The Wreck

by Meg Keneally

  She did not respond. But she knew Sam’s night-time forays into the streets, which had earned him some scuttler-inflicted wounds, might put him in prison even if she stayed free.

  Briardown cleared his throat, reached into his breast pocket and drew out a small volume. ‘May I ask, have either of you heard of the writings of Thomas Spence?’

  When Sam shook his head – Sarah was not familiar with the name but did not want to give Briardown a reason to sneer – she perceived the hint of a smirk on the older man’s lips.

  He opened the book, then cleared his throat again. ‘Mr Spence says that revolution would be “more exhilarating and reviving to the hunger-bitten and despairing children of oppression, than a benign and sudden spring to the frost-bitten earth, after a long and severe winter”. No talk of asking nicely. No talk of avoiding provocation. I heard what you said to your friend, Miss McCaffrey, and you are right – it is not over. Not as long as men of good heart are willing to join us.’ He beamed at Sam.

  Her brother would, Sarah thought, be extremely useful to someone like Briardown. A young man made malleable by rage. And she had noticed, through her grief, Briardown’s approaches to other mourners on the field that day: they had all been men.

  ‘And women of good heart?’ she asked.

  Briardown inclined his head and gave her a smaller smile. ‘Naturally.’

  Sarah knew the man was not there for her. There was, though, a debt she owed to the woman and man lying nearby, now completely covered by earth they should still be walking on. She leaned against Sam and whispered, ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘I do not know. But I can tell you this – I do not want to stay. I do not think I would see out the year. And if I am to die . . . well, why not in the service of bringing pain to them who put our parents in the churchyard?’

  Sarah nodded. She turned to Briardown. ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, as close to the heart of the serpent as we can get,’ said Briardown. ‘Which means, of course, London.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Marylebone, London, May 1820

  No one noticed Sarah in her grey laundress’s skirts. She wandered the streets of Marylebone, seemingly aimless, as the sky drew low around her.

  She was not supposed to attract attention, and it wasn’t hard to follow that command as she made her way through the crowd, turning side-on to make way for a woman carrying buckets of water from the nearby pump, ducking to avoid a ball kicked by one of a group of boys playing nearby. She couldn’t resist the occasional greeting, though: a nod to another servant, a smile at the woman who sold cabbages here, her wares piled on a rickety table in front of her.

  The message had been waiting for her that morning when she had opened the kitchen door of the grand house in which she now served, in order to accept a delivery from the baker’s boy. No one noticed that he only ever came on days she was there, and that he only knocked at precisely eleven in the morning. The basket he handed her gave off the distracting waft of freshly baked bread, but her interest lay in what was under the loaves. That morning it was scratched into the fibres at the bottom of the basket, faint but visible to someone who knew to look. One word: Tonight.

  There was also a folded note where there had never been one before. Sarah quickly stuffed it down her shirt; she did not want to confuse it with the four slips of paper that were already in her pocket.

  Now she stopped in front of a terrace and glanced around briefly before descending the steps and knocking three times at the door. She extracted one of the slips from her pocket, slid it under the door and moved along without awaiting an answer. A few streets later she took out another note and bent to slide it into a slightly opened window.

  If anyone had been watching her, they might have wondered what was on the little missives. But when she stopped outside a tavern and languidly started drawing in the hoof-churned dirt with a stick, they probably would have decided the papers contained witless ramblings. It was like that with servants, sometimes.

  Each note was crudely inked with a black circle, nothing more. It represented an alchemical symbol known as an ouroboros: a serpent eating its own tail in a cycle of destruction and renewal.

  Sarah had only seen it herself for the first time after she and Sam moved to London. Briardown had told her its name. This symbol was unknown by most, and the message it carried was intended for only a few, who understood its import well enough.

  In Sarah’s wake, hands were unfolding the papers, then cloaks were being drawn tight around shoulders. For some it would be a long walk in the chilly evening, and no man among them could afford a coach.

  *

  Sarah always kept watch during the meetings, crouched by the opening in the loft wall, having exchanged her dress for boys’ breeches and one of Sam’s shirts. She had a good view of the street and of the Horse & Coach tavern opposite. At the sight of a soldier or a Bow Street Runner, she would signal to the others with a nod. Candles would be snuffed with licked fingers, seats abandoned, and Sam would position himself at the top of the loft’s narrow, steep stairs, ready to play a confused tenant should anyone hammer at the door below. They would wait, then, in silence, for half an hour or more, until Briardown nodded to Sarah, who would rekindle the candles with a taper lit in the low fire at one end of the loft.

  The stable off Edgware Road, flat-roofed and grimy, had once housed cows on the ground floor. The upper floor, which hosted the gatherings organised by Briardown, had been a storage space for hay bales hoisted through a large opening in its wall, now covered in canvas. The smell of the cows remained, ancient excrement ground into the timbers, mocking those who met here with a reminder of the meat they rarely tasted.

  This was more than a gathering place, though. After the men eventually left, Sarah and Sam would move the rough wooden table and chairs aside, spread out their bed-rolls, douse the candles and the lantern, and whisper to each other until they fell asleep.

  With his own rough brand of love, Sam had coaxed her along these past six months. He would hold her after she gasped awake from a dream of their parents, shaking to find herself in a London loft rather than a Manchester cottage, gulping down sobs at the renewed knowledge that the world no longer included her mother and father. The dragging grief had gradually begun to subside. It still waited for her around corners, but there were moments now, sometimes whole minutes, when she forgot about the last time she had seen her parents.

  She supposed this little collection of radicals was the closest she had to a family, now. Sam certainly felt so. Briardown had shown him some of Thomas Spence’s works, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, and he read them until the candle flickered into darkness each night, occasionally waking her to share a passage he loved.

  Briardown had lured his men with food and promises, collected them, and placed them precisely. This group – five men and Sarah, although Briardown did not include her in his calculations – was, he claimed, just one of a number of thickets of brave, visionary citizens sprouting across London. They probably passed their brothers in the street or sat near them in coffee houses and taverns, but Briardown said it was best for everyone that most of them could not identify one another if captured and questioned.

  Sarah, still crouched, wiped her hand on the greasy floor beside her, then rubbed it against her cheek. She wanted her face to be less visible as she peered out of the loft. But she had another reason: if the government saw her as refuse, she would let them – after all, why should they fear her – right up until they felt the bite of metal against their necks.

  ‘I’d keep two of the heads, for Westminster Bridge,’ one of Briardown’s earliest recruits, Tully, was saying. ‘The others . . . I don’t know, find a hill to roll them down most probably.’ He chuckled and rubbed the big mound of his belly. It had already shrunk since their last meeting. In his job as a butcher’s apprentice, he had supplied meat to some of the finest London families, including Cabinet members, and had taken the occasional choice cut f
or himself. Now, though, the butcher had no more need of an apprentice, particularly one with such a liberal approach to inventory.

  ‘And this is why you’re unwed,’ said Sarah, looking over at him with a smile. ‘Most girls don’t like talk of beheadings.’

  Tully jovially blew her a mocking kiss. He had decided that she was just as much his younger sister as Sam’s – and she didn’t mind, as it allowed her to wreath criticisms in affectionate sisterly scorn.

  ‘Honestly, Tully,’ she said, ‘you seem far more in love with this enterprise than you could ever be with a woman. Mind your lust for it doesn’t lead you to the gallows.’

  Sam, next to Tully, reached over to pat the butcher’s belly. Sam’s whole body probably contained less fat than one of Tully’s legs. He turned in his chair towards his sister. ‘You’d marry him, wouldn’t you, Sare? If he wasn’t so bloodthirsty.’

  A gust through the makeshift window blew her long dark hair over her face. She tied it in a knot at her neck, wrinkling her nose at her brother. ‘Do we not have more pressing matters? Can we find Tully a bride, well . . . after?’

  Sam might have responded, but Sarah didn’t hear it – her ears had identified the footsteps she had been waiting for. They were light and quick, the soles of worn shoes barely troubling the loft stairs, their owner hungry but still strong.

  ‘Who are we finding a bride for?’ His voice was still stretching to reach into the corners of its final manly shape, but it and its owner had matured greatly since Sarah had first met him. A young man possessing a strong jaw dusted with ginger stubble was rapidly replacing the boy who had not known how to manage his long limbs. His brows were drawn together more often than they had been, but the blue eyes beneath still darted with curiosity. She had yet to see them reflect the deadened acceptance in some other men’s gazes.

  Henry Landers: the only one here who treated her as a young lady, not a sister or a resource or an annoyance; the only one who made the effort to acknowledge her each time he arrived.

  She returned his smile. She had seen too much, lost too much, to play the coquette and cast shy glances. At the cotton mill, workers had filed past the gaffer each morning with their heads down as though they did not deserve the sight of his blotchy, whiskered face, but Sarah had always looked directly at him – she would never, she had vowed, let anyone tell her where to aim her eyes. Henry, though, presented a far more pleasant sight than the gaffer had.

  She and Sam had met Henry shortly after arriving in London half a year earlier. Briardown had taken them straight to the stable, where Henry had been waiting to greet them. As the youngest of the men, he had been given the task of sweeping out all the unnameable substances that had gathered in corners during the place’s long vacancy.

  Henry had stared at Sarah then, too, although she hadn’t noticed at first. After the long journey to London, four days past a blur of hedges and fields and trees, it had taken her a moment to realise the cart, with Briardown at the reins, was no longer moving. She certainly had no attention left to spare for the young man leaning on a broom, until he threw it aside and strode towards her, taking off his brown coat and settling it around her shoulders.

  She looked at him and smothered a gasp. The lad had appeared like summer lightning in a world she had thought leached of kindness. Her gaze had followed his chin past the planes of his cheek, roughened with stubble and bearing the shallow indentations that told of a childhood marked by the pox. The eyes set in such a head were often dull, but his were the blue of slate after rain, beneath ginger eyebrows drawn together in concern.

  As he helped her down from the cart, the cramps in her legs made her stumble against him. He chuckled, and she looked up, ready to rebuke him for the mockery. There was none, though – only a man who had given away his coat on a cool evening. Sturdy, if the firmness of his chest was anything to go by.

  She soon discovered Henry was around her age, but he had been alone in the world since he was just fifteen. His mother, he told Sarah, had died because the government found this preferable to allowing her to eat imported grain. Sarah had seen many motherless boys in Manchester: blank eyed and shambling, or taking out their grievances in drunken brawls. Henry, though, had managed to cling to a sense of purpose. His mother had taught him to read – not a common skill among poor young men, and enough to get him work as a printer’s apprentice. Now he was useful to a group that relied on anonymous pamphlets.

  ‘We’re looking for a bloodthirsty girl to marry Tully,’ Sam told Henry.

  Henry, though, was not paying attention to Sam, his gaze lingering on Sarah. He pressed his lips together and took off his rough wool jacket, the colour of oatmeal. He strode over and settled it around Sarah’s shoulders. ‘Still cold, these nights,’ he said quietly.

  She shrugged it off and tried to return it. ‘Won’t you need it?’

  ‘I will be bathed in the fiery breath of Briardown,’ he said, then went over to the table. When his back was turned to her, Sarah buried her face in the cloth and inhaled deeply.

  At the table, Henry began fidgeting with a little leaden man that he must have taken out of his pocket before surrendering his jacket. He had made several such figurines from worn-out letter blocks, hammering them together, shaping them, colouring them with ink when he could get it, scratching features into them. Sometimes he worked on them in the loft while waiting for Briardown to arrive, frowning in concentration, unaware Sarah was watching him from the shadows near the window. People might pretend to be all sorts of things, she thought, but the pretence disintegrated when they did not know they were being observed. In all the time she had watched Henry, she had never seen his face contort into a sneer. Now he was just a man smiling down at a toy he had crafted, his red hair almost gold in the lamplight.

  She had once asked to see the figurines, so he had laid four of them out on the table. After she settled on the chair beside him, he pointed to the one with a red splash on its torso and a sharp protrusion she assumed to be a bayonet. ‘Soldat – soldier.’ To Henry, French was the language of freedom, and he picked up whatever words he could. ‘Boulanger – baker,’ gesturing to one that held a misshapen lump of lead pastry. ‘Voleur – thief,’ tapping a stooped, skulking figure. And last, one with white trousers and a blue splash of a shirt: ‘Marin – sailor.’

  She had smiled. ‘But where’s the woman?’

  ‘I haven’t the skill,’ he had said. ‘I wouldn’t insult you.’ He had cleared the pieces off the table quickly, then proceeded to stare at her for the rest of the evening as though sizing her up as a model. She resisted the temptation to look away whenever his eyes caught her examining him just as closely. Instead, she gave him a smile that spoke of a confidence she did not feel.

  Paper was scarce, but Henry brought her offcuts from the printers, and in the evenings when the candles were low and no men had gathered, she would take out her pencil stub to sketch the little figurines and inscribe their French names. She would always clear them away when he was expected – he didn’t need to see her imprecise pen strokes.

  ‘Anyway, enough about wives,’ Henry said now. ‘Most of us can’t afford one. And where will you find a woman who can’t smell, Sam?’

  People did marry without being able to afford it, Sarah thought. Perhaps this was a fact with which she needed to acquaint Henry.

  Briardown had arranged work for Sam as a tanner’s apprentice, and now he always smelled of piss, a tool of his trade, and looked as though he had not washed his stained hands. But he was insistent that he would never again work at a mill.

  Sarah heard more steps on the loft stairs, heavy ones unconcerned with concealing their approach: Briardown.

  CHAPTER 4

  This was not a regular meeting – there was no such thing, as it would have been far too dangerous for them to converge at the same time each week.

  Sarah had read the note already; of course she had. She did not recognise the hand, but that was not unusual – Briardown se
emed to have a broad network of informers, and information arrived tucked into the heads of cabbages like those sold by the woman she had seen earlier, or in a scuttle of coal, or a basket of bread. She remembered her mother’s voice when Sarah or Sam had fidgeted while practising their letters: ‘No matter what they take, they can’t take what you know. Not unless they take your life along with it.’ Emily had been alone among the women of their acquaintance in demanding her daughter be taught to read.

  The note told of preparations for an event at the home of a senior member of the government – no source, no date, no time, simply that the event was to take place.

  Briardown marched over to the table, scraping back a chair and throwing himself into it. Another man, who had followed him in, positioned himself behind Briardown’s right shoulder.

  Albert Tourville was the only one among them who had experienced a real revolution. He had told them his parents had sent their young son to England in the arms of a fleeing cousin, fearful that the tide of rebellion in Paris would not discriminate between insurgents and oppressors. He had never seen or heard from his mother and father again.

  Tourville glanced at Sarah over his bulbous nose, and when she nodded a greeting he contorted his mouth into an approximation of a smile.

  The others had gone silent, waiting for Briardown to speak. He said nothing, staring at each of his men in turn from beneath his extravagantly bushy eyebrows.

  Tully hated silence. ‘We’ve been talking—

  ‘I come here every week,’ Briardown said, as though no one else had spoken. ‘I hear you all talk – and talk and talk – about the starved, about the lack of recourse for them or any of us, about lack of suffrage as though we are less worthy of the vote than those who happened to be born into land. I hear of your grievances with the King and his ministers, your desire for revolution, your willingness to hurl your lives and souls into the mangle to achieve such an end.’