It wasn’t the first time Frank had been up the Hudson River. Three years earlier, soon after his seventh birthday, there had been a bad outbreak of yellow fever in New York. There was often some fever in the port. “The ships bring it from the south,” his father would say. “And we’re always at risk. New York’s as hot as Jamaica in the summer, you know.” But when a lot of people in the city had started dying, Weston had taken his whole family upriver to Albany until it was over.

Frank had enjoyed that journey. On the way up, they’d gazed west at the Catskill Mountains, and his father had reminded them: “That’s where Rip Van Winkle fell asleep.” Frank had liked Albany. The busy town was the capital of New York State now. His father had said this was a good idea, since Manhattan was at the bottom end of the state, and had plenty of business anyway, but Albany was nearer the middle, and growing fast. One day, Weston had taken them all to the old fort at Ticonderoga, and told them how the Americans had taken it from the British. Frank wasn’t very interested in history, but he’d enjoyed seeing the geometric lines of the old stone walls and the gun emplacements.

This time, after coming up the Hudson as far as Albany, Frank and his father had headed west. First they’d taken a coach along the old turnpike road across the northern lip of the Catskills to Syracuse, then along the top of the long, thin Finger Lakes, past Seneca and Geneva, and after that, all the way across to Batavia and finally Buffalo. It had taken many days.

Frank reckoned he knew why his father had brought him. Of course, he was the only boy in the family, but it wasn’t only that. He liked to know how things worked. At home, he enjoyed it when his father took him onto the steamboats and let him inspect their furnaces and the pistons. “It’s the same principle as the big steam-powered cotton gins they have in England,” Weston had explained. “The plantations we finance in the South mostly produce raw cotton, which we ship across the ocean to those gins.” Sometimes Frank would go down to the waterside to watch the men packing the cargoes of ice, so that it would stay frozen all the way down to the kitchens of the big houses in tropical Martinique. When the workmen had installed gas lighting in their house that spring, he’d watched every inch of piping as it went in.

So it was only natural, he supposed, that his father should have chosen him of all his children to accompany him now, to witness the opening of the huge engineering project in the North.