God Is an Englishman (13 page)

“Are you expecting the Yeomanry?” Adam asked. “They’re breaking no law holding a public meeting, are they?”

The man looked up at him sardonically. “Tha’ don’t know Sam Rawlinson’s hands if you’re banking on ’em listening to hot air and then goin’ quietly to bed.

They’ll sack his mill if they have their way,” and he looked balefully at the yellowish sky. “On’y one thing can save it now and that’s a storm and a drenching all round.”

They were interrupted by a full-throated roar that was echoed by a second roll of thunder and a flicker of lightning, followed by a third, much heavier peal. As the constable broke into a run, Adam saw the section of the crowd closest to him surge forward leaving the foot of the ramp almost clear. At the same moment a yellow streak of flame rose from the loading bays and ran the length of the piers.

A stunted man came scrambling through the fence and ran past Adam shouting, in a gleeful, sing-song voice, “They’ve fired t’bales! They’ve fired bloody bales…!” before disappearing round the corner at top speed. The mare began to tremble so Adam slid from the saddle and looped the reins to the fence post, running down the ramp to see if the nearest face of the Square was clear enough to make his way back by the route he had come. Mercifully it was, for now the crowd had split, one section surging across to the fire on the loading bays, the other and larger section moving diagonally across the width of the Square towards a large oblong building opposite. Above the tumult he could hear the crash of glass, and from the elevation of the ramp he saw smoke curling from several of the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 60

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first-storey windows of the mill. Over on the left side of the Square a fire-bell clanged, and through the smoke Adam could make out the tossing heads of stationary horses, apparently harnessed to an engine that was being prevented from moving towards either fire. He could even see the silhouette of the driver, arms upraised as in supplication, before he was dragged from the box and swallowed up in the crowd.

The frenzy of the spectacle kept him there for perhaps a minute, absorbing small, unrelated facets of the scene: a fat woman drag ging a screaming child by the hand; a tall, scarecrow of a man scrambling on to a wall surrounding the building, a brand held above his head so that he looked like a figure in an allegorical painting; the wide, glittering arc cut by a metal object, probably a fireman’s hel met, as it soared out of the group struggling round the engine.

Then, like a frame for these pictures, came the steady lick of flames under the angled roof of the mill. He thought, grimly, “My God, this is like Delhi all over again,” and ran the length of the ramp, untying the reins and dragging the horse round with the object of fighting his way out before the Yeomanry and police reinforcements waded into the mob. It was something he had seen once before, when the mili tary had been called out to quell a bread riot at Hounslow during his first year of service. The memory of Englishmen trampling English men still had the power to disgust after the passage of years marked by the Crimea and Cawnpore. The mare wheeled again, dragging at the rein and backing away from the intense glare and the uproar rising from the Square. With a curse he fumbled with the straps that enclosed his rolled boatcloak, dragging it free and blinding the horse with its folds. She quietened at once so that he was able to drag her down the ramp and along the unembattled face of the Square to the street by which he had entered the town. Here it was relatively de serted. He removed the cloak, tied it about his own shoulders, and lifted a foot to the stirrup. At that moment several things happened simultaneously.

Behind him part of the mill roof collapsed with a soft explosion, and a million sparks soared, making the narrow street as light as day. Ahead of him, but as yet heard rather than seen, a group of horsemen thundered over the setts, the first coming into view while he stood with his hands on the pommel and one foot on the ground so that he paused before swinging himself into the saddle. Then, on the blind side of the horse, a shambling little figure in clothes several sizes too large for him darted from the shadows and ran diagonally across the street towards the doorway of a shop. He was standing close against the wall immediately opposite the shop, and another flicker of lightning lit up the scene in the greatest GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 61

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detail. He had time to take note of the first galloping horseman, a thickset man in a low-crowned beaver hat, who sat his horse awkwardly, as though unused to the saddle. The darting figure in the baggy clothes saw the horseman at the same time, and he seemed to hover in the shop doorway. Then, with panic in every movement, he turned and ran back across the street, right into the path of the leading policeman, if policeman he was. A collision was not inevitable, but the horseman made it so, swinging his horse hard left so that its shoulder struck the running figure a heavy glancing blow. Adam saw the man’s hand shoot up and down, a short cudgel he was holding crashing down on the reeling figure with tremendous force, so that the crack of the wood on bone punctuated the uproar in the Square.

The force of the blow swept the victim inwards under the belly of the horse, and then another flicker of lightning showed a feebly threshing ball, spurned by the rear hooves the width of the street and finally coming to rest against the wall of the shop.

By then the following horsemen were on the scene, about a dozen of them, some in uniform and some not, and behind them a reck lessly driven carriage containing two passengers, one elderly and sitting hunched on the box, the other young and standing upright, lashing the horse with a long switch. The cavalcade swept by in a confused mass, debouching at the Square where its arrival created re newed uproar. In a moment the little street was empty except for Adam and the huddled figure under the window of the shop.

He went over and knelt on the greasy setts, turning the figure over and looking down at the face. It was a dead face, the face of a child about thirteen, wearing clothes that were obviously cutdowns, for sleeves and trouser legs were shortened to half their original length. The eyes, wide open, held an expression of terror, and thin trickles of blood ran from the nostrils and the corners of the mouth.

Adam Swann had seen innumerable dead men before, slain in hot blood on a dozen contested fields, and had witnessed any number of execu tions at Delhi and elsewhere, but this was different and he could only think of it as murder. This had occurred in an English street, and the butcher had not been a maddened sepoy, in the grip of terror, big otry, and prejudice but a middle-aged Englishman, at the head of men representing the forces of order. He knelt there looking into the accusing eyes of the child and his gorge rose. The action was at one with everything ugly he had noted passing through the territory of the Black Dwarfs.

It was pitiless, pitiable, obscene. It had the power to stir him as no scene of carnage apart from the well at Cawnpore had stirred him, for there was nothing GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 62

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inevitable about it, as of one blind force colliding with another. It was a single, decisive gesture, proclaiming the terrible arrogance of the propertied against the weak and dispossessed, and in a way it fused with the terrible indig nation he and Roberts and every other mercenary had experienced in their fighting advance along the Ganges.

He took a handkerchief and wiped the face clean. Then he straight ened the grotesquely clothed limbs and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the wild outcry behind him. It was futile to seek justice there or, for that matter, anywhere else in the area. Judg ing by the fury of the crowd, and the storming approach of the horse men, there might be many such deaths before dawn, and with the arrival of police reinforcements and the Yeomanry the fire-raisers would be hunted from street to street as he had once hunted sepoys. The prospect, together with the dead boy at his feet, made escape from this foul place imperative. He hoisted himself into the saddle and turned the mare’s head towards open country, and as he went he swore an oath. If, in the time left to him, he involved himself in commerce of any kind, then he would throw away the book of rules that clearly governed its practitioners in places like Seddon Moss. He would write new rules, embracing an entirely different set of values, of the kind that he had always supposed were acceptable in Western communities that were making some kind of attempt to emerge from the Middle Ages. There would be no reciprocal hatreds of this kind, no cut and thrust regulated by profits on one side and mob rule on the other. In his ledgers, if he ever came to keep any, the life of the child wearing his father’s cutdown corduroys would count for more than a penny an hour and a breakfast break.

He crossed the railway line and headed back to the fork in the road where the dust track joined the turnpike, and as he coaxed the tired horse into a trot the thunder crashed overhead and the first heavy raindrops fell like pellets. He thought of them striking the upturned face of the child under the wall of the shuttered shop and no longer felt hunger in his belly.

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Three

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They saw one another at the same moment, Adam topping the last fold of the moor with the rising sun at his back, Henrietta standing in a shallow pool, her head turned sideways as she struggled to free her copper hair of the husks sown in it during the night. Perhaps he had the minimal advantage. When the level of his eyes rose above the heather rim south of the shepherd’s hut they fastened on the one incongruity present in the view, the momentary glimpse of a pair of neat buttocks, enclosed in white pantalettes as she straightened her self after completing a perfunctory wash.

He never afterwards forgot this unconventional introduction for on that particular morning he felt himself to be in need of laughter, and the prospect of a girl washing herself in a puddle on a deserted moor was not only unexpected but droll.

He called, cheerily, “Hullo there!” but the little figure in the pan talettes whirled and fled back into the hut at such speed that he won dered, for a moment, if he had imagined her. Then he went on down the gentle slope to the hut, reining in outside the entrance and call ing, in the tone of voice one might use to coax a child, “Hi! You in there! Don’t be scared. Can you tell me if this road spans the rail way?”

Seconds elapsed before a dishevelled, copper-coloured head peeped from the hut like a turtle from its shell, and he saw then that what he had mistaken for a half-dressed urchin was a young woman and that she was blushing but looked more indignant than frightened.

“Go away!” she said, severely. “I’m not dressed. The road leads to Lea Green and there’s sure to be a bridge. There are bridges for all the halts along the line.” The girl interested him. Her accents were not those of a goose-minder, or a GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 64

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shepherd’s daughter, but of someone at pains to over lay a strong, Northcountry brogue with a spurious gentility, and this made him wonder why a girl like that should be making her toilet in a puddle after, as appeared evident, spending the night in a turf-roofed hut on the open moor. He said, trying to keep the laughter from his voice, “Are you lost? Did you get caught in that storm last night?” and she replied, primly, “I’m not in the least lost. I live near here. I…er…I had an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I was thrown from a trap when the horse was frightened by lightning.” She had now withdrawn her head and was addressing him through the wall of the hut.

“Are you hurt?”

“No!”
The voice was petulant now, a child thoroughly exasperated by grown-up nosiness, “I took shelter, that’s all.” Then, with the merest hint of appeal,

“Would you be going to Lea Green?”

“I’m going that way,” Adam said, “then across the county to Cumberland.” There was a long silence before she said, pleadingly, “Could I ride behind you?”

“Why not?” he said, grinning.

“Wait then, let me get dressed, but ride away and I’ll call when I’m ready.” He chuckled at this but humoured her, squeezing the mare’s flanks so that she retreated as far as the hillock. The sun began to siphon moisture from the moor, so that the hut was soon rooted in vapour, and presently she called, “Turn your back,” and he swung round watching, over his shoulder, her undignified exit on all fours, draped in what seemed to be a green tent so voluminous that she had to sup port its folds with both hands. Her coppery hair hung down in tangled hanks, but she had done what she could to dress it with a piece of ribbon tied in a bow.

The dress she was wearing looked as if it had been put through a mangle.

“It’s awful,” she said, surveying herself, “I must have been crazy to run away in this. Wherever I go, I’ll be noticed. Then they’ll catch me and send me back. I’m hungry too. I’ve only had those toffees.”

He looked at her closely, liking what he saw: a small, indomit able figure, enveloped in a green dress that had, he supposed, begun life as a crinoline but now looked ridiculous draped about her and held in damp handfuls about her hips.

Her face was the face of a pretty, imperious child, but she had a woman’s figure and there was maturity of a kind in the way she planted her feet and stood her ground, as though to counter mockery.

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“You ran away? You mean from that riot in the town?”

“No, from that toad Makepeace.”

“Makepeace?”

“Makepeace Goldthorpe.”

He was at a loss what to make of her. She looked like a genteel girl who had lost her way in a thunderstorm on the way home from a soiree or dance, but her assumption that he should know all about the encounter with Makepeace Goldthorpe, whoever he was, reduced her to the status of a child, and a spoiled child at that. Alone up here, and enveloped in the ruin of a cageless crinoline, she did not seem in the least afraid of him, and he supposed this was due to ignorance, or a privileged background that would encourage her to take his respect for granted. He said, with a smile, “I’m a stranger, I rode into the middle of that riot last night and decided to make a detour. Is Makepeace Goldthorpe anything to do with that shoddy little town over the hill?” She looked confused and then, rather charmingly, revealed a pair of enormous dimples in a smile. “I
am
a goose,” she said, “I thought everyone about here would know the Goldthorpes. They own most of Seddon Moss, all but the mill that is, and my father owns that. The mill beside the railroad.” He stared at her unbelievingly. “You’re Sam Rawlinson’s daughter?” She said, sharply, “If you’re a stranger…” but he interrupted, impatiently, “Yes, I am, but I heard about Sam Rawlinson and his lockout last night, before the real trouble started. How long have you been out here alone?”