The Wreck

by Meg Keneally

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Further Reading

  Reading Group Questions

  Advert for Fled

  Copyright

  For Judy, with love and thanks.

  Part of this story unfolds on the country of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The author acknowledges them and Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia, and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. She pays her respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

  PART ONE

  ‘Rise like lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number!

  Shake your chains to earth, like dew

  Which in sleep had fall’n on you:

  Ye are many – they are few.’

  The Mask of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley

  CHAPTER 1

  Manchester, August 1819

  Some called out to them on the way. Told them to go home. Said they were a rabble. If that was true, they were the merriest rabble anyone had ever seen, and none of them had any intention of going home.

  Sarah glanced at the other Female Reform Society members marching with her. They had been easy enough to spot, walking with arms linked and dressed in white, wearing green rosettes or ribbons. Those like Sarah and her mother, who could not afford a white dress and wore their everyday brown or grey, looked like pigeons mixing among swans. Sarah and Emily had their dark hair stuffed beneath white cloth caps.

  Whenever Sarah glanced at her mother, she fancied she saw the future of her own face. The skin sagged a little, emptied of any fat that had once resided in its cheeks, while Emily’s smile revealed two black voids in the middle of her lower row of teeth. She was, though, still a handsome woman; she stood straight, when others her age were so used to rounding their shoulders they had forgotten there was any other posture, and her grey eyes still constantly searched for objects of interest on which to focus.

  They had marched six abreast from home, the crowd swelling as they went, and it took some time for the narrower passageways to disgorge the choking stream of people onto the broader streets.

  Sarah hoisted the flag she held a little higher. Today, she had the proud job of being the Society’s standard-bearer. The shining white banner depicted a woman modestly dressed in blue, holding up the scales of justice and treading on a serpent over which Sarah had embroidered the word ‘corruption’.

  As they marched, the cramped cottages and tenements gave way to grander stone buildings, some two storeys high, many with shuttered windows as schools had sent their scholars home and shops had closed for fear of looting.

  The crowd was jovial enough. Streams of chattering, laughing people who waved banners, draped arms around shoulders or linked arms, shouting and singing. Among them, though, were those who marched with set jaws and squared shoulders, and others whose heads were lowered, more suited to a mourning procession.

  There had been talk, for a long time. Despair behind the single-brick walls of cottages and tenements. Men in the beer houses dropping their mumbled stories into cups. Wails as children were taken by the encroaching dark, discovered still and cold.

  The discontent had leaked from the cottages and beer houses into open fields where speakers would call down condemnation on a government that seemed only interested in protecting merchants, with laws to keep out foreign grain that would have made sustenance more than a remote possibility. Then the anger propelled people from motley local gatherings into larger organised assemblies, where shouts and jeers accompanied the calls for annual parliaments and votes for all men.

  The assemblies exposed the anger to air, and the smouldering became flame. The magistrates and the government looked fearfully across the Channel, worried the echoes of the bloody uprising in France were making their way across the water.

  Now, one of the most famous speakers in all of England would give shape to the people’s rage, and he would do it in a Manchester square.

  Sarah was walking so fast, she nearly missed the notice. Bills proliferated on the sides of buildings throughout the town, so it could be difficult to pick out notices of interest. This one, though, was pasted over others, aggressive black letters making its intent clear. Some words were larger and darker than others: ILLEGAL. ABSTAIN. PERIL.

  Sarah tapped her mother’s arm, and Emily stopped to read the notice alongside her, as the crowd surged past them, occasionally pushing Sarah flat against the wall.

  New Bailey Court-House, 31 July 1819

  Whereas it appears by an advertisement in the Manchester Observer paper of this day that a public and illegal meeting to be addressed by Harold Hartford be convened for Monday, the sixteenth day of August, to be held in the area near St Peter’s Church in Manchester, we, the undersigned magistrates, do hereby caution all persons to abstain at their peril from attending such illegal meeting.

  Emily pursed her lips and glared at the notice as though it could feel ashamed. ‘It’s illegal because they say it is, because they fear it.’

  ‘Why, though?’ asked Sarah. ‘It’s just a talk!’

  ‘Talk is where everything starts. And they know it.’

  Sarah had not expected so many, nor had she expected she and Emily would be marching alongside the barouche ferrying the great orator Harold Hartford to the place where he would silence thousands simply by raising a finger, then hold everyone’s trembling breath in his hand between that gesture and his first word.

  Sarah was unable to resist glancing up at the open carriage from time to time. She had thought the famous man would be tall, severe, perhaps with a hawkish nose down which he could glare at his intellectual inferiors. If she had not seen him riding in the barouche, being borne on a wave of goodwill that seemed to propel the carriage every bit as much as the horse did, she would have thought him unremarkable. His face was clean-shaven, and his mouth neither sneered nor smiled but simply waited to be called upon. Light hair was brushed forward from the crown of his head. He looked, if anything, like a worker she might see at the mill.

  The orator, though, was not the only reason she kept glancing at the carriage. Sitting next to the driver, in the white dress she always wore on such occasions, high-necked and demure, was a beaming Delia Burns. The founder of the local Female Reform Society, whose members she referred to as her ‘Sisters of the Earth’, was clearly having the most marvellous time. She waved a handkerchief at people as they passed, and some waved back at her, though far more at Hartford.

  While the Sisters acknowledged Delia with nods and smiles, some in the crowd were less than entranced with the woman in white. The men must have understood they would be ill-advised to insult the woman riding besid
e Hartford; some women, though, had no such scruples. Sarah heard ‘whore’ hissing and slithering out of the crowd. One woman yelled, ‘What right have you to be there? Leave it to the men who know their business!’

  Delia simply wafted her handkerchief in the air and continued beaming.

  The banner Sarah carried was one of many, and she could not guess at where people had found the fabrics into which they had stitched their desires: bright blue and green and black, words picked out in white or gold. The female reformers of Royton flew a flag bearing the words, LET US DIE LIKE MEN, AND NOT BE SOLD LIKE SLAVES. Others called for liberty and fraternity, annual parliaments, universal suffrage. One, stark white on black, showed two clasped hands beneath EQUAL REPRESENTATION OR DEATH – UNITE AND BE FREE. Rising above them all was a scarlet cap of liberty on a thin wooden pole, the Latin word Libertas inscribed on it in gold.

  The crowd moved onto the field in a jostling, chattering river, trailed by pamphleteers and peddlers who saw an easy audience, and an easy profit.

  All of the glutted streets fed into a broad square, surrounded by buildings – a Quaker meeting house, a cooper’s cottage and some three-storey slab-like structures, and at one end the church that gave the square its name.

  Sarah had not been to a carnival, but she imagined this meeting would top any such festivity. Some people were singing and dancing. A group of Irishmen, marching under a green banner, began to dance as a band of musicians struck up a jig.

  In the back of the barouche, Hartford stood waving the white hat for which he was famous while grinning at the cheers his gesture brought forth. The adulation seemed to transform him, broadening his shoulders and bringing forth an air of divinity about him. Sarah was unsure if he could survive too long without it.

  The crowd became denser and louder as they approached the makeshift stage: two carts tied together and topped with planks. A few men were standing there already, waiting to greet Hartford. He clambered from the carriage onto the hustings and thrust his hat into the air. The noise of the crowd vibrated through the earth and up through Sarah’s feet to her stomach. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see buildings laid waste.

  While Hartford was thrusting his hat and waving, a gentleman already on the stage walked to the side and solicitously offered his hand to Delia, who clambered up and waved as though the shouts and stamping feet were meant for her.

  Sarah and Emily jostled closer to the stage and handed up the banner, which Delia waved from side to side, narrowly missing one of the worthies standing next to her. She glanced down, acknowledging Sarah with a smile and inclining her head towards the barouche. After returning the smile, Sarah scrambled into the carriage and stood on the seat that Hartford had vacated; she bent over and dragged her mother up too. The two of them gazed around at the crowd, taking in the colourful banners and excited people, and smiled.

  Sarah tried to pick out the faces of her father, Jack, and older brother, Sam, but it was impossible. The field was so packed that anyone who stepped to the side would find their shoe on someone else’s toe.

  There were some faces that caught her attention, though. In a building across the field, three or four men stared out from the second-storey window of a well-built stone house. She could not see their expressions, but their white bibs – mere dots at this distance – marked them out as magistrates. Their presence indicated that they expected trouble, but Sarah knew they often saw what they expected to see, whether it was there or not.

  The sound of the crowd was dying down now; Sarah looked to the stage and saw Hartford waiting for quiet. When the noise had reduced to a faint murmur, he took a deep breath before he cried, ‘Friends!’

  The crowd roared again, as though the endearment was a finely crafted argument.

  Hartford put out his hands, one of which still grasped his hat, palms down until there was silence. ‘It seems, fellow countrymen, that the delay in the proceedings has worked in our favour, as far more are now in attendance than anyone expected!’

  Again there came a cheering and stamping and shaking of banners.

  Sarah glanced over at the magistrates and saw one of them looking down on a piece of paper that he held forward so that his arms stretched out the window. She could not tell from this distance, but it seemed as if he was speaking.

  ‘Friends, we are asking for the freedom that is ours by right,’ Hartford said. ‘But with that freedom comes responsibility. You may know that I refused to address this gathering unless there were to be no arms borne.’

  The cheers gave way to a mutter.

  ‘Looking out now, I see a peaceable people driven to desperation by their oppressors. Let us confound those oppressors with our good behaviour. I ask for your help in keeping the peace here – I ask you to keep order and restrain anyone who seems unwilling to do so. With our exemplary behaviour, we will shame our enemies!’

  This was surely the start of what the crowd had been waiting for: a soaring Hartford rant laying out where they had been wronged and how it would be redressed.

  When the cheering died down, though, it was not replaced with expectant silence; instead, a susurration passed from one person to the other from the corner of the field. Sarah stared across the heads of the crowd from her vantage point in the carriage. When she saw the cause of the disquiet, her chest tightened until she felt her heart might be stilled. She gripped her mother’s arm and pointed to the edge of the field. The yeomen were advancing in their blue uniforms, mounted on the kind of horses only those from the wealthier families could afford.

  The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry had only been running for a few years, and it attracted young men who felt anyone with radical leanings was a threat to their very existence. They also felt that violence was the first and best answer to any perceived threat.

  The yeomen were sedate at first, almost as though they were trying to nudge the crowd out of the way with the chests of their horses. A few of them were swaying in the saddle, very possibly drunk – they were known for imbibing before an exercise. The one she assumed to be their leader was gripping his horse’s neck for balance.

  Emily squinted and drew in a breath, then squeezed Sarah’s hand. ‘They’re not a threat, love. They are just here to show off.’ Her eyes, though, were frantically sweeping the crowd for Jack and Sam.

  Hartford, too, had seen the yeomen. ‘Hold tight to your ideals, friends! Give them no provocation!’

  The barouche rocked under Sarah’s feet. She looked over to the hustings and saw that men in the surrounding crowd were linking arms to form a protective circle around the two carts on which Hartford and Delia were standing. When Sarah glanced at Delia, she gazed back calmly, without a trace of the joy she had shown earlier in the day. Her hands whitened as she gripped the banner.

  Sarah’s eyes flickered back to the advancing yeomen. She would never know what had set them off – it usually didn’t take much. It could have been an insult called from the crowd. The shaking of a banner. Or perhaps nothing at all. Seemingly without warning or provocation, their leader brought the butt of his sword down on someone’s head.

  It was all the permission the rest of them needed. With a clang of metal, the blades were drawn. The yeomen raised them aloft like a forest of profane Excaliburs.

  There was a held breath, a moment of stillness, before the swords arced into the crowd. When a hand rose up to protect its owner, the slash of a blade separated the fingers from the palm. Others were brought down with such force and at such an angle that Sarah wondered if she was watching a life being taken. The violence spread as the yeomen moved further into the field. Thousands of people screamed and began to run.

  Then the shots started. From the other end of the field, Hussars were emerging around the corner of the building where the magistrates perched. Mounted like the yeomen, they were less wantonly violent but their presence was far more ominous. Why, Sarah wondered, did the authorities feel the need to deploy trained cavalry against women and children? She had seen th
em in increasing numbers over the past few weeks, riding as visibly as possible through the streets. She knew their presence was a threat, but she had not allowed herself to believe it would be acted upon.

  In front of the Hussars, she could see bayonets and the occasional glimpse of red, as soldiers discharged their weapons into the air above the crowd before lowering them.

  Sarah shook her head to clear the fog of disbelief. By sending in both Hussars and the Yeomanry, the magistrates were treating this peaceful crowd as a murderous rabble.

  She gripped her mother’s arm. ‘We need to get away. They are coming, look!’

  People ran in all directions, some from the Hussars but right into the path of the yeomen. Sarah saw one brute rein in his horse next to a man who was leaning against a wall and gaping at the carnage. The yeoman plunged his sword into the fellow’s chest, then galloped away before he had slid to the ground.

  Forcing their way through, dodging the fleeing spectators and stepping over prone forms, a group of constables made their way towards the stage while slashing as indiscriminately with their truncheons as the yeomen did with their swords.

  ‘We are not leaving,’ said Emily. Her lower jaw was jutting out a little, and she trembled slightly, but her eyes did not leave the crowd. ‘Not without Sam and your pa.’

  As Sarah craned her neck, she saw a mother lose her grip on her baby, the infant falling to the ground, trampled by fleeing feet and plunging hooves; the mother dropping to her knees, picking up the small broken bundle, lifting her chin and wailing at the sky. Sarah turned to her mother, grabbing her by the shoulders and bringing her face close to Emily’s so she could be heard above the screams and hoofbeats and the ring of clashing metal. ‘Ma, we have to go! Pa and Sam will have made it to safety, and those constables might arrest us!’ They had seen neighbours arrested for sedition – neighbours who had not returned.

  But Emily frowned as though she was struggling to understand her daughter’s words.

  The constables had reached the hustings, driving their truncheons down on the heads of the men with linked arms. Hartford screamed, ‘These people have done nothing wrong! This is murder!’ Delia was stabbing the banner staff at the constables trying to storm the stage.