An Untitled Lady (34 page)

Why had he come? Of course. He was an official, too. A pig-tailed gentry, a know-nothing, a dangerous fool. She’d heard all three epithets, plus more she couldn’t quite understand, hurled at the magistrates and their committee by the marchers. Were they wrong? Not if one based judgment on the actions of others. Yes, if one based judgment on empathy, or understanding.

For a moment, amid all these bodies and their melodic shouting, Maddie felt alone, singled out, even as she knew she was invisible. How was it that only she could see both sides of the argument, that only she could see how the antipathy between the people and their masters only hurt them both? She didn’t want this special sight, if that was what it was. She wanted to be as straight and sure as Kitty, or as Mr. Malbanks, or anyone else, really. It was easy to stay in one’s place when one knew what one’s place was.

As they neared the town, more and more spectators lined the roads, as well as white-smocked weavers, spinners, and other workers forming into their own contingents. They were entering the narrower streets now, and their party split, one taking the high road. The second, with the women’s contingent, dropped down the lane to Smedley Cottage, to lead Mr. Hunt’s carriage to the fields.

“We need a fiddler or three,” Kitty called out. Bamford waved the closest two, a woman and her daughter, to keep their time.

The sound of music and cheering seemed to come from every direction, though they could only see themselves in the narrow street. Finally they reached the cottage, where stood a carriage with no horses but young men to pull it. Hunt was handing a well-dressed working woman into the coach.

“That’s Mrs. Mary Fildes, with young George Swift. They’re going to speak to the whole crowd. Who says women can’t do what the men can do?” Kitty gave a loud huzzah.

The sound turned Hunt’s head. He waved them over to join them in the coach. Kitty clambered on eagerly, the banner with her, but Maddie shook her head. The carriage smacked of her old life. She needed to walk to get to her new one.

Then she spied her father, among the men pulling the coach. She pushed over to him.

“Hie on up to the coach with you.”

She shook her head “Can I help you?”

“No, but take this.” He pulled a tambourine out from under his shirt. It was warm from his body and scented of him. “Lead us. You’ll need to make a lot of noise to get anyone’s attention.” He nodded at her.

She took the tambourine and gave it a shake. Joy filled her heart so fast she thought it might burst. This is where she belonged.

Despite the jostle and general hubbub, the chariot finally set off, Kitty sitting beside the driver, and Mrs. Fildes, who truly was as pretty as everyone said, beside the Orator. The young man sat post.

The convoy set off at a pace almost as slow as a funeral. It took an hour just to carry on down Deansgate. All Maddie could see, though, was her father, pulling with a dozen other men, smiling if he couldn’t sing. He looked a different man when he smiled.
All was giddy excitement as they made the last turning and could see the fields beside St. Peter’s church. And the more than sixty thousand faces looking for them.

Her father must have heard the stutter in her rhythm at the shock of the sight. Their gazes locked, and he grinned at her. She grinned right back. Even as the din threatened to burst her eardrums, she felt as if he were the only other person there.

{ 39 }

“Hunt! Hunt! Huzzah!”

The roar of the gathered crowd carried the force of an ocean wave, pushing Maddie back on her heels. She turned to see Mr. Hunt standing in the carriage, a stern smile on his lips, his legs braced by his fellow passengers.

The bands took up the refrain to “See the Conquering Hero Come” as the women and carriage pushed into the crowd. Though the path from Mount Street to the speakers’ platform was lined by special constables, the carriage could not easily make its way down the street to reach it. Maddie and the other women made no headway against the thickening tide of people. Each contingent on the field had clumped together around its banner, leaving barely the width of one person between. The Middleton contingent was forced to press ever closer together.

Her father, in the lead of the cart, called for the women to fall back. Maddie and the others gratefully stepped to the side to let the barouche pass. Even Mr. Hunt, sitting straight in the seat, and taller in his signature white top hat, looked a bit taken aback by the size of the crowd. Mrs. Fildes beside him waved a small flag. Kitty waved her larger one side to side, her arms pumping as if there were a great wind. Her grin rivaled the sun, bright and high at one o’clock.

Maddie fell in behind the carriage, its wheels kicking up dust even on ground as hard-packed at St. Peter’s field in high summer. There would be no shelter from the sun—not the smallest cloud marred the blue of the sky. She began to wish she’d had more than a few sips of water at the last stop.

After they breached the first of the two single rows of constables, protecting a path from lower Mount Street to the speaker’s platform, it was only a minute’s work to reach it. Two flat wagons lashed together, a short stair between them, formed the platform, or what the country folk called hustings. The men pulled the barouche to the side, and Hunt jumped to the ground, then handed Mrs. Fildes and Kitty down. Other women took up places in the carriage for a bit of rest. One looked as if she might give birth at any moment.

Kitty was the first up the steps, joining some two dozen others already on the platform. She took a place on the far right, away from the constables, seating herself on a large drum. She held the banner out so all could see the image: Justice, an elegant woman dressed in pale blue, carrying scales in one hand and treading the serpent of corruption under her boot.

Maddie didn’t recognize the handful of other women on the stand, nor the many men. Mr. Bamford was not there; he must have remained with their contingent. Kitty’s head swiveled side to side, her smile dimming. Was she looking for her?

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 speech 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.