well, sir. Perhaps we can leave sooner than we expect. I shall see to your bed, which, mercifully, is longer than that dreadful one at Knutsford on our journey to Liverpool.”
* * *
Darcy boarded the fly-boat at the Royal Canal Harbour at Broadstone, opposite the King’s Inns, a rather grand building surmounted by a domed tempietto—pretentious, like much of Dublin’s architecture.
The boat, taking passage to Thomastown, was long and narrow; both the first and second class cabins were covered over; the first cabin served tea, breakfast, and dinner.
Though it travelled at fast pace—drawn by four horses at seven miles an hour—Darcy discovered it was the smoothest travel he had ever experienced.
Progress was initially slow, as the canal ascended from the River Liffey at Dublin through twelve locks to Castleknock, a distance of six miles.
The passage through a lock was a cumbrous affair.
The fly-boat entered the lock-chamber, and heavy timber gates—sealed with oak and supported by limestone masonry—were closed behind it.
The lock keeper lifted the sluice paddles in the opposite gates, letting in water to lift the boat.
“How much water does it take to fill the chamber?” Darcy asked the boat’s guide, who stood at the bow.
“Ah, sure, it’d be nigh on five hundred barrels, so it would, an’ when the water runs low, faith, it’ll take a fair bit o’ time to fill, so it will,” the guide replied in his thick Irish brogue—a way of speaking Darcy would surely soon be accustomed to.
He slipped the guide a coin—if he were to complete the canal from Thomastown to Mullingar, then it would be best to be on good terms with the canal workers.
The boatmen were the public face of the canal, and it was through their labours that the company earned its income—little enough to pay out the interest and capital.
Darcy knew that, by the time the canal reached Mullingar, over ￡700,000 would have been spent—a prodigious sum.
The canal boat slowed as they traversed the Deep Sinking, where the canal had been dug and blasted through a limestone quarry, the bridle path over five and twenty feet above the canal.
It was here that the company had spent ￡10,000 on gunpowder alone for just a mile and three-quarters of canal; all because the Duke of Leinster wished for the canal to pass close to his country residence at Maynooth, just twelve miles from Dublin.
Once the boat had passed beneath the Leixlip Confey bridge, it soon traversed the lofty aqueduct spanning the Ryewater, an elegant structure rising seventy-five feet above the River Rye.
Darcy could not help but reflect, with a mixture of astonishment and dismay, upon the singular history of the aqueduct—a monument to the ingenuity of engineer Richard Evans, whose ambitious undertaking had demanded a sum of ￡27,000 and suffered the ignominy of collapse not once, but twice, before its completion.
How swiftly, he mused, might the ￡184,500 secured upon Pemberley be squandered by such extravagant undertakings!
And yet, he had not been afforded the benefit of a proper map detailing the lands about Thomastown, and the prospect of the canal encountering another river, perhaps as troublesome as the Rye, filled him with a most uncomfortable apprehension.
As the fly-boat pressed onward, the landscape slipped by in a patchwork of green fields and grazing cattle, interspersed with the occasional turf-roofed cottage and reedy bog.
Darcy watched the reflection of the towrope along the water’s surface, its tautness a visible symbol of the determination—often improvident—that had driven the canal’s construction this far.
The passengers, a mix of merchants, some English tourists, and the odd country squire, lounged about the cabin, taking tea and exchanging murmured gossip about the fortunes and failings of the towns along the canal’s length.
It was not long before the conversation turned to the canal itself. A portly gentleman, whose accent betrayed a recent arrival from London, opined that the canal was “the very height of Irish ambition—splendid, but doomed to cost twice what it should.”
The helmsman’s wife, who tended the kitchen, overhearing, replied with a cheery smile, “Well sir, it’s a rare thing to find a dream worth half its price, and this one’s worth every shilling.”
Darcy smiled politely, though his thoughts were less sanguine.
He could not help but calculate the mounting cost, the vast sums swallowed by every lock, bridge, and aqueduct.
Yet with each mile, he saw not only expense, but the living proof of human ingenuity—stone embankments standing firm against a river’s restless flow, arches of cut limestone spanning valleys that would have been impassable a generation before.
As they neared the approach to Maynooth, Darcy rose and stepped out onto the narrow deck, breathing in the sharp, peaty air.
The Palladian country seat of the Duke of Leinster, Carton House, stood proudly in the distance, half-shrouded by the late morning mist. The horses slowed at a signal from the driver, and the fly-boat drifted gently to a halt beside a small stone quay, where a pair of children waved at the passengers.
Darcy tipped his hat in return, struck by the quiet dignity of the countryside, and the realisation that the canal, for all its excess, had already begun to reshape the lives of those who lived along its banks.
No hackney was to be found at Maynooth, and Darcy, rather against his inclination, was obliged to accept a place upon a farm cart, the property of a farmer who had just delivered his sacks of potatoes to the harbour for conveyance to Dublin by trade-boat.
Darcy sat on the bench next to the farmer, Croft perched on the tailgate.
“You send your potatoes by canal—why not by road?” Darcy enquired, as the cart made its slow progress along the lane toward Carton House.
“Aye, sir, I once used the road,” the farmer replied, “but they say the canal’s the surest way—leastways, that’s the word his lordship at the castle gives us.
An’ at a halfpenny the ton, sure it might be the cheapest road as well.
I’m gatherin’ the praties from all the farms roundabout—‘tis all his lordship’s ground, so it is—and sendin’ the lot off to Dublin by the trader’s boat. ”
The 2nd Duke had been an influential subscriber to the Royal Canal Company, having lent his name and purse to it at its inception in 1789; his son, the 3rd Duke, now occupied Carton House.
Without his favour, Darcy knew, the completion of the canal to Mullingar would prove a difficult undertaking, especially as certain parcels of land along the intended route remained to be purchased.
“Darcy, did you say? The old Duke spoke of a George Darcy—a sharp fellow, he said, who owned a considerable estate in Derbyshire.” The present Duke was a young gentleman, having succeeded to the title in 1804, at the age of sixteen.
“My father, Your Grace. It is owing to his investment in the Royal Canal that I find myself now in Ireland.”
“Ah, the canal—cursed, some say, or haunted! For none of the boatmen will moor at the thirteenth lock, Deey Bridge. But then, they are Irish, so perhaps we ought not be astonished. Yet I presume, Mr. Darcy, you have not travelled all this way merely to take tea with me?”
Darcy explained the matter of the call on the shares, and his consequent need to raise funds by means of a lien upon Pemberley—Child and on the following morning, having enjoyed both the Duke’s table and his company, he set out once more by fly-boat for Thomastown, well contented with his visit and the prospect of future cooperation.
* * *