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1. 8:30 a.m.: Embark Granville 8:30 a.m. EMBARK GRANVILLE
There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

No matter where it’s going.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY,

“TRAVEL” (1921)

Half past eight in the morning, on the twenty-second of October, 1895, in Granville, on the Normandy coast. Stocky, plain, and twenty-one, in her collar, tie, and boxy skirt, Mado Pelletier stands across the street from the little railway station holding her lidded metal lunch bucket, watching.

The down train, as they call any service from the capital, deposited Mado here yesterday afternoon, sooty and bone-jarred. Only now does it occur to her that she could have waited until this morning to leave Paris, disembarked early at Dreux, Surdon, or Flers, bought what she needed, and caught the next express back. All that really matters is that she be on a fast train to Paris by lunchtime on the twenty-second.

She supposes she came all the way to Granville because it’s the end of the line. The Company of the West’s posters call this wind-raked town the Monaco of the North. In the hours Mado’s been here, she hasn’t sought out the lighthouse or the casino or any of the so-called sights of this resort, off-season. Except one—she had a hankering to, for once in her life, set eyes on the sea.

It wasn’t pretty like everyone said. Wonderfully fierce, in fact—those waves biting into the stones of the beach yesterday evening as the sun went down behind the empty Lady Bathers’ hall. Hard to believe in October that invalids flocked here every summer to be wheeled out in bathing machines and half drowned for their health. Mado found a sandy patch and even made an attempt at a castle.

She’s always loved being outside, staying out late, spending as little time as possible in the room that has a tang of rot at the back of the Pelletiers’ greengrocery in Paris. (It had to hold all four of them when Mado was growing up, but it’s just her and her long-faced mother now.) Mado’s best memory is of setting off firecrackers in the street one Bastille Day. So this trip to Granville is the kind of thing she’d have enjoyed hugely when she was younger. Not that her parents would ever have been able to spare the money. Like much of the population of the famously wealthy City of Light, even before she was widowed, Madame Pelletier lived by the skin of her teeth.

Her daughter’s been planning this trip since she turned twenty-one. Mado spent last night in a room on the unfashionable inland side of the Granville train station, picked at random and paid for with the few coins she hadn’t set aside for buying supplies. She blew out the lantern and squeezed her eyes shut for hours at a time, but her mind would never stop buzzing long enough to let her fall asleep.

Up at dawn this Tuesday morning, like a good housewife she did her shopping as soon as the shutters opened. Back in the shabby room, she made her meticulous preparations before leaving in plenty of time to catch the up train to Paris.

So what’s preventing Mado from walking into Granville Station now and taking her seat in a Third-Class carriage? What’s keeping her feet—still stubby, child-size, in secondhand boots—rooted to the pavement?

Motionless at her side, a small boy with a schoolbag over his shoulders stares at the station entrance as if imitating Mado. She gives him a glare, but his round eyes don’t even blink.

Come on, in you go, she tells herself. The strap of her satchel cuts uncomfortably between her breasts.

A fellow glides by on a bicycle, smirking and waggling his eyebrows at her. Mado’s been getting this a lot in Granville. That’s the price of wearing a tailored jacket with short, oiled-down hair. Even back in Paris, where quite a few young women go about à l’androgyne, sneers and jeers have come Mado’s way ever since she scraped together the cash to buy this outfit at a flea market last year. Her hair she cuts herself with the razor that was one of the few possessions her father had when he died.

She’ll take sneers and jeers over lustful leers any day. Bad enough to have been born female, but she refuses to dress the part. Stone-faced, Mado checks the set of her cravat, then her hat. Her mother’s always nagging her to make half an effort to catch a husband when the fact is there’s nothing Mado wants less. Even if you got a kind one like her papa, marriage uses you up like a fruit. Mado likes to look at a handsome fellow as much as the next girl, but if the choice is virginity or slavery, she’ll take virginity. Like the Maid of Orléans, she thinks, straightening her back.

And then: The Maid of Orléans would be on the blasted train by now. Get moving—unless you mean to miss it?

Frowning, Maurice Marland looks up at the clock over the station entrance as the Breton guard with the great moustache sent him out to do. Railwaymen are figures of legend to Maurice, and engines are the dragons they command.

The boy lives in the Calvados town of Falaise, more than a hundred kilometres inland. He’s taken five rail journeys already in his seven and a half years, but this is the first time he’ll be riding alone. Georges had a friend to meet in Granville so couldn’t stay to see his little brother settled on the train, but he says Maurice has such a good head on his shoulders that he’s ready to travel on his own like a grown man.

The clock shows just past 8:40, the longer hand stabbing the V of the VIII. That can’t be right. Georges told him the Paris Express would be leaving at 8:45, and why would the guard send Maurice outside the station if it’s almost time to go?

A trick?

Maurice pelts back into the station, ducking under elbows, vaulting a terrier’s leash and then a spaniel’s, almost tripping over a cane, his face brushing bustles and coats. But this steam engine, which the guard assured him was a splendid beast and fighting fit, is showing no signs of motion yet, only hissing through her veils of white and grey.

The Breton takes the chewed pipe out from under his furry handlebar. “What did I tell you about the clock outside, youngster?”

“You said it would surprise me.” Maurice’s forehead is so furrowed, it aches. “But if the time’s gone eight forty already... does that mean we’re going to be late setting off?”

With a shake of his head, the man points his pipestem at another clock, this one hanging over the platform. It shows 8:36—the minute hand barely nudging past the VII. “Time’s different inside the station.”

Maurice’s mouth falls open. When a train takes off, do its crew and passengers somehow stay on this inner time, moving along in an enchanted bubble of five-minutes-behind? That makes no sense, not even for magic. Trains cut through the air so blindingly fast, wouldn’t they be, if anything, five minutes ahead?

Behind his leathery hand, the guard says: “Stationmaster keeps this clock wound back, doesn’t he?”

“Does he?” Maurice’s voice a squeak.

“Otherwise half of you would miss the train.”

“Half of me?” His eyes bulge. Maurice’s left half or his right? Top or bottom half?

“The dawdlers.” The guard gestures at the throng.

Maurice puzzles over this, tugging the straps of his schoolbag higher up on his shoulders. So the stationmaster puts back the hands of this clock, the one inside the station, with the result that half the passengers will believe they’re boarding on time when in fact they’re dawdlers, and the train’s been waiting patiently for them. “You mean the Express actually runs five minutes late?”

“Every train in France does.”

What a cheat! Railways are pure speed, the most modern thing there is. They’re a shortcut to the future, steaming along gleaming metals. So the clocks should all tell true, and the trains should set off on time and leave the dawdlers in the dust.

A gent’s voice: “Over here!”

The guard tips out his embers and pockets his pipe. “Coming, monsieur.”

Maurice remembers to pull out his brown cardboard ticket, printed with Third-Class Granville–Paris. “You haven’t clipped this yet.”

He only nods. “Don’t lose that—you’ll need to show it when you get down at Dreux. And don’t let anyone take anything off you.”

What might they try to take—Maurice’s lunch wrapped in waxed paper? His milk bottle stoppered with a clean rag?

The guard grabs a T-shaped handle on the train above him and pulls open a brown door, beckoning.

Maurice hurries over, ready to climb the iron steps. But the man seizes the back of his collar and the belt that keeps up Georges’s hand-me-down trousers and hoists Maurice into the carriage like a dog. “Dreux—remember.”

Affronted, straightening his seams, Maurice nods over the half-lowered pane in the door. How could he forget the name of the station east of Falaise, the name Georges has drilled into him, the place where Papa has business this week, where Papa will be waiting for Maurice in the cart outside the station at 2:16 this afternoon?

He glances over his shoulder but can’t spot anywhere to sit. He’s embarrassed for all these strangers to see him harbouring designs on their benches; they probably think he’s a dawdler. So for now Maurice stays at the door as if he prefers standing, eyes fixed on the mud-brown wall covered with words and pictures—Louriste Razors, Valda Pastilles, The Divine Sarah, Smoke Gauloises, Irisine Beauty Powder, Liebig Meat Extract, St. Raphael Quinine, Rochet Bicycles, Colle-Bloc Glues Everything—as if he’s enclosed in a book, a sturdy volume with the power to carry these people all the way to Paris.

On the platform below, the bookstall’s yellow awning reads Hachette: Banish Monotony and Ennui. The word banish makes Maurice think of villains sent abroad and never allowed to return to France. Georges says if Maurice listens to his elders and reads every spare minute he gets, one day he’ll know all the words there are and could even be a schoolteacher. Before his brother hurried out of Granville Station this morning, he bought Maurice a story about an Englishman circumnavigating the globe in eighty days, which sounds impossible, but Maurice doesn’t think the book would be called Around the World in Eighty Days if the hero failed.

His right hand turns over the hoard of shells in his pocket. These few days in Granville were his first encounter with the sea. The rock pools! The wide, blustery beach where big boys were flicking stones at the waves and each other in a game that seemed to get more hilarious the closer they came to shedding blood.

Papa’s from the Normandy town of Caen, and Maman’s always lived in nearby Falaise; they’ve buried a baby in each town, which is what she calls a root that never breaks. But it strikes Maurice that when he’s grown to be a man, he could choose to move away and settle on the coast, where he could smell this salt breeze every day. Is that what a holiday is, a glimpse of another, larger life?

An exotic-looking woman glides along the platform—no, it’s a man in a skirt, a limp skirt all the way down to his sandals; Maurice can see the fellow’s bare brown toes. An extraordinary tank on the man’s back wobbles high above his brimless cap, with... could that be steam leaking out of the top? The appliance has its own long wooden leg behind. Is the little man half machine?

A gent in a top hat with a valise puts his hand up, and the foreigner produces a tiny handleless cup and fills it with brown liquid from a tap on his chest. He’s a human coffeepot! The gent pays and tries to walk away with his drink, but he’s brought up short by the thinnest of chains attaching the cup to the tank; that makes Maurice grin. Top Hat has to knock back the drink in one go before he hurries off, leaving the wet cup dangling.

Here’s the guard again, snatching two cases off a cart as if they weigh no more than pillows...

Jean Le Goff settles passengers in carriages with the tolerant air of one who has stepped away from important business to do them a favour; that makes them more inclined to offer him a pourboire. Not yet thirty, he keeps the points of his great handlebar waxed, hoping the combination of peaked cap, pipe, and moustache will add a few years. (Jean would quite fancy a goatee but the Company of the West frowns on beards.) Le Goff—or “Ar Goff,” the way they say it in Brittany—means “blacksmith,” and the men in Jean’s family are squarely built; he keeps his shoulders set in a soldierly fashion. He did register with the military at twenty, as required by law, but he’s never been called up, as they don’t need so many soldiers in peacetime. At any rate, it does no harm to give the impression of having served, since every second railwayman is a veteran. Jean lets passengers thank him for his patriotism as they dig deeper in their pockets.

He prefers to keep Rear First vacant at the start of the day in case someone awfully rich needs to board later. So he tries to induce First-Class passengers to bunch up in the front carriage of their two in the middle of the train rather than spread out over both. They’re mostly hard-to-please Parisians, but he supposes their reluctance to share is understandable; the whole point of paying top rates is to stretch out in something like a private sitting room—except, of course, that it’s rattling through the countryside on wheels.

Jean opens the green door of Front First and ushers in a gent with a wooden arm and a family of three complete with a yappy cocker spaniel. He seats them on the plump red velvet banquettes and sucks up mightily—stows their hatboxes, bags, muffs, shawls, and canes in the nets overhead; arranges travel rugs over laps as if it were deepest January instead of October; tucks hats by their brims under the taut strings that run along the ceiling for storage... shall he pull back the lace-edged curtains and put the blind up? Half up—just so; he adjusts it tenderly by its tassel. Turn up the lamps for reading? No need, no weak eyes among this party. Very good, and yes, the oil does smoke rather.

The spaniel spins and yips. “Animals are really supposed to be kept in their baskets in one of the baggage vans,” Jean mentions.

“Oh, but Ouah-Ouah would be lonely. He’d whine.” The girl’s so wan, she’s almost greenish.

“He promises to be good,” the mother says.

Must be nearly tip time, especially if Jean’s going to turn a blind eye to the dog. He drops a hint about the radiator’s being freshly filled with boiling water.

“Oh, a footwarmer for our daughter too, please.”

Merde! Tell First Class what you’ve already done for their comfort, and you prompt them to ask for more.

“I wouldn’t bother, ma chère,” the husband tells the wife, “they’re always stone-cold after an hour.”

A show of brains can shake the money tree, so Jean puts in, “Ah, but we use acetate of soda now, which holds on to the heat longer.”

The gent looks impressed.

Jean jumps down to the platform to grab the girl a footwarmer—but he’s distracted by a dark young lady tugging at the door of Rear First. “Locked, I’m sorry to say, mademoiselle.”

“Could you open it, please?”

She hasn’t reached for her purse, and judging from her plain blue outfit, she’s not a lavish tipper, so Jean lies: “Very likely that one’s being taken off before Paris.”

She sighs, switching her cumbersome case—some kind of sewing machine?—from one hand to the other. A femme de couleur, Jean would guess—mixed ancestry—and she’d be quite pretty if she took a little trouble.

He hands her up the steps into Front First, where the one-armed gent is already occupying the tiny mahogany table with a notebook and pen. The family man’s immersed in a copy of this morning’s Granvillais, its ink still damp. The four make room for the intruder civilly. But the footwarmer Jean meant to get for the pale young girl! There’s never enough time at stops, and more than once he’s forgotten a passenger’s request and missed his chance to earn a tip. “Just one more minute, mademoiselle.”

He lopes along the platform to the bubbling cistern. He hooks one of the oval metal footwarmers, grips it with a rag, and canters back to Front First to get... fifty centimes in copper from the father. Could be worse. That’ll buy bread and cheese and coffee or a condom, depending on what he’s in the mood for at the end of his shift in Paris.

Jean pulls out the heavy disc of his watch: no more time. At Christmas all crewmen receive up to a full month’s pay for good work, which boils down to keeping their train on schedule. He rushes down the train to position himself in Rear Baggage, where the junior guard always rides as if ready for any danger from behind. (Brigands galloping down the track? That makes him grin.) Or in case the convoy wrenched apart in the middle, Jean supposes, so the second half wouldn’t be left unmanned. Or, more realistically, so that if they were rammed from the back by a train with a drunk or dozing driver, it would be Rear Baggage that got staved in; injured passengers or bereaved families might sue, but crewmen (like soldiers) accept the risks that come with the job.

Well, these unlikely hypotheticals don’t weigh heavy on Jean. At the start of every journey, Rear Baggage is an empty box, his haven from all the demands to come. Soon he’ll have his first long smoke lounging in his chair with his feet up on the desk he uses only for that purpose.

At the front of the train, driver Guillaume Pellerin’s taken up his position on the iron footplate. A thick drawbar links his engine to the tender that holds her coal bunker and water tank. His stoker, Victor Garnier, stands at his left in the same red scarf to the chin and cap over his ears as Guillaume. There’s no cab to sit in, not so much as a stool to rest their arses; the Company prefers its rollers on their toes throughout the journey. The Express has a crew of four, including the guards, but only the driver and stoker count as rollers—royals among railwaymen.

Victor Garnier’s greying bush of a moustache masks his mouth, but Guillaume can always tell if his mate’s in good humour, which he is this morning.

Three Third-Class carriages, two Firsts, two Seconds, one baggage van at the back and another at the front, and a post van behind the tender, which means almost a dozen vehicles for Engine 721 to pull; Guillaume’s known this great hog to haul seventeen, though he’d never agree to more than twenty. Her train is put together at Granville every second night by a coupler who ducks beneath undercarriages, deft with his shunting pole. (Guillaume’s seen a slow mover get his leg carved right off at the knee.) The Granville yardmen have been up half the night swabbing because the least speck can clog a valve but also for pride in the machine. They’ve greased her, topped up her oil and sand, and used a high dumper to load her tender with the best black-brown coal. Hours ago they raked out her firebox and threw in a paraffin stick to light her up, so she’ll have time to warm up. With a hydraulic crane, they’ve filled the U-shaped water jacket around her bunker with a tankful pumped out of the Boscq. (Victor’s very fierce about getting only pure river water; any silt of clay or salt could bung up her pipes.)

Guillaume and his stoker have been here since half past six this morning. He’s tried the regulator, reverser, air brake, hand brake, and steam whistle to make sure each wheel and handle moves as it should. Down by his feet, the drain cocks and the sanding gear are in good order. He doesn’t need to ask whether Victor’s checked his boiler controls on the left—the pressure gauge, safety valve, water-level glass, injector wheel, and dampers.

They’re both family men. Guillaume spends every second evening with his Françoise and their little boy in their lodgings just off the tracks, a kilometre before Montparnasse Station in Paris, where the rooms shake every time a train goes by. And Victor lives with his Joséphine by Montparnasse Cemetery, ten minutes’ walk from Guillaume’s. The mates never see each other in the city, as their wives don’t get on, but they spend ten days out of every eleven elbow to elbow on the footplate of Engine 721 and every second night in the same boardinghouse in Granville. Even their work clothes have merged over the years; they grab smock shirts, soft jackets, denim trousers, and caps from the one parcel the laundrywoman sends back.

Guillaume wears boots, but Victor prefers clogs so he can stamp out a flaming cinder without setting his soles on fire. He cracks four eggs into a puddle of butter on his shovel to test the fire’s heat.

How they crackle! Guillaume’s stomach is empty, harsh with a morning shot of black coffee and red wine. He breaks a roll and leans over the glowing red metal.

“Wait!” Victor says.

Guillaume laughs under his breath.

“One more minute,” Victor insists, holding Guillaume’s sleeve.

“But you always overdo the eggs.”

“Half a minute, then.”

Guillaume bumps him aside, dips his bread. The two fight to mop up the slithering gold. Merde, that’s good. They burp and wipe their mouths. Victor scrubs at his moustache with a handkerchief that’s not yet grimy. Some of the men call him Walrus; only Guillaume knows that his stoker grew it from the age of twelve to hide the puckered scar from a cleft lip.

Nothing’s hurting Guillaume yet, and the day promises fair weather. “What kind of trip are we going to have, mate?” His customary question.

“Fast but smooth,” Victor assures him.

Guillaume cracks his tight knuckles one by one. “Smooth but fast.”

Blonska’s bones are sixty years old and feel more like a hundred. She stirs on the platform where to save a night’s lodging she curled up behind a pillar, which failed to keep the Granville wind at bay. The sea breeze, the locals call it, as if it’s some soft zephyr rather than a knife of air. Her eyes are cemented shut; she rubs the crumbs away. She tries to sit up. May have overdone it this time, kipping on flagstones. But what else was Blonska supposed to do when she found the platform had no benches? This morning she might not be able to get to her feet in time to board the Express before it blasts away. If she has to be carted off to hospital—if this seaside town even has one—it’ll mean further worry and expense for the Parisian ladies who sent her here for a fortnight to restore her health. (Blonska’s eyes have been red and blurred, her twisted spine more trouble than usual.)

This modern notion of needing to go away on holiday for one’s health is an invention of the railway companies, in her view, but it would have seemed churlish to refuse her patrons outright. Still, she didn’t feel obliged to spend all their money on her own trivial comfort, and a week seemed more than long enough for a rest. So last Tuesday she came down in Third Class instead of First, as it would have offended her intelligence to pay twenty-seven francs. She took one look at Granville’s Hôtel des Bains—facing the shore, all froufrou gingerbread and ruched curtains—and turned away towards the steps clambering up the cliff. For the first six nights she found a much cheaper room in an alley where the wind whipped across the high town, rented out by the wife of a fisherman who was off in Newfoundland after cod for half the year. She also saved the money her patrons had given her for meals, instead munching on nuts and apples as she looked out at the island of Jersey and sucked in the free salt air.

Hard to catch her breath on this busy platform, though, after the cold night on the ground. Blonska’s dressed in her patrons’ gauzy hand-me-downs; she has no objection to fine wrappings if they’re free, even if they look queer on an old spinster bent over like a question mark. Back in Russia, before any journey, you sat down on your baggage for a quiet moment to gather your forces. But Blonska has brought only a satchel, to save the effort of toting a suitcase, and it’s time to stop stalling and get up. When she tips back her head, she realises that the iron-and-glass roof of the station needs to be this high to make room for the steam and smoke; a low ceiling would trap passengers and crew in a blinding fog.

All of a sudden, a whistle makes her jump, and her back spasms—the moustachioed guard’s giving the first warning of departure. She scrapes herself off the flagstones and lurches to her knees, then to her numb feet. Only her orthopaedic corset holds her up. This was a surprisingly useful present, moulded to her exact misshape, so she hasn’t passed it on to someone needier.

Sometimes Blonska accepts lavish gifts to soothe the givers’ unease; it’s only in the privacy of her mind that she mutters, Go to hell with your bonbons and your fortifying wines. It’s a fact that society would be rather less terrible if the bonbons, wines, and francs were more evenly distributed, so Blonska plays her part by letting the guilty philanthropic ladies of Paris use her as a faceted lemon-squeezer on which to press their wealth.

Third Class is always placed at the front of the train so as to catch the brunt of the coal dust and of course so that in the event of a head-on collision, those in the cheap seats will do their duty by getting crushed before their betters. The middle of the three brown doors is hanging open just a few steps away. Blonska might move with the frail, bobbing glide of a seahorse, but she’s a tough old boot. She heaves her satchel upwards and pushes it onto the splintering floor of the carriage, then gets one worn sole on the metal step, claws at the handrail, and drags herself up and in.

She scans the pairs of long wooden benches facing each other. She inches through the narrow gap down the middle of the carriage. The air is thick with tobacco, garlic, whiskey, linseed oil, and wet straw. Ah, a gap; Blonska drops into it. She leans her shoulder blades against the narrow back bar. Catching her breath, she peers past somebody’s hat at the steamed-up window. She’ll have a view north this time, all the way home to Paris. She’ll enjoy the scenery, even if the lush green fields of lower Normandy aren’t a patch on the Great Steppes.

She takes her knitting out of her satchel because she can knit by feel. She’d love to read on the journey—she’s halfway through Chekhov’s latest stories—but she must keep resting her eyes or she’ll be no use to Monsieur Claretie this week. Blonska has a part-time job looking after his library at the Comédie-Française and takes pride in this slim connection to the oldest theatre company in existence. She’s put in order the books and papers of other men of letters as well (less for money than out of her itch for tidiness)—the tireless reformer Clemenceau, for instance, who calls her stubborn old Blonska. She was baptised Elise, but these fellows use only her surname, almost as if she’s one of them.

A fisherwoman opposite has a startlingly intricate strip of Bayeux lace over her muscular shoulders. She’s holding a great basket of oysters that pokes Blonska’s knees and is already causing complaints from a man in a bowler hat.

“Fresh out of the sea,” the oysterwoman tells him without turning her head, “and the sea’s all you can smell, so don’t dare say otherwise.”

“Well, I just hope they don’t start stinking by Paris.”

“Cold day in October? No fear of that.”

“Can one of you pull down the blind to keep the sun off them?” he grumbles.

“Oi!” Several voices are raised in protest at the idea. Blonska nods; she’s still chilled to the bone and would miss the bit of sunshine.

The bowler-hat man sucks on his pipe. “Well, can you move the basket so we’ve got some elbow room?”

“Move it where?” the fisherwoman wants to know.

“Put it on the floor.”

“Can’t have no dirt or ash getting on my oysters.”

“Such prices you lot charge,” the bowler hat says, “Granvillais can’t afford a taste of our own shellfish anymore.”

The oysterwoman pulls a faux-sympathetic face. “Have to sell high, don’t I, to cover the ticket to Paris and back?”

“Or you could save yourself the trouble of going—stay home and sell them cheaper. It’s not as if it takes long to pull a few oysters off the rocks.”

“Risking my life in those storms, and the highest tides in Europe? If you think it’s that easy, go pull your own!”

Blonska’s seen fistfights break out in Third before, but this argument has a lazy tone to it; the two locals are just passing time.

“Well.” The oysterwoman sighs. “Poor people’s bread always burns.”

Nobody’s inclined to disagree with that old saw.

The man with the bowler hat folds his coat into a lumpy cushion to sit on. Blonska would do the same with her shawl if she didn’t need it to keep the chill off her chest.

“They make Third Class as uncomfortable as they possibly can, don’t they?” he throws her way.

She smiles. “On purpose, monsieur—you think?”

“The Company’s trying to force anyone with the cash to fork out for Second. See these tiny holes drilled in the floor to make draughts?”

Sceptical, Blonska bends over—but the man’s right, there are pinpricks at regular intervals.

On the whole, she’s relieved to have her holiday behind her and to be heading back with more than two hundred francs stuffed in her corset. (She can’t imagine any robber bold enough to riffle through her damp wrappings.) Blonska will have the satisfaction of handing over the cash to the next person she meets who needs it for rent, shoes, coal and candles, bread and milk. Having somehow made it to the advanced age of sixty despite all her ailments, she likes to see how long she can sit on a winter day without lighting a fire; scrimping gives her a little shiver of triumph. That’s conceited in its own way, Blonska knows; everyone has his or her vanity, and doing without happens to be hers.

Perhaps this will be her last long trip. Life’s too short to make a habit of travelling arduously to faraway places and doing nothing there in hopes of bolstering your powers so you can do useful things again for a little longer. Why not just keep trying to be useful until the whistle blows?

It’s best to be prepared. Long ago Blonska entrusted a hundred francs to her employer Monsieur Claretie to be used to bury her decently. Varvara Nikitine, whom Blonska lived with for two years, has left space for her friend in her own plot in Montparnasse Cemetery. (Varvara was touring Ireland to study poverty when she caught pleurisy and died of it.) You can’t cheat the hourglass; the sand will run out whether you’re watching it or not. Forward over the graves, as Goethe wrote after the death of his last child.

Senior guard Léon Mariette checks he has all his necessary kit: timetable, rule book, pencil, log (squared paper covered in black cloth and closed with an elastic band), medical kit, pocket torch, whistle, carriage keys, signal flags in red, green, and white. He relishes the weight of responsibility, unlike young Jean Le Goff, who gets by with a penknife, a flashy waistcoat and tie, and a ridiculous moustache.

Léon has followed the departure protocols; he’s walked the length of the platform with a station guard (a former stoker deafened by the work). They’ve scanned every coupling and sprung buffer to make sure they’re sound and oiled with a pair of side chains hooked on as a backup but loosely enough to give some play where the train will need to curve with her tracks. Sometimes those turnbuckle screws work loose, or the chains crack, or dishonest railwaymen nick bits and sell them for scrap. In Léon’s experience, the Company of the West is infested with thieves, shirkers, and time-wasters.

Crews can be just as stupid as civilians; they cut corners and rebel against the rules. Few seem to grasp that accidents don’t happen by accident. Léon thinks of the railways as a hard school in which making the least slip can kill an innocent person. A stage upon which character is revealed in a merciless light... but unlike at the theatre, on the railways justice is not done.

Now he’s making sure that every door is shut and every handle horizontal. He wishes he could grab the last few stragglers like stray chickens and toss them into their hutches. He’s already heard Le Goff’s first whistle—pert, almost cocky—so he hurries all the way to the train’s nose to check that the kerosene headlamp is burning well above the Company plaque that reads West. The smokebox is like a great clock with no hands, and the steel blade (for snow or other obstructions) is gleaming below.

Moving at a trot, Léon doubles back to Front Baggage, his base for the journey, and climbs in just in time to hear Le Goff’s final warning whistle. He mounts the short ladder to perch in the senior guard’s birdcage, a lantern-shaped lookout on the roof. He glances down at the platform and sees a young woman with a lidded tin lunch bucket dash out of nowhere and up the steps of Rear Third.

“Too late,” Léon roars at her. More than a few fools have brought death on themselves by leaping on or off at the last moment.

She has the cheek to ignore him, this peculiar person, upright as a toy soldier in a straight skirt, a collar and tie, brilliantined hair cut to just below the ears, a worn slouch hat. Paris fashion—Léon will never understand it. But she’s wrestled the carriage door open and leapt in, and here comes the dignified note of the steam whistle, Guillaume Pellerin formally asking permission for departure. Only once the Granville guard clangs his handbell does Léon lift his own whistle from his chest to give the sharp all-clear. Some gripe that you could shave a minute off the whole ritual by cutting out this exchange of sounds, but as Léon always says, Better prepare and prevent than repair and repent.

Sometimes ignorant civilians or even fellow railwaymen, who should know better, address Senior Guard Mariette as if he’s a mere baggageman, a creature of labels and ledgers, when the fact is, the lives of more than a hundred persons are in his experienced hands. Up in his birdcage, he has the most comprehensive view of train and track, and an alarm bell hangs to his right in the event of his spotting danger ahead or behind.

Also, he plays an unseen but not unimportant role in actually driving the train. Every time Pellerin moves the train out, Léon fingers the leather binding of his hand brake and leans a little on the crank, which turns a screw under the floor and presses the iron teeth softly against the wheels to smoothen the gathering movement. Without that, the links of the train can jerk, which Léon feels just like the ache in his hips at the end of each day. (He turned forty-two this year.) He wishes passengers would understand that rolling stock is called that because it rolls; it’s in the nature of its pieces to lag a little behind or leap ahead or nudge each other. Do these people expect to glide halfway across France in a day as smoothly as angels on a cloud? And it’s Senior Guard Mariette, the public face of the Company, who’s obliged to present himself on the platform at every station, patient and accountable. Those who complain of being yanked about, let them take it up with the Maker, who neglected to polish the earth like a billiard ball.

Léon skews around to check himself in the Front Baggage van’s small mirror. His muttonchop whiskers are sharply trimmed; his stiff, black, flat-topped kepi reminds him of the red one from his army days. (As it was peacetime, he was mostly assigned to protect railway lines in West Africa—keeping order as civilisation advanced across the continent one kilometre at a time.) His buttoned-on shirt collar is fresh this morning and his grey coat is fastened all the way down his thighs over its matching jacket. This makes it rather hard for Léon to bend at the waist, but what’s the point of having standards if they’re to be let slip?

The Paris Express is properly underway now, so he releases the hand brake and allows himself a moment’s ease, watching the last shuttered houses of Granville flick by.

Moving at last!

She is how the crew refer to the train, out of fondness but also to mark the distinction between her and them. Technically, she is Engine 721, a six-wheeled locomotive constructed for the Company of the West eighteen years ago. But in another sense, she is this whole train, since without the coal and water in the tender coupled on behind her, she couldn’t huff and puff and power her wheels, and without the long, thick chain of carriages assembled afresh every night, she’d have no reason to move.

From the tip of Normandy, she cuts due east, like a spoon taking the top off the lightly boiled egg of France. Every passenger, whether paying nine francs to squeeze into one of her Third-Class carriages, eighteen for Second, or twenty-seven for First, will be treated to the luxury of speed. Today’s trip of 326 kilometres should be interrupted by only four brief stops. Barring acts of God, caprices of Nature, mishaps, or human failings, she should pull into Paris-Montparnasse in seven hours and ten minutes, at 3:55 p.m.

Why should you take an interest in this particular railway journey? France has one of the densest meshes of tracks on earth. The iron vine writhes across the plains, bores through the mountains, leaps the rivers. Every hour of the day, trains shatter the quiet, char the air, and scare the wildlife. So why care about this one express from Granville on the morning of the twenty-second of October, 1895?

Not because she’s bound for Paris. Most trains go to or from that knot at the top of the net, the spider at the heart of the web. It’s prohibitively expensive to ship goods anywhere other than the capital, but that’s where the majority of customers live anyway. For half a century, the six companies have extended their routes like spokes radiating from the great hub of Paris.

No: What’s remarkable about this train is that she’s heading straight for disaster.

Every journey must come to an end, after all. As a Scottish saying has it: Hours are time’s arrows, and one of them is fletched with death.