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, wandering Israelites and locusts devouring the land. She had enquired of her husband whether they should not carry instruments of protection; but Dr Achille had preferred to rely, for both guidance and possible defence, upon one of his medical students, Charles-André, a sturdy, shy youth born out on the great chalk plain beyond Barentin. The shanty-town, however, proved quiet. Nor was this calm, as they initially suspected, consequent upon the stupefaction of drink, for the men would not be paid until the end of the month, and would only then go on a randy, fighting Jack-come-first, spending their wages in cabarets and low taverns, swallowing French brandy as they would English beer, getting drunk and then diligently sustaining that drunkenness so that by the time all had been rounded up the horses at the workface would have been rested a full three days. Rather, what the French party discovered was the calm of orderly repose. A ganger in scarlet plush waistcoat and corduroy breeches was having himself shaved by an itinerant French barber, courteously shifting his short pipe from one side of his mouth to the other in order to facilitate the task. Nearby, a navvy was soaping his lurcher, which whined at theindignity and made as if to bite its master, receiving a hard-palmed cuff in reply. Outside a squat turf shanty, an old witch stood before a stock-pot, into whose grey and turbulent waters a dozen or so thick strings mysteriously disappeared. Each string bore at its dry end a large brown label. Charles-André had heard from one of his fellow students that an English navvy might eat up to five kilogrammes of beef in a normal day. But they were unable to verify this speculation, their nearer approach being discouraged by the witch, who beat her ladle against the stock-pot as if to drive off demons.

    Yorkey Tom was proud to be a Brassey man. Some of them had been with him from the start, like Bristol Joe and Ten-ton Punch and Hedgehog and Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby. With him since the Chester and Crewe, the London and Southampton, even the Grand Junction. If a navvy fell ill, Mr Brassey supported him until he was fit to work; if one died, he relieved his dependants. Yorkey Tom had seen some deaths in his time. Men crushed by falls of rock, blasters sent to kingdom come by the rash use of gunpowder, boys cut in half under the wheels of soil wagons. When Three-Finger Slen lost his other seven fingers and both forearms too, Mr Brassey paid him forty pounds, and would have paid sixty had Three-Finger not been drunk at the time and nudged the brake with his own shoulder. Mr Brassey was mild in his manner but firm in his decisions. He paid good wages for good work; he knew that ill-paid men took things slow and worked to a lower standard; he also recognisedweakness where he saw it, and wouldn’t allow tommyshops, or let travelling beer-sellers trade amongst his men.
    Mr Brassey had helped them through that devil’s winter three years ago. Hungry navvies crowding the boulevards of Rouen; work on the line from Paris stalled, and nothing on offer back in England. Charity and soup kitchens had kept them alive. It was so cold that the game had gone to ground; Streaky Bill’s lurcher scared up hardly a hare all winter. That was when young Mr Brassey the contractor’s son had come out to witness the excavations and seen nothing but starving navvies on the idle. His father had forcefully and often repeated the opinion that philanthropy was no substitute for brisk work.
    And they had had brisk work in the main, ever since the spring of 1841 when they’d started the 82 miles from Paris to Rouen. Five thousand British labourers brought out by Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie had proved insufficient; the contractors had been obliged to hire a second army of Continentals, another five thousand: French, Belgians, Piedmontese, Poles, Dutch, Spaniards. Yorkey Tom had helped train them up. Taught them to eat beef. Taught them what was