Of course, she had been born destined for a certain beauty. Even in the rags she had worn when first she passed this way, her hair unkempt, her face grimy— even then men had renewed their hunger as she passed. But now, when she stood tall and almost arrogant in the self-imposed plainness and severity of her dresses, there was something compelling about her.
That was what John meant when he thought of her as having grown older. From that very first night, as he had watched and helped her work through the small hours, marshalling figures with a nimbleness of mind that outstripped his at times, displaying an invention that soared far beyond any ethical constraint… from then on he had never considered her anything other than a full partner in his business. In fact, her grasp of it sometimes frightened him.
At such moments he shallowly envied those of his contemporaries who kept pet wives at home, like sweet toys or private playthings. Men like Thornton— though, considering the panting little doggie he had turned into this lunchtime, rushing off with the Irish toothache like that, it made one wonder what sort of plaything the fair Arabella had turned out to be.
His life with Nora had such a rightness that he rarely thought of these comparisons. Only at such infrequent moments as this, when her eyes were hid and her girlish body lay curled across him, the perfect counterfeit of the toy wife, did they strike him.
There was a sudden stab of heat on his stomach; it turned cool and quickly slithered away down a fold of his skin. Wet! A tear?
Nora weeping?
She was not moving as a sobbing person moves. Her breathing was regular.
He put one hand upon her hip and fondled her hair with the other.
One more tear fell; now he was certain of it. He tightened his grip, but she did not stir.
"Nay," he said gently. "What's made thee miserable then?"
She shook her head and still more tears fell upon his skin. He leaned forward to see her face but she turned farther from him and buried herself again. She was like a small furnace upon him.
When he lay back once more she resumed her former place. She sniffed back an ocean of salt and said in a voice choked to a whisper: "I'm 'appy, thou soft fool." And then, her voice growing steadily more reedy and disobedient, she added: "Oh John! Tha'rt such a marvel of a man. I think there's none like thee in all the world…an' 'ow I 'ad the luck to meet thy notice and gain thy… regard…I s'll never…never…understand."
And with those last, halting, straying, whispered words she burst into sobs and wormed her face into his chest in a soup of tears and streaming nose.
He, unable to speak through the tightness of his throat, unable to see her clearly through his brimming eyes, unable to hold and cherish her where she lay, grasped her and lifted her on to his lap, and held her.
Still not letting him glimpse her face, she threw her arms about his neck and sobbed without remission on to his neck and shoulder, and into his hair and ear.
At last her passion spent itself and her tears ceased to flow. His single deep sniff, clearing his nose of its blockage, alerted her to his condition. So, too, when he spoke, did the hoarse edge to his voice.
"Now see what tha'st done! Lord John weepin'!" he said.
She laughed, stoking up the furnace at his ear. But still she did not pull away to see his face. He felt her whisper, secret and tickling, in his ear, "I can feel another effect I've 'ad on thee an' all. Thou ram!"
He found her ear with his lips. "A bit more?" he asked. She pulled her head away from him then. "Nay," she said, a surprising degree of normality back in her voice. "I must 'ear 'bout this strike we've gotten."
Laughing, he poked the tip of his finger delicately into her umbilicus. "Spoken like Mrs. Stevenson!" He walked his fingers lower down, tempting her. "Sure?" he whispered.
"Sure," she said, smiling unblinking at him.
"Then bloody shift!" he said aloud. "It 'urts!"
Laughing, she changed position but did not rise. She laid her arm across his chest. "Eay!" she said. "We're disgustin' dirty, thee an' me. See that. Could grow potatoes there on you."
"It all wears off," he said.
"Nay. We s'll 'ave a bath toneet."
"Ee, I'll fall down dead o' weakness tomorn! Anygate, I 'ad a bath when we wed."
"We s'll ave another toneet."
She stood and tried unsuccessfully to piece her torn shift around her; in the end, she pulled a face of theatrical complicity at him. Then she shrugged on her corset and backed up to him to have the strings drawn tight.
He began to itch for her again. "What is it?" he asked. "When your body's 'ad all it needs an' 'as given all it's gotten, what is it makes you still…yearn? That must be love, mustn't it?"
"Ay! I've torn this petticoat, too," she giggled.
During dinner he told her of his triumph at the oval shaft by Deanroyd, and her eyes shone greedily as she lived and shared his joy in the telling.
Then they took their bath, by the same fire that had warmed their earlier labours. If she curled her legs carefully, she could get all of them under water; and then, if she lay like a stuck turtle, she could submerge from neck to loin while he poured hot water over her.
"When we get to Rough Stones," she said, "we s'll 'ave a big bath likes o' this an' we s'll bath by't fire every even. Look at this watter! It's plain disgustin'."
They left its surface a speckled gray jelly of dead skin and went, renewed, to bed.
Before she pinched out the candle, Nora put her proposal to him. "When I sweated in't mill down Stockport," she said, "foreman there made us spend a third part o't wage at't tommy shop. It were mildewed flour an' meat wi' no fat on it—all lean an' gursley—an' cheese wi' mites for lodgers. They'd not o' dared offer it elsewhere. But they must o' made a fortune…" His astonished gaze halted her. "Whassup?"
He shook his head in wonder. "Thou want us to do that! Thou, that's suffered from it thissen!"
"Aye," she said. She could not fathom his objection. "We're in the position to do it now, aren't we? Get our own back."
"I'd as soon see us transported."
She relapsed into baffled silence, watching him fall deep in thought.
"See if I can make thee understand," he said at last. "This is what I learned in three year wi't English navvy. There's folk as is feared for 'im. Thou! Thou were feared. Dost recall? Yon day?"
"Aye—an' I'd still be feared if it weren't for thee. They're like…different men."
"Well I'd say there's no better worker nor more loyal servant than't English navvy. To them as treats 'im right. I've been under bad masters. Men as'd cheat ye afore yer back's 'alf-turned, as'd keep't lads in debt on piss-poor ale an' tommy rot, as'd welch on payday. But I'll tell thee: They make no profit on it, not in't end. They make nowt but trouble. What do they get? They get bad work finished late by sullen lads. I'm not preachin' Chartist rubbish now. What I'm sayin is common sense. A good master—by which I mean a fair one, not a soft one—a good master'll always make more profit nor a bad un. An I'll tell thee for nowt: I s'll never cheat on any lad as works for me. I'll pay best. I'll demand best. An' I s'll get best. I s'll look after 'em through lean times an' they'll stay by me when there's a mania an' labour's short an' they could walk on to any site in't land. Because, lass, we're not 'ere to make a few thousand today an' skip to America tomorn. This is our trade for life. 'Undred years from now, old navvies'll meet on't highway an they'll look at each other wi' that certain special glint i' their eye, and they'll say 'I started as a lad wi' Stevenson's lads!' An' they'll be that proud!"
She was tense with the grandeur of this vision. "Meet on't 'ighway?" she said. "Nay—on't railway."
He laughed. "'Appen! An' I'd like to say as one mile in every five they travel were put there by them an' us."
She sighed. "Aye…well, then—no truck. No tommy."
"Nay!" he said. "I never said no truck. I've nowt against sellin' good grub an beer. But no tommy rot. There's 'usband-farmers 'ereabouts, see tha, payin' eight shillin' to
labourers wi' families as is all nigh starvin'. An' them same farmers come to me—there was one there last week by Stone House—watchin' my lads, on fourteen or fifteen shillin before bonus, an' 'e was grumblin', sayin' why couldn't 'is labourers work as willin'! An' they can't see it. They're blind. Porridge an' bacon rinds—what can any labourer do on that! It's that plain they can't see it."
Silence fell.
"Eay, love, forgive us!" He dropped a hand on the outer cover, over her thigh, and gave a squeeze. "I know I rabbit on. I do."
"I was goin' to ask thee one other thing," she said.
"Ask on."
"Shall us…shall us rear bairns? Shall us start?" He looked puzzled. "Do'st mean we've not?"
"Not yet."
His eyes narrowed. "What 'ast tha done?"
"I been drinkin' tea o' sweet basil," she said and pulled a face. "Tastes like bloody sike watter."
"Oh aye?"
"Don't always work Mrs. Hampton said, but…"
"Oo's she?" he interrupted.
"She were next down to us in Stockport. When me da deed. She 'ad thirteen bairns."
He laughed. "Aye! I see what she means an' all. 'Don't always work!' Thirteen bairns, I s'd think not!"
She joined his laughter at the confusion but then sought to explain. "Ah. No. But wait, see tha. There was only four reared. And the youngest was eight year old. And she 'ad none after 'im, an' 'er man was always at it. 'E was one like yon Thornton. An' that was when 'er auntie put 'er on to sweet basil. Cos she could've 'ad…oh, she could've 'ad dozens, see. She started that young."
He reached over her to pinch out the candle—an act that brought him to straddle her. He saw her eyes gleam with fresh promise in the moment before the light failed and he stopped her monologue with a kiss.
"Aye," he said softly. "'Appen we'll share this bed wi' sweet basil while we see this contract out."
Chapter 25
The frost was so sharp that when he rose at three-thirty—early for this day of days—there was ice on the water in the ewer. Its chill sharpness shrivelled his skin but brought a fiery afterglow that made him ready for whatever might follow. Nora always rose at the same hour as he and took breakfast with him, though, unless it were a day for going to Manchester, she usually then returned to bed.
Today they ate porridge, cold smoked trout, veal-and-egg pie, and a slice of tart, washed down with sweet coffee. It was as well, for when he opened the door he stepped out into a white world far below the temperature of freezing. The snow clouds had passed over, and the waning moon was still rising in the eastern limb of the sky. The wind swirled in madcap eddies, lifting storms of powdered snow that spun like ghostly dancers over the deserted square and collapsed silently in the lee of one or other of the walls that framed the area.
Behind him, Nora shivered and clutched her shawl to her. "Poor John," she said as she kissed him her warmest goodbye. "Good luck."
He shivered, too. "Shouldn't never ought to of bathed," he said.
She pushed him playfully out and shut the door. The church clock struck the hour, four o'clock, as he stamped by on his silent way. And in all that long journey he passed not one other soul. Snug in their beds or shivering in their hovels, the whole world lay drowned asleep beneath its new white shroud. He was glad for once not to join that pathetic throng of paupers on their way to the mill; he was even too early for the miners today. To see children as thin as fishbones walking barefoot through this icy waste would be more than he could bear. The mill loomed dark and silent as he passed. The moon, picking out the cotton dust on its panes, lent the windows a spurious and eldritch light, as if a host of phantom weavers tended the hushed looms and silent spindles.
A little way beyond the mill he entered the Blackstone gap. Here the hills banked sharply up on either side, towering white over the black, turgid ribbon of the unfrozen canal. Water from its summit reservoir gurgled down the cloughs and dashed, cold and complaining, over the spillways of every lock. He startled a stray sheep upon the turnpike, making it turn and hasten back up the sides of Reddish Edge—the first living thing he had encountered since leaving Nora at the inn.
A doubt began to nag somewhere in the cellars of his mind. There was a wrongness. Something was wrong. In the landscape ahead. It was…too red. The red cast was alien to this wintry night. Filled with a growing doubt he quickened his pace. Was it the jolting of his walk or did the glow truly flicker? He stopped; the flickering did not. Fire! There was a fire—something was on fire. Ahead. He broke into a run.
The strikers had fired the site office!
Or perhaps Fernley, his clerk of works, who had come early to copy out the terms of his offer and put them up on display, had knocked over a lantern and set the hut ablaze?
Or was it a conflagration in one of the houses—nothing to do with his site?
Every possibility flashed through his mind as he ran to the bend at Stone Bridge, from where the whole of Deanroyd would come into view. But when he reached that vantage, the scene spread before him was one whose possibility would never in a thousand miles of running have entered his mind.
The firelight glow came from the torches that last night had lined the rim of the oval shaft; now they stood in a random grouping, refilled and relighted, on the gentle slope between the site offices and the canal. And around each there was gathered a knot of men, stamping their feet, warming their hands, joking, horseplaying, laughing, passing flasks of spirit…waiting. He estimated their numbers at eighty.
Two hours before knocking-on time? It could not be his lads.
Moreover, there were no footsteps in the snow—had they been there all night? No, it could not be his men.
Well—a contingent of out-of-work bricklayers come to break the strike? Or special constables? Would they just turn up without reference to him?
"He's there!"
That was Martin Carter, one of his masons. So some of his lads were there anyway. The cry galvanized the rest. They turned as one man and peered out along the dark turnpike, seeking him. Then, like a face of broken rock coming adrift, the whole solid phalanx of men erupted toward him.
Still he did not understand. They're out for my blood, he thought. What had gone wrong? What had Metcalfe said or done after his departure last night?
Even so he did not falter in his stride. Against the glowing torches he could read no expression on the faces—he could not even see the faces—of the silhouettes that bore down upon him—cheering.
Finally, it was their cheering that alerted him of their mood; it was warm; it was not the chilling, vengeful howl of an angry mob. Among the earliest arrivals there was a scuffle to be the very first to shake his hand and clap him on the shoulders. And all the way to the hutments he walked a gauntlet of proffered hands and a barrage of greetings, some profuse, some mumbled.
The mumbling was curious; there was in many of them a suggestion of shame or guilt that jarred oddly with this hearty—and quite uncharacteristic— enthusiasm. Too mystified to remember his public face, he passed unsmiling among them, noticing their growing anxiety yet failing to connect it with his own apparent severity.
Blacksmith, mason, carpenter, engineer, mason, carpenter, carpenter, smith… not one bricklayer. Yes there was—one. Bennett, born to be different.
"Where's't brickies?" he asked.
No one answered. They looked away when his eyes met theirs. One spat in disgust.
"I see." He looked around. The inconceivable truth was beginning to reach him; this was some kind of atonement. At last he smiled, and the relief he saw spreading among them was beyond all proportion.
"Another question: 'Ow long 'ave you lot stood ere? I thowt as I were early enough but I saw no mark in't snow of any foot."
Now they grinned and some laughed, like men who have played a warm, unwounding joke on one of their number. Martin Carter, the man who had seen him first, nodded up toward the Scout and said: "We come ower't brow."
"Knowin' as thou always come by't
bottoms," Trevor Wood, a smith, added.
"We determined that last neet," Carter said.
Now the full extent of their purpose—and their unity of spirit—was borne in upon him. He was suddenly too moved to speak…to trust himself to speak. Then he saw that his emotion embarrassed them; it was not what they expected of him.
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