The Wreck

by Meg Keneally

  Sarah jumped down from the carriage and tugged at her mother’s arm. ‘We have to go now! We’re no good to them dead, Ma.’

  Emily’s face grew pale as she looked around at the bloodied and the wounded and those who would never feel pain again. She climbed down and grabbed Sarah’s hand, and they began to push their way through the panicking crowd towards the edge of the field.

  Sarah looked back at the hustings. Delia was still fending off truncheon blows when a constable grabbed her banner staff, pulled her off balance and sent her to the ground. Defiantly she tried to get up, but wobbled and landed in the dirt again. The constable laughed.

  Many of the men who had closed ranks protectively were now insensible or nursing their wounds, and the constables scrambled over them to seize Hartford and the other men on the stage as horses foamed and plunged around them.

  Delia was struggling to her feet, seeming as groggy as some of the drunken yeomen. She did not notice the horse rearing above her.

  Sarah let go of her mother’s hand. In a few steps, she reached Delia and pushed her to the side just as the horse’s hooves plunged towards them, striking Sarah in the shoulder. Her teeth came down on her tongue as she hit the ground, and a trickle of blood ran down her chin as she gripped her throbbing arm. Now she and Delia were both in the dust; if they stayed there, they would not live long. Sarah dragged the woman to her feet and asked, ‘Can you walk?’ Delia, bleeding from a gash on her cheek, gave a slow nod, then unsteadily plunged into the stream of fleeing people.

  It was only when Sarah had turned three times, in increasingly desperate circles, that she realised her mother was no longer nearby.

  CHAPTER 2

  Under a lightening sky that morning, Sarah and her mother had said goodbye to her father and brother outside their cottage. It was smaller than the one in which Sarah had been born, a half-remembered place where nothing was plentiful but where hunger pangs had not awoken her. The four of them had worked in that home, her mother spinning and her father weaving, taking pride in the snippets of fabric they produced. When Sarah was not peeling potatoes or sweeping out the cottage, she had watched her parents closely, trying to see what magic they were using to transform cotton into thread and thread into cloth. They built a reputation for fine, close-woven work and commanded a decent price for it. But when power looms appeared in greater numbers in Manchester’s cotton mills – great steam-powered gnashers doing the work of many men – the demand dried up, and the McCaffrey family had to trudge every day to attend to the beasts that had reduced their livelihood.

  They now lived in Angel Meadow, a part of Manchester where, it was said, only the insane, stupid or desperate went. Sarah supposed they were among the latter.

  Their cottage, its walls a single brick thick, at least had a fireplace, but there was precious little wood to burn. They slept and ate in one room on sheaves of straw – although more often than not they ate at the mill, biscuits soaked in milk that had to be consumed quickly before they became tainted with cotton dust.

  Angel Meadow was noisy with a certain type of life. Scuttlers spilled out of the beer houses, shaping up to each other on the street as others laid bets. Pigs wandered in and out of tenement doors, snuffling up piles of refuse. Prostitutes barely glanced at the rare man who could afford to lie with them as he handed over coins.

  There was also more death than they had been accustomed to in their old home.

  Emily was angered that her children frequently stepped over the bodies of the starved and diseased. They should, she often said, be spared that in the tenderness of their youth. There was a shrillness to her as she lectured Jack on what her children were being denied, what they were forced to endure. Sometimes, if she was particularly tired, she could not hide her fear that one day she would encounter Sarah or Sam lifeless in the street.

  When Sarah and Emily had left for the assembly that morning, Sarah had thought it might be the first time since the cotton mill was built that no one had been there on a Monday to feed steam and thread to the spinning mules. Was it the first Monday on which the smokestacks had not injected their fumes into the air? Certainly it was the first she could remember since the gates of Hodgkins & Sons in Ancoats had opened to her and swallowed an eight-year-old girl.

  Sam, a few years older than Sarah, had moved from foot to foot, impatient. He had his father’s height and fairness, and those passing them would not have known he and Sarah were from the same family had they not been huddled so closely together. Jack was also eager to get moving; these past few years he had seen his family eat food not fit for dogs, and watched his children gradually waste, becoming creatures of sharp angles rather than gentle curves.

  ‘You’ll be all right, the both of you?’ he asked his wife.

  ‘Sarah and I? We’re marching with the Sisters – couldn’t be safer. It’s you two little flowers I worry about.’

  Sam chuckled, and even Jack managed a small smile.

  *

  There had been, Sarah would learn later, upwards of sixty thousand people in St Peter’s Field. But now, less than half an hour after the Yeomanry had started its assault, only a few hundred remained. Some were wandering in a haze; others were bending over insensible or lifeless forms, turning them onto their backs, exhaling with relief or gasping in despair.

  Sarah walked around the field, yelling at the top of her lungs, ‘Ma! Sam! Pa!’ Inwardly she cursed everyone she saw for not being her family.

  She was so engrossed that she jumped when a hand clasped her shoulder.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Sam, hugging her. Sarah’s cheek was on his chest, but she could tell by the thickness in his voice that he was crying. ‘Where’s Ma?’

  She shook her head. ‘We got separated.’

  ‘Pa and I too,’ said Sam. ‘They’ll have made it to safety, of course.’ He nodded, obviously trying to convince himself of this.

  Keeping in sight of each other, Sarah and Sam went from one form to the next. Men who had poured out the last of their blood into the earth, some unrecognisable thanks to the horses’ hooves. A woman, pregnant, lying on her side; another with her abdomen sliced open at an angle, probably the result of a wild flail. Here and there a child – perhaps they had started the morning aloft on their fathers’ shoulders, brought to see the great Mr Hartford so that one day they could tell their grandchildren.

  Jack must have been intent on getting as close to Hartford as possible. He had been like that at the other assemblies the family had attended, angling his body sideways, worming his way eagerly through a crowd, dragging a protesting Emily by the hand. There was no other way to explain his location, not fifty feet from the cart where Hartford had started to rail against oppression just before it made itself manifest.

  Across Jack’s chest there was a scarlet line, punctuated by the wound that had killed him: a deliberate stab, not a thoughtless slash. In the dim light from the cottage hearth, Sarah had watched that chest rise and fall in sleep. She had heard it fill with air and eject songs or jokes, endearments, shouts of anger. There was an ominous, disjointed quality to the world she had entered, one in which no more sounds would be carried out of her father’s slack mouth. But she found herself watching his chest for a tiny lift she knew would not come. Eventually the stillness became unbearable, and she balled her fists and roughly rubbed her eyes.

  When she opened them, she saw her mother.

  After Sarah had dashed back to save Delia, Emily had not gotten far. Sarah must have walked right past her, desperate to find the living, not wanting to see the dead.

  Emily was around ten yards from the hustings, her chest caved in from a hoof-strike. Perhaps the same hoof from which Sarah had saved Delia.

  Sarah looked up, opened her mouth, tried to call her brother’s name.

  Her legs lost all intention, and she was on her knees, Sam drawn to her by a sound she had not intended to make, a keen she did not recognise. He knelt beside her but made no attempt to embrace her, to comfort her
. Swaying a little, he seemed not to notice the tears dripping from his chin and the end of his nose into the grass.

  ‘This is their answer to our requests,’ Sarah said, taking great draughts of air into her lungs to steady herself. ‘This is the answer of the Prince Regent, the prime minister, the Cabinet.’ She curled beside her mother, laid her head on the ruined chest. ‘This is what they do when we ask for food, for rights,’ she whispered. ‘What we are worth.’

  ‘It cannot go unanswered in return,’ Sam said after a while, his voice rasping. ‘It cannot.’

  ‘It will not,’ said a man who had come to stand beside them without Sarah noticing. He put his hand on Sam’s shoulder and helped him up. The hand, half hidden by a lace cuff, was then extended to Sarah; she took it and was raised to her feet. She looked along the arm until her gaze reached a long nose that came down almost to his top lip. Her eyes lifted to his high brow and swept-back, greying hair. ‘My name is Aidan Briardown. I will make sure your dear ones are seen to. And I promise you, those in power will have our answer soon enough.’

  *

  Sam and Sarah stood by two jagged holes cut into the earth while the wooden boxes were lowered in.

  Briardown had paid for a rough cloth pall and some bearers. Father Denny dispassionately said the rites; Sarah had seen him display far more emotion at other funerals, but he had spoken the words so many times over the past few days, it seemed as though he had forgotten their meaning.

  Most who might have come to pay their respects were back at the mill. Some had been docked for missing a Monday’s work, and there were many burials to attend.

  But Delia came. Staring at her, Sarah felt a ripple of shock. She had never noticed before quite how short, how pale, how sandy Delia was. And now she seemed to have shrunk into one of the hollow-eyed creatures Sarah saw daily on the mill floor.

  It was Delia who had started the reform society. Delia who had appeared in her white gown at assembly after assembly, leading a phalanx of women to the hustings, presenting the speaker with a green cap of liberty to bind him to her cause, and talking to people who had never heard a woman speak in public before.

  ‘Dear Sisters of the Earth,’ Delia would begin in her high, clear voice. Then she would talk of ragged elderly parents dying with the stink of corruption in their nostrils. Of near-naked, wretched children, their hungry cries decreasing in force until the day when the sun rose to silence. Of the corruption that slid into parliament through the rotten boroughs, which sent to Westminster men with loud voices but few constituents.

  Towards the end of her speeches, when she was about to reveal her true purpose, the woman in white would pause, drawing back her shoulders. ‘Dear Sisters, I speak now to the wives, mothers and daughters of the upper and middling classes of society. Our fate will soon be yours. When we are mixed with the silent dust, you will become the next victims to be chased to misery and death!’

  Delia and the other female reformers would proceed back to the Union Rooms, the sparse meeting place of the society, and wait, often for hours. It was rarely in vain.

  Women would trickle in, dressed in finer fabrics than those that touched Sarah’s skin. They would form a queue in front of the table where Delia sat, smiling, and give their names in voices ranging from haughty brays to apologetic whispers. Many of them seemed uncertain, anxious, perhaps fearful of discovering they had joined a den of radicals rather than a group of like-minded women. All were drawn to the Sisters of the Earth by fears of their children’s faces transformed into stretch-skinned masks and of their parents dropping from life in lice-infested rags.

  Sarah had seen Delia command audiences, silence catcallers with a calm gaze, answer any challenge with determined conviction. Some of the challengers, after Delia had sweetly rebuffed their objections, simply sat and fumed. The fumers were no trouble, though – it was the underminers who were the problem.

  ‘Female suffrage?’ Mrs Bell, a newer member, had scoffed at one of their meetings. ‘How ridiculous. It would never be allowed, and most women are sheep anyway and would vote as their husbands told them.’

  ‘In Westminster they care not for us,’ Delia answered. ‘They care not whether we are starving. They simply care that the merchants are happy to have no competition from imported grain. Why do they care what the merchants think? Because they fear that a united effort from the merchant class will unseat them! And what can we do? Can we unseat them? Make them fear us? Only if we have the vote!’

  ‘Fear you?’ Mrs Bell retorted. ‘They are laughing at you!’ She waved a sheet of newsprint in the air, then strode to the front of the room and placed it on a small table for all the Sisters to see.

  The caricature showed three women on stage, all with scandalously revealing dresses. One woman was straddling a stick with an elongated, phallic cap of liberty dangling from the end. Another had her arms in the air so that her breasts were almost fully visible. The third was pointing at the cap on its stick, declaiming: ‘Dear Sisters of the Earth, I feel great pleasure in holding this thing, as our sweethearts and husbands are such fumblers at the main thing, we must of course take things into our own hands.’

  Sarah glanced at Delia, who kept her head down, gazing at the parody as her cheeks reddened. When she looked up, Sarah realised they were coloured not from shame but from anger. ‘I welcome this,’ Delia said, ‘for a wounded animal attacks.’ She had drawn herself up to her full height.

  She looks fearsome, Sarah realised.

  ‘Well, Sisters, it appears there is a certain kind of man who is diverted by the sight of a woman on a stage. Most of Manchester will be at that meeting in St Peter’s Field – including, most likely, whomever this fellow is. We must ensure that we give him what he wants!’

  Now, standing next to her parents’ graves, Sarah could not reconcile the woman who had led them to the assembly with this shadow who occupied only the space her stature allowed. As she began to walk over to them, Sam gave Sarah a brief nod and went towards the battered gate, its timbers lined with deep troughs from exposure to the weather, set in the low, moss-stained stone wall. Sarah knew he did not trust himself around Delia. He was, she feared, sliding away from her.

  Only two heartbeats now, in their small cottage. No sudden snores from Jack or quiet remonstrations from Emily. But even with only the two of them, the cottage was too small to contain Sam’s anger. He had taken, these past few nights, to stalking out, slamming the door so hard she feared it would splinter, then returning late with a split lip and a bruised cheek.

  This was, Delia told Sarah, the third burial she had attended since the massacre. ‘We lost, Sister,’ she said. ‘I am sorry. Nothing will change.’

  Sarah shook her head and took Delia’s cold hands in hers. She looked down at the dainty fingers that had wafted a handkerchief in the air, now bleeding around the nails where Delia had clearly been picking at them.

  ‘No, this will not end. It is not over,’ she cried out. Her cheeks were wet but she made no move to dry them. The holes in which her parents lay were now being filled in by a man who could have been digging in a garden for all the care he was showing. ‘My parents will not have died for nothing. They’re martyrs!’

  Delia smiled weakly. ‘They are, of course.’ It was the kind of empty comfort usually offered to the bereaved, but under the circumstances its insincerity was insulting.

  Sarah’s jaw clenched, and she snatched her hands away. ‘It would be you they’re putting in the earth now, if I hadn’t come for you!’

  Delia, whose eyes were welling up, looked to the graves.

  ‘My ma hated the damp and the cold, and now she will lie in it forever! And you mewl about how we’ve lost. You dishonour her, her sacrifice, and my pa’s, by giving up.’

  ‘No! I’m sorry, Sister!’

  ‘I am not your sister.’

  Delia’s mouth dropped open. She reached out for Sarah’s hands again, but Sarah turned her back and walked towards the churchyard gate where Sam was wa
iting. On the other side of the low stone wall, Briardown was standing near a cart harnessed to a low-bellied horse that was cropping the weeds. He had not attended the burial, despite having paid for it. She wondered if he was here to offer condolences, or to collect on the debt.

  She nodded to him. ‘I am grateful for your generosity in letting us see our parents decently buried. We both are,’ she said, glancing towards Sam who was kicking at the dirt of the tree-canopied lane.

  ‘You are most welcome,’ Briardown said. ‘They are martyrs. They deserved a far grander burial, but I did what I could.’

  Sarah nodded towards the cart. ‘You are leaving?’

  ‘Yes. And I am very much hoping you will come with me. Both of you.’

  Sam raised his head quickly. ‘Come where? You’re not suggesting we should leave Manchester?’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t think you have a choice,’ Briardown said. ‘You were prominent during the assembly, Miss McCaffrey. I was in the middle of the crowd and could see you quite clearly – which means others did as well. Standing in that carriage, you were very near to Orator Hartford. And I am sure you have heard what happened to him.’

  Sarah hadn’t, but was not going to admit it. She folded her arms and stared at him.

  Briardown sighed. ‘You know, some of us tried to talk him out of his short-sighted insistence on banning arms. Now he’s in prison.’

  ‘And you believe I might be arrested too,’ said Sarah, an edge of scepticism to her voice. But she knew it was possible. Neither she nor Sam had gone back to the mill since the massacre. There had been her parents’ funeral to arrange – and there had been a nagging fear of being greeted by a constable.

  ‘Miss McCaffrey, an excess of caution has saved my life on numerous occasions,’ Briardown said. ‘I do not believe you can take your continued freedom for granted.’

  Sarah’s eyes were on Briardown – the man reeked of superiority – but she felt Sam’s arm around her shoulder. He leaned down to whisper in her ear. ‘He is right. You know he is.’