Mrs. Engels

by Gavin McCrea

  He gives the end of the door a light kick. “All right. We can talk here.”

  I lower the brolly and glance out to the weather. “I’ll not be a tick. In and out before you see me.”

  He pushes his hands deep into his pockets and sighs. Nods me inside.

  A woman, not near his match in looks, is at the table. On her lap a babby, bare dressed.

  “What a love of a child,” I says. “What’s he called?”

  “Who in blazes are you?”

  On the table, two places set. Bacon and potatoes. A smell of turnips too, though I can’t see them put out.

  “Freddy? Who in God’s name is this?”

  “Lizzie Burns. That friend of my father.”

  “The famous Mrs. Burns, is it? That’s all we need now.”

  “I’ll not stay a minute. Go ahead and finish your tea.”

  Freddy sits and chins to the empty chair. The woman rocks the babby and fumes over at Freddy. The babby grabs at her breast and pushes his face against it. She takes it under the arms and sits it down hard.

  “Will you have something?” Freddy says.

  “I’ll not, thanks. I’m on my way to my own. Go on now, don’t let me get in your way.”

  He gets back to his food. Big healthy gulps.

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Primrose Hill.”

  “Where on earth?” says the woman.

  Freddy uses his thumb to point to her. “This is my wife, Sarah. And that’s my son, Harry.”

  “Nice knowing you. He’s a dote.”

  “Shame on you coming here.”

  “Sarah, I’ll deal with this.”

  One, two, three, four tubs put out to catch the droppings from the ceiling cracks. They beat out a time uneven enough to set you wailing. Freddy finishes and brings the teapot over. Puts a mug in front of me.

  “Drink that,” he says. Hands like plates. Nails eaten away.

  “You’re very good.”

  Harry starts to cry.

  “Must give him his feed,” Sarah says, and brings the child away, draws the curtain across. Gone, she’s a bigger presence than when she was here; a shadow on the wall.

  “Were you at work today, Freddy?”

  “I was.”

  “And is it going well for you?”

  “Well enough. It keeps us going. In charge of my own lathe now. The prospects are good for moving up.”

  “Good for you.”

  He offers to roll me a fag.

  “Thanks, dear, but my lung wouldn’t take it.”

  He lights up and moves his chair to the stove so he can flick his ash into the fire.

  “So, Mrs. Burns, I take it my mother showed you my letter.”

  “Tell me, Freddy, what’s the matter?”

  “The matter?” shouts Sarah through the curtain. “You know what’s the matter, Mrs. Burns!”

  “Leave this to me,” Freddy shouts back.

  “Did something happen? What has you so upset?”

  He pulls on his fag. Breathes out a heavy cloud. “Don’t mind my upset, Mrs. Burns, and tell me what you want. What is it you’s after from us.”

  “I’m after naught, Freddy. Naught at all. I’ve come to help.”

  “Drop the bull. You has us caught up in something. Something we don’t want to be caught up in.”

  “For the life of me, I don’t know what you’re speaking to.”

  “I’m a union man, Mrs. Burns. I do my bit. But I know what Marx and your man Engels do, I know what they want for the world, and I ain’t saying I don’t have no regards for it. I do. It’s just I’ve a family, and I don’t want no strife for them.”

  “Believe me, Freddy, your father doesn’t want any strife for you either. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

  “Don’t let her off easy,” says Sarah.

  “I told you to shut up,” he says.

  Now, slow and fierce, he uncurls a finger, turns it towards the floor. Through his vest I can see his tissues taut. “There were a man here. There were a man here, asking questions.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of weeks back.”

  “What kind of man?”

  “A man who said he knew you. Your lot.”

  “Did you let him in?”

  A clattering from behind the curtain and Sarah comes haring through it. Comes to stand by Freddy. From over in his cot, Harry bawls. “Napoleon were how he called himself,” she says. “Louis Napoleon. Mean anything to you, Mrs. Burns?”

  I think on the name a minute. Napoleon? Louis Napoleon? I look out the window, as if a memory of the man might be found there. A cat sits on the back wall. A wind blows through the ivy and the weeds. It has stopped raining, but it looks about to start again. “I don’t know a Louis Napoleon,” I says. “Did you tell him who you are, Freddy? Did you tell him where you come from?”

  “We didn’t tell him anything. Despite what you might think of us, Mrs. Burns, we ain’t thick.”

  Relieved, I shift forward on the chair and reach out to put a reassuring hand on Freddy’s knee, but he draws back from me. “It was probable only a newsman, Freddy, sniffing about for a story. Don’t worry yourselves about him. He was a chancer is all he was. You don’t have to worry, your family isn’t in danger. In future, just be careful about who you let in.”

  “We don’t know nothing about this Communism business, and we don’t want to know. We’re just trying to get by.”

  “In that, we’re all on the same keel, Freddy. Doing our best.”

  Wrapping my shawl around, I make to leave.

  “What I’ll do is, I’ll come back in a couple of weeks’ time and check up on you, just to be sure.”

  “We don’t want you back here,” says Sarah.

  “I’ll come back just to be certain things are settled.”

  “Don’t, Mrs. Burns,” says Freddy. “Keep your distance from us.”

  I nod as if assenting to their wishes, though I’ve no intention of honoring them.

  They follow me to the door. I swing it open myself and step out.

  “I’m sorry we’ve brought this worry on you,” I says.

  I rummage about myself for the bits of coin I have hidden about me, and, slow, no flash moves of the hand, I drop them into the pocket of his jacket.

  “Your father asked me to give you this.”

  He looks at his pocket, as if revolted. “He don’t need to do this.”

  “He wants to help.”

  “He must be doing well for himself if he can spare so much.”

  “Don’t worry for him, Freddy.”

  “We have enough, Mrs. Burns. We don’t need it.”

  “It’s a fool won’t take money that’s offered him.”

  He shakes his head. Takes the money out and holds it up in his open palm—four shiny coins lying flat on his scored and blackened skin—for me to reclaim.

  “If you won’t use it, Freddy, then give it away. Or put it into the union. It’s yours and that’s the end of it.”

  He flinches when I touch his arm.

  “You know where to find us if you need something,” I says.

  “We’ve never asked for anything.”

  “I know, Freddy. But you can now, if you need it.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Looks at the ground.

  “I’ll be back,” I says. “When I can, I’ll be back.”

  I go down the path and pull open the back gate. The coins fall on the stone behind me, the chimes of a beggar’s tantrum: flung away now but sure to be rooted after when the times come hard to require them.

  It occurs to me on the journey home, and as the days and weeks pass, it lives within me as a new certainty: it’s a thing to be changed and put right. The boy isn’t in the gutter yet, I’ve seen bodies in brutaler situations than his, but he is unsteady. For the son of a wealthy man, he’s too much taken up with the effort of surviving. If word was to get out, Frederick would be judged a shoddy father, and it’s a
name that can’t but paint me as well. And God’s truth, I can’t shoulder another load of shame in this life. To have this knowledge, and to fail to do something handsome to correct it, would be to take the good out of having anything at all.

  I have no choice. Only one road lies before me. From this day on, every farthing I spend will be a farthing less for a creature on this earth more deserving, so every farthing I spend must be matched by a farthing put aside for him. Compared to what goes to Karl and the Cause, what I take will be like spit in the sea. It’s to rebalance the accounts that I’ll do it. At the end of the day, it’s the poor that must do things for the poor.

  Aye, it’s a thing to be changed and put right. But it must be careful done. Charity is best pulled off so that, if someone asks, nobody knows.

  November

  XXXIII. Love Brings Death to Itself

  The letter carrier brings a note from Moss. I step out and ask him to read it.

  “Commemoration of Manchester Martyrs. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock p.m. Sixteen Maynard Street. Come. Or have you decided against me again?”

  I thank the boy and send him away with a penny. Come back inside and put the note in the fire.

  Decided against him? Until this moment, I didn’t know this is what I’ve done; now I see that it is.

  I sit by the window and look out at the winter coming on, the trees at the bottom of Primrose Hill trembling, and I think that the only pity—God’s greatest rig—is that the people we want to help are so seldom those who want it; the desperate, we decide against.

  And is it any different with love? Isn’t love the reverse side of the same medal? To love is to have, but rare does it happen that what we have is what we love. Love buys cheap and seeks to sell at a higher price; our greed is for gain that lies outside our reach. We desire those who don’t desire us in return.

  The wind comes to rattle the panes. I pull a rug over my knees, and realize, now, that Moss must be told. I must go to his commemoration and make it clear to him: I’m cleaned out, my money is needed elsewhere, by a cause more noble than the delivery of any nation. That we loved once, long ago, is not in question. But it does not give him a claim on my means. He is to leave me alone and stop looking at me to fund his ideas. If he insists on staying in London, he is to make as if I’ve emigrated or passed over.

  He will play with me, of course. He will say that he has heard this before, that between us it’ll never be for the last time; there’ll always be another chapter, a new phase. We are bound by invisible string; tied to our wrists is a length of Diamond Thread; we cannot make the final break. And when his playacting doesn’t work, he’ll become angry, as is his nature. But his nature will only strengthen mine. I will stand in defiant endurance of it.

  “Your love?” I’ll say. “I wouldn’t want it again at any price.”

  The Manchester peelers put out a reward of three hundred pounds for the recapture of Kelly and Deasy, two hundred for the seizure of anyone known to have attacked the police van. Mobs maraud the streets in search of stray Irishmen to drag away. The peelers roar like fire through the District and Little Ireland and Ancoats and Hulme and Salford, and hundreds, thousands are rounded up. They knock on my door, but seeing only a matron living alone, they don’t overturn the furniture like they do in other places; a quick sniff around and they’re gone again. I pray to God Moss has made it to London and won’t be found. Frederick reads me the newspapers, and every day it comes as sweet relief when his name isn’t spoken with the others.

  “Are you looking out for someone in particular?” says Frederick. “A relative or a friend?”

  He has noticed my nerves, which I’m too nervous to hide, so I tell him out. I was involved, I says. I hid some of the Fenian men in the house. It was an act of loyalty. An obligation I had to my people. He’s nettled at first. He judges me foolish for risking arrest in political actions that, on account of their lack of proper forethought, are destined to end in disappointment and failure. Once his piece is said, however, he softens, and his admiration comes out, free-spoken.

  “You are no ordinary woman, Lizzie Burns,” he says, and kisses me. “A fighter, just like your sister.”

  Three men are convicted of killing the peeler during the rescue. They’re to be executed outside the New Bailey. Frederick wants to go and watch, it being just a walk away. He thinks it an event of importance that we oughtn’t miss. He says that if there’s no reprieve given and the executions are carried out, they will be the start of a new phase in the struggle between England and Ireland; a true Irish rebellion might follow. And, after that, perhaps even a revolution in Britain.

  Says he: “Ireland lost, the British Empire is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms.”

  Important or not, I’m not fain to go and see it. I think it gruesome to make a spectacle of a man’s end. But when the news reaches me that the priests have banned us from attending, I turn proud and decide to join Frederick, after all. There ought be witnesses. A free road oughtn’t be given to the ruffs and bandits who are sure to make a Protestant mockery of something that’s sacred.

  By the time we arrive on the morning of the event, huge crowds have already formed. Men, and women too, and babbies. They’ve been here since last night, it seems, roughing it out for good vantage. The beerhouses are doing a capital trade. Singing, laughing, shouting, brawling: it’s like a national holiday. Pushing through, I don’t hear any Irish voices till, by some miracle, a man gets through the line of peelers at front of the scaffold, climbs the barricades, and begins to speak out on the plight of Ireland and the bad things the hangings will bring about. He’s dragged down, and while the peelers beat him, he’s taunted by the mob, wild and terrible.

  We take places where we can find them, outside Sidebottom’s tobacconists. At the strike of eight on the jail clock, the men are brought onto the scaffold. A yellow fog has come down, but when the air moves and a clearing happens, it’s possible to see the leather straps that have been passed around the men’s waists, their elbows held by loops, and their hands fettered to the front of their bodies. The man Allen comes first, his face white as a sheet. O’Brien, next, is holding a crucifix and praying out. His words are passed back through the crowd.

  “Christ, hear us,” he’s saying. “Christ, graciously hear us.”

  Larkin, the third man, has lost control of his legs and is being held upright by a warder on either side. He stumbles up the flight of steps and has to be half-carried to his place.

  The three men, stood now beneath their ropes, turn to each other and give blessings. Before the cap is put over his head, O’Brien takes hold of Allen’s hand and kisses it. It’s a sad scene; I keep being about to cry.

  The ropes are put over their heads. Larkin faints to his right. Now, held up by a warder, he slumps to his left. I can’t bear to look, and yet I do. The hangman pulls the lever and the three men drop. The rope holding Allen sways for only a short time, and now hangs still. The other two jerk and swing for many minutes. The crowd break their silence to share their revulsion, to delight in it. The hangman goes down the steps that lead underneath. The ropes bounce as he tugs down on the men’s legs to end their suffering.

  We make our way out of the crowds and walk home without saying a word. Only once we’re well inside and our drinks are poured can we bring ourselves to talk a little.

  “Well, all you lacked were martyrs,” Frederick says. “And now you’ve got them.”

  I look into my glass and try to put a shape on my feelings. “It was well organized, that’s for certain.”

  “Good planning. That’s what that is.”

  I look out the window. Naught to see only the fog. “That’s me done now,” I says. “I’ve had enough of the politics. I want a quiet life.”

  He nods, understanding. “You’ve had a long and hard run of it, Lizzie. And it won’t be long now till you get your rest. I’ll be rid of the mill before you know it. Then we’ll be
in London, and you’ll have a proper house, run by people. And Tussy, and Jenny, and plenty of friends to go about with. I was even thinking that, before the move, we could take a trip to Ireland?”

  I drink down and sigh out. “That’d be nice.”

  I’m not prepared for this moment. In spite of the stink of death that lingers all around, the happiness rises up from a deep place, a great and earnest feeling.

  What can you do, only press ahead?

  Maynard Street is as I expect: a back room in a falling-down house. Inside the door is a table with piles of caps stacked. I’m the only woman, I see. I keep my bonnet on.

  Word is sent to Moss that I’ve arrived, and he comes to bring me in. He throws a boy off a stool to let me sit down. “Thanks for coming,” he says.

  The crowd is the common sort, and the speeches are the same; common things are hard to die. The lives of Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy are recounted. The particulars of their rescue are gone over. Prayers are offered that their new lives abroad will be happy and long-lasting.

  After a pause to allow a more somber mood to settle, the three martyrs Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien are invoked. These men, we’re told, were put to death by the British for an act they didn’t commit. The peeler was not murdered, as the authorities say, but was caught by a stray bullet during the normal course of his duties. None of the executed men could have fired the shot. Their fingers didn’t touch their triggers. Witnesses put them in positions where a clear mark would have been impossible. Their arrest and hanging was a spiteful act of revenge: an act of war. And it’s a war, now, that’s being fought, and it’ll go on till the independence for which our fathers yearned, struggled, and suffered is won.

  A minute’s silence is observed. A song is sung. Moss reads a poem. The meeting is moved to a tavern down the road.

  “Will you come for one?” says Moss.

  “Nay, I’ve to get back,” I says.

  “Well, you’re good for coming out.”

  “It’s the last time now.”

  He looks down at his feet. “If that’s what you want.”