The Loving Cup by Winston Graham

not been problems already with the two eldest, no one denied the likelihood of many more with all of them: that was part of the challenge and the stress and the stimulus of life.
    When Jeremy got upstairs he impatiently broke the seal of his letter and frowned at the handwriting. It was new to him. He carried it to the window and read it in the fading light.
    Dear Sir,
    Over the last few months I have heard from my friends that you are developing or attempting to develop a steam carriage for use on our common roads. This is a subject which has fascinated me all my life, and I would be greatly obligated to you to be told something of the progress of your experiments. I have met Mr Trevithick on two occasions and am fascinated by his mechanical and scientific genius.
    I am a doctor by profession, being junior partner to Dr Avery of Wadebridge - from which town I write, and alas admit it to be in an area remote from the centres of experiment. However, I have an uncle who is Vicar of St Erth, and several times I have been able to visit him, and also have been privileged to meet Mr Davies Giddy and Mr Henry Andrew Vivian of Camborne, who first told me about you.
    I should be especially interested to learn in what way you intend to combat wheel spin, also whether you have ever considered the proposition that the bursting of boilers is not always occasioned by the pressure of steam but can come about through the decomposition of the waters? Is it not possible that hydrogen combined with nitrogen and oxygen may form an explosive compound?
    These and.many other matters I would welcome your views on, and if your machine is sufficiently advanced that it may be
    seen I should esteem it an honour to be shewn it.
    If you should be so willing, and consider a preliminary meeting appropriate, I could come to Truro any Wednesday, preferably in the forenoon, and we could talk over the matter. Although Mr Trevithick now says not, I believe there are enormous commercial possibili ties in this development - and not so far ahead. Steam carriages are the national conveyances of the future.
    I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, G. Garner
     
    Jeremy turned the letter over, and if he had known how to smile sardonically he would have done so. Mr Garner, whoever he was - Doctor Garner - was a little out of date. Jeremy's attempt to build a new steam carriage had ended more than a year ago when Trevithick had come upon him unexpectedly in Harvey's Foundry, had examined the carriage that was being built, and had pronounced it unworkable: far too heavy, with a boiler of obsolete dimensions. Of course Trevithick had tried to soften the blow, but, remembering his remarks later, one could see that he really thought the machine was a young man's folly, with no prospect of success whatsoever.
    Sometimes the thought of constructing a horseless carriage, the ambition to try again, still disturbed Jeremy in the night, the argument being, as Stephen had once put it, that Mr Trevithick's disapproval need not mean the automatic end of the idea; or as Cuby had said at their one happy meeting of last year, that it was not the way of a true inventor to give up after a first set-back.
    All the same, Dr Garner was too late: the events in January, of this year still stood abrasively across Jeremy's mind. There were a number of things he could still do with his life, but the patient, slow-evolving world of engineering and invention did not seem to be one of them.
    So a brief reply to Dr Garner politely choking him off.
    In the chest under the window were all the papers Jeremy had accumulated during the years when his passion for steam had had to be purely theoretical: the newspapers, the magazines of his boyhood, the sketches and drawings of the later period, together with calculations and estimates he had jotted down when first visiting Hayle and discovering the boiler for himself. After his meeting with Trevithick last spring he had thrust his later