sighed. “Maybe I will bring him on a quiet walk.”
“Get him back to work,” said Roki.
“Are you coming back to work?” asked Neil, “I’m keeping your place open for you.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lewis listlessly, his mind beginning to dwell on the possible chances of finding Dorothy by walking the shores of the Firth.
“What I said. I’m doing your work, one of the lads is doing mine. Anyone can be a stoker. Takes brains to be a smith.” Neil smirked, hitting his fists together, “tap, tap!”
“But you are not a smith. You are a farm worker turned stoker. You have no papers.”
“The foreman did not seem to mind. I said I could do it and so I can. I have been watching you for more than a year.”
“I watched my master for seven years and he watched me. It takes care and practice to be a smith. I will come back tomorrow, before you hurt yourself. I will have to trust that someone else will find my Dorothy.”
“I will tell them to expect you. Tap tap!” Neil was gone, leaping down the stairs, singing in his off-key voice.
It was a week before another body was found, but then over the next few days, many, mostly men, were brought ashore and funeral services were held in the waiting rooms at the station where they should have arrived tired and happy after their journeys. Lewis went down to the shore every time he could and the cold seeped deeper into him each time as he began to realise that his wife would probably never be found. He went once to eat the fried potatoes they had enjoyed together, but they were ashes in his mouth and no amount of vinegar could help. It was a waste of a halfpenny, he thought, that I cannot afford now that I am only being paid as a stoker.
“You must fight that, Lewis. You are a skilled man. You wanted to be a smith back in the Médoc and couldn’t because you were a woman, but you are a man now. Don’t let being a smith go to waste. At least you can enjoy your skills.” Trynor had been involved in this one-sided argument ever since Lewis had gone back to the foundry and discovered that the foreman had given his job to Neil. Lewis had just said ‘oh’ and looked around him with dead eyes. “You have to care about yourself, Lewis. That Neil has been making lives difficult for you for a long time. It is time to fight back.”
“I wonder…” Lewis stopped, hoping the people sitting around him on the benches, enjoying their chips, had not heard him talking to himself. I wonder, he thought quietly, why Neil did it. He said it was to keep my job open and it did, for him. How can the foreman have been taken in by him, pretending to be a smith. ‘But Mr Martin, why did you not bring your papers with you?’, ‘Oh, I am sorry Sir, but I left them safe at home in Fife. You know how it is in a rented room, nothing is secure. Will I send for them?’ The cheek of him, thought Lewis, taking a risk like that. The foreman had not demanded to see the papers and Neil was settled into Lewis’s place. ‘You can have another position when one comes available, Mr Lindsay,’ the foreman had said to Lewis on his first day back after the accident, ‘you have not been reliable this last week. I think it would be easier for you as a stoker for the time being.’ Lewis said nothing, but wondered how reliable all the other people whose relatives had drowned had been this week and how it was that anyone in this town had been so untouched by the tragedy as the foreman seemed to be.
“Why have you stolen my job?” Lewis asked Neil, as they left the foundry that evening.
“I have not. I have made a job for myself. I need the money more. You have only yourself to keep, but I have my eye on a bonny lassie who works in the grocer’s in the street behind. I will need to buy pretty things for her. You will be fine as a stoker for the next little while and then he will give you another job.”
“But you are not a smith, you are not qualified. You will make a mistake.”
“No, I will not. You will stop me.” Neil