The World From Rough Stones

by Malcom Macdonald

  But he went no further. His brother nudged him hard in the kidneys; he spun round to see what the problem might be, and then, following Paddy's alarmed and frozen gaze, turned toward the corner and the slouching figure there in the dark. "What?" he asked angrily.

  "Well, look!" Paddy said.

  "Hello, Pat. Hello, Paddy," John said, still not moving into the light.

  Nora felt Pat's hand tighten. She jerked her jaw away but the hand hung there, just where it had been, empty and petrified.

  "Big John?" Pat asked.

  "Ye owld eejut!" Paddy swore. "Who else'd it be?"

  "Offer your guests some toddy, Mr. Eade," John said. "I'm sure they'd not mind supping with three potatoes the likes of us." There was no humour in his voice. As he finished speaking, he sat forward into the light. The effect on the two brothers was galvanic.

  "Good Christ—ye never said about Big John!" Pat turned to Charlie.

  "Said? Big John? I have no notion what ye may mean," Charley protested. "I'm sittin' quietly 'ere. Drinkin wi' two friends. An' the pair of ye come burstin' in…"

  "Ah—bad 'cess to ye!" Paddy said, and plucked his brother's sleeve. He looked shiftily at John as they left. "No harm intended," he said.

  John's coldly malevolent stare sped them on their way.

  "Believe me," Charley said after they had gone, "I had no notion that would happen."

  Nora and John laughed heartily and long. "No, Charley," Nora said. "I believe that! Indeed I do!"

  Later, when they were on their way to the printer, she said: "You must have been a hard sort of man in your youth."

  He was not pleased. "Not so much of the 'have been' if you don't mind," he said.

  She accepted his rebuke with an inclination of her head and thought ruefully of how, only a month or two earlier, he would have congratulated her for the way she had handled Charley.

  "Anyway," she said, "if Charley Eade tries to screw us now, he's a bigger fool than I take him to be."

  "Aye." He brightened—though it was plainly a deliberate effort. "Ye did well there."

  They walked on in silence under his umbrella. Heat rising through poorly insulated houses was melting the snow on the roofs all over Manchester and causing minor avalanches to slide down the slates and fall on the pavements— and often on their unwary passengers, too. The air temperature was still below freezing, though, and very quickly, the slush that fell grew a skin of ice, which crunched underfoot. Nora's toes were so perished with the cold that, when they stood at the New Bridge crossing, she had to wriggle them furiously just to make sure they were still there.

  "Looks like there'll be a hanging tomorn," John said, nodding over the river toward the yard by New Bailey prison. There a gang of workmen were busy erecting stands. "D'ye want to come back and watch it?"

  She shook her head. "I'd as soon watch dogs tear a caged fox. No fun in a hanging, to my taste."

  "I'm glad ye feel like that," he said.

  A little waif, a girl of about nine, shuffled barefoot from a nearby doorway. She was so thin her head seemed perched only very precariously on her shoulders and quite out of proportion with the rest of her shrivelled little frame. It was a sight so common that Nora saw her and looked away without interest. Only when the child tugged her cape did she turn again. "What?" she asked.

  The girl's lips barely moved as she muttered a few, inaudible words in a hoarse croak; when she finished, she stared up with her listless eyes, so heavy-lidded that she seemed to lack the energy to open them more than half way. Even to look at her in her threadbare cotton rags made Nora shiver.

  "Well—what do we do with this?" John asked.

  "Little bag-o-nails," Nora said, feeling the child's arm through her cotton sleeve. If the child had been dead it could have been no colder.

  "I know this lay." He shook his head.

  The child was so unsteady, she rocked dangerously on her legs. Nora wondered for a moment if she were drunk.

  "D'you say you know her?" she asked John.

  "I know the lay. 'Grafting with charvies' it's called—sending bairns out in pitiable rags to beg."

  Nora put her fingers under the almost transparent material of the girl's bodice. "This bairn's near-dead. Where's the sense of a dead child for a beggar?"

  John shook his head. "As Lady Henshaw says, they're 'easily come by.' I imagine there's eight or nine others at home and if they bring in less than two pound on a day like this, there'd be a dozen or more of the strap for them."

  "I'd say this child's dying now. You just feel."

  John looked up and down both streets. "There's a pie seller. I'll go and get a hot pie," he said. "You stay with her."

  Nora, though cold herself by now, pulled her shawl out from under her cape, and, wrapping the child in it, tried rubbing some warmth into her shrivelled limbs. "Going to get you some food," she said. It raised no light, no sign of expectation in those listless gray eyes.

  Just before John set off on the return journey from the pie-seller's cart, a woman who had been standing a little way off came forward. "What may you be doin, ma'm?" she asked in a curious mixture of belligerence and sycophancy.

  "Are you her mother? This bairn's mother?" Nora ignored the woman's question.

  "An if I am?" The woman tossed her head. "What've ye got, Emmy?" she asked the child roughly. Mechanically, Emmy held out her left hand, which, until now she had kept tightly clenched. She opened it to reveal about seven coppers, as close as Nora could estimate before the mother snatched it.

  "What's this?" the woman said quietly, menacingly. The child at last looked up at her with that same battered resignation. "Five pence hup'ny? Five and a halfpence!" She lashed out with her fist and felled the child to the pavement. The child did not rise.

  "How dare you!" Nora cried, standing up so as to strike the woman for this outrage. But before she could even raise a fist John, arriving at the double, grasped her arm and pulled her away.

  "You're playing into her hands," he said. "There's nothing she'd like more than if you struck her."

  A small crowd began to form, asking each other what was afoot, and sharing their misinformation avidly.

  Once he was sure Nora was not going to be stupid, John turned round to see to the child. The woman was unwrapping her from Nora's shawl. He gripped her arm to stop her; she was about to protest when her eye caught his. "Ye'll not lose by it," he said quietly. "Leave it to me."

  He lifted the child and helped her to the doorway in which she had earlier been sheltering, wrapping her again in the shawl. He took the pie from his pocket and put it in her hands. Still the child did not really believe it was for her. "Eat!" he said, and he waited to see that she obeyed before he returned to the woman. Most of the bystanders, seeing there was no fight in the offing, went their ways. Those that remained found reason to leave when John looked at them.

  "Yon bairn'll dee," John said to the woman.

  She shrugged. "There's no other lay for th' brass. If I send 'er out properly clad and in boots…"

  "Nay!" John was scornful. "But there's ways. Do'st tha not know?"

  Nora went across to Emmy. The woman looked at him blankly, keeping a suspicious watch on Nora out of the corner of her eye.

  "There's ways to dress a charvey as looks bad wi'out riskin' death."

  "Eee!" the woman said in wonder.

  He took out a silver shilling and held it where she could see it. "D'ye know Ma Lock?" he asked.

  "Ma Lock?"

  "Over Germany Street, off Newton Lane?"

  The woman shook her head.

  "Ere's a shillin'," he said though he still did not give it to her. "Take this bairn 'ome now. Get 'er covered up an' warm. If tha don't, she'll dee on thee. An' that'd be no service to thee. Tomorn, tha'rt to tak th'bairn to Ma Lock, Germany Street, over Ancoats way. Say to 'er, to Ma Lock, Big John sent thee, an' she's to show thee 'ow to dress a charvey for this raw time. Say if she does that, all is quit. She'll understand."


  The woman nodded at each instruction and he made her repeat them until he was satisfied she had it perfect. Only then did he give her the coin, saying as he did so. "If tha do'st not do those things, I s'll seek thee down an' drive thee out o' this town." The woman nodded, gaping at him again. "Tak th'bairn 'ome then," he said.

  Emmy had finished the pie and was sucking the spots in her clothing where the gravy had fallen. Every now and then she sat upright suddenly, as a bird repeatedly rears its head when drinking from a pool; unlike a bird, she swayed in confusion, her eyes taking in nothing.

  "Keep that shawl round 'er," Nora said coldly. The woman helped the child up and, looking very motherly in the way she stooped over her—a kindly, well-dressed lady helping a poor little ragged waif to sanctuary—set their course for home.

  John turned at once to Nora, a few fences to mend. "She'd of taken us for pounds if ye'd laid half a finger on her." They resumed their stroll up toward the cathedral.

  "But the way she hit that child," Nora protested, even though she knew John spoke the truth.

  "It would've been intervening between parent and child. Even the law can't do that."

  "Poor little bunch of dogs' meat."

  "But what if she sent the child out warmly clad and well shod? How deep would that make you dig in your purse?"

  Nora was silent.

  John pointed to a well-dressed young boy who at that moment was leaving a bookshop just across the street. "If yon lad was to come up to ye, begging, how much'd you give?"

  "A box on the ear," she agreed. Then, after only a moment's thought, she added: "But it's terrible, what we just did."

  "Aye," he said.

  "We just rewarded that…that old…" Her rage found no word strong enough.

  "I told her where she may learn to clad the child fitly for this brim wind."

  "But she'll still have to go barefoot."

  "Oh, aye. She can't have everything."

  Nora crushed the ice on a snowpile nearby and shivered. "Eay," she said. "What's the answer?"

  "We're engaged upon it now: work. Employment. The sooner we build a railroad, the more we hasten the day when things like that become impossible. Bad dreams. Bad memories."

  "Meanwhile?"

  "Meanwhile? We see as any man who works for us gets a fair crack."

  "No—I mean…" She nodded back toward where Emmy had stood. "Likes of her, Emmy?"

  He sighed. "For them, we cheat; break the rule. Our tomorrow'll come too late for them."

  Again they walked in silence. "Well…" he said, as if she had accused him of something. "If we'd left her there, she might already be dead."

  "Still," she said, reluctantly voicing the thought he had been afraid to meet, "if every charitable person in Manchester stopped giving, that…evil…that, using a child in such a way, it'd soon stop."

  "Bairns'd die before then."

  "They die anyway. But every penny given to that child is rewarding the cruelty practised on her."

  The faint strains of an anthem reached them from the cathedral across the road, where the devout were celebrating Matins. He gave a short, bitter laugh, quite unlike any laugh she had ever heard him give before. "It's enough to make God turn in his grave," he said.

  It struck her as such a shocking statement that even to protest, even to gasp the astonishment she felt at hearing it, would perpetuate it and, to that extent, lend it dignity. She wanted it unsaid. She wanted it effaced. It was to be forgotten.

  She grasped his arm and led him forward, quickening their pace considerably. "Well," she said. "We've done what we can. Which is more than the thousand other folk who've walked past that young waif today."

  And he, sensing the shock that engendered this sudden briskness, smiled back, patted her arm, and said, "Sorry!"

  The printers were in Long Gate, the far side of the cathedral. He took her a little way beyond their shop to where there was a small gap between the houses opposite. "See that bridge there, over the Irwell?"

  "I know yon bridge!" she said. "That's Strangeways workhouse beyond there."

  "Well, that's Hunts Bank. This bank of the Irwell. And that's where the Manchester and Leeds are going to build their main Manchester station."

  Nora was surprised. "Not Oldham Road?" she asked.

  "Hunt's Bank," he repeated. "The Act went through Parliament this first of July and that was two days before the Manchester and Leeds opened the service from Oldham Road to Littleborough. So Oldham Road had its fate sealed even before it opened."

  "Eay! Money's like water to railways!"

  "But look," he pointed again at the site. "There's two places where…if you want to go by train right across England, coastline to coastline, Liverpool to Hull, there's two places where you have to get out and proceed by coach. One is here in Manchester: Liverpool Road station to Oldham Road. Hunts Bank is on the line they'll build to link those two. The other place is between…"

  "Between Littleborough and Todmorden!" she chorused with him. "Eay! What if we got the Hunts Bank contract!"

  "You're there!" he said. "You and me…we're like that." And he held out two crossed fingers. "To be known as the man who put Liverpool and Hull in communion!"

  She was still excited at the thought, feeling it to be hers as much as his. "D'you think we s'll get it?"

  "There's a story going round that the Liverpool and Manchester want a different route going south round the city on arches all the way."

  "Which'd be best? For us?"

  "Difficult," he shook his head. "Southern route's about seven hundred thou'. Hunts Bank's about four-fifty. But which would show us most profit, I'd not say. The southern route has more engineering than I can estimate. I'd need a good engineer—with bigger experience than McKinnon."

  "Not Thornton!" she said hastily.

  He laughed, in a way that underlined her judgement. "Not Thornton. Though he's a good man for tunnelling and other railroad work."

  She relaxed. "Mind you," she said, "we'd never be short of a laugh with him about us."

  "Come on," he said. "We've a busy day."

  Chapter 35

  Stevenson's Shop the handbill was headed in a bold, black face. They had discussed many alternatives—Summit Stores, Site Shop, Railroad Shop, and so on—but had decided that if the venture were successful, they would repeat it elsewhere and so would want a general name whose goodwill would transfer.

  "I want lads or their wives to say 'I got it at XYZ or whatever we call it' and to mean they got a right bargain," John said.

  Stevenson's Shop had just the quality they desired.

  Beneath the heading was a simple list of the victuals sold and their prices, with the date 1st January 1840:

  Well-hung beef with no gursley or impure matter @ 5d the pound for boiling and stewing.

  Potatoes good and firm with no rotters or bungs @ 3lb the penny.

  "What's a bung?" Nora had asked when they composed it.

  "A joke," he said. "The lads'll understand it. When ye get a little potato they say it'd do to bung a London whore." Still she looked mystified. "There's a lot o' little bairns are whores in London," he added.

  Savoys, good hearted and well headed @ 2d each.

  India tea, best ordinary with little dust @ 1s the quarter

  Cheap red sugar @ 8d the pound

  Beer, best local brew @ 10s the 10-gallon cask (2s returnable deposit). Bread in two-and four-pound loaves mainly of wheat @ 2d the pound.

  For beer they had organized the woman who had supplied the feast in Summit East and a dozen other licensed beer brewers like her to provide, between them each week, about 500 ten-gallon casks of beer to an agreed standard. Each had signed an affidavit agreeing to use nothing but malt, hops, water, and yeast, and especially to refrain from stretching the beer with treacle, colour, sliced root of liquorice, salt of tartar, capsicum, Spanish liquorice, or logwood. "We can conduct tests for all these adulterations," Nora assured them—wondering privately how long it would
be before one of them tried it.

  The bread they got from two bakers, one in Littleborough, one at Gawks Holm, both of whom had their own retail shops adjoining the bakery. Nora had foreseen, quite rightly as it turned out, that other shopkeepers beside the line— who had been making small fortunes out of cheating and short-weighting the navvies whenever they could—were going to be furious to see the bulk of their trade vanish overnight. And they would probably combine to refuse to supply the navvies with coffee, spices, butter, gin…and the dozens of other commodities not on the Stevensons' basic list. She therefore made it a condition of the bread contract, which was worth £70 a week gross to each shop, to undertake the supply of any such commodity thus refused.