‘A merry Christmas, Will,’ she said softly, still smiling. She put her coat on the chair and, quite deliberately, moved across the small room towards him. When she was directly in front of him she lifted her hands, resting them on his shoulders.
‘Well, are you not going to wish me the same, Will Broadbent?’
‘Lass,’ and his eyes narrowed, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing here. I’m no lad to giggle with under the mistletoe.’
‘I’m not giggling, Will. ’
‘What the hell’s that got to do wi’ it?’ he said roughly, since he knew exactly what she meant.
‘Drew and Pearce kissed me, Will. I liked it.’ Her smile deepened.
It was perhaps this, the knowledge that some other man had sampled what he was so busy denying himself, that shattered his control and his voice was beset with peril.
‘I’m not Master Pearce, Tessa Harrison, nor his brother. Are you sure you want to continue with this game?’ But his hands were about her waist now, big and gentle but ready to be rough since she felt so lovely beneath them. He wanted to grip her tightly, perhaps hurt her a little though he didn’t know why, to savour the warm smell of her skin and hair against his face, to blend her limbs into his. But she was only a girl testing her female strength and power over the male and he did not care to frighten her. She knew nothing of passion, true passion, nor what she did with her light-hearted flirtation and he must put a stop to it . . . he must . . .
‘It’s only a Christmas kiss beneath the mistletoe, Will,’ she breathed, her soft young face lifting to his, her eyes beginning to close in what she thought to be the accepted fashion.
‘’Appen it is,’ his voice was husky, ‘and ’appen it isn’t . . .’ Then her mouth reached his and he took it as gently as he knew how. Her lips were trusting, innocent, and he held back, desperate not to offend her in this game she was playing, appalled at the back of his mind by his own behavior, but her lips parted and clung and her arms crept about his neck. She shifted her body, drawing it closer to his and his mouth became more urgent, more demanding since, his body said, he was a man holding a woman who was willing in his arms. He crossed them at her back, lifting her up against him, feeling the roundness of her breasts press against his chest and when she seemed not to mind he lifted his hands to the back of her head, his will beginning to master hers, his male body to dominate. His hands moved to her neck, caressing the soft flesh of her throat beneath her chin and his mouth travelled about her face, warm and moist on her cheeks, on each closed eye, her jawline.
‘Oh, God,’ he moaned in the back of his throat, pleading with her to stop him, for someone must.
‘Will . . .’ Her breath was warm on his brow and her own mouth found, somehow, the tender place beneath his ear, and the hot desire which might have been stopped, flowed madly through him. She was so lovely; her skin was smooth, like satin and smelling of wild flowers, and her shoulders which were revealed . . . somehow . . . Oh, Christ . . . were a pale golden silk in the fire’s glow. Her breasts . . . her breasts . . . her nipples round, sweet, pink and hard with her longing, swelled into his hands which closed eagerly about them. She arched her throat and small sounds of delight came from it. He pressed his mouth against it before moving down to take her peaked nipple between his lips.
‘Tessa . . .’ Her name was sweet and soft on the air, ‘I love you, girl . . .’
‘Love me . . .’
Her clothes lay in a feverishly abandoned heap about her feet. Her body was a pale amber column and for a moment he stayed his demanding, compelling hands, and hers, to look in wonder, his eyes worshipping the beauty of it. Her splendid shoulders, smooth, womanly and yet strong; the high peaks of her young breasts, rosy and eager and full. Her small waist and slender hips, her long tapering legs between which was the dark, flowering centre of her and which she was, though she was not quite sure how, longing to give him, longing for him to take from her. She was one of those rare creatures of her own sex, he realised, marvelling, who are ready for love, for loving, with no need of the complexity of wooing, of coaxing; a freely giving, enthusiastically taking woman who would match his own ardour once he had taught her how.
‘Will . . .’ Her naked body swayed towards him, enclosed his like a flower clinging to the trunk of a tree. His own emerged quite miraculously from its wrappings, beautiful, hard, the muscles of it standing rigid beneath his brown skin.
‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ he heard himself murmur, terrified somehow that this loveliness, this forbidden sweetness would be snatched from him. He was beyond reason, beyond any thought, any concern other than that he must have this girl, this woman, wherever he could lay her.
‘I love you, Will,’ he thought he heard her say as they clung together and then the worn fabric of the fireside rug was beneath them and when he took her they both cried out with the pain and joy of it.
They lay for a while in silence, the firelight dappling their entwined limbs to gold and amber and rose and he heard her sigh in pleasure.
‘I do love you, Will,’ she said, in that natural, free-spoken way she had. She had not learned to be subtle or artful, and all her life had said exactly what she felt or meant, and it seemed she could see no reason to be different now.
He lifted himself on one elbow and looked down into her rosy face. His heart was straining to free itself of his love for her, to pour it over her in endless waves, to wrap it about her, to hold her within it, with him, for the rest of their days and his eyes were deep, filled with his pride in having her love. He cupped her cheek with a gentle hand and smiled.
‘Aye, I reckoned you might, after what we’ve just done. There was no holding you, nor me neither, for which I make no apologies. But what’s done is done, lass, and there’s no turning back now.’ He turned to look about him at the room which was no longer just a room but a shrine – dear God, what had she done to him, to make him so fanciful? – a shrine to their love. He let his eyes study each piece of furniture, each picture and ornament, before he brought his gaze back to her. She lay against his arm, her eyes unfocused and dreaming, the short crop of her hair in a cloud about her head and he put up a hand to brush it back from her forehead.
‘There’ll have to be a few changes but I’ve got a bit put by so you must get whatever you need to make this place just as you want it, sweetheart. I know it’s not what you’re used to but you an’ me’ll be happy here.’ His face was very serious. ‘I’ll make you happy, Tessa Harrison, I swear it, for if ever a lass was loved it’s you.’ He grinned and ruffled her hair again. ‘But do one thing for me, will you? Grow your hair for the wedding. I’d like to see it a bit longer, maybe with a flower in it, you know, like a proper bride . . .’
She had been smiling, still woven in the fabric of love, not really listening to what he was saying, just the pleasant sound of his deep voice, but gradually through the languorous mist she distinguished a word or two. ‘Wedding’ was one; ‘bride’ was another.
She sat up slowly and his eyes dropped to the soft weight of her breasts as they fell forward. He raised a hand to cup first one, then the other, but she pushed it away.
‘What did you say?’ she asked him warily.
He looked momentarily perplexed, the hand she had refused hovering somewhat uncertainly as though her rejection of it had sown a sudden seed of doubt.
‘Say?’ He tried a smile but even then her expression alarmed him. ‘What about?’
‘You . . . you mentioned . . . a wedding.’ She drew away from him a little, shrugging off his arm and his alarm grew stronger, surging quite sickeningly through him, seizing him by the throat. Really, this was mad, for had she not just . . . well, any girl of her upbringing . . . she would hardly have allowed him . . . encouraged him, surely, if she did not mean to . . . she had said she loved him . . .
‘That I did, sweetheart.’ He forced his voice to be steady and put out a hand to draw her back into his arms. ‘We must be married now. I want it more than anything,
Tessa, and so do you, else why should you . . . ?’
‘Married!’
‘Aye. As soon as she’ll see me I’ll speak to your mother, or should it be your Uncle Charlie, seeing as how he’s the man of the family?. They’ll not like it . . .’ His face became anxious then. ‘You don’t think they’ll refuse, do you? Make you wait until you’re of age . . .’
‘Married,’ she said again. Her enormous eyes left his and wandered about the room. In them was such a look of terror he reached out to her, not certain what was frightening her so but ready to protect her from it with his life.
‘Aye, what else? We’re handfast now, my love. More than that, I reckon. It’ll be hard but your mother was a working lass once, and Charlie Greenwood came from . . .’
‘Married! To you!’ Before he could stop her she had scrambled to her feet, reaching urgently for her clothes which she began to drag about her. Her eyes were haunted, her face so drawn she might just have been recovering from some dreadful illness.
He stood up slowly, magnificent in his manly beauty but her eyes would not look at what had, only minutes before, delighted her. His voice was harsh.
‘You’ll not marry me then, Tessa Harrison?’
‘I don’t want to marry anyone.’ She began to laugh, the sound tearing hatefully through the small room. In his agony he did not recognise the panic in her, the desperate beating of her wings against the bars which he had imperiously put up about her, the bars which were closing on her freedom. He only heard what he thought to be her amusement, her scorn, her rejection of the gift, the precious bounty of the love he had for her.
She had gone, blundering blindly into the snow when he himself began to laugh, the sound gaining volume, on and on until it died away into the empty lonely silence her going had left.
The snow had nearly gone when she came back, the sudden, almost spring-like sunshine clearing it from rooftops and garden walls and revealing the track between Greenacres and Chapmanstown.
‘Will . . . ?’ Her eyes were enormous in her hesitant face and she tried a tremulous smile.
‘Yes?’ he replied coldly, but already he was opening the door wider the more quickly to have her over the doorstep. The book he had been reading fell to the floor as his arms lifted to take her inside and he groaned as her body nailed itself to his.
10
The lead up to the big strike was long. Wages had been cut in the recession of seven years ago but promises had been made by the millowners to return to the old levels when trade improved. Trade was improving, the operatives said, but against a background of rising food prices and the non-appearance of the increased wage they had been promised, in March 1853 a general wages campaign began. There were mass meetings and parades to rouse and mobilise those who were unorganised and the resolution was formed to demand nothing short of an unconditional advance of ten per cent in their weekly wage packet.
In October of the same year employers in Preston locked out their entire workforce and in many other places ‘short time’ was introduced. The lock-out in Preston began to create hardship and anxiety, not only in the town itself but amongst many of the people not actively engaged in dispute. Most had become involved without really understanding what their union leaders told them, willing to obey since the hardships of the ‘hungry forties’ must not be repeated. If they were told this course was best for them, that this was the only way to show the masters that they were a solid, unbending army, no longer prepared to be trampled beneath the millowners’ feet, then they would obey; but they had not known, they whispered to one another, that the struggle would take so long.
Six months had passed now and each week the benefit they lived on, collected from men and women still in work, not just in the textile trade but in many others, including the shopkeepers who if they did not keep the millworkers’ custom would go down with them, was reduced and men who had earned two pounds a week were trying to keep a family on no more than ten shillings.
Every man who still worked in a strike-bound mill, and there were a few, was branded with dishonour; not a man, but a ‘knob-stick’ who was subjected to the most harrowing forms of intimidation. Many of them sincerely did not believe in the strike, and said so, and the tales of beatings and other brutalities were reported each week in the newspapers. Often the ‘Bashi-Bazouks’, as the gangs of youths who perpetrated these outrages were called, had been arrested and charged not only with criminal assault, but conspiracy. They roamed about in groups of thirty or forty, under the guise of ‘body-guards’ but in reality terrorising any man or woman who tried to work.
In February 1854, the masters said they would re-open their mills if the workforce would be prepared to accept the wages they had earned before the start of the lock-out in the previous October, but when the mills were opened none of their operatives reported for work.
Agents were sent to Ireland and to various agricultural areas of England to fetch men and women who were starving and would therefore be glad to do anything to put food in the mouths of their children. Thousands arrived by train and were then carried in covered carts to the factories of Lancashire, escorted by police constables.
Again arrests were made as many of the strike leaders tried to stop these new hands from entering the mills and taking the jobs they themselves were trying, or so they said, to protect. Lord Palmerston had been appealed to by the striking men but he could do nothing to help them, stating that their employment was still available to them if they cared to take it up again.
The situation was becoming more ugly as each week passed and now it was said that the union tax, ‘voluntarily’ paid by those in work to support the strikers, was to be put as high as eightpence a week on each loom or mule. The rumblings were beginning to be heard as far away as Colne or Burnley and indeed in all the towns where cotton was manufactured. Families, hard up themselves, were forced to support what they had begun to realise was not a just cause.
A young widow with two children and not a penny to spare had refused to pay last week at Abbotts when the collector came to her loom-gate. When she returned to it after her breakfast she found her shuttles had mysteriously vanished and when she complained those about her merely looked away, saying it were nowt’ to do wi’ them. She was now out of work and on ‘relief’ and the unions were not collecting for her.
Written threats had been nailed to walls where any operatives not complying with the union men could not miss seeing them.
‘IF THAT OILER AT CROSSBANK MILL DOES NOT PAY UP A CALLER WILL BE OBLIGED TO COME AND PUT HIM IN THE COUNTY COURT.’
‘IF THOSE HANDS AT ALLSOP AND GREENS DO NOT PAY UP THEY WILL GET SOMETHING THEY DO NOT LIKE.’
‘IF THE BLOW ROOM HAND AT BRIDGEFOLD MILL DOES NOT PAY UP “PUNCH” WILL SEND A FINE TROOP TO HIM.’
There were men, women and girls in many mills with a will on them like iron, short of cash and not a little impatient with those who were on strike for no good reasons that they could see, and who would be bound to say so, and refuse their eightpence a week to those who demanded it of them.
It was a week later when the first of the bad troubles began. Chapmans had not experienced any problems since the unions had scarcely a toe-hold there. For twenty years the operatives had held themselves apart from other mills, their better working conditions, shorter hours, decent wages and the neat and sturdy company cottages most of them occupied instilling in them no desire, or need, to associate with those who wanted what they had. They were content with their labour and what it brought them and like those who believe that another man’s fight is best left alone, especially if that fight made no sense, they walked by when the street-corner meetings, and the men who formed them, demanded they fight the injustice which was being done to their fellows. The unions had become strong with spinners’ unions, weavers’ unions, combers’ unions and in the past twenty years many wrongs had been put right but the Preston operatives’ strike was a hardship of their own making, so most of those not involved believed
.
It was said that young men and boys were turning to petty crime, stealing and getting into fights which were more than youthful squabbles, with nothing better to do than roam the streets and look for mischief. Young girls might be had at any street corner for the price of a loaf of bread. These girls had no other way to keep themselves alive and some, finding they had a taste for such a life, were unlikely to give it up when times were better. They were innocent, most of them, when they began their new trade, inexperienced, and when the strike was finally over and the cost of it counted the number of illegitimate babies was found to have increased and who was to pay for their upkeep? Certainly not their mothers who were little more than children themselves, and so they fell on the parish like hundreds of others whose lives were drastically changed by the lock-out.
Annie Beale was at her mule when the man approached her. It was three years since her mother had died, taking the child she had just borne with her, leaving Annie to support the four she left behind. And she had done so uncomplainingly for they were her responsibility. A great one for responsibility and duty was Annie and if, with hard work and an obsessive sense of loyalty, she could give them a bit of decency and a start in life, then she would. There was Jack, three years younger than herself, and bright and he’d make more of himself than her own father had, wherever he was, for he’d run off and left them when his wife had told him he was to be burdened with yet another child. Nelly, who was eleven, had never been ‘right’ since she had been interfered with by the overlooker but she worked besides Annie without complaint. The two youngest, Polly and Grace, not yet old enough to work, were champion in their tireless and sadly mature preoccupation as guardians of their home in her absence and somehow or other the family managed. She was proud of her honest, independent, hardworking brother and sisters. They were obliged to no one, paying their way as decent folks should, but only just.
Shining Threads Page 17
