Laurie Alice Eakes - [Daughters of Bainbridge House 02]

by A Flight of Fancy

  Risking his family’s future with his rebellion against factory owners and the Crown.

  Whittaker curled his upper lip and stepped out of the shadow of the tree. The sourness of ale fumes replaced the tang of the pine. He grimaced but forced himself forward.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of another shadow, a flicker of movement. He pivoted on one heel. “Is someone—” He stopped. He was forgetting to roughen his accent.

  He saw no one anyway. Starting at chimeras, at nothing substantial.

  He headed for the door again, bracing himself for the smells of unwashed men, spilled spirits, and rough talk he would find inside. He must not show his distaste, his dislike. He was supposed to be one of them, quiet, solitary, but agreeing with their cause in a cautious way.

  He reached for the door handle.

  “You don’t want to go in there.” Jimmy spoke from the darkness behind Whittaker.

  He jerked his hand from the latch, dropped it to the knife hilt at his waistband. “I do if I want my supper.”

  “If that’s all you want, then come to my house. It’ll be naught but bread and dripping, but the bread’s good.”

  And likely Whittaker would be taking tomorrow’s breakfast from someone like Jimmy himself.

  “Why?” Whittaker asked, turning slowly.

  Jimmy shrugged. “You’re too young to be cozying up to the likes of Rob and Hugh. If you’re tired of your own company, then you’ll find plenty in my house.”

  “That’s, um, very kind of you.” Despite the melding of his words together, Whittaker still sounded too educated for the role he attempted to play. Not knowing what else to say, he shrugged and stepped away from the tavern door. “Let’s be off then.”

  Off to a possible trap?

  One hand on the hilt of his knife, he fell into step beside Jimmy. “Will your wife care about an extra to table?”

  “My wife?” Jimmy snorted. “I don’t have a wife.” His tone was decidedly bitter.

  “I’m sorry. I thought . . . You mentioned making enough to support a family once, and I thought . . .”

  “Aye, I have a family. Four children, but my wife left me after the baby was born. I came home from the mill one day, and she was gone with every spare penny in t’house.”

  “I’m sorry.” Whittaker recalled Miss Honore’s brief missive expressing Cassandra’s wishes. In two and a half months, she insisted she had not changed her mind, and her father had agreed and sent Whittaker packing too.

  “I lost my la—woman too,” he murmured. “We weren’t married yet.”

  “Best for you ’til you can support her and any little ones proper.”

  And not need Cassandra’s dowry.

  But that was years into the future. Her father would find her a husband before then—a nice, quiet, and dispassionate man like Philip Sorrells.

  “Maybe you’re right.” Whittaker sighed. “But the nights are lonely.”

  “Aye, that they are. Here we go.” Abruptly, Jimmy turned down a track invisible to Whittaker, though after a few dozen yards, he began to recognize the terrain even in the dark.

  Beyond the mills, beyond the fence surrounding his own weaving houses, lay hovels no larger than his own bedchamber. They smelled of rotting vegetables, coal smoke, and night soil.

  His stomach churned. His feet dragged like those of a schoolboy not wanting to take his punishment.

  Going into Jimmy’s cottage was punishment. From what a solitary tallow dip on a plain deal table showed, the single room forming the lower floor appeared spotlessly clean. So did the old woman and three children seated around that table, though a whimpering baby, lying in a wooden box for a cradle beside the grate that gave off more smoke than warmth, smelled as though he or she needed to be changed.

  A very young baby. So Jimmy’s loss of his wife must have been recent.

  Whittaker’s heart wrenched. He stood on the threshold, his head ducked to keep from banging his brow on the lintel.

  Jimmy went straight to the cradle and lifted up the baby, murmuring something that made the whimpering cease. The others scrambled from their stools, the three children swarming around him and chattering like a flock of sparrows. The old woman crossed to the dresser in a corner and removed the remnants of a loaf from the shelf. A knife flashed. What wasn’t enough food for one man was divided in two.

  How to repay the man’s kindness without insulting him?

  Watching Jimmy embrace and talk to each of his children in turn, then carry the baby into a dim corner to take care of the dirty napkin, Whittaker could not believe the same man engaged in wholesale destruction of property and sometimes lives.

  No, Jimmy would avoid taking lives. Surely a man who played nursery maid to his child instead of leaving that for the old woman—surely his grandmother, judging from her lined and wrinkled skin and white hair—was too good to harm a human being. And yet, perhaps mill owners and those workers who would not join the Luddite cause were fair game.

  Pondering these thoughts, Whittaker did not realize that everyone was staring at him until Jimmy gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.

  “Come in, man. We aren’t warming the outside.”

  They were not doing much to warm the inside either.

  With a muttered apology, Whittaker stepped into the single room and pulled the door closed behind him.

  “Let me introduce the children,” Jimmy said. “Sally, Little Jimmy, Timothy, and Susan is the baby there.” Tenderness filled his voice as he spoke each name.

  An emptiness opened inside Whittaker, a longing for children of his own, a family to greet him when he returned from the mills or Parliament. Not that most children in his class were allowed to greet their fathers at the door. Their wives did not go up in balloons either. But his family would greet him at the door. All of them—wife, children, perhaps a dog or two . . .

  He bowed to the children, making them laugh.

  “Is he a prince, Papa?” Sally asked.

  Jimmy chuckled. “Aye, to you, no doubt, he is just that. But right now we’re havin’ our bread and dripping. Ma, come meet my new friend, Geoff.”

  His mother? Surely his mother should not look seventy instead of forty-five or fifty, the same age as his own mother. Jimmy was not all that old, especially not for a man with four children.

  Four children and a mother to support on his meager wages. When this was over, Whittaker would find work for the man in the Hern mills.

  Jimmy led the way to the table. His mother brought wooden plates with the bread smeared with a glaze of meat fat probably procured for a pittance at the nearest chophouse or tavern. It smelled vile, perhaps a little rancid. Whittaker ate it anyway, washed it down with water, and longed for a chair with a back he could lean against, beside a fire that warmed him.

  Jimmy worked a whole lot harder and had neither. Yet he had a mother and children who loved him. They came to him in turn to receive what appeared to be a silent blessing, with his hand resting momentarily on their heads, then they vanished up a stairway little more than a ladder, and the room grew quiet save for the baby’s snuffling noises beside the hearth and the patter of fresh rain outside. The residents of the nearby houses must have been asleep or away.

  “Thank you for joining me,” Jimmy said into the stillness. “Ma don’t talk much ’cause I won’t let her say aught ill of my wife in front of the children, and she says that’s all there is to talk about. And the nights are long.”

  Whittaker nodded. Long nights alone he understood.

  “Maybe one day,” Jimmy continued, “I can learn to read to fill the time before I can sleep. I’d love to read my Bible.”

  Something Whittaker had not been doing much of lately, and he bore no such excuse as being unable to read. Guilt prompted him to blurt out, “I could read it to you if you like.”

  Too late he realized he should not admit to any kind of education.

  “I’d like that, but not now.” Jimmy did not appear in
the least surprised that Whittaker could read.

  His skin chilled beneath his woolen shirt and coat. If Jimmy was not surprised, it might mean he knew more than was safe for Whittaker.

  He dropped his hand to the hilt of his knife.

  Jimmy curled his fingers around Whittaker’s wrist gently but firmly. “You don’t need to be pulling that out. I’m not your enemy.”

  Whittaker did not move except to raise his eyebrows. “I have an enemy?”

  “Aye, at least one.” Jimmy laughed and released Whittaker’s wrist. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I don’t know if it’s Rob or Hugh, or maybe it’s a friend of theirs, but I followed them one night and overheard them talking.”

  “Did you, now?” Whittaker pretended nonchalance. “Seems an odd risk to take when you have a mother and four children depending on you.”

  “They’re why I do this. Until we make more money, I cannot support them. They won’t have a future if the machines take over our jobs.”

  “But neither will they have a future if you get yourself hanged.”

  “I won’t.”

  Whittaker wanted to call him a fool. No man should be so cavalier about his mortality, especially when others depended on him remaining alive.

  “You,” Jimmy continued, “are the one who will die.”

  Gunshots and gunpowder!

  Whittaker gripped the edge of his stool and tried to control the bunching of his jaw muscles as he strove for a disinterested mien.

  “Rob and Hugh know who you are,” Jimmy announced.

  Whittaker’s stomach felt as though the pork dripping had turned back into a boar and commenced galloping around his innards. “Truly? And who is that?”

  “The ninth earl of Whittaker, with a death sentence hanging over him.”

  “Hmm. And what would his lordship be doing consorting with those wishing to steal his livelihood?”

  Jimmy laughed, a great guffaw. “You can’t talk like us no matter how hard you try. You can get the accent right, but you still talk like a nobleman.”

  “Indeed?” Whittaker’s ears went hot beneath his hair.

  Jimmy laughed harder. “And you’re too cool and calm. You should’ve knocked me flat for laughing at you.”

  “I would never—” Whittaker’s lips curled into a reluctant grin. Still, not admitting anything, he said, “So if someone knows me, why don’t they stick a knife in my back?”

  “Gotta look like an accident, milor’. You can’t just go around killing peers. They’d hang everybody they could think was in the area at the time.” Jimmy leaned forward. “But you watch yourself and your mills. They’re going to kill you and burn the mills.” He shoved back his stool with a screech of wood against wood. “Now I’ll walk you home before anyone notices you’re gone.”

  “How would they know that?” Whittaker asked, rising also.

  “You’re watched.” Jimmy strode to the door and opened it.

  Slightly colder air rushed into the room, along with the noisome smells of the lane. The shepherd’s hut would feel like a palace when Whittaker returned.

  He wished it were a fortress.

  If someone wanted him dead, he could not go back to Whittaker Hall and risk the lives of the inhabitants. Yet staying alone in the cottage sounded just as foolish.

  Except that entailed risking only his own life. His own life and the mills.

  If Jimmy was telling the truth.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Whittaker asked as they reached the road.

  “I don’t know why you joined us, and sometimes I think what you say makes sense. And I hear you’re a fair employer. Your workers won’t rebel.”

  “I know what it’s like to have—”

  What was he saying? That he knew what not having money was like? What a lie. He had no idea what being poor felt like. Cassandra had not walked away from their betrothal because he was poor by noblemen’s standards. He never worried how he would eat or whether or not he would be evicted from his house without warning. His mother didn’t look twenty years older than her age because of a lifetime of hard work and too little joy.

  Jimmy knew all those things too well. And apparently he knew a great deal more.

  Whittaker took a deep breath and did something he never before thought he would have—ask advice of a man who ranked amongst the lowest of classes. “What do you propose I do? Leave the gang?”

  “Not unless you plan to go to London and out of their reach. If you’re staying here, they’ll get you for knowing as much as you do.”

  “Which is why I’m not sure I believe you.”

  But he did, of course. Seeing the shepherd’s cottage a hundred yards up the lane, Whittaker suppressed the instinct to dash inside and lock the doors until morning.

  “Why would they keep giving me information and letting me come along with them?” he pressed.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Easier to find an accident to kill you.” He rested a hand on Whittaker’s shoulder, halting him. “You don’t have the power to stop this rebellion even if you take down their leader—whoever gives Rob and Hugh orders—so watch your back and your mills. I want to work there one day.” Speech delivered, he slipped away into the darkness like a shadow, like a chimera.

  Whittaker did not return to the cottage. He turned his steps toward the Dales and the Hern mills. Hiding in the cottage looked like cowardice. If these men or someone higher than them in the rebellion wanted him dead, he would remain out in the open and give them a fight.

  And he would die protecting the future for his heirs and for men like Jimmy, who deserved to be able to support their families on the twelve hours a day they worked.

  21

  Cassandra could not sleep. Every puff of wind, every creak of the house, every rustle of bare branches, brought her startling awake for fear that rain had begun to fall, a gale had blown in, someone was coming to stop her. Added to the fear of sleeping too late, she found herself pacing the floor at four o’clock in the morning, rubbing her legs where the scars pulled on her skin, wondering if she would be too tense and clumsy to climb into the balloon basket.

  If only females could wear pantaloons and Hessian boots like men, then getting about would prove so much easier. Skirts hampered one dreadfully. But she dressed in a proper gown, an old and warm one of heavy linen with one woolen petticoat beneath and a velvet pelisse on top. For extra warmth, she draped a shawl around her shoulders and rounded up a pair of knitted mittens, then put them back. She needed as much use of her fingers as possible to open and close the valves on the balloon, to ensure the fire burned consistently as needed, to hold on if the basket rocked. She settled for soft leather gloves and slipped out of the house before first light. Honore would tell everyone she would not be coming out for breakfast, and no one would expect her for the morning rides that Miss Irving insisted everyone but Cassandra enjoy each day.

  “Miss Irving.” Cassandra ground her teeth on the name. “Mushroom.”

  Unfortunately, the nabob’s daughter may have been produced in the obscurity of the bourgeoisie, but her father’s fortune certainly helped her spread out at the highest echelons of Society, at least in Lancashire Society. Everyone included her in the parties to which they invited the Whittaker Hall guests because of her connection with the family, however remote, through the two boys. The table in the great hall, where the mail waited for Lady Whittaker to collect and sort and deliver, always held more cards for Miss Irving than for Cassandra.

  No matter. In less than an hour, she was going to fly.

  She stepped through the gate on the other side of the parkland and into the field. In the distance, light flickered through tendrils of morning mist. Rain might stop her from going up. Mist would not. It would burn off before she landed. Even though October had slid into cold and wet November, morning fog did not last the whole day.

  As best she could, she hastened her steps. Her leather-soled slippers slid on the damp grass stubble. She should have chalked the bot
toms of her shoes like dancers did. Too late now. Her cane helped her keep her balance, and nothing rubbed against her still-healing ankle.

  And she was going to fly.

  If possible, she would have leaped her way across the field, cavorting and shouting with glee. Instead, she approached at a quick but sedate pace and lifted a hand in greeting to her comrades in aeronautics. Her friends for certain, for all they were gentlemen.

  They lifted hands in response, and Mr. Kent shouted something unintelligible, for he munched on an apple.

  “It’s all ready for you,” Mr. Sorrells announced as Cassandra drew within earshot. “Are you ready to go up?”

  “Beyond ready, I think.” She smiled when she wanted to laugh.

  He smiled too. “Very good. Are you certain you wish to go up alone? One of us can go with you, you know.”

  “I think one of us should.” Mr. Kent lowered his apple. “We haven’t yet gone up alone ourselves and aren’t certain one man—er, woman—can manage on her own.”

  “I have thought something about it.” Cassandra gazed at the balloon, the silk bag coated with the new mixture of birdlime, turpentine, and linseed oil, expanding as the fire pushed the gas into the tube leading into the silk. It was a sight far more beautiful to her than all of Miss Irving’s jewels. “I want to be alone my first time.”

  “But if something goes wrong and you need assistance,” Mr. Sorrells pointed out, “such as you having to land in a field far away, you might be too far away to walk.”

  “Not that we think you’re infirm,” Mr. Kent hastened to add. “That is . . . um . . .”

  “I am a bit lame.” Cassandra grinned at him. “Let me climb into the basket and see what I think once there.”

  With the balloon nearly filled, the basket bobbed a foot or more off the ground, tugging at its mooring ropes. That made the top of the basket at her shoulders. She could climb up like mounting a horse. It was not even as high as a horse’s back. But then, with a horse, her left foot would be in the stirrup to give her a bounce up. Perhaps she should add something to the sides, at least loops of rope into which one could slip one’s foot. Until then . . .