The flakes of gray-black floated like oversized dust motes, and just as elusive. When she reached for one, it seemed to pulse away, but as she walked, more and more fixed on her. The parasol protected her head and shoulders, but her skirts slowly turned from blue to light gray, streaked with black.
After all this time, she knew not to expect Kitty would be there. When her sister came up beside her as she paid her respects at her mother’s grave, she could not feel surprise. Today was already too much.
“You be persistent.” Her bonnet and skirts, already black, took on sheen from the soot. She was coated in it, even her sharp chin streaked. Maddie wondered if her own chin could take on as hard an aspect as Kitty’s. Her lids were half-closed, her blinks slow, but her eyes carried that same unearthly crystal blue.
“You could not sleep, either?”
Kitty shrugged. “No work today. Any cloth as goes out of doors is ruined for sale.”
“Did you see the fire?”
Kitty’s gaze tried to read her. “Did your husband tell you so?”
Nash had said nothing at all about the fire, Maddie realized. “Were you there?”
“Heard it first, nothing like that sound. Then the light, pouring down our streets. You don’t see that but once a lifetime.” She tapped their mother’s grave marker as if for luck.
“A blessing no one was killed.”
“But no one will be working there no more, either. More like a slow death for some.”
Not her! Before she even thought of it, Maddie reached out to touch her sister. She jerked her hand back, but not before Kitty had taken a half-step away from her.
“Don’t worry for us. We’ve some saved. Hard times are forever on the way, you need be ready. Besides, this month it gives me more time to help with the banners for the meeting.”
“The reform meeting? You know the reformers?” Maddie couldn’t hide her shock, or her interest. Nash and the others were always going on about them as if they were devils, and Kitty might have spoken to one.
“I’m one myself. Treasurer of the Women’s Reform Society, allies with the Manchester Patriotic Union, although we have far more cheer than coin.”
This time, it was Maddie who took a step back. Knowing someone who knew of a reformer was one thing, consorting with one herself was another.
“I won’t infect you, if that’s what you think. Especially seeing as your master is one with the magistrates. Da said to stay wide of him.”
“Did your father agree to see me?”
“Not yet. He’s thinking it over, though.” Kitty’s voice rang carefully neutral, but her words sent Maddie to the depths and heights alternately.
“Truth is, he doesn’t know what you want.”
“Only to meet him once. Perhaps to see him from time to time. I could help him.”
“That’s the part worries him.”
“Why?”
“We don’t need your blunt. He’s worried of what you might do to him.”
“What could I do to him?”
“Why, you’d unman him, wouldn’t you? Make servants of us. We earn a good living, most times. We do fine on our own.” She was nearly shouting.
“I have no thought of that, I swear. I might help you, if you need it, but I would never force you to take anything. I would never force him to do anything. I would rather hope he might, he might…” She couldn’t get the words out.
“He might love you?”
Maddie nodded, her heart almost too full to speak. “I don’t expect it.”
“You do hope.” Kitty looked out toward the street. Through a slow drip of tears, Maddie watched her sister, her face so like, mirror the same shifting emotions that buffeted her. Fear, joy, terror, dread, anger, pain, loss.
“I hope, too,” she whispered.
Maddie grasped at this lifeline. “I don’t expect it.”
“Well you shouldn’t.” Kitty’s gaze sharpened, and she drilled it into Maddie. “Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t give us a hand, now and again. Quiet-like.”
Maddie nodded. She could help her father, and he wouldn’t need to know.
“What sort of straits are you in?”
“Same old.” Kitty’s legs twitched, as if she was tired of standing. “I have an idea, though, how you could help, and not just our poor, piteous family. Can you pay a call in two days’ time?”
“To your home?” Her hopes were a rising balloon burst by another of Kitty’s sharp glances. Maddie’s throat burned with ash.
“No, an inn. We’re holding a sort of a meeting there.” Kitty’s hands grew animated. “A charity sewing party. Help some of the folks put out by the fire.”
“I would be honored to help.”
“And you’ll say nothing to your Mr. Quinn?” Maddie shook her head no, not really a promise, more an intention.
Kitty nodded. “Then come by the Black Tulip, up Long Millgate at Millers, around four. Can you do it?”
No one wanted her at home, and here was an opportunity to do good for others who needed it right now. A Christmas sewing circle come early. Maddie didn’t think twice.
“I’ll be there.”
* * * *
“Sidmouth’s mouthpiece calls it sedition.” The boyish committee man from Ashton pounded the table at the Star Inn. Nash tried not to roll his eyes. He was losing a lovely Saturday afternoon to this?
“Sit down, Mr. Trefford, thank you.” Heywood’s crisp diction washed the spirit out of Malbanks’s lackey. Nash was surprised to see Malbanks seated in his usual spot. With his manufactories boarded up, the man could go on holiday. Heywood jostled his arm, reminding him to take the floor.
“Mr. Trefford and I have differing readings of the current instruction from London. The Home Office, you’ll remember, including Lord Sidmouth, advised to arrest the Oldham delegates and prosecute the speakers at Ashton, and we did neither.”
“How could we?” Malbanks glared at him. “Sacrifice our spies to prosecute some low-lying fruit?”
“As you said at the time. The meetings here and at Stockport came off with no loss of life, property, nor apparent sedition. The latest meeting, in Birmingham, also was peaceful, though Wolsey’s nomination worries London.”
Clayton snorted. “I should say so. Electing a legislatorial attorney, my ass. It’s pure National Convention, and you know how poorly that served the French.”
Malbanks stood, leaning over the table toward Nash. “I tell you we have revolution on our hands.”
“And I tell you we don’t. London agrees with me. Look at the instruction: ‘Watch and report.’ Nothing of arrests; nothing of sedition.” Nash leaned in, glaring at the man. Why wasn’t he in Bath? Or Plymouth? Or Spain, which would win the Portuguese trade now that he’d toppled Manchester’s chances.
Heywood nodded. “We should have started arresting the rabble-rousers in Oldham. Now we’re deep into marching season. There’s no stopping them.” Silence settled as each of the dozen men considered his personal stake in peace and order.
Heywood turned to Malbanks. “What do our spies tell us?”
“Our men see conspiracy, but they can’t put their finger on it.”
Clayton patted the man’s hand, not unkindly. Malbanks stared at the hand, then the bespectacled man, with something like wondering disgust in his face.
Clayton lifted his hand. “Spies are paid only when they discover conspiracy. It’s in their interests to push one along.”
Nash still stood. “Or create it wholesale, as did our friend Oliver.”
Malbanks turned back to him. “Oliver didn’t create the Pentrich rising. That was local men, acting alone.”
Clayton gave the man’s hand one last pat. “Then why did Oliver have to flee?”
Nash tapped the table. “Gentlemen, please. I’ve heard that plans are under way for another meeting, here in town, even bigger than February last.”
“Who’s your spy?” Malbanks pulled his arms in and crossed them.
“No spy, a young man who attended an open meeting up in Middleton. He says organizers sent an invitation to old Major Cartwright, but he’s ill, and now they are asking Hunt.”
Clayton tapped his chin. “Hunt was well-received last winter. In summer, he could easily draw thousands.”
“Cut them off at the root,” Malbanks urged. “Nothing good can come of thousands storming the town.”
Nash pushed off the table, disgusted. “You put thousands out of work. They ‘storm the town’ every day now.”
“It’s too bad about your precious merchant cartel, but true gentlemen need to do what’s right for England.”
“Our men need work.” Nash closed his eyes. He needed this man’s agreement, or at least his neutrality, to make his plan real. “Listen. I can set up a parlay, a meeting between some of us and some of the more-moderate reformers. Perhaps we can agree to delay the meeting, or kill it outright.”
Nash could sense their interest. No one had pitched this idea before. Even old Pedersen, nodding off, shook himself awake.
Malbanks crossed his arms. “What man would parlay with us? Seditious bastards, all.”
“Bamford, from Middleton, Knight you know. One or two others.”
Clayton puffed out a chain of smoke. “The older crowd might listen to reason. What would we give them in exchange for their docility?”
“Information. We tell them why wages are depressed and agree to revisit the issue come winter.”
Clayton nearly dropped his pipe. Malbanks laughed out loud. “You mistake them for rational creatures.” Pedersen smiled, and then nodded back off. A few others snickered behind their hands or their pints. He was losing them, but he had to keep trying.
“They see us making profit now, while they suffer. Even an irrational man can see the imbalance.”
Heywood rapped the table. “I agree that to tell them our trade is foolish. Simply sounding them out might serve us as well. At the least we know how they will argue their case and we can prepare a good defense of our position.”
Malbanks waved an arm wide. “So we parlay. Let it be not some token group, though. Let all of us stand before this rabble, and see how bravely they come to meet us then.”
Nash could just picture it. Not a cordial introduction, laying the groundwork for a continuing conversation, but a parade of battleships meant to awe and cow. Malbanks had twisted his plan to sink it. The man would put his own pride ahead of an entire country’s livelihoods.
Nash wished he’d never come up with the idea. Of course, it might still work.
Just as there might be another virgin birth.
* * * *
The Roman baths were all Mrs. Heywood had promised. A city block long and wide at Piccadilly and Portland streets, the series of baths weren’t even a decade old, yet their style called to mind the aqueducts in Bath. Mechanical rather than natural, they were far more reliable.
The whitewashed stone walls gleamed even in the dusky haze of a heavy manufactory day. And they were full of lovely, steaming bathwater. Of course, she couldn’t have it all the time. Ladies and gentlemen took turns, morning shift or evening. Pay the ten-shilling subscription fee, and come as much as you like.
Once she’d seen how delighted Maddie was with the place, Mrs. Heywood had paid her first month’s subscription then and there. “No need to bother your busy husband about it just now.” Maddie could have kissed her.
Even the prospect of attending the baths on her own didn’t frighten her. Mrs. Heywood came only rarely, with that cottage bath of hers. Once Maddie made acquaintances, she wouldn’t feel so lonely, either. Even if she did, it was so, so worth it.
On her second visit, she nearly skipped the eight blocks from the cemetery and still had plenty of wind to greet the baths’ proprietress, a tall no-nonsense woman wearing a practical cotton dress and Roman sandals. Of the four styles of baths, Maddie preferred the swim pool, which ran nearly the width of the building.
After a quick rinse and in her new swimming outfit, a woolen singlet, she stepped into the rooms full of waters, humming with the sound of their movement. She’d forgotten the taste of the waters at Bath, its murmurs and gurgles. Only a handful of other women lined the edges of the pools, most content to float, eyes closed, or chat in whispers. Once their hair had fallen free or been tucked into neat caps, she couldn’t tell which were the great ladies and which the merchants’ families. Did workers come here, as well? Kitty would love this.
Maddie spent two entire hours in the baths, first a cool, bracing one. Then she slowly swam lines in the larger pool, reveling in the sleekness of her body as the water rolled around it. Finally, she soaked in the warmest bath, relaxing muscles just starting to feel the strain of her new exercise.
She could be clean every day, clean down deep. It was a dream come true. Best of all, it cost Nash nothing, just the pin money already allotted to her.
After the serenity of the baths, the streets seemed to shout with activity. Nash would be at the meeting all afternoon, so there was no need to rush or take a hack. Maddie glided through the halting, teeming stream of human beings, seeing them as flashes of gray, brown, blue in the heavy afternoon light. There were always more people milling about now, walking slower, as if they had lost their purpose. After months in town, her own steps had taken on a force and direction that matched the flow of traffic, but now her steps seemed too fast. It was summer, and there was little work.
Crossing Piccadilly, she wondered whether Jem’s family might enjoy a visit. She was empty-handed, though. Perhaps she should first go home to pick up some of Mrs. Willis’s fresh-baked bread. People in good times should share with those in need. She didn’t see the wiry man in her path until he spat on her.
She stopped, raising a hand to her chest. For a moment, she wasn’t sure she’d understood what he had done, and then she saw the trail of brown spittle leaching down her shoulder, toward her hand. She swallowed the bile back down to her stomach.
Not a large man in size, but his face was red and raw. In rough homespun, he stood feet splayed, hands on hips. “Wear Frenchie cloth in a good English town, do you?”
He was right. She’d somehow chosen her favorite dress from school days, simple spun silk in a sea-foam green near the color of her eyes. Her chest thickened, heavy with shame. How could she have forgotten, after all this time?
“It’s folk like you put us out of work. You’re as bad as the masters.” His breath reeked of homemade ale and cabbage. He turned, as if he would call the street’s attention to them. She had to say something.
“I am sorry you have no work.”
His head snapped to look at her, mouth softening. “A southern girl? Don’t know no better, I expect.”
“It’s not like a girl can swap out her wardrobe every time she moves to a new town.”
“Would be for the best, missy. Sell ’em or burn ’em, don’t matter much. Hard times, these is, and a body’s looking for a fight. Begging your pardon.” He touched his cap.
She knew better than to offer him money. Mancunians wanted to earn their keep. Best to simply watch him go and swallow the tears.
No one showed weakness in these streets.
{ 25 }
All the talk in and out of the Exchange and about the warehouse carried the same overtone of hysteria Nash remembered from the eve of a major sea operation. Once the crew saw the enemy ships, all set to, determined and unyielding. Beforehand, it was as if nearly every hand had turned into a fishwife.
He closed the account books and set them on the high shelf. When Maddie was here, he’d set them lower, so she could reach. His workers would not riot in the streets, and what befell Malbanks was of his own doing. So why couldn’t Maddie come back to work? Because her husband was a hypocrite.
Most women didn’t mind being left alone to play all day and visit their friends, he’d always heard. What utter nonsense: His own Mama managed a large household, and Heywood’s lady oversaw the busiest charity in town, th
e widows and childrens’ fund. Why wouldn’t Maddie wish to be of use?
Somehow, she’d grown too precious to endanger by exposing her to the rough ways of the warehouse. Idiocy. He’d seen women at Malbanks’s ’factory, helping their men, as well as the wives of the spinners and weavers; surely they were just as precious to their husbands. Maddie deserved the chance to be useful just as he did. More, probably. If she chose to serve in trade, what of it?
It couldn’t be worse than her behavior when he forced her to be a hothouse flower, all dainty and fragile. This obsession with water, when would it end? How he tried not to look at her when he left after luncheon, the longing in her face unmasked. The sound of a rushing skirt as he opened the door, only to see her sitting noodling at needlework on the seat farthest from the window. She waited for him, because that was all he’d allowed her to do.
Nash left early for home, but opened the door to silence. Maddie must still be with Mrs. Heywood, at those blasted baths. Nobody needed to bathe every day. If only she had more friends. No, as Mrs. Willis had pointed out, Maddie couldn’t very well entertain here. These were Spartan single man’s lodgings, not the gracious home of a fine lady.
A letter stood on the sideboard in the hall. Nash hung up his hat and took the starched vellum piece into the drawing room. Sitting down, he noticed with surprise how calm he was, how regular his heartbeat, despite the fact the letter carried the Shaftsbury seal. He didn’t dread what Deacon could write to him.
They had both lived in terror of their somber, stoic father, but now Nash wasn’t sure if that hadn’t been all their imaginations. The man had been gruff, sure, and a heavy sort, but he never struck them, except with a glance or a word. Nash had experienced far, far worse in the Navy, but never the lead-belly dread as at Shaftsbury. And if anyone should have felt their father’s wrath, it was Deacon, nearly drummed out of college for failing to attend to his studies.
Instead, the old sharp had found another answer—a woman who would undertake Deacon’s studies for him. He hadn’t sought to break his boy and re-form him into the earl’s own image, but left Deacon to grow into what manner of man he would.
An Untitled Lady: A Novel Page 20