Maddie pushed through the crowd to reach her before the space in front of the hustings packed too tight with people. Those in the back were surging toward the front, pushing the women who circled the wagons even closer. For the first time, she felt uneasy. She was well and truly trapped here, even if it was blue sky overhead and not a prison ceiling.
When Kitty caught sight of her, at the edge of the wagon, she gestured frantically for Maddie to come up, patting the edge of the drum to offer her a perch. Her mouth moved, but the cacophony of voices around her stole the words away. Clapping and chanting skittered over their heads, with the chatter of thousands rumbling underneath.
Maddie started to slide past the last few women in her path, but a picture of Nash flashed through her mind. It was bad enough a committee man’s wife attended a workers’ meeting, but to stand on its stage? Could she truly break from him so completely?
Why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. She made it to the back of the “stage” and took the steps up. Kitty pulled her into a sideways hug on top of the drum. She grinned, twin to her sister’s.
Where was their father? If he were on the platform, too, it would be perfect. But Hunt’s head popped up from the stairwell; as he stepped onto the hustings, it rocked. Too many feet on it already. Their Da must have gone around the other way.
Hunt held up a hand. A pocket of quiet washed across the field. Then a roar the likes of which Maddie had never heard rumbled through the field, resolving itself into a single word: “Hunt! Hunt! Hunt!”
* * * *
“So, a Sunday-school parade, after all.”
Nash stepped into the first-floor parlor of a Mr. Buxton’s house on Mount Street, his mouth gripping a smile. Trefford might have told him the magistrates had moved from the Inn to here, across the street from St. Peter’s fields.
Most of the men didn’t turn from where they stood, staring out the wide bowed windows at the swirl of bodies that filled the field, but Heywood, seated at a writing desk, looked at him and frowned. He was too late. The first words out of Malbanks’s mouth proved it.
“Nothing like. Trefford reported in already. Death threats sewn lovingly into flags. And look at the women. All in white, impudent hags.”
Nash joined them at the window. The first dozen rows rounding the stand were women, a sea of white faces, dresses and bonnets, as if the two dozen people on the hustings were the center of a daisy and the first rows of listeners its petals. “Mothers and daughters, all,” Nash said.
Chief constable Nadin crossed his roast-beef arms in front of his porcine chest. “Not our mothers and daughters. Harlots all, drunk on the poison of reform.”
“Need to be taught a lesson,” agreed Malbanks.
A cold foreboding brushed Nash’s forehead. Maddie was out there somewhere, marching and singing. She had deserted him in favor of the family that had once deserted her. The pain of it seemed lodged in his gut.
“What lesson?” At their silence, he pictured the worst. “You’d throw them all into jail?”
The church bells chimed over the top of the hour. Nash tried to follow the tune to quell his rising sense of panic. Then a wave of roaring noise crashed against the house, rattling the window frames.
He’d never heard a sound at such volume, far greater even than the steady rumble-roar of the largest manufactory. “Hunt! Hunt! Huzzah!”
Nash leaned out the window. Past the heads of Malbanks and Nadin leaning from the window beside him, he saw a barouche and the white top hat that was Hunt’s. He had women in the carriage with them, waving more of those banners.
Nash was sorry to recognize “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes,” on the trumpets and drums. The scene did remind him of the stories of Roman coliseums and gladiators primed for battle. Hunt planned to fight today with only words. How could he win?
They pulled their heads back in and turned to stare at one another, eyes wide. Even now, with all they had expected, the sheer force of a crowd this size shocked them.
Heywood approached the window. “Gentlemen?”
“A riot, just waiting for Hunt to set spark to tinder,” Malbanks said.
“Nothing of the sort.” Nash had to shout to be heard over the crowd.
Malbanks pointed at the banners. “Liberty or Death. Equal Representation or Death. There’s no other interpretation.”
Nahs tried to remember those he’d seen. “Labour is the Source of Wealth. Taxation without Representation is Unjust?”
“Enough.” Heywood stepped up to the window and handed a sheet of paper out to Nadin. “Constable, please arrest Mr. Hunt and his fellow organizers.”
Nadin pulled his head from the window’s opening. “I’ll need more help, with this crowd.”
Malbanks nearly skipped to the window. “My yeomanry will back you up.”
Heywood walked heavily back to the writing table. “We’ll call the cavalry first.”
Nash stepped in front of the desk, startling Heywood into dropping the pen. “You never intended to let this happen.” Heywood stared at him as if he were an insect, letting Malbanks talk for him.
“On the contrary. This is exactly what we intend. Show the people that these gatherings are a danger, to us and to them. Especially to them.”
Nash couldn’t let this go. Heywood had the ultimate power. He could still stop this.
He grabbed the man’s wrist. “You are going to attack women and children?”
“We attack no one. We intend simply to arrest the men on the stands. We will read the Riot Act, and the people will disperse. This is too big for us, Quinn. We can’t control a mob.”
Malbanks stared out at his unsuspecting victims and smacked his lips. “Without the head of the snake to lead them, the tail will straggle back to their homes. Tails between their legs.”
“Snakes don’t have legs,” Nash said softly.
“Details. An enemy that would not hesitate to commit murder. That is what we have saved our country from today.”
Heywood wrenched his hand from Nash’s grip. “Call in the message-riders, Quinn, on your way out.”
Malbanks slapped the window’s sill. “Perhaps you’d wish to accompany them. It’s your bruiser of a wife riding post with Hunt. No doubt she’ll join him on the hustings.”
“You lie.” Nash ran to the window. He could see only the back of her, tawny curls under the band of a classic bonnet.
“Loose hair, loose morals, my mam always said. You heard what she did to poor Wetherby.”
Nash closed his eyes. It could not be true. “He deserved it.”
“Careful, man, or I’ll have you arrested as a Radical spy,” Malbanks said. “As well as for slander.”
* * * *
On the hustings, Maddie found the sights and especially the sounds overwhelming, but Kitty seemed to bask in the roar. Her feet square to the corner of the platform, she stood tall, surveying the tens of thousands of people facing her. The tallest heads in the crowd seemed high enough only to kiss her clogs.
Another lady reformer stood parallel to Kitty on the right side of the hustings, waving one of Stockton’s rather militant black flags. Kitty’s gorgeous deep-green silk seemed more appropriate.
From her perch at the back of the platform, Maddie gave up trying to guess the numbers in the crowd. It filled the huge field, overflowing onto the streets at the rear, and people still pushed in. The women in the front rows were now squeezed so tight they looked like threads pressed out of pattern. Washerwomen, cotton batters, weavers, hand laborers, and hawkers of all sorts, all in white, all calling and clapping.
Hunt held up a second hand, and the chanting ceased. Maddie swayed; her ears had grown so accustomed to the chants and roars, their sudden absence threw her off balance. Now she could hear the regiments’ flags snapping behind him on the hustings and before him on the ground.
“My friends, we are here peaceably assembled.” The hush settled on the crowd, at least those who could hear his voice, ready to listen to a spee
ch she expected would last a good hour or more.
Hunt projected his voice out, but somehow it also rolled back and around her. She’d always been in the midst of the crowd before. The odd ricochet made her feel singled out, as if she were helping Hunt speak.
Hunt’s cadences seemed to draw the attention of even the double row of special constables. What had Kitty called them? Penny-pinching pawnbrokers, second-rate inn keeps who sold watered ale, and men of business who kept their boot on the throats of their workers, taxing their wages for imagined infractions while dressing their wives in French thread. How could they stand there so blithely among thousands who resented them?
As he spoke the word “countrymen,” Hunt waved his arm, drawing her gaze toward the far end of the corridor of specials. A movement. Horses, with men upon them, tossed their heads, mincing in place.
That must be the yeomanry Nash talked about. High upon their saddles, making their way down the aisle of constables, they were going to arrest Hunt. Many had expected Hunt would be arrested by day’s end, but his speech had only just started. What could he have said already that was seditious?
Most in the crowd strained to hear the vibrant sentences of the speaker, but the sound of murmuring grew as more and more people saw the horses.
“Steady, friends,” Hunt called out. “Welcome them. Show them our new ways. If they want me, they will have me. No striking back.”
The lead horseman raised an unsteady sword, as if in drunken greeting. The crowd closest to him raised their arms and their voices, calling and responding, as if they were at the loom, or the spinning-wheel, or church on Sunday. The chorus spread across the crowd, a wave of salutes sparkling like water over pebbles in a brook.
The horses looked nervous, side-stepping, coming too close to the tightly packed bodies. The lead horseman turned, perhaps to see if his men were following him, but that turned his horse’s head as well. The horse lurched into the crowd, which spilled into the open aisle to get away from it.
“Stand fast!” Hunt’s call was picked up by the leaders of the regiments across the field. “They ride among us, stand fast.”
Other horses and their riders had lodged themselves in pockets along the route, people jamming their paths, unable to move. The horses snorted in panic. The lead man—did he grin?—lifted his sword and slashed it down. Blood spurted from the head of a defenseless woman.
Other riders had drawn and were cutting. But the bulk of the yeomanry was pounding toward the hustings, toward her, their swords out, their horses’ eyes crazed.
Fear punched Maddie in the chest. She stepped back, against the drum, and almost fell off the platform. A man in the platform’s center was waving, standing halfway up the stairs. “Women this way!”
Maddie reached for Kitty, and they locked hands. Her sister’s face was wild with anger, but the noise was such Maddy couldn’t hear what she was shouting. As they were pushed down the stairs, Kitty’s hand let go.
Maddie turned back, pulling herself out of the stream of ladies running for the carriage to go back for Kitty. The wagons were rocking, the ties binding them together pulling apart. The yeoman must be boarding from the front.
The short stair collapsed.
{ 40 }
“Good god, sir, don’t you see they are attacking the yeomanry? Disperse the meeting!”
Heywood’s voice was ragged as he stood at the top of the steps to Buxton’s house, but his eyes were clear with rage. From the base of the steps, Nash watched him order Lt. Col. L’Estrange to send his trained cavalry troops into battle as if he were watching a play upon the stage. This couldn’t be real.
Ethelston leaned out the balcony’s window, speaking the words to the Riot Act in a voice that only the soldiers and committee men could hear. At least the Act allowed the crowd an hour to disperse. Nothing serious could happen till then.
They intended to arrest Hunt. To arrest Maddie. He played through his mind the steps he’d need to take to get her released from jail. He wasn’t sure who the magistrate on duty was this week, but surely no one would want women held in that cesspit overnight. He’d pledge the warehouse as surety; they couldn’t want more. But what if they charged her with gross sedition? There might be no bail at all.
The thought of her locked away from him tore at his chest. He pushed it out of mind, concentrating on the military arrayed against her. L’Estrange had mounted and was shouting orders. Nash grabbed the man’s ankle, careful to avoid spooking his charger. The lieutenant was young but cool under fire, and he’d put up with the committee with no more than the occasional locked jaw and reminder that they were no longer at war.
“You’ll not wait the hour?”
“I have my orders.” He’d just ordered them to present. They were going in now.
Nash didn’t let go. “But there are women and children here.”
“I have my orders, sir.” But he put a hand on Nash’s shoulder. “I’m not a monster, man. We won’t wage war on the people.” But that was exactly what the yeomanry were doing, Nash saw as he trailed the horses to the edge of the street. Those part-time soldiers had not been in danger, yet had lashed out. He knew reinforcements, infantry and artillery, stood in the streets to his left and right. If this caught fire, no one would escape it.
Maddie, his Maddie, was in the thick of it.
Malbanks stood beside him and grimaced. “A right scheme, this was. Every district in Britain is in revolt. At least Manchester will be preserved. We will not be taken.”
Nash couldn’t help responding, though he knew nothing could reverse the man’s mind. “You’ve made it so they cannot escape, even the innocent. The exits are blocked.”
“Just as well. Quicker this way.”
“May all the souls who die today wait for you at the pearly gates.” St. Peter himself must surely be watching.
“They are traitors, Quinn. They will rest in hell.”
Nash mounted his horse, trying to steady his mind so he wouldn’t spook her. As he turned the mare’s head toward lower Mosley Street, away from the field, he watched L’Estrange’s Fifteenth Hussars lining themselves along the eastern end of the field. They would be the bottom pincer, with the yeomanry at the north the top, pressing the people into the fixed bayonets of the Eighty-eighth Infantry. A slaughter waiting to happen. Nash knew he couldn’t stop it. He knew he should run. In battle, weapons don’t discriminate.
He turned his horse back toward the crowd. Toward Maddie.
He followed the wake of the first line of cavalry. As they met the crowd, they slowed, and he shot through them toward the hustings, barely registering the bloody gashes and moans of constables and crowd alike. The field was screaming. He opened his mouth to match it, to keep the scream from lodging inside him.
Fewer than a dozen people still stood on the hustings, constables in blue pushing men in brown down. A flash of white at the front, skirts swinging. Her bonnet pushed back, her arms wielding the pole like a scythe, Maddie seemed to be floating in midair.
She must have tried to jump and caught herself on a piece of the wagon. She couldn’t reach the ground. She couldn’t get away.
A yeoman galloped past, slashing the pole apart damned close to her hands. She wriggled and reached back, trying to free herself, as the man turned his horse to charge her again.
Nash gouged his horse’s belly, pushing her to run. He had to get there first.
Her arms crossed in front of her, the short pole facing away, as she swung to nearly facing him. The front of her dress was dark red with blood. Someone had already gotten to her.
Bile rose to his throat, his nose. His horse snorted at the pain of his kicks. He would kill that yeoman.
As he rode past Trefford, arm raised for another blow, Nash stripped the sword from his hand. Not slowing down as he reached the platform, he swung the blade to just behind Maddie. His arm rang at the impact of the weapon on the nail, but the blade won out. She was free. He leaned to wrap his left arm around her shou
lders, but she’d slid water-fast to the ground.
With a powerful underswing, he knocked the charging yeoman’s sword away. As the man passed, the surprise on his face turned to pain as Nash punched him in the side hard enough to knock him off his beast.
Nash dropped down beside her. The screams, the shouts, the sickening crunch of bone and suck of wounded flesh that had assaulted him while astride fell to nothing. All he heard was her too-loud gasps, the gurgle of blood punctuating the end of each breath.
She lay in a ball, trying to protect her insides. From the front, he could see her shoulder blades between the pulses of her heart.
“Cross your arms tight, sweetheart. Hold yourself in.”
He scooped her up, and pushed himself to stand. Her head lolled back, eyes closed, pain altering her features beyond recognition. He had to get her help. The hospital, or Lady Egerton’s house. Heywood’s, if he had to. Her hand scrabbled at his shirt, but had no strength to grasp it.
“That’s him!”
He looked up at L’Estrange riding toward him. Then eye level, at the angry young yeoman he’d felled. The first punch, to his jaw, only made him stagger. The second, at his temple, stunned him enough that he let go of Maddie. She hit the ground without a whimper.
“Enough! He’s under arrest. I’ll take him myself. Yeoman, move on.”
Nash dropped to his knees, trying to scoop her up again. As he touched her shoulder, her body gave way.
Her dress gaped open, exposing all she had lost. He slipped off his coat and draped it over her, shielding her innards from the sun.
He wiped the gore from her beautiful face. Her head fell back, lids opening, her unseeing eyes a pure reflection of the sky’s perfect blue.
Kitty.
* * * *
Faster than the day’s faint breeze, panic swept across the field. The crowd that had been pressing so persistently toward the hustings now was fleeing it. Maddie quickly made her way to the front of the platform.
An Untitled Lady: A Novel Page 31