On the boards, the dark-clad special constables had their truncheons out, clubbing whomever stood in their path, their weapons rising and falling. One constable tugged Hunt by the coattails as if to throw him off the stand and onto the ground. Others were ripping the flags and breaking their poles, some by swinging them at the people on the stands. She saw the older lady fall. Chivalry be damned; they were not going to spare the women today.
A man jumped from the wagon, falling into the path of one of the part-time cavalry. Maddie quickly looked away, but she couldn’t block out the sound of crunching bone and howling voice. It took her eyes panicked seconds to find Kitty in the melee. Her sister had backed up, pushing the giant drum between her and the club-wielding men. But two of them had longer reach, landing blows on her shoulders. One knocked her hand back into her face, blacking her eye.
The pain of each blow seemed to echo in Maddie’s body. Her vision blurred.
“Jump, Kit! I’ll catch ye.” Her father’s voice cut through the din. He was as far away as Maddie, but back and to the side, pushing against a tide of fleeing women. The truncheons would lay Kitty low before he got to her.
Maddie got to the front edge of the hustings first. “No! Jump here. Here!” She pounded on the bed of the wagon, as if her puny force could distract anyone from the grisly dance on stage.
Kitty must have heard her; they locked gazes. Another blow knocked Kitty’s shoulder crooked, but she kicked the drum at him, pushing him back and giving her room to run straight off the front of the stage. Maddie stepped back to give her space to fall. She held out her arms and held in her breath, bracing for her sister’s dead weight.
She didn’t hear the horseman until the force of another flailing body hit her from behind. She was thrust forward, past the corner of the stage, landing on her hands and hips a good yard from where Kitty should have landed. Maddie’s face and hair were wet with blood. A young man, his shoulder cleaved from his body, lay across her.
She had to get back to Kitty. She rolled out from under him, not listening, not hearing his screams, and scrambled to her knees. Spitting dust and blood, she blinked hard to clear her vision, and then wished she hadn’t.
In front of her were the deadly prancing steps of giant horseshoes. Which meant above her was one of those killing swords. She froze, her fear so great it sharpened every sense while dulling her power of volition. “This is Waterloo for you!” His sword hand wobbled, a sign of poor practice, but it did not stop its arc directly at her.
It was only inches away when she regained control of her limbs. She pushed herself backwards, trying to get away, but the movement first raised her chest, pushing it toward the blade.
The force of the blow severed the plackets of her dress and pounded her heart into a solid bruise. But it also pushed her farther back and down, where he couldn’t reach her to deal a second blow from way up on that high horse. She told her limbs to move, scramble away from those sharpened hooves, but they did not respond. She wasn’t going to be able to help Kitty. She couldn’t even help herself.
She closed her eyes, shutting the blood and din and smell and chaos out. In the safety of her mind, she said farewell to Kitty, to her friends from school, to her parents, one by one.
Then Nash’s face flashed behind her eyelids. She couldn’t say goodbye to him. He refused to listen, even in her own imagination. He would not let go, would not believe she was through. Get up, he said, and fight for your family. That’s how you prove you deserve one.
She opened her eyes. She lay on her side beside the bloodied man, now merely groaning. The cavalryman had turned away from her, looking for more live meat. She moved her arm and pressed her palm against her chest. Dry. No blood.
Shocked into sense, she ran her fingers up and down. The blade had split one of the stays in her corset. The stays were bone, two inches wide and a quarter-inch thick, she knew from the corset maker’s advert. Her skin might be scratched enough to scar, but nothing more.
If she could just catch her breath, she could get away from here. Windmill Street wasn’t but twenty yards behind her. She struggled to sit up, and wiped at the blood on the side of her neck and face.
A thought floated by. She wasn’t modestly attired at the moment, her dress gapping like that and blood all in her hair. She shouldn’t really be seen in public. The idea somehow calmed her, and she took a sip of air.
“There ye be.” Strong hands under her arms jerked her to her feet. Her father, a gash on his temple but still seeming to have all his senses. He must have helped Kitty, and then come back for her. “Can ye run or must I carry ye?”
She took a step and did not fall. He clasped her hand in his, both slippery, hers from blood, his simple sweat. They slipped under the wagons and then dashed onto the street. The yeomanry must have massed here, she could see their trampling, but all were on the field now.
Step by labored step, they slid past the carnage. Screams and a crunch of metal behind them turned her head. Between the horses, she saw a pile of arms and legs and torsos tumbling down one of the cellars of a rowhouse.
With each step, Maddie’s dim hopes rose. She might live through this.
“Keep moving, lass. We’re not safe yet.”
But safety felt just a step ahead. Beside them stumbled women and men with cuts across their faces and hands and children whose faces were streaked only with terror.
“Just around the bend.”
With a sigh of relief, they passed the crowd at Mount Street and could see the sign for lower Moseley and escape. But as they passed the final knot of men and horses, the flow of frightened people around them stopped.
Turning the corner, blocking their escape, came an army, bayonets fixed and aimed straight at them.
Maddie and the others froze in terror. Then they realized the soldiers were only creeping at them. They weren’t going to mow them down, merely slowly crush them underfoot. They did not leave room enough for a body to pass. Regular troops, trained and cool under the heat of the sun, they would not stop.
Maddie recovered her wits before her father did. She tugged him to the side of the street. His feet trod slowly, as if his clogs were sticking to the cobblestones.
There—an eighteen inch alley between houses, not meant for any but the night-soil man. She dragged him to the entry and pushed him in ahead of her. He was a tight squeeze, and unwilling. The stench stalled her too, but holding her breath she pressed them on. They had no other option.
They popped out into a closed space less than the width of Nash’s bed and holding three privies, ancient but still in use. Maddie bent, hands on her thighs, to recover her breath. But her nose refused to take in the air her lungs were screaming for. She forced herself to inhale; the air scorched her nose and burned its way down to her already bruised lungs. Her body felt as if it were working at one-quarter capacity, her heart as leaden as that artillery’s cannon.
The courtyard’s filth hurt her eyes, but the picture of what had occurred on the field blotted it out. Impressions she had not had time to notice in their pell-mell escape now crowded her mind for attention. One woman screaming as another’s forehead split open. A man, clutching his hand, hanging from a fold of skin, his attacker riding away with the pole he had been holding. Mounds of clothing writhing in the dust and dirt. A boy, unhurt, not running away but crouching beside his fallen mother, crying for help. So much blood.
“Go ahead, cry, sweeting.” Her father laid his heavy hand on her shoulder. She felt him shudder. “Hunt and them had it wrong. City rules don’t hold for Manchester men.”
Maddie sobbed, as deep as her bruised chest could stand, her horror mixed with wonder. Her father had come to her. Her true father. She leaned into his embrace, the brightest of silver linings in this death-cloud of a day.
How could this have happened to her, to them? Her first meeting ever, and it ended in bloodshed. Nash would never forgive her now. Could she ever forgive him? A committee man, he must have agreed to call th
is attack. He, at least, knew better.
It was right for her to leave him. Her true supporter stood at her side now, or rather leaned against the brick wall. She’d waited all her life for someone to choose her, just her, and now someone had. She turned her tear-streaked face up to his.
He pulled the cap off his head and wiped at her teary face absently, looking down the alley. “Rum foul in here, but it’s still commotion without.”
“How long, do you think?”
“Gudgeons will make short work of us.” Then he froze, head tilted, as if listening to a silent bird in his head.
Or repeating her upper-crust accents.
He spun her to face him, pushing her shoulders into the brick. She winced as he shoved her bonnet back.
“Look on me!”
She looked full at him, watching the darks of his eyes grow round. He dropped her shoulders and brought his hands to his face as if he didn’t believe they were his own. A keening came from his throat, resolving into a hissing whisper.
“Where is my daughter?”
{ 41 }
“What ha’ thee done with my Kitty?”
Her father slapped the sides of his head once, twice, three times before Maddie thought to take his hands in hers.
“I thought you knew.” Hadn’t he said she was nothing like Kitty? How could he pretend to be surprised? Yet in the cramped courtyard, fouled by generations of waste, here he stood, flabbergasted.
He wrenched his hands away, tipping her off balance across the opening to the alley. Before he could enter it, he had to stop and turn his hips sideways, which gave her time enough to take his hand again.
“Wait. You don’t know if they’re through.”
He didn’t even try to release her grip, just dragged her behind him as he side-stepped back to the street. Back into fresh air—and danger. They emerged onto the street, and saw a nearly deserted field. Her father stopped, gasping for breath, as if he could not understand what he was seeing. Where tens of thousands of people had stood and cheered, now stood only remnants of their presence, the wounded and the dead.
The sun shone blindly on an array of caps and bonnets, shawls and coats, misshapen, bloody. Shoes and clogs their owners’ feet had run directly out of in their flight. So many, as if a hurricane had whisked the people up, and everyone had dropped whatever they held in their hands. To their right, near the corner house, the cavalry had dismounted, seeing to their horses and cleaning their swords. Laughing and slapping one another on the back, they evidently thought their work well done.
Maddie almost couldn’t bear to look at the larger bundles of clothing strewn across the field, each a being either in distress or recently released from it. She forced herself back onto the field: One of them could be Kitty. Now it was she who took the lead, pulling them toward the hustings. The two wagons remained, broken flag-staves rising from their beds. The banners were taken or destroyed, the people only taken, she prayed.
The densest number of casualties lay closest to the wagons. Maddie took some to be children, their bodies so small, and then she realized they had been crushed into the earth. At each mound, she looked for Kitty’s auburn curls. She was too weak to look into their faces. A woman, a man, a woman, another woman. Others, Samaritans or fearful relations, also stepped from one to the next, seeking the living.
Kitty.
The curls spilled out from under a man’s coat cut like Nash’s. Maddie swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly too dry to call to her father, who was searching near the other wagon. He must have seen her stop, for he rushed to her side.
“Damn Tory fabric.” He thrust the coat away from her, and then recoiled. Kitty’s lively face held the red marks of a beating, marks that never would bruise. Even with her arms across her belly, parts spilled into the dirt in front of her. She hadn’t been merely killed, she’d been gutted.
Maddie fell into blinding pain all over her body, mirroring Kitty’s wounds. To regain herself, she looked away, up, anywhere, everywhere else. Set her eyes and ears adrift. Rows of houses, all their curtains pulled, blinds closed, doors shut tight. Horse’s harnesses glittering in the sun. The steady tramp of soldiers’ boots melting into a confusion of strides as they were called out of formation. The keening of a man mourning his wreck of a daughter. His tones melting into the moans and cries of other fathers. Her father.
Maddie sank to her knees. The discarded coat lay before her. She picked it up and wrapped herself in it, fastening its familiar buttons. So like Nash’s, she let herself imagine it smelled of him, too. She tried to focus her senses on the memory of that scent, chamomile and musk, to mask the harsher smells of blood and despair. She looked down the field to the horses and their scarlet-plumed masters. Cavalry, against cloggers. The world had no sense of proportion, no measure. She hated the soldiers, and the world they represented. If she’d been a reluctant radical before, she was a full-blooded one now.
Her father’s grief was attracting the attention of one of the soldiers, which could only mean ill. She dared put a hand on her father’s shoulder, only slightly less dangerous than facing those dragoons. “She shouldn’t be in the dirt, like this. Take her to hospital?”
He pushed her away, leaning over the body, a mother hen after the fox has raided the coop. He pulled Kitty toward him, and lurched to his feet, pressing her belly to his. “Out of the way.” Step by staggering step, he carried Kitty across the field, toward the church. He hadn’t gone three dozen steps before his knees folded and he sank to the ground, holding Kitty as Mary does her child in the Pietà sculpture. “I dinnae want your help,” he insisted, his sobs making the words a dirge.
“Your home is more than a mile away. Let me find a wagon, at least.” He nodded, perhaps; she left him there, his shoulders shaking under the pressure of his unshed tears. But not a wagon, nor a coach, nor a carriage was to be found. The hospital wagon transported only the living, and the morgue wagon would only take her there. The sun’s steady glare mocked Maddie, stealing her energy. She weaved on her feet as she went from house to house, closed shop to closed shop. She started calling out, a town crier of death, pleading for final transport.
At last, a man appeared from the courtyard of a house she’d just passed, pushing a wheelbarrow. He dropped the handles, setting the barrow at the edge of the street, and retreated. At his locked door, she called out her thanks and her father’s address.
The church bells rang half past two before she got back to the field with the barrow, and seven before they got Kitty home. Moore had insisted he push her every step of the way, and it took all Maddie’s will just to keep up with even his slow pace. He’d covered Kitty with his own shirt, and wore only his vest. He’d been whipped sometime in the past.
Twice, they had to pull to the side and take shelter in an alley as riders passed by. They had to skirt Shude Hill and Market Street, where shouts and clacking stones and metal warned of conflict best avoided. By the time they reached the cottage in Clock Alley, Maddie felt beaten down to her soul.
* * * *
Maddie forced herself to keep moving, collecting all the pans and buckets in the house to carry to the pump in the courtyard. A neighbor woman sent her boy to help carry them back to the cottage.
After draping his daughter onto the table, Moore collapsed onto the floor, his head hanging so low it nearly touched the swept earth. Maddie fetched the stool from beside the cold fireplace and set it beside him.
“It would help if you hold her hand while I make her ready.”
He pushed himself up and onto the stool, his face a creased mask of sorrow. He gripped Kitty’s good hand and sat silent witness as Maddie folded up the cuffs of her coat and started to cleanse the body. Had her three-year-old face looked so ravaged as she held her mother’s hand while they prepared her for her eternal journey? Her adopted mother.
Dusk deepened into gloom as she worked, first to get the body clean, then to shape it back into her sister. Finally, she asked for a needle and thread. H
e fetched it for her, but just as she bit off a length of it, he shuddered and retreated back up the stair. She sighed in relief. Now she could light the candles; he hadn’t wanted any light. She wanted this part done as quickly as possible.
Above her head, she heard a click-click-clack, click-click-clack. He must be at the loom, weaving. The rhythm soothed her. She hoped it soothed him.
Kitty and she were so alike. Long legs, fine fingers. They’d slashed at her breasts, but she was so small they’d only taken the tips. Maddie’s breasts ached in angry sympathy. There was little she could do with the cuts to the hands but make the stitches as neat as possible. She could do nothing with the chest, but merely wrapped it with strips from her petticoat.
Finished, she kissed the closed lids of Kitty’s eyes, then her forehead. The sister she never knew she’d always wanted.
She sat on the stool for just a minute before going up to look for Kitty’s other dress. But the click-clack lulled her into a sleep so deep the new nightmares couldn’t touch her.
* * * *
Money had done what his weakened influence could not, and by evening Nash found himself in the best accommodations the New Bailey jail could offer. He could only pray that Maddie was as secure.
The turnkey had recognized him and gone against constable’s orders to install him and some of the others in a largish room on the second floor with six cots and two slop-pails. He’d also given them pen and paper—or rather sold it to them at a usurious rate. Nash had gotten a letter out to Deacon; if only his brother could wield his power to conjure up Maddie.
He should have known it would be Kitty on the hustings. He should have known not to believe Malbanks’s eyes. He should have known to trust Maddie’s good judgment. All the things he should have known filled the space of the room, spilling out along the corridors. What he didn’t know was acid eating him slowly from inside.
Where was she? Was she hurt or frightened? There were no woods to hide oneself in Manchester, but there were two rivers. She’d promised him not to consider it again, but he’d promised in return that he’d never leave her. Would she consider that contract broken? After seeing the carnage of this day, was she—were any of them—thinking rationally tonight?
An Untitled Lady: A Novel Page 32