Chapter 318: New Ventures Part 1

The Kingdom of Belfast was fast becoming a nation of machines.

In Helmarte, private motorcars navigated the paved avenues. Along the trunk rail lines, heavy locomotives hauled passengers and manufactured goods between towns that had once been days apart. In Oriel, factories worked through all shifts, turning out steel plates, dynamos, copper wiring, and the automobiles bearing the Teucher crest. Even the rural market towns were shifting; motor trucks were beginning to line up beside provincial stations, swallowing grain sacks that used to require teams of draft horses.

Yet step just beyond the graded roads and rail sidings, and another Belfast remained untouched.

It was a world governed strictly by animal muscle and seasonal panic. A tenant farmer’s entire year rested on the weather, the thickness of the loam, and how many acres a team of horses could break before spring rains turned the topsoil into soup. While city factories hummed under electric arcs, the fields were still plowed by hand and harness, almost identically to how they had been worked two centuries before.

Ernest Teucher had spent the last five years revolutionizing how Belfast moved. Now he was about to discover that moving the kingdom was only half the struggle; the other half was feeding it.

The shift began not with a royal commission, but with an envelope brought in by Arthur Pendelton one wet Tuesday morning.

Arthur dropped it atop Ernest’s stack of engine casting tallies. "Something unusual for you."

Ernest glanced up, rubbing his eyes. "Another fleet complaint about leaky radiator hoses?"

"No."

"A petition for a cheaper runabout?"

"Not that either." Arthur smiled dryly. "Someone wants you to build a better horse."

Ernest stopped his pen mid-stroke. "A what?"

"Read it yourself."

Ernest broke the wax seal. The handwriting was uneven, the letters large and carefully traced by fingers far more accustomed to callous-forming reins than steel nibs:

To Lord Ernest Teucher,

I hope you will forgive a working man for writing directly to your office. I have seen your motorcars passing through the market outside Oriel, and last month I watched one of your covered wagons haul forty sacks of oats up the station hill without breathing hard.

Folks say your engines never tire and don’t need oats to stand in a shed. I work forty-eight acres of mixed soil. Every spring, my sons and I spend weeks behind our two heavy teams trying to turn the ground. When the rain sets in, the horses sink; when the sun bakes it, the crust breaks their shoulders. Before we finish, the planting window closes.

I am not asking to buy a motorcar. I am asking whether an engine can be made to drag a plow. If your machinery can haul heavy freight along a road, surely it can help men like us in the dirt.

Respectfully,

Thomas Bell

Ernest read the page through twice, then folded it carefully along its crease. He looked past Arthur toward the soot-streaked factory windows, completely silent for several seconds. A slow smile crept onto his face.

"Arthur."

Arthur took a wary step backward. "Oh, heaven help us. Don’t look at me like that."

"Where is Hollen?"

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Down in the machine shop, where you should leave him."

Hollen was in the middle of chewing out a lathe hand over bearing tolerances when Ernest found him.

"It doesn’t matter if the caliper says it’s within three thousandths," Hollen was growling, tapping a heavy brass sleeve. "If the shaft binds when it gets warm, it’s scrap. Re-cut it."

"Hollen," Ernest called, stepping over a pile of curled iron shavings.

"Unless the foundry roof has collapsed, Ernest, give me five minutes."

Ernest held out the letter. "A farmer wants us to build an engine that can pull a plow."

Hollen froze. The machinist blinked and looked between them.

Slowly, Hollen wiped grease from his palms with a rag and turned around. "A what?"

"A motorized plowing machine."

Hollen stared at him, then glanced down at a heavy truck axle resting on the timber trestle, and finally back at Ernest’s face. "Tell me you’re not planning to bolt a three-share plow to the back of a Cargo One."

"Of course not," Ernest said. "That would be absurd."

"Good."

"The chassis would snap, the tires would spin uselessly in wet clay, and the cooling system would boil within twenty minutes," Ernest added cheerfully. "We need an entirely new machine."

Hollen closed his eyes and let out a long breath. "Naturally we do."

The following Sunday, Ernest invited Eleanor for an outing into the country.

He had promised her an afternoon away from the stink of furnace coal: lunch at a coaching inn, fresh air, and an easy drive through the hills south of Oriel. She had accepted happily—until she noticed the stiff leather notebook tucked under his coat as he handed her into the Model One.

"Ernest," she said, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes, my dear?"

"Why is that notebook coming with us?"

"Just a precaution," he said innocently. "In case an idea strikes."

"Are we taking a pleasant drive, or are we inspecting someone’s ditch?"

"A very pleasant drive," he insisted, though his smile betrayed him. "With perhaps a brief detour past a farm."

Eleanor groaned, though she couldn’t hide her amusement. "You are completely incorrigible."

"So my partners frequently remind me."

"Fine," she said, leaning against his shoulder as the motorcar cleared the cobblestones of the southern gate. "But we are having a proper lunch first, and you are not allowed to talk about cylinder bore over roast fowl."

The countryside beyond Oriel rolled out in long, gentle swells of green pasture, stone hedgerows, and wide swaths of freshly harrowed earth. But once they left the macadamized turnpike, the road deteriorated into rutted dirt. The Model One rattled over dried wagon tracks, forcing the driver down to a crawl.

Half a mile down a valley road, Eleanor pointed out the window. "Look over there."

In an open field bordered by hazel trees, a lone team of heavy draft horses was trudging forward. Behind them walked a burly farmer in a canvas jacket, his boots caked in yellow clay as he leaned his full weight onto the handles of a iron-shod wooden plow. Every few yards, the horses strained, the plow point struck a stone, and the man had to heave the blade back into line.

The acreage was vast; the furrow they were carving looked like a hairline scratch across an ocean of weeds.

"Stop the car," Ernest told the driver.

Eleanor gave him an amused glance. "Five minutes, you said."

"Ten," Ernest bargained, already opening the door. "At most."

The farmer was Thomas Bell himself. The name was painted neatly on the milk pail hanging by the boundary gate.

When Ernest introduced himself, Bell nearly dropped the leather reins into the mud.

"Lord Teucher?" The man pulled off his wool cap, his weathered face showing pure shock. "You... you actually read my letter?"

"I did," Ernest said, shaking the farmer’s calloused hand. "This is my wife, Lady Eleanor."

Bell stammered an apology for his working clothes, but Eleanor quickly waved it off with an easy smile. "Please don’t mind us, Mr. Bell. My husband just couldn’t resist seeing your horses at work."

Ernest was already inspecting the plowshare. "How much ground can that pair turn in a full day?"

"An acre and a half if the soil is dry and they’re well-fed," Bell answered, relaxing slightly. "In heavy clay like this? Barely an acre before their legs give out. And if the spring rain catches us, they sink to their hocks."

"How much time do you lose to care?"

"Two hours every morning just to feed, curry, and harness them," Bell said with a tired sigh. "Another hour at night. And they eat whether they’re working or standing in the barn all winter. But the real enemy isn’t the feed, My Lord. It’s the calendar. If we don’t get the barley seed into the ground before the late rains, the crop stunts. Every lost afternoon costs us at harvest."

Eleanor watched the plow team attentively. "Do your sons help?"

"Two boys and three seasonal hands when we harvest," Bell replied. "Plowing is the hardest pull, but reaping isn’t much easier. Shaking, threshing, hauling—it’s all muscle, My Lady. A man spends his whole life just trying to keep ahead of the weeds."

Ernest listened closely, nodding to himself. The parallel was striking. In the rail depots, the bottleneck hadn’t been the locomotive; it had been the loading dock. Here, the bottleneck wasn’t the fertility of the soil; it was the sheer physical limit of how quickly animal sinew could prepare the ground.

Before they climbed back into the motorcar, Ernest looked the farmer in the eye. "I can’t build you a machine tomorrow, Mr. Bell. But we are going to build one. And when the first prototype is ready, this is where we’ll bring it."

Bell smiled faintly, looking back toward his resting team. "We’ll be here, sir. Waiting on the weather, as always."