“I would be obliged to you if you were to bring Captain Bentley’s conduct to his attention – the man is a disgrace to his uniform and should, if at all possible, cease to wear it. I would not wish to have him stand before me again, and would almost certainly dismiss any case where he was a witness for the prosecution. I would be obliged to you as well were you to meet the six convicts and discover their account of the day. I shall be sitting in Manchester for three more days, Mr Star, and would wish to bring any mitigating factors to the attention of the Lord Lieutenant in person.”
The Lord Lieutenant of the county had wide and unspecified powers over the treatment of convicted prisoners, was effectively free to commute sentences as he would. With more than six hundred capital offences on the statute book so many death sentences were passed that it was simply impractical for the Home Secretary in London to take the decision whether any particular individual should live or die, yet there was no precise legal procedure available to allow the process to occur at a lower level. In the absence of any official guidelines the localities did much as they wished – a very few hanged enthusiastically, most transported whenever possible, numbers were known to offer short prison terms or even absolute discharge to lesser offenders. Pressure for a particular course by a High Court Judge from London would almost invariably be successful.
“I will speak to them this evening, m’lud, and will place my conclusions in your clerk’s hands tomorrow, if I may.”
Mark returned to his chambers, wrote his account of the men’s actions. They had been coincidentally present, he noted, had sought only to offer their Christian duty to the unfortunate and had been most brutally taken up by a drunken Yeomanry officer and his men. All six swore that they had harboured no disloyalty to their Sovereign Lord, the King, God bless him!
The six had been returned to the Round House, were pulled out at his insistence and brought to him in the keeper’s office. Mark briefly read out his statement and informed them that he required them to sign it; they could expect to be free before the Assizes rose on Friday afternoon.
“If so be we was not to sign, master? What then?”
“Then I could do no more for you. Nor could His Lordship, the judge. You will not hang in any case, but Botany Bay would be very probable. You have not been treated well, I know, but I would beg of you that you should swallow your resentment.”
“And be cast out of clink to starve in the streets, your honour – there will be no work for us in Manchester!”
“There will be in St Helens. I will send your names to my father and he will find something for you.”
“In St Helens? They pay well there, sir, at both Roberts and Star. I will be glad to go there.”
The two hand-loom men and the tailor were much less entranced at the prospect of losing their independence, but grudgingly agreed that it was better than what awaited them in Manchester.
All six signed Mark’s account of their doings, three of them laughing and shaking their heads the while.
“It was St Peter who denied his Master, was it not, sir? I am following a fine precedent, as you legal gentlemen might say – but, ‘tis far better than hanging, after all!”
“So it is. Now that you have signed the document, and I can say that you have agreed that it is a true bill, I will submit it to the judge. When he has used it for his purposes and all is clean and tidy and the case is closed, well, gentlemen, then I might like to meet you again and discuss these events further. For the while, all that I know of the case is here and this is what I understand to be true, and I wish to know no more for the nonce.”
The law did not demand that its servants should believe their clients’ versions of events, merely required that the lawyer should not know that they were lying. It was possible to go to some lengths to avoid that knowledge.
The tailor, Wakefield, was the most bitter, and voluble, of the six. A bachelor, he had had a small shop, a growing trade amongst the clerical classes and three outworkers of his own. He had discovered his shop burnt out when he had returned, his rooms ransacked, empty of all his possessions, including his small savings. The one neighbour who would talk to him said that the watch-constables had paid him a visit, attempting to discover treasonable writings, they had said.
“They know me to be a past Secretary of the Manchester Corresponding Society, sir, and will not believe that we do no more than discuss reform. I have been threatened in the street before now, have been hauled up in front of the magistrates and warned – no charge, no attempt to put me on trial, just told to beware of my future conduct. So much for ‘freeborn Englishmen’!”
“What sort of reform do you espouse, Mr Wakefield? There are many versions, I believe.”
“Secret ballot; all adult men to vote, irrespective of property; equal constituencies; one House – no hereditary Lords to rule us – no more and no less than that, sir.”
“It sounds like democracy to me – surely you do not want the illiterate and ignorant and stupid to vote, the village idiot and the Cambridge don quite equally?”
“There are worse things than democracy, sir. Would you rather we were ruled by a madman or a poxed-up libertine?”
Mark stood, rapidly brought the conversation to an end. They had met in a chophouse, permitting him to buy Wakefield a meal without offering him charity, and he was very unwilling to be associated in public with those sentiments – it was barely five years since Leigh Hunt had been imprisoned for commenting on the Prince Regent’s many inadequacies.
“Would you care to call at my rooms tomorrow evening, Mr Wakefield? We could continue our discussion there over a glass.”
“I note, Mr Wakefield, that you do not pretend to offer women the vote in your new democracy.”
“I note, sir, that peeresses in their own right may not sit in the House of Lords as present constituted. I do not believe politics to be the proper sphere of the female, see no reason why men should attempt to breastfeed babies nor why women should try to govern a country – each to their natural sphere, to the betterment of both, I would say, sir.”
“Queen Elizabeth, therefore, should not have held the throne?”
“Not a fair example, sir – she was born to a poxed father, was almost certainly harmed so by inherited disease that she could hardly be a woman at all, poor lady! Queen Anne as well, of course, unable to bear a healthy child for the same cause – again not a true woman!”
Mark began to marshal his arguments, realised then that he had no especial desire to see women enfranchised, nor any great belief that the political world would be any better served by their presence. He accepted Wakefield’s case, said so smilingly.
Wakefield returned the smile, most attractively, Mark felt – he was a very handsome young man, blue-eyed, light-brown hair, not at all mousy, charmingly curled, he could imagine running his hands through those locks, shifted in his chair, experiencing some embarrassing discomfort.
“You are not wed, I believe, Mr Wakefield?”
“No, sir, wedlock is not for me – that is to say I am far too busy to be a family man!”
“I feel the same, Mr Wakefield, hence my bachelor rooms – no family house for me! Where are you dwelling now? You said that your shop and rooms were quite destroyed and I presume you could not stay there.”
Wakefield was trespassing on the kindness of an acquaintance temporarily, sleeping on his floor. He was very pleased to accept Mark’s offer of his spare bedroom, pledged himself to return with his one salvaged valise on the morrow.
It was ‘Mark’ and ‘Christopher’ when they met next day and the pretence of separate rooms was rapidly dispensed with. By the end of the week it had been agreed between them that Wakefield should become a second, junior clerk in Mark’s chambers.
As was not uncommon on the provincial circuits he was alone in his chambers, no other barrister shared with him. If he took silk then he would naturally recruit a junior to devil for him, but that would be many years in the future, a question t
hat could be dealt with when eventually it arose, in any case unorthodox affections were a commonplace amongst those learned in the law, or so he had seemed to observe, so there should be no great set of hackles to rise. His father might be more difficult to reconcile to his way of life, but, in the event that he was cast off, he was now earning a very respectable competence from his practice, could survive without his allowance, though he would be sad to lose contact with the family, his mother especially. Perhaps, he thought, he could make his way across to Wigan, there to have a chat with young Joseph Andrews, who would, no doubt, rapidly pass the word to his father who would, in turn, gently break the news to his own father, a roundabout process giving plenty of time for second and third thoughts to supervene before they met – there would be no outburst of righteous indignation leading in the heat of the moment to hasty words that might be difficult to retract.
The shipyard had full order books, much to the workers’ delight – iron-hulled coal barges had taken off and three of the largest ship-owners had decided to purchase their own tug-boats – it was immediately clear that a small steamer would pay for itself in months with its ability to bring merchantmen into their berths without regard for wind or tide. Time was money and ships sat in the roads, unable to make the final two miles into the docks for days at a time, had long been a source of frustration.
The small canal steam tender had been a failure – the little boat had taken the water and had threshed mightily, delivering its power and capable of towing half a dozen barges, but the turbulent wake of the paddle wheel had rapidly started to undermine the canal banks and the owners had banned it from their waters, threatening legal action the while. The stern-wheeler was limited to the open waters of the River Mersey and the docks, just paid for its coals, pottering about with lighters to ships berthed offshore and discharging part cargoes, occasionally assisting with a tow to a grounded ship that had found a sand-bar. Matthew Star thought that it might be valuable as a tender working a wide waterway such as the River Clyde or the mouth of the Thames, possibly in Spithead, other than that it had little future in British waters.
The main aim now for the long-term was to produce a more efficient and reliable steam engine, capable of powering a merchantman of at least one thousand tons carrying capacity and of crossing the Atlantic in three weeks. Their current calculations showed that they could produce such a vessel, but that eight hundred of its thousand tons would be bunker coal, a prohibitively inefficient waste of money. For the while they were forced to concentrate on small ships to carry high-value loads for a short distance, had almost immediately decided that passengers had to be the answer – ferries across waterways too wide to bridge and yet needing frequent crossing. The Mersey was on their doorstep, was an obvious first target, but there were many others – the Thames itself, Spithead again, the Severn above Bristol, the Humber, the Scottish Islands, eventually, perhaps, the Irish Sea and the Channel, in the far future the German Ocean. Passengers had the great advantage that they demanded speed and predictable sailing times – they objected to waiting days at a time for the wind to change so that they could make a five or ten mile journey and they would pay quite handsomely for reliability; they also took up relatively little space and would load themselves on and off ship, much easier to move than bales of cotton, for example. A first ferry to cross from Liverpool to Birkenhead was already on the stocks, was being discreetly puffed-off to potential buyers as they had no wish to become operators themselves and was attracting a little interest from a firm of speculative builders with housing land on the Birkenhead side.
Every calculation they made showed that sail had the advantage on long runs – the weight of coal reduced carrying capacity to such an extent that a voyage of more than a day’s duration was too expensive for a steamer, except it was carrying people, light-weight and of high value. The steam powered vessel came into its own whenever it was impossible for a sailing ship to make its long tacks – in estuaries, docks, narrow channels generally. When the need was to progress despite wind and tide, then the steamer was the answer.
“What of naval ships-of-war, Captain Star?”
“Iron hulls, certainly, Mr Fraser, there are some obvious benefits to be seen there, but, tell me, sir, would you wish to be the engineer when a single cannon-ball struck the boiler?”
Fraser shuddered in horror – he had seen a burst boiler once, and had listened to the short-lived screams of the flayed, boiled, blinded machine-men who had been caught by the scalding steam. He withdrew his suggestion.
“It might be just possible to design a gun-boat, for harbour defence perhaps, carrying a single large cannon in the bows and able to manoeuvre against the elements to come on the stern or bows of line-of-battle ships. A long forty-two pounder, for example, possibly a pair of very large carronades, could do great damage, drive off any attacker, much as galleys can attack far larger square-riggers with considerable success, but even then, a single well-aimed shot from a chaser and the contest is over, and the paddlewheels themselves are vulnerable to even quite small shot. I would not wish to be the sailor who commanded such a steam warship, Mr Fraser, and I am very unwilling to create a ship I would not myself sail in.”
“Point taken, Captain Star!”
Iron hulls had to be fabricated from wrought plates, which must then be joined together and fixed to the wooden framings. Nuts and bolts were the only answer for the woodwork but the plates could be riveted more cheaply - holes drilled or punched first and then hot rivets pushed through and hammered flat on both sides. Joseph was called in, presented with the task of producing iron rod of consistent diameter. The problems of rolling plates of wrought iron had been solved for many years and the bolt and screw makers had dies for drawing relatively thin rod, but the rivets had a diameter in excess of an inch, more than twice the size of the biggest nuts and bolts commonly in use.
“Mass production of identical iron rods, gentlemen, each of exactly the same length and diameter and mix – free of slag or other impurities which could make them brittle, for we do not want our rivets to fracture at sea, I believe!”
Joseph came up with a series of rollers, the hot metal compressed into billets of increasingly smaller square section before finally being forced between a pair with hemispherical grooves top and bottom and coming out as round rod. Steam-powered shears cut the rod into the correct lengths for the rivets, saved time and energy with hacksaws, much to the admiration of the older men.
Joseph accepted their applause as his due and turned his mind to the question of drilling holes in the plates. His first thought was to punch the holes at the foundry, while the metal was still hot, but it was impossible to predict exactly where the rivets would go until the plates were actually bent into position on the frames of the individual hull. He had to remain content with hand drills and augers, but was deeply unhappy at such a compromise. Hand work was inferior to machine, that was a central tenet of his existence, therefore it was a moral obligation upon him to eventually come up with a portable drilling machine – and if steam would not supply the power, then perhaps water or air under pressure might provide a solution? He made a note in his list of problems to be solved one day, when he had the time or when sudden inspiration struck. He had noticed that if he consciously thought about a particular task before he went to sleep then very often he would wake in the morning with a solution in the front of his mind, his brain active overnight, not wasting its time dreaming, he presumed. The only problem was that it never happened if he had company in his bed – when Abby was there he evidently had room for only one set of thoughts. Marriage, with its concomitant of an available partner every night, might well inhibit his genius, he feared.
Two months of strict mourning and Tom became restless – he needed to move, to travel at least. He ordered the horses and set off for South Wales, both because he had bridges to build with the managers he had bullied earlier in the year and because he enjoyed the countryside across the hills to Banbury and Cheltenha
m and Gloucester, a night in each and then the crawl to Monmouth and a final day to the Rhondda, all of it agricultural, untouched, except for the new, bigger, rectangular fields, not a chimney in sight, never a plume of black coal smoke to be seen until he reached the mines themselves.
“Hypocrite,” he muttered, comfortably, knowing that he would almost certainly be called upon to sanction the building of another set of chimneys, another black cloud on the horizon, when he reached the works and well-aware that he would have no qualms in doing so.
“’England’s green and pleasant land’, so long as you are rich enough to be able to live in it, or so poor that you must work in it!”
He passed by a village of tumbledown shacks and blackened, rotten thatch, evidence of a landlord who abused his people, screwing every last penny from them and putting nothing back into the land, shook his head in comfortable disgust – his people would never experience that sort of abuse!
The minor inefficiencies he had detected earlier in the year were all remedied, to the sighing relief of his underlings. He swore to himself, he had been far too hard on them, and disbursed five hundred pounds in bonuses, one hundred apiece to his three most senior men, twenty-five to their immediate inferiors. The atmosphere lightened and an evident spokesman dared to offer their commiserations on his great loss; they had offered up their prayers in chapel, he was informed.
It still hurt.
He smiled as well as he could and thanked them, asked for his appreciation to be made known to all who had shown that they cared.
Down the valleys to Swansea where the first Roberts’ collier was loading – a fairly new but second-hand vessel. Captain Star had bought out a small shipper with six two- and three- hundred tonners, paying a very low price for the gentleman had been a good seaman but had been content to allow his chief customer – ‘so reliable a man, a friend almost after so many years’ – to defer payment for six months in the hard times that were upon them, and when he had gone to the wall after twenty weeks he had very rapidly followed him. He gravely watched as the brig sailed and a gang of labourers filled the holds of a second, beckoned to their overman.
The Pain Of Privilege (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 4) Page 12
