A Song Twice Over (30 page)

Not that it was the first time they'd been cut. Not that John-William himself hadn't done his share of cutting and laying-off, as the state of trade required it. And nobody's order books had been full this summer.

And what did Goldsborough care about that? What did he care about getting rid of the Corn Laws either – which was what the whole argument had been about – since they'd been created in the first place for the benefit of his land-owning friends?

But he'd sat there listening, with that sneering smile of his, drinking Ben's claret as if he was doing the Braithwaites a great favour, while Ben, who'd had his share of claret too, lamented the fall of the Whig government, which might have done something for the manufacturing classes, and the election of the land-owning Tories, that bunch of country squires like the Larks, who would not. The Corn Laws had to go, Ben had been saying, hammering his mother's carved mahogany table. John-William had been saying the same thing himself when Ben Braithwaite had still been in his cradle. A squire's trick, the Corn Laws, banning the import of cheap foreign corn – which would have meant cheap bread in the cities – so that the squires, who grew the stuff on those ancestral lands of theirs could charge as much as they liked for it. And since an expensive loaf caused havoc in St Jude's and trouble in everybody's weaving sheds, with demands for higher wages keeping profits down at a time when trade was far from good – when it would probably never rise again to the level of those early, heady days when the machines first came in – then Ben Braithwaite and his dinner guests had reason for their anxiety.

Except Christie Goldsborough, who'd sat watching them, as supercilious as if he found their accents comical or difficult to understand which, when one remembered what he must be accustomed to hearing in St Jude's, he certainly did not. And then, leaning back in his chair,
lounging
like all the gentry seemed to do, as if they were permanently half asleep and just about to put their spurred and booted feet on the table, he'd said, ‘If the new government won't play your way then you'll have to stir it up a little, won't you?‘

‘How's that?' Ben Braithwaite, who could never stand being told what to do, particularly by the landlord of a common tavern, even if he did have a diamond on his swarthy hand and his name was Goldsborough, had spoken sharply.

‘I'll tell you.' And Goldsborough's voice had been like velvet. ‘Don't avoid trouble. Cause it. If your employees are hungry then make them hungrier. Don't worry about them coming out on strike. See to it that they do. After all, if your order books are as empty as you say they are, then how can you lose? So long as they're on strike you can keep their wages, can't you? And if they get very famished and very desperate and enough of their mates come out to join them, then how can Sir Robert Peel and his Tories fail to listen when you tell him it's all because of the Corn Laws? If the trouble spreads far enough and he thinks he can buy peace with a cheap loaf of bread then I should think he will. Wouldn't you?'

It had sounded very plausible through the claret and the brandy and the smoke of Ben Braithwaite's excellent cigars. Less so the next morning when, his stomach seriously disordered and his head aching, John-William had started to wonder why a man like Goldsborough who was ‘gentry'through and through despite his odd goings-on at the Fleece, should be making revolutionary suggestions as to how the ‘squires'government'might be brought down.

Not that John-William was particularly opposed to revolution if he thought he had a chance of winning. He'd threatened to withdraw his money from the Bank of England in 1832 like all the other manufacturers of his acquaintance, and to withhold his taxes, in a bid to force the government's hand so that the new industrial cities could elect their own MPs. Giving the vote, in effect, not only to men like Goldsborough who had always had it as a birthright, but to men like himself and Ben Braithwaite's father who had come up the hard way. And remembering how furiously the Larks and the Covington-Pyms – and no doubt Goldsborough himself – had opposed the opening of parliament to the new and much despised middle-classes, he wondered afresh why the captain should now be murmuring against his own kin.

Or was he? Might he not be playing a far deeper game although not a new one, since it would not be the first time that the man who hatched the plot and encouraged others most ardently to join it, should be the very one to turn his fellow conspirators over to the magistrates. For money. Or for his own twisted amusement. Both, John-William had concluded, in the case of Goldsborough.

But, by that same morning, Ben Braithwaite had started to believe that he had thought of the cut in wages all by himself. Uriah Colclough, unable to see beyond his pious nose-end, had at once cut his to match. So too did many others, on both sides of the Pennines, not all of them obeying the mischievous hints of Captain Goldsborough, of course – since even he could not have been in so many places all at once – but intent on stirring up trouble nevertheless. A commodity never difficult to find, in John-William's experience, particularly now when the Chartist leaders, who had been locked up after the troubles of 1839, were all out of prison again; except for that Sheffield lad, of course, who'd died at twenty-seven, from the hard labour he'd been put to at Northallerton jail.

John-William, who knew that he would have been a Chartist himself had he remained a poor man, felt sorry about that death. But he was not a poor man and had been naturally and sensibly alarmed to hear of the 50,000 disgruntled people who had attended the ‘martyr's'funeral in Sheffield, which had given the Chartists something to build on.
Something
– he wasn't sure just what – which had caused the entire north to rise like yeast in sudden and furious ferment, the whole of industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire seething with militant men and women –
highly
militant, those women – on the march, carrying banners and loaves of bread on the end of sticks, singing hymns and psalms and chanting that it was no longer a matter of wages. Although most of them were being paid so little that employment had become a farce, an irrelevance. Nor even a matter of starvation. Although many of them had starved in the past and were therefore well equipped to recognize starvation now that they had met it again.

No. It had become less simple and at the same time less complicated than that. They were on strike for the Charter which, in its six points, would give them the power to redress their own wrongs. They were on strike for the right to vote, to elect men like themselves to positions of authority – as the gentry and the millmasters now did – who would make laws not only to suit the needs of squires and of the middle-classes – but of the common man.

They were on strike for the Charter and only for the Charter, a multitude of them, coming like the tributaries of a great river, from everywhere. Pouring across the Pennines from Lancashire to be joined by eager exalted crowds from Bradford, Halifax, Barnoldswick, Huddersfield, Frizingley, some of them carrying sticks and flails and home-made pikes, most of them empty-handed and full-hearted, singing their Chartist hymns of freedom and justice and brotherhood and stopping every mill they passed on their way by the simple process of removing the plug from the boiler, letting off the mill-dam, and drawing the workers into their ranks with the irresistible attraction of a ragged, hundred-handed Pied Piper.

In one day's march thirty-eight mills had had their plugs drawn in Dewsbury, the masters standing amazed in their empty sheds while the workers streamed out to join what to some had become a Crusade, to others a Pilgrimage; an opportunity for revenge; an exciting chance for a holiday. Every mill in Hebden Bridge had been shut down. Leeds and Cleckheaton had been cordoned off by troops to stop the crowds from getting in. Halifax and Frizingley had been invaded from all directions, the streets sprouting Chartist placards like weeds from every chink in the cobbles, demanding what John-William himself had once demanded. Democracy. Dignity. His right to govern himself by his own vote, which he had fought for and wrestled from the grip of the landed gentry himself only ten years ago.

Well, they hadn't got their Charter. Not this time at any rate. They'd got themselves arrested, in dozens, and sentenced to terms of hard labour and transportation to Australia, as always happened. But most of them had come back to work reasonably cap-in-hand, preferring to be half-starved on half-pay than to starve altogether on none. That always happened too. Although quite a few had subsequently been dismissed, both Braithwaite and Colclough having had their spies in the Chartist ranks, men who had sung those Chartist hymns about freedom and justice the loudest as they had been memorizing names and faces to sell afterwards to Uriah and Ben. As Christie Goldsborough, the sardonic, black-skinned devil, had no doubt whispered Ben's name, and Uriah's, and John-William's own, into some haughty, land-owning, Corn-Law-loving ear. Thus swelling the crowd of bitter, hungry men forever hanging around St Jude's with time on their hands to plot their treasons. Thus adding to the number of women and children already in the workhouse, already overburdening the rates.

And the Corn Laws had not been repealed.

Would they ever be? Would it even matter, if this rabble of which he had himself once been a part, managed to get their vote and fill the House of Commons with men who would pass Factory Acts galore, including that damnable Ten Hours Bill of Richard Oastler's, so that no man would be able to control his own affairs? And small good it would do any of them. Because there had never been enough of anything to go around, and never would be. John-William had always known that. Dog ate dog And man ate man. Not just in the alleys of St Jude's, where John-William had taken good care never to be devoured himself, but everywhere. And when these poor fools won their vote what would it really mean to them but the right to choose their own oppressors?

John-William had not cut his wages this time, and no one had thanked him for it. They'd taken the plug out of his boiler just the same and let off his mill-dam without a thought for what it was going to cost him – and
them
, he'd see to that – in the long run. And now, to set the seal on this disastrous year, the member of parliament for Frizingley, old Charlie Bowen, who had been John-William's man and Ben Braithwaite's man and knew exactly what he had to do to earn the money they paid him, had fallen off his horse – the damned fool – and broken his neck. Which meant all the hullabaloo of a by-election, with a new man of their own to find, and the Larks and the Covington-Pyms trying to get their own man in. And a Chartist candidate too, he'd heard, if one could believe the insolence, bringing his Chartist banners and his hymns to Frizingley again; with not a hope of winning, of course, since the men who would like to elect him had no votes to do it with. But – since those men were numbered in thousands – with every opportunity in the world for rekindling those ugly sparks of revolution.

Thank God he had taken Amabel safely away to Almsmead.

Leaning back in his chair John-William was unaware of the sleep which abruptly overcame him, an old man's sleep from which he would wake presently with a start and in great confusion. But Gemma saw it and smiling at him, her affection undiminished, closed her own eyes gratefully. Not to sleep but simply to think, freely and unobserved, without the burden of her mother's solicitude, the obligation not only to look cheerful but to go on repeating how well she felt so that Amabel – always unnerved by silence – should not weary her further by growing alarmed.

She was, of course, quite well in the sense of feeling no actual grief or pain. She was, in fact,
all right
: not unhappy, not dissatisfied, not anything in any way so definite as that. She was very much as she had expected to be, having found in her marriage nothing to surprise her nor to cause her the least distress. Tristan had been – well,
Tristan
. Amiable, agreeable, never making a fuss, trained as carefully – by Linnet, she supposed – in the arts of correct behaviour as he himself had trained his dogs. A charming if somewhat absent-minded companion. Undemanding as a lover, she was beginning to realize, but so beautiful, of course, that few women could have objected to his touch.

She did not object to it. She had not known what to expect from this side of marriage since there was no literature available to her on the subject and her mother had told her nothing. Nor would it have been possible to ask, nor even to rely on any information which might have been forthcoming, since Amabel, who always retired to bed for the duration of her own ‘monthly curse' had said nothing more to the point than, ‘Darling, I must beg of you never to speak of this to anyone,' when Gemma at the age of fourteen had first seen evidence of hers. While Mrs Drubb, with no more explanation than that she was a woman now and had better keep well away from men, had then scolded her for upsetting her mother.

She had taken to her marriage-bed, therefore, a certain natural innocence and all the ignorance considered essential to her station, of which Tristan had relieved her as gently and pleasantly as he had been able, his passion lacking the intensity which might, on those honeymoon nights, have alarmed her; being, instead, a light-hearted matter, full of the nonchalant reflections of the man himself. A gentleman, in fact, of sporting rather than truly amorous inclinations who would never dream of forcing his attentions on anyone but was always absolutely delighted to oblige.

‘Gemma, you must be the most agreeable girl in the world – a rattling good sort.' Those were the words he spoke to her as she lay in his arms in the vulnerable moments following his pleasure when only a lout – in his opinion – would turn away from a woman without a word and go to sleep. In her opinion too, although she had no idea how other men behaved, nor any way of measuring the depth of Tristan's desire for her; whether it came easily and naturally to him, as any stallion would mount any mare, or whether it required a degree of effort he chose to conceal.